But when it comes to purchases made via streaming services, it’s more accurate to consider them rentals, despite them not being labeled as such and costing more than rentals with set time limits. As we’ve seen before, streaming companies can quickly yank away content that people feel that they paid to own, be it due to licensing disputes, mergers and acquisitions, or other business purposes. In this case, a company’s failure has resulted in people no longer being able to access content they already paid for and presumed they’d be able to access for the long haul.

For some, the reality of what it means to "own" a streaming purchase, combined with the unreliability and turbulent nature of today's streaming industry, has strengthened the appeal of physical media. Somewhat ironically, though, Redbox shuttering meant the end of one of the last mainstream places to access DVDs.

The weather theme of “Twisters” could have easily lent itself to a climate change angle, but there’s no hint of an agenda. That’s on purpose, according to Director Lee Isaac Chung.

“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like (it) is putting forward any message,” Chung explained in an interview with CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

There’s something I never thought I’d hear from Hollywood.

For all its apparent lack of message, my roommates and I agreed the tornado-chasing left us feeling strangely patriotic.

Perhaps that’s because the movie centers on the characters’ dedication to serving their community.

The first chapter of Kevin Costner’s new Western epic has a lot more to offer than its critical and financial woes suggest.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, the Vatican compiled this list of "great films." The 45 movies are divided into three categories: "Religion," "Values" and "Art." The USCC classification for each film follows its description

In 1995, on the "centenary of cinematography", 100 years after the Lumière brothers displayed their first film for an audience, the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications compiled a list called Some Important Films (Italian: Alcuni film importanti). The 45 movies are divided equally into three categories—religion, values, and art—with no order of importance placed on the films. The council was careful not to regard the films on the list as the "best", or most important, saying: "not all that deserve mention are included".

“Inside Out 2” is a very safe film, and that is frankly its greatest flaw. As with many of Disney’s mistakes, it comes down to rank cowardice in the face of creative, financial, and political risk. Making a late sequel to the most critically acclaimed Pixar film of the past decade is not a difficult decision, nor is it dangerous to make a movie about the importance of expressing emotions in our modern therapy-obsessed culture.

It may forgo some of the superficial trappings of “wokeness,” but it pulls too many punches and falls short of the first film. It’s already a faster-paced film, tuning heavily to the hyperkinetic sensibilities of the TikTok generation being faster than they were a decade ago. In a film landscape that has already made the creatively bankrupt live-action “Lion King” remake into one of the highest-grossing films of all time, it is a shame that “Inside Out 2’s” box office success rewards Disney for being safer and less risky.

“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody.”

“[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files.”

“Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, “Oh my god”

“I grabbed the phone… unplug the machine!”” //

“Let’s put the witch hunt away. We’ve got to get the show back first. Let’s not go spend a week of our time trying to kill somebody. Where’s the movie?”

“Obviously, five minutes in the meeting, you’re all sweating and red-faced. And somebody will say, “Let’s go kill somebody and lynch them. Now,” says Jacob, “I support lynching on our agenda. But, number one is, just get the movie back and work on Buzz and Woody again. We’ve lost our friends.”

With this many man-years, or even man-decades, worth of work on a project, the temptation to find someone to blame, to expend effort on hunting down the person responsible, is intense.

But that kind of negative thought process doesn’t help anyone and it just removes focus from what matters most: moving forward. //

Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time. //

The thing that I take away about these experiences is that the spontaneity of the communal support speaks to the culture of Pixar the rest of the time. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen all of a sudden. You can’t have a disaster and instantly develop this kind of community and camaraderie.

It has to seep out. It has to be in the soil. You don’t just plant it and watch it grow in a day. It has to be cultivated over time, as it obviously was at Pixar.

This action-packed film embraces the good-versus-evil dichotomy of World War II as Allied commandos rain fury on the Nazis. //

Sometimes an old-fashioned, Nazi-killing romp is just what the movies need. And that’s exactly what “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” brings to the cinema. The film, very loosely based on the real-life exploits of World War II British special operators, eschews politics in favor of humor, action, and plenty of Nazi-centric violence.

“My sons absolutely hated it. They felt that it was emasculating. And I agree, to a certain extent. I'm raising two boys. I want 'em to feel powerful too [while] respecting women. I like pop culture when it attempts to empower women without robbing men of their possibility to be men, to also protect and provide. I believe in giving women all the tools and the trust that we can do it all without losing our essence, without losing our femininity. I think that men have a purpose in society and women have another purpose as well. We complement each other, and that complement should not be lost.”

