New DVD release

19 Jul

The Biggest Movies and TV Shows Delayed by the SAG-AFTRA and WGA Strikes

New DVD release

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since May 2 after the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) failed to meet their reasonable terms during contract negotiations. This strike halted a number of film and television productions, although some continued until the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) was also forced to go on strike by the AMPTP after the studios failed to meet their reasonable terms, even after the negotiation deadline was extended to July 12. SAG-AFTRA officially went on strike July 14, and since then, a number…

Read More

19 Jul

Oppenheimer Just Made Movie History: How the Christopher Nolan Film Changed IMAX

New DVD release

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. Get your copy here. For decades he stood at the bleeding edge in his field of study, an undeniable prodigy whose aptitude for drilling down to the theoretical essence of things was only matched by an ability to apply that theory to technological innovation. For better or worse, his has been a talent that shaped worlds. This could easily describe J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist widely credited as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Yet it’s not a bad fit either for the filmmaker bringing the scientist’s story to the…

Read More

19 Jul

Oliver Stone’s Unmade Mission: Impossible II Did Evil AI Decades Before Dead Reckoning

New DVD release

In the summer of 1996, Tom Cruise and director Brian De Palma achieved something that Hollywood would spend much of the next decade trying to replicate: a genuinely great movie adaptation of a popular television show that blew up at the box office. The first Mission: Impossible movie was somehow both an ode to the face-swapping, hi-tech hijinks of the original 1960s series while also serving as the perfect star vehicle for Cruise. Even De Palma was at the peak of his powers as an auteur, having just made his most underrated movie in Carlito’s Way. In the years that…

Read More

18 Jul

The Worst Star Trek Movie Happened Because of a Contract Dispute

New DVD release

Put down the marshmallows and stop singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It’s time to gather ’round the campfire and listen to the contract squabble that led to one of the strangest movies in the Star Trek franchise. Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek III: The Search For Spock certainly have their fans, but it was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier that cemented the adage that “only the even-numbered Star Trek movies are good.” How in the world did the franchise follow its most successful movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home with a film about Spock’s…

Read More

18 Jul

Oppenheimer Cast Reveal Why Christopher Nolan Movies Connect with So Many People

New DVD release

In Oppenheimer, the new biographical epic from Christopher Nolan, the disturbingly still relevant story of the “father of the atomic bomb” is recounted in visceral, nerve-shattering detail. For here, a profoundly intelligent man, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy in the film) assembles and manages some of the most brilliant minds in his field, bringing many of the best American physicists and engineers of that moment out into the desert where, from nothing, they build a town and a device that changes the fate of the world. It was a great and terrible achievement, and one which influenced how even fellow…

Read More

18 Jul

Hidden Gem Sci-Fi Movies on Amazon Freevee

New DVD release

Amazon Freevee is packed to the gills with free-to-watch movies and TV shows, and the streaming app now boasts a few original productions of its own, but when there’s so much choice at your fingertips, how do you decide what’s worth your precious eyeball time? If you’re on the lookout for a hidden sci-fi gem to check out, we’ve got you! This list sorts the science fiction wheat from the science fiction chaff, and we’ll be updating it regularly to make sure all the best options are still available, while adding any new gems that appear on the streaming service…

Read More

17 Jul

Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood ‘Implosion’ Prediction Feels Closer Than Ever

New DVD release

Starting 10 years ago, a series of quotes by Steven Spielberg about the emerging ecosystem of 21st century Hollywood went viral when they hit social media. The first came when Spielberg, along with George Lucas, addressed students at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. On a sunny June day, the filmmaker behind blockbusters like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jurassic Park, told an audience, “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four, or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the…

Read More

17 Jul

Christopher Nolan: We Are Living in an ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ Thanks to AI Development

New DVD release

Writer, director, and filmmaker Christopher Nolan has been reassured by researchers working in the development of artificial intelligence (A.I.) that they recognize parallels between their work and when J. Robert Oppenheimer “fathered” the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1945. The filmmaker takes this modicum of self-awareness as a hopeful sign, but it is not necessarily a comforting one for those who know the Oppenheimer story—including Christopher Nolan. The director seemed to suggest as much during a panel in New York City that commemorated the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test in New Mexico—the first time a nuclear…

Read More

16 Jul

Mission: Impossible Just Outdid James Bond’s Best Stunt

New DVD release

For a long time, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the James Bond film series was considered the crème de la crème of action and stunts. Back in the early years of Sean Connery and Roger Moore, there were very few competing franchises at all, let alone one that delivered the same kind of highly choreographed chases, jumps, fights, and explosive battles as the 007 movies. What’s even more amazing is that there was no CG back then either, which meant that just about everything the Bond stunt and visual effects teams pulled off was practical—sure, there were things like…

Read More

16 Jul

Mission: Impossible Just Outdid James Bond’s Best Stunt

New DVD release

For a long time, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the James Bond film series was considered the crème de la crème of action and stunts. Back in the early years of Sean Connery and Roger Moore, there were very few competing franchises at all, let alone one that delivered the same kind of highly choreographed chases, jumps, fights, and explosive battles as the 007 movies. What’s even more amazing is that there was no CG back then either, which meant that just about everything the Bond stunt and visual effects teams pulled off was practical—sure, there were things like…

