Showing posts with label steven spielberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steven spielberg. Show all posts

Monday, February 9, 2026

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

A New UFO Film From Steven Spielberg? Yes, Please!

If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to … Disclosure Day.

Universal Pictures is proud to release a new original event film created and directed by Steven Spielberg. The film stars SAG winner and Oscar nominee Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer, A Quiet Place), Emmy and Golden Globe winner Josh O’Connor (Challengers, The Crown), Oscar winner Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, Kingsman franchise), Eve Hewson (Bad Sisters, The Perfect Couple) and two-time Oscar nominee Colman Domingo (Sing Sing, Rustin).

Based on a story by Spielberg, the screenplay is by David Koepp, whose previous work with Spielberg includes the scripts for Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Combined, those films earned more than $3 billion worldwide. Koepp also wrote the script for this 2025’s Jurassic World Rebirth.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Honeydew (2020)

 

Botany student Rylie (Malin Barr) and her waiter-cum-actor boyfriend Sam (Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw) are travelling across New England, so she can research an outbreak of an ergot-like fungus called "sordico" that has been devastating local farms.

After their attempt to camp in a field is interrupted by the land owner in the middle of the night, they find their car won't start and so have to walk to the nearest property in the hopes of being able to call for assistance.

They turn up at the home of eccentric old farmer Karen (Barbara Kingsley), who lives in a rundown house with her brain-damaged son, Gunni (Jamie Bradley), who passes his time watching Popeye cartoons or staring at static on the TV.

Karen phones a neighbour to come over and help, but he never turns up and so the young couple are forced to share an awkward evening meal with Karen and Gunni, before the strange old lady shows them to a basement bedroom where they can pass the night.

Despite his medically-necessary dietary regime, Sam can't settle and so goes back upstairs to eat some more.

He is surprised by Gunni, who seems to be trying to tell him something, but then Sam passes out and has a Popeye-themed hallucination about his stomach condition.

Upon waking, he can't find Rylie - or Karen - and starts to search the house and its environs, but wandering into a barn he is ambushed and drugged.

Written and directed by Devereux Milburn, Honeydew is Texas Chain Saw Massacre family dynamics seen through a David Lynch or League of Gentlemen lens, with the extended sequence of Karen's hospitality to her guests being a marvellous, nerve-testing, exercise in the horror of the peculiar and uncomfortable.

Milburn clearly likes to push his audience as far as they can comfortably go, then push them a bit further.

No matter how bizarre the behaviour of the strange hostess - and her son - gets it feels so real and genuine, there is clearly something going on that the young guests aren't privy to.

While there is shock and gore in Honeydew, the best weapon in its arsenal is discomfort. 

From the start, this atmosphere is accentuated by unusual sound design and experimental split screen, which could be construed as affectation, but if you allow yourself to be drawn into this nightmare, it can be genuinely unnerving.

Having taken a reasonably cliché set-up - and some very on-the-nose foreshadowing of the cause of the madness ahead - the writer/director puts a impressively disturbing spin on things.

Even when you think the action has moved into more familiar captivity tropes, matters continue to unfold in dark, weird, perverse, and unexpected ways. 

For a moment, Devereux Milburn lulls you into thinking Honeydew might turn out to be standard Hollywood horror fare after all, but then he swiftly pulls the rug from under your feet.

But then the frights aren't over. 

The bleak denouement seems to go on and on (but in a good way), and the more you dwell on what is happening before your eyes the more it'll get under your skin.

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Historian Rates Nine American Civil War Battles In Movies

Garry Adelman, a historian, rates nine American Civil War battles in movies.

He comments on the Civil War-era artillery and rifles on display in Free State of Jones (2016), starring Matthew McConaughey; and Emancipation (2022), starring Will Smith. 
He explains the use of dynamite and other explosives seen in Cold Mountain (2003), starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger; Sahara (2005), starring Matthew McConaughey; and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967), starring Clint Eastwood.
He breaks down the military strategy seen in the battle scenes in Glory (1989), starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington; Gettysburg (1993), starring Jeff Daniels; and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones. 
And finally, he separates fact from fiction regarding Civil War-era surgeries as seen in Dances with Wolves (1990), starring Kevin Costner.
Adelman is the chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust. He has also been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for 27 years.
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc