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Spoiler Alert !!!Major Spoilers for Weapons (2025)

Having rave reviews and an iconic Rotten Tomatoes score, Zach Cregger‘s recently released horror flick, Weapons, is what everyone’s been talking about. With a twisted and dark ending that was as gory as it was shocking, Cregger had a masterful stroke of genius in defeating the evil entity that was at the centre of 17 missing kids.

At the end of the film, Alex’s parents were breaking down the door with their hands when the little kid had hidden in the Witch’s room. Breaking down the door and Alex’s mother looking through the gaps made me feel like Cregger might have paid a quick homage to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Alex quickly gathers the branch, puts the Witch’s hair and wraps around it, and snaps the two pieces. The Witch realizes that dark magic has been cast as...

Now in its third year, Netflix’s The Paris Theater has today announced the full lineup for its much-enjoyed Big & Loud screening series, available exclusively on IndieWire. Per today’s release, the screening series “will deliver four consecutive weeks of cinema’s most unforgettable sensory experiences with a jam-packed lineup of 70mm, Dolby Atmos, and audio-obsessive cinema.”

This year’s series will kick off August 29 and run through September 25, and will put Manhattan’s largest Atmos theater to the test with 41 films, including 13 films on 70mm, and 6 films presented with special Dolby Atmos sound mixes. Per Netflix, the series aims to offer “a completely immersive experience, with picture and sound that allows audiences to fully immerse in the worlds onscreen, reveals new details to even the most seasoned filmgoers, and brings the intricate, thoughtful sound design of some of cinema history’s most gifted film artists to life.”

As has...

The trailer for Him has been released, and it is looking Eyes Wide Shut-level glamorous and brutal. With Jordan Peele serving as the producer of the movie, Him stars Tyriq Withers and Marlon Wayans in leading roles, and is a sports/horror film.

Things go wrong quite literally when a promising young Footballer (the American version) is invited to the compound of his dream team. The trailer is bloody, chaotic, ritualistic, and almost Satanic, and it is literally every sports-lover’s nightmare. Check out the trailer below:

New trailer for ‘Him’, a horror movie produced by Jordan Peele & directed by Justin Tipping

The film follows a college quarterback who is taken into a sinister world by his idol to see what he’s willing to sacrifice for fame

In theaters on September 19 pic.twitter.com/Q205BctOUv

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 6, 2025

The film heavily reminds me of Tom Cruise and Stanley Kubrick...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival is one of the world’s longest-running film festivals, known for its adventurous programming, exciting retrospectives, and nightly open-air screenings in the Piazza Grande, which is capable of seating 8,000 spectators. The latter is by no means the only screening spot, but it’s the location most associated with the festival.

Hosting world premieres and special screenings of highlights from Cannes, Sundance, and other early-year festivals, this year’s Piazza Grande selection includes the launch of Mediterranean drama “The Birthday Party,” starring Willem Dafoe and Vic Carmen Sonne; Emma Thompson-led thriller “The Dead of Winter;” Joachim Trier’s Cannes prize-winner “Sentimental Value;” a 35mm screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining;” Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’or winner “It Was Just an Accident;” and the European premiere of Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Alexander Payne, Golshifteh Farahani, four-time Oscar-winning costume designer Milena Canonero,...

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Any horror fan worth their screams must have some love for at least one Stephen King tale that was adapted to the big screen. Since 1976, the beloved author responsible for some of the most iconic horror stories in history has been seeing his works earn the same amount of love in theaters. Over the years, these have accumulated a box-office take of over $3 billion. While the likes of "Stand By Me" and "The Shawshank Redemption" (which is considered by IMDb as the greatest film ever made) have stood the test of time, there has been a varied collection of horrors that have stood as filmic favorites and earned a different kind of love, as a result. Sorry, Andy Dufresne, but your prison break from Shawshank might still bring tears, but there are other stories from the esteemed writer's works that...

David Lynch passed a little more than six months ago, and the world of cinema is still mourning. Let’s start with a book devoted to two of the most important elements of any Lynch creation—music and sound—followed by works from Walter Murch and Neil Jordan, new books on music, and a stack of novels made for summer reading.

Always Music In the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks by Scott Ryan (Tucker DS Press)

We have Scott Ryan to thank for some of the finest coverage of David Lynch’s career—namely, the Twin Peaks-dedicated Blue Rose Magazine, Fire Walk With Me: Your Laura Disappeared, and Lost Highway: The Fist of Love. Ryan’s latest, Always Music In the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks, is another deep dive into the works of David Lynch, this time all three seasons of Twin Peaks. Here, Ryan discusses the late,...

