This article contains Death of a Unicorn spoilers. “You know what? We really must put more stock in art history.” This is a moral truth that should be repeated. It also, perhaps, is a thought that flashed through the mind of Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) right before a unicorn’s horn also smashed into that soft, squishy gray matter. It might have similarly been in the back recesses of Belinda Leopold’s (Téa Leoni) head while another unicorn opened her belly. They were both warned earlier in their movie by art history student Ridley Kintner (Jenna Ortega) that ancient masterworks tell…

Someone once said the waiting of a thing makes for such sweet sorrow. Sure, but it can also be the source of all anxiety, horror, and unrelenting dread, as proven in Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare. That is until the titular fire and thunder, shock and awe, descends. Then comes the high-pitched screaming and a different type of waiting. Such is Mendoza’s brutal estimation of his time in Iraq during a film with its face so buried in the dirt that you might feel the bullet casings singe your hair. But that comes later, after a deep breath and…

“Armageddon.” That word, spoken by political officer Putin in the 1990 adaptation of Tom Clancy‘s The Hunt for Red October, is weighted with meaning. It’s not just that The Hunt for Red October is a Cold War thriller about the Russian and American Navies racing to find the titular nuclear sub, a conflict that might set off World War III. It’s that the delivery of the word completely changes the movie. Up until that point, Putin (Peter Firth) and the other Russian characters—most notably, Captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) and his second officer Vasily Borodin (Sam Neill)—have been speaking Russian.…

To me! My… folding chairs?! Marvel raised a lot of questions yesterday when they chose to announce the cast of its much-anticipated Avengers: Doomsday via a five and a half hour video posted to social media, in which the camera moves every 12 minutes or so to reveal a new chair with a star’s name on the back. But the biggest questions might be around names such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, and James Marsden. These names all belong to stars of the Fox X-Men movies from the 2000s, films made outside of Disney’s influence and before the…

Forget “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Forget “I’ll be right back.” The defining line of the Scream franchise in this humble writer’s opinion is the one that Jennifer Jolie delivers as she gets stabbed by Ghostface: “You can’t kill me!” she shouts in disbelief. “I’m the killer in Stab 3! I’m the killer!” Yes, that line does show up in Scream 3, easily the least loved entry in the series. Which might be why you don’t remember it. Indeed, while Scream 3 brought back director Wes Craven, it replaced screenwriter Kevin Williamson, whose snappy and self-aware dialogue was central to…

“In another time, in another place… the world has been poisoned.” So opines the introductory wall of text in O’Dessa. Marketed ahead of its release as writer-director Geremy Jasper’s new rock opera fantasia starring Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr., from the outside the film looks of its current moment with the stars of Stranger Things and Waves marqueeing a streaming release. But inside its own head, there burns a fever dream that is something much more hallucinatory… and retro. Just take that opening insert text and the visions of post-apocalyptic ruins which accompany it. The message is superimposed on…

Being a James Bond fan is never easy. Not only is the franchise seemingly always teetering on the brink of social irrelevance, but the behind-the-scenes drama to even make these movies seems never-ending. At the start of this year, 007 loyalists and casual movie fans alike were shocked to learn that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson—representatives of Eon Productions and the producing family that has stewarded the Bond films since 1962—were closing up shop and selling to Amazon. Immediately pundits and fans the world over, myself included, lost our minds. The thing that made James Bond special and truly…

Marvel shocked everyone at San Diego Comic-Con last year when Doctor Doom strode onto the stage and pulled off his mask to reveal himself as Robert Downey Jr., returning for Avengers: Doomsday. And now Marvel’s doing something just as audacious to reveal the rest of the Avengers: Doomsday cast. On their main Twitter feed, Marvel Studios is revealing… chairs. Okay, yeah, they’re chairs with names on them! But they’re still chairs. At intervals of 10-15 minutes, we see a new chair and a new cast member’s name on it. Which is kinda annoying if you’re a regular person who doesn’t…

It’s broad daylight. A towering woman dressed in all black, her face covered in an ominous black veil, stands in the yard of a farmhouse. Acres upon acres of land sit empty in the distance. This is the first clip we are shown on the studio’s monitors of Blumhouse Productions’ new horror The Woman in the Yard when we visited the Athens, Georgia set last year.  Those chilling few seconds of footage set the tone for the tour. It was also, intriguingly, the closest we came to meeting the titular character of the movie (at least in costume). While the…

Given that Charlie Cox‘s work as Matt Murdock on Daredevil: Born Again, as well as Robert Pattinson‘s turn as Bruce Wayne in The Batman, it might be easy to understand why Ben Affleck recently announced that he’s done with the superhero genre. Affleck’s two outings in the world of tights and capes, in 2003’s Daredevil and later the Zack Snyder 2010s era of the DC Universe, were largely met with critical and audience division. Anyone just focusing on Daredevil or Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice might therefore think that Affleck’s retirement from superheroes is no great loss. That’s especially…

