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The week of Monday, September 1 through Sunday, September 7 is stacked on Prime with a mix of 2025 theatrical titles and a trove of studio favorites. Below, you’ll find every film hitting the service this week, with quick plot primers plus who made and starred in them, so you can jump straight to what you want.

Release days are noted inside each entry. Monday brings a big catalog drop (from ‘Rain Man’ to four ‘Bourne’ films and three ‘Death Wish’ sequels), Wednesday adds Jason Statham’s new action vehicle ‘A Working Man’, and Friday closes with Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller ‘Black Bag’.

‘After Earth’ (2013) Columbia Pictures

Arriving Monday, September 1, ‘After Earth...

Prime Video is stacking September with a big mix of classics, genre favorites, and brand-new titles rolling out across the month. Below you’ll find what’s arriving each date, plus quick, useful details on plots, casts, and how each project came together.

Release days are noted inside each entry so you can plan your queue week by week. Everything listed below is scheduled to land on Prime Video between Monday, September 1, 2025, and Friday, September 19, 2025.

‘The Boss Baby’ (2017) DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation’s family comedy follows a briefcase-toting infant who teams with his big brother to stop a scheme at Puppy Co.; Tom McGrath directs with voices from Alec Baldwin,...

To answer the question in the headline of this article, the short answer is: yes. Jim Parsons actually taught himself how to play the theremin for "The Big Bang Theory."

In the episode "The Bus Pants Utilization", the lead characters gather together to invent an app that lets users solve differential equations. Such an app, they figure, is specialized enough that no one else has published one yet, and they begin to have fantasies about potential wealth and fame. Sheldon, however, begins to fantasize that their roommate Penny (Kaley Cuoco) might be angling to steal their idea, even though she clearly wants nothing to do with it. Sheldon also becomes preoccupied with their team's command structure and who the leader might be. He becomes caty, cruel, and vindictive, making fun of his teammates to assert his leadership over them.

Sheldon is eventually, understandably, kicked off the team. As revenge, he...

Even in its most buoyant moments, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters retains a palpable, stifling air of desperation and moral rot. The trio of grifters at the center of the 1990 crime thriller are introduced via a visual triptych, in which each of them are donning designer sunglasses and a slick outfit as they ready themselves for their respective cons. But despite their suave appearances, these schemers—Lilly (Anjelica Huston), Roy (John Cuscack), and Myra (Annette Bening)—aren’t living large.

There are no obscenely rich marks, no luxurious locales, no big score that’ll allow them to sail off into the sunset. No, while Lilly skims a little off the top of her employer’s winnings at a horse racetrack, Roy heads to a dive bar for a money swap that nets him a whopping $10 and Myra seduces a jewelry shop owner. Roy later works a similar scam that earns...

The action-packed Western The Magnificent Seven, starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, will soon be available for streaming. The movie is a remake of a 64-year-old Western, which is itself heavily inspired by a samurai film.

Starting Jan. 1, 2025, Peacock subscribers can saddle up and revisit this thrilling remake of the iconic Western classic. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, most known for Training Day, the film features Washington as Sam Chisolm, a bounty hunter who leads a group of outlaws, gamblers, and sharpshooters to protect a small town from a ruthless industrialist. The star-studded cast also includes Chris Pratt as the charming and wisecracking gunslinger Josh Faraday, Moon Knight’s Ethan Hawke, Daredevil’s Vincent D’Onofrio, and Byung-hun Lee, bringing fresh energy to the story of justice and sacrifice.

Related This ‘80s Action Director Made One of the Most Underrated Western Movies

Walter Hill helped to usher in countless 80s classics, but...

En mundoCine tuvimos el honor de recibir el Premio a la Mejor Labor Informativa. © Asecan

Ayer se celebró la gala de los 37 premios Asecan. Una gala cuyo protagonismo recayó en la película Solos en la noche, de Guillermo Rojas, que se alzó con cuatro premios y la serie En fin, de David Sainz, que se llevó tres galardones. Por otro lado, destacó el momento en el que la actriz sevillana María Alfonsa Rosso recogió el Premio Asecan de Honor. Además, nuestro medio de comunicación también estuvo muy presente con la directora Marta Medina recibiendo de la mano de los periodistas Leonardo Sardiña y Paz Piñar el Premio Asecan a la Mejor Labor Informativa sobre cine. Aquí la lista completa de los premiados:

Premio Asecan PELÍCULA (Ex Aequo)

La infiltrada

© Beta Films

Solos en la noche

© La Claqueta PC

Premio Asecan DIRECCIÓN De Cine

Guillermo Rojas por Solos en la noche...

