Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival Revels in the Horror of the Grotesque

We were incredibly relieved at Summer Game Fest 2026 when we learned that Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival wouldn’t be yet another asymmetrical online horror game based on an existing cinematic property. After all, following in the steps of Dead by Daylight, there has been no shortage of them, including Friday the 13th: The Game, Evil Dead: The Game, and Halloween: The Game – that well has run bone dry for some time. After that SGF preview, we’ve gotten to play the full version of the game and we’re happy to report that Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is a solid single-player horror title that definitely feels in line with the horror franchise that Barker created.

Developed and published by Saber Interactive, the game follows protagonist Aidan Lynch, whose girlfriend Sunny is viciously taken by the Cenobites after they accidentally unleash the sinister potential of a puzzlebox known as the Genesis Configuration. Following the Cenobites into their hellish dimension to rescue Sunny, Aidan finds himself traveling between Hell and his own reality, where he must contend with a murderous cult known as the Scarlet Church. Using a variety of weapons and unlocking the powers of the Genesis Configuration, Aidan travels between the Scarlet Church’s sanguine hideouts and the labyrinthine corridors of Hell, braving cultists and Cenobites alike to save Sunny.

Right from the game’s opening scene, it’s clear that Revival is keeping in line with the gratuitous nature that the Hellraiser franchise is known for, with plenty of graphic sex and violence to set the mood. Even as someone who’s watched the Hellraiser movies – well, the good ones – and is well-aware of how delightfully nasty it can be, I was surprised by how much was shown on-screen in the game, something that only seems to escalate as the story progresses. Simply put, this is a game that earns its M-rating and definitely evokes the grimy and unpleasant atmosphere of the cinematic source material, inviting players to experience the lurid sights that it has to show them.

Played from a first-person perspective, players get to see these gory and BDSM-inspired sights up close and very personal as they guide Aidan through his nightmarish adventure. Running the game on a standard PlayStation 5 for the purposes of this review, the game visually looks stunning, particularly whenever the action shifts back to Hell and its puzzle-filled levels as Aidan ventures deeper into his own heart of darkness. The game’s early sequences in the real world are similarly well-crafted but as Aidan enters more well-lit environments, the technical presentation’s seams start to show, with its textures and frame rates not quite up to par in these portions of the game. Horror works best when it’s in the darkness and so does Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival.

The game’s combat is where the overall experience falters the most, particularly when multiple enemies are on screen at once. Aidan relies on everything from melee weapons and conventional firearms to the Genesis Configuration and its supernatural abilities to kill and dismember any foes that get in his way. Feeling routine at best and uninspired at worst, the combat system serves its purpose but rarely exhilarates in a way that contemporaries like Resident Evil or even the more grounded melee action in Silent Hill does. I never quite found myself looking forward to a skirmish in Hellraiser: Revival and was usually more relieved when a given fight was done than anything else, so that I could move on. The boss fights are handled much better, with any encounter with the Chatterer being a standout sequence, but they tend to be further and farther in between than ripping and tearing through the rank and file enemies populating every level.

Where Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival excels is through its atmosphere and the more puzzle-centric challenges that players have to overcome throughout the game. Whenever the player is plunged into the masochistic mayhem in the shadows or the Gothic majesty of Hell, the whole experience is elevated significantly. If the game shaved off its more perfunctory combat sequences and heightened its focus on exploration and puzzle-solving, including multiple memorable sequences that feels directly inspired by P.T., it would be a near-flawless recreation of what has made the Hellraiser franchise so great.

When Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival leans into its strengths through unsettling mood and tension-fueled set pieces over overt action, the game is truly firing on all cylinders as the ultimate love letter to the franchise. The game recognizes when its major set pieces are expected to deliver and appropriately takes its biggest swings creatively during these sequences, making the most of the familiar Hellraiser aesthetics. It’s the moments in between, however, where the game could use a bit more polish, though the title is still a must-play for fans of the franchise.

And, at the very least, it’s a good thing this isn’t yet another Dead by Daylight knock-off.

Developed and published by Saber Interactive, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

How Greta Gerwig Got Led Zeppelin’s Support and THAT Song in Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew

Greta Gerwig was pitching a Chronicles of Narnia movie to Netflix before she realized she wanted to make it.

The year was 2019 and her frequent collaborator/husband Noah Baumbach was in the midst of the Netflix rollout for his own passion project, Marriage Story. Meanwhile Gerwig was fresh off the release of her solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, and on the eve of her second feature opening: Little Women. She was a renowned filmmaker with two Oscar nominations to her name, but she was also still an indie maven who simply wanted to corner Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. At the time, it was just to enthusiastically advise him that Netflix should absolutely begin its recently acquired Chronicles of Narnia adaptations by making The Magician’s Nephew first. It’s technically the sixth published fantasy novel by C.S. Lewis set in the mythical realm of Narnia, but it’s also the first chronological book in the narrative, acting as a prequel to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

“Would you like to write it?” Sarandos asked Gerwig on the spot. The filmmaker was floored, and yet also undeniably intrigued as a lifelong fan of Lewis’ fantasy series and the magic they represent to many, many generations.

She recounted as much during a heartfelt presentation of The Magician’s Nephew’s first trailer Tuesday morning in New York City. Sitting beside fellow Lewis and fantasy enthusiast Stephen Colbert, Gerwig recounted both her earliest passions for the books, as well as how that was shared by everyone she collaborated with. Hence in the below trailer, you can even hear the shocking strains of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” an iconic 1971 rock anthem that Gerwig said spoke to her with its narrative poetry about faith, as well as the danger of following false idols—a menace that any fan of Magician’s Nephew or the later Narnia books would recognize.

Famously, though, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page do not let any filmmaker or movie use their music, especially that song. And yet—like Gerwig—they grew up with Narnia and granted permission for “Stairway to Heaven” after she showed them a cut of Magician’s Nephew months ahead of the film’s February release.

The use of the song in the trailer (and presumably the film) certainly signals a bold vision for the adaptation, anachronistically combining a story set in London circa 1900 with post-‘60s rock ’n roll. Similarly, Emma Mackey’s White Witch in her go-go minidress looks like she’s ready for a night out in Soho London during Zeppelin’s heyday. But the anachronism—and vote of confidence from a notoriously film-shy rock band—makes an unmistakable promise: this interpretation of Narnia will be much more personal and filmmaker-driven than the Disney iterations that tackled the first three published Narnia novels in the early 2000s.

Indeed, during the presentation Gerwig spoke eloquently, and even tearfully, about how important these books were to her growing up. “They were read to me before I could even read,” Gerwig told the audience (in a presentation where no recording was allowed, so our quoting is done by memory). “My mother read them to me, and then I read them and reread them after I learned to read.” Her parents even got the first television set Greta knew so their daughter could watch the BBC version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe on PBS (“I have no notes for BBC!” the director said.)

She later surmised that the Chronicles of Narnia as a collective were “one of the two books that made me,” noting that the most significant childhood novels shape who we are. “For me, those books were just as much C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.” Getting to interpret both in her own voice on the big screen is something the filmmaker seems visibly thankful for and, perhaps, still a little awed with responsibility by.

Yet that is why she felt so strongly about beginning with The Magician’s Nephew. Like most children, her original exposure to Narnia is through Lewis’ first published fantasy novel, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which she read as a kid, followed by Prince Caspian. She didn’t get to The Magician’s Nephew until near the end of the series, as the penultimate story ahead of The Last Battle. However, as a young adult she discovered in a letter Lewis wished new readers to start with Magician’s Nephew, which chronicles the genesis of Narnia.

“I love the idea of beginning with the start of a universe,” Gerwig explained, and setting a stage for a movie saga that can run the entire cycle from Narnia’s rise (Magician) to its eventual end (The Final Battle). “The image of Aslan singing a universe into existence” specifically stuck with Gerwig. As did the sense of faith in the novels, something Gerwig grew to appreciate after attending Catholic School as a child (hence Lady Bird). She admitted she always conflated the communal experience of going to church with the only other she knew growing up: the movies.

Now as a filmmaker, she sought to literally walk in Lewis’ footsteps. Not only did she reread the Narnia books, but much else of what Lewis wrote, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. Additionally, she traveled to Oxford, Cambridge, and Belfast in order to try to see the world through his eyes.

Netflix, meanwhile, seems to be peering at it through Gerwig’s, backing her way into this saga and also supporting her to the hilt more than any previous filmmaker by making Narnia a theatrical event. When Magician’s Nephew opens next February, it will be the first Netflix-produced movie to have a 50-day theatrical window in wide release, including on IMAX screens.

“I can only write for the big screen,” Gerwig explained and she expressed gratitude for Sarandos and Netflix supporting that instinct. The Netflix CEO apparently encouraged Gerwig to write it for the biggest screen she could, and now it’s about to make history for the streamer at the largest theatrical venues in the world. Maybe a new universe really is beginning.

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew opens in theaters on Feb. 12.

Wuxia, Anime, and Giant Hair: Street Fighter Director Explains ‘90s Influences

It’s one of the most recognizable silhouettes in video game history. With six-plus feet of beefy muscle squeezed into a tight, sleeveless green shirt, the character they call Guile cut a towering figure over arcade cabinets via his blonde flattop haircut, not least of all because the do reached sizes larger than most men’s heads. This ludicrous-looking sprite is one of the many design choices that made Street Fighter II a staple of ‘90s childhoods, alongside iconography like Blanka’s green-hued skin and Chun-Li’s impossible thighs. And he was among the first things fans saw in the earliest Street Fighter movie teaser, with wrestler-turned-actor Cody Rhodes adorned in an upright, platinum wig roughly the size of a Shih Tzu on his head.

“We went through a lot of iterations,” director Kitao Sakurai confides with a weary grin. “A lot. There was some debate of ‘okay, are we really going to do this?’ But I think at that point, we’re like, ‘Yes! We have to do this.’” There were apparently versions of the design more outlandish, scaled to a size where even the filmmaker/lifelong Street Fighter super-fan could concede “that’s too far.” (The biggest being a full six inches taller than the wig in the finished movie.) But in a weird way, getting to that very threshold is a kind of mission statement for the new video game movie: they are going for “maximum fidelity,” and taking it right to the point where it strains credulity.

When Street Fighter opens Friday, it will be the second major Capcom video game adaptation of the year after Zach Cregger’s winning take on Resident Evil, and the second this year riffing on 1990s glory days in arcade style tournaments (the other being Mortal Kombat II). Yet perhaps more than any other video game adaptation in recent memory, Sakurai’s appears to be leaning into the sheer visual lunacy of its game—and away from the instincts of so many Hollywood movies that often seek to ground the absurd of comic books or video games into something approaching reality. 

“I think that for a lot of years we’ve been getting adaptations that feel like, ‘Okay, what’s the gritty, real world version of this game or IP? How do ground it into the real world?’” Sakurai explains. In fact, that was one of the directions Paramount Pictures was considering when entertaining pitches on a new Street Fighter movie. “I was like, ‘Look, to do that for Street Fighter just feels wrong.’ There needed to be a different approach, and I think that more vibrant, ‘90s, having fun with the [interpretation], that embraces the colorfulness of the game and embraces the boldness of the world, felt like a fresher swing on this material.”

It also felt in line with Sakurai’s own muses. Forty-three years old and a child of both Japan and the U.S.—he was born in Kyoto but grew up in Cleveland, Ohio—Sakurai has vivid memories of playing Street Fighter II at friends’ homes on Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. His favorite character to play “in beast mode” was Blanka, for the record, and Dhalsim when he wanted to get silly. “The way he stretched, and the floating and levitating, there was just something so unique about him that drew me in.”

But the future filmmaker also grew up aware of the differences between Western and Eastern action cinema; it was an era when Hong Kong martial artists were going to insane, sometimes dreamlike places that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone would never dare venture.

“I grew up on Japanese anime and manga, and that was my kind of bread and butter of what I was watching growing up,” says Sakurai. “So I wanted to make a movie that did bridge those gaps. My favorite action movies were Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies, and Wuxia wirework sort of things where people are flying across the room and it doesn’t look real but it’s great, so who cares? It’s awesome! I wanted to make a movie that could support that style of filmmaking and embrace the sort of fun of that era and try to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western action filmmaking.”

Indeed, as revealed over this past weekend, Street Fighter will even feature a deliberately retro throwback to ‘90s anime styles, infamous for their colored line work and physical imperfections created by hand-brushed strokes and analog photography. Street Fighter, which is largely set in 1993, homages those techniques in a prologue that reveals the ‘80s backstory of the film’s central heroes Ryu and Ken (Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo).

Says Sakurai, “In prep, we’re like, how are we gonna actually shoot these flashback sequences? Are we going to de-age the actors? Are we gonna hire child actors? None of that felt great.” That’s when the director lit on the fact that Street Fighter already has a rich history with anime in Japan. So “the more interesting choice is let’s go ahead and do these sequences as fully hand-drawn ‘90s style animation.”