This article contains some very mild spoilers for Disney’s Snow White. Long before seven Dwarfs show up as CGI motion-capture oddities instead of of lovingly hand-drawn creations, 2025’s Snow White was already making striking changes to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And believe it or not, not all of them were as disturbingly misguided as those Dwarfs of the Uncanny Valley. Gone is the Prince, who is now replaced here by a roguish resistance leader. An instead of ending with Snow White revived by true love’s kiss—a scene which still occurs—the 2025 film continues on past the resurrection…

The 2025 Oscars were filled with memorable moments, from Conan O’Brien’s able job hosting to Sean Baker’s historic four wins for a single movie, Anora. But the most notable for folks in the heartland might’ve been Adrien Brody’s Best Actor win for The Brutalist. Not so much the fact that Brody won, but rather his reaction to winning. Brody gave a five-minute speech that ranged from the personal to the political. And it was longer than that of any other recipient ever. It apparently also was a subject of conversation, if apparently mostly in jest, among the people who made…

After battling deep into the heart of a desolate city to retrieve the kidnapped President of the United States, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) hands over a cassette tape at the end of Escape from New York. The tape, we’re told, contains the secret to nuclear fusion, a technology that could convince the warring nations of the world to finally stop their fight and finally erach peace. But when the President plays the tape, we hear not scientific secrets, but the sounds of “Bandstand Boogie” Snake destroys the tape as he limps away, confident in the oblivion that follows. Now compare…

After years of internet scrutiny, memes, and vitriolic podcasts, it’s official: Disney’s Snow White remake debuted as a box office disappointment. With studio estimates pegging the film’s opening at around $43 million in the U.S., the new musical comes in south of Tim Burton’s remake of a similarly antiquated Disney property, Dumbo, which opened soft at $45 million in 2019, and above last year’s Mufasa which premiered to $35 million in December. Given Snow White’s reported $270 million price tag, let’s just say the princess has her work cut out to turn a profit. The confirmation of a Disney remake…

This post contains spoilers for Snow White. At the start of Snow White‘s second act, the titular princess finds herself in an enchanted wood. The dark, frightening trees around her recede, replaced by animals who approach Snow White, recognizing her as pure of heart. A bluebird floats up to the princess and lands gently upon her extended finger. This moment, of course, comes from the movie’s primary source, the 1937 Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But there’s one key difference between the 1937 depiction and the one from 2025. In 1937, Snow White (voiced by Adriana…

This article contains spoilers for The Electric State. The Electric State has many problems: derivative plot, lackluster acting, indifferent visual style. But the most troubling issue might be the way it portrays AI. In The Electric State‘s fictional 1994, a technological leap in 1990 allowed machines to become self-aware. They immediately rebelled against their creators, leading to a civil war between humans and machines. Lacking physical feelings of pain and fear of death, the machines seemed poised to win the war until scientist Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) created Neurocasters. Neurocasters allowed humans to put their consciousness into mechanical bodies, giving…

And that’s another SXSW for the history books. At the same festival that saw a keynote talk given by the CEO trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back, cinephiles and genre enthusiasts also got a new Babak Anvari banger, the unicorn horror-comedy you never knew you needed, and a reported return to form by Matthew McConaughey after he stepped away from the big screen for the last six years. It was a lot of fun, a lot of work, and as always over too soon. (Spoiler: McConaughey’s much celebrated The Rivals of the Amaziah King is one of the ones…

Producer Irwin Winkler has been trying to get The Alto Knights or a movie similar to it made since the 1970s. It might go back even further he confides while reminiscing of his youth growing up in New York City. At the time, his idea of what a “gangster” looked like was defined by a certain image: James Cagney mostly, walking through a downpour of rain while glowering beneath his fedora. Yet that changed when the nightly news started reporting about guys like Frank Costello—the future protagonist of The Alto Knights and the real-life boss of bosses who “retired” from the…

Mortal Kombat 2, directed by Simon McQuoid, is set to hit theaters this October. The previous movie from 2021 ended with three big reasons to stick around for the sequel. First, as the film was itself a “Surf Dracula” narrative, we were finally going to get to that pesky fighting tournament instead of just talking about it. Second, we would see the franchise’s iconic villain Shao Kahn in action. Most importantly, we were promised Johnny Cage as a cliffhanger. Actor to be determined. That’s kind of crazy, really. Johnny Cage has been around Mortal Kombat since the very first game.…

Amanda Peet is not her character Dianne in Fantasy Life. While the fictional creation bears some similarities of also being an actress and facing the eternal insecurities and foibles of this industry, Peet is not a person so stricken with anxiety that it caused her to be away from the screen. In fact, Peet works constantly, including on shows like Brockmire, Togetherness, and The Chair, the latter a Netflix series she co-created. Still, when we sit down to discuss Dianne and everything else about Fantasy Life, a Matthew Shear comedy-drama which would go on to see Peet win the SXSW…