(CHATHAM, NJ) -- Featuring some of the best soon-to-be-released movies from around the world, Arthouse Film Festival will unspool for ten weeks beginning September 15, 2025 at Chatham Hickory Cinema. The selected films comprise award winners from Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Telluride, Venice and SXSW film festivals, along with prestige studio films, screened in Chatham before their New York theatrical release dates.
(RED BANK, NJ) -- Some stories don't fade with time—they grow deeper. For 40 years, Stand By Me has spoken to something timeless in all of us: the wonder and heartbreak of growing up, the bonds we form in childhood, and the way those moments stay with us long after the journey ends. On December 5, 2025, a special screening of the film will take place in Red Bank.
Join host Gina Marie Rodriguez as she speaks with Mr. Jon Crowley, the recently appointed Executive Director of the New Jersey Motion Picture & Television Commission, under the purview of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
(ENGLEWOOD, NJ) -- Bergen Performing Arts Center (bergenPAC) presents Dirty Dancing in Concert on Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 7:00pm. You fell in love with their first dance, now it's your turn to relive it. Dirty Dancing in Concert is a cinematic live-to-film concert event that brings the iconic love story back to the big screen, with a twist.
There comes a time in every British actress's career where they trade period frocks for black roots and henna tattoos to portray a member of the American working class. Vanessa Kirby's time for this rite of passage has arrived with Night Always Comes, which sees her reteam with The Crown director Benjamin Caron. Kirby may have left the palace but she's in a right royal mess in this film, which mashes together the "one crazy night" format of movies like After Hours and Collateral with an Uncut Gems/Small World of Sammy Lee-esque story of a desperate attempt to gather a sum of money in a limited window.
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.
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.
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.
