Movies

When Star Trek: The Motion Picture debuted in theaters, it had been ten years since the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise had come together on television. For the fans, it was a huge event that made largely forgivable the opportunity taken by the SFX department to show how cool computer generated fractal graphics could look. It was the launchpoint for five more movies to come, sometimes calling back to the television show but mostly introducing new concepts and new aliens.

It’s always exciting to see someone take huge risks on the big screen. Check out this list of the best gambling movies of all time from different eras. 

Arrow Video brings to Blu-ray the long-awaited special edition version of Bernard McEveety’s 1971 film, The Brotherhood of Satan.

The film follows the recently widowed Ben, his girlfriend Nicky, and his daughter K.T. on a road trip across the Southwest. During the trip they are witnesses to a horrific accident and head to the nearby isolated desert town of Hillsboro to report it to the Sheriff (played by L.Q. Jones). While there, they are met with a not-too-welcoming reaction from the locals, who are gripped by paranoia and fear due to a series of gruesome deaths and the mysterious disappearance of eleven of the community’s children. As more disappearances and deaths continue during their visit, Ben and his family find themselves joining the sheriff, a local priest and the town’s doctor, Doc Duncan (Strother Martin, Cool Hand Luke), but all clues lead to an evil satanic cult that is slowly gripping the town and its inhabitants.

Marvel’s 25^th entry to their Cinematic Universe is something you don’t see Hollywood do very often. They made a film with a predominantly Asian cast, with an Asian-centric story. Most of the time, Hollywood either imports a foreign film via distribution rights (think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) or they take an Asian star like Jackie Chan and drop him into an American style film with an American actor as a co-star (think Rush Hour). Executive Producer Kevin Feige tabbed a relative newcomer Destin Daniel Cretton to direct Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Given a reasonably blank canvas to work from, Cretton has crafted a surprisingly engaging superhero film. 

There’s something inherently terrifying about the forest. In our modern world of suburbs and pizza delivery, air conditioning and streaming services, the remote, unspoiled areas beyond the city are a connection to a collective past before civilization arose. Those wooded realms hold secrets, and sprites lurk there that, once unleashed, cannot be contained, and it’s with little wonder that so many legends, myths and fairy tales are associated with such rural barrens. After all, Hansel and Gretyl follow that path into the woods and…

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” 

--Andy Warhol

The result of the social media revolution of the late 2000’s was the democratization of celebrity. During Hollywood’s Golden Era, performers had to spend years learning their craft, toiling in obscurity to pay dues and earn their iconic statuses, but in the post-YouTube world anyone with a cell phone and some spare time can ride the viral rocket to internet stardom, fulfilling pop-art guru Warhol’s most well-known pop-cultural prophecy along the way. And with an increasing amount of our individual lives taking place online, privacy itself has devolved into an uncomfortable form of currency: we willingly expose the portions of our lives we want others to see in exchange for Likes, Shares and Subscribers, yet feel betrayed and even fearful if the information we don’t disclose becomes known.

St. Louis native James Gunn makes superhero movies the way you wished they would have when you were a kid.

Presumably raised on the traditional diet of St. Louis—too-thin pizza topped with cheese that tastes like it’s still wrapped in plastic (In My Opinion, see?), toasted ravioli, frozen custard, “Old Vienna Red Hot Riplets” potato chips and Vess soda—and stacks of comic books to read while hiding indoors from the miserable summer humidity, Gunn's body of work includes the very offbeat Super (2010) and the zany Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel. As brilliant as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, the creators all know that they're free to make their film the way they want provided it meets with the overarching blueprint of visionary MCU maestro Kevin Feige.

