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No Time To Die's shocking ending sees Bond sacrifice himself, but the promise of his return signifies a new chapter for the franchise. Craig's reinvention of Bond paves the way for a fresh perspective, ensuring the 007 franchise continues to evolve post-Craig's era. While the death of Bond in No Time To Die marks an end, the series' enduring popularity ensures a new actor will take up the mantle.

Despite the movie's dramatic climax and seemingly definitive sense of finality, No Time To Die still declares that "James Bond will return". Although the signature title card is a regular feature in the Bond series, the promise that 007 would be back was a surprise given No Time To Die's conclusion. Since the Bond movies remain a hugely profitable franchise another film wasn't in much doubt, but unlike other James Bond movies, No Time To Die takes the radical decision...

No Time to Die is a fitting end to Daniel Craig's tenure as James Bond, but his death scene could have considerably more impact without one particular scene. The 2021 movie was Craig's swan song, as it cleverly ties all the previous movies together and elevates the character to more than just an invincible, charming, British spy. There are more stakes in the movie than in any previous James Bond release, as Bond sacrifices himself for the greater good, saying goodbye to Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) and never getting to see his daughter, Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet) again.

No Time to Die's ending sees M launch a missile strike to successfully destroy the whole island and erase the Heracles virus from existence, and Bond opens the doors of Lyutsifer Safin's (Rami Malek) island so he can escape. When Bond opens the doors, Safin reappears, closes the doors, and infects Bond with Heracles,...

No Time To Die wasted Blofeld once again, but his cameo could have been far more impactful with one key change. Spectre are Bond's most famous enemies, to the point that it's easy to forget that they essentially disappeared from the series for over 30 years. This was due to legal issues involving the novel Thunderball and the rights to use Blofeld and Spectre, which weren't resolved until 2013. What should have been a joyful homecoming with 2015's Spectre proved to be a major disappointment, as the sequel's handling of the organization and Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) felt utterly lacking.

For a time, it appeared Christoph Waltz's Blofeld wasn't returning, with the actor himself stating it was tradition to recast the iconic villain with each new appearance. No Time To Die dropped this tradition, with Blofeld - who in this continuity is Bond's foster brother - appearing in a couple of scenes, including...

Warning—Spoilers for Love Island UK season 9 ahead!!!After eight weeks, the winners of Love Island UK season 9 have been announced. While the reality TV hit usually airs in the summer, this was the second special winter season, premiering in January. Instead of the summer's Mallorca location, the season played out in a new South African villa. Maya Jama also made her debut as the show's host, taking over for Laura Whitmore.

On the finale, Maya announced that Kai Fagan and Sanam Harrinanan won the £50,000 prize. According to ITV's voting percentages, Kai and Sanam received 44-percent, less than the overwhelming lead of last year's winners Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu and Davide Sanclimenti.

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In second place were original couple Ron Hall and Lana Jenkins. Bombshells Tom Clare and Samie Elishi came in third, while Shaq Mohammed and Tanya Manhenga got fourth.

Sam Mendes is a frontrunner to earn a Best Director Oscar nomination in 2020 for “1917.” Mendes’ virtuoso direction of the World War I action thriller is something of a comeback for the English filmmaker after his last directorial effort “Spectre,” the 2015 Bond film that is often considered one of the weakest installments in the 25-film franchise. Ahead of “1917” opening in theaters this Christmas, Mendes told The Sunday Times (via The Independent) that directing Bond films was a no-win situation.

“When I think of them my stomach churns,” Mendes said of his Bond movies, which include “Skyfall” and “Spectre.” “It’s just so hard. You feel like the England football manager. You think, if I win, I’ll survive. If I lose, I’ll be pilloried. There is no victory. Just survival.”

Mendes said there are simply too many fans across the world to please when it comes to the James Bond franchise,...

This week’s edition of Tuesday Blus includes the following titles:

The Wound (2017) – Kino Lorber / Maigret Sets a Trap (1958) – Kino Lorber / Maigret and the St Fiacre Case (1959) – Kino Lorber / Valdez is Coming (1971) – Kino Lorber / Heat and Dust (1983) – Cohen Media Group / Operation Petticoat (1958) – Olive Films / Time to Die (1966) – Film Movement / The Unknown Girl (2016) – Sundance Selects (DVD) / False Confessions (2016) – Big World Pictures (DVD).

