Film

Film

With the exception of Elf and A Christmas Story, Home Alone is the funniest Christmas movie ever. The 1990 comedy about a little boy who's mistakenly left home by himself while his family goes out of town for the holidays and has to fight off two bumbling robbers is a must watch this time of year. But this isn't just a regular old viewing of the classic film.

The industry, born in Japan in the early `990s, now accounts for about 300 businesses in the country. Ideas ping-ponged about and the screenplay underwent various changes, all as a tumultuous period of isolation and upheaval spread out across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown. Not so ironically, a primary theme in Rental Family is our need to get out there, find authentic connections and form tight-knit communities beyond bloodlines.

At the risk of sounding like the Grinch, I must once again bemoan the release of Christmas movies before Thanksgiving; the temperatures may be dropping at long last, but it's still too close to the gloominess of daylight savings and too far from the belt-loosening of the actual holidays to fully indulge in Netflix's now-annual buffet of cheap Christmas confections.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 's story is unlike any of the three previous books. It follows Harry Potter (his hair now overgrown into a very 2000s mop) as he returns to Hogwarts for an unusual year: he not only becomes an unprecedented part of a big wizarding event, but he also experiences some of the hallmarks of his teenage years, including crushes.

And now we live in an era in which a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it is perhaps surprising that there hasn't been a huge shift in how film-makers approach this particular corner of sci-fi. Gareth Edwards' The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about AIs being the newly persecuted underclass as 1962's The Creation of the Humanoids, except that the former has an $80m VFX budget and robot monks while the latter has community-theatre production values.

We hope this film can be broadcast out to the Vietnamese American community, many of whom, just like our family, lost everything,

and we still get those periodic, surreal pronouncements given by the city's notables to the diverse folk of Oz, those non-player characters crowding the streets. But now the focus narrows to the main players and their explosive romantic crises, essentially through two interlocking love triangles: Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard and Glinda, Elphaba and Prince Fiyero, the handsome young military officer with whom both witches are not so secretly in love, as well as possibly having feelings for each other.

In her 1970 essay "On the Morning After the Sixties," Joan Didion described her disillusionment with the idea that political protest could "affect man's fate in the slightest." It's an opinion James Blaine "J.B." Mooney might share, if he were paying attention. He's the lead character and hapless art thief in director Kelly Reichardt's new film The Mastermind, set in 1970.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

In a sprawling promo/sketch posted by production company A24 and shared by Chalamet Saturday morning, the actor appears to link up with the brand's creative team via Zoom call to offer his insights on how to best promote the movie. Eighteen minutes of galaxy-brain satire follows. Words don't do the video justice (you can watch it for yourself here) but highlights included Chalamet screensharing custom assets he had his visual artist work on for six months,

Back in 2019, I interviewed Rian Johnson at the Toronto International Film Festival the morning after the world premiere of the first "Knives Out." This somehow seems both like not that long ago and impossibly ancient history, all at the same time. But it was a time in which Johnson was still regularly asked what his three upcoming "Star Wars" movies were going to be about.

"She's taught us so much already. Perspective is a huge thing. The smaller things in life are so much more precious. Our days are filled with lots of cuddles and laughter and love. It's just endless joy."

It is about Bezinovic's hometown of Rijeka, a port on the Adriatic which after the first world war was the site of one of the 20th century's strangest episodes, whose key moments the director stages through re-enactments with locals. The film is in effect a protofascist Passport to Pimlico. In 1918, this city, with its significant ethnic Italian population, was known as Fiume and was formerly ruled by the recently destroyed Habsburgs.

I genuinely think I've been more at airports than I have in my own bed.

I also consider her the greatest movie actress from the thirties to the fifties, if only for a handful of performances-indeed, for a handful of scenes. She was in few great films and not even many good ones, but her acting, at its peak, is different in kind from that of her similarly celebrated peers. Displaying both the most extreme artifice in self-presentation and the most authentic emotion in performance, she exemplifies Hollywood's paradoxes in concentrated form.

Terry Jones was a Python, a historian, a bestselling children's author and a very naughty boy. He loved to play women in drag, started a magazine about countryside ecology (Vole), founded his own real-ale brewery and was even once a columnist for this newspaper, beginning one piece in 2011 like this: In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare.

I used to watch Breaking Glass when I worked a very corporate job in the City. With its vision of London at the end of punk and the beginning of the Winter of Discontent, the film provided me a blast of gritty, unvarnished relief in the light of endless training courses and encouraged groupthink. Released in September 1980, it was disliked by critics (Q magazine memorably quipped: Breaking Glass? More like Breaking Wind ) but through today's eyes feels relevant again.

Since launching Cinematrix in early 2024, we've loved seeing how players have gotten creative with repping the game in the wild. Halloween costumes, bootleg merch, printing out custom grids for celebratory occasions - it's all lovely. But we've also gotten plenty of requests for ways to show off your Cinematrix pride without relying on DIY skills. Call us Movie Santa because, just in time for holiday gifting season, we're here to deliver.

In a career retrospective talk at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Mamoru Oshii spoke, if not regretfully, mournfully about "Angel's Egg." The legendary Japanese writer and director-who secured his place in animation history with "Ghost in the Shell"-said that his dreamlike, allegorical 1985 OVA film nearly killed his career: "After that, nobody gave me jobs for three years," he said.

We finally got a sneak peak, albeit an unofficial one, of the upcoming Legend of Zelda movie. Over the weekend, footage of the film's production in New Zealand leaked on social media. It's a short clip, and nothing can be heard over the sound of the wind, but they hint that the princess' Sheikah bodyguard Impa will have a role to play in the live-action adaptation.

But among all of that, there has not been a new theatrical film at all, despite the fact that there have been many promises made that a new Trek feature was coming at warp speed. By now, fans know that development on a new Trek feature hasn't just been slow, but perhaps is an illusory trick created by Q or Trelane. So, with the announcement of yet another new Star Trek film project, is there any reason for hope?

At some point in late 1975 or early 1976, I became aware of "Opening Soon at a Theater Near You," a monthly review program on WTTW-Channel 11. The show featured Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert and Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel talking about new releases in the low-key but instantly engrossing style that made you feel like you were eavesdropping on your two favorite teachers as they verbally sparred between classes. (Roger was 33 when the show debuted; Gene was just 29.)

If you thought 'Avatar: The Way of Water' was big and impactful, 'Fire and Ash' is going to be an experience unlike anything.

Over Thanksgiving, Disney+ will serve up a delicious treat for Beatles fans: a newly restored and remastered version of The Beatles Anthology documentary film will be released with the addition of a new ninth episode. Marking its streaming debut, the film will debut on Disney+ over three nights: episode 1-3 will launch on November 26th, followed by episodes 4-6 on the 27th, and episodes 7-9 on the 28th.