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Comedy sequels are notoriously difficult to pull off, but there are a few exceptions to this rule that have kept fans laughing. Comedy movies tend to derive a lot of their humor and conflict from a particular situation, and once the story is wrapped up, there is no logical reason to bring the characters back for more. This is why a lot of comedy sequels feel overly contrived, or unrelated to the first movie.

While unnecessary comedy sequels have sadly become the norm, this just makes it even more exciting when a sequel lives up to the standards of the original. Not all movies are set up for sequels, but comedy can often get more creative. Audiences will forgive comedies for coming up with silly premises as long as the movies are just as funny. If a comedy sequel gives beloved characters a fun new story that plays to their strengths,...

Clint Eastwood has made some of the most revolutionary films in his career both as an actor and a director. He has been making films since the 60s and still continues to be inspired and fascinated by the art of filmmaking. While mostly known for his spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone, he has made some brilliant westerns of his own along with some Oscar-winning dramas.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Naomi Watts in J. Edgar | Credits: Warner Bros

Eastwood directed the biographical film J. Edgar in 2011, based on the famed first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To ensure the film was as historically accurate as possible, the director went deep into his research and even went the extra mile, meeting the then-director of the FBI in person. Eastwood and the FBI disagreed on the inclusion of one disputed aspect of Hoover’s life in the film.

The FBI Was Apprehensive...

Allllllrighty Then! Fact: if you were a kid in the nineties, you grew up idolizing Jim Carrey, and probably had the two Ace Ventura movies memorized. Recently, actor Kurt Russell fondly reminisced about taking his son Wyatt to see Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and it looks like another Hollywood tough guy was also a huge fan as a kid. In a surprisingly deep THR profile, Reacher star Alan Ritchson fondly remembers seeing the film as a kid and found Carrey’s performance loosened him up, as he had a deeply devout, religious home life that tended to be austere.

Calling Carrey his hero, Ritchson remembers, “When Ace Ventura came out [in 1994], I was in sixth grade, and I was enamored. He was so physical, goofy and unafraid. I’d never seen anything like it. I dressed up as Ace Ventura for three Halloweens in a row. I showed up to school...

Exclusive: Cinema Guild has acquired North American distribution rights for Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s short film The Daughters of Fire, following its buzzy world premiere in Cannes this year.

Set against the backdrop of Costa’s stomping ground of the Atlantic Ocean island of Cape Verde, the film follows three sisters who are separated by the eruption of the local Fogo Volcano.

They remain bound in spirit, singing the same words: one day, we will know why we live and why we suffer.

The Daughters of Fire received an enthusiastic reception in Cannes when it played as Special Screening Jean-Luc Godard’s Trailer of the Film that Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” and Wang Bing’s 2023 Palme d’Or contender Man in Black.

For its North American theatrical release in late 2023 or early 2024, Cinema Guild is planning to play the short alongside Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s Berlinale 2023 Encounters title In water,...

New Delhi, June 18 (Ians) Those who have tried their hands on the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air for productivity, creativity and entertainment, the smooth and powerful experience has just got bigger and better, with the same ultra-light portability to take it anywhere with ease.

The world’s thinnest 15-inch laptop (measuring only 11.5mm thin) is now available with an expansive 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display and M2 silicon chip — offering an all-new six-speaker sound system and a silent, fanless design.

The new 15-inch MacBook Air comes packed with incredible features for people from all walks of lives — professionals, creative souls, students and innovators. It comes in four finishes — midnight, starlight, space gray and silver.

It weighs just 1.49 kgs, so it’s incredibly portable. Even with its expansive display, the new MacBook Air is solid and durable.

On the performance front, the 15-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip is up to 12 times...

Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp recently unpacked Walt Disney's influence on the founder of the 1993 blockbuster's titular theme park, Dr. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough).

Koepp discussed his more sympathetic, Disney-inspired take on Hammond in a recent episode of the Script Apart podcast. "[Director] Steven [Spielberg] identified with [Hammond], whether consciously or not," he said. "And he also knew and understood Walt Disney the man, and wanted [Hammond] to be a bit more like him. He is darker in [Michael Crichton's original Jurassic Park] book, and therefore harder to sympathize with." Koepp added that the Jurassic Park movie's version of Hammond shares Disney's "grand vision for something that somebody hadn't seen before," as well as his "entrepreneurial and visionary" qualities.

Related: Jurassic Park Could Have Had an Ace Ventura Twist

Koepp's comments on the development of Hammond's characterization formed part of a wider conversation about how Jurassic Park's screenplay came together, itself meant...

