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04 Nov

Cailee Spaeny on Priscilla, Elvis, and Why Sofia Coppola Movies Are So ‘Freeing’

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On the morning of March 2, 1960, Sgt. Elvis Presley, an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, got on a military aircraft outside Bad Nauheim, Germany. From there, the so-called King of Rock ’n Roll would head back to the United States, back to civilian life. Yet it is what he left behind on the day which haunts more than 60 years later. Standing far below the plane’s steps, captured in photographs and newsreels, is the waifish but devoted Priscilla Beaulieu—not quite 15 years old and perhaps the loneliest girl in the world. That’s at least one way to interpret…

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04 Nov

Insidious: The Red Door’s Post-Credits Scene Shows Us the Future of the Franchise

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This article contains spoilers It may seem hard to believe, but the Insidious franchise is getting long in the tooth! The first Insidious movie was released all the way back in 2010, kickstarting an unlikely string of movies under the watchful eye of Saw horror duo Leigh Whannell and James Wan. At first, the franchise focused on the Lambert family, whose move to a new home coincided with their son Dalton falling into a mysterious coma. They soon found out that it wasn’t their home that was haunted, but their family. Thanks to the Lamberts’ ability to astral project their…

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04 Nov

Disney’s Best Animated Villains Ranked

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It’s been virtually 100 years to the day since Walt Disney’s animated mouse took the wheel of a steamship and steered himself into immortality. But for anyone who grew up watching Disney movies that might seem surprisingly recent. Since near its very inception, Walt Disney Animation Studios has evoked a timeless sensibility which seems eternal and everlasting. With likely your parents and grandparents growing up on Disney movies, the studio’s brand of hand-drawn magic has always been there in the background of living memory. But every magic has its dark side… and the shadows cast by the House of Mouse…

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03 Nov

We Need to Stop Saying Movie Theaters Are Dead

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Early Friday morning, the third biggest cinema chain in North America, Cinemark Theatres, announced its quarterly earnings, which included a significant surprise. After years of movie theater owners and exhibitors reporting grim news, the fiscal quarter that ran between July and October turned out to be something of a reversal: Cinemark saw not only its best Q3 since the pandemic… but also since before the pandemic started. As per Cinemark’s press release, the Texas-based theater chain witnessed box office revenue rise 35 percent over the same frame in 2022 and a remarkable six percent over its 2019 counterpoint. Additionally, July…

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03 Nov

Priscilla: The True Story of Elvis’ Hangups About Sex and Virginity

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Sofia Coppola’s atypical biopic Priscilla centers Elvis Presley’s iconic wife in a way no portrayal of the one-time King of Rock n’ Roll has even considered. Adapted from Priscilla Presley’s bestselling autobiography Elvis and Me, the tumultuous, troubling relationship between a shy schoolgirl and the most famous singer on the planet raises more questions than it answers. Offstage and at home, the charismatic and swaggering crooner and sometime actor is revealed to be a temperamental husband with a lot of phobias around sex and an abusive need for total control. And one of audiences’ biggest questions about the King’s proclivities…

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01 Nov

Spider-Man: What’s Going On With Spider-Verse 3?

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This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. “You want in?” When Gwen Stacy asks that question at the end of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the answer is invariably “YES!”, and we shout that answer not just because Gwen is incredibly cool and anyone would be honored to join her band, the Mary Janes. Rather, it’s because Across the Spider-Verse ends on a cliffhanger, with Gwen gathering a team of Spider-People to rescue Miles from an alternative universe. And from whom are they going to rescue Miles? From himself, sort of. All this is after the shocking reveal that…

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01 Nov

Christmas Movies and TV Specials: Full 2023 Schedule

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It’s the holiday season, everyone! And that applies for whenever you end up reading this because, as we all know, holiday cheer is a state of mind as much as it is date on the calendar. Speaking of calendar dates though, there are many Christmas movies and TV specials to enjoy throughout November and December in 2023. Whether it’s via cable or streaming, television has a jam-packed schedule to keep you in the Christmas spirit. Here we’ve gathered all of those Christmas movie and TV special options that we can find in a helpful day-by-day format. Read on to find…

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01 Nov

Netflix’s Sister Death Is More Than Just a Retread of Veronica

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This article contains spoilers for Sister Death and Veronica. You probably remember those hyperbolic headlines about 2017’s Veronica, the so-called scariest movie on Netflix, the horror film so frightening users turned it off midway through. Six years on, the internet has had plenty of time to reevaluate this Spanish-language chiller. Was it really that scary? This writer would say no, but art is subjective. But even if it didn’t live up to all those internet headlines and tweets you read about it, director Paco Plaza’s possession film, which stars Sandra Escacena, is still a fun time, with a few genuinely…

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31 Oct

Pain Hustlers Fails Because It Wants You to Pity the Villain

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This article contains Pain Hustlers spoilers. The opening moments of Pain Hustlers play a clever bit of reversal on audiences accustomed to watching movies “inspired by real events.” Driving a too-cool-for-school convertible across a vast southeastern bridge, Emily Blunt’s Liza Drake is introduced like many other cinematic devils. Here is a villain whose rise to a real-world throne of vice and corruption is so seductive, they’re going to spend the entire movie bragging about it to us. While Liza doesn’t quite reach the heights of Henry Hill’s opening gloats in Goodfellas—who famously began that movie by saying, “As long as…

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31 Oct

The Best Sci-Fi Movie Flops of the 2000s

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The 2000s were a great time for science fiction. Thanks to The Matrix closing out the 90s, studios were more willing to give the green light to stories about science gone awry, leading to favorites such as A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Paprika, as well as superhero hits like Spider-Man 2, X2, and Iron Man.  With so much good stuff out there, it’s no surprise that some really good movies would pass by audiences. Sometimes, these movies simply got buried by higher profile and more popular works. Sometimes, they were rejected by audiences disturbed by their audacious or disturbing ideals.  For…