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We have seen things you people wouldn't believe. A cult classic have its reputation re-evaluated and restored by a series of fan-fueled screenings long after it was unceremoniously "retired" from a theatrical run. A film with no less than six different cuts in circulation. Critics declaring a sequel a masterpiece, while others say it's "stylish but hollow." The evolution of basic story elements being considered "spoilers." All of these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain and unlike a legion of tweets bandied about in its name.

An elemental Western about inherited sins and the difference between honor and pride, Arturo Ripstein's Time to Die follows a man who, having served 18 years in jail to pay for killing a man, finds the victim's sons now believe he owes his life as well. Said to be the first produced screenplay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote it with Carlos Fuentes, it was also the directing debut of Ripstein, who had just helped his father Alfredo Ripstein produce Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. Finally seeing American release and beautifully restored, the involving picture is no museum piece; it...

New Line Cinema's It remake gave the sagging box office a much-needed jolt after the worst summer season in 11 years, pulling in a massive $123.4 million, which even came in $6 million higher than the original estimate of $117.1 million. The tally easily set a new record for the highest September opening weekend in history, along with the highest debut for any horror movie in history, and provided even more proof that audiences are hungry for edgy R-rated fare. This weekend, Pennywise and The Losers Club will go up against three new movies opening in wide release, Lionsgate's action-packed adaptation American Assassin, Paramount's bizarre drama mother! and Open Road Films' thriller All I See Is You. None of these movies are expected to give It a serious run for the box office crown, with the movie easily expected to repeat atop the box office with $66.2 million.

What's ironic about that projection is,...

Heading into the weekend, most box office analysts predicted that New Line Cinema's highly-anticipated Stephen King adaptation It would have no trouble taking the top spot at the box office, but it ended up coming in much higher than anticipated. The movie ended up setting a new September box office record, earning $117.1 million, nearly three times higher than the previous record-holder, Hotel Transylvania 2, which took in $48.5 million back in 2015. This adaptation also continues to prove that there is in fact an audience for R-rated fare.

Box Office Mojo reports that the It movie debuted in 4,103 theaters, pulling in an impressive $28,552 per-screen average. The movie has already made more than three times its $35 million budget, and it's faring well overseas also with $62 million for a worldwide total of $179.1 million. This adaptation continues the trend of R-rated fare overperforming at the box office, although it didn't quite reach the opening...

The Labor Day holiday weekend is typically not the strongest at the box office, signifying the end of the summer movie season, and in turn, lower box office receipts. This year, the Labor Day grosses were the lowest in 17 years bringing to an end the worst summer movie season in 11 years, and while early September isn't typically home to blockbuster opening weekends, that certainly seems to be the case this year with New Line's highly-anticipated It remake, which looks to shake things up in a big way. We're projecting that It will take in $65.7 million, which would be more than enough to break a few box office records.

If these projections are true, it will be the highest-grossing September debut of all time, easily beating the animated sequel Hotel Transylvania 2, which took in $48.4 million in its September 2015 debut. It will also break the 16-year record set by Hannibal as...

The Mexican Western Time To Die (Tiempo de Morir – 1966) screens Friday September 8th through Sunday September 10th at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood). The movie starts each evening at 7:30pm.

Juan Sáyago returns to his hometown after serving 18 years in prison for the murder of Raúl Trueba. Although he killed in self-defense, rumors in town circulated during his absence speculating that the victim was killed in cold blood. Sáyago wants to rebuild the life he was denied with his old lover, Mariana Sampedro, but Trueba’s sons have sworn to avenge the murder of their father. This classic Mexican neo-western, was the first realized screenplay of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and legendary Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. Under the direction of Arturo Ripstein, Time to Die represents one of the earliest examples of New Mexican Cinema and one of the most accomplished Mexican films from the 1960s.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSViennale director Hans HurchWe are heartbroken to learn the the director of the Vienna International Film Festival, Hans Hurch, has died unexpectedly in Rome over the weekend. The Viennale—which we have covered for many years—has long been a beacon of aesthetically bold, politically engaged and defiantly personal programming. Hurch and his work will be greatly missed. In his honor, we're revisiting a fabulous interview with the festival director published by Sight & Sound in 2012:i would be happy if it’s a festival that’s not doing harm to the people. It sounds very defensive, but it isn’t. There are so many things in the world that are doing so much harm, and I believe in an old leftist idea – everything you experience does something to you. So if you drink something that is not good,...