En mundoCine tuvimos el honor de recibir el Premio a la Mejor Labor Informativa. © Asecan

Ayer se celebró la gala de los 37 premios Asecan. Una gala cuyo protagonismo recayó en la película Solos en la noche, de Guillermo Rojas, que se alzó con cuatro premios y la serie En fin, de David Sainz, que se llevó tres galardones. Por otro lado, destacó el momento en el que la actriz sevillana María Alfonsa Rosso recogió el Premio Asecan de Honor. Además, nuestro medio de comunicación también estuvo muy presente con la directora Marta Medina recibiendo de la mano de los periodistas Leonardo Sardiña y Paz Piñar el Premio Asecan a la Mejor Labor Informativa sobre cine. Aquí la lista completa de los premiados:

Premio Asecan PELÍCULA (Ex Aequo)

La infiltrada

© Beta Films

Solos en la noche

© La Claqueta PC

Premio Asecan DIRECCIÓN De Cine

Guillermo Rojas por Solos en la noche...

While some question the power of celebrities to guarantee box office success, there is one actor whose name value seldom wavers in getting people into the theaters. Tom Cruise has become one of the world's most recognized and revered actors, with an impressive filmography of fan favorites throughout the decades, including Risky Business (1983), Top Gun (1986), Mission Impossible (1996), Jerry Maguire (1996), Minority Report (2002), and the list goes on and on up to the modern era with massive blockbuster his like Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and fan favorites like Edge of Tomorrow (2014).

His success as an actor has remained prevalent for decades, despite controversies involving his association with the Church of Scientology and some oddball interviews (who can forget Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch in 2005?). Still, Cruise remains best known as an actor who is very much in charge of his career trajectory. That is what makes his first and last directed work such an oddity.

There were great cinema composers before John Williams and there will be great composers after him. And yet, through his seven-decade career, he towers over everyone else. His music is not only iconic, but the movies we revere as classics wouldn’t have acquired such legendary status if not for his scores.

“Jaws” without John Williams isn’t “Jaws.” “Star Wars” without John Williams isn’t “Star Wars.” Although he only handles the music, the composer has left such a mark on cinema history that he makes a case as co-author of some of Hollywood’s biggest triumphs.

Director Laurent Bouzerau gives the full spotlight to the composer in the new documentary, “Music by John Williams.” Bouzerau is fully comfortable in his mode as celebrating Williams and his legacy, which is fine. I’m not sure I was looking for someone to “rip the lid off” the subject, and while...

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire got off to a slow start at the box office, but ended up making over $100 million domestically, showing the franchise still has signs of life. Some will say this is the fourth Ghostbusters film, but of course, we all know it’s actually the fifth, as you have to count Paul Feig’s reboot to a certain extent. While critics have been cool on Gil Kenan’s addition to the franchise, fans seem to really be enjoying the film, which gives the Og Ghostbusters enhanced roles. All this got me thinking: what are the best Ghostbusters films? So, I had to do it – here’s my Ghostbusters Movies Ranked list. I’m sure this will inspire a little debate, so let me know what you think of this list in the comments below – even if you hate it. Note that this list is from worst to best.

Twisters isn't an announced remake of Jan de Bont's 1996 cow-chucker Twister, but it kinda is? Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) honors the beloved storm-chasing picture by borrowing plot milestones for his blustery "continuation," yet it's hardly a copycat. Twisters is an exhilarating summer blockbuster with plenty of giddyup, trading Van Halen needle drops for buckin' Wild West rambunctiousness. Chung's breathtaking intimacy as a storyteller never sacrifices the adrenalized thrills found in life-threatening tornado hunts, swirling together rapturous disaster sequences with adventurous mavericks who yee-haw their way into our hearts. It's hands-down one of the 2024's champion titles so far, meant to be experienced on a gigantic theater screen.

The film's setups are familiar, but new characters hardly make for a stale Twister regurgitation. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Cooper, the New York City meteorologist called back into action five years after tragedy strikes in the field. Kate's former colleague...

Douglass Fake, founder of leading movie soundtrack label Intrada and producer of more than 700 albums of movie and TV music, died Saturday at a Richmond, Calif., hospital after a long illness. He was 72.

Fake’s many credits include the first complete restoration of Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Waterfront,” a lavish 5-cd release of Elmer Bernstein’s “The Ten Commandments” and the debut of several Henry Mancini scores including “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” previously only available in abridged pop recordings.

Among the label’s best sellers were expansions of previously incomplete recordings of such classics as John Williams’ “Jaws,” Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future” and Jerry Goldsmith’s “Alien.” Fake also supervised the re-recording of a dozen albums of classic film music including Bernard Herrmann’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and Miklos Rozsa’s “Ivanhoe,” “Spellbound” and “Julius Caesar.”

A longtime film-music fan, Fake launched Intrada Records...

Elmer Bernstein is one of the greatest composers in the history of film scoring. He broke in writing music for Z-grade schlock like "Cat-Women of the Moon" and "Robot Monster" (forever in the conversation for The Worst Movie Ever Made) and quickly hit the A-list with his scores for "The Man with the Golden Arm," "The Ten Commandments," and "Some Came Running." In a career that spanned over 50 years, he dabbled in every imaginable genre, earning 14 Academy Award nominations (winning only one) without ever overtly repeating himself (a hazard for many movie composers).

How versatile was Elmer Bernstein? He could rouse us with his plucky theme for "The Great Escape," break our hearts with his soaring "To Kill a Mockingbird" score, and find classical grandeur in the frat-boy hijinks of "National Lampoon's Animal House."

He scored Martin Scorsese's luscious "The Age of Innocence" and two ludicrous "Billy Jack" movies.

Regardless of its importance to the storytelling process, film music is too often an afterthought. There are a variety of theories that composers have as to why, and they’re mostly related to a lack of education. So I’ve decided to take an active stance in educating filmmakers about the role of music in film and the process of how a film score comes into being.

My hope is that by the end of this piece you’ll be more familiar with: A) the history of film music in general, and B) the key composers who have contributed to the development of film music as an art. So—where did this all start?

The Silent Era (1890s-1929) Silent film star Mary Pickford. Somewhere, a pianist is inspired.

During the silent era, films music is provided by each individual theater, either by phonograph or as performed live by flesh-and-blood musicians.

What kind of music goes best with comedy? Even if you’ve never seen The Benny Hill Show, you know its silly, sped-up theme song. For years, funny movies would incorporate swinging jazz or playful orchestral tunes. Then, in the late 1970s, John Landis had the idea to tap acclaimed Oscar-winning composer (and friend) Elmer Bernstein to write a no-winking serious score for Landis’ outrageous Animal House. The juxtaposition worked perfectly, the onscreen hijinks accentuated by Bernstein’s soaring strings — almost as if the movie was pretending to be classy while the characters were thumbing their nose at the pomposity. Soon, other movies, like Airplane! (also scored by Bernstein), were doing the same thing, proving that what initially seemed like a bizarre notion for music in a comedy could actually be brilliant.

But times change, and one trend gets replaced by a new one. By the mid-1980s, several hit comedies contained a hit single.

While “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” basically put Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader on the map as massive cinematic forces and “The Last Temptation of Christ” continues to have a strong cult following, as well as an early Criterion Collection release (Spine #70 to be exact), their final collaboration, 1999’s “Bringing Out the Dead,” starring Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette, still has yet to receive the praise and recognition of their previous works.

Paramount, the studio behind the film, seems to want to change that this upcoming September, as they plan on giving the psychological drama a 4K Uhd Blu-Ray release to coincide with its 25th anniversary. In reappraisal of this unfairly maligned capper to a multi-decade partnership, IndieWire lists our reasons for why “Bringing Out the Dead” is worth bringing out of the shadows.

‘Bringing Out The Dead,’ Martin Scorsese©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection A Spiritual Sequel to...

John Sturges' "The Magnificent Seven" is one of the best Westerns of all time. We are bound by the Unspoken Rules of the Internet to acknowledge that the film is a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," and Kurosawa himself found it "disappointing, but entertaining." With all due respect to the Japanese master, though, "The Magnificent Seven" is a banger. Led by a stalwart cast that serves as a who's who of 1960s manly men, including Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Horst Buchholz, Brad Dexter, and Charles Bronson, the plot follows a small Mexican village that's being terrorized by a gang of bandits led by a guy named Calvera, played Eli Wallach. With their backs against the wall, the villagers decide to hire a group of seven gunslingers to protect them, and the stage is set for an inevitable showdown.

Brynner and McQueen butted heads behind the scenes,...

In a Variety profile of legendary composer John Williams earlier this year, director Steven Spielberg singled out a reason why the musician's work seems to stand out among his contemporaries.

"Every score he's ever composed, and even the ones that might have the most complicated orchestrations, he always has a beautiful main theme," Spielberg said. "And I don't hear themes being written for movies as much as they used to be by Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann. Film composition isn't a lost art, but thematic scoring is becoming more and more a lost art. And the great thing about Johnny is, he's still got it."

Of course, to say Williams has "still got it" is something of an understatement. The prolific composer is synonymous with the type of sweeping, powerful, emotional music that helped to define blockbuster filmmaking. A crucial part of why those scores clicked with audiences,...

There wasn't a more capable director of massive, widescreen Westerns working in Hollywood during the 1950s and '60s than John Sturges. Whether classical ("Gunfight at the O.K. Corral") or somewhat unconventional ("Bad Day at Black Rock"), Sturges could frame a mountainous expanse or stage a gunfight with the best of them. He thrived when working with big casts and specialized in discovering stirring nuances in characters that would've been walking cliches in more typical genre flicks.

Sturges was also efficient, which came in handy when managing expensive studio productions populated with big egos. His biggest challenge in this department might've been "The Magnificent Seven," the 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Seven Samurai." Yul Brynner, then a hugely popular movie star (largely on the strength of his Academy Award-winning performance in "The King and I" and his portrayal of Ramses in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments"), controlled...

