Latest news with #TheRuleofJennyPen
Sydney Morning Herald
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Any big man will crumble': Why mums are the heart of this hit NZ film
We need to start seeing the world through a mother's eyes. This is what Miki Magasiva learned while making his directorial debut, Tinā, a heartwarming Samoan-New Zealand drama that has already become the sixth-highest grossing Kiwi film in history. 'The key is in the title – Tinā means mother in Samoan. Formally in our culture, mothers raise the village's children, not just their biological children. There's something special in that – that our mothers don't see race, don't see culture, they just see children,' he says. 'Wouldn't it be amazing, in the culture and environment we're in now, to see the world the way mothers do? Where we don't see race any more, we just reach out if somebody is in need.' Mareta Percival, the face and heart of Tinā, sees the world this way. Played by Anapela Polataivao (The Rule of Jenny Pen), Mareta loses her daughter in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, quits her job at a local Samoan school and falls into relative seclusion. A few years later, still overwhelmed by grief, she begins work as a substitute teacher at an elite, mostly white private school, where she starts a choir that becomes a refuge for struggling students. It's a story about the universal need for a guiding figure paired with a firm, but loving, hand. As a mother herself, Polataivao says she found playing a character like this almost instinctual. 'It's something you kind of just naturally possess once you have a child,' she says. 'I've grown up with lots of incredible women, my mum and my aunt included. They are real straight-talking, no-nonsense, no beating around the bush kind of women, so it's an intrinsic thing.' Others on set felt the same way, drawing on memories of their own maternal figures – strong women who seemed to single-handedly hold their families together. 'It's not just Samoan culture,' says Beulah Koale, who plays Mareta's nephew and social worker in the film. 'In most cultures, mothers are the top tier of the family … Put any mum in front of any big island man, and they will crumble because of the amount of respect we put on all mums.' One particular line in the film captures this perfectly. In an attempt to get her rowdy choir back in line, Mareta whips out a jandal (Kiwi slang for a flip-flop), warning them they'll 'get the jandal' if they're not careful. 'With love, of course,' she quickly adds. The film's focus on the tough-but-loving mother is clearly paying off. In less than two months, Tinā has become the widest release ever for a New Zealand film, screening at 128 locations across New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, Fiji and Samoa. It has also become one of the top 10 highest grossing New Zealand films ever, earning nearly $8 million to date. This takes it ahead of hits like What We Do in the Shadows and cult classics such as Footrot Flats. There's more to the film than just motherhood, though, Magasiva says. If Mareta is the heart of Tinā, music is the soul. The story is inspired by a real-life high school choir in Auckland, Choralation Choir, which Magasiva came across on YouTube in 2013. Their performance of a traditional Samoan arrangement at a choral competition called The Big Sing went viral online, a performance that brought Magasiva to tears. 'I felt so emotional, I could feel it right in my heart,' he says. 'It brought me an overwhelming sense of pride. There's something magical about the experience of music – it's a way of communicating that's unspoken. Musicians connect through the frequency of music, they can see each other's turmoil and struggles without having to say the words.' Though no longer a singer himself, Magasiva says it was important that the singing in the film was as authentic as possible. So, with the help of two well-known New Zealand choirmasters, they assembled a cast of singers from the New Zealand Secondary School Choir and the Auckland Youth Choir. Loading Music is what ultimately connects Mareta to the students at the elite school, young people whose lives initially seem a million miles from her own. It's the connective tissue that bridges the gap between Samoan and New Zealand culture, and what ultimately gets the students wearing lavalavas (a traditional Samoan skirt) and entering the classroom saying 'talofa' ('hello' in Samoan). Sharing these elements of Samoan culture, among others, was vital for everyone involved in the production of Tinā. 'Growing up as a Samoan in New Zealand, we were always told not to forget who we represent, who our parents are,' Polataivao says. 