“It’s an incredibly difficult process,” he adds. “Every frame of animation is fully drawn by hand by an artist in a ‘90s throwback way. We fully went for it, and it was an incredibly expensive and painstaking thing, but I think you feel the love and effort that goes into it.”

Like the anime component, the film’s entire ‘90s setting was a “layer” that Sakurai found himself really championing. The film is of course based on a video game franchise best associated with that era of arcade cabinets, however the film embraces this fact by occurring in a 1993 that’s more neon day-go more outlandish than the actual 1994 Street Fighter movie made at the time with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia. Granted, the modern director almost sheepishly admits he really wasn’t “close” to that movie growing up, instead favoring the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. “Tonally, I thought it just rocked. And then that was so close to the game, to the spirit of the game, so I always had that in the back of my mind, a movie that embraces the game.”

With that said, his Street Fighter in some ways is every bit as ridiculous, if not more so, than the video games. Although it pulls its punches in carefully chosen ways as well.

“I didn’t want to devalue certain elements like the hadouken,” says Sakurai. “In the game, you can shoot hadoukens a lot, but in the movie if you showed that a bunch of times, it would kind of lose its meaning. If everybody had energy attacks all the time, it starts to be a different thing… So I wanna be really purposeful about how these moves and energy attacks are being portrayed and when they come, how they come, and assigning real meaning to them. But as far as a character like Blanka, I was like yes. That was kind of a more is more thing. Let’s really lean into making this absurd character real.”

There are of course a lot of characters in the film, as well as the tournament structure that fans expect from the games (and which was curiously absent in the 1994 adaptation). Sakurai is acutely aware that fans need that competitive format onscreen, but he also is trying to balance that with the demands of building central character arcs for his three principles: Ryu, Ken, and who might just be the film’s breakout, Callina Liang as Chun-Li. The actress has indeed gone viral on social media even before the movie’s release, with the star revealing she gained six centimeters of muscle in each leg for the film.

“I was surprised [she did that],” her director laughs, “but I also kind of had this inkling when I met her and just understood what this meant to her. She’s also a hardcore gamer, and I could just tell that she had this level of unbelievable commitment. She was just the most—you could not stop her from training, day in and day out. As soon as she got the role, it was like a crazy person training.”

But there are many performances that Sakurai savors in the film, and those he’d like to expand on if given a chance. That goes for even the man underneath the comically wide flattop.

“I want everybody back,” the director says. “It was such an incredible experience with everybody. But I was very surprised by, to be honest, Cody’s performance as Guile. He’s so funny and so unexpected, and I think a lot of people are going to be really surprised by what he brings.” The hair, however, won’t be a surprise. That’s a promise.

Street Fighter opens on Friday, Oct. 16.

Mike Flanagan on Carrie White’s Place in the Stephen King Multiverse

This article contains spoilers for Prime Video TV series Carrie.

Carrie White was never alone.

While the titular teenager of Stephen King‘s debut novel may have felt isolated under the burdens of high school bullies, an abusive mother, and burgeoning telekinetic powers, in reality she was but one of many experiencing those same trials and tribulations… yes, even the “telekinetic powers” bit. That’s made apparent in the pages of King’s epistolary text and it’s something that showrunner Mike Flanagan wanted to make even clearer in Carrie, Prime Video’s eight-episode modern update to Carrie White’s story.

“[King] is pretty explicit about the fact that Carrie is not unique in this ability,” Flanagan tells Den of Geek. “She’s very rare, but she’s part of a sorority of other gifted women that have this ‘TK gene,’ as King calls it. An opportunity we had that a lot of the other adaptations didn’t have was we had the real estate to really explore that. There’s a much larger world that Carrie belongs to that she doesn’t know about. And I think one of the tragedies of King’s story is she never finds out. We had a chance to change that.”

Carrie does indeed change Carrie White’s (Summer H. Howell) perception of her own world, and in grand fashion too. The series features multiple other “TK” individuals who lurk in the background of the narrative before (quite literally) bursting onto the scene of a familiar climactic prom night at Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School. Emaline West (Thalia Dudek) astral projects to the gym to encourage Carrie’s fiery revenge, eventually going so far as to get her permission to “take the wheel” of her consciousness and ratchet up the mayhem. Meanwhile members of a telekinetic cult Cara (Ruth Codd), Caitlin (Delainey Hayles), and Sable (Cassandra Naud) also arrive on scene to maximize the shadowy ambiguity of what actually happened that night. Masterminding these events is Adelaide (Kate Siegel), the leader of said cult who interviews survivors in the wake of the prom night massacre and eventually kills Carrie’s mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan).

Even before all that violence, however, Carrie finds a creative, less explosive way to communicate the true scope of the show’s supernatural universe. Episodes two through seven of the series feature cold opens that depict supposed real life instances of women displaying telekinetic powers. These range from a woman lifting up a car in 1982 Georgia to a woman levitating in 2010 Hebei, China, to a mysterious teleporting young sleepwalker in 2015 Iowa.

According to Flanagan, these scenes were not only fun to research and shoot but they also placed Carrie in an important larger context.

“We named some real historical figures who can very easily be viewed as potentially part of Carrie’s world. That was a blast to research but it also kind of helps it on the biggest themes of the show, which is a young woman finding out the legacy of the community to which she belongs. The one thing about our Carrie is that she’s been sequestered away from any community her whole life in an effort to protect her. So getting to expand that world, it’s a very Stephen King thing to do.”

While the real life instances of suspected paranormal activity tie Carrie into our world, there’s another, arguably more important world that Carrie White needs a connection into: Stephen King’s. The horror maestro and undisputed heavyweight champion of pop culture has been playing with storytelling multiverses long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made them a household concept, something that frequent King adaptor Flanagan believes often goes under-appreciated.

“He started [a multiverse] when he was 19 and he doesn’t get enough credit for that. It’s become the engine of so much of our pop culture – the connected universe, the multiverse. You’ve got studios falling over themselves to build a universe from scratch. King’s had one the whole time. If you grow up reading his stories, the joy of finding the connections is completely unique and wonderful.”

Carrie White does not physically appear in any further Stephen King books (which makes some sense given that she’s, you know, dead). But the tragic events of Chamberlain, Maine are referenced in multiple other King works like The Dead Zone and It. If King’s Carrie can operate as the de facto beginning for a larger storytelling universe on the page, then can Flanagan’s Carrie serve a similar function on the screen? It’s a question worth asking, especially since Flanagan has received King’s explicit blessing for this adaptation and others and has access to a lucrative overall deal with Amazon that includes some ambitious plans for King’s epic Dark Tower saga.

“[King] certainly plays with that in everything. There’s a lot of talk in The Shining about the ‘other people.’ Danny Torrance isn’t alone in that world. He meets one other in The Shining, and then the growing world of that is hinted at pretty explicitly. Doctor Sleep blows the lid off of it and then you get into The Institute and Firestarter and everything else. This felt like a really wonderful way in that extended Stephen King universe to acknowledge that too and say, Carrie only ever felt like a loner. She was never really alone.”

By the end of Carrie‘s eight episodes, Carrie counts Emaline, Adelaide, and more among her peers. Perhaps one day she’ll count Roland Deschain, Danny Torrance, and other King favorites among them too.

All eight episodes of Carrie are now available to stream on Prime Video.

The 10 Best Time-Travel Movies of All Time

Why in the world would anyone make a time-travel movie? As soon as a character steps out into the past or the future, even by a matter of minutes, it raises huge questions that most filmmakers don’t want to answer: Is this a new reality? What happens at a physics level? Is the future different now? And yet, when we’re watching a great time travel movie, we don’t ask any of those questions. We just go along for the ride.

The ability of the best movies to overcome those fundamental questions and grip the audience make time travel one of the most exciting and interesting genres, which is why we’re ranking the best in the canon here. But two quick notes: first, we’re mostly concerned with time-travel movies here, as distinct from time-loop movies. The distinction can be a fine one, but we’re intentionally leaving off stories about people forced to repeat the same segment of time, as in Groundhog Day and Palm Springs. Second, we’re most concerned with movies that tell compelling stories, with interesting characters and thought-provoking themes, and not with movies about the mechanics of time travel. Which is to say, Primer isn’t on this list.

But, hey, if you don’t like it, you can always go back in time and keep this list from ever being written!

10. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

On one hand, the “time heist” section of Avengers: Endgame feels more like a victory lap than it does its own story. As Marvel’s heroes rewatch scenes from The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, one can almost hear the characters slap each other on the back, like cast members hugging at the end of a Saturday Night Live episode.

That should be absolutely exhausting, but somehow, Endgame pulls it off. Endgame was indeed a capstone for the first three phases of the MCU (if not the entire franchise, as superhero fatigue suggests). And so we do allow them the victory lap, cheering along as Captain America rolls his eyes at his younger self or Bruce Banner blushes to see himself Hulk out. If good time-travel movies are never about the science, and always about the feelings they can evoke. then Endgame ranks among the best.

9. About Time (2013)

Given his penchant for big, emotional swings, it’s kind of surprising that Richard Curtis hasn’t returned to the trope more often (he did, of course, write the Doctor Who weepy “Vincent and the Doctor”). About Time follows the meek Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson), who learns from his father (Bill Nighy) that the men in his family have the ability to travel through time. How, you ask? By going to a quiet spot and concentrating really, really hard.

If that explanation bothers you, then wait until you learn about what Tim does with his powers: going through a trial and error process to make himself into the type of person who wins the love and affection of the girl of his dreams, Mary (Rachel McAdams). Yes, if you stop and think about it, About Time makes no sense and has icky implications. But unlike the other McAdams romantic time-travel movie of the era, The Time Traveler’s Wife, About Time‘s charming cast and open-hearted emotion overcomes all of those objections, making it much easier to just go with the (time) flow.

8. Timecrimes (2007)

Time-travel stories tend to have one of two themes: either that the future is unwritten (yes, that will come up more later), or that we can change the future by reliving the past. Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo’s lean thriller Timecrimes falls into the latter category, and advances the theme through a clever circular plot structure.

Timecrimes stars Karra Elejalde as a bored, rich creep named Héctor, whose afternoon spent ogling women in the woods nearby his impressive house is interrupted when he’s attacked by a man whose head is covered in red bandages. Héctor eludes the attacker by ducking into a laboratory, where a scientist offers to help by putting him into what turns out to be a time machine, sending Héctor back by one hour. As Héctor tries to escape his fate, the situation gets increasingly more deranged, leading to a fun (if somewhat telegraphed) climax.

7. 12 Monkeys (1995)

In Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, written by David Peoples and Janet Peoples, the theme of inescapable fate carries emotional weight in addition to being a clever plot mechanic. A loose remake of the French short film La Jetée, 12 Monkeys seems to offer hope that humanity can improve and learn from its mistakes. But instead, the characters find themselves locked in an unbreakable chain of events.

What sets 12 Monkeys apart, besides Gilliam’s gonzo visual style, is the film’s genuine heart. Bruce Willis tones down all of his cool confidence to play Cole, a convict living in the post-apocalyptic 2020s who is sent back to 1996 to learn about the virus that wiped out much of humanity. While he does indeed search for the secret of the Army of the 12 Monkeys and meets charismatic mental patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), Cole also gets put in an asylum, where he bonds with psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). That bond gives 12 Monkeys a pathos that goes deeper than the mind-bending plotting of the average time-travel film.

6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek loves a good time-travel story, and the franchise has no qualms about wrestling with the heady questions the sub-genre raises. And the Enterprise crew’s fourth cinematic adventure does certainly touch on those ideas, as Kirk leads his team back to 1986 San Francisco to find a whale who can communicate with the probe attacking Earth in the future. But with The Voyage Home, director Leonard Nimoy and his team of writers (including Nicolas Meyer, whose H.G. Wells vs Jack the Ripper movie Time After Time just misses this list), lean almost entirely on fish-out-of-water comedy.

And that’s exactly what makes The Voyage Home a delight. By 1986, the stars of Star Trek had grown fully comfortable in their roles and established an unshakable camaraderie with one another. Nimoy gives his longtime cast mates moments to show off their comedic skills: James Doohan’s Scotty talking into a computer mouse, Walter Koenig’s Chekov looking for nuclear wessels, and William Shatner’s Kirk shouting “double dumb ass on you!” The Voyage Home isn’t Star Trek at its most thoughtful or exciting, but it is the most fun.

5. Interstellar (2014)

Given his obsession with time, it’s shocking that Interstellar is Christopher Nolan‘s only real time-travel movie (though an argument can be made for Tenet). From his breakout Memento all the way to The Odyssey this year, Nolan has loved playing with timelines and timeframes to create mesmerizing effects. While some find his approach too formal to elicit a genuine emotional response, others find Nolan’s study of time deeply effecting, especially in Interstellar.

Interstellar begins in the future, when former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is called back into service to undergo a mission to go through a wormhole and find a new planet for humanity to inhabit. But various mishaps result in the mission taking decades instead of the two years he had planned, forcing the single father Cooper to miss the opportunity to raise his children. We won’t go into detail here about how time-travel plays into Interstellar, but if you’ve seen a Nolan movie before, you know that Cooper will do anything to get back to his family.

4. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Just because time-travel mechanics are boring to discuss doesn’t mean that they can’t be fun to play with. Case in point: the build to the climax of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) get cornered by the latter’s stern cop dad. “Trash can, remember the trash can,” Ted tells himself, prompting a trash can to fall from the sky and land on his dad’s head.

How did that happen? Bill and Ted realized that they could solve any problem by going back in time after the event to fix it, which means that their future selves were also in the scene, waiting to drop the trash can and allow their past selves to go to the future and drop the trash can and… Obviously, it’s confusing. But that’s the genius of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon and directed by Stephen Herek. The plot can cook your brain and we’ll accept it, because we’re already following a couple of brain-dead (complimentary) metal-heads.

3. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)

As highlighted by the titular group’s name, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie constantly forces viewers to ask, “How did they do this?” From the original web shorts that Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol made together, through the 16-episode TV series that ran on Viceland, up to last year’s feature film, Johnson and McCarrol common sense and copyright laws to create incredible comedy that blends real-life with absurd fiction.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie continues the tradition. When Matt puts a flux capacitor in their camper, and when Bird accidentally uses it to go back to 2008, they use the outrageous situation to finally realize their dream: playing the Rivoli, a mid-size club in Toronto. As always, that meager ambition leads to outrageous bits, including direct riffs on Back to the Future, and mixtures of real world reactions with planned stunts, some of which are achieved by incorporating unused footage from web shorts form 2008. More than the audacious filmmaking, the pleasure of NTBTSTM comes from its emotional heart. At the end of the day, the movie’s just about two guys who love each other, and who want to play the Rivoli.

2. The Terminator (1984)

James Cameron fans will spend the rest of their lives debating the merits of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with some praising the first movie’s lean horror vibe, while others extolling the spectacular virtues of the blockbuster follow-up. But on a list of time-travel movies, the original terminates every sequel.

Inspired by a fever dream about a metallic man pulling himself from an explosion, The Terminator stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800, an android sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the woman whose son John will lead the human resistance against machines. To protect Sarah, those humans send back Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a loyal soldier who eventually becomes a greater part of John Connor’s story. Cameron’s film directly addresses questions about fate and free will, but never at the expense of the action, making The Terminator one of the most purely entertaining time-travel movies.

1. Back to the Future (1985)

Back to the Future isn’t the first time-travel movie, but it is the most important. At least half of the films on this list pay homage to it, either by direct reference, or by just building on that movie’s structure. The movie does lots of things right: Robert Zemeckiss fantastic work with special effects, the memorable lead performances by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, and especially that awesome Delorian time machine.

But the secret to the success of Back to the Future stems from the relatable emotions that prompted its creation, when co-writer Bob Gale looked at his dad’s old yearbook, and wondered if he and his father would have been friends. So even though, as John Mulaney famously observed, Back to the Future has plenty of nonsensical and unsavory moments, the central idea of a kid learning that his parents weren’t what he expected them to be carries the story through, always couching the time-travel conceit in real emotions.

CBS Comedy Eternally Yours Examines the 500-Year Itch of Vampire Marriage

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They say love never dies, but after 500 years, it might at least need a nap. CBS’s newest supernatural comedy asks what happens when forever starts to feel a little too long.

Eternally Yours follows Charles (Ed Weeks) and Liz (Allegra Edwards), vampires married for five centuries who’ve long since lost their spark, going through the motions of eternity alongside their eccentric coven in modern-day Seattle. Their stagnation gets upended when their daughter Emma starts dating Max, a well-meaning human, forcing the couple to reckon with whether their marriage—and forever itself—is worth holding onto. 

The series’s pilot has an against-the-odds origin story, originally being written in 2015 by Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, the same writing duo behind Ghosts. Weeks first read the script in 2019 for the podcast Dead Pilots Society, which stages readings of pilots that were bought but never picked up. 

Seven years later, the script resurfaced, with CBS greenlighting the project after the success of Ghosts. As Weeks recalls, “I guess in the interim, Ghosts had become a huge success, and CBS had given Eternally Yours another chance, and we’re all so relieved they did because it’s been a dream.” 

The long wait didn’t dampen the rest of the cast’s enthusiasm once the script landed in their hands. “Anything that makes me laugh out loud while I’m reading it is always a good sign, and that happened every page,” Edwards says. 

Helen J. Shen (Emma), a longtime fan of vampire lore, appreciates that humor, admiring how the show took something dark and was able to “spin it and have a heartwarming element to it” as well. Parker Young (Jesse) feels similarly, sharing that he “was so thrilled just to have the opportunity” to be part of the project. Having such a fun script to work with, Jaren Lewison (Max) summed up the resulting bond the ensemble shares now: “We have kind of become a bit of a coven.” 

That camaraderie extended beyond the Eternally Yours cast. Asked if the Ghosts cast offered any advice on working with CBS, Lewison recalls, “I think the biggest thing is they said, ‘You’re just going to have the best time.’ They were like, ‘You’re going to be so taken care of. You’re going to have so much fun; just enjoy it.’” 

The connection naturally raised the question of a crossover between the two CBS supernatural comedies. Edwards (who guest starred as Donna on Ghosts) doesn’t rule out a visit, saying, “I would love to go to Woodstone as a family. A little traveling vacation to Woodstone! They could put us anywhere.”  

Eternally Yours premiered Oct. 8, 2026 on CBS. New episodes debut Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. ET on CBS.

Minus Zero Director Reveals Why He Brought Back Godzilla’s Greatest Enemy (Exclusive)

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The release of Godzilla Minus One in 2023 marked a watershed moment for the legendary giant monster, whose screen exploits began nearly seven decades earlier with the original Japanese release of Ishirō Honda’s Gojira (1954). Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, Minus One was the first Godzilla movie since the original to be set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when a defeated and traumatized Japan was left with nothing and forced to rebuild in the wake of the devastating atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Perhaps even more explicitly than any other Gojira follow-up, the monster was once again positioned as a metaphor for the emergence of nuclear weapons and their devastating physical and psychological toll. Yamazaki also added not just fully fleshed-out human characters to the mix, but also approached Godzilla’s attacks on the populace with an intensity and realism previously unseen in the franchise. Audiences around the world responded, with Minus One becoming the highest-grossing Japanese Godzilla film ever made and the Academy awarding it Best Visual Effects, a first for both the Oscars and the Big G.

Now the King of the Monsters is back, and Yamazaki has returned to write and direct Godzilla Minus Zero, picking up the story of the found family comprised of former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), his partner Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and their adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani).

“I’m very attached to the family,” Yamazaki explains, even as he acknowledges revisiting human characters in this franchise is rare. “I wanted to see what was going to become of this family going forward… I also wanted to see how people would try to deal with a situation where an even fiercer catastrophe befalls them.”

Not that it should be a surprise, but just as the Shikishima family and their compatriots attempt to return to a normal life after the events of the first film, a still-recovering Japan is threatened once again—but not by a re-emergent Godzilla. At least not initially.

In the opening moments of Godzilla Minus Zero, Yamazaki boldly introduces his version of another reigning kaiju from the Shōwa era of Toho Studios: King Ghidorah, the gigantic, three-headed, dragon-like beast from space whose history with the franchise goes back more than 60 years.

“I have a special sentiment toward this kaiju, because Ghidorah first appeared on the screen in 1964, and I myself was born in 1964,” says Yamazaki, who notes that Ghidorah was his first and only choice for the film out of Godzilla’s long list of monstrous enemies. “It was also the first time a kaiju came [on-screen] to my hometown of Matsumoto. So I have particular memories about this, and a sense of nostalgia for the kaiju. It had always been in my mind to have Ghidorah appear if I were to make a second film, and I never really strayed from that idea.”

While Godzilla has been and continues to be a metaphor for human-made nuclear horrors, Ghidorah represents something different for Yamazaki. “The way in which he interacts with or affects the weather is a metaphor for a natural disaster … which Japan suffered a lot,” the director explains. “There were a lot of disastrous typhoons that we had to survive through in our postwar era, which is also a reason that our postwar recovery was a bit delayed as well. So it does symbolize the turmoil and catastrophe that we had to survive in that era in Japan.”

A towering monster capable of flattening cities with its sheer size, lightning breath, and massive disruption of the skies themselves, Ghidorah seems unstoppable until a regenerated Godzilla rises from the ocean. The question thus becomes: can human beings somehow point Godzilla toward Ghidorah and force him into battle on Japan’s behalf?

The answer to that question is far from straightforward in Godzilla Minus Zero. Without spoiling too much, it involves direct references to the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, certain plot strands left unresolved at the end of Minus One, and even ideas first hatched all the way back in the original 1954 film. It also reexamines a concept that Yamazaki touched on in Minus One: Godzilla is not just a monster, but in some ways, a god. A coldly indifferent one.

“I didn’t want to depict Godzilla as a being that is on the side of humanity,” Yamazaki says. “He is not our friend. Here he is depicted not as a complete god, but as a presence somewhere between beast and god. Therefore the human beings who are left to battle against him have to resort to certain methods and means that are absolutely taboo for human beings… That we as humankind should not step into this taboo is the idea that I’m depicting here, and I wanted to portray the internal conflict that comes with that.”

It’s this rich brew of metaphor, subtext, character study, and, of course, giant monster battles that has allowed Yamazaki to reach a whole new audience with his vision of Godzilla, and should he have the opportunity to direct a third film—for which he muses he might create his own original kaiju to battle the title character—he’s more than ready to move forward and carry Godzilla and his legacy into an astounding eighth decade on screen.

“As a filmmaker and a Godzilla fan myself, given that Godzilla has had a very long history of 70 years, to be part of the continuation of this tradition and this history gives me a sense of immense responsibility,” Yamazaki says with reverence. “I want to make Godzilla a very spiritual and sublime figure. And because of my absolute love for this kaiju, going forward, it makes me very happy to have so much support, and I’m very thankful for that.”

Godzilla Minus Zero opens in U.S. cinemas on Nov. 3.

Clayface Will Show That Gotham City Is Bigger Than Batman

In a few weeks, the DCU will finally take us to Gotham City for Clayface. But don’t expect to see Gotham’s Caped Crusader as we watch actor Matt Hagen’s strange transformation into a shapeshifting monster. When asked about the prospect of a Batman appearance in Clayface, director James Watkins told SFX Magazine, “You’re in a city called Gotham. So I guess you feel the shadow of the Bat inherently.” In other words, no, Batman in Clayface.

But that’s alright, because Watkins is right. It’s not just that Batman casts a shadow all over Gotham. It’s that Gotham City is a rich, multifaceted place, a setting for all types of stories—not just stories about Batman.

Clayface stars Tom Rhys Harries as up-and-coming actor Hagen, whose face gets disfigured by gangsters who catch him with one of their girlfriends. Desperate to keep his career, Hagen agrees to an experimental procedure by scientist Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), which allows him to restore his good looks—as long as he concentrates to keep from becoming an amorphous blob of goo. As Hagen slips further into supervillainy, his case is investigated by Corr’s boyfriend John Borrelli, a detective in the Gotham City police.

Clayface will be the first movie set in Gotham City since James Gunn and Peter Safran took over as heads of DC Studios, but it isn’t the first time the infamous metropolis has come up. We saw people leaving for Gotham City during the escape scene in Superman, Leota and Keeya Adebayo mention moving from Gotham in Peacemaker, and, most recently, Sheriff Kerry Kane of Lanterns came to Rushville, Nebraska from Gotham. Moreover, we actually spent some time with Gotham in the Doctor Phosphorus origin story episode of Creature Commandos, an episode that featured a shadowy cameo from Batman.

Moreover, the comics have shown that good stories can be told in Gotham without Batman’s interference. The city hosts other superheroes, including the Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott and Ragman, to say nothing of interesting figures in Batman’s supporting cast. In fact, the excellent series Gotham Central by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark follows various officers in the city and only contains, in Watkins’ words, the shadow of the Bat, with very little of Batman himself.

That series inspired the TV show Gotham, which certainly had more superheroes and villains than the comic, but still managed to move Batman out of the spotlight. Then there was the short-lived sitcom Powerless, which featured office drones working at a Wayne-owned business in Gotham City.

As these examples demonstrate, Gotham can play host to police procedurals, horror stories, tales of magic, comedy, and wacky melodrama. None of them require Batman’s presence to be interesting.

And that’s a good thing, because with the official DCU entry, The Brave and the Bold, still in pre-production and The Batman: Part II delayed once again, shadows of the Bat may be all we’re going to get for a long, long time.

Clayface comes to theaters on October 23, 2026.

Carrie: Mike Flanagan Reveals How He Changed Stephen King’s Mind

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Mike Flanagan understands your skepticism when it comes to modern horror reboots. After all, the prolific horror auteur already had to address one notable genre fan’s qualms before embarking on Carrie, Prime Video’s TV miniseries based on the classic Stephen King novel. 

