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A woman plots revenge against her unfaithful husband in this so-bad-it’s-good low-budget drama recalling the likes of Fatal Attraction and The Last Seduction

Here is a low-budget erotic thriller directed by Yara Estrada Lowe, which recalls both the highs and the lows of the genre’s heyday. As with classics of the genre such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and The Last Seduction, the plot is one that, if it offered psychological realism, would qualify as a freak tragedy. But since it’s an erotic thriller, it qualifies as a romp.

Husband and wife Caleb and Celine are planning to have a child but, unbeknown to Celine, Caleb has a bit on the side, Fiona. Celine has the worst day of her life when she learns that not only is she herself infertile, but her husband has knocked up his mistress. Caleb subsequently divorces her and goes off to...

Exclusive: Woman of the Hour‘s Daniel Zovatto and Independence Day star Bill Pullman are boarding the Black Bear, Esmail Corp, Caviar production Famous which A24 is releasing stateside theatrically.

They join Zac Efron, Bridgerton‘s Phoebe Dynevor, Nicholas Braun, Stephanie Koenig, Debby Ryan, Mekki Lepper and Cory Michael Smith. Cameras are rolling in LA on the Jody Hill directed movie.

Famous explores the dark side of celebrity and the lengths people will go to attain it. Efron plays dual roles: Overzealous fan, Lance Dunkquist and Hollywood heartthrob, James Jansen. Lance has the spitting image of James, and will do whatever it takes to be famous. Pic is based on the novel by New York Times bestselling author Blake Crouch. Chad Hodge adapted for the screen, the scribe also adapted Crouch’s Wayward Pines trilogy into a series.

Famous is being produced by Sam Esmail and...

The early 1990s were a good time for the now-moribund genre of the erotic thriller. Mainstream Hollywood was pushing the limits of what audiences wanted to see in terms of sex and nudity, and multiple movies tapped into that sexual zeitgeist. Films like "Poison Ivy" (with Drew Barrymore) and "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" (with Rebecca De Mornay) warned that one's babysitters might be there to take over the family with their sexual wiles, while "The Last Seduction," "Jade," "Sliver," and "Color of Night" tinged standard thrillers with a sexual element. Madonna starred in "Body of Evidence," a movie about a woman who accidentally sexed her partner to death. A lot of the genre's popularity was kicked by the assertive sexuality on display in Adrian Lyne's 1987 ultra-hit "Fatal Attraction." 

The biggest hits of the day were probably Lyne's "Indecent Proposal" and Paul Verhoeven's "Basic Instinct," with the former making $266 million,...

I’m no historian, but America circa 1857 was a brutal, eye-opening time in the nation’s history. During these dark days, blood and bodies enriched the soil while poisoning the minds and hearts of people fighting to survive. Today, Pete Berg takes audiences back to a time of strife for Netflix‘s latest limited series, American Primeval. The six-episode series hails from The Revenant writer Mark L. Smith, with Berg directing and executive producing. On Tuesday, Netflix unveiled the show’s January 9, 2025, release date and first-look images for the upcoming series, depicting an oppressive atmosphere with bone-crunching combat, unions crumbling to pieces, and non-negotiable alliances paving a road to ruin.

Here’s the official logline for American Primeval courtesy of Netflix:

This is America…1857. Up is down, pain is everywhere, and innocence and tranquility are losing the battle to hatred and fear. Peace is the shrinking minority, and very few...

How now, what news: the Criterion Channel’s July lineup is here. Eight pop renditions of Shakespeare are on the docket: from movies you forgot were inspired by the Bard (Abel Ferrara’s China Girl) to ones you’d wish to forget altogether (Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing), with maybe my single favorite interpretation (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet) alongside Paul Mazursky, Gus Van Sant, Baz Luhrmann, Derek Jarman, and (of course) Kenneth Branagh. A neonoir collection arrives four months ahead of Noirvember: two Ellroy adaptations, two from De Palma that are not his neonoir Ellroy adaptation, two from the Coen brothers (i.e. the chance to see a DVD-stranded The Man Who Wasn’t There in HD), and––finally––a Michael Winner picture given Criterion’s seal of approval.

Columbia screwballs run between classics to lesser-seens while Nicolas Roeg and Heisei-era Godzilla face off. A Times Square collection brings The Gods of Times Square,...

Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, Manhunt is an exploration of competing political agendas played out in the shadow of a presidential assassination. Based on the New York Times bestseller "The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer" by James L. Swanson, the Apple TV+ series depicts the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle). Directed across seven episodes by industry veterans Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress) and John Dahl (The Last Seduction), this compelling historical drama demands to be watched.