Read More

15 Jul

Bird Box: Barcelona Ending Reveals Surprising Twist in Franchise Lore

New DVD release

This post contains spoilers for Bird Box: Barcelona. The Bird Box franchise is all about what you don’t see. That’s true for the characters in the movie, who wear blindfolds to avoid seeing monsters that will otherwise cause you to commit suicide on sight. Yet it’s also true for the viewers, who also never see the monsters. At their best, Bird Box and the sequel Bird Box: Barcelona follow the principles of Jaws and Alien: They keep the creepy thing out of sight to let the viewer’s imagination do the work. However, Bird Box: Barcelona does break from its predecessor…

Read More

15 Jul

Tom Cruise’s Best Movies Ranked

New DVD release

Tom Cruise may be the last person standing when it comes to old-fashioned Hollywood movie stardom. While others have fallen by the wayside, Cruise still has the ability to deliver crowd-pleasing, spectacular movies that appeal to the all-important “four-quadrant” demographic when it comes to paying customers at the box office—at least as long as the words “Top Gun” or “Mission: Impossible” appear somewhere in the title, anyway. Whether Cruise can score with movies outside those two intellectual properties is a subject for a different article, but it’s clear that he’s done so plenty of times in the past. More importantly,…

Read More

15 Jul

Bird Box Creatures Explained

New DVD release

The following contains major spoilers for both Bird Box: Barcelona and Bird Box. Much to some viewers delight (and others’ annoyance), Netflix’s buzzy horror saga, which has grown out of a 2018 zeitgeist-y hit into a bonafide franchise via this weekend’s Bird Box: Barcelona, continues to take its cues from The Blair Witch Project. That is to say, they never show us the damn monster! Or in Bird Box’s case, monsters or creatures, plural.  This is of course thematically sound. The characters of both Bird Box (directed by Susanne Bier) and Bird Box: Barcelona (from writer-directors David Pastor and Alex Pastor) cannot gaze upon…

Read More

14 Jul

Lessons from the Last Time Actors Went on Strike

New DVD release

The only other time members of both the actors and writers guilds were simultaneously on strike was in the first half of 1960. For context, this was around the same time that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was unleashed on cinemas, the biggest movie stars of the screen were still Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe, and the actors’ union was led by someone named Ronald Reagan. In other words, members of what we today call the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) rarely take their bargaining power to the picket lines. When they do, it’s often…

Read More

14 Jul

Bird Box: Barcelona Review: Netflix At Last Has Its Own Final Destination

New DVD release

This review has a mild Bird Box: Barcelona spoiler. Is Bird Box a movie franchise? More precisely, is Bird Box essentially a shared cinematic universe? Netflix obviously thinks so, as this weekend’s Bird Box: Barcelona acts as both a spinoff and a naked bit of franchise world-building after the original Bird Box movie took streaming subscribers by storm… for a couple of weeks in December 2018, at any rate. Yet I might argue that it’s unclear whether that film scored with audiences because of its grindhouse-adjacent premise or simply due to it being a high-concept movie starring Sandra Bullock that…

Read More

14 Jul

Legendary Pink Floyd Mythology Finally Confirmed in New Documentary

New DVD release

Pink Floyd is best known as the band whose Dark Side of the Moon broke all records as the longest charting album in rock music history. Dozens of their songs are classic rock staples, the feature length film of their rock opera The Wall is a cult classic, and their sound is as instantly recognizable as their enigmatic back story. Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd is co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, the filmmaker behind Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, and Storm Thorgerson, a Pink Floyd intimate who started…

Read More

14 Jul

The Inglourious Basterds Kill Hitler and Other Wild Alternate Histories in Movies

New DVD release

Alternate history is one of science fiction’s biggest niches, at least on the bookshelves. There’s some big winners out there, like when historian and author Harry Turtledove took us on a trip through a Civil War where mercenaries funneled modern weapons to the Confederates in The Guns of the South. Meanwhile David Drake has a joyful obsession with introducing Roman centurions to aliens everywhere from Birds of Prey to Ranks of Bronze. It’s a ton of fun to splash through a world of what could have been. Movies dip their toes into the genre to a far lesser extent, frequently…

Read More

13 Jul

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Makes a Big Mistake with Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust

New DVD release

This article contains a whole lot of Mission: Impossible 7 spoilers. Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise’s third Mission: Impossible collaboration might just be the breeziest three hours you’ll ever spend in a cinema. It’s certainly the most exhilarating of this summer’s action spectacles, which are almost uniformly longer than 150 minutes, and nearly every one of them feels it. But Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is the exception, a film as nimble and lithe as its title is long and unwieldy. It gallops through giddy set pieces like Cruise sprinting across the rooftop of the Dubai airport; and…

Read More

13 Jul

Barbie vs. Oppenheimer: A Definitive Answer for Which Movie You NEED to See First

New DVD release

Anticipation is mounting for the cinematic event of the century, which will commence on the 21st of this month. On that hallowed day we will see the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a toy tie-in movie starring Margot Robbie as the iconic doll. Some see these works as competitors, cheering on one or the other like the audience at some backroom snail race. These people are fools. Barbie and Oppenheimer are not competitors. They are not even fellow travelers. They are two parts of a single cohesive…

Read More

12 Jul

Why Jeremy Renner Left the Mission: Impossible Franchise

New DVD release

We all know that Mission: Impossible is about Ethan Hunt, the living manifestation of destiny. With mega-star Tom Cruise in the role, the character of Hunt became more important to the franchise than any of the leads of the original series, Jim Phelps (originally Peter Graves, portrayed by Jon Voight in the 1996 movie), Dan Briggs (Steven Hill), or Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain). But for a little while, producers considered phasing Hunt out of the series, making him the new secretary of the Impossible Mission Force while Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt became the new team leader.  Those plans changed midway…

Read More