Free Republic

Known best for his role as Sam in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Christian actor and current star of the recently released Moms' Night Out, Sean Astin said part of Christians' frustrations with the film industry may be their own fault. "Hollywood is antagonistic to Christian films because of forces that are hard to describe, but Christians have made things difficult for themselves by the way they approach the outside community," Astin told Fox411, adding that studios needed to ignore those "who grab the microphones and yell the loudest." Astin, who has starred in two Christian films, said that...

There are plenty of lousy film comedies, but there are only two that I outright hate: "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby." Both were released in 2006 when Hollywood's fury against George W. Bush had reached its peak, and both let the voters who re-elected him in 2004 have it with both barrels. On its face you would think that Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" chose the exact same targets (rural Red Staters) to humiliate, but he didn't. With his masterpiece (that has just been released as...

LOS ANGELES -- It has been described as one of the most important stories never told: the case of Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor some believe killed thousands of babies over the span of three decades. From the 1970s to early 2010, the sign on Gosnell's West Philadelphia clinic read "Women's Medical Society." But in 2010, after investigating claims of an illegal prescription drug operation, federal agents discovered what they call a "house of horrors." Three years later, a jury found Gosnell guilty on three counts of murder for killing babies that were born alive. He was also convicted of...

Now that the cast of the seventh "Star Wars" movie has been announced, you can imagine the anticipation among the millions of fans of the film franchise. And why not? The six "Star Wars" films have been enormous successes: they have grossed over $2 billion domestically at the box office, spawned scores of books, comic books and merchandise (how many kids have their own light saber?) and made household names of characters like Darth Vader, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.

Check the films you've watched all the way through.

Luke. Leia. Han. Chewie. Artoo. Threepio. All present and accounted for as StarWars.com unveiled the official cast of "Star War: Episode VII" Tuesday. Here's the full release: The Star Wars team is thrilled to announce the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. Actors John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow will join the original stars of the saga, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film. Director J.J. Abrams says, "We are so excited to finally share the cast of Star Wars:...

The accountants in Hollywood don't have to believe in heaven to notice the box office numbers on recent movies with religious themes. "Heaven Is for Real" opened in the days before Easter and grossed more than $22 million, coming in second for the weekend, just $3 million behind the latest "Captain America" blockbuster (in its third week). The movie's per-screen average -- $8,895 -- was far above the rest of the top five. "Heaven Is for Real," like many movies, is based on a best-selling book. It's a real-life story about 4-year-old Colton Burpo and his visions of heaven after...

[1]“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.” So wrote the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.By the same token, I can’t imagine God’s glory is increased any when we make movies about him, and so I don’t suppose the Lord is much interested in the latest box office news out of Hollywood. Nonetheless, that news is good for faith-based films. Not long after the indie film God’s Not Dead [2]was a “surprise hit,” (i.e., a...

The world needs to see this.

There are lots of Biblical Movies coming out this year (Son of God, Noah), but I don't think many compare to some of the older ones (like Ten Commandments, Passion of the Christ). What is your favorite Biblical movie?

So I finally saw the new Captain America sequel (Oh, and there are spoilers ahead in case you’re planning to see it but are even lazier than I am). Off the bat, I enjoyed it. It moved along well. Good action, blah, blah, blah. Now, on to the controversies. The most pressing of which is the lunacy of Captain America’s shield. The physics make absolutely no sense. In the comics the shield is composed of adamantium, vibranium, and a certain lost/secret ingredient that made replicating the shield impossible. In the first Captain America movie they changed that, saying the shield...

The wooing of religious moviegoers — a delicate operation, as the “Noah” backlash attests — has been ramping up lately, with major players like Ridley Scott and Ben Kingsley mining the Bible for box office gold. But if there’s such a thing as a safe bet in this genre, it’s “Heaven Is for Real,” a Christian sermon that even the most doctrinaire believer can applaud.

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".