Awesome Movies

Before cell phones, phone booths were the best way to get in touch when out and about. Enclosed for privacy, the confined glass spaces served as a useful prop for scenes of secrecy, suspense, revelation, and wonder in movies and TV. Little White Lies pays homage to the once-ubiquitous street fixture in this great video essay.

Musician Samuel Fu presents a great piano medley of memorable movie themes, with tracks dating back Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho, up through Marvel’s blockbuster Avengers Infinity War. Bonus points if you can identify every movie without looking at your screen.

On Saturday, 11.07.2020, Rhode Island’s heavenly Weekapaug Inn will present an outdoor screening of the holiday classic Home Alone, complete with a gourmet “TV Dinner” bento box meal, warm cocktails served in a thermos, and a fur heated blanket to help keep you warm in your lounge chair. Dinner menu here.

After spending years being medicated, a fry cook discovers she’s been repressing her superpowers. Once she starts to understand her abilities, she finds others with similar powers, and stumbles onto a dangerous conspiracy. This fun looking German import arrives on Netflix 9.2.2020.

Motion designer and editor Duncan Robson has been painstakingly cropping, aligning, and sequencing images from movie posters in order to create the illusion that each featured actor is turning their head. You can view the individual animations over on the project’s Instagram page.

While the trailer basically tells us nothing, the plot synopsis for this gritty action film definitely piques our interest. Joe Manganiello stars as Max Fist, a man who insists he’s a hero who fell through time and space and landed on Earth, where his superpowers don’t work. From fan-owned movie company Legion M.

Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dominique Fishback star in this Netflix action movie about an addictive and dangerous new pill that turns up on the streets of New Orleans and is capable of bestowing those who take it with a random superpower – for five minutes at a time. Drops 8.14.20.

At one point, John Travolta was offered the part of Forrest Gump, but he turned it down to do Pulp Fiction instead. But with the help of Shamook and deepfake technology, we can now see how the Bob Zemeckis classic might have turned out had the original casting held. Now we want to see Tom Hanks as Vincent Vega.

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was arguably the best movie of 2019, blending tense storytelling, moody cinematography, social commentary, and the darkest of humor. Great Big Story explains how the house at the center of its story never really existed, and was entirely created as a series of sets by Production Designer Ha-Jun Lee.

Film Radar made this great video about wardrobe design in film and TV. Good costume designers inhabit the minds of both the characters and the director. In terms of production, costumes are often custom made, even for extras, and may have multiple replicas.

Plane crashes are a staple of action movies. But how realistic are the crashes depicted on screen? Insider sat down with Stephen Moss, a former investigator at the UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch and asked for his opinion on a dozen movie air disasters. As expected, some are far more accurate than others.

We all know that science fiction takes its share of liberties with its depiction of what life is like in space. In this clip from Vanity Fair, astronaut Chris Hadfield shares his thoughts on what movies like Gravity, Armageddon, The Martian, and Interstellar got right and wrong.

Lois Weber is a name not known to many, but she was a pioneer of the cinema. She directed her first film in 1914, and owned her own movie studio. After directing more than 100 silent films, often tackling difficult subjects, she became nearly lost to history. Documentarian Travis Lee Ratcliff shines a light on her achievements.

Actor Paul Hogan portrays himself in this meta-movie about Hollywood’s insistence on relaunching the Crocodile Dundee franchise with a younger version of himself. We’re so happy that they decided to take this route rather than another sequel or reboot.

(PG-13: Language) Filming things against a green screen and then replacing that area with digital images has become the norm in visual effects shots. But with the dramatic improvements in rear-projection tech perfected on The Mandalorian, Mr. Sunday Movies wonders if that could spell the end of the long-standing chromakey technique.

These days, when you want to shoot a film or TV series on location, green screens and CGI often replace real places. But you’ll still need a big space when you want to shoot with lots of extras. Great Big Story dropped by Atlas Studios, a massive film studio in Morocco, which has appeared in everything from Game of Thrones to Gladiator.

More than five decades ago, NASA landed the first humans ever on the moon. But prior to the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, Hollywood took us there thanks to a heaping helping of imagination and movie magic. The Royal Ocean Film Society looks back at some of these early examples of science fiction films.

(PG-13: Language) Editor Sleepy Skunk recently bestowed us with his regular end-of-year movie trailer mashup. But since it’s the end of a decade, he decided to do one better, and put together this epic and emotional montage of movie moments from the past 10 years as a bonus. How many of these movies did you see?

(PG-13) Despite Hollywood’s unhealthy obsession with reboots, remakes, and sequels, there have been some pretty great movies in the past decade. Little White Lies‘ Luís Azevedo put together this all-too-short compilation of some of the best, from The Grand Budapest Hotel to Mad Max: Fury Road to Get Out.

We love watching movies like Godzilla and Mothra and Ghidorah for their building-stomping monster action. But as Overly Sarcastic Productions points out, there’s way more depth to these films than just guys in lizard and moth costumes stepping on scale models of Tokyo.

(Gore) Produced by Guillermo del Toro, and directed by Scott Cooper (Black Mass), this creepy horror film follows the story of a gruesome death that at first appears to be an animal attack, but turns out to be something far more insidious – and the young boy who in some way is connected to it all.

Wonder Woman is back, and she’s headed to the mall. The sequel to one of DC’s better recent outings drops our hero into the decade of big hair and Rubik’s Cubes to save the world with her Lasso of Truth, and take on two new foes: Max Lord (Pedro Pascal) and The Cheetah (Kristen Wiig).

Director Dimitri Basil’s music video for the Joywave track Obsession is both a tribute to and a loving parody of vintage movie title sequences, featuring an array of convincing, but fake opening credits for spaghetti westerns, exploitation flicks, B-movies, and much more. Quentin Tarantino would be proud.

Go inside the story of one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies of all time. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary delves into the origins of Ridley Scott’s tense, gory, and artful masterpiece. Legion M’s DVD and Blu-Ray discs come with a special limited-edition pin featuring the art of H.R. Giger.

The area along Wacker Drive near State Street is one of Chicago’s most architecturally significant and iconic locales. Perhaps that’s why Hollywood loves to destroy it over and over again. The A.V. Club looks at some of the many movies which made a mess of the place.

Clint Eastwood directed this retelling of the tragic story of the security guard who went from being lauded as a hero to being treated as a terrorist after the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. If ever there was a cautionary tale for irresponsible journalism, it’s this.