Despite having lost three of her shipmates to an alien invader she doesn’t understand, despite learning that her shipmate and science officer Ash (Ian Holm) is an android, despite nearly getting killed when Ash tried to shove a porn mag down her throat, it’s something else that truly disturbs Ripley in Alien. It’s the two words she saw in a message from her employer: “crew expendable” With those two words, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) realizes that she’s at the bottom of a food chain, and not just because there’s a bloodthirsty Xenomorph on board. Never one to portray businesses or anyone…

In the first Marvel Thor story from Journey Into Mystery #83, the All-Father Odin sends his son to Earth to learn humility. It sounds like Thor actor Chris Hemsworth has had to do the same thing. Hemsworth’s Thor was riding high going into 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, following 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, which won over fans who dismissed his first two solo outings, as well as the strong emotional arc in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. But for many, Love and Thunder pushed the wacky sensibilities of writer/director Taika Waititi too far, resulting in a movie too glib to be funny. And…

Whatever one thinks of the highly controversial TV series Euphoria, there’s one thing no one can deny. No show of this era has been a better launching point for the careers of young movie stars. Zendaya is currently enjoying huge success on the big screen, thanks to Dune: Part Two and Challengers, while Sydney Sweeney is just on the other side of a rare rom-com box office success with Anyone But You and has also just produced and starred in the excellent horror flick Immaculate. Jacob Elordi received a bit of praise for his portrayal of Elvis Presley in the…

Every couple of months in comic book-centric social media circles, someone reposts a comics page in which Deadpool shooting Spider-Man in the head or decapitating an exhausted Bruce Banner. These panels usually spark arguments about whether or not these kills are in character (they aren’t) or if the entire thing is a joke (it is). Eventually, someone points out that the pages come from Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, a 2012-2013 miniseries by Cullen Bunn and Dalibor Talajic. The story involves Deadpool’s fourth-wall-breaking powers driving him so mad that he decides to kill all the other Marvel characters because they’re…

Even in this age of instant YouTube gratification, movie trailers are a big deal. They get us hyped for an upcoming project by making promises that the eventual film will (hopefully) pay off. The best sizzle reels are even able to do this by giving a taste of things to come without ruining any surprises or plot twists. Think about the teaser for Alien with its cracking egg and unnerving siren sound, or the deft use of a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” in the classic promo for The Social Network. Both of those examples speak to the haunting nature…

“Satan is his father and his name is Adrian!” shouts the coven leader Roman Castevet at the end of 1968’s. Rosemary’s Baby. “He shall overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples. He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured.” Even when making allowances for Roman’s (Sidney Blackmer) understandable delight at seeing his plan come to fruition, that’s a lot of expectation to put on a newborn, no matter who his father might be. Unfortunately, the sequels chronicling Adrian’s rise to power didn’t quite live up to those expectations. Neither the…

This article contains likely spoilers for Dune: Part Three as well as the books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. You are not prepared for what is to come. These are the words of promise, or prophecy, in Anya Taylor-Joy’s lone scene in Dune: Part Two. Whether the sequence is a kind of psychic chat room occurring between Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides (Timothée Chalemet) and his unborn sister, Alia, or an actual vision of a conversation they will have in the future is obscure. Either way, the meeting seems otherworldly, not least of all because Paul and Alia are conversing on…

You thought you were okay sitting on the toilet until you read Dreamcatcher. You’d happily walk past a storm drain until you read It. You’d go into a creepy boutique shop before checking Needful Things out of the library. You didn’t even mind checking into Room 217 at a hotel until you read The Shining. More than perhaps any other horror novelist, Stephen King has unnerved our collective imagination with twisted creations that stalk our everyday lives. Demonic cars, rabid dogs, alien domes, possessed caretakers, crazed fans… there’s a Stephen King monster for every day of the year, plus one…

Steven Spielberg has had a lifelong fascination with alien beings from beyond the stars. When the legendary director was just 17, he made a nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic on his 8mm camera called Firelight, a film that he more or less remade 14 years later as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That 1977 classic would be the first of three professional movies Spielberg would make about aliens arriving on our planet, the other two being E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005). And each trip into the extraterrestrial has led to one of the director’s most successful…

“Why is it that only those who have never fought in a battle are so eager to be in one?” Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) asks at one point in FX’s Shōgun. It’s a question that resonates not only with the show’s characters but may strike at the heart of our long-standing fascination with samurai.  Its resonance is all the more profound because Shōgun is loosely — very loosely — based on real events from the end of Japan’s Warring States period that pushed the nation into a new era. Taking historical events and crafting drama from them is something the…

