The hotly anticipated sci-fi Blockbuster Dune is now out and available to watch – and HBO Max is streaming it for 31 days. Let the spice flow!

Dune will be a two-part movie adaptation of the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert and has a star-studded line up including Timothee Chalamet, Zendeya, Jason Mamoa, Oscar Isaac and more. To celebrate its release, HBO Max is streaming the movie simultaneously alongside its theatre release and it’s available to stream right now.

How to stream Dune in the US

Bride Prejudice
SBS World Movies, Friday 5 November, 9:35pm

PG, AD
UK, 2004
Genre: Musical, Comedy, Romance
Language: English
Director: Gurinda Chadha
Starring: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Martin Henderson, Nadira Babbar, Nalveen Andrews
What’s it about?
A modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, Pride and Prejudice. Mrs Bakshi (Babbar) is looking for suitable husbands for her four daughters. When the rich single gentlemen Balraj (Andrews) and Darcy (Henderson) visit, the Bakshis have high hopes, but circumstances get in the way of romance.

STREAMING AT SBS ON DEMAND:

Bajirao Mastani

M
India, 2015
Genre: War, History, Romance
Language: Hindi
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Starring: Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Tanvi Azmi, Vaibhav Tatwawadi, Mahesh Manjrekar, Milind Soman, Aditya Pancholi, Ayush Tandon, Rudra Soni, Raza Murad, Benjamin Gilani, Anuja Sathe, Yatin Karyekar, Irrfan Khan
What’s it about?
Peshwa Bajirao married to Kashibai, falls in love with Mastani, a warrior princess in distress. They struggle to make their love triumph amid opposition from his conservative family.

Love Aaj Kal

M
India, 2009
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Romance
Language: Hindi
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Starring: Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, Rishi Kapoor
What’s it about?
Jai (Saif Ali Khan) and Meera (Deepika Padukone) are in deeply love. But when their careers take them in different directions, they decide to break up. Over time they each realise their feelings have endured despite their separation…

Mukkabaaz

M
India, 2017
Genre: Drama, Action
Language: Hindi
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Starring: Rajesh Tailang, Zoya Hussain, Ravi Kishan, Jimmy Shergill, Vineet Kumar Singh

What’s it about?
A sharp social commentary on the multiple battles that a lower caste boxer, Shravan, struggles with to make his mark on the boxing world.

R… Rajkumar

M
India, 2013
Genre: Bollywood
Language: Hindi
Director: Shahid Kapoor
Starring: Prabhu Deva, Sonakshi Sinha
What’s it about?
An aimless youngster is working as a drug runner when he falls a beautiful, educated woman at first sight. In order to win her love, he takes on his former employer, to eliminate the insidious drug cartel.

Umrika

M
India, 2015
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Language: Hindi
Director: Prashant Nair
Starring: Suraj Sharma, Tony Revolori, Prateik Babbar, Smita Tambe, Pramod Pathak, Adil Hussain, Rajesh Tailang, Amit Sial, Mayur More, Sauraseni Maitra
What’s it about?
When a young village boy discovers that his brother, long believed to be in America, has actually gone missing, he begins to invent letters on his behalf to save their mother from heartbreak, all the while searching for him.

Hotel Salvation

PG
India, 2016
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Language: Hindi
Director: Shubhashish Bhutiani
Starring: Adil Hussain, Lalit Behl, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Palomi Ghosh, Navnindra Behl, Anil K Rastogi
What’s it about?
An ominous dream convinces 77-year-old Dayanand Kumar that his end could be near. He takes the news to his son Rajiv, knowing he wants to breathe his last in the holy city of Varanasi and end the cycle of rebirth, by attaining salvation. Being the dutiful son he is, Rajiv is left with no choice but to drop everything and make the journey with his stubborn father. Daya and Rajiv check into Mukti Bhawan (Hotel Salvation) in Varanasi, a guesthouse devoted to people who want to die there. But as the days go by, Rajiv struggles to juggle his responsibilities back home, while Daya starts to bloom in the hotel. Rajiv gives his father a shot at salvation but as family bonds are tested, he finds himself torn, and not knowing what he must do to keep his life together.

Dinner and a Movie: ‘Hotel Salvation’ and aloo pitika

Aligarh

M
India, 2016
Genre: Drama
Language: Hindi
Director: Hansal Mehta
Starring: Sukhesh Arora, Manoj Bajpayee, Balaji Gauri, Sumit Gulati, Dilnaz Irani, Sachin Parikh, K.R. Parmeshwar, Rajkummar Rao, Ishwak Singh, Nutan Surya, Suman Vaidya, Ashish Vidyarthi
What’s it about?
Set in the city of Uttar Pradesh and based on true events, the plot revolves around Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras who taught Marathi at Aligarh Muslim University. He was sacked from his position of Reader and Chair of Modern Indian Languages, on charges of homosexuality. 

