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I’m 80 years old and this is my 60th year in the entertainment business. It’s hard to believe even as I write it. Most of my career was in public relations, working with the biggest stars of the day. There were too many secrets in Hollywood back then, but I sometimes miss the mystery of icons like Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Ali MacGraw, Diahann Carroll, Charlton Heston and so many others. They spoke to the audience mainly through their work and carefully controlled press to promote their latest film. That mystery allowed me to pull off one of my most unusual achievements for a client when I accompanied actress and photojournalist Gina Lollobrigida to Cuba in 1974 for an exclusive photo essay and interview with Fidel Castro. As I watched Castro playing 5 on 5 basketball in an empty arena, I asked myself how a girl from a small town in Virginia ended up here.

Charlton Heston became a household name with leading roles in action adventures and biblical epics, but his credits extended past those two well-worn genres. Let’s take a look back at 12 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

After serving in the United States Army Air Force during WWII, Heston made his professional movie acting debut with the film noir “Dark City” (1950). His big breakthrough came just two years later with Cecil B. DeMille‘s big top soap opera “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), in which he played the circus manager. Though an audience favorite in its time, the film often ranks among the all-time worst Oscar winners for Best Picture.

Heston later reunited with DeMille to play the Old Testament prophet Moses in “The Ten Commandments” (1956), which brought him a Golden Globe nomination. A holy hit at the box office, the role undoubtedly inspired William Wyler to cast...

The following article contains discussions of sexual abuse.

The ending of the classic 1996 legal thriller Primal Fear has a lot of twists, turns, and deeper meanings to explore, as it concludes on a hauntingly ambiguous note. Richard Gere stars as hotshot defense attorney Martin Vail, who welcomes media attention as he works to get high-profile clients off the hook on technicalities. A young Edward Norton, in his film debut, co-stars as Aaron Stampler, an altar boy accused of killing a powerful Catholic archbishop, who insists that hes innocent and that his violent behavior is the work of a second personality called Roy.

Nortons breakthrough performance in Primal Fear earned him Oscar and BAFTA nominations and a Golden Globe win. One of the reasons why it's one of Nortons best performances is that he nailed the delivery of the shocking climactic twist. For most of its runtime, Primal Fear lulls the...

Kim Kahana, the stunt performer, teacher, coordinator and war hero who played Chongo on the kids show Danger Island and doubled for Charles Bronson in several action films, has died. He was 94.

Kahana died Monday of natural causes at his home in Groveland, Florida, his wife, Sandy Kahana, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Kahana, 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds, taught stunts to many thousands of students since the mid-1970s in six-week courses that took place in Chatsworth, California, and Central Florida. Many went on to have thriving careers in show business.

He also had six different black belt degrees — he taught martial arts, too — and worked as a professional bodyguard protecting Hollywood types.

A native of Hawaii, Kahana appeared in his first film as a biker in the Marlon Brando-starring The Wild One (1953) and was an extra in other movies before he realized that stunt performers got paid more than he did.

This post contains spoilers for "Soylent Green" and its source material.

Richard Fleischer's 1973 dystopian sci-fi classic, "Soylent Green," ends with a shocking revelation. Set in a future consumed by ecocide — thanks to unchecked overpopulation and the depletion of resources that came with it — New York City stands on the brink of collapse. The increasing divide between the affluent and the poor has prompted riots over the artificial wafers made by the Soylent Corporation, and their latest product, the plankton-rich Soylent Green, remains coveted, while the rich indulge in organic delicacies. After NYPD detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) gets embroiled in a conspiracy, he learns that the plankton claimed to produce Soylent Green has gone extinct, and that the key ingredients in the wafer instead come from human bodies. "Soylent Green is people!" he shouts in anguish to the crowd assembling around him in the end, devastated that the truth might never be uncovered.

Richard Fleischer's 1973 dystopian sci-fi film "Soylent Green" takes place in the distant future of 2022 when Earth's resources are dwindling, thanks to overpopulation and climate change. Food sources are becoming scant and difficult to maintain. Food and water are rationed for everyone, and the most common foods are small processed crackers called Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow (named for their two ingredients: soy and lentils). A new flavor is taking the populace by storm: Soylent Green is said to be made from plankton and possessed of a much better flavor. It seems that a recent thriving biome was discovered on the ocean floors.

This is a bleak future, and citizens are encouraged to volunteer for euthanasia to keep the population down. The government provides special death rooms where people can relax to calming music and lovely forest scenes as they receive lethal injections.

Charlton Heston plays an NYPD cop named...