Hou Hsiao-hsien is best known and most acclaimed for historical dramas like A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, Flowers of Shanghai, and The Assassin, but a much more persistent subject for him has been contemporary films about young women. From his first two films through the early 2000s (after which he took a break from his native Taiwan, and, soon, directing in general), urban-set and neon-lit portraits of restless youth have proven a renewable source of interest. For those who casually dismiss Cute Girl and Cheerful Wind as pop entertainments he made for hire – they were, but they’re quite good – this trend can more definitively traced back to 1987’s Daughter of the Nile.

Lin (played by pop star Lin Yang) is in her late teens, working at KFC and attending night school (where, typically, underperforming or troubled students are shuffled). Her mother has passed away, her eldest brother killed in gang activity.

Mincing words is the last thing Pope Pius Xiii would want us to do here, so we'll say it plain: Tonight's episode of The Young Pope is absolutely magnificent. It juggles the climaxes of two major storylines, either of which could command an entire hour on their own, as effortlessly as the Holy Father juggles oranges. Whether it's Cardinal Gutierrez trying to bring down the abusive Archbishop Kurtwell or Pius making peace with the dying Cardinal Spencer, every image feels deeply considered. Every character is full and fleshed out. Not a moment is wasted.

When cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing received his apprenticeship training at the Central Motion Pictures Corporation, Taiwan’s largest studio and production company, he was exposed to elaborate lighting setups and shooting on sound stages. To the young cinematographer the sheer number and size (often large 10Ks) of the lights never felt quite right.

“We were just putting up lights because that was what was expected, but I never understood why,” Lee told IndieWire in a recent interview at MoMA, where a two-week retrospective of his 30 year career started on Friday. “You don’t always need more lighting — sometimes you put up a light and it kills the good light you already have.”

Gallery: Luminosity: The Art of Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing at MoMA

Lee had his opportunity to test his ideas in 1985 when he met Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a young director who had his own distinct ideas of how movies should be made,...

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

Blade Runner plays midnights this weekend (May 6th and 7th) at the Tivoli as part of their Reel Late at the Tivoli Midnight series.

Blade Runner is the movie that all the other “sci-fi” films of the last 20 years have been trying, unsuccessfully, to live up to. Some of them have achieved more compelling action, some spiffy CGI effects, but none of them can match the grandeur of this film’s vision or its colorful gallery of characters. It’s a film meant to be savored on the big screen and lucky St. Louis film fans will have that opportunity this weekend midnights at The Tivoli.

The Festival de Cannes has announced the lineup for the official selection, including the Competition and Un Certain Regard sections, as well as special screenings, for the 69th edition of the festival:COMPETITIONOpening Night: Café Society (Woody Allen) [Out of Competition]Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar)American Honey (Andrea Arnold)Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)La Fille Inconnue (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne)Juste La Fin du Monde (Xavier Dolan)Ma Loute (Bruno Dumont)Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)Rester Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)Mal de Pierres (Nicole Garcia)I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach)Ma' Rosa (Brillante Mendoza)Bacalaureat (Cristian Mungiu)Loving (Jeff Nichols)Agassi (Park Chan-Wook)The Last Face (Sean Penn)Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)Elle (Paul Verhoeven)The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding-Refn)The Salesman (Asgha Farhadi)Un Certain REGARDOpening Film: Clash (Mohamed Diab)Varoonegi (Behnam Behzadi)Apprentice (Boo Junfeng)Voir du Pays (Delphine Coulin & Muriel Coulin)La Danseuse (Stéphanie Di Giusto)La...

Section to include world premiere of Bertrand Tavernier doc; a cinema masterclass with William Friedkin and a tribute to documentary giants Raymond Depardon and Frederick Wiseman.

Bertrand Tavernier’s documentary about French cinema Voyage à Travers le Cinéma Français will receive a world premiere at the Cannes Classic section of the Cannes Film Festival (May 11-22).