Vicky Donor

M
India, 2012
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Language: Hindi
Director: Shoojit Sircar
Starring: Ayushmann Khurrana, Yami Gautam, Annu Kapoor, Dolly Ahluwalia, Kamlesh Gill, Puja Gupta, Inderpal Singh, John Abraham
What’s it about?
When a Bengali woman falls in love with a young Punjabi man, she finds it hard to fathom his past as a sperm donor. 

Visit SBS On Demand to explore more films in the Celebrate Diwali collection. 

Updated 9:57 AM ET, Sun October 3, 2021

A look at some of the series and films streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu and more in October.

A movie director and an actress are joining a cosmonaut for a mission to the International Space Station as Russia bids to make the first movie in orbit.

The mission, called MS-19, saw the crew blast off from Kazakhstan earlier from where they will dock with the space station and shoot the film during a 12-day stay.

It is Russia’s latest attempt to rival the US, where the first all-civilian crew on board a rocket recently orbited the earth.

It also aims to get in first before a Hollywood project announced earlier this year, which involves actor Tom Cruise, NASA and SpaceX.

The three Russians took off on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket at 9.55am UK time and it is expected to take them several hours to reach the station, which orbits the earth at an altitude of around 220 miles (354km).

They will join two Russian cosmonauts already on board the ISS, along with several others including Americans.

On Russian state TV station Channel One, a countdown clock has been running and news anchors have been framing the development as a significant breakthrough by Russia that the rest of the world is watching closely.

More on International Space Station

• International Space Station forced to dodge debris, Russian space agency says

• NASA cancels spacewalk on International Space Station due to deadly space junk

• International Space Station crew endangered by space junk from ‘reckless’ Russian weapons test

A live feed on the TASS news agency Twitter feed showed the view from the side of the rocket as it launched.

The Russian movie is called The Challenge and focuses on a story of a doctor, played by actress Yulia Peresild, who is asked to go to the space station to save the life of a cosmonaut.

One of cosmonauts already on the ISS will also appear in the film with Ms Peresild, which will be directed on location by Klim Shipenko.

The director told a news conference in Russia on Monday another of the cosmonauts on the ISS will also be involved in the filming, but the cosmonauts will not play themselves.

Not taking anything to chance, there was a backup crew available if any of the cosmonauts, or other crew members were unable to take part.

The director general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, told the Tass news agency that he hopes the film will attract the “cream of the crop” to his country’s space sector.

He said: “This mission is special. We have people going into space who are neither tourists nor professional cosmonauts…as a result of this work, we hope to obtain a truly serious work of art and a whole new development of the promotion of space technologies.”

He did admit, however, that the crew “are nervous…anything can happen.”

Russia’s space industry has in recent years been dogged by delays, accidents and corruption scandals as US-based private firms backed by wealthy tycoons have pushed the technology ever onwards.

First the Soviet Union, then Russia, have been locked in a fiercely fought battle to be the first nation to explore space and break new boundaries since soon after the Second World War.

Russia launched the first satellite and put the first man and woman in space, but astronauts from America’s NASA made it to the Moon’s surface first.

Russia is developing a new spaceport, called the Vostochny Cosmodrome, but it is years away from being ready to launch humans into space, officials say.

Why you can trust Pocket-lint

(Pocket-lint) – The Shortcuts app on iOS is one of the most powerful yet neglected tools available on any iPhone or iPad today. However, just because it’s gone unnoticed by the vast majority of users doesn’t mean you should let its powerful capabilities slide by.

RSS readers might seem like an echo from the past, but they can still serve as a powerful tool to read headlines without having to deal with all the other fluff you’d come across when browsing social media to get your information via instead. 

If you’d like to easily see the latest headlines from your favourite news sources with only a tap of an icon or just a quick summon by Siri, follow along. 

Here’s how to create a custom RSS feed reader using Shortcuts. 

1. Open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the + icon at the top to create a new shortcut.
3. In the search bar, find and select the Choose from Menu action. 

Once you’re at this step, you’ll be given two item lines by default — the amount of items you choose will be the amount of news feeds you’re going to source from, so if you have four favourite websites in mind, make sure to add four items altogether. 

After that, make sure you rename all the items to the names of the news outlets you’ll be using so you can easily identify them when the shortcut is up and running. 

Next, add the URL action underneath each of the items we added in the step before. This URL box is where you’re going to need to paste the RSS feed links for the accompanying websites. If you aren’t sure where to find a specific news outlets RSS information, Feedspot is a simple to use website that easily helps you find the RSS link you’ll need to make this shortcut work. 

Pocket-lint

Now at the end of your shortcut, add the Get Items from RSS Feed action. By default, it’ll be set to pull 10 headlines from each outlet, but if you’d like to adjust that number, here’s your chance. 