The thing about big swings and high concept genre television is that when it lands, its smacks you squarely in the stomach. It's how you get all-time greats like the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episodes "Hush", "The Body" (one of the most gut-wrenching explorations of grief put to screen), and, of course, the musical spectacular "Once More, with Feeling." When it misses, on the other hand, you can end up with "Buffy" stinkers like "Doublemeat Palace" (which is far less captivating than its "Soylent Green"-inspired premise would suggest) and the one-two punch of "Beer Bad" and "Where the Wild Things Are".

When it comes to "Bones," Hart Hanson's agreeable, long-running rom-com crime procedural was constantly testing the waters to determine whether a comedic episode was perhaps a little too silly for a show about nightmarish murder investigations. You can see that in the common denominator shared by the...

Disney+ will release a new Simpsons short featuring classic Disney characters for Mother's Day. The acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney allows for crossovers between The Simpsons and Disney. The special will showcase Disney characters in The Simpsons' art style and airs on May 10.

The latest The Simpsons holiday short will bring together a couple dozen notable Disney characters. The Simpsons is currently in season 35, which began in October 2023 with an episode called Homers Crossing. Its next episode, titled The Tell-Tale Pants, is set for release this weekend on May 5. The Simpsons season 36 has also been confirmed for renewal.

Now, Disney+ has announced the release of a new Simpsons short that will include classic Disney characters. The short will be in honor of Mothers Day, and it is titled May the 12th Be With You. The Simpsons short will be released to Disney+ on May 10.

Wookiee what we have here.

In the warehouse-huge back room of his company Return Home, just south of Seattle, Micah Truman walks over to what looks like an off-white shipping crate, complete with a lock on the front. “Put your hand onto it,” instructs Truman, who, with his woodsy vest and tidy appearance, looks like a genial banker on a hiking tour.

The machine is warm to the touch. “They’re running 140 to 150 degrees,” he says approvingly. “The magic number is 131 degrees for 72 hours. Gets rid of all your baddies. Your viruses. I don’t...

If the most terrifying horror monsters are the ones that most reflect real-life terror, then cinematic cannibals might be the most terrifying monsters of all. Unlike vampires, werewolves, or ghosts, cannibals on film are fully flesh-and-blood humans — just with a taste for the flesh and blood of other humans. The garishness of the act makes cannibalism a perfect subject for shock horror, and the cannibal film fully came alive in the ’70s and ’80s via low-budget splatter triumphs like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Cannibal Holocaust,” which pitted their protagonists against horrific waves of flesh eaters.

In recent years, cannibalism has had a bit of a “moment” — on film, at least. As The New York Times pointed out in 2022, a wave of movies, TV shows, and books exploring cannibalism has emerged in popular culture, from “Yellowjackets” to “Bones and All” to “Fresh.” Many of these projects use the practice as...

When Gene Roddenberry began developing the screenplay for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in 1975, expectations for how a science fiction film could look and feel were rapidly shifting. "2001: A Space Odyssey" offered moviegoers a 70mm trip to outer space, while "The Omega Man," "Soylent Green," and the "Planet of the Apes" series fed off the sociopolitical tumult of the times to thrust audiences into dystopian futures of our own foolish making.

Where did a show that was, at its core, a dream of racially and ethnically inclusive space exploration fit in an era of consciousness-raising spectacle and pessimistic earthbound forecasting? Though the series had failed to enthrall a sizable enough viewership to survive more than three seasons during its initial run on NBC in the late 1960s, "Star Trek" had become popular in syndication with 1970s couch potatoes. There was clearly a hunger for more, and there weren't any...

Westworld was a huge financial hit upon release, earning $10 million on a budget of only $1 million. The movie broke the sci-fi movie mold by focusing on the perspectives of the park's visitors, scientists, and robots. Westworld's use of digital image processing and prioritizing the androids' point of view influenced later sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Jurassic Park.

Not only was Westworld a huge hit upon release, but the sci-fi classic eventually led to Jurassic Park’s franchise-spawning success. The Michael Crichton adaptation Westworld was released in 1973. Directed by the aforementioned author, Westworld was the story of an interactive theme park populated by unnervingly lifelike robots. Westworld was a huge financial hit upon release, earning $10 million on a budget of only $1 million. However, the extent of the movie’s influence on sci-fi cinema would not become clear until decades later, when Crichton’s other "Theme park gone wrong" novel...