Hollywood can be a capricious place, so there's truly no shortage of stories about actors whose starring roles changed seemingly on a whim. For every time a casting idea works out, there are dozens of "what-ifs," like when Val Kilmer almost had the role of Morpheus in "The Matrix" before Laurence Fishburne came along. When it came to the now-classic 1973 comedy caper "The Sting," however, there were a whole bunch of potential big name stars up for roles, and they all almost exclusively turned down the film. Since "The Sting" went on to win seven Academy Awards and has become quite beloved over the years, those actors who turned down roles might have some regrets about it... unless they happen to be Jack Nicholson.

Before he terrified us all playing Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" or showed us how chilling a comic book villain can be as...

Like most other daily challenges, Framed has you solve a series of puzzles in order to stand victorious. Framed discerns itself by being based on movies instead, and poses frames from certain movies, with a total of 6 attempts per puzzle. Framed also makes sure to swap its puzzles daily – meaning that you can expect new puzzles daily.

These puzzles can be a bit challenging to complete at times, and for this, I will be listing the solutions for all 4 Framed puzzles as of August 3, 2025. You can find a complete breakdown of each puzzle below as well.

Framed Classic Solution for Today Image Credits: Framed/FandomWire

Today’s Framed Classic puzzle has you identifying the correct name of the movie from a total of 6 slides. Each slide will be a random frame from the movie in question, and you will have a total of 6 attempts before it’s game over.

Today...

Minority Report

Starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Now Showing At Veena (Patna)

At times, as we watch Steven Spielberg’s latest spin on futuristic trauma, we wonder if we’re watching a Hindi film. A slick, supple and slender film, but nonetheless inured to Hindi film conventions.

Now take this particular sequence from Spielberg’s sleek spinball: a woman who can see into the future accompanies fugitive Tom Cruise into a shopping mall. As the cops run helterskelter searching for our hero on the run she murmurs, “Just stand here.” At that very minute a man with a bunch of balloons passes in front of Cruise, blocking him from the surveillants’ view.

Now take this sequence: Cruise is chased into a futuristic car manufacturing plant where he gets squeezed into a moulding machine. We soon see him emerge in a sleek sports car and drive away.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to shape everything from business to entertainment, it’s clear that science fiction has long been ahead of its time, exploring the possibilities and the dangers of machines surpassing human intelligence.

From the earliest tales of sentient machines to the sophisticated AI concepts seen today, sci-fi has sparked our fascination with the digital future. Here’s a look at ten pieces of sci-fi media, including a range of books, movies, and TV shows, that have played a role in inspiring today’s AI-obsessed world.

Frankenstein. BTS - (L to R) Jacob Elordi as The Creature and Oscar Isaac as Dr. Victor Frankenstein on the set of Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

Often considered the original sci-fi novel, Frankenstein is a foundational text that delves into the themes of creation and the unintended consequences of playing god.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s ambition...

Hollywood is a global dream factory, an exporter of myths that shape aspirations from Tehran to Tokyo. Dead Take, the new psychological horror game from Surgent Studios, positions itself not as another product of that factory, but as a tour of its broken machinery.

The game presents a familiar cinematic nightmare. You are Chase Lowry, an actor portrayed by Neil Newbon, stepping into the cavernous Hollywood mansion of producer Duke Cain. Your friend and professional rival, Vinny Monroe, played by Ben Starr, has vanished after a party, and the house holds the only clues.

This first-person interactive mystery uses the tropes of the haunted house genre to dissect something far more tangible: the corrosive nature of ambition. It is a story steeped in the specific culture of the American film industry, yet its cautionary tale about power and desire feels unnervingly universal.

An Architecture of Dread

The game’s primary location,...

Is there anything more exciting than an onscreen romance that bleeds into reality? We obsess over our favorite fictional relationships secretly hoping the actors’ chemistry will create lasting sparks in their personal lives. Though not known for uplifting stories of love, the horror genre claims its fair share of cherished couples. While fending off a variety of dangerous threats, some find love amidst the blood and gore, then continue the relationship after final cut.

Michael Shanks’ buzzy rom com horror Together blurs the line between love and fear with a real-life couple steering the ship. Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) are on the verge of separation when a mysterious force literally fuses their bodies. Married offscreen, the co-stars follow a long line of couples whose true romance only adds to the power of their horrific films. While drawing attention to their work, they usually prove a twisted version...

This article contains mild spoilers for "Fantastic Four: First Steps."

The first scene in Matt Shakman's "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" sees Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) learning that she is pregnant. She tells her husband Reed (Pedro Pascal), and he is elated — they had been trying for a while — but also struck with trepidation. Both Sue and Reed are superpowered individuals who absorbed an unhealthy dose of cosmic rays on a space voyage many years before, and Reed was worried that their altered DNA would affect the health of their child. All through the first half of "First Steps," Reed conducts multiple medical tests on the fetus. Also, because Sue can turn invisible, she and Reed are able to look in on the baby directly to visually monitor its development. Reed and Sue also panic as they build cribs and baby-proof their retro-futuristic home.

Sue is nine months pregnant...

Writer-director Larry Cohen’s The Stuff takes aim at consumerism, advertising, and right-wing paranoia, and though high on the gore quotient, it isn’t really a horror movie. Using its high-concept sci-fi premise—an evil corporation mass markets a sentient yogurt-like product that slowly takes over its consumer’s mind and body—to ground its supercharged satire, The Stuff is the Catch-22 of alien-invasion movies, made three years before Chuck Russell’s remake of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob. Only here the threat comes bubbling up through the ground rather than from beyond the stars.

In the early stages of its takeover, the Stuff proves highly addictive, playing on the notion that corporations knowingly peddle harmful products to unsuspecting consumers. It also points out that consumerism itself is akin to addiction. Hooked users end up being known as “Stuffies.” Throughout, Cohen takes on the glib superficiality of contemporary advertising,...

Although Marvel Studios did not make a presentation in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con this year, Gallery Books held a presentation of Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics Sunday afternoon in a return to the roots of the convention: fan and community engagement.

Written by Beautiful Creatures author Margaret Stohl, former Marvel Entertainment editor Jeanine Schaefer and producer and Women of Marvel podcast host Judith Stephens, the book delves into the experiences of women behind Marvel Entertainment — from the early days of the comics to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“We talked to some of the movie people that had come into earlier chapters, but we really had to focus less on Marvel Studios by the end. This book was done with permission of Marvel, and Marvel Entertainment was so cool about it,” Stohl told Deadline on Saturday morning. “There also would have been five more years of an approval process.

Among the various Stephen King adaptations released this year, none of them reach the deeply melancholic and emotional level that The Life of Chuck does. Originally released at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, The Life of Chuck is now set for a digital release, a couple of months after the film premiered in theaters. Mike Flanagan's most personal and intimate project yet, the movie should not be missed. Featuring an ensemble cast that includes Tom HIddelston, Jacob Tremblay, Karen Gillian, Mark Hamill, Mia Sara, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and many more, The Life of Chuck will now be available to watch at home.

Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck will be heading to digital platforms starting Tuesday, July 29. Purchase and rent options will be available on services like Fandango at Home, Apple TV, and Prime Video, among others. The film tells the story of Charles "Chuck" Krantz and the significant moments...

Stephen King has had over 50 of his novels, short stories, or novellas adapted on screen, making him one of the most popular authors. The author's smooth and straightforward prose attracts filmmakers because it's filled with relatable characters, and rooted in a strong sense of place (often rural Maine). Once he settles you in the story's rhythms, King will smack you in the face with some of the most stomach-churning gore or existential dread. King's books often explore the insidious evil beneath small-town America, the emotional fragility of childhood, and unfold as Lovecraftian epics with a vast mythology.

But not every Stephen King film adaptation is successful or worth watching. For every "The Shawshank Redemption," there's "Cell"; for every "Misery," there's "Trucks." The failure of such movies to capture the essence of the source material would bother a lot of authors. In an interview with Vulture, Stephen King references "Rosemary's Baby" author Ira Levin,...

The Fantastic Four: First Steps was directly inspired by a Christopher Nolan film, according to MCU director Matt Shakman. The admission follows a much-needed successful opening weekend for the MCU hit, which is already regarded as the best adaptation of Marvel's First Family in three decades.

This is largely thanks to the bold interpretation of the team as being explorers first and foremost. The Fantastic Four: First Steps delves into the titular team's spacefaring activities without rehashing their origin story, except for a brief recap in the movie's opening minutes. Some of the movie's most memorable sequences occur in deep space.

Matt Shakman recently revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that these sequences were directly inspired by some of the sci-fi genre's most prominent movies, including Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Apollo 13. In fact, the celebrated MCU director even admitted that he might have directly stolen certain scenes,...

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is finally in theaters, marking the long-awaited Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) debut of Marvel Comics' First Family. Thankfully, the movie mostly lived up to expectations, receiving an 88% "fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes based on 291 reviews. There has been plenty of praise for its lead performances, story, and especially the production design. One scene that has been frequently praised for its beauty, intensity, and creative execution is a space travel sequence in the film, which bears a striking resemblance to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

Featuring a risky trip into a black hole, light-speed travel, and high-dramatic stakes, First Steps has plenty of parallels with Nolan's 2014 modern sci-fi classic, and director Matt Shakman would be the first one to admit it. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Shakman would provide an interesting quote: “T.S. Eliot said, ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal,...

