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24 Jan

The Biggest Snubs at the Oscars 2023

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It was a morning full of surprises in Hollywood. Few in the Oscar prognostication pool predicted that Netflix and Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front would score an astounding nine nominations, dominating not just in the Best International Film category, but also appearing to be a real contender in Best Picture following a string of technical awards. Similarly, after earning a notoriously mixed reception—culminating yesterday in a Razzie nomination for Worst Picture—Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is still an Oscar-nominated film, with Ana de Armas pulling out a surprise nomination for Best Actress. So for many folks, especially those at…

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24 Jan

The Last Jedi’s Most Divisive Twist Wasn’t Rian Johnson’s Idea

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Someday, peace will come to our galaxy. But for now, the war rages on with no end in sight, as warriors from each side gather their armies and ready their weapons, preparing to respond to the next strike. That war, of course, is about 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Rian Johnson-directed middle chapter to the Sequel Trilogy. Five years after its release, the film is still heavily debated within the fanbase, with some taking exception with Johnson’s storytelling choices, such as turning Luke Skywalker into a bitter old man who tosses aside an elegant lightsaber and devoting a…

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24 Jan

Star Wars Just Improved Upon a Classic The Phantom Menace Moment

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This Star Wars article contains spoilers for The Bad Batch. Clone Force 99 is back in action, and while we know season 2 of Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Bad Batch is building toward a unified adventure, the first crop of episodes has taken the anthology approach by splitting up our characters and sending them off on their own arcs. But on top of throwing new challenges at our heroes, The Bad Batch‘s latest episode, “Faster,” also improves on an idea originally used in George Lucas’ most divisive Star Wars prequel.  Out of all of Lucas’ Skywalker Saga films, it’s…

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24 Jan

Oscars 2023: Where to Stream the Best Picture Nominees

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The ballots are in—or at least the nominations! And with them, we now have a pretty clear idea of what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deems to be the best films of 2022. The enviable Oscars short list for Best Picture this year went much as how we predicted at the start of the month—with our top seven “Best Picture frontrunners” all making the cut. Nonetheless, as with 2022 before it, this year marks a surprisingly competitive Best Picture race. After The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Everything Everywhere All at Once were all deemed to…

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23 Jan

JUNG_E Cast: Kang Soo-yeon and Who’s Who in the Latest Netflix Hit

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This JUNG_E article contains spoilers. From Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan, JUNG_E is a sci-fi drama set in a dystopian future where the Earth has been ravaged by climate change and is no longer habitable. Humans are forced to abandon the planet for man-made shelters in space, though not every shelter is on board with their proposed leadership. What remains of humanity becomes engulfed in a civil war between the Allied Forces and the Adrian Republic. But there’s more to JUNG_E than war games and big CG-laden battles. Deep down, Sang-ho’s newest film is about the ethics…

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23 Jan

Spider-Man: No Way Home Almost Brought Back a Surprising MCU Villain

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This article contains Spider-Man: No Way Home spoilers Look, Aunt May is always on the verge of death. It doesn’t matter what universe poor Peter Parker is in, his beloved old Aunt is always in danger and sometimes, she slips into oblivion. Or gets pushed into oblivion. Yes, she always come backs to life, sometimes when Peter makes a deal with the devil for some reason, but Aunt May’s precarious health has always been an important part of Peter’s story. Not even casting the vivacious actor Marisa Tomei could prevent that fundamental fact. So when Spider-Man: No Way Home storyboard…

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22 Jan

Invaders From Mars: The Sci-Fi Classic That Inspired The Spielberg Generation

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Invaders from Mars may have appeared at first glance to be just another cheesy, cheap sci-fi B-movie made during the 1950s. It was, after all, a time when the genre was booming and both major studios and independent film producers started churning out shockers about alien invasions and giant insects at an alarming rate. But thanks to a dedicated cult following and some dogged technical detective work, a brand new 4K Ultra HD restoration of 1953’s Invaders from Mars has finally surfaced to re-introduce us to a surreal classic that had a profound effect on a generation of filmmakers who…

