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Noah Hawley brings a classic sci-fi horror franchise to the small screen with the lavish-looking Alien: Earth. Here’s our spoiler-free review of episodes 1 and 2:

Television spin-offs from hit genre films haven’t always had a particularly good hit-rate. RoboCop, Highlander and Total Recall all got their own small-screen shows years ago, and while there was entertainment to be found in them, it’s probably fair to say that their meagre budgets meant they couldn’t always compare to the movies on which they were based.

This is the 21st century, though: an era in which TV shows are given a level of financing and visual polish that the makers of, say, Highlander: The Series could only have dreamed of. We’re also living through a period in which TV now attracts the kind of talent that would have been making mainstream movies in the 80s and 90s. In other words,...

This year’s edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival will host British filmmaker Ken Loach and his longtime creative collaborators, writer Paul Laverty and producer Rebecca O’Brien.

The trio will discuss the acclaimed films they have created together over the years including Palme d’Or winners The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), on Aug. 20. The group will then introduce a special retrospective screening on 35mm print of the The Wind That Shakes The Barley, starring Cillian Murphy, the fest confirmed.

Eiff’s In Conversation strand also features a range of other major filmmaking talent who will discuss their creative careers to date, including director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void, One to One: John & Yoko) speaking with his brother, producer Andrew Macdonald (Trainspotting, Civil War, 28 Years Later). Kevin Macdonald will also present a screening of The Cranes are Flying...

"I live in my land, and land, it lives with me. We live together." Madman Films in Australia has revealed an official trailer for a documentary film titled Journey Home, David Gulpilil, made by filmmakers Maggie Miles & Trisha Morton-Thomas. It premiered at the 2025 Sydney Film Festival last month, and next plays at the Melbourne Film Festival in Australia. Everyone in cinema knows his face - Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, who famously starred in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Gulpilil passed away in 2021 (at age 68) but it was important to return his body back to his homeland up in Northern Australia. Gulpilil's life & work were previously explored in his own words in Darlene Johnson's Gulpilil: One Red Blood and Molly Reynolds's My Name Is Gulpilil; in this final chapter of his singular story, narrated by Hugh Jackman and Yolngu hip-hop artist Baker Boy, the filmmakers portray the man through the eyes of his community.

As he approaches his 76th birthday, which falls on July 26, Jeremy Thomas shows no signs of slowing up.

“I am never going to stop [producing]. It’s my life,” said the taboo-breaking UK producer of The Last Emperor, Crash and Naked Lunchat Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival (Mff),where he is receiving a lifetime achievement award.

As ever, the Recorded Picture Company founder has plenty of new work in the pipeline, including“five or six workable scripts that I am trying to make”.

He is also readying a slate of projects to be unveiled in the coming months: Takashi Miike’s...

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Robert Downey Jr.'s talent was always obvious, but his appetite for drugs and alcohol made it easy for studios to deny him work throughout the first few decades of his career. The son of trailblazing independent filmmaker Robert Downey (whose "Putney Swope" is one of the most scabrous pieces of pop cultural satire you will ever see), Downey fils popped up on the periphery of 1980s favorites like "Weird Science" and "Back to School" before delivering his breakout performance as the redlining addict Julian Wells in Marek Kanievska's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero."

Downey had the gift. He had it all. He was always the most exciting person on screen, which probably cheesed off some of his co-stars, but the kid couldn't help it. Like Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams, you were primed to laugh...

The A24 adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque Of The Red Death is to shoot this year, with Mikey Madison replacing Sydney Sweeney in the lead.

In a story that we covered in January, A24 and Picturestart are teaming to tackle an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic short story, The Masque Of The Red Death. It centres on a group of privileged nobles who lock themselves away for endless revelry while a plague decimates the outside world. You can probably imagine that not everything goes to plan for the wealthy partygoers.

It’ll be the feature debut of New York filmmaker and theatre director Charlie Polinger, and the project is said to be ‘wildly revisionist and darkly comedic.’

The whole ‘eat the rich’ genre continues to surge, and should this project not deviate too far from the source material, we could be looking at another film...

When I spoke to Alan Rudolph a couple months ago, he confirmed that Criterion had sought to release his Remember My Name but were held up by music rights––a situation so complicated that a lawyer hired by the director himself simply gave up. I like to think something’s changed in less than 60 days: the Criterion Channel will stream Remember My Name as part of a quartet featuring Afterglow, Trouble In Mind, and Breakfast of Champions, the latter recently given a 4K restoration. It’s part of a retrospective-heavy month that also includes a 12-title Johnnie To series, numerous films by René Clair, highlights of Amy Holden Jones and Ougie Pak, and Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip saga in both television and theatrical editions. Meanwhile, Gene Hackman is celebrated with six titles.

