This article contains light spoilers for Spider-Noir. As its name implies, the MGM+/Prime Video series Spider-Noir is many things. It is a story about Spider-Man, albeit as middle-aged private investigator Ben Reilly, who used to fight crime under the codename “the Spider.” It’s also a noir series, thanks to its postwar setting, its gangster baddies, and its nods toward classic films like Gilda. But most of all, Spider-Noir is the ultimate highlight reel for its star, Nicolas Cage. As private dick Ben Reilly, Cage gets to take on all sorts of personas, little bits that his character adopts to sneak…

An original BookTok relic The Midnight Library is being revived nearly six years after its film rights were sold. Florence Pugh will produce and star as the novel’s main character, Nora Seed, a woman who finds herself in a library between life and death and who reads alternative realities of her own life in the library’s vast catalog.  The Midnight Library was published August 13, 2020 and was a part of the first wave of #BookTok favorites alongside titles like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Song of Achilles, and It Ends With Us. #BookTok is a TikTok hashtag that…

This article contains spoilers for Obsession. Original horror movie Obsession has become a massive success at the box office, generating $60.7 million in North America. But director Curry Barker has now revealed that the film’s largely-praised ending was not what he originally had in store. In fact, Obsession’s conclusion shot not one, but two major last-minute takes that changed the impact of the final moments entirely.  In Obsession, protagonist Bear (Michael Johnston) uses a $6.99 toy called a “One Wish Willow” to wish that his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) would “love him more than anyone else in the world.” Upon…

Even by Game of Thrones standards, House of the Dragon is old. Based on George R. R. Martin‘s 2018 history of Westeros, Fire & Blood, House of the Dragon takes place two full centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, pushing it even further away from our current time and place (though admittedly technology and culture seems pretty stagnant in Westeros). Yet, no matter how far and away into a fictional Medieval-style past the series goes, House of the Dragon is still made by modern actors, trying to appeal to modern audiences. So it shouldn’t be too much of…

The X-Men debuted in the early 1960s, and the comic achieved its creative peaks throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s. But for most people, the X-Men are the ultimate ’90s comic book. During the ’90s they became the premier superhero franchise, expanding to not just several spinoff comics with teams such as X-Force and X-Factor, but also to television, with the hit animated series that ran from 1992 to 1997. The cartoon solidified the lineup with some characters forever associated with the 1990s, including Jubilee and Gambit. The first season of the sequel series X-Men ’97 brought these characters…

Poor Peter Parker, he can never get rid of his worst enemies. Take Doctor Otto Octavius, a.k.a. Doc Ock. Since the green-clad baddie debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #3 way back in 1963, he has died a few times, once to be replaced by a young woman and again to swap bodies with Spider-Man. And yet, every time, Doc Ock comes roaring back—silver tentacles, green jumpsuit, and bowl haircut all intact. Given that history, it makes sense that the greatest actor to ever portray Otto would follow his character’s lead for an unlikely encore. “If they came knocking on my door…

This review contains light spoilers for Spider-Noir. We still haven’t fully reckoned with what a miracle of a movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is. That film introduced mass audiences to a new variation of Spider-Man who wasn’t Peter Parker, while putting the famously street-level, friendly neighborhood hero into a dimension-hopping story, one that also starred a Spider-Pig, a Spider-Robot, a Spider-Gwen, and a Spider-Gumshoe. Against all odds, Into the Spider-Verse not only gave us a delightful adventure with dazzling visuals and punchy gags, but it also managed to be a satisfying story about new kid Miles Morales. Yet, despite Spider-Verse‘s…

The 2000s had a very specific idea of what looked cool. If a movie had leather jackets, slow-motion walking, aggressive editing, neon lighting, nu-metal soundtracks, or endless attitude, Hollywood often assumed it had cracked the formula. The problem was that trying too hard usually aged faster than anything else. Many films chased trends instead of building timeless style, stuffing themselves with edgy visuals, forced swagger, and overdesigned action meant to feel modern and rebellious. Some still became cult favorites (albeit ironically), but others now feel like time capsules of manufactured ‘cool.’ These movies did everything possible to look stylish, only…

Spider-Noir may be about a guy who can shoot webs fighting people with electrical powers and super-strength, but it is fundamentally a riff on noir films. Literally “dark film,” film noir was the term that French critics applied to the crime movies that Hollywood made from the 1930s and through the early ’50s, movies such as The Third Man, Double Indemnity, and The Big Heat. A cursory look at the trailers for Spider-Noir emphasize the show’s connection to those movies. Even when he’s wearing a mask, Ben Reilly a.k.a. the Spider (Nicolas Cage) keeps his fedora and trench coat on,…

The following contains spoilers for the first four episodes of Rivals season 2. The first season of Rivals rightfully generated a lot of buzz for its scandalous sensibilities — the series opens with a couple joining the Mile High Club in an airplane toilet as a champagne bottle overflows outside and pretty much just proceeds from there. It was full of attractive male leads, most of whom all took their shirts off at various points during its run. It unabashedly embraced the idea that television is — and should be — fun. Now the buzzy bonkbuster is back for another…

The disappointing fifth and final season of The Boys suffered from a myriad of problems. According to creator Eric Kripke, one issue was that the series was just too darn timely. How could he have guessed that the absolutely absurd moment when Homelander has a gaudy vision that convinces him he is God would be trumped by the President sharing an AI image of himself as the divine? The first trailer for The Boys prequel series Vought Rising seems to promise a series devoid of such issues. The show goes all the way back to 1950, and seems to present…

This article contains minor spoilers for The Mandalorian and Grogu. At the climax of The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s first act, the odds stack up against Din Djarin. A horde of monsters floods into the gladiatorial arena to which he’s been sent, forcing Mando and Rotta the Hutt, the shockingly ripped son of Jabba the Hutt, to fight against a giant lizard in a leather vest, some unsettling worm thing, a gloopy dude with giant eyes, and other beasties. At first, the fight scene just sucks, one of many indifferently-shot action sequences in The Mandalorian and Grogu. The monsters have neat…

Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures Anthology series takes on heavy themes about the darker aspects of humanity, free will, and morality. Players learn to make decisions for survival on the fly and deal with the outcomes of those decisions, sometimes impacted by choices of characters centuries before them.  The first game of the franchise, Man of Medan, was released in 2019, and the world has since expanded across five games of pure terror, with fan-favorite narrator, The Curator, walking players through numerous puzzles and questions in hopes of finding out the central mystery that connects back to the mysterious narrator himself. …

This article contains spoilers for The Boys season 5. The future of The Boys is in the past. Now that the show is over, we can look forward to a prequel series called Vought Rising that will explore the adventures of Soldier Boy, Bombsight, Liberty, and a host of other new characters in the 1950s, but until then, we can also look back at The Boys itself, as season 5 has marked the end of the mothership show on Prime Video. Butcher and the gang gave us five seasons of absolute chaos to treasure forever, along with endless memes and…

Actors, like any other person, need to work to pay the bills. Sure, a lot of them have a lot more money than the average person, but that isn’t true for all performers, much less at the start of their careers. And yet, there are a few actors that, once they gained some renown, decided to be more picky on the films they starred in. Not all of the films they chose were instant classics, but that’s not why they chose them. These are actors clearly working their craft to the best of their ability, searching for roles that challenge…

To be a television fan in the year of our Lord 2026 means forcing yourself to accept the fact that we live in an era of reboots, revivals, and remakes. And with new takes on everything from Scrubs and Malcom in the Middle to Little House on the Prairie and The Forsytes hitting screens this year, it’s pretty much only a matter of time before it’s your beloved favorite’s turn. But sometimes, the idea of a reboot is so egregious that it seems worth it to wonder: What on Earth are we doing here?  Case in point: The BBC is…

Harry Potter is a pioneer of internet fanfiction. With over 600,000 stories written by contributors on Archive of Our Own (AO3), nearly 200,000 on Wattpad, and close to 75,000 posts under the #HarryPotterFanfic hashtag on TikTok, fans have created a unique storytelling subculture that extends the Wizarding World narrative far beyond J.K. Rowling’s original novels. Recently, publishers have recognized the commercial potential of this enterprise and have churned out repackaged Harry Potter fanfiction novels such as Alchemised, Rose in Chains, and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy – all Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy romance stories featuring rebranded…

Paralives has released the first look at its gameplay, providing a new world for life simulator players to exercise their god complexes on. The game, created by Paralives Studios, started as a solo passion project by creator Alex Massé. With the help of his team of 10, they are now set to launch one of 2026’s most anticipated life simulation games.  The indie title’s early access gameplay looks promising for the launch, garnering excitement for a fresh take on the genre.  The Sims players, in particular, are excited about the game’s promise of creative freedom, transparency, and features that fans…

It appears that all hope may not be quite lost for fans of Sarah J. Maas’ blockbuster romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses who’ve been hoping to see the genre-defining saga adapted for TV. The series may yet find its way to another streamer, as Maas has reclaimed the rights to her works and, per Puck News, is “reportedly shopping the project elsewhere”.  Fans have been waiting an awfully long time to see the world of Prythian come to life. Tempo optioned the film rights to the series all the way back in 2015 – before the romantasy…

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. This timeless bit of wisdom doesn’t technically come down to us from Homer—a version of the phrase first appeared in Virgil’s The Aeneid, a quasi-retelling/sequel to the Trojan War and its aftermath written by a Roman more than 700 years after The Iliad and The Odyssey were committed to paper—but its potency remains. When you have reasons to doubt the kindness or intentions of others, maybe keep your perspective when those same folks offer a proverbial wooden horse to worship. That should’ve gone for old King Priam of Troy 3,000 years ago, and it definitely…