“Can’t you do better than that?” This is one of the many legendary taunts offered up by victory screens in 1991’s Street Fighter II—in this case by E. Honda, a sumo wrestler who proves to be a surprisingly good boxer—but it probably refers to the opinions of a lot of gamers about the two live-action Street Fighter movies that have so far been made. Despite the iconic fighting video game series being one of the touchstones of ’90s gaming culture, and one which still produces genre-shaping hits as indicated by 2023’s Street Fighter 6, Hollywood has struggled to make a…

To hear him tell it, veteran character actor Neal McDonough shocked his writing partners when he showed them the initial draft for his latest movie, The Last Rodeo. Where did this come from? his friends would ask. You write about Lee Marvin and tough guys. Those are your heroes! As much as it surprised the folks he knew, The Last Rodeo will feel quite familiar to anyone who knows McDonough from his many supporting roles. With his striking blue eyes and wide smile, McDonough’s become one of the most recognizable “that guys” in Hollywood, especially when he’s playing a tough…

The upcoming movie Jurassic World Rebirth knows that we’ve seen it all before. As the seventh entry in a franchise that stretches back more than 30 years, the film makes no apologies for its place in cinema history. Like the first trailer released months ago, the newest Rebirth teaser features plenty of call-backs to the Steven Spielberg movie and the Michael Crichton book that inspired it, including waving red flares and a raft scene excised from Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation of Jurassic Park. However, the latest trailer also features something new to the franchise: a mutant dino that draws from the…

Perhaps the most defining aspect of the Mission: Impossible movies during their Christopher McQuarrie era has been their spontaneity. Outside of a renewed emphasis on Buster Keaton-like daredevil stunt work, each Mission film since 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation has been informed by the IMF characters onscreen, led by the indefatigable Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), knowing the loose framework of what the job is and then figuring out all the hair-raising details as they run along. Behind the scenes, it’s been much the same for the cast and crew, who likewise discover the plot specifics and their characterizations in…

Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston recently concluded a run on the West End of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. This is perhaps not a surprise. Both thespians have multiple Olivier nominations to their names and are veterans of the Bard, with Atwell at one time being a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And yet, it was lost on perhaps no one that by casting these actors in Shakespeare’s frothiest comedy, iconoclastic theater director Jamie Lloyd was uniting the MCU’s Loki and Peggy Carter on the stage. In typical Lloyd fashion, there are even fourth-wall breaking winks to the…

This article contains full spoilers for every Final Destination movie, INCLUDING Bloodlines. For more than a decade, we thought we’d finally made it. It’s been 14 years since the last Final Destination film, the last time Death started killing off those who escaped its plan in exceedingly gruesome fashion. We thought we were free to go to theaters in safety once more. But as the mortician William Bludworth, played by the late great Tony Todd, has taught us, there’s no escaping Death. The franchise is back with one of its best entries: Final Destination Bloodlines, written and directed by newcomers to…

Recently a friend mentioned how much of a shame it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those backdoor “classic” reimaginings today like the ones we had growing up. And after thinking for a moment, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘90s were treated to an embarrassment of riches when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent films. Nearly every week seemed to offer another modernization of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a wink and a nudge to appeal to teenagers reading much the same texts in high school or university. But then…

Iron Man was a resounding success when it opened in 2008, earning more than half a billion dollars and declaring in no uncertain terms that Marvel Studios—and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as it later came to be known—had arrived. Although Marvel was also developing movies about Thor, Captain America, and Ant-Man at the time, Iron Man 2 was pushed to the front of the line and set for release in May 2010, just two years after the first film. The idea was to cash in on the surprise success of Iron Man and give the other movies a little more…

Look, up on the internet! It’s a clip, it’s a teaser… No! It’s the full Superman trailer we’ve been waiting for! After giving us bits and pieces, DC Studios has finally released a massive three-minute trailer for this summer’s Superman, written and directed by James Gunn. The sizzle reel finally gives a sense of the central conflict of the movie, in which Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) takes advantage of public opinion turning against Superman when he stops a war in foreign lands. We also are hinted that these actions create ripples within the Daily Planet newsroom and cause friction with…

The old school action movie hero, like the old school movie star, is a dying breed. Tom Cruise is acutely aware of this since pretty much all of his franchised efforts in the 2020s have been about the glories of the fading old days and ways. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, explained why we still needed Cruise up on that wall, protecting us with one piece of superb blockbuster cinema at a time. But in the interim between Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and this month’s long anticipated Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, even the rare company he keeps…

It’s been 25 years since the original Final Destination film hit screens and began terrorizing audiences with its deeply memorable (and memeable) Rube Goldberg-like murder tableaus, which get more and more intricate and anxiety-inducing as the franchise goes on. Yet it’s somehow been 14 years since the last entry into the series—the campy, fun, and sort-of-prequel Final Destination 5—and with the appetite for inventive horror as ravenous as ever, and chaos all around us in 2025, we seem perfectly primed for another entry into the series.  Final Destination: Bloodlines thus begins like every other installment in the series: with a…