One of those, Night Moves, gets a Criterion Edition; so do Les Blank’s A Poem Is...

Ever since Turn on the Bright Lights debuted in the summer of 2002, Interpol frontman Paul Banks has been the epicenter of cool. Trying his hand at a variety of musical projects––from solo albums to instrumental experimentations to, even, collaborations with RZA––he’s never not been trying new things. He now has one more item to add to his resume: film composer, making his Ost debut on the 2024 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight hit Sister Midnight. Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, opening in theaters this Friday, follows Radhika Apte as Uma, a wife who finds her own creative ways to rebel in the early days of an arranged marriage.

In Devan Suber’s review of the film, he said, “Sister Midnight unfolds with a particularly deadpan style in both humor and performance. Kandhari favors simple gags, like the aforementioned handshake or a bit where Uma flees from the beach after being...

The jubilantly gory horror franchise returns with a hugely entertaining sixth installment which sets up an entire family tree for the slaughter

Final Destination, the giddy and splatterific franchise where the grim reaper finds increasingly cartoonish and comical ways to get back at those who think they’ve cheated death, has been sitting things out for more than a decade. Maybe that’s telling.

In the time since, we saw the rise of so-called “elevated horror”, a trend that arguably began with 2014’s The Babadook and enjoyed its biggest success with last fall’s Longlegs. Those earnestly artful films tend to shrug off the horror genre’s baser pleasures to instead mine drama, trauma and influences such as Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Nicolas Roeg. For those feeling a bit trauma-fatigued, I’m happy to say Final Destination is not only back but better than ever.

Seven films down with an eighth and final edition launching in cinemas this month, Mission: Impossible is undoubtedly one of contemporary cinema’s most enduring franchises.

But back in 1996, what made a young Tom Cruise, red hot in Hollywood thanks to hits like A Few Good Men and Interview with the Vampire, board the spy thriller?

“It was the music,” Cruise joked this evening in London, where he took part in a wide-ranging discussion about his career onstage at the British Film Institute. “I loved the theme music.”

The first Mission film was Cruise’s first credit as a producer, and he told the crowd in London that he sought the franchise out because he was interested in investigating how he could change the action genre.

“It was about looking at Mission and thinking ‘what can we do with action’,” he said. “It was about how I can evolve action...

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Jules is a sci-fi comedy-drama film directed by Marc Turtletaub from a screenplay by Gavin Steckler. The 2023 film follows Milton Robinson, an elderly man whose peaceful life is interrupted when a UFO crashes in his backyard. He soon befriends the alien, but things go awry when his neighbors and the government learn about the alien. Jules stars Ben Kingsley, Harriet Sansom Harris, Zoë Winters, Jade Quon, and Jane Curtin. So, if you loved the entertaining story and likable characters in Jules, here are some similar movies you should check out next.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Rent on Prime Video) Credit – Universal Pictures

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a sci-fi adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Melissa Mathison. The 1982 film follows Elliott, a young boy who comes across an alien and names him E.T.

Can’t get enough of Ryan Coolger’s “Sinners?”

You aren’t alone. The visionary vampire movie, which made over $180 million at the box office, is a genuine cultural phenomenon. Quite frankly, it’s enough to make you want to repeat the experience of watching “Sinners” at home, without, you know, the 70mm print and IMAX-certified screen.

But fear not, there are plenty of “Sinners”-adjacent material to watch at home, along with some of the other movies that Coogler has cited in the run-up to the movie’s release.

“Sinners” is a singular work of staggering genius, but here are a bunch of movies that will at least partially scratch that itch – at least until you can get back to the theater to watch Michael B. Jordan raise some more hell.

Miramax/Dimension Films “From Dusk till Dawn” (1996)

This is, perhaps, the most easily comparable movie to “Sinners...

Joshua Erkman’s debut feature A Desert follows a struggling photographer down a spiral of unpredictable horrors in The Middle of Nowhere, USA. Hoping to recapture the spark of his earlier work, he sets out into the unknown, capturing the urban decay of locations left for dead. An abandoned movie theatre, a junk yard fighting a losing battle with rust- these are the scenes he hopes to make the subject of a new, career-invigorating book. Getting “purposefully lost” in the wasteland of America, he instead steps into a living nightmare that lies hidden just outside his depth of field.