Sylvester Stallone merges with Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura in a bizarre AI trailer for the Cliffhanger sequel. Released in 1993, the original Cliffhanger starred Stallone as a mountain climber who, months after failing to recuse his best friend's girlfriend, becomes embroiled in a botched midair heist of a U.S. Treasury plane flying through the Rocky Mountains. It has been announced that a Cliffhanger sequel from Greenland director Ric Roman Waugh was in the works with Stallone returning to reprise his role as Gabe Walker.

Shortly after Cliffhanger 2 was announced, an incredibly bizarre AI trailer for the sequel merges Stallone with Ace Ventura. The video even offers an amusing title for the sequel – "Cliffhanger 2 - Raccoon Mountain." Check out the fake trailer below:

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Brian Monarch (@brianmonarch)

Shared by Brian Monarch, the trailer merges Stallone with Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls' opening scene,...

Apple's latest iOS 16 lets iPhone users unsend texts in the Messages app, but how long do they have to do so? For those catching up, the company released iOS 16 in September 2022 alongside the iPhone 14 lineup. The latest operating system comes with new features such as home/lock screen customization, Live Activities, Focus Filters, and other updates for apps like Mail, Health, Wallet, and Messages. While one of the new abilities allows Apple Messages users to delete sent messages, people still wonder how much time they have before the text can't be unsent.

On a support page, Apple mentions that users can unsend or edit recent messages to fix a typo or pull back a text from the wrong person. However, users must be operating iMessage on iOS 16, iPadOS 16, or macOS Ventura for this feature to work. With that out of the way, let's learn the maximum time limit...

New Delhi, Aug 27 (Ians) A little known spyware company, Intellexa, is now competing with Pegasus developer Nso Group, offering its services to hack into Android and iOS devices for a fee of 8 million (around Rs 64 crore).

Malware source code provider Vx-underground found documents representing a proposal from Intellexa, offering services that include Android and iOS device exploits.

“Leaked documents online show the purchase (and documentation of) an 8,000,000 iOS Remote Code Execution zero-day exploit,” it tweeted.

The offer includes 10 infections for iOS and Android devices, as well as a “magazine of 100 successful infections”.

According to Security Week, the documents, “labeled as proprietary and confidential”, revealed that the exploits should work on iOS 15.4.1 and the latest Android 12 update.

Apple released iOS 15.4.1 in March, which suggests that the offer is recent.

“Specifically, the offering is for remote, one-click browser-based exploits that allow users to inject a payload into Android or iOS mobile devices,...

Pedro Costa is not the most obvious Oscar contender. The director of “Vitalina Varela,” a slow-burn atmospheric character study about an immigrant woman confronting her past, has never been keen on self-promotion. But now that “Vitalina Varela” is the Portuguese submission for Best International Feature Film, he has no choice.

“This is the part where I’m supposed to put a smile on,” the 62-year-old director said in a recent interview. He attempted a dry laugh that did not come naturally to him. “I would love for a different type of people to see this film. If they’ll watch it because of this Oscar thing, great.”

And they should. Costa has been making rich, ambitious documentary-fiction hybrids since the ‘90s, but they rarely get noticed much beyond the festival circuit. Nearly all of his films take place in the same rundown immigrant community of Fontainhas and surrounding areas, in Lisbon,...

The 2020 special edition of the Locarno Film Festival, deemed For the Future of Films, gathers audiences in both virtual and physical space. At the center of this year's festival are 20 suspended projects, each halted in some way by the Covid-19 pandemic, that will compete in the The Films After Tomorrow section. From Lisandro Alonso and Miguel Gomes to Lav Diaz and Lucrecia Martel, these 22 filmmakers have also joined together to handpick twenty films from previous editions of the festival. The program, A Journey in the Festival's History, is an anthology of timeless films from Locarno's past (from 1948 to 2019) that reflect the festival's spirit of discovery and celebration of stylistic breakthrough. Mubi is immensely proud to be partnering with the festival to make these selections available for streaming outside Switzerland. Below, the directors have shared some words about their inspired choices. Wang Bing on Horse MoneyPedro Costa’s films explore...

Films by Roberto Rossellini, Chantel Akerman and Marguerite Duras feature in selection.

The Locarno Film Festival has unveiled the selection of 20 classic film titles that will be showcased in its A Journey In The Festival’s History sidebar as part of its special hybrid edition running August 5 to 15.

The line-up is part of the festival’s ’Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films’ edition which was created after it was forced to cancel its 73rd edition due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The titles have been selected by the directors taking part in its festival’s exceptional The Films After Tomorrow initiative...