Less bleak than Anthony Mann’s westerns with James Stewart, including Winchester ’73 and Bend of the River, The Tin Star still wastes little time sketching an unwelcoming vision of the Old West. It begins with bounty hunter Morgan Hickman (Henry Fonda) riding into a small town with his latest deceased prize in tow. The townspeople gather around him in the street like pigeons, though the open hostility and disapproval in their faces undermines the sense that they’re in any way titillated by the sight of a dead body or a grizzled gunslinger. Forced to wait for the paperwork to clear for his payout, Morgan settles in for a few days of frosty reception that the townsfolk extend to any outsider, including those within their community who violate the narrow-minded boundaries of accepted behavior.

Perhaps inevitably, Morgan becomes briefly attached to Nora (Betsy Palmer), a local woman ostracized to...

Don Siegel’s 1976 western The Shootist stars John Wayne in his final film appearance, though it’s perhaps just as notable for the muted nature of its regard for the pathology of violence. After all, Siegel is the same filmmaker who half a decade prior made Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood’s renegade cop relishes squeezing the trigger of his 44-magnum revolver whenever the opportunity presents itself.

There’s a propulsive mania to Siegel’s direction of Dirty Harry, tapping as it does into the curious overlap between Harry’s police tactics and a psycho sniper’s bloodlust. Wayne’s J.B. Books in The Shootist has no such compelling correlate. He’s a former sheriff turned gunslinger, now an old man easing the pain of his terminal cancer with swigs of laudanum, and he’s aiming to die in peace. It’s 1901, and the fact that he can’t...

Dan Wallin, the music scoring engineer who recorded such classic film scores as “Spartacus,” “Bullitt,” “The Wild Bunch” and “Out of Africa,” died early Wednesday in Hawaii. He was 97.

Twice Oscar-nominated for best sound (1970’s “Woodstock” and 1976’s “A Star Is Born”), he won a 2009 Emmy for sound mixing on the Academy Awards telecast and received two additional Emmy nominations in the sound mixing category.

But it was Wallin’s skill behind the console, recording and mixing musical scores for movies and TV, that won him legions of fans among nearly all of Hollywood’s top composers and ensured steady employment for more than half a century.

He recorded the music for an estimated 500 films, including those for “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Finian’s Rainbow” in the 1960s; “The Way We Were,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Nashville,” “King Kong” and “Saturday Night Fever” in the 1970s; “Somewhere in Time,” “The Right Stuff...

Plot: After having relocated to NYC to fight ghosts, the Spengler find themselves tangling with an old nemesis of the Ghostbusters, Mayor Walter Peck (William Atherton), who wants to shut them down for good. Meanwhile, an ancient evil will be unleashed over the city, releasing all the spirits caught over the last forty years.

Review: I was a big fan of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Jason Reitman’s film skillfully blended nostalgia with a new take on the franchise that opened up the Ghostbusters universe in an inclusive way. It welcomed new fans without alienating old ones, something the 2016 reboot notoriously failed at. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire seems to be aimed at building the franchise out more extensively. While it’s still a fun, nostalgia-driven return to the Ghostbusting universe, it’s not as good as the last film and spreads itself too thin to do the new characters justice.

One thing fans...

Following the outsized PG-13 success of both M3gan with its frightening robotic doll and then Five Nights at Freddy’s with its animatronic rock band, Blumhouse has now settled on a familiar childhood companion, a seemingly innocent stuffed bear named Chauncey, to deliver carefully calculated chills in Imaginary. It is a formula that sheds the R-rated explicitness from the horror genre, something Blumhouse knows well, and makes it more palatable for a younger audience not just in ratcheting down the bloodletting, but also in bringing it to a level kids might relate to. And what better than putting familiar playthings at the center of the action, in every case guaranteed to stir up our demons and make us jump out of our seats.

There is no reason to believe that Imaginary won’t also succeed, and this one from director and co-writer Jeff Wadlow (Truth Or Dare) delves deeper into psychological terror,...

The concept of time travel, though usually lumped in with science fiction, is actually far closer to fantasy. The notion is rooted in nostalgia, the collective unconscious assumption that there was such a thing as "the good old days." It's also borne out of an interest in history, which as "The Holdovers" so recently and succinctly stated, is really an interest in knowing more about ourselves. While actual time travel will likely never exist, a particular form of it has already existed for over 100 years: cinema.

If poring through film history allows a viewer to ostensibly travel through time, then it only follows that cinema would be a natural tool to examine history and time travel as well. When co-writer and producer Bob Gale hit upon his father's old high school yearbook one day and wondered if he and his father would've been friends (let alone like each other) had...

New York City? More like New York Chilly! Amirite?! The first trailer for the unfortunately titled "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" has arrived, and it's going to be a cool summer in the Big Apple, as a freezing paranormal threat suddenly invades the city.

Following the events of "Ghostbusters: Afterlife," Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) and her kids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) have returned to New York after heading out to Summerville, Oklahoma to inherit a dusty old farm and a paranormal legacy that will turn them into rising Ghostbusters, alongside the return of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and the uncanny CGI double of Harold Ramis as the original Ghostbusters gang: Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Winston Zeddemore, and the spirit of Egon Spengler, respectively.

