A Star Wars Outlaws Detail Makes It a Spiritual Successor to Solo

Star Wars Outlaws is the next big video game adventure set in the galaxy far, far away. Developed by The Division studio Ubisoft Massive, the game puts you in the boots of a thief named Kay Vess, whose run afoul of the galaxy’s criminal underworld and is now one of the most wanted criminals in the Outer Rim Territories. To get out of this predicament with her head intact, she’ll need to pull off a daring heist to pay off her bounty. In a new story trailer, we learn just how stacked the odds are against Kay and her little…
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Why James Bond Creator Ian Fleming Didn’t Originally Want Sean Connery to Play 007

Even before the final moments of No Time to Die made abundantly clear that a James Bond of the Daniel Craig variety would not return, people began wondering about the identity of the next 007. Eon Productions has not yet answered that question, despite rumors that Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been offered the part. Whoever ends up getting the honor to be the face of a new era of Bond, expectations are very high. It’s a time honored tradition, one that goes all the way back before the first Eon Bond movie Dr. No released in 1962. While that movie, and…
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Abigail Review: Explosive Horror That’s Buckets of Fun

Elevated horror can be wonderful. Packed with subtext, visually stunning, often emotionally devastating with standout performances across the board, the subgenre is full of greats. But sometimes you just want exploding bodies. If this is you, with Abigail you have come to the right place. From directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett who are part of the collective called Radio Silence, this is a genre mashup which begins with an Oceans 11-style set up where the loot is a little girl our gang of professional criminals will be holding for ransom. But when they get to the vast mansion where…
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Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’s “High Ground” Scene Was Almost Very Different

One of the most famous scenes in the Star Wars film saga almost didn’t happen at all. Although the movie was always going to end with Anakin Skywalker losing a few limbs, the stunt team behind Prequel Trilogy closer originally choreographed a different climax for Revenge of the Sith‘s final duel between brothers. In fact, an earlier version of the fight on Mustafar didn’t have Obi-Wan getting the high ground on Anakin at all; there was no cocky last leap from young Skywalker to seal his fate. As Revenge of the Sith stunt coordinator Nick Gillard explained to Empire magazine,…
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Maxine Promises to Be a Slasher Movie in Love with Hollywood’s Past

Quick: Name five stars who got their start in horror movies. This is such an easy question, even for much of today’s modern crop of Gen-Z talent. So posing it in the 1980s is hardly fair. And yet, that is what Mia Goth’s eternally striving dreamer does at the top of the new MaXXXine trailer from A24. “Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta, Demi Moore, and—” Maxine’s video store clerk buddy rattles off. She cuts him off before what surely must have been Kevin Bacon. At least it’s easy to presume this, because the trailer almost immediately cuts to a shot…
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The First Omen’s Most Shocking Scene is its Most Important

Contains spoilers for The First Omen. If you’ve seen The First Omen you’ll probably know the scene Den of Geek and director Arkasha Stevenson are talking about. In it, our hero, young would-be nun Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) witnesses a woman in the birthing room at the convent, traumatically having her baby. Her feet are in stirrups, she visibly distressed, and no wonder. Because what Margaret, and we, see as the head starts to crown is a demon hand appearing out of the woman’s vagina. It is extremely disturbing and it was vitally important to Stevenson that the image made…
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Immaculate, The First Omen, and the Blessed Rise of Pro-Choice Horror Movies

This article contains multitudes of The First Omen and Immaculate spoilers. One cannot envy the strange limbo Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen finds itself in this weekend. A macabre and fiendishly urgent spin on old school religious horror, it’s a film dripping with passion and fire despite its origins as a franchise installment. Unfortunately, it’s also a movie that uses an Italian setting awash in crucifixes and constrictive nun habits during a moment where another zeitgeisty chiller appears to be doing the same thing in the theater next door. Yes, there is plenty of overlap between The First Omen and…
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The First Omen Ending Explained: How the Movie Changes the Original

This article contains major The First Omen spoilers. It is said the Devil is in the details, and the details are quite devilish, indeed, in The First Omen. The surprisingly stylish and adroit chiller from first-time feature director Arkasha Stevenson takes the well-worn Hollywood formula of making a “story before the story” prequel, and actually conjures something drenched in atmosphere, originality, and modern urgency. Most of the time. While the movie has a despairing timeliness in 2024 with its parable about a patriarchal system attempting to control and use women’s bodies to achieve their own power-hungry ends, The First Omen…
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The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem Resurrects the Rot of Millennial Online Culture

It’s clear that meme culture has strangely seeped into the real world over the past decade, and boy, are we still facing its consequences today. How did the culture stir from wholesome trolling like getting Rickrolled to the catastrophic spiral into the Jan. 6 insurrection? The latest Netflix doc, The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, sees co-directors Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones of Feels Good Man—the Pepe the Frog doc— draw the timeline and try to pinpoint the moment(s) when the Agent Smiths of the far right took control of the Matrix and seeped into our daily lives. Yet their…
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Netflix’s Scoop: What Happened Next?

