“Ah, there it is,” the adult Ralphie intones in the opening scene of the holiday staple A Christmas Story. “My old house. How could I ever forget it?” Narrator Jean Shepherd, the author whose stories inspired the film, imbues the lines with innocent warmth. Matched with the sumptuous version of “Deck the Halls” that opens the movie, this beginning sets the stage for a nostalgic look at an innocent time in a WASP American boy’s life. So sweet, so welcoming is the music and narration that we almost fail to realize what, exactly, we’re looking at. Accompanying the words and…

Mythical creatures. Movie stars. And the studio that recently gave the world The Brutalist and Sing Sing. We probably were always going to be at least a little intrigued by Death of a Unicorn, the upcoming dark comedy starring Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd that’s oh, so A24 that it even intentionally misspelled “unicorn” by way of old-timey early modern English when it was first announced. (Its original title was Death of a Unicorne, which might be fitting when one knows the writer-director Alex Scharfman previously worked on Robert Eggers’ The Witch.) Still, when this morning’s gloriously batshit trailer came…

Despite the singular event suggested by its title, Day of the Fight features a lower stakes match earlier in the film, hours before prizefighter “Irish” Mike Flannigan (Michael Pitt) has his title bout. Visiting the gym to check in with his trainer, Mike overhears a young fighter mocking the sparring partner he just trounced. Mike, who has spent the past several years in prison for reasons not immediately clear, is a man who’s visibly lived with shame, guilt, and the loss of his once illustrious acclaim. So the cocky contender running his mouth doesn’t object when Mike climbs into the…

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an awesome movie. No, it’s not as whiz-bang as its immediate successor Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, nor as spectacular as the 2009 reboot film Star Trek. But what word can better describe a movie that spends so much time on loving shots of all things Trek—the crew, the starbases, and especially the USS Enterprise. The movie strives to evoke a sense of awe. But if there’s one aspect of The Motion Picture that doesn’t get enough recognition, it’s the redesigned Starfleet uniforms. The Motion Picture introduces a full new set of…

I am old enough to remember when Wicked opened on Broadway. I was still in high school and what felt like a million miles away from New York City. Still, even from the relatively provincial wilds of North Carolina, I was aware something big had landed on the Great White Way; an event so extraordinary to my generation that virtually overnight every theater kid was singing “Defying Gravity” and “Popular” in the halls of Green Hope High, whether their classmates wanted to hear it or not. While there had been other hit musicals in my pint-sized life up to that…

Five and a half minutes into Nickel Boys, young Elwood stops to watch Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “How Long, Not Long” speech. It is broadcast on a stack of televisions in a storefront window. As the TVs click on and the picture comes into focus, Elwood’s grandmother, her friends, and other passersby stop and watch the face on the screen, to listen to his faithful claims that the injustice America inflicts upon its Black citizens will soon come to an end. We see this crowd gather not directly, but in the reflection of the storefront window where the…

If you grew up with 8-bit consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System or home computer of the time, I’d wager you’ll probably remember the painful attempts gaming companies such as serial movie tie-in murderer, LJN, made to bring the classic temporal sci-fi flick Back to the Future to our screens. These games were some of the worst, defecated out onto the market, and bore little to no relation to the events that took place on the silver screen. Often, they were made up of levels that had the smallest, most tenuous link you can imagine to the source material, and they were…

Is it safe to say the movies are back? Admittedly, they never really left. But it seems in this decade where every year throws up new challenges and hiccups in the industry, folks become convinced the sky is falling and cinema’s days are numbered. Still, here we are back at the end of the year. And once again, there seems plenty to be thankful for as new cinematic images burrow their way into the collective subconscious for years to come. Whether it’s the sight of Muad’Dib standing before a nation of radicalized disciples as if he were a space-aged T.E.…

A Clayface movie is on its way. And it couldn’t come at a worse time. Variety reports that a Clayface movie will begin production next year, produced by The Batman director Matt Reeves and written by Mike Flanagan, creator of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. The news comes just before the release of Kraven the Hunter, the last in Sony‘s ill-fated attempts to build a shared universe around Spider-Man villains. Which begs the question: why would DC try to follow in Sony’s shameful footsteps with its own Batman rogues? The obvious answer is that Reeves and company…

It’s official. Knull has destroyed Sony’s Spider-Man villain universe. Morbin’ time is over. Ezekiel Sims has prevented the future. Kraven’s last hunt has commenced. Or so a cynic might say! (Ahem.) Be that as it may, The Wrap is indeed reporting this weekend’s Kraven the Hunter will bring an end to the shared universe Sony has built around Spider-Man villains. Honestly, it’s about time. Look, we’ve all had our fun. Tom Hardy’s sweaty take on Eddie Brock made the Venom movies into unlikely and enjoyable rom-coms. Morbius spawned hilarious memes, which in turn spawned major studio blunders. And apparently, people…