There is something to be said about the cycle of sci-fi films made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. While the decades to come would be defined by Star Wars pew-pews, for a little while there, the genre was fixated almost wholly on grim cynicism, downbeat endings, and unadulterated dystopia. I’m a sucker for all that jazz, even when it’s at its silliest. That would be your “Soylent Green is people!” films or the sequels to Chuck Heston crying, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” This could also explain why I sat with a smile for nearly all 157 minutes of Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. It’s grandiose, kooky, and sometimes cruel. But despite being adapted from a YA book, this gray universe imagined by Suzanne Collins still feels refreshingly adult in our own modern multiplex land of bread and circuses.

Fandoms everywhere can now rejoice, for in October Our Flag Means Death finally returns to our screens for its second season. Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi will be romancing the high seas once more thanks to an enormous outpouring of love and support from the show’s fans. The safety of the cult favorite is not yet known beyond season two, but if this one is as good as the first, it certainly won’t be for lack of trying.

Talking of little shows that could, Doom Patrol is back for its last ever block of episodes, having long outlasted the many of the other ill-fated DC streaming series. Season two of The Gilded Age is also streaming this month, with Bertha challenging both Mrs. Astor and the old system in this new run.

And if none of that is up your street, there’s always Jason Statham punching sharks in the face,...

Rhys Darby in ‘Our Flag Means Death’ season 2 (Photograph by Nicola Dove/Max)

Max’s 2023 October lineup of series includes new seasons of Our Flag Means Death, The Gilded Age, and 30 Coins, as well as the second half of Doom Patrol season four (the final season). A documentary focusing on the notorious Bling Ring premieres on October 1st, along with all five Final Destination films.

In addition to a batch of horror films joining the network’s lineup, Max is celebrating Halloween with new seasons of Ghost Adventures and The Haunted Museum.

Series & Films Arriving On Max In October 2023:

October 1

3 Godfathers (1948)

The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996)

All About the Benjamins (2002)

The Amazing Panda Adventure (1995)

Angels in the Outfield (1951)

The Answer Man (2009)

Anthropoid (2016)

Appaloosa (2008)

The Apparition (2012)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Badlands (1973)

Be Cool (2005)

Bee Season (2005)

Beetlejuice (1988)

The Benchwarmers (2006)

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Blindspotting (2018)

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012)

Cesar Chavez (2014)

Charlie Wilson’s War...

The Wachowski sisters' movies are known for their disturbing and off-beat themes, including cannibalism, which is used to highlight the endless cycle of consumption in their dystopian worlds. The Matrix franchise famously explores the concept of humans being used as batteries by machines, with liquidized corpses being recycled to feed human babies in pods. Other Wachowski movies like Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending also incorporate cannibalism as a theme, portraying enslaved clones being recycled as food and powerful aliens drinking elixirs made from humans to stay young. Humans are depicted as mere resources in their nightmarish dystopias.

While Lilly and Lana Wachowski have been known to make use of disturbing themes in movies like The Matrix, one recurring motif is particularly stomach-churning. Several of the Wachowski sisters' movies are set in dystopian worlds, saturated in surveillance, consumption, and AI. The filmmakers tend to weave specific themes such as cloning throughout...

Sci-fi is a catch-all term, really. Most folks might think of franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek when they hear it—imagining fantastical vistas with magic wizards and teleportation beams. And to be sure, the space opera is a prized staple in the genre’s cabinet of curiosities; but the more interesting science fiction, or at least the type that sticks around in the old noodle, is the more grounded “hard sci-fi.” With a greater emphasis on speculation and estimation derived from the scientific realities of their times, as opposed to the flights of fancy in their pulps, these are stories created by writers, directors, and artists with an eager eye on the horizon.

It is easy to walk out of a film and announce “that will never happen,” but there have been plenty of times where the sci-fi of today turned out to be the scientific reality of tomorrow.

Great movies often have famous lines, but some classics are best or even only known today for one particular quote. While many screenwriters strive for naturalistic dialogue that doesn't stand out, some of the most iconic moments in cinema come from lines of flowery speech that stick in the audience's mind. Films like The Godfather, The Big Lebowski, and Clueless have tons of quotable lines that have stood the test of time and lasted with their film's legacy.

Some great films, however, are primarily known for one line of dialogue, either because that quote perfectly encapsulates the themes of the movie, or because it's so good that its legacy outlasts its origins. These movie quotes can be funny, heartbreaking, scary, revealing, or even a mix of all of them. What matters is that they have gone down in history, perhaps even single-handedly keeping these great movies in popular culture.

Related:...

Horror movies are known for their ability to scare us, make us jump out of our seats, and occasionally, make us question our decision to watch them alone at night. But did you know that some horror films have also eerily predicted the future? That's right, folks! These films have shown us that sometimes, the line between fiction and reality is thinner than we think. Get ready as we explore 10 instances where horror movies eerily predicted the future!

