IF YOU LIKE TRUE BLOOD... : HERE ARE OVER 200FILMS, TV SHOWS, AND OTHER ODDITIES THAT YOU

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Dave Thompson | 231 pages | 01 May 2013 | Hal Leonard Corporation | 9780879108113 | English | New York, United States

Sheet music, scores: Sookie SookieSao Paulo Nights 3. Xibaba 4. Upa Neguinho feat. Thalma De Freitas. C Side 1. Casa Forte 2. Amazon Stroll 3. Berimbau 4. Anna deAmsterdam Reprise 5. Waiting on the Corner. D Side 1. Tijuca Man 2. Nao Tem Nada Nao 3. Sunset at Sujinho 4. Segura esta Onda feat.

Mamao on vocals. In celebration of Specialty Records' 75th anniversary, a new Sam Cooke compilation featuring tracks from his Specialtycatalog focusing on his pop-leaning tracks plus the live recordings from the legendary Shrine Concert that have never been available on vinylbefore. This 3 X 10" release in a triple-gatefold jacket, featuring replica flyers and other ephemera included as inserts in the packaging. SIDE 1 1.The fourteenth solo album from Alice, originally released in , and the first 45 RPM pressing. Remastered and reissued on g transparent crystalvinyl, the first vinyl pressing in four decades. Pressings feature individual hand-numbering. Mountain feat.

Frank Bello 2. Kiss it Goodbye feat. Howard Jones 3. Everyone Dies feat. Stix Zadina 4. Rat Child. Kinked is a compilation of Dave Davies'work from the late '90s and early s. A lot of this disc features selections from the collection Unfinished Business: Dave Davies Kronikles , whichitself contained a bunch of re-recordings from the late '90s of classic Kinks tunes. That accounts for a little under half of this track collection, therest contains selections from the live album Rock Bottom: Live at the Bottom Line four tracks and 's studio album Bug two cuts , plus a couple ofrelative rarities -- "When the Wind Blows Emergency ," which was written for the End Hunger Network in , and a cover of George Harrison's"Give Me Love, Give Me Peace on Earth," which was for a Harrison tribute album -- and a brand new tune, "God in My Brain," which waswritten and recorded in , after Davies recovered from a serious stroke.

Unfinished Business 2. Living on a Thin Line 3. Picture Book 4. Fortis Green 5. Love Gets You 6. This Man He Weeps Tonight 7. Death of aClown 8. Suzannah's Still Alive 9. Hold My Hand Strangers Too Much on My Mind When the Wind Blows Emergency God in My Brain RockMe, Rock You. Sivad 2. Little Church 3. What I Say 2. Nem Um Talvez Side C 1. Selim 2. Funk Tonk Side D 1. Inamorata and Narration byConrad Roberts. White Dress 2. Chemtrails Over the Country Club 3. Tulsa Jesus Freak 4. Wild At Heart 6. Dark But Just a Game 7. Yosemite9. Breaking Up Slowly feat. Nikki Lane Dance Til We Die For Free feat. The debut solo album from British singer-songwriter and ex-CatherineWheel frontman Rob Dickinson. This first-ever vinyl release adds a bunch of extras that did not appear on the original CD, including the track "TheEnd of the World" recently covered by Billie Eilish , and a second disc with the Nude EP from the deluxe CD reissue, made up of acousticversions of Catherine Wheel songs.

Packaged in a gatefold jacket and pressed in red and yellow "seahorse" vinyl, limited to copies worldwide. Score to the much-buzzed-about filmstarring Nicolas Cage. A quiet loner Cage finds himself stranded in a remote town when his car breaks down. To survive, he must fight his waythrough each of them. Songs From the Deep captures our collective moment perfectly with a sense of personal nostalgia Late Night Drive, BackPorch , sociopolitical resolve Forward March , and several powerful shout-outs to recently departed civil rights icon and fellow Alabamian JohnLewis Walk With the Wind, Stand. First released in , Evanescence followed the immense success of global chart-toppers Fallen and The OpenDoor. Side A: 1. What You Want 2. Made Of Stone 3. The Change 4. My Heart Is Broken 5. The Other Side 6. Erase This. Side B: 1. Lost InParadise 2. Sick 3.

The End Of the Dream 4. Oceans 5. Never Go Back 6. Swimming Home. A fourteen-song LP pulled from the Fleetwood Mac Super Deluxerelease, including a further seven songs from the Tusk tour, four from the Rumours tour and three from the Mirage tour. SIDE B 1. ANGEL 2.TUSK 4. Warped Confessional 2. Nothing Left 3. Misguided Memories 4. Exremities 5. No One's Coming Home 6. Trouble If You Hide 7.Insanity 8. Echoes 9. Princess Die Billy F. My Lucky Card 2. More-More-More 4. Vagabon Man 6. Spanish Fly 7. West Coast Junkie 8. LarkinPoe 9.

I Was A Highway Hey Baby, Que Paso Desert High. Originally released in following the birth of his daughter, Show You The World took LivingLegends MC The Grouch on a new path of growth and maturation as he navigated his new world of fatherhood and the new perspectives itbrought. With topics ranging from his experience as a new father, partner and son, to drug addiction in the family, as well as his own personalstruggles and triumphs, The Grouch succeeds in showing us his world. Microphone Intro feat. Rio Amor 2. Watch Watch feat. Mike Marshall 3.

Clones 4. Artsy 5. Favorite Folks 6. Yarkwork 7. Show You The World feat. Raphael Saadiq 9. The Bay To LA feat. Murs Never Die SheroBring It Back Hot Air Ballons feat. The Time feat. Marty James A never-before-released recording of the live performance of the original GunClub lineup, at the Starwood in Hollywood. Devil In The Woods 2. Bad Indian 3. Black Train 4. Jack On Fire 5. Promise Me 6. Preaching TheBlues 7. Sex Beat 8. Ghost On The Highway 9. Goodbye Johnny Sleeping In Blood City. Pressed on heavyweight transparent orange vinyl withindividual hand-numbering. His legendary performances had him dressed in gold and leopard costumes with props including rubber snakes, asmoking skull on a stick, and his signature coffin.

Over his career he didn't record many studio albums. Who would have figured the man who brought us the world's most potent "PsychobillyFreakout" back in would be helping to share in the joy of the holiday season a mere 13 years later? We Three Kings is a set of 12 classicChristmas tunes with one new original added for good measure whipped into a nervous froth of twangy guitar and rolling drums by Jim Heath andhis partners in crime.

Frosty The Snowman 2. Santa Bring My Baby back 3. Jingle Bells 4. Silver Bells 6. We Three Kings 7. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer 9.Santa On The Roof What Child Is This Pretty Paper Winter Wonderland Run Rudolph Run. Stone Free 2. Hey Joe 3. Fire 4. Catfish Blues SideB 1. Rock Me Baby 2. Red House 3. Purple Haze 4. Wild Thing. In the late s, the renowned American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger JohnHicks formed one of the most influential ensembles consisting out of musicians that had played music at the highest level all their lives and gainedtheir status as both stand-alone artists and important sidemen. Each of them had participated in many of jazz's great moments and all shared theability, documented on many albums, to inspire their fellow musicians to even greater heights. On this album Is That So? He served as a leader onmore than 30 albums and played as a sideman on more than other recordings.

In the early '70s he taught jazz history and improvisation at Southern Illinois University before resuming his career as a recording artist. He thentoured with Sam Cooke and would later go on to work with Curtis Mayfield. The album was produced by John Hicks and Timeless Recordsowner Wim Wigt and is a remarkable outing of advanced musicianship by three jazz-giants in their prime, delivering an inspirational gem of analbum. Is That So? Expect supercharged Post Bop with striking notes, no-holds-barred musicianship, high swinging solos, screaming choruses andplenty of solid virtuosity to spare. The up tempo none stop Latin beat is complimented by the terrific drum solos of Idris Muhammad and the

rhythmic bass stokes of Ray Drummond. This electrifying set of tracks makes this release a bonafide hit and a must have for any self-respectingjazz fan or collector.

This unique album comes as a deluxe g DOUBLE vinyl edition strictly limited to copies worldwide with obi strip. The jacket features exclusivepictures shot by legendary Dutch photographer Joost Leijen known for his work with artists such as Chet Baker and Pharoah Sanders , alsoincluded is an insert with liner notes by renowned author and producer Russ Musto. Experience Frank Ocean through the ears and sounds of HighPulp, as the Mutual Attraction saga continues, with the final installment of the project.

The three arrangements are an homage and a thank you to Frank, who has had such a heavy impact on the band and the way they think aboutwriting music. Along with digging into a different genre of music, and focusing on being a tribute to just one artist for this volume in the series, MA 3also has the band performing as their largest ensemble yet: a piece band, including a 5-piece string section. Giving no limits to these reimaginedversions of Frank Ocean tunes. And damn is that gonna be fun" This is that double blue vinyl album!

All proceeds go to Fair Fight Action. Released in , Tear Gas is the fourth and arguably most notable studio album from The Jacka. The albumfeatures the hit singles, "All Over Me feat. Matt Blaque," and "Glamorous Lifestyles feat. Andre Nickatina". Summer feat. Just A Celebrity feat.Sky Balla 3. Glamorous Lifestyle feat. Andre Nickatina 4. Greatest Alive feat. They Don't Know feat.

Freeway 6. Dream feat. Won't Be Right feat. Cellski 8. Keep Callin' feat. Devin The Dude 9. Girls Scared Money feat. Get It In feat. What'sYour Zodiac feat. Phil Da Agony Dopest Foreal Callin' My Name feat. Mistah F. What Happened To The World The Movement feat. PlanetAsia Storm feat. Cormega Our Heroes feat. Stalin All Over Me. Madison Carnival of Losers, Pt. The Elusive Sensation of Bliss It Was Perfect AThing for Weak Guys Honeymoon Iraq Triangle of Death Cheerleaders Huffers of 1st Platoon Another Day, Another Mission Night TremorsUnholy Retribution Date Night Acquiescence I'm Your Worst Nightmare Crossing the Line Rob Another Bank Overdose Side D Your Fate isDarkly Determined One Last Job The Comedown Album Version What I'm Trying to Say Is Bonus Track.

The second studio album by The Jackson 5, which peaked at 1 on Billboard charts in and sold millions of copies worldwide. Side 1: 1. The LoveYou Save 2. One More Chance 3. ABC 4. Side 2: 7. Never Had a Dream Come True 8. True Love Can Be Beautiful 9. I'll Bet You I FoundThat Girl The Young Folks. Goode, Johnnie Johnson lived in obscurity in his hometown of St.

The record represents Johnnie's brilliance and reaffirms him as the formative master of rock n' roll piano. The package also boasts brand newgatefold packaging. Contains the original tracks on the first three sides, with an original band interview on Side Four. This first ever picture disc forthe soundtrack of this heartwarming animated film celebrates The Robot, his best friend, Hogarth, and a cast of characters. A first-ever vinylpressing for the Christmas record from Jorma Kaukonen, originally released on Relix Records. It includes customized traditional Christmasstandards and some original Christmas-themed compositions.

One of two versions for RSD Black Friday the Christmas Tree version of this first-ever vinyl release is pressed on red and green vinyl. The deluxepackaging includes an OBI strip, a gatefold jacket, printed inner sleeve and specialty color vinyl. One of two versions for RSD Black Friday theCandy Cane version of this first-ever vinyl release is pressed on red and white vinyl. I Feel The Earth Move 2. So Far Away 4. It's Too Late SideB 1. Smackwater Jack 2. Way Over Yonder 3. Will You Love Me Tomorrow 4. Up On The Roof. The first time on vinyl for the album. The firstvinyl release for this album. Legend worked with a great list of producers and co-writers on Once Again, including Kanye West, will. Each DayGets Better 2. Slow Dance. Though this album doesn't present a baseline criterion, Muddlin Gear will prep you for when the body-snatching podsland to give you the most visceral baseline experience of your life. The Entroscooper 2. Said Dram Scam 3.

Ill Shambata 5. In Inphidelik 7. Silent Why 8. Da Doo Doo. The recording captures the band cranking out songs from what are arguably two oftheir three best studio albums, at the pinnacle of their chemistry. Side B 1. Eye, Eye, Eye 2. Drive 3. Daydreamer 4. Dark Horse 5. Black HoleSun Side B 6. Shape Shifter 7. Make You Ok 8. A Light Comes Through 9. What I'm Looking For What Is Love. Magma is one of the mostinfluential of all French bands. They have left a legacy of music that defies any of the standard and convenient classifications of rock, operatinginstead in a realm of their own creation. BBC Londres is pressed on silver vinyl. Only individually numbered copies are available worldwide,exclusively at record stores for RSD Black Friday. Breeze 2. In The Temple 3. Dance Of The Furies 4. Slide Hidden Track 5. Starblood RemixHidden Track. The band had its roots in the Congo although it formed in Kenya in the mid-sixties.

Each of the songwriters sang lead in their native tongues and this meant they used vocals in three African languages next to the songs sung inEnglish. In when the BBC held a competition to find the best band in Africa, Matata submitted a song and came in first. Several singles also cameout of this and Matata scored hits in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. With a wealth of material and a dynamic live act to its name they wouldplay packed gigs every night. The group was a visual, as well as musical feast and quickly became favorites at several well-known Londonnightclubs. There would be no further Matata recordings and sadly the band split after releasing their second album. The album we are presentingyou today Independence from comes swinging right out the gate with a set of no less than TWELVE monster tunes.

This unique record comes as a deluxe g vinyl edition strictly limited to copies worldwide with obi strip and featuring the original artwork. Thisreissue also comes with an insert featuring pictures of the band and extensive liner notes from award winning author John Masouri. NOW becameMaxwell's first album to reach 1 on the Billboard , selling over , units in the U. Get To Know Ya 2. Lifetime 3. Changed 5. NoOne 6. For LoversOnly Side B 1. Temporary Nite 2. Silently 3.

Symptom Unknown 4. Includes the iconic protest song and title track, which hit 1 on the US Billboard Hot in September Eve of Destruction 2.She Belongs To Me 3. Sloop John B. Baby Blue 6. Try To Remember 8. You Were On My Mind What Exactly's the Matter With Me Featuringeleven original tracks written by JD McPherson and his friends. SOCKS is an album of holidays songs sure to be standards while you aredecorating the tree. SIDE A: 1. All The Gifts I Need 2. Bad Kid 3. Hey Skinny Santa! These are animation in its purest form, the directors andanimators involved clearly just enjoying the riot of color and movement they present to the viewer. When Cowboy Bebop first premiered in North

America on Adult Swim in September of , it was one of the great defining moments of anime securing its cultural foothold in the West. Set in theyear , Cowboy Bebop was many things: a sci-fi western noir character drama built around the themes of existentialism, identity and loneliness.

Released in , the film serves the purpose of what any good anthology should—putting supremely talented animators on a project and allowing themto throw whatever they want at the wall. All in all, Genius Party is a stunning collection of shorts produced by one of the most eclectic productionstudios operating today and should not be missed.

However, when a film is this well-animated and put together, the accusation of unoriginality can be forgiven. On the eve of the 21st century, thecollective memory of every living being on Earth was wiped by an inexplicable mass phenomenon, decimating civilization and reducing the humanrace to roving tribes of scavengers devoid of language, reason or technology. Wataru, a survivor of this worldwide amnesia meets Sophia, amysterious young woman seemingly unaffected by this worldwide epidemic. Instead, Miyazaki eschews anthropomorphic crabs and garish musicalnumbers in favor of honing in on the love story between a young boy and a girl-fish who yearns to be human.

As the years proceed and their friendship deepens, Hotaru and Gin begin to develop feelings for one another. A short and impactful film whosebeauty and tenderness merits the best of comparisons to the likes of Miyazaki and Shinkai while remaining something wholly its own. The film andpreceding television series, both directed by anime luminary Toyoo Ashida, follow the exploits of Kenshiro, a superpowered martial artist whowanders the wastes of a post-apocalyptic future brought on by a nuclear apocalypse as he aids the helpless by vanquishing the wicked on apersonal quest for revenge and retribution. Produced in , Fist of The North Star earns the dubious honor of being so extreme that the originalJapanese release had to be heavily censored with strategic cuts and psychedelic distortion effects. Its age most definitely shows through thesomewhat dated crudeness of its animation and its paper-thin plot, but what one can confidently praise Fist of the North Star the most for is itscomically unrelenting self-awareness and sincerity in knowing exactly what it is and sticking to it.

An unabashedly fun action movie that touts the over-the-top machismo of Schwarzenegger and Van Damme in their prime. Placed in the body ofmiddle-schooler Makoto Kobayashi, the soul is granted six months to solve the mystery of its own death and in doing so rediscover the intrinsicvalue of life itself. Colorful , in spite of its name, is a movie that tackles weighty topics such as the societal pressure to succeed and conform,adultery, depression and suicide, albeit with an ultimately a life-affirming tone. Taut with emotional tension and existential nuance, Colorful is a filmthat rewards on a visual and emotional level. The film ponders the question of whether anything exists at all, on whether ideas of the past that hauntthe collective consciousness of humanity can reify themselves in the present tense, of whether belief in the perception of anything is worthwhile orreliable.

These are themes that Oshii would go on to further explore, particularly through his work on Ghost in the Shell , but nowhere near on this level ofabstraction. After the tragic passing of her father, year-old Momo Miyaura and her mother Ikuko move from Tokyo to the family home on SetoIsland to start over. While adjusting to her new life, Momo discovers an unfinished letter addressed to her by her late father, along with amischievous trio of Yokai spirits who follow her around constantly.

Junji Ito is one of the most celebrated names in contemporary Japanese horror fiction, easily warranting mention along the likes of Shintaro Kagoand Kazuo Umezu. Gyo , arguably his most famous work, revolves around a young couple who are assaulted by a horde of homicidal fishmonsters with mechanical spider legs. After leaving Studio Pierott and striking out on his own as a freelancer on a few projects, Oshii would jointhe independent creative collective Headgear and become a major influence in shaping the aesthetic of their first project, Mobile Police Patlabor.

For Princess Kaguya , Takahata would again return to reiterate and arguably refine this technique, imbuing every frame and scene with the sort ofscrupulous attention one would expect from a master calligrapher or Ukiyo-e artist. As clandestine paramilitaries and a rogue U. Instead, what itturns out to be is a super-powered Indiana Jones meets Armageddon spy flick packed with thrilling chase scenes, psychic martial art showdowns,and breathtakingly beautiful montages of the sparse picturesque plains and mountains of Nepal. Originally created as a four episode OVA, then re-released as a cut-down, theatrical version with 20 minutes of new footage, Macross Plus is the first Macross sequel that takes place in the originaltimeline of the TV series. Macross Plus take place 30 years after the war between the humans and the alien Zentradis, detailed in the original show,and instead focuses on two rival test pilots and former childhood friends and their struggle to be the first to secure funding for a new, experimentalfighter that would replace the current model.

As with all things Macross, the two pilots are a part of a love triangle with a woman from their childhood, who is now the producer of SharonApple, the most famous singer in the galaxy actually an Artificial Intelligence. Things start to go wrong when Sharon Apple achieves sentience andgoes rogue, taking over the SDF-1 Macross ship and threatening thousands of lives. Macross II is perhaps best known for its heavy usage of CGI,a novelty at the time, and its fluid, realistic dog-fighting sequences, something Kawamori was obsessed with getting right. Macross Plus , like allthings Macross, has a complex history in the United States. The theatrical version was never made available as a dub, and is now very hard to find—but the OVA is readily available, and almost as good. Phoenix: , then, written and produced by Tezuka, loosely adapts characters and conceptsfrom several volumes of the manga.

The young man, Godo, sets off with his crew to capture and kill the Phoenix, but as with any quest for immortality, they are doomed before theyeven begin. The background work is simple but clean. This is clearly feature film level animation with some musical sequences particularly thedialogue-free first 12 minutes and action scenes that rival anything in the Disney canon. The date is October 31, In the midst of this bottleneck ofinternational tension and unsuspecting revelry, a mysterious transfer student named Saya has come to the school on a mission: to hunt down and killa trio of terrifying creatures who prey on the blood and bodies of their human prey. Blood: The Last Vampire is significant for many reasons. Themovie is not only the first anime film to be foremost produced entirely in English with Japanese subtitles, but also the first to eschew traditional celdrawn animation and be drawn and produced entirely through digital imaging software.

As the eighth and best theatrical release in possibly the best known anime franchise on the planet, Dragon Ball Z: Broly — The Legendary SuperSaiyan has probably been seen by more people than most of the other films on this list. The story, which, as with most other DBZ movies, is simply

an excuse to gather the Z fighters together to combat a new threat to the universe. This time it concerns a super saiyan—a warrior from an alienrace—who wants to enslave humanity, and whose quest begins with an orchestrated revenge against the heroes of DBZ. In other words, a typicalshounen plot for perhaps the ultimate shounen show. What then separates Broly from the many other DBZ movies and specials? Two things: Brolyhimself is a silly but fun, over-the-top villain—a Super Saiyan version of The Hulk who only gets more powerful the angrier he gets—and the battlescene comprising half of the film , which is endless fun for fans of kinetic action.

