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A film about kamikaze pilots has been playing to packed theaters from Hokkaido to Kyushu since its release in December of 2013, becoming one of the top-grossing Japanese productions of all time. In addition to attracting the admiration of Prime Minster Shinzo Abe, “The Eternal Zero” has drawn a fair amount of criticism for being the latest in a string of recent films that mythologize the Japanese role in World War II.

<p>‘as time goes on, weirdly, I’m growing less liberal. I’m more like, ‘No, religion is ruining the world, you need to stop!’.</p>

Is it just global warming, or has it gotten a tad steamy in the multiplex lately? No sooner had viewers taken in the long, graphic lesbian sex scenes in the French coming-of-age drama “Blue Is the Warmest Color” last year than they were treated to “Stranger by the Lake,” a homoerotic thriller (also French) set in a gay cruising site, at which men could be seen pleasuring each other and themselves with unsettling, frankness. ........................................................ The challenge today is that, rather than being relegated to disreputable theaters or scruffy back sections of video stores, porn is on the home entertainment...

Mary Anderson, who played Maybelle Merriwether in Gone With the Wind and was one of the nine survivors cast adrift from a torpedoed ship in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, has died. She was 96.

One of the last remaining stars of Hollywood's golden era, Mickey Rooney was born to vaudeville parents, and appeared with them onstage by the age of 1. He became a star when he was signed to play the part of comic book hero Mickey McGuire in a series of successful shorts that began in 1927 with "Mickey's Circus" and ended with "Mickey's Derby Day" in 1936. But it was at MGM in the 1930s that the diminutive dynamo hit real fame, particularly with the "Andy Hardy" movie series that launched in 1937. While at MGM he earned Oscar nominations for...

Every decade or so, Hollywood has an epiphany. It turns out faith-based audiences enjoy going to the movies, too. And they enjoy films with A-list actors and big-budget productions, as well. So it’s no surprise that “Noah,” even with the artistic license and rock monsters, had such an impressive week. This is good news. Because whether you’re a believer or not, a flawed biblical epic is going to be more entertaining than a remake of a Paul Verhoeven movie or some third-rate sci-fi flick.And if there’s one thing we know about Hollywood it’s this: if a genre turns a...

At first, director Darren Aronofsky felt like an odd choice to bring the biblical story Noah to the big screen. Aronofsky is known— in movies like Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan and yes, The Wrestler— for casting a camera on pain and the dark side of human existence. Noah is a story of goodness being preserved from the harsh world around it. But the story’s foundation is, at its core, a painfully harsh one and the depiction of that reality is Aronofsky proves that he was the perfect choice to bring this story to the screen. “In the beginning,...

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Sir Alec Guinness and to commemorate this, several of his finest films are being reissued on DVD and shown at the cinema. Such fuss would probably have caused the intensely private star acute embarrassment. After all, his good friend John Le Carré once noted how much Guinness "loathes the world's flattery and mistrusts its praise".

These are considered to be the Greatest Actresses in film based on talent, versatility, influence, characterization, charisma, and success in the movie business. (The actors are followed by a movie that showcases their talent.) How many of these great movies have you seen?

Part of this year’s Lenten discipline for many religious people has been to see two bad religious movies, “Noah” and “God’s Not Dead.” Both left me longing for the comparative moral simplicity and integrity of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In “Noah,” the main character is a brooding, misanthropic vegan. One hopes that Russell Crowe, a fine actor, does not end up being typecast a la Charlton Heston. There just aren’t many parts for brooding, misanthropic vegans. The movie itself consists of tedium punctuated by anachronism, sanctimony and animated rock people. It contains just enough spiritual pretention to make you...

The Bible has long been a rich source of story ideas for filmmakers, and recently released movies like Son of God and Noah suggest that the biblical epic genre is far from exhausted. There are many reasons why filmmakers continue to make movies based on biblical stories. The Bible’s familiar stories feature larger-than-life characters, plenty of action, and time-tested storylines. However, from the film producer’s perspective, the primary reason why films based on biblical stories continue to be made is that these films are consistently able to make money. Darren Aronofsky’s interpretation of the biblical story of Noah opened last...

It may not quite approach the stature of building an ark to withstand an epochal flood, but the box office success of Noah this weekend — which opened with an estimated gross of $44 million — is still something of a remarkable feat. No other overtly Bible-themed feature film has opened anywhere close to that amount since 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, doubly remarkable considering that director Darren Aronofsky’s $125 million adaptation of the Old Testament story faced serious opposition from Christian groups that objected to perceived liberties the film takes with the biblical text. The film pulled in...

Can you believe the real name of one pop culture's most prominent icons of rugged American masculinity was... 'Marion'? The Duke himself (another name he went by, originally belonging to his boyhood pooch) would argue that the name 'John Wayne' is just as real as the one that appeared on his birth certificate. The Hollywood legend didn't take his aliases lightly; each represented a different persona in the late actor's life and career, a subject explored in Scott Eyman's exhaustively researched new biography, "John Wayne: The Life and Legend." "In Wayne's own mind, he was Duke Morrison," writes Eyman in...

Amazing screen performance: "God's Not Dead" Looks like God is doing his thing with a bit of help from film viewers, the Duck Commander, Willie Robertson, his great wife, Corie and the magnificent cast and production group led by Actor Kevin Sorbo, etc.!!! As Winston Churchill proclaimed to Herr Hitler after the Battle of Britain..."We are coming for you!!!" and then began sustained, night & day bombing of German Factories & Cities by the RAF & the AAF....we, the people, proclaim to anti-religion, Christian hater, POTUS, Obama, his Godless Academia lap dogs and his media Obamabots: "We, the God believers,...

Estimates for Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah are now anywhere from $41M to $44.6M based on a strong $15M Friday box office. I wondered while writing the box office last night if Southern CA audiences watching the film when the earthquake hit got a little seasick thinking how realistic the special effects were. Noah (PAR) was playing like a mainstream movie when it opened, but that bump indicates that it had some cross-over from the faith-based audiences which continue to keep God’s Not Dead in business. noahmovieAlthough based on the Biblical story, Noah doesn’t mention the name God once – how funny...

Kevin Sorbo, star of God’s Not Dead told a reporter at Faith, Media & Culture that by simply voting for the best person, that, in itself, is enough to get me blacklisted in Hollywood. Marius Forte, who co-authored with Sam Sorbo, radio talk show host and wife of Kevin Sorbo, The Answer: Proof of God in Heaven notes: We all know that Hollywood leans left and is uncomfortable with a Christian based message. Left-wing Hollywood seems impervious to the fact that God’s Not Dead opened on only 780 screens yet the movie, without benefiting from a mega-media roll-out that often...

The pre-release advertising promoting the movie Noah made a point of stating that while the director took artistic license in the production it was still faithful to the biblical story. Early theater previews were carefully edited to appeal to people of faith, but this is the least biblical “biblical film” of all time! However, to be charitable, the bare outline of the Flood story is present, but after that artistic license has taken the film so far afield of anything resembling the Bible that it is offensive to people of faith. To say that the biblical story was watered down...

Darren Aronofsky's controversial biblical epic Noah is winning over faith-based and mainstream moviegoers alike at the North American box office, ending weeks of speculation as to whether the filmmaker's darker take on the story of Noah and his Ark would be a turnoff for more devout moviegoers. The Paramount and New Regency movie easily topped the Friday chart with $15.2 million from 3,567 theaters for a projected $41 million to $43 million weekend, a strong start. Overseas, Noah is likewise prospering, grossing an early $28.3 million from only 21 markets (many of those opened Friday) and coming in ahead of...

When atheist director and co-writer Darren Aronofsky promised that his epic "Noah" would be "the least biblical film ever made," that was not hyperbole. "Noah" is a brilliant, compelling, beautifully-mounted, beautifully-acted piece of storytelling conceived for the sinister purpose of leading people to believe that Christianity and Judaism are something they are not. And I ask you, could anything make Satan happier than something that leads people to believe they are saved when they are not? I have absolutely no problem with a filmmaker taking a biblical story and adding or subtracting from it as a way to craft a...

Lorenzo Semple Jr., the creator of the campily classic Batman TV series who went on to craft such big-screen paranoid thrillers as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor -- though he would be replaced on both films -- has died. He turned 91 on Thursday... Semple’s résumé also includes the Steve McQueen-Dustin Hoffman escape tale Papillon (1973); Paul Newman’s Harper sequel The Drowning Pool (1975); Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong (1976) starring Jessica Lange; and the rogue James Bond movie Never Say Never Again (1983)...