Paramount 1. The Truman Show (1998)

While not a traditional horror film, the existential dread that permeates The Truman Show is palpable. The film presents a man whose entire life is a reality TV show, with every moment broadcasted to millions of viewers. Fast forward to today, and we have an endless array of reality TV shows, from Big Brother to Love Island, where people willingly sign up to have their lives scrutinized 24/7. The...

The Purge 6 director James DeMonaco provides story details for the next installment of the franchise. The yet-untitled sixth movie in The Purge franchise will see DeMonaco, who helmed the first three installments while writing all five and creating the spinoff show, return to write and direct the horror series' big screen return. The next installment is said to pick up a decade after The Forever Purge's shocking ending in which the United States is left divided, and two million Americans crossed both the Canadian and Mexican borders.

Nearly two years after the sequel was first announced to be in development, DeMonaco caught up with Collider to share new details on The Purge 6. The writer/director explained how the next installment will pick up from The Forever Purge's devastating ending, with America now undergoing an era of "remapping" as states separate themselves based "on ideology, sexuality, and religion.” See...

Dystopian horror movies have a special power to transport us into nightmarish worlds, where man is pitted against the elements, his peers, or even himself. Whether the environment has fallen, capitalism has won, or technology has taken over– it's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

From the bone-chilling confines of Snowpiercer to the urban wasteland of Escape from New York, these ten harrowing films will immerse you in a terrifying realm where survival is a desperate battle. Brace yourself for a pulse-pounding journey through the darkest corners of dystopia as we explore the most thrilling and terrifying movies that will leave you clutching your resources and begging for daybreak.

Universal The Purge (2013)

Welcome to a world where all crimes, including murder, are legal for one night every year. In The Purge, you'll witness the terrifying consequences of such a society as one family fights to survive the night. This dystopian nightmare...

Dystopian horror movies have a special power to transport us into nightmarish worlds, where man is pitted against the elements, his peers, or even himself. Whether the environment has fallen, capitalism has won, or technology has taken over– it's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

From the bone-chilling confines of Snowpiercer to the urban wasteland of Escape from New York, these ten harrowing films will immerse you in a terrifying realm where survival is a desperate battle. Brace yourself for a pulse-pounding journey through the darkest corners of dystopia as we explore the most thrilling and terrifying movies that will leave you clutching your resources and begging for daybreak.

Universal The Purge (2013)

Welcome to a world where all crimes, including murder, are legal for one night every year. In The Purge, you'll witness the terrifying consequences of such a society as one family fights to survive the night. This dystopian nightmare...

VFX artists are blown away by the practical effects used in The Ten Commandments, which was released 67 years ago. The 1956 film features Planet of the Apes star Charlton Heston as Moses and adapts the Book of Exodus from the Bible. The film includes a famous scene where Moses parts the Red Sea so he can take the Hebrews to safety.

Corridor Crew has released an episode of VFX Artists React on YouTube, which sees three VFX artists commentating on Moses parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.

The segment, which starts at 15:24, gives insight into how Paramount used vast amounts of real water and editing tricks to make it look like Moses was parting the Red Sea. The VFX artists praise the movie for its use of practical effects to create such an impressive scene on a massive scale.

Charlton Heston's History With Practical VFX Explained

The effects...

Some sci-fi movies have made terrifyingly accurate predictions about the future, while others have totally missed the mark. It's hard to imagine what a future we haven't inhabited yet will look like and many films from the mid-to-late 20th century predicted there would be a lot more technological advancements in the coming years than there were. For example, flying cars were a popular prediction in film and TV, and while Tesla introduced self-driving cars, a plan for flying vehicles is still yet to materialize.

While society has made some impressive advancements compared to when a lot of popular sci-fi movies came out in the late 20th and early 21st century, things haven't exactly gone according to the vision many laid out. Some of these things are unfortunate, as flying cars and instant meals would make life a lot easier. However, society is better off without nuclear wars and cyber assassins.

There are some great movies with a color in the title from a wide range of genres, including the lavish musical Moulin Rouge! and the psychological horror noir Blue Velvet, but which are the very best? Some movies with a color in the title are taken from existing comic book properties, like Green Lantern and Blue Beetle, while others are taken from place names, like Orange County, or common expressions, like White Christmas. There are also a number of war films with colors in the title referring to military terms, like Green Zone and Black Hawk Down.

Colors are frequently mentioned in song lyrics, as they evoke a strong visual image, so movies that tie into the iconic works of musicians often have a color in the title, like Purple Rain starring Prince and Yellow Submarine inspired by the music of the Beatles. From the small-town thrills of Blue Ruin...