Like any good theatrical film based upon an ongoing series, Dragon Ball Z: Broly — The Legendary Super Saiyan contains everything that makesthe series a hit, while offering the more fluid, cleaner animation that comes with a theatrical budget, and highlighting the best thing about the showitself—the pure, addictive thrill of great beings doing battle. Whisper of the Heart is the story of Shizuku, a stubborn and precocious bookwormwho, after meeting Seiji Amasawa, an ambitious young violin-maker who shares her affinity for literature, is inspired to pursue her own passion forwriting as an alternate means of accepting and professing her nascent affections for him.

Attempting to describe the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise to a newcomer, let alone an outright anime neophyte, is anything but simple. The series is aprime example of postmodernism, with self-referentiality, existential crises, and a non-linear continuity that has captivated and infuriated fans since itfirst aired. Trust me on this. Anime owes a great debt to the legacy of Kenji Miyazawa. The story follows Giovanni and Campanella, two youngboys from a hillside town who are swept up on a mysterious dreamlike voyage across the boundless reaches of time and space aboard the titularrailroad.

The film is premium cyberpunk material, with sprawling cityscapes, homicidal cyborg junkies, brooding bounty-hunters, and an enormous megacityhanging above the mainland separating the haves from the have-nots. Fans of the series passionately criticized the film for relieving Lupin of hisanarchic predilections and instead casting him in the mold of a true gentleman thief, stealing only when his nebulous sense of honor permits it. Aflawed Miyazaki film is a triumph all the same. Created by Mushi Productions, the studio behind such classics such Astroboy , Kimba the WhiteLion and Dororo , and produced by none other than anime patriarch Osamu Tezuka, One Thousand and One Nights was the first installment inwhat would later come to be known as the Animerama series, a trilogy of thematically linked experimental erotic films created for adult audiences.

The Animatrix is, without a doubt, the best thing to come out of the Matrix franchise since the original movie. All the familiar tropes are present: themirrorshades, the kung fu acrobatics, the pulsing rain of digital kanji. The movie cut is the superior viewing experience, however. Endless Waltztakes place one year after the events that wrapped up Gundam Wing , and involves the Gundam pilots, and their enemy Zechs Merquise, comingout of retirement to battle one last threat—and in some cases, each other. Where the Gundam Wing TV series had a plot that tended to meander,and sometimes used cheap animation or repeated cels, Endless Waltz is a feast for the eyes—filled with gorgeous, fluid battle scenes that any fanof giant robots will appreciate. For this film version, several shots from the OVA were retouched, and there are some mild adjustments to theoriginal animation.

The usual questions about the cost of war, the price of peace, and human determinism that run through virtually all Gundam series are on fulldisplay here. If you want a concise example of what Gundam does so well relative to other types of giant robot anime, this is a dance worth taking.Told across three short stories, the film follows Takaki Tono through childhood, adolescence, and eventually adulthood, documenting how hisunrealized romance with his former best friend, Akari Shinohara, both spurs him forward and tragically leaves him incapable of pursuing humanconnection elsewhere. Isao Takahata, for all his legendary status as a director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, is sometimes a hard director to pindown, stylistically. Case in point: the delightful, virtually plot-free, humane comedy My Neighbors the Yamadas, which looks and feels like nothingelse in his oeuvre.

Despite this, it somehow also feels like quintessential Takahata. Based on the comic strip manga, Nono-Chan , the film is a series of vignettescentered around the Yamadas, an average family living in metropolitan Japan. Complex truths about aging, marriage, family, and childhood areexpressed through these simple tales about particular family members and their trials, tribulations and daily foibles.

Also of note is the striking visual style of the film, designed to look like a watercolor comic strip. Takahata was so firm in his desire to achieve thislook that My Neighbors the Yamadas ended up becoming the first fully digital film from Studio Ghibli. Whether you find it slow-moving ordelightfully sedate, the visuals will captivate.

My Neighbors the Yamadas is a film only Ghibli would make, and only Takahata could shape into such a poignant ode to the humanity ofeveryday families. Essential Takahata, indeed. Directed in by Tatsuo Sato and co-conceived by Sato and Masaaki Yuasa, Cat Soup is an award-winning dark comedy short film inspired by the work of cult manga artist Nekojiru. The film is a brilliant example of stream-of-consciousnessanimation, following the exploits of a young kitten named Nyatta who embarks on a bizarre journey to recover the soul of his sister Nyaako.Describing what happens in the film is insufficient in attempting to understand it as compared to simply watching it. Miyazaki seized the reins andmade the film his own, crafting the source material into a creative vessel through which he could forge his impassioned contempt for the then-ongoing U.

The film follows the hyper-violent misadventures of two amnesiac criminals sentenced to life imprisonment aboard a space penitentiary embeddedin the remnants of the moon. While investigating a wave of murders perpetrated by an experimental line of sex gynoids, Batou and Section 9uncover a deadly conspiracy linked to a rash of mysterious disappearances that extends to the highest echelons of the Japanese government. AsBatou plunges into the depths of the criminal underground in his search for answers, he begins to question the extent of his own humanity as aprosthetic cyborg. Can someone ever truly recreate themselves? What does it mean to be happy? And will the Major ever truly return? Innocenceis a noticeably different film than the original in regard to its tone and subject matter.

Approaching it less as a sequel and more of epistemological investigation through the medium of anime, Oshii doubles down on the Christianesotericism and philosophical koan-esque questions that define the greater part of his work to create a film that, although visually impressive andconceptually complex, feels bogged down in its latter half by the weight of too much ambition. When middle-schooler Mikako Nagamine is

recruited by the UN Space Army to serve as a mecha pilot to fight off an alien threat striking at human civilization from the fringes of the solarsystem, she leaves behind her friend Noboru Terao on Earth. Jin-Roh follows a member of an elite anti-terrorist police unit who, after failing tosubdue a mysterious suicide bomber in the midst of a heated riot, is plagued by disquieting visions and doubt regarding the virtue of his service.

The final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are notorious among fans of the series. In response, Anno set to work on an alternative endingto the series to be produced in two parts and aired in theaters. If you were looking for a light, campy and celebratory conclusion, End ofEvangelion is not that movie. Instead, what fans were treated to was perhaps one of the most fatalistic, avant garde, and oddly enough, life-affirming endings to an anime series ever produced.

In short, it is the best and worst of everything that is Evangelion combined to create a film that is unlike anything that had come before it. Despite itsunrelenting darkness, End of Evangelion remains true to the ethos of its subtitle, that the joy of death is in the act of rebirth. Leiji Matsumoto was,along with Go Nagai, one of the preeminent creators of manga and anime in Japan in the s. He is best known for his Yamato series, but his ultimateartistic achievement is perhaps the shared universe represented by the Galaxy Express , Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas manga and animeseries.

Everything in between falls just out of bounds, or goes wide, or whatever the proper sporting metaphor might be for this particular occasion. Pointis, the film stretches its 77 minutes to maximum length with a feeble blend of lesbian humor, out-of-nowhere cowboy-musical selections, andnoticeably professional makeup effects. Director Olivier Afonso, behind the camera for the first time, hails from the faux -gore department in a longline of Z-movies past. But even listing the incongruous elements making up this film runs the risk of piquing interest that it cannot generate itself.

Both the last-gen animation and writing that most kids would find childish mark this as a Vanguard production, one of the lesser-regarded cartoonhouses for fair reason. Clinical Everybody knows therapists are just as unwell as their patients, but Dr. Jane Mathis Vinessa Shaw has a little bitmore going on upstairs than the usual head-case shrink. Take this Spanish-language con game transplanting Dirty Rotten Scoundrels from theFrench Riviera to a luxury cruise liner: The much-touted popularity of Like Father surely compelled Netflix to seek out other vacation-ship-basedentertainment, and with scamming currently on-trend, this was a no-brainer buy.

Anon I was rooting for you, Gattaca director Andrew Niccol, we were all rooting for you! Niccol has been wise about future panic up until now,when he alternately ignores and simplifies the implications of a complete eradication of privacy. He assigns a pat killer-on-the-loose plot to anintriguing hook, casting Clive Owen as the hard-nosed detective hunting a murderer off the universal grid, and Amanda Seyfried goes digital femmefatale as a woman mysteriously exempt from the omnipresent readout. Substitute teachers looking to keep eighth-graders busy for an hour wouldbe better off with another Gattaca rewatch. Rowling and the Royal Family.

Director Vicky Jewson does not, saddling Sam with emotional baggage that turns her own womanhood against her, and succumbing to her ownpaltry-budget limitations. But without sufficient funding and off-screen talent, she never stood a chance. Howard has stripped away the politicalanthropology that posed Vance as the Republican-whisperer in favor of a plainer story about a boy who broke out of his Ohio holler to go be alawyer at Yale. At last, the right and political left can join in harmony, able to agree that those Hollyweirdoes have no idea how the Real Americalives. In Family I Trust Light enough to be blown away by a single sneeze, this Spanish-language romcom sends another hapless single lady hometo regroup and rediscover her inner goddess, or something.

Those not immediately put off by the preceding sentence may have a better time with absolute ding-dong Bea Clara Lago , who kicks the film offby setting her man up with a foxy newscaster she knows he has a crush on and then flipping her lid when they hook up. Bea finds refuge in theembrace of a widower with a souped-up hot-pink hot rod, the two perfect for one another in their equal proportions of dullardry.

He falls off of a roof on December 24th and awakens one year later, and then again another year later the next day, one Eve after the other.Because this is just about the same plot device as in the lesser Adam Sandler vehicle Click , our man Jorge learns the same lesson about how lifeconsists of the less-than-fun moments we might try to pass by on autopilot. Mercy Adult children tend to show their true colors when their parentsreach their deathbed. With each brother blander than the next, however, the big reveal wields all the dramatic heft of a balloon.

With his imitation-Blumhouse plainness, Domenico Emanuele de Feudis seems intent on not letting any of those predecessors in the national cinemainfluence his work or make it any more interesting. It is a slight step down from his last feature effort, Threat Level: Midnight. A nosy cop SashaAlexander goes from thinking she did it, to thinking that her boyfriend Jessie T. Usher did it, to something near the needlessly muddled truth.Learning what really went down feels a bit like finishing a maze on the back of a cereal box — the satisfaction of resolution, severely limited by alack of any deeper meaning.

Rock My Heart Hold the damn phone — another work of hardcore inspiration-porn about a spunky white girl overcoming a debilitating medicalcondition to attain her equestrian dreams? The broken bones have been exchanged for a heart condition and the older mentor has more bite, butaside from the language barrier, this film clip-clops along the exact same hoof tracks as its horsey forefather.

Which was, itself, following the trail of The Rider. Who will defend this poor creature, so overtaxed as an analog for ornery characters learningdiscipline and control in bush-league indies? Have some mercy, directors, and cease beating a dead — oh, well, you know. Director Bartosz M.Kowalski is very late to the game, his attempted revitalizing of scary-movie tropes lagging behind the likes of Cabin in the Woods. Six stabbableteens venture into the most foreboding woods Poland has to offer for a phone-addiction deprogramming summer camp, only to be stalked by apair of boil-covered twin killers.

And super-jumping. Director Francesco Lettieri never draws attention to the qualities making the Apache culture its own, in particular the faintfascist associations stoked by their iconography. A gangster movie by any other name…. Music Teacher Not to paint India or its cinema with toobroad a brush, but it sure has plenty of movies about developmentally stunted men getting in touch with their feelings because of the efforts of

tolerant, accommodating women.

Take Beni Manav Kaul , an educator with a chip on his shoulder and unrealized fantasies of musical superstardom. To make matters moreagonizing, his former pupil Jyotsna Amrita Bagchi announces a homecoming concert after eight years of making a name for herself at the uppermostpop echelon. Will they find love? Erotic-thriller sex should be scary in a hot way, not scary in a 50 Shades of Grey way. In this version, thehawklike Mrs. Danvers Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a climactic monologue laying bare the nature of her devotion to the former Mrs. ShimmerLake Smarter than the average Coen Brothers ripoff looking at you, Cut Bank , this one has the good sense to also be a Memento ripoff. A littlebit of money. Time to Hunt In a post-financial-meltdown Korea of the future, a trio of slick operators plan to liberate a giant block of Americandollars from a gambling house. But this is a heist film that gets that part out of the way early on, spending most of its two-plus-hours on the blood-spattered fallout once the former owners of that money send a contract killer to get it back.

With drab monochromatic color-filters, director Yoon Sung-hyun conceptualizes a dystopia with nothing to show for all its catastrophes, nonotable features to make it anything other than an anonymous entry in an overstuffed genre. Director Detlev Buck who also appears as awheelchair-bound ally to the crooks seems to be aiming for the wound-up, non-stop energy of an After Hours , but the environ our man musthustle through has all the detail and personality of a level design in an especially violent video game. Throwing more money at a production rarelysolves problems, but for a premise that wholly orients itself around the near-pornographic gazing upon military weaponry — much of it fantastical,engineered with futuristic technologies explained at length — looking good is everything.

The real infante takes over his body and has to prove himself a reformed man, an objective that mostly leads to advances from an unending streamof adoring women. A pitchy lead performance, in conjunction with a punitively jammed-up concept, consign this Infante to cinema hell. Reilly actedas a receptacle for the alienation from every aspect of modern society that would ultimately drive Toole to suicide; Jodi is six-foot-one. DirectorNzingha Stewart overestimates the disadvantage that a few extra inches would give this conventionally attractive young woman in what the filmmakes out to be an adverse search for someone to love her, size thirteen Nikes and all. At one point, our giraffe heroine complains about how hardit is to be tall to her factory-issued best friend — who is black! Read the room, Jodi! Uncorked Of the many different types of stories about beinggood enough at something to make it out of your stifling neighborhood — dancing, rapping, basketball — at least wine tasting gets points fornovelty.

Director-writer Prentice Penny then loses those points with her dumbed-down approach not just to the art of vino, but to the agony and ecstasy ofstriving. To All the Boys: P. Brain on Fire Susannah Cahalan had it all: a great job writing for the New York Post , a devoted boyfriend, brightprospects. Writer-director Francesco Carnesecchi has the good sense to structure the entire thing within the space of the game, punctuating forflashbacks and digressions, instead of leaving the game as a played-out climax. On both counts, the answer is a confidently intoned yes. And thattitle? The title is an enigma more engrossing than the film containing it. Nanki Kiara Advani must do some soul-searching after her boyfriend VJGurfateh Singh Pirzada gets accused of rape by Tanu Akansha Ranjan , putting her heart in direct conflict with her feminist principles.

The film gets there altogether too easily, missing the whole point of how nasty such cases can become as quotes tell opposing narratives, offering avision of a kinder world for which none of us has any real use. Send it back to hell! Coin Heist Coins are amazing — designed using lasers, mass-produced through an elaborate assembly line of casting and forging, inspected down to the tiniest detail for flaws so minute only professionals cansee them, and all for something we keep in our pockets only to trade for chewing gum.

It is, regrettably, an apt pairing of auteur and subject. After auditioning and being rejected for the role years earlier, Larson gets the last laugh byleading as Kit, an art student booted from her program when a professor deems her Lisa Frank—esque paintings insufficiently serious. Theemotional arcs come across as prescriptive — she learns to control her anger and other impulses, he gets through the yearning for his own lostdaughter — but the characters are easy to spend time with.

At a wedding soundtracked by only the most identifiable public-domain classical standards, rugrats run around swapping the seating arrangementcards at one table, and create variations on unstable reactions between those forced to sit next to each other. Never mind that the film takes aboutone full hour to get to this device, once it does, the winning dice roll of chance has a bum payout. The main couple Olivia Munn gets together, theirmain point of connection being that they are the exact same amount of boring.

An interrupting boor Tim Key learns that he will have better luck with women if he allows them to speak, a lesson for a six-year-old. This is thehappy ending we were holding out for? Bomb Scared You thought eating disorders were a testy source for laughs? This Spanish-language comedyfocuses on a dunderheaded gang of Basque-separatist extremists, impatiently awaiting their next mission while Spain makes a run at the WorldCup in the background.

Director Borja Cobeaga treats their mission to await instruction in a safe house like a tedious office job and the characters like bumbling wageslaves instead of radicalized killers. But because everyone gets their own special power from Power hence the name! That goes for the cop JosephGordon-Levitt , the vigilante Jamie Foxx and the dealer Dominique Fishback, destined for greater things all hunting down the supplier RodrigoSantoro , a dime-a-dozen plot not all that enhanced by the DNA-altering hook. What better setting for a trip between amigos, the meat of thisSpanish-language comedy on the move? The film does everything that films about oldsters taking to the road have trained us to anticipate: drugexperiences all in good fun, May-December pairings for the shoehorned hints of romance, chin-up humor about the impending visit from the GrimReaper.

But writer-director Zak Hilditch, back to the Netflix grind after showing the limits of his proficiency with high-concept horror on , stretches anotherwhat-if scenario to the point of tearing. At one point, our woman seems to be going in circles while lost in the desert, a regrettably apt parallel tothe film around her. His many fruitless attempts make him the Road Runner to her Wile E. Coyote, occasionally clever enough in its slapstick toearn the comparison. Santo eventually getting a mullet does not help.

His various whacking, loot-boosting, and general gangsterism has nothing to contribute to the ongoing dialogue each of the greats has advanced intheir own way, not to mention the lesser-seen Italian productions bringing social consciousness and formal adventurousness to the genre as of late.One hopes that top-flight choreography might pick up the slack left by cookie-cutter writing, but alas, these Scandinavian posers have alreadybeen served by their American cousins.

Skam -heads aside, best moonwalk your way to Step Sisters instead. Daniel Calparsoro disregards all of this counsel on his way to dashing theaptitude he showed in The Warning , a genre piece that couched its twists in a story firm enough to sustain them. There seem to be fewer shitsgiven all around in this case, as Calparsoro rushes through his watering-down of Thomas Harris so he can get to three successive bait-and-switches, each less meaningful than the last.

Until, of course, we figure out the game — at which point all that remains are some eye-catching diversions with pink, green, and yellow, alongwith a few practical effects shots not worth writing home about. There is only one Tyler Durden. For generations, a clandestine society of ultra-babysitters have battled the forces of darkness, represented here with more whimsy than usual. These puckish monsters hew closer to the likes ofAaahh!!!

Real Monsters , only with the edges sanded off. Born as an obsessive Fincherian hunt-for-the-killer thriller, pupating into a head-on action chase,and finally bursting out of its cocoon as a hideously malformed time-travel travesty, this film has an entirely separate set of issues. Walraven vanHall is no Oskar Schindler — though this biopic wants him to be so very badly — and star Barry Atsma does a commendable job of giving thisreal-life human being an identity of his own. His White Fang had teeth, speaking to a young-adult audience prepared to reckon with the hazards ofthe natural world, but this kiddie spin strips the woods of their formidable might. A scene depicting dogfighting feels out of place in a film so mushy.The title pretty much translates to Lost Girl. There will be plenty more. What sounds like a weird cousin to Dear Zachary makes up a lot of groundin execution, as the characters buy into the absurdity enough that it starts to fold into the fabric of the universe.

Flipping a middle finger to the grandfather paradox, the script even makes it through the easily blown second-act exposition without falling apart.Amato works harder to earn his tears than most of the guys behind merciless melodramas such as this. The preceding weeks saw an influx ofphoto enthusiasts streaming in from across the country to get their exposures while they still could, and this drama follows once such road tripbetween cancer-stricken snapshotter Ben Ed Harris , his good-natured assistant—nurse Zoe Elizabeth Olsen , and his adult son Matt JasonSudeikis. From the mm. George Clooney continues his less-admired directorial career while starring as a grizzled researcher, the last in his AppleStore-looking Arctic base that affords refuge from the humanity-culling conditions outside.

A good villain could have made up for the scripting, but the trio of little undead girls only serves to add The Shining to the laundry list of superiorfilms from which this one has leeched. Free Pugh. Take the 10 For those viewers in search of a scattershot, fitfully funny crime caper in which TonyRevolori spends one long day scrambling around the outskirts of L. At least that one had a more charming leading man in Shameik Moore than thisone gets in Josh Peck, playing a sleazebag with the pretty face of a former child TV star. That movie had some entry-level commentary on race,too, and a nifty soundtrack from Pharrell.

All this dime-store knockoff has is a Pulp Fiction— lite nonchronological structure, a closeted coke baron, and one great Danny Brown needledrop it unloads in the first 15 minutes. The most a critic can say is that its pop-culture references are very of-the-moment. Eli Paramount pawnedthis one off on Netflix after executives reasoned that figuring out how to market a film built around a remarkably stupid late-phase twist would betoo much of a hassle. This made it a perfect fit for Netflix, and a business model that subsists on word-of-mouth over marketing.

