New DVD release

01 May

HBO and Max New Releases: May 2024

New DVD release

With its list of new releases for May 2024, HBO streamer Max is bringing back one of the best comedies on television. Hacks season 3 premieres on May 2 and will continue the tortured (platonic-ish) love affair between comedy superstar Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her former joke writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder). That will be followed up by Pretty Little Liars: Summer School on May 9. Movie-lovers have more than enough to keep them occupied in May 2024 as well. The latest John Green adaptation, Turtles All the Way Down, will premiere on May 3. That will be followed…

Read More

01 May

Hulu New Releases: May 2024

New DVD release

Hulu’s list of new releases for May 2024 is missing a certain amount of original series firepower. In the place of a blockbuster like The Handmaid’s Tale or Shōgun, however, is some content diversity. The first of the month sees the premiere of four-episode British series Shardlake. This mystery drama takes place during the reign of Henry VIII and features none other than Thomas Cromwell (Sean Bean) investigating a murder. Other series of note this month include the Korean drama Uncle Samsik on May 15. Movies are bit more interesting on Hulu in May. Teen comedy Prom Dates premieres on…

Read More

01 May

Amazon Prime Video New Releases: May 2024

New DVD release

With its list of May 2024 releases, Amazon Prime Video is giving us the kindest gift of all: cougar Anne Hathaway. May 2 sees the premiere of The Idea of You, a romantic-comedy that features Hathaway as a 40-year-old mom finding romance with a 24-year-old boy band singer (Nicholas Galitzine). Having saved the medium of film forever, Prime Video is celebrating with some big time library titles this month as well. American Fiction and BlacKkKlansman arrive on May 14 and will be followed by Creed and Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story on May 16. For its TV offerings, Prime is…

Read More

01 May

Netflix New Releases: May 2024

New DVD release

As summer approaches (for the Northern Hemisphere at least), Netflix is set to premiere a fresh season of one of its biggest hits. Brigerton season 3 is set to arrive on May 16 and will debut a “new crop of debutantes” into the regency drama fray. Other original series of note this month include Indian drama Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar (May 1), the Jeff Daniels-starring A Man in Full (May 2), and intriguing Korean title The 8 Show (May 17). Of course, Netflix is also rolling out a suite of true crime docs and docuseries as well. Chief among those…

Read More

30 Apr

Francis Ford Coppola Reveals the Childhood Sci-Fi Story That Inspired His Final Film

New DVD release

Francis Ford Coppola has made some of the most defining American films of all time, including The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. Although not every film in his oeuvre holds such a vaunted place in cinema history, Coppola’s over 60-year career deserves a titanic close. Megalopolis promises to be just such a proper ending with its ambitious self-funding and a massive cast led by Adam Driver. Coppola has been gathering ideas about the project for as long as he’s been making movies, but the kernel of the concept goes back even farther. “The seeds for Megalopolis were planted when as…

Read More

30 Apr

The Shakespeare Play That Makes Anyone But You Such a Charmer

New DVD release

Whether you love it or hate it—or just hate that you might, kinda, maybe be chill with it—Will Gluck’s Anyone But You has found its audience. The Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell two-hander defied critics and connected with plenty of folks happy to bake in the Australian sun as the film’s stars swam around Port Jackson Bay and debated what it means to be “hot girl fit.” In theaters, the movie over-performed and grossed more than $200 million worldwide, and now on Netflix it’s soared to the top of the movie viewing chart around the world. It turns out folks…

Read More

30 Apr

Chris Hemsworth Calls His Thor in Love and Thunder a Parody

New DVD release

In the first Marvel Thor story from Journey Into Mystery #83, the All-Father Odin sends his son to Earth to learn humility. It sounds like Thor actor Chris Hemsworth has had to do the same thing. Hemsworth’s Thor was riding high going into 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, following 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, which won over fans who dismissed his first two solo outings, as well as the strong emotional arc in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. But for many, Love and Thunder pushed the wacky sensibilities of writer/director Taika Waititi too far, resulting in a movie too glib to be funny. And…

Read More

30 Apr

The Xenomorph Isn’t the Scariest Monster in Alien

New DVD release

Despite having lost three of her shipmates to an alien invader she doesn’t understand, despite learning that her shipmate and science officer Ash (Ian Holm) is an android, despite nearly getting killed when Ash tried to shove a porn mag down her throat, it’s something else that truly disturbs Ripley in Alien. It’s the two words she saw in a message from her employer: “crew expendable” With those two words, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) realizes that she’s at the bottom of a food chain, and not just because there’s a bloodthirsty Xenomorph on board. Never one to portray businesses or anyone…

Read More

29 Apr

Cuckoo: Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens on Getting Creepy for Tillman Singer’s New Horror Film

New DVD release

Whatever one thinks of the highly controversial TV series Euphoria, there’s one thing no one can deny. No show of this era has been a better launching point for the careers of young movie stars. Zendaya is currently enjoying huge success on the big screen, thanks to Dune: Part Two and Challengers, while Sydney Sweeney is just on the other side of a rare rom-com box office success with Anyone But You and has also just produced and starred in the excellent horror flick Immaculate. Jacob Elordi received a bit of praise for his portrayal of Elvis Presley in the…

Read More

29 Apr

Deadpool & Wolverine Needs to Kill the Old X-Men for Good

New DVD release

Every couple of months in comic book-centric social media circles, someone reposts a comics page in which Deadpool shooting Spider-Man in the head or decapitating an exhausted Bruce Banner. These panels usually spark arguments about whether or not these kills are in character (they aren’t) or if the entire thing is a joke (it is). Eventually, someone points out that the pages come from Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, a 2012-2013 miniseries by Cullen Bunn and Dalibor Talajic. The story involves Deadpool’s fourth-wall-breaking powers driving him so mad that he decides to kill all the other Marvel characters because they’re…

