Jem and the Hologramsis a genuine live-action movie that is actually happening. Look, it's not that the idea of a toy line/cartoon coming to the movies is a particularly bad thing. The Transformers franchise, dreadful as it is, prints boatloads of cash, and I have a real soft spot for GI Joe: Retaliation.

It's just that Jem is a bit of a trickier, more out-there concept. Giant robots and soldier superheroes are one thing. An adventuring glam-rock band is something else. And really, if you're not going to go all out with the visuals in this flick, don't bother, right?

The good news is that this first official photo from the movie, is...colorful enough. The quality isn't great, as it's a scan from the March issue of Elle, but we got it from the good folks at io9, who actually have a much more detailed breakdown of what's going on in this photo than I'm qualified to give you. Sorry, folks, I was more into the retro tones of Josie and the Pussycats (the movie is also good, so be quiet) than the more '80s-tastic Holograms.

Jem and the Holograms is directed by Jon M. Chu (who directed my favorite GI Joe movie). Aubrey Peeples will play Jem, while her band, The Holograms will consist of Stefanie Scott (Kimber, Jem's sister), Aurora Perrineau (Shana), Hayley Kiyoko (Aja). Molly Ringwald, and Juliette Lewis. It opens on October 23rd, 2015.

And, for real, there had better be a cameo by members of the actual Misfits in this thing.

A lot has changed in post-apocalyptic Ditka Country since last year’s spring blockbuster hit, Divergent. For starters, lead actress Shailene Woodley cut her hair for The Fault in Our Stars, and as a result Tris Prior is now rocking a pixie cut as she takes the battle to the authoritarian leadership of the Erudite in The Divergent Series: Insurgent. But better still, the box office success of Divergent ensures that Insurgent will enjoy all the big budget pyrotechnics fans of the Veronica Roth book series crave. Just look at this final trailer for proof.

Directed by Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife, RED), The Divergent Series: Insurgent picks up with Tris Prior (Woodley) on the run from civilization after the fallout from the previous film. Despite saving the dystopia from an Erudite militaristic takeover, she and boyfriend Four (Theo James) have been targeted as fugitives by the community’s leader (Kate Winslet). Sides will be chosen and secrets revealed. The film also stars Octavia Spencer, Jonny Weston, Naomi Watts, and Miles Teller, who is coming off the fantastic Whiplash.

The Divergent Series: Insurgent opens on March 20, 2015.

Sylvester Stallone really knows how to milk a franchise. He’s pumped out three Expendables flicks, an extraneous Rambo, and has somehow managed to keep the Rockyseries going strong. The next installment in the Rocky franchise is the spin-off Creed, which will feature Sly in character as Rocky Balboa, now transitioning into the Mickey role of sitting ringside for his former rival’s son, Adonis, which is the perfect name for the son of Apollo Creed.

Adonis will be played by Michael B. Jordan, known for excellent in roles on TV’s Friday Night Lights and in the independent picture Fruitvale Station. Jordan will next be seen as Johnny "The Human Torch" Storm in Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot.

Images from Creed have been available for a while, but now we have an official synopsis with some new character details that you can check out below:

Adonis Johnson (Jordan) never knew his famous father, world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, who died before he was born.  Still, there’s no denying that boxing is in his blood, so Adonis heads to Philadelphia, the site of Apollo Creed’s legendary match with a tough upstart named Rocky Balboa.

Once in the City of Brotherly Love, Adonis tracks Rocky (Stallone) down and asks him to be his trainer.  Despite his insistence that he is out of the fight game for good, Rocky sees in Adonis the strength and determination he had known in Apollo—the fierce rival who became his closest friend.  Agreeing to take him on, Rocky trains the young fighter, even as the former champ is battling an opponent more deadly than any he faced in the ring.

With Rocky in his corner, it isn’t long before Adonis gets his own shot at the title…but can he develop not only the drive but also the heart of a true fighter, in time to get into the ring?

Sounds like ol’Rocky may be fighting the big C. Will Rock be heading to the main event in the sky? Are you excited by the prospect of this fresh take on the franchise? Sound off in the comments!

Creed hits theaters November 25th.

Source: Badass Digest

Chemistry between actors and actresses is such a fleeting, difficult thing to pin down, and movie screens are littered every week with onscreen couples who fail to find the spark. That’s not the case with Focus, the new heist thriller starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie: at the risk of sounding tasteless, I might be a little more open to believing those trashy tabloid stories about their supposed off-screen dalliance based on the heat the two generate in this twisty caper from writers/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Crazy, Stupid Love). But despite the successful pairing of the veteran Smith and relative newcomer Robbie, Focus eventually plays out like a con game itself, building up to a finish that leaves you feeling vaguely cheated.

Smith plays Nicky, a career grifter whose expertise ranges from picking pockets to running long cons worth millions. The only things he can’t handle well, thanks to a dysfunctional family history, are attachments; like Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley in Heat, he’s prepared to walk away from anyone and anything at a moment’s notice. But when an aspiring con artist named Jess (Robbie) comes into his orbit, Nicky is slightly thrown off. After showing her the basics in New York and introducing her to a complicated scam at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, he ditches her – only to run into her again three years later in Buenos Aires. It is there that Nicky is about to pull off a massive con involving a high-stakes auto race. The question is, can he keep his focus on the prize?

Ficarra and Requa drape their story – which is, at its heart, a slow-burning romance dressed in the trappings of a faster-paced crime escapade – in as many beautiful decorations as possible. The locations are sumptuous, the cars and clothes often fabulous, and of course the 46-year-old Smith and 24-year-old Robbie are in peak shape. Smith, after phoning it in for Men in Black 3 and going almost ridiculously grim in After Earth, finds a sweet spot here. Nicky combines his jauntier wisecracking self with the heart of a wounded, defensive child left to fend on the streets. Robbie, meanwhile, oozes the same simmering sexuality that lit up The Wolf of Wall Street in a role not too far removed from that film’s Naomi; she’s a brash, confident presence, but we’ll hopefully see more range in from her in roles down the line.