Even the premise sounds like it was reverse-engineered from mined data: a boy quarantined from the world around him Charlie Shotwell, whoselast name does not describe this film lands in a haunted house containment facility, but is his sickness real? The script has been, at most, a quarterthought-through. Evil , about a pair of convivial rednecks who, through a series of unfortunate accidents and coincidences, present as bloodthirstylunatics to a gaggle of nubile vacationers. Anne Hathaway. Dee Rees. In any case, Didion will be fine. She goes missing and law enforcementsuspects Lucy may be the guilty party, her interrogations interspersed with flashbacks to her doomed love triangle.

Noah Centineo, a name doodled in diaries worldwide, plays a lower-middle-class high-school senior putting together cash for college by posing asan escort for girls in need of some arm candy. Handsome From the opening narration in which the culprit introduces himself and confesses to hiscrime, this comedy purports to be a different breed of murder mystery. A cursory web search provides clarity on how a charlatan could havelanded such an adulatory portrayal, as well as the equally confounding question of why a French-set film about a Frenchman ended up as aPortuguese-language Brazilian production: the last modern-day stronghold of Spiritism is in Brazil. This is by them, for them, but offered up to all ofus due to the globalist business ethic of Netflix. In doing so, they convert an odd historical footnote into a more ambiguous consideration betweenan overbearing government a little too into its control, and a rebel who barely has a cause.

Sahara In the abattoir of lowest-common-denominator kiddie entertainment, a viewer can sometimes read between the lines and see the grown-upwriters starting to crack under their own madness. I credit this cut-rate French-Canadian co-production with offering the most glimpses into thefrustration that comes alongside making a cartoon about the desert adventures of a scorpion and a cobra. Norwegian filmmaker Jarand Herdal setsan auspicious scene, sending stragglers in a famine-stricken Scandinavia into a mansion for a show that costs whatever they can afford, withperversions and carnage awaiting in each room.

One guess where that comes from. Lucid Dream Among the curiously large backlog of East Asian sci-fi projects that Netflix has imported, thisdoes not rank among the more memorable. Yeh Ballet In , Sooni Taraporevala directed a fifteen-minute documentary short about ManishChauhan and Amiruddin Shah, two Mumbai kids scooped out of their chawls and deposited into a top-of-the-line ballet academy. In elongating tonearly two hours and going the narrative route, Taraporevala bathes his subjects in a phoniness that only exaggerates the distance from its ownreality. Coming from India gives the film a few chances to say something worth hearing, much of it about the casual racism of the ballet world; thewhite instructor is quick to tell his new pupil to shear his luscious locks in order to conform to Western performance standards. The few scenes

articulating this concept get closest to recapturing the observational spirit of its source. It must be one hell of a fluoridation process that gave us thechiseled fortysomething sexpots who appear to have skipped right into this film from a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

No white sweaters and white wine for this quasi-First Wives Club, however; the weekend turns into a cougar prowl of partying, eager-to-pleaseyoung studs, and pelvis-focused beach volleyball montages. Though by no means a good film, it ranks as one of the more tolerable bad ones, withmost of the genital-driven jokes made in good humor and good faith. She then squandered part of that goodwill on limp-noodle biopic MaryShelley , and now threatens to completely deplete it on this rom-com lacking both volume and a lustrous aesthetic shine. Uptight advertising execViolet Sanaa Lathan keeps her life as rigorously controlled as her elaborately treated do, but she must forsake the picture-perfect fakery to gonatural up top and find herself.

Sunanda Usha Jadhav is precisely the sort of character that Chopra and other outspoken advocates for women in the entertainment industry havecalled for. A lawyer ardently arguing for abused women against their alcoholic husbands, she has a feminist yen for justice at war with an innerturmoil that still haunts her. Take a wild guess at what happened in her past to make her pursue this particular line of work. For a while, thecharacter is more fully-developed than the film around her, until the final twenty minutes take some shall-we-say-unanticipated turns that seriouslyundercut its progressive messaging. Slightly coercive sex and cuckolding: the cure to a flagging marriage? Revenger The seventh art started goingdownhill the day that CGI blood was ruled more cost-effective than squib packs and karo syrup. Hopefully, powerhouse star Bruce Khan will findmore sure-handed tutelage elsewhere, and soon.

This film, a Polish rush job in the English language, makes that faux pas into its main event. Even if the visual profile looks more like an HBOprestige movie. Conflict-averse academic Paul Adama Niane finds this for himself as his family returns from vacation in their RV, greeted byhousesitters exploiting a loophole to squat on the property. Paul calls the cops, and because all they see is a Black man trying to break into a bighouse, they arrest him instead of the offenders. Holiday Rush The politics of poptimism figure prominently into yet another fish-out-of-water classreversal, this time starring Romany Malco as a radio personality suddenly out of a job when his pride and joy station gets bought by abloodsucking megacorp. While he and his bratty children move back in with family auntie Darlene Love!

The racial subtext of that divide also makes this film more watchable in theory than in practice, a counterweight against writing so dedicated tobeing unfunny that it actually drops the record-scratch what-just-happened moment without a trace of irony. For some, the minute-by-minutepredictability will be a bug, but others, a feature. The most costly production in Malay film history often feels like an extended recruitment video,showing how PASKAL soldiers save lives and assist the U.

Leader of men Commander Anwar Hairul Azreen entertains the notion that he may not be able to serve his country and his family at the same time,a nagging doubt typical of the war film, but the film settles that with the conclusion that country and family are one and the same. Though the threetactical operations around which the script has been molded are executed with the precision and efficiency expected of the military, the shut-up-and-put-up thinking leaves its topic only half-covered. A film in which no one comes out looking so good, least of all women. The battle for thefuture of the banlieue takes human shape in Mali-French teen Noumouke Bakary Diombera , torn between his older brothers.

Soulaymaan Jammeh Diangana is on track to be a lawyer and Demba polymath James, pulling double duty runs the local drug game, embodyingthe two paths facing Noumouke in rather plain fashion. With such a natural feel for the banlieue, any falseness within it jumps right out. As a culturalpresence, sure, I get the appeal. Excepting her tiring habit of constant fourth wall breakages, Enola makes for a great role model and flat character,her lack of doubt or any other apparent flaw robbing her of the complexity that actually speaks to young people.

The online Keanumania sparked by the episode in the middle featuring Reeves as a funhouse-mirror version of himself, however, has been well-founded. The aspiration? For camera-ready Rumi Prit Kamani , the Bollywood big time. The obstacle? You can take it from there, the onlydivergence from what the previous sentences would lead a viewer to expect being the cultural import of the bun maska. We learn that the comboof buttery bread and strong chai tea carries a plank of their selfhood, as the signature dish of the Iranian-style eateries set up by immigrants goingeast to India. This sturdy concept gets left behind, however, as the ghost of Rustom buries Rumi under reams of voiceover as his living son goesabout his shitty little adventure.

Nowhere outside Pinterest have canned aphorisms ever carried this much clout. If only it was funnier. On the other hand, there is something slightlyrisky and revisionist about placing a half-Korean character in a role so historically steeped in whiteness. If nothing else, the specter of Long DukDong will have been forever dispelled. Animal Crackers The Variety report about the machinations behind the scenes of this Chinese-Americananimated coproduction makes for an absorbing read, an odd yarn involving Harvey Weinstein, sudden bankruptcy, and one seriously pissed-offseafood magnate.

He hoists the whole of this cloistered comedy as a neurotic enjoying a tight sort of comfort in a closed-off home where he can keep everythingjust-so. From a city-block bombing to a shooting spree at a campground, Greengrass treats discretion like weakness as he shows and shows andshows. Benji The Great Louisiana Tax Break Production Boom has attracted many stars to the oak-lined streets of New Orleans over the pastdecade, and the latest addition to the list is the hottest star on four legs, wonder dog Benji. The best that can be said for this neutered reboot of themusty mutt franchise is that it makes active use of its surroundings where so many have attempted to obscure them. And yet nu-Benji lacks acertain canine charisma present in his doggy forebears, and weirder still, this film plays up the element of Christian dogma — thank you, thank you— traditionally constrained to the subtextual level.

The Influence Spanish novice Denis Rovira enrolls at the Guillermo Del Toro School of High Gothic Revivalism for a story of wicked enchantmentand familial discord, and he only barely passes the final. Rebirth The first rule of this anti-corporate psychological thriller is do not talk about FightClub. Goldberg breaks his pal out of a funk by inviting him to join a new movement of self-actualization he recently discovered, where instead oftherapeutically punching the bologna out of one another, members chant creepy affirmations about accessing inner truth. Ugarte slowly comesundone as a nurse capable of communicating via haunted VHS tape with a boy who died 25 years earlier.

Paulo has a week-one-freshman grasp on chaos theory, and succeeds only in dumbing the concepts down while falling into the same grandfatherparadox facing any time-travel movie. Not even the broad shoulders of Ugarte can carry a film so poorly thought-through. Eye for an Eye In thismorality play shipped over from Spain, a wheelchair-bound gang lord Xan Cejudo wastes away in a nursing home, left with nothing to do but facethe guilt from his checkered past — or lack thereof. It might sound like a lesser sibling of The Irishman The Spanishman! Plaza bends overbackwards to maintain these stakes, resorting to several cheap writerly tricks of coincidence that weaken the story instead of enriching it. Theoccultist on the job suffers from the same thinness, revealing nothing of himself as he brings his daughter along for their own grief counseling sessionof terror.

How else to account for the absolute absence of any signs of life whatsoever in each and every performance? As a mother grieving her young sonrecently nabbed by wolves, Riley Keough never breaks her heart-monitor monotone, and Jeffrey Wright matches her mumble-for-mumble as thenature expert who comes to find the missing boy. Director David E. Talbert uses this pressure cooker as a breeding ground for a black comedy ofschemers and bumblers, brought to life by a cast seemingly picked at random from a hat. Tim Allen! Jessica Alba! A viewer gets the impressionthat nobody in this motley troupe was in contact with one another during shooting.

The cartoonishly inept lawmen plotting to resolve the situation have a Keystone Kops thing going on, the news team broadcasting the eventsoccupy a more cynical atmosphere, and on the scene indoors, the shooter and his bargaining chips are doing Coen brothers cosplay. Been SoLong I am of the steadfast belief that any bad movie can be improved at least slightly with the addition of musical numbers, a principle supportedby this adaptation of a London stage smash. Without the occasional ditty to spice things up, this would be a standard-issue guy-meets-gal romanceabout a single mother trying to get back out there. While the music suffers from Repo! Burning Sands Yet another clone movie, this one retreadingthe stomach-churning account of hazing gone too far undertaken by Goat the previous year. But instead of tiptoeing around the jocks, prevailingattitudes of mandated prudence mean that our boys must tiptoe around their parents, their nation, and their own guilt.

Schoolgirl Hatsuni Miona Hori gets her first taste of womanhood with three crushes, each more ill-suited to her affections than the last. What mightscan as retrograde is in practice nakedly human, though it leads to some overdone comic setups that are anything but. Our chronically single galAna Cassandra Ciangherotti goes to a professional love coach Gabriela de la Garza to get her out of the lonely hearts club, and a few montageslater, what do you know! The architect with the well-manicured beard has swept Ana off her feet. The sword of Damocles finally drops when hispartners turn against him, his wife sends a messenger boy to announce her request for a divorce, and his substance-based hobbies threaten toworsen into habits, all on the same Monday.

In America, it feels like the Sundance-industrial complex gives us another one of these every couple of years. He casts a bold silhouette as theimage of gallantry, oftentimes to disbelief-testing extents. Did he really wait to deflower his teen bride, played by a poorly utilized Florence Pugh,until she was ready to give her consent? Mackenzie wants us to gawp at his lengthy tracking shots and flaming catapult, but the bouquet of loosescrew-ups has a way of holding the attention. Close Enemies You know movie cops, always torn between their responsibility to uphold the lawand their allegiance to where they come from. Driss Reda Kateb has long since left behind his lawless French neighborhood to pursue work as oneof the boys in blue, but he must get back to his roots after his boyhood friend and informant gets bumped off. Nothing all that revelatory here, butreheated genre exercises like this can be improved by cut-above acting and writing; this one has the former in spades, as Kateb and Schoenaertsfume and snort with bullish machismo they have the cojones to actually sell.

The resulting uproar destroyed treasured relationships and put him through a great test of faith in line with Christian lore, and director JoshuaMarston chooses to relate this with all the dramatic nuance of a Lifetime Original Movie. Not even a sensitive turn as an AIDS-positive organistfrom the unerring Lakeith Stanfield can earn this film salvation. The Killer And now for something completely different: a Western by way of Brazil,where a scar-faced killer those excited for a film about Spanish bullfighters are in for a rude awakening plays the cowboy liberating a dusty villagefrom a ruthless capitalist.

Being Human (TV Series –) - Being Human (TV Series –) - User Reviews - IMDb

Buy, rent or watch 'Akira'. All of which gave screenwriting brothers Jim and John Thomas an idea…. With Sly tied up with 'Rocky V', Arniestepped in to play Dutch, the military tough guy who takes his top team of wisecracking mercenaries into the Latin American jungle to rescueAmerican hostages, before terrorists turn out to be the least of their problems.

But of course the climax sees Old Ironballs taking the creature on single-handed, duking it out in the mud, mano-a-mano. Buy, rent or watch'Predator'. The world that the characters inhabit, at once futuristic and primordial, looks like a cross between Tatooine and a Dali dreamscape:dinosaurs mingle with tentacled aliens while headless humanoid statues abruptly spring to life.

Buy, rent or watch 'Fantastic Planet'. The set-up is fairly simple: an alien lands on Earth and tries to fit in while also having to sate an appetite forhuman flesh by assuming the form of a beautiful woman Johansson and luring keen men to their deaths. Like much superior sci-fi, the genreelements mainly exist to cast new light on our world as it is. Buy, rent or watch 'Under the Skin'. Satire in science fiction is nothing new — butcreating a perfect balance of entertainment and politics requires a particular set of skills. The attacks against American imperialism and Hollywoodshallowness come thick and fast, culminating in one of the most striking images in all of sci-fi as Neil Patrick Harris, in full Gestapo dress, preparesto send a platoon of terrified teenage boys into battle. Buy, rent or watch 'Starship Troopers'. Another film that balances on the edge of sciencefiction — perhaps explaining its relatively low placing on this list.

Rumours of a reboot emerge on an almost daily basis. Buy, rent or watch 'Ghostbusters'. Is Carl Sagan the unsung hero of modern science fiction?Buy, rent or watch 'Contact'. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a middle-aged man who lives alone in an apartment overlooking askyline of skyscrapers the film was partly shot in Shanghai and whose day job involves writing emotional handwritten letters on behalf of strangers.Theodore is going through a divorce and falls head over heels in love with an operating system, Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Rather than go heavy on developments in technology, Jonze prefers to use them to explore more timeless ideas about love, relationships and whatwe expect from a partner. Buy, rent or watch 'Her'. No one saw this one coming. Buy, rent or watch 'District 9'. But is it all just a dream, amemory, a Messianic vision — or all of the above? The script is bursting at the seams with wild ideas. Buy, rent or watch 'Total Recall'. Never acritical favourite, the French filmmaking magnate Luc Besson has resolutely persisted in following his own idiosyncratic taste, and this waywardfantasy has an individuality distinct from Hollywood formula. But boy, did Besson assemble a crack team to visualise it.

Buy, rent or watch 'They Live'. Unable to manage their waste output, humans have evacuated Earth, leaving robots behind to clean up the mess.Soon enough, though, they have other problems to worry about, like the bouncy alien — who looks like a beach ball with claws — wandering thecorridors, or the malfunctioning talking bomb that tries to existentially justify its need to explode and kill everyone onboard. Buy, rent or watch'Dark Star'. The next time you hear a friend bemoaning the Hollywood remake factory, send them a link to this list.

As the film progresses, the clammy hand of paranoia tightens its grip — and the final shot is a sucker-punch like no other. Buy, rent or watch'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. The film admirably credits the audience with the intelligence to decipher the clues in its elliptical narrative,gradually picking its way towards a state somewhere between paranoid anxiety and head-spinning dizziness. Buy, rent or watch 'Primer'. For thisstory, Page and co are employed on an upping-the-ante mission: to insert rather than remove an idea into the head of a corporate bigwig CillianMurphy in order to sate the ambitions of a business rival Ken Watanabe. Most memorable are some jaw-dropping set pieces where Nolan and histeam ostentatiously flex their special-effects muscles, most notably a scene that sees Page and DiCaprio walk through Paris as the streets appear tofold up and over before their eyes.

Buy, rent or watch 'Inception'. With his orange hair and a perceptible coked-up jitteriness, Bowie is perfect as the alien, Thomas Jerome Newton:spiky, awkward, uncomfortable in his own skin. But the real stranger in this strange land was cult director Nicolas Roeg, fascinated by theAmerican Southwest — its listless nurses the brilliant Candy Clark and bored college professors a fearless Rip Torn. The movie is filled withdaydreamers desperate for a sense of purpose.

They instead find television, guns, alcohol and inertia. The result is wickedly smart and knowingly in-jokey without ever ahem alienating the non-nerds. Buy, rent or watch 'Galaxy Quest'. In a future where plants have become extinct on earth, a handful of starships act as greenhouses,preserving the few remaining specimens in the hope of eventually reforesting the planet. He rebels, kills his co-workers and heads off to tend to hisplants with a couple of trusty robots in tow.

The film may not have aged perfectly we can live without those willowy Joan Baez numbers , and Lowell is a bit of a blowhard. But the message iseternal: whatever the risks, man must be his own saviour. Buy, rent or watch 'Silent Running'. Buy, rent or watch 'Gattaca'. This being Hollywood,suave Michael Rennie was perfectly cast as the angular alien — after all, he came from the distant galaxy of Bradford.

All well and good until the security system failsis tampered with and a T-Rex and friends go on a chomping rampage. The cast, led by Sam Neill asa gruff, kid-hating paleontologist and Jeff Goldblum as a chaos-theory rockstar, is an absolute delight. And Spielberg knows how to build a nail-biter of a set-piece, like the now iconic but ever so tense velociraptor kitchen sequence or the central tyrannosaurus attack that was a landmarkshowcase for then-nascent CGI technology and which, over 25 years later, still looks pretty impressive. While the film's numerous sequels hagvevaried in quality — definitely avoid the third outing — 'Jurassic Park' remains a gold standard when it comes to huge Hollywood blockbusters.

Buy, rent or watch 'Jurassic Park'. Effectively, the film splits society into three species: warlike gorillas, intellectual orangutans and cautiouschimpanzees what happened to the gibbons? A recent run of entertaining prequels have only served to enrich the original. Buy, rent or watch'Planet of the Apes'. Don't despair, struggling filmmakers: you can make your sci-fi classic without a James Cameron-sized budget or any budget,really. Nor do you need a feature-length running time or, amazingly, a motion-picture camera. In it, Paris is reduced to radioactive rubble, butscientists living underground hope to send a dreamer back in time via his strong memories of an alluring woman. The guy sees her in his mind, theybegin to flirt and fall in love, and who can blame him if he never wants to return? Kubrick and Burgess were satirising new forms of psychotherapy,while Cold War totalitarianism was also on their minds.

Sci-fi fans will also appreciate that a minor character, Julian, is played by Dave Prowse, aka Darth Vader. Buy, rent or watch 'A ClockworkOrange'. Establishment scaremongering about the communist threat against American freedom of conscience seemingly underpins this drumhead-tight B-thriller about sinister extraterrestrial pods taking over small-town California in its sleep. Bruce Willis plays a low-level criminal in a futureearth destroyed by disease, sent back in time to trace the roots of the plague. In the process he manages to fall in love with Madeleine Stowe fairenough and gets banged up in a mental institution where he stumbles upon Brad Pitt in one of his first and finest roles as a demented, jitteryenvironmental terrorist. But this is such a bizarre mind-fuck of a film that it hardly matters.

Plus, you get to see our Bruce wearing a blonde wig and Hawaiian shirt, which is a huge bonus. Oscar Isaac chills as Nathan, the psychopathic yetcharismatic billionaire founder of the search engine company that protagonist Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, works for. Circumstances sendDavid on a dangerous journey to discover his maker, a nightmarish trek with many allusions to that other lost boy, Pinocchio that includes a sinistermechanical gigolo Law , a tech-phobic Flesh Fair, a visit to a half-submerged Manhattan and a controversial, highly emotional climax that lingers inthe heart and the mind.