Freud might have once said a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but the good doctor would never mistake a tennis racket as mere sports equipment when watching Challengers. Those interlaced, titanium-gripped meshworks are extensions and metaphors in the hands of director Luca Guadagnino and his huffing, puffing young cast. What exactly that extension is morphs from scene to scene, but it is always libidinous, unmistakably eager, and ever in search of connection: with the ball, with the other player, or sometimes just with the sweat dripping out their pores. In one sequence, Zendaya’s tight smile thinly conceals an ironclad…

This article contains mild spoilers for Shōgun and major ones for The Last Samurai. A lonely Westerner who seems lost before he even steps off his ship; a strange land filled with ritualized grace and deadly niceties; and a culture shock that is both intoxicating and intimidating—even before our stranger sees the samurai masks and katana blades come out. This could very well be a description of the odyssey which English seaman John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) finds himself on in FX’s astonishing new limited series, Shōgun. Yet I’m actually describing a popular Tom Cruise vehicle loosely set in the same…

During the extended climax of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, the much debated filmmaker not so much winks at his audience as he vigorously shakes us while shouting in our ear, “Do you get the reference?!” The lonely samurai-like character (read: Jedi), Bae Doona’s Nemesis, stands alone against an army of imperial thugs. She lights up her now familiar glowing machetes that are essentially lightsabers by a different hue, and her opponents each switch on their own. The sequence could have appeared in any one of the Star Wars prequels released in the 1990s and 2000s,…

Although all three of the MCU Spider-Man movies have “home” in the title, Spidey didn’t feel like he really came home until the very end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That’s when Peter Parker walked into a squalid New York City apartment, knit together a home-made suit, and remembered his late parent-figure’s words about power and responsibility. So why the heck is Marvel unsure about what to do next? From the first stories by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee to the married father of two in Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man is almost always a hard-luck hero,…

Monsters are everywhere! Godzilla and Kong are going at it once again (this time as a double act) and now Abigail has hit screens, a movie about a heist gone wrong where the loot is an adorable 12-year-old ballerina. Starring Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera and Kathryn Newton and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett aka Radio Silence, who made the raucous Ready Or Not (as well as the most recent Scream movies), it’s a gore-soaked genre love letter that at one point had ties to the Universal Monsters canon. Without Abigail spoilers, that’s not entirely evident in the finished…

When it comes to the classics of cinema—and sometimes the dregs—it’s always fun to think about what might’ve been. Casting especially can be a strange alchemy between actor and role, and when the formula is off, it’s easy to ponder whether the spell would work at all. Can you imagine Robert Redford as Michael Corleone? What about Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones? And it’s an interesting challenge to envision what Tim Burton’s Batman might’ve been if it starred Bill Murray versus Robin Williams. The casting of Neo in The Matrix is another legendary “what if?” in movie history. The 1999…

Wolverine is the best at what he does. And what he does is self-loathing and swear words. At least, that’s what we see in the latest trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, courtesy of a returning Hugh Jackman seemingly as the only surviving X-Man from his universe. The third Deadpool movie has long promised to be an R-rated reunion for 20th Century Fox mutants and a way to bring the X-Men into the MCU, so far the teasers are delivering just that. The first trailer was a cameo-fest full of Deadpool‘s supporting cast and other Fox characters, as well as a…

The best things come in threes, especially stories. In Western nations, we like a three-act structure in which we set a status quo, watch our heroes fall, and then see them return to greatness. Some of these stories cannot be held within a single movie. For those epics, those monumental narratives, the movie trilogy was born. Trilogies represent some of the best that cinema has to offer, movies that changed the culture and the art form. The trilogy might vary in quality from film to film, but together these three films tell a story that cannot be ignored. Before we…

This Rebel Moon article contains spoilers. Like Star Wars before it, and Dune earlier this year, Zack Snyder‘s two-part space epic Rebel Moon ends with the defeat of an evil Empire. At least a temporary one. While Kora (Sofia Boutella) and the rest of the heroes have defended the moon of Veldt from Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) and his dreadnought, the Imperium still stands, presumably ready to strike back in a future movie. Balisarius (Fra Fee) is still emperor and Kora still has unfinished business with her treacherous father figure. And in Part 2: The Scargiver, we also learn Princess…

At its core, the Alien franchise is easy to understand: people meet aliens, bad things happen. It’s a lot harder to keep track of when exactly these things occur. Alien takes place in 2122, Aliens 57 years later, and then Alien 3 happens shortly afterwards. But then things get weird. Alien Resurrection jumps ahead 202 years, Prometheus begins sometime in prehistory and then in 2093, and Alien: Covenant is in 2104. Alien: Romulus will squeeze in between the first two movies, around 2142, which is 20 years after the original. And that’s not even going through the Alien vs Predator…