Poor Aaron Taylor-Johnson. We admit that as a preternaturally handsome man and talented actor who in the right role can smolder, he doesn’t need our sympathies. (Seriously check out his sinister good ol’ boy on the Texan frontier in Nocturnal Animals and realize that’s the same English chap who played a perfect American zero in Kick-Ass.) Even so, here is a guy who’s got rizz for days, yet every time he is plugged into an American blockbuster, it’s in one of the most insipid and bleakly impersonal of studio products. And as Kraven the Hunter is the latest Spider-Man-less Spidey…

Marvel’s Civil War continues! Just months after Robert Downey Jr. announced his return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Avengers: Doomsday, his on-screen one-time rival is following suit. The Wrap reports that Chris Evans will be back for the next Avengers film, along with directors Joe and Anthony Russo. But who, exactly, will he be? You might be quick to answer “Captain America, duh!” but there are actually a surprising amount of options here, especially when you consider Downey’s own return to the MCU as baddie Doctor Doom and the multiversal shenanigans that have been the focal point of this…

Not quite 28 years later, filmmakers Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are returning to the zombie tale that revitalized and evolved the zombie genre. The horror story that kicked off with 2001’s 28 Days Later and continued in 2007’s 28 Weeks Later jumps forward almost three decades to a world completely changed by the Rage Virus. In fact, the first trailer for the long-awaited third installment reveals an England where survivors armed with bows and arrows live in primitive settlements and a filthy Ralph Fiennes stalks around a temple-like structure made of human skulls. But the trailer may not just…

Well, this is unexpected: Jeremy Allen White, who stars in The Bear as a tortured chef with anger issues named Carmy, is set to voice Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta the Hutt, in The Mandalorian & Grogu. This was first reported by industry scooper Jeff Sneider on The Kristian Harloff Show before being corroborated by several trades, including Variety. We highly doubt anyone had this latest casting on their 2024 Star Wars bingo board. While Rotta the Hutt, canonically nicknamed “Stinky,” isn’t exactly a household name these days, he is technically a blast from the franchise’s big-screen past, specifically from…

Midway through James Mangold’s often hushed and occasionally deafening A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan comes as close as he ever will to lowering his defenses. Which is not to say the man who defined a generation’s counterculture verbalizes much in the way of his wants or dreams. Rather, in that classic Hollywood biopic style, he cries out his essence with a pained lamentation. “When people ask me where the songs come from, they don’t want to know,” Timothée Chalamet’s elfin folk singer broods. “They only want to know why they didn’t come to them!” That may be, but the essence…

It’s still impressive how evocative Howard Shore’s Middle-earth music can be 21 years after The Lord of the Rings trilogy ran its course. While the composer is most celebrated in fan communities for his rousing “Fellowship” theme, or the provincial beauty (and flutes!) of “The Shire” leitmotif, I’ve always felt like the vaguely Nordic ditty he wrote to signal the Riders of Rohan is its own little wonder. One might assume anime artist and director Kenji Kamiyama agrees since the opening prelude to The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim also basks in the sounds of Shore’s…

This post contains spoilers for Dune: Prophecy episode 4 and details from the book Dune Messiah. In the final minutes of Dune: Prophecy‘s fourth episode “Twice Born,” Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson) feels a twinge of doubt about her mission. However, she recovers her resolve when she faces her beloved older brother Griffin, whose death decades earlier inspired her revenge quest. Griffin speaks words of reassurance, even when Valya asks if she pushed her brother too far. As the conversation reaches its conclusion, Griffin’s face begins to crack. “Thank you, Theo,” says Valya, who then watches what appeared to be her…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. If the past year has proven anything, it’s that folks in the film industry can grow accustomed to waiting on tenterhooks. After all, 2024 has been a good news/bad news situation for studios and theater owners who spent 12 months recovering from last year’s production delays and the pressures they placed on the release schedule. Yet while much of Hollywood can cautiously breathe a sigh of relief after the past summer slump shrank by August, much of the horror genre has proven…

While 1984’s Supergirl is very much a low-budget attempt to cash in on the majesty of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, it does maintain the world that Richard Donner established in one regard. Midway through the film, Supergirl (Helen Slater) strikes a classic hero pose to face off against two baddies. “I am Kara of Argo City, daughter of Alura and Zor-El,” she says with confidence. “And I don’t scare easily.” Unfortunately, she says those words to a witch called Selena, portrayed by Faye Dunaway at her hammiest. With just a flick of her finger, Selena flings Supergirl into an…

It’s almost the Christmas season, and once again Netflix merely teases us with in-jokes alluding to the Christmas Prince movies instead of providing a new installment from that cherished cinematic universe. However, the streamer has still come through with a half-dozen new holiday rom-coms and a heartwarming family tale. This year’s Christmas movies are a mix of riffs on existing stories (you’ll see some inspiration drawn from Serendipity and Magic Mike), and unique hooks that may or may not fulfill expectations. Regardless we’ve got hunky snowmen and shirtless dancers, winking nods to Mean Girls and Love Actually, and quite the…