We all want a future where humans can thrive in a clean environment. But as the eye-opening documentary “Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth” reveals, while we hear dire warnings that we must rapidly eliminate fossil fuels to avoid a climate catastrophe, we are manufacturing a humanitarian crisis of our own.

https://youtu.be/zmfRG8-RHEI //

Wealthy countries built their economic resilience on coal, oil, and gas. Denying the same benefit to poor countries for the sake of hypothetical climate risk is immoral.

As Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser bluntly puts it, “It’s all a crock of crap.”

The documentary shows that the goal of energy policy should be to provide clean, reliable, and resilient power to raise standards of living, both in America and overseas.

That means maintaining an energy mix that can handle nature’s curveballs. It means maximizing our options, not banning entire categories of energy the world still needs. But as environmentalists seek to ban fossil fuels, they are raising the price of electricity for some and depriving others in emerging economies of that valuable resource.

For you Millenials, Gen Zs, and whatever, I'd recommend putting aside your anime for a couple of hours and watching a real movie.
While the breakout from Stalag Luft III is the most famous prison break, it was nowhere near the biggest or most successful. It occurred at Stalag 315 in Epinal, France, on May 11, 1944. Stalag 315 housed over 3,000 Indian, Sikh, and Gurkha soldiers, mostly captured in Dunkirk and North Africa. On May 11, the Eighth Air Force carried out a 67 bomber raid on Epinal, and some of the collateral damage was the prison. About 70 prisoners were killed, but over 1,000 prisoners made a break for it, and about 500 made it to Switzerland. Unfortunately, their story hasn't received the attention of the Stalag Luft III escape. As with the Great Escape, some of the prisoners were summarily executed upon recapture.

Here are some of the other major prison breaks.

For a movie based on the life of a saint, it is decidedly non-religious. I suppose this was focus-tested at some point along the way, but it really detracts from the movie. God is maybe mentioned once. Jesus is not mentioned. The only prayer in the movie is one scene where the nuns say grace before a meal, and it is done in a very non-Catholic way. The characters are almost archetypes. //

Also interesting is the subtext of the position of recent immigrants as portrayed by David Morse in the role of Archbishop Michael Corrigan. They are so interested in not making waves and blending in with native New Yorkers that they ignore the plight of immigrants like their parents suffered. Cabrini's persistence and goodness come through. I think Cabrini's actions are straight from the Parable of the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1-8). In a society that is increasingly paralyzed by inaction and indecision, seeing what one person, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, can accomplish is a tonic. //

The opportunities for the Christian faith to be effortlessly incorporated into the movie were limitless. Cabrini never prays and never contemplates her pain in terms of sanctifying suffering. She never has doubts about her mission or her abilities. She never prays for guidance or assistance. All of this is very un-Catholic, particularly in the context of a nun. At one point, the Archbishop tells her he often wonders if she is acting out of her religious calling or from ambition. It's a question that needed to be explored and answered but ended up as a toss-away line in the script. //

The decision to make a film that doesn't fit into the "Christian movie" genre results in attributing Cabrini's work to her efforts rather than to the greater glory of God. That is unfortunate.

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a spiritually empty, imaginatively bereft upscale spectacle, engineered for fans of Kamala Harris and subscribers to The New Yorker //

Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.

What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.

One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.

Take a look at the fastest, smallest, and silliest aircraft to appear in the James Bond franchise.

And while the sci part of the sci-fi equation may be questionable in Scott's 1982 original, the production design felt so right to audiences that it has overshadowed almost every future-set movie since. Even if – with only two years to go – our world looks nothing like Blade Runner's vision of 2019, Scott's vision remains the benchmark for The Future.

William Gibson invented the future. He also coined the term "cyberspace", which earned his place not just in literary and sci-fi but also nerd history. His world of elite hackers, shady super-corporations and unfathomable artificial intelligences inform almost all modern speculative fiction.

Gibson didn't invent Blade Runner. He was just breathing in the same post-industrial silicon fumes as its director Ridley Scott and futurologist production designer Syd Mead, who also shaped the look of Aliens and Tron. A heady mix that stapled Blade Runner to the pantheon of film and ensures we're discussing it today.

johnwalker

If you enjoy classic movies and find yourself bored with the endless series of sequels and reboots from present-day Hollywood, each striving to be more woke, transgressive, and aligned with the momentary obsessions of the “creative class”, the good news is that we’re living in a golden age when hundreds of film classics which not long ago you may have been lucky to see screened once in a decade or two at an art house or on late night television, interrupted by bottom-feeder advertisements, are now just sitting there on YouTube and other streaming services, completely free, waiting for you to enjoy them.

