Götterdämmerung, Act 3: Siegfried's Funeral March (Twilight of the Gods) very well could be in the top 5 of the most moving pieces of music ever created. Those of us who were around in 1981 may have seen the John Boorman movie "Excalibur" (or maybe watched it years later) will recall the final battle and the death of King Arthur, where his body is carried away to Avalon and the sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake... all playing out with Siegfried's Funeral March emotionally…

glücklich Heute war ein perfekter Sonntag. Ich habe Pancakes gekocht und den ganzen Tag Videospiele gespielt. Zunächste spielte ich „Tomodachi Life” (auf Deutsch!) und anschliessend „Witcher 3”. Es war auch eine sehr produktive Woche. Wäsche-MontagFrüher haben wir unsere Wäsche am meistens donnerstags gewaschen, aber das funktioniert jetzt nicht mehr so gut, weil Daniel arbeitet. Deshalb wechseln wir ab sofort am montagnachmittags. Das passt besser, da wir montags sowieso reinigen. Es ist auch…

Elizabeth performed in Les Misérables this week with Leading Lights, an Aberdeen-based youth musical theatre group. There were five shows starting on Wednesday and finishing last night. Ben and I went to the matinee yesterday and as always we’re impressed with the amount of talent on display. This was Elizabeth’s third and final year with Leading Lights as she’ll be heading off to university when they do their show next year. She absolutely loved being part of the production and, after all the…

StarringAlan Ritchson, Agnez Mo, Sydelle Noel, Anggun, and Christopher Rodriguez MarquetteOverviewReacher's back.Jack Reacher, a veteran military police investigator, has just recently entered civilian life. Reacher is a drifter, carrying no phone and the barest of essentials as he travels the country and explores the nation he once served.Review Reacher This was one hell of a season. Reacher isn’t award winning television, but it’s fun as hell. Sometimes you just want to see the big guy do…

More warm weather incoming, so let's have another blast of a summery tune.

Charli XCX is Playboy’s Fall 2026 cover girl. Photographed by Aidan Zamiri. For the rest of the story, read it here.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

This blog post is the thirty-sixth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.The 51st World Science Fiction Convention had a more robust media presence than many of its predecessors had.Special effects legend Stan Winston showed up to promote the upcoming adaptation of Interview With The Vampire. Rockne S. Obannon was on hand to show clips from his new series Seaquest DSV. There were presentations from that autumn’s hot…

Here. Another of the things I worked on this summer is available: Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET. A fun video essay to do. Masters of Cinema are making much of the fact that I got Alexander Payne to voice Darryl F. Zanuck — he was surprised enough to be asked that he went along with the […]

Back in 2001, BMW made a series of short films that they released to the web. They starred a then-unknown Clive Owen as “the driver.” He was a guy who drove BMWs and… did stuff. Some of this was spy stuff, some of it was private detective stuff, but all of it was very cool.The films were five minutes or so, and they got some named directors for this: I remember John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, and Guy Ritchie (along with his then-wife Madonnna). Production values were sky-high — each film was a…

by Eurocheese Rinko Kikuchi could become the first Japanese Best Actress Oscar nominee ever if HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY! goes all the way. Continuing our quest to find potential Best Actress contenders among TIFF screenings, we have already seen nomination potential in The Debut, Being Heumann and Onwards and Sideways. Next up, we have the Canadian premiere of Rinko Kikuchi’s performance in Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! after its Sundance competition slot earlier in the year, and the…

I recently caught a screening of Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), and I’m happy to report that they remain an interesting filmmaker making interesting films. The first of those, 2021’s We're All Going to the World's Fair, didn’t really work for me but was at least formally and visually inventive. I thought a better balance was struck with I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which was funny and tender as well as looking great (and calling on both 90s nostalgia…

Did Colin Baker ever appear in The Young Ones? And if he did, why the hell can’t I remember ever seeing him, when I’ve endlessly watched those 12 episodes for years? Certainly, Wikipedia claims that he was in the show: “Baker returned to television, notably guest-starring as the villainous Bayban the Butcher in the 1980 Blake’s 7 episode “City at the Edge of the World”. He also had a regular role as James West in the ATV soap opera For Maddie with Love (1980). Other programmes in which Baker…

Peg o' My Heart (1933)

I have been watching all of the top division bouts at the 2026 Aki Basho (September Grand Sumo Tournament). One of the highlight bouts on day 4 featured Yokozuna Onosato vs Takayasu. Takayasu delivered a brutal hit at the Tachiai, forcing the Yokozuna back. Onosato backpedaled, and circling away, tried to guide Takayasu out of the ring. He very nearly succeeded, but Takayasu gracefully twirled one leg, staying in. Unfortunately for Yokozuna Onosato, he ended up twirling as well, but without the…

A young couple (Molly Bee, Ben Cooper) planning to elope get picked up by Woody Watts, a retired train conductor (Edgar Buchanen), and spend the morning in his chartreuse-colored caboose which is his home. The couple are enroute to Denton, where the soon-to-be bride's sister is waiting with the preacher. However, her father issued a missing person's report and they find that police are searching for them, so they return to the safety of the caboose. Meanwhile, Woody's caboose ends up being…