“I went to Stephen King and said, ‘We’re talking about doing Carrie. I of course won’t do it without your express blessing,’” recalls the TV showrunner and King aficionado. And King, ever the veteran of screen adaptations himself, was quick to ask the obvious question: why? It’s been done. “I said, ‘I know, but what if we make some pretty fundamental changes?’ I walked him through the proposal, and he got very excited.”

Few in Hollywood have a better understanding of why the industry feels compelled to return to the ghosts of horror past than Mike Flanagan, especially when it comes to King. After jump-scaring onto the scene with indie horror darlings like Oculus and Hush, the Salem-born writer/director became the go-to guy for any and all things King: from psychological thriller Gerald’s Game to the unlikely Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, and even the miraculously feel-good The Life of Chuck. 

But despite that impressive portfolio, adapting Carrie presents a much steeper challenge than your typical TV transfer. Originally released in 1974, Carrie was the soon-to-be legendary author’s first-ever published novel. It tells the story of Carietta “Carrie” White, a naïve 16-year-old girl dealing with an extreme mother, high school bullies, and her own burgeoning telekinetic powers. The book was adapted into the massively successful 1976 film directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek as the titular telekinetic firestarter. Several cinematic sequels and reboots followed, with the most recent offering being a 2013 remake starring Chloë Grace Moretz.

That’s why when presented with the opportunity to reboot Carrie as part of his overall deal with Amazon MGM Studios, Flanagan initially balked before considering a fresh approach. The only way to remake Carrie was to remix it, he realized, in a similar fashion to Flanagan’s Netflix horror shows The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Fall of the House of Usher, which drastically updated the works of Shirley Jackson, Henry James, and Edgar Allan Poe, respectively. 

“The themes in Carrie about human cruelty and empathy feel more relevant today than they did 50 years ago,” Flanagan says. “So why not put those characters through the looking glass into these familiar but unfamiliar distortions of the characters we expect, and see what story grows out of that? That became a bit irresistible for me.”

Finding Carrie White

Many of those distortions start with Carrie herself. While the TV iteration of the character is every bit as naïve as her literary counterpart, she’s also much more hopeful, optimistic, and bright. Following the death of her father Ralph at his construction job, Carrie is discovered by the state’s child protective services and forced to attend a public school for the first time in her life, an opportunity the secret bookworm cherishes. 

After an audition process that screened more than 1,400 young actors, Flanagan and casting director Anne McCarthy honed in on Summer H. Howell, a young actress with the ability to capture Carrie’s sense of wonderment at a modern world long kept hidden from her.

“I’m a sensitive girl, and I like to use that when I can in my acting. Luckily, Carrie is sensitive as well,” Howell tells us. “She’s excited for the world and to experience things because she’s been kept in her home her whole life. So I connected with that a lot, just growing up and wanting to get out there as a teenager, so eager and wanting to experience new things.”

In both King’s book and De Palma’s film—in which she’s played with intense religiosity by Piper Laurie—Carrie’s mother Margaret looms large over the White household and feels like the real locus of power in a story that features literal telekinetic powers. 

For Flanagan, the choice of who to embody the conspiracy-minded Margaret was among the easiest he had to make. “It was instant. It was: ‘We’re doing Carrie. Sam Sloyan is Margaret White.’ There was never another candidate for me.”

Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan

A Flanagan collaborator since 2016’s Hush, Samantha Sloyan is best known for playing villainous church busybody Bev Keane in his 2021 Netflix series Midnight Mass. On paper, Bev and Margaret have much in common, including a penchant for bending religious doctrine toward their own selfish means. But according to Sloyan, there’s a key difference between the two.

“Beverly has complete belief in what she says because she needs that authority. Margaret wants Carrie to love her, but she just keeps going. She expects to be able to behave the way that she’s behaving and still have the love and respect of her daughter, and she can’t have both.”

Carrie and Margaret’s relationship forms the creative and emotional backbone of the proceedings as the pair lead a cast that’s a mix of high school characters (Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Joel Oulette) and the adults who supposedly have their best interests in mind (Matthew Lillard, Amber Midthunder, Rahul Kohli). 

The world of Carrie isn’t confined solely to Ewen High School, however. As Flanagan points out, King’s original text is explicit about the fact that Carrie isn’t the only person in the world to exhibit telekinetic abilities. The show explores some of the other carriers of the so-called “TK gene.”

“There’s a much larger world that Carrie belongs to that she doesn’t know about,” Flanagan says. “I think one of the tragedies of King’s story is that she never finds out. We had a chance to change that. It also helps with one of the show’s biggest themes: a young woman discovering the legacy of the community to which she belongs. Our Carrie has been sequestered away from any community her whole life in an effort to protect her.” 

Mean Girls

Many of the other changes involved in remixing Carrie are simply inherent to taking a story from 1974 and updating it for 2026, especially when it comes to high school. 

Himself the father of three children, one of whom is a high school sophomore, Flanagan invited teenagers into the writers’ room to get their perspective of what a modern-day high school looks like. Their input helped inform the look and feel of the show’s high school set (filmed on location in a real, out-of-use high school in Vancouver)—from Gen Alpha lingo to metal detectors at the doors to intense active-shooter drills. 

The depiction of the lattermost moment is sure to be one of the series most horrifying scenes for anyone who has not yet witnessed someone posing as an armed intruder pointing a terrifyingly realistic gun in a child’s face. Not only has the previously home-schooled Carrie never experienced such a drill, but neither had the Canadian actor who portrays her. 

“That was one of the scenes I was most nervous for, actually, because I’ve never been in that situation,” Howell says. “It added this extra bit of pressure. We had certain drills when I was younger but nothing like somebody banging on the door and trying to scare the children.”

And then there’s that damned internet. While Stephen King has always been known to craft a particularly vicious brand of literary bully, even Carrie’s tormentors had to clock out at the end of the day in 1974. Now social media makes the bullying of our nation’s youth a 24/7 proposition, as the miniseries’ iteration of Carrie discovers to her horror when frenemy Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) launches an “@CarrieRed_” Instagram handle full of compromising material. 

The profile photo of said account is a snapshot of Carrie’s pained face, amid an updated version of the original’s devastating locker room scene. When the undernourished 16-year-old experiences her first period in the locker room after gym class and believes she is injured or dying upon the sight of blood, her classmates, naturally, prove to be less than empathetic to her ignorance. The moment is not only a turning point for Carrie, her classmates, and her teachers, but for everyone else on set that day.

Summer H. Howell

“Mike does a really beautiful job of making sure we all pause and acknowledge what a big deal a moment is before it passes by,” says Amber Midthunder, who plays supportive gym teacher Rita Desjardin. “I mostly witnessed the locker room scene and what an intense day that was. I think it’s one of the most upsetting scenes I’ve ever experienced just because of the nature of it.”

Of course, even a remixed version of Carrie wouldn’t be complete without the tale’s fiery prom finale. By now, the sight of Prom Queen Carrie White in a high school gymnasium, wide-eyed, vengeful, and covered in pig’s blood from a prank gone wrong is as American as apple pie and about as sticky. 

“I don’t know if I even want to know what’s in the blood,” Howell reports of the red concoction she was doused in. “I’d have to stand in the perfect spot, and they’d lower a tennis ball to my head to make sure it’s lined up. The blood knocked off my tiara once, and they were like, ‘Oh, we can’t use that one.’”

Filmed over the span of two weeks, the bloody prom and its equally bloody aftermath serve as the union between the classic King version of Carrie and the blended elements that Flanagan seeks to incorporate. The series’ star didn’t fully appreciate that synthesis until seeing De Palma’s film for the first time at a special screening in Vancouver that the showrunner put together for the cast, crew, and locals. 

“It was the coolest way I could have seen the film, having just filmed a whole series based on it,” Howell says. “We capture the iconic moments, but just slightly differently because we have more time. Seeing the differences was very jarring but super cool. Sissy Spacek is clearly an incredible actor, and it’s hard to fill her shoes, but I hope I made her proud.”

All eight episodes of Carrie are available to stream on Prime Video now.

Hunger Games’ McKenna Grace and Joseph Zada Give Exclusive Look at Sunrise on the Reaping

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The Capitol has always been good at making murder look pretty.

That contradiction is baked into the Hunger Games, in which children are sent to die, but first they get costumes, parades, interviews, constructed reality-TV storylines, and an audience trained to consume suffering with indifference. In Sunrise on the Reaping, that structure will be operating at full capacity. The world is brighter, grander, more colorful. Even the arena is resplendent…this makes the whole ordeal much, much worse to witness. 

For Joseph Zada and Mckenna Grace, filming the 50th Hunger Games (or: the second Quarter Quell) against beautiful, mountainous terrain on location in remote Spain was something closer to watching a horror movie take place in the daytime, like Midsommar, than a traditional YA fantasy. That deceptively chilling image gets to the heart of what makes the film’s story so messed up. There is no dark corridor obscuring the violence in this arena. Everybody can see it. The Capitol just makes sure you see it the way the Capitol wants you to.

More unsettling still, audiences already know where our hero Haymitch Abernathy ends up. Sunrise on the Reaping isn’t just about watching someone survive; it’s witnessing a hopeful, vibrant boy turn into the haunted, bitter old man Woody Harrelson introduced to us in the original films. 

Director Francis Lawrence calls Sunrise on the Reaping “by far the most emotional story that Suzanne Collins has written,” precisely because tragedy and hope are allowed to exist at the same time. That emotionality matters because young Haymitch is nothing like the man audiences first met in The Hunger Games. Producer Nina Jacobson describes original series hero Katniss Everdeen as “a much more stoic character” than Haymitch. Whereas Haymitch is “a heart on his sleeve boy,” Katniss survives partly by compartmentalizing. Haymitch arrives without that armor.

That is already a lot to ask of a young actor; luckily, Zada was hardly doing it all in a vacuum. In addition to the vast travelogue scale of the arena, Zada and Grace also found themselves surrounded by a ridiculous amount of acting firepower, including Jesse Plemons, Glenn Close, and Elle Fanning. The funny part is that neither actor knew just how stacked the ensemble would become when they signed on. 

Grace reveals that she discovered many of her castmates through The Hunger Games social accounts, at one point reacting, “Elle Fanning’s in our movie!” Zada similarly recalls watching the announcements roll out online day after day, remembering it as “a crazy way to find out you’re working with some of the best actors in the world.” For two young actors stepping into roles carrying enormous franchise baggage—with Zada especially tasked with making audiences believe this boy becomes Harrelson’s burned-out drinker—there is something poetic about Sunrise pairing its new generation with performers who already come with serious star power.

As Lawrence notes, we first encountered Haymitch as “a drunk, bitter, dissolute, and cynical man who appears to have thrown in the towel” a decade ago. Sunrise asks the obvious question: What did it take to turn that boy into that man? The answer is not just the games, but the entire system surrounding them.

Author Suzanne Collins has never been particularly subtle about the politics of Panem, nor should she be. Lawrence says Collins begins with questions about “the consequence of war and PTSD, and even propaganda,” but Sunrise pushes further than ever before for this franchise. “This time around,” Lawrence says, “Collins became interested in this idea of implicit submission,” asking why people simply accept being told what to do even when they are unhappy with those making the decisions.

That enigma changes how the Games function. Jacobson describes the Games as a manufactured product, pointing to the hidden hand that shapes what audiences see in order to keep people in their place. It’s a product designed to tell people they have no power to take on the Capitol. Even Haymitch himself becomes complacent.

“You’re not necessarily seeing what really happened,” Lawrence adds. And he’s right. The Capitol shows people what it wants them to see, not the way things are. They create a carefully crafted narrative for Haymitch in the new movie, but nothing about it is based on his life in District 12 or who he is as a person. It is not enough to control someone’s body; the Capitol wants ownership over the story of what happens to that body afterward. Hence even the clothing becomes part of the cruelty.

Grace and Zada note that the tributes’ 1970s-inspired costumes are their own form of torture: tight pants, capes, pristine white outfits, and Doc Martens, all while these kids are preparing to fight to the death. Grace sums up the absurdity perfectly: “I feel like it’s very President Snow and very Capitol how impractical those costumes are, and just like, the ridiculousness of it to send out all of these kids in these pristine white outfits.” It is funny until you think about what she is actually describing. These children are being dressed for somebody else’s entertainment. Literal human sacrifices to an elite’s passing distraction.

Lawrence wanted the physical suffering underneath all that pageantry to remain visible. Zada remembers that whenever the cast performed a stunt sequence, the director would sometimes have them do the entire sequence again even if production only needed a small piece of footage, forcing them to carry the characters’ exhaustion into the shot.

“It felt like a punishment at the time,” Lawrence says, “but you watch it, and it looks incredible.” That distinction between looking incredible and feeling terrible might as well be the Capitol’s mission statement. The thing is, Sunrise on the Reaping is not interested in suffering for suffering’s sake. Its larger argument is about what happens when resistance fails to produce immediate gratification. That may be where Haymitch differs most significantly from Katniss. She eventually gets to lead a revolution;  Haymitch doesn’t.