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31 Oct

Best Horror Movies of the 21st Century

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Horror has come into its own in the 21st century. This is not to say that the genre has ever not been one of the most interesting and creative in the long history of cinema. Since nearly the beginning of the art form, using moving images to scare audiences has been a gateway for aspirin filmmakers to break into the industry—or for even veterans to creatively something about the greater world by painting a landscape of anxiety. Nonetheless, the 21st century (particularly beginning in its second decade) has brought a renewed appreciation for scary movies’ abilities to speak to audiences…

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31 Oct

Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings Refreshingly Refuses to Be a Movie for Everyone

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This article contains No Hard Feelings spoilers. According to Jennifer Lawrence, she had zero intention of making No Hard Feelings or any other film when the script landed on her desk. Having gone through filming Don’t Look Up during the pandemic and recently giving birth to her son, the Oscar-winner was ready to take a rest. But that was before she read a screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips so deliriously funny she couldn’t say no. A little over a year and a half later, that appeal is still shocking audiences as the exceedingly R-rated and raunchy comedy finds…

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30 Oct

Lord of the Rings Characters From the Books That Didn’t Make It Into the Movies

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It is well known that The Lord of the Rings is a very long book, so long that the original publishers insisted on dividing it into three volumes. And so it is hardly surprising that not every character in the book made it into the major screen adaptations directed and produced by Peter Jackson, and often with good reason. Many of them do not need any special mention; there’s no need to list every Orc that did not get individually named or every minor Hobbit character at Bilbo’s birthday party. However, some of the characters who did not quite make…

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28 Oct

All Universal Monsters Movies Ranked

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Long before Jigsaw and Annabelle, Ghostface and Samara—going back to even before Freddy and Jason—there were the Universal Monsters. These were the creatures and character designs who were so iconic that they defined what the horror genre was to most moviegoers during the earliest decades of talking pictures. Primarily released in two film cycles by Universal Pictures across the 1930s and ‘40s (plus a few outliers on both sides of this), the legacy of these films and the people who made them endures still. It echoes in Halloween costumes and TV specials, merchandise toys and candies, it’s even informing recent…

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27 Oct

Every South Park Special Ranked

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After 26 years, 26 seasons, and 325 episodes of television, South Park could be forgiven for wanting to try something new. So that’s exactly what creators, showrunners, and stars Trey Parker and Matt Stone are doing with their crass, yet beloved animated franchise. When the duo reached a $900 million deal with MTV Entertainment Studios to produce new episodes of South Park through season 30, they also locked themselves in to creating 14 South Park movies for streaming service Paramount+. The first of these near feature-length specials, “South Park: Post Covid: The Return of Covid” premiered at the end of…

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27 Oct

The Fall of the House of Usher’s Mike Flanagan Does Trauma Horror Right

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This post contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher and other Mike Flanagan works. Acid raining from the sky, bodies melting into globs of indiscernible flesh, a troubled boy sucking the last bits of breath into his decimated lungs.  These sights and so much more punctuate the climax to the second episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, easily the most ghastly death in a series full of unsettling ends. Any horror filmmaker would be happy to craft such an upsetting scene, but that’s not all that Usher creator Mike Flanagan can do.  Just moments…

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26 Oct

Five Nights at Freddy’s Review: One Night Is Too Many

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There is a scene in Five Nights at Freddy’s where two animatronic monstrosities—one a giant teddy bear and the other a yellow canary so devious even Sylvester would avoid it—look menacingly at a character who watches them both on a security camera. Now, how they know this poor doomed soul is looking at the security feed at that exact moment, or why they harbor him ill intent, I cannot say. What I can attest to is they’re so determined to end his life that they are serving him a dish best served screaming. No, really! The pair carry a sentient…

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24 Oct

Star Wars Has Revealed the Sad Fate of a Fan-Favorite Attack of the Clones Character

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Although he might not have been as appreciated when he debuted in Attack of the Clones in 2002 (the very shoddy CG did not help), wise Besalisk diner owner Dexter Jettster has enjoyed a bit of a Star Wars renaissance in recent years on social media. The subject of countless memes and gifs on Twitter and Reddit, Dexter is one of several Prequel Trilogy characters who have enjoyed a bit of a reevaluation from fans who grew up with those movies, even if in this case it’s largely just for laughs. Of course, Dexter’s latest appearance in Star Wars canon…

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24 Oct

The Best Horror Movies of 2023 (So Far)

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After almost four years into a new decade, horror remains one of the most resilient and fascinating genres of this century. In fact, it’s fair to say that the cinema of chills has only grown in esteem. About 10 years ago, some critics were dubiously suggesting that horror movies were undergoing an “elevation.” Nowadays, though, scary movies’ popularity and respect just seems nearly ubiquitous. In a time when everything is dubiously being stripped down and sold as “content,” horror remains one of the last refuges for filmmakers to make art—or at least a wild good time with a dancing robo-doll!…

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24 Oct

How the Five Nights at Freddy’s Games Became a Movie

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Like almost anyone else who grew up in the past 50 years, film director Emma Tammi has distinct memories of visiting a certain type of children’s entertainment restaurant. You know the kind. The place where the arcade games are plentiful, the ball pits are crowded, and the stage is full of animatronic critters who do their best to twitch on key to a prerecorded music jamboree. There’s a universality to Tammi’s recollections about such places too. As a child, she had joyous fun playing the games, hearing the songs, and chewing on the pizza. And yet, every once in a…

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