When Saturday Night Live began, it wasn’t even called Saturday Night Live. That honor belonged to a rival variety show hosted by Howard Cosell that launched the same year on ABC primetime. Hence why the young, hungry, and immensely talented sketch comedians assembled in 1975 were dubbed the “Not Ready for Primetime Players.” That earliest and now quasi-mythical first class of SNL alumni remain the only ones to hold that title. Perhaps this is because the joke stopped working after many of them proved more than capable of carrying a primetime television series. In fact, most of them went on…

When walking into a film like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the problem with prequel stories cannot help but linger in the back of one’s mind: Can there be excitement in telling us a story we already know? Indiana Jones can’t die in Temple of Doom and Anakin Skywalker will grow up to become Darth Vader. It’s inevitable. Some prequels manage to navigate that hurdle by completely subverting our expectations (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), largely functioning as standalone experiences (X-Men: First Class), or by simply parodying their very concepts (Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp). No…

Adam Scott might have the most thankless part in Madame Web. He exists simply to share the screen with a listless Dakota Johnson and trade expository dialogue about how her character Cassie Webb doesn’t like children or anything related to family—obnoxious signposts to give the movie something like a character arc. Cast to bring the good will he earned playing wholesome snarks in Party Down and Parks and Recreation, Scott delivers his lines with a wry reserve that feels like resignation. And yet, Scott’s mere presence in the film gives Madame Web an important quality lacking in all of Spider-Man’s…

Filmmaker George Miller has made no bones about classic cinema’s influence on the Mad Max saga over the years. Iconic physical comedians like Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd are cited often as inspirations for the queasy death-defying stunts that Max Rockatansky or Imperator Furiosa get up to, including when we spoke with the writer-director. He even muses to us, “Buster Keaton would survive very well, actually” in the fabled Wasteland. Perhaps so too then would the stars he selected to bring his most epic adventure yet on the Fury Road to life. Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth are actors that…

Amidst the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Imperium delegation’s arrival to the Atreides home world of Caladan, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), has a practical question. “How much did it cost them, traveling all this way for this formality?” he asks his Mentat Thufir Hawat at the start of Dune. And then Thufir, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, does something weird. He doesn’t whip out a palm pilot or consult his calculator watch. He instead rolls his eyes into the back of his head for a couple of seconds and then produces an answer: “Three Guild Navigators, a total of…

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the 10th and latest entry in the 56-year-old science fiction film series, made more than $58 million at the box office in its opening weekend. Not only did the movie exceed analysts’ expectations but it proved that seven years after the previous film in the cycle, and nearly six decades since the whole barrel of monkeys started, there is still an audience out there for this venerable and fascinating concept. Which is all the more impressive when you consider how much of a unicorn this series is among the various stories, brands, and…

In the first scene of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Charlotte (India Amarteifio) sulks in a carriage en route to marry King George. Her brother jokes that she hasn’t moved in six hours.  Charlotte scowls and responds: “The gown sits atop a bespoke underpinning made of whalebone. The problem with whalebone is that it is rather sharp. I am in the height of fashion, so this corset is quite snug. If I move too much, I might be sliced and stabbed to death by my undergarments. I am angry and I cannot breathe. Turn this carriage around or I will…

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom holds a strange place in every Indiana Jones fan’s heart. The awkward middle child, Temple of Doom is a dark, problematic prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, one which takes the series in a weirder, wilder direction—and manages to pull off one of the greatest openings of any action movie ever (Quentin Tarantino’s words, not mine).  Today there’s often an assumption that contemporary critics weren’t enamored by director Steven Spielberg and writer George Lucas’ second collaboration, but that’s slightly misleading; The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael preferred Temple to Raiders because it fully…

Patricia Velásquez long ago made peace with the fact that she and Egypt will be eternally linked. It’s an amusing quirk of fate for the Venezuelan actor since she grew up not in the sun-soaked deserts of North Africa, but rather the lush greenery of Latin America and France. She is a woman of proud Indigenous Wayuu descent and of a multicultural childhood that took her all over the world. Just never that part of it. Nonetheless, because of a movie she did a quarter-century ago—because of The Mummy—when friends, family, and even strangers think of the Land of the…

When most cinephiles think of Francis Ford Coppola, they think of his miracle run in the 1970s. During that decade, he directed four films, all of them five-star masterpieces: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather, Part II, and Apocalypse Now. Or they think of embarrassments from his for-hire period, including the Robin Williams weepy Jack. Yet those five films hardly encapsulate the entire career of Francis Ford Coppola, which will likely end with the upcoming Megalopolis. Instead the best indication of Coppola as an artist and filmmaker might be found in the most recent movies he’s made, with Coppola having…