The film is a really accomplished indie slow burn that plays by its own rules and doesn’t fall in line with the mainstream Horror template. Its story unfolds as it sees fit, introducing new characters or plot points whenever it damn well pleases. The characters drive everything, and each one...

“Sinners” director Ryan Coogler has penned an emotional open letter thanking fans for showing up in droves to see the film in theaters, writing that his heart is “bursting” with “eternal gratitude.”

Coogler’s movie, starring Michael B. Jordan as the Smokestack twins, won the weekend, grossing $48 million domestically and $63 million globally.

The only way they got to that figure, the filmmaker writes, was thanks to the fans who bought a ticket: those “who decided to drive to see the film in different formats. Who bought popcorn and a drink, booked a sitter and carpooled, and stood in the lobby afterwards and talked and made a friend. Who changed their work schedules. Who saw the film in groups. … who watched more than once, who recommended the film to others, both in person and on social media or on your text message chains.”

In the typed letter, Coogler writes about what...

Mickey Rourke began his career as one of the hottest young actors of the 1980s with roles in Body Heat, Diner, The Pope of Greenwich Village and 9 1/2 Weeks. Among the directors he worked with during that period: Stephen Spielberg, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas Roeg, Barry Levinson and Alan Rudolph.

While his near 50-year career has had its ups and downs (and ups and downs again), the actor has continued to do remarkable work. That includes playing Charles Bukowski in Barfly, Marv in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City and his Oscar-nominated turn in Darren Aronfosky’s The Wrestler.

Scroll through the photos below to see a selection of photos from Rourke’s extraordinary life and career.

When you click play, stark images of trees, water bodies, spring-laden countryside, and a scattered coloring stump appear as a girl sings a prayer. While colors often signify happiness and joy, Carol Morley has other plans. Like leaves that fall from tree branches as spring approaches, The Falling gets darker with every angel that falls prey to an unanswered question. It’s staggering how she manages to showcase a wide range of emotions, all surrounded by one truly chaotic entity—based mostly on lies, or maybe not?

There are films that make you feel happy—this isn’t one of those. There are films that make you sad—this isn’t one of those either. And there are films that connect with you—this isn’t that kind of film. And yet, it feels essential. Carol Morley’s The Falling has cemented a fact in my head: “I’m going...

Entering what he described as “the Vatican of film,” composer Hans Zimmer decided to take a more solemn approach to his selections in the Criterion Closet. Pouring over the options, the Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve collaborator chose to recognize a fair amount of dark choices, starting with war film “The Battle of Algiers,” then moving on to Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog.”

“Oh, God, I went for all the heavy ones, didn’t I?” Zimmer said. “‘Night and Fog.’ The film that, to me, in its most unflinching way, describes the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the concentration camps. So you have to have strong nerves to go and watch this one.”

Another bleak pick, Zimmer went on to grab Andrei Tarkovsky’s biographical drama “Andrei Rublev,” which uses the story of the 15th century artist to craft an intricate portrait of medieval Russia.

“Favorite film my whole life long.

Courtesy of StudioCanal

by James Cameron-wilson

I have always been aware of the 1969 British film A Touch of Love, but I knew relatively little about it other than it starred Sandy Dennis and Ian McKellen. The title is misleading, to say the least, and the author of its screenplay, Margaret Drabble, was not happy with it either – the title, that is. Neither was she wild about the American moniker, Thank You All Very Much. Neither really sums up the content or the tone of the film, which was adapted by Dame Margaret from her own 1965 novel The Millstone, the name of which the producers, horror tycoons Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, were none too happy with, either. Being a restored title as part of StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection, it does though offer considerable historical merit and had a significant impact on changing the attitude and practices of the NHS.

Stars: Mimi Rogers, Bryan Brown, Christopher Burgard, Elizabeth Barondes, Gareth Williams, Patrick Neil Quinn, Heather Gunn | Written by Dan Gurskis | Directed by Nicolas Roeg

I went into Full Body Massage expecting something akin to the erotic thrillers that dominated the early-to-mid 90s—those sultry, dangerous films that combined noirish intrigue with sweaty, dimly lit encounters. Nicolas Roeg, a director known for his surreal and visually arresting storytelling, seemed an interesting choice to helm what, at first glance, appeared to be a steamy genre piece. But this film isn’t a Basic Instinct or a Body of Evidence. Instead, it’s a slow, meditative exploration of intimacy, philosophy, and human connection that feels like it belongs adjacent to the erotic thriller boom rather than within it.

