The Coolest Cosplay From Houston Comicpalooza 2. Houston Comicpalooza is making waves in Texas this weekend, and Canada’s getting its cosplay on with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
Universal Studios’ “Halloween Horror Nights” is the ultimate Halloween event. For more than 20 years, guests from around the world have visited Halloween Horror. New genre combines the horror of arena sports with supernatural horror. Roller coaster and industry news, photos, rumors, and gifts.
And since none of us are in Toronto (and there’s always more cosplay than meets the camera), if you were at either of these events, we’d love to see some of the great cosplay you discovered!
HHNRumors.com is a Halloween Horror Nights Rumor mill. The number one source for Halloween Horror Nights 25: 2015 information.
The best movies of 2. Club. Hundreds of movies come to American theaters every year. Sometimes they arrive at a rate of 2.
- If you were still somehow hoping that the Doctor Who spinoff series Torchwood could return to TV, six years after it last aired, then we’ve got some news for you.
- Houston Comicpalooza is making waves in Texas this weekend, and Canada’s getting its cosplay on with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
New York, where most films that don’t open widely begin their first runs. And that’s not even taking into account Netflix and other streaming services, which have changed how movies are being distributed without really decreasing the total number of them out there. What this means, practically speaking, is that it’s impossible for The A. V. Club to review every new movie available to audiences in a given year, month, or week. The hard reality is that we can’t cover everything, and plenty of films slip through the cracks—not because they’re bad (although some of them are), but mainly because they’re too small to compete with the more high- profile fare we have to privilege.
These oversights do weigh on the conscience, though. And so to atone for our annual sins of omission, we try to carve out a space every December for some of the best movies we missed along the way—the films that deserve to be seen, even though we didn’t review them during their initial release. Below, we’ve singled out 1. Don’t sleep on these movies, even if we did. The Academy Of Muses Most of the films of the Barcelona- based director Jos. Club favorite In The City Of Sylvia.
Like that beguiling and self- reflexive masterpiece, The Academy Of Muses concerns itself with the old story of men drawing inspiration from the mystery of women. Playing a fictionalized version of himself, the real- life academic Raffaele Pinto teaches a seminar on historical muses (“As philologists, we know that love and desire were invented by the poets”) at the University Of Barcelona. Most of his students are women, and as the semester trudges on from fall into winter, their discussions stretch the movie’s boundaries further into both fictional drama and documentary. Playing in select theaters; click here for cities and dates. But it’s also, somewhat sneakily, a paean to a community of workers who live communally right in the brewery for seven months each year, forming a unique bond. Many of them are elderly and wonder aloud how much longer the old way will endure. Should the tradition die, however, this doc provides most of the information that’d be necessary to resuscitate it.
Available on Netflix, i. Tunes, Amazon, and VHX.
Initially asking how weapons of war ended up in the hands of everyday cops, Do Not Resist carefully digs beneath the phenomenon to find a whole evolving culture within American law enforcement, wherein the poor, the foreign, and the petty criminal are cast as savage supervillains whom bleeding- heart politicians and defense lawyers are too weak to stop. Along with some jaw- dropping ride- along scenes with armored small- town officers in urban tanks, the film features chilling snippets of the us- or- them rhetoric being drilled into rank- and- file policemen every day by modern crime experts—including, yes, FBI director James Comey.
This doc is a vital record of an America transitioning to martial law so quickly and stealthily that we’re barely acknowledging the change. Playing in select theaters; click here for cities and dates. There’s definitely a Carruthian vibe to the enigmatically titled H., though, in terms of both its no- budget formal precision and commitment to tantalizing obfuscation. Divided into chapters, it first introduces a middle- aged married couple (Robin Bartlett and Julian Gamble) whose easy rapport extends to the woman’s obsession with creepily lifelike baby dolls. Unrelated weird stuff—objects that suddenly float; a loud, paralyzing hum—happens in the margins and continues in the second chapter, which shifts focus to a younger couple (Rebecca Dayan and Will Janowitz) who collaborate on art projects. But its unusual amalgam of low- key, keenly observed naturalism and WTF inexplicability is potent enough to keep viewers enraptured.
The narrative picks up steam when Jun (Rira Kawamura) announces her intention to divorce her husband, then takes a boat out of town and out of the movie entirely. As in L’Avventura, a disappearance resets the narrative tone completely, as the movie turns increasingly sinister, morbid, and far away from the restrained emotions of the first half. Long workshops and rehearsals prior to shooting enabled the actresses, all making their big- screen debuts, to seem like people who have genuinely known each other for a long time. That’s already a huge achievement.
That Hamaguchi then pushes that group portrait into unexpected, strange terrain makes for a bracing, adventurous experience. But since this birthday party is a parent- supervised one for evangelical teen Henry Gamble (Cole Doman) and his devout friends, you might not expect too much debauchery. Still, Henry’s becoming aware that he might be gay, and as day turns to night, all the characters’ problems emerge along with the alcohol that wasn’t supposed to be there. Writer- director Stephen Cone—himself a preacher’s son whose features generally explore Christian milieus—doesn’t condescend while tracing the moment when faith becomes an obstacle to self- realization.
And he’s still thrown a party, with lots of moments of group uplift and hilarity captured in elegantly framed widescreen by cinematographer Jason Chiu. Streaming on Netflix; also available on i. Tunes and Amazon. Which is a shame, because Mike Flanagan’s ruthlessly efficient Hush would play like gangbusters on the big screen. At just 8. 1 minutes, the film wastes little time setting up its cat- and- mouse game, which pits a deaf novelist (Kate Siegel) against the psychopath stalking the perimeter of her secluded country home. The heroine’s impairment ratchets up the threat level (how can she fend off what she can’t hear?), and Hush toys with genre convention by unmasking the killer fairly quickly.
Mostly, though, this is just an effectively straightforward exercise in suspense, one that further positions Flanagan—who also made the year’s well- received Ouija prequel—as a filmmaker with a strong grasp on horror’s fundamentals. It’s enough to make one wish those rumors about him taking over the Halloween franchise had turned out to be true. But director Zhang Yang’s movie—a meditation on ritual filled with jaw- dropping Tibetan scenery—isn. The clear- eyed Paths stays admirably focused throughout on the sheer enormity of the months- long, 1,2.
Their devotion is staggering. Available on i. Tunes and Amazon. True, it stars Dominic Monaghan as a socially inept loner who gets frustrated when his awkward efforts to woo an old schoolmate (Ksenia Solo) come across more like stalking. And yes, when he picks up her journal and learns her habits, he forms the kind of plan that normally turns into dime- store violent voyeurism of the gratuitous kind. But from there, the films zigs where you expect a depraved zag, resulting in a smart and unsettling tale—filmed with surprising brio by director Carles Torrens, who makes sure the viewer knows every nook and cranny of the layout—in which the expected plod through yet another disturbed creep torturing a plucky damsel gets a jolt of campy energy. Playing in select theaters.
Not all of The Prison In Twelve Landscapes’ segments are equally fascinating. An overlong chapter on Ferguson, Missouri, tries to squeeze too big of a subject into an inadequate frame. Even there, though, Story mostly focuses on the alarming and heartbreaking particulars of a society that first criminalizes then exploits its underclass, squeezing every last dime from citizens who can’t spare a nickel.
Playing in select theaters; click here for cities and dates. The Seventh Fire mostly follows criminal lifer Rob Brown, a frequent convict who lives in a small village on a reservation, where he picks up a teenage disciple, Kevin.
Combining nuts- and- bolts detail about the low- rent narcotics trade with evocative scenes of extreme poverty and native rituals, the film explores how cultural pride has been warped over time by pervasive criminality and the cold grip of addiction. Available on i. Tunes and Amazon. Madness observes the day- to- day life, by turns chaotic and somnambulant, on the men’s floor of a hard- up mental institution in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province.
Having gained (improbable) access to this forgotten corner of the world, Wang proceeds to do something remarkable with it, crafting deeply humane portraits of these troubled individuals and their makeshift community. It’s a tough sit, bleak in content and forbidding in length, but also a formidable achievement. Yeon clearly establishes the rules governing his flesh- eaters early on and works within them well (one clever set piece involving a climb through the luggage racks will leave one’s nails in shreds), though his humans don’t have that same thought- through quality. Workaholic dad and precocious young daughter?
Tragic teenage lovers? Check.) But a zombie movie content not to aspire to any loftier subtextual readings needs little more than a skilled choreographer of action, and there’s plenty of evidence that this film had one in Yeon. Ooh, do “demons in a submarine” next! Available on Blu- ray and DVD.
Watch Ariana Grande FREAK THE F*ck Out At Halloween Horror Nights — Thanks To Ellen De. Generes! There's nothing Ellen De.
Generes LOVES more than scaring celebs. Usually it's during interviews, but when she can, she'll send stars out to roam the mazes at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. This year, Ellen sent Ariana Grande along with her executive producer Andy Lassner to the decorated theme park because they apparently both get scared REALLY easily! Related: Which Witch From Pop Culture Should You Be For Halloween?! What makes the HIGHLariously spooky video even better is Grande and Lassner went through the American Horror Story maze — and yes, they nearly sh*t themselves!
LOLz! Ch- ch- check out Ariana and Andy as they get the crap scared out of them at Halloween Horror Nights (below) and let us know if you could survive the maze! Tags: andy lassner, ariana grande, daytime tv, ellen, ellen degeneres, halloween, halloween horror nights, highlarious, scary!, tv news, universal studios.