Star Trek might be a franchise about humanity overcoming its divisions and working together for the common good, but Star Trek fans remain divided on almost everything. And no question breaks the bonds of peace like that of the best captain in Starfleet. Before we add fuel to the fire in which we burn with our rankings, we need to point out that this list only covers Captains who starred in their own series. On one hand, that restriction does prevent the comments section from exploding when they see how high Carol Freeman from Lower Decks would rank on our…

It’s a good time to be a hero who throws bone-crunching punches in the streaming world. Amazon Prime Video’s list of new releases for February 2025 features a third season for both Invincible and Reacher. Invincible season 3 is set to arrive on February 6 and will find young Mark Grayson leveling up in his training to become the superhero Earth needs. The third season of Reacher follows on February with Alan Ritchson’s title character flexing his massive biceps and trying to rescue a DEA informant. Other Amazon original series of note this month include Laverne Cox-starring comedy Clean Slate…

Like most other redos, horror movie remakes begin their journey on shaky ground. The name recognition that often gets them made is the same recognition that leads to them being judged before anyone watches. It’s hard enough to make a good movie and get people to see it; imagine having to do so while battling the perception that your work diminishes the significance of another beloved movie?  Yet the best horror movie remakes remind us that the existence of remakes is about more than lazy studios looking for cheap cash-ins. When done well, a horror movie remake can elevate the…

In the new trailer for Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s first foray into the horror genre, a worldly voice warns, “There are legends of people where the gift of making music [is] so true, it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. This gift can bring fame and fortune, but it can also pierce the veil between life and death.” For anyone steeped in the history of American music, such mysticism and menace is part and parcel for a story set in the South. Still, the vampires are a new innovation on the part of writer-director Coogler’s film, which follows…

It’s already a rare win for a horror movie to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, especially one as gleefully gross as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. It would be rarer still for one to actually win, but Demi Moore’s lead performance has collected at least one hefty early award at the Golden Globes, and she’s now the odds-on favorite for Oscar night. No stranger to baring it all onscreen in previous roles, including Striptease and The Scarlet Letter, Moore’s turn as an aging actress in crisis—and the nudity required for its body-swapping plot—is no longer a cause for…

This Star Trek article contains spoilers for Section 31. Like the Bell Riots of Deep Space Nine, the movie Star Trek: Section 31 is such a disaster for Trekkies that we’ve stopped our petty debates about Janeway killing Tuvix, or Kirk’s captaincy compared to Picard’s, and have finally come together. As much as Section 31 deserves the drubbing it’s getting, the first duty of every Star Trek fan is still to the truth, and the truth is that the movie does get one thing right about Star Trek. Section 31 is fundamentally an ensemble story about people with vast differences…

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and director Robert Eggers go way back. They’ve worked on every one of Eggers’ features to date—The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and Nosferatu—plus several shorts well before those, starting with 2007’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Yet while their resources and scale have exponentially increased, culminating in last month’s triumphant Nosferartu remake, their working methods and tastes have not. “We would just hang out all the time, because we weren’t working,” Blaschke says while speaking with Den of Geek in correlation with the digital home media release of Nosferatu (available now). “There’s like seven years of that really.…

On the one hand, it’s a simple enough image: Oscar Isaac, veteran stage and film actor, stands before an audience of physicians and academics. We can tell from the style of dress and unkempt hair that Isaac’s Dr. Frankenstein lives in the 19th century (so a bit unlike his literary counterpart). But there’s also a look of mania in his eyes; a face of obsession. It’s fitting for a new screen version of literature’s first mad scientist, and yet it is perhaps more befitting Guillermo del Toro, a celebrated director and dreamer who’s been trying to bring his Frankenstein to…

Doctor Stephen Strange may have the ability to see 14,000,605 futures, but his actor Benedict Cumberbatch cannot. So let’s cut him a bit of slack for being wrong when he initially said that he would not be reprising his role as Doctor Strange for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Cumberbatch retracted that statement on the red carpet at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, telling Business Insider, “I got that wrong, I am in the next one… Don’t ever believe anything I say.” This comes a week after Cumberbatch told Variety he wasn’t in Doomsday but that Strange would be “in a…

“This is a twisted web,” private detective Benoit Blanc tells his partner Marta (Ana de Armas) in 2019’s Knives Out. “And we are not finished untangling it, not yet.” We begin with that quote not just because it’s always nice to recall the syrupy Southern accent Daniel Craig gives Blanc, but because it’s important to keep our limitations in mind when getting a new look at the upcoming Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man. Where the first images from Knives Out and Glass Onion highlighted the ensemble cast of those movies, a new first look photo from Wake Up…