Buy, rent or watch 'AI Artificial Intelligence'. Gondry became more capable than his usual craftsy music videos, and Charlie Kaufman, thescreenwriter, proved himself deeper than his reputation suggested. The biggest revelation comes in the shape of Jim Carrey and his turn as thesquirmingly uncomfortable Joel. Meanwhile, Kate Winslet plays Clementine, one of the great sphinxes in modern movies: voluminous, punkish,soulful, cherishable. She would be hard to forget after a breakup. Buy, rent or watch 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'. Let it be stressed: atthe root of every great sci-fi film is a killer script, not special effects or lasers. It helps when your star is Michael J Fox, captured at the peak of hisyouthful heroism. Buy, rent or watch 'Back to the Future'. Add to this some still-impressive effects, a wonderful swooping electronic score and thedry, ironic presence of that mechanical icon Robbie the Robot, and the result is a film that stands up to modern scrutiny at every turn.

Buy, rent or watch 'Forbidden Planet'. Buy, rent or watch 'The Fly'. Everything in this nightmare vision of the future is recognisable. What qualifiesit as sci-fi is the setting and global infertility crisis — no child has been born since Like the city, Clive Owen, a pen-pusher at the Ministry ofEnergy, is a shell of a man, talked by his ex, the leader of a terrorist guerrilla group, into aiding an African refugee. Buy, rent or watch 'Children ofMen'.

Our human protagonist is Kris Kelvin Donatas Banionis , a grief-stricken scientist still mourning his long-dead wife, Hari. After an earthboundprologue that culminates in a mesmerising drive through an otherworldly metropolis, Kelvin journeys to a space station orbiting Solaris, a sentientplanet that apparently has the power to resurrect dead beings. In the midst of investigating these claims, his spouse Natalya Bondarchukmiraculously reappears, and things only get stranger from there. Buy, rent or watch 'Solaris'. Forget all the time-hopping, helicopter-exploding andbanging on about destiny — at heart, this is a story about people, whether real or fabricated: their loves, their friendships, their failings and theirregrets. Buy, rent or watch 'Terminator 2: Judgement Day'. Buy, rent or watch 'Stalker'. But it also deals with the sheer overwhelming monotony ofeveryday life and the crushing depression of solitude. We only wish that more contemporary sci-fi emphasised ideas over explosions.

Buy, rent or watch 'Moon'. Those pitiful sequels may have gone and ruined it all with impenetrable cod-philosophising and crusty rave chic, but fora moment this really did feel like the future of film. Buy, rent or watch 'The Matrix'. A helicopter flies in low over an American scientific researchstation in the Antarctic. The dog turns out to be a parasitic alien organism that can imitate any life form, and which proceeds to pick off theYankees one by one.

John Carpenter prolongs this gut-twistingly tense paranoia throughout the whole film, and Kurt Russell leads an ensemble cast of totally believable,blue collar guys, bored to death and stir crazy. Not anymore. When the Frenchman found out that said family flick would also involve a strandedalien, he laughed out loud. Minute in scale, intimate in tone, it is one of the finest films ever made about how kids think and how families fit together.Buy, rent or watch 'ET the Extra-Terrestrial'. Nowhere is this more true than in the feisty Bogart-Bacall interactions between rakish rogue HarrisonFord and ice princess Carrie Fisher — their on-set dust-ups may be legendary, but their on-screen chemistry is unmistakable.

Buy, rent or watch 'The Empire Strikes Back'. While promoting that quickie horror sequel, a dream of a metallic torso pulling itself from anexplosion sparked his imagination. The story is blissfully pulpy: a killer robot in synthetic skin Schwarzenegger, then best known for playing asword-wielding comic-book barbarian is sent back in time from a ruined Earth to the present day. His task is to murder Sarah Connor Hamilton ,the mother of the future saviour of humanity. Buy, rent or watch 'The Terminator'. But over time it has become perhaps the most imitated sci-fi filmever. In a densely packed and towering city of the future, Freder, the son of a wealthy industrialist, falls in love with a girl from the hellishunderground slum where workers toil to fuel the lives of those above. Buy, rent or watch 'Metropolis'. Lowry dreams of soaring high like amechanical bird and sweeping a beautiful mystery woman Greist off her feet.

In reality, he finds himself at the heart of a confusing scandal involving presumed terrorists and a case of mistaken identity, reluctantly taking up ajob at a government department called Information Retrieval so he can seek answers. But this is something altogether more majestic, ambitious andtroubling. Buy, rent or watch 'Brazil'. Suffice it to say, the stakes were raised and the space blockbuster was born. But chiefly, this was a film thatlaunched a million toys — and, not insignificantly, a million dreams.

Harrison Ford became a megastar overnight; ditto the black-masked Darth Vader, whose synthesised breathing noises entered the lexicon. Buy,rent or watch 'Star Wars'. How did James Cameron, the veteran of precisely two films one of which was unwatchable manage to match, somewould say improve upon, one of the most inventive sci-fi movies ever made? Where did that script spring from, so streamlined and propulsive yetat the same time so sharp and quotable? Cameron has never managed to repeat the trick. Buy, rent or watch 'Aliens'. Well, that and thebreathtaking special effects. The appearance of the mothership over the mountain is one of the great visual punches in cinema. And the gloriouslyunflashy performances — Truffaut and Bob Balaban make a perfect nerdy double-act.

How many non-musicals feature their score so prominently? The result is pure joy distilled onto celluloid. Maybe God does have a beard, after all.Buy, rent or watch 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'. Space can also be a bleak, functional hellscape — just another workplace. Buy, rent orwatch 'Alien'. If the robots are programmed with more soul and compassion than the humans, how do you tell the difference? And does it matter?And it succeeds flawlessly. Buy, rent or watch 'Blade Runner'. And so we reach the top of our list by a galactic margin , a film that scrapes thefarthest edge of cinematic achievement. It made sense, then, that he would dive into an unprecedented four-year production process to bring sci-fiup to his exacting standards.

The film was impressively open-ended for a mass entertainment, allowing for plenty of speculation. The way ahead is full of stars — we only needthe minds to take in the view. Buy, rent or watch ' A Space Odyssey'. You have some eye candy and also a great plot and storyline. It's not allabout hot vampires and werewolves beating each other up for a girl You forget that their superhuman but people going through some difficult times.

It's fun to watch Also if your a big fan of syfy, you'll love tuning in to watch 45 mins of fantasy, drama, and humor. Don't shoot it down till youchoose to sit down and watch it with arms open and enjoy. CountVladDracula 17 January I just watched the American Being Human and I have aconfession. I liked it. If you're not familiar with it the plot of Being Human is about supernatural creatures that secretly live among us and awerewolf, vampire and ghost share a place together while trying to pass as human. That's the plot of both the BBC version and the Americanversion in a nut shell. When it first started the voice over gave me this uneasy pseudo-intellectual impression of talking down to the viewer withsimplistic while terms trying to sound deep, a major turn off for me.

But it gradually got better. The main plot is very obviously taken from the early Being Human pilot from BBC 3, the major differences start with thecharacter names and the supernatural powers. The vampire is named Aiden instead of Mitchell. And unlike Mitchell Aiden can't eat human food.Aiden also seems physically stronger than Mitchell. Aiden's also over where as Mitchell was only , having been made a vampire during World War1. He also has the power to enthrall people like the vampires of Forever Knight, a power the vampires of the original Being Human did not have.Aiden's maker is the local vampire lord or king, Bishop, who in the original BBC version was named Herrick but otherwise serves the same exact

purpose. Aiden is more intellectual than Mitchell. He quotes Byron and is a fully qualified nurse. Mitchell a janitor in the original BBC version.

Both work in a hospital with the werewolf. I don't like that make up when he's feeding looks obnoxiously like Edward Cullen's make up inTwilight. Don't mix Twilight with my Being Human I also didn't care for how the fangs looked. The fangs look pretty bad. I guess I'll get used tothem but I think the BBC version had better fangs and had really cool looking black vampire eyes which I haven't seen on this one.

They even have the same outfit. However Annie had a quirk of liking to make hot drinks and leaving them around the house. Sally so far can'tinteract with the world around her. The supernatural creatures can see her but she can accidentally fade out of view for them too a nice effect theBBC version does not have. And even our Supernatural boys Josh the werewolf and Aiden the vampire can't physically touch her yet unlke Anniewho had no trouble interacting with other supernatural creatures. One thing I did NOT like was she made a twilight comment about the werewolfand vampire. The original show has never done this. Please don't mix Twilight into my Being Human Josh is the biggest change. He's the werewolfand in the BBC version his name is George. Before and after his werewolf transformations they do not show his behind at all but this is to beexpected, somehow in the last ten or so years the human behind has become taboo on American TV.

We USED to be able to see it. I don't know why we can't now. There's a little joke about Josh and Aiden possibly being lovers when they firstmove in but it's very glossed over. The scene is a lot funnier in the BBC version because George is a very spastic and neurotic character whobabbles when he's nervous and has very geeky, intellectual nerd traits. Josh is not a spastic nerd which takes away some of the charm. In fact hecomes off as somewhat of a jerk. I am not too thrilled with the personality of the werewolf.

His potential love interest, a character named Kara Nina in the original BBC version seems to have more of the original neurotic, babbily,awkward geek personality that George originally had in the BBC version. This is a cute character trait. Nina was a little shrew-like in the originalseries. I feel the Josh and Kara personalities are a reversal on George and Nina. A funny joke borrowed from the original series where Georgeand Mitchell now Josh and Aiden are mistaken as a couple has lost it's edge because Josh doesn't have the spastic awkward response Georgehad. Blink and you'll miss it. Another change made was in the original pilot it was George's exfiance that showed up at the hospital and would laterunfortunately follow him to where he makes his monthly transformation. In this version it's Josh's younger sister who follows him.

One thing I wish they had changed from the BBC version but they didn't is in both versions they have the werewolf only change one night a month.Technically the full moon is three to four nights a month. Also George changed at Moonrise. The moon was already up in this and Josh hadn'tchanged yet. He clearly doesn't change until the sun has gone down. The American version felt a little rushed, plot-wise. The time progression isuncomfortable and jerky whereas it seemed smoother in the BBC version.

The British version is set in Bristol while the American version is set in Boston. The background music was also pretty good. In general I still preferthe original BBC version but this was a lot better than I thought it would be. I thought I'd hate it. Instead I actually want to watch it and see whereit goes CarmaChan 26 April I give it 10 stars because it is perfection in the art of storytelling. I am an American viewer, and I prefer the Americancast. Let me first say that if you are like me, you haven't watched Twilight saga or True Blood and generally you feel sick of vampires at the meremention. That said, what made me tune in to Being Human? I saw the ad on a city bus and it struck my curiosity.

I looked into it and loved the premise - modern roommates, cursed in 3 different ways, all trying to be normal. I watched the pilot and fell in love.This series has been at the top of my list since. I can't wait for it to start again, and it kills me when a season ends - always a great cliffhanger! Iadore the werewolf, Josh. I sympathize with Aiden, the vampire. And Sally, well, Sally is just irresistible fun! Nora is also a great character andactress Perfectly written, which above all is a must. Perfectly cast. Perfect performances each week. Fabulous direction, editing. And the makeupartists and CGI artists are cream of the crop! Being Human makes me look forward to Mondays! I fell in love with the original version of thisshow. I can understand why they needed it to have a little more appropriate content but I felt like I was just watching the watered downHollywoodized version of the original.

I have never been able to understand why they make remakes of things yet change the characters names even though we know who they were inthe other version. They didn't change the plot very much and in fact the beginning scene with Aidan practically mirrors the original. I have a friendwho watched the pilot of this version and she said she felt as though she was watching one of the episodes from later in the season, because shefelt that nothing was fully explained. They added random stuff Josh's sister but they didn't keep in the stuff that needs to be in a pilot. I found that Iwas disappointed with Aidan's Mitchell-original overall look.

I am so tired of vampires that looked different from normal humans. He is all pale, broody, and gives off hind of creepy bad guy vibe. The Britishversion is slightly more sexual, without nudity, and violent than this one but if you think that you are mature enough to get past that, then I think thatit would be more beneficial to experience the show in its true and greatest form. Philly88 20 January BUT without the good acting, humor, scripts,direction, and film editing.

It tries so hard to be an original series but falls into the problem areas of all other "SYFY series-of-the-week" losers before it. My biggest issuebesides those listed above , is that this series lacks heart and humor. They constantly WHINE and they're always angry about being monsters,making them less than sympathetic and interesting. How to make it better? Fire the writers you have now. Hire new ones and new actors withtalent. The actors should be able to act and be reasonably attractive. These actors are neither.

Amazingly entertaining show for everyone. A good combination of supernatural characters in one house is a brilliant idea. They just want to be asnormal as possible and we experience their struggles with life. It is so much fun to watch all three. Plus, the actors and actresses are very talented.Josh Sam H. I love them all. I think everyone should seriously consider watching the episodes.

The content is decent and both the action and drama are well presented. I was about to cry in the 2nd season ep. Well, I highly recommend thisseries for everyone. TammyServo 21 January This is so typical of SYFY. I don't think so!! What they actually did was take a popular series from

the BBC, use the same title and basic characters What's left is yet another cheaply made series that couldn't hold my attention past the first half-hour I did watch it to write this review. At a suspiciously short 69 minutes — truly, the nicest run time of all — it comes and goes without leavingany indentation on your mind or soul, a memory-foam movie if ever there was one. In the first, a woman is whisked off her feet by a man soperfect that his love instantly gives her a life of wealth, glamour, and leisure. But because what makes that tempting also makes it a smidgen sexist,the film puts forth a counterfantasy of female agency within that first fantasy; Queen Amber wants to continue being a journalist, and believes thatshe should be part of treaty-signing protocol.

On top of everything else, it just means the least. The central conflict in this squib of a sequel pertains to her choice between Harvard and her long-distance boyfriend Noah, already a student there or UC Berkeley where her A1 day-one Lee has enrolled. This film ladles an oversized this thingis minutes! Another sequel will come in , whether we like it or not. The Kissing Booth Teens and their mushy, impressionable brains should be keptfar away from this putrid rom-com that plays like the most regrettable studio acquisition of Let it instead die the natural death awaiting it. TheRidiculous 6 Sandler stretched himself a little bit by getting into genre work with this Western.

Springing this viciously unfunny John Ford riff on America two weeks before Christmas like a present nobody especially wanted, Sandler portraysa leathery cowpuncher on a search for his wayward Pa with his legion of half-brothers. The Silence Part of me wishes I could simply cut-and-pastemy blurb about Bird Box here with a few altered proper nouns and kick my feet up. The militant sameness enforced by this algorithm has neverbeen so perceivable, as it sculpts a novel into a remora clinging to the underside of A Quiet Place and its sensory-deprived progeny.

The monsters hunting by sound are impish bat freaks in this instance, and until the late-in-the-game introduction of an evil priest, shunted in to fillthe empty space where a real antagonist should be, each beat syncs up with a corresponding section of its twin. Not even the divergent casting —Stanley Tucci leads his family to safety, while Chilling Adventures of Sabrina star Kiernan Shipka is his daughter by cross-promotional synergy —can provide any sense of individuality. The dead giveaway: It was written by a guy who made his name penning rip-offs. One afternoon, achauvinist pig walks into a pole on the street and awakens in a world where the roles of men and women have been completely reversed! Thesatire just writes itself! Though, in a much more real way, it does not. To say nothing of the remorselessly exploitative finale, in which the mutilationthat Laura inflicts on herself is treated not as rock bottom, but as a happy ending. This sci-fi epic is an incoherent mess filtered through an intenselypersonal vision, and the result is something closer to Battlefield Earth than Southland Tales.

The writing confounds the viewer by constantly bursting out into narrative seizures about robot sex or child pornography while remainingsteadfastly boring through its two-plus hours. The Fundamentals of Caring That this film could actually manage to be worse than its title is a grimsort of accomplishment. Its pathos is so disingenuous and suffocating that not even Human Embodiment of Charm Paul Rudd can salvage it. Heplays a depressed writer red flag No. Together, they set out on a cross-country road trip red flag No. By starting with a premise so rich withpotential for overcooked emotional manipulation, the film sets an uphill battle for itself so steep that it can fall right off the mountain.

The film behaves as if his efforts to use his extensive knowledge of her personality to trick her younger self into falling for him are sweet butmisguided. The Wrong Missy Lauren Lapkus sets all her dials to maximum capacity as the date from hell in this comedy linked to the expandedSandlerverse by star David Spade and production company Happy Madison. Of course the movie tries to save face by coupling its two maincharacters up, but to do that it must magically turn Missy from a live-action Looney Tune into a sympathetic, reasonable human woman. The worstthing you can do is backpedal. But one online search and, ah, it all becomes clear: Graham has spent years as the star of The Vampire Diaries.Father of the Year Our world is full of unknowable mysteries: How does the aurora borealis form? What happened to D. Their idiotic feud todetermine the top paterfamilias leads to accidental MDMA-dropping and male breast enhancement, but the mischief does little to perk up anotherwise stultifying family outing.

This film is the equal and opposite reaction to the era of the Hot Dad. In every sense, the center cannot hold for this sequel seemingly throwntogether over a long weekend. Not in the broad strokes of the plot, which resurrects characters we saw obliterated in the first film for no goodreason just so we can all do the same thing again, and not in its finer points, which turn school counselors and convenience store clerks into juvenileyet sex-crazed MAD Magazine doodles. Class-A nebbish Motti Joel Basman falls for one such siren in this Swiss romcom, much to theconsternation of his overbearing mother and the rest of their Orthodox enclave in Zurich.

So begins a sexual coming-of-age narrative coming -of-age! The Players If director Stefano Mordini is to be believed, infidelity is as much a partof Italian heritage as pasta and Roman Catholicism. Which is French, but you get the point. In some cases, or maybe just one case, the man endsup on the losing side of the joke. This theoretical person would take it all at face value and love it. Why is there so much trouble in the world? Theselections have been strung together with a useless framing device in which our man relays his recollections of this time in his life to a blogger at arestaurant, presumably the only scenes produced for this release in specific. The humor is spirit-breaking, the animation horrendous one close-upshot of ice cubes floating in a glass of water looks like an MS Paint debacle , and the emotions atrophied.

It is, at least, slightly less unpleasant than The Do-Over , though not for lack of trying. Would-be entrepreneur Omar Gustavo Egelhaaf fullysubscribes to the perverse start-up worship flourishing in Palo Alto, his ambitions in app development an end in and of itself. The almost-too-telegenic graduates that this film follows for three magical months before college — an ensemble led by K. Blockbuster Where did the French gettheir reputation as masters of romance? Lola Charlotte Gabris kicks Jeremy Syrus Shahidi to the curb with good reason, and still the film tacitlycheers him on as he goes about whipping up a DIY superhero movie to win her back. The most baffling aspect of all is that a female directorwould be behind this blend of toxic male entitlement and high-viscosity corn syrup. Has any movie relationship begun under false pretenses evernot bloomed into the real thing?

Rom-coms come alive in execution, and this one does not rise to be the best version of itself. Rapping grandpa: Still A Thing, Apparently! Though,of course, if she calls her dad, he could stop it all. In this aspirationally moronic comedy from where else! France, two suit-wearers Manu Payetand Jonathan Cohen make a career change into the party industry, arranging such unspeakable getaways under the banner of Crazy Tours. Thispremise mostly acts as a container for lots of narcotics, pendulous breasts, and other monkey business, all of which is for nothing more than its own

sake. The contentious debate over depiction vs. One-time Hitman director Xavier Gens is simply too accommodating to the men making all theaccommodations.

Perhaps the veritable tens of viewers for that featureless, rewarmed crime procedural have been waiting to get the backstory of cop Pipa LuisanaLopilato , but even they will be enraged to find that most of the screen time belongs to her senior partner Juanez Joaquin Furriel. The multiple casesthey tackle in these two hours, an unfocused length giving it the disjointedness of a TV binge-watch, do nothing to illuminate who these people areor why we should take interest in their work. From this unsound premise he weaves an incomprehensible story involving a powerful magic wand,Noomi Rapace as a tremulous elf, and latent plot-hole-fixing superpowers revealed at just the right moment.

Ellie Nia Long is living the dream — big house, high-power lawyer job, photogenic family — but feels like a stranger to her husband StephenBishop. There goes all the spice the erotic thriller genre once held, and indeed, all the eroticism. While some of us might use technopathy toredistribute wealth or expose covert wrongdoing, our hero Tom Bill Milner instead goes after neighborhood toughs like a USB-enabled Kick-Ass.The After Party WorldStarHipHop, that august online repository of fight clips, uploaded freestyles, and twerk videos, produced this misbegottenrap comedy in their first foray into feature-length entertainment. But even without the name-drops, the Worldstar stamp would still be evident fromthe long line of rapper cameos, some better than others.

Jadakiss stopping by to drop a little knowledge about Eric B. Tau Riding high off his Oscar win for a Winston Churchill buried under pounds ofprosthetic jowl, Gary Oldman estranged himself even further from humanity by voicing the artificially intelligent computer program that gives thisdismal sci-fi project its title. Sandy Wexler This biopic of a fictitious, incompetent, ill-mannered talent manager benefited from the subtle handicapof lowered expectations, exceeding the likes of The Do-Over with a handful of decent one-liners and some amusing celebrity cameos. The TribeHow the same laws requiring Lee Daniels to slap his name on The Butler fail to prevent confusion between this stink-bomb and the superlative filmof the same title also on Netflix as recently as a few months ago!