The revered French filmmaker has described his latest work as an expression of “gratitude to all the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians that have appeared suddenly in my life.”

Voyage à Travers le Cinéma Français is a Little Bear-Gaumont-Pathé co-production and was made in participation with Canal+, Cine+ and the Sacem, with the support of Région Ile-de-France and Cnc. Gaumont will handle international sales and Pathé have distribution in France. The film will be released in theaters in October 2016.

As in previous years, Cannes Classic will also feature nine documentaries about cinema and restored prints of 20 international classics including rare gems...

Section to include a cinema masterclass with William Friedkin, the 70th anniversary of the Fipresci prize, a tribute to documentary giants Raymond Depardon and Frederick Wiseman and the double Palme d’Or of 1966.

Bertrand Tavernier’s documentary about French cinema Voyage à Travers le Cinéma Français will receive a world premiere at the Cannes Classic section of the Cannes Film Festival (May 11-22).

The legendary French filmmaker has described his latest work as an expression of “gratitude to all the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians that have appeared suddenly in my life.”

Voyage à Travers le Cinéma Français is a Little Bear-Gaumont-Pathé co-production and was made in participation with Canal+, Cine+ and the Sacem, with the support of Région Ile-de-France and Cnc. Gaumont will handle international sales and Pathé have distribution in France. The film will be released in theaters in October 2016.

As in previous years, Cannes Classic will also feature nine documentaries about cinema and restored...

The Cannes Film Festival has announced the lineup for this year's Cannes Classics program of restorations, revivals and documentaries about cinema. Flagged first is Bertrand Tavernier's Voyage à travers le cinéma français, a personal exploration of the history of French cinema. William Friedkin will be giving a masterclass and the fresh restorations include Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin féminin, Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte, Milos Forman's Valmont, Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and Arturo Ripstein's Tiempo de morir. » - David Hudson...

The Cannes Film Festival has announced the lineup for this year's Cannes Classics program of restorations, revivals and documentaries about cinema. Flagged first is Bertrand Tavernier's Voyage à travers le cinéma français, a personal exploration of the history of French cinema. William Friedkin will be giving a masterclass and the fresh restorations include Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin féminin, Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte, Milos Forman's Valmont, Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and Arturo Ripstein's Tiempo de morir. » - David Hudson...

Now that most of the Cannes Film Festival 2016 line-up has been settled when it comes to new premieres, their Cannes Classics sidebar of restored films is not only a treat for those attending, but a hint at what we can expect to arrive at repertory theaters and labels like Criterion in the coming years.

Today they’ve unveiled their line-up, which is toplined by Bertrand Tavernier‘s new 3-hour and 15-minute documentary about French cinema, Voyage à travers le cinéma français. They will also be screening William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer following his masterclass. Along with various documentaries, both classics in the genre and ones about films, they will also premiere new restorations of Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Solaris, Jean-Luc Godard‘s Masculin féminin, two episodes of Krzysztof Kieślowski‘s The Decalogue, as well as films from Kenji Mizoguchi, Marlon Brando, Jacques Becker, Mario Bava, and more.

Check out the line-up below.

The venerable, Taiwanese filmmaker Hsiao-hsien Hou has persistently transcended the tropes of the genre in which he is tackling. With a career behind the camera spanning 35 years, presenting features such as A Time to Live, a Time to Die to the more recent endeavours Three Times and Flight of the Red Balloon, here is

The post Exclusive Interview: Legendary filmmaker Hsiao-hsien Hou speaks to HeyUGuys about The Assassin appeared first on HeyUGuys.

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Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus all display an interest in AI. Here, we look at Ridley Scott's complex depiction of androids...

“All of those moments will be lost, like tears in rain... Time to die.”

One of the most poignant final lines of any sci-fi character? Almost certainly. That replicant Roy Batty evokes such sympathy in Blade Runner's dying moments is perhaps the greatest of all the conjuring tricks Ridley Scott managed to achieve in his 1982 classic. The film may be prized for its special effects and production design, but it's the arc of Batty's character - not to mention Rutger Hauer's peerless performance - that gives Blade Runner its emotional weight.

Released three years after the similarly influential Alien, Blade Runner was the last of Scott's science fiction films before his late-career return to the genre with 2012's Prometheus and this year's The Martian.