[Related: First trailer for Focus, starring Will Smith]

Less charismatic than Smith and Robbie, but equally helpful, are a sturdy supporting cast that includes standout performances from B.D. Wong as a sleazy businessman who goes toe-to-toe – and millions-to-millions – with Nicky in a Super Bowl betting marathon, and Gerald McRaney as the ruthless, cruelly misanthropic right hand man of the race car owner that hires Nicky in Argentina (between this and his work in House of Cards, McRaney should be first in line if they ever make a biopic of the ultimate amoral bastard, Dick Cheney). Yet the focus here – no pun intended – is squarely on the two leads, who joust with each other in crackling fashion and provide what emotional heart the film has.

But the mechanics of the story around them – starting with Nicky’s Super Bowl scam before moving on to the racecar job in Buenos Aires – often clash with the romantic fireworks. The cons are played for almost Ocean’s Eleven-like complexity and strain one’s belief: the excellent sequence in which Nicky lays out the full picture of the Super Bowl job pushes his scientific approach toward the con to its breaking point, but the Argentina job smashes right through it. The switchbacks, betrayals and reversals pile so high that they finally begin to totter over, leading to a strangely subdued climax that doesn’t bring the central relationship to a boil or generate the kind of satisfying payoff Steven Soderbergh achieved with the first of his caper trilogy.

Focus is amiable, intelligent and slick enough to lure you into its game; there’s no higher purpose to the film than to wrap you around its finger and keep you entwined there. But that disappointing final stretch makes you realize in retrospect that even with its gleaming, eye-catching surface pleasures, Focus is as shallow as the life that Nicky and his colleagues lead. In a way, the filmmakers – aided and abetted by their willing leads – are pulling a scam on the audience too. It seems like a lot of fun along the way, until you realized you’ve just been distracted all this time.

Focus is out in theaters Friday (February 27).

It would appear that Dr. Jones is not the only temple running explorer about to enjoy a big screen resurgence. Indeed, MGM and Warner Bros. made official steps Wednesday to resurrect Lara Croft in a Tomb Raider reboot.

MGM has revealed that it’s partnering with WB and producer Graham King (Argo, World War Z) to bring the alluring Lara Croft back to life and into theaters. Further they have hired Evan Daugherty to pen the screenplay for the reboot. The geek community should already be very familiar with Daugherty since he also scripted Divergent and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot; he is also writing the forthcoming GI Joe 3.

While the original series, which lasted from 2001 to 2003 at least began with a successful entry that featured a well cast Angelina Jolie as the titular raider of tombs (plus Daniel Craig!), it is not what one would call a classic. Similarly, while Daugherty enjoyed two hits last year, I’m not sure many will remember them more fondly (or at all) than the Jolie era of Lara Croft adventures. Then again, as with at least the first film, which grossed over $430 million worldwide, nobody is going to a Tomb Raider flick to stare at the scripted prose.

Deadline

Brian Wilson, the driving force behind The Beach Boys, never surfed. He could add wave after wave of sound when he rhapsodized about the beach, but he felt that sand between his toes though a box he kept by his piano at his home. It took John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd together to rouse him from his piano stool and onto the beach on a film short for Saturday Night Live.

The mad genius of Brian Wilson is featured in the upcoming biopic Love & Mercy from Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. John Cusack plays the grown up man-child Wilson. Paul Dano plays him as a young rock and roller, singing out of the side of his mouth. Elizabeth Banks plays Wilson’s second wife, Melinda. Paul Giamatti plays Dr. Eugene Landy, the therapist who put the sandbox beneath Wilson’s feet.

Love & Mercy is due to hit theaters on June 5th.

Love & Mercywas directed by Bill Pohlad. The screenplay was written by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner.

Love & Mercy tells the story of Brian Wilson as he led is brothers from a band that ripped off Chuck Berry riffs wholesale to becoming a major influential force in rock music, rivaling even the Beatles. The Beatles said their classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandalbum was produced to beat the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album’s clean and clear harmonic production.

Love & Mercy premiered in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Love or hate the trailer that debuted earlier this month for the Fantastic Four reboot, there is no denying that Josh Trank got your attention. Indeed, while it’s clear that this iteration of Marvel’s First Family is a long way from the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby glory days, there is something about the Cronenberg vibes that at least keeps the mind curious about just what kind of shenanigans this Fantastic Four will get up to.

In that vein, four new images of the team have surfaced via Empire, and noticeably it is all pre-powers (or at least we are not seeing them). In the below images, Kate Mara as Sue Storm, Miles Teller as Reed Richards, Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm all appear very human. Perhaps that is the point?

Fantastic Four takes a page out of the Ultimate Comics reimagining of the original super team by de-aging them as five young outsiders that teleport into an alternate, dangerous universe that has horrifying and wondrous effects on their physical forms. With their lives irrevocably distorted, this makeshift family must learn to harness their abilities if they are to save Earth from Doctor Doom.

Fantastic Four flames onto theaters on August 7, 2015.

The French Connection is a seminal work in cop movies. It was that first sniff that hooked the moviegoing public on Hollywood’s war on drugs. It changed the look and the dynamic of law enforcement on film by focusing on the worn heels and tires of street-level surveillance. The movie should be boring with all that waiting around and stealthy shadowing, but the pacing and the performances keep it moving at a breakneck pace comparable to chasing a subway. The French Connection is probably the closest Hollywood has come to a true on-the-street crime procedural in a blockbuster. Things that are clichés in cop movies now were invented here.

The French Connection screeched into theaters in 1971. It was directed by William Friedkin, produced by Philip D'Antoni and starred Gene Hackman as Detective "Popeye" Doyle and Roy Scheider as his partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Russo. The movie also starred Fernando Rey and Tony LoBianco as the criminals. The screenplay was written by Ernest Tidyman. It's a fictionalized adaptation of the 1969 true crime book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy by Robin Moore.

The book focuses on New York Police Department Narcotics Detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso as they follow a hunch named Pasquale "Patsy" Fuca out of the Copacabana nightclub to an international heroin ring. The ensuing investigation led the two narco cops to one of the biggest heroin busts in history. The 1962 pinch pulled in 64 pounds of "pure" heroin, worth about $220 million on the street. A lot of junkies went into forced detox on account of this case.

