This article contains major Civil War spoilers. It’s the smiles that ultimately get to me. The entire, deafening finale of Civil War is meant to disturb as secessionist soldiers storm the nation’s capital, obliterating enemy combatants and U.S. landmarks in the same breath. Their foes, the few remaining armed forces loyal to a failed American dictator, are hardly meant to be sympathetic. And yet, it’s impossible to not shudder at the sight of the Lincoln Memorial reduced to rubble or unarmed bureaucrats being executed on the carpeted floors of the West Wing. The whole sequence crescendos into the inevitable. We…

There are so many directions that a SPY x FAMILY could pursue. The ongoing anime has a deeply versatile story structure that allows it to indulge in diverse missions so that the series always feels fresh. Accordingly, it’s seriously surprising to see Code: White function as a covert cooking anime movie.  It’s the type of story that audiences would expect to see in a Food Wars! or Toriko feature film, but not SPY x FAMILY. It’s also an ambitious approach to SPY x FAMILY’s first movie that hedges its bets and is too cautious to disrupt the status quo. Code:…

Under $5 million; no first time directors (unless there’s a named producer); actually good. These used to be the tenets by which Blumhouse built its name. But oh how things have changed. It’s looking increasingly like the little studio that could is making a land grab for virtually every property in horror-dom.  The latest trailer to drop from Blumhouse is for Speak No Evil, a remake of the 2022 Danish film of the same name which caused a big buzz when it hit Shudder for being so utterly and depressingly grim. Blumhouse snapped it up and cast James McAvoy, star…

The 1990s represented a golden epoch for action cinema. This was the time which saw VHS and its digitized successor DVD introduce a whole new generation of fans to the magic of stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. And those titans from the ‘80s still claimed big wins, too, at the box office and home media via the likes of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Demolition Man, and Cliffhanger. It was also the decade that saw audiences turn out in droves to theaters and rental stores to catch a glimpse of Steven Seagal’s flying fists in movies like Under Siege…

Alex Garland’s Civil War is not an easy movie to quantify or grapple with, including for the folks who were there when it was made. An intentionally provocative film that is as much speculative fiction as it is a dystopian thriller about the United States descending into chaos, it is an immensely disquieting experience, and one which is being hotly debated even before its wide release on Friday. While most of the press that saw the film during its SXSW premiere were impressed by the experience—including admittedly us—there has been a vocal counterpoint in some reviews and social media posts…

It takes The Matrix about three minutes to become the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. That’s when Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) evades a cop by breaking his arm, punching his throat, and then freezing mid-air so the camera can whip around her before she unleashes a kick that sends him across the room. Three minutes. And everything changed. But the most impressive part may be the fact that the amazing stuff doesn’t stop there. For the 117 minutes that follow, The Matrix directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski offer an improbable mix of kung fu action, Continental philosophy, and fin de siècle…

It’s a tale as old as Bat-time: an Arkham Asylum psychologist named Harleen Quinzel is driven mad by the Joker and she becomes the insane clown’s accomplice and oft-abused paramour. More recent takes on the character, especially in the comics, have seen Harley Quinn thankfully break up with the Clown Prince of Crime and become more of an anti-hero, but the upcoming film Joker: Folie a Deux is taking a more familiar approach to this dark “love story.” Sort of. The first trailer for Todd Phillips’ follow-up to his hit 2019 horror flick confirms not only that the highly-anticipated sequel…

Star Wars Outlaws is the next big video game adventure set in the galaxy far, far away. Developed by The Division studio Ubisoft Massive, the game puts you in the boots of a thief named Kay Vess, whose run afoul of the galaxy’s criminal underworld and is now one of the most wanted criminals in the Outer Rim Territories. To get out of this predicament with her head intact, she’ll need to pull off a daring heist to pay off her bounty. In a new story trailer, we learn just how stacked the odds are against Kay and her little…

Even before the final moments of No Time to Die made abundantly clear that a James Bond of the Daniel Craig variety would not return, people began wondering about the identity of the next 007. Eon Productions has not yet answered that question, despite rumors that Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been offered the part. Whoever ends up getting the honor to be the face of a new era of Bond, expectations are very high. It’s a time honored tradition, one that goes all the way back before the first Eon Bond movie Dr. No released in 1962. While that movie, and…

Elevated horror can be wonderful. Packed with subtext, visually stunning, often emotionally devastating with standout performances across the board, the subgenre is full of greats. But sometimes you just want exploding bodies. If this is you, with Abigail you have come to the right place. From directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett who are part of the collective called Radio Silence, this is a genre mashup which begins with an Oceans 11-style set up where the loot is a little girl our gang of professional criminals will be holding for ransom. But when they get to the vast mansion where…