Packed with Emmy Award winners including Tobias Menzies (The Crown), Patton Oswalt and creator Monica Beletsky (Fargo), this Apple original is a riveting return to a pivotal point in American history. The series was set in a time when the hopes and fears of a nation sat on the shoulders of President Abraham Lincoln (Hamish Linklater). He was an advocate and political architect of...

The former Misfits and Utopia star loves pushing boundaries. But, as a drag queen out for revenge, in his new erotic thriller he’s ventured into truly novel territory

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett loves an erotic thriller. “The Bedroom Window with Elizabeth McGovern. Body Heat with Kathleen Turner. The Last Seduction … I mean, basically, I love all of those movies,” he says.

The reason we are talking about erotic thrillers is that this is how I have just described Femme, an electrifying two-hander starring Stewart-Jarrett as Jules, a drag queen who is beaten up by a gang of homophobic young men. His life derailed by the attack, Jules withdraws into himself, until a chance encounter at a gay sauna reveals two useful pieces of information: first, that Preston, the gang’s ringleader, is himself gay, and second, that Preston hasn’t recognised his former victim out of drag. Jules realises he has...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Directed by David Lynch

On the occasion of the home video and streaming release of the newly remastered Inland Empire (for which we were lucky enough to chat with the man himself), Criterion has put together a fine tribute to David Lynch, also featuring Eraserhead (1977), Dune (1984), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Dr. (2001). Don’t sleep on the bonus features, including a new conversation between Laura Dern and Kyle Maclachlan. Also, set to arrive on April 1 is The Elephant Man (1980).

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons

French New Wave master Eric Rohmer’s 1990s project was Tales of the Four Seasons, all of which have now received new restorations. Following...

Good news for those who wish to know what their Twitter feed’s jacking off to: the Criterion Channel are launching an erotic thriller series that includes De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double, the Wachowskis’ Bound, and so many other movies to stir up that ceaseless, fruitless “why do movies have sex scenes?” discourse. (Better or worse than middle-age film critics implying they have a hard-on? I’m so indignant at being forced to choose.) Similarly lurid, if not a bit more frightening, is a David Lynch retro that includes the Criterion editions of Lost Highway and Inland Empire (about which I spoke to Lynch last year), a series of shorts, and a one-month-only engagement for Dune, a film that should be there in perpetuity.

Retrospectives of Harold Lloyd, Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, and shorts by Fanta Régina Nacro round out the big debuts,...

We're about to enter the prime Oscar-hopeful months of the year. Excited? But before we do, here's a quick look back at August at Tfe. In case you missed any of this baker's dozen...

Some Highlights

• Interview Nine Perfect Strangers Abe interviews Michael Shannon

• Emmy Categories -we've analyzed many of the top races

• Spencer tease - will Kristen Stewart be up for gold?

• Jennifer Hudson in Respect a big new role for a fine singer

• The Green Knight -Matt has a big crush on Dev Patel

• Phil Tippet -Elisa meets the "mad god" of vfx

• Jeanette Goldstein in Aliens Nick gives a strong genre turn its due

• Gay Best Friend: Chuck and Buck - with White Lotus all the rage, Christopher looks back at Mike White's breakout

• A Room With a View a long-read team retrospective

• How had I never seen...Blue Velvet Ben has never been a...

An unfortunate statistic among many acclaimed dramas with rabid fans is they often get snubbed for awards on TV’s biggest night. So, when Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone,” 2020’s highest-rated cable series, finally nabbed a nomination in its third season, its many, many fans breathed a sigh of relief.

“It’s a thrill and I’m very happy ‘cause it’s a great show, and it deserves a little love,” says Cary White, who is the production designer carrying the Emmy banner for the Western-flavored series. “It’s kind of like a Lifetime Achievement sort of thing because I’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s been, like, 25 years since I had the last nomination.”

That last nomination was for 1995’s Anjelica Huston-starrer “Buffalo Girls”, which is a strong indicator that White feels very comfortable in the Western genre. And though “Yellowstone” is frequently about how modernity is encroaching on legacy,...

“I was sitting here minding my own business and the art director sitting next to me said, ‘you will never guess what happened! We’ve just been nominated for an Emmy!’ I was like, ‘come on, that’s not right,'” an incredulous Cary White jokes about his surprise production design bid for “Yellowstone.”

