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2005 was filled with great slasher, spooky, and creature-feature movies. Early 2000s horror movies weren't afraid to push boundaries and scare audiences in new and exciting ways. Movies like Saw 2, Hostel, and The Devil's Rejects displayed a whole new type of brutal horror subgenre and showed just how terrifying the world could be in these franchises. These graphically violent movies weren't the first of their genre, but they brought the shock value that audiences felt worldwide.

Released in the same year, movies like The Ring 2 and The Exorcism of Emily Rose were about ominous, supernatural horror. These movies were about suffering from within and the vengeful spirits inside the main characters. There was such a wide range of horror movies, proving that people loved all subgenres of horror movies and were open to anything unsettling. 2005 was the year of fear in movies, from realistic, sadistic killers to supernatural horror...

At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, 29-year-old Czech runner Emil Zátopek achieved the seemingly impossible, winning three gold medals in the 5,000-meter, 10,000-meter and (following an unexpected last-minute entry) marathon races: a hat-trick that remains unmatched. He’d already won two medals at the previous Olympics, and repeatedly broken his own speed records in assorted categories. Two years later, he broke the 29-minute barrier in the 10,000 meters.

Most of these achievements are dramatized, in suitably hearty and rousing form, in director David Ondříček’s polished, engaging biopic “Zátopek,” and certainly, it’s a life that could forgivably merit the most bombastically flattering sort of sports-drama treatment. Yet the emotional peaks in Ondříček’s film lie, unexpectedly, elsewhere. Ambitiously attempting both an interior character study as well as a broad historical overview, “Zátopek” appears to sincerely grasp the soul of a man for whom winning wasn’t everything, even if he always won.

Although The Painted Bird is only director Vaclav Marhoul’s third film (his previous works include Smart Phillip [2003] and Tobruk [2008]), it is, in short, an epic masterpiece of cinematic accomplishment.

In an effort to spare their child the horrors of the Holocaust, a Jewish couple send their son Joska (Petr Kotlár) to live out the war in safety with a relative somewhere in the Eastern European countryside. But, when the child’s guardian unexpectedly dies, the now homeless boy is forced take to the open road and endure a hostile world now governed by hate, fear, and violence. Struggling for survival, he journeys through a world besot by locals and villagers driven by prejudice, superstition, and their own rules. But, when the war ends, his fight for survival may just become one for his soul as well as his life.

Based on Jerzy Kosiński’s 1965 novel, Marhoul’s script is...

Anyone depending on the kindness of strangers is going nowhere fast in “The Painted Bird,” a child’s-eye Holocaust drama of such unrelenting brutality as to make even the vaguest gestures of humanity — a held hand, a shared crust of bread — feel in context like miracles of grace. Only the third directorial effort in 17 years from Czech multi-hyphenate Václav Marhoul, this stonily imposing adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s contentious 1965 novel is by some measure his most ambitious and accomplished: a 169-minute panorama of violent societal breakdown, following a nameless boy through a cruel obstacle course of survival and abuse in an unidentified Eastern European country at the frenzied close of the Second World War.

The extreme lashings of suffering and sadism shown here are scarcely ameliorated by the exacting beauty of their presentation. Shooting in ravishing 35mm monochrome, apt enough for illustrating a world drawn into stark black-and-white polarities of good and evil,...

Eli Roth, the multi-talented director, writer, producer and actor, will adapt his enormously successful Hostel film franchise to create "Eli Roth's Hostel: Hunting Season," a twisted new Halloween Horror Nights maze at Universal Studios Hollywood. The event begins on September 23 and continues on select nights through October 31.

"Hostel: Hunting Season," for which Universal will build elaborate sets re-creating locations in Slovakia, will mark the horror auteur and star's first effort at transforming his screen work into a live theme park experience. The maze will re-imagine the film's dehumanizing torture chambers and send guests on a spiraling journey through the corrupt halls of Elite Hunting's torture factory. Elite Hunting, a secret society that tortures and kills American youth for sport in exchange for large sums of money, will prowl the factory and prey on its many maze visitors.

Eli Roth, said:

"Creating a maze for 'Halloween Horror Nights'...