In so many ways, the movie is completely faithful to the book. In so many ways does it deviate. For the most part, the variations are for cinematic effect. The car chase scene is one of the seven wonders of crime movies, along with waking up to a horse’s head in your bed and the tollbooth scene in The Godfather; Cagney’s death roll down the church stairs in The Roaring Twenties, or Cody’s explosive exit in White Heat; Wesley Snipes canceling his bitch in New Jack City; Al Pacino staring down a chainsaw in Scarface, and the what-the-fuck multiple endings of The Departed.

In the book Egan and Grosso follow Fuca through a huge heroin deal the low-level Mafiosi is making with Jean Jehan. The Frenchman with the connection brings hundreds of pounds of junk through a beautiful new Buick driven by French TV personality Jacques Angelvin. The car is a thing to behold on the page. Angelvin can’t wait to get behind the wheel and he’s got no idea what’s under the hood, in the chassis, or behind the panels. The film captures the mechanical wonder of this drug-delivery system sedan by tearing it up and putting it back together to justify the weight differential caused by hidden drugs. The book explains how grease monkeys did it.

According to Grosso, Corsican Jean Jehan was the kingpin of the French Connection heroin ring during the 1950s and into the 1960s, but he was never arrested for international heroin smuggling. Friedkin contends that Jehan was part of the French Resistance to Nazi Occupation during World War II and that trumps jail time to French authorities. Being a national hero is a get out of jail free card in the progressive country renowned for its cold soup and creamy pastries. Jehan reportedly continued pushing dope all over Europe throughout the eighties and died of old age at his home in Corsica.

The book mentions that Lucky Luciano died in 1962 and pondered whether it was the blown international deal that bugged him to death. The French Connection drug route went through Turkey to France and then to the United States through Canada. The French Connection was headed by the Corsican criminals Paul Carbone, who ran the labs, François Spirito, Antoine Guérini, and Auguste Ricord, Paul Mondoloni and Salvatore Greco. Ricord reportedly laid out the cash from money he stole from the French Gestapo during the German occupation of France He also had some help from the CIA, who gave him seed money to get rid of communists from the loading docks of Corsica in 1947.

In the fifties, the Corsican mob made an alliance with Lucky Luciano creating a super-syndicate for the production, refining and distribution of heroin. The group got opium from Turkey, refined it into heroin in Lebanon and shipped it out from Marseilles, France, into Europe and the U.S. The dope made its way into the Canadian and American markets through the Bonanno and Magaddino familes, allegedly, the mob fathers always denied it.

The French Connection could be a silent film. It has whole scenes that are done in another language without subtitles or dubbing, there are long stretches, almost the whole film actually, where there is no dialogue at all. Unlike stage plays, movies don’t need a lot of conversation and don’t necessarily suffer if you don’t know exactly what is being said. Look at the execution scene in John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre, you don’t have to speak Spanish to know exactly what is going on. The conversations in French are obviously filled with useful information that is going over most of the audience’s head, but we catch on right away when the movie returns to the streets of New York.

Before The French Connection, William Friedkin directed the then-pinnacle of gay celluloid, The Boys in the Band, in 1970. Friedkin made The Exorcist in 1972. He was a master at creating a trend-setting niche. He broke ground, probably without realizing it, just going for the shots. This movie should be boring, the book should be too. It’s basically just standing around and waiting, but even the pizza Popeye eats on the curb is part of a cat and mouse game that’s so wonderfully played out on the streets.

Popeye Doyle was played by Gene Hackman. Hackman always reminded me of Claude Rains. He doesn’t talk like him or look like him, but Hackman is the kind of actor who brings a touch of class and artistry to every role he inhabits, even if the character lacks any style. He brings a sense of bonhomie to Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother in the 1967 gangster classic Bonnie and Clyde. Hackman even brought class to the all-star The Poseidon Adventure, all sweaty and shoving Shelly Winters up a Christmas tree by her ass. Geeks may love him most as Lex Luthor, Superman’s main nemesis. He also brought a touch of justice to Mississippi Burningin 1988. Hackman gave a wonderfully tortuous performance in Unforgiven in 1992 and proved he could do comedy in Get Shorty(1995) and The Birdcage (1996).

Hackman won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in The French Connection.

Roy Scheider plays Buddy "Cloudy" Russo. Scheider made his film debut in the 1964 low budget horror flick The Curse of the Living Corpse where he was billed as Roy R. Scheider. He’d also done Klute the year he did The French Connection. He would reprise his Russo role in 1973’s French Connection follow-up, The Seven-Ups. Scheider would buy a much bigger boat when he traded chasing criminals for sharks as Police Chief Martin Brody in blockbuster Jaws with Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss. Scheider couldn’t keep his onscreen younger brother Dustin Hoffman safe from Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man in 1976. He would return to horror and William Friedkin when he remade the 1953 French film Le Salaire de la peur as Sorcerer.

For his role as Sonny Grosso, Scheider was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He was nominated again when he dropped Visine for to dance through All That Jazz as Bob Fosse.

Salvatore "Sal" Boca was played by Brooklyn-born actor and former Golden Gloves boxer Tony Lo Bianco. Lo Bianco isn’t acting when he’s playing Boca on the streets. He’s walking, he’s talking, he’s going through the motions of the character’s routine. Lo Bianco was known for his tough guy roles in movies like The Honeymoon Killers and God Told Me To. Lo Bianco founded the Triangle Theatre in 1963 where he worked with Roy Scheider. As a stage actor, Lo Bianco won an off-Broadway Obie award for Yanks-3, Detroit-0, Top of the Seventhand was nominated for a Tony for playing Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Lo Bianco has spent a large part of his professional life playing the larger-than-life mayor of New York City Fiorello H. LaGuardia. First in the one-man show, Hizzoner! in 1984, then in 2008 in the play LaGuardia and in October 2012 in the Off-Broadway show The Little Flower.

Alain Charnier was played by Fernando Rey, a Spanish stage and screen actor who has appeared in over 150 movies but is best known his roles his work with surrealist director Luis Buñuel in the films Tristana from 1970, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie from 1972 and That Obscure Object of Desire from 1977.