The cinemagraph is making a comeback, as Facebook embraces the animated Gif to its news feed at last and Apple tries to convince us that its magic Live Photos are completely and utterly different, honest. But it's the world's movie-watchers that remain the art form's finest exponent.

Movies, naturally, are tailor-made to make the most of cinemagraphy's mix of still photography and video, the subtle movements more artistic than the mega-lolz GIFs that usually flood our social feeds. Here are some of cinema's greatest scenes given the cinemagraph treatment.

1. Great Scott! Doc sends Marty to 1985 in Back to the Future

via: Imgur

2. Father Merrin gets ready to face the devil in The Exorcist

via: Reddit

3. "Lost, in time, like tears in rain." Time to die in Blade Runner

via: Imgur

4. Yippee ki-yay! Bruce Willis scuttles through air ducts in Die Hard

via: TechNoir

5. Fight Club's Edward Norton gets embraced...

Ewa Puszczynska, a producer on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Ida, is preparing the first feature project of her own new company.

Speaking to ScreenDaily during this week’s Polish Days in Wroclaw, Puszczynska said Lodz-based Extreme Emotions is managed with her daughter Emilia and is in addition to her work as a producer and head of development at Opus Film (Ida).

Puszczynska was at the Polish Days’ pitching session on Thursday (July 30) with Aa, the planned feature film debut by the Israeli-born writer-director Jack Faber, which she has been accompanying in its development for the past 18 months

Based on actual events, the film centres on the last night of a heritage tour in Poland by a group of Israeli high-school students when a prank quickly spins out of control and exposes the violent nature of the young people’s present lives.

Faber had initially started working on the project during his studies at the Netherlands Film Academy...

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

Blade Runner plays midnights this weekend (April 24th and 25th) at the Tivoli as part of their Reel Late at the Tivoli Midnight series.

Blade Runner is the movie that all the other “sci-fi” films of the last 20 years have been trying, unsuccessfully, to live up to. Some of them have achieved more compelling action, some spiffy CGI effects, but none of them can match the grandeur of this film’s vision or its colorful gallery of characters. It’s a film meant to be savored on the big screen and lucky St. Louis film fans will have that opportunity this weekend midnights at The Tivoli.

Walking spoiler Sean Bean has bitten the dust in film and television more than any other actor. But how well do you know his big-screen demises?

With Bean starring in this week's Jupiter Ascending, the film is naturally going to be loaded with tension over whether he makes it to the end credits in one piece. With that in mind, we've assembled a Sean Bean Death Quiz to test your knowledge on the many downfalls of Sheffield's favourite son.

1. Which on-screen death has Sean previously claimed is his favourite?

A) Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Correct! "It was a good, slow, heroic death," Bean told Digital Spy in a 2012 interview. Watch the entire 'Death Reel' chat below:

B) Ned Stark in Game of Thrones

Wrong!

C) Danny Bryant in Outlaw

Wrong!

2. What were the final words of Sean's Bond villain Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye?...

Everyone loves a good one-liner. Arnold Schwarzenegger in particular has practically built a career around that famous 'I'll be back' moment.

But plenty of others deserve some of the limelight for classic phrases. Below are some of our favourites, but can you guess the movie?

Some are harder than others, but we like it that way. Just click the phrase to reveal the answer!

1. "Shooot her... shooooot her."

Click to reveal

It's Jurassic Park!

2. "Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last, I lied."

Click to reveal

If you guessed Arnie in Commando, you guessed correct!

3. "Red light. Green light."

Click to reveal

Tom Cruise with his exploding chewing gum in Mission: Impossible.

4. "Get busy living, or get busy dying."

Click to reveal

It's the greatest film ever made (according to IMDb's top 250 chart) - The Shawshank Redemption.

5. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Click to...

Just for fun, on this Easter holiday, take our trivia challenge. Can you place all these quotes? If you’re stumped, scroll down for the answers.

Where are the Following Quotes From?

1) "Into the garbage chute, flyboy!"

2) "I never drink...Wine."

3) "Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?"

4) "You've got the brain of a five year old child, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it."

5) "I spent eight years trying to reach him and another seven trying to see that he never got released, because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil!"