The film centres on a single day in the life of Nina, played by Mimi Rogers, as she receives an unexpected massage from Fitch (Bryan Brown), a rugged,...

Tom Cruise is to receive a BFI Fellowship, the highest honor bestowed by the UK’s lead organization for film.

The award will be presented to Cruise at the BFI Chair’s dinner in London on Monday 12 May, hosted by BFI Chair Jay Hunt. The day before, Cruise will take part in an onstage In Conversation session at the BFI Southbank where he will discuss his decades-long career.

The Fellowship presentation will be the centerpiece of a month-long retrospective of Cruise’s film career at the BFI. A season of 27 films featuring Cruise will screen at the BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX throughout May 2025.

“I am truly honored by this acknowledgment,” Cruise said in a statement. “I’ve been making films in the UK for over 40 years and have no plans to stop. The UK is home to incredibly talented professionals — actors, directors, writers, and crews, as well as some...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Chaos: The Manson Murders (Errol Morris)

Over half a century later, what new information can be gleaned from the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969? Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s riveting (if convoluted) book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties––released in June 2019, between the Cannes premiere and theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino’s cathartic rewrite of that history––argues that while all the evidence of the murders has been gleaned, there’s a complex and knotty web of conspiracies for the motivations, some more plausible than others. To pare down the 528-page book to its most overarching theory, it postulates Manson may have been allowed (and perhaps even directed) by the CIA to concoct a reign...

Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance was shot in July 1968, but its release was postponed by a skittish Warner Bros. until August 1970. The timing couldn’t have been better, since the film not only perfectly encapsulates Swinging London’s faith in “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” but also effectively hammers the last nail in the counterculture’s coffin. As a sort of epilogue to the Rolling Stones’s disastrous concert at Altamont, Performance illustrates precisely what can happen in the void left gaping open when performers stop performing.

The film’s title is aptly overdetermined. Reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) is obviously one kind of performer. But performer, in British slang, also refers to mobsters like Chas (James Fox). In the film, the worlds that these two men inhabit collide and entwine in fascinating fashion. Over the course of the first half, which is dedicated to delineating...

Gene Hackman, who died at 95 on February 26, 2025, was nothing short of a marvelous actor. Apart from his two Academy Awards -- for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his work as Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (1971) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for playing Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" (1992) -- his proverbial mantelpiece accumulated over 30 different acting awards over his decades-long career. Knowing the kind of spotlight such success places on a performer, you'd expect that any studio that could score Hackman's services would have rushed to release his movies the second they were done ... but the film industry can be a strange place, and even a giant like Hackman isn't always safe from behind-the-scenes meddling.

Hackman's fans in the U.S. might be surprised to discover that some of the actor's arguably finest work hasn't always been readily available,...

Nicolas Cage is putting the rumble and tumble into surf and turf.

The iconic actor leads psychological thriller “The Surfer,” which centers on a man fighting local surfers in a turf war to reclaim his beachfront home.

Cage stars as an unnamed character who brings his teenage son (Finn Little) to the Australian beach where he was raised. His character is an Australian who moved to California when he himself was a teen after his father was found dead on the same beach. Now, he wants to reestablish his Aussie roots in town — the only issue is that the locals are less than thrilled to welcome him back.

The synopsis reads: “A man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son. But his desire to hit the waves is thwarted by a group of locals whose mantra is “don’t live here, don’t surf here.

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The musician-to-actor pipeline is nothing new, but few films are as notorious as Performance, the Mick Jagger vehicle that was so appalling to Warner Bros. that they shelved it for 18 months. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll are just the start — the gritty gangster flick has plenty of violence, too.

In the intervening half-century since its release it’s become a cult classic, and to certify its film buff bona fides,...

Though the summer movie season of 1988 would not officially begin until the May 20 opening of Ron Howard and George Lucas' "Willow," movie buffs hungry for spectacle after enduring an unusually weak spring (led by Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice" and Oscar-winning holdovers like "The Last Emperor" and "Moonstruck") were eagerly looking forward weeks in advance of this kickoff and wondering which of the studios' big-ticket offerings would satisfy as wholly as "The Untouchables," "RoboCop," and "Predator" had done the previous year. Amid the glut of mostly unpromising sequels, there were two seemingly sure things (Robert Zemeckis' "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and the Eddie Murphy vehicle "Coming to America") and a smattering of originals toplined by some of the biggest stars in the industry.