A funeral procession emerges from the pitch-black center of a walled cemetery outside of Lisbon. Mourners move past the camera, but no one speaks of the deceased or of anything else. For the first 10 minutes of Pedro Costa’s latest, “Vitalina Varela,” wordless sound design and an immersive darkness settle in, the storytelling restricted to the aftermath of sickness and an unknown man’s last days.

Costa’s films often star first-time or other nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, with storylines reflecting their real lives, elements of fiction and documentary forming a seamless whole; as such Vitalina Varela plays “herself.” And as the film opens, and Vitalina arrives, she’s three days too late. The funeral was for Joaquim, the husband who abandoned Vitalina years earlier, and this three-day passage amounts to an anti-resurrection. Here, the dead stay dead.

Vitalina positions herself in the shadowy, crumbling hovel where Joaquim lived and died,...

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband

If there is a cinema of the dispossessed, then its hero has to be the Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa. His static, austere and often dreamlike movies – unfolding in a mysterious, forbidding semi-darkness – are about marginalised souls, often those in the impoverished (and now demolished) Fontaínhas shantytown in Lisbon. His new film once again reminded me of the pure Beckettian bleakness and starkness in his work: its characters are lonely unsmiling people living below the poverty line who have endured much. Their material wretchedness is not endowed with a condescending nobility but with a serenely laconic self-reliance. Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões have composed strangely compelling images of crumbling walls and shadowy, tatty interiors, picked out with fierce key lights to give them an almost modernist look,...

Compared to almost all contemporary cinema Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela stands out as a film that takes more risk, runs the most difficult course of existence, and is devoted with every ounce of its being to the compassionate transmission of another’s experience. It premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival last August, where it deservedly won the top prize, the Golden Leopard, and Varela, its heroine, won best actress. The Portuguese filmmaker’s last feature, Horse Money, won the Best Director award in Locarno in 2014, and while this new film doesn’t have the imaginative range of that masterpiece—which was rendered in a remarkable pulses of memories, dreams, nightmares, and history—and while it feels somewhat uneven in its editing despite its compellingly singular subject, Vitalina Varela is nevertheless a film of fierce determination and paramount resonance.Those familiar with Horse Money will undoubtably remember an...

From Horse Money to Colossal Youth and beyond, Pedro Costa has consistently impressed with his enigmatic and austere works, turning his camera to the disenfranchised and marginalized with his signature docufiction style. Working in Lisbon throughout his career, his masterful newest film Vitalina Varela is a part of the tradition. The winner of the Golden Leopard and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival and an official selection at Nyff and Tiff, Grasshopper Film has unveiled the first trailer for the film in anticipation for Sundance debut, and with a release to follow starting February 21 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center.

Continuing the informal trilogy he began in Colossal Youth, Costa turns his focus to an older woman Vitalina Varela, (playing herself) who travels to Lisbon to find the husband who left her twenty-five years ago, only to discover that he’s been dead for three days. The film...

Like a moth to the light, Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa (“Colossal Youth“) always finds himself returning to the Fontainhas neighborhood that he holds so near and dear— a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon that’s home to predominantly immigrant communities. Almost always using non-actors and blurring reality and fiction by drawing from their real lives, in “Vitalina Varela” the Portuguese filmmaker refracts and expands an episode from his previous feature “Horse Money,” wherein a Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the death of her husband.

Continue reading ‘Vitalina Varela’ Trailer: Pedro Costa Tackles Grief & Ghosts Of The Past at The Playlist.

Perhaps not so unexpectedly, the rigour and tenacity of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa seduced the jury of the International Competition. A regular of the Locarno Film Festival, which has always reserved a prominent place for him (his previous film Horse Money won the Best Director award in Locarno in 2014), Portuguese director Pedro Costa this year wins two awards with his superb and uncompromisingly bitter Vitalina Varela: the Golden Leopard, the supreme recognition of the festival, and the Leopard for Best Actress, given to Vitalina Varela, the lead of the film. An acting award which the jury of the International Competition, headed by Catherine Breillat, gave to the woman who, with her person, her story, and her tormented physicality gave body to Pedro Costa’s film. Beyond the hermeticism of a demanding and aesthetically grandiose cinema, which recalls masters of supernatural horror such as David Lynch (and his Elephant Man), Vitalina.

A dark back-alley drowned in shadow; towering concrete walls on either side; on the top right a row of headstones overlook; the glimmer of a walking stick emerges in the distance, and then a funeral procession. 15 minutes later a women disembarks from an airplane and is greeted not by family but by the airport’s cleaning staff. “There is nothing for you in Portugal, Vitalina,” they say.

