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20 Apr

Sinners: Ryan Coogler Reveals the Devil’s Bargain of America

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This article contains Sinners spoilers. In a movie suffused with otherworldly musical sequences and phantasmagorical imagery, it is easily the weirdest thing we see. Jack O’Connell’s presumably thousand-year-old Remmick is performing a Celtic jig from his homeland, and freshly turned vampires like poor disfigured Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), lonely Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), and even rebellious Stack (Michael B. Jordan) are prancing right along with him in the river dance. Only a handful moments earlier in the film, these same people, all Black or of mixed heritage, were communing with a different kind of spirit when they thrived and writhed to…

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19 Apr

David Bowie’s Best Performance Came in a Jesus Movie

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The Man Who Fell to Earth. Labyrinth. The Prestige. These are the titles that usually come to mind when people think of David Bowie’s film career, and with good reason. Even when playing real-world scientist Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, each of these performances captured Bowie’s ethereal public persona. Bowie floated through the movies like a being from another world, immediately imbuing the story with mystery and danger. It’s somewhat fitting then that Bowie’s best film performance came in the most unexpected of places, a movie about the life of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Bowie had one short but powerful scene…

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19 Apr

New Superman Footage Features One of DC’s Weirdest Heroes

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“We love getting to play with the incredible DC library of characters and stories,” declares DC Studios co-head Peter Safran. “And we really want to do justice for them.” Safran’s comments come as part of a new Superman clip focused on James Gunn‘s process of discovering the story and the actors’ passion for the characters in the director’s reinterpretation of the Kal-El mythos. The producer’s observation also shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone following his and Gunn’s work in the DC Universe. After all, The Suicide Squad pitted Z-Listers like Javelin and Bloodsport against Starro the Conqueror. Meanwhile Peacemaker…

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19 Apr

Why Ben-Hur Is Still the Best Jesus Christ Movie Ever Made

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What makes a good Jesus movie? That is admittedly a loaded question, but on weekends like this when the airwaves and streaming services are awash in biblical epics of every stripe—those appealing to followers of the New Testament and those favoring only the Old—it is a query that arises time and again in my mind. Whether you love or hate the Hollywood hokum of Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor, there are many excellent films derived from the Torah. In the modern era as well, storytellers as eclectic as Darren Aronofsky and Ridley Scott return to those same tales to…

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18 Apr

Fantastic Four: First Steps Feels a Lot Like the Incredibles and That’s a Good Thing

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Four heroes, each with amazing powers. One with remarkable strength; another can turn herself invisible; the next has a body that can stretch in odd configurations; and the last leaves a trail of flames as he zooms by. Remarkable as these abilities certainly are, the quartet’s most important quality is the love they share for one another. Because, more than superheroes, these four are family. That description applies to Marvel‘s first family the Fantastic Four, whose shared affection (and occasional antagonism) is on full display in the latest trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps. However, it also describes Disney‘s…

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18 Apr

Minecraft Movie Reveals Generational Divide: This Is a Good Thing

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For the second weekend in a row, Warner Bros.’ A Minecraft Movie defied its original and relatively humble expectations when the film topped the box office with an impressive $80.6 million haul. That’s barely 50 percent down from its $162.7 million debut last weekend, and both figures tower above WB’s original projection for its debut of around $60 million—a lowball number commensurate with studios wanting to damper expectations, but also evidence that no one really understood how big this thing could be, even the studio that greenlighted it. It’s also remarkable for a movie which critics, including our own, have…

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18 Apr

Fantastic Four Trailer Teases Arrival of Marvel’s Most Powerful Character… and It Isn’t Galactus

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He is coming. Synopses and first looks had long hinted that The Fantastic Four: First Steps would introduce an incredibly powerful character to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, someone whose mere existence would have reverberations across realities. The latest trailer for First Steps doesn’t completely reveal this character, but we do see a harbinger announce his arrival and its effects on team leader Reed Richards a.k.a Mister Fantastic. What? No, the name isn’t Galan, better known as Galactus. Yes, the world-devourer does appear in the form of a shadow and a foot (not a cloud!), but the most powerful character teased…