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22 Jan

New Gods for a Lunar New Year: A Guide to China’s Light Chaser Fantasy Films

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The Lunar New Year is a time of feasting and family gatherings. It’s also a time for new movies. China’s Lunar New Year film rush is on par with the holiday film rush in the West, with dozens of premieres jockeying to be the season’s number one blockbuster. In the Chinese queue for this year are films like Donnie Yen’s Kung Fu fantasy Sakra, The Wandering Earth II, the prequel to China’s visionary 2019 sci-fi, and the eagerly anticipated action comedy, Everything Under Control.  It often takes a few months for new Chinese films to cross the pond to the…

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21 Jan

The Best Screenlife Horror Movies

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Thanks to the runaway success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, found footage movies quickly became the hottest thing in horror. By relying on camcorders, surveillance footage, and other unlikely camera sources, filmmakers could not only add some verisimilitude to their stories but could also do it on the cheap. But just as quickly, found footage became the most hated subgenre, as fans and critics decried its rigid constraints, laughing at the ridiculous ways characters justified recording when they should be running.  Just as the subgenre died, a new and more relevant approach emerged: desktop movies taking place entirely…

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20 Jan

Channing Tatum Really Didn’t Want to Be in the G.I. Joe Movies

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“G.I. Joe is the codename for America’s daring, highly trained, special mission force.” So declares the voiceover in the theme song for G.I. Joe, the cartoon show that dominated after-school televisions in the 1980s. And by that criteria, Channing Tatum seems like the perfect choice to play Duke, leader of the Joes. Is he highly trained? Of course! Have you seen Step Up or Magic Mike? Is he daring? Anyone who caught his cameo in This is the End would give a resounding “yes”! But the song also tells us that G.I. Joe “never gives up” and is “always there.”…

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20 Jan

The Glorious, Good-Natured Mess of Miami Connection

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This article contains Miami Connection spoilers Friends through eternity. Loyalty. Honesty. These are the core tenants of Dragon Sound, a rock and roll band made up of black belts in Tae Kwon Do who also happen to all be orphans. Ridiculous? Yes. But it’s that sort of excessive cheese that makes Miami Connection such a wonderful movie, and not in an ironic way.  If you know anything about Miami Connection, you probably learned about it from a lover of “so bad, it’s good” movies. Filmed in 1987, Miami Connection was created by Tae Kwon Do Grandmaster Y.K. Kim as a…

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20 Jan

Who Should Be the Villain of Marvel’s New Fantastic Four Movie?

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2023 is a big year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Marvel Studios and Disney moving its ongoing saga into Phase 5. Fantastic Four won’t be releasing until the MCU reaches Phase 6, but the narrative arcs that are sure to be vital for the movie will likely begin to take shape far before that. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Qunatumania, for instance, will potentially feature plenty of close ties to Fantastic Four; as the scientific premise of both projects is an easy parallel to make.  When speculating on the villains for the next chapter in the big screen history of…

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20 Jan

Bank of Dave: What Happened in Real Life?

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It’s not surprising that Bank of Dave – Netflix’s latest film, based on the heartwarming true story of Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick trying to open a community bank – has captured people’s attention. The real man himself delightedly shared the news it was number one in Netflix UK’s Top 10 Films soon after its release: WOW!! JUST WOW!!!Bank of Dave is Number ONE! @Netflix Top 10 Films #BankofDave #Netflix @NetflixUK pic.twitter.com/qqIi99LDzY— Bank on Dave (@FishwickDavid) January 19, 2023 Indeed, Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick is as real as they come, a joyful, larger-than-life character that – judging from his social media…