Welcome—or perhaps welcome back—to the world of Pedro Costa, the austere Portuguese director behind Colossal Youth (2006), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and other haunting works with which to grapple. His latest is titled Vitalina Varela and picks up where last year’s Horse Money left off, focusing on the eponymous character who first appeared as a supporting player in Money while also persisting in Costa’s unmistakable style: slow static shots set up like minimalist plays; stark white lighting from far above,...

The mystery and wonder of Pedro Costa’s filmmaking defies any specific category other than his own unique blend. The Portuguese director conjures dark, dreamlike visions of post-colonial neglect and yearning that hover somewhere between fantasy and neorealism, horror and melodrama, spirituality and desperation. “Vitalina Varela,” Costa’s fifth journey into the shantytown Fontainhas outside of Lisbon, once again showcases Costa’s masterful ability to mine cinematic poetry from a unique environment and the mournful figures who wander through its murky depths.

The Costa Expanded Universe stems back to 2006’s “Colossal Youth,” when Costa first began exploring the Cape Verdean residents of Fontainhas by casting members of the immigrant community as themselves. Costa’s ravishing blend of light and shadow captures the characters as they wander the claustrophobic interiors of their ramshackle homes and muse about their wandering lives. Costa’s dour, humorless aesthetic takes time to settle in and...

Talking to directors, there’s a common interviewing misconception to overcomplicate the filmmaking process, to assume that the process is the execution of reams of premeditated notes as opposed to felt out in the moment. And while there are certainly filmmakers whose reputation of procedural perfectionism precedes them, more often than not, filmmaking is a matter of doing rather than the thinking.

And yet, it’s a somewhat understandable assumption to make with Diane, the narrative feature debut of prolific film critic and programmer Kent Jones. Best described as a character study with a metaphysical lean, the autumnal Diane’s life is defined by routines; regular reminiscing breakfasts with her dwindling friends, visits to a coterie of relatives and grandchildren, check-ins on her in-and-out of recovery son, Brian (Jake Lacy), and volunteer shifts at the local soup kitchen.

Led by the great character actress Mary Kay Place, her performance is...

Vitalina Varela

Portuguese director returns to Fontainhas for his seventh feature, Vitalina Varela (which has been previously listed as the title Daughters of Fire). Starring the actress for which the film is named, she is joined by two other actresses from Horse Money (2014), Costa’s last feature, including Ventura and Isabel Cordoso (who was also in his 2006 film Colossal Youth). The project also influenced a recent art installation from Costa. Known for filming with non-professionals who are usually playing variations of themselves, while shooting on a micro budget in digital, Costa is Portugal’s premiere art-house auteur, ever since his 1989 debut Blood.…...

On May 14, Acid Trip #2, an initiative of the Association for Independent Film Distribution, is dedicated to Portuguese cinema. It will screen three films selected by the Portuguese Directors’ Association (Apr) – Pedro Cabeleira’s “Damned Summer”, Teresa Villaverde’s “Colo” and Leonor Teles’ “Terra Franca.”

The Apr’s note accompanying the selection stated that Portugal’s cinema is “persistent and resilient, and despite production difficulties, it invents its own conditions to continue to exist and create.”

Portuguese films in at Cannes this year include Un Certain Regard-player “The Dead and the Others” by João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora, acquired for sales by Paris-based Luxbox; Carlos Diegues’ “The Great Mystical Circus”, sold by Latido Films; soccer-themed “Diamantino”, by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, which could be a break out in Critics’ Week; and short film “Amor, Avenidas Novas”, by Duarte Coimbra, again playing in Critics’ Week; and Terry Gilliam’s closing pic,...

The Daughters of Fire

Portuguese director Pedro Costa is ready for his fire walk and back with his first narrative project since 2014’s Horse Money.

Continue reading...

Before diving deep into the slums of Fontainhas for his epochal trilogy and its follow-up, Horse Money, Pedro Costa applied his lens in a significantly different way — though no less impressively and, I do not think it’s at all unfair to say, far more accessibly. To my mind, the best display of his early talents is 1994’s Casa de Lava, a mystery of mistaken (or forged) identity — and a reworking of Jacques Tourneur’s classic I Walked with a Zombie — grounded in Portugal’s stunning Cape Verde islands. It’s understandable that something from a filmmaker with Costa’s marginalized status would go so long without a U.S. release, yet still disappointing in sight of the entrancing thing itself.

That will change this fall as Grasshopper Film release Casa de Lava on Blu-ray and DVD, in advance of which there is a brief, appropriately enigmatic teaser that gives...