Jacobson describes resistance as something where participants may make “profound sacrifices” without ever knowing whether anything changed. The point, she argues, is that resistance itself sets an example that, eventually, somebody else will follow and respark. It inspires the next era of resisting, until circumstances finally allow that resistance to threaten the status quo.

The young cast reached almost the exact same conclusion. Zada says he hopes audiences understand that “change takes longer than that a lot of the time and not to give up.” Grace takes the idea even further, pointing directly toward the franchise’s future. “Standing up for what you believe in may not reward you immediately,” she says, but “you may be paving a way for somebody later down the line.”

That is Haymitch’s tragedy, and maybe his victory? He does not get to be the Mockingjay. He does not get the posters or the armies. He gets absorbed by the Capitol system he fought to survive and then perpetuated for decades. Yet somewhere underneath it all, something survived. Katniss becomes the face of resistance. Something she wouldn’t have been able to do without Haymitch.

Haymitch belongs to the generation that had to keep the damn thing alive long enough for her to exist. Sunrise on the Reaping is the story of what that kind of survival actually costs when you are the one forced to carry the spark before anyone knows it will become a fire.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is in theaters on Nov. 20.

VisionQuest: Paul Bettany and Terry Matalas Talk Ultron’s Return, Mindspaces, and Robot Families

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The last time audiences saw Vision and Ultron together, the two of them disagreed. Convinced that humanity was doomed to destroy itself, Ultron (a synthetic big bad voiced by James Spader) tried to save the world by starting it over. Conversely, Paul Bettany’s altruistic Vision saw something beautiful in humanity despite—or due to—our failures. When Ultron sneers, “You’re hopefully naive,” Vision responds, “Well, I was born yesterday.”

Many days have passed since that conversation at the end of 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, but that question lingers over Vision and Ultron’s reunion in the Disney+ series VisionQuest.

“That conversation is very much the launching point for the show,” series creator and showrunner Terry Matalas tells us. “In Age of Ultron, Vision wanted to be ‘a real boy.’ In VisionQuest, he’s not so sure it’s a good idea to be a real boy.”

The star, and a steward of Vision’s journey for more than a decade now, would agree. “VisionQuest is a mash-up of the Pinocchio and Frankenstein stories,” explains Bettany. “Vision’s having an existential crisis at the beginning of the show. He’s asking questions like, ‘Who am I? What am I for? What is my purpose? Who made me?’”

Set after the events of WandaVision, VisionQuest finds Vision (still Bettany) unsure of who he is. He was killed by Thanos, rebuilt as a mindless automaton by S.W.O.R.D., and received the memories of the Vision conjured back to life by the magic of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). But this new Vision doesn’t feel like his old self. Hence the journey to determine a different identity. Helping him along is a collection of AIs he keeps in his Mindspace, a virtual mansion where he lives with the butler J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), personal assistant F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), security expert E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), and handymen U (Jonathan Sayer) and D.U.M.-E (Henry Lewis).

And then there’s Ultron (James Spader), whose consciousness Vision has been keeping in the Mindspace since the events of Age of Ultron. Why does Vision keep Ultron around, and why does he consult the supervillain when going on his journey of self-discovery?

“Ultron’s been imprisoned for a long time and has been consuming humanity’s artistic efforts. He has a slightly different perspective,” points out Matalas. “But he’s also considering that maybe burning everyone to ash is still the best call.”

“Vision just thinks Ultron is interesting,” Bettany adds. “Vision is fascinated by Ultron’s chaotic impulses.”

As much as VisionQuest involves sentient robots, relentless bounty hunters, and the spirit of a magical boy possessing a speedster, at the center it’s about a guy trying to figure out his identity, all while dealing with his tumultuous father. In other words, VisionQuest is a very human story.

Pre-Visions

Fundamentally, every Vision story is a human story. Created by Roy Thomas and John Buscema for 1968’s Avengers #57, Marvel Comics’ Vision was an update of the Golden Age Human Torch, an advanced android that burst into flames when exposed to oxygen. When the evil robot Ultron wanted to emulate his creator, Dr. Henry Pym, a.k.a. Ant-Man, by making his own robot, he repurposed the Human Torch’s body into the red-skinned Vision.

Moreover, Ultron copies the “brainwaves” of the fallen Avenger Wonder Man, giving Vision the capacity to feel emotions. Of course, the plan backfired, and Vision turned against his creator, becoming a mainstay among Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

Vision’s MCU origin more or less follows the same structure, just swapping out Hank Pym and Wonder Man with Tony Stark and J.A.R.V.I.S. 1.0. In both comics and live action, Vision is a thoughtful, inquisitive synthezoid… whatever that is.

“A synthezoid is an artificial human being!” Bettany declares with confidence. Matalas would agree with some added context.

“A synthezoid means that he’s not just a robot. There’s a consciousness and self-awareness to him that goes beyond your typical android,” the creator affirms. “He’s a self-aware artificial intelligence with a quantum computer for a brain, but he had human parents in some ways, with Stark and Bruce Banner. He also has a robot dad in Ultron. It’s a complicated question, which is the point of our show. He’s a character who is trying to decide how human he is and how much he’s still his older versions.”

It’s a question that Matalas has dealt with before, having come to VisionQuest from the highly successful third season of Star Trek: Picard, which brought back the android Data (Brent Spiner) and his positronic brain.

“I started having meetings at Marvel because Kevin Feige’s a huge Star Trek fan. It set up a great back and forth that continues to this day. Same thing with Brad Winderbaum [head of Streaming, Television and Animation at Marvel Studios],” notes Matalas. “Star Trek is your way into so many kinds of stories, because it offers reference points to big ideas.” That said, he does distinguish differences between each brand’s synthetic lores. “Data wasn’t a big influence on VisionQuest because, in a lot of ways, Vision is the anti-Data. Data always wanted to be human, whereas Vision’s a little bit more uncertain about it, especially when we meet him.”

Vision may be uncertain about his own humanity, but the person who plays him is not.

“I haven’t really troubled myself with trying to play a robot because they give me a costume and prosthetics that make me look like a robot. I’m quite lazy, so if the job’s done for me by the costume and makeup, then I get on with the stuff I have to do,” Bettany laughs.

Bettany makes that job sound easy enough. But then you remember his work involves going toe-to-toe with James Spader, and you realize the daunting task before him.

The Second Age of Ultron

Much of the first episode of VisionQuest involves Vision once again facing off with Ultron. But where they previously argued about the relative merits of mass genocide, Ultron and Vision now disagree mostly about the latter’s tendency to shut himself off from the world.

“You’re meeting the two characters when they’re on the fence about humanity. And Ultron might have a better perspective than Vision on what it means to be human at this point,” Matalas teases.

For that reason, Ultron had to be the central antagonist of VisionQuest, at least as far as Matalas was concerned. “I really didn’t know what else it could be,” he admits. “It was vital that Paul have someone of equal adult stature to play off against, and we didn’t have Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda. So the only answer was Ultron.”

However, to get Ultron, Matalas had to get Spader, the performer who brought him to life 11 years ago but hasn’t returned to the MCU since.

“I flew to New York to have lunch with James and tell him this gonzo idea. I was told that I would be met with reservations about him returning,” Matalas confesses. “Whether or not that was true, I did go in with the fear that I could easily screw this up. But I just gave him my honest enthusiasm and started pitching some scenes. James immediately jumped into the process and started adding ideas. We immediately hit it off, and by the end of the lunch, he wanted to do it.”

Matalas’ commitment to bring back Vision paid off as soon as Bettany and Spader got on set together. “This show is a delivery system for everything you love about Paul Bettany,” Matalas promises. “Paul is a highlight in everything you see him in, and it felt so natural putting him front and center. It’s about time he’s been the focus, because he wears the hero’s cape so well.”

Indeed, Bettany has been part of the MCU since the very beginning, voicing Tony Stark’s original AI J.A.R.V.I.S. in 2008’s Iron Man. Yet Bettany’s characters have always been in a subordinate or supporting role, whether that’s advising Iron Man, standing alongside Wanda, or serving with the Avengers.

However, Bettany sees the Vision of VisionQuest as a new person with a different relationship from his previous incarnations. “Vision was really a big reset from J.A.R.V.I.S., because there was a birth in Age of Ultron,” he explains. “VisionQuest feels like a major reset too. When Vision was first born, he was both omnipotent and entirely naive, like a sort of omnipotent ingénue. That was fun to play, yet this is something different,” he observes. “I did go back and watch Vision’s previous appearances to remember his mindset.”

VisionQuest also offers a new challenge for both Bettany and Spader since Vision and Ultron often take human form, allowing the actors to share the screen without capes or robot prosthetics.

“There is a significant amount of time in the costume, and with new costumes and new makeup,” Bettany points out. “But it is more comfortable to play the part without the costume, and I think it’s a big part of Vision’s quest in the series. He’s trying to figure out who he is and to understand human beings. It makes sense that he would move through the world incognito, disguised as a human to further that quest.”

“You’ll definitely see plenty of robot action,” Matalas concurs. “But I just love it when you get to see Vision look like Paul Bettany. It’s a way to access the human side of these characters. There’s a story reason for Vision and Ultron to look like people, but ultimately I wanted to watch Paul and James chew the scenery, so that’s what we did.”

In fact, that desire to let his actors show off informed many of Matalas’ creative decisions. When it came to writing Ultron’s dialogue, the showrunner asked himself, “What do I want to hear James Spader talk about?” He adds with a laugh, “The best part of a James Spader performance—whether it’s Boston Legal, The Practice, or The Blacklist—is hearing him monologue about humanity and the things that plague us. [He] has a relentless enthusiasm for stirring the pot. I was ready for grenades, but he always had a ‘yes, and’ spirit of improvisation. James, Paul, and I never had a real, strong creative disagreement.”

Joining the Quest Party

It’s a good thing that everything is so copacetic behind the scenes of VisionQuest, because on the screen it’s all turmoil and chaos. Vision’s attempts to hide out and define his identity on his own terms get disrupted by the arrival of the relentless mercenary Paladin (Todd Stashwick).

Matalas promises, “Paladin’s going to be a really interesting point-of-view character because he allows us to consider what it means to be a bounty hunter in the MCU. It’s not an easy life, so we want to know what makes him tick.”

Joined by his sarcastic assistant, played by Diane Morgan of Cunk on Life fame, Paladin has potential to be a comedic buffoon, but Matalas insists that’s not the case. “He’s a guy with his own code. He’s committed to this bounty hunter life, for better or worse. But he doesn’t know how many years he has left to do this, and he’s thinking about what he wants to be and what he wants to pass down.”

Paladin actor Stashwick previously worked with Matalas on 12 Monkeys and Star Trek: Picard, and was the only choice to portray a morally complicated tracker. “Todd can play a monster, someone ruthless and by-the-book,” Matalas adds. “But he can still be likable and maybe even understandable. He has a dry sarcasm that grounds big ideas about hunting a robot, and that makes him easier to write.”

Further complicating things is the arrival of Thomas Shepherd (Ruaridh Mollica), a.k.a. Speed, a.k.a. Tommy Maximoff. Like his twin brother Billy, Tommy was created by Wanda’s hex to be her son with Vision. As we saw in Agatha All Along, when Wanda’s hex dissipated and the twins disappeared at the end of WandaVision, Billy’s soul entered the body of young William Kaplan, who became the superhero Wiccan. A similar thing happened to Thomas Shepherd in VisionQuest, something the show addresses head-on.

“We lean into the zaniness of Thomas’ story. It would be pretty screwed up to have the soul of some made-up entity drop into you,” Matalas observes.

More than just a matter of canon-keeping and faithfulness to the source material, Thomas’ plight ties into the central themes of VisionQuest. “This show has a lot of characters going through identity crises,” the showrunner notes. “You have Vision asking if he’s who he used to be, or if he’s something new. You’ve got Ultron wondering if he really wants to destroy the world, and you have this kid, Thomas Shepherd, who suddenly has all these memories of a life he didn’t live. I think that gives you a great family that’s trying to find itself.”

According to the writer, those questions of family, identity, and especially maturity drew Spader back into playing Ultron again: “James’ perspective was that the Ultron of Age of Ultron was a bit of a teenager, wrestling with others and petulant. The Ultron of VisionQuest is slightly older and wiser. That doesn’t mean he’s any less villainous, but it does mean that he has a more erudite and sophisticated take on humanity than he had previously.”

For Bettany, those themes also give VisionQuest a pressing urgency, especially to adolescents and young adults in the audience. “Vision has all these memories and no ability to connect them to himself. He feels alienated, and I think that’s what makes him interesting to young people. When you’re a kid, it is urgent business to discover who you are. Vision’s always in the process of change because of his super-intelligence and having a dizzying array of options. Young people today are faced with a dizzying array of options for how they identify themselves. So the major contract with the audience that the character of Vision makes is that he must always be in a moment of decision.”

That contract with the audience matters because VisionQuest doesn’t just set out to be a simple superhero story; it wants to tackle the ultimate mystery of what it means to be human.

Envision the Big Picture

Even though the series involves AIs figuring out how to be human beings, VisionQuest isn’t going to grapple with the real threat of artificial intelligence in our current society.

