(ASBURY PARK, NJ) -- On Thursday, May 8, 2025, The ShowRoom presents a special screening of Sing You a Brand New Song - a wonderful documentary about Coleman Mellett, a musician who passed away 16 years ago and an unfinished album that was discovered in his home recording studio. Following the screening there will be a discussion with his wife, Jeanie Bryson.
Director Duncan Skiles, whose 2018 thriller The Clovehitch Killer has developed something of a cult following in recent years, returns with Neighborhood Watch. Skiles' latest has the sort of setup that fuelled many a comic thriller back in the '80s. It's a classic buddy movie, pairing two mismatched misfits for an adventure that plunges them into their city's criminal underworld. 40 years ago it would have paired a seasoned veteran like Nick Nolte or James Woods with a rising comic star like Eddie Murphy or Michael J. Fox. It also likely would have struck a more natural balance between its comedy and its action, something Skiles and writer Sean Farley never quite pull off here.
2016's The Accountant performed modestly at the box office yet somehow became the most rented title on US VOD platforms of 2017. Despite such unlikely returns, it has taken almost a decade for a sequel to surface, with original director Gavin O'Connor and writer Bill Dubuque back on board. Despite having so much time to refine this, O'Connor and Dubuque's sequel plays like it was rushed to market, with a script desperately in need of a couple more rewrites and baggy pacing that cries out for some judicious editing.
(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- State Theatre New Jersey presents Naruto: The Symphony Experience on Tuesday, May 6, 2025 at 7:00pm. For the first time ever, audiences will see a live orchestra perform the most iconic songs and themes from the Naruto animated series, live-to-picture. Tickets range from $39-$99.
(RAHWAY, NJ) -- The Union County Performing Arts Center Film Fest opens with a screening of Singin' In The Rain on Friday, May 16, 2025. Join them for the Opening Ceremony and the feature presentation, a digital screening of a classic film that celebrates the art of motion pictures! Doors are at 6:00pm, showtime is 7:00pm.
The most famous legend in all of musical lore is that of guitarist Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for blues greatness. With Sinners, writer/director Ryan Coogler takes inspiration from Johnson's story and remixes it as a vampire thriller and a tribute to popular music's roots in the Delta blues. An alternate title might be "The House That Honeydripped Blood."
Combining the bawdiness of Walerian Borowczyk's medieval fantasies with the postmodernism of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Norwegian writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister might be described as a neo-fairy tale. It's essentially the Cinderella story, taking elements from both the Perrault and Brothers Grimm versions, and it's set in a beautifully rendered version of some non-existent Scandinavian kingdom of the past. But the trouble with fairy tales is that they were written hundreds of years ago when the world was a cruel and insensitive place, and their black and white presentation of good and evil doesn't fit with our modern sensibilities. Nor does the reprehensible idea present in so many fairy tales that physical "ugliness" is a sign of bad moral fibre.
You know you're out of touch when a movie introduces you to a piece of technology to which you're oblivious, but which everyone in the movie is entirely familiar with. That's the case with Drop, a thriller centred around 'DigiDrop', a fictional cousin of the iPhone's AirDrop feature. As someone who views a phone as a necessary evil (if I could live without one in 2025 I gladly would), I had never encountered the concept of "drops," which I now know are messages sent between iPhones (via bluetooth?) within a certain distance of one another.
1981's The Amateur was an early entry in the wave of '80s Cold War thrillers that simultaneously exploited both the public's growing interest and general ignorance of computers. Rather than a James Bond figure, the protagonist was a nerdy codebreaker who becomes a proto MacGyver, using brains rather than brawn to seek revenge for the killing of his wife by terrorists. The use of technology in the movie was absolute hokum, but 1981 audiences simply didn't know any better and assumed that maybe an arcade machine could be reconstituted as a code-breaking device.
Today's employers expect far too much from their workers. They expect you to work through your lunch. To stay on an extra half hour without overtime. To answer phone calls, texts and emails outside of office. To start a war with the Russian mob when your boss's daughter gets herself abducted.