Finding the right movie to watch while taking a break can be difficult, especially if there is a specific movie genre niche you’re looking for. Scrolling on and on through Netflix’s recommended page just won’t do. You need to watch something that can actually let your mind go on autopilot, and the movie “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

The frustration that you may be feeling right now is relatable. In fact, it’s the very same feeling that people get when they can’t find a good legal online casino Canada. Frankly, it’s tiring to keep looking for things that turn out to be nothing. You just want to relax and enjoy your movie or game, but the movies that they’re recommending are not only bland or boring- but you’ve already watched them before!

Once the undisputed King of Hollywood, the Western, that chest-thumping, two-fisted, oh-so-American cinematic ode to Manifest Destiny, fell into disarray towards the end of the 1970’s. Long past its mid-century heyday, the one-time silver-screen stalwart had experienced a surge in the previous decade due to a new, realistic approach to storytelling, but a combination of cultural factors—burnout from the war in Vietnam, drugs, struggles for social equality, the advent of dazzling special effects, new types of male icons—made the Western seem as antiquated as the Pony Express. Clichéd, predicable plots and tired stock characters withered in the face of burgeoning ’80’s theater extravaganzas. In the wake of Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, Rocky, Rambo and Schwarzenegger du jour, how could any simple cowpoke possibly hold his own down at the local bijou?

Sam (Karen Gillan, Doctor Who) was abandoned as a teenager by her mother, Scarlet (Lena Headey), after she took the initiative to take an unsanctioned assassination. Now Sam follows in her mother's footsteps as a deadly killer in the employ of the wide-reaching agency called The Firm, headed up by her mentor, Nathan (Paul Giamatti). But when Sam's last job ends up with a victim with a powerful father, Nathan is no longer able to protect her.

Complicating matters, Sam's current job is to take out a target who stole from The Firm, and bring back the money. But what Sam walks into is the ransom delivery for a kidnapping of 8-year-old (excuse me, 8 and three-quarters) Emily (Chloe Coleman). Unable to leave a child abandoned and feeling personally responsible for Emily's well-being, Sam must defend the both of them from an endless army from both The Firm and a bereaved mobster father (Ralph Ineson).

Pixie Hardy (Olivia Cooke, Ready Player One) is the daughter of a mob boss (Colm Meaney) who, with peace having existed between his rivals, spends his later years learning how to be the perfect homemaker and single father.. But Pixie wants more than "this provincial life," and concocts a plan to steal a large quantity of drug money from another mob, one led by Father McGrath (Alec Baldwin) and the gun-toting priests and nuns in his employ.

Sexual activity in horror cinema is the riskiest of frisky film endeavors. Innumerable hormone-fueled teenagers have lost their celluloid lives at the hands of homicidal, masked slashers brimming with twisted Freudian menace and toting weaponry that reinforces their conspicuous phallic intent. The equation of sex = death is well known even to casual viewers, so much that the formula became institutionalized, then parodied; Scream built a franchise upon deconstructing the link between amorous coupling and murder, but from the potent eroticism present in Bela Lugosi’s Dracula leer to Rosemary’s Baby to Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive and the more blatant sexually-transmitted fatalities of 2015’s It Follows, the notion that physical intimacy begets personal destruction is mined with frightening consistency.

With a career spanning over 60 years and 22 films, Greek Director Nico Mastorakis -- known for such films as Island of Death, The Zero Boys, and Bloodstone -- learned his craft on his own, starting in television work before graduating to music videos and feature films. His freshman feature, Death has Blue Eyes, is in no way his best work, but you can tell his television studies were paying off, and showing through this film that he did know how to shoot a scene like a seasoned director.

Death has Blue Eyes can only be summed up as a paranormal thriller, a buddy film, and a softcore porn that fails miserably at all three genres.  It starts as we follow a young con man and his friend into a few misadventures before they ultimately meet their match in the form of two women (one younger, one older) who have a secret themselves: they are psychics on the run from a group of men out to capture them.

In 1996, the cold war spy thriller series, Mission: Impossible, made the leap from fan-favorite television series to big budget theatrical production. The potential for a franchise out of this was great -- and realized, with several M:I films having been released since.