“This isn’t really the show to debate whether or not AI is going to take our jobs or siphon off our creativity,” Matalas says. “We’ve been working on this for almost two and a half years. By the time you write something, it’s immediately obsolete by the technology that’s come out. Just look at the advances in artificial intelligence in the last week. We would never be able to keep up, so it was never going to be that show.”

He continues, “VisionQuest does focus on our role as parents of this creation, and how it’s up to us to bring them into the world in the right way. There’s a family tree here from humanity to AI.”

Bettany also keys into the familial connection of this whole unlikely trilogy as one of its greatest appeals.

“This is a show about grandfathers, fathers, and sons,” the actor muses. “It asks big questions about identity and purpose in a really fun, adventurous way.” For him, the appeal of the MCU has always been balancing the big questions with the fun.

He adds, “I often think about the big swing that Captain America: Civil War took, asking whether the Avengers needed a governing body like the United Nations or if they had the right to unilaterally decide to invade another country and affect its political outcome. As we were going around the world doing press, Robert Downey Jr. would always come out on stage and ask who was Team Cap and who was Team Iron Man. Everywhere we went in America, two-thirds of the crowd were on Cap’s side. They believed we absolutely have the right and, indeed, we have the onus to police the world. And everywhere else in the world, it was two-thirds on Iron Man’s side. That’s fascinating. Of course, these are entertaining movies, but they also are a really broad church to have these kinds of discussions, in a fun way that I think was quite revealing.”

As Bettany’s observation reveals, messiness and complexity are essential parts of his character. Vision and Ultron may not know how they feel about themselves, each other, or humanity, but such disagreements aren’t flaws. It’s just who they are.

The first two episodes of VisionQuest premiere Wednesday, October 14 on Disney+.

Ben Affleck’s Batman v Superman Comments Revive Age-Old Questions About Superhero Audiences

In a recent interview with Variety, Ben Affleck shared some thoughts about his time playing Batman for Zack Snyder, and the superhero movie genre in general. Recalling the criticisms leveled at the dark tone of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Affleck observed, “It seems to be an ongoing question, and I don’t know the answer: Do you go all the way to a hard-R rating like Joker? Or do it like Marvel, which does something broad, unless you’re talking about Deadpool & Wolverine?” He continued, “There seems to be more tension between ‘Are we doing the grown-up version or the one that’s open to kids?’”

Leaving aside the actual variety of DC Studio’s offerings over the past few years, Affleck raises a good point. Are superheroes for kids? Or can they tell stories for adults? It’s such a good question, in fact, that people have been asking it since the birth of the comic book industry… and no one has come up with a good answer yet.

Judging by the cover of 1938’s Action Comics #1, one could argue that superheroes were invented to appeal to kids. That cover introduced Superman, the world’s first superhero, as pure power fantasy, dressed in blue and red togs and smashing a car over his head, while a scared bystander runs away. Even the story by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster seems to teach a simple moral lesson. Bully Butch thinks he can push around Clark Kent and Lois Lane because he’s stronger, and it takes Superman and his superior strength to put him in his place.

Throughout that issue and most of the issues that follow, Superman does the same thing, leaping over buildings and outrunning locomotives to tell powerful people to make better decisions. However, the specific details in the story spoke to issues more complicated and adult than one would expect. Superman’s first enemies weren’t just tough guys who wanted to duke it out with him; they were governors sentencing innocent men to the electric chair, or landlords who let their tenants live in squalor. Superman’s feats of strength were less power for the sake of power and more fantasies to imagine simple solutions to real problems.

That tension only intensified when America entered World War II. Comic books became a hit among GIs, thanks to the fact that they were cheap, easy-to-read, and easy to transport. Superheroes followed suit, going to war with their audience, either defending the home front from saboteurs attacking our factories or battling super villains like Red Skull and Captain Nazi, who weren’t that different from Hitler and Mussolini.

Yet, as crucial as adult readers were to the origins of the genre, soldiers put superhero comics so firmly behind them when they returned from the front that the larger public forgot they existed. Even to this day, people talk about superhero comics as if they were originally created just for kids, and that adult readers are immature deviants, clinging to a genre they should have long outgrown. Or, they talk about more mature comics as something new that creators such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller brought to medium, creating a split that wasn’t there before.

To be sure, the loss of a military readership meant that superheroes became sillier in the 1950s, with Batman and Superman more likely to battle alien invaders than economic inequality. But until the moral panic caused by psychologist Frederic Wertham’s 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent, adults regularly read sci-fi, horror, and even romance comic books. The mind-bending stories that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko made for Stan Lee at Marvel only drew those audiences back to superheroes, setting the stage for the moral complexity of the Bronze Age.

Such moral complexity happened within the genre’s established tropes. For example, the 1988 Batman storyline A Death in the Family, by Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo, does indeed add stakes by having the Joker murder Robin. But it also involves the Joker becoming Iran’s delegate to the United Nations under Ayatollah Khomeini. And, of course, the entire story is built around a gimmick in which readers called a 900-number to vote on Robin’s fate.

Silly? Absolutely. Immeshed in current politics and themes? Undeniably.

Stories like A Death in the Family draw attention to an uncomfortable truth about superhero comics, that the line between childish and adult isn’t nearly as clear as we assume. Affleck’s own work in Batman v Superman illustrates the point. He may play a man driven to action after a 9/11-like incident, but the movie doesn’t have anything to say about the nature of terrorism, vigilantism, or the role of leaders in responding to a crisis. Lex Luthor may babble about theodicy, wondering why a good and all-powerful god would allow bad things to happen, but his observations sound less like Erasmus and more like a thirteen-year-old internet edgelord.

So what is the answer? There is none. Superheroes are inherently silly. They are about people in bright costumes with fantastic powers who punch people in the face. But they come from a place of real conflict and real concern. Adults concern themselves with questions of power as much as anyone else, and if superheroes are the medium through which they ask those questions, then so be it. Such has been the case for as long as comics have been around, entertaining children and giving adults space to think about big questions, with no easy answers.


The Exorcist: Martyrs Sounds Like a Sequel to The Exorcist III

Even though it’s more than 50years old, The Exorcist remains both a spooky season favorite and the standard pick for “the scariest movie ever made.” That canonical status explains why legacy sequels like the 2016 television series or 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, would stick so closely to the first movie’s characters and iconography. That also explains why one would expect Mike Flanagan to follow the first film’s model for his upcoming take The Exorcist: Martyrs.

But according to a first-look released by Esquire, it sounds like Flanagan’s moving off of the 1973 movie by William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty (who wrote the original novel, The Exorcist) at least a little. Esquire reveals that Scarlett Johansson will play an NYPD detective named Julie Miller, who gets drawn into a greater mystery after apprehending a serial killer called the Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo. The first Exorcist movie is pretty light on detectives and serial killers, but the franchise is not. In fact, they’re the key element of the third film, making The Exorcist III, itself based on Blatty’s 1983 book Legion—a book Flanagan describes to Esquire as “a wonderful novel.”

As most horror fans know, both the novel and the film version of The Exorcist deal with the possession of young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), daughter of actress Chris (Ellen Burstyn). When secular methods fail to heal her daughter, Chris turns to the Catholic church, first Father Karras (Jason Miller, whose name is echoed by Johansson’s character) and then Father Merrin (Max von Sydow). The Exorcist was a huge hit, earning 10 Academy Award nominations and winning two. After the inexplicably weird sequel, 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic, Blatty stepped behind the camera to adapt Legion for the third film.

In The Exorcist III, George C. Scott plays Lieutenant Kinderman (taking over from Lee J. Cobb, who played the part in the first movie), who investigates murders occurring around the Catholic church. Kinderman realizes that the killings recall the work of the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif), despite the fact that he was executed more than a decade earlier. Moreover, Kinderman learns that Father Karras survived his encounter with Pazuzu, the demon who possessed Regan, and is now in a mental institution, claiming to be the Gemini Killer.

With its emphasis on cops and killers, The Exorcist III often plays more like a cop drama than a horror movie, despite containing one of the scariest jump scares ever committed to screen. Moreover, it feels like a real genre shift from the first film, even as it continues that movie’s plot. That may be part of the reason Exorcist III met with a mixed reception from critics and fans, and took some time to be accepted as a worthy successor to the first movie.

The underdog status of Exorcist III (and the unassailable canonicity of the first movie) might be why Flanagan chose to focus on cops and killers for his take, instead of the beleaguered parents of The Exorcist: Believer. Yet, Flanagan isn’t shying away from the franchise’s central themes. “Part of the great thing about religious horror and part of the way we’ve used the horror genre since, I mean, geez, going back into the ancient world, is to try to take the horrors of being alive on the earth and confront them,” he told Esquire. “In fiction, we can stare the devil in the face.”

Perhaps our familiarity with The Exorcist has made it a bit too easy to look at the devil. If so, The Exorcist: Martyrs‘s riff on the third film might be just what we need to make the devil scary again.

The Exorcist: Martyrs releases in theaters on March 12, 2027



TV Premiere Dates: 2026 Calendar

Wondering when your favorite shows are coming back and what new series you can look forward to? We’ve got you covered with the Den of Geek 2026 TV Premiere Dates Calendar, where we keep track of TV series premiere dates, return dates, and more for the year and beyond. 

We’ll continue to update this page weekly as networks and streamers announce dates. A lot of these shows we’ll be watching or covering, so be sure to follow along with us! 

Please note that all times are ET. 

Note: These are U.S. releases. For upcoming British releases, head on over here.

DATESHOWNETWORK
Tuesday, October 13The TrapNetflix
Tuesday, October 13TYSONNetflix
Tuesday, October 13Ludwig Season 2BritBox
Wednesday, October 14Love Is Blind: Boston Season 11Netflix
Wednesday, October 14The Lowdown Season 2 (9:00 p.m.)FX/Hulu
Wednesday, October 14NOVA: EvolutionPBS
Wednesday, October 14Helluva BossPrime Video
Wednesday, October 14VisionQuestApple TV
Thursday, October 15The Diplomat Season 4Netflix
Thursday, October 15Hollywood ArtsNetflix
Thursday, October 15Crystal LakePeacock
Thursday, October 159-1-1 Season 10 (8:00 p.m.)ABC
Thursday, October 159-1-1: Nashville Season 2 (9:00 p.m.)ABC
Thursday, October 15Grey’s Anatomy Season 23 (10:00 p.m.)ABC
Friday, October 16Money Trap: The Karun TreasureNetflix
Friday, October 16Tulsa King Season 4Paramount+
Friday, October 16The Rainmaker (10:00 p.m.)USA Network
Sunday, October 18Maigret (9:00 p.m.)PBS
Sunday, October 18The Gold (10:00 p.m.)PBS
Tuesday, October 20Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2Netflix
Wednesday, October 21The Mothers of Penguins Season 2Netflix
Wednesday, October 21The New Stanford Prison Experiment Netflix
Wednesday, October 21The Terminal List Season 2Prime Video
Thursday, October 22Nobody Wants This Season 3Netflix
Thursday, October 22Did Someone Happen to Mention Me?Netflix
Friday, October 23Lupin Part 4Netflix
Friday, October 23Fading GrandeurNetflix
Friday, October 23Yaga AMC+
Friday, October 23Happy’s Place Season 3 (8:00 p.m.)NBC
Friday, October 23Newlyweds (8:30 p.m.)NBC
Monday, October 26Minimum WageNetflix
Monday, October 26The MobHulu
Tuesday, October 27The One About Matthew PerryNetflix
Thursday, October 29Balaraw: Blood IslandNetflix
Thursday, October 29Ghosts Halloween Special (9:00 p.m.)CBS
Friday, October 30A Couple of LiesNetflix
Friday, October 30AkkaNetflix
Friday, October 30How to Ruin Diwali: Meet the ParentsNetflix
Friday, October 30Dexter: Resurrection Season 2Paramount+
Friday, October 30NocturneApple TV
Sunday, November 1The Gilded Age Season 4 (9:00 p.m.)HBO
Monday, November 2St. Denis Medical Season 3 (8:00 p.m.)NBC
Monday, November 2The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins Season 2 (8:30 p.m.)NBC
Tuesday, November 3Bass x MachinaNetflix
Wednesday, November 4The GreatestPrime Video
Thursday, November 5North of NorthNetflix
Thursday, November 5Black DovesNetflix
Sunday, November 8City of God: The Fight Rages On Season 2HBO Max
Wednesday, November 11The BodyNetflix
Wednesday, November 11The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of PowerPrime Video
Thursday, November 12The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange CountyHulu
Thursday, November 12The Good DaughterPeacock
Friday, November 1312 12 12Apple TV
Sunday, November 15The ChosenPrime Video
Thursday, November 19The AltruistsNetflix
Friday, November 20Yellowjackets Season 4Paramount+
Friday, November 20Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 3Disney+
Monday, November 23DigPeacock
Wednesday, November 25Blade Runner 2099Prime Video
Thursday, November 26The Hunting Wives Season 2Netflix
Wednesday, December 2Bad Monkey Season 2Apple TV
Tuesday, December 8Only Murders in LondonHulu
Thursday, December 10Ghosts Christmas Special (9:00 p.m.)CBS
Thursday, December 10The Murder of JonBenét RamseyNetflix
Thursday, December 17Ted: The Animated SeriesPeacock
Thursday, December 24Emily in Paris Season 6Netflix
Friday, December 25Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s StoneHBO Max
Friday, January 22NeuromancerApple TV
Sunday, January 24Common Side Effects Season 2 (11:00 p.m. ET)Adult Swim
Monday, February 15The LandHulu

If we’ve forgotten a show, feel free to drop a reminder in the comment section below!

