For a long time I mistakenly believed that when American news anchors in old footage promised the audience "film at 11," they were letting the viewers know a late movie was due to be broadcast. At some point in my teens I realised that of course it meant that the footage related to a news story had yet to be developed, but that it would be ready for screening by the next bulletin. Today we've become accustomed to seeing major events break on social media rather than on our TV screens, with cellphone footage of said incidents available within seconds while the mainstream media scrambles for permission to air such images; the idea of having to wait a couple of hours to see pictures of any newsworthy event is now unthinkable.
,Tasmania-1976.jpg)
Here is the 2025 United States Super 8 Film +DV Festival Video Q+A with Memory Film Director Jeni Thornley, as well as New Jersey Stage entertainment writer Anran Li and Festival Director Al Nigrin.
(ASBURY PARK, NJ) -- Get into the Valentine's Day spirit at The ShowRoom in Asbury Park with two special screenings that capture romance, mystery, and timeless storytelling. The films are Picnic at Hanging Rock and Casablanca. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at showroomcinemas.com.
(TEANECK, NJ) -- The Teaneck International Film Festival offers an online screening of the documentary film Home Court by Erica Tanamachi, Jenn Lee Smith, and Brandon Soun on Wednesday, February 26, 2025. The screening is part of a five documentary film series called Indie Lens Pop-Up.
Now in its 37th year, the United States Super 8mm Film & Digital Video Festival is the largest and longest running juried festival of its kind in North America. The festival encourages any genre (including animation, documentary, personal, narrative, and experimental) made on Super 8mm/8mm film, Hi 8mm/8mm, or digital video. The Festival will be held Online and In-Person at Rutgers University on February 15+16, 2025.
There's a growing sub-genre of horror movies based around the setup of a shy and nervous young woman embarking on a getaway with a bunch of people whose company makes her feel like an outsider. As circumstances spiral violently out of control, the young woman in question finds herself in the role of a slasher movie final girl. What differentiates these movies - which includes the likes of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Sissy and Birdeater - from your typical spam-in-a-cabin backwoods slashers is that the threat doesn't come from some supernatural force or rapey rednecks but rather from within the friend group itself, which is usually comprised of shallow, bitchy millennials or zoomers.
For some reason, the most popular sub-genre when it comes to original movies greenlit by Netflix and Amazon seems to be the spy comedy. These movies usually feature a variation on the same central setup, that of someone discovering a person they thought they knew well has secretly been living the life of a spy. By all accounts these films are uniformly awful. Director Neil Burger's Inheritance is made for neither Netflix nor Amazon but it has the sort of premise those streaming services seemingly can't get enough of. In this case it's a young woman who discovers her estranged father is secretly a spy.
The premise of director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp's Presence might seem unremarkable: a family moves into a new home and begins to feel an otherworldly presence. What makes Presence stand out from the scores of horror movies with which it shares its surface setup is how the story is presented. Every event in Presence is seen from the point of view of the ghost/spirit/spectre/poltergeist/whatever-you-want-call-it.
It's a Forrest Gump reunion as director Robert Zemeckis, writer Eric Roth, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, composer Alan Silvestri and cinematographer Don Burgess all reteam for Here, a shambolic adaptation of a ground-breaking 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, itself an expansion of a six-panel story published in 1989. Forrest Gump saw Hanks play a man-child who unwittingly stumbles in and out of some of the key events of the second half of the twentieth century. In Here, such events simply play out on a TV or radio in the corner of the living room of a house in New Jersey. The movie instead focuses on the relatively mundane events in the lives of the residents of said house.
Artists rarely engage with their own art once the creative process has been completed (save for Quentin Tarantino, who seems all too happy to watch a triple bill of his own movies). A musician won't listen to their records; a filmmaker will refuse to watch their movies; a painter will sell a painting and never set eyes upon it again. The artist will tell you it's because they only see the mistakes in their work, and it's now too late to correct them (George Lucas aside).
