Teen supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a formative force in the world of genre television. It made lead Sarah Michelle Gellar a star, helped shape over two decades worth of similar shows that followed in its wake, and became beloved by a legion of dedicated viewers who can still almost certainly recite the “Into every generation a Slayer is born” monologue that once opened the show by heart. But it’s been a particularly rough year to be a Buffy fan, as several of the series’ core original cast members, including Michelle Trachtenberg and Nicholas Brendon, have passed away…

Even a few months ago, if I told you about a movie that had a blond guy with gigantic muscles, a rainbow bridge between dimensions, and endless monsters and spaceships, you’d think I was talking about Thor. But this weekend, the description fits a non-Marvel flick, Masters of the Universe. The similarity between the two properties isn’t entirely a coincidence. Masters of the Universe started out in 1982 as Mattel’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of Conan the Barbarian and Star Wars, launching a toy line that was part sword and sorcery and part sci-fi. When Mattel teamed…

In the latest clip from Supergirl, Earth gets a new hero in the form of Kara Zor-El, cousin of Superman. But did she bring something more sinister with her? The scene in the clip comes directly from Supergirl’s first appearance in 1959’s Action Comics #252, by Otto Binder and Al Plastino. But where Plastino drew Supergirl emerging from a rocket, not unlike the one that baby Kal-El took to Earth, Milly Alcock arrives via a silver sphere, with a very unsettling pattern. The sphere consists of hexagons, a pattern new to Supergirl’s rocket, but not to DC Comics. In fact,…

This article contains spoilers for Masters of the Universe In the first big payoff moment of Masters of the Universe, kindhearted HR rep Adam Glenn (Nicholas Galitzine) raises the power sword into the air and declares, “By the power of Grayskull… I have the power!” Where once stood a milquetoast man in a powder pink shirt now stands a certified hunk, all rippling biceps, with a tiny metal plate over his impressive pecs and a loin cloth keeping the movie PG-13. Now in He-Man mode, Adam lunges toward his enemy, a blue-skinned pirate guy with a red metal mouth and…

Magicians have been using the art of illusion to deceive the mind for centuries, yet it appears that even they can fall victim to trickery. In Fish Bowl Films and Magic Castle Entertainment Production’s documentary Stealing Magic, the audience will follow British illusionist Andi Gladwin as he launches a multi-year global investigation of an online piracy ring whose mark is any and everyone with a magic trick.  Gladwin teams up with magicians from across the world to follow a trail of encrypted messages, aliases, and suspicious transactions through an underground marketplace built on stolen magic. The team of magicians faces…

The console war was the constant back and forth of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to be the main household name for the video game console. It’s been a long time coming, and it hasn’t always been these three, but they are the main names associated today to this ‘console war,’ but it seems to be finally over. Nintendo was never seemingly interested in this competition, since they were doing their own thing, and it was enough to be in a ‘second place’ of sorts (except in Japan where it is the undisputed number one). But the Xbox console could never…

Stan Lee played a role in coming up with some of the greatest villains of all time: Doctor Doom, Magneto, Devin Dark. Oh, you don’t know that last one? Well, clearly, you weren’t watching the NHL All-Star Game on January 30, 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina. That was not just the night when Team Lidstrom, led by the Perfect Human Nicklas Lidstrom, beat Team Staal, led by then-Carolina Hurricanes captain Eric Staal. It was also the night when the NHL Guardians gathered to do battle with the evil cloud man known as Devin Dark. Okay, even if you were watching,…

The following contains major spoilers for The Terror: Devil in Silver episode 5 “Vermillion.” The penultimate episode of The Terror: Devil in Silver is a tragedy on many levels. An hour that not only features another tragic death but a look back into the dark history of New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, it’s disturbing in ways that have almost nothing to do with the malicious supernatural entity prowling the institution’s halls.  The bulk of the episode focuses on Dorry, a schizophrenic woman who has been a resident at New Hyde for most of her life. Her history is firmly intertwined with…

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Scary Movie? Ever since its inception a quarter century ago, here has been a comedy series defined by its crassness; its cruelty; its happy-go-lucky, stoned-out-of-its-goddamn-mind bad taste. Criticizing it for crossing a line too taboo, or a joke too mean, is to highlight a feature and not a bug. I recall rolling my eyes as a kid at the negative reviews aimed at the original while anxiously anticipating every vulgar, four-letter-laced fart joke the 2000 movie could throw my way. And to be sure, in almost just as long a time since…

He is the best at what he does, and it isn’t very nice. Sony Interactive Entertainment is giving the X-Men’s most iconic, violent, and animalistic member his own game in what may be Insomniac Games’ most violent outing yet. Now, the 2026 PlayStation State of Play presentation has provided gamers with their first look at the highly-anticipated single-player action-adventure game, Marvel’s Wolverine.  Three years after leaving his team, James “Logan” Howlett, a.k.a. Wolverine rejoins Task Force X as they face one of their darkest challenges yet. Bolivar Trask is kidnapping mutants based on his belief in human superiority, and Wolverine…