First time in a long time I've seen a creature feature that is this visually and conceptually inventive. This movie knows it's about Cool Set Pieces and it delivers them. If I knew nothing about Zach Cregger and you told me he was a sketch comedian who transitioned to making high-concept horror movies I'd believe you 100% just from seeing this movie; it absolutely has that construction where individual scenes all function as a joke—sometimes explicitly funny, sometimes just a monster-movie…

I have enjoyed most of Zach Cregger's previous few films, so I was absolutely locked in to see Resident Evil... even though I've never played a single one of the games, or even watched a single one of the other movies all the way through. I really enjoyed it, though!! And I have absorbed enough Resident Evil knowledge through industry osmosis that I could recognize what it was doing with respect to the games. What "it's doing" is obvious enough, actually, that I think anyone could enjoy this…

Daffy comedy is at a premium in this delightful, long overdue local revival of hit Broadway musical Spamalot. “Lovingly ripped off” from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spamalot was part of a wave of musical comedies that followed the extraordinary success of The Producers (2001). Adapted for the stage by Monty Python’s Eric Idle (with John Du Prez as co-composer), Spamalot won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Musical, running on Broadway for four years. With the original 2007…

(This post is a part of the 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)The 1940s saw a number of supernatural fantasy films on both sides of the Pond. From Hollywood emerged such movies as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), It's a Wonderful Life (1946). The British film industry produced such films as The Ghost Train (1941), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Miranda (1948). Arguably, the greatest British supernatural fantasy of the 1940s was A Matter of…

everything looks different from home.

by Cláudio Alves In the current political climate, it feels incredible, nigh impossible, for such a movie as Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother to come out of a major Hollywood studio. Yet, here it is, in all its MGM-backed glory with a TIFF world premiere to boot. Bassam Tariq’s third feature and follow-up to 2020’s Mogul Mowgli, concerns a man of that profession which seems ever-so-common in moving pictures, but not so much in real life – the contract killer. He’s Latif, whom we meet in a…

Artistic depiction of the event by an eyewitness **Alien AliensAlien 3Alien: ResurrectionPrometheusCovenant ** Alien: Resurrection (1997, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)Not unique to this movie, but it does always feel intrinsically wrong for the 20th Century Fox fanfare to not immediately transition into the Star Wars theme.**Still an orange opening, except it’s closeups of grotty/distorted organic material. No nebula when we get to space, just an ugly-ass ship. The overbearing theme music is here to…

...will not appear this weekend.The column will also not appear on September 26th.Around the Blogosphere This Week will return on Saturday, October 3rd.In the meantime, I have prescheduled some posts for the coming week, so please check back periodically for new content.For the most recent classic film news links, please visit my September 12th column.

While perusing, as opposed to the 1920's and 1930's slapstick we often focus on, the latest news in the world of comedy (notably, the talented comediennes Saidah Belo-Osagie and Grace Reiter joining the SNL cast for season 52), the gang here tips a top hat worn in 1926 by Raymond Griffith to one of our favorite comedy writers and comics, Robert Smigel.Since anyone who even worked on the periphery of show business is now required by federal law to have a podcast, here's Robert's podcast!First…

One of the lesser-known benefits of joining the Tatsunami International Fan Club is that it includes access to observe asa-geiko, the stable’s morning practice. I had joined the Fan Club mainly to get a regular banzuke and because I thought it would be interesting. Once I started planning a trip to Japan, I came to … Continue reading A Morning at Tatsunami-beya: Watching the Professionals

Michael Shannon as President James A. Garfield in Death by Lightning (Episode 4: “Destiny of the Republic”) Vitals Michael Shannon as James A. Garfield, Ohio farmer-turned-20th President of the United States Washington, D.C., Summer 1881 Series: Death by Lightning Episode: “Destiny of the Republic” (Episode 4) Streaming Date: November 6, 2025 Director: Matt Ross Creator: Mike Makowsky Costume Designer: Michael Wilkinson WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background President James Garfield died 145 years…

IIn the era which we call B.C.—that is, Before Cable—movies on television were a Big Deal. A Very Big Deal, in fact. They were, and had been for years, a staple of local television, and in the late 1950s ABC had experimented with a couple of movie packages consisting of pre-1950 movies or movies from England, but when NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies debuted in 1961, it represented a masssive change. Now, for the first time, movies that had been in theaters after 1950 could be seen in the…

Welcome to this bizarro world

Fabulous family dinner at Loretta, location of so many great family events.

The best part of the new Resident Evil is the extended opening sequence, which could be an outstanding short horror film on its own, before it even shows us a title card. Austin Abrams is fantastic as Bryan, a medical courier who agrees to take on an urgent request (at double pay) to deliver a mysterious package to the hospital in Raccoon City. We see him driving in the snow at night, knowing far more than he does about what’s going to be waiting for him as soon as he reaches his destination.…