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James McEachin, who wrote and produced songs for Otis Redding before turning to acting to portray cops on his own NBC Mystery Movie series and in 18 of the popular Perry Mason telefilms, has died. He was 94.

McEachin died Jan. 11 and was interred last month at Los Angeles National Cemetery.

The familiar character actor also appeared in four films opposite Clint Eastwood: Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Play Misty for Me (1971) — as the deejay Sweet Al Monte — Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Sudden Impact (1983).

All in the Family aficionados know him for his turns as the IRS tax examiner who won’t be bribed on the 1972 episode “Archie’s Fraud” and as Solomon Jackson, a Black Jew whom Carroll O’Connor’s character invites into his lodge to check off some diversity boxes, on the 1977 installment “Archie the Liberal.”

A onetime contract player at Universal, McEachin starred as family man Harry Tenafly, a...

James Gunn and Peter Safran have big plans for the DC Universe. "Chapter One: Gods and Monsters" will begin in animated form with the release of Creatures Commandos on Max in December. Superman, directed by Gunn, will be the first live-action movie to hit big screens in the Summer of 2025. Many notable heroes and villains will debut in the two introductory Dcu projects, but they are just the beginning.

DC Studios is currently working on a range of film, television and gaming projects that will all be interlinked. There is a wealth of characters that deserve to be part of the ever-growing Dcu, as Chapter One leads into Chapter Two. Gunn is seemingly a fan of more obscure characters as well as already-popular DC icons, so the spotlight will be shared as DC's new era launches.

Plastic Man Is Primed to Join the Dcu Plastic Man first appeared in Police...

The 2022 Grammy Awards on April 3 crowned an eclectic crop of winners. Jon Batiste, who was nominated in 11 categories, ended up winning five awards, including album of the year. Silk Sonic - the R&b superduo featuring Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak - took home all four awards they were nominated for, including record and song of the year.

Meanwhile, Doja Cat and Sza won best pop duo/group performance for their song "Kiss Me More," and Olivia Rodrigo won three awards, including best new artist. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett also won best traditional pop vocal album for their album "Love For Sale."

The award ceremony, held for the first time in Las Vegas and hosted by Trevor Noah, kicked off with a performance by Silk Sonic. Though BTS didn't win, they wowed the crowd with their "Butter" performance. Rodrigo emotionally sang her hit "Drivers License," Nas performed a medley of his hits,...

Jon Batiste hauled home five trophies at the 64th Grammys, including Album of the Year for We Are. He went into the night with 11 nominations and ended up with Album of the Year, American roots performance and American roots song, best score soundtrack for visual media (in a tie with Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score for The Queen’s Gambit) and best music video for “Freedom.”

Right behind Batiste was the duo Silk Sonic, who took the night’s two other big categories: Record and Song of the Year, both for “Leave the Door Open” as well as Best R&b Performance (in a tie with Jazmine Sullivan) and Best R&b Song.

Olivia Rodrigo was named Best New Artist and also won Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Pop Solo Performance.

Other big winners included Chris Stapleton, who won for Best Country Album, Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance.

The 64th Grammy Awards moved from January in Los Angeles to April in Las Vegas this year thanks to another Covid surge. Trevor Noah, who made his Grammy debut last year, returned to host a show that included performances by Silk Sonic, Lady Gaga, Chris Stapleton, Billie Eilish, BTS, and Olivia Rodrigo. Here’s a rundown of all the Grammy winners.

Best Pop Vocal Album: Sour — Olivia Rodrigo

Best R&b Album: Heaux Tales — Jazmine Sullivan

Best Rap Performance: “Family Ties” — Baby Keem feat. Kendrick Lamar

Best New Artist: Olivia...

Scooby-Doo co-creator Ken Spears died on Friday, November 6. He co-founded Ruby-Spears Productions with Joe Ruby, who died in August. Spears was 82.

Spears’ son Kevin confirmed his death to Variety, saying that he died from complications related to Lewy body dementia.

A Los Angles native, Spears co-created the iconic animated series Scooby Doo with Ruby. He was born Charles Kenneth Spears in L.A. on March 12, 1938. He befriended the son of animation producer William Hanna of Hanna-Barbera fame. This was his way into the animation space.

In 1959, he was hired to work at Hanna-Barbera Productions as a sound editor. It was here he met Ruby and they forged a bond and became writing partners. They wrote teleplays for projects at Hanna-Barbera as well as Sid and Marty Krofft Television Productions and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.

In addition to Scooby-Doo, the duo created Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, Jabberjaw and other programs. While at Depatie-Freleng, they...