No one would argue that Batman: The Animated Series got better when it was redesigned and renamed The New Batman Adventures in 1997, but that latter run still had its bright spots. Case in point, season 2’s “Legends of the Dark Knight,” which homages several classic Batman stories, including Frank Miller‘s The Dark Knight Returns. Prime Video series Batman: Caped Crusader, the Bruce Timm-created spiritual sequel to the Animated Series, hopes to follow in the footsteps of The New Batman Adventures, but not only referencing Dark Knight Returns, but mashing it up with one of the most beloved episodes of…

Stranger Things might now be known for its irresistible mix of humor and scares, but when the Duffer brothers started putting together the first season of their hit Netflix show behind the scenes, it apparently had a much more dramatic tone that soon evolved after one particularly surprising revelation. During a recent “Fix It in Post” panel at Netflix’s FYSEE LA festival (via Deadline) Stranger Things editor Dean Zimmerman revealed his part in altering the tone of the show in season 1, noting that the Duffer brothers may write “very tight scripts and are very specific on how they want…

Southern Gothic has never looked as good as it does on the pages of That Texas Blood. The Image Comics-produced neo-Western series, written by Chris Condon and illustrated by Jacob Phillips, combines the blood-and-dust stained fiction of Cormac McCarthy with the nihilistic noir of a Frank Miller graphic novel.  Despite its phenomenally twisted storyline and intense visual style, That Texas Blood has largely flown under the radar of mainstream audiences. Recently, however, the acclaimed comic flew to the top of the aftermarket sales charts, beating out multiple issues of heavyweight titles such as Absolute Batman and Amazing Spider-Man.  This sudden…

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more. As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match…

Criminal. Liar. Thief. A Kingsagent sent to test the loyalty of the citizenry, who killed a good man for criticizing the ruler. That’s how Krem of the Yellow Hills is described in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. We knew that Krem would get an upgrade to be the big bad of the upcoming movie Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueir, but until the final trailer released, we weren’t sure how much more imposing Krem would become. The trailer shows off Krem and his group the Brigands, space marauders like the Ravagers…

This article contains spoilers for Backrooms. Backrooms, the long-awaited A24 horror movie directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, hit theaters last week with a lot of expectations from the audience of Parsons’ previous short film series, The Backrooms (Found Footage), which has more than 80 million views on YouTube. While Parsons has said that the feature-length movie exists within the reality of his YouTube films, he’s also aware of what he refers to as “lorebloat” a term that describes the internet’s inclination towards incessant theorizing. “[Lorebloat] really does run the risk of totally defeating the ability of this project to actually…

Doctor Doom is the greatest villain in comic book history, if not in all of American fiction. But you wouldn’t know that if you only watched Fantastic Four movies. In the 2000s, Julian McMahon played the supervillain as a petulant CEO who pouts his way into the experiment that transforms Reed Richards and family into superheroes. In 2015, Toby Kebbell played Victor Von Doom as a moody gamer who also pouted a lot. Of course, the MCU promised to fix all that. The same people who gave us an earnest Captain America in a star-spangled suit and Thanos donning the…

There are two Skeletors living along the backroads of our pop culture landscape. The first is the original Saturday morning cartoon villain that many Gen-Xers and some elder Millennials remember fondly. He sneers, schemes, and otherwise slinks his way through one 30-minute Masters of the Universe adventure after another wherein, invariably, He-Man kicks his ass. The other is an internet creation spawned by those same viewers decades later. This guy is funnier, more acerbic, and basically a chaos agent snarking about whatever daily indignity his creator wants to complain about. He’s both supervillain and meme. The modest joys and bigger…

Hollywood usually acts like it owns everything when it comes to movies, but every once in a while, a film from another country changes the conversation. Some introduced styles that American studios try to copy, while others showed mainstream audiences genres they had never seen before. They became the kind of movies audiences keep recommending years later because they still feel unique every single time. IMDb City of God (2002) Its explosive energy, raw performances, and kinetic camerawork immediately grabbed the attention of American directors and studios. IMDb Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) Its graceful martial arts sequences introduced many…

The following The Vampire Lestat review is spoiler free. AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is, hands down, one of the best adaptations in television history, a series that manages to honor the luxurious, emotionally decadent spirit of its source material even as it makes major changes to the events depicted in Anne Rice’s original novel. Full of decadent, often gleeful violence, thorny moral questions about truth and memory, and a central relationship that’s as frequently toxic as it is desperately romantic, the series’s first two seasons are an utter delight, and a powerful reminder of the great things that genre…