Read More

27 Apr

Great Movie Trailers That Were Better Than the Actual Movies

New DVD release

Even in this age of instant YouTube gratification, movie trailers are a big deal. They get us hyped for an upcoming project by making promises that the eventual film will (hopefully) pay off. The best sizzle reels are even able to do this by giving a taste of things to come without ruining any surprises or plot twists. Think about the teaser for Alien with its cracking egg and unnerving siren sound, or the deft use of a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” in the classic promo for The Social Network. Both of those examples speak to the haunting nature…

Read More

26 Apr

Apartment 7A: Rosemary’s Baby Prequel Movie Hits Paramount+ This Year

New DVD release

“Satan is his father and his name is Adrian!” shouts the coven leader Roman Castevet at the end of 1968’s. Rosemary’s Baby. “He shall overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples. He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured.” Even when making allowances for Roman’s (Sidney Blackmer) understandable delight at seeing his plan come to fruition, that’s a lot of expectation to put on a newborn, no matter who his father might be. Unfortunately, the sequels chronicling Adrian’s rise to power didn’t quite live up to those expectations. Neither the…

Read More

26 Apr

Dune 3: The Problem With Adapting Alia From the Books

New DVD release

This article contains likely spoilers for Dune: Part Three as well as the books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. You are not prepared for what is to come. These are the words of promise, or prophecy, in Anya Taylor-Joy’s lone scene in Dune: Part Two. Whether the sequence is a kind of psychic chat room occurring between Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides (Timothée Chalemet) and his unborn sister, Alia, or an actual vision of a conversation they will have in the future is obscure. Either way, the meeting seems otherworldly, not least of all because Paul and Alia are conversing on…

Read More

24 Apr

Are You Stephen King’s Number One Fan? Try Our Quiz

New DVD release

You thought you were okay sitting on the toilet until you read Dreamcatcher. You’d happily walk past a storm drain until you read It. You’d go into a creepy boutique shop before checking Needful Things out of the library. You didn’t even mind checking into Room 217 at a hotel until you read The Shining. More than perhaps any other horror novelist, Stephen King has unnerved our collective imagination with twisted creations that stalk our everyday lives. Demonic cars, rabid dogs, alien domes, possessed caretakers, crazed fans… there’s a Stephen King monster for every day of the year, plus one…

Read More

24 Apr

The Real-Life UFO Story That Led to a Famously Unmade Steven Spielberg Sci-fi Movie

New DVD release

Steven Spielberg has had a lifelong fascination with alien beings from beyond the stars. When the legendary director was just 17, he made a nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic on his 8mm camera called Firelight, a film that he more or less remade 14 years later as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That 1977 classic would be the first of three professional movies Spielberg would make about aliens arriving on our planet, the other two being E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005). And each trip into the extraterrestrial has led to one of the director’s most successful…

Read More

23 Apr

The Best Samurai Documentaries to Watch After Shogun

New DVD release

“Why is it that only those who have never fought in a battle are so eager to be in one?” Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) asks at one point in FX’s Shōgun. It’s a question that resonates not only with the show’s characters but may strike at the heart of our long-standing fascination with samurai.  Its resonance is all the more profound because Shōgun is loosely — very loosely — based on real events from the end of Japan’s Warring States period that pushed the nation into a new era. Taking historical events and crafting drama from them is something the…

Read More

23 Apr

Challengers Review: Zendaya Scores in Twisted Sports Thriller

New DVD release

Freud might have once said a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but the good doctor would never mistake a tennis racket as mere sports equipment when watching Challengers. Those interlaced, titanium-gripped meshworks are extensions and metaphors in the hands of director Luca Guadagnino and his huffing, puffing young cast. What exactly that extension is morphs from scene to scene, but it is always libidinous, unmistakably eager, and ever in search of connection: with the ball, with the other player, or sometimes just with the sweat dripping out their pores. In one sequence, Zendaya’s tight smile thinly conceals an ironclad…

Read More

23 Apr

Shogun Fixes The Last Samurai’s Greatest Weakness

New DVD release

This article contains mild spoilers for Shōgun and major ones for The Last Samurai. A lonely Westerner who seems lost before he even steps off his ship; a strange land filled with ritualized grace and deadly niceties; and a culture shock that is both intoxicating and intimidating—even before our stranger sees the samurai masks and katana blades come out. This could very well be a description of the odyssey which English seaman John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) finds himself on in FX’s astonishing new limited series, Shōgun. Yet I’m actually describing a popular Tom Cruise vehicle loosely set in the same…

Read More

22 Apr

Rebel Moon 2: The Scargiver Review – Zack Snyder Definitely Leaves a Mark

New DVD release

During the extended climax of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, the much debated filmmaker not so much winks at his audience as he vigorously shakes us while shouting in our ear, “Do you get the reference?!” The lonely samurai-like character (read: Jedi), Bae Doona’s Nemesis, stands alone against an army of imperial thugs. She lights up her now familiar glowing machetes that are essentially lightsabers by a different hue, and her opponents each switch on their own. The sequence could have appeared in any one of the Star Wars prequels released in the 1990s and 2000s,…

Read More

22 Apr

The Biggest Challenge Facing Tom Holland’s Spider-Man 4

New DVD release

Although all three of the MCU Spider-Man movies have “home” in the title, Spidey didn’t feel like he really came home until the very end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That’s when Peter Parker walked into a squalid New York City apartment, knit together a home-made suit, and remembered his late parent-figure’s words about power and responsibility. So why the heck is Marvel unsure about what to do next? From the first stories by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee to the married father of two in Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man is almost always a hard-luck hero,…

Read More