To follow that, add Safari’s Filter Articles action and (presumably) you’ll want to set the Sort by setting to Published Date then the Order option to Latest First. This ensures you’re seeing recent news first and not stories from 2010. 

Final steps

Finally, you’re ready to put the finishing touches on now. 

Close out this shortcut by adding the Choose from List action, then finish it all off with a simple Open URLs trigger. 

If you’d prefer to not go through the hassle of building this up yourself but instead would rather add this shortcut directly onto your iPhone or iPad with just a tap, click here. Once it’s on your device, you can easily adjust the template created above with all your personal news preferences.  

The info for all our RSS feeds at Pocket-lint are available right here.

To read an overview of what exactly the iOS Shortcuts app is and how you can use it for even more featuers, check out our explainer by tapping here. 

WB Relaunches Mysterious ‘What is The Matrix’ Site for ‘The Matrix 4’

by Alex Billington
September 7, 2021

It has begun. It’s finally time to kick off the marketing for The Matrix 4, officially known as The Matrix Resurrections. The first glimpse of footage from the sequel was revealed a few weeks ago at the industry event CinemaCon in Las Vegas, a teaser trailer showing what seemed to be lovers Neo Trinity meeting but having no memory of anything in their past lives. At the moment, Warner Bros still has Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix 4 scheduled to debut in theaters December 22nd, 2021 just before the end of this year. There are rumors it could be delayed (again), but nothing has been confirmed or announced yet. Many fans have been wondering why there is no marketing yet – absolutely nothing – not even an announcement about the title. But now it looks like they’re finally firing up the marketing machine. Game creator / movie geek Hideo Kojima tweeted about a brand new website for The Matrix called “What is The Matrix?” And here we go…

The website located at whatisthematrix.com has been owned by WB since 1998, and has always been the homepage for The Matrix movies. However, it was re-registered and updated earlier this year. It is definitely a real Warner Bros website – including all the legal notices, privacy policy, and cookie approval scripts. For now it only shows the classic green Matrix code trickling down as a simple background video. Click to visit:

We’ll continue to monitor the site for any updates and watch for more info about The Matrix Resurrections. Including release date changes or any other interesting updates related to viral marketing. Stay tuned, folks.

Way back before I even launched FirstShowing, I was an obsessive fan of The Matrix movies. After the first one blew my mind in 1999, and they began work on the two sequels (both released in 2003), I spent years passionately following various movie websites and blogs combing for updates and hints and other details. Every day I would check the forums to see if anyone found anything new, whether it was leaked bits about the production, or hints in viral websites, photos, or other marketing material they released. This obsession with learning everything about The Matrix sequels and following their development undoubtedly influenced my own love for movie updates and how I’ve been running this website over the last few years (launched in 2006). Hollywood doesn’t really do any viral marketing anymore, but we used to cover it closely for years on here. As a life-long fan of The Matrix franchise and the Wachowskis (Cloud Atlas and Speed Racer are all-time favorites), I’m excited to cover this new one closely again. Buckle up! It’s time to return to The Matrix…

Update! A few people have posted some details on Twitter including a billboard going up in the UK stating that there’s a “Trailer in 2 Days“! So that means on Thursday, September 9th, it seems like we’ll finally get our first look at The Matrix 4. So excited to see this footage! The full trailer is now available to view here.

Update #2! WB has officially announced the trailer unveiling on Thursday later this week with a teaser.

The website has also updated with a few clips of footage that appear when you click on the red pill or blue pill – to give us some teases and first look images from the upcoming trailer. There’s already a few shots featuring Keanu Reeves as Neo, Jonathan Groff, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (who is speaking in the footage). You can now watch the first official trailer here. This is so incredibly exciting! Can’t wait to watch.

Find more posts: Movie News, Viral Marketing

George Clooney has said he was offered 35 million US dollars (around £26.3 million) for “one day’s work” but turned it down.

The Hollywood star said the offer was for him to star in an airline commercial but that, after speaking to his wife, human rights lawyer Amal, he had decided against it.

He told the Guardian: “I was offered 35 million dollars for one day’s work for an airline commercial, but I talked to Amal about it and we decided it’s not worth it.

“It was (associated with) a country that, although it’s an ally, is questionable at times, and so I thought ‘Well, if it takes a minute’s sleep away from me, it’s not worth it’.”

Clooney, who celebrated his 60th birthday in May, married Amal in 2014 and they have two children, twins Ella and Alexander, born in June 2017.

Speaking about childcare, he said they only have a nanny “four days a week”, as “it’s so important to Amal (to be involved)”.

He told the newspaper: “And during lockdown it was just us – for a full year! I felt like my mother in 1964 – doing dishes and six loads of laundry a day.”