God save any poor soul looking for the latter who lands on the former, another dispatch from French studio comedy hell. Big-man-dancing jokes.CEO nice. Spenser Confidential Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg seemed to have a good thing going there, spinning red-white-and-blue accountsof lunchpail heroism from real-life tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing or the BP oil rig explosion. As he gets out of prison — following asmackdown from his pal Post Malone — and goes to work ridding Massachusetts of crime, he essentially morphs into the Parliament-smoking,Dunkin-chugging hero BostonMan. Or Easy A. This is the saddest kind of bad movie, one that feels like a worse version of so many wonderfulmovies.

The latest in a long line of films that know teenagers use social media but utterly fail to understand how, this pat after-school special dispensesnuggets of wisdom about being true to yourself and knowing who your friends are that possess all the depth and nuance of a tweet. Gugu Mbatha-Raw does her best as an astronaut mourning the death of her children would you believe that comes up later on in the film? A handful of nifty setpieces get kneecapped by technical shortcomings, and the big reveal as to what the hell this all has to do with Cloverfield is so cheap, somanipulative, and so nihilistic that it could have come from one of the latter seasons of The Walking Dead. This one sets out to launder the kid-TVtalents of Sabrina Carpenter no one has ever been less believable as the awkward, uncool everygirl and Liza Koshy into a new level of industrylegitimacy, placing them in a movie that only affirms that how staggeringly outclassed they will be by the Haley Lu Richardsons and Zoey Deutchesof the world.

Unequipped with comic timing or a skill for reaction, they lumber through the usual tournament-style competition in service of that favored plotmotivator for teen movies, college admission. Where have you gone, Julia Stiles? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. This crowd-pleasing GreatWhite Way tourist attraction, an empty exercise in feel-goodery adapted for the screen by the aptly self-congratulatory Ryan Murphy, starts fromthe popularity with LGBTQ teens and reverse-engineers a story from there. Tapping Captain America to portray an Israeli commando would belike getting J-Law to play Anne Frank; Jewish viewers can smell the falsity like a brisket cooking in the oven. Slavery, genocide, and now this? Thescript and camerawork frame leading lady Sofia Carson as a movie star she simply cannot be. The hoary premise — a cutthroat Broadway chorusgirl gets her moral bearings by returning to her sleepy Wisconsin hometown and coaching the local junior dance team to glory at regionals —requires a true celestial object of the screen in order to work, a winning combination of personality and song-and-dance talent that compels us toeat around all the other stuff.

The cheap pathos milked from Deaf Girl and Tomboy Girl hocks a loogie in the face of School of Rock , which did this earnestly and honestly. Wewere all so focused on the question of whitewashing in this originally Asian property that the media narrative almost entirely ignored how defiantlyuninteresting this movie is. It contradicts itself too many times to make any lucid point.

Then he blows that too, moving on having shown no growth. Not all funny voices are created equal. Though the facts may be real and the stuntsauthentic, her pain is all fake. Only the most dedicated horse girls will be able to make it through this rough ride without getting thrown. ExtinctionUniversal had a good reason to ditch this sci-fi genocide allegory with scant days to go before its theatrical release. A rogue human comes to learnthat the bots can feel , just like flesh-and-blood homo sapiens, cuing up the sagacity that killing people is wrong. A leaden work of Commentarydressed as an action tentpole — more like Bore of the Worlds , am I right? For this big, broad, loud, obvious comedy does indeed aspire to satirewith its harebrained plot about two thick-skulled news-radio journalists ginning up a bogus Ecuadorian revolution from the safety of a guest roomin America.

But Gervais cannot muster either the brains or balls to say anything substantive about the anything-goes state of modern media or hectic bananarepublics in South America. The heroically distasteful Gervais of The Office feels so far away. For starters, his loudly stated identification with theblue-collar clock-punchers of America rings hollow as the man himself continues to be devoured by his own wealth. Leo gets to chew a whole lotof scenery as she takes the fight to remove prayer from public schools into court, attracts scorn from every corner of society, and eventually getsherself abducted.

Regular people will wonder how a film ostensibly dealing with First Amendment rights could possibly generate zero original insight. He took thebiggest crowd-pleaser in his repertoire fatuous boob David Brent of the British Office out of mothballs for this uninspired spin-off that finds theformer middle manager, reduced now to grunt work at a toilet chemical company, touring with his band Foregone Conclusion. The nondescriptFrench fields in which Jonathan Helpert shot this sneeze of a movie look more like, well, fields with some crap thrown all over the place than awasteland made arid by an unbreathable atmosphere. Their unendurable trip to a still-standing art museum will make you sympathize with thegaseous cloud.

This is what happens when a Scorsese imitator lacks the good Christian guilt of the O. And yet! Sierra Burgess Is a Loser The insidious influenceof the almighty algorithm feels more palpable in some movies than others. Though that leaves the question of how one film can be both focus-grouped to death and completely bereft of any self-knowledge regarding tone or character. Her scheme to win the man of her dreams involvesdeceiving him and intentionally humiliating her one friend. Duck Duck Goose Children, if your parents have exposed you to this very-bad-no-goodcartoon, tell your teacher, religious official, or another responsible adult in your area. They should know better than to subject an innocent child tothe volley of poop jokes, age-inappropriate pop-culture references, and pathos-as-afterthought contained in this sub- Minions animatedabomination.

Jim Gaffigan voices a carefree goose bachelor who ends up in custody of two defenseless baby ducks separated from their flock. He has nochoice but to take them under his wing and return them from whence they came, learning some threadbare lessons about responsibility along theway. And because this film was produced by the Wanda Media Company as well as Jiangsu Yuandongli Computer Animation Company, andbecause we are at the mercy of the Chinese entertainment economy, the film is set in China. For all intents and purposes, you have now seen thefilm XOXO. Blood Will Tell Cops have a saying that when a woman dies under mysterious circumstances, nine times out of ten, the husband did it.This thriller coming to us via Spain poses the question as to whether that might be the case, then expects us to spend the next couple hours strokingour chins about the all-but-assured.

The truth comes out, as we knew it would, only to conceal a more pointless and vacuous version of the truth within itself. In other words, sometwists are best left un-twisted, especially the ones slapped together from convenience and happenstance just to set up a belabored full-circleending. She tries to get her moisturized, callous-free hands on the royal riches while Hudge 1 has marital issues with her princely beau and Hudge 2decides to get back with the guy she dumped off-screen between movies. Please, let this be the full extent of the relatives. Paradox I got yerparadox right here: How could a sci-fi—Western featuring Neil Young as a futuristic bandit roving the countryside in search of computerkeyboards and Super 8 cameras feel like such a chore, even at 73 minutes? Young is, at best, conscious.

Call me when this gets the Disaster Artist treatment by the mids. Rosenthal takes The Road less traveled by, and unfortunately, it makes all thedifference. The poor judgment extends to casting as well, with Whitaker acting circles around James. I Am Mother As with Orbiter 9 , this filmalso toys with the makeup of the Passengers blueprint, only sans the artful CGI that kept the former from total worthlessness. Distant future,uninhabitable world, hermetically sealed environment, last living girl Clara Rugaard , android caretaker, you know the drill.

Not even a voice performance from Rose Byrne as Mother can bust through the thicket of boredom; for all we know, her contribution could havebeen literally phoned in. I demand to know who loved Passengers enough to have planted the seedling for this emergent trend. Maria Like a DJ setcurated from the refuse bin at a record store condemned by the U. Korn-knockoff nu-metal, screamo, idiot-rawk like Andrew W. Such a baggysetup would suggest a display case for an elevated level of fight choreography or cinematography, but director Pedring Lopez and DP PaoOrendain forgot to come through with that much. That brief sentence does in twenty-odd words what takes the first act of this French shootoutjamboree about half an hour, far too long to spend getting ready for the extended siege that could contain the film in toto. The eventual whirring ofthe big sawblade, only a matter of time from its first appearance, hardly makes a dent. The script busts out every antiquated stereotype in thebook, with plenty of unimaginative caricature to go around for the Jews, the Muslims, the LBTQ community, and whoever else might be curiousenough to watch this best-forgotten cringefest.

Stave off the shakes with this Prince and the Pauper- style trifle that sends Vanessa Hudgens to the Belgravian palace to compete in a reality showthat is pointedly not related to The Great British Bake-Off. Belgravia seems to be in Eastern Europe, though everyone has a crisp British accent,and Belgravia is a real place in the U. Just something to consider as you wait for the movie to end. Dry Martina It is with a heavy heart that I mustreport that the title of this motion picture is indeed a pun, that the main character is a woman named Martina Antonella Costa and that she hasliterally gone dry down there as a result of her recent lack of sexual attention. The once-vivacious singer regains her zest for life when a womanclaiming to be her long-lost sister pops up with her Don Juan-ish boyfriend in tow. Martina wastes no time luring the guy to bed, spoken-for as hemay be, and setting off on what could be fairly characterized as an erotic rampage.

It all sounds much saucier than it ends up being, with too much time frittered away on life-coach-type gum-flapping about finding yourself.Something snaps when he has to move his family from their chi-chi Barcelona penthouse into a mid-grade rental, and he soothes himself byperiodically sneaking back in to his former abode. As he further insinuates himself into the lives of its new inhabitants by making contact outside thehome, a psychothriller takes shape, though it happens to be an ungainly oblong shape. Is this what Jesus died for? Anyway, Hudge and her literalknight in shining armor Josh Whitehouse bring out the best in one another, him exposing her soft caramel center as she shows him modern ways offollowing the chivalrous code.

Greg Pritikin, director of the criminally underseen Adrien Brody vehicle Dummy , plugs Chevy Chase and Richard Dreyfuss into the the machinethat takes in geriatric acting legends and spits out toothless jokes about dentures. Orbiter 9 Only God and Ted Sarandos will ever know why, butNetflix seems to be willing to buy up just about any sci-fi project it can get its licensing contracts on. Director Hatem Khraiche sees the putridfoundation of this premise more clearly than Morten Tyldum ever did, but the lack of star power as a serviceable distraction leaves the match-up awash. But unlike their Step Sisters , the racial dynamic gets downplayed by a script that wears its multiculturalism without drawing attention to it,and unlike its French sibling Battle , it is nearly two hours. How easy would it be to go week-by-week through the caseload of Amaia SalazarMarta Etura, back again as she follows the trail of dead babies and fortune-bringing hexes?

The Highwaymen You may think that Bonnie and Clyde were a pair of sexy, morally ambiguous counterculture types thumbing their nose at JohnQ. I give them a year! The unrestful ghost of Norbit shows its silicone-and-rubber face to Marlon Wayans as he assays both straight-man Alan aswell as his five siblings: the seemingly progeria-stricken Baby Pete, the voluptuous Dawn, the jive-talking Ethan, the flatulently obese Russell, andthe fair-complexioned Jasper. Wayans is nothing if not consistent, albeit in his reliable tendency to reach for the lowest-hanging fruit in any givenscene. It is truly a remarkable thing, how little chemistry a man can have with himself. Holiday in the Wild For those right-thinking souls well awarethat Western colonialism in Africa is and was wrong, but who still get the warm fuzzies at the thought of its aesthetics — khaki, white linen, theslight glint of sweat on the brow — has Netflix got a treat for you! Kristin Davis puts a well-moisturized face on the scourge of voluntourism as awoman eating, praying, and loving her way to Zambia for a new start, and in a truer sense, for tax purposes.

Love your children, love yourself, and just go with Gnomeo if the offspring insists on diminutive-sized fun. See if you can guess where this isheaded: A pretty and otherwise trait-free amnesiac Brenda Song wakes up in a hospital to find her husband Mike Vogel , who hastily notifies herthat she has no job, family, or friends. For those readers under the impression that the film would be above pitting these adult women against oneanother in a series of behind-the-back kvetch-a-thons, congratulations, you have given Poehler too much credit.

She coasts through the production with the same minimum of giving-a-shit that Adam Sandler brings to his Grown Ups franchise, eating up whatmust be half an hour with karaoke-singalong scenes sent from the deepest reaches of hell. Latte and the Magic Waterstone The third-string-estanimators that Belgium and Germany had to offer came together for this talking-animal adventure with little to show for itself beyond one detourinvolving a mystical frog sorceress.

The stone will restore water to a forest dying of thirst, a hopeful clue that some vitamin-packed environmental message may be in store for the kidswatching. But the script, translated with a modicum of artful interpretive spirit, never really makes any overtures towards any theme-having at all.That sounds like a wholly original horror concept — a commodity now more precious than gold — until Soraya falls back on Western visuallanguage to bring the undead Suzzanna Luna Maya back to wheezing, dreadful life. However rooted in regional culture, this looks and moves likethe least-attended title playing at your local AMC. Sometimes A notion that could be the stuff of great black-box theater turns into a limplymounted The More You Know advert in this single-issue drama imported from India. From a Spanish border town on the northern coast of Africato a Cameroon nature reserve and all across the Moroccan hinterlands, a collection of punishment sponges make their way through a smorgasbordof hardships.

What about the mothers who never sleep, because their sons move to the city and never call? She gets to the bottom of it all, but by virtue of beingthe second piece of a trilogy as well as being largely unintelligible, it feels like more of the middle. Nicholas Hoult, to his credit, plays his reluctantsoldier as a bit savvier than the usual bumpkin on a collision course with shell shock. But otherwise, Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Coimbracontributes nothing novel to the conversation. And on top of all that, the gap in age and attractiveness between PM Rispoli and Senator Rossi is, ina word, noticeable. The way Aiman conducts himself, he deserves to end up with no one, the most glaring shortcoming of a script that has nosense for romance, humor, or even basic human functioning.

During a big night-on-the-town send-off for Jenny Gina Rodriguez with ride-or-dies Blair Brittany Snow and Erin DeWanda Wise before sherelocates to San Francisco for a choice Rolling Stone gig — please suspend all disbelief at the door — the gal pals talk in a pidgin of buzzwordsand catchphrases that vaguely resembles a trending-topics chart. For us, that just means another talking animal cartoon to be stuffed into the toychest with the rest of them, with a voice-dub cast of talents significantly less likely to enthuse a child.

Unless the thought of a dog doing a Super Mario-style Italian accent tickles your funny bone, best to stick with the goodly number of name-brandalternatives. Eligible bachelor Sunny Vikrant Massey has been assigned the hand of the blushing Ginny Yami Gautam , but she wants nothing to dowith him, so he teams up with her mother Ayesha Raza Mishra to get her on board. The unchallenged conservatism also extends to the rest of thefilm, which pulls the old Bollywood trick of passing off its paucity of well-honed dialogue with layer-cake spectacle. Mehdi Sami Bouajila insertshimself into one such scenario after doing a dime and a half in the clink, keen on collecting the money his former mates have been holding for him.The lone moment that does do so — it involves an eye-gouging for the ages — then gets usurped by another reminder of how lovely Phuket is.The actors seem to have paid their travel agents as much as their talent agents. But to suggest that Game of Thrones , the most popular thing in theworld, is the sole province of mouth-breathers?

Come now! Knowing that the Hulk was at one point grey is pretty Week 1 in the grand scheme of nerdery. This Turkish girl-meets-boy storyproves otherwise, showing that not everyone can share the chemistry of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Instead of finding common interpersonalground through their thoughts on literature or philosophy, they mostly discuss their respective relationship dramas — the very thing Linklateromitted, knowing that it would intrude on the sexy bubble the characters share. Each septuplet gets to stray out in the world under a shared identityfor one day of the week, though they all have one distinctive character trait, Multiplicity style. A ludicrous conspiracy plot linking governmentofficials and nefarious schemes to control the populace through resource withholding gives the film shape, explained through endless andinterminable dumps of exposition and implausible turns of plot.

Of course Glenn Close did it. Glenn Close always did it! Upstarts Silicon Valley has come to India over the past decade, with a windfall of venturecapital funding turning scruffy college graduates into millionaires practically overnight. He treats the trio of college buds Priyanshu Painyuli,Chandrachoor Rai, Shadab Kamal like a garage band hitting it big: the de facto frontman gets an offer to go solo from a corporate sleaze, the trioalmost breaks up, but they remember the importance of staying true to the music.

The singular Berliner sense of humor also informs this feature spinoff rejoining Lolle as she does a number of other things. That traffic jam synopsisbetrays creator-turned-screenwriter David Safier as a born showrunner without much of a sense for plotting in feature form. It does not help thatthe writing is punishingly unfunny. As young adults, they return to the house where they grew up following the death of their parents, and Alia startsto get a much clearer bead on the phantoms her sister once screamed about. Realized with a inadvertently charming lack of technical polish, thefilm cycles through the usual haunted-house tricks as steadily and as predictably as a carnival ride. Ali lies to his family about his med school test

scores and sets a series of farces in motion, all as he pursues his crush Dianne Helenna Sawires in a lunge at personal agency. On the way to abanal final moral, director Stephanie Laing indulges in all manner of shameless emotional manipulations, the most egregious of which revolvesaround a rascally terminal patient portrayed by Christopher Walken.

He puts a brave face on while withstanding suffering, both within and without the context of the film. Rich in Love Red, juicy, and round, everyoneknows that tomatoes are far and away the most romantic type of produce. This overripe Brazilian comedy following the scion of a vast tomatofortune hinges on the comic potential of the fruit or is it a vegetable? The playboy Teto Danilo Mesquita lies to his meant-to-be Paula GiovannaLancellotti about being poor, so he goes Undercover Boss and starts as a trainee at his own company to find out how we common folk think. TheLast Hangover Brazilian YouTuber comedy troupe Porta dos Fundos sends up The Hangover with this Biblical takeoff, in which the twelveApostles replace the Wolfpack, Jesus replaces the missing groom, and a steady hum of insipidity replaces the functional humor.

The addition of another villain, rather than filling out a sparse film, succeeds only in feeling grafted-on and unwanted. Surely there are less taxingways to look at muscle cars than this. She leaves the film no more enlightened than she started it, as do we. Juanita Alfre Woodard gets her grooveback in this menopausal comedy that just so happens to be written by her husband Roderick Spencer. She catches a bus to Butte, Montana,presumably a choice vacation spot for the Woodard-Roderick family, then gets her blood pumping by rehabilitating a flagging restaurant andshacking up with its fetching Native chef Adam Beach. The Climb In , a French-Algerian free spirit who had never set foot on a mountain in his lifesummited Everest through sheer force of will. Forcing this story into the mold of a romance negates the inspirational overtones and makes Nadiainto a trophy awarded to Samy right on cue.

My research suggests that some encoded details will make this a richer experience for Indonesians and those familiar with the culture. The bestthing would be French acting legend Denis Lavant as the face-painted leader of that very cabal, going above and beyond his already lofty standardfor goblinesque physicality.

Everything in between falls just out of bounds, or goes wide, or whatever the proper sporting metaphor might be for this particular occasion. Pointis, the film stretches its 77 minutes to maximum length with a feeble blend of lesbian humor, out-of-nowhere cowboy-musical selections, andnoticeably professional makeup effects. Director Olivier Afonso, behind the camera for the first time, hails from the faux -gore department in a longline of Z-movies past. But even listing the incongruous elements making up this film runs the risk of piquing interest that it cannot generate itself.

Best supernatural TV shows ever, ranked - GoldDerby

And will the Major ever truly return? Innocence is a noticeably different film than the original in regard to its tone and subject matter. Approachingit less as a sequel and more of epistemological investigation through the medium of anime, Oshii doubles down on the Christian esotericism andphilosophical koan-esque questions that define the greater part of his work to create a film that, although visually impressive and conceptuallycomplex, feels bogged down in its latter half by the weight of too much ambition. When middle-schooler Mikako Nagamine is recruited by the UNSpace Army to serve as a mecha pilot to fight off an alien threat striking at human civilization from the fringes of the solar system, she leaves behindher friend Noboru Terao on Earth. Jin-Roh follows a member of an elite anti-terrorist police unit who, after failing to subdue a mysterious suicidebomber in the midst of a heated riot, is plagued by disquieting visions and doubt regarding the virtue of his service.

The final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are notorious among fans of the series. In response, Anno set to work on an alternative endingto the series to be produced in two parts and aired in theaters. If you were looking for a light, campy and celebratory conclusion, End ofEvangelion is not that movie. Instead, what fans were treated to was perhaps one of the most fatalistic, avant garde, and oddly enough, life-affirming endings to an anime series ever produced.

In short, it is the best and worst of everything that is Evangelion combined to create a film that is unlike anything that had come before it. Despite itsunrelenting darkness, End of Evangelion remains true to the ethos of its subtitle, that the joy of death is in the act of rebirth. Leiji Matsumoto was,along with Go Nagai, one of the preeminent creators of manga and anime in Japan in the s. He is best known for his Yamato series, but his ultimateartistic achievement is perhaps the shared universe represented by the Galaxy Express , Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas manga and animeseries. Galaxy Express started as a manga, then became a episode anime, and culminated in a series of films, of which the self-titled is the first.

