Superman: The Motion Picture Anthology
Blu-ray
Starring Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey
Release date: June 7, 2011

With all the superhero movies that have been made over the last few decades, the first Superman movie is still by far my favorite. Based on the DC Comics character, the 1978 film was the superhero film for all ages, not just children, and set the bar for all comic book movies to follow.

Now, all four original films, which starred Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, along with the 2006 sequel/reboot hybrid Superman Returns starring Brandon Routh, are now collected in high definition in Warner Home Video’s new offering Superman: The Motion Picture Anthology Blu-ray Edition.

Empire Magazine celebrated their 20th anniversary a while back, and they made sure to do it proper. Many big news stories and goodies came from the event, but one of the big plans they hatched, was to attempt to book a bunch of the world’s biggest Hollywood stars for a photo shoot where they would re-create some of their own classic film scenes.

The result: big stars showed up. Lot’s of them. And though they didn’t get completely dressed in costume (the plan was to simply shoot them in nice attire with obvious props used to clarify the film), many fantastic images now exist. The list of names is impressive and includes Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Christian Bale, Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Mel Gibson, Laurence Fishburne, Ben Stiller, Viggo Mortensen, Kevin Spacey, Matt Damon, Anthony Hopkins, and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, naturally! Movies that were re-created include Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Braveheart, The Matrix, Sev7en, Silence of the Lambs, Jurassic Park, and Shaun of the Dead.

Click over to the other side to check out some of the images we were quite smitten with; head over to Empire in order to see many more, including a lot more stars and movies not mentioned here!

In the new crime biopic Public Enemies, Johnny Depp stars as John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber who became Public Enemy #1 in 1930s in the United States in the beginning years of the J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI. During the Great Depression, the real-life Dillinger was a two-time escaped convict who not only pulled two dozen bank heists across the MidWest, but murdered several police officers and led a dangerous gang of unsavory characters.

But in the film, we see a different side to this criminal underworld figure, one of a graceful, charismatic man. Depp’s character is someone you can actually believe was able to woo his beautiful young girlfriend into total devotion and get a gang of ruthless thugs to give him respect as their leader.

It’s the combination of Dillinger’s supervillain-like abilities and Depp’s charming portrayal of this machine gun-toting crime lord that makes this on-screen character so alluring. But this role of the bad guy with likable charm isn’t a new one, though, there’s been plenty in cinematic history. Here’s a look at 10 Charismatic Bad Guys in Film.

Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects brought us so much as a movie. It exposed Bryan Singer to the mainstream, collated a lot of stars in a great ensemble cast (including one of Stephen Baldwin’s few good performances)… but most of all it brought us Keyser Söze.

Söze’s involvement in the criminals’ dealings is never actually confirmed at any point in the movie — everything we hear or see about him is pure conjecture. And this is what makes the character such a great bad guy. Verbal Kint describes him perfectly in the following sentence:

“Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Söze. You never knew. That was his power.”

A Bug’s Life
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Denis Leary, Madeline Kahn, Phyllis Diller, John Ratzenberger
Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Release Date: May 19, 2009

On November 25, 1998, Walt Disney Pictures and the budding Pixar Animation Studio put out their second feature-length computer-animated motion picture after the classic Toy Story, and this movie was called A Bug’s Life. When it came out, the movie cost only $60 million to make, and pulled in over $350 million at the in box office, which was an amazing feat, seconded only by Toy Story‘s $30 million budget and over $350 million box office take. Even with these impressive numbers, Pixar still fought through many troubled times before really taking off and never looking back.

Since then, eight more Pixar movies have been released, and as we all know, they have all been brilliant. Pixar is now majorly considered to be completely fail-proof — and all of this started with the first couple of Toy Story movies and A Bug’s Life.

A Bug’s Life tells the story of a colony of ants who have collected a pile of food in order to pay off a bigger, more-dangerous group of grasshoppers lead by Hopper (Kevin Spacey) who demand payment from the little ants. The colony’s wannabe inventor Flik (Dave Foley), however, uses his latest invention to disastrously lose the entire pile of food into the river, which in-turn angers the grasshoppers, who in-turn demand another pile of food double the size of the initial rations. This would leave the ants without any food at all for themselves for the winter, so they banish Flik for his actions. Eventually, he convinces the Queen (Phyllis Diller) and the Princess (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to allow him to venture off to Bug City and find the biggest, baddest group of bugs to stand up to the grasshoppers and get rid of them forever. Unfortunately, the bugs he finds may not be quite what they hoped for.