'We come in as a village, and when you're in, you belong to the whole village … Sia Figiel [a Samoan author] writes 'I is we always' in her book Where we once belonged. That's always been the thing for us.' Samoans need more of their stories told on screen, she says. While she celebrates Tinā 's success so far, she knows it can't stop here. 'How long do we need to wait and how many hoops do we need to jump through for another one? We need these stories to guide us, to support us … My auntie says they're lessons for us – we're feeling, we're thinking, and we're being questioned while watching.' Beulah Koale agrees, adding that he hopes their film makes it easier for the next Samoan filmmaker who decides to bring more Pacific culture to the silver screen. 'Miki faced a lot of challenges making this film, but the drive for our people, the drive to teach other cultures, love through our culture, is what makes us want to do it. There's no money or goal in mind. It's just the fact that we're trying to use our culture to show love to everyone.' Loading Now that the film is out in the world, Koale says it no longer belongs to those who made it, but to all the people it represents. He remembers a recent red carpet appearance, when 10 Samoan mothers dressed in traditional gowns gently pushed to the front of the line, proudly saying, 'This is our movie; we're going to take a photo with our sons.' These 'little wins' mean more to the Tinā team than any box office success, Magasiva says. It reminds them that they accomplished what they set out to do – to show the world through a mother's eyes.
The Age
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Any big man will crumble': Why mums are the heart of this hit NZ film
We need to start seeing the world through a mother's eyes. This is what Miki Magasiva learned while making his directorial debut, Tinā, a heartwarming Samoan-New Zealand drama that has already become the sixth-highest grossing Kiwi film in history. 'The key is in the title – Tinā means mother in Samoan. Formally in our culture, mothers raise the village's children, not just their biological children. There's something special in that – that our mothers don't see race, don't see culture, they just see children,' he says. 'Wouldn't it be amazing, in the culture and environment we're in now, to see the world the way mothers do? Where we don't see race any more, we just reach out if somebody is in need.' Mareta Percival, the face and heart of Tinā, sees the world this way. Played by Anapela Polataivao (The Rule of Jenny Pen), Mareta loses her daughter in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, quits her job at a local Samoan school and falls into relative seclusion. A few years later, still overwhelmed by grief, she begins work as a substitute teacher at an elite, mostly white private school, where she starts a choir that becomes a refuge for struggling students. It's a story about the universal need for a guiding figure paired with a firm, but loving, hand. As a mother herself, Polataivao says she found playing a character like this almost instinctual. 'It's something you kind of just naturally possess once you have a child,' she says. 'I've grown up with lots of incredible women, my mum and my aunt included. They are real straight-talking, no-nonsense, no beating around the bush kind of women, so it's an intrinsic thing.' Others on set felt the same way, drawing on memories of their own maternal figures – strong women who seemed to single-handedly hold their families together. 'It's not just Samoan culture,' says Beulah Koale, who plays Mareta's nephew and social worker in the film. 'In most cultures, mothers are the top tier of the family … Put any mum in front of any big island man, and they will crumble because of the amount of respect we put on all mums.' One particular line in the film captures this perfectly. In an attempt to get her rowdy choir back in line, Mareta whips out a jandal (Kiwi slang for a flip-flop), warning them they'll 'get the jandal' if they're not careful. 'With love, of course,' she quickly adds. The film's focus on the tough-but-loving mother is clearly paying off. In less than two months, Tinā has become the widest release ever for a New Zealand film, screening at 128 locations across New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, Fiji and Samoa. It has also become one of the top 10 highest grossing New Zealand films ever, earning nearly $8 million to date. This takes it ahead of hits like What We Do in the Shadows and cult classics such as Footrot Flats. There's more to the film than just motherhood, though, Magasiva says. If Mareta is the heart of Tinā, music is the soul. The story is inspired by a real-life high school choir in Auckland, Choralation Choir, which Magasiva came across on YouTube in 2013. Their performance of a traditional Samoan arrangement at a choral competition called The Big Sing went viral online, a performance that brought Magasiva to tears. 'I felt so emotional, I could feel it right in my heart,' he says. 'It brought me an overwhelming sense of pride. There's something magical about the experience of music – it's a way of communicating that's unspoken. Musicians connect through the frequency of music, they can see each other's turmoil and struggles without having to say the words.' Though no longer a singer himself, Magasiva says it was important that the singing in the film was as authentic as possible. So, with the help of two well-known New Zealand choirmasters, they assembled a cast of singers from the New Zealand Secondary School Choir and the Auckland Youth Choir. Loading Music is what ultimately connects Mareta to the students at the elite school, young people whose lives initially seem a million miles from her own. It's the connective tissue that bridges the gap between Samoan and New Zealand culture, and what ultimately gets the students wearing lavalavas (a traditional Samoan skirt) and entering the classroom saying 'talofa' ('hello' in Samoan). Sharing these elements of Samoan culture, among others, was vital for everyone involved in the production of Tinā. 'Growing up as a Samoan in New Zealand, we were always told not to forget who we represent, who our parents are,' Polataivao says. 'We come in as a village, and when you're in, you belong to the whole village … Sia Figiel [a Samoan author] writes 'I is we always' in her book Where we once belonged. That's always been the thing for us.' Samoans need more of their stories told on screen, she says. While she celebrates Tinā 's success so far, she knows it can't stop here. 'How long do we need to wait and how many hoops do we need to jump through for another one? We need these stories to guide us, to support us … My auntie says they're lessons for us – we're feeling, we're thinking, and we're being questioned while watching.' Beulah Koale agrees, adding that he hopes their film makes it easier for the next Samoan filmmaker who decides to bring more Pacific culture to the silver screen. 'Miki faced a lot of challenges making this film, but the drive for our people, the drive to teach other cultures, love through our culture, is what makes us want to do it. There's no money or goal in mind. It's just the fact that we're trying to use our culture to show love to everyone.' Loading Now that the film is out in the world, Koale says it no longer belongs to those who made it, but to all the people it represents. He remembers a recent red carpet appearance, when 10 Samoan mothers dressed in traditional gowns gently pushed to the front of the line, proudly saying, 'This is our movie; we're going to take a photo with our sons.' These 'little wins' mean more to the Tinā team than any box office success, Magasiva says. It reminds them that they accomplished what they set out to do – to show the world through a mother's eyes.
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Geoffrey Rush on Pirates, Pinter and pugs: ‘Just be happy we evolved on this bit of rock'
The Rule of Jenny Pen looks terrifying! Does the prospect of sudden ageing frighten you? BenderRodriguez It's not sudden. I was in [King] Lear when I was 64 and said: 'I need a wig that's grey because he's supposed to be 80.' Now I'm 73 and I still think inside I'm a brunette. This is the 54th year of my career. The last decade has just galloped past. I waited for something like this – a project that I latched on to. There's been a lot of stuff that I turned down. I'm now being very pernickety about what I commit three or four months of my life to. No doubt there was also a lot of work behind it, but was playing Hector Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean films as much fun as it looked? Have you ever reinhabited the character for a brief moment, to amuse yourself or others? Liam01 Yeah, it was fun. [Director] Gore Verbinski had a kind of pop cultural sense of anarchy. Anyone who liked the Pirates films should also check out Rango, which has his cinematic fingerprints all over it. I've reinhabited the character for brief moments, for the Disney ride in Anaheim, and I think Shanghai, and maybe in Florida. I remember having to go and voice some lines after a day on another film, and rolling my eyes going: 'Oh my God, will this never go away?' It's the vanity of being a moment of cinema folklore. It's fun. Have you had much experience of care homes? BenderRodriguezMy mum died in 2022, quite sweetly on Valentine's Day, which was very moving. She'd been in a care home for about three or four years. The last year there was a noticeable decline. She was in her 90s. My mother-in-law, also. So, yes, once you turn 60, the time is coming up for you to thank your carers. How did it feel having a Nobel prize winner playing your conscience? (Harold Pinter in The Tailor of Panama.) UrrurrshIt was three of the greatest days of my life. He was a hero to me when I was studying English theatre in the late 60s in Brisbane. And suddenly he was there. They'd done a painting of Harold in a three-piece, blue pencil-stripe suit with a tailor's measure around his neck. He came in, a little sweaty and a little prickly, and he saw that painting and tears just welled in his eyes. He said: 'My father worked in the East End as a tailor, like many Jewish émigrés did. So I find that overwhelmingly powerful.' Pinter told me that when he got his first royalty cheque for The Homecoming, he went down and said: 'Dad, you're coming home and you don't need to come back here any more.' You've played a lot of real-life characters including Trotsky and now Groucho Marx. How does your approach to these roles differ from fictional characters? hubbahubba, Haider3, WomanofWolfvilleI have played a number of what people would sniff their noses at and call biopics. And we all know that, for some biopics in commercial Hollywood, you're gonna get the Wikipedia tropes. With Elizabeth, the director Shekhar Kapur – being a man from India – never spoke to me like he was from the RSC. He just spoke about Krishna. He spoke about Elizabeth and Walsingham as being like gods: mythical as well as big political figures. So that's always been a useful way to go. Even playing Einstein [in Genius] or Trotsky [in Frida], you've got to find what's inside that character that has some kind of contemporary relevance you can portray without denying the historical context. Quills (2000) is a favourite and your performance was superb. What was it like working with Philip Kaufman? BicuserI went into a meeting with Philip to say that I couldn't possibly do the part and that Marlon Brando should do it, because in 1808, the Marquis de Sade was 300lb and I'm not. I learned a great lesson from that because he said: 'No, the Marquis that Doug has written is the fantasy in the Marquis' head. It's as if he's the hero of the story: a wry, lithe, elegant, muscular god in his own attic.' I very much enjoyed The Best Offer in which you and Donald Sutherland were both excellent. It should have been a bigger success. Any other films you've done which deserved more than they got? pconlFilms get what they deserve. I would've liked The Warrior's Way, originally called Laundry Warrior – which I thought was a much more kitsch and honest title – to have done better. It was struck down by the big financial crisis in 2008. The fact that the lead character was a baby, too, didn't help. I thought they'd written a fantastic eastern western where what was at stake was the survival of the baby who was the last of the clashing clans. I thought it could have gone gangbusters, but yeah, not so much. What memories do you have of Toowoomba? Didgebaba When I was eight, my single mum and my sister and I went to live with my grandparents there. It was kind of artistic wasteland in regional Australia. But it also wasn't. George Sorlie had created this travelling variety troupe which had been picked up again by his widow and a great clown, Bobby Le Brun. By night, they would do a variety show with jugglers and dancers and songs and speciality acts. And then by day, that whole troupe would do a panto. These people were deeply rooted in the smell of sawdust, the greasepaint, putting the tent up. There was also the Toowoomba Philharmonic Society, which gave me a lifelong love of Broadway musicals because their production in 1959 of Oklahoma is still deeply edged into my psyche. Lantana is one of my favourite neo-noirs. Is noir an Aussie genre, or is can-do, sunny optimism more in line with the national psyche? StevefromNottinghamI'm always surprised that's the film the gen Z audience knows me for. Both pessimism and optimism happen. When I did Shakespeare in Love, the young guys were all staunchly regional and proud of it, no longer the generation who had to crush their regional dialect into PR. They were proudly scousers or northerners. But they could do their stuff. Every afternoon we'd watch Neighbours and they were all really great at what they thought was a fantastic Australian accent. And I said: 'No, that's a television Australian accent. No one exists that actually speaks like that. It's much more nuanced.' I think that is the sunny can-do image of Australia. There's a cultural reality to the Ten Pound Poms. But Australia also has films like Wake in Fright and Nitram, the film that Justin Kurzel did about the Port Arthur massacre. We come from a country that has a lot of skeletons in the closet, a lot of regrets, a lot of difficulties, from white settlement onwards. The good film-makers don't shy away from that. I think that's why our boisterous, rough-edged sardonic sense of humour can be quite biting and quite satirical. A way of acknowledging that we're just not surf culture. Was John Lithgow as scary as he looked [in Jenny Pen] and how do you rate his Aussie accent? BenderRodriguezYes! The first conversation we had on a Zoom he said: 'I've got this guy to make some special teeth.' And I went: 'You're my kind of actor.' He's got a De Palma degree in horror acting. And he had silver-grey contacts made and said: 'The moment I put them in, the character was 98% there.' I did tell him to beware the New Zealand accent. It's a trap for English-speaking people. Kate Winslet is the only person I know who has the kind of dialect chops to do it. Her impression of Jane Campion was forensic in its detail. John and I talked about what one of my voice tutors used to call having an 'idiolect', which is the distinct sound of your voice. And John went for something nasty and dry and deceptive and duplicitous, just in the nature of the character. What is your favourite Peter Sellers film? After preparing for your great performance as him [in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers], would you agree with his very sad assessment that outside his roles, he had no real sense of his own identity? Bauhaus66I was so lucky. I was in LA doing Pirates and at the end of Sunset Boulevard there were a lot of extraordinary DVD and VHS shops. We found pretty much every Peter Sellers film. So I did watch everything. He was blessed with a kind of extraordinary genius. But with success and fame and drugs and swinging London and everything, you have to confront a lot of stuff. I think that happened to him. I don't care that Caravaggio murdered people. I don't mind that Ripley murders people, because I thought Andrew Scott made that character so alarmingly true that I sort of hoped he got away with it. A lot of what was going on around him was privileged and he's going: 'Fuck off! You are dead, east coast rich people!' You've portrayed Lionel Logue (in The King's Speech), Donovan Donaly (Intolerable Cruelty), Hans Hubermann (The Book Thief), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Twelfth Night), and even voiced Bunyip Bluegum (The Magic Pudding). Is it purely coincidental, or are you secretly drawn to alliterative characters? VerulamiumParkRangerThis made me actually go through my IMDb list, and my theatrical list, to see if they'd missed anything. I avidly read Superman comics as a child and I was obsessed by the LL syndrome: Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luther. I found that kind of phenomenal when I was 10 as I did when I read Ulysses in Shakespeare and Company, where I was fortunate enough to blag a room for six weeks when I first moved to Paris. I have played a 'Harry' more times than any other character – in The Tailor of Panama, The Banger Sisters, in some short film. I've been 'Harried'. Michael Caine has the same thing. Caine would only ever call Joaquin Phoenix 'Joe-a-quin'; 'You read it, Geoffrey,' he'd say. 'And it's not Rafe Fiennes, it's Ralph.' He was hilarious like that. Kia ora! What attracts you to roles first – the story or the character? I love your performance in House on Haunted Hill, even though it's hardly Proust. You seem to have a whale of a time, though, and that comes through every scene. WilfyFrederick I never assumed it was Proust. I liked the fact that it was a William Malone horror piece, avoiding CGI, with all of the old William Castle techniques to create a netherworld and creepy scenarios. I'd been in tights or period costume for so long and I thought: this is the ideal role to do because, as one of the producers – Robert Zemeckis or Joel Silver – said: 'It's low budget. We'll make it for $15m and it will do two bumper weekends for Halloween.' Which it did; it made $40m. So they were like: 'Hey, we just made $25m. Let's move on to the next chapter.' There was something nice about that. When you get home and are not working, what do you do for entertainment?AwightmateMy obsession apart from Superman and vaudeville is the Mercury Seven [astronauts] and the James Webb telescope. I'm intrigued that it's now however many million miles at a certain point in orbit around the sun, so that it can be at the right temperature. And that they ingeniously had to develop this massive shield which is made up of hexagons. And that was all folded up mathematically, like a chrysalis, like a moth in a cocoon. And it went up into space and then it opened itself and we're now seeing stuff in the dark. I'm just completely obsessed by the otherness of what's out there. Everyone says one day they'll suddenly go: 'There's been definite communication with beings or creatures or overdeveloped insects that went into a different direction. They're making contact with us.' The magnitude of it all! But that may not even happen. It may have happened millions of years ago and come and gone. So just be happy that we actually evolved on this bit of rock and became relatively sophisticated. But not that sophisticated, because this is probably the worst time the planet's ever really been through. There's an edge, and in Jenny Pen audiences tap into that. What would it be like to be in that home in the last chapter of your life, to know that there's really no hope? I also like dogs and cryptic crosswords. I have a greyhound and a regular series of generational pugs. The one we've got at the moment is nearing her end. The look in her eyes is becoming bewildered and lost and I tell her: 'You're a honey.' The Rule of Jenny Pen is in UK and Irish cinemas now, and on Shudder and AMC+ from 28 March
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What Persuaded John Lithgow To Join Horror Film The Rule Of Jenny Pen? He Told Me About The One Thing That's 'Not Ordinarily How You Hear Horror Directors Talk'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The horror genre has a unique place in the entertainment industry. Some of the best horror movies were made on a minimal budget, allowing there to be massive profit if a title hits big. Horror has been experiencing a renaissance for years now, attracting some A list talent to join in on the fun. Case in point: the upcoming horror movie The Rule of Jenny Pen, which stars icons Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow. And the latter actor shared with CinemaBlend how he was inspired to sign on, specifically after hearing the vision of filmmaker James Ashcroft. I had the pleasure of speaking with Rush and Lithgow about their collaboration on The Rule of Jenny Pen, and the latter actor couldn't say enough positive things about the movie's director. I asked about the film's grueling tone, where he revealed his original reaction to the movie's script. In the 3rd Rock from the Sun (which was arguably one of the best NBC shows) alum shared: We were really having fun. You're right, it's a dark and disturbing film. It's a script that was so scary and unsettling that I wasn't even sure I was capable of doing it. Of plunging into this dark world. But the process of doing this film was exhilarating. So much of this has to do with James [Ashcroft], a man who loves the horror genre as you do, Corey. He takes it very seriously and he finds great layers, deep layers of serious intent to what he's doing. It's a film about bullying and about cruelty and revenge. Ideas that are, God knows, are very much up in the air these days. Points were made. This latest horror flick is set in a nursing home, where Lithgow's villainous Dave Crealy is terrorizing his fellow residents with the movie's titular puppet. CinemaBlend's The Rule of Jenny Pen review praised the "nasty" film, although it sounds like the cast had a great time filming the project. The setting of the movie is definitely captivating, with Geoffrey Rush equating Jenny Pen to Alien when speaking about the way the nursing home immerses viewers into the story. Despite how hard it is to watch the residents being victimized, John Lithgow explained how Ashcroft actually tried to be very "compassionate" about the story. In his words: And is a kind of meditation on trying to find out what makes cruel people tick. Where does this come from? So often it comes from damage. It comes from hurt that they themselves have experienced. That's how I approach it, how I approached this character and the whole film. And James was just this great tour guide of his intent. He's a remarkable man, he's very smart. In depth knowledge. He's got a great heart, he's passionate. And he sees this as a very compassionate story, which is not ordinarily how you hear horror directors talk about what they do. That's what persuaded me. While there are scenes in The Rule of Jenny Pen that are hard to get through, it's only because we're meant to care for the elderly residents and want the best for them. That's where the compassion part comes in, and why Dave Crealy is so easy to hate as the villain of the project. In our interview, John Lithgow also shared that director James Ashcroft's family is actually uniquely tied to the process of caring for the elderly. Namely because his wife and her family a run them. As he told me: His wife is a woman who runs senior care facilities and runs them very well. She's second generation; her mother and father create a chain of care homes. He really wanted to treat the subject with great dignity. I feel they did just that, even if the movie was grueling at points... even has a horror fan. The circle of life means that so many of us have cared for elderly relatives, allowing for an easy emotional anchor in The Rule of Jenny Pen. Add in the two legendary actors at the forefront of the story, and the project has a lot going for it. Moviegoers can judge for themselves as The Rule of Jenny Pen gets its wide theatrical release on March 7th as part of the 2025 movie release list. And it's just one of many horror titles expected to arrive this year.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The ‘Final Destination' Films, Ranked from Worst to Best
Like it or not, 2025 is rapidly becoming the Year of the Freak Accident. In horror, everybody from audiences who loved 'The Monkey' to that very flammable fellow in 'The Rule of Jenny Pen' is feeling it. But there's even more to come when 'Final Destination' — the genre's most criminally underrated supernatural franchise — returns with scads more not-so-accidental death on May 16. The aughts used to get a bad rap in pop culture, but that's improved somewhat in recent years. As filmmakers have released their death-grip obsession on the '80s, familiar faces and franchises from throughout the 2000s have reemerged across all types of movies and TV. Right now, for example, you can see the forty-something 'Veronica Mars' dating that forty-something guy from 'The O.C.' in a rom-com on Netflix that's been wildly popular — in spite of the title 'Nobody Wants This.' More from IndieWire When Nora Ephron Met Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger: Meet Horror's New Iconic Killer in 'Heart Eyes' The Best Horror Movies of 2024 A Guinness World Records Consultant Analyzed 27,000 Horror Movies for a New Report. Here's What He Found When it comes to nostalgia for aughts-era nightmares, specifically, 'Saw' is back and going on strong. 'The Strangers' is a multi-part melodrama… for some reason. And it might still be a way off but the long overdue 'Jennifer's Body' sequel seems practically imminent. Is it all an overdue artistic reevaluation of a bygone period suddenly realized? Or is it happening to us now…in this way…by some kind of…design? Co-directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, 'Final Destination: Bloodlines' is among this year's most anticipated horror releases — reviving the gory death-by-Rube-Goldberg-machine format that divided critics but never failed at the box office from 2000 to 2011. 'Bloodlines' is the sixth film in the series, which kicked off with the original movie directed by James Wong and distributed by New Line. The film celebrates its silver anniversary on March 17 and is based on an 'X-Files' spec script by Jeffrey Reddick. The first 'Final Destination' crash-landed into theaters as an unconventional slasher, following a kid (Devon Sawa) who acts fast after getting a terrifying premonition while boarding a plane to Paris. He'll live to regret it… for a while anyway… as Death's Design hunts down each and every shouldn't-have-been survivor from the ill-fated Flight 180. By swapping the typical masked villain for an unseen lethal presence — lore-dumped about in the films by the late-great Tony Todd — Reddick and Wong uncovered a brilliant new method of making kills their movie's main event. The formula that emerged (mass casualty event + freak accident ^nth power = fine enough FD sequel) worked well for a decade and got an added layer of intrigue with a twist-ending that brought the events of 'Final Destination 5' full circle. From an Olympic-qualifying spine snap to a tanning bed/casket jump-cut you'll feel in your toes, the grisly freak accidents that make 'Final Destination' memorable have aged with varying degrees of success. We don't need to see another pool drain suck organs out of some asshole's butt… and yet, we're not saying 'no' to another 'Final Destination 2' logging truck incident. (It's the film that still haunts America's freeways!) Ranked worst to best, these are the five 'Final Destination' films 25 years since it all began. —Alison Foreman Best of IndieWire The 15 Best Robert Pattinson Performances, from 'Good Time' to 'High Life' The 17 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in March, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 97 Oscars Best Picture Winners, Ranked
