Star Wars Rebels
The Complete Season 1
Blu-ray | DVD
Created by Dave Filoni, Simon Kinberg, Carrie Beck
Starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Taylor Gray, Vanessa Marshall, Tiya Sircar, Steve Blum, David Oyelowo, Jason Isaacs
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
Release date: September 1, 2015

As a life-long Star Wars fan, I’ve always kept my ear to the ground for anything new in the universe, especially during those post-Jedi drought years. I would take anything I could get, even an Ewok adventure, if it meant more Star Wars and I devoured the offerings of the Expanded Universe. But, as with many fans like me, I became jaded and partially disinterested after the disappointing prequel films. While the Clone Wars animated series helped reinvigorate my love of the franchise and J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens feature film has given me hope that Star Wars can be restored to its former glory, I didn’t know what to expect of Star Wars Rebels, a new CGI-animated series airing on Disney XD.

After Disney acquired Lucasfilm, the company eventually revealed that all their new Star Wars projects — movies, TV show, books, video games, you name it — would be considered “canon,” with Rebels to be the first new on-screen project to meet this qualification. That means that everything that happens in Rebels would be considered official, sanctioned, true, untouchable, unchangeable — that’s a huge deal.

Let me just put it out there right up front: Star Wars Rebels is awesome and I love it.

Selma
Director: Ava DuVernay
Screenwriter: Paul Webb
Cast: David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson, Carmen Ejogo, Tim Roth, Oprah Winfrey, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Wendell Pierce
Paramount Pictures
Rated PG-13 | 127 Minutes
Release Date: January 9, 2015

Directed by Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere, I Will Follow), Selma is the story of a movement. The film chronicles the explosive three-month period in 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) led a campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement.

Selma isn’t the first film about the civil rights movement, nor is it the first to feature Dr. King. What makes DuVernay’s film special, however, is that it doesn’t depend on the stereotypical white savior to rescue people of color from their plight. Films like Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, and To Kill a Mockingbird explore segregation, racism, and injustice for African Americans, but always with the help of an idealistic white person.

Last Thursday, San Diego Comic-Con kicked off in typically hyped-up fashion with a panel presented by Paramount Pictures that among other things offered attendees a glimpse at the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan‘s upcoming outerspace adventure Interstellar. It was greeted with extraordinary enthusiasm and now that trailer is online in full HD glory.

You can watch the trailer here below.

Okay folks, it’s confession time. I thought Jack Reacher, the Christopher McQuarrie-directed adaptation of Lee Child‘s novel One Shot that courted major controversy among fans of Child’s books when Tom Cruise was cast as Reacher even though he hardly fit the character’s description as a blonde, hulking bruiser who spoke softly and carried a big stick called himself, was one of the finest and most undervalued movies of 2012.

McQuarrie turned the novel into a classical, old school action thriller that would not be out of place in the filmographies of directors like John Frankenheimer and Don Siegel. The fist fights, shootouts, and car chases were executed and filmed with lean, professional precision and edited with fewer cuts than you would find in most modern action scenes. I wasn’t a fan of the Reacher books but nevertheless I thought Cruise gave a cool, forceful, and at times hilarious performance as a human killing machine with far more brains, wit, and soul than you would expect. He had able support from Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, David Oyelowo, Robert Duvall, and famed German filmmaker Werner Herzog as the movie’s villain, the Zec.

Sometimes there’s brilliance in simplicity, and that’s what Disney and DreamWorks seem to be aiming for with their new poster for Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln.

To make the poster even more simplistic it has no tag line and it’s black and white. It just features President Lincoln in a pensive state of mind once again, much like the first image we saw a couple of weeks back.