This is a fantastic first tease for the "Ghostbusters" sequel, one that taps a bit more back into the humor of the original franchise,...

Writer/director John Landis always intended to use Sam Cooke’s version of the song “Blue Moon” over the famous transformation scene in his 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London (watch it Here), and he let the film’s composer Elmer Bernstein know that up front. He chose “Blue Moon” because he wanted the scene to come off as being sad and painful rather than scary – but while putting together the score for the film, Bernstein decided to go ahead and compose some of his own music for the transformation scene. Just in case. Landis ended up rejecting Bernstein’s transformation music and stuck with “Blue Moon”… but now filmmaker Paul Davis, who generously shared 35 minutes of rare outtake footage from The Exorcist on Halloween this year, has put Bernstein’s rejected music over the transformation scene and uploaded it to YouTube. You can check it out in the embed...

Remember those never-before-seen outtakes from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist that we shared with you for Halloween? That rare footage came courtesy of Paul Davis, who directed Beware the Moon: Remembering An American Werewolf in London as well as the films The Body and Uncanny Annie (both part of Blumhouse’s anthology series “Into the Dark”).

Davis is back this week with another rare and never-before-seen treat, and this time it’s all about An American Werewolf in London. Specifically, Davis has shared the film’s iconic werewolf transformation sequence – with the original rejected musical score!

“Here is something that myself and the team at New Wave Entertainment tried to pull off back in 2008 as a bonus feature for the first Blu-ray release of An American Werewolf in London in September 2009,” Davis explains. “With the blessing of John Landis and Universal Home Entertainment, we attempted to restore Elmer Bernstein’s...

It’s a case of one score to rule them all, as Howard Shore’s stirring epic soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings trilogy was voted the U.K.’s favorite movie music.

Shore’s score for the Rings film, which has won three Academy Awards, three Golden Globes and four Grammys, came out ahead of some of the greatest and most recognizable soundtracks of all time, including John Williams’ music for Schindler’s List and Star Wars, which came second and third respectively.

The list of the top 100 film scores was compiled by popular U.K. radio station Classic FM, as part of their annual Movie Music Hall of Fame. More than 10,000 people voted for this year’s edition and the winner was revealed on Sunday by Jonathan Ross, the former presenter of the BBC’s Film program.

“Many thanks to all the Classic FM listeners,” Shore told...

A film or TV series is often most effective and potent as an artform when it makes us feel, so what are the best ways that good scores elicit an emotional response in the audience? Which film or TV scores and composers are you most fond of and why? These were some of the secrets revealed by five top composers when they joined Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2023 Emmy Awards contenders: Bear McCreary (“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”), Tom Howe (“Shrinking” and “Ted Lasso”), Stephen Barton (“Star Trek: Picard”), John Powell (“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie”) and Ingrid Michaelson (“Tiny Beautiful Things”). Watch our fascinating full group roundtable panel above, and click on each name above to view each nominee’s individual interview.

See dozens of interviews with 2023 awards contenders

“There’s only one thing you ever need to ask a filmmaker,...

The soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s war epic Inglourious Basterds features songs by a wide range of artists, from pop legends like David Bowie to prominent film composers like Ennio Morricone. Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s blood-soaked take on a guys-on-a-mission World War II movie like The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone, charting two parallel plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the final scene, Tarantino declares Inglourious Basterds to be his masterpiece via Brad Pitt’s suave antihero, Lt. Aldo Raine. The film has a chilling villain, a subversive alternate-history storyline, and one of the director’s most memorable soundtracks.

Inglourious Basterds was Tarantino’s first period piece, but he didn’t let the historical setting get in the way of his signature needle drops. A lot of the music featured in Inglourious Basterds is anachronistic. The soundtrack of Tarantino’s action-packed, darkly comedic treatise on cinema’s...

When it comes to prisoner of war stories, few are as remarkable as "The Great Escape." During World War II, the inmates of Stalag Luft III in modern-day Poland embarked on a grand plan to dig not just one but three tunnels out of the camp. The goal was to bust out over 200 men and cause disruption to the Nazi war effort by tying up as many resources as possible trying to recapture them. It was no easy task, however, as the camp was specially designed to be escape-proof: the huts were raised above the ground to deter digging and built on sandy earth to make any efforts to disperse hundred tons of soil excavated from the tunnels obvious to the guards.

Nevertheless, the team, overseen by "Big X" Roger Bushell and his escape committee, largely made up of British servicemen and others from around the Commonwealth, displayed remarkable ingenuity...

Robert Benton and Paul Newman’s show-biz detective tale is one of the best-looking thrillers of 1998. With its star lineup of Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Reese Witherspoon, Stockard Channing and James Garner, its the equivalent of a dog-eared comfy mystery paperback. The classic themes and stylistics are here, but in a new Hollywood where movie stars can get away with murder, and nobody seems to care. Everyone is excellent and the show quite enjoyable, even if it seems we’ve seen a lot of it before. A solid academic extra is the audio commentary by Alain Silver and James Ursini.