And then there was "Die Hard."

As you likely know, John McTiernan's classic was initially viewed by some as a looming folly based on 20th Century Fox...

Romance for indie filmmakers Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer blossomed in the most unexpected of places — as they shot their 2020 debut feature Violation, a relentlessly violent and gory revenge drama set in cottage-country Canada.

“After making our first film, which really dealt with trauma and was very dark, very painful to make and really delved into the dark recesses of our minds, we wanted to make something that was about love,” Sims-Fewer tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Honey Bunch, their sophomore feature, having its world premiere in Berlin on Feb. 18.

In their first feature, which bowed at the Toronto Film Festival, Sims-Fewer played a young woman in an unhappy marriage who, with her sister and their husbands, stays at a secluded cottage where unspoken traumas and upsetting sexual violence are gradually revealed.

But on Honey Bunch, the Canadian filmmakers deliberately toned down the dark, bloody material of their first feature.

With the exception of John Wayne, no other actor is more synonymous with the Western than Clint Eastwood. In fact, even in films that aren't part of the Western genre that Eastwood takes part in, audiences still find themselves reveling in the persona that the actor established in films such as The Outlaw Josey Wales and A Fistful of Dollars. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Kelly's Heroes. Released in 1970 and featuring a stacked cast that saw Eastwood star alongside Donald Sutherland, Tully Savalas, Don Rickles, Gavin MacLeod, and Carol O'Connor, Kelly's Heroes is a boisterous action-packed heist film set during the Second World War.

The plot, which involves Private Kelly (Eastwood) leading a rag-tag group of individuals behind enemy lines to steal a cache of gold, might sound familiar if you're a fan of many Western films. In fact, Kelly's Heroes is best described as a "World War II Western,...

The story around Isaiah Saxon’s feature debut, “The Legend of Ochi,” took a drastic turn, as so many Hollywood stories did, with this month’s Los Angeles fires. Saxon lost his home in the blaze, and the film’s theatrical release was pushed back. However, having spent years developing and working on the fantasy feature, Saxon is standing steadfastly behind his film and will be present for its Sundance world premiere.

“The Legend of Ochi” is a throwback. Its aesthetics, fantasy elements and a blend of practical and digital effects will be instantly endearing to audiences of a certain age but are modern enough and so well executed as to attract younger audiences weaned on the vfx-heavy fare of more recent decades.

The film tells the story of Yuri, a shy farm in a remote village on the island of Carpathia. Born as the only child to a father who yearned for a son,...

The banning of books in school libraries, an especially hot topic in 2022/23 news cycles, may not feature high in the headlines recently given the new presidential administration’s tsunami of rights-snuffing, Constitution-flouting executive orders. But it’s still going on. That makes the debut at Sundance of The Librarians, a scrupulously assembled feature documentary by esteemed, Peabody-winning director Kim A. Snyder, all the more welcome. (It’s extra timely given since Snyder was just Oscar-nominated, alongside producer Janique L. Robillard, for her documentary short Death By Numbers, which concerns a school-shooting survivor.)

Seamlessly assembling a wide variety of material, including vintage film snippets mixed in with the archival and original footage, The Librarians observes a clutch of educators, almost all women, fighting on the culture-war frontlines. Their opponents are legion: conservative school boards, members of the recently scandal-ridden right-wing organization Moms for Liberty and publicity-hungry Republican politicians, among others.

Snyder...

The classic Edgar Allan Poe tale of The Masque of the Red Death is headed back to the screen with a new movie adaptation from A24 and Picturestart, Deadline reports today.

Additionally, the site notes that Sydney Sweeney (Immaculate) is in talks to star.

Charlie Polinger is writing and directing The Masque of the Red Death for A24, said to be a “wildly revisionist and darkly comedic take on the short story.”

Deadline details in today’s report, “The original Poe short story follows a prince who attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey. Details behind this new take are being kept under wraps. Sources say the film will shoot this year.”

Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death was originally published in 1842, and the tale was notably brought to the big screen as part of the Corman-Poe Cycle back...

The best horror films not only try to sink their hooks into you during the entire three acts of their runtime, but they also go for a wallop of an ending, so you're stunned as you turn off the TV or walk out of the theater. For example, Smile 2 was one of 2024's best horror films, but as scary as it was, it's that final image which stays with us the most. One of horror's most messed up, shocking finales goes to Martyrs, a 2008 French film, with a last scene that'll make your jaw drop as it sends a chill down your spine. Neither of these more modern examples can compare with 1973's Don't Look Now, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. This Nicolas Roeg film is a haunting story about loss, all building to an ending that will make you jump out of your seat and leave you feeling utterly hopeless.

