Miscellaneous bits of news and fun stuff from around the Internet......An advance review copy MURDER AT THE MOVIES: A MOVIE PALACE MYSTERY by Alicia Malone of Turner Classic Movies has just arrived in my mailbox. It will be published by Running Press in October. Looks like fun! ...Dave Karger of TCM also has a book coming out from Running Press later this year: 50 MOVIE NIGHTS: CONTEMPORARY STARS ON THEIR FAVORITE CLASSIC FILMS...Raquel Stecher of Out of the Past has just published a new…
back in the day, in one of my philosophy classes, we were given a list of films organized by different areas of philosophy. i started borrowing two films a week from the university's film center and worked my way through that list. that's how i discovered directors like kieslowski, tarkovsky, bergman, richard linklater, michel gondry, david lynch, kubrick, wim wenders, truffaut, jim jarmusch, lars von trier, gus van sant, and many others. somehow, cinema felt more philosophical than the…
A Magical Mystery Tour parody, I think. A Monkee wonderful-lifes himself off a bridge, then a girl makes out with each Monkee in turn in a single take. A highlight is Mickey puncturing a Western scene by swiping away the fake arrows and walking through the backdrop. Maybe not a highlight but certainly memorable is when the boys get shrunk to dandruff-size then are vacuumed off Vic Morrow’s head. Pretty meaty role for Timothy Carey. Jack Nicholson pops in for three seconds, and Frank Zappa…
Watched: Dark Matter S1E8, Jupiter 🍿 One more episode left and this one was very good!
★★★★: Still a little goofy in that way 60s movies were, but has a pretty straightforward plot and some fun action. Good humor too, he's cheeky. The series is really starting to come together! FYI: My reviews are scored out of 4. Also, thanks for subscribing to my RSS feed and supporting the indie web!
By Kirk KahoeCrimson River Games LLCGeneric/UniversalLevels: Any Warning! This is as close as you can get to being a Heartbreaker without actua;;y being a Heartbreaker. An eternal horror haunts the woods, reaping an endless harvest of woe from those foolish or desperate enough to travel through them. Tired and injured, the party will have to not only face an endless onslaught from the horror but fatigue and madness as well, for there is no sleep in the Old Man’s realm other than the sleep of…
Have you ever had a romantic moment interrupted? It can be annoying – and it is certainly the case for the two lobsters in Tanked an award winning animated short by Duncan Rudd. Their tango in a tank is interrupted by the chef, who has a dinner order to fulfil and a sadistic gleam in his eye. Well, you know what karma is… Tanked was something of a passion project for Rudd, who fitted it in around family and work commitments over a period of nine months. Although this animation is short and…
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come” –Victor Hugo 2010’s Shinryaku! Ika Musume was one of the more memorable series of its time – centred around the premise of ocean-dweller Ika Musume, Shinryaku! Ika Musume follows Ika Musume as she migrates onto dry land with the singular […]
The swashbuckling classic THE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH (1954) has just been released on Blu-ray by Universal Pictures.I don't use the word "classic" lightly; like Curtis's earlier SON OF ALI BABA (1952), this film is a joy start to finish, '50s era studio entertainment at its best.The movie played on local television often when I was young -- I seem to recall it was KHJ Channel 9 which showed it -- and the wonderful cast and combination of action, humor, and romance helped draw me into the…
A fascinating read by Albert Wegner
BERTAIL, Thomas; GHERGHESCU, Mica;LUCCI-GOUTNIKOV, Nicolas. L’Internationale situationniste. Vies, textes et pratiques (2026). Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2026. 183 p.; ill.; white wrappers with text in black. Francais Suite à l’acquisition des archives de Guy Debord par la BNF en 2009, et de celles de tous ses petits camarades de l’Internationale situationniste par Yale dans les quinze années qui ont suivi, les chercheurs ont enfin pu avoir accès à la majorité des lettres, manuscrits et…
Click here to book through August, September & October . I cycled along the River Lea to Waltham Abbey. On my approach, even from the riverbank, I could see the majestic tower rising over the water meadows as the Abbey has done for the past thousand years, commanding the landscape and undiminished in visual authority. Once you see it, you realise you are following in the footsteps of the innumerable credulous pilgrims who came here in hope of miraculous cures from the holy cross, which had…
In my Kurosawa festival, I’ve gotten to The Bad Sleep Well, which is astonishingly good, with a riveting performance by Mifune — I can’t believe I’d barely heard of it. (Actually, I can, because it’s the grimmest, bitterest movie he ever made aside from Ran, and it openly attacks the corruption and brutality of corporate life.) But I bring it here for its title, which in Japanese is 悪い奴ほどよく眠る Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru. Now, I don’t actually know Japanese, but I did when I was very young and…
The following was written for Locarno Film Festival’s retrospective and book Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht. It wasn’t called Foul Pest at the time, but actor Brian Pettifer tells me that was Guest’s nickname in the industry, and even though I love a lot of his work as a blog […]
*Jacques Henri Lartigue, "Florette, Piozzo, Juillet 1959." (Other Lartigue clotheslines here.)*James Tate, "At the Clothesline."*Related: "Love calls us to the things of this world."