In this episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for Tuesday, May 31st 2016.

Subscribe in iTunes or RSS.

Follow-Up Bill and Ted Universe News 88Films: IndieGoGo Scream Factory: The Thing Warner Archive: June Titles Olive Films: August Titles Criterion: Valley of the Dolls Kino Lorber: Daisy Kenyon, Bad Girl, Biggles: Adventures in Time Links to Amazon Blood Bath (Arrow) Christina (Intervision) City of Women (Cohen) Gods Of Egypt (Lionsgate) Horse Money (Cinema Guild) Human Tornado (Vinegar Syndrome) Pride + Prejudice + Zombies Psychic Killer (Vinegar Syndrome) The Terror (Film Detective) Venom (Blue Underground) Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy (The Criterion Collection)

Also: L’avventura (Criterion UK), The Uninvited (Wild Side Video France)

Credits Ryan Gallagher (Twitter / Website / Wish List) Brian Saur (Twitter / Website / Instagram / Wish List)

Music for the show is from Fatboy Roberts’ Geek Remixed project.

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

City of Women (Federico Fellini)

Federico Fellini‘s epic 1980 fantasia introduced the start of the Maestro’s delirious late period. A surrealist tour-de-force filmed on soundstages and locations alike, and overflowing with the same sensory (and sensual) invention heretofore found only in the classic movie-musicals (and Fellini’s own oeuvre), La città delle donne [City of Women] taps into the era’s restless youth culture, coalescing into nothing less than Fellini’s post-punk opus. Marcello Mastroianni appears as Fellini’s alter...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSThe great avant-garde filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad has died at the age of 76.If you're sending mail in Austria, now you can creep your family and friends out with an image of austere art-house task-master Michael Haneke on your stamps.A terrific-looking new book "by" Jean-Luc Godard is out via Contra Mundum Press: Phrases features the texts contained within several of Godard's films, including Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, Forever Mozart and In Praise of Love. After his feature documentary Junun and music video for Joanna Newsom, Paul Thomas Anderson is returning to the music world, having reportedly shot a video for Radiohead.Recommended VIEWINGFilmmaker (Traveling Light, Here's to the Future!) and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli has shared online an exquisite new video work, Starting Sketches: Theresa and Jeanne.

★★★★☆ Horse Money is one of those films that makes more sense after watching than during. Pedro Costa's latest feature has no conventional narrative to speak of, but follows ghostly presence Ventura (an immigrant from Cape Verde living in Lisbon playing himself) as he wanders - alone or accompanied by mute, white coated doctors - through dark spaces at times resembling abandoned hospital corridors, at other times catacombs or ancient caverns. His hands tremble incessantly, perhaps because of a nervous disorder he may or may not have. Ventura is a man of few words, but his weary expression and shuffling gait speak volumes about the life he has lived.

The more “international” body of tastemaker critics have anointed Todd Haynes’ Carol, Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s The Assassin, George Miller’s Mad Max, Sean Baker’s Tangerine and Bruno Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin as the better film items for 2015 and top vote getters with the most noms for 2016 Ics Awards. Winners of the 13th Ics Awards will be announced on February 21, 2016. Here are the noms and all the categories.

Picture

• 45 Years

• Arabian Nights

• The Assassin

• Carol

• Clouds of Sils Maria

• The Duke of Burgundy

• Inside Out

• Li’l Quinquin

• Mad Max: Fury Road

• A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

• Tangerine

Director

• Sean Baker – Tangerine

• Bruno Dumont – Li’l Quinquin

• Todd Haynes – Carol

• Hou Hsaio-Hsien – The Assassin

• George Miller – Mad Max: Fury Road

Film Not In The English Language

• Amour Fou

• Arabian Nights

• The Assassin

• Hard to Be a God

• Jauja

• La Sapienza

• Li’l Quinquin

• Phoenix

• A...

This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the movies for anyone who liked something other than what they saw and liked. And ‘tis the season, or at least ‘thas (?) been in the recent past, for that most beloved of academic parlor games, bemoaning the death of cinema, which, if the sackcloth-and-ashes-clad among us are to be believed, is an increasingly detached and irrelevant art form in the process of being smothered under the wet, steaming blanket of American blockbuster-it is. And it’s going all malnourished from the siphoning off of all the talent back to TV, which, as everyone knows,...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column (with a special year-end retrospective today) focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably.

It hasn’t been a great year for domestic movie poster design. Yes there are always a handful to admire each month, but that’s not saying much when you’re comparing them to absolute dreck.