It took over three decades for a filmmaker to pull it off, but Matt Shakman has now made the definitive live-action adaptation of Marvel’s first family by way of The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Fantastic Four is not only the most well received blockbuster of the summer, but it’s also just set 2025’s opening night record of $24.4 million. The critical and commercial win couldn’t come at a better time for Marvel Studios amid the superhero genre’s post-pandemic inconsistency. And given the heavy losses that Shakman himself has endured recently, one can’t help but root for him and his film.

When THR last caught up with Shakman for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, he mentioned his admiration for Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick, and so it doesn’t come as a surprise that his Fantastic Four invites comparisons to Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Kubrick’s 2001: A...

Even if you don’t know who Joseph Kahn is, you’ve seen one of his music videos.

Since getting into the business in the early 1990s, he has directed nearly 200 videos for some of the industry’s biggest stars – everyone from Willie Nelson to Backstreet Boys to U2 to Taylor Swift. Eminem’s “Without Me” clip? That was Kahn. Janet Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter?” Also Kahn. Britney Spears’ “Womanizer?” Well, you get the picture.

Typically, a director as talented and prolific as Kahn would transition to an equally lucrative career in feature films, just as countless have done before him – people like Michael Bay, David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Antoine Fuqua.

But Kahn’s output as a feature director has been frustratingly few and far between. His fourth film in 20 years, “Ick,” oozes into 800 theaters nationwide on July 27, 28 and 29, as part of a Fathom Events special presentation.

Winona Ryder opted to stand by her iconic dark comedy “Heathers,” and it ultimately cost her a gig starring alongside Matthew Broderick and Marlon Brando. Ryder has long been open that she decided to star in the 1989 dark comedy “Heathers” against warnings from her agents at the time. Now, Ryder is telling Elle UK that starring in the cult classic directly led her to losing out on a role in “The Freshman” with Brando.

Ryder recalled how she was told she would “never work again” if she played teen sociopath Veronica Sawyers in “Heathers,” adding that she did in fact “lose a job” because of the film. Ryder was already cast in “The Freshman” before “Heathers” was released; however, after the “Freshman” studio executives saw controversial “Heathers,” she said her offer was rescinded.

“They thought it was making fun of teen suicide,” Ryder said. “They were deeply offended and they revoked the offer.

“The Bad Guys 2” is a benignly rambunctious cartoon about a quintet of critters — the debonair Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), the goofy/badass Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), the flatulent Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the disguise expert Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and the brainiac Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina) — who are famous for being bad guys (they’re known as “the Bad Guys”), but when you come right down to it they’re actually pretty good guys. They’re like any movie team with a special freak quality, from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” brigade to the escaped zoo animals of “Madagascar.” They’re bad guys the way that Gru, from the “Despicable Me” films, is a “bad guy” — a notorious troublemaker who’s really just trying, on his own terms, to do right.

In the three years since the first “Bad Guys” (a major animated hit during the pandemic), our team of...

This piece was originally published in Issue 7 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of the unfilmable. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.Back in 1964, British director and producer Michael Apted interviewed a group of seven-year-olds from different social and economic backgrounds. The resulting program, titled Seven Up!, was aired on May 5 of that year by itv (Granada Television). Seven years later, Apted reached out to his subjects for a second interview, 7 Plus Seven, also broadcast by itv. Despite its origin on television, some episodes were theatrically released in the United States and elsewhere, speaking to the cinematic quality of the project. He repeated the process seven more times. The last installment in the series was 63 Up (2019); the next one would have been scheduled for 2026, but Apted died five years before then, in 2021. Both praised by critics and reviled as folk psychology,...

Has there ever been a more controversial year in cinema than 1971? It was the year that Ken Russell's "The Devils" caused outrage with its graphic sexuality and blasphemous imagery; elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" divided critics with its ugly violence upon making its debut in New York, while Ted Kotcheff's "Wake in Fright" turned stomachs with its grisly kangaroo hunt sequence. In the United States, the gloves were off after the Hays Code had given way to the more lenient MPAA ratings system in 1968, allowing filmmakers to explore challenging themes and show sex and violence in more explicit detail. Among the American movies that pushed these new boundaries were Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry" and Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs," an intensely misanthropic psychodrama that became notorious for its depiction of sexual assault.

"Straw Dogs" was Peckinpah's first non-Western film, and it was an unusual hybrid,...