When the 2019 Newsnight interview finally blew up the time bomb that was Prince Andrew’s friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, not all of the pieces came back down to Earth in the same place. The interview that the Duke of York’s team were hoping would charm the public and rid him of his “Randy Andy” reputation achieved the opposite. Viewers found Prince Andrew to be callous and unsympathetic, while his denials of wrongdoing failed to convince many. What followed were legal proceedings, a substantial out-of-court settlement, and a great many job resignations. From the prince to his team…
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Netflix’s Scoop Review: Self-Satisfied Girlboss Ego Trip

In the final minutes of Netflix’s Scoop, a fictionalised behind-the-scenes account of Newsnight’s infamous Prince Andrew interview, Billie Piper’s character Sam buys a kebab. Two lamb shawarmas – her usual, says the vendor, who gestures at the TV news and asks if she’s seen all this business with the prince? Boy, he’d love to have been in the room when that interview was filmed. Sam McAlister looks wistfully at the screen with the beginning of a smile on her face. “Yeah I did. I saw it,” she tells him, and then turns and leaves. So humble. So real. So unmotivated…
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Fantastic Four: Julia Garner Silver Surfer Casting Reinforces a Dark Plot Theory

“Somewhere, deep within the deep vastness of outer space, an incredible figure hurtles thru the cosmos, a being whom we shall call the Silver Surfer, for want of a better name!” That typically verbose bit of narration by Stan Lee comes from Fantastic Four #48, in which it accompanied the powerful imagery of Jack Kirby in his prime. Since that moment, the Silver Surfer has become a major part of the Marvel Universe, appearing not only in countless comics but also in many film and television adaptations. The upcoming Fantastic Four MCU movie promises to continue the tradition, and director…
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Everything We Saw at SXSW 2024

This SXSW round-up is a bit like our living (and growing) scrapbook from this year’s big event. We’ll continue to update the article as more video interviews and entries become available. The SXSW festival has changed and changed again in its 35-plus years. Originally begun as “just” a music festival, the event has become an intersection that’s ever expanding. Bringing in the best of film, television, gaming, and even the cutting edge of technology, it is sometimes hard to quantify what isn’t SXSW these days. Even the Film Festival is now the Film & TV Festival. Still, Den of Geek…
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The First Omen Review: A Devilish Reinvention of the Classic

It’s a bit of a mixed bag being a nun in The First Omen. One minute you’re enjoying smutty talk with the sisters while peeling potatoes, or jumping on a trampoline smoking a cig, and the next you’re at the center of a terrifying conspiracy which could change the world as we know it. A direct prequel to the original 1976 Richard Donner movie, at it’s best The First Omen is an intriguing bit of new lore for a beloved franchise that is also very much its own film—and an intensely female one at that. Director Arkasha Steveson, who makes…
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Radio Silence’s Abigail: A Dracula Movie That Says ‘F*** the Lore’

Glenmaroon House hunches at the top of a long driveway, the severe angles of its walls and joints softened by climbing ivy and deepening twilight shadows. A bronze elk statue towers over the drive’s wet flagstones, antlers pointing to the treeline as though the creature was frozen as it fled the house’s open front doors, the darkness within. Much like the team of criminals at the center of Abigail, Universal Pictures’ upcoming horror movie, Den of Geek is invited to cross the threshold and spend (part of) the night inside to do a job.  Our stakes might not be as…
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How James Bond Lost His Greatest Enemy for 30 Years

“It was all me, James. It’s always been me,” the villain played by Christoph Waltz reveals to super spy James Bond. “The author of all your pain.” The name of that author? Ernst Stavro Blofeld. When Waltz revealed himself as Blofeld in 2015’s Spectre, he reversed a problem that had plagued the Bond franchise for decades: the long absence of 007’s greatest recurring arch-enemy and the huge stakes that came along with his every appearance. How could the man who escaped every death trap and seduced every woman lose his man? How did the notoriously controlling EON Productions, which owns…
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Please Don’t Turn The Matrix into a Shared Universe

A case can be made that Drew Goddard is one of the more underappreciated genre voices to break through in the last 20 years. The filmmaker has had an impressive track record, from writing and directing a bonafide cult classic like Cabin in the Woods to also penning one of the best sci-fi movies of this century, 2015’s The Martian, which was adapted from the Andy Weir novel of the same name and earned Goddard an Oscar nomination. He also wrote the original Cloverfield and helmed the extremely overlooked Bad Times at the El Royale. In nerd circles, his name…
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Dev Patel’s Journey from Real Martial Arts Medalist to Monkey Man Badass

Before he became a professional actor, Dev Patel was a competitive martial artist. Really. The British-born son of Indian immigrants took up Taekwondo at the age of 10 in a neighborhood dojo where he’d go on to earn a black belt. Furthermore, only three years prior to his breakout on the TV series Skins, young Patel won a bronze medal at the Action International Martial Arts World Championships in Dublin. It was a defining moment in his youth. It was also something—he concedes on the other side of completing his first action film, the ferocious Monkey Man—which has always been…
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Godzilla x Kong References an Underrated John Carpenter Movie in Its Best Fight Scene

This article contains mild Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire spoilers. Before Godzilla vs. Kong finished its opening weekend, genre director and lifelong kaiju fan, Adam Wingard, knew he had to get these two crazy guys together again. Despite releasing the film in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic—Godzilla vs. Kong was in fact one of the first bright spots for movie theaters in the spring of 2021 when social distancing kept cinemas at a quarter capacity—the vibe in the auditorium was still electric by picture’s end. “I remember there’s a moment at the end of the movie when Godzilla…
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Let’s Face It, Godzilla Is Pop Culture’s Most Versatile Star

Is there any movie opinion more wrong-headed than saying that Godzilla isn’t my Godzilla? Sure, you might prefer the serious allegorical Godzilla from the 1954 movie or, more recently, Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One. Or you might like the goofier Godzilla from Godzilla vs. Gigan and the newest film, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Heck, it is absolutely okay if the American Iguana monster Zilla is your jam. The only thing that’s unacceptable, that’s absolutely dumb and worthless, is saying that a particular movie doesn’t understand Godzilla. A movie may botch everything else around the giant lizard monster,…
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