Producer Irwin Winkler has been trying to get The Alto Knights or a movie similar to it made since the 1970s. It might go back even further he confides while reminiscing of his youth growing up in New York City. At the time, his idea of what a “gangster” looked like was defined by a certain image: James Cagney mostly, walking through a downpour of rain while glowering beneath his fedora. Yet that changed when the nightly news started reporting about guys like Frank Costello—the future protagonist of The Alto Knights and the real-life boss of bosses who “retired” from the…

Mortal Kombat 2, directed by Simon McQuoid, is set to hit theaters this October. The previous movie from 2021 ended with three big reasons to stick around for the sequel. First, as the film was itself a “Surf Dracula” narrative, we were finally going to get to that pesky fighting tournament instead of just talking about it. Second, we would see the franchise’s iconic villain Shao Kahn in action. Most importantly, we were promised Johnny Cage as a cliffhanger. Actor to be determined. That’s kind of crazy, really. Johnny Cage has been around Mortal Kombat since the very first game.…

Amanda Peet is not her character Dianne in Fantasy Life. While the fictional creation bears some similarities of also being an actress and facing the eternal insecurities and foibles of this industry, Peet is not a person so stricken with anxiety that it caused her to be away from the screen. In fact, Peet works constantly, including on shows like Brockmire, Togetherness, and The Chair, the latter a Netflix series she co-created. Still, when we sit down to discuss Dianne and everything else about Fantasy Life, a Matthew Shear comedy-drama which would go on to see Peet win the SXSW…

The prospect of debuting a film at SXSW would excite any filmmaker, but few can match the energy of director Eli Craig, who premiered his movie Clown in a Cornfield there last week. He was so excited, in fact, that he couldn’t help but shout “I’m effing back, baby!” after walking into the Den of Geek Studio in Austin. “I wanted to be here so bad,” Craig elaborates. “You know, when you’re a writer-director, a lot of projects that you spend a lot of time on don’t get made. But this was one I had to see to the end…

The film that Disney’s Snow White remake is, and the one it so clearly wants to be, are on simultaneous display in the scene where the title character first reveals her trademark colors. Upon a sunset-drenched hill far afield from the palace, Rachel Zegler is at last encased in the red, blue, and white ruffles which looked so charming nearly a century ago on the hand-sketched page. Beside her a huntsman completes the tableau. It’s a live-action recreation of an exquisite composition from the first animated feature Walt Disney ever produced. If you squint, some of the aspirations that director…

No event is more synonymous with the teenage American experience than prom. And the film industry, Satan bless it, has never lost sight of that fact. Prom movies are dime a dozen in the high school subgenre, ranging from the sweet (Never Been Kissed) to the spirited (Footloose) to the downright Shakespearean (10 Things I Hate About You). Not only does prom have a way of heightening the already hormone-saturated high school experience, it has clear winners or losers like any other American institution worth its salt. Getting on that prom court is a must and becoming prom queen is…

Ahead of a SXSW screening for Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome, the director of the film came out to address a theater audibly ready to imbibe in the frothiness of a rom-com with a three-way hook-up. This is not unusual for a film festival, of course. Filmmakers are often on hand to discuss their work. Nonetheless, given that this particular theater was also one which served food and drink, burger and beers, Hartigan had a unique pro-tip for his film: finish the finger food early, because the eponymous threesome in the movie arrives shockingly fast. When that comes, no one will…

Stakes naturally feel high on almost any first date. As much as it is an opportunity to meet or better acquaint yourself with someone, first dates can also be veritable leaps of faith. There is an air of mystery or suspense when you put yourself out there. And if you’ve ever had such a rendezvous at a restaurant, you know how much worse it is when catching strangers staring at the proceedings, eager to judge how the evening’s dinner and a show goes for the new potential couple. Unfortunately for Violet and Henry (Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar), they have…

Horror movie fans can handle a lot. Nice people, the elderly, even sometimes children can be subjected to all manner of terror without alienating the audience. But there’s one line not even the most hardened Terrifier fanatic can handle. Animals are so sacrosanct, so off-limits, that complete websites have been created to protect viewers from seeing a furry friend come to a bad end. So director Ben Leonberg and his producer Kari Fischer clearly enjoy living dangerously with their new movie Good Boy, a horror film told completely from the perspective of their dog Indy. “This is a horror movie,…

Kate Mara knows a little bit about being in space. As one of the stars of Ridley Scott‘s 2015 hit, The Martian, Mara continues to carry parts of that experience with her, including the costuming. “I have my flight suit from The Martian,” she admits with a smile while inside the Den of Geek studio. But where that Scott movie focused on a man abandoned in space, Mara’s new movie The Astronaut is about a space traveller feeling abandoned at home. “For a lot of the film, I am solo,” Mara says of her character, the titular astronaut Sam. “It’s…