This post collects, in the comments, films you may want to check out. For each, I provide a YouTube player to watch the film and commentary from Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). With the exception of a few films which are included because they’re “so awful they’re good”, most of these films are rated 7/10 or better for quality on IMDB.

The movies are listed in no particular order.

Don’t forget the popcorn!

Tossing aside Godfather, we’re on pretty thin ground for fabulous Hollywood trilogies. This is entirely to be expected. Hollywood doesn’t make trilogies because stories need to be carried over three films. Hollywood makes trilogies because film number one hit big and the studio wants to crank up the money machine. Hollywood Film Trilogies, almost by definition, are not creatively necessary, merely financially desirable. In the history of film, Rings is very nearly unique because it was conceived as a trilogy — it was understood going into the production that the arc of the story would take three films. Comparing this intentional trilogy to other, basically unintentional film trilogies is comparing apples to oranges. //

Until 2005, at least, Rings is literally sui generis.

Indeed, in all the cases above, the film version of the story is the definitive version — the original text is, at best, complementary to the film. This is because the film is the better telling of the story. And it’s not simply because some stories are better told as films for visual purposes. It’s because the texts did not best express the story. It doesn’t mean the books are bad — Baum’s Oz books, for one, are a delightful read. It simply means the story is more completely serviced in film.

As is the case with The Lord of the Rings. Director Peter Jackson is famously a huge fan of the Tolkien books, but based on the movies (and the various commentary I’ve read from and about the man) I think it’s more accurate to say he’s a huge fan of Middle-Earth — he seems very nearly enamored of the work other artists have done in the place as he is with Tolkien’s prose.

After The Return of the King was released, I wrote two longish essays about the film trilogy, one attempting to explain where it sat in terms of film history, and a second, somewhat more controversial, in which I posited that the film trilogy was better than the book trilogy, in terms of storytelling. Rather than to repeat the points made in those essays, I will simply link to them here, for your perusal at your own convenience. Likewise, because I assume my audience of readers has seen these films, over and over and over again, I won’t spend any time substantially revisiting the plot or themes of the trilogy. You know it, you’ve seen it, you can whistle “Concerning Hobbits” unprompted.

Instead, allow me to present a series of five thoughts about the The Lord of the Rings, both the individual movies, and the production itself.

Director Ridley Scott has achieved the impossible—making Napoleon Bonaparte boring. //

It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.

This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.

This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.

Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.

So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.

Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring. //

Ultimately, the film feels like a disengaged fifth grader’s petulant history project. It takes pains to note when and where each event takes place, as if to say, “Hey, audience, see this? It actually happened, please care about it,” without allowing the events to breathe.

This slavish obsession with accuracy seems an extreme overcorrection from “Gladiator,” where Scott butchered the historical record but captured the heart of Roman virtue. Here, Scott has preserved the history only by carefully excising the drama and passion that audiences expect from a blockbuster film. //

As if an afterthought, the movie serves up two spectacles of battle: Austerlitz and Waterloo, but manages to remove any real drama from those famous conflagrations. In each case, the audience has no sense of why the battles are important, what Napoleon and his opponents are trying to achieve, and why they should care about the men dying before their eyes.

By contrast, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” provides a masterclass in battle storytelling. The Battle of Helm’s Deep delivers an awesome spectacle of fascinating siege tactics, setting and fulfilling audience expectations, and making audiences care by placing the main characters at the heart of the action. Viewers have a stake in the twists and turns of the battle because they have gotten to know and care about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and Gimli (John Rhys Davies), who are intimately involved in the fighting.

By contrast, audiences in “Napoleon” see nameless, faceless soldiers fighting in ranks they don’t understand, with Napoleon in the distance commanding things. The film has spent no time explaining why the battle matters, what the ramifications are for France if Napoleon loses, and why viewers should care about those doing the fighting. All we know is that this is a massive battle, and Napoleon is in control, so we should just watch and eat our popcorn.

The problem with this approach is that it tosses all the drama out the window. //

I got the sense that if someone could just sit down with Scott and tell him, “Hey, here’s why Napoleon’s important, and why he’s actually interesting,” perhaps we would have got something a little more like “Gladiator” and a little less like “Real Housewives of Revolutionary Paris.” ///

History should be taught as drama; to do that, one has to connect with historical people, understand why they matter, and the consequences of their action or inaction. Then the dates and events make sense.