Steven Spielberg has had a lifelong fascination with alien beings from beyond the stars. When the legendary director was just 17, he made a nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic on his 8mm camera called Firelight, a film that he more or less remade 14 years later as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That 1977 classic would be the first of three professional movies Spielberg would make about aliens arriving on our planet, the other two being E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005). And each trip into the extraterrestrial has led to one of the director’s most successful…

“Why is it that only those who have never fought in a battle are so eager to be in one?” Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) asks at one point in FX’s Shōgun. It’s a question that resonates not only with the show’s characters but may strike at the heart of our long-standing fascination with samurai.  Its resonance is all the more profound because Shōgun is loosely — very loosely — based on real events from the end of Japan’s Warring States period that pushed the nation into a new era. Taking historical events and crafting drama from them is something the…

Freud might have once said a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but the good doctor would never mistake a tennis racket as mere sports equipment when watching Challengers. Those interlaced, titanium-gripped meshworks are extensions and metaphors in the hands of director Luca Guadagnino and his huffing, puffing young cast. What exactly that extension is morphs from scene to scene, but it is always libidinous, unmistakably eager, and ever in search of connection: with the ball, with the other player, or sometimes just with the sweat dripping out their pores. In one sequence, Zendaya’s tight smile thinly conceals an ironclad…

This article contains mild spoilers for Shōgun and major ones for The Last Samurai. A lonely Westerner who seems lost before he even steps off his ship; a strange land filled with ritualized grace and deadly niceties; and a culture shock that is both intoxicating and intimidating—even before our stranger sees the samurai masks and katana blades come out. This could very well be a description of the odyssey which English seaman John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) finds himself on in FX’s astonishing new limited series, Shōgun. Yet I’m actually describing a popular Tom Cruise vehicle loosely set in the same…

During the extended climax of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, the much debated filmmaker not so much winks at his audience as he vigorously shakes us while shouting in our ear, “Do you get the reference?!” The lonely samurai-like character (read: Jedi), Bae Doona’s Nemesis, stands alone against an army of imperial thugs. She lights up her now familiar glowing machetes that are essentially lightsabers by a different hue, and her opponents each switch on their own. The sequence could have appeared in any one of the Star Wars prequels released in the 1990s and 2000s,…

Although all three of the MCU Spider-Man movies have “home” in the title, Spidey didn’t feel like he really came home until the very end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That’s when Peter Parker walked into a squalid New York City apartment, knit together a home-made suit, and remembered his late parent-figure’s words about power and responsibility. So why the heck is Marvel unsure about what to do next? From the first stories by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee to the married father of two in Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man is almost always a hard-luck hero,…

Monsters are everywhere! Godzilla and Kong are going at it once again (this time as a double act) and now Abigail has hit screens, a movie about a heist gone wrong where the loot is an adorable 12-year-old ballerina. Starring Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera and Kathryn Newton and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett aka Radio Silence, who made the raucous Ready Or Not (as well as the most recent Scream movies), it’s a gore-soaked genre love letter that at one point had ties to the Universal Monsters canon. Without Abigail spoilers, that’s not entirely evident in the finished…

When it comes to the classics of cinema—and sometimes the dregs—it’s always fun to think about what might’ve been. Casting especially can be a strange alchemy between actor and role, and when the formula is off, it’s easy to ponder whether the spell would work at all. Can you imagine Robert Redford as Michael Corleone? What about Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones? And it’s an interesting challenge to envision what Tim Burton’s Batman might’ve been if it starred Bill Murray versus Robin Williams. The casting of Neo in The Matrix is another legendary “what if?” in movie history. The 1999…

Wolverine is the best at what he does. And what he does is self-loathing and swear words. At least, that’s what we see in the latest trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, courtesy of a returning Hugh Jackman seemingly as the only surviving X-Man from his universe. The third Deadpool movie has long promised to be an R-rated reunion for 20th Century Fox mutants and a way to bring the X-Men into the MCU, so far the teasers are delivering just that. The first trailer was a cameo-fest full of Deadpool‘s supporting cast and other Fox characters, as well as a…

The best things come in threes, especially stories. In Western nations, we like a three-act structure in which we set a status quo, watch our heroes fall, and then see them return to greatness. Some of these stories cannot be held within a single movie. For those epics, those monumental narratives, the movie trilogy was born. Trilogies represent some of the best that cinema has to offer, movies that changed the culture and the art form. The trilogy might vary in quality from film to film, but together these three films tell a story that cannot be ignored. Before we…