The movie ends with the bust. The book continues into proving the bust. A lot of work goes into it, papers to fill out: documents to file, typing, all the stuff that happens on the TV series Barney Miller, plus gathering a grand jury and changing warrants to match arrests. Like the last chapter in A Clockwork Orange, the movie ends on the high note rather than settle into something that might mar the legend by overstaying its welcome.

The book and film differ in the details, the names are changed, the streets might be a few blocks away from one source to the other. The book had quite a few scenes that could have been rendered wonderfully on screen. Popeye Doyle is great chasing down suspects as Santa Claus as an opening on film, but the movie could have used the book’s scene with Egan in semi-drag with his pants hiked up under his dress, running past the traffic cops. Maybe Hackman was self-conscious about his gams, maybe the director thought it would be a little too humorous and take away from the trajectory, but I think it fit better than Santa. There is a scene in the book where Patsy’s brother Tony goes after a cop with a crowbar.

The French Connection created the cliché of the cop who leads with his intuition and pisses off other cops. It was drawn from the book’s description of the usual tension between FBI and local law, which is also now a well-worn stereotype. The book gets more heavily into some of the gruff humor that goes on behind the scenes during claustrophobic stake-outs. The movie didn’t try and make hiding in a cellar waiting for someone named Tony to pick up another dozen or so kilos of white powder exciting.

The book barely skims the personalities of the cops, not to the extent that Joseph Wambaugh would do. It mentions that Buddy has a perennial bachelor friend who is getting married. Buddy’s got to cut his best man speech short in order to be in on a collar. Eddie loses his girlfriend to his overzealous nightwork, even though she does hand him a good lead. This dynamic also became a kind of running gag in cop movies.

I like gritty films. I don’t mean seedy or particularly graphic or violent, but the film quality. The stock, there’s something about it that seems made for New York movies. It doesn’t matter if they’re filmed in Arkansas, if the stock is right, there’s something that feels like the neighborhood. I think Lovelace captured the gritty look of seventies movies better than American Hustle, which got more credit for it. Part of the reason grit worked so well in New York at the time is because there was something about it that captured the spirit of the young neighborhood directors. Scorsese, I’m looking at you. The shots were more important than the stock and the stock had an inborn character, like New York City usually becomes a character in movies that are shot there. Friedkin was from Chicago, it’s kind of like a borough right?

A lot of movie connoisseurs of today are bugged by grit in film. But hey, think of it like roughage in your diet because you miss out on a lot of great performances and writing when you can’t get past the imperfections of film grade. So many things are airbrushed or CGI’d or in some other way perfected, when the only thing that a cinematographer has to set up perfectly is the framing, because a great shot is a great shot.

Some of the film looks like it came from surveillance cameras. The static camera catches a frozen moment of time that would look just as natural on the five o’clock local news as it does sandwiched between the perfectly framed angles of the city.

The French Connection brought a sense of realism to Hollywood’s law enforcement films by throwing the book at them.

What happens if we cure death? What if we could bring someone back from the Great Beyond and into a world where the grass is a little less green? More than a science fiction concept, this idea set the standard as the first sci-fi tale ever published in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And this lingering question has persisted up to Pet Sematary and through our latest Blumhouse Production: The Lazarus Effect. Named after that biblical fellow who proved to have merely one foot in the grave, this Lazarus pulls from all of the above material for an intended February fright. If only it lived up to its animated namesake.

As the story of a group of researchers attempting to play God and finding out that they are actually dealing with something far more hellacious, The Lazarus Effect is the quintessential B-horror film that builds on a very tantalizing concept, and then buries it deep in the earth for the sake of familiar jump scares and failing light switches. However, it does enjoy one genuine thrill where no screeching score or sound effects are necessary: Olivia Wilde’s wonderfully demented performance as a modern day Frankenstein monster who revels in the wrath of a woman scorned. And being awakened from her brief trip to Hell has left her very scorned, indeed.

When the movie starts, Wilde is the very charming if somewhat tightly wound Zoe, one of the lead medical researchers of the Lazarus Project at an unnamed university. She is a kind-hearted woman with a terrible childhood secret that haunts her and feeds into her Catholic guilt as an adult. Thus it makes her engagement with lead scientist Frank (Mark Duplass) a bit of a curiosity since he is an out-and-out atheist who wants to disprove there is an afterlife by bringing the recently deceased back to life. Why such disparate perspectives would collaborate on playing God is an intriguing question that, like so many others in The Lazarus Effect, is promptly ignored.

Using the vantage of a new undergrad named Ava (Sarah Bolger), who was brought in to videotape the transcendent moments of their experiments, the film swiftly and economically invents a found footage-ish exposition dump to lay out their plans, as well as introduce us to stoner biotech bad boy Clay (Evan Peters), and sweet computer guy Niko (Donald Glover), the latter of whom is carrying a barely concealed torch for Zoe. All of this is clumsily dropped in about five minutes, and we’re off to bringing a dead dog back to life, and then after a freak lab accident, Zoe as well. Carnage and death ensues since some form of Hell has come with her.

The most thought provoking ideas raised by The Lazarus Effect are why it is such a disappointing experience to sit through. The picture is touching the immortal question that plagues all mortal beings: what comes next (if anything)? The film pays plenty of lip service to the scientific theory that all near-death experiences with bright lights are just a chemical reaction to DMT flooding the body. However, like so much else in this film, it is only lip service.

Immediately following Zoe’s unnatural resurrection, the question is posed whether she actually went to Hell for a childhood mistake or whether before she died, she re-experienced a traumatic event due to DMT-created hallucinations. However, both concepts are equally disfavored by Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater’s script, which dares to plunge into mankind’s greatest anxieties and even more audaciously finds in such rich ambiguity a generic slasher movie formula. It matters little if Zoe went to a Hell of her own making or a demonic one, because she’s now going to torment viewers with the most predictable series of “jumps” this side of a Wayans parody, resuscitating even the “she cut the phone lines” cliché.