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20 Jan

How WW2 Turned Marilyn Monroe into a Movie Star

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Late during an autumn night in 1954, Marilyn Monroe stood above a New York City subway grate at the corner of Lexington and 52nd. As a train passed beneath her feet, and a gust of air rushed ever upward, a smile erupted across her face. Cinematic history was made. The sequence in question was filmed for The Seven Year Itch, Billy Wilder’s exceedingly ‘50s romantic comedy. But while that movie’s antiquated plot has long since faded from memory, the vision of Monroe in the white dress never did. For many it is the encapsulation of Monroe’s mystique: an innocent (some…

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19 Jan

Cloverfield Director Reveals His Original Sequel Idea

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Despite its kaiju trappings, Cloverfield always seemed like an unlikely movie to earn a sequel, let alone a franchise. One of the best entries of the 2000s found footage craze, Cloverfield was less a killer monster movie and more character driven, focusing largely on Rob (Michael Stahl-David) making his way across a devastated New York City to reunite with his ex-girlfriend Beth (Odette Yustman). When their story ended, so did sequel chances. But that wasn’t always the plan. Talking about the movie’s 15th anniversary, director Matt Reeves recalled the sequel hook he included in the original film. “I did something…

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19 Jan

Scream 6 Trailer Honors Franchise’s Most Iconic Kill with Easter Egg

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It may have taken 11 years for Hollywood to deliver a fifth Scream movie, but 2022’s soft reboot took off its black gloves and butchered the competition via Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s genre-defining requel. And now it’s “New York, new rules” for Scream 6, as the previous film’s surviving crop of tormented teens leaves Woodsboro for the Big Apple. Scream 6 is poised to be one of 2023’s biggest horrors, and it’s already honored its history with a brilliant marketing poster which retraced the past 27 years of spills and kills. Now the first full trailer confirms the next…

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19 Jan

King Kong: When Peter Jackson Tried to Bring Horror to Blockbuster Cinema

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In 2005, Hollywood did the unthinkable—it launched a remake of the 1933 cinematic masterpiece, King Kong. This was not the first attempt to do so, although if anything the previous attempts were cautionary tales about why you should never attempt to remake King Kong. The first, in 1976, replaced the original’s groundbreaking stop-motion effects with a guy in a gorilla suit and a hugely expensive, life-sized mechanical gorilla that provided a total of 15 seconds of usable footage. The second was an attempt in the late ‘90s to remake the film with an up-and-coming indie horror director better known for…

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18 Jan

How Julia Louis-Dreyfus Altered Her MCU Character

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While MCU Phase Four was a decidedly mixed bag, one of the most important developments was the introduction of Contessa Valentina de Fontaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Valentina made her MCU debut at the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, providing the USAgent identity to failed Captain America replacement John Walker. Since then, Valentina has been operating on the side-lines of the MCU, most notably meddling in Wakandan affairs in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. For those who limit their superhero diet to live-action entries, Valentina is still a mysterious figure. But comic book readers recognize the character as…

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18 Jan

How Horror Movies Dominate in the Age of TikTok and Social Media

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It’s like a scene from Carrie right now in Hollywood as the corn syrup flows and horror ascends back to the top. While the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe duke it out with behemoths like Avatar and the Fast & Furious movies, horror has been quietly, and consistently, carving its own path. It’s also been unafraid to get its hands dirty. Whereas Avatar: The Way of Water strives to make between $1.5 and $2 billion just to break even (depending on who you ask), our bloodlust proves that horror doesn’t need all the bells and…

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17 Jan

Lord of the Rings: Saruman the Red and the Weirdest Choices in the Animated Movies

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By the late 1970s, there were two major animated adaptations of The Lord of the Rings in development. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, known for their holiday season specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman, had directed an animated dramatization of The Hobbit for television, broadcast in 1977 and they were planning a sequel, also for television, based on The Lord of the Rings. But filmmaker and animator Ralph Bakshi beat them to it in 1978 when he directed an animated feature film, The Lord of the Rings, which he intended to be Part 1 of…

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