For decades, Pop's Chock’lit Shoppe has been a (relatively) safe haven for the fine folks of Riverdale to gather and converse over a frosty milkshake and a steamy basket of burgers and fries, but in the new one-shot anthology Chilling Adventures Presents... Pop's Chock’lit Shoppe of Horrors, Pop Tate has turned his community hub into a house of horrors where his own customers just might end up being on the menu!

With Pop's Chock’lit Shoppe of Horrors out now from Archie Comics, we had the pleasure of catching up with Jordan Morris, the writer behind "Soylent Teen," one of the three tasty tales served up in the new one-shot. In this new Q&a feature, he reflects on what it was like to cook up a cannibalistic story in the idyllic world of Archie Comics, collaborating with talented artist Liana Kangas, and he also discusses his upcoming...

[Editor's Note: Welcome to Archie's House of Horror! We're thrilled and chilled to team up with Archie Comics for this recurring column written by Jamie L. Rotante, writer and Senior Director of Editorial at Archie Comics. Each column takes a closer look at the terrifying themes and eerie inspirations found within the pages of the ever-expanding world of Archie Horror, with this month's column focusing on the delectably deadly horrors to be found on the menu in the new one-shot anthology Chilling Adventures Presents... Pop's Chock’lit Shoppe of Horrors, now available from Archie Comics!]

I’m a sucker for a good ol’ fashioned greasy spoon. Is there anything more American than a 24-hour roadside diner, complete with neon lights and jukeboxes? American diners are like relics of the past, preserved in time. At my local diner, the neon sign is almost a roadside attraction in and of itself. There are still jukeboxes on each table—albeit with more updated songs, for anyone who wants to...

This story is part of The Hollywood Reporter’s 2023 Sustainability Issue (click here to read more).

In 1970, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day. One of the more alarming predictions that day was from Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foresaw a future in which “population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” resulting in the starvation death of hundreds of millions.

Hollywood took notice and released a string of eco-disaster films in the years to follow.

In 1972’s Silent Running, a science fiction film starring Bruce Dern — and directed by 2001: A Space Odyssey effects master Douglas Trumbull — all plant life on Earth has gone extinct. And 1973’s Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston (who had starred in two other sci-fi hits, 1968’s Planet of the Apes and 1971’s The Omega Man), took Ehrlich’s ideas to scary, if campy, extremes.

Helmed by Richard Fleischer...

Dreams.Some of my favorite work at this year’s Berlinale engaged in some way with death or the afterlife. Lighten up, you say? Impossible. The most literal and beguiling of these was Lois Patiño’s Samsara, which ingeniously conjured the transitional passage between life and death, Buddhism’s intermediate state of bardo. There were the cinematic afterlives of lost films, excavated collections, and reimagined family albums; the archive’s perpetual reincarnation as a generative source for experimental and artists’ film. There were homages to artists from the past, whose legacies continue to inspire the present, including work by the recently deceased Michael Snow and Takahiko Iimura, and film tributes to avant-garde legends like Margaret Tait in Luke Fowler’s Being in a Place, and John Cage in Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move. Then there was the teeming, unseen world of spirits...

Impressively bleak animated Hungarian sci-fi feature White Plastic Sky imagines a grim dystopia a hundred years from now where, like in Soylent Green (1973), older people are harvested at age 50, turned into trees so that they can become food for the younger generation. Except in this movie, the high-tech cannibalism is no state secret waiting to be blurted out by Charlton Heston, but a fact of life universally accepted phlegmatically by all. It only becomes a problem for protagonist Stefan (Tamas Keresztes) when his wife Nora (Zsofia Szamosi) decides to undergo the “implantation” procedure at age 32, having lost the will to live since the death of their child.

Made using a striking blend of rotoscope-traced live actors and intricate CG-drawn background designs to build a richly detailed world, this could build a cult following off a warm reception in Berlin.

Rotoscoping is a technique that dates back to the earliest days...

When 1960s and ‘70s icon Raquel Welch died last week at the age of 82, much of the media focus was on her (well-deserved) status as one of the most memorable and gorgeous sex symbols in movie history. A lot of the coverage, in fact, noted that the Chicago native’s substantial talents as an actress, singer, and dancer, were overshadowed by her status as one of the era’s premiere pinups.

While she may be best remembered for her turn as a skimpily-clad cavewoman in 1966’s One Million Years B.C., her breakout role came earlier that year in the 20th Century Fox sci-fi spectacle Fantastic Voyage. The film was Welch’s fourth, but the first in which she had a lead role. She played Cora Peterson, one of five members of a medical team who are miniaturized, along with a small submarine, and injected into the body of a defecting...