Quick Links What is The Edge About? The Edge Is a Different Adventure For David Mamet Alec Baldwin Brings a Career Best Performance

It's always impressive when a movie manages to elicit genuine emotional distress from audiences, but it's even more impressive when they manage to accomplish this on a small scale. Most of the greatest thrillers of all time, from Seven and Children of Men all the way to Chinatown and North By Northwest are absolutely massive in scale and feature intense and meticulous world building across cities, states, and countries. While these films are huge in scale, they sit on the thriller genre Mount Rushmore because they manage to make massive worlds feel small, claustrophobic and isolated through ingenious tension creation. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are small-scale films like Coherence and Green Room that manage to feel huge and sprawling despite their mostly singular setting.

Year after year, one genre continues to pull audiences into the lobbies of cinemas around the world. While its stars might not often be up for major awards, they are heroes to the fandoms who have their own terms for the best in the biz. With so many subgenres, horror has something for everyone. Although directors like Peter Medak and Nicolas Roeg began exploring the sub-horror-genre of family trauma decades ago in their films The Changeling and Don’t Look Now, respectively, the last decade has ushered in a brand-new lineup of directors exploring close-to-home themes. In 2018, Ari Aster made his feature-length directorial debut with one of these projects, a movie that will stick with viewers long after the credits roll. Are you filled with intrigue? Well, luckily, Aster’s breakthrough pairing with A24, Hereditary, is coming to one of the most popular streamers, as it will celebrate its Netflix debut...

Mick Jagger, the charismatic frontman of the British rock band The Rolling Stones, shows no signs of slowing down at age 81. His discography has earned him millions of fans with unwavering loyalty worldwide. But, like David Bowie and Kris Kristofferson of the time, music isn't the only craft Jagger's turned his hand to throughout the years.

Jagger was well-equipped for his first film role in the twisted 1970 psychological thriller Performance, considering he plays an enigmatic one-time rock star (named Turner). Co-directed by Donald Cammell and the great Nicolas Roeg, Performance is getting the release it deserves 55 years later, on 25 February 2025, with 4K and Blu-ray options, where viewers are free to make their minds up about the controversial film.

The Two Sides of 'Performance'

5/5 Performance RCrimeDrama

Performance is a 1970 British crime drama film co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. The film stars James Fox as Chas, an East London...

Bridget Fonda is the daughter of Peter Fonda, the granddaughter of Henry Fonda, and the niece of Jane Fonda, so it only seemed natural that she would become an actor. She started appearing on stage as a girl and appeared in "Easy Rider" with her father when she was only five years old.

Fonda would go on to study method acting at the famed Lee Strassberg Theater. She started appearing in films only two years after graduating at NYU. Acting was in her blood and it seemed like she never considered doing anything else. From 1988 to 2002, Fonda appeared in dozens of high-profile Hollywood films, and was nominated for two Golden Globes and an Emmy. She retired unexpectedly in 2002 and hasn't been seen on screen since. Throughout the 1990s, however, Fonda was something of a cinematic "It" girl, appearing in raucous comedies, dramatic indies, intense crime films, and a few of Sam Raimi's productions.

Physical media collectors, take note. The Criterion Collection has announced six new Blu-ray releases coming in February 2025, including titles from some of today’s most beloved auteurs and one famously elusive late-career work from a French New Wave legend.

The slate is headlined by Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear,” an essential work from the “Breathless” director’s experimental period that has long been unavailable to own or stream. The film uses William Shakespeare’s tragedy as a jumping off point for a postmodern riff on art in a world decimated by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. While it shares little DNA with the actual play that shares its name, “King Lear” contains some of the most striking imagery of Godard’s filmography, including the director himself donning a Rastafarian wig made entirely of electrical cables. The nonlinear film is a pastiche of influences, references, and ideas that stands out to many...

The Criterion Collection has unveiled its February 2025 lineup, featuring 4K Uhd upgrades for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love and Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos. Also among the lineup is one of the great rom-coms, Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, alongside Gus Van Sant’s second feature Drugstore Cowboy.

Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language feature King Lear and Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance are also coming to the collection, the latter featuring Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1998), a documentary by Kevin Macdonald and Chris Rodley Influence and Controversy: Making “Performance” (2007), a documentary about the making of the film.