Whereas most years I’m collecting 15-20 images and find myself exasperated trying to cull them down into a Top Ten, 2015 had me struggling to fill the #10 slot. Only maybe three or four were “musts” and the rest ended up waging a war of attrition to...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Everest (Baltasar Kormákur)

Curtain raisers seldom come more bombastic than the last two films to open the Venice Film Festival, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity in 2013, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman last year. Attempting to maintain that level of volume this year on the Lido is Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, a grand-scale, by-the-numbers 3D epic about the doomed 1996 expedition to climb the titular peak.

Todd Haynes' "Carol" has been receiving a lot of love from various critics groups and this time, it topped the ranking of the year's best films at the annual Film Comment magazine poll!

Take a look at the complete list below and then wonder, didn't these critics see "Star Wars: The Force Awakens?"

Film Comment's Top 20 Films of 2015

1. "Carol"

2. "The Assassin"

3. "Mad Max: Fury Road"

4. "Clouds of Sils Maria"

5. "Arabian Nights"

6. "Timbuktu"

7. "Spotlight"

8. "Phoenix"

9. "Inside Out"

10. "The Look of Silence"

11. "Hard to Be a God"

12. "Anomalisa"

13. "In Jackson Heights"

14. "Son of Saul"

15. "Horse Money"

16. "Jauja"

17. "Tangerine"

18. "Brooklyn"

19. "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"

20. "Bridge of Spies"

Film Comment's Best Undistributed Films of 2015

1. "Right Here, Right Now"

2. "Chevalier"

3. "The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers"

4. "The Academy of Muses"

5. "Don't Blink . Robert Frank"

6. "Cosmos"

7. "Journey to the Shore"

8. "Happy Hour"

9. "Lost and...

At the halfway point of December, there are, to put it lightly, many end-of-year lists hitting the web, and few publications have round-ups as consistently excellent as Film Comment‘s. (“Consistently excellent” translates to “aligns with my specific taste,” of course.) Their 20-film selection represents the year rather nicely, from the widely seen and frequently listed (e.g. Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out) landing among some of our limited-release favorites, including Timbuktu, The Assassin, and Jauja. As editor Gavin Smith says, “That balance, which happens to be encapsulated in the top five in micro form, feels about right for the agenda of this magazine, which, since the very beginning, has been to champion the best in cinema wherever it hails from, all creatures great and small. Since we managed to run features on 11 of these and sung the praises of another five, it’s a pleasure to close...

1. The AssassinThough it doesn’t always follow, the most beautiful film of the year should have the most beautiful poster, and Erik Buckham does Hou Hsiao-hsien right with this gorgeous piece. What looks at first like a combination of photography and illustration is in fact entirely taken from images from the film. Buckham told me “I didn’t want to use any imagery in the poster that did not come from the film itself, so everything you see is taken from screen grabs and some on-set photography.” What I always thought were stylized clouds surrounding Shu Qi are actually elements from an embossed picture of a rooster on a lacquered vase or some similar object. As Buckham confided, “I liked the look of the lines so I cropped in super close and played around with lighting and layer effects to blend it in with the background imagery. It was...

1. The AssassinThough it doesn’t always follow, the most beautiful film of the year should have the most beautiful poster, and Erik Buckham does Hou Hsiao-hsien right with this gorgeous piece. What looks at first like a combination of photography and illustration is in fact entirely taken from images from the film. Buckham told me “I didn’t want to use any imagery in the poster that did not come from the film itself, so everything you see is taken from screen grabs and some on-set photography.” What I always thought were stylized clouds surrounding Shu Qi are actually elements from an embossed picture of a rooster on a lacquered vase or some similar object. As Buckham confided, “I liked the look of the lines so I cropped in super close and played around with lighting and layer effects to blend it in with the background imagery. It was...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Setsuko Hara, 1920 - 2015The great Japanese actress of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring and Mikio Naruse's Repast passed away in September but the news has only recently been released. An indelible screen presence whose absence from movies has been felt every year since 1966.My MotherTop 10s: Cahiers du Cinéma + Sight & SoundFor us it's still too early to make judgement—we've hardly caught up with all of 2015's great cinema!—but the esteemed magazines of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound have made their selections for the best of the year:Cahiers du Cinéma1. My Mother (Nanni Moretti)2. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)3. In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel)4. The Smell of Us (Larry Clark)5. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)6. Jauja (Lisandor Alonso)7. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)8. Arabian Nights...

