After decades of failures, video game adaptations are suddenly a hit at the box office, with screen translations of such heavy hitters as Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and Minecraft among the biggest earners of recent years. Just as there are cult movies, there are cult video games. Take The Mortuary Assistant, in which the player takes on the icky job of the title and attempts to finish their night shift at a morgue while evading demons. With another cult horror game, Five Nights at Freddy's, spawning two hit movies, it's no surprise that The Mortuary Assistant has now received a cinematic adaptation.
Pitting teenage ballerinas against heavily armed Hungarian mobsters, Pretty Lethal gives new meaning to the term "balletic violence." It's a throwback to all those '70s/'80s exploitation thrillers in which stranded cheerleaders were menaced by mouth-breathing rednecks. Surprisingly for a movie debuting on a mainstream streaming service in 2026, it carries over the extreme violence of those movies, along with the threat of sexualised violence, but its tongue is firmly in its cheek.
(RED BANK, NJ) -- The 2026 Count Basie Center Breakthrough Filmmaker Fest, the annual competition celebrating New Jersey's emerging crop of young filmmakers, takes place Saturday, April 25th on the Count Basie Center campus (99 Monmouth Street) in Red Bank.
(WOODSTOWN, NJ) -- The Salem County Film & Arts Festival is gearing up to bring an exciting celebration of film, creativity, and community to the region, welcoming filmmakers, artists, and audiences from across New Jersey and beyond. On April 25, 2026, Salem County will host their first Film & Arts Festival in Woodstown, NJ. A newly released promotional video offers a glimpse into the energy and experiences that attendees can expect, while highlighting Salem County as a unique and film-friendly destination.
(ASBURY PARK & CRANFORD, NJ) -- The 24th Annual Garden State Film Festival (GSFF), New Jersey's Premier Independent Film Festival (R), drew record crowds across Asbury Park and Cranford, delivering sold-out screenings, strong industry participation, and one of the most impactful weekends in the festival's history.
After decades of failures, video game adaptations are suddenly a hit at the box office, with screen translations of such heavy hitters as Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and Minecraft among the biggest earners of recent years. Just as there are cult movies, there are cult video games. Take The Mortuary Assistant, in which the player takes on the icky job of the title and attempts to finish their night shift at a morgue while evading demons. With another cult horror game, Five Nights at Freddy's, spawning two hit movies, it's no surprise that The Mortuary Assistant has now received a cinematic adaptation.
Pitting teenage ballerinas against heavily armed Hungarian mobsters, Pretty Lethal gives new meaning to the term "balletic violence." It's a throwback to all those '70s/'80s exploitation thrillers in which stranded cheerleaders were menaced by mouth-breathing rednecks. Surprisingly for a movie debuting on a mainstream streaming service in 2026, it carries over the extreme violence of those movies, along with the threat of sexualised violence, but its tongue is firmly in its cheek.
2019's Ready or Not was a mediocre riff on the old The Most Dangerous Game template of a pleb being hunted by wealthy elites. The twist was that the murderous toffs weren't engaging in their hunt for the love of the sport but rather to avert a family curse that eventually saw them all explode at dawn, having failed to kill their prey. As a horror-comedy it was a dud for two reasons: the final girl, Samara Weaving's Grace, was so competent compared to her antagonists that we never felt she was in any real danger; and it simply wasn't funny.
Whenever two movies that share a similar premise are released in the same year, movie geeks like to figure out which one is Deep Impact and which is Armageddon. Those two 1998 blockbusters shared the same setup of an asteroid on a world-ending collision course with Earth, but took very different approaches. Deep Impact was a relatively sombre affair while Armageddon was a Michael Bay action comedy.
Writer/director John Patton Ford's 2022 feature debut Emily the Criminal proved one of the more interesting crime thrillers of recent years. In that movie, Aubrey Plaza gave a career best performance as a struggling young woman who desperately turns to crime only to discover she has a knack for it. Ford's second movie, How to Make a Killing, features a similar anti-hero, but here the crime is murder.