6) "I love dead! Hate living!"

7) "I'm like a dog chasing a car. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it!"

8) "I am big! It's the pictures that got small!"

9) "If I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.

Odd List Ryan Lambie 4 Oct 2013 - 06:41

They're funny, they're sad, they're weird. Here are 50 famous last words from characters in the movies...

Please Note: There are potential spoilers ahead. Check the name of the film, and if you haven't seen it, don't read the entry!

As someone famous probably once said, “We’ve all gotta go sometime,” and if we’re going to die, we might as well do so with a witticism or a memorable line rather than a scream and a cry for mother. Which is the subject of this lengthy but far from definitive list: the memorable things movie characters have uttered shortly (not necessarily immediately) before they’re about to meet their maker.

Some of these last words are long, tear-jerking monologues. Others amount to little more than a word or two. But all of them, in our estimation, are worthy of mention, and one...

 WWE's annual "Night of Champions" show has arrived, and there is one person noticeably missing from the card. After losing the WWE Championship at "SummerSlam" in August, John Cena is on the shelf, recovering from injury. That's why Triple H, acting as the new evil corporate honcho, has christened Randy Orton as WWE Champion and the new face of the company.

The show is headlined by Daniel Bryan getting his WWE Title rematch against Orton, after weeks of insults and attacks by the extended McMahon family. Now's the time for the company to show they actually have faith in Bryan being the top guy for a while. It only seems fair as he's one of the most talented wrestlers on the planet and arguably the most popular one at the moment.

The scheduled card for the show is below:Randy Orton vs. Daniel Bryan for the WWE ChampionshipCM Punk vs.

Snooki is offering up her services to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

The "Jersey Shore" star is ready to hit the gym with Christie, who just revealed that he secretly underwent lap-band surgery in February. Snooki took to Twitter today to share her thoughts on Christie's weight loss plan, tweeting:

Hey @govchristie, happy to hear u want to lose weight! If u ever hit the gym & need a work out buddy, call me.

Feature Ryan Lambie Jan 23, 2013

Jack Palance kisses mice. Teri Hatcher plays drums. Just two of the many remarkable things we've discovered in Tango & Cash...

In this occasional series of 'remarkable things' articles, we've mostly focused exclusively on movies that were critical or financial flops. Previous entries have included Jaws: The Revenge, Battlefield Earth and RoboCop 3, which all suffered in both critics' reviews and at the box office.

This time, our choice isn't a notorious flop at all - it's Tango & Cash, a film which actually made a few million dollars more than it cost to make. At this stage in Sylvester Stallone's career, which featured the critical and financial nightmares Rocky V, Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Tango & Cash was a comparative blockbuster.

In terms of critical reception, though, Tango & Cash fared less well. It was nominated for three Razzies (though won precisely none) and reviews...

Readers answer other readers' questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific concepts

What is the most critically acclaimed film that was a box-office disaster on release?

The Fall of the Roman Empire, directed by Anthony Mann in 1964, is frequently cited as being the most intelligently written, the most strongly cast, and most capably acted of all the movies in the sword-and-sandal genre that was so fashionable in Hollywood in the 1960s. Yet it lost a then-record $14.25m at the box office, at a time when studios were not able to recoup some of those losses by video or DVD sales.

Since 1964, and allowing for inflation, only a dozen films have lost more money, and given that they include such turkeys as Heaven's Gate and The Adventures of Pluto Nash, it is safe to say that none of them are in the same league as Mann's...

Welcome back to This Week In Discs! As always, if you see something you like, click on the image to buy it. Justified: The Complete Third Season Deputy Us Marshall Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) is a patient man, but even he has his limits. His feuds with Boyd (Walton Goggins) and Dickie (Jeremy Davies) are still going strong when two more men enter the fray in the form of a Detroit mobster (Neal McDonaugh) and a local butcher named Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson). Not everyone will be standing by the end of these thrilling and entertaining as hell thirteen episodes. Three seasons in this FX series continues to shine thanks to sharp writing, a colorful cast of characters and the absolute coolness that Olyphant brings to Givens. Fun stuff, perfect length, highly recommended. Also available on DVD. [Extras: Commentaries, outtakes, deleted scenes, featurettes, interviews] Looper Pitch: Time to die… again… Why Buy? Joe’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) job involves shooting people sent back in time...

