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11 Dec

28 Years Later Trailer May Have Just Confirmed the Fate of Cillian Murphy’s Jim

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Not quite 28 years later, filmmakers Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are returning to the zombie tale that revitalized and evolved the zombie genre. The horror story that kicked off with 2001’s 28 Days Later and continued in 2007’s 28 Weeks Later jumps forward almost three decades to a world completely changed by the Rage Virus. In fact, the first trailer for the long-awaited third installment reveals an England where survivors armed with bows and arrows live in primitive settlements and a filthy Ralph Fiennes stalks around a temple-like structure made of human skulls. But the trailer may not just…

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11 Dec

The Mandalorian & Grogu Brings Back a Forgotten Star Wars Movie Character

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Well, this is unexpected: Jeremy Allen White, who stars in The Bear as a tortured chef with anger issues named Carmy, is set to voice Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta the Hutt, in The Mandalorian & Grogu. This was first reported by industry scooper Jeff Sneider on The Kristian Harloff Show before being corroborated by several trades, including Variety. We highly doubt anyone had this latest casting on their 2024 Star Wars bingo board. While Rotta the Hutt, canonically nicknamed “Stinky,” isn’t exactly a household name these days, he is technically a blast from the franchise’s big-screen past, specifically from…

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11 Dec

A Complete Unknown Review: Timothée Chalamet Doesn’t Solve Bob Dylan’s Mystery

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Midway through James Mangold’s often hushed and occasionally deafening A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan comes as close as he ever will to lowering his defenses. Which is not to say the man who defined a generation’s counterculture verbalizes much in the way of his wants or dreams. Rather, in that classic Hollywood biopic style, he cries out his essence with a pained lamentation. “When people ask me where the songs come from, they don’t want to know,” Timothée Chalamet’s elfin folk singer broods. “They only want to know why they didn’t come to them!” That may be, but the essence…

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10 Dec

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Review: A Beautiful But Off-Key Ballad

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It’s still impressive how evocative Howard Shore’s Middle-earth music can be 21 years after The Lord of the Rings trilogy ran its course. While the composer is most celebrated in fan communities for his rousing “Fellowship” theme, or the provincial beauty (and flutes!) of “The Shire” leitmotif, I’ve always felt like the vaguely Nordic ditty he wrote to signal the Riders of Rohan is its own little wonder. One might assume anime artist and director Kenji Kamiyama agrees since the opening prelude to The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim also basks in the sounds of Shore’s…

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10 Dec

Dune: Prophecy Just Introduced a Major Element of Dune 3

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This post contains spoilers for Dune: Prophecy episode 4 and details from the book Dune Messiah. In the final minutes of Dune: Prophecy‘s fourth episode “Twice Born,” Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson) feels a twinge of doubt about her mission. However, she recovers her resolve when she faces her beloved older brother Griffin, whose death decades earlier inspired her revenge quest. Griffin speaks words of reassurance, even when Valya asks if she pushed her brother too far. As the conversation reaches its conclusion, Griffin’s face begins to crack. “Thank you, Theo,” says Valya, who then watches what appeared to be her…

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10 Dec

Jason Blum on the State of Horror Cinema and What’s Next for Blumhouse in 2025

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. If the past year has proven anything, it’s that folks in the film industry can grow accustomed to waiting on tenterhooks. After all, 2024 has been a good news/bad news situation for studios and theater owners who spent 12 months recovering from last year’s production delays and the pressures they placed on the release schedule. Yet while much of Hollywood can cautiously breathe a sigh of relief after the past summer slump shrank by August, much of the horror genre has proven…

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08 Dec

Supergirl Is the Only Movie to Remember That Superman’s World Needs Magic

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While 1984’s Supergirl is very much a low-budget attempt to cash in on the majesty of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, it does maintain the world that Richard Donner established in one regard. Midway through the film, Supergirl (Helen Slater) strikes a classic hero pose to face off against two baddies. “I am Kara of Argo City, daughter of Alura and Zor-El,” she says with confidence. “And I don’t scare easily.” Unfortunately, she says those words to a witch called Selena, portrayed by Faye Dunaway at her hammiest. With just a flick of her finger, Selena flings Supergirl into an…

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07 Dec

New 2024 Netflix Christmas Movies Ranked from Worst to Best

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It’s almost the Christmas season, and once again Netflix merely teases us with in-jokes alluding to the Christmas Prince movies instead of providing a new installment from that cherished cinematic universe. However, the streamer has still come through with a half-dozen new holiday rom-coms and a heartwarming family tale. This year’s Christmas movies are a mix of riffs on existing stories (you’ll see some inspiration drawn from Serendipity and Magic Mike), and unique hooks that may or may not fulfill expectations. Regardless we’ve got hunky snowmen and shirtless dancers, winking nods to Mean Girls and Love Actually, and quite the…

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07 Dec

Steven Soderbergh on the Unique Horror of Presence, Making a Spy Thriller, and Seeking New Challenges

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. “I like to have fun, you know?” Steven Soderbergh has clearly been having a ball directing over 30 feature films (averaging one per year) since his auspicious 1989 Palme d’Or-winning debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. That body of work has been anything but predictable, from pulpy crime movies (Out of Sight, The Limey) to sci-fi (Solaris) to comedies (Let Them All Talk) to sports flicks (High Flying Bird) to eccentric biopics (Che, Behind the Candelabra). Arguably, the only genres he hasn’t tackled are…