Director David Gelb, whose previous feature was the delightful documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, is off to a surprisingly bumpy start in narrative filmmaking here since he squanders the potential of a set-up that 1980s David Cronenberg would have a field day unpacking. Indeed, dropping the death motif for the same silly superpowered origin story of Lucy, this film also becomes about a heroine who is forced against her will to use “more than 10 percent of her brain,” which apparently equates to telekinesis and psychic mind-reading abilities. And visually that means an overreliance on closed circuit footage of Zoe going the full Carrie White on each of her former colleagues. Less than point and shoot, it’s hardly a step up from found footage in some sequences.

But in the role of those colleagues, the cast does fine with what they are given. Almost all of this repertory hails from a better television series (House, Community, The Tudors, American Horror Story), and they all at the very least inhabit their characters with more life than the reanimated dog prowling the halls. Donald Glover especially brings some sympathy to what on the page probably read like a throwaway part.

Still, this is Wilde’s show and she knows that she is the best thing in it. As she gets to embody both pre and post-death Zoe, not to mention many conflicting personalities after waking up, Wlide runs the gamut of almost several characters in a single film. The fun she has switching between guilt-ridden and wicked sinner is also the only kind of amusement you’ll have too. But by the third act, when she is playing with her food one victim at a time, we cannot deny her the joy of digging in.

The Lazarus Effect is a routine thriller about an atheist-led research team named after a story from The Gospel of John. The lack of awareness by any of them on this contradiction sums up the film in a nutshell as a surface level series of jolts with something far more sinister or profound hiding beneath the surface, waiting to be quickened to life.

***You can bring me back to life by following me @DCrowsNest.

The fourth installment of the Daniel Craig as 007 era is upon us, and with Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) returning to the helm of the series, one should have very good feelings about where this is heading.

Perhaps that is why in our first actual behind-the-scenes footage of Spectre, Eon Productions is comfortable enough to let Mendes walk us through where James Bond 24 is heading with the character. While speaking in the below video blog, Mendes explains a concept that we haven’t seen really explored since GoldenEye: Bond is now the veteran and M is the newbie with something to prove. In many ways, I am detecting that Mendes and screenwriter John Logan are in several sneaky ways pulling from Ian Fleming material in the short story For Your Eyes Only and the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But putting my personal speculation aside, below is the synopsis of the film, the video, as well as several new images for the upcoming 007 adventure!

A cryptic message from Bond’s past sends him on a trail to uncover a sinister organization. While M battles political forces to keep the secret service alive, Bond peels back the layers of deceit to reveal the terrible truth behind SPECTRE.

Spectre finds 007 (Craig) at odds with MI6’s new M (Ralph Fiennes) about the best way to handle the ever-changing world of espionage and terrorism. Whereas M continues to be under siege by political realities in London, Bond is forced to finish “one last mission” from the previous M and his late mentor, played by Judi Dench. Along the way, he will discover a political conspiracy that taps back into one of Ian Fleming’s most feared creations—the terrorist organization known as SPECTRE.

Spectre also stars Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Monica Bellucci, Naomi Harris, Ben Whishaw, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott, and Rory Kinnear. It opens November 6, 2015.

The Lazarus Effect is the latest horror offering from Blumhouse Productions, the independent company that has specialized in the genre for years with movies like the Paranormal Activity series, Insidious, Sinister, Oculus, Ouija and many more. Like the company’s dystopian hit The Purge, The Lazarus Effect mixes a little sci-fi into the supernatural proceedings, telling a Frankenstein/Flatliners-type tale of a team of researchers who stumble upon a way to bring the dead back to life. But when one of their own is killed and resurrected, something else comes back as well.

The movie stars Mark Duplass (Togetherness), Olivia Wilde (Her), Donald Glover (Community) and Evan Peters (X-Men: Days of Future Past) and was directed by David Gelb, best known for his arthouse debut, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Like many directors who work with Blumhouse, Gelb is still a relative newcomer. But the company has also collaborated with established filmmakers like James Wan and Scott Derrickson, and is taking its biggest step in that direction this year by working with M. Night Shyamalan on his upcoming film, The Visit.

That’s not the only way in which Blumhouse (which has a first-look deal with Universal) is branching out: on tap for the future is a film based on Jem and the Holograms, a Western from indie horror auteur Ti West called In a Valley of Violence, and a “family horror film” written by Robert Ben Garant (Jessabelle) and directed by Harald Zwart (The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones). It may also surprise some people to know that Blumhouse was behind last year’s acclaimed, triple Oscar winner Whiplash. That’s where we start in our interview with Blumhouse president Jason Blum, before moving onto The Lazarus Effect, M. Night Shyamalan and the state of the Paranormal and Purge franchises.

Den of Geek: Congratulations is being an Oscar nominee (Whiplash was nominated for Best Picture).

Jason Blum: This is really my first one and it’s really cool.

Whiplash is kind of the little movie that could in a way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was definitely an underdog. No one ever thought, including me by the way, no one ever thought we would get this far with it. So I’m really -- it was an awesome, awesome year. Awesome run with that movie.

What appealed to you about The Lazarus Effect? You get so many projects that pass over your desk I’m sure.

We do a ton of supernatural horror so although there is kind of a supernatural element to this, this is much more grounded. I forget who said Flatliners, but that was the movie we talked about a lot when we were developing it. And we haven’t seen a movie like that for a while. So that’s what I liked about the movie. Usually that’s what I look for first, like does it feel different? Does it feel fresh? And this felt that way to me because most of what we get is supernatural so this was less of that and that was the first thing that I kind of identified and liked about the script.

In a way it made me think of the old Outer Limits, the black and white ones, where they had these science fiction stories but done in these Gothic haunted house settings. This felt like a modern descendent of that.

Yeah. And also like, you know, talking about creation or the afterlife. Is there an afterlife? Is there not an afterlife? Kind of tying religion into it. But those were a lot of the things that we talked about when we were developing the script for sure.

[Related: The Lazarus Effect review]

The religion versus science debate is the essence of a lot of great horror.

For sure. I think that’s the whole thing. I think that, to me, makes horror believable, because obviously there are believers and non-believers and if you kind of show that and show that conversation it allows you to be more scary...if you engage people in that debate, it makes movies scarier.

Were there any particular challenges to this one on the production end?