One of the most famous scenes in the Star Wars film saga almost didn’t happen at all. Although the movie was always going to end with Anakin Skywalker losing a few limbs, the stunt team behind Prequel Trilogy closer originally choreographed a different climax for Revenge of the Sith‘s final duel between brothers. In fact, an earlier version of the fight on Mustafar didn’t have Obi-Wan getting the high ground on Anakin at all; there was no cocky last leap from young Skywalker to seal his fate. As Revenge of the Sith stunt coordinator Nick Gillard explained to Empire magazine,…

Quick: Name five stars who got their start in horror movies. This is such an easy question, even for much of today’s modern crop of Gen-Z talent. So posing it in the 1980s is hardly fair. And yet, that is what Mia Goth’s eternally striving dreamer does at the top of the new MaXXXine trailer from A24. “Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta, Demi Moore, and—” Maxine’s video store clerk buddy rattles off. She cuts him off before what surely must have been Kevin Bacon. At least it’s easy to presume this, because the trailer almost immediately cuts to a shot…

Contains spoilers for The First Omen. If you’ve seen The First Omen you’ll probably know the scene Den of Geek and director Arkasha Stevenson are talking about. In it, our hero, young would-be nun Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) witnesses a woman in the birthing room at the convent, traumatically having her baby. Her feet are in stirrups, she visibly distressed, and no wonder. Because what Margaret, and we, see as the head starts to crown is a demon hand appearing out of the woman’s vagina. It is extremely disturbing and it was vitally important to Stevenson that the image made…

This article contains multitudes of The First Omen and Immaculate spoilers. One cannot envy the strange limbo Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen finds itself in this weekend. A macabre and fiendishly urgent spin on old school religious horror, it’s a film dripping with passion and fire despite its origins as a franchise installment. Unfortunately, it’s also a movie that uses an Italian setting awash in crucifixes and constrictive nun habits during a moment where another zeitgeisty chiller appears to be doing the same thing in the theater next door. Yes, there is plenty of overlap between The First Omen and…

This article contains major The First Omen spoilers. It is said the Devil is in the details, and the details are quite devilish, indeed, in The First Omen. The surprisingly stylish and adroit chiller from first-time feature director Arkasha Stevenson takes the well-worn Hollywood formula of making a “story before the story” prequel, and actually conjures something drenched in atmosphere, originality, and modern urgency. Most of the time. While the movie has a despairing timeliness in 2024 with its parable about a patriarchal system attempting to control and use women’s bodies to achieve their own power-hungry ends, The First Omen…

It’s clear that meme culture has strangely seeped into the real world over the past decade, and boy, are we still facing its consequences today. How did the culture stir from wholesome trolling like getting Rickrolled to the catastrophic spiral into the Jan. 6 insurrection? The latest Netflix doc, The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, sees co-directors Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones of Feels Good Man—the Pepe the Frog doc— draw the timeline and try to pinpoint the moment(s) when the Agent Smiths of the far right took control of the Matrix and seeped into our daily lives. Yet their…

When the 2019 Newsnight interview finally blew up the time bomb that was Prince Andrew’s friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, not all of the pieces came back down to Earth in the same place. The interview that the Duke of York’s team were hoping would charm the public and rid him of his “Randy Andy” reputation achieved the opposite. Viewers found Prince Andrew to be callous and unsympathetic, while his denials of wrongdoing failed to convince many. What followed were legal proceedings, a substantial out-of-court settlement, and a great many job resignations. From the prince to his team…

In the final minutes of Netflix’s Scoop, a fictionalised behind-the-scenes account of Newsnight’s infamous Prince Andrew interview, Billie Piper’s character Sam buys a kebab. Two lamb shawarmas – her usual, says the vendor, who gestures at the TV news and asks if she’s seen all this business with the prince? Boy, he’d love to have been in the room when that interview was filmed. Sam McAlister looks wistfully at the screen with the beginning of a smile on her face. “Yeah I did. I saw it,” she tells him, and then turns and leaves. So humble. So real. So unmotivated…

“Somewhere, deep within the deep vastness of outer space, an incredible figure hurtles thru the cosmos, a being whom we shall call the Silver Surfer, for want of a better name!” That typically verbose bit of narration by Stan Lee comes from Fantastic Four #48, in which it accompanied the powerful imagery of Jack Kirby in his prime. Since that moment, the Silver Surfer has become a major part of the Marvel Universe, appearing not only in countless comics but also in many film and television adaptations. The upcoming Fantastic Four MCU movie promises to continue the tradition, and director…

This SXSW round-up is a bit like our living (and growing) scrapbook from this year’s big event. We’ll continue to update the article as more video interviews and entries become available. The SXSW festival has changed and changed again in its 35-plus years. Originally begun as “just” a music festival, the event has become an intersection that’s ever expanding. Bringing in the best of film, television, gaming, and even the cutting edge of technology, it is sometimes hard to quantify what isn’t SXSW these days. Even the Film Festival is now the Film & TV Festival. Still, Den of Geek…