It’s the first ever nomination for the hit show and his third career nom, decades after his first two, for “Buffalo Girls” in 1995 and “Lonesome Dove” in 1989. “You know, I think it may be a lifetime achievement sort of deal they’re doing here, I’m not sure,” he smiles. Watch our exclusive video interview with White above.

See Ignore the ‘Yellowstone’ rumors! Kevin Costner isn’t going anywhere and remains the star of the hit Western

Paramount Network’s hit neo-Western, created by Oscar nominee Taylor Sheridan (“Hell or High Water”), centers on a...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Body Double (1984)Born of film noir and Alfred Hitchcock, erotic thrillers began to flourish in Hollywood in the 1980s, with Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984) from Brian DePalma, and the knock-out success of Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987). Although nudity in film had been acceptable for a couple of decades, mainstream American cinema didn’t quite know how to do softcore cinema the way the European’s had managed to. So it’s almost as if erotic thrillers provided a solution—sex can be shown as long as it was presented with a threat, and usually, a punishment. In the hands of crafty screenwriters, bold stars, and directors who were not bashful, the genre stands out for its ability to titillate, taking audiences on a wild ride where sex can undo marriages and careers.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Art-House Animation

If your eyes are tired of the latest cookie-cutter animation from the Hollywood mill, Criterion is featuring quite a line-up of inventive arthouse offerings in the field. With works by Marcell Jankovics, Satoshi Kon, Ari Folman, Don Hertzfeldt, Karel Zeman, and more, the series includes The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962), Belladonna of Sadness (1973), Fantastic Planet (1973), Watership Down (1978), Son of the White Mare (1981), Alice (1988), Millennium Actress (2001), Mind Game (2004), Paprika (2006), Persepolis (2007), Waltz with Bashir (2008), Mary and Max (2009), It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), Tower (2016), The Wolf House (2018), No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019), and more.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Neo-Noir

One of the greatest series to arrive on the Criterion Channel thus far is this selection of neo-noir offerings, including Brian De Palma’s masterpieces Blow Out and Body Double,...

The July lineup at The Criterion Channel has been revealed, most notably featuring the new Wong Kar Wai restorations from the recent box set release, including As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and his shorts Hua yang de nian hua and The Hand.

Also among the lineup is a series on neo-noir with Body Double, Manhunter, Thief, The Last Seduction, Cutter’s Way, Brick, Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and more. The channel will also feature a spotlight on art-house animation with work by Marcell Jankovics, Satoshi Kon, Ari Folman, Don Hertzfeldt, Karel Zeman, and more.

With Jodie Mack’s delightful The Grand Bizarre, the landmark doc Hoop Dreams, Orson Welles’ take on Othello, the recent Oscar entries Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and You Will Die at Twenty, and much more,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

After Poetry, it makes sense that Lee Chang-dong would find himself interested in deconstructing another literary genre: the murder mystery. Adapting Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning” for the screen, the South Korean master has created something that feels akin to a real page turner, with each cut, the tensions, and the mystery rise as we become desperate to know whatever happened to Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), the young woman who went missing, leaving her childhood friend Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) searching for her. With pulpy characters, including a delicious Steven Yeun as a mysterious Gatsby-like figure, and a dark sense of humor, the film also serves as a study of class and the way in which the...

Film posters are often the first piece of movie iconography to draw us into a new world. They are symbols of a new adventure, a promise to eager film fans that something exciting is coming. Whether they are blu-tacked to bedroom walls or plastered hundreds of feet high in Leicester Square, these images have the power to enthral and entice.

The very best of these posters become emblems, the film that exist to promote emboldened by their imagery. Whether you love the minimalist symbolism of Saul Bass, or the warm, detailed glow of Drew Struzan, or more recently the master of negative space Olly Moss, these posters are works of art in their own right, the artists who create them legends in their own lifetimes.

On the 22nd of April fans around the world will have the chance to bid for their very own piece of film history, as Prop...

Larry McMurtry, the Texas novelist known for American West epics like Lonesome Dove and the Oscar-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, has died. McMurtry’s death on Thursday was first reported by The New York Times. He was 84.

Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936, McMurtry was a prolific author with an uncanny gift for making a lengthy opus like Lonesome Dove — all 843 pages — eminently readable. The page-turning tale of two grizzled cowboys on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the mid-19th century won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. First...

Larry McMurtry, who won an Oscar for penning Brokeback Mountain, earned a nomination for The Last Picture Show and authored books that spawned Emmy winner Lonesome Dove and Best Picture Oscar winner Terms of Endearment, died Thursday of heart failure. He was 84. The news was confirmed to media outlets by family spokeswoman and 42West CEO Amanda Lundberg.