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16 Apr

Sinners Review: Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan Throw Tasty Vampire Party

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The legend of Robert Johnson, blues musician, juke joint prodigy, and Mississippi trailblazer, is a mythic one. A guitarist who plucked his strings so well that strangers whispered he played like a man possessed, Johnson died before the age of 30 of unknown causes. Still, he lived long enough to see the rumor grow of how on a dark night at a crossroads in the Delta, he handed his guitar to a large menacing figure for a tune up. When it was returned to him, it came with the musical ecstasy of the damned. Johnson reportedly did not discourage these…

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16 Apr

Captain America 4 Writer Explains Key Difference Between Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers

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When Sam Wilson flew onto the screen last February in Captain America: Brave New World, he had everything you’d expect from the Sentinel of Liberty. There was the star-spangled suit; the unparalleled hand-to-hand combat abilities; and of course he had the shield, given to him by Steve Rogers in Avengers: Endgame. But there’s one thing that Sam (Anthony Mackie) lacked, which also set him apart from his predecessor: the super-soldier serum. And for veteran scribe Rob Edwards, one of the screenwriters on Brave New World, that makes all the difference. “Sam did not take the serum. That’s one of the…

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15 Apr

Fantastic Four: First Steps Fixes the Biggest Mistake of Previous Movies

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The sky is on fire. A streak of silver cuts through the clouds. A towering alien arrives to silently watch. Galactic is coming. Even today, those moments that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created for 1966’s Fantastic Four #48 – 50 still amaze readers, still set the standard for all superhero epics. So with Fantastic Four: First Steps pitting Marvel‘s first family against the Devourer of Worlds, expectations couldn’t be higher. First Steps director Matt Shakman knows about these expectations too, and is doing what he can to meet them. “I didn’t want to just use motion-capture for Galactus,” Shakman…

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15 Apr

The ’90s Disaster Movies Ranked from Worst to Best

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Ah, the 1990s! Stable economy, relative global peace, rich hucksters appearing in The Little Rascals instead of politics. What did we have to worry about? Nothing, really. And that’s why we had to make up trouble and put it on the big screen! The 1990s weren’t the first heyday of the disaster movie. That honor goes to the 1970s when producer Irwin Allen churned out star-studded hits like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, earning the title “The Master of Disaster.” But the 1990s versions might be more interesting, coming at a unique time in Hollywood and in the…

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13 Apr

13 Movie Stunts That Deserved Oscars

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It’s always good to hear welcome news, even when it arrives 97 years late. So it was Thursday when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors announced that beginning in 2027 they will annually award an Oscar for Achievement in Stunt Design. Or: there will finally be an Oscar for Best Stunts beginning at the 100th annual Academy Awards. This is genuinely happy tidings considering stunts and derring-do have been the hallmarks of why folks have gone to the cinema since the glory days of the silent era when Harold Lloyd hung precariously from a clocktower…

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12 Apr

’90s Video Game Movies Deserve More Respect

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A Minecraft Movie has finally emerged from development hell, only to be greeted by a strangely familiar reaction. Despite critics mostly loathing it, the video game adaptation quietly and confidently went on to set box office records. The whole thing has also triggered arguments about who gets to criticize kids’ entertainment and about how some things are simply “for the fans.”  While it’s pretty tough to call A Minecraft Movie “good” in the classical sense of the word, its quality is probably the least interesting thing about the project. The far more fascinating development is that films like A Minecraft…

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11 Apr

Dune 3: Robert Pattinson Could Be Getting His Ultimate Weirdo Role

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This article contains potential spoilers for Dune 4 and Dune 5. By this point, Robert Pattinson has firmly established himself as one of our great weirdo actors. In the past 15 years, he’s played a shut-in billionaire in Cosmopolis, a sinister and hallucinating wickie in The Lighthouse, an emo Dark Knight detective in The Batman, a croaking magical bird in The Boy and the Heron, and most recently an army of twitchy clones in Mickey 17. But it may be with Denis Villeneuve that Pattinson gets to do the greatest onscreen weirdo of all time. It appears that Pattinson is…