Pedro Pascal might be best known for The Last of Us and The Mandalorian, but when it comes to scary movies, he’s still very much a kid of the ’80s. In an interview with Sky, the actor shared some of his all-time favorite horror films, and his list shows he’s got a real love for the classics, the kind that still make you want to hide behind the couch.

When he was little, Pascal says he used to act out scenes from Poltergeist, the 1982 horror hit about a haunted house.

His love for creepy movies started early and never really went away. He didn’t include A Nightmare on Elm Street in his top picks, but several other major horror titles made the cut.

One that stands out for him is An American Werewolf in London. The 1981 film mixed horror and comedy with groundbreaking special effects.

Directed by...

Pedro Pascal has always loved horror movies. Growing up in the 1980s, he was completely hooked. In fact, he says he used to act out scenes from Poltergeist as a kid. When asked by Sky to list his all-time favorite films, many of them turned out to be horror classics.

One of the movies he picked is An American Werewolf in London. Released in 1981, it became famous for its shocking special effects and clever mix of horror and comedy. Pedro remembers watching it when he was young, and it left a mark.

“It’s amazing. We got cable TV when I was very young. It scared me, and I thought it was hilarious. And you look at it now, and it really holds up. It has special effects that changed cinema, and has been built on since then,” he said.

Another horror film Pedro swears by is The Shining. Stanley Kubrick...

To call Superstar a biopic is like calling a hurricane a bit of a breeze. This is no paint-by-numbers life story. Instead, creator Nacho Vigalondo grabs the strange, true tale of Spanish pop phenomenon Tamara and shatters it into a thousand glittering pieces, creating a fever-dream fantasia on the nature of fame.

The series dives headfirst into the early 2000s, a wild west era for television where a singer with a limited voice and an extravagant aesthetic could become a national obsession. Superstar isn’t interested in a simple chronicle of Yurena, the name Tamara would later adopt.

It seeks to capture the bizarre cultural weather system that surrounded her: the phenomenon of “Tamarísmo.” Vigalondo, a master of sci-fi comedy and fantasy, uses his distinct style not to escape reality, but to find a more profound truth within the media-fueled madness. It’s a chaotic, hilarious, and often unsettling ride.

The Monkey, an adaptation of Stephen King‘s short story by the same name, from Oz Perkins, finally has a streaming release. Starring Theo James and Tatiana Maslany in the lead, the movie follows a family caught up amidst a sinister toy monkey’s grip after twin brothers Bill and Hal unearth it.

Although the adaptations of King’s works have had a mixed reputation in recent years, 2025 is proving to be a fresh turn with Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck and The Monkey, which is headed to Hulu on August 7.

Oz Perkins’ The Monkey Heads To Streaming Next Month

Having earned a respectable 77% rating on the Tomatometer, The Monkey is one of the better King adaptations and arguably one of the best in recent years. With a box-office total closer to $69M from a production budget of $10M (via Box Office Mojo), the movie has now secured...

With the fourth attempt to immortalize Marvel’s First Family on the silver screen and the official launch of the MCU’s Phase Six, The Fantastic Four: First Steps helmer Matt Shakman said the latest entry serves to tee up further exciting releases from the juggernaut studio.

The director spoke to Deadline on the blue carpet for the world premiere of the superhero movie, starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach in the iconic roles, and how the Russo brothers factored in.

“They were very curious about what we were doing, they came to tour our sets, they would watch scenes that we were cutting together, they wanted to get to know these people as they were working on their story and their script, so that I could pass the baton to them and these characters would be well cared for,” Shakman said of Anthony and Joe Russo,...

UK-Ireland top five, July 18-20 RankFilm (origin)DistributorJuly 18-20TotalWeek 1 Superman(US) Warner Bros £4.9m £16.4m 2 2 Jurassic World Rebirth(US)

Universal £3.3m £24.9m 3 3 F1: The Movie(US) Warner Bros £1.3m £18.2m 4 4 Smurfs(US-Bel) Paramount £1.2m £1.2m 1 5 I Know What You Did Last Summer(US) Sony £941,968 £941,968 1

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.35

Opening titles Smurfs and I Know What You Did Last Summer stumbled at the UK-Ireland box office; but there was better news for holdovers including number one Superman.

Warner Bros’ Superman dropped just 30% on its second weekend, with £4.9m taking it to a £16.4m total. The first in a...

