A lot of Minecraft’s more recent attention tends to be about the upcoming movie adaptation, but the game is still getting plenty of love and support. If you’ve been tuned out of Minecraft, you might’ve missed news about the recently released game drop, which added a brand-new biome to explore called the Pale Garden.…
A lot of Minecraft’s more recent attention tends to be about the upcoming movie adaptation, but the game is still getting plenty of love and support. If you’ve been tuned out of Minecraft, you might’ve missed news about the recently released game drop, which added a brand-new biome to explore called the Pale Garden.…
Nearly 19,000 video games were released on Steam in 2024. That’s a lot! In fact, it’s more than hit the platform in any other year. But most of those games, around 80 percent of them in fact, went mostly unplayed, according to publicly available data.
Nearly 19,000 video games were released on Steam in 2024. That’s a lot! In fact, it’s more than hit the platform in any other year. But most of those games, around 80 percent of them in fact, went mostly unplayed, according to publicly available data.
PLOT: While covering the 1972 Munich Olympics, the team at ABC Sports find themselves covering the horrifying Munich Massacre in real-time.
REVIEW: September 5 isn’t the first movie about the Munich Massacre. Steven Spielberg brilliantly depicted the events and their aftermath in Munich (perhaps his last truly great film). However, this movie takes a different approach in how it covers the events unravelling in real time from the studios at ABC Sports in Germany. We follow a team of sleep-deprived journalists who are supposed to be there covering the Olympics and find themselves chronicling events that they know can only end in tragedy and will have global consequences, the repercussions of which are still felt today.
For me, the film had particular resonance. Before I started working for JoBlo, I worked in radio as an “op”, which basically meant I handled the audio boards, screened the calls, and ran the operations side of live radio broadcasts. Whenever big event happened, everyone working that day went into overdrive, and no movie has ever captured what it’s actually like to be in the thick of things in a newsroom as well as September 5 has. The thing people don’t get about these events is that you’re running on adrenaline, and you have to make real-time calls on what you should or should cover without the benefit of context. I vividly remember working the board during a horrifying school shooting here in Montreal and the whole crew having to make snap decisions about what information should and shouldn’t be conveyed on air.
While this no doubt sounds grim – and it was – your adrenaline goes into overdrive, and you don’t really pause to think about how tragic things are – that comes later. September 5 brilliantly depicts that vibe, as John Magaro’s Geoffrey Mason, a new associate producer, shows up to work thinking he’s going to be covering sports and winds up helping literally write history as it unfolds.
Running a taut ninety minutes, the propulsive editing and pace makes us feel like the journalists themselves must have felt, with them alternatively energized and repulsed as they plough ahead with the coverage. All of the journalists are shown to rise to the occasion, with Peter Sarsgaard’s Roone Arledge, the head of sports, fighting to keep the ABC News team from taking over, instead entrusting his team, which includes a young Peter Jennings (played by Benjamin Walker), and a lot of rookies who are untested in covering event of this magnitude. Standouts include Leonie Benesch as the crew’s German translator, who becomes invaluable as the day goes on, while Ben Chaplin’s Marvin Bader fights to keep the journalists in-check. With so much conflicting information coming in, he shows us how hard it was to figure out what should be reported and, most importantly – what shouldn’t, as the terrorists themselves were reportedly watching ABC News coverage the whole day. John Magaro, who’s quickly rising as one of the best of a new generation of character actors, is superb as the plucky, creative, but occasionally hard-headed and impulsive Mason, who, like everyone else, isn’t immune from getting things wrong in a situation where there’s little margin for error.
Director Tim Fehlbaum has crafted an invaluable historical document that resists the temptation to sentimentalize or sensationalize events. The soundtrack is sparse, and the camera never leaves the news studio, with the efforts of sports journalists Jim McKay and Howard Cosell documented through archive footage. The only problem with September 5 is that everyone in the cast is so uniformly excellent that no one ever gets the chance to dominate (uniquely. – Paramount has chosen not to campaign anyone from the cast in the leading actor category). That might keep the film from earning the awards attention it deserves, as it’s so impeccably crafted and unshowy (for lack of a better term) that it comes off as effortless, even if it’s anything but. It certainly deserves its place in the pantheon alongside All the President’s Men and Broadcast News as far as great films about journalism go.
September 5 opens this Friday in wide release!
The post September 5 Review: A fact based account of a chilling tragedy appeared first on JoBlo.
Over the weekend, my wife and I watched Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same. Fargeat’s unnerving body-horror thriller goes to the extreme, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I hid behind a pile of pillows for 40% of the film. What? Fingernail and teeth “stuff” is my horror movie kryptonite, and The Substance gives audiences no quarter with its approach to gross-out scenes and unforgiving self-reflection. Luckily, I watched the movie in the comfort of my home, but now those brave enough to watch The Substance in public can do so at the cinema when the film returns to US theaters on January 17, 2025.
In The Substance, a fading celebrity called Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) takes a black-market drug: a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself. When Elisabeth’s other self, Sue (Margaret Qualley), disobeys the rules of the transformation, the give-and-take of the effects of the drug begin wreaking havoc on Elisabeth’s body, the struggle to maintain dominance between the two goes out of control.
Here’s the official synopsis for The Substance:
“It generates another you. A new, younger, more beautiful, more perfect you. And there’s only one rule: You share time. One week for you. One week for the new you. Seven days each. A perfect balance. Easy. Right? If you respect the balance… what could possibly go wrong?”
