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5 Reasons a Wonka Sequel Would Need to Be Dark as Hell

This article contains plenty of Wonka spoilers (plus more from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!). There’s just something about the sight of a man in a plush plum coat dancing with a green-haired Oompa Loompa that is irresistible. Try as you might not to give in, even the dastardly chocolate cartel would smile if they saw the final scene of Wonka, which features Timothée Chalamet’s Willy tripping the light fantastic with a miniature Hugh Grant. Together, the pair are poised to build what will become Willy Wonka’s fabled chocolate factory. A place of pure imagination, as the song goes.…
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Rebel Moon Review: At Least It’s Better Than The Rise of Skywalker

A robot sits along a riverbank and washes his face. The action serves an obvious utility. Moments earlier space fascists (which seem in overabundance these days) bullied the automaton, knocking his face into the dirt, and kicking him while he’s down. Still, it is in how Zack Snyder stages the machine’s cleansing ritual that sticks with me. Voiced by the endlessly regal Anthony Hopkins, our ostensible C-3PO appears to have the soul of Lear—or at least Odin given Rebel Moon’s visual lexicon.  The android waxes nostalgic about a slain king and tells a young girl who watches him bathe that…
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Dune 2: Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Echoes One of the Greatest Movie Villains

It is said more than once in Frank Herbert’s Dune that fear is the mind-killer; it’s the little death that brings obliteration. This might be so, but after getting a better look at the Oscar-nominated Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha, the unofficial prince of House Harkonnen, it’s worth remembering there are some things that are the killer of the whole damn body. And in the latest Dune: Part Two trailer, Feyd-Rautha appears to be a manifestation of death itself. Shaved balder than a tech CEO and licking his knives like they were lovers, he makes a grotesque and immediate impression when…
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New 2023 Netflix Christmas Movies (and Other Streamers) Ranked from Worst to Best

While you can always rely on Hallmark and other channels to provide a frankly overwhelming number of new Christmas movies each year, the streaming services have all been slower to crank out their own Yuletide romcoms and North Pole-centric misadventures. This year there are a solid half-dozen options among four streamers, starring plenty of familiar faces going through the usual holiday hijinks in suburbia: Christmas cards, delayed toy delivery, body swaps. If you’ve seen it before, you can expect it again with pretty paper and a bow! I’m gonna warn you now though, there are no bonafide modern classics in…
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Rebel Moon First Reactions Are Here: Is Zack Snyder’s New Movie Any Good?

Zack Snyder finally got to make his long-rumored Star Wars movie, except this one has the “violence, sex, and swearing.” That’s according to actor Ed Skrein, who plays the evil Admiral Atticus Noble in the new Netflix sci-fi epic, Rebel Moon. Headed to the streaming service next week, the latest Snyder film is the culmination of a long journey for the director, who first pitched his idea for a more mature, “Seven Samurai in space” to Lucasfilm in the early days of the Disney take over. While the Mouse House didn’t bite back then, Netflix was happy to oblige as…
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Dare You to Watch the Civil War Trailer Without Hyperventilating

In the summer of 2021, the organization Bright Line Watch released the research from their latest poll, and it left American political scientists stunned. The organization, which was founded essentially to study the stress being placed on American democracy in the 21st century, was no longer simply asking American voters about their confidence in the economy or current leadership, but whether in fact they would like to see their state or region of the U.S. secede from the Union. According to the group’s first major poll released months after the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt, where a mob of Donald Trump…
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Dune 2’s Trailers Are Still Hiding the Book’s Biggest Twist

This article contains potential spoilers for Dune 2. For longtime fans of Frank Herbert‘s most famous novels, the new Denis Villeneuve films are a kind of gift. As he made clear in 2021, Villeneuve is a Dune fan first, and a filmmaker second. “To me, reading Dune is like a paradise,” he said two years ago just before the launch of Dune: Part One. “The book stayed with me all these years.” Now, with Dune: Part Two just around the corner, we’ve been given a tantalizing new trailer for the film, one that showcases just how much of Herbert’s original…
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Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka Movie Is Still the Most Faithful Adaptation of Roald Dahl

Wonka, the phantasmagorical musical starring Timothée Chalamet as the world’s most famous chocolatier, opens in cinemas in time for the holiday season this week. The film, directed by Paul King of Paddington fame, arrives on the big screen with a lot of audience skepticism. We already have two very popular adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl’s most beloved novel, and the idea of a prequel following young Willy Wonka feels unnecessary given that the book isn’t exactly about him. Still, there is a reason that Dahl adaptations remain popular, even as the author long faced pushback for…
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The Best Geeky Cookbooks to Read This Holiday Season

Sometimes, when you’ve watched a really great show or film—or played a really fantastic game—it feels like there ought to be more. How else can you immerse yourself in the world once the series is over or you’ve beaten the final boss? Luckily for food lovers, there’s another option: sinking into a cookbook and either reading, or eating, your way deeper into your favorite setting.  Geeky cookbooks aren’t new. There are a dozen different unofficial Lord of the Rings inspired cookbooks, some of which have been out for a decade. But the growing library of officially licensed cookbooks that celebrate…
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Return of the King’s Greatest Book Change Made Sam the Hero of the Story

When adapting any great work of literature, or even one that is just mid, filmmakers and visual artists will be forced to make changes big and small for any myriad of reasons. Sometimes it is due to the economy of storytelling in a truncated form—such as the famous example of Scarlett O’Hara’s number of children shrinking from three to one in Gone with the Wind. Other times, the changes are made because the requirements of a visual medium shifts the structure of the story; like showing the massacre at Hardhome by ice zombies in Game of Thrones instead of simply…
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The Zone of Interest Is the Scariest Movie of the Year