Fifty years ago, the sci-fi thriller “Soylent Green” warned viewers of a distant future—the year 2022—where environmental catastrophe and over-population would cause such dire resource scarcity that the bodies of those who ended their lives voluntarily and with the government’s assistance were transformed into edible wafers to feed the masses.

In “White Plastic Sky,” a heady dystopian animated feature from Hungary, directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó depart from nearly the exact same premise, a reality a century from now where crops and animals no longer exist, but the solution to ensure humanity’s survival is no longer a matter of personal agency but of mandated duty for all citizens.

Continue reading ‘White Plastic Sky’ Review: Dystopian Animated Feature from Hungary Imagines a Future Where Our Bodies No Longer Belong To Us [Berlin] at The Playlist.

The first few minutes of White Plastic Sky, the animated feature from Hungarian directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó that debuted at the Berlin Film Festival 2023, sketch a future world with echoes of past cinematic dystopias.

The world has been stripped of life, the soil poisoned, and all animals driven to extinction. Humanity survives under a huge geodesic dome (the plastic sky of the title) and has learned to feed on itself. At the age of 50, every citizen gets a special implant that turns them into a food source for the next generation. In a scene resembling the pod farms of the Matrix films, we see how implanted humans are transmogrified into a hybrid plant species, becoming trees that provide oxygen and food for those under the dome.

“There are similarities in our story to Soylent Green or Logan’s Run, similar motifs to other high-concept, or hardcore science fiction,” admits Bánóczki,...

Newly remastered in 4K! Bruce Dern’s (literally) tree-hugging forest ranger Freeman Lowell commits space piracy to save the trees, dude, and becomes lost in space with only Huey, Dewey and Louie for companionship. The only soul back on Earth who seems to care is Joan Baez. Douglas Trumbull’s technically-accomplished first feature film does 2001 on a tiny budget, and creates something original, if a bit mushy — the bittersweet ending depresses more than it uplifts.

Silent Running

4K Ultra HD

Arrow Video

1972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 90 min. / Street Date December 13, 2022 / Available from / 49.95

Starring: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint, Mark Persons, Steven Brown, Cheryl Sparks, Larry Whisenhunt.

Cinematography: Charles F. Wheeler

Film Editor: Aaron Stell

Original Music: Peter Schickiele

Special Photographic Effects: John Dykstra, Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich

Written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, Steven Bochco

Produced by Michael Gruskoff, Marty Hornstein

Directed by Douglas Trumbull

Arrow has been on a two-year roll,...

Oblivion was released as a Tom Cruise vehicle in 2013, giving him his second best box office weekend up to that time outside of the Mission: Impossible franchise. However, the sci-fi pseudo-epic also received middling reviews and almost immediately dropped out of the public consciousness altogether. Which makes its reemergence into it via Netflix this month intriguing.

Oblivion admittedly has its flaws, yet it is worth a second look if only because it so clearly has ambitions to be something so much more. In 2013 we had only recently gotten a glimpse at what the future held as the commercial effects of the first Avengers movie began to be felt. It was a year of two Marvel movies (three if you count The Wolverine), one Superman movie, and a slew of remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels, from The Hobbit, and The Hunger Games, to Star Trek: Into Darkness and G.I. Joe.

The Friday the 13th franchise is very important to me, so it always hits me hard when I hear that someone involved with the series has passed away… and last Friday night, the news broke that we have lost another Friday the 13th alumnus. Someone who played the hockey masked icon Jason Voorhees himself: stuntman Ted White. White had already been working in the entertainment industry as an actor and stuntman for thirty-five years by the time he was offered the chance to play Jason in 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (watch it Here). It’s not a job he was thrilled to do, he didn’t even want to be credited on the movie, but he accepted it because the pay was good. As years went by, White eventually realized that he had been involved in something special and started connecting with fans at conventions.

It has...

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Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s SeaWorld exposé Blackfish wasn’t an easy documentary to watch, but it was an easy documentary to get hooked by, which I don’t think is intended as a fish pun. The anger and sadness from Blackfish kick in after only a few minutes and are sustained for over 80 minutes.

After turning her directing attentions to scripted features (plus FX’s recent Children of the Underground), Cowperthwaite returns to the documentary world with The Grab, a new feature that is in all ways a tougher film to embrace. The Grab thrusts viewers into a complicated world without prelude, examines a problem that isn’t necessarily clear even to the onscreen heroes and, unlike Blackfish, spends much of its running time without an obvious point of sympathy or hissable villain.

There are, however, rewards to the toughness of The Grab. Its...