McMurtry — whose son is the singer-songwriter James McMurtry — won the Pulitzer Prize for writing Lonesome Done, which became a popular 1989 CBS miniseries and spawned a sequel and a syndicated series, and was awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

McMurtry’s 1975 book Terms of Endearment became the 1983 film from writer-director-producer James L. Brooks. Starring MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Jeff Daniels and John Lithgow, the pic was a commercial smash and led all films with 11 Oscar noms. Along with Best Pictrure, it earned Academy Awards for Shirley MacLaine, Nicholson and...

Rosamund Pike plays the villainous Marla Grayson in the new Netflix film “I Care a Lot.” The role just earned the actress her third Golden Globe nomination and her first victory on Sunday night.

Pike recently spoke with Gold Derby contributing editor Riley Chow about what she thinks of her character, what brought her back to playing a character like Amy Dunne in “Gone Girl” and what projects she has coming up. Watch the exclusive interview above and read the complete transcript below.

SEEGolden Globes nominee profile: Rosamund Pike (‘I Care a Lot’) affirms herself as an HFPA favorite

Gold Derby: There are a lot of films about anti-heroes, but “I Care a Lot” really stood out for me because I found myself actively rooting against the main character. I find that usually in these movies, you still kind of want to see how far they go but I feel...

Emmy-nominated film and TV editor Richard Bracken has died. He was 90.

Bracken died Thursday of kidney failure in Chatsworth, California, according to his daughter Kathleen Bracken.

Over the course of his 30 year career, Bracken served as editor for a roster of television classics, including “Columbo,” “The Bold Ones” and “Ironside.” He spent a particularly fruitful number of years working for Oscar-nominated producer Ross Hunter, editing films “The Thrill of It All” and “Madame X,” miniseries “The Moneychangers” and NBC drama “A Family Upside Down,” which starred Fred Astaire and Helen Hayes.

Much of Bracken’s career was dedicated to television, having also worked on NBC drama “Run for Your Life,” ABC American Western series “Alias Smith and Jones” and TV movie “The Jesse Owens Story.” His work was recognized with four Emmy nominations, including for the 1976 TV miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man” and the Anjelica Huston-starring miniseries “Buffalo Girls...

The coronavirus has made everyone a bit sensitive, with good reason, inspiring memes around such now-sensitive movie titles as delayed 007 entry “No Time to Die” and Emily Ting’s culture-shock indie “Go Back to China.” To this list of inappropriately named movies we might add “Why Don’t You Just Die!” — except that Russian director Kirill Sokolov’s pitch-black horror debut, which nixed its April 10 theatrical plans in favor of a straight-to-streaming option two weeks later, is the kind of deranged Grand Guignol bloodbath that’s wrong in all the right ways. So, in a sense, it fits.

Set almost entirely in a corrupt cop’s Moscow apartment, “Why Don’t You Just Die!” is a neatly conceived dark-comedy chamber piece — à la the Wachowski siblings’ clockwork-perfect queer-noir “Bound” or Sidney Lumet’s airtight but otherwise diabolical “Deathtrap” — in which a simple setup spirals into unimaginably twisted mayhem. A tough, agitated young...

Awkwafina will star in the fantasy-adventure feature film “The Last Adventure of Constance Verity” for Legendary.

The production company has acquired the feature film rights to adapt the eponymous series written by A. Lee Martinez. John Raffo has written the script.

Jon Shestack, who brought the project to Raffo and attached Awkwafina, is producing. Jon Silk will oversee alongside Jay Ashenfelter for Legendary Entertainment.

The series follows Constance Verity who, for mysterious reasons, was thrust into a battle with the supernatural from the moment she was born, and has been saving the world from disaster ever since. She’s exhausted and wants to sample what she has missed out on: a boyfriend, a normal job, best friends. But it’s not easy to walk away from a life of adventure when in fact you are the chosen one.

Saga Press published “The Last Adventure of Constance Verity” in 2016 and a...

A TV series about the Wwi spy Mata Hari, directed by Roland Joffe, is one of two projects that adorn the debut slate of new production company Palanquin. Noir-thriller “Call Center” completes the initial line up.

Palanquin is jointly headed by producer Guy Louthan and Joffe. The company will focus on producing Southeast Asian projects including India-based film and television projects.

Joffe believes that that the true story of Mata Hari is more bizarre than the lurid reputation that she has since attracted as an exotic dancer and spy. To be produced by John Fitzgerald and Julian Grimmond (“The Amazing Race”), “Mata Hari” is structured as an eight-part series that charts the extraordinary life of Magritte, a Dutch girl who escaped an abusive childhood, fled to the Far East with a brilliant but manipulative adventurer who was more than twice her age, and was sucked into the world of espionage,...