A new Lord of the Rings spin-off movie has been announced, and it’s getting the old gang back together; the producers/writers of both film trilogies, Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens, and Fran Walsh will be producing once more, and directing duties will be taken over from Jackson by Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in both trilogies and who was also second unit director on The Hobbit films. Since then, he has directed three movies (2017’s Breathe, 2018’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage) so he is well prepared to take on this one. Serkis will…

Twenty-five years ago, director Stephen Sommers turned a respected, but admittedly pretty dusty, Universal horror movie into a rip-roarin’ adventure. It’s fair to say all these years later that 1999’s The Mummy the best Indiana Jones movie not directed by Steven Spielberg. And yet, when Universal wanted to remake it again, they didn’t even bother to consult Sommers. Is it any wonder, then, that 2017’s The Mummy was a colossal flop? Talking with Sommers about the 25th anniversary of The Mummy ’99, The Hollywood Reporter asked if he had any involvement with the 2017 film, to which the director gave…

The so-called Xenomorph is one of the greatest monsters in movie history. The brainchild of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, the Star Beast combines biological and mechanical elements, blending genders in a way that underscores the themes of pregnancy and violation in Alien. But before Giger and director Ridley Scott brought the Xenomorph to life in 1979, the alien had a very different trial run. Before crafting the initial treatment and script that would become the basis of Alien, writer Dan O’Bannon worked on another sci-fi project, alongside a fellow student at the University of Southern California film school. That student…

Who knew that French author Pierre Boulle’s slim, satirical 1963 novel, Le Planete des Singes, would lead to one of the most successful science fiction franchises of all time? Consisting of 10 films (to date), two TV series , comic books (including a magazine series from Marvel), toys, games, merchandise and more, Planet of the Apes remains one of the most enduring and unique sci-fi sagas in cinematic history. The success of the original film, 1968’s Planet of the Apes, led studio 20th Century Fox (which finally made the movie after years of development and stalling) to launch a series…

It’s official. Galactus is coming to the MCU. After months of speculation, Marvel officially announced that they’ve found their Galactus. Ralph Ineson, a Game of Thrones veteran known for standout supporting roles in The Witch and The Green Knight, will portray the Devourer of Worlds. Ineson’s casting comes on the heels of other compelling announcements for its upcoming film The Fantastic Four, including Paul Walter Hauser and John Malkovich. Marvel hasn’t yet disclosed which characters those two are playing, but the smart money has Hauser down for the Mole Man. Malkovich could fit a number of characters, including minor baddies…

This article contains spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. At the end of Planet of the Apes, the human astronaut who strove to understand the strange, simian-occupied planet made a shocking discovery. Horror overwhelms him as he struggles to make sense of the honored American monument before him, now barely recognizable. Of course, that description can refer to the twist ending of the 1968 sci-fi classic, in which Charlton Heston falls on his knees at the sight of a decimated Statue of Liberty, realizing that he has been on a post-nuclear Earth the whole time. However, it…

The 2000s saw the action genre in a state of flux. The Matrix revolutionized everything at the end of the previous decade, The Bourne Supremacy would make shaky cameras standard practice in 2004, and the MCU would take flight with Iron Man in 2008. At the same time, Michael Bay reached his ultimate form with Bad Boys II, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill made kung fu classy, and Oldboy changed the way we look at hallways. Within those changes came a host of greats that didn’t get the same attention. Some of these movies represent the first steps…

“I’m much more comfortable being the underdog,” Kevin Feige recently told Empire. If anyone has lost the right to call themselves an underdog, it’s got to be Feige, right? After all, he’s the head of Marvel Studios, the architect of a film franchise that dominated box offices for over a decade. He’s a key member of Disney’s corporate empire, a byword for a producer who knows how to please fans and executives alike. Why in the world would he use that word to describe himself? Well, you don’t have to look much further than recent Marvel movie reviews and disappointing…

“They’re just gonna accidentally create cable again.” That’s been a frequent joke about the streaming landscape in media circles of late. You see it pop up in Slack windows and tweets every time one entertainment conglomerate gobbles up another and consolidates their respective video on demand apps. CBS All Access and Showtime synthesize into Paramount+. HBO becomes HBO Max and then becomes Max. Hulu and Disney+ are suddenly one and the same. The joke works every time because it’s not a joke—it’s a prophecy. The “cablefication” of streaming was always going to happen. And now it has. This week, Warner…

This article contains Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes spoilers. The penultimate scene in Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes might be its most important. The chimpanzee they call Noa (Owen Teague) and the young human woman he learns is Mae (Freya Allan) stand at a crossroads for their characters and their species. Despite Noa generally disliking humans, or “echoes,” for their smell and their ignorance, he’s grown attached to Mae, perhaps not least of all because she’s revealed herself to be as intelligent as an ape—if not more so. Yet Mae, as we learn over…