More than 40 years after starring alongside Tom Cruise in Risky Business, Rebecca De Mornay is still stealing scenes on the big screen. Her new thriller Saint Clare is a far cry from the 1983 comedy classic, being a thriller and all, but De Mornay is no stranger to the dark and edgy stuff. Back in 1997, she portrayed Wendy Torrance in Stephen King's own adaptation of his iconic novel The Shining. This time, it was for the small screen, released on ABC in three episodes, and starkly different from Stanley Kubrick's film version that hit theaters in 1980. MovieWeb recently spoke with De Mornay while she was promoting her new movie. The longtime actress also took time to reflect on her experience working with King and portraying the iconic character Wendy Torrance that had been tackled by the late Shelley Duvall in Kubrick's film. De Mornay also offered insight into...

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's "The Shining" is widely regarded as one of the best horror movies of all time, and its influence continues to resonate with modern audiences. For proof, look no further than Hulu's "Nine Perfect Strangers" season 2, which follows various people who gather for some psychedelic therapy in the Austrian Alps. The isolated setting, coupled with the show's more mind-boggling elements, has had some viewers comparing the Nicole Kidman-starring drama to Kubrick's classic, and they have a point.

While there is a "Shining" influence throughout "Nine Perfect Strangers" season 2, the finale takes it to another level. The episode sees a crazed -- and heavily tripping -- man called Martin (Lucas Englander) chase Masha (Kidman) through the snow after experiencing a ghostly hallucination in a hotel. The sequence is a clear nod to the ending of "The Shining," which involves Jack Nicholson...

Science fiction cinema has long held a hallowed space in our culture as a window into tomorrow, a genre where imaginative minds dare to envision the worlds we might one day inhabit. Yet, to label these films as mere fortune-tellers is to miss their profound, often startlingly direct role in shaping the very future they depict. The silver screen has functioned not as a passive crystal ball, but as a vibrant, chaotic, and astonishingly effective cultural research and development lab. It is a space where future technologies are prototyped in the public imagination, where their ethical and societal implications are debated before the first circuit is soldered, and where a visual and conceptual language is forged for the innovators who will eventually turn fiction into fact.

This symbiotic relationship between cinematic fiction and technological reality unfolds primarily in two ways. The first is direct inspiration, a clear causal chain where...

If you want to understand how a filmmaker like Bong Joon Ho became a master of juggling such wildly disparate tones in the same movie (and often in the same scene), a good place to start would be his list of the 10 greatest films of all time for the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound poll. There, you'll find Kim Ki-young's 1960 horror film "The Handmaiden" comfortably rubbing shoulders with Hou Hsiao-hsien's post-World War II tragedy "A City of Sadness." There's some magic realism in there as well (Alice Rohrwacher's "Happy as Lazzaro") and a trio of serial killer-ish films, but you've also got Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" and Luchino Visconti's epic family drama "Rocco and His Brothers." That horror is so pronounced here shouldn't come as a surprise for a director who's made three movies that fit into that genre, but Hou's film is an odd choice given its under-statedness.

Since the mid-20th century, cinema has been haunted by the figure of the nymphet—a sexually precocious, often underage girl, constructed not as a real child but as a projection of adult male fantasy. This figure, most famously canonised in Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, “Lolita” (1955), gave rise to “nymphetmania”: an enduring cultural and cinematic obsession with the forbidden allure of the girl-child.

In Nabokov’s own words, a “nymphet” is not defined merely by age, but by her perceived power over the older male gaze—“maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature, which is not human, but nymphic.” She exists not independently, but only in relation to the man who is bewitched by her. This dynamic—where the girl becomes a mirror for male longing, loss, and madness—has since become a cinematic trope,...

Actress Rosie Perez is curating a double feature of classic boxing films for TCM’s “Two for One” this Saturday, July 19, 2025, at 8:00 Pm. The program, now in its second season, presents Perez’s selections, Killer’s Kiss and The Harder They Fall, with her personal commentary alongside host Ben Mankiewicz. The first film, Stanley Kubrick’s […]

Two for One: Rosie Perez – Killer’s Kiss & The Harder They Fall...

Severin Film's Restoration of Lo Spettro/The Ghost Receives Prestigious Film Festival Selections: "In one of the most prestigious events in company history, Severin Films proudly announces that their restoration of Riccardo Freda’s landmark 1963 horror thriller Lo Spettro/The Ghost starring Barbara Steele has been selected to premiere in the Venice Classics section of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September and open for the Seven Chances section of the 58th Sitges Film Festival in October.

Hailed as “Riccardo Freda’s masterpiece” (At the Mansion of Madness), Lo Spettro/The Ghost resets the bar for Italian horror history with a screenplay by Freda and Oreste Biancoli (Bicycle Thieves), and featuring a career-best performance by the supernaturally beautiful Steele. But after 50-plus years of tattered prints and murky transfers, Severin’s global sleuths finally located the thought-lost original camera negative in a storage facility near Cinecittà, only to...