This Rebel Moon article contains spoilers. Like Star Wars before it, and Dune earlier this year, Zack Snyder‘s two-part space epic Rebel Moon ends with the defeat of an evil Empire. At least a temporary one. While Kora (Sofia Boutella) and the rest of the heroes have defended the moon of Veldt from Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) and his dreadnought, the Imperium still stands, presumably ready to strike back in a future movie. Balisarius (Fra Fee) is still emperor and Kora still has unfinished business with her treacherous father figure. And in Part 2: The Scargiver, we also learn Princess…

At its core, the Alien franchise is easy to understand: people meet aliens, bad things happen. It’s a lot harder to keep track of when exactly these things occur. Alien takes place in 2122, Aliens 57 years later, and then Alien 3 happens shortly afterwards. But then things get weird. Alien Resurrection jumps ahead 202 years, Prometheus begins sometime in prehistory and then in 2093, and Alien: Covenant is in 2104. Alien: Romulus will squeeze in between the first two movies, around 2142, which is 20 years after the original. And that’s not even going through the Alien vs Predator…

It was an initially groan-inducing idea 20 years ago: a remake of George A. Romero‘s 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. That film was arguably the Romero’s masterpiece, a biting satire about American consumerism that still feels relevant today. But the Zack Snyder version that followed turned out to be much more worthy of the Dawn name than anyone expected from a director making his feature film debut. More of a reimagining than a traditional remake, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead was a gorier, balls-to-the-wall action flick featuring zombies that didn’t just shamble down the post-apocalyptic street but sprinted…

How is it forty years since 1984?? Well, that’s just how time works, my friends. It was a time before mobile phones. Before the internet. Before we got worried about and then forgot about Y2K. It was the year in which George Orwell envisioned a world of doublethink, room 101 and Big Brother. And it was several years before Room 101 and Big Brother would come to mean TV shows and not dystopian ideals. But we digress… Fortunately, the very nature of films is that the passing of time does not erode the quality of a classic movie, and even…

A lot goes into a good performance – from research to blocking to facial expressions and beyond. But at its core, an acting performance comes down to reading lines of dialogue on a piece of paper. Many actors do their level best to read the lines as written. Some other actors, bless them, like to get a little more creative. Television and film are filled with fascinating line readings from actors. Whether it’s an emphasis on an unusual syllable or just an outright scream, certain performers are able to make dialogue feel particularly vibrant. As pop culture travelers ourselves, we’ve…

Quentin Tarantino loves film. Few filmmakers can boast such a wide knowledge of movies, especially the B-films and grindhouse works that have inspired his greatest cinematic accomplishments. Tarantino also loves to talk about future projects. Put those two passions together and you get a guy who often teases movies he never actually ends up making. Of course, it’s not always talk. Many of his best movies, including Kill Bill and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood started as ideas that he blabbed about to anyone who would listen. But while that approach builds excitement, it also sets up fans for…

AMC drama Mad Men is one of the best TV series of its era – or any other for that matter. The seven season-long saga of 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executive Don Draper (Jon Hamm) has rightfully taken its place among the classics in the TV canon. In addition to its greatness, however, another thing that Mad Men should be remembered for is its bizarre commitment to secrecy. Mad Men was one of the most spoiler-phobic TV shows ever. Showrunner Matthew Weiner insisted that AMC’s promos for the drama reveal next-to-nothing about upcoming plots. A typical “on the next episode…

RoboCop became both a blockbuster and a controversial critical darling upon its release in 1987 due to a mix of jet black humor and as subtle as a jackhammer social commentary sticking a perfect landing. Its success was a surprise to an industry that had looked at Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner’s original script with its simplistic one-word comic book title and assumed it was fated to be a high-concept stinker. The 2023 RoboDoc documentary miniseries does a terrific job of chronicling the effort it took to turn RoboCop into both a box office win and an enduring cult masterpiece…

Zack Snyder made his name with his gruesome, much more action-y remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in 2004. The director then tried to line up an even bigger sequel called Army of the Dead for years, but there were many detours along the way, including his eventual role as the chief architect of the early DCEU. He finally returned to his long-lost zombie sequel in 2021, this time as the launching point of a whole new cinematic universe for Netflix, which also included a crime thriller prequel called Army of Thieves and even an animated series…

Over the past several days, a new viral story spread around social media when (thanks to a New York Post write-up), the juxtaposition of the terms “A.I.” and “girlfriend” became a chilling promise of things to come. That’s at least one way to interpret Late Checkout CEO Greg Isenberg’s prediction that the next growth industry for artificial intelligence is “dating.” In a social media post on X, which is the platform formerly known as Twitter, Isenberg recounted how he met a 24-year-old “single guy” who told him he spends $10,000 a month on “AI girlfriends.” The anonymous man even described…