Before praising the 2024 Oscars and their approach to sex, we need to acknowledge one truth. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences completely ignored one of the best movies of the year, and a movie that features one of the most frank and vulnerable sexual scenes committed to film. It, of course, involves a bathtub, where one man’s desire for another becomes clear in a way that not even he had heretofore acknowledged. What? No, not Saltburn. I said a good movie, not a loud nothing that approaches sex like a 12-year-old who just learned a few rude…

The biggest, most audacious James Bond movie during Sean Connery’s celebrated run as the British superspy is 1965’s Thunderball, a spectacular adaptation of the Ian Fleming novel of the same name. Thunderball sees the insidious terrorist syndicate SPECTRE steal two nuclear warheads from NATO and hold the world governments hostage for ￡100 million. After a run-in with SPECTRE operatives at a local clinic while recuperating from a recent mission, Bond suspects the warheads are hidden in the Bahamas and convinces M to investigate further. Upon arriving, Bond matches wits with high-ranking SPECTRE figure Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) and assassin Fiona…

This Dune article contains spoilers. If the shocking ending of Dune: Part Two left you wanting more, you can actually watch Dune: Part Three right now. Kind of. Although Denis Villeneuve hasn’t fully committed to a movie adaptation of Dune Messiah, there is an often overlooked filmed version of this Dune sequel out there right now. This isn’t a bootleg or a fan film either, but The Sci-Fi Channel’s excellent Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune miniseries. This very real adaptation of Dune Messiah even stars several major Hollywood stars, including James McAvoy and Susan Sarandon, as well as Star Trek…

“Don’t presume you know everything.” For decades, that was actor Paul Reiser’s response whenever people would ask him about playing Burke, the Weyland-Yutani middle-manager who tried to kill the heroes of Aliens to please his bosses. Since the release of the James Cameron classic in 1986, viewers have taken Ripley’s summation of the situation to heart. “You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is worse,” she tells him after escaping from a trap he set to infect her and the child Newt with a Xenomorph. “You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.” And yet,…

This article appears in the SXSW 2024 issue of Den of Geek magazine. Check out all of our SXSW coverage here. The Fall Guy wasn’t supposed to be a romance. Or at least it didn’t start out that way. But when Ryan Gosling came on board to collaborate on the script, the shape of the wildly ambitious action film changed. Director David Leitch was reminded of what his cinematographer Jonathan Sela would always say: “I want to do a sweeping romance. All we do is punch people in the face. Stop punching and start kissing!” That was ringing in Leitch’s head when Gosling…

This Star Wars: The Bad Batch article contains spoilers. The squad’s back together in the latest episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, suitably titled “The Return.” Well, most of Clone Force 99 is back. While Echo is back with the Batch, and Hunter is begrudgingly letting Crosshair back into the fold, they’ve still lost Tech. There are already plenty of theories out there suggesting Tech’s still out there, but for the moment, his apparent death has left a hole in the fabric of the team. At its best, this Star Wars series is about family and this one’s close…

For Henry Hill, the appeal of becoming a mobster is simple. “They weren’t like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted,” he explains in the famous monologue at the start of Goodfellas. “They parked in front of hydrants and never got a ticket. When they played cards all night nobody ever called the cops.” Hank might also add to the list that they get the best deals at the grocery store, something that happens to wiseguy Vinnie Antonelli in the comedy My Blue Heaven. Noticing an unattended pricing gun, Vinnie gives himself a huge markdown on a bunch of steaks.…

Percy Jackson and the Olympians has been doing phenomenal numbers for Disney+ with 110 million hours streamed as of Feb. 7, according to a press release. Fans of this beloved Rick Riordan book series have been waiting nearly two decades for a worthwhile adaptation, and thanks to Riordan’s involvement and an immense amount of care from the cast and crew, Disney+ seems to have struck gold with this franchise. However, Percy Jackson and the Olympians isn’t the only mythology-based middle grade book series that Rick Riordan has written. The Kane Chronicles may not be as well-known as its Greek predecessor,…

If you’ve spent any time online over the last few months, it’s really no surprise that Madame Web didn’t pull in huge box office numbers. From the “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” meme that sprouted from the first trailer to Dakota Johnson’s brutally honest press tour promoting the movie, it’s been hard to take any part of this film seriously. Nearly a month after Madame Web’s release, the verdict is in, both critically and financially: it’s not very good, currently holding a 13% Rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes.…

It was almost 10 years ago when Warner Bros. Pictures released Edge of Tomorrow, a sci-fi thriller from director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) that starred Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Edge of Tomorrow was acclaimed at the time of its release as a more intelligent than usual, character-driven and kinetic sci-fi action movie. Yet the studio, producers, and director ended up fighting over the movie’s title before it was even released, a classic Hollywood marketing conundrum that may have hurt the film’s chances. Cruise plays Maj. William Cage, a public relations officer for the military in a future where…