The American Society of Cinematographers said today that Robert Richardson will receive its Asc Lifetime Achievement Award and Jeff Jur is set for the Career Achievement in Television Award. They will pick up their prizes February 9 during the 33rd Asc Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.

Asc also noted that it also will marks the guild’s 100 anniversary during the 2019 trophy show.

In a career spanning nearly four decades and counting. Richardson has won three Cinematography Oscars — for Hugo (2012), The Aviator (2005), and JFK (1992) — and been nominated six other times for The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds, Snow Falling on Cedars, Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon. His most recent film is A Private War, in is in theaters, and his latest of several Quentin Tarantino films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is slated for release next year.

Jur has a pair of Emmy...

A gloriously repellent performance by M Emmet Walsh is one of many highlights of this thriller – a drum-tight gem that launched a film-making phenomenon

The Coen brothers’ debut from 1984 is this superb, slightly atypical classic (which got a little-known and rather baffling Chinese-language remake from Zhang Yimou in 2009 entitled A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop). The original is now getting a rerelease: a gripping, drum-tight noir masterpiece to compare with Touch of Evil.

Apart from everything else, it has one of the most disturbing nightmare scenes I have ever sat through. Yet for all the mastery with which it is written and planned out, right down to the spectacular final line and the eerie brilliance of the dying man’s point of view, Blood Simple does not hint – or does so only indirectly – at the more prolix wit, the verbal, visual riffing and offbeat wackiness of the Coens’ later gems.

The Last Seduction: Coppola Eschews Subtext with High Profile Remake

Claiming to be a closer adaptation to Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel than the famed 1971 Don Siegel version starring Clint Eastwood, Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled unfortunately seems a missed opportunity.

Continue reading...

Thank God for Clint Eastwood. “Sully” is the sole bright spot during this disastrous fall 2016 box office decline.

This weekend three new studio wide releases —”Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” (20th Century Fox), “Deepwater Horizon” (Lionsgate) and “Masterminds” (Relativity) — grossed a total of $56 million! Compare that to the $54 million that “The Martian” grossed by itself exactly one year ago.

With “Queen of Katwe” (Disney) drawing little interest, “The Magnificent Seven” diving 55% on its second weekend and other films not holding well, the weakness is widespread. Only “Sully” is thriving among fall openers.

This is distressing news for theaters. The 27 days of the season show a drop of 9% from last year. That’s $50 million. During the fall season a strong film or two (“The Girl on the Train” and “The Birth of a Nation” take their chances next week) can quickly change the direction, so it’s not fatal.

Mark Harrison Sep 13, 2016

Before he hit big with Star Wars and Star Trek, Jj Abrams was penning films such as Forever Young, Regarding Henry and Armageddon...

Jj Abrams is one of the most powerful people in Hollywood right now. Over his career in the movies, he's written, directed, produced, acted and played a wicked keyboard solo on Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions, and through his production company Bad Robot, his name is counted among the credits of massive franchises like Cloverfield, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and of course Star Wars. He's more of a household name than most filmmakers of his generation and we sometimes wish we wanted anything as much as he wants that Steven Spielberg status.

You can't blame him when you hear about his first paid job in the film industry. Returning a bunch of Spielberg's personal super-8 home movies that he discovered after his...

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Castle enacts another Firefly reunion as Summer Glau appears in season 8 of the Nathan Fillion-led detective show...

This review contains spoilers.

8.13 And Justice For All & 8.14 The G.D.S.

I'm playing a little catch-up this week, after a bout of flu, and Castle had two interesting if flawed episodes to get me through at least some of the Nyquil-infused twilight.

And Justice For All is one of the sub-genres of Castle that I both love and hate. As an American, I appreciate anytime a show that doesn’t have to takes on a political issue and does something enlightening with it. And a few months ago, the topic of illegal immigrants being extorted to avoid deportation, and a sitting judge making kickbacks off funnelling those immigrants who cannot afford the payments into the private prison industry, was one that might have seemed, in my country, like...

ABC’s Castle has stories to tell beyond this season. But just in case, the showrunners — like those before them — are prepared to hedge their bets and work toward a season finale that doubles as a capper to the series as a whole.

Related2016 Renewal Scorecard: What’s Coming Back? What’s Getting Cancelled? What’s on the Bubble?