I’ll admit, coming up with new ideas is not always easy. Furthermore, when it’s your job to create ideas and your performance is judged by how well those ideas are received, it’s understandable that you might use something that already has been proven to work. Horror movies are perhaps the best example if this.

For writers of horror movies, your job is to scare people. Furthermore, the medium of film as entertainment is somewhat limited in what you can do to incite a frightened response from your audience. Perhaps this is one reason that horror films, above all other genres, seem to be most guilty of reusing the same bits over and over again.

If you want to scare people, why deviate from what has worked in the past? It’s the same end result, right? Plus, even if they know what is coming, it’s often...

Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus all display an interest in artificial life. Here, we look at Ridley Scott's complex depiction of androids...

“All of those moments will be lost, like tears in rain... Time to die.”

Those final words marked not only the death of existentialist replicant Roy Batty in 1982’s Blade Runner, but also Ridley Scott’s 30-year departure from the science fiction genre. With Alien, released in 1979, and Blade Runner, released three years later, Ridley Scott established a visual style which would define the way sci-fi movies were shot for decades afterwards, and it’s little surprise that his belated return to the genre, with this summer’s Prometheus, has been the subject of so much scrutiny, and such intense anticipation.

It could even be argued that, in Scott’s career after 1982, he never bettered Alien or Blade Runner, despite the financial success of such movies as Black Hawk Down,...

Everything happens as it should. There’s a reason for everything. There’s definitely a reason that USC (The University of Southern California) exists, and I’d be so bold as to say it was to bring the talents of Lucky McKee and Sean Spillane together. Lucky McKee is known for his talent behind the camera, as director of May, The Woods and most recently The Woman. Sean Spillane may not be as known at the moment, but his unadulterated talent showcased through the soundtrack to The Woman, makes it clear he should be.

Their initial meetings were as casual as any, both playing in bands while attending USC. They became friends and continued to play in the same scene. A few years later and they would both be off on their own paths away from school. A mutual friend suggested that Sean go see Lucky’s first film, May at its premiere,...

Early in March of this year the Warner Bros company Alcon Entertainment bought the film, television and ancillary franchise rights to Blade Runner, to produce prequels and sequels, spin-offs and reboots at will.

Sending an initial shudder through the legion of fans, both of the 1982 film and of Philip K. Dick’s source novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, there were projections of diluted returns to the neon infused dystopia so beautifully rendered in Ridley Scott’s film.

A series of three novels set after the events of the film acted as a sequel of sorts and were written by Dick’s friend K. W. Jeter, beginning with Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human. An early PC CD-Rom game based in the world was released in 1997 but the unexpected news today promises an altogether brighter future for one of the most beloved and influential movies in the sci-fi genre.

Thirty years on from Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer returns to the limelight with a violent, cult classic-in-waiting

To paraphrase Blade Runner's Dr Eldon Tyrell, "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very brightly, Rutger." Mr Hauer is by no means burnt-out, he's still flickering along nicely in fact, but nothing in his subsequent career has quite matched his white-hot moment as Roy the über-replicant in Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic. He was such a believable model of Aryan perfection: too handsome and blond and blue-eyed to be naturally occurring, versed in chess, molecular biology and literature, and fond of reciting poetic epitaphs to himself. Many sci-fi fans can recite verbatim Roy's closing speech from the end of Blade Runner: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe … All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

It's the first of April! A day of pranks, pratfalls and poetry. Poetry? Yes, poetry, verse, balladry, poesy, doggerel. Poetry. April is National Poetry Month (donchaknow) and instead of trying to prank you today, I thought I would take a moment and look at the best uses of poetry in film. We're going to pretend that film where Cameron Diaz learned to read and then stumblewept her way through e.e. cummings never happened. If I missed your favorite, let me know. . .mayhap in meter and rhyme? Is that asking too much? Then a haiku will do.

1. John Hannah--"Four Weddings And A Funeral

Poem: W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues"

Best Lines: He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest.

2. Sarah Polley--"The Sweet Hereafter"

Poem: Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"

Best Lines: It's dull in...