Want to know what big movies are coming out in 2026? We’ve got you covered here.

The Social Reckoning Review: Aaron Sorkin’s Transformation of Mark Zuckerberg Is Complete

There are few movies coming out this fall where the role of expectation will as dramatically influence perception as The Social Reckoning. Aaron Sorkin’s surprise sequel to one of the greatest films in the 21st century always seemed like a tall order. Here is a new movie with the gumption to expound on what many consider to be both Sorkin’s finest screenplay and a vision that managed to define the shadow of big tech on modern life at a time when many were only dimly aware of its influence.

In 2010, Facebook was either a time-waster or a utopian promise of connectivity and shared knowledge, depending on who you asked. But few were seriously debating the danger of allowing antisocial narcissists with god complexes to shape our understanding of reality, or “the public square” as some still insist. Yet The Social Network saw that phantom menace coming and dramatized it by way of a paranoia that seeped into your bones thanks to David Fincher’s moody blacks and muted browns, and all underscored by an electronic melancholy, courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Silicon Valley dismissed it in its moment as alarmist (maybe) and as a hit piece (definitely), but it proved as provocative a snapshot of a new world shaped by Millennial maladjustment as we had ever seen up to that minute.

The better part of two decades later, however, and we’re steeped in this nightmare now, chapter and verse. We see it in our algorithms, on our newsfeeds, and in the pages and screens of antiquated “legacy media” that so many Meta executives smirk at like a cat who’s come upon a frail canary with a busted wing. The Social Reckoning is even based on exactly such an investigation, in this case by The Wall Street Journal and its printed reports that Facebook deliberately incentivized content that would reward engagement via anger, outrage, and in many instances radicalization. WSJ’s reporting arrived with dramatic accoutrements, too, including whistleblowers, congressional hearings, public humiliation rituals for executives, and… relatively little changing in the aftermath.

Which might be why The Social Reckoning arrives at both the best and worst time for a sequel, or “companion piece” as Sorkin describes it in the press. Most viewers are well aware of the negative impact Instagram has on teenage girls’ mental health, or Facebook on people’s ability to understand what is going on in their government. And yet, the film approaches it all like a startling exposé.

For better and worse, Sorkin is correct in asserting this movie, which he directed in addition to writing, is a different animal from the Fincher-helmed original. It’s more preachy and didactic than Fincher’s work, but also less cynical and mean-spirited. It is, in other words, more purely Sorkin. The film truly doesn’t position itself as a sequel, but more of a critical reassessment. Whereas the 2010 movie ended with Sorkin’s screenplay leaving it open-ended as to whether Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is “an asshole” or simply pretending to be one, The Social Reckoning moves past damning judgment and straight to righteous sentencing.

If that previous film is a modern day Citizen Kane, angling a current media mogul’s ethical deficiencies as a mirror for his age, then The Social Reckoning wants to be All the President’s Men; an exciting media procedural about crusading journalists holding a corrupt institution to account.

That journalist’s name in this film is Jeff Horwitz, the real-life WSJ investigative reporter who set his sights on Facebook in 2019 and who is framed here as a dauntless, infallible white knight played with stoic serenity by Jeremy Allen White. It might be this constant calm that makes him so ingratiating to the film’s version of Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a member of Facebook’s civic integrity team, which is tasked with finding ways to make Facebook more ethically aligned with its supposed mission statement. That is also just one reason to explain why she is so unpopular at the company, leading her to be disgruntled enough to take a clandestine rendezvous with Jeff.

Theirs is the classic reporter/source courtship, a budding professional dance that begins with a slightly charged meeting on a park bench in the Bay Area hiking trails (all the better for Frances to make sure no one else in the company is walking up on them). Frances insists she doesn’t want to go on the record and will only point Jeff in the right direction. Yet time and again, she finds herself drawn closer to the journo. The two’s cover becomes date night, of a sort, at his hotel, only they’re actually sharing information that will bring Facebook’s misdeeds to light. Meanwhile, hovering high above it all is a new, absolutely diabolic vision of Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong). The tech CEO is reimagined as an overlord so menacing, so dictatorial that he moves through scenes in the same way Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor Palpatine ruled star systems in Return of the Jedi.

The recasting of Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network to Strong has dominated the oxygen around the new movie. The film mostly gets away with it since the interpretations are so different. While I’m not certain either is based too literally on the real man, Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg at least made some attempt to humanize and rationalize why this guy would screw over his best friend, or look at someone like Napster creator Sean Parker and think they’re seeing Justin Timberlake at his suavest. One might call it sympathy for the devil.

Strong’s Zuckerberg is simply the Devil, full-stop with a capital D. When the insinuations are so severe, and the global impact so demonstrably sinister, Sorkin seems to have lost little interest in comprehending the man. So he instead emphasizes this black hole’s effect to an almost cartoonish degree, which Strong meets by wielding the Zuck’s famed headphones like a crown and scepter. I can empathize with the instinct, but in a strange way it most encapsulates the differences in directors. Whereas The Social Network script held out hope for the kid with “I’m CEO, Bitch” business cards, Fincher’s direction was rife with sardonic disdain for the world he inhabited; a hopeful ending note on Sorkin’s carried the luster of fool’s gold in Fincher’s framing. Conversely, director Sorkin is so much more optimistic about humanity than Fincher that Zuckerberg can be nothing less than Saturday morning supervillain in need of vanquishing.

Those who are taking on that heroic quest are where the lion’s share of The Social Reckoning’s interests lie, and they’re the better aspects of the movie. I don’t know enough about the real Horwitz or Haugen to comment on the accuracy of White or Madison’s portrayals, although both feel like standard issue Sorkin protagonists: witty, good-hearted, and classics-educated eggheads who like sparring about the plots of Broadway musicals and Arthur Miller plays while doing the right thing.

In many ways, they’re closer to the leads of ‘90s Sorkin plays-turned-films like A Few Good Men than The Social Network, a fact composer Alexandre Desplat intentionally echoes in his old-fashioned, Aaron Copland-flavored score. This is a film about the soul of America, the music all but announces as a lonely horn plays over a title card. Given the subject matter, it can be on-the-nose. But it is also undeniably entertaining in the scenes where White and Madison just trade barbs on a gray park bench, with her not-so-patiently explaining tech jargon to the political reporter, or whenever our male hero looks forlornly off into the distance.

White keys into Sorkin’s hagiographic tone better than Madison, never playing less than an archetype, but with always the right balance of wariness and certitude. Madison has the more complex character, and in scenes where she must navigate the leering condescension of Silicon Valley work culture is quite compelling. She seems to struggle worse with Sorkin’s most heavy-handed instincts, which often whittle down to Madison in a low-cut dress being lectured to by Allen about why she must continue pushing the limits of her NDA to save the world. A sequence where White/Sorkin dismiss Madison for claiming he is “mansplaining” journalism to her doesn’t quite equal the Get Out of Jail Free Card the script seems to think it does.

Those obvious Sorkin flourishes are both The Social Reckoning’s greatest assets and weakest liabilities. On the one hand, there’s a reason so many Sorkin scripts have been nominated for or won awards; the rapid-fire patter of his dialogue is like music. To hell with realism! He piles on facts and figures, statistics and classic cinema asides, like a composer winding up a symphony. At the same time, he cannot help but always reach for the most conventional and even cloying of crescendos.

So it is in The Social Reckoning’s final movements where, without giving away spoilers, he arrives at his final, scornful pillory of Facebook by drawing direct lines between the social media site and the horrors of the last six years. Nonetheless, Sorkin paints it in such a moralizing, broad, and self-pleased shading that one could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that Horwitz’s bombshell reporting and Haugen’s fearless testimony was the stake through the heart of the Zuck-pire; a courageous act that brought an end to Facebook and the chaos of social media misinformation.

Yet even though it’s been barely half a decade since where The Social Reckoning closes its book, more than enough time has passed to know the world is still getting worse; one courageous journalist and undaunted whistleblower are not enough to bring down a trillion-dollar conglomerate that chillingly refers to itself as “post-government” in one of Sorkin’s best lines; and at the end of the day everyone knows Facebook is getting away with it. A real reckoning remains elusive.

It makes for a film that is easily digestible and entertaining, as well as slighter and sillier than its predecessor. It also makes that film a fairy tale.

The Social Reckoning is in theaters on Friday, Oct. 9.

Lanterns Finale Leaves Open the Comic Book Story of Hal Jordan’s Return

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns.

Ever since the pilot episode of Lanterns ended with a shot of Hal Jordan, frozen on a high school football field stand and dead from a bullet hole in his head, fans have hoped against hope that the death would be undone. Yet, despite the fact that Lanterns takes place in a world with robot Manhunters and magical wishing rings, the finale ended not only with Hal still dead, but the Hal-o-Gram backup that allowed him to pal around with John Stewart dissipating once and for all.

Yet, as final and the finale seemed to treat Hal Jordan’s expiration—and as many deviations from the comics taken by the show—it does leave open a path to return. The Hal Jordan of the DCU could return in the same way he did in the comics, by becoming the Spectre, the living manifestation of God’s wrath.

Before talking about the Spectre, we have to go back to the conditions of Hal’s death. As discussed in previous articles, Hal Jordan goes mad when Coast City is destroyed during the Death of Superman storyline. By the end of the 1994 storyline Emerald Twilight, Hal has destroyed the Corps, killed his friend Kilowog, and become the supervillain Parallax. For a while, Parallax is a big bad for new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and the DC Universe in general, even rewriting for the line-wide soft-reboot Zero Hour.

But by 1996, Hal’s villain journey came to an end. In that year’s company-wide crossover The Final Night, Earth’s heroes must work together to prevent a Sun-Eater from consuming our sun. In a final desperate move, Hal expels all of his power to reignite the sun, reciting his oath as he sacrifices himself. Despite all that he had done wrong, that one act of selflessness was enough to earn Hal Jordan a chance at redemption by becoming the Spectre.

Although not an A-list character, the Spectre actually goes back further than Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern concept. Created by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily for 1940’s More Fun Comics #52, the Spectre came to be when tough cop Jim Corrigan is murdered by thugs, but he is revived by a divine force to enforce justice on Earth. In his earliest stories, the Spectre played like a standard superhero, with Corrigan transforming into a white-skinned figure in a green cloak and underpants to punch bad guys and save the innocent. Fighting alongside the Justice Society of America, the Spectre wasn’t above killing a goon by aging them to a skeleton in a matter of seconds, but he was more or less heroic.

However, throughout the Silver Age and Bronze Age, the Spectre became more macabre, something like a heroic Freddy Krueger. He manifested a giant pair of scissors to cut down a baddie, turned killers into candles to let them melt to death, or transformed heroin addicts into the tips of his fingers so he could inject them with fire. These stories explicitly identified the Spectre as the living manifestation of God’s wrath, giving justification for the cruelty he inflicted upon baddies.

In fact, that cruelty drove the narrative of the Hal Jordan Spectre stories. After his sacrifice to reignite the sun, Jordan still deserved punishment in the eyes of God. However, Jim Corrigan, who had previously been retconned into a crooked cop before becoming the Spectre, had earned his atonement, and thus was free from the Spectre. The Spectre needed a new human spirit as a host, and the guilty, but not unredeemable, Hal Jordan was perfect.

Across the excellent Spectre series by J.M. DeMatteis and Ryan Sook, which ran for 27 issues between 2001 and 2003, Jordan wrestled with the Spectre entity, trying to inject it with more kindness while also dealing with his own guilt over his actions as Parallax. DeMatteis and Sook presented Jordan as a man who had fallen far from his once great heights, but who still had the heart of a hero, to say nothing of his impressive will. As Hal tried to harness the power of the Spectre like he once did with the power of the Green Lantern, he did so from a new place of humility, without sacrificing any of the charm or bravery that made him a great hero.

Which sure sounds like the Hal we saw at the end of Lanterns. Obviously, Hal had grown bitter and suspicious by the time of the 2016 storyline. The events of Rushville and the prison sentence that followed left him broken, as demonstrated by the way he sat chastened by citizens at a restaurant in the finale. But the good works he did to try to make things right, as well as the goodness still apparent in the Hal-o-Gram reminds us that there’s still a hero in Hal.

James Gunn has made it clear that death is final in his DCU. But given that the mural in Superman showed Justice Society members such as Sandman and Amazing Man, the Spectre could very well exist in this universe. If so, then the time is right to give Kyle Chandler a ghostly return as the Hal Jordan version of the Spectre.