There’s a routine, but profoundly telling moment when many visitors complete their first walkthrough at Future Pastime, the exhibition of paintings by the visionary artist and visual futurist Syd Mead currently on display in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “His outlook on the future is so positive. I thought Syd Mead was dystopian,” many attendees exclaim, as if on cue.  This perception is heavily guided by the work that—-for many—is the single most widely known reference point for Mead’s impact as a visual futurist: Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 rain soaked, techno-dystopian masterpiece, Blade Runner, whose visual landscape was largely Mead’s creation. In…

On Sunday evening, U.S. President Donald Trump declared the American movie industry as dying on his Truth Social account and announced that he is beginning the process of implementing what he described as a 100 percent tariff on “any and All movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” In addition to erroneous capitalizations, the president described this as a matter of national security, suggesting that the tax breaks other governments have used to incentivize Hollywood film production outside the U.S. amounted to “a concerted effort by other Nations” to control messaging and create propaganda. As with…

Ever since James Gunn announced the full cast for Superman, people have been scratching their heads. Sure, we expected that the cast would include Superman, Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor–played by David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, and Nicholas Hoult, respectively. But as the cast list grew, so did the names of other superheroes. Edi Gathegi and Mister Terrific? Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl? Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner? Is this a Superman movie or a Justice League movie? Gunn has clarified on social media that Superman focuses on the central triangle of Clark, Lois, and Lex, but also that his movie sees…

It’s unquestionable. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a verified box office smash.  The record-breaking film recently achieved another massive feat, taking $33.1 million on its third weekend of domestic release with another impressively small drop of just 27 percent week-on-week despite losing all Premium, Large Format, and IMAX screens to Marvel‘s latest would-be blockbuster, Thunderbolts* (Nee *New Avengers). That’s notable for many reasons, but also makes sense as leading into the release of Thunderbolts* on May 3, many fans were still attempting to see Sinners in IMAX with pretty much all available IMAX screenings sold out—or close to it—on Wednesday, May…

This article contains light spoilers for Thunderbolts*. By this point, Marvel has fully spoiled the closing twist that the main team in Thunderbolts* is not in fact the Thunderbolts, but rather the New Avengers. The New Avengers aren’t the only team with a big future for Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier either. According to The Wrap, Marvel‘s looking at Schreier to adapt their much-anticipated X-Men movie, which is being written by The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes screenwriter Michael Leslie. The news might be surprising to some. Sure, Thunderbolts* is the best-reviewed (if not quite the most popular)…

Gather round summer children, Zoomers and Alphas alike, for I want to tell of a long ago time when the multiplexes were full and the choice for big screen comedies plentiful. It was a lost age of laughs and tears, and in the best romantic comedies, you’d get both: a feat always promised, too, by the soothing disembodied voice in every trailer that spoke as warmly about a film’s stars as a deacon would be reciting scripture on Sunday morning. It was a time of cinematic glory and stars like Sandra Bullock and Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant.…

It is supposed to be difficult making new friends after 30. This is a truism so agreed upon that the New York Times regularly runs the same article about it, wistfully reminiscing about the halcyon days of a youth passed by. But that’s not always the case, especially for guys like Austin (Paul Rudd), that affable dude with the cool-new-kid hair and a rockin’ ‘satche that inexplicably matches the one Rudd sported in Anchorman. This delightful creation in Andrew DeYong’s venom-laced comedy, Friendship, leans heavily on Rudd’s famed charm and eternal youthfulness. Not only is Austin made to deliberately echo…

Breathless anticipation for white smoke or black; seas of men in red gowns and white; enigmatic meetings behind the sealed doors of the Sistine Chapel. There is something defiantly old world about how the Catholic Church still selects its next supreme pontiff—the man said to be ordained by God to sit on the Chair of St. Peter. Like a blast from the medieval world, the papal conclave remains one of the most mysterious and speculated-upon election processes: an event made up of a College of Cardinals casting paper ballots that are subsequently destroyed, but whose weight carries with it the…

This article contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*. Poor Thunderbolts. Nothing ever goes right for them. Within seconds of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine renaming the team the New Avengers, the final credits of Thunderbolts* feature newspaper headlines mocking them as Earth’s Less-Than-Mightiest Heroes. Even worse is the post-credit scene, set 14 months later, the group is revealed griping about Captain America’s Avengers and how Sam Wilson is suing them. We even get hints at a rift between Bucky and Sam Wilson. Bad as that state of affairs may be for the New Avengers, it’s good news for fans. Superhero on superhero fights…