Over the past couple of decades Julia Roberts has convincingly transitioned from a great movie star to a fine actress. Recognising this, Luca Guadagnino has rewarded her with the sort of role usually reserved for the Kidmans, Blanchetts and Winslets of this world, a juicy lead part in a hot button drama. Roberts elevates the shoddy material and her magnetism ensures we're always at least partially engaged, but the film around her is an overblown mess.
(LONG BEACH ISLAND, NJ) -- Lighthouse International Film Society presents a screening of Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror on Thursday, October 23, 2025 at Long Beach Island Foundation of Arts & Sciences. The screening begins at 7:30pm.
(NORTH BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The Rutgers Jewish Film Festival will feature eleven thought-provoking and entertaining films, dynamic discussions with filmmakers and special guests, and New Jersey premieres. Running from November 6-16, 2025, the festival will be held at the Regal Cinema Commerce Center, North Brunswick.
Sports biopics have always come up against one major problem, that of the target audience already knowing the outcome. As someone who previously thought UFC stood for Uxminster Football Club, I'm probably not the target audience for a biopic of MMA fighter Mark Kerr (isn't he your man from Simple Minds?). As such, I had no idea how The Smashing Machine might end, which meant I probably enjoyed it a little more than MMA devotees might.
We're in the midst of a wave of horror movies that take well-worn concepts and refresh them with unusual perspectives. In a Violent Nature told its standard slasher plot from the POV of its Jason Vorhees-like killer. Presence was a haunted house thriller shot from the first person perspective of a ghost. Skinamarink was...well, whatever Skinamarink was. Ben Leonberg's directorial debut Good Boy is a horror movie with a rather unremarkable plot about a man succumbing to a malevolent spirit in a haunted house, but what makes the film remarkable is its perspective, that of a dog.
Over the past couple of decades Julia Roberts has convincingly transitioned from a great movie star to a fine actress. Recognising this, Luca Guadagnino has rewarded her with the sort of role usually reserved for the Kidmans, Blanchetts and Winslets of this world, a juicy lead part in a hot button drama. Roberts elevates the shoddy material and her magnetism ensures we're always at least partially engaged, but the film around her is an overblown mess.
Sports biopics have always come up against one major problem, that of the target audience already knowing the outcome. As someone who previously thought UFC stood for Uxminster Football Club, I'm probably not the target audience for a biopic of MMA fighter Mark Kerr (isn't he your man from Simple Minds?). As such, I had no idea how The Smashing Machine might end, which meant I probably enjoyed it a little more than MMA devotees might.
We're in the midst of a wave of horror movies that take well-worn concepts and refresh them with unusual perspectives. In a Violent Nature told its standard slasher plot from the POV of its Jason Vorhees-like killer. Presence was a haunted house thriller shot from the first person perspective of a ghost. Skinamarink was...well, whatever Skinamarink was. Ben Leonberg's directorial debut Good Boy is a horror movie with a rather unremarkable plot about a man succumbing to a malevolent spirit in a haunted house, but what makes the film remarkable is its perspective, that of a dog.
The professional thief known as "Parker" is the protagonist of a series of pulpy crime novels by author Donald E. Westlake's Richard Stark alter ego. The first actor to portray Parker on screen was Lee Marvin in John Boorman's 1967 arthouse thriller Point Blank. The Parker of Boorman's film was a stoic figure, and that's generally how he's been depicted in the many subsequent adaptations of Westlake/Stark's books. As played by Mark Wahlberg, the Parker of Shane Black's Play Dirty is similarly sardonic, but the world Black and co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi create around him is now positively cartoonish, a far cry from the grittiness of Point Blank and 1973's The Outfit, the two best Parker movies to date.
Most movies take place in either the real world or a fantasy world. Some filmmakers like to blur the two, like how Tarantino's movies play out in his own version of reality, or how the Conjuring series and its spinoffs imagine a version of our world where Ed and Lorraine Warren weren't con artists but actually battled paranormal forces of evil for real. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel 'Vineland', Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another takes place in a version of America that overlays the 1970s on top of our current times. In Anderson's world, the organised left-wing revolutionaries of the Nixon era still operate, freeing migrants from detainment camps, pulling off bank robberies in the manner of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and blowing up federal buildings like the far right militia of '80s America.