Check out the cover art below and learn more here.

The post Criterion Collection’s February 2025 Lineup Features Paul Thomas Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Crossing Delancey & More first appeared on The Film Stage.

There is something about the dark fantasy movie genre that just isn't easily replicated. While many a fantasy movie has transported audiences to new and expansive worlds with epic stories of big adventures, historically the genre has also been limited by both technology and budgets that restrain movies from achieving the potential of the stories being told.

The dark fantasy genre, however, often tells smaller scale stories inspired by fairy tales, focusing on eerie atmosphere, stellar creature and set design rather than VFX spectacle. Still, many dark fantasy movies have fantastic special effects that feel as grand and epic as big budget blockbusters. Even in animation, the dark fantasy genre has delivered some of the best and scariest works in the medium.

From the apogee of the genre in the 80s, to modern examples, this list pins down the 10 best dark fantasy movies out there.

Read more: The 50 Scariest Horror...

It’s shaping up to be a Huston family Christmas.

Siblings and Hollywood royalty Anjelica and Danny Huston are teaming on a new project, The Christmas Witch Trial of La Befana, a hybrid animated and live-action feature film that is currently shooting in Los Angeles and Ontario, Canada.

HighballTV confirmed the details of the film, which was written by David James Brock and HighballTV’s Melissa D’Agostino based on an idea they conceived with Matt Campagna who is also directing with D’Agostino, a frequent creative partner. Johnathan Sharp is producing.

The plot follows a peculiar court case that unspools after the children in a rural Italian village kidnap their legendary Christmas witch, played by Huston, and put her on trial in an attempt to stop her annual judgment from their lives. While casting a spell through witches, fantasy and Italian folklore, the project is said to touch on universal themes of grief,...

Christopher Nolan has been attracting the eyes of critics throughout his entire career. Although it was working with a minuscule budget of $6,000 and only played in a few theaters in the United States, his 1998 debut feature "Following" was praised for its tight storytelling and terse psychological underpinnings. Nolan then rose to international fame with his 2000 film "Memento," a neo-noir about a man unable to form new memories. Its backward-chronological-order plot was cleverly conceived and impeccably laid out, somehow coming to a traditional narrative climax even while running in reverse.

From there it was off to the races, so to speak. Nolan became a power player in Hollywood, directing gigantic movie stars like Al Pacino and Robin Williams in a remake of "Insomnia" and making a gigantic, zeitgeist-shifting hit with 2005's "Batman Begins." Nolan's three Batman movies are still spoken of with enthusiasm to this day. Their success also allowed him...

While fast-paced action can be incredibly enjoyable, theres a lot to be said for a slow-burn sci-fi movie that takes its time to reveal its true nature. By allowing the space for atmosphere and complexity to grow and breathe, sci-fi stories can become all the more thought-provoking and philosophically rich when they dont underestimate the audience and allow for events to occur naturally without the need for endless explosions, chases, or blockbuster movie spectacles. A slower-paced sci-fi film allows for tension to build and the characters' motivations to reveal themselves.

Some of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made ran at a slower pace and rewarded viewers' patience with meaningful revelations. By focusing on characters over pure, mindless entertainment or giving room for striking visuals and a sense of discovery within the movies world, sci-fi stories can go from being merely good to truly great. Some of the most epic sci-fi...

Nicolas Roeg is a director who has inspired more films of note than he has created himself. His style is somewhat impenetrable and obscure, and that is often a mark of a respected auteur. But in 1988, Roeg would put out a film that may have asked too much of casual audiences: Track 29. Gary Oldman gives a wild early performance as Martin, a young Englishman searching for his birth mother (Theresa Russell) in North Carolina. This normal sounding plot is nowhere near as heartwarming as it sounds, with Roeg presenting a surreal, maddening Oedipal drama complete with stalking and lots and lots of model trains.

Spoopy Season is upon us, dear readers, and any cineaste worth their weight in bone matter is likely scouring the world's many streaming services looking for the best fright flicks available. Most casual horror fans may be content to idly re-watch well-trodden classics like "Halloween," while more enterprising gorehounds will be studiously studying the carefully curated films on Shudder. The jaded, more experienced fright fans, however, will require stronger coffee to get their fear fix, and those brave souls may dive face-first into the overstuffed trough of Night Flight or Eternal Family, looking for oddities that the average soul cannot stand. Are you going to watch a gentle film like "Hocus Pocus" this October, or are you the type to try out "Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell?"