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11 Apr

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza Want to Reinvent the War Movie with Something Radical: Truth

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When Alex Garland first worked with Ray Mendoza, he was immediately struck by the latter’s precision and intuitive storytelling instincts. At the time, the pair were collaborating on Civil War, Garland’s blistering speculative fiction about, perhaps, the direction things could head in the U.S. Garland wrote and directed that movie, but Mendoza gave the violence in its title a ferocious believability as the military advisor. The way Garland tells it now, Mendoza even had a prominent hand in shaping the movie’s spectacularly kinetic, and chilling, climax wherein rebel forces shoot their way from room to room in the West Wing,…

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10 Apr

Minecraft: 4 Reasons This Video Game Movie Is the Worst Kind of IP-Moviemaking

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This article contains spoilers for A Minecraft Movie. “There was no joy or creativity at all!” That’s how protagonist Steve (Jack Black) describes the Nether, a dark underworld introduced during the mandatory and expository voiceover that opens A Minecraft Movie. Of course, that description also describes A Minecraft Movie itself, a slog of IP-driven nonsense that somehow has the temerity to make its bad guys monsters bent on destroying joy and creativity in their endless search for more money. Granted, A Minecraft Movie isn’t the worst bit of IP-driven media released lately, that dishonor still belongs to The Garfield Movie.…

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10 Apr

New Superman Trailer Reveals How Deep into Pulp Origins James Gunn Is Diving

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Some might complain that the sneak peek for Superman doesn’t actually let us peek anything new. It begins with Superman crashing into the snow and calling for his dog Krypto, just like the trailer released a few months earlier. It continues with a montage of scenes, including shots of superheroes such as Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. It ends with Superman (David Corenswet) embracing Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), all while a variation of the John Williams theme plays. Yet, there is new footage in this teaser. Well, only new in the sense that we haven’t seen this…

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09 Apr

Could James Gunn’s Superman Finally Get Lois Lane Right?

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Even after a recent sneak peak that revealed five minutes of new footage, we still don’t know much about how James Gunn‘s Superman will handle the famed romance between Clark Kent and Lois Lane. In Superman: The Movie and in Man of Steel, we saw the beginning of this courtship, with Lois and Clark meeting and beginning to fall for each other. This is also how most television and animated adaptations approach the characters. But in promotional material for the upcoming Superman, we see the Clark (David Corenswet) and Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) exchanging knowing looks to one another, and even…

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08 Apr

Action Movies Need More Heroes Like Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan

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Late in The Hunt for Red October, a sweaty Jack Ryan squeezes through a tube. “Ryan, some things here don’t react well to bullets,” he says sardonically, mimicking Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery. “Yeah, like me. I don’t react well to bullets.” It’s easy to understand Ryan’s frustration. He began the film a nervous CIA analyst who couldn’t sleep through the turbulence on the overnight flight that brought him from London to Washington. He only intended to relay information from British Intelligence, who learned about a top secret silent propulsion system in the Soviet nuclear submarine…

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08 Apr

Minecraft Box Office Should Teach Hollywood Gen Z Wants Its Own Franchises

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In an unexpected turn of events, A Minecraft Movie has broken the opening weekend box office record for a video game adaptation, surpassing the mark set by The Super Mario Bros. Movie during the same timeframe two years ago. Ringing in at an estimated $157 million domestically, Minecraft bested Mario‘s $146.3 million outing in April 2023. Additionally, A Minecraft Movie exceeded even the most lofty expectations, with most outlets estimating its box office returns from this past weekend to score less than $100 million. This begs the question, what does A Minecraft Movie‘s unprecedented success mean for the industry moving…

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