(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.
(ASBURY PARK, NJ) -- The Waiting Game, an award-winning documentary celebrating the ABA and its players is coming to New Jersey as a Feature Documentary exclusive screening at the Garden State Film Festival. The screening will take place on Saturday, March 29, 2025 at The Asbury (Block TA11) - Asbury Hall (210 Fifth Avenue) in Asbury Park, NJ. The event begins at at 2:45pm.
The 23rd Annual Garden State Film Festival takes place March 27-30, 2025 in both Cranford and Asbury Park. The festival includes screenings, filmmaker breakfast & panel discussions, a table read of the screenplay competition winner, and the annual awards banquet.
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.
You can tell a lot about a nation by its heist movies. British capers usually expect us to root for the criminals and possess an anti-authoritarian streak, with cheeky chappy working class heroes striking back at the establishment. American heist thrillers tend to be more moralistic, usually ultimately siding with law and order and portraying the criminals as trigger-happy sociopaths. France's heist movies usually focus on the mechanics of the heist itself, highlighting the ingenuity and professionalism of the men involved.
WW Jacobs' 1902 short story 'The Monkey's Paw' might be the most influential work in the horror genre. In the century since its publication we've received countless novels, stories, plays, TV shows and films that riff on its "be careful what you wish for" template. With his 1980 short story 'The Monkey', Stephen King playfully acknowledged the influence of Jacobs on his chosen field, but rather than merely a paw he presented readers with a whole damn monkey. An organ-grinder's monkey to be precise, one that causes death whenever it's wound-up and its cymbals crash.