With the calendar about to turn to December, one thing you can count on is a ton of Ten Ten/Best of the Year lists beginning to come down the pike. From critics groups to guilds to various organizations and publications, now is the time to start feting the top titles of 2015. This year, the season of giving, as it were, has begun with Sight & Sound publishing their esoteric list of the top 20 releases of 2015. This European film magazine is highly respected and always makes interesting choices, with this year being no exception. You’ll see that list below, though I also want to talk about what might do the best during this section of 2015 as well. We’ve got 32 days left in the year, so it’s very much crunch time, in all senses of the term. Which films from this year stand to do best with Top Ten...

With December right around the corner, it’s time for movie critics from around the world to start compiling their best-of-2015 lists, and the highly respected Sight & Sound magazine is kick-starting the process by unveiling its own list of the 20 Best Films of 2015.

Topping the incredibly diverse list of faves this year is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, a Taiwainese martial arts film that won its helmer Best Director at Cannes when it debuted there earlier in 2015. It’s expected to be the frontrunner for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, and given that the voting body for Sight & Sound’s list includes 168 critics from all around the globe, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that an acclaimed arthouse pic from a renowned auteur placed so highly.

Todd Haynes’ lovely period piece Carol took second place, and there were plenty of other smaller titles included (such as Anomalisa,...

While our year-end coverage will arrive at… well, the end of the year, other outlets are getting the jump early. One of the first is the estimable Sight & Sound, who have culled together 20 of the year’s best films from 168 of their contributors and colleagues. Topping the list is Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s magnificent The Assassin.

Some may be surprised at the inclusion of Inherent Vice, but that hit U.K. theaters this year, while Arabian Nights, 45 Years, Son of Saul, Cemetery of Splendour, Amy, and Chantal Akerman‘s final film, No Home Movie, all cracked the top 10. Also rounding out the top 20 are two animated films: Charlie Kaufman‘s Anomalisa and Pixar’s Inside Out.

While some have yet to be released in the states, if you’ve missed a few during their theatrical run, we’re keeping tabs on where you can stream them here. In the meantime,...

The British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine have announced their annual top movies of the year list, a poll conducted amongst 168 film critics from around the world.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "The Assassin" and Todd Haynes' "Carol" took the top spots with 38 and 35 votes respectively. 'Assassin' is coming off its big win at the Golden Horse Awards last weekend - often regarded as the highest prize for Chinese-language films.

Not far behind were "Mad Max Fury Road," the "Arabian Nights" trilogy, "Cemetery of Splendour," "No Home Movie," "45 Years," "Son of Saul," "Amy" and "Inherent Vice" (which premiered this year in many international markets).

Rounding out the Top 20 were "Anomalisa," "It Follows," "Phoenix," "Girlhood," "Inside Out," "Tangerine," "Taxi Tehran," "Hard to Be A God," "Horse Money" and "The Look of Silence" also made the list.

The full list is up at BFI.org.

The Tucson’s Loft Film Fest starts today and runs until Sunday October 25. The program will bring some of the best works from around the globe to Tucson, many of which will be have their local premier during the festival.

The acclaimed drama "Court," a quietly devastating portrait of political injustice involving an elderly folk singer facing persecution for his art, is India’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as the winner of the Lion of the Future Award for director Chaitanya Tamhane at the Venice Film Festival. This is the film’s Tucson Premiere.

"Mustang" France’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and winner of the Europa Cinemas Label award at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, is a haunting portrait of five young sisters struggling to come of age under highly unusual circumstances in a remote Turkish coastal village. The film makes its Arizona Premiere at The Loft Film Fest.

The Loft Film Fest 2015 will also showcase numerous top prize winners from major film festivals around the world, including Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Venice and more.

The highly-anticipated new British drama "45 Years," directed by Andrew Haigh ("Weekend"), will have its Arizona Premiere at The Loft Film Fest. This riveting and melancholy tale of a long-married couple confronting a dark secret from their past, has generated major Oscar buzz and garnered the Best Actress and Best Actor awards at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival for its celebrated stars, Charlotte Rampling ("Swimming Pool") and Tom Courtenay ("Doctor Zhivago").

The moving Italian drama "Mia Madre"from acclaimed filmmaker Nanni Moretti ("The Son’s Room"), stars Margherita Buy ( "Days and Clouds") and John Turturro ("O Brother, Where Are Thou?") and tells the story of a harried filmmaker juggling with production of her new film with caring for her dying mother. Winner of the prestigious Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival, the film will also have its Arizona Premiere at The Loft Film Fest.

"Taxi" the crowd-pleasing comedy/drama from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, ("The White Balloon") follows the filmmaker himself as he assumes the role of taxi driver for a number of diverse citizens in his home country, learning about their lives as he ferries them through the city. Winner of the Fipresci Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival,"Taxi" makes its Tucson Premiere at The Loft Film Fest.