If there was any doubt that the future is here (for better or worse), just remember that you are now living in George Jetson’s lifetime. Animation fans are celebrating an important milestone this weekend, as several savvy Twitter users noticed that the Spacely Sprockets employee, husband to Jane, and father of June and Elroy, is said to be born on July 31, 2022. That still gives us 40 years before the events of the show begin, so there’s no need to feel bad about not having flying cars yet.

“The Jetsons” famously followed a middle class family living in Orbit City in a chrome-tinged future where robots allow humans to live leisurely. It was conceived as a companion show to “The Flintstones,” which famously reimagined 1950s sitcom tropes from shows like “The Honeymooners” in a Stone Age world full of cavemen and dinosaurs. “The Jetsons” took the inverse approach, making a...

Set in the distant future of 2022, Soylent Green is an ecological thriller with a twist ready-made for The Twilight Zone. Charlton Heston is a detective who discovers the synthetic food produced by the omniscient Soylent Corporation features a stomach-churning special ingredient. Richard Fleischer directs a terrific supporting cast including Chuck Conners, Joseph Cotten, and, most movingly, Edward G. Robinson in his final film appearance.

The post Soylent Green appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Joachim Trier, writer/director of the multi-Oscar nominated film The Worst Person in the World, discusses his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

A History of Violence (2005)

Gremlins (1984) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review, Tfh’s retrospective links

Innerspace (1987) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Worst Person In The World (2021)

Back To The Future (1985)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Dennis Cozzalio’s review

Mirror (1975)

Stalker (1979) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Soylent Green (1973)

Dr. Strangelove (1964) – Michael Lehmann’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

The Hunt (1959)

Remonstrance (1972)

Don’t Look Now (1973) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Bad Timing (1980) – Bernard Rose’s trailer commentary

Walkabout (1971) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary

Performance (1970) – Mark Goldblatt’s trailer commentary

Drive My Car (2021)

491 (1964)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Persona (1966)

The Wild Strawberries...

So, it came out this week that David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic “Fight Club” has been Hilariously censored in China. Instead of the film’s actual ending — Jack/Tyler Durden successfully pull off a terror attack against the companies that hold everyone’s credit records — the Chinese edit abruptly ends with text on a black screen assuring audiences that authorities figured out the plot and arrested everyone.

That got a lot of people talking. And it also inspired a fairly amusing “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” cold open on Thursday, which imagines how other classic films might end up censored in China.

First up, it’s “Star Wars: A New Hope.” In Colbert’s censored-in-China version, immediately after Luke successfully blows up the Death Star, this text appears: “The Empire quickly rebuilt the Death Star and imprisoned the rebel protesters.”

After that it was “The Sixth Sense.” In Colbert’s censored-in-China version,...

“I’m done.”

So said Charlton Heston, the stoic but exhausted hero of the 1973 futurist thriller Soylent Green. The movie’s message: Society will self-destruct in the year 2022 even as rigid rules and secret efficiencies are imposed to cope with disease and food shortages.

As we launch into Year 3 of the pandemic, there are fears that 2022 might eerily turn out to be the doomsday year forecast by that movie, with Omicron and its subsequent variants stirring anger and confusion.

I’ve reached out to a mix of denizens of the entertainment community this week and found that the words “I’m done” comprise a frequent theme. Even Bill Maher, ever irascible at 66, has now joined the dissidents who reject what he calls the “mask paranoia.” He endorses the view of guest Bari Weiss that the U.S. has created “a pandemic of bureaucracy,” while Europe, by contrast, has learned to live with Covid-19.

The public,...

This year is a big one for science fiction mythology. If there is any truth in advertising, The Jetsons will be celebrating a blessed pre-event this year. According to the math, 2022 is the year George Jetson will be born. When it premiered on ABC on Sept. 23, 1962, The Jetsons’ promos explained the series, which had plotlines as old as The Flintstones, was set exactly 100 years in the future.

Everything there is to know about George, voiced by George O’Hanlon, seems to be laid out in the theme song. He is the husband of Jane Jetson (Penny Singleton), they have a teenage daughter Judy (Janet Waldo), who goes to go to Orbit High School, and a son named Elroy (Daws Butler), who orbits middle school. George works at Spacely’s Space Sprocket. Modern science has not yet determined what a space sprocket actually does, but we can assume it will be...

Why settle for tacos when Tuesday can be Soylent Green Day? Far more nutritious than Soylent Red or Yellow, the green stuff is made with a secret ingredient that makes it a real delicacy. Of course the line “Soylent Green is people” is now an insta-spoiler meme and trope. But when Charlton Heston first uttered that anguished warning, it might as well have been a supermarket can-can sale promotion. Store shops in the 1973 science fiction classic Soylent Green were so mobbed on Tuesdays that riots started every week in this dystopian vision of 2022.