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By Nick Anez

Universal released The Groundstar Conspiracy starring George Peppard in 1972 and it died a swift death at the box-office. It is based on the 1968 novel The Alien by L. P. Davies, a British author whose novels were known for merging the various genres of horror, science fiction, mystery, adventure and fantasy. The Alien combines mystery and science fiction for an intriguing plot that takes place in England fifty years in the future and involves unidentified flying objects, an amnesiac patient who may be from another planet, espionage, murder and regenerative surgery. The Groundstar Conspiracy retains the basic premise of the novel but changes virtually everything else. The screenplay by Mathew Howard (a pseudonym for Douglas Heyes) transfers the setting to 1972 California, focuses primarily on the espionage storyline and eliminates the novel’s plot of a possible invasion from another planet.

The...

The Walking Dead fans have been wondering about the identity of the mysterious masked man who debuted in the season 10 finale for a long time. We first found out he was coming in the sneak peek revealed back in April, but though the episode finally aired on AMC this past weekend, we’re no closer to discovering his real identity. It seems we just have to be patient a while longer, though, as the answer will be unearthed when the show returns in 2021.

Lauren Cohan’s Maggie Rhee returned just in time to save Gabriel from death by Whisperers in the finale, and she brought a personal bodyguard with her – an unknown, silent individual, dressed in a grey hoodie with a metal mask and wielding kama weapons. They never gave us any hint as to who they are in the episode, but showrunner Angela Kang has previously promised that they...

Very sad news is breaking today as veteran animator, writer, and producer Joe Ruby has reportedly passed away. Perhaps best known for co-creating the famous cartoon dog Scooby-Doo along with his longtime collaborator Ken Spears, Ruby died of natural causes on Wednesday in Westlake Village, California, though he continued to be creative until the very end. "He never stopped writing and creating, even as he aged," his grandson Benjamin Ruby said. The television legend was 87 years old.

Born in 1930, Ruby had begun his career in entertainment working as an inbetweener and editor for Walt Disney Productions. Following a stint in the U. S. Army, he then moved on to Hanna-Barbera Productions, where he first met Ken Spears. Sparking a years-long partnership, the two would team up to create many original characters and shows for Hanna-Barbera, such as Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, and Jabberjaw.

Of course, their most well-known work is certainly...

Joe Ruby, best known for co-creating the cartoon Scooby-Doo, died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday Aug. 26, according to Variety. He was 87.

Ruby along with his partner Ken Spears, also made Dynomutt and Jabberjaw, and the 1988 animated Superman series, as well as making cartoons out of Pac-Man, Rubik The Amazing Cube, Donkey Kong. They masterminded Space Ace, Dink the Little Dinosaur, It’s Punky Brewster, and TV movies Bunnicula, the Vampire Rabbit and The Cabbage Patch Kids First Christmas.

Joseph Clemens Ruby was born on March 30, 1933. He grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Fairfax High School. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Ruby trained as a music editor at the Walt Disney Studios animation program in the 1950s. He became a sound editor at Hanna-Barbera Productions, where he first partnered with Spears. They wrote a spec script and were hired as staff writers in the 1960s.

The Hong Kong International Film Festival named Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s “The Cloud in Her Room” and “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese as winners of its Firebird Young Cinema competitions, despite the event having been canceled due to Covid-19 pandemic.

The festival was initially postponed from its usual spring slot to summer due to the coronavirus, and was eventually canceled. But organizers revealed the names of the films they selected and then saw the competition sections judged by a virtual jury. They handed out 13 awards

“The Cloud in Her Room” was the winner in the Chinese-language category, with its lead star Jin Jing also bagging the best actress award. The jury headed by auteur Stanley Kwan, director and cinematographer O Sing-pui and May Fung, independent art and cultural worker, called the drama, Zheng’s debut, “witty” and “a delicate portrait of the new generation’s state of mind.

The Cloud In Her Room and This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection were named as best films.

Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud In Her Room and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection were named as best films at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hkiff), which was cancelled due to Covid-19, but went ahead with online judging for its competition sections.

Both films also won best actress in their respective sections – Jin Jing for The Cloud In Her Room in the Young Cinema Competition (Chinese-language), and Mary...

All eight Harry Potter movies are available for streaming on HBO Max, the WarnerMedia service that launched Wednesday in the U.S.

Released between 2001 and 2011, the films based on J.K. Rowling’s family-friendly series of books collectively grossed $7.7 billion for Warner Bros. Like other Warner titles, they had premium cable releases on HBO and in 2018 became available via the HBO Go and HBO Now streaming apps. (Go is for pay-tv subscribers to HBO and Now is a stand-alone version of HBO.) Digitally, they were available for rental and purchase but not via subscription streaming through a single outlet for non-hbo subscribers.

As was the case when Disney secured the Star Wars feature lineup for Disney+, WarnerMedia wanted to avoid any perception issue by herding all of the films into the HBO Max pen. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a spinoff of the Potter films, will also be available on HBO Max.