People starting the movie Spaceman would be forgiven for thinking that their Netflix had glitched. Yes, we do see Adam Sandler’s character Jakub dressed in a space suit. But he’s not floating through the cosmos. He’s walking through a wooded stream, the greenery of the trees and bushes reflecting off his mask. What the heck does this have to do with being a space man, one might ask? By the end of the movie, directed by Johan Renck and written by Colby Day (adapting the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař), Spaceman answers all your questions. Or rather, Jakub’s…

This Dune article contains big spoilers. Does Paul Atreides seem okay to you? He’s the unequivocal winner of Dune: Part Two. He gets revenge on the Harkonnens for killing his father, he takes over as Emperor, he marries Princess Irulan, and even gets cool superpowers from drinking the Water of Life. So why is Paul so… angry? Readers of the book Dune don’t recall Paul being such a jerk at the end of the story, and the David Lynch version ended on an inspirational note. Is Denis Villeneuve taking liberties with the Frank Herbert novel again? Yes… but also no.…

Marvel’s First Family is finally on its way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Matt Shakman’s Fantastic Four hitting screens in 2025. From the ashes of Tim Story’s two noughties movies and Josh Trank’s maligned Fantastic Four, here’s hoping it’s third time lucky for Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm. Boasting an all-star cast of Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, the team is up there with the arrival of the X-Men in terms of MCU hype. While recent MCU entries have faltered at the box office, Fantastic Four has the potential to go…

This article contains Star Wars and Dune spoilers. When Frank Herbert published “Dune World,” the first part of what would become the novel Dune in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1963, it was a moment that would reverberate through science fiction for decades to come, especially on the big screen, where the story’s influence can still be felt to this day. In fact, you can easily track how Herbert’s creation led to some of the biggest blockbuster franchises of all time. If you’ve watched the excellent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, you know how the story goes. Alejandro Jodorowsky, the avant-garde…

This Dune article contains spoilers. Broadly speaking, Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two represent the best adaptation ever of the first Dune book. But this isn’t to say that these films are the most faithful versions of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi masterpiece. Back in 2021, director Denis Villeneuve told Den of Geek, “I had to condense some ideas to tell the story in the most eloquent way possible so that it will be understood by everybody…When you adapt it’s an act of vandalism. You will change things.” This means that while Dune: Part Two is true to the spirit of…

When director Ridley Scott was promoting his latest—and we might argue funniest—historical epic back in November, the filmmaker spoke with pride about the film addressing Napoleon Bonaparte’s legendary campaign into Egypt. As Scott pointed out to Deadline, no previous film about the Frenchman who plunged Europe into decades of war had also addressed his misadventures in North Africa and the Near East too. “I saw these wonderful two paintings,” Scott said at the time. “One was of a man sitting on a horse staring at the Sphinx, and it was Napoleon. So I thought I had to have that because…

“You get me?” barks Career Drill Sergeant Zim (Clancy Brown). The young, beautiful, and vapid recruits giving him their full attention answer in kind: “Sir yes sir!” Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and his fellow roughnecks might get Zim, but most people do not. Since its first theatrical run through today, viewers misread, misunderstand, and, frankly, misattribute Starship Troopers time and again, failing to see the cutting satire at work. The most recent example comes from author Isaac Young, who took to Twitter to critique the film’s approach to satire. Young argued that director Paul Verhoeven failed to make fun…

This article contains massive spoilers for Dune: Part Two (and possibly Dune: Part Three). If you have seen Dune: Part Two, then you know that Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, The Witch) pops up for a very brief, and very important, vision of Paul Atreides’ yet-to-be born sister, Alia. It is a nice bit of seed-planting for an eventual Dune 3, which will be based on Frank Herbert’s novel Dune Messiah. In that book, a teenage Alia plays a critical role where she is almost as deified by the populous of Arrakis as Paul himself. When we spoke to director Denis Villeneuve,…

This Spaceman article contains spoilers. Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) has lofty goals. The first astronaut in the Czech Space Program, Jakub is on a year-long solo mission to study a strange violet phenomenon in deep space, dubbed the Chopra Cloud. “As I enter the Chopra cloud,” he tells the public via video-link from his ship the Jan Hus-1 (named from the 14th century proto-Protestant theologian), “I might just unravel some secrets of the universe.” Despite Jakub’s grand ambitions, Spaceman director Johan Renck and screenwriter Colby Day, adapting the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, intend instead to explore the…

This article contains massive spoilers for Dune: Part Two. Author and producer Brian Herbert is no stranger to the world of Dune. As the son of Frank Herbert, the visionary writer who published the first Dune novel in 1965, Brian saw firsthand his father create the mythology of Arrakis and the legend of the Kwisatz Haderach. He also would go on to add to that mythology, with Brian co-writing numerous Dune novels of his own. So it should not be taken lightly when he praised this past week the completion of Denis Villeneuve’s two-part Dune adaptation. “I saw Dune: Part…