Born Nigel Neill in 1947 in Omagh, Nth Ireland to an English mother and a New Zealand father serving in the British army. His family moved to Christchurch N.Z in 1954 where Sam went to school. He took the name Sam because there were several Nigels at school, saying “I moved more easily in the world as a Sam”.Sam Neill and Meryl Streep as Michael & Lindy Chamberlain,Evil Angels, 1988Sam Neill went on to study English literature and acting at Canterbury Uni. He began acting in Canberbury Uni…
My latest Film Data Scientist video, this time investigating why so many film posters seem to have forgotten the names of their lead actors.I’ll be uploading new video essays every couple of weeks throughout 2026, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).https://www.youtube.com/@TheFilmDataScientistAnd to help explain the channel, I also created a…
I enjoyed the space art in this book. It is a nice background for these fictional space adventures.Bleep and Booster was a beloved children's animated sci-fi series featured on the BBC's Blue Peter from 1963 to 1977. The story followed the galactic adventures of Bleep, an alien boy from the planet Miron, and Booster, an adventurous young human boy. Originally shown on the BBC's Blue Peter. A total of 313 five-minute episodes were made. There were a series of books and Annuals issued over the…
For the longest time, I’ve had a page on my blog dedicated to my favorite movies. The original idea was to showcase the movies I love most, kind of like the four favorites on Letterboxd. But over time, it gradually shifted from movies I loved to movies I simply liked, and it became an almost endless list. They were all great movies, and I would recommend every single one of them, but not every title was an absolute favorite of mine. So, I made quite a few changes to the list. It now only…
I've written plenty of times about how I don't much care for Tom Cruise as a person whenever I've read about how he's quite unpleasant, egocentric, and so forth. That said, I will never deny that the man can act. That is quite on display in the trailer for the upcoming dark comedy, "Digger." Cruise plays an elderly and deranged oil tycoon whose company's actions put the safety of our planet at risk, so he's got to save us all from the problem he created. Give the trailer a view:Cruise is the…
I'm out of town so this is obviously my second priority, but the studios have fortunately made it pretty easy on me! The big opening is The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's star-studded version of the classic adventure, featuring Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, plus seemingly half of Hollywood. Shot entirely on Imax film, it's getting most if not all of the premium screens in
A delightful explainer video from the Buckinghamshire Archives posted to Bluesky on 14 July 2026 contains a cheeky stringboard toward the end. ▲ “Who doesn't love a bit of gossip?" Buckinghamshire Archives (2026) ▲ “Who doesn't love a bit of gossip?" Buckinghamshire Archives (2026)
I wasn't expected to post after the Apple Hide My Email case post today, but then I scrolled my feed and ran into this. If you've been following along, I've been covering Warner Bros Sale since Netflix first started to buy Warner Bros. — back when Paramount wasn't even the frontrunner. Since then Warner Bros went with a counter offer from Paramount and as I was mentioned a few days ago the DOJ okayed it and several states said no and are taking it to court. On Wednesday, ProPublica gave us the…
The trailer has dropped for the latest Jane Austen adaptation, a feature-film version of Sense and
Project Runway 22 episode 2 brought back the jury of designers, and somehow it's even worse this season! Let's recap all the ways this episode went awry.
This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Ashley Schofield, author of VA-11 Hall-A: Design Works. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.I'm going to spend the process of drafting this piece seeing how long I can go before talking about EVO Moment 37. Let’s find out together.Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is not the greatest fighting game ever made, nor a perfect one. It’s…
Maultaschen italienisch mit einer Füllung aus geschmorten Auberginen, Zucchini und Kräutern auf einem Bett aus leicht spicy italienischem Gemüse Gestern hatte ich dem Professor die neuen Maultaschen vorgestellt – italienische Art. Mit einer Füllung aus Auberginen, Zucchini, frischem Thymian… Auf einem Bett aus spicy Gemüse mit wunderbarem Olivenöl. Mild – wie ich es mag. Caprese brummte. Nickte. Betrachtete die Sauce. Die Augen blitzten. Ich erkannte Wohlgefallen. »Wie nennen Sie Maultaschen in…
FLOWERS, PHONETICS, PHABULOUS Always a joy to have them back: the phoneticist and the flower-girl, born to enthral one another and us. Cheers first for Keziah Ibe as Eliza, fresh out of Arts Ed on a first professional job. She eooowessand garrrrns at the start with confidently alarming shrillness, then suddenly – as the opera-crowd leave the stage to Covent garden workers round a brazier – sings “Wouldn’t it be loverly” at first merrily then downstage with a brief wistful sadness, then again…
Cars (2006)