When TVLine spoke to co-showrunners Alexi Hawley and Terence Paul Winter about the fall finale, we pointed out that the series had been hovering — though quite steadily — around ratings lows since returning down in September. As such, the conversation turned to:...

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This review contains spoilers.

8.7 The Last Seduction

I signed off last week’s review by pointing out that the absence of Kate in the episode had the unfortunate effect of making us realize that we didn’t really miss her all that much. So it was wise—and possibly the first truly smart thing done all season—to follow that up with The Last Seduction, an episode that reminds us precisely why we should miss our female lead.

The episode revolves—ostensibly—around the murder of a gigolo: a handsome actor who seduces older, rich, married women for initially unspecified but obviously nefarious purposes (boy, wouldn’t it be nice to see more May-December romantic or sexual attachments with women in the December role that were actually based in mutual attraction?). He ends up dead at just about the moment he decides that what he’s doing isn’t very nice,...

Recently, ABC released the new,official synopsis/spoilers for their upcoming "Castle" episode 7 of season 8. The episode is entitled, "The Last Seduction," and it turns out that we're going to see some very interesting stuff go down as Don Juan becomes the main focus of Castle and Beckett's latest investigation after a seducer comes up murdered, and more. In the new, 7th episode press release: On Their One-year Anniversary, Castle And Beckett Investigate The Death Of A Don Juan, On ABC's "Castle." Press release number 2: In order to hunt down the brutal murderer of a grifting seducer, Castle & Beckett is going to have to investigate New York's elite. In the meantime, Castle will plan to surprise Beckett on their one-year wedding anniversary. Guest stars feature: Sunkrish Bala as Vikram Singh, Lindsay Price as Lindsey Trent, Sheldon Bailey as Anton Ford and Andrea Roth as Nancy Underwood. The episode was...

Castle‘s Captain Kate Beckett is scantily clad on the occasion of her first wedding anniversary — though probably not for the reasons one might suspect/hope, as seen in these photos from the fall’s antepenultimate episode.

RelatedNovember Sweeps Preview: Scoop on Castle, Once and More

In “The Last Seduction” (airing Nov. 16), Rick and Kate manage to mark a milestone in their admittedly fractured marriage, all in the course of hunting down a murderous grifter. Lindsay Price (All My Children) and Andrea Roth (Rescue Me) guest-star.

“What’s exciting about the episode is that this is the first anniversary for...

Can someone make sense of the Once Upon a Time and Castle schedules? Which Scorpion secret shall be revealed? Will the Sleepy sisters enjoy some sibling revelry? Read on for answers to those questions plus teases from other shows.

Related2016 Renewal Scorecard: What’s Coming Back? What’s Getting Cancelled? What’s on the Bubble?

I hope you can clarify: I thought Once Upon a Time Episode 510 was supposed to be finale before hiatus, and 511 (the 100th episode) was the spring premiere? —Katrina

Clarify, I shall! Or rather, co-creator Adam Horowitz shall. He told me that Episode 10, titled “Broken Heart,...

"Red Rock West" (1994) "Red Rock West" takes us back to a time when Nicolas Cage was a great, risk-taking actor. Director John Dahl had the misfortune of having both "Red Rock West" and "The Last Seduction" get troubled releases in 1993/1994. "The Last Seduction" had its debut on HBO and thus was ineligible for the Oscars, which essentially robbed Linda Fiorentino of a much deserved nomination (the film did, however, get a limited theatrical run after its HBO debut). "Red Rock West" was Dahl's indisputably great straight-to-video movie. When Cage's Mike enters a mysterious small town and is mistaken for a hitman, he takes the money and runs before the kill. Bad idea, Mixing surreal sequences with nasty violence, Dahl is a master at work here, infusing his film with clever noir relics and an abundance of plot twists. Best of all is Dennis Hopper, who basically does what Dennis Hopper does best: Play a homicidal.

The Lego Movie has earned prizes far beyond an Oscar nomination. But the snub still hurts...

The dust has settled somewhat on last week's Oscar nominations, and as is the norm, controversy has not been in short supply. The more Oscar-friendly films - such as The Imitation Game - have already arguably been over-rewarded, whereas edgy, genuinely brave and daring movies such as Nightcrawler have been all but blocked out. To be fair, that's a surprise to virtually nobody: rarely have the Oscars ventured too far out of a mainstream comfort zone when it comes to giving out main prizes.

Yet the snub this year that's got people talking the most is the bizarre failure to nominate The Lego Movie for a Best Animated Feature Oscar.

It is, to be fair, a fairly staggering omission. For many people, The Lego Movie was the finest animated production of last year; a film bubbling with ideas,...