There wasn’t. The biggest challenge to this was really distribution. We made this movie and I really was happy with how it came out, all of us were. And it was very touch and go if the movie was going to come out or not. So that was kind of the hardest thing. But Relativity got behind it and we figured it out. But that was the trickiest thing on this movie by far for me.

Does it surprise you sometimes, what clicks with a distributor or what doesn't?

It shocks me every time. We make a lot of movies that I don’t think merit a wide release. We have this label called Tilt and we have the movies come out on that and that’s fine. But it shocks me when, having done this a few times, when I really believe a movie should get a wide release and I struggle to get it released. That does surprise me. It still surprises me.

It's interesting that you said at last night's screening and then again at the press conference today that you weren’t convinced about David directing this and you’ve kind of made a point of saying that you really turned around on that.

Because it’s true. We came onto the script after he was attached and I was definitely very skeptical about him directing the movie. And there was another producer on the movie, a guy named Matt Kaplan who has a deal with us. And he really like stuck his neck out for the guy, you know. He really, really advocated and I didn’t say yes but I didn’t say no. I said let’s see how it goes. I was never comfortable with David until we were looking at dailies. But what made me say, "Okay, let’s do it with him," is after he met with Mark and after he met with Olivia. Both those people wanted to do the movie and I thought, "Okay." Because that’s a big deal. Those guys have done a ton of movies so for them to a) do a horror movie and b) with essentially a first-time director -- nine times out of ten they would come out of that meeting and be like, "Uh, it was good but I don’t think I’m going to do it." But they wanted to do the movie and that gave me the confidence to say you know, let’s give David a shot.

A lot of directors either get their start with Blumhouse or are sort of flying below the radar before they work with you, but now you’re working with M. Night Shyamalan. So now you’re working with a guy who not only is a very big name but a name that is kind of divisive in some ways. What’s that experience been like?

Well I’ve had a great time working with him. He’s really passionate and I find that infectious. When someone is really into what they’re doing I love that because I love what I do and so I really feel a kinship with him on that level. You know, James Wan had done Saw but then he had done two movies that hadn’t worked before he did Insidious. Some people loved him and some people didn’t. You can see that with Night and I think Hollywood is not fair to people in those positions. I mean he’s made some of the most iconic movies ever and those movies didn’t come out of thin air. They came out of his brain. So I prefer to work with those people. Actually I prefer to work with those people than like the super-hot director who’s had three hits in a row and really doesn’t want to listen to anything. It’s nice, you know. He feels much more collaborative and it feels very collaborative with him. And we worked a lot on the movie. I saw a rough cut of the movie and the movie that I saw and the movie that it is now are two very different movies and he was very collaborative in that process.

[Related: Universal Pictures Pay for M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit]

It’s a horror movie?

Yeah. A thriller. It’s a thriller. It’s not a horror movie, it’s a thriller but it’s scary. It’s super scary. It’s actually really funny too. It’s a lot like Paranormal Activity 3. I don’t know if you remember but there was a lot of fun in that one. And so Night’s movie is a scary thriller but it’s a fun scary thriller. There’s a lot of fun in it. It’s not just a dark journey, which is one of the things I like about it.

Where does Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension stand and what’s been the process with that? The release date has changed several times.

You’re right. It was October (2013) to March (2015) and now it’s the following October. We’re tinkering with the movie like we’ve tinkered with all the other movies. Shooting, writing, shooting, writing, cutting. Found footage movies are actually much harder to make well. An effective found footage movie is much harder to make than an effective traditionally shot movie. A crappy one is much easier to make, because you take your camera and you shoot the scene and you’re done. But to make it effective they’re actually much trickier. When people come to me with an idea and they say, "We can do it found footage or traditional," I always say to do it traditionally.

[Related: Paranormal Activity, Friday the 13th Release Dates Shuffled]

Where are things at with The Purge 3?

We’re not in production but we’re working on it. We have an idea, we have a script that we’re working on and it’ll be out July 2016. And I hope James (DeMonaco, writer/director of the first two) is going to direct it. He hasn’t declared yet but I’m hoping that he will. He’s writing it. It’s an awesome idea. I’m super psyched about it.

You also just announced that you're doing a family horror film. Is that an oxymoron?

No it’s not. I’m trying to think of a good comparison for that. It'll be fun, scary, like Halloween for little kids. It’s like Home Alone. I would think that would qualify as like scary fun, right, for young kids. Something like that. I’m psyched. The way we’re branching out with the company is instead of being like most producers, when they have success, and striving to make more expensive movies -- I don’t want to do. The heart and soul of the business will be scary movies but every so often there's a Jem and the Holograms or the western we did with Ti West or we'll try low budget movies in other genres -- but ones that still make sense that they come from a scary movie company.

The Lazarus Effect is in theaters on Friday (February 27).

On February 24th, Marvel released a new poster for Avengers: Age of Ultron, a movie so big that they put absolutely no effort whatsoever into the poster itself. On February 25th, Robert Downey Jr. revealed a much more reasonable Iron Man character poster for the film, and promised, perhaps as a way of apologizing for the previous poster, that a big reveal is coming on March 5th.

Today, we got our first Hulk poster. All future character posters will live here, by the way. So, here's the Hulk, and then we've got yesterday's Iron Man poster as well. Check back tomorrow (most likely) for the next one, and so on down the line.

There's a little info to go with it, too:

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) uses his advanced intelligence to solve the most difficult situations. When Ultron (James Spader) appears with plans of destruction, Banner’s anger takes over and transforms him into the rage-fueled Hulk!

Here's the Iron Man one:

Avengers: Age of Ultron opens on May 1st. It's probably going to make some money.

Truly the still mysterious D-Rex must be one nasty critter, because she has forced the impossible to happen: man and velociraptor have joined forces to combat this common and deadly foe.

One of the biggest selling points of Jurassic World to date has been A-list movie star Chris Pratt and his personal team of domesticated raptors to that act like obedient sidekicks, which means plenty of fun motorcycle-led walks through the park, as well as the ability to take on the nastiest of dino-stein monstrosities. In that vein, Empire (via ComingSoon) has unveiled four new images from Jurassic World, including of Pratt, director Colin Trevorrow, and of course the Raptor Squad!

Jurassic World is the fourth trip to Isla Nublar (or Isla Sorna) and its legendary inhabitants, just off the coast of Costa Rica. This time though, it is a fully functioning theme park visited the world over by tourists. I’m sure everything will go swimmingly from there. Directed by Colin Trevorrow, the film also includes the cast of Chris Pratt, Idris Elba, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jake Johnson, and Irrfan Khan. The film is set to raise its gates on June 12, 2015.

…Personally, I think Jurassic World might be even better than Bigger Jaws…

The late, great Jim Henson was guaranteed immortality when he first put his hand up a green sock puppet and decide to name it Kermit. As the man behind The Muppets, Henson became almost as famous as his creations.

But The Muppets are far from Henson’s only interesting work. Everyone knows his key successes – the Muppet TV shows and films, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth – but he was a far more daring and inventive filmmaker and storyteller than he is often given credit for. Working both with and without puppets, Henson made or oversaw some truly brilliant non-Muppets movies. Some of were very hands-on projects, others were just Jim Henson Company productions, but here are some of his lesser-known films that are really worth tracking down.

Time Piece (1965)

Despite breaking into TV with the 50s puppet show Sam And Friends, Jim Henson never initially saw himself as a puppeteer. Throughout the early '60s, his passion project was this eight minute short, which owes more to the French New Wave than Miss Piggy. It’s an abstract, wordless piece, starring Henson himself as a man always on the run through various situations. He starts out in a hospital bed accompanied by a ticking clock, and then begins a mad dash through a Mad Men-style office, a stereotypical nuclear family dinner, a jazzy nightclub and so forth.

It’s a simple metaphor for life and onward march of time, and it’s pretty damn pretentious in a very 60s way, but its really, really enjoyable. It has a terrific score, which mixes jazz drumming with crashing sound effects and noise looped to the beat, There’s also abstract animation that frequently breaks up by the action, not unlike the bumpers from Sesame Street. The short was eventually nominated for an Oscar.

The Cube (1969)

In Brian Jay Jones' excellent biography of Henson, he’s quoted as saying that back in the '60s he considered himself an experimental filmmaker. Nowhere is this more obvious than this one-off drama made for NBC. It focuses on a nameless protagonist being trapped in blank white cube, constantly being hassled by visitors who offer him rambling, meaningless advice.

Intentionally obtuse, its hour long running time does drag in a way that Time Piece’s eight minutes definitely don’t, but it’s still a fascinating glimpse of where he could have gone as a director (or just what he needed to get out of his system before The Muppets).

Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977)

Several Muppet productions have become Christmas traditions, but Jim Henson also made this wonderful non-Muppet seasonal special. Based on Russell & Lillian Hoban’s children’s book of the same name, it’s a riff on O. Henry’s festival tale The Gift Of The Magi, and follows Emmet the otter as he enters a talent contest in order to afford Christmas presents for his family. It’s has a slower, sweeter pace than your average Muppet show, with a lovely Wind In The Willows meets Southern Gothic feel. The otter puppets are adorable, and there’s a host of great original songs.

It aired on HBO in the US, and the fact that the fledgling cable network was only available to a very limited number of homes meant it never really entered the public’s consciousness, but it’s definitely worth getting hold of when December comes around. The special was originally introduced by Kermit, but modern day DVD and digital releases have him edited out as Disney now own The Muppets.

The Christmas Toy (1986)

Almost a decade after Emmet Otter, The Jim Henson Company made another Christmas special. This one wasn’t directed by Henson himself (he only operated a few puppets), but is still a really interesting film. The basic set up is pretty much the same as Toy Story – on Christmas Eve, a group of toys that come to life when no one is around begin to worry about what new toy will be unwrapped, and if they’ll be replaced. When the presents are opened and the She-Ra like Meteora interacts with the others, she even does the whole naïve-Buzz Lightyear routine ten years before Pixar did.

But it’s the key differences that it has with Toy Story that make the special really remarkable. In this world, if the toys are ever seen moving by human being, they permanently freeze. They never use the D-word as such, but they clearly die if this happens. It brings an incredible bleakness and horror to the special, giving it unexpected gravitas about the meaning of human (toy?) relationships when a key character is frozen. It’s heavy stuff and as great as it is I’d probably keep it away from younger Muppet fans to be honest.

The fact that these are real physical objects that come to life, in real time, make them actually feel like living toys, coupled with the looming presences of barely seen human actors, gives the whole thing a tactile quality that Pixar could never match. I’m not saying it’s better than Toy Story, but it’s an interesting sidepiece. Like Emmet Otter, an introduction from Kermit has also been cut from recent releases.

Dog City (1989)

The short lived Jim Henson Hour, which ran for 12 episodes in 1989, gave us some of the most interesting late-period work from Henson. Essentially, it was an anthology show introduced by him (in the style of Walt Disney’s old shows), pairing new Muppet sketches with longer content, like the excellent John Hurt-fronted Storyteller series (also definitely worth tracking down).

Occasional episodes would be dedicated to longer TV movies, of which Dog City was one. Very Muppet-y in vein, but featuring all new characters (and a Rowlf cameo), it’s a big brash musical parody of classic gangster movies. Canine tough guy Ace Yu runs through every noir cliché in the book as he tries to avenge his uncle’s death and win the heart of a dame.

You know exactly where this is going, but it’s the sheer scope that makes this one such good. Henson builds a massive living, breathing city filmed with dog gangsters and cops. There are big musical numbers, (intentionally) god-awful puns and dog jokes, and even a Muppet car chase. It was later spun-off into a Saturday morning animated series, but the original film is where it’s at.

Living With Dinosaurs (1990)

This incredibly lovely British-set comedy-drama originally aired as the final episode of The Jim Henson Hour, and I’m honestly shocked it isn’t a beloved family classic, to be honest. Taking clear influence from Calvin and Hobbes, it centres on a young boy called Dom, and his best friend Dog, who’s a talking stuffed dinosaur (voiced and puppeteered by Henson’s son Brian). Dom is an awkward child starting a new school, and his situation isn’t helped by his unorthodox artist dad, as well his mum being pregnant.

It’s a simple, uneventful coming of age tale, but it’s just so beautifully told. The relationship between Dom and Dog is perfect – only Dom can talk to him or see him move, but it’s never explicitly stated weather he’s magical or just imaginary. It’s the perfect use of magical realism used to accentuate character. Dom slowly grows up over the few days the film spans, and there’s an aching sense of melancholy as you feel he could soon be letting Dog go (the ‘Dinosaurs’ in the title could as much refer to the parents he’s living with, as it does Dog). It’s not a film of big events, and it’s left open ended, and is all the better for it.

I’m really surprised it’s not a regular TV fixture in Britain. It has a recognisable British cast (Juilet Stevenson plays Dom’s mum, and Cassandra from Only Fools And Horses pops up as a teacher), and hasn’t really dated at all – it really feels like the sort of thing that should be on every Boxing Day. There is a plot point about Dom having a list of enemies he’d like to die that probably wouldn’t fly post-Columbine, but it’s perfectly innocent and an accurate expression of pre-teen angst. It doesn’t seem to be available at all – not even on VHS – but it’s a truly wonderful film and I really implore you track it down if you can.

While Arnold strides inexorably towards his destiny as King Conan in Conan 3 or The Legend of Conan or whatever you want to call it, another Robert E. Howard creation may grace the silver screen, as well. This time it's the "she-devil with a sword" known as Red Sonja.

Christopher Cosmos has been hired by Nu Image/Millennium Films to write a Red Sonjascreenplay. And there, in that sentence, we have all the official information out there about the Red Sonja movie. Savor it.

Of course, this isn't the first time we'll have seen Red Sonja on the screen. 1985 (were the mid-80s the golden age of sword and sorcery flicks?) saw the release of the appropriately titled movie, Red Sonja, from Conan the Destroyer director Richard Fleischer. It starred Brigitte Nielsen in the title role and Arnold Schwarzenegger as burly sword-swinger not named Conan.

The character currently calls Dynamite Comics the home of her printed adventures, most of which have been penned by the always awesome Gail Simone. We'll get you more on this as we hear it.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

In what amounts to the third competing attempt to revive the adventures of Robin Hood into a new post-Avengers world, Leonardo DiCaprio and Joby Harold have joined forces to bring new life to the Princes of Thieves and his merry men. Sherwood Forest is getting awfully crowded these days…

As first broken by The Tracking Board, DiCaprio’s Appian Way is teaming with Harold’s Safehouse Pictures production company to produce a spec script Harold has entitled Robin Hood: Origins. As you might expect, it is a new detailed origin story for the bandit of Sherwood that with its current title is just begging for franchising capabilities.

Harold has previously contributed on Edge of Tomorrow as an executive producer and as one of its many writers, as well as a writer on WB’s upcoming Guy Ritchie reimagining, Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur. Purportedly, close to Warner Bros. on both projects, Harold’s presence makes WB a likely distribution home for Robin Hood: Origins.

DiCaprio’s Appian Way, meanwhile, is reported by The Tracking Board as luring the project to Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures Entertainment). This is would be an interesting development, because Appian Way and Columbia haven’t teamed since Columbia distributed Django Unchained internationally (it was released by The Weinstein Company in the U.S.), and further Sony is already developing its own pointed Robin Hood universe, which is currently being hatched by a project titled Hood, which the studio bought from Cory Goodman and Jeremy Lott for a seven-figure sum.

Is Sony considering ditching Hood (where Robin would be the center of an “Avengers” styled universe in a role described akin to “Ethan Hunt” in the Mission: Impossible films) for Robin Hood: Origins? While it is not yet known who would star in the new Appian Way and Safehouse Pictures collaboration, we imagine that if DiCaprio himself held the bow and arrow that it would make it very enticing for any studio…

For the record, Warner Bros. has not produced a Robin Hood picture since 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which we would wager is better than you remember if you can get past Kevin Costner’s ridiculous non-accent. They also produced the legendary Errol Flynn and Michael Curtiz classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, which is still the gold standard for Sherwood yarns.

But lest we forget, there is also a spec script by Brandon Barker being developed at Disney that’s called Nottingham & Hood. Apparently that project was pitched as a “revisionist” take on the Robin of Locksley mythology that the studio views as a medieval equivalent to Pirates of the Caribbean.

It’s all enough to make you say, “hey noni noni and a ho ho ho.”

Robocop! Who is he? What is he? Where does he come from? By know you know the answers to all of these questions, but what you may not have realized is that the so-called "future of law enforcement" is one hell of a commercial pitchman --especially overseas. You see ever since the first Robocopfilm was released in 1987, the character has been used in a variety of commercials -- including spots for fried chicken, ramen noodles, bug spray, televisions, and so much more.

But don't take our word for it, see for yourself in this compilation video of Robocop commercials, PSAs and other insanity that Den of Geek made in advance of Robocop screening that we're holding on February 27th at Videology in Brooklyn:

It's hard to pick a favorite commercial here, in fact it is downright Sophie's Choicedifficult. But if we had to choose we'd say our favorites are the Japanese chicken commercial (which for reasons to awesome and strange to comprehend features music from Back to the Future Part III) and an old Meineke ad in which a blatant Robocop rip-off refuses to pay a lot for his muffler. We absolutely love this kind of sci-fi ephemera, and if you do as well, let us know which of these spots is your favorite in the comments!

Want more sci-fi madness? Then follow @scifiexplosion on Twitter!

Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) has been tapped to direct the long-rumored sequel to sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner. Principal photography is set to begin in summer 2016. Which means that this thing is even closer to actually happening. Good or bad? 

Harrison Ford will reprise his role as Rick Deckard, although how big his involvement will be in the film remains to be seen. We do know that the sequel will take place many decades after the original. 

Hampton Fancher, who penned the first Blade Runner (with David Peoples), and Michael Green wrote the script for the sequel based on a story by Fancher and Ridley Scott.

The ORIGINAL Blade Runner is, of course, actually a wonderful novel called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by sci-fi grandmaster Philip K. Dick. If you read this site, you might have heard of him once or twice. 

THR