The historical montage which opens Soylent Green, based on real photographs from the 20th century, shows how industry and population colluded to form a dystopian future where too many people struggle for too little food, gag at the air, and wear masks on a daily basis. The face covering in the montage actually increases exponentially as the...

From murderous mayhem in The Purge to the grim dystopia of Soylent Green, writers have predicted very bad things for the next 12 months

It’s gotten rather tricky to calibrate the the annual relative quotient of tragedy. 2021 was a year of tribulation closing out with a backslide into the same rampant viral spread that we saw in square one of the pandemic that just won’t end – but hey, at least it’s not 2020 any more. As it becomes apparent that we will have to accept a few massive catastrophes as the new status quo, assessing the quality of life turns into a matter of degrees, weighing each fresh stretch of hardship against the last. It may prove some cold comfort to note that things have, by sheer numbers, gotten slightly better since last year. The corollary to this way of thinking, however, is the understanding that our circumstances can always get worse.

Zack Snyder has come home. After spending a large portion of the past decade immersed in the DC film universe—even more if you count the development and production of Watchmen, his third film, a few years before that—Snyder has returned to the genre that launched his career as a feature film director.

That genre is horror, more specifically the subgenre of zombie movies, and the film is called Army of the Dead. Premiering on Netflix after a brief theatrical run, Army of the Dead is only the second movie of Snyder’s career not produced and distributed through Warner Bros. Pictures. The other one was his first feature, the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which came out through Universal and was the movie that put Snyder on the map.

Coming back to horror—or in this case, a hybrid of the zombie movie...

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By Mark Cerulli

Mike Henry, the rugged former football player-turned-actor, passed away on January 8, 2021 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease and Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, likely from his heavy physical contact during his years in the NFL playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers and LA Rams. Although not a household name, Henry carved out an impressive career playing heroic roles, most notably Tarzan in three films from 1966 – 68. I remember stumbling across Tarzan And the Valley of Gold on network TV as a kid and being enthralled by this hulking, well-spoken Tarzan who wore a suit in one scene and the traditional loincloth in the next. Henry took over the role of Tarzan from Jock Mahoney Blessed with a chiseled physique that Weintraub crowed looked like it was “sculpted by Michelangelo”, Henry could easily handle the athletic demands of the coveted part.

What Henry...

It has been a good day for everyone, even for God. No sign of rain. No evidence of disease or blood. — Henry Miller, quoted at the beginning of El año de la peste Around this time a year ago, many of us were suddenly sent home and forced to become film programmers. I asked people: after Contagion or, from a far distance, Outbreak, what was the ultimate Coronavirus movie? The Last Days of Planet Earth? Prophecies of Nostradamus? 28 Weeks Later? The Host? Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole? The South Korean apocalypse thriller The Flu? Logan’s Run? The Seed of Man? Soylent Green? 12 Monkeys? Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus? […]

The post Phase Zero: Felipe Cazals on His 1979 Gabriel García Márquez Collaboration, El año de la peste (Year of the Plague) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It has been a good day for everyone, even for God. No sign of rain. No evidence of disease or blood. — Henry Miller, quoted at the beginning of El año de la peste Around this time a year ago, many of us were suddenly sent home and forced to become film programmers. I asked people: after Contagion or, from a far distance, Outbreak, what was the ultimate Coronavirus movie? The Last Days of Planet Earth? Prophecies of Nostradamus? 28 Weeks Later? The Host? Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole? The South Korean apocalypse thriller The Flu? Logan’s Run? The Seed of Man? Soylent Green? 12 Monkeys? Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus? […]

The post Phase Zero: Felipe Cazals on His 1979 Gabriel García Márquez Collaboration, El año de la peste (Year of the Plague) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Mike Henry, a USC and NFL linebacker and later an actor in Tarzan movies of the 1960s and the Smokey and the Bandit films, has died.

Henry died at age 84 in Burbank, Calif. on January 8 from chronic traumatic encephalopathy and Parkinson’s disease, according to social media posts.

Henry played football for the University of Southern California and was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1958. He moved on to the Los Angeles Rams in 1962 and was noticed by a Warner Bros. producer. subsequently He was cast as Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, in three films: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), Tarzan and the Great River (1967), and Tarzan and the Jungle Boy (1968).

His run as the jungle lord ended after being bitten by a chimpanzee while filming.

Henry segued into another franchise in 1977, playing Junior, the son of Jackie Gleason’s Sheriff Buford T. Justice, in Smokey and the Bandit.