This post contains major spoilers for Alien: Romulus. It all comes down to Ash—or whatever he is called these days. If the duplicitous android/science officer aboard hadn’t overridden Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) security protocols and allowed the infected Kane (John Hurt) aboard the Nostromo in the original Alien, none of this would have ever happened. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Ash, one of the Alien franchise’s most insidious monsters, would return in Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, a movie the director co-wrote with Rodo Sayagues. After all, the new film is determined to tie the whole franchise together,…

This article contains spoilers for both Alien: Romulus and Alien: Isolation. It’s a green, blinking box. Yet every time it appeared in the background of Alien: Romulus, a cold chill went down the spines of possibly millions of viewers, including this writer. That’s because if you ever played Alien: Isolation, Creative Assembly’s relentless survival horror game from 2014, those proverbial telephone boxes are the stuff of nightmares and lingering trauma. Appearing in more than one scene during Fede Alvarez’s love letter to the larger Alien franchise, these “registration points,” or emergency telephone booths, are littered throughout the Renaissance Space Station…

You wanna get nuts? Then ask Michael Keaton a question about a controversial topic, and he’ll get nuts. That’s what GQ discovered when they profiled Keaton in advance of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The magazine asked Keaton to weigh in on Batgirl, for which he returned as Batman. Even though the movie was almost finished, Warner Bros. decided to shelve it, electing for a tax break instead of completing and releasing the movie. The move outraged anyone who wants a long-running studio like Warner Bros to continue putting out movies. But not Keaton. “I didn’t care one way or another,” Keaton admitted…

Star Trek has always been about boldly going, so it’s no surprise the franchise quickly moved beyond television sets. Even before the series jumped to the big screen, Star Trek expanded into the world of paperbacks, first with novelizations of Original Series and Animated Series episodes and then with original stories created for the page. Starting with 1970’s Spock Must Die! by James Blish, the novels gave fans a chance to check in on the continuing missions of their favorite crews and characters. As of this writing, over 850 novels have made it to print, encompassing not only every series…

The most important person in the Mad Max movies is not, in fact, Max Rockatansky. Nor is it Imperator Furiosa. It isn’t even one of the villains, be they Immortan Joe or Lord Humungus. No, the most important person is the tattooed old man seen in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Played by George Shevtsov, he is known simply to his flock and overlords as the History Man, one of many elderly people in the Mad Max universe tasked with keeping records of times past. When someone like Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) calls for a “wordburger,” it’s the job of the…

In space no one can hear you scream. Or at least that is what some rather ingenious 20th Century Fox marketers pushed back in 1979. Yet we did hear the people scream, and gasp, and panic as the facehugger’s tendrils tightened around John Hurt’s throat in movie houses across the world. And in the near half-century that followed, those screams continue to echo in our ears. Hence this weekend’s anticipated return of the xenomorph in Alien: Romulus, a movie which star Cailee Spaeny previously described to us as walking a careful line between the understated dread of the ’79 classic…

This post contains massive Alien: Romulus spoilers. “I’m not going to go after the women in the audience. I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs.” So declared Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon in the 2002 documentary The Alien Saga, and no one can say he failed. The most famous moment in Alien involved Kane (John Hurt) giving violent birth after a facehugger forced itself inside him. Although later contributors would leave aside the male focus, pregnancy metaphors continued to drive…

This article contains spoilers aplenty for Alien: Romulus and the whole franchise. “I admire its purity,” a robot says during an infamous scene in Alien. Ian Holm’s synthetic science officer is of course referring to the “organism” (or “xenomorph” as Aliens later defines it). However, this line of dialogue has gone on to be cherished by science fiction fans all over the world as a metaphor for the original, sleek, and mysterious 1979 movie that started it all. It would seem director Fede Alvarez and his Alien: Romulus co-writer Rodo Sayagues would agree. Their new seventh entry in the mainline…

This post contains spoilers for It Ends With Us. Lily Bloom sits at the edge of a tall building, smoking a cigarette while thinking about her late father, whose final days she intentionally avoided. Her contemplation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni), who storms onto the rooftop and kicks a chair. Thus is the meet cute of It Ends With Us. “Meet Cute” is, of course, the term used to describe the unlikely circumstances under which the central couple first encounter one another. It can be a squabbling German couple prompting Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and…

It is fair to say that Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original million-dollar idea for Alien remains one of the great all-time movie scares. A crew of astronauts, or at least space truckers, sits down for dinner before the long hyper-sleep home. Earlier in the story, one of them, a man, was attacked when an alien organism attached itself to his face. The crew’s science officer, a cagey and unknowable figure, tells us the man is fine. Yet come dinner time, everyone realizes too late that the man has been implanted (or impregnated) with extraterrestrial life. And it is a…

Earlier this month, Argentina’s Ministry of Security announced the creation of an “Applied Artificial Intelligence for Security Unit,” a special task force whose remit will be to “use machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data to predict future crimes and help prevent them.” You can read the original announcement in Spanish here. Now whatever arguments exist for and against the creation of this new crime fighting course, all the least funny people reading the headline of this story skipped the article entirely to post animated Gifs of Tom Cruise operating what appears to be an Xbox Kinnect. Because if…

Since the beginning, every sequel and prequel in the now seven-film Alien franchise—yes, there are only seven movies, those other two monster mashes never happened!—has been at war with itself. And the battle has remained the same: How much do we evolve the sci-fi concepts suggested by the monster versus serving up what worked before? Over the past 45 years, the series has flirted with intriguing ideas, such as when Renny Harlin (who quit) and then Jean-Pierre Jeunet proposed respective Alien 3 and 4s that ended up on Earth. There was also the original intentions of Vincent Ward (who quit)…

In a world… in which movies are just as much products as they are art, studios need to sell the latest releases to the broadest possible audiences. That means that they not only need to craft trailers promoting the films, but they need to misrepresent what films are really about. On a certain level, that tendency toward misrepresentation makes sense. Trailers only have a couple of minutes to get people interested in the film, and complex works of art don’t lend themselves to such simplicities. That said, it’s hard to see a masterpiece reduced to just a few sizzle moments,…

The latest trailer for Kraven the Hunter features a long-awaited character from the Spider-Man mythos. No, not Spider-Man. Of course it’s not Spider-Man. Kraven is the latest in latest in Sony‘s attempts to build a cinematic universe based on Spider-Man characters, but without using Spider-Man. No, the newest character is Aleksei Sytsevich, better known as the Rhino. We’ve seen clips of Aleksei in his civilian form, played by Alessandro Nivola. But this latest trailer is the first time he’s appeared in his Rhino form and it is… different. The trailer shows Aleksei transforming into a type of human/rhino hybrid, a…

“What’s in the box?” The very fact that you just heard Brad Pitt‘s unique delivery in your head demonstrates how iconic that line has become. The question and reveal brought David Fincher‘s unrelentingly bleak crime thriller, Seven, to a head (sorry) and confirmed a hopelessly despairing worldview. The box, of course, contained the severed head of Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), the sweet wife to Pitt’s detective David. The disembodying is the final move by the serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who based his crimes on Catholicism’s Seven Deadly Sins. Doe killed Tracy out of Envy, driving David to kill him…

What sort of car does Marty McFly drive back to the future?DeLoreanFord PrefectVolkswagen BeetleFiat XI/9Which of these historical figures do NOT feature in Bill & Ted’s history report?Queen VictoriaSocratesBilly the KidSigmund FreudLa Jetée inspired which time travel movie?12 MonkeysThe TerminatorTime BanditsTime CopIn Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), to what year are the characters transported by the eponymous time machine?1986198419851987How many Star Trek movies feature time travel?FourOneThreeSixWhich 19th century villain must HG Wells attempt to thwart in 1979 movie Time After Time, feat. Malcolm McDowell?Jack the RipperMoriartySweeney ToddJohn Wilkes BoothWhat is the name of the time-travelling police force in 1994 Jean-Claude…

Release the Schumacher Cut! Okay, that nerdy battle cry maybe hasn’t caught on like the demands for David Ayer’s darker cut of Suicide Squad or another, longer cut of whatever Zack Snyder is making. But the Schumacher Cut of Batman Forever is a thing, a longer and darker version of the 1995 sequel based on director Joel Schumacher‘s original intentions, and according to Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the script with Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler, the Schumacher Cut almost saw the light of day. Speaking with Collider at SDCC 2024, Goldsman revealed that the Schumacher Cut does exist and…

This article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine. Do you know what happens to a movie star when they’re not asked to be in your movie? Same thing that happens to everything else. Or, to put it another way, you gotta ask actors to be in your films. That’s the lesson that Ryan Reynolds might be learning, at least according to Halle Berry. In conversation with ComicBook.com, Berry explained the absence of her X-Men character Storm in Deadpool & Wolverine. “Blake [Lively] asked me one time,” Berry recalled in the interview. “I ran into her at a Marc Jacobs fashion…

They might have played brothers almost 30 years ago on the set of From Dusk Till Dawn, but it’s fair to say the sun has gone down on George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino’s camaraderie. Clooney’s shots across Tarantino’s bow are making the rounds, too, after the actor sat down with his frequent co-star Brad Pitt for a GQ cover story interview. During the careers-spanning conversation, the subject of actors and auteurs came up, including how each leading man has enjoyed long-lasting relationships with some of the greatest auteurs of their generation. For Clooney that can include Steven Soderbergh and the…

Following the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, Wesley Snipes is rightfully getting some late recognition for his work in the Y2K era Blade films, but there’s another early-2000s Marvel pioneer who deserves some praise as well. Thomas Jane, who portrayed the title character in 2004’s The Punisher, was part of the same generation of early Marvel films that showed there was a massive market for superhero properties. Along with Jane’s Punisher – X-Men (2000), Elektra (2005), and yes even Ben Affleck’s Daredevil (2003) walked so the juggernaut known as the MCU could run only a few years later.  While promoting…