Lanterns is now streaming on HBO Max.

The Batman: Part II Can’t Seem to Catch a Break

Batman has defeated some of the greatest villains in pop culture history: Joker, Two-Face, Ra’s al Ghul. He shot Darkseid with a god gun. He even survived George Clooney. Yet, for whatever reason, the Robert Pattinson version of the Caped Crusader can’t seem to find a way to victory.

According to Deadline, production on The Batman: Part II has paused as director Matt Reeves has stepped away to focus on a family matter. Obviously, the report doesn’t go into greater detail, to allow the Reeves family their privacy. But one thing is clear: the night has never been darker for this version of the Dark Knight.

Believe it or not, it’s been six years since The Batman hit screens, releasing to largely unanimous praise from audiences and critics. Immediately, Warner Bros. green lit a sequel, once again starring Pattinson as an emo Bruce Wayne early in his career as Batman, alongside Jeffrey Wright as police Lieutenant James Gordon, and Andy Serkis as a more combat-grizzled version of Alfred. Originally, Warner Bros. planned to release the movie on October 3, 2025. Then it was pushed back to October 2, 2026. And then October 1, 2027. And then to February 18, 2028, where it stands… at least of this writing.

As crazy as it is to lay all those delays out, a lot has happened over these past few years. Since The Batman: Part II went into pre-production, the actors and writers went on strike, DC Studios was formed under co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, and now Warner Bros. has been sold to Paramount and will be rechristened Skydance under the ownership of David Ellison.

Furthermore, the world has expanded, as the miniseries The Penguin released on HBO Max in 2024, and Reeves has a producing credit on the animated series Batman: Caped Crusader (which does not take place in the world of The Batman, but has some tonal similarities).

Yet, Reeves himself has admitted that he’s taking his time making the movie. Thus far, Gunn has been nothing but supportive of the process, assuring fans that The Batman movies take place in their own universe, disconnected from the rest of the DCU, and that Reeves can take his time to get the movie right. Moreover, the mainline DCU has its own Batman movie in the work, The Brave and the Bold, slated to be directed by Andy Muschietti.

All of that said, the timing of Reeves’s announcement is curious. After much litigation and negotiation, the sale of Warner Bros. to Paramount is set to close tomorrow, October 6. Beyond the loss of two historic Hollywood studios and the opportunity for more variety in productions, the Warner Bros. sale rankles audiences because of CEO David Ellison’s political positions, particularly his ties to President Donald Trump. Even if spokespeople are insisting that his relationship to Trump is “overstated,” Ellison’s position and his ownership over two studios has worried some creatives.

Again, Reeves has not said anything specific about his reasons for stepping away, and this just may be one more delay in The Batman: Part II‘s process. Were it any other movie, we would say that The Batman: Part II will never see the screen. But this isn’t just any movie. This is Batman, and Batman has overcome worse.

The Batman: Part II is slated to release on February 18, 2028. For now.

What Digger’s Satire Should Have Learned from Paul Verhoeven

This article contains spoilers for Digger.

Something strange happens during the final credits for Digger. Not a sequel tease or an easter egg. Rather, we just watch as an audience files out of a theater and into post-apocalyptic streets, while Melanie’s folk song “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” plays. That is, until a buzzer cuts off the song and a voice declares, “Level 4,” leaving the rest of the credits to unfold in silence.

The declaration “Level 4” also occurred a few minutes earlier in the film, telling the characters on screen, an audience who has been watching a stage play about the final days of oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), that they needed to put on their masks to deal with the poor air quality outside. But this second declaration isn’t for the characters: it’s for us, the audience in the real world, indicating how we needed to leave the theater. And if you found that bit of fourth-wall-breaking clever, then you’ve responded exactly how Digger director Alejandro G. Iñárritu intended. And you’ve also done something that Paul Verhoeven, another raconteur who worked within the Hollywood system, would never dream of letting you do: condescend to the movie.

No One’s Gonna Save the World

According to the trailers that played in front of pretty much every movie released in the past few months, Digger tells the story of Digger Rockwell, a crass, larger-than-life oil tycoon whose company’s drilling creates a crack in the polar shelf. The crack sends a massive chunk of ice heading toward Norway, and then toward Alaska, killing thousands and causing worldwide environmental and economic chaos. While Digger and his advisers, including American President Compton (John Goodman) and scientist Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) debate ways of dealing with the disaster, showing more concern for saving face and preserving profits than they do lives.

All of that does unfold on screen, in big and loud sequences that recall sub-Coen Brothers slapstick films like The Men Who Stare At Goats or Get Low. But after the first act, the story stops to reveal that we’re actually watching an expensive stage play called Fossil Fools, several years after the events it’s depicting. Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather Curtis Markson, portraying Rockwell. Moreover, the entire show is funded by the real Rockwell’s nephew Kenny (Jesse Plemons), who invites performers and audiences alike to laugh at the ego and foolishness of his family.

The reveal of Kenny’s involvement also reveals the movie’s central theme. Digger isn’t a satire about dumb capitalists and American warmongers. Rather, it’s a satire about satires about dumb capitalists and American warmongers. Kenny invites people to laugh at his family because it charges money. He’s still rich and powerful, even after his uncle nearly destroyed the world. The system has not changed. When the Fossil Fools audience hears the “Level 4” declaration, telling them that Digger’s actions have left the air unbreathable, they put on masks made by the Rockwell Corporation.

By the time the movie directs its “Level 4” declaration at us, the real audience, Digger‘s point is clear: big Hollywood satires do nothing to actually change the world, because they’re made by the people who run the world.

It’s a valid point, and one that’s hard to refute. We’ve all seen how Amazon pays for episodes of The Boys that mock Vought International or how Apple TV pays the creators of Severance to show a dystopian office that looks like an Apple store. Those in power don’t realize that these works mock them; more likely, they don’t care. Either way, it changes nothing.

But is Digger‘s satire more effective? It’s hard to believe that Paul Verhoeven would think so, precisely because Paul Verhoeven would never be as easy on his audience as Iñárritu is.

You’re Doing Your Part

Starship Troopers released to mixed reviews in 1997, but everyone agreed upon one thing: it had the makings of an exciting sci-fi action film. The story of good-looking teens seeking adventure and glory by joining the Earth military’s battle against invading bugs, Starship Troopers hits all the war movie tropes and contains plenty of thrilling action sequences.

By the movie’s climax, aloof jock Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) has risen through the ranks to lead the elite Roughnecks, pretty girl Carmen (Denise Richards) has become a captain, and the human forces have captured the Brain Bug orchestrating the enemy attacks. When psychic intelligence officer Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) reads the Brain Bug’s thoughts and declares, “It’s afraid,” the people stand up and cheer, and the movie invites us viewers to cheer with them: the music swells, the camera pans over the celebrating soldiers, the attractive heroes we’ve been following throughout the movie all smile together.

At no point does Starship Troopers break to point out that, in fact, it’s kind of depressing to cheer about a living creature’s fear. Nor does it point out that Carl’s dressed like an SS officer. Instead, it simply heightens the reactionary nature of the Robert A. Heinlein novel it adapts and uses classic Hollywood war movie tropes, and leaves it to the viewer to decide if they want to cheer, or if they can recognize that endless conflict renders any form of life meaningless.

Starship Troopers is hardly the only time Verhoeven’s exposed the nasty side of Hollywood tropes. His first American movie, Robocop, presents itself like a sci-fi action movie, with the violence and bloodlust heightened to ridiculous degrees. Showgirls follows the same plot as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Gold Diggers of 1937, musicals about starlets making it big in showbiz, but emphasizes all the exploitation and cruelty it involves. Basic Instinct goes beyond the sleaziness of a film noir to make the police utterly incompetent and craven.

Each of these films have moments that should turn the stomach of a viewer with a mildly functioning moral compass. The shot of a pre-teen joining Earth’s military in Starship Troopers—turning to the camera and declaring with a smile, “I’m doing my part!”—or the weak resolution to Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) and Cristal’s (Gina Gershon) tensions in Showgirls undercut any good feelings the music and dialogue demand.

But Verhoeven’s movies never do what Digger does. They never break from the facade to create a second audience, an audience to whom the real viewers can condescend. Instead, they just force the real audience to face the awful things they find enjoyable, and to wrestle alone with the messages the movie gives them.

Not So Deep

Even within the Fossil Fools section of the movie, Digger raises questions about how to control the narrative, suggesting that the way a story is told often has more power than what the story’s about. That’s true, and Iñárritu’s not wrong to point it out. However, by giving a foolish, false audience, Digger suggests that it’s “other people” who hear and believe that false story. Whether viewers loved or hated watching Cruise bluster on the screen and listening to Goodman bellow about his anal cancer, the frequent shots of fake audience members crying and cheering at the end of Fossil Fuels assures the viewer that they aren’t taken in. They’re smarter than the dumb-dumbs who are cheering for Fossil Fuels because they see what Digger‘s trying to do.

That raises two problems. First, it completely ignores the fact that Iñárritu is actually the person making the big Hollywood movie for Warner Bros. (now David Ellison and Skydance), in the same way that most of Digger actually is the broad Hollywood satire it claims to mock. Second, it doesn’t actually address any questions about the role of propaganda and the power of the culture industry, nor of the function of popular art in a consumer society. Digger plays like someone wanting praise for having read the wiki entries about Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord.

Verhoeven avoids those pitfalls because his movies own their depravity. They have no respect for the audience, nor respect for themselves. They take their tropes to the furthest, most stomach-churning degrees and leave it to the audience to do with them what they will. If they cheer, so be it. If they’re revulsed, even better. But Verhoeven movies will never ask for self-satisfied applause, something Digger and Iñárritu want so badly.

Digger is now playing in theaters.

Den of Geek Returns to NYCC with VisionQuest Leading Its Variant Magazine Covers

Paul Bettany and VISIONQUEST are embarking on their final Marvel mission in the latest issue of Den of Geek Magazine about to make landfall at New York Comic Con! The cover story includes an exclusive look into the Bettany and James Spader-led Disney+ limited series that will bring the curtain down on the WandaVision trilogy.

The October issue also comes with the magazine’s most packed spooky season preview yet, which includes deep dive interviews with Robert Eggers ahead of WERWULF’s Christmas transformation, Takashi Yamazaki finally opening up about bringing back GODZILLA’s greatest foe, Mike Flanagan revealing how he got Stephen King’s blessing to reimagine CARRIE, and much, much more! Plus Mckenna Grace, Joseph Zada, and Francis Lawrence invite us to witness Hunger Games’ SUNRISE ON THE REAPING!

Yearly subscriptions to Den of Geek magazine make a triumphant return with TWO VARIANT COVER OPTIONS featuring Bettany and Spader available now.

New York, Oct. 5 – Den of Geek, the premier destination for pop culture enthusiasts and everything Comic Con is returning to Manhattan’s Hudson Yards in a massive way this October. On the cover of the latest issue of the magazine—which will also be available via Den of Geek’s network of shops, comic book store partners, and subscription—is the finale to the most daring trilogy in Marvel Studios history. Paul Bettany’s beloved synthezoid hero is finally confronting what it means to be human… and whether he still wants it.

“You’re meeting two characters when they’re on the fence about humanity,” showrunner Terry Matalas says in the issue about bringing back Vision and his “father,” the supervillain Ultron (James Spader). “And Ultron might have a better perspective than Vision on what it means to be human at this point.”

The ability to actually challenge audiences’ preconceived notions more than the superhero genre might get credit for also seems to be on Bettany’s mind. In the issue, he even reflects on memories of Captain America: Civil War from a decade ago: “Everywhere we went in America, two-thirds of the crowd were on Cap’s side. They believed we absolutely have the right, and indeed, we have the onus to police the world. And everywhere else in the world, it was two-thirds on Iron Man’s side. That’s fascinating.”

The fall issue also features exclusive sitdowns with the filmmakers and creatives behind:

  • GODZILLA MINUS ZERO
  • THE HUNGER GAMES: SUNRISE ON THE REAPING
  • CARRIE
  • ETERNALLY YOURS
  • THE SIMPSONS TREEHOUSE OF HORROR EPISODE THAT INSPIRED OBSESSION
  • CREEPY COMICS’ LEGENDARY IMPACT ON POP CULTURE
  • Plus a deep-dive profile with director ROBERT EGGERS, in which the WERWULF helmer explains his fascination with lycanthropes, learning to write in Middle English, and the reasons he might be so transfixed by historical authenticity and early modern muses like Shakespeare. “So much of this job, like any job, is when do you listen to the people around you who are more experienced than you, and when do you know this is my time to reinvent the wheel?”

How to join the Den of Geek Collector’s Club secure your copy: 

  • Gold Edition: Available only through our premium yearly subscription (Limited to 100). 
  • Holo Edition: Variant subscriber cover run for Friends of Geek subs tier.
  • Base Edition: Distributed for free to fans at New York Comic Con via the Den of Geek brand ambassador team. 

About Den of Geek

By Experts. For Fans. Den of Geek is dedicated to serving the interