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20 YEARS AGO — Just the other day, I was sitting in my living room when I heard a loud bang from the basement. Undoubtedly, it was one of my kids destroying yet another piece of our home — but I'll never know. That's because the noise made me turn my head, resulting in me hurting my back. Yes, a head turn can now hurt my back. When I was a kid, I'd ride my bike off a shed roof and hit the ground like a satellite returning to Earth's atmosphere. I'd then pop up, grab a popsicle and go...

Melinda Dillion, the actress best remembered for her roles in the much-loved holiday film “A Christmas Story” and sci-fi classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” died Jan. 9, her family confirmed Friday. Dillion began her storied career as an improvisation comedian with Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe after stepping in as an understudy for a sick Barbara Harris. In her first major role, Dillion debuted on Broadway as Honey in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” That role earned her a Tony nomination in 1963 for featured actress in a play, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Western icon John Wayne starred in over 160 movies during his long career, but two of his earliest acting roles have been lost to time. Two of John Wayne's movies have been lost to time. Long before his breakout role in John Ford's Stagecoach, Wayne was a struggling young actor who fronted dozens of "Poverty Row" films. These were low-budget b-movies that were filmed quickly, with some notable examples from his career including Wayne's sole "horror" Haunted Gold. He always appeared to be on the cusp of stardom, but after concerns about being typecast, Wayne attempted to leave Westerns behind...

Tuesday, January 31st, Cinemapolis will begin offering “Masked Tuesdays.” The theater will start offering a day when all staff and moviegoers will wear masks. This is an effort to make moviegoing accessible for people who feel safest and most comfortable in a fully masked environment. On “Masked Tuesdays,” Cinemapolis will not offer typical concession sales. Candy and baked goods will be available for purchase to take home, but the theater will not sell concessions to eat during the movie in order to encourage consistent masking on these days. The theater uses a HEPA air filtration system to maximize safety at...

A new Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves trailer releases and provides a better look at Paramount's movie adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game. Directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, and Hugh Grant. Paramount kicked off the film's marketing campaign at San Diego Comic-Con 2022 with the first trailer, but there has been no other trailer released over the last six months. Now that the movie's release is less than two months away, Paramount has released a new Dungeons & Dragons:...

Masculine male characters seem to be a dying breed in modern movies. Why? Well, I've got a few ideas...

Gina Lollobrigida arrives on the red carpet during the 4th Rome International Film Festival in Rome on October 16, 2009. She died Monday at age 95. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Italian screen legend Gina Lollobrigida, whose sultry roles in the 1950s and 1960s established her as a international sex symbol, has died, Italian media reported Monday. She was 95. Known affectionately to her countrymen as "La Bersagliera" for her starring role in Luigi Comencini's 1953 film Bread, Love and Dreams, Lollobrigida's family broke the news of her death, the Italian agency ANSA...

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, a sultry Mediterranean diva who came to represent Italy's vibrant rebirth after World War Two, has died aged 95, her former lawyer said on Monday.

There's a temptation once you've started sorting anything into a genre to start making lists, of the most typical, the most essential, or simply the best. Film noir, a genre whose tangled roots begin somewhere in the early '40s and ends – by general critical acclaim, though your mileage may vary – with Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil in 1958, begs for these kinds of rankings, if only because its hardboiled subject matter tends to attract a male fandom, and everybody knows how much men love lists. If you were making a list of most typical noir films, you'd...

Speculation about who is going to be the next James Bond reemerges every time any young, tallish actor makes an impression in a role that requires wearing a suit. When Daniel Craig’s long-awaited Bond swansong landed, one of the first things we thought about was who will eventually succeed poor old Craig, who was beginning to look a bit weary by the end. Now, the great rumour mill has begun to turn again, as producer Michael G Wilson has said that the next actor will be “a thirty-something”. Speaking at an In Conversation event at London’s British Film Institute, Wilson...

Movie about a young rich radical

On the surface Holiday Affair (1949) is a standard Christmas-in-the-big-city movie – a less mawkish Miracle on 34th Street with touches of His Girl Friday, Holiday, Bachelor Mother and Remember the Night. Making the picture was anything but regular, from the legal troubles of the leading man to the sexual harassment of his co-star by the famously eccentric and lecherous owner of the studio. Holiday Affair was the second film Robert Mitchum made after he was released from a stint at Wayside, a prison farm in Castaic, California where he was sentenced to forty-three days after being arrested for marijuana...

If I mention the Bruce Willis movie, "Die Hard" you probably know what I mean. What other movies are like this? One that comes to mind for me is the first Rocky film from 1976. Christmas not mentioned but the story takes place during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. There are Christmas movies trees and decorations in several scenes. There's also the classic Frank Capra movie, "It's a Wonderful Life". I could be wrong, but I don't think Capra intended that to be a Christmas movie but obviously it gets associated with the holiday with what happens at the end...

Based on real events during WWII, this is the story of four Allied POWs who are forced to build a railroad through the Burmese jungle. 2004 · 2 hr 1 mi [See comment for more description]

Fatal Attraction is to get a ‘woke’ makeover – told from the bunny boiler’s point of view. The reboot of the gripping tale of an unfaithful husband and his vengeful lover that shocked audiences 35 years ago may not even feature the grisly demise of a pet rabbit. The 1987 movie starred Glenn Close and Michael Douglas as the ill-fated lovers, obsessive Alex Forrest and New York lawyer Dan Gallagher, played in the TV remake by Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson.

BBob Iger, the newly appointed CEO of Disney, pledged to double down on LGBT “storytelling” in the company’s animated kids’ movies during a Monday town hall with employees, according to The New York Times. Iger served as CEO for 15 years before retiring in late 2020; he was brought back in about a year later after his successor, Bob Chapek, was fired, according to the NYT. Tumbling stock prices marked Chapek’s tenure as CEO, as did public outrage over the company’s political engagement in Florida and its alleged efforts to inject sexual content into children’s shows, particularly through gay and...

Dating all the way back to the very birth of American cinema in the 1910s, the western genre was pioneered by national filmmakers like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah, releasing such respective classics as The Searchers, Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch. Though, after decades of dominance, by the 1960s, the genre had become stiff, with the arrival of Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone shaking up generations of stuffy cowboy tales. Inspired by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Leone brought an iconic style to his Western trilogy that included A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and his...

Disney’s upcoming adventure film “Strange World” will feature a gay teen romance — the first in an animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Bradley Cooper is set to star in Steven Spielberg’s next film, an original feature based on the character of Frank Bullitt, the no-nonsense San Francisco cop played by Steve McQueen in the 1968 action-thriller “Bullitt.” Josh Singer (“The Post,” “Spotlight”) is writing the screenplay for the film, which is currently in development at Warner Bros. Though plot details haven’t been revealed, the forthcoming production is expected to follow Bullitt on an entirely different exploit than the McQueen original’s. Warner Bros. released the original “Bullitt,” which was directed by Peter Yates and based on the 1963 novel “Mute Witness.” In what...

"RED" is a Bruce Willis movie with a stunning cast. A retired CIA assassin is targeted by a corrupt CIA that wants to protect an equally corrupt Vice President before he makes his run for President. This forces the agent onto the run, along with the girl he was just about to court. Although he tries to protect her, she's enjoying the adventure too much to want his protection.