It was clear from the beginning that a torch was going to have to be passed from IMF leader Jim Phelps (with Jon Voight playing the role made iconic by Peter Graves) to the new guy, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Old time fans were prepared to accept that. But what they weren't prepared for was the absolutely disrespectful way Phelps was removed from duty. It's been 25 years, so I really shouldn't have to worry about a spoiler warning at this point, but if that sort of thing bothers you, this is the last paragraph you want to read of this review.

Tom and Jerry, the Hanna-Barbera cat-and-mouse frenemies, have had a fairly decent run of direct-to-DVD animated adventures, where our heroes get dropped into animated versions of classic movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, or The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps this success emboldened the decision to make the jump to the big screen with Tom and Jerry: The Movie. If so, they might have stuck with the formula that was working, choosing to animate yet another classic movie with the titular characters running hijinks behind the plot.

Chloe Traicos and Jeff Coppage headline this charming romantic indie take on My Fair Lady.

Introducing Jodea finds Traicos portraying the titular Jodea Maxwell, a struggling actress who takes menial jobs and stage hand positions while waiting for her big break. There's only one problem with this dream: Jodea couldn't act her way out of a wet paper sack.

Comedy and horror, though wildly different avenues for creative storytelling, share a common bloodline. Both rely on stock situational premises that slowly build tension until reaching a climax centered around surprise. Their divergence rests upon intent: where the culmination of a joke (hopefully) is to make an audience laugh, the pinnacle of any horror scene (hopefully) is the invocation of fear. Some filmmakers understand the structural thematic genre links and aspire to craft cinematic fusions between the two, but the results aren’t always silver screen sublimity: for every Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein or Evil Dead 2 or Zombieland, a dozen cadavers like Idle Hands, My Boyfriend’s Back and Dark Shadows lie D.O.A. at the movie morgue. It’s a precarious tightrope to walk: too many comedic yucks dilute the yuckiness of the horror and vice versa, but brave souls continually endeavor to strike that perfected balance.

The wait is almost over, the build-up starting in earnest this month as Oscar season officially gets underway.

The 93^rd Academy Awards are finally just around the corner, set to get underway on April 25, 2021, after the awards ceremonies were pushed back in the calendar due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

There are still a few weeks to go before the film industry’s glitterati take to the red carpet for the 2021 Oscars, but those mere mortals that are interested in betting on the top showbiz awards extravaganza need not wait any longer. Betting is already open with odds markets in full swing at a slew of online betting shops.

Lydia and Emily become best friends in grade school by virtue of both being social misfits. Emily was the curve-blowing smart kid, while Lydia was the sleep-in-class and deliver answers cribbed from Peppermint Patty. But when they have a falling out, they lose touch with each other for twenty years, until Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) decides to reach out to Emily (Octavia Spencer) to attend their class reunion. Through a series of childish missteps, Lydia accidentally obtains super powers from an experiment Lydia's tech company was working on.

The setting for Thunder Force is one where cosmic rays bombarded the world decades ago, creating genetic mutations in a small minority of people, giving them super abilities. Unfortunately, all these people turned out to be sociopaths dubbed "miscreants." One of them killed Emily's parents, and she's devoted her entire life to finding a way to grant super powers to someone who could fight the miscreants on their own level.

Finding the right movie to watch when you have a date can be difficult in case your partner don’t want to watch something overtly romantic, highly sweet, or cheesy (even if it is your favorite film). Fortunately, some films are great for just about every occasion because of their compelling narrative stories. Users of uptoflirt site have compiled the list of such movies with different human stories that they first found out about on date nights.

Wicker Park (2004)

You can call the story to Wicker Park convoluted, sure, but you can’t fake the emotions that will swell within you for watching the film. Matt Simon returns to his hometown and decides to give one final attempt to meet his former flame before the business takes him out of town. The story has twists, turns, and head-scratching moments, but it is romantic too.