The story inspired by the classic novel A Night on the Galactic Railroad concerns a distant future where humans have developed the ability todownload their consciousness into robot bodies, essentially achieving immortality—but also losing some measure of humanity. Only the richesthumans can afford this procedure, and the poor are forced to live in squalor and die in backwater areas. Tetsuo Hoshino is a young boy whosemother was determined for them both to become immortal. Hearing of the legend of the galactic train, the Galaxy Express , whose passengers areguaranteed immortality, he meets Maetel, a mysterious woman who controls the train and offers to grant his wish if he keeps her company alongthe way.

Exploring concepts like class struggle, immortality and what it really means to be human, Galaxy Express is a heady piece of work. It was a smashat the Japanese box office, leading to a somewhat confusing sequel, Adieu Galaxy Express , three years later. It was adapted for the U. Stick tothe original with this one. A good place to start with Leiji Matsumoto, when you are ready to go beyond Yamato. Set in amid the landmark GreatExhibition in London, Steamboy is a high-flying steampunk adventure centered on a young inventor named Ray and a powerful object engineeredby his genius scientist father and grandfather. The supporting characters are slight and ultimately insignificant to the arcs of either the protagonist orantagonist. With that being said, despite its shortcomings, Steamboy remains a visually impressive technical achievement in modern animation.

Set in Croatia in the years immediately following World War I, the film revolves around the the titular character, an ex-WWI flying ace who hasbeen turned into a human-sized pig through a mysterious curse which is never really explained, only alluded to. His obsessions with Europeantowns, the forward march of technology, the disruptive effect of war, plucky young heroines, and of course, planes and flight, are more than justforegrounded here—they are the film. The entire enterprise has a mournful, melancholy feel, and thus a possibly ridiculous situation a pig living his

life as a man is given a surprising amount of pathos.

More grounded than a fantasy about a pig man would suggest, Porco Rosso nevertheless reaches heights that will leave any anime fan breathless—and does it in style. Makoto Konno is by all appearances an average high school girl with a habit of clumsiness and oversleeping. What then beginsas frivolous dalliances of youthful indiscretion soon enough cascades into an unforeseen series of chain reactions that threaten to shake her life tothe core and force her to commit to the consequences of her actions. Like all great science-fiction, The Girl Who Leapt through Time offers thesatisfaction of speculative wish fulfillment combined with an earthly lesson that touches home: time waits for no one, and no matter our fears orregrets, an inescapable part of growing up means taking a leap of faith into the unknown and learning how to fly on our way down.

This adolescent quest soon escalates into a dramatic international conflict involving parallel dimensions, false realities and experimental technology.Inspired by the likes of Yasujiro Ozu, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sergei Parajanov, Sofia Coppola, and Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Yamada is a directorpar excellence, capable of arresting attention and evoking melancholy and bittersweet catharsis through delicate compositions of deft sound, swiftediting, ephemeral color palettes, and characters with rich inner lives rife with knotty, relatable struggles. When Shoya Ishida meets ShokoNishimiya, a deaf transfer student, in elementary school, he bullies her relentlessly to the amusement of his classmates. One day when Shoya goestoo far, forcing Shoko to transfer again for fear of her own safety, he is branded a pariah by his peers and retreats into a state of self-imposedisolation and self-hatred.

Years later, Shoya meets Shoko once again, now as teenagers, and attempts to make amends for the harm he inflicted on her, all while wrestling tounderstand his own motivations for doing so. A Silent Voice is a film of tremendous emotional depth, an affecting portrait of adolescent abuse,reconciliation, and forgiveness for the harm perpetrated by others and ourselves. Back in , Daft Punk were on top of the world. However, the pairhad yet still more surprise up their sleeves. During the early recording sessions of Discovery , Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo co-wrote a screenplay based on the album with the intent of pitching it to their childhood hero, Leiji Matsumoto. The rest, they say, washistory. More than just a serendipitous alignment of two immensely creative forces, Interstella surpasses the limitations of having no spokendialogue to become a fascinating allegory for the appropriation of talent and the predatory machinations of the entertainment industry.

In the pre-internet, VHS era, U. To otaku of a certain age, Vampire Hunter D is a classic of this bygone era. As an OVA, the animation quality isbetter than the average TV series of the era, but not up to the level of a theatrical release. A superior follow-up film, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust ,was released 15 years later, and the series of light novels upon which the films are based still continues today. Along with a few other key titles likeWicked City and Ninja Scroll , Vampire Hunter D lit the flame for many older anime fans, and for that reason alone it deserves to be appreciated.Castle in the Sky , alternatively titled as Laputa: Castle in the Sky , opens with a young girl named Sheeta who, after narrowly escaping theclutches of a band of air pirates who seek to exploit her for unknown ends, is miraculously saved as she falls from a flying airship by a mysteriousamulet that levitates her safely to the ground.

What follows is a two-hour high-action adventure between the pair being doggedly chased by pirates, the military and an unscrupulous governmentagent—all on a quest to find the legendary castle and manipulate its untold treasures and secrets to their own nefarious ends. Castle in the Sky is atremendous film powered by pure propulsive momentum, each setting filled with back-to-back hilarious and harrowing moments that would giveIndiana Jones a run for its money in terms of action and spectacle. Initially released that year as a minute theatrical short film before beingexpanded a year later with a second installment titled The Rainy-Day Circus , Panda! Go, Panda! Conceived, scripted and storyboarded byHayao Miyazaki and directed by his mentor Takahata, Panda is the story of a little girl named Mimiko who, after being left home alone while hergrandmother is away, becomes the adoptive daughter and surrogate mother to a giant talking panda and his son Panny.

Still, Panda! Perhaps the most famous example from this era of animation was Fantasia , produced by Walt Disney and released to critical acclaimin For sure, not every short shines as a pillar of canonical greatness, e. Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of the Gundam series, directed and wrote thefilm, adapting it faithfully from his novel, Hi-Streamer. Featuring gorgeous, tense fight sequences set in space, an excellent soundtrack by ShigeakiSaegusa, and some of the most lauded Gundam designs in the history of the franchise, the film is inarguably one of the high points of the GundamUniverse. Hail Zeon! The film is a story of independence, positivity and the font of inner strength that compels every young person to go out intothe world and build a life for his or herself. After all, anime features that depict Christmas as something more than a backdrop are few and farbetween, especially one that offers such an inspired modern take on the Three Wise Men and the birth of the Christ.

Tokyo Godfathers is the story of Gin, Hana and Miyuki, three homeless friends who discover an abandoned baby while rifling through the trash insearch of a Christmas present. This comparison however, much like in the case of Hosoda, ends up being frustratingly reductionist in its appraisalof both directors. With Beautiful Dreamer , Oshii stopped playing to the gratifications of his audience and instead made a film that was, for betteror for worse depending on who you ask, entirely his own. In many ways, Beautiful Dreamer can be viewed as the forebear to The Disappearanceof Haruhi Suzumiya , at least in terms of its ambition to upend and experiment with the status quo of an established series.

Katsuhiro Otomo is a legend in the field of anime and manga for good reason. Beyond his crowning achievement, Akira , he is responsible for ascore of interesting and thought-provoking anime films that continue to push the boundaries of what animation can do. One such case is Roujin-Z ,a pitch-black satire of the Japanese health care industry and military industrial complex. All the talent arrayed in the creation of Roujin-Z help makeit one of the most singular animated comedies ever made.

The story concerns a not-so-distant future where the government has developed a robot that can care for the elderly in every way—cleaning them,entertaining them, allowing them to use the bathroom, all while they remain safely ensconced in the unit. The first person to test the unit is a dyingwidower named Kiyuro Takazawa. He is deeply unhappy at being placed in the machine, and his unhappiness manifests itself in unexpected waysas his psyche infects the unit, and it begins to use ingrained abilities the government thought no one would discover. Soon enough, the Z iscareening across Tokyo, destroying buildings and battling government military hardware, all while Kiyuro wails about going to the beach, where heand his dead wife made some important memories. Somehow, it all hangs together and makes for a dark but often hilarious satire with somedelightful scenes of robotic destruction.

The film overall looks more like an OVA than a high-budget feature, but the designs are memorable and based in hard science again, this is Otomo, and the characters are vibrant and goofy enough to soften the proceedings. Those looking for more Otomo after Akira would do well to give thisunusual gem a look. When a small army of extraterrestrial land developers move into town to destroy the low-income housing in and around thecity, the brothers attempt to defend their turf and fight back. But lightning-fast punches and death-defying leaps can only delay the inevitable for solong, and Black and White must both eventually come to grips with the consequences of trying to live in the past. Inspired by his time exploring thecityscapes of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Colombo, Treasure Town is almost a character itself—a love letter to the unique chaoticism of pan-Asianindustrialism. Tekkonkinkreet is a complicated and compelling story of love and friendship amid a constantly crumbling and reshaping world thatfeels intimately tied to the communities through which it was inspired.

Only Yesterday follows Taeko Okajima, a year-old unmarried office worker who takes a holiday to visit her extended family in the rural farmlandsof Yamagata where she helps to harvest safflowers. While there, she reflects back on her time as a young girl growing up with her parents inTokyo and how her experiences back then have come to shape her life in the present.

Only Yesterday remains something special nearly twenty-five years later: an earnest and affecting story of a woman continuing to grow and learnwell past becoming an adult. Following the release of The Castle of Cagliostro , Miyazaki was commissioned by his producer and future long-timecollaborator Toshio Suzuki to create a manga in order to better pitch a potential film to his employers at Animage. And if you have already, it onlygets better with age. After wrapping production on Akira in , Katsuhiro Otomo returned in to helm his third anthology collection of short films,titled Memories. Whatever your palate as anime film-goer, Memories is not to be missed. Set during the Tokugawa era of Japan, Ninja Scrollfollows the story of Jubei Kibagami, an itinerant samurai warrior partly inspired by the real-life folk hero, Jubei Yagyu who is recruited by agovernment agent to defeat the Eight Devils of Kimon, a cabal of demonic ninja who conspire to overthrow the Tokugawa regime and plungeJapan into destruction.

Along the way he meets Kagero, a beautiful and mysterious poison eater, and is forced to confront the demons of his past as he fights to preservethe present. Its well-defined animation, unflinching hyper-violence, and impressively creative fight sequences made it a requisite gateway title forearly anime fans and is rightfully looked upon as a cult classic to this day. Ninja Scroll pushed the boundaries of excess, with unflinching depictionsof sensuality and sexual violence shown alongside showers of gore and decapitation. Based on the Chinese folktale The Legend of the WhiteSnake, Panda and the Magic Serpent is noteworthy for being not only being the first full color anime film, but for being the first licensed anime filmto be shown in America.

In , shortly after the post-war animosities between Japan and the West began to dissipate, Toei studio acquired the rights to the story and fiveyears later set out to adapt it into a feature-length film. When year-old aspiring comic artist Nishi dies in a yakuza hold-up while attempting toprotect his childhood crush Myon, his soul meets God before escaping Limbo and reassuming his body moments before his tragic death. MindGame is like witnessing a seven-hour Ayahuasca trip encapsulated into a feature-length film. Without question, Takeshi Koike is one of the greatestanimators alive and working today. Not surprising, considering his most critically recognized work was not produced until well into his late thirties.Redline is a feast for the senses, a no-holds-barred visual spectacle with every framed packed with innocuous intricacies rendered in meticulousloving detail.

This is not a huge surprise from a talent as legendary as Yamamoto, among whose mighty credits are titles like Kimba the White Lion and SpaceBattleship Yamato. Belladonna of Sadness is the tale of a village woman named Jeanne who is raped by her liege lord and his men on her weddingnight, then makes a literal deal with the devil to gain magical powers and lead a rebellion against her rapists. Belladonna is extreme in every senseof the word: Start with the look—the film consists almost entirely of pans across still watercolor paintings, with occasional expressive bursts ofcolor and movement scattered throughout. It deserves to be seen, examined and cherished for years to come. The film is essentially a reimaginingof the at the time popular TV series, Macross.

Like the show, the film centers around the crew of a giant space fortress, Macross, as they attempt to evade an alien race, the Zentradi, anddiscover that the key to their victory just might be the effect that Earth-made pop music has on their enemy. Yes, you read that right. Although thecast of characters and voice actors are the same as those that appear in the TV series, and the plot covers much of the same ground, within thecanon of the Macross universe, Do You Remember Love? In many ways it is typical of its time, in terms of character design, themes and the plotdevice of a band of humans on the run from an alien menace. Yet it is an incredibly well designed, directed and animated film that retains its senseof adventure even in the context of the somber overall plot.

A massive hit in Japan, it has never had an uncut, official release in the United States due to legal squabbles between Harmony Gold, the Americanrights holder for Macross, and various Japanese production entities. The original film was a huge hit in Japan, with lines stretching around the blockon the weekend of its premiere, and is now considered a classic. Set in the titular multi-layered megacity amid social upheaval between the humanbourgeoisie and the robotic working class, Metropolis follows the story of private detective Shunsaku Ban and his nephew Kenichi who, whilevisiting Metropolis on their mission to apprehend the nefarious Dr.

Much like Akira , Metropolis is a sprawling epic of intersecting storylines, sweeping set pieces, and monolithic settings packed with a dense arrayof intricate details and beautiful color palettes. There is perhaps no more catastrophically significant event in modern Japanese history than that ofthe nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The film is, all in all, a human story of resilience and stubborn hope inthe face of annihilation, and hopefully can be looked back upon as a sobering reminder of the costs of unremitting warfare and what we all still haveto lose if we were to forget the lessons of the past. Pom Poko is the type of film that feels inconvertible from its cultural origin. Forget trying tomake this one more palatable for Western sensibilities, Pom Poko doubles down on the qualities that identify it as Japanese film and brandishesthem proudly for all to see.

Emboldened both to defend their home and possibly learn to peacefully coexist alongside the humans, the tanuki retrain themselves in their lostancestral ability of transformation to disguise themselves in modern society. But what distinguishes Pom Poko as such a unique cultural curiosity?

The answer is simple: balls. Set during the early 16th century, the film follows the story of Ashitaka, the last remaining prince of a small easternvillage who is wounded while defending his home from a wild boar overtaken by a malicious spirit. Mortally cursed with no hope of a cure,Ashitaka takes it upon himself to journey to the West and discover and halt whatever malevolent force is causing this havoc. What he finds there ismore complicated than he could have imagined: a settlement of humans mining the region to build a home while fending off the forces of the nearbyforest who see their world being destroyed.

Later he meets San, a young woman raised by the clan of wolves who defend the forest as he attempts to broker an uneasy peace between thetwo sides. Quite simply, it is everything that one would come to expect from the pedigree of Hayao Miyazaki. In , an upstart Japanese studiocalled Gainax pitched Bandai Visual on the idea of a very expensive animated film about an alternate reality in which two nation states, torn by war,struggle to be first to develop manned space flight in an industrialized society. He apologizes to Riquinni, who essentially tells him it was her fault forleading him on.

Even so, regardless of how one feels about this particular scene, the rest of the film is well worth critical evaluation. Directed by Otomo, the shortfollows Tsutomu Sugioka, a Japanese salaryman dispatched by his superiors to the remote and fictitious South American country of the AloanaRepublic to shut down their remote construction designated Facility The film has a sort of timeless appeal about itself, disarming audiences new andold of their cynicisms and suspicions with beautiful settings, empathetic characters, and an infectious marching band theme. Set in , the film followsuniversity professor Tatsuo Kusakabe and his daughters Satsuki and Mei as they move into an old house along the countryside in order to becloser to their mother, who is recovering from a long illness.

My Neighbor Totoro was revolutionary for its time for luxuriating on quiet contemplative moments in a time when most of anime was otherwisedominated by the chase from one flash to the next spectacle. It is the culmination of a master animator coming into the fullness of his creativefaculties and the spiritual preface to the film that would later go on to become his magnum opus. Perfect Blue is a precious rarity in the genre-saturation of contemporary anime: an honest-to-god psychological horror thriller brimming with malice, menace and cinematic sophistication. Withexquisitely inventive editing, thoughtful color direction, and a gripping plot, Kon delivered a strong first outing as a director that would set the barfor his tremendous decade-spanning career. Though ostensibly a film about inherent toxicity of pop culture in manufacturing idols with sameinfatuation as it would destroy them, Kon was by and large unconcerned with the surface reading of his work.

A story of how a creator cannot control what their work becomes, only the dedication and craft to which they pour into the work itself. He will besorely missed. Ghost in the Shell follows the story of Major Motoko Kusanagi, the commander of a domestic special ops task-force known asPublic Security Section 9, who begins to question the nature of her own humanity surrounded by a world of artificiality. When Ghost in the Shellfirst premiered in Japan, it was greeted as nothing short of a tour de force that would later go on to amass an immense cult following when it wasreleased in the states. Adapted from the autobiographical story of Akiyuki Nosaka, the film follows Seita, a young Japanese boy forced to care forhis younger sister Setsuko in the wake of a devastating Allied attack that leaves his hometown in ruins.

The horror of Grave of the Fireflies is not reliant on brooding over callous acts of violence or fixating on the macabre, but rather on the heart-wrenching futility of Seita and Satsuko trying desperately to cling to some shred of normalcy in a world devoid of peace and security. The film isextraordinary in that it shows the audience, with no uncertainty, that these children will perish and somehow through its hour-and-a-half runningtime compels the viewer to hope that this fate can be averted.

Grave of the Fireflies is a chilling portrait of the fragility of human life when confronted by the indifferent brutality of an uncaring world, a film utterlyunlike anything Studio Ghibli had produced before or since. Tragic in the truest sense of the word, Grave of the Fireflies is not only one of thegreatest films the studio has ever produced, but unmistakably one of the greatest anime films of all time.

The strength and perseverance of a young woman, the rapturous glory of flight, the spiritual struggle of personal and cultural amnesia with Japanesesociety, the redeeming power of love. Whatever the case, there is nothing quite like watching Spirited Away for the first time. The image ofChihiro, having discovered her parents transformed into pigs, running frantically through the streets as the town surrounding her comes to life aslights flicker into existence and spirits rise up from the earth is nothing short of magical. Set thirty-one years after after World War III was sparkedby a massive explosion that engulfed the city of Tokyo, Akira is set in the sprawling metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, built on the ruins of the former andteetering precariously on the cusp of social upheaval.

The film follows the stories of Kaneda Shotaro and Tetsuo Shima, two members of a youth motorcycle gang whose lives are irrevocably changedone fateful night on the outskirts of the city. While clashing against a rival bike gang during a turf feud, Tetsuo crashes into a strange child and is thepromptly whisked away by a clandestine military outfit while Kaneda and his friends look on, helplessly. Tomb of Suleyman Shah. One of theburial sites of the first Ottoman emperor's grandfather is part of Turkey despite being 27 kilometres 17 mi south of the country's border with Syria.By kana , the tersest railway station in Japan, serving the capital of an equally terse prefecture.

By stroke count, the tersest in the world. By transliteration, only second -tersest. Wonderland Amusement Park Beijing. The tallest building everdesigned, standing 4 kilometres 2. It is, however, "never meant to be built". A 6th-century pagoda which was possibly the tallest structure in theworld until it was destroyed by lightning 18 years after its completion. An illegal gold mining settlement that developed into a thriving unrecognisedcountry, only surviving because the Chinese government was unaware that it existed.

A non-existent town in Lancashire , England that appeared on Google Maps. Two municipalities, one of Belgium and one of the Netherlands, thatsurround each other twice and many times over. Some houses and shops are in both countries. Barcelona Supercomputing Center. A completelyRussian town, inhabited by Russians, with Russian buildings, supported financially by the Russian government, located in Norway. Beans andBacon mine. With such little ventilation, visitors may want to avoid any source of ignition. Berlin Brandenburg Airport. A construction-finished butunfinished in other areas airport in Berlin. Construction was finished in ; however, the opening date was repeatedly pushed back as the firesuppression system was installed incorrectly. It finally opened in October Bielefeld Conspiracy. Brusio spiral viaduct. A German town that is fully

contained within Switzerland.

A tiny residential street in the UK that was so infamous for its name that it became a tourist attraction. The third shortest-lived state in history seeBenin Republic in Nigeria ; it was independent for only 24 hours. Cerne Abbas Giant. A 1,metre 4, ft hill with a metre ft stuffed pink bunny on top.Ebenezer Place, Wick. Fallen Monument Park. Flannan Isles Lighthouse. A gigantic swastika made of larch trees that went unnoticed for nearlysixty years. Graham Island. Gropecunt Lane. A street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages. Icelandic PhallologicalMuseum. A museum in Iceland solely devoted to the collection of penis specimens and penis-related art.

Leaning Tower of Suurhusen. List of missing landmarks in Spain. Over 60 interesting buildings, including larger castles, royal palaces, leaningtowers, city gates which were completely or partially demolished and no longer exist, with their respective articles and images. Magic Roundabout.Only in the United Kingdom would you find a large roundabout with six mini-roundabouts. A lighthouse built on this island led to a redefinition ofthe border between Sweden and Finland. An autonomous polity in Greece home to 20 monasteries, notable for being the only political subdivisionin the world in which women as well as female animals are prohibited from entering for any reason. Municipalities of Liechtenstein. The blotchy,angular borders between these divisions seem almost arbitrarily strange. The UAE's are similarly weird. A tiny European region — approximately1.

Newhaven Marine railway station. A railway station that was technically open between and , despite a no passenger trains serving the stationduring that time, b an inability to buy tickets to the station and c the station itself being demolished in A micronation and BDSM resort whoseultimate goal is "absolute matriarchy " — for all men to be enslaved by women. Papa Westray Airport. An unassuming coastal airport in theOrkney Isles, where you can take a scenic flight to the nearby island of Westray, and enjoy all 47 seconds to 1 minute and 30 seconds of it. Anuninhabited river island which switches sovereignty between France and Spain every six months. Principality of Sealand. A micronation located 6miles 9.

A piece of Russian territory through which a metre 3, ft stretch of Estonian road passes. Although people are allowed to drive on the road withouta permit or visa, it is prohibited to travel on foot, or to stop the vehicle for any reason. A piece of Nazi architecture in Berlin, built with the solepurpose of being heavy. Scottish Court in the Netherlands. A Christian chapel decorated by the bones of approximately 40, people.

Sexi Phoenician colony. Shell Grotto, Margate. A grotto with a mosaic of 4. Nobody knows who built it, when, or for what purpose. SmallestHouse in Great Britain. Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Svalbard Global Seed Vault. If a global famine occurs, you better hope you live inSvalbard. The most dangerous path in the world? Would you join a hundred others who died walking the invisible path? Uffington White Horse.The only of its kind on the island of Unst , Shetland.

It is periodically refurnished and contains a sofa and TV. And the best street name has to go to this street in York , England. Also said to be theshortest street in the city too! Try driving a truck under this bridge in North Carolina. Actually, please don't. A natural topographic feature inAlberta, Canada, which, when viewed from above, looks remarkably like a human wearing a Native American headdress and earbuds.

Two non-existent Ohio towns that appeared on Michigan 's official highway map as a reference to the University of Michigan and their rivals, OhioState University. The branch of the Chicago River that was so contaminated with blood from the Stock Yards that it gained this appetizingmoniker. Bullfrog County, Nevada. A former county in Nevada established around a mountain which was to become a radioactive waste disposalsite. As of , it is the only uninhabited county-equivalent to ever be created in the United States.

A road that's in both Canada and USA. Centralia, Pennsylvania. Clinton Road New Jersey. In addition to having the longest traffic light in thecountry, the road is also notorious for reported occurrences of paranormal activity. A temporary "city" established as the site of an publicity stunt, astaged train wreck. The wreck unexpectedly caused two deaths and numerous injuries among spectators. A shopping mall that stood abandonedfor over twice as long as it was in business until it was finally demolished in It was featured in the film The Blues Brothers and became a populartarget for urban explorers.

An island off the coast of Cuba that was sort of ceded to East Germany and thus sort of remains part of East Germany, which doesn't existanymore sort of. Fenelon Place Elevator. The shortest and steepest railroad in the world, supposedly located in a town of around 60, people.Florence Y'all Water Tower. A Northern Kentucky town's unique "welcome" sign. List of former counties, cities, and towns of Virginia. All theplaces that are no longer found in Virginia , such as Illinois County, and a few that never were including Walton's Mountain. Gann Valley, SouthDakota.

Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. A brick wall in Seattle burdened by chewing gum. Cleaned in , only to be turned into a memorial forParis. A quaint island in Maine purchased by Cards Against Humanity in Hess Triangle. This used to be part of a bigger plot of land but a roaddestroyed it but the planners couldn't plan correctly so it left this piece of land.

Horace Burgess's Treehouse. A treehouse built by a minister who received a vision from God. Interstate Wyoming. An Interstate Highway thatisn't really a freeway at all. The only U. Island of California. The third-largest U. Island of the Dolls. Located in Mexico City , this is an island full ofbroken and deteriorated dolls of various styles and colors, originally placed by the former owner of the island. The aptly named test site for theworld's first and only nuclear-powered rocket engines. The highest natural point in Rhode Island. For years, one of the toughest highpoints in theU. Just Room Enough Island. This island is about one-thirteenth of an acre in size but that didn't stop the Sizeland family from building a house onit. List of gaps in Interstate Highways. Traffic-lighted intersections, drawbridges, and other oddities in the Interstate Highway System which violatethe standards. List of Las Vegas casinos that never opened.

London Bridge. An over century year old authentic English bridge M Michigan highway. The only state highway in the country that bans motorvehicles. If you thought Texas State Highway was an exceptional state highway, well The smallest park in the world — in 2 0. A public phone

booth that stood for several decades in the middle of a desert, miles away from any roads or other structures. National Raisin Reserve. Createdafter World War II to control raisin prices. Run by the Raisin Administrative Committee, of course. Located on Baffin Island , Nunavut, Canada.It's the largest lake on an island and also contains the largest lake on an island on a lake on an island, which in turn contains the world's largestisland in a lake on an island in a lake on an island. A house in California , built out of beer cans, abalone shells, car parts, and other garbagepreviously tossed out by local residents, is now a historic landmark.

Plymouth, Montserrat. Point Roberts, Washington. Pyramid mausoleums in North America. Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. Republic of Indian Stream.An area of land in northern New Hampshire that was an independent country from to Republic of Molossia. A person micronation in Nevadawhich takes the meaning of the phrase " a man's home is his castle " to new extremes. A city that was ceded by the United States to Mexico in dueto an earlier diversion of the Rio Grande. Rough and Ready, California. A currently populated, unincorporated mining town in the United Statesthat seceded from the Union in , forming the " Great Republic of Rough and Ready ". Secession was rescinded less than three months later whenits citizens noticed that they could not celebrate U. A municipality consisting solely of a Slovenian fraternity's recreation center, established in partto get around liquor laws.

Scott County in northern Tennessee seceded and formed its own state in opposition to Tennessee joining the Confederacy. It remained this wayfor over a century until it rejoined Tennessee in Tower of Wooden Pallets. Track 61 New York City. Presidents when they would visit the hotel.An island in the East River with a surprisingly in-depth history for only being 2, square feet m 2 in area.

War of the Roses. The historical rivalry between Lancaster and York. Not to be confused with Wars of the Roses , the historical rivalry betweenLancaster and York. It's harder than you think to construct the state of Delaware with a ruler and compass. A city in Alaska where almost all of itsresidents live in one building: Begich Towers. Winchester Mystery House. A house believed to be haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed byWinchester rifles. World's littlest skyscraper.

The result of a fraudulent investment scheme, it's a four-story brick building constructed in in downtown Wichita Falls , Texas that has only oneroom on each of its four floors. Zone of Death. The part of Yellowstone National Park in Idaho, where any crime can technically be committedwithout punishment — but don't tempt fate! A short suburban road in Dunedin , New Zealand , reputedly the world's steepest street. Did aJapanese apocalypse cult test a nuke in the middle of rural Australia? Bayswater Bridge. Bridge in Perth that has been hit by trucks 50 timesbetween and Concrete bus shelters in Canberra. These brutalist cylindrical bus shelters are an icon of Australia's capital city. Egmont NationalPark. An island that was created in after a volcano erupted between two islands and connected them. Jervis Bay Territory. Kalawao County,Hawaii.

The least populous county in the United States, with a population of 90 as of the United States Census. Established as a leper colony in , itoccupies a peninsula on Molokai and is not connected by road to the rest of the island. It's designated as its own US overseas territory despitehaving an area of only 0. Considered a mountain when only 43 metres ft above surrounding terrain and metres ft above sea level.

There are parts of Sydney which have a higher elevation and are not considered a mountain. Murray Valley Highway. A kilometre mi road that hasa road route number of B for kilometres mi in the Victorian section and unmarked for 3 kilometres 1. Nelson—Blenheim notional railway. A roadthat was officially considered to be a railway by the New Zealand Government for 22 years. New Zealand State Highway A road in Timaru , NewZealand, that is designated a highway despite being only metres 3, ft long. Pink Lake. Princes Freeway east. A freeway with houses, traffic lightsand a kilometre-per-hour 37 mph limit in some areas.

What are VicRoads thinking? Sandy Island. A tree named after a hashtag on Instagram. With a full name consisting of 85 characters, this hill maybe the longest place name in the world. A notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. The man himself was not without his abjectfailures in Brazil. The luxurious estate of the deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar that may lead to an invasive hippopotamus population in Colombia.A series of towns in Argentina 's Chubut Province with a minority of Welsh speakers.

Architecture terrible. Burned house horizon. The horizon which consumed cultures in the Balkans and around the Black Sea. Count of St. Theoriginal Tommy Wiseau , an eighteenth century polymath who made a number of contradictory claims about his origins, including that he was yearsold. People have also claimed he is an important theosophical figure who many have claimed to have met years after his supposed death inCrocker Land Expedition. An expedition to a non-existent island created to swindle a businessman. Dancing Plague of In around people took todancing for days without rest, and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.Daughter of Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei. A disputed first female monarch of Chinese history before Wu Zetian , whom the EmpressDowager Hu declared was a boy and was emperor for a day before being replaced by another infant. Defenestrations of Prague. A Frenchmanwho was so successful in convincing 18th-century Britain he was a Taiwanese man, that he wrote an elaborate and blatantly fictitious history of theisland.

Believing oneself to be made of glass was quite in vogue among Renaissance-era European nobility. Great Molasses Flood. A storage tank burstand flooded the streets of Boston with a foot 7. An infamous article by The Sun that claimed that animals such as unicorns and bat-winged humanswere found living on the moon. Great Stink. A London summer so smelly it prompted government action. John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland.The world's first drinking game. Care to play? All you need is a bronze "lamp stand" with a tiny statuette on top and some wine.

London Beer Flood. The West German who landed on a bridge in Moscow in The superposed moose cavalries of Sweden and Russia. Mutiny onthe Bounty. The true story starting with a stern captain and a lustful crew on a Royal Navy ship and ending with the British-Polynesian Seventh-dayAdventist culture of the Pitcairn Islands. Plenty of drama in-between. Norwegian butter crisis. A massive inflation of butter prices caused illegalsmuggling and an "emergency appeal" from a Danish television show. Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood. A PepsiCo warehouse collapse flooded the streetsof Russia with an assortment of juices. He became the last Emperor of China at the age of two and died as an ordinary citizen, ending 2, years ofdynastic rule in China. In his twilight years, he also did community theater. Sacred Band of Thebes.

One of the most lethal wars in history centers around a Chinese man claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ. An unidentified man who achievedwidespread recognition after standing in front, and blocking the procession of a column of tanks, the morning after the bloody suppression of theTiananmen Square protests. When the people of Brussels protested against their rulers by building satirical and pornographic snowmen. TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion. Weather Station Kurt. That time when the Nazis landed in North America. Zero has a negative flavor in the worldsof computing , experimental science and statistical mechanics. The real number of the beast? Bertrand's postulate. The Complexity of Songs. Atreatise on the computational complexity of songs by venerable computer scientist Donald Knuth. Don't take it shopping.

Not very friendly with the frugal number either. A number so large that the observable universe is not big enough to write it in full in decimalnotation. And that is a gross understatement. Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel. A fully occupied hotel cannot accommodate any more guests.Or can it? Or, once it can, can it not? Illumination Problem. Infinite monkey theorem. An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number oftypewriters will almost surely produce all possible written texts. Interesting number paradox. Legendre's constant. Look-and-say sequence.Mathematical fallacy. Complex numbers are all fun and games until someone loses an i.

That's when things get real. Minkowski's question-mark function. A function with an unusual notation and possessing unusual fractal properties.The counter-intuitive way to prevail when playing Let's Make a Deal. Nothing-up-my-sleeve number. One, four, seventeen, twenty-fourSchizophrenic number. A mathematical coincidence , the sequence "" appears a mere digits into the decimal expansion of pi. Never tell aNumberphile that a number is uninteresting. Sometimes found in conjunction with triskaidekaphobia see below in East Asian cultures. Moreprevalent in Japan, where 49 is associated with "suffering until death".

Titanic prime. No, it's not related to the Code of Hammurabi. No, it's not always considered unlucky. Yes, space exploration has been touched byit. Will Rogers phenomenon. When moving an element from one set to another set raises — counter-intuitively — the average values of both sets.Also known as the Will Rogers paradox. An ordinal number popular in computing and related cultures. She followed her parents in the business ofselling people Greenwich Mean Time. A fictional Christmas-Hanukkah hybrid, popularized by the television show The O. December Holidaycelebrated by the Costanza family on the television show Seinfeld , since appropriated by many. International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Shiver mytimbers a-harrr! List of non-standard dates. Including, among other things, January 0 , February 30 , and May The Avogadro constant iscelebrated on October 23rd starting at exactly am.

Phantom time hypothesis. Therefore, it is now rather than Any date when the day and month are both the square root of the last two digits of theyear the next being 5th May Swatch Internet Time. Don't forget to bring a towel , terrible or otherwise. In Java , the thirteenth month of the year. Aword created as an alternative name for all the holidays at the end of a calendar year. It came to prominence after Birmingham City Council theEnglish city used it in A possible computing problem in the 's that was supposed to have occurred when the 21st century and 3rd millenniumarrived. Of course, that never happened. The computing problem that will arise due to the Unix time representation used in many computers. Wasthere a year between 1 BC and AD 1? A Book from the Sky. A must-see for connoisseurs of gibberish.

Antiqua—Fraktur dispute. A dispute over which typeface was more "German". At first, the Nazis were for Fraktur Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalobuffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. A meaningful, grammatical construction that has inspired linguists to talk about bullying amongst Western NewYork's bison population. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. A sentence contrived by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate that a sentence can begrammatical yet nonsensical. Comparative illusion. More people have researched these nonsensical sentences than I have. Controversies about theword niggardly. Chinese word for "crisis". More notable among Americans than among the Chinese, apparently. The secret language of identicaltwins, also called idioglossia. Disambiguation disambiguation. A nonexistent English word, supposedly meaning " density ", which was listed in thesecond edition of Webster's New International Dictionary from to A usually good-natured African American ritual in which two competitors,usually male, exchange trash-talk until one has no comeback.

Attempts by East Asian people — especially the Japanese — to construct English words and phrases. Cryptic echoes from the days of hot metaltypesetting. Faggin—Nazzi alphabet. That's its real name. What did you think it was about? Deliberately misleading, irrelevant or false informationmeant to suggest conspiracy. A popular word among Discordians. As good an argument as any for English-language spelling reform. A dashbetween communism and independence. Inherently funny word. Some influential comedians have long regarded certain words in the Englishlanguage as humorous because of their sound or resemblance to other words. Poodle , wankel , ni Intentionally blank page. James while John hadhad had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

Repetition gone wrong. The delicious-sounding ethnolect prevalent in multi-ethnic Oslo. La plume de ma tante phrase. List of English wordscontaining Q not followed by U. Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. A character poem written in Classical Chinese, in which every syllable has thesound "shi" in different tones when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. List of common false etymologies of English words. Believe it or not, " crap" did not originate from Thomas Crapper. List of ethnic slurs. List of English words without rhymes. List of proposed etymologies of OK. Longestword in English. Floccinaucinihilipilification , supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and other contenders. The Guinness World Record holder for the"most succinct word". My postillion has been struck by lightning. Ancient spirals of undeciphered hieroglyphs.

All Steve Miller 's fault. Response to sneezing. Robert Shields. Scientific wild-ass guess. A type of slang used to identify an individual with a veryspecific region, usually with accompanied value judgments. Also, a funny word. Spelling of Shakespeare's name. That that is is that that is not is notis that it it is. The Moon is made of green cheese.

Thinking about the immortality of the crab. A colorful Spanish idiom for daydreaming ; try using this one if your teacher notices you becominginattentive in class. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Another example of syntactic ambiguity. Tiles found embedded in asphalt ,usually sporting cryptic messages. Unknown unknown. An undeciphered illustrated book written six hundred or so years ago by an anonymousauthor using an unidentified alphabet.

Adolf Lu Hitler Marak. This Indian politician does not dispraise his parents' questionable name choice. Amandagamani Abhaya of Anuradhapura.

A Brazilian footballer with a socially problematic last name. An unforgettable newspaper headline once declared "Fucks Off to Benfica ". BuysBallot. No evidence of electoral fraud by the chairman of a precursor to the World Meteorological Organization. Cesar Chavez. Cox—Zuckermachine. An officials' association in pre-war Vienna , Austria , of a shipping company for transporting passengers and cargo on the Danube.

A Slovenian -born Italian basketball player with another socially problematic last name. Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr.Ima Hogg. American society leader, philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts, and one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20thcentury. A former New York Times reporter whose middle name is the number eight. And you thought Harry S. Truman had an exceptionalmiddle name Being good enough, this guy invented random access memory and the lithium-ion battery. Leone Sextus Tollemache. List of examplesof Stigler's law. List of people with reduplicated names.

Mansfield Smith-Cumming. The first head of MI6 , whose name became appropriate as he promoted the use of semen as invisible ink. MettaWorld Peace. A committee in Iceland that determines whether a name is suitable for integration into the Icelandic language. Apparently voted yesabout themselves. Naming law in Sweden. An odd Swedish law regulating children's names, which has led to disgruntled parents submitting namessuch as Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb , A , and Metallica.

Public Universal Friend. An 18th century Quaker who died, and was then revived, becoming an evangelist, gaining this unusual name, andbecoming one of the earliest instances in recorded history of a person identifying as genderless. A warning to us all about taking double-barrelledsurnames too far And that's the short title of this German beef labelling law. Roger Fuckebythenavele. A Confederate general during the AmericanCivil War. Thursday October Christian I.

The son of Fletcher Christian , leader of the mutiny on the Bounty. Despite not being Japanese or a sperm whale , he has control over the globaldiamond industry. A name given in Kosovo in honor of a certain British politician. Can ancient pottery be used to play back recorded voices fromthe distant past? Buttered toast phenomenon. Buttered cat paradox. Cneoridium dumosum Nuttall Hooker F. This scientific paper has the longestarticle name on Wikipedia. The paper itself only has five words, though. Eminent Soviet biologist and father of the canine head transplant. Russiangirl who claims to have X-ray vision. Drake's Plate of Brass.

A forgery -related practical joke that went horribly awry. A taxon species, genus, family, etc. Further research is needed. Some researchers areresearching its effects, but FRIN Gilbert U Atomic Energy Laboratory. You may have had a chemistry set when you were a child. I bet it didn'tcome with radioactive substances in the box. Leaping Lazarus! Somewhat like Monty Python 's Dead Parrot , it's not really dead; it's just resting.List of Ig Nobel Prize winners. Nobel Prize meets Weird Science. A parody of science that purports to study what lies beyond the realm ofmetaphysics.

Pathological science. A pejorative term for scientific ideas that will simply not "go away", long after they are given up on as wrong by the majorityof scientists in the field. A wildly successful list of scientists in which all signatories 1 support evolution , 2 oppose intelligent design , and 3 arenamed Steve or a variation of that name Steven, Stephan, Stephanie, etc. Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrates that at least some postmodernistscan't see an emperor with no clothes.

Timeline of the far future. A phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positiveattributes with the general social category of women compared to men. Anatoli Bugorski. What happens when you stick your head in a particleaccelerator? Including white , pink , purple, blue A year-old, known as the Radioactive Boy Scout , who irradiated his back yard attempting tobuild a nuclear breeder reactor from spare parts. Demon core. A two-time radioactive killer. Fictional elements, isotopes and atomic particles.Fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position. Named after a famous cereal phenomenon. Frog battery. A curious experiment to determine theexistence of animal electricity.

A phenomenon involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency noise of a humming character and unknown origin, not audible to all people,reported in various geographical locations. A serious piece of scientific apparatus whose name has induced sniggering among English-speakingschoolchildren for over years. List of unusual units of measurement. An alternative theory of integrated circuits : once the smoke is released they nolonger work. Something in the lab not working? Technical difficulties? Blame this guy.

Quantum suicide and immortality. What happens when you blow in a hole in a tube? Hot air comes out one end and cold air comes out the other.No consensus reached on why it happens yet. A strange unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge. Sound of fingernails scrapingchalkboard. Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake? Snow in Florida. International Flat EarthResearch Society. Kentucky meat shower. List of unexplained sounds. Mumbai "sweet" seawater incident. Red rain in Kerala. South-up maporientation. The crew of Apollo 17 snapped Earth with Antarctica on top.

