This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1. The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only…

Turn on a television, stroll the bookstore, walk through a movie theater, and you’re bound to see a cop. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching Spider-Man touch base with Jean DeWolff in Brand New Day, enjoying Jake Peralta goof around on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or reading the latest John Sandford thriller to pass the time at the airport, the police are everywhere. Moreover, they’re almost always the heroes—certainly flawed, often beleaguered, but at the end of the day, effective and morally good. But that wasn’t always the case, at least in film and literature. While several different events sent cops to…

Hot Spot isn’t an easy movie. Directed by Polish auteur Agnieszka Smoczyńska—best known for The Lure, a horror/musical take on The Little Mermaid—Hot Spot explores pressing issues like AI, state surveillance, police violence, and immigration. But it does so through a surreal, sci-fi lens, one that takes time out for ecstatic dance sequences and animal transformations. Hot Spot may baffle as many viewers as it thrills, but that’s nothing new for star Noomi Rapace. After all, she was in Prometheus, the highly-anticipated Alien prequel that turned out to be a mediation on humanity’s relationship to God. “I love Prometheus. I…

Not every movie needs to be good to be worth watching. Some are messy, over the top, painfully cheesy, or simply fail to deliver what they promised, yet they still manage to offer something interesting. A bad movie can teach you about filmmaking mistakes, capture a fascinating moment in pop culture, showcase an actor before a career breakthrough, or become so entertainingly ridiculous that its flaws are part of the experience. Some are even useful precisely because they get things wrong, giving viewers a chance to question the history, science, or ideas they put on screen. These movies may not…

There was something wonderfully excessive about American cars in the 1970s. Big engines, long hoods, aggressive grilles, wild paint jobs, enormous tires, and interiors that could feel more like living rooms than places to sit behind the wheel. Street machines were built to be seen, heard, and enjoyed, often with modifications that made each car feel like a reflection of its owner. The photographs from the era capture a particular kind of car culture that is difficult to recreate today, when these machines were still relatively new and their owners were turning parking lots, streets, and driveways into personal showcases.…

Some of the most memorable movie moments weren’t sitting neatly on the page waiting to be filmed. An actor tried something unexpected, reacted naturally to another performer, or kept going after a scene took a turn nobody had planned. Sometimes the director loved the result enough to leave it in. Other times, the accidental moment became more famous than anything anyone could have scripted. Of course, Hollywood stories have a habit of turning every good performance into an “it was completely improvised” legend, so not every famous example actually qualifies. These 15 do, at least in some meaningful way, and…

A director can spend years building a reputation for making great movies, earning awards, attracting major stars, and delivering exactly what audiences expect. Then one project comes along and somehow everything falls apart. Sometimes the idea sounds perfect on paper, sometimes the cast is stacked with talent, and sometimes the director’s previous work makes the disappointment even harder to understand. Even highly respected filmmakers have movies that simply do not connect with audiences or critics. These are the films that stand out in otherwise impressive careers, proving that even the safest names in Hollywood can occasionally make a movie that…

Introverts and extroverts view the world in different ways. For most extroverts, a road trip with friends where small talk transforms into the random minutiae of a wandering mind sounds like a blast in eight-hour chunks. To an introvert, the prospect of spending even a fraction of that time “shooting the shit” can be its own special type of torture. In writer-director Alex Ullom’s debut horror movie, It Ends, both sides of the mind find common ground in a cosmic hell that is as fresh as it is economically clever. It’s the story of four childhood friends who, now as…

Some movies end and you immediately know how you feel about them. Others leave you sitting through the credits wondering whether you missed something, whether any of it actually made sense, or whether you just watched the strangest thing ever committed to film. A Reddit discussion about exactly that feeling produced an interesting mix: some people named movies they absolutely hated, while others picked films they loved precisely because they couldn’t stop thinking about them afterward. That’s the fun of the “What did I just watch?” category. A movie doesn’t necessarily have to be bad or impossibly confusing to qualify.…

When Adam Driver was announced as the villain of the upcoming X-Men movie, fans felt both relief and confusion. Driver is one of our best working actors, someone who shines in indie films like Marriage Story and Paterson, but who can also bring depth to genre pictures, as his Kylo Ren was one of the best parts of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Moreover, it was nice to see a villain who wasn’t Magneto announced for the first movie, with Driver stepping into the thigh-high boots of Mister Sinister. At the same time, fans were confused to hear the name…

