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[caption id="attachment_1382" align="alignnone" width="560"]Bruce Ricker (that’s him on the left, with Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino) [/caption]

Bruce Ricker — a Cambridge, Massachusetts -based director and producer of documentaries whose best-known film, “The Last of the Blue Devils’’ (1979), is a jazz classic — died of pneumonia Friday in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.

He was 68.

Mr. Ricker specialized in documentaries about jazz, popular music, and film history.

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image via Boston Globe

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Donald Krim, a film distributor, president of’ Kino International, a company founded in 1977 and acquired by Mr. Krim in 1978, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 65.

Among the films imported by Kino as a result of Mr. Krim’s festival explorations were Percy Adlon’s “Zuckerbaby” (1985), Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s “Himatsuri” (1986) and Michel Khleifi’s “Wedding in Galilee” (1988). Mr. Krim also helped to introduce the work of such art-house stalwarts as the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai (“Days of Being Wild,” 1990), the Austrian Michael Haneke (“The Piano Teacher,” 2001) and the Israeli Amos Gitai (“Kadosh,” 1999).

Three Kino releases received Academy Award nominations in the best foreign-language film category: Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” (2007), Scandar Copti’s “Ajami” (2009) and Giorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” (2010).

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[caption id="attachment_1311" align="alignnone" width="533"] Jackie Cooper in SUPERMAN III (1983)[/caption]

Jackie Cooper, Emmy-winning director of “M*A*S*H” and other hits, plus known to moviegoers as Perry White, editor of The Daily Planet, in four “Superman” films died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 88.

His agent, Ronnie Leif, said Mr. Cooper died in a hospital after a short illness.

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Yvette Vickers, an actress best known as the femme fatale in two late 1950s cult horror films, “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead Wednesday at her Benedict Canyon home. She was 82.

The body’s mummified state suggests that she could have been dead for close to a year, police said.

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After announcing that the 8th Beijing Independent Documentary Film Festival has been cancelled, the festival’s artistic director, Zhu Rikun, has reportedly resigned from the festival’s foundation, closed his production house, Fanhall Studio, and fled the Chinese capital.

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Tim Hetherington, the director and producer of the Oscar-nominated Afghan war documentary “Restrepo,” was killed while covering the Libyan conflict in the city of Misurata on Wednesday, and three photographers working beside him were wounded, one fatally, when they came under fire. He was 40 years.

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Oscar winning actress Catherine Zeta-Jones has quit as patron of the Swansea Bay Film Festival and her image has been removed from the festival’s website. This follows the resignation of actor Michael Sheen, who quit as vice president of the festival last month

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