Depicted in countless movies and TV shows, as well as in hip hop lyrics, the Shaolin Temple is a very real place, one of China’s historic treasures and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Established in 495 CE, the original Shaolin Temple lies in the heart of China and is considered the birthplace of Zen and Kung Fu. But before Jet Li came, it was in ruins.  The 20th century was tough on the temple too. In 1928 during the turbulent Republic of China period, the temple was burned down by a warlord named Shi Yousan, who was suspicious of the…

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Section 31 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Dr. Julian Bashir is furious. The Chief Medical Officer aboard Federation Starbase Deep Space 9, Bashir has spent the entirety of the season six episode “Inquisition” being mentally tormented by Luther Sloan, a member of Starfleet Intelligence. Sloan came to DS9 to investigate reports of a senior officer collaborating with the enemy Cardassians, and thinks he’s found his man in Bashir. Worse, Bashir begins to question himself, as evidence mounts that he might indeed be the traitor and has wiped his own mind as a…

Cognitive dissonance plays a big role in Companion. It is after all designed to be a feature in the film’s titular companion series, synthetic lifeforms built to offer physical and emotional assistance to their owners (or “fuck-bots” as Jack Quaid’s Josh enthuses about his purchase). These artificially intelligent machines are meant to emulate human consciousness up to a point—but they must never be aware they’re robots. And yet, by virtue of the movie’s title, trailer, and overall marketing campaign, we know that Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is very much a robot during the movie’s first act, even if she and the…

Most of the first teaser for the FX series Alien: Earth feels pretty familiar to anyone who has seen an Alien movie before. Set to the sounds of the warning klaxon used so effectively in the trailer for the 1978 original, we watch a facehugger scramble through a ship, with internal designs not dissimilar to the USCSS Nostromo. However, in the final seconds of the teaser, we see that the ship is crashing and we see where it will land: Earth. The impact of that reveal is certainly lessened by the fact that the show is called Alien: Earth. However,…

We’ve long known that Quentin Tarantino has imposed a 10-movie limit on himself, claiming that he plans to retire after directing his next picture, whatever that picture will be. But while speaking with critic and commentator Elvis Mitchell at the Sundance Film Festival, Tarantino put a new twist on his oft-discussed rule. He’s not working on a movie at all anymore. Now he’s working on a play. He’ll get to that movie eventually, but given the state of the industry (among other reasons) he is in no hurry. When asked why by Mitchell (as per) Variety), Tarantino responded with a…

There’s no shortage of rumors circulating about Natalie Portman’s potential return to Star Wars. Now that Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor have returned as their Prequel era characters Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, respectively, there seems to be an even greater desire from fans to see Portman to reprise her role as Padmé Amidala in a future Star Wars project. While most of the current rumors revolve around her making an appearance in Ahsoka season 2 as Christensen did in the first season, a new rumor suggests Portman was actually originally slated to appear in another Disney+ series in 2022.…

The nominations are in, the predictions have begun, and a whole lot of folks are probably just looking for where they can see the 10 films nominated for Best Picture (we got you covered on that as well). Still, all the prognostication, horse race reporting, and second-guessing over the snubs and surprises has a bad habit of obscuring why folks care about these things in the first place. The movies. If you’ve ever cared about the Academy Awards, or simply felt the urge to express your lack of care for their selections, it is because deep down we all share…

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Section 31. A quick scan of the internet finds that Den of Geek was hardly the only outlet to set phasers to kill on Star Trek: Section 31. Fans and critics alike have thoroughly rejected the movie, dismissing it as unfunny, unexciting, and largely derivative. It even ranks at the very bottom of our updated Star Trek movie ranking and it’s deserved. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of people ion the internet saying that Section 31 isn’t “real Trek” or, more directly, that the franchise needs to course correct by going back to the…

You’d think there wouldn’t be all that many surprises in a ranking of the various Star Trek movies. Official fan doctrine tends to elevate a select handful of them to the very top (and rightfully so, because when this franchise is great, it’s really great) while dismissing, fairly or unfairly, others. But the reality is, there’s such a wide array of tones across Star Trek films that one fan’s skippable entry is another fan’s favorite (well…most of the time). We chose a panel of our most decorated Starfleet experts to vote on the highs and lows of the Star Trek…

It might seem strange to say that Conclave, a movie nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor, is becoming something of a Best Picture long shot… but conventional wisdom suggests Conclave is now something of a Best Picture long shot. While the Vatican thriller received a host of nominations, including a Best Adapted Screenplay nod for Peter Straughan and Best Film Editing for Nick Emerson, the film’s absence was conspicuously noted in the Best Director race where James Mangold got in for A Complete Unknown over Edward Berger. It was also snubbed in Best Cinematography where, to…