The 78th edition of the Locarno International Film Festival has a lot to offer movie buffs. There is auteur cinema, both from established and new voices, big-screen classics, plus experimental fare, Cannes highlights, and stars like Jackie Chan, Emma Thompson and Lucy Liu who will receive fest honors.

Some of the more high-profile titles screening at this year’s fest, running Aug. 6-16 in the picturesque Swiss lakeside town, include Dracula by Romanian director Radu Jude, the latest from Abdelletif Kechiche, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, this year’s Cannes winner, Jafar Panahi‘s It Was Just an Accident and Legend of the Happy Worker, which was executive produced by David Lynch and directed by veteran editor Duwayne Dunham, who worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.

Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro is the man who is once again in charge of serving up an eclectic lineup...

Tom Cruise’s Film That He Still Regrets ( Photo Credit – Instagram )

There’s one movie Tom Cruise wishes he could erase from his filmography—and it’s not the one you’re thinking. Long before Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, the Hollywood superstar found himself in a film so forgettable, even he openly regrets doing it. Losin’ It came early in Tom Cruise’s career. It was an adult comedy meant for teens that landed in 1982. The movie followed a group of boys chasing after the usual coming-of-age plot. The Mission: Impossible star did not like it back then, and the years have not changed his mind. The film did not offer much in the way of substance, and he later admitted it taught him something important: that he never wanted to do that kind of project again.

Tom Cruise and Shelley Long in Losin' It (1983) pic.twitter.com/shLZK...

Warner Bros.’ “Superman” debuted atop the U.K. and Ireland box office with £6.9 million ($9.4 million), according to Comscore.

The James Gunn-directed reboot, starring David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan, was below the $15 million opening enjoyed by predecessor “Man of Steel.” The ongoing heatwave conditions in the region appear to be keeping audiences outdoors, choosing sun over cinema, as evidenced by the drop in blockbuster collections, which experienced a decline of 35% week-on-week. The massive popularity of Wimbledon, which concluded Sunday evening, could also be a contributing factor.

Universal’s “Jurassic World Rebirth” dropped to second place with $4.4 million in its second frame, pushing its cumulative total to $26 million. Warner Bros.’ F1” remained in the top three, adding $1.5 million in its third outing for a running total of $21.4 million.

Rounding out the top five were Universal’s “How To Train Your Dragon,” which banked $782,759 in its fifth week for a total of $25.9 million,...

Part of the appeal of war and military movies has to do with the fact that they're often based on real-life events and the way real-life situations are portrayed. Regardless of the excessive carnage that some movies are obligated to depict, the military genre is very popular across generations. But how exactly real are they? Former Marine Corps special operations team leader Elliot Ackerman offers his valuable perspective.

Ackerman's resume speaks for itself. The former service member was part of the Marine Raiders group as well as a CIA operative for covert operations. Since retiring, he has followed a writing career, winning several awards in the field. The winner of a Silver Star, Purple Heart and Bronze Star has enough experience to validate whether Hollywood's most important military films are realistic or not.

The former soldier appeared in a video for Insider, where he went through cinema's exemplary record in depicting the Marine Corps.

It is no secret that Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of his bestselling horror novel, "The Shining." The reasons are multi-pronged, ranging from strong disapproval over Jack Nicholson's casting as Jack Torrance to disappointment over substantial changes from the original book. These criticisms, while valid, clash with the film's undisputed status as a horror classic. The celebrated status of "The Shining" adds a bitter sting to King's perception of it; he called the "maddening, perverse, and disappointing" adaptation "a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it" (via Deadline).

Now, these are really harsh words, as King essentially likens Kubrick's rendition of "The Shining" to an exercise in style over substance, and accuses him of warping the book's artistic intent for the worse. Irrespective of whether you agree with King, it is true that Kubrick's story significantly diverges from the source material, to the extent that...

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is getting very, very retro with its marketing campaign.

Mimicking the style of old-timey, 1960s-era commercials, Marvel's latest trailer for the First Family's MCU debut promises a new experience presented "in brilliant Fantastivision" amidst clips from the movie. Other retro techniques include using old animation styles, voiceover narrations, musical cues, aspect ratios, and title boxes introducing each of its four stars as Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm. Additionally, the trailer features several new scenes like the Fantastic Four launching themselves into space, using their powers, the Fantasticar, and their faithful robot H.E.R.B.I.E. watching over baby Franklin Richards.

Unlike previous Marvel Cinematic Universe films, this Fantastic Four iteration will be the only established heroes in their universe, a reto-futuristic timeline influenced by the Space Race and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. This, according to director Matt Shakman,...

