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UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Challengers
Follows three players who knew each other when they were teenagers as they compete in a tennis tournament to be the world-famous grand slam winner, and reignite old rivalries on and off the court.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
When the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces to protect their home and save the world from a second ice age.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
In the Lost Lands
A sorceress travels to the Lost Lands in search of a magical power that allows a person to transform into a werewolf.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
The Electric State
An orphaned teenager traverses the American West with a sweet but mysterious robot and an eccentric drifter in search of her younger brother.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Spaceman
Jakub Procházka, orphaned as a boy and raised in the Czech countryside by his grandparents, overcomes his odds to become the country's first astronaut.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Dune: Part Two
Paul Atreides unites with Chani and the Fremen while seeking revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Ordinary Angels
Inspired by the incredible true story of a hairdresser who single-handedly rallies an entire community to help a widowed father save the life of his critically ill young daughter.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Hitpig
A bounty hunter pig finds himself trekking the globe with a free-spirited elephant he intended to capture.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Arthur the King
An adventure racer adopts a stray dog named Arthur to join him in an epic endurance race.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Red One
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Poor Things
The incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter; a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Road House
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An ex-UFC middleweight fighter ends up working at a rowdy bar in the Florida Keys where things are not as they seem.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Havoc
After a drug deal gone wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Wolfs
Follows two lone wolf fixers who are assigned to the same job.
UPCOMING MOVIES 2024
Kung Fury 2
The story will focus on Kung Fury's universe with no real connection to the short movie other than the lead character.
Freedom Boosts Happiness More Than Money
It's as the saying goes: money can't buy happiness. Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen found that societies that expanded their level of freedom and independence saw a corresponding boost in the quality of life of the citizens. He concludes that allowing people to live the way they prefer to is far more likely to result in widespread satisfaction than the usual focus on GDP and other economic concerns.
Happiness Improves as We Age
Here's some good news for anyone actively planning to grow older: Chances are that your level of happiness will grow with the number of birthday candles on your cake. A study by the University of Alberta tracked subjects level of happiness over a 25-year period, determining that across the board (and controlling for other variables), those who got older, got happier.
Some Cultures Frown on Happiness
While happiness is a highly valued trait in Western cultures, that's not the case worldwide. "In fact, some individuals across cultures are averse to various kinds of happiness for several different reasons," according to Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. They found that in a number of cultures, from Japan to Germany to the Middle East, a tendency toward "happiness aversion" can be found. The reasons for this avoidance of happiness fall into a range of categories that might seem, well, foreign to Americans:
Being happy makes it more likely that bad things will happen to you
Being happy makes you a worse person
Expressing happiness is bad for you and others
Pursuing happiness is bad for you and others
Phone Calls Are Better for Happiness Than Texts
Or at least, they're better for the happiness and health of long-distance relationships. Researchers found that those who communicated via phone or webcam were more likely to feel emotionally supported by their significant other. Those who used text messages and instant messaging felt no such connection.
Lights Make a Big Impact on Happiness
In his book of science-based tips for improving happiness, Happiness Hacks: 100% Scientific! Curiously Effective!, Alex Palmer writes "Feeling down? Turn on some lights—or at least turn them up. In three separate study conditions, researchers found a correlation between people's feelings of hopelessness and their perception of room lighting. They found that participants rated the brightness of a room as darker when they were feeling hopeless and also indicated a preference for a brighter room."
Pets Make You Happy
Yeah, we know—duh. But here's where it gets interesting: According to Allen McConnell, university distinguished professor at Miami University's Department of Psychology, the difference between felines and canines is nil. As he said in Happiness Hacks, "We've never found differences between dogs and cats. The primary difference is the extent to which you anthropomorphize the pet. If you view your iguana as having human-like compassion and qualities, it's as good as a golden retriever. It's all in the mind of the owner."
Happiness Is Contagious
It turns out that surrounding yourself with happy people will cause that happiness to rub off on you. Those were among the findings of researchers who looked at the Framingham Heart Study, which looked at the health and happiness of more than 4,700 residents of the city of Framingham, Massachusetts, and found that people who reported feeling happy tended to form their own "clusters" with one another. They found that your likelihood of happiness rises 15.3 percent if a family member or close friend is happy.
Each fireworks is a glimpse of wonder that brings new hope
Happy Places Also Have High Suicide Rates
The countries and states that get high places on the "Happiest Places" lists also tend to have the highest suicide rates, according to research from the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England; Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York; and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. "This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them," one of the researchers noted. "These types of comparison effects have also been shown with regards to income, unemployment, crime, and obesity."
Bad Days Can Be a Good Thing
Just as experiencing emotions beyond happiness can have surprising, positive side effects, bad days can actually be good for your long-term happiness. A psychology team from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering found that subjects who experienced a combination of happiness and sadness at the same time were more likely to improve their sense of mental health over the long run.
Small Towns and Rural Areas Are Found to Foster Happiness
Big cities aren't great for one's happiness, according to findings from public policy researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, who examined data from the General Social Survey, revealing a correlation between higher levels of happiness and being located in a small town or rural area.
Being Happy Might Make You Less Creative
Another point Palmer brings up is that, as a study by University of North Texas' Mark A. Davis revealed, "moderate levels of positive moods can help to open up our minds and get us to think outside the box. But those experiencing high levels of happiness did not exhibit the same burst of creativity as those feeling less cheery."
Over-Happy People Make More Mistakes
As Palmer explains in Happiness Hacks, "Researchers have developed the concept of 'depressive realism'—that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world around them and their place in it," and in one study, "Participants were asked to press a button and a green light would or would not turn on. When asked to rate the level of control they felt they had over the light, the nondepressed subjects overestimated how much control they had, while the depressed students were much more accurate."
Our Love of Happiness Is Relatively New
We imagine that "the pursuit of happiness" is part of a person's DNA, but, as Peter N. Stearns explains in Harvard Business Review, "Until the 18th century, Western standards encouraged, if anything, a slightly saddened approach to life, with facial expressions to match. As one dour Protestant put it, God would encourage a person who 'allowed no joy or pleasure, but a kind of melancholic demeanor and austerity.'"
The Enlightenment Heralded Happiness Obsession
According to Stearns, our modern concern with personal happiness can be traced back to the Enlightenment, with Alexander Pope stating "Oh happiness! Our being's end and aim!" and John Byrom stating "it was the best thing one could do to be always cheerful." That philosophy influenced western thinking more broadly, and shaped how Americans in particular viewed their sense of life satisfaction.