Welcome to Sexpositions, a weeklong Vulture celebration of sex scenes in movies and on TV. A good sex scene is about a lot more than just showing some skin. (Though sometimes it's about that, too!) In director John Dahl’s 1994 neo-noir The Last Seduction, Linda Fiorentino’s femme-fatale character Bridget Gregory turns sex into a spider’s web — a tool for ensnaring her victims. As the hapless Mike Swale, Peter Berg played one of Bridget’s character-revealing sexual conquests. He tells us about the experience.I was hanging on for dear life in those scenes. Linda was by far the aggressor. There’s a scene where I had to tell her I was hung like a horse, and she stopped and said, "Really? Let’s see." She unzipped my pants, reached down, and grabbed a hold of me and squeezed hard with a handful of ice. That’s when I...

He began the 90s with Bill and Ted's silliness and ended them with The Matrix's existential angst, but in between came Keanu Reeves's greatest role as Jack Traven, a taciturn, tough-guy cop who oozed charisma. Getting the job done never looked so cool

Why I'd like to be Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous

Why I'd like to be Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink

Why I'd like to be Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction Continue reading...

Cold in July

Directed by Jim Mickle

Written by Nick Damici

2014, USA

Fans of pulp fiction will get a kick out of Cold in July, a gritty – at times bloody – and darkly funny crime yarn directed by provocateur Jim Mickle (Mulberry Street, Stakeland). This rigid and enthralling Texas thriller is one the most hyperbolic and stylish crime yarns in years. Think Drive, but with a better cast – a better script – and a sense of humour as sharp as a knife.

Jim Mickle’s violent black comedy stars Michael C. Hall as Richard Dane, a suburban family man who has a small-town framing shop, a beautiful wife and son – and a gun hidden away in the house which he should have no business owning. The opening scene gets the plot moving fairly quickly as he confronts and then fatally shoots a burglar who’s broken into his home. The local sheriff...

He's a giant dog/bear with a blood-curdling howl who oozes cool as he flies spaceships around the Star Wars galaxy and shoots clone fascists with lasers plus he saved me from the terrors of Watership Down

Why I'd like to be Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink

Why I'd like to be Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction

Why I'd like to be Val Kilmer in Tombstone Continue reading...

We talk to director Jim Mickle about his latest film Cold In July, the secret of suspense and his influences, from the Coens to Argento...

Interview

Where Hollywood appears to have largely abandoned the thriller genre in favour of ever bigger action adventures and sequels, indie filmmakers have stepped in to fill the breach. Earlier this year saw the release of Jeremy Saulnier's quirky low-budget genre piece Blue Ruin - a satisfyingly grisly thriller with a great everyman performance from Macon Blair.

This Friday sees the UK release of Cold In July, the latest film from director Jim Mickle. It stars Dexter's Michael C Hall as Richard, an ordinary family man thrown into a wild and unpredictable criminal underworld after shooting a mysterious intruder in his living room one night.

Adapted from Joe Landsdale's novel of the same name, Cold In July initially slips into the southern neo-noir subgenre,...

Written by Peter Ackerman and directed by John Dahl (Rounders, The Last Seduction), the eighth episode of The Americans' second season is another classic, suffused with feelings of guilt and culpability, and eager to confront head-on the implications of its characters' actions. The final scene is one of the most wrenching I've seen in a TV drama: Henry, son of the show's married secret spies, has been caught breaking into a neighbor's house to play their coveted Intellivision video game system, and tearfully confesses and asks forgiveness."I know the difference between right and wrong," he tells Philip and Elizabeth, after the neighbor family catches him snoozing on their couch, video-game console in hand. "I do. It just seemed like no one would even know! And they weren't there, you guys weren't here. Once I did it, it just seemed so easy to keep doing it. I know it was wrong,...

“Weight” was the best episode of Justified’s fifth season, partly because Taylor Elmore and Keith Schreier’s script resolved so many lingering subplots in dramatically perfect ways, but also because it was directed by John Dahl (The Last Seduction, Rounders). Dahl, one of the great, largely unsung heroes of American indie film, has always directed the way Elmore Leonard writes: eloquently but cleanly, finding pathos in hard, dark places and lighting it just enough that you can appreciate it but not so much that melodrama shades over into kitsch. Scenes that might otherwise have been merely functional had a snap, even a grimy beauty, thanks to Dahl’s keen eye for arranging characters within the proscenium of the 16x9 frame. The compositions, the lighting, the energy of certain scenes lent already powerful moments a cry-in-your beer grandeur.Let’s start with the fate of poor Chelsea the pit bull.