Director Stanley Kubrick's 4-time Oscar-winning 1975 feature "Barry Lyndon", based on the 1844 novel "The Luck of Barry Lyndon" by author William Makepeace Thackeray, has been restored in 4K, screening July 18, 2025 internationally in theaters:

Considered Kubrick's masterpiece, the deliberately slow-paced “Barry Lyndon" recounts the exploits of an insincere, 18th century, fortune-hunting Irish rogue.

Director Martin Scorsese has said that "Barry Lyndon" is his favorite Kubrick film.

One-note actor Ryan O'Neal is perfectly cast as a wooden innocent, determined to maintain his standing as a 'gentleman', while evolving into a devious scoundrel, in order to survive the era's useless wars, thievery and debauchery.

Drawing inspiration from "the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough," Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott also relied on the art direction of Ken Adam and Roy Walker, who would win Oscars for their candle-lit work on the film.

Critic Roger Ebert called "Barry Lyndon" one of the most beautiful films ever made.

Chris Cunningham is an embodiment of a time and place, of 1990s and early 2000s British underground cool, a moment when avant-garde art forms and personalities were enmeshed with the overground mainstream. Pop culture at large was still up for getting weird and transgressive, even during primetime, and commercials and promo videos were full of libido and artistry (just think of iconoclasts like Chris Morris and music-video talents like Hype Williams).When I was a teen, two DVD collections were pivotal to me. The first was Palm Pictures’ Directors Label series, which compiled the visionary commercial and music-video work of such directors as Cunningham, Williams, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbijn, and Stéphane Sednaoui, many of whom broke into feature filmmaking around the year 2000. The pipeline of working at an ad house, then making a promo, then directing a feature was a route to admire and...

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Barry Lyndon is out this week in a deluxe 4K/Blu-ray combo pack from the Criterion Collection this week. What can one say about a film that’s been written about extensively for the last five decades? I’m not even going to delve into that, it seems to be a rabbit hole from which one can never return. Barry Lyndon flopped on its initial release, but has been reevaluated and many critics name check it as the most beautiful film ever put to celluloid. The historical drama cost $11mm in 1975 dollars, or pounds, really. It’s also three hours and five minutes long, and the film knows it; hence, the fun, retro (and honestly helpful)...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Venice Classics will screen restorations of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador as part of an 18-film line-up at the 82nd Venice Film Festival (August 27-Septemer 6).

Lolita is a US-uk co-production, adapted by Kubrick from Nabokov’s novel, with James Mason and Sue Lyon in the leading roles. It first played at Venice in 1962.

Matador is one of Almodóvar’s early works. The 1986 erotic thriller sees Antonio Banderas play a student matador who wrongfully confesses to murder.

Among the four Italian films are Giuseppe De Santis’ once underestimated 1952 filmRome 11:00andLuciano Salce’s 1967 filmI Married You For Fun.

Restored movies by Pedro Almodóvar, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Manoel de Oliveira, Krzysztof Kieślowski and Tsai Ming-Liang are set to screen as part of the Venice Film Festival’s 18-title Venice Classics lineup.

Almodóvar’s 1986 erotic thriller “Matador,” featuring Antonio Banderas as a young bullfighter and exploring themes of sex and violence in the bullfighting world – a film that Quentin Tarantino has cited an inspiration – is part of a clutch of European titles in the selection. It also includes de Oliveira’s first film “Aniki-Bóbó”; Marcel Carné’s classic noir “Quai des brumes,” starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, which was a prizewinner at Venice in 1938; and Kieslowski’s “Blind Chance, which heralded his famed “Decalogue.”

U.S. highlights comprise Kubrick’s 1962 Vladimir Nabokov adaptation “Lolita,” starring James Mason and Sue Lyon; Delmer Daves’ 1957 western “3:10 to Yuma,” redone by James Mangold in 2007 in a version starring Russell Crowe...

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled the 18 recently restored movies that will be showcased in its Venice Classics sidebar at upcoming 82nd edition.

The line-up features Delmer Daves’ 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, based on a 1953 short story by Elmore Leonard, which was revisited by James Mangold in 2007 in a version starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

Other U.S. highlights include The Delicate Delinquent, starring Jerry Lewis, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, House of Strangers, starring Edward G. Robinson in the role of a rags-to-riches Italian American banker accused of criminal activity.

The sidebar will also showcase Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 Vladimir Nabokov adaptation Lolita, starring James Mason and Sue Lyon.

European classics in the selection include Manoel de Oliveira’s first film Aniki-Bóbó, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance, which heralded Decalogue; Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, and Marcel Carné’s pioneering film noir Le Quai des brumes, starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan,...