When we meet them, Rudolf and Hedwig are an ordinary couple with ordinary concerns. He wants a promotion at work, and she needs a loving home for their children to grow up in; he dotes on their pets, particularly his prized horse, and she must make sure the garden is ready to bloom come the spring and all the lawn parties that attend it. And both are fixated on making sure their children are happy. Jonathan Glazer depicts their lives as the most mundane of domestic concerns. Yet it’s the fact the director never points his camera to what lies…
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Elf: How Zooey Deschanel’s Singing Changed the Movie for the Better

Twenty years later, it’s fair to argue that Elf is the last great Christmas movie. This Jon Favreau classic, which also marked a significant turning point in Will Ferrell’s career, came out during a holiday season that was awash in memorable Yuletide flicks, with adult-skewing audiences getting to spike their eggnog via Love Actually and Bad Santa. Yet in addition to being the only one of those three films that was suitable for the whole family, Elf has also aged the best. The movie, is in fact, magic. There are more than a few reasons why Elf works as well…
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Merry Little Batman: Who is Damian Wayne?

Viewers of Merry Little Batman meet Damian Wayne as the lovable scamp who chases his cat Selina through the halls of stately Wayne Manor, decked in a blanket for a cape and a brown paper bag for a cowl, just like his dear old dad, Batman. The delightful holiday special imagines Damian as a good-hearted soul who wants nothing more than to be like his pop, and doesn’t even get too upset at his father’s overprotective demands. When the Joker returns to Gotham while Batman is trapped in the Arctic, Damian gets his chance to prove that he deserves to…
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Nicolas Cage Thinks Movie Stardom Is Like ‘Gambling Addiction’

Nicolas Cage did not know writer-director Kristoffer Borgli from Adam when he opened the first page of Dream Scenario. A Norwegian filmmaker with only one other feature under his belt—2022’s Sick of Myself, which also is in Norwegian—Borgli is an exceedingly new voice in cinema, but one Cage was keyed into recognizing as promising because the screenplay had been sent by Ari Aster. As it turns out, the director behind Hereditary and Midsommar was producing this mysterious new dark comedy called Dream Scenario, and he thought Cage would respond to a story about a mild mannered college professor who one…
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Merry Little Batman Review: The Best DC Movie of the Year?

I love it when a Batman-centric project arrives animated and has a stylized design. Such is the case with Warner Bros. Animation’s family holiday movie Merry Little Batman, which takes the Caped Crusader and his son Damian Wayne and gives them an illustrative, Ron Searle-inspired coat of paint. As if Prime Video hasn’t cornered the market enough regarding stellar superhero content, their acquisition of Merry Little Batman, along with a ton of other Batman-related projects, including the Bruce Timm/Matt Reeves/J.J. Abrams animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, from Warner Bros. Discovery, adds just a bit of power to the streamer’s greatness.…
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The Must-Watch Movies Coming in 2024

What do moviegoers want to see right now? For decades, studios have had very specific answers to this question, but considering that 2023’s box office was dominated by two films called Barbie and Oppenheimer, it seems like those preconceived notions might be changing. When we look at the films already scheduled for 2024, there certainly seems to be a lot of familiarity that might be old hat. But look again at a few of the auteur pieces that have already been slated. Even the blockbuster class looks surprisingly ambitious, with new works from the likes of George Miller, Denis Villeneuve,…
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Godzilla Minus One Is the Oppenheimer Sequel You Didn’t Know You Needed

This article contains mild Oppenheimer and Godzilla Minus One spoilers. The most terrifying sequence in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is one that never occurred—at least anywhere beyond J. Robert Oppenheimer’s own mind. Mere days after the U.S. government dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the scientist who would later be referred to as “the Father of the Atomic Bomb” stands before a cheering crowd inside a Los Alamos gymnasium. Before these giddy revelers, Oppenheimer (played as a man hollowed out by Cillian Murphy) indulges in a bit of flag waving, and a bit of gloating.…
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How Wonka stays true to Roald Dahl and Gene Wilder

Two words: Young Wonka. This was the pitch from celebrated producer David Heyman to director Paul King at the end of their time working together on Paddington 2, according to King. “I think it was literally our last sign-off,” he smiles. Food for thought, right? Several years and a pandemic later, their fruitful collaboration is finally making its way to screens in a whirlwind of color and candy.  “It was definitely the idea to try to make something that would be warming and festive at Christmas,” King says, but he’s quick to acknowledge that the world we live in today…
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Argylle: Matthew Vaughn Talks Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa, and Theories That He’s Elly Conway

Matthew Vaughn is no stranger to spy movies. The iconoclastic genre filmmaker has already directed three Kingsman movies, and that came after having a brief flirtation with James Bond. Yet the filmmaker who’s also dabbled in fantasy (Stardust) and superheroes (Kick-Ass) is up to something extra mischievous with Argylle, his new 2024 action spectacle: he’s playing it for real. Kind of. Set in a heightened world where Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard playing the allegedly real-life author of the Argylle novel) stops writing spy fiction, which includes Henry Cavill as her idealized agent Argylle and begins living it upon meeting…
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Nicolas Cage Names His Most Underrated Movies

Nicolas Cage does not use the word “masterpiece” lightly. In fact, he tells us that he has never utilized that term before while describing one of his own films. Yet when he sat in a screening room with his manager to watch the first cut of Dream Scenario, a new startlingly original dark comedy he stars in, the actors was absolutely floored and called it a masterpiece on the spot. Also to his satisfaction, more folks are coming around to his point-of-view on this surrealist film from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli. “The reason why I say it’s a masterpiece is because…
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