Twilight (1998)

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1998 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date December 27, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Reese Witherspoon, Stockard Channing, James Garner, Giancarlo Esposito, Liev Schreiber, Margo Martindale, John Spencer, M. Emmet Walsh, Lewis Arquette, Jack Wallace.

Cinematography: Piotr Sobocinski

Production Designer: David Gropman...

Composer Bear McCreary discusses a few of his favorite movies with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Wolf Man (1941) – Alex Kirschenbaum’s Wolf Man movie power rankings

Host (2020)

Gremlins (1984) – Glenn Erickson’s 4K Blu-ray review, Tfh’s 30th anniversary celebration

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Total Recall (1990)

Robot Monster (1953) – Joe Dante’s trailer commentary

Cat-Women Of The Moon (1953)

The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) – Katt Shea’s trailer commentary

The Ten Commandments (1956) – Larry Cohen’s trailer commentary

The Swarm (1978) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

The Howling (1981) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairings

Batman (1989)

Dick Tracy (1990)

Looney Tunes: Back In Action (2003) – Mike Schlesinger’s trailer commentary

Chinatown (1974) – Ernest Dickerson’s trailer commentary

The Professor And The Madman (2019)

Hollywood Boulevard (1976) – Jon Davison’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

Do The Right Thing (1989) – Allan Arkush...

John Sturges’ Road Show comedy western has more in common with 1941 than The Magnificent Seven, but Kino has MGM’s new remaster and the visual result is spectacular. The Ultra Panavision 70 epic is still a favorite of fans of out-of-control Hollywood filmmaking. Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton, Pamela Tiffin and a huge cast lead the charge for a convoy of frontier whisky. It’s all in a fine spirit of madcap fun. . . so where are the big laughs?

The Hallelujah Trail

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1965 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 156 165 min. / Street Date December 13, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton, Pamela Tiffin, Donald Pleasence, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, John Anderson, Tom Stern, Robert J. Wilke, Dub Taylor, Whit Bissell, Helen Kleeb, Val Avery, Hope Summers, John Dehner (narrator).

Cinematography: Robert Surtees

Art Direction: Carey Odell

Costumes: Edith Head

Film Editor: Ferris Webster

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein...

This writer remembers Easter Sunday mornings of childhood when all the candy-filled eggs were collected, sitting before the TV and devouring Cadbury treats as the sweeping fanfare of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" filled the family room. Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner made big impressions with their booming voices, but what I remembered most was the swell of strings that would arise anytime Yvonne De Carlo's saintly Sephora would grace the screen. Years beyond that childhood, Elmer Bernstein's epic score is what remains in the memory.

Responsible for the oom-pah horns accompanying the "Ghostbusters" on their paranormal escapades and for the militant pomp of Ivan Reitman's "Stripes," Bernstein is as much associated with comedies as the more serious dramas, though you might not know that the guy who scored "The Man With the Golden Gun" is the same who worked on "Animal House." In short,...

For many of us Brits, just the mere mention of "The Great Escape" provokes an urge to tuck into a large plate of turkey sandwiches. When I was growing up, John Sturges' rousing prisoner-of-war thriller seemed like it was on telly every Boxing Day, and it is still regarded as a festive favorite in many U.K. households. At three hours long, it was perfect holiday viewing, ideal for killing off an afternoon drifting in that post-Christmas funk, with the grown-ups grazing steadily in front of the TV while the kids played with their new toys.

In his list of 10 great prisoner-of-war films for the BFI, critic Samuel Wrigley described it as the "epitome of war-is-fun" action films. From an era well before films like "Saving Private Ryan" showed us that war was hell in harrowing detail, "The Great Escape" is an upbeat war adventure for the whole family, playing...

Nostalgia is a tricky thing, especially these days. What used to be a slice of escapism has since become the blueprint for Hollywood studios, who have seemingly molded intellectual property into a skeleton key to get projects off the ground. Indie filmmakers graduate into blockbuster reboots, veteran filmmakers stretch their limbs with unnecessary sequels, and listicles are made about all the Easter eggs and trivia and yadda, yadda, yadda. There are exceptions, sure, but this is the business today, and our rose-tinted lenses are feeling the wear and tear.

Maybe. Hopefully. Probably not.

Ghostbusters, to stay on theme here (there is a point to all of this), is no exception to this riff raff. Last year, Jason Reitman finally delivered the second sequel die-hard fans have been waiting for since the days of Chris Farley rumors. It was fine. Rather than attempting to capture the comedy of the first two entries,...