The Clooneys were guests at the star-studded wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in May 2018 and were given VIP seats in the Quire of St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

The actor has directed The Tender Bar, a coming-of-age film based on a book of the same name by JR Moehringer, which tells the story of a boy who seeks father figures at a bar run by his uncle.

The movie, released this month, is set in New York and stars Ben Affleck as bar owner Charlie, with Tye Sheridan playiing his nephew J.R.

It had its UK premiere in October at the London Film Festival, where Clooney said it had given him a welcome break from the “pretty dark” types of movie he normally works on.

“Most of the films I do are pretty dark and this one felt light, and it felt like the world was pretty dark so I wanted to work on something that was a little lighter, you know,” he said.

Alec Baldwin has told US broadcaster ABC that he did not fire the gun that killed a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust.” 

“Well, the trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger,” Baldwin said in an interview to be aired on Thursday. The actor could be seen breaking down in tears in an excerpt released ahead of the broadcast.

Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died on the set of the Western

On October 21, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed and director Joel Souza was wounded on the set of the Western movie Baldwin was making near Santa Fe. Baldwin had previously called the incident a “tragic accident.”

How did live bullets end up on set?

When asked by ABC how a live round ended up on set, Baldwin said: “I have no idea. Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”

Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed has also said she had “no idea” why live bullets were present.

On Tuesday, investigators said an Arizona weapon rental supplier may have provided “reloaded ammunition” that matched the cartridge suspected to have contained the live round that killed Hutchins. Reloaded ammunition is made up of recycled parts, including bullets.

No charges filed

The Santa Fe Sheriff’s Department said on Wednesday that it had no comment on Baldwin’s interview statements. Investigators say it is too early to determine whether criminal charges will be filed.

Two crew members have filed civil lawsuits accusing Baldwin, the producers of the film and others on the production of negligence and lax safety protocols. Some staff had earlier complained about difficult working conditions, leading to a walk off from set.

The producers have said that they are conducting their own internal investigation.

Baldwin, who was also to star in the film, was one of the producers of the low-budget Western.

sdi/nm (AP, AFP, Reuters)

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and Farhan Akhtar set the bar high with their first collaboration, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), in which the former’s gift for storytelling and the latter’s efforts to transform himself into an athlete combined to produce a classic sports drama. But fans hoping to see the duo surpass themselves in Toofaan are bound to be disappointed.

Toofaan begins with a brash, gutsy Aziz (Farhan), thrashing fellow goons of his area. He is an orphan who has been brought up by a local gangster. After the brawl, he lands in a local charity hospital where he meets Dr Ananya (Mrunal Thakur). Aziz discovers boxing during a visit to a local gym and immediately gets hooked on to legendary boxer Muhammad Ali’s videos.

The boxing bug has bitten Aziz but he needs to find the right coach. Enter Nana Prabhu (Paresh Rawal), Mumbai’s best coach who is also a Hanuman bhakt and a staunch Hindu. At first, Nana dismisses Aziz, thinking of him as a troublemaker, but soon changes his mind after seeing his dedication. Under Nana’s guidance, Aziz quickly climbs the ladder and reaches the nationals but love gets in his way. What follows is an untoward incident that changes Aziz’s life forever.

Toofaan begins on a promising note but soon turns incoherent and scattered. Writers Anjum Rajabali and Vijay Maurya try to cover too many topics in this 2-hour-47-minute-long flick. Apart from being a sports drama, Toofaan comments on the Hindu-Muslim debate and inter-faith relationship. But, those scenes are so forced that they derail the whole film and leave a bad taste. Toofaan also has a song for every mood, almost six of them, which sure adds to the length of the film, but little else.

There is no method to this madness. The makers add multiple elements but don’t stay loyal to their characters and their primary topic – boxing. They don’t spend time exploring these characters and hence the audience doesn’t form a bond with them. We see Aziz sweating it out in the ring but there is no talk on his technique of becoming a good boxer. The film’s dialogues are drab too and fail to stir any kind of emotions.

Toofaan is somewhat redeemed by its commendable actors. Paresh Rawal stays true to his character of a stern, stubborn coach Nana Prabhu. Mrunal Thakur is watchable as an honest doctor and a supportive partner.

But the one person who carries the whole film on his shoulders is Farhan Akhtar (also one of the producers). Farhan is the force behind this Toofaan. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that Toofaan is a one-man show. From nailing boxing sequences to being vulnerable during emotional scenes, Farhan stands firm through the entire film. Like for Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, for Toofaan, too Farhan pushes the boundaries and worked hard to get the body of an athlete and it seems to have paid off. He looks effortless on the screen as a boxer. But Farhan’s efforts deserved better.

You can watch Toofaan on Amazon Prime Video.

2.5 out of 5

ALSO READ | Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Farhan Akhtar and Mrunal Thakur spill the beans about Toofaan