It's Friday night, and you want to watch a movie at home with that special someone. You could go to a video store and rent a film, and instantly it's yours; popcorn extra. Or you could go to Netflix, and the movie will arrive, earliest, on Tuesday. Here's hoping you had a Plan B for your big date. Ah, but you love Netflix, the online rental service that delivers movies and TV shows to your mailbox. Since its ...

You've heard the propaganda: Zombies Are the New Vampires. Once relegated to back-list B movies like I Walked With a Zombie and Night of the Living Dead, those slow-moving, post-mortem drudges of West African mythic origin are now the hot horror creature. The PR is positively zombastic. They have their own anthem — Zombies Are the New Black, by the Philly pop-punk sextet The Wonder Years — and their own music video, which you may have seen in ...

A lot of people like Adam Sandler. The box office earnings for many of his films are testament to his drawing power. Sandler's biggest comedic blockbusters include "Big Daddy," "The Waterboy" and "The Longest Yard," each of which has earned well over $150 million domestically. He has seven other titles that have also passed the coveted $100 million mark. The thing all these films have in common is that they are all comedies. So, it's likely safe ...

Comedy is hard; dying is easy. Any stand-up will tell you that. Let's have a hand, then, for Judd Apatow. Hollywood's most successful contemporary comedy producer isn't resting on his laurels but continues to push toward risky subject matter: male sexual insecurity in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," unwanted pregnancy in "Knocked Up" -- and now the big C. No, not cancer -- though Adam Sandler's superstar comedian George Simmons is stricken with an appropriately eccentric form of leukemia. No, this ...

A 40-year-old needs to retire his record as America's oldest male virgin. A schlub gets drunk and impregnates a woman he just met. The two films that Judd Apatow has written and directed, not including the 493 other comedies he's produced in the past two years, are relationship pictures. The dialogue may be raunchy, the subsidiary characters beyond rude, but at the movies' core, Apatow wants you to know, there's a real, beating, borderline-mushy heart. That heart ...

With rumors piling up about a forthcoming Apple tablet, it appears more and more likely that such a device will emerge soon. But what's still unclear is how this gadget will set itself apart from Apple's multimedia-savvy product line, including the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the scores of failed tablet PCs that have come and gone. Judging from the company's past moves, we're betting that Apple's tablet will be a media-centric device, focused -- at least ...

A zombie movie made using a camcorder for less then the price of a DVD box set is set to be distributed in cinemas across the UK. "Colin," made by budding British director, Marc Price, will now get its own DVD as well as hitting the big screen in time for Halloween alongside Hollywood blockbusters like "Zombieland." "It's kind of scary in a cool way," says Price of his success on a shoestring. Price wrote, directed, shot and edited ...

Abayte Ahmed and her husband learned of their son's death in the most heinous fashion. A family acquaintance called and told them to click on an Internet site. There on the screen were photographs of their 20-year-old son -- the boy with the movie-star looks -- shot through the head thousands of miles away in Somalia. "He must have been somewhat disillusioned and indoctrinated, because he didn't have any clue about Somalia at all," his mother said, fighting back tears ...

Back in the days of Bogart and Bergman, Hepburn and Tracy, it was said that people learned how to fall in love -- how to kiss, beguile, or just hold hands -- by watching the people in the movies. Today, anyone eager for tips on how to find, and woo, the perfect mate hardly needs to look to Hollywood. Amorous instruction is everywhere -- on reality shows; in hipper-than-thou men's and women's magazines; in music videos and stand-up ...

Political tension over the deadly riots that struck northwest China has spilled into an unlikely venue: the Melbourne International Film Festival. Three Chinese directors announced they were pulling their works from the event to protest the inclusion of a documentary about a Uighur activist. The Uighurs are a Turkic speaking, largely Islamic minority group concentrated in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. On July 5 several hundred Uighurs went on a rampage in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi. The violence left 197 ...