No matter how zoomed-out the view, you can only fit so many mountain ranges, so many massive armies, and so many dirty hobbit fingernails into a single frame. In Middle Earth, it’s the musical score that can always go further, capturing emotion, character turmoil, and the awe and wonder of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world in a way that (sometimes literally) echoes far beyond what we can see. The way music works with the image often makes the best scenes out of Tolkien’s stories feel as rousingly epic as they do and why, in both the Peter Jackson film trilogy and Prime Video’s new television series, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” scenes that are just bits of landscape catching on fire (or flooding and catching on fire) pack such a punch.

The Amazon show posed the same challenge to showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne...

Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers' "I Love Trouble" was supposed to be a throwback rom-com in the mold of a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn classic. The pairing of Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts as a couple of quarrelsome newspaper reporters seemed relatively promising. Roberts was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood at the time, while Nolte was two years removed from being named People's Sexiest Man Alive. This duo was nothing if not photogenic. Surely, they could generate enough chemistry to keep movie theaters packed throughout the summer of 1994. The erstwhile movie magazine Premiere was bullish enough on the film to predict it would be the fifth highest grossing movie of the season. It felt like a can't-miss proposition.

But miss is exactly what it did. The 45 million film opened to a paltry 7.9 million in late June, barely finishing fifth ahead of Mike Nichols' "Wolf," which was...

After bouncing about in a couple of good Blu-ray editions, Carl Franklin’s superior film adaptation of the great Walter Mosley novel makes the jump to 4K. Denzel Washington’s star quality and acting prowess shine in the smart production, with Tak Fujimoto cinematography that put the color back into ’90s filmmaking. There’s plenty to enjoy in this hard/soft-boiled tale, starting with the great music. Everybody’s good and Don Cheadle’s loose-cannon henchman ‘Mouse’ is terrific. It’s one of Washington’s best pictures, and should have initiated an entire franchise of Walter Mosley / Easy Rawlins detective adventures.

Devil in a Blue Dress 4K

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1135

1995 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 101 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 19, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals, Don Cheadle, Maury Chaykin, Terry Kinney, Lisa Nicole Carson, Albert Hall, Mel Winkler.

Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto

Film...

Happy Centennial to the composer Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein was born 100 years ago today in NYC to Ukrainian immigrant parents. As a teenager he hoped to become a concert pianist. Fate had different plans; He became a legendary film composer instead. His A list breakthrough came in the mid 50s with the back-to-back success of The Man with the Golden Arm (his first Oscar nomination) and Cecil B DeMille's The Ten Commandments. A year before his death in 2004 he was Oscar nominated for a 14th time for Far From Heaven (2002).  So many classic films on his resume. Consider...

Sudden Fear (1952) The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) The Ten Commandments (1956) The Magnificent Seven (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) - Oscar win An American Werewolf in London (1981) The Grifters (1991) The Age of Innocence (1993) Far From Heaven (2002)

Do you have a favourite score from his work?...

The smash hit monster-gore popcorn flick comes to 4K Ultra HD two years and four months after a deluxe Blu-ray, so we do a pointed comparison for purchase-crazy fans that want official sanction for their madness. Happily, you don’t need to be full-moon looney to go for the 4K: David Naughton and Griffin Dunne’s descent into a lycanthropic nightmare is as wrenching as ever.

An American Werewolf in London 4K

4K Ultra-hd

Arrow Video

1981 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date March 15, 2022 / Available from / 59.95

Starring: David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, Jenny Agutter, John Woodvine, Brian Glover, Frank Oz, Sydney Bromley.

Cinematography: Robert Paynter

Art Director: Leslie Dilley

Film Editor: Malcolm Campbell

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein

Special Makeup Effects Designer and Creator: Rick Baker

Produced by George Folsey Jr., Peter Guber, John Peters

Written and Directed by John Landis

The street date for a 4K disc of a certain high-profile...

John Williams turns 90 years old on Feb. 8. And the world’s most famous film composer shows no signs of slowing down.

The five-time Oscar winner, creator of many of the most well-known movie themes of all time — everything from “Jaws” and “Star Wars” to “E.T.” and “Harry Potter” — is finishing work on two new film scores and, Covid permitting, plans to conduct concerts with at least five orchestras between April and November.

Commemorating Williams’ nonagenarian status is the release of “John Williams: The Berlin Concert,” a two-disc Deutsche Grammophon set recorded during the composer’s Oct. 14-16 concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic.

The 93-minute collection includes many of Williams’ familiar signature tunes — “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Jurassic Park,” “Superman” — plus a few less familiar pieces, including his theme for “Solo: A Star Wars Story” and his moving, non-film “Elegy for Cello and Orchestra.”

The Berlin album might...

Director Ron Underwood discusses a few of his favorite westerns with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Mighty Joe Young (1998)

Speechless (1994)

Heart and Souls (1993)

Stealing Sinatra (2003)

City Slickers (1991)

Tremors (1990) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Tourist Trap (1979) – David DeCoteau’s trailer commentary

The Seduction (1982)

Puppet Master (1989)

The Boondock Saints (1999)

Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952)

Capricorn One (1977) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary

Panic In The Streets (1950) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

Back When We Were Grownups (2004)

Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018)

Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020)

The Howling (1981) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

Red River (1948) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Johnny Guitar (1954) – Michael Lehmann’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Searchers (1956)

Seven Samurai (1954) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary

The Magnificent Seven (1960) – Jesus Treviño’s trailer commentary

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

Westworld...

Marilyn Bergman, the Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning songwriter whose lyrics written with her husband, Alan Bergman, graced such hits as “The Way We Were,” “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “In the Heat of the Night” and the songs from “Yentl,” has died. She was 93 years old.

Bergman was the first woman president and chairman of the board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), a post she held from 1994 to 2009. She and her husband and lifelong writing partner Alan Bergman wrote the words to some of the most popular film and TV songs of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and continued to write together well into the 2000s.

They were Oscar nominated 16 times, and won three. The Bergmans were frequent collaborators with composers Michel Legrand and Marvin Hamlisch (“The Way We Were”).

The Bergmans were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980 and received its Johnny...

I must have at least 7 home video releases of John Sturges’ classic, starting from VHS, but they’ve come up with a good reason to return: a 4K transfer with color and contrast grading that to me better represents the movie. The thrilling, not-too-violent escapades of Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, James Garner, David McCallum, James Coburn, Charles Bronson & James Donald are no longer timed so that everything looks like a washed-out high noon: both the 4th of July and much of the mad-dash escape scramble are meant to take place near the crack of dawn. In this case ‘Much darker’ is much richer; faces don’t get blown out. And I do see more detail in the enhanced image. So here we go again, happily.

The Great Escape 4K

4K Ultra HD

Kl Studio Classics

1963 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 172 min. / Street Date January 11, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 39.95

Starring: Steve McQueen, James Garner,...

Take a look at more new footage from director Steven Spielberg's feature film reboot of "West Side Story", adapting the original 'street gang' "Romeo and Juliet"- inspired Broadway musical, starring Ansel Elgort as 'Tony' and Rachel Zegler as 'Maria', opening December 10, in theaters:

Cast includes the 'Jets' members 'Anybodys' (Ezra Menas), 'Mouthpiece' (Ben Cook), 'Action' (Sean Harrison Jones), Jets leader 'Riff' (Mike Faist), 'Baby John' (Patrick Higgins)...

...Maria’s brother and 'Sharks' leader 'Bernardo' (David Alvarez), Sharks members 'Quique' (Julius Anthony Rubio)...

...'Chago' (Ricardo Zayas), 'Chino' (Josh Andrés Rivera), 'Braulio' (Sebastian Serra) and 'Pipo' (Carlos Sánchez Falú).

Spielberg organized open casting calls for the new film in New York City April 29, 2018 and Orlando Florida May 25, 2018.

Casting was seeking actors to play four leading roles: 'Maria' (18-20), 'Tony' (18-23), 'Bernardo' (20-24) and 'Anita' (20-24 years):

"...All four actors must be able to sing. Maria, Anita and Bernardo must speak Spanish.

Sneak Peek director Steven Spielberg's movie reboot of "West Side Story", adapting the original 'street gang' Broadway musical, starring Ansel Elgort as 'Tony' and Rachel Zegler as 'Maria', opening December 10, in theaters:

Cast includes the 'Jets' members 'Anybodys' (Ezra Menas), 'Mouthpiece' (Ben Cook), 'Action' (Sean Harrison Jones), Jets leader 'Riff' (Mike Faist), 'Baby John' (Patrick Higgins)...

...Maria’s brother and 'Sharks' leader 'Bernardo' (David Alvarez), Sharks members 'Quique' (Julius Anthony Rubio)...

...'Chago' (Ricardo Zayas), 'Chino' (Josh Andrés Rivera), 'Braulio' (Sebastian Serra) and 'Pipo' (Carlos Sánchez Falú).

Spielberg organized open casting calls for the new film in New York City April 29, 2018 and Orlando Florida May 25, 2018.

Casting was seeking actors to play four leading roles: 'Maria' (18-20), 'Tony' (18-23), 'Bernardo' (20-24) and 'Anita' (20-24 years):

"...All four actors must be able to sing. Maria, Anita and Bernardo must speak Spanish. Dancing experience is a plus..."

The 1961 musical drama "West Side Story" starring Natalie Wood,...

Vincente Minnelli’s best non-musical drama hits on a magic combination — a tough tale of small-town malaise, his patented hyper-expressive sense of visual design, and a triple-win in casting, including Frank Sinatra in his most committed performance this side of The Manchurian Candidate. Frankie may even have said Yes to a Take 2 now and then. The fireworks begin when ex-soldier, lapsed intellectual writer and self-styled gambling bum Dave Hirsh inadvertently returns to his hometown. This is also Dean Martin’s best picture, with a breakout role for Shirley MacLaine as the pathetic woman with the purse made from a stuffed toy. With Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy and the great Nancy Gates.

Some Came Running

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 137 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date November 16, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates.

Cinematography: William H. Daniels...