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Showing film results: From 141 to 151

A Look at Three Free Filmmaking Workshops offered at New Jersey Film Festival Fall 2025
by Gary Wien
published 2025-08-20

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The New Jersey Film Festival Fall 2025 runs from September 5th through October 10th with screenings on the Rutgers University campus and available via video-on-demand. In addition to the screenings, the festival is offering three free filmmaking workshops this year: intro to filmmaking, audio recording, and one on the film business itself. New Jersey Stage reached out to Professor Albert G. Nigrin, the Executive Director/Curator of the festival, to learn more.

New Release Review - "Nobody 2"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-08-18
At some point in the last decade Hollywood decided that what the public desired was an endless supply of knockoffs of Renny Harlin's 1996 action comedy The Long Kiss Goodnight. It seems like at least once a month either Amazon, Netflix or Apple drops yet another action comedy in which a suburbanite is revealed to have a past life as a deadly secret agent or assassin. The nature of streaming platforms means it's difficult to tell if anyone actually watches these movies. That they keep getting made suggests somebody must be watching, but when was the last time you heard someone mention Back in Action? The only worthwhile movie to come out of this inexplicable and undemanded wave was 2021's Nobody, which stood out from its peers by not only playing in cinemas, but actually featuring some entertaining action and comedy.

New Release Review - "Weapons"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-08-09
The art of magic is largely the art of distraction. Many of the best magicians are also very good comedians, able to keep their audience distracted with enough comic shtick that they don't notice the leggy assistant being replaced by a dummy that's about to be sawn in half. Writer/director Zach Cregger's 2022 debut Barbarian was a classic magic trick. With that film, Cregger drew us in with what we thought was its story, only to take us by surprise in pulling several rabbits out of his hat. Barbarian's distraction was very entertaining, but the magic was also impressive. With his follow-up, Weapons, Cregger once again provides a very engaging distraction, but the magic is underwhelming this time. If Barbarian was a creepy horror movie with occasional moments of hilarity, Weapons is an entertaining character-driven black comedy skirting the periphery of an uninspired horror movie.

New Release Review - "Monster Island"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-07-26
In John Boorman's 1968 WWII drama Hell in the Pacific, Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin play Japanese and American soldiers forced to work together to survive when they find themselves stranded on a remote island. In Stanley Kramer's 1958 thriller The Defiant Ones, Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play bickering escaped convicts forced to work in tandem due to being chained together. Both movies have been refashioned since - Hell in the Pacific as the '80s sci-fi Enemy Mine, The Defiant Ones as the '70s grindhouse fave Black Mama, White Mama - but with Monster Island, writer/director Mike Wiluan mashes these two setups together, adding dashes of Predator and Creature from the Black Lagoon to the mix.

New Release Review - "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-07-24
I Know What You Did Last Summer is the latest belated horror sequel to annoyingly adopt its predecessor's title. You might argue that with the titles I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer having already been taken by sequels, this fourth instalment had run out of options. But it's still bloody annoying. You tell someone your favourite movie is Halloween, and they're like "Really? That bad slasher movie from 2018?" or worse, "I presume you mean the 2007 original?". I guess the studio suits worry that younger viewers won't have seen the original movies, but if this is the case why bring back the original characters? If you aren't aware that this IKWYDLS is the third sequel to a movie from 1997 you'll be pretty confused when Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr show up.

New Release Review - "Harvest"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-07-17
At first glance, Greek Weird Wave alum Athina Rachel Tsangari's English language feature debut Harvest suggests we're in folk-horror territory. Like the recent The Severed Sun, it's set in an ambiguous time and place. It looks like rural England but the accents are Scottish. It seems vaguely like the Middle Ages except some characters wear spectacles, high five one another and use insults like "knobhead." A ritual that sees children forced to smack their heads against a rock to ward them off leaving the boundary of their hamlet suggests we might be in for a twist like that of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village.

First Look Review - "Abraham's Boys"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-07-15
The makers of 1922's Nosferatu ran into trouble with the estate of Bram Stoker for pilfering the plot of his career-defining novel 'Dracula'. Robert Eggers had no such worries with his recent remake of that silent classic, as Stoker's novel has long been in the public domain at this point, meaning anyone is free to adapt it or use its characters. We've seen scores of adaptations of Dracula, but few filmmakers have strip-mined the novel for its supporting characters, the Hugh Jackman headlined Van Helsing a notable exception.

New Release Review - "Jurassic World Rebirth"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-07-12
When a new coach takes over a struggling sports team they often start pinning the blame on their predecessor, complaining about the lack of fitness in their players. It's a way of buying themselves time. "Look at the mess I inherited!" With Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards and returning screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the first two Spielberg directed entries, pull a similar stunt. Opening text tells us that the world of this series has begun to take dinosaurs for granted, and in an early sequence we see New York commuters moan as the sort of dinosaur that inspired wonder in Sam Neill and Laura Dern all those years ago is now the cause of a traffic jam. Edwards and Koepp are clearly acknowledging that they've inherited a mess, but the box office figures suggest the public hasn't lost interest in this series. The most recent entry, Dominion, made a billion dollars despite being the series' low point. At time of writing, Jurassic World Rebirth has made a staggering $250 million in just its opening day.

First Look Review - "No Sleep Till"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2025-07-08
The filmmaking collective known as Omnes Films has been responsible for three of the best American indie features of recent years. Tyler Taormina's Ham on Rye and Christmas Eve in Miller's Point and Carson Lund's Eephus all share an elegiac quality. All three are centred around characters confronting the notion that a way of life they've taken for granted is coming to an end. The people in Omnes Films productions don't so much rage against the dying of the light as quietly accept it. In Ham on Rye, a teenage girl contends with being left in her small town when all her friends depart through a strange portal. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point sees an extended Italian-American clan gather for one last Christmas before their family home is sold. Eephus is centred on the last ever game to be played at a beer league baseball field.

Fall 2025 New Jersey Film Festival Preview

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The New Jersey Film Festival returns to Rutgers University September 5 through October 10, 2025. As it has done the last few years, the festival will include select in-person screenings with all films available via video on-demand (VOD) as well. There are also a few screenings available only via VOD. Twenty films will have their New Jersey or Area Premiere (Middlesex County).

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