The Overlooked Hotel, having found a spare room for Stephen Tobolowsky, now welcomes another deserving guest, the late, great Jt Walsh. You know, that really talented guy from that thing you really like.

Jt Walsh, in many ways the definitive supporting character actor, passed away suddenly in 1998. He succumbed to a heart attack at the relatively tender age of 54, but left behind a quite astonishingly varied and accomplished body of work, despite never being nominated for anything other than a Primetime Emmy and a couple of SAG cast awards. If nothing else, this amply demonstrates that far too often, real talent goes unrewarded and although (of course) not every0ne can be lavished with awards and in any given year the same performance is likely to hoover up every award going, the fact that Walsh never received an Oscar, Golden Globe or SAG award (or even a solo nomination) is a glaring omission.

Fifteen years ago, Peter Berg was an actor with a few notable credits (among them, a regular gig on Chicago Hope and a supporting role in the noir classic The Last Seduction), but he's since engineered an impressive career change as a film director, working himself up to Hollywood's top tier after helming films like Friday Night Lights and Hancock. As he'll be the first to admit, Berg needed every bit of that leverage to make his new movie Lone Survivor, adapted from the book by former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell, about a harrowing Afghanistan mission that found Luttrell (played in the film by Mark Wahlberg) and his fellow SEALs (played by Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, and Emile Hirsch) stuck on a dangerous Afghan mountain, radically outnumbered and outgunned while awaiting rescue. Berg recently sat down with Vulture to discuss how he pulled it off, when he had to calm...

Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 14 Nov 2013 - 06:19

The overlooked greats of the year 1998 come under the spotlight in our list of its 25 underappreciated movies...

Dominated as it was by the financial success of two giant killer asteroid movies, gross-out comedy hit There's Something About Mary and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, 1998 proved to be an extraordinary year for cinema.

Okay, so history doesn't look back too fondly on Roland Emmerich's mishandled Godzilla remake, and Lethal Weapon 4 was hardly the best buddy-cop flick ever made, despite its handsome profit. But search outside the top-10 grossing films of that year, and you'll find all kinds of spectacular modern classics: Peter Weir's wonderful The Truman Show, John Frankenheimer's rock-solid thriller Ronin, and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

Then there was The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers' sublime comedy that has since become a deserved and oft-quoted cult favourite.

Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 17 Oct 2013 - 06:29

Here are 25 more great, unsung films - this time, from the year 1994...

Yes, 1994. The year cinemas were dominated by such whimsical wonders as The Lion King, Forrest Gump, The Mask and, erm, True Lies. It was also the year Gump dominated the Academy Awards, and Four Weddings And A Funeral loomed large at the Baftas.

As ever, there was so much more to the year's cinematic landscape than Tom Hanks' park bench ramblings or Hugh Grant mithering from beneath his gorgously crafted hair. To prove it, here's a list of 25 films that, in our estimation, are among its most underappreciated. There's much horror, drama, tears and laughter, plus a couple of classic documentaries, too.

25. Phantasm III: Lord Of The Dead

The Phantasm series was quite unusual, in that writer and director Don Coscarelli made all four of them. This means that,...

Since the finish of BBC's extra bleak crime drama "Luther" in July, many have been wondering more about what comes next for the franchise.

Creator Neil Cross has previously stated on numerous occasions that there have been plans for a movie, but wouldn't say if it is going to be a prequel or a sequel.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Cross finally confirmed that it will be a prequel. The script is done and he hopes to get the film made next year.

Cross says: "It will follow his [Luther's] career in the earlier days, when he is still married to Zoe, and the final scene in the film is the first of the initial TV series." That scene being the death of a serial paedophile Henry Madsen (Anton Saunders) whom Luther failed to save from a fall off a catwalk in a chemical factory.

Cross says that part of...

Shallow Grave

Directed by Danny Boyle

Written by John Hodge

1994, UK

From its opening sequence set in the point of view of a driver’s seat headed down the streets of Edinburgh, with the techno sounds playing in the background, audiences back in 1994 must have known they were in for something dark, hip and very different. Boyle’s talent was apparent right from the start with those overhead rotating shots closed in on Christopher Eccleston’s head. In his big-screen directing debut, British film maker Danny Boyle demonstrates wit, patience and shows what he can do with little resources and a limited budget. We knew we had a star in the making. Invoking the memory of Alfred Hitchcock, Shallow Grave is a deadpan, nihilistic thriller, best compared to The Last Seduction and Red Rock West – with an overcast similar to the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan.