The art of creating demos – non-interactive, animated digital bragging rights – has its roots within the cracking subculture of yore. Upon cracking a piece of software, pirates would often add their own intro or “crack screens” which initially were quite plain, eventually evolving into increasingly technical and impressive animations.

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Piracy is fast reaching the point where it affects nearly every single Internet user in some way or another. Often the attempts to curb the illegal downloading of copyrighted materials threaten to spill over and affect other aspects of our online lives, much like the recent debate regarding SOPA and PIPA. For film-makers the impact [...]

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Netflix recently launched in the UK – and I wrote up a full and shining review of the service last time. It offers an affordable way to get high quality on-demand movies and TV straight into your living room (or any portable device). My question today is – is Netflix the ultimate solution to piracy? Our generation has grown up believing everything should be instant access. But the industry hasn’t adapted.

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Charlie Chaplin is by far one of the most recognizable faces of cinema, and this is surely due to the sheer volume of well-received films he was involved in during his lifetime. Chaplin starred in more than 80 films, most of which were silent and 40 of which were filmed in 1914. Nearly all of Chaplin’s work involved very visual comedy routines, so it’s silent films and slapstick comedy we’ll be focusing on today!

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A while ago we featured a couple of historically important Disney animations commissioned during the Second World War in the form of propaganda. Today we’re losing the cutesy animation and diving in with real footage of some of the most politically motivated films ever made. Propaganda is a by-product of nearly every war or major conflict.

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Media crossovers can often be highly successful. Books such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Forrest Gump, and It’s A Wonderful Life have found new audiences after being translated into movies. But video games don’t seem to be able to make the transition quite as well. In fact, most video game movie adaptations suck. That’s just a fact.

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A thrilling and well-filmed shootout can define a film, and a film chock full of thrilling, quality shootouts can define a genre. Every year a new flurry of action movies make it into cinemas, but how many make it into the hall of fame? Today’s Stuff to Watch takes a look at the action movie genre and features a few of the juiciest shootout scenes ever captured on film.

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Eric Fensler heads Fenslerfilm, a video production company based in Chicago, Illinois. As well as music videos and TV spots, Eric is responsible for some of the greatest videos ever to go viral on the internet – the incredible G.I. Joe public service announcement parodies. The films that follow earned Eric a cease-and-desist order from Hasbro for using their intellectual property, but it was probably worth it.

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Movie trailers are designed to tantalize an audience into wanting to spend their hard earned cash in the cinema. Now there are a few terrible movie trailers of bad films, but generally speaking many are entertaining enough to endure. The following trailers though, will probably not have the desired effect of making you want to part with your cash or your spare time.

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It’s December already, and that means Christmas is just around the corner. What better way of getting in the mood than sitting back and enjoying some festive fluff once you’ve decked the halls and wrapped the presents? This week’s article features a healthy mix of classic and obscure, featuring both short films and full movies [...]

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