What happens to a weather-controlling mutant when she gets put in an X-Men movie? Same thing that happens to every other-weather controlling mutant who gets put in an X-Men movie? She’s largely ignored, except for being saddled with the worst lines in the franchise. In the original X-Men from 2000, Halle Berry had to ask about a toad getting struck by lightning, the payoff of a running gag written by Joss Whedon by excised from the finished film. Alexandra Shipp’s Storm set up the funniest part of X-Men: Apocalypse, asking En Sabah Nur what he was doing with his face…

The Walking Dead may have concluded its run back in 2022, but the universe lives on in a string of spinoffs like Dead City and Daryl Dixon. Not content with waiting for viewers to demand more franchise stories, AMC also explored a few spinoffs while the mothership show was still on the air. But how many of those spinoffs are worth a watch, and how many of them should you feel comfortable skipping? We’re ranking every The Walking Dead spinoff so you can figure out if you should spend your precious time on them. However, if you’re a true Walking…

The world of lions is full of shifting power dynamics, fragile monarchies, and feline strife. This applies not only to The Lion King; it extends into the savannas of Africa, where the roiling ecosystems showcase clashes between beasts of all shapes and sizes.  An upcoming docuseries is set to explore the exciting world of a lion pride in extreme detail. Lion will air Wednesday, August 19 on National Geographic and then hit Disney+ and Hulu on Thursday, August 20. The four-episode series follows a male lion cub named Kio and his four-year journey in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Preserve as…

The experiences we have at work are as varied as there are people on Earth, so not all claims of what happens in the workplace should be taken as fact. However, having insider knowledge of the ins and outs of certain companies can be more of a boon than a burden. A recent Reddit thread asked people to share the things they learned on the job that customers, patients, travelers, and the general public probably never see, letting us have a peek at that insight. We’ve rounded up some of the strangest and darkest claims, always keeping in mind that…

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1. At the start of the pilot episode of Lanterns, a young John Stewart watches a television interview with Hal Jordan, the first human member of the Green Lantern Corps. Jordan talks a little about being a space cop, but for the most part, he focuses on the quality that makes him a suitable choice to join the Corps: his absolute lack of fear. The interview sets the model for the rest of the episode, in which Hal trains the adult John by mentioning a few details about the power ring…

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1. John Stewart spends most of the premiere episode Lanterns living in the shadow of his mentor, Hal Jordan. And it’s an unpleasant place to be. Hal never misses an opportunity to needle the young hopeful, whether it’s abandoning him in a crashing car or making him navigate his own way to Rushville, Nebraska. But Stewart does manage to earn the older man’s respect in one case, when he describes the copy that Hal made for himself as a “Hal-o-Gram.” The name makes Hal smile and say, “That’s clever,” before checking…

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1. The first episode of Lanterns begins the way any show with knotty lore should: with a flashback to 1996, where a young John Stewart watches the Green Lantern interviewed on 60 Minutes. Through the interview, we learn about Hal Jordan, the first human member of the intergalactic space cops known as the Green Lantern Corps, who were granted power rings by immortal blue beings known as the Guardians of the Universe. When John’s father sees what his son is watching, he orders John to go outside and places an apple…

When 12,000 fans, press, and professionals stuff themselves into Anaheim’s Honda Center you can expect electricity. And on a sweaty Southern California Friday night Disney hoped to channel that energy into another win — building on the momentum of the record breaking opening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day — on the opening night of their “Ultimate Fan Event” D23.  After a slew of huge announcements across the Disney spectrum, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige came on stage and intro’d a new teaser for VisionQuest — which was very Wandavision coded — before bringing on Sadie Sink as Jean Grey. Of…

This article contains spoilers for The End of Oak Street David Robert Mitchell’s late-summer sci-fi movie The End of Oak Street has landed in theaters, and its final scenes feature some truly unexpected narrative twists and turns worth thinking twice about after the credits roll. In the film, we follow the Platt family, an all-American clan of four who are transported back in time from 1982, along with the rest of their neighborhood, to an era when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Yet for a film that has time travel built into its core concept, it spends surprisingly little time dwelling…

Ever since Superman debuted in 1938’s Action Comics #1, superheroes have been the primary draw of comic books. Since then, superheroes have spread into every type of popular culture, from TV and movies to toys and video games. But here’s the secret about superheroes: most of us aren’t coming just for the good guys. The heroes only matter to the degree that they have interesting people to fight, and that’s where the bad guys come in. The great heroes have some great enemies: Captain America and Red Skull, the Avengers and the Masters of Evil, Wonder Woman and Circe. But…