Show-stopping stunts have long been as important to the James Bond movie formula as gadgets, villains, and the appropriate amount of workday martinis. While the early Connery movies didn’t emphasize such stunts quite as much as future installments did, audiences soon came to expect in the 1970s to see Bond put his life on the line in some incredible stunt sequence for queen, country, and our entertainment. While other action franchises (most notably, the Mission: Impossible movies) have certainly raised the bar for film stunts since then, there is a charm to the best Bond stunts that can’t easily be…

Ryan Gosling is living his best life these days. Or certainly his funniest. After earning an Academy Award nomination purely based on his ability to persuasively turn “Kenergy” into a noun in last summer’s Barbie, he brought that pure, uncut Ken stuff to the Oscar stage. No, not by winning the prize, but by taking home the hearts and minds of the internet with an epic performance of “I’m Just Ken.” In hindsight, the spectacle of it all might be viewed as a turning point in his career as audiences embrace the guy who seemed so stoic and tortured in…

Five years ago, the idea of discussing the best video game adaptations ever felt like a largely joyless task. Inevitably, you would have to lower the bar to allow room for movies and shows that you would never otherwise discuss in a positive light. There were a few genuine highlights even back then, but the perception that the majority of video game adaptations were quite bad was both widespread and largely accurate. The situation has changed in truly remarkable ways in recent years, though. We now regularly receive video game adaptations that aren’t just good according to the standards of…

Space is great. It’s massive, it’s colorful, and you can have big fights with lasers there. It really does have everything you could want. But it also has problems—mainly, like we said, that it’s massive. In fact it’s so massive that if you want to go anywhere in it (apart from a few nearby planets with hardly anyone to shoot lasers at), by the time you get there, you’re dead. Now you might think that if you can just go fast enough, you’ll get there before you die, but there’s a problem. That problem, as Albert Einstein tells us, is…

“You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented,” the hip teen Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) tells the stereotypical Barbie standing before her. “You represent everything wrong with our culture: sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals.” Stereotypical Barbie is horrified: “No, no, no, you’re describing something stereotypical,” she insists. Margot Robbie spent much of Barbie proving why the doll she portrayed wasn’t the sexist object that girls like Sasha see. The Aussie actor has a much more difficult task ahead of her if she’s going to do the same thing in her upcoming project Avengelyne. Everything about Avengelyne screams…

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…

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…

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…

It’s an exciting time for Disney+ subscribers. That’s because Disney’s agreement to stream new episodes of Doctor Who is about to start bearing fruit. On May 10, Disney+ subscribers in the U.S. will be able to access to the two newest episodes of Who season (or, excuse me: series) 14: “Space Babies” and “Devil’s Chord.” Additionally, the 2023 Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” will be available to stream then as well. For more traditional Disney-heads, May 2024 sees one Star Wars season premiere (Tales of the Empire on May 4), one Star Wars season finale (The Bad Batch…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…