This article has some pretty big Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga spoilers. For 18 years and 148 minutes of runtime, Furiosa simply wants to go home. This primal, human need is a universal motivation, and it takes on mythic proportions in a movie where audiences know that quest is doomed. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is of course being marketed as an “odyssey;” an epic about the formative years of the most badass character to ever cross the Wasteland. Yet because you should remember that the Green Place is long destroyed by the time Mad Max: Fury Road rolls along,…

The darkness enveloped me, and despite the summer heat outside, the air in the building was cool. I sat in silence, intently focused, anticipating what happened next, but not quite prepared. I tensed up upon seeing the spectral woman directly ahead of me. She silently floated, translucent and seemingly unaware — until at last facing me and lunging with a guttural growl as her face distorted into some horrific entity. This memory is entirely true; it is a ghost story, but not one that took place in a haunted house. Rather, the setting was a haunted library, projected on screen…

Few types of movies sum up the 1990s quite like “dad thrillers.” A term popularized by the brilliant Max Read a few years ago, the dad thriller is a subgenre of thriller movies that was largely designed to appeal to older male viewers or otherwise featured thematic elements associated with that demographic. Yes, such movies often feature men being really good dads, but it’s about more than that. Dad thrillers were often closer to ’70s paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, which pitted crusaders of truth against staggering odds in a slow-burn narrative. They typically featured lawyers, law…

This article contains dune spoilers for across the saga. Even the most casual Dune fan knows that, at some point, there’s a giant worm boy. Since its first printing in 1981, Frank Herbert’s fourth book in the franchise, God Emperor of Dune, has proudly displayed a human/sandworm hybrid on its cover. Dune fans know that hybrid as Leto II, the son of Paul Atreides and Chani, who melds with a sandworm and becomes an all-powerful tyrant. Leto II is also one of the most fantastic elements of the Dune franchise, a series already filled with images wonderful and bizarre. God…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. When we last left Riley Andersen, the young protagonist of Pixar’s 2015 animated classic, Inside Out, she was 12 years old, and her still-developing mind was finding a way to balance all the core emotions of childhood, including Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Nearly a decade later, Pixar is returning to the vast territory inside Riley’s mind as she turns 13 and enters adolescence with Inside Out 2. This time she’ll grapple with new emotions, changes to her psyche and body,…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. When Bad Boys for Life came out in January 2020, it ended a 17-year wait for the third film in the franchise, which launched in 1995 with Bad Boys and continued in 2003 with Bad Boys II. It’s only taken a relatively brief four-plus years to get the latest entry in the series, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, to the screen—but it’s been a tumultuous stretch, to say the least. “The hope is definitely that everything will be a little bit smoother…

It’s easy to be jaded in the year of our lord 2024 about legacy sequels. What once seemed like a novelty less than a decade ago—back when Harrison Ford said, “Chewie, we’re home”—has increasingly become a threat. Hollywood studios continue to be hellbent on dragging from the grave every 1980s and ‘90s pop culture relic. However, terms like “hellbent” and “the grave” have always befitted Tim Burton’s second, and in some circles still best, feature film: Beetlejuice. Released in 1988 to a smattering of amused if confused critical notices, Beetlejuice’s dark comedy setup about a bland small town couple (Alec…

Recently, I watched the trailer for Transformers One, the Cybertron-set sequel about the origins of Optimus Prime and Megatron. Every time I see that trailer attached to whatever movie, an unenthusiasm washes over. It’s mainly a byproduct of Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry’s casting as pre-Adam’s-apple-dropped versions of their respective characters. And make no mistake, they did not change their voices at all for these roles. It’s not just Transformers One that’s the butt of this phenomenon though. Nearly every animated movie emphasizes a celebrity voice cast as part of its marketing. How else can you explain the overexposure…

“Who broke the world?” asks graffiti scrawled across the room where Immortan Joe locked up his “wives” in Mad Max: Fury Road. Fury Road and each of its three predecessors argue pretty persuasively that the answer is men like Immortan Joe: power hungry people whose actions lead to war and economic disaster. But an interesting fan theory poses another culprit, one whose breaking made the world of Mad Max: Max Rockatansky, the heroic road warrior portrayed by Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy. According to this idea, the policeman Max’s mind broke down after the events of the first movie in…

Dan Stevens is a busy man. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire landed in theaters at the end of March, where Stevens played charming leading man Trapper, then anarchic horror Abigail arrived hot on its heels in April. Next up, August brings strange horror/sci-fi Cuckoo, which sees Stevens playing a deranged scientist. Between press tours, festivals, and new projects, he’s got a lot going on. And we get the sense he wouldn’t have it any other way. Describing himself as an “experience hound,” Stevens is a man who thrives on challenges. He began his career in theater, made it big…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. Meals eaten off lettuce leaves, walking barefoot on paths made of sand, furious arguments taking place entirely in sign language. A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II introduced us to a world of oppressive silence through the eyes of the people who had lived long enough to learn those lessons. It is a very different world to the one at the opening of A Quiet Place: Day One. “There’s a lot more sound. We’re in New York, so as you…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. For Jeff Nichols, The Bikeriders’ long road trip began with a handful of photographs. Among them in grainy black and white was a lone figure, captured in blurred motion and with his head turned away as he zoomed across the Ohio River. The only clear details were the leathered texture of his jacket and the gleam flashing off his Harley’s steel. When discovering this image and many like it in 2003, Nichols was in no way a motorcycle connoisseur. To this day,…

Let’s not beat around the bush; Marvel’s going through something right now. The superhero studio’s recent output has simply exhausted both casual and hardcore fans alike (lest we forget that not so long ago WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If…?, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home were released in a single year).  The sentiment appears to be close to universal too: amidst the avalanche of MCU content, there have been too few hits and too many misses. The fact that Bob Iger, Disney’s Chief Executive Officer, has publicly said that they’re going to…

This Dune: Part Two article contains spoilers. For most casual fans and hardcore spice addicts alike, Dune: Part Two is a triumph. Not only did Denis Villeneuve get to complete his visionary adaptation of the first Frank Herbert Dune novel (phew!) but he was also able to infuse his cinematic trip to Arrakis with modern sensibilities. For longtime fans, Dune: Part Two is not the most faithful filmed version of the first book, but it’s much closer to the text than the 1984 version and feels bigger and grander than the (more faithful) 2000 miniseries version. To put it simply,…

The desert may grow cold at night, but for two intrepid adventurers and would-be fortune seekers, the evening is flush with excitement. Earlier in the day these heroes—rugged Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and effervescent Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz)—seemed to make a breakthrough on their grave-robbing exploits after they literally broke through the ceiling of a tomb, discovering a juicy mummy along the way. A little later, they got in a shootout with desert nomads and bedouin, which nonchalantly left a body count well into the double digits. And yet, none of that really seemed to matter in the grand scheme…

Sci-fi films and special effects have gone hand-in-hand for over the last 120 years. For much of that time, the idea of going to see the latest sci-fi movie has partially been based on the appeal of seeing what incredible effects its filmmakers would bring to the biggest screen possible. Though the evolution of special effects on film certainly isn’t limited to the sci-fi genre, it’s remarkably easy to trace the evolution of movie special effects by discussing some of the most significant sci-fi films ever. These are the sci-fi films with revolutionary special effects that showed us the impossible…

When Saturday Night Live began, it wasn’t even called Saturday Night Live. That honor belonged to a rival variety show hosted by Howard Cosell that launched the same year on ABC primetime. Hence why the young, hungry, and immensely talented sketch comedians assembled in 1975 were dubbed the “Not Ready for Primetime Players.” That earliest and now quasi-mythical first class of SNL alumni remain the only ones to hold that title. Perhaps this is because the joke stopped working after many of them proved more than capable of carrying a primetime television series. In fact, most of them went on…

When walking into a film like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the problem with prequel stories cannot help but linger in the back of one’s mind: Can there be excitement in telling us a story we already know? Indiana Jones can’t die in Temple of Doom and Anakin Skywalker will grow up to become Darth Vader. It’s inevitable. Some prequels manage to navigate that hurdle by completely subverting our expectations (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), largely functioning as standalone experiences (X-Men: First Class), or by simply parodying their very concepts (Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp). No…

Adam Scott might have the most thankless part in Madame Web. He exists simply to share the screen with a listless Dakota Johnson and trade expository dialogue about how her character Cassie Webb doesn’t like children or anything related to family—obnoxious signposts to give the movie something like a character arc. Cast to bring the good will he earned playing wholesome snarks in Party Down and Parks and Recreation, Scott delivers his lines with a wry reserve that feels like resignation. And yet, Scott’s mere presence in the film gives Madame Web an important quality lacking in all of Spider-Man’s…

Filmmaker George Miller has made no bones about classic cinema’s influence on the Mad Max saga over the years. Iconic physical comedians like Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd are cited often as inspirations for the queasy death-defying stunts that Max Rockatansky or Imperator Furiosa get up to, including when we spoke with the writer-director. He even muses to us, “Buster Keaton would survive very well, actually” in the fabled Wasteland. Perhaps so too then would the stars he selected to bring his most epic adventure yet on the Fury Road to life. Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth are actors that…