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07 Dec

Kyle Mooney Taught Rachel Zegler and the Cast of Y2K to Party Like It’s 1999

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Kyle Mooney still vividly remembers New Year’s Eve 1999. At age 15 he was sitting on his couch with a friend watching MTV and waiting (hoping?) for the world to end. It didn’t happen. Looking back on the evening, the SNL alum smirks and then points out that it was like the “opposite of COVID-19. So many people thought it would be nothing and it turned out to be one of the worst things to happen.” Nonetheless, the memory of the infamous Y2K panic that led to nowhere—and that New York minute where folks were confident the end was nigh…

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06 Dec

The Electric State Imagines How Walt Disney Destroyed the World (in an Alternate Timeline)

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. One of Stanley Tucci’s earliest memories is from the 1964 World’s Fair. “I remember very clearly going to the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens when they built that whole thing,” Tucci tells Den of Geek magazine in an exclusive interview. “I was three, seeing this robot talking, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s incredible, that is the future. I have it so clearly in my mind.” Those animatronics, made by Walt Disney, are a matter of public record. However, there are events following…

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05 Dec

How Paddington in Peru Uses Old Movie Tricks to Put the Bear in South America

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. Occasionally there is a movie where the plot, the direction, and the special-effects magic all fall by the wayside, and people have just one question: “What was it like working with the star?” It is one of our first questions. “Well, he’s very demanding,” says the film’s director Dougal Wilson. Then, perhaps fearing retaliation, he corrects himself. “No, he’s very reasonable, very hardworking, and very professional.” He is talking about Paddington Bear, the star of Paddington, Paddington 2, and, of course, the…

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05 Dec

From Wicked to Sing Sing: Early Awards Season Bellwethers Confirm Wide Open Oscar Race

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It is often a function for any awards prognosticator to suggest that this year, whichever it might be, is the most competitive we’ve seen in ages. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it amounts to a bit of creative fiction, with industry watchers straining to imagine a scenario where anyone could seriously challenge Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer for Best Picture, Director, and the whole slew of other awards it inevitably won last March. Still, with all that being said, we can say in complete honesty and without a sense of hyperbole that this year, 2024, might indeed be the most competitive…

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05 Dec

Margot Robbie Is Right: Babylon Is Built to Last

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Margot Robbie is still befuddled about why Babylon flopped two Christmases ago. For some it might be a strange thing to linger on. The Oscar-nominated actress and producer found immediate mega-success afterward courtesy of the cultural juggernaut that was Barbie (as well as her work as producer on smaller streaming hits like Saltburn and My Old Ass). Yet for Robbie, who recently sat down with Ben Mankiewicz for the Talking Pictures podcast, Damien Chazelle’s epic about the bygone era of Golden Age Hollywood during the height and demise of the silent movie feels like unfinished business. “I love it, I…

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03 Dec

Nosferatu Review: Robert Eggers’ Beautiful Nightmare Made Flesh

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A man walks alone in the snow. Hours earlier on this frigid morning, local Romani took his horse and left him stranded—a cruelty or a comfort, depending how you read their warning not to seek out the desolate castle on a hill. There, he is told, awaits only shadow and demons; a nightmare without end. For anyone who has seen F.W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu from more than a century ago, as well as many of the other films that have played in Bram Stoker’s crypt, this all has the unmistakable air of familiarity. Yet in rarefied moments, Robert Eggers’ 2024…

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03 Dec

How Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Expands Tolkien’s Great Untold Story

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. Nobody could forget the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the doomed bloodbath that became a surprise victory in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. But who remembers the king who gave the setting its name? King Helm Hammerhand was a legendary ruler of the horse-loving kingdom of Rohan, whose story was outlined briefly in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings. This December’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim casts Succession’s Brian Cox…

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01 Dec

The Curious Way James Bond Spends Christmas

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When folks think of James Bond, a lot of things can come to mind: a finely tailored tuxedo complete with cuffs; a vodka martini shaken, not stirred, and with a lemon twist if you’re a literary purist; or sometimes just beautiful women in an exotic locale. Whatever vice or trapping you imagine for the character, chances are all of the above involves excitement. Action! It’s been the appeal of the character from the very beginning when he sprang from author Ian Fleming’s typewriter. Yet the literary James Bond, it should be noted, is not the cinematic superhero he inspired. Fleming’s…

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30 Nov

Holiday and Christmas Movies Based on True Stories

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“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” So speaks Zuzu Bailey in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). While we cannot attest to her theological assertion, it might surprise you to know that much of the emotional truth of that film, and its story of an optimistic man finding himself down and out, and existentially stressed in postwar America, is partially drawn from James Stewart’s own life. “It’s a Wonderful Life has become synonymous with the holidays and with spiritual rebirth and perseverance, all those things that really embodied Jim were infused into this picture…

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29 Nov

Christmas Movies and TV Specials: Full 2024 Schedule

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Happy holidays! Whether you’re a staunch believer that the holiday season shouldn’t start until December 1st or the type of person who keeps their decorations up year-round, there’s no denying that we could all probably use a little extra magic this time of year. Thankfully, between cable and streaming service there’s plenty of holiday cheer to go around with an impressive number of holiday movies and TV shows available to watch throughout November and December 2024. No matter when you might catch the festive bug this season, you’re bound to find something that will spark the good tidings and joy…

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29 Nov

Movie and TV Moments We Are Thankful for in 2024

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While 2024 is not entirely over, it’s certainly winding down on some cold notes as the nights grow longer and the weather brisker. The holiday season leaves some relieved, others restless. For us, it’s a chance to take stock of the year that’s been and to count whatever blessings you can find. And even in a year as marked by upheaval and post-strike fallout as 2024, there have been more than a few occasions in film and television to get us grinning. So without further ado, here are some of the movie and TV moments to be thankful for in…

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