In the modern era, we’ve frequently seen comics adapted into massive film and TV properties accompanied by demands that comics tie into what’s happening on screens. The thinking there is that exposing people to X-Men, Spider-Man, or any other superhero comic through widely consumed media has some impact on sales and would get more people reading comics. And while that narrative hasn’t necessarily borne out on new stories and series, it still might be worth taking a look at back issue sales to see if a media tie-in moves the price on key issues.  Before we start digging into any…

This post contains spoilers for The Electric State. Halfway through The Electric State, our hero Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) and her friends are captured by enemy robots and brought to their leader. The robots, who have been formed to look like vaudeville performers, lead Michelle and her friends to the stronghold: a rotted out mall, complete with a food court, pay phones, and a Sears. There they meet the leader of the robot resistance… Mr. Peanut. As the group makes their way through the mall, the camera focuses on Michelle’s look of wonder at the world around her, accompanied by…

The worst nightmares are the ones you can believe in. They feature the people you love in your life—and sometimes the people you fear. And no matter how weird or unforgiving they become, the reason they linger into your waking life is because you recognize the truth beneath the unreality. Nine years after a similarly merciless feature debut, Under the Shadow, director Babak Anvari has again crafted exactly such a torment in Hallow Road, a relentless 80-minute nerve-gnasher that sets out from a parent’s worst fear before driving toward a destination far stranger and crueler than its already-grim premise suggests.…

Many years before co-founding Colossal Biosciences, future entrepreneur and champion of genetic research Ben Lamm was just a child growing up in the 1990s. And like any ‘90s era kid, this meant he absolutely loved Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. “I was probably scared at the time, but it was inspiring too,” Lamm says decades later while visiting the Den of Geek Studio ahead of his SXSW keynote talk. “I think all sci-fi has inspired me to be in tech. I’m not a biologist, I’m not from this world. But I just like to build teams of people that are much…

When people talk about their favorite parts of the Star Wars franchise, the first images that come up are often the epic lightsaber duels, the jaw-dropping space battles, and the cute little aliens that are always in ample supply. Of course, these are all important aspects of this franchise. Star Wars wouldn’t be what it is without them. But there is one thing that Daisy Ridley thinks more people should talk about when it comes to this popular space opera – the performances. While in the Den of Geek studio promoting her film We Bury the Dead at SXSW, we…

Robin Hood is a folk hero. If there was a real Robin Hood, he might have been from Nottingham, or he might have been from Yorkshire (the earliest stories feature both). He might have lived in the reign of King Richard, or King John, or even later. Centuries after he might have lived, he gained a noble background as the Earl of either Locksley or Huntingdon, though of course he always ends up living as an outlaw in Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men. His stories survive because while they can be dramatic, tragic, and meaningful, they are also fun,…

At first glance, you might not think that an indie horror movie that explores grief, loss, and our relationships with our parents would have much in common with the gory, satirical superhero show The Boys, aside from the fact that they both star Colby Minifie. However, The Surrender does have an unexpected bullet point to add to the Venn diagram of these two projects – characters pulling their own hair out, root and stem. In The Boys, Minifie’s character Ashley Barrett works for a company known as Vought International that has essentially manufactured superheroes and made them a commodity in…

Early in The Electric State, inventor and Stanley Tucci paycheck role, Ethan Skate, sits at his mother’s kitchen table. With a loving smile, she sets baklava before her son, which Skate accepts warmly. “It’s good to see you like this, mom,” he says, trying to hold back the sadness creeping in. But no sooner does Skate settle into enjoying the experience than her apartment begins to flicker, her speech start to stutter. In the very next shot, we see Skate sitting at his shiny office desk, wearing a headset. With a frown, he pulls off the headset and smashes it…

It’s out there now. As all the rades are reporting, Sadie Sink, best known for her breakout role as Max Mayfield in Stranger Things, will join the cast of Spider-Man 4. While Marvel Studios has yet to confirm the news, fans are already speculating about which character Sink might portray in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next Spider-Man story. Admittedly, just about every detail of Spider-Man 4 is anyone’s best guess at this time. Still, Sink’s acting style, look, and Spider-Man’s current status in the MCU do suggest some intriguing possibilities. With all things considered, and all disclaimers applied, here are…

Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch knows exactly what to say when people ask what his next film, We Bury the Dead, is about. “Oh, it’s a Daisy Ridley zombie movie,” he laughs while in an exclusive conversation at our SXSW studio. But Hilditch also knows there’s a lot more to his new film than that. “There are many ways you could sell this movie,” he observes. “It’s about grief and it happens to have zombies in it; it’s a movie about isolation; it’s a movie about guilt and redemption. It just happens to be set against this canvas of a larger…