The Substance is a fascinating, unconventional, and unapologetic downward spiral of self-image, paranoia, and body dysmorphia. As I’d said, I spent some of the film hiding from my screen. Fargeat’s movie makes aspects of David Cronenberg’s work feel like child’s play, giving the thriller genre a new queen as Fargeat promises to make bold, surprising, and original films.
Fargeat says there will not be a sequel to The Substance. Speaking with Variety, she addressed her next steps as a filmmaker, saying, “For now I’m not discussing anything. I’m just enjoying the moment and taking some time as I really want to write my next project. It’s slowly starting to be put in motion in the back of my brain and when things calm down I’ll take it from there.” That next project is “going to be totally different but with a lot of similarities (to The Substance). I love to make bold and surprising films with things that you don’t expect, so definitely that’s what I want to do. And I love the freedom that I gave myself for this film and that’s certainly something I want to keep doing. That was the greatest thing for me on The Substance.”
The Substance returns to US theaters on January 17, 2025.
The post The Substance returns to theaters on January 17 to add more nightmare fuel to the new year appeared first on JoBlo.
Over the weekend, my wife and I watched Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same. Fargeat’s unnerving body-horror thriller goes to the extreme, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I hid behind a pile of pillows for 40% of the film. What? Fingernail and teeth “stuff” is my horror movie kryptonite, and The Substance gives audiences no quarter with its approach to gross-out scenes and unforgiving self-reflection. Luckily, I watched the movie in the comfort of my home, but now those brave enough to watch The Substance in public can do so at the cinema when the film returns to US theaters on January 17, 2025.
In The Substance, a fading celebrity called Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) takes a black-market drug: a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself. When Elisabeth’s other self, Sue (Margaret Qualley), disobeys the rules of the transformation, the give-and-take of the effects of the drug begin wreaking havoc on Elisabeth’s body, the struggle to maintain dominance between the two goes out of control.
Here’s the official synopsis for The Substance:
“It generates another you. A new, younger, more beautiful, more perfect you. And there’s only one rule: You share time. One week for you. One week for the new you. Seven days each. A perfect balance. Easy. Right? If you respect the balance… what could possibly go wrong?”
The Substance is a fascinating, unconventional, and unapologetic downward spiral of self-image, paranoia, and body dysmorphia. As I’d said, I spent some of the film hiding from my screen. Fargeat’s movie makes aspects of David Cronenberg’s work feel like child’s play, giving the thriller genre a new queen as Fargeat promises to make bold, surprising, and original films.
Fargeat says there will not be a sequel to The Substance. Speaking with Variety, she addressed her next steps as a filmmaker, saying, “For now I’m not discussing anything. I’m just enjoying the moment and taking some time as I really want to write my next project. It’s slowly starting to be put in motion in the back of my brain and when things calm down I’ll take it from there.” That next project is “going to be totally different but with a lot of similarities (to The Substance). I love to make bold and surprising films with things that you don’t expect, so definitely that’s what I want to do. And I love the freedom that I gave myself for this film and that’s certainly something I want to keep doing. That was the greatest thing for me on The Substance.”
The Substance returns to US theaters on January 17, 2025.
The post The Substance returns to theaters on January 17 to add more nightmare fuel to the new year appeared first on JoBlo.
Werewolves may not be as sexy as vampires, or as spine-chilling as ghosts, but their violent and tragic stories make for fascinating supernatural creatures that have been a crucial part of the horror genre for decades. Their stories typically revolve around someone losing their humanity and sense of self, becoming…
Werewolves may not be as sexy as vampires, or as spine-chilling as ghosts, but their violent and tragic stories make for fascinating supernatural creatures that have been a crucial part of the horror genre for decades. Their stories typically revolve around someone losing their humanity and sense of self, becoming…
At the start of 2024, JoBlo’s own Chris Bumbray got to check out the Sundance Film Festival premiere of director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp’s ghost story Presence, and in his 7/10 review (which you can read HERE), he described the film as “a supernatural tale that’s light on horror but heavy on heart.” A wider audience will have the chance to see the movie now that we have switched over to our 2025 calendars, as Neon is planning to give Presence a limited theatrical release on January 24th – and with that date swiftly approaching, the film’s final trailer has now dropped online. You can check it out in the embed above.
The story of Presence gets rolling when a family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they are not alone. A supernatural force has infiltrated the house, and taken a specific interest in the couple’s daughter.
The film stars Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Julia Fox, Eddy Maday, and West Mulholland.
It hasn’t been revealed how much Neon is paid for Presence, but it is known that they came out the winner of a bidding war between “about 10” different interested distributors. So they’re probably forking over “a healthy sum.” Deadline points out that it was “shot entirely in a single location, which creates the haunting mood sought by the filmmakers.” Bumbray’s review informed us that “Soderbergh’s camera is always from the perspective of the presence itself (no one uses the term ghost here), making it an interesting visual exercise. The family is observed from an arm’s length, with us eventually realizing that the presence itself isn’t necessarily malignant, nor is it even aware of why it’s in their home in the first place.”
Julie M. Anderson and Ken Meyer produced Presence, with Koepp serving as an executive producer alongside Corey Bayes. H.H. Cooper co-produced and Gus Gustafson, Samara Levenstein, and Claire Kenny are associate producers.
What did you think of the final trailer for Presence? Will you be catching this movie on the big screen? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
The post Final trailer released for Steven Soderbergh, David Koepp ghost story Presence appeared first on JoBlo.