NASA followed Ptolemy and rotated it "back". An ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole in An unlucky park ranger who was hit by lightning onseven separate occasions. He survived them all, but came to his own tragic end. A recently discovered mineral that forms from bird feces.Dihydrogen monoxide. A commonly used chemical that can be deadly to all forms of plant and animal life, contributing to global warming , erosion, acid rain , torture and countless other maladies.

Azidoazide azide. List of chemical compounds with unusual names. Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work ofwhimsical chemists. Thomas Midgley, Jr. Inventor of two of the world's most severe pollutants — and a machine that killed him. Pitch dropexperiment. The world's most viscous liquid dripping out of a funnel since There's been 9 drops so far. Proton-enhanced nuclear inductionspectroscopy. A nuclear magnetic resonance technique with a very long name, so we can just call it penis. A bullet-resistant frozen-watercompound once used in an attempt to create an aircraft carrier. A term used to describe any material with properties that are unlikely or impossiblefor any real material to possess. Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster.

Embryo space colonization. Extraterrestrial real estate. A small statuette which is the only sculpture on the Moon. Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey.Five mice who circled the Moon 75 times on Apollo Among the last eight Earthlings to travel to the Moon, upon returning to Earth the fourremaining living mice were soon murdered and dissected in the name of science "That's one small squeak Hot, dust-obscured galaxies. List ofhypothetical Solar System objects. The planets that could have been. You think Pluto had it rough? At least it got its fifteen minutes of astronomicalfame. A Mars mission that failed after the spacecraft housing failed to open following launch. It was unable to deploy its solar panels and ran out ofpower. It is still orbiting the Sun. Mars Climate Orbiter. Another failed Mars mission that disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere due to a unitconversion error. Moon landing conspiracy theories.

Best Sci-fi Movies | Mind Bending Science Fiction Films

With all the humour and quirkiness of Alfie's Pointless YouTube site, Pointless Book 2 book will be packed with a host of games, activities, dares,pranks and jokes - and, of course, a cake in a mug recipe! Pointless Book 2 features another free, downloadable, and fully interactive app. Sincethen, the book has been used not just by military tacticians but by business leaders, planners, traders, politicians, and even sports coaches. Here,Sun Tzu's lessons are applied to how to play a winning game of chess. In Chess and the Art of War author and chess teacher Al Lawrence andInternational Grandmaster Elshan Moradiabadi have studied Tzu and drawn on his philosophies to deliver 40 fascinating lessons organized into theopening, the middlegame, and the end game.

Illustrated with extracts from classic chess games, the authors prove that playing by Sun Tzu's philosophies will make you a skilled opponent and awinning player. Whether you're a beginner or a tournament veteran, Sun Tzu's ancient lessons in Chess and the Art of War will teach yousomething new and useful on and off the chessboard. Featuring over 1, of the greatest military and commercial aircraft in the world, this is anamazing visual guide tracing their evolution over the past 10 decades. Plus, go on a virtual tour inside the engines of some of the legendary planesto see just what powers their performance. The Aircraft Book is essential for aviation buffs, covering the enduring impact that aircraft has onsociety as an object of curiosity, a symbol of luxury, and an essential weapon of war. The materials are already cut to shape, just thread the needleand start sewing!??

Sharpie Art Workshop For Kids. You'll also find ideas for working with classrooms and groups, full-sized templates, and instructions for howadults can help. Let your imagination leave its mark! Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes Hb. It's an adventurous cookbook that embraces the big hittersfrom the incredible countries I've visited recently, as well as completely new things I've made up by taking cues from the influences around me. I'vetaken some of the most famous and exciting dishes from these beautiful places and tweaked them so you can recreate the paellas of Spain, thetagines of Morocco and the risottos of Italy easily, and authentically, in your own kitchen. Every now and then, being brave, escaping the dailyroutine and filling up on other cultures is a great thing to do. Just get out there and discover the fantastic flavors, people, and places that exist just aflight away.

So, if you've been talking about going somewhere in particular but haven't gotten around to booking your ticket, I urge you to go for it. You'llcome back feeling optimistic about life, with a head full of beautiful memories--not to mention ideas for incredible dishes. In the meantime, let thisbook introduce you to some of the fantastic new recipes and flavors I've discovered, and maybe even reintroduce you to recipes you've loved andenjoyed on your own holidays, but just never knew how to make. The Quick-Look Cookbook. From the hands of the bestselling, innovative andaward-winning authors of Show Me How, comes the highly entertaining and informative sequel - Eat!

The Quick Look Cookbook. Comprised of more than virtually wordless tutorials on essential cooking skills from basic knife use to advancedrecipes, this is the book every home cook needs. Packed with highly practical tips and tricks, secret shortcuts and timesavers from expert cooks,delicious recipes and quick-reference cook's charts, this book has everything you need to get started, and continue to learn. This is the perfect giftfor novices, curious cooks and passionate foodies alike. Whether you prefer non-PVP combat games like arrow golf and elytra ace or games thatlet you battle other players like spleef and sky wars, there's something for everyone.

Each picture is numbered so that, by following the color key, you can build up a beautiful image to be proud of. From pictures inspired by natureand animals to themes of art, music and meditation, there is a wealth of imagery to engage your attention and remind you of the good things in life.Enchanted Forest Artist'S Edition. Take a look--a close look--at the world's most beautiful cityscapes, from Mumbai to Manhattan, andeverywhere in between. Cities of the World: Extreme Spot the Difference features forty-two stunning images of these metropolitan wonders. Froman obvious firework added to one skyline, to a tricky-to-spot now-you-see-it-now-you-don't bridge in the mid-ground of Manhattan, each findbrings the puzzle closer to completion. The perfect mental challenge to keep brain synapses firing, Cities of the World: Extreme Spot the Differenceeven includes a unique and reusable spotter's grid that lies overtop the pages and can be written on and erased, keeping the beautiful imagespristine and ready to be used time and time again.

Explore the rainforest and you will find extraordinary flowers, birds, butterflies and reptiles beautifully presented and ready to personalise with atouch of colour. These postcards - that can easily be removed from the book - can be sent just as they are to friends and family, coloured in oreven framed and hung on walls. These bite-sized cards of beauty can be used for a range of things but will delight anyone who receives one.Capture moments with words on one page and fill the next page with color. Light journaling lines are paired with hand-drawn gardening images.

Stimulate your creativity, express your feelings, and de-stress! Cook's Illustrated founder and editor Christopher Kimball has spent years testingrecipes to make them foolproof and as delicious as possible. Here, he takes the mystery out of cooking with more than essential recipes you cantrust. What's the ideal ratio of oil to vinegar in vinaigrette? Ever wonder why cakes sometimes sink in the middle or why pie dough falls apart whenrolled? What are the risks of using an 8-inch cake pan when a recipe calls for a 9-inch pan?

Kimball has the answers, and he pairs his tried-and-true advice with hundreds of step-by-step illustrations. This box set delivers the best andeasiest ways to master every meal of the day. The Cook's Bible features all-time favorite preparations for soups, salads, vegetables, meat, fish,

pizza, and pasta; The Dessert Bible shows you how to make tempting cakes, pies, cookies, ice cream, and more. This beautiful compendium is acooking school in book form for beginners and experienced cooks alike.

Sudoku Puzzle Book Three. Large Print Crosswords - Over 60 Puzzles. Each challenge is designed to stimulate your brain and keep boredom atbay. Unleash your inner genius with over 60 wonderful crosswords. Time Traveller Colouring Book. Visit the mysterious Karnak Temple, whereancient Egyptians are honouring the gods, gaze in awe as builders work on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and watch the first Model T Fordcars rattle off the production line. As you colour in the busy scenes, watch out for fascinating things to spot, hidden travel souvenirs and weird andwonderful misfits on your captivating puzzle trail. Millie Marotta's Home Sticker Book. Beautiful images, in Millie's inimitable style, can be addedto walls above the sofa, mantelpiece, shelf, in hallways, on bookcases, stairs, tiles and mirrors.

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Compendium 15 Games. Large Print Wordsearch Plus. A great workout for your mind, each challenge is designed to keep your brain active,engaged and entertained. Includes 96 page magazine, high quality stainless steel steam train kit, includes tools and instructions. Will artificialintelligence take over the world?

How does gene therapy work? What are the Higgs boson, stem cells, and gravitational waves? With clear, easy-to-understand graphics andhundreds of fascinating facts, How Science Works demystifies both core and cutting-edge science and answers the question that spark ourcuriosity. Welcome To The Museum: Animalium. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote. To me TV has been a little boring of late If it isn'tforensics then it's reality or cooking shows - too much So, if you are looking for a fun sci-fi fantasy to keep your attention, this just may do thetrick.

It's weird, a little quirky and dramatic to boot Hopefully we will see some romantic possibility with Aiden and Sally - because to me that seems likea perfect match. Aiden doesn't want to kill anyone and well, Sally can't die again Don't avoid a show like this because you think you are above the"vampire" trend. It's not about a vampire and a werewolf, it's about "trying" to be normal, kind and morally acceptable under extremely abnormaland immoral conditions. Can they rise above and choose the high ground or will they be trapped in their violent natures, forever miserable. I'vekept right up with all of the episodes, and the characters have grown nicely. Anyone who can be critical after just one or two episodes is not acritic. I decided to watch the British version after I began watching this one, and, frankly, I decided not to watch it again.

I'm very satisfied with the characters in the U. The show is unique, as far as I am concerned, and I put it in a class with "Supernatural", which is atthe top of my list for good entertainment and acting. People need to decide for themselves rather than have someone promote another version thatthey have become over-familiar with. It becomes like "the movie just can't compare to the book". I love British TV, but, in this instance, it can'tcompare to this version, and I'll stay a dedicated fan for what I hope is a long run. Thanks, SYFY! ElessarAndurilS 12 July I have to say thatBeing Human took time to grow on me and at times I felt I was being led down a path that would leave me sorry I had wasted my time watchingthe show.

I read this sentiment in many reviews articulated in various ways, but the bottom line is Being Human is a very good show, however it isn't until itsover that you truly appreciate the show for what it was and is because the end is not sloppy, hacked, or rushed. It simply brings a lot moremeaning to the previous seasons and makes you appreciate the whole show a great deal more. At that final place is when you truly engage all thatthe show brought you through and makes you appreciate the idea behind the story and realize it is much more than you thought while on the ride.Season 4 of Being Human was the best season of the series without question.

The peculiar thing is that I believe it was the best season because it was the last season and the really big questions that this show presents in termsof our main characters can't be answered until the show ends. The other seasons gets us to know the characters, vested in them and the story, andtook the viewer to the point of a unique interest in a world of monsters trying to retain what they could of their humanity while by their nature madeit impossible to obtain anything but frustration and heartache. But season 4 didn't just bring the story to a close, it took us back through the storywith a perspective of how things could have been much different but for the groups will to make them different and appreciate the first 3 seasons agreat deal more in the process of taking the characters to a place that I couldn't have imagined in the beginning.

But given the nature of shows like this that teeter on the edge of being renewed each year there isn't the security to allow the writers to do that. Sogiven the unknown faced with writing each season I have to say that season 4 made my opinion of the writing go up a great deal as it was the bestby far and brought a somewhat uneven story come together in a way such that I enjoyed the final episodes far more than I ever would havethought. There are some oddities that bothered me throughout the series that the end made the trip very worth the effort, and a wonderful endingthat left me surprised in a day and age when shows rarely surprise me in a positive way. Season 4 makes the whole series better and I'm certainhad they figured out a way to work that sort of intensity and emotion into the other seasons would lave made Being Human a more popular, longerrunning show.

But as it is, I'm simply glad I got a chance to enjoy it. Seems like a number of people commenting about the UK version negatively mostly don'tknow that it started with a pilot that was much different than the rest of the series. A bigger difference than comparing the US to UK version infact. The first two episodes of the US version combined are a remake, with a number of changes, of the UK pilot. Anyone having started to watch

the UK series with episode 1 missed a very important introduction to the characters. Find the UK pilot and watch it if you haven't. It will add a lotof background for the rest of the UK series as well as provide a better basis for comparison to the US version thus far. Both series are good. TheUS version has been a pleasant surprise, I didn't think it would be half as good as the UK version.

I'm more vested in the UK version at the moment, which just started its third season. In the UK it's only 6, which feels rather short. I have only aseen few scenes of the UK version, so I can't compare very well. I do want to see more of the UK version, but at this point in time the US BeingHuman has been firmly cemented as my favorite, even if it is not the original. The first thing that caught my eye is that even though it is aboutwerewolves and vampires, it did not feel like a Twilight or Vampire Diaries type show. There is angst here, but it's from an adult point of view,which is much more relatable to me. Josh was the first person to stand out to me. I saw a commercial about the characters and he was soawkward and quirky, I just fell in love. I love Aidan and Sally as well, I think all the characters are very engaging, and I really care about them andwant to see what is going to happen with them. The one thing I would say for fans of the original is please try not to compare it to the US version!

If you love the original, of course you are not going to like the new version as much because you've established a connection and love for thecharacters and story. You are going to feel like the new version is just terrible, even if it's not. This happened to me after I read Harry Potter andthen saw the movie. I didn't like it at first, but then I decided to watch it as a separate entity, not thinking about the book or comparing it, and Ireally enjoyed it. That is what people should do with the US Being Human. It really is a great show, and even it if it is a remake, people should atleast try to watch it, and give it a chance! I am certainly glad I did! Being Human is a breath of fresh air for the whole "Creatures of the Night"genre. If you think it's just another Twilight rip-off I'm gonna stop you right there.

Aiden is not just some Edward. He's believable as a Vampire. When he's jonesing for some blood he looks like he's going to puke and startripping out his hair. His love interests, unlike in some other vampire shows, are based either on him acting like a normal human being with humansor drugs with vampires. Blood is crack to him. He's not a monster, really none of them are. He's just a very old drug addict. He's also hilarious.The vampire bit doesn't freak you out but the male nurse thing does? He's a stereotypical Jewish man and former honor student with OCD. He hadeverything; close friends, loving well- to-do family and the girl of his dreams. But every full moon now his heart stops, his organs fail, his skin ripsapart and every bone breaks and relocates itself and he must suffer through every last second and give his mind up to a serial killer who looksawesome by the way.

He lost everything and it's obvious to see why. She a free-spirit who had everything to live for but ended up living more dead with her new friendsthan she ever did alive. Ghost have the obvious trait of going insane if they stick around for too long. They also have many addictive abilities thatlook fun but are incredibly dangerous. The second season will have a plot twist that will make your head spin with delight. Sally has many problemsto deal with being a ghost.

But hopefully her loving friends will keep her sane. She's also hilarious. I would get that mole checked out if I were you. Compared to the UKversion, I'd say there both equally great. The US version has more depth to it more in it to like while the UK version I'd say is deeper thecharacters are closer and more it's more emotional. This is show is great. I know there's so much werewolf and vampire movies and shows beingthrown about now days but this breaks away from the brooding vampire werewolf combo. You have a serious but humorous vampire living with apuppy dog faced and funny werewolf living together in a house with a ghost who can't move on. The cast is pretty dang good in my book. They allhave a chemistry that makes you believe their actually real life friends. You have some eye candy and also a great plot and storyline. It's not allabout hot vampires and werewolves beating each other up for a girl You forget that their superhuman but people going through some difficult times.

It's fun to watch Also if your a big fan of syfy, you'll love tuning in to watch 45 mins of fantasy, drama, and humor. Don't shoot it down till youchoose to sit down and watch it with arms open and enjoy. CountVladDracula 17 January I just watched the American Being Human and I have aconfession. I liked it. If you're not familiar with it the plot of Being Human is about supernatural creatures that secretly live among us and awerewolf, vampire and ghost share a place together while trying to pass as human.

That's the plot of both the BBC version and the American version in a nut shell. When it first started the voice over gave me this uneasy pseudo-intellectual impression of talking down to the viewer with simplistic while terms trying to sound deep, a major turn off for me. But it gradually gotbetter. The main plot is very obviously taken from the early Being Human pilot from BBC 3, the major differences start with the character namesand the supernatural powers. The vampire is named Aiden instead of Mitchell. And unlike Mitchell Aiden can't eat human food.

Aiden also seems physically stronger than Mitchell. Aiden's also over where as Mitchell was only , having been made a vampire during World War1. He also has the power to enthrall people like the vampires of Forever Knight, a power the vampires of the original Being Human did not have.Aiden's maker is the local vampire lord or king, Bishop, who in the original BBC version was named Herrick but otherwise serves the same exactpurpose. Aiden is more intellectual than Mitchell. He quotes Byron and is a fully qualified nurse. Mitchell a janitor in the original BBC version. Bothwork in a hospital with the werewolf. I don't like that make up when he's feeding looks obnoxiously like Edward Cullen's make up in Twilight.Don't mix Twilight with my Being Human I also didn't care for how the fangs looked. The fangs look pretty bad.

I guess I'll get used to them but I think the BBC version had better fangs and had really cool looking black vampire eyes which I haven't seen onthis one. They even have the same outfit. However Annie had a quirk of liking to make hot drinks and leaving them around the house. Sally so farcan't interact with the world around her. The supernatural creatures can see her but she can accidentally fade out of view for them too a nice effectthe BBC version does not have.

And even our Supernatural boys Josh the werewolf and Aiden the vampire can't physically touch her yet unlke Annie who had no troubleinteracting with other supernatural creatures. One thing I did NOT like was she made a twilight comment about the werewolf and vampire. Theoriginal show has never done this. Please don't mix Twilight into my Being Human Josh is the biggest change. He's the werewolf and in the BBCversion his name is George. Before and after his werewolf transformations they do not show his behind at all but this is to be expected, somehowin the last ten or so years the human behind has become taboo on American TV. We USED to be able to see it. I don't know why we can't now.

There's a little joke about Josh and Aiden possibly being lovers when they first move in but it's very glossed over. The scene is a lot funnier in theBBC version because George is a very spastic and neurotic character who babbles when he's nervous and has very geeky, intellectual nerd traits.

Josh is not a spastic nerd which takes away some of the charm. In fact he comes off as somewhat of a jerk. I am not too thrilled with thepersonality of the werewolf. His potential love interest, a character named Kara Nina in the original BBC version seems to have more of theoriginal neurotic, babbily, awkward geek personality that George originally had in the BBC version. This is a cute character trait. Nina was a littleshrew-like in the original series. I feel the Josh and Kara personalities are a reversal on George and Nina. A funny joke borrowed from the originalseries where George and Mitchell now Josh and Aiden are mistaken as a couple has lost it's edge because Josh doesn't have the spastic awkwardresponse George had. Blink and you'll miss it.

Another change made was in the original pilot it was George's exfiance that showed up at the hospital and would later unfortunately follow him towhere he makes his monthly transformation. In this version it's Josh's younger sister who follows him. One thing I wish they had changed from theBBC version but they didn't is in both versions they have the werewolf only change one night a month. Technically the full moon is three to fournights a month. Also George changed at Moonrise. The moon was already up in this and Josh hadn't changed yet. He clearly doesn't change untilthe sun has gone down. The American version felt a little rushed, plot-wise. The time progression is uncomfortable and jerky whereas it seemedsmoother in the BBC version. The British version is set in Bristol while the American version is set in Boston. The background music was alsopretty good. In general I still prefer the original BBC version but this was a lot better than I thought it would be.

I thought I'd hate it. Instead I actually want to watch it and see where it goes CarmaChan 26 April I give it 10 stars because it is perfection in theart of storytelling. I am an American viewer, and I prefer the American cast. Let me first say that if you are like me, you haven't watched Twilightsaga or True Blood and generally you feel sick of vampires at the mere mention. That said, what made me tune in to Being Human? I saw the adon a city bus and it struck my curiosity. I looked into it and loved the premise - modern roommates, cursed in 3 different ways, all trying to benormal. I watched the pilot and fell in love. This series has been at the top of my list since. I can't wait for it to start again, and it kills me when aseason ends - always a great cliffhanger!

I adore the werewolf, Josh. I sympathize with Aiden, the vampire. And Sally, well, Sally is just irresistible fun! Nora is also a great character andactress Perfectly written, which above all is a must. Perfectly cast. Perfect performances each week. Fabulous direction, editing. And the makeupartists and CGI artists are cream of the crop! Being Human makes me look forward to Mondays!

I fell in love with the original version of this show. I can understand why they needed it to have a little more appropriate content but I felt like I wasjust watching the watered down Hollywoodized version of the original. I have never been able to understand why they make remakes of things yetchange the characters names even though we know who they were in the other version. They didn't change the plot very much and in fact thebeginning scene with Aidan practically mirrors the original. I have a friend who watched the pilot of this version and she said she felt as though shewas watching one of the episodes from later in the season, because she felt that nothing was fully explained.

They added random stuff Josh's sister but they didn't keep in the stuff that needs to be in a pilot. I found that I was disappointed with Aidan'sMitchell-original overall look. I am so tired of vampires that looked different from normal humans.

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