We can say for sure that actor Kevin Bacon, a great actor with impeccable taste, is an aficionado of the genre and likes...

Few films are as haunting, strange, and unforgettable as Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, which is now available to watch on Max. One of the earliest examples of what would later become known as the Australian New Wave, it tells a story of three unnamed children from two very different walks of life, and how their inability to overcome their differences leads to tragedy. As Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies review, it concerns "lives that are destroyed, in one way or another, because two people could not invent a way to make their needs and dreams clear." In that way, it works as a metaphor for our broader issues to communicate with one another across barriers of language, race, and culture.

This weekend is The International Edgar Allan Poe Festival & Awards, commemorating the 175th anniversary of Poe's death in Baltimore. Taking place from October 4th - 6th, the event also celebrates a big milestone: the 60th anniversary of Roger Corman and Vincent Price's The Masque of the Red Death.

The event includes a panel of special guests to talk about the film and its legacy, including Victoria Price, whom I had the pleasure of speaking with to talk about the importance of the film, Vincent Price's lasting impact, and her Halloween celebrations.

The festival will have a 60th anniversary screening of Roger Corman and Vincent Price's The Masque of Red Death, which is a personal favorite of mine.

Victoria Price: Me too! Roger was one of those people I thought was going to live forever, so it's strange to not have him here.

He left such an impression on the people he interacted with.

Irish director John Crowley and his “We Live in Time” actor Andrew Garfield hosted the last of this year’s star-studded San Sebastian press conferences for their Official Selection player, which will close the 72nd edition of the festival this evening.

Also starring Florence Pugh, “We Live in Time,” written by acclaimed playwright Nick Payne (“The Crown”), is the time-twisted love story of Almut and Tobias. Through disordered snapshots of their life together, the two experience great joys like parenthood, meeting each other’s families, a marriage proposal, and life-changing tragedies such as divorce and a recurring ovarian cancer diagnosis. The couple learns through their shared memories to cherish each moment of the roundabout path their relationship has traveled.

During Saturday morning’s press conference, Garfield said he was in a contemplative place when Payne’s screenplay crossed his desk. “When I read [the script], I was in deep contemplation of the meaning of life.

The Criterion Channel’s at its best when October rolls around, consistently engaging in the strongest horror line-ups of any streamer. 2024 will bring more than a few iterations of their spooky programming: “Horror F/X” highlights the best effects-based scares through the likes of Romero, Cronenberg, Lynch, Tobe Hooper, James Whale; “Witches” does what it says on the tin (and inside the tin is the underrated Italian anthology film featuring Clint Eastwood cuckolded by Batman); “Japanese Horror” runs the gamut of classics; a Stephen King series puts John Carpenter and The Lawnmower Man on equal playing ground; October’s Criterion Editions are Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Hunter, Häxan; a made-for-tv duo includes Carpenter’s underrated Someone’s Watching Me!; meanwhile, The Wailing and The Babadook stream alongside a collection of Cronenberg and Stephanie Rothman titles.

Otherwise, Winona Ryder and Raúl Juliá are given retrospectives, as are filmmakers Arthur J. Bressan Jr. and Lionel Rogosin.

The 1973 horror, Don't Look Now, was overshadowed by a controversial scene that has made the film infamous. Directed by Nicolas Roeg and based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now tells a chilling story of a grieving couple who experience mysterious things after meeting a clairvoyant woman. The horror movie received critical acclaim upon its release and has become one of the best horror movies about grief.

Although the film which starred Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie is a masterpiece, the notorious scene overshadowed the best parts of the movie, such as its core themes and forward-thinking portrayal of intimacy. Despite the controversial scene, Don't Look Now's shocking ending, inventive editing style, and incredible quality have earned its place as one of the best movies of its era. The horror film is not only highly regarded in the horror genre, but it has a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes,...

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” is a meta ghost story, according to legendary author Rachel Kushner.

The California writer, whose latest novel “Creation Lake” will be released in September, appeared on the Criterion Channel’s “Adventures in Moviegoing” series to share her favorite San Francisco-set films. Of course, “Vertigo” was on the top of her list, both due to her personal connections to the locations captured by Hitchcock onscreen and just how much the 1958 film still haunts the city itself 70 years later.

The beloved thriller stars James Stewart as a former police detective who becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) he is hired to investigate. (Read our list of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies here.)

“I find ‘Vertigo’ to be an exquisite movie,” Kushner said. “There’s this sense of holographic ghosts hovering in San Francisco and come to think of it, the holograph is an imagery that is actually...