This War of the Worlds review contains spoilers.

War of the Worlds episode 8

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting… the Organ Grinder! In a shock twist, neither a Wellsian octopus, a Digby-sized massive robo-dog, nor a pulsing fist of Cronenbergian flesh, but a humanoid. Possibly even a human. Possibly even, by the look of him, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth before he fell to Earth.

Few series finales have conjured that much tension in the approach to a cliff-hanger. For several episodes now, War of the Worlds has held its nerve, sticking with its careful, deliberate pace and delaying our gratification until the last possible moment.

The surprise was worth the wait. Whatever we were expecting Emily to find at the end of that long, slow walk down the sci-fi corridor, it wasn’t something that looked like us.

And also looked… pitiable? For a genocidal murderer, ‘The Alien...

This year’s edition of Berlinale is not riddled with political scandals like it was the case one year ago, when films were pulled out of the festival even if they were selected for the official competition, or barely made it to the festival after all. It was an “interesting” year for Chinese cinema, with the government fortifying itself by the means of censorship. This year’s biggest attempt at scandal also comes from Asia, but from a different part of the continent – from Iran. Nader Saeivar’s directorial debut “The Alien” was set to premiere at Forum sidebar of Berlinale, and the principal question was would Saeivar and his crew be able to leave the country and travel to Berlin. They made it.

The Alien screened at Berlinale 2020

“The Alien” opens with an establishing shot typical for Iranian cinema, a long, fixed camera shot of a shop’s front in the afternoon.

Character actor Tim O’Connor, best known for his role as Elliot Carson in 1960s prime time soap Peyton Place, has died. He passed in his sleep on April 5 in his longtime home of Nevada City, California at age 90.

O’Connor had a long career on stage and particularly television, where he had appearances in such iconic shows as All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone, General Hospital, Dynasty, and Star Trek.

Born in Chicago, his career spanned Broadway, television and films. He worked with such actors as Sir Laurence Olivier, George C. Scott, Edward G. Robinson, Jessica Tandy, Maximilian Schell, Vincent Price, and Boris Karloff, among others.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1965, O’Connor moved to Santa Monica, California, and gained national recognition as one of the stars of Peyton Place. He starred as Elliot Carson, father of Mia Farrow’s Allison, in more than...

You love the horror, suspense thriller, action and science fiction films that make up the world of Canadian cult cinema affectionately known as Canuxploitation.

You’ve watched the entire David Cronenberg genre filmography (if not, please do so now as The Brood, Scanners and The Fly are three of the greatest horror films ever made).

You’ve seen Black Christmas and The Changeling and watched a slasher-ific marathon of Prom Night, Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me and My Bloody Valentine.

You caught up with Cube, the Ginger Snaps series, Splice, Hobo with a Shotgun and WolfCop all while keeping close tabs on the works of Astron-6.

Yet your hunger for Canadian genre film productions and co-productions cannot be satiated.

To aid you in your deeper exploration of the field, following is a chronological look at a number of Canadian genre films that simply don’t get enough attention.

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The Groundstar Conspiracy...

This article is dedicated to Andrew Copp: filmmaker, film writer, artist and close friend who passed away on January 19, 2013. You are loved and missed, brother.

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Looking at the Best Actor Academy Award nominations for the film year 2012, the one miss that clearly cries out for more attention is Liam Neeson’s powerful performance in Joe Carnahan’s excellent survival film The Grey, easily one of the best roles of Neeson’s career.

In Neeson’s case, his lack of a nomination was a case of neglect similar to the Albert Brooks snub in the Best Supporting Actor category for the film year 2011 for Drive(Nicolas Winding Refn, USA).

Along with negligence, other factors commonly prevent outstanding lead acting performances from getting the kind of critical attention they deserve. Sometimes it’s that the performance is in a film not considered “Oscar material” or even worthy of any substantial critical attention.

Updated through 4/23.

"Michael Sarrazin, a tall, dark-eyed Canadian actor who starred opposite Jane Fonda in Sydney Pollack's 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, died of cancer Sunday," reports Claire Noland in the Los Angeles Times. He was 70. Noland quotes from a 1994 interview given to the Toronto Star in which Sarrazin recalled working on Horses: "You could have paid me a dollar a week to work on that. It hits you bolt upright; I still get really intense when I watch it. We stayed up around the clock for three or four days.... We stayed in character. Pollack said we should work until signs of exhaustion. Fights would break out among the men; women started crying."

"Sarrazin was one of the last actors to come up through the old studio system, signing with Universal in 1965," writes John Griffin in the Montreal Gazette. "After an indifferent start in television and movies-of-the week,...