“Is it better to be on or be good?” sings the Dodos’ Meric Long on the San Francisco indie-folk duo’s new No Color. It’s an apt question: For 2009’s Time To Die, the group added a third member (to play vibes, of all things), contracted big-name producer Phil Ek, and introduced electric guitar into the mix—all attempts to be “on” that resulted in The Dodos’ most patently “off” work to date. But No Color scales things back, with Long and drummer Logan Kroeber playing mostly as a duo again, carrying the majority of the sonic load ...

“Do you know what happens to an eyeball when it is punctured?” asks Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher (1985), sliding a switchblade up to The Kid’s eye, catching a tear on the glistening blade and watching it twinkle in the passing highway lights. This was not in the script and co-star C. Thomas Howell may have had to contemplate the fact that this bear-like Dutch actor might actually show him.

After all, with his manic intensity, reliance on gut instinct and bloody-minded commitment to character Hauer had become one of Hollywood’s favourite psychos. Roles in Blade Runner (1982) and Flesh and Blood (1985) had cemented his reputation as an unhinged cinematic killer – “a one-man slaughterhouse,” as one critic labelled him.

In the 1980s Hauer seemed fearless. Onscreen he was intense and regularly insisted on fucking with his audience (and co-stars) expectations. He claims he put the blade to Howell’s eye because it,...

Wake up! Time to die! Just as we all are just dying from the time we are born, so is every classic film merely headed to the recycle bin or sequel machine from the moment of its inception. People seem up in arms about the news that "Blade Runner" film and TV rights are being bought by Alcon Entertainment for potential prequel and sequel projects. But the plan seems to be for stories set in the same world as Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic. That sounded familiar, so I went into the Spout archives (literally the Internet Archives, via their…...

If I didn't quote movies, I might not be married.

I have a weird memory for dialogue. If you asked me what I ate for lunch yesterday, it could take me ten minutes of piecing my week together to figure it out. If you asked me to tell you what George Costanza said to Jerry Seinfeld when Jerry announced he wasn't going to have a menage a trois with two women, I'd have the answer instantly ("What? Are you crazy?!? This is like discovering plutonium by accident!!!"). It's just this strange way I'm wired. I've gotten a rotten brain. "It's Rotten, I Tell Ya! Rotten!"

How'd this antisocial behavior land me such a beautiful wife? Despite my incredible physique and raw animal magnetism, I was a bit of a dork when I was 19 years old. I used to quote a lot of stuff, but my favorite was "Austin Powers" and its sequel.

'Zombie Spaceship Wasteland' author talks to MTV News about reaction to his controversial Wired article.

By Rick Marshall

Patton Oswalt

Photo: MTV News

Late last year, Patton Oswalt created quite a stir in the online world when he wrote a column for Wired calling for the annihilation of the nerd world as we know it. Just a few weeks and no small amount of controversy later, the actor/comedian says he feels vindicated by the discussion the column generated.

Titled "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die," the column was published just days before the release of Oswalt's "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland," a collection of essays that collectively form the newly minted author's memoir.

In the Wired piece, Oswalt lamented the mainstreaming and growing accessibility of all of the things that once defined "nerd culture." With all manner of geekery now providing the fuel for popular culture, he pushed for readers to accelerate the burn,...

In a recent impassioned essay at Wired entitled “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die,” comedian and geek philosopher Patton Oswalt explains how, now that geek culture has been coopted by the mainstream: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. and the Internet has turned nerdery into something that anyone can acquire in much the same way that immersion courses can teach one a foreign language:...

With Tsr Buzz, you’ll find links to articles, videos and other random things that will help you waste your time just a little bit more.

“Portlandia” is coming to IFC starring Fred Armisen. I am very excited. I’ll be talking about this one quite a bit. Here’s a brilliant music video to get you excited.

The servers are currently overloaded, so just bookmark this link and check back with it in the future. These images will stay with you for a long time. Muppets with People’s Eyes. It’s a little late in the game, but here’s the Star Wars Christmas Special that should have been done.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMmaO6MzK4E

Quentin Tarantino has given his Top 20 Movies of 2010. Since this list has come out, he has commented about omission of Somewhere.

1. Toy Story 3

2. The Social Network

3. Animal Kingdom

4. I Am Love...