Just a few of the other major international festival award winners hitting the screen at the Loft Film Fest include Pedro Costa’s "Horse Money" (winner of the Locarno International Film Festival award for Best Director); Sebastian Silva’s "Nasty Baby," starring Kristin Wiig (winner of the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at the Berlin International Film Festival) and "In Transit," the final film from legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles (winner of a Best Documentary Special Jury Mention at the Tribeca Film Festival).

Many more prize-winning features, documentaries and short films will light up the screen at The 2015 Loft Film Fest. In addition to acclaimed films, the fest brings an incredible line-up of filmmakers and special guests to Tucson! Rita Moreno ("West Side Story"), Alfonso Arau ( " Like Water for Chocolate.""Three Amigos"), Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana (10th Anniversary Screening of "Brokeback Mountain"), Bobcat Goldthwait ("Call Me Lucky"), Michael Joplin (brother of Janis Joplin with the doc "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Andrea B. Scott ("Florence, Az"), Francesco Clerici ("Hand Gestures"), Jessica Cox & Nick Spark ("Right-Footed") and Justin Johnson ("Double Digits") are among the guests who will be on hand to present films alongside critically-acclaimed films selected from prestigious festivals around the globe. For more information and to purchase tickets and passes, please visit: www.loftfilmfest.org.

In today's roundup: Essays on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Wim Wenders's A Trick of the Light and actresses Rafaela Ottiano and Marceline Day; interviews with Pedro Costa (Horse Money) and John Magary (The Mend); the new trailer for Adam McKay's The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis and starring Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt; and Clint Eastwood may lure Doris Day back in front of a camera. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup: Essays on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Wim Wenders's A Trick of the Light and actresses Rafaela Ottiano and Marceline Day; interviews with Pedro Costa (Horse Money) and John Magary (The Mend); the new trailer for Adam McKay's The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis and starring Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt; and Clint Eastwood may lure Doris Day back in front of a camera. » - David Hudson...

A retrospective of films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is heading to New York's MoMA next spring. Also in today's roundup: J. Hoberman on Sidney Lumet’s Daniel and Costa-Gavras’s The Confession, Nick Pinkerton on Pedro Costa's Horse Money, Uncle John producer and co-writer Erik Crary on his years as an assistant to David Lynch, Erik Morse's interview with Mélanie Laurent and Anne-Sophie Brasme (Breathe), Valerie Grove on a new biography of Maggie Smith, Adrian Curry on posters for movies by Vittorio De Sica, Lodge Kerrigan in New York, Agnès Varda in Chicago—and more. » - David Hudson...

A retrospective of films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is heading to New York's MoMA next spring. Also in today's roundup: J. Hoberman on Sidney Lumet’s Daniel and Costa-Gavras’s The Confession, Nick Pinkerton on Pedro Costa's Horse Money, Uncle John producer and co-writer Erik Crary on his years as an assistant to David Lynch, Erik Morse's interview with Mélanie Laurent and Anne-Sophie Brasme (Breathe), Valerie Grove on a new biography of Maggie Smith, Adrian Curry on posters for movies by Vittorio De Sica, Lodge Kerrigan in New York, Agnès Varda in Chicago—and more. » - David Hudson...

★★★★☆ Since as far back as his third feature, 1997's Ossos, the work of auteur Pedro Costa has frequently explored the troubled Lisbon district of Fontainhas. In a loose trilogy he has chronicled the existential wanderings of impoverished immigrants, most recently in Colossal Youth (2006), which focused on the Cape Verdean Ventura. Costa is once again the subject of the director's latest film, Horse Money (2014), which moves at a brisker pace than previous outings but is unlikely to convert disbelievers. It's a singular and deeply resonant work that finds a mesmerising poetry amidst the chiaroscuro rubble of post-colonial Portugal and won the Best Director prize at last year's Locarno Film Festival.

Everest | A Walk In The Woods | Tangerines | The D Train | A Syrian Love Story | A Girl At My Door | Horse Money | Bill | The Messenger | Misery Loves Comedy

The star cast suggests an old-school Towering Inferno-style disaster epic, but the treatment here is the opposite: a faithful account of a true story with the emphasis on mountaineering authenticity and ordinary people. That’s both a blessing and a curse. There’s real conviction to the high-altitude, sub-zero settings, but the dramatic impetus can get lost amidst the high-insulation clothing. Not quite the pinnacle of mountain movies, but a noble assault.

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