(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- State Theatre New Jersey presents their annual free summer movie series from July 1 through August 5, 2025. The series offers screenings of Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, The Wild Robot, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Inside Out 2.
(CRANFORD, NJ) -- The fifth annual Cranford Film Festival will showcase selected short films from rising and established filmmakers at the Cranford Theater on Saturday, April 26, 2025. Filmmakers and enthusiasts alike are invited to participate in an evening celebrating the best and most creative voices in short film.
The 1934 mystery classic The Thin Man famously climaxes with the married heroes - amateur sleuths Nick and Nora Charles - throwing a dinner party designed to flush out the person responsible for the murder they've spent the movie attempting to solve. Director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp draw heavily from The Thin Man for their spy thriller Black Bag. Their movie similarly climaxes with a tense dinner party, one which resolves itself almost exactly like its '30s predecessor, but it also opens with a dinner party, one purposely designed to set its guests on edge.
(JERSEY CITY, NJ) -- Art House Productions and Puppet Heap are thrilled to announce The Heap at Art House, a screening of short films narrated by The Heap. On Thursday, March 27, 2025, Puppet Heap will present a series of short films featuring their puppets, followed by a Q&A with Puppet Heap founder Paul Andrejco. This event is open to all ages. Tickets are $30.00 for adults and $20 for students.
(UNION, NJ) -- Kean University will host the ReelAbilities New Jersey Film Festival in a hybrid format this year, including in-person and virtual film screenings, from Thursday, April 3 through Saturday, April 5, 2025. ReelAbilities, a film festival dedicated to reframing disability through the power of film, features a diverse selection of award-winning documentary and narrative films from around the world that spotlight authentic experiences and artistic expressions of individuals with disabilities.
If you thought Joker owed a lot to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, you ain't seen nothing yet. Writer/director Eljah Bynum's Magazine Dreams is so indebted to those Scorsese movies (along with a couple of other obvious influences) that it makes Todd Phillips' film seem like a work of staggering originality by comparison. But for all its nods and homages, Magazine Dreams is a movie that keeps us engaged thanks to a fascinating central performance and a narrative that plays like a slow motion car crash from which we simply can't look away.
Michael Cera did it in Youth in Revolt. Jesse Eisenberg did it in The Double. Jake Gyllenhaal did it in Enemy. Now it's Robert Pattinson's turn. Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17 is the latest movie that asks its leading man to play two versions of themselves, one a socially awkward nebbish, the other a confident and sinister alpha male. Pattinson plays the part(s) well, but the movie around him is a fiasco, perhaps the worst ever made by a filmmaker directly after landing a Best Picture Oscar.
There are few news stories that rile us up quite like revelations of elder abuse in retirement or convalescent homes. Bullying old people who can't defend themselves is about as low as it gets, so to hear of such horrors really makes our blood boil. But while we sympathise with the victims of such crimes, it also sets us selfishly thinking about our own uncertain futures, of whether we might end up in such a place and find ourselves similarly victimised.
In my review of Craig Gillespie's Dumb Money, which dramatised the GameStop "short squeeze" of January 2021, I remarked how it resembled a Steven Soderbergh movie in both its execution and the use of its ensemble cast. Perhaps Soderbergh felt like he missed out on lending his commentary to our current culture of tech-savvy get-rich-quick endeavours, as he has lent his name (in the form of a "Steven Soderbergh Presents" title card) to director Cutter Hodierne's crypto-themed thriller Cold Wallet.
In the last few years we've received a crop of films from Argentina (Rojo; A Common Crime; Azor) and Chile (1976; El Conde) addressing those South American nations' years under the rule of fascist military dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century. Now Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles reopens and hopes to salve his own country's wounds with I'm Still Here, adapted from a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. In 1971, Paiva's father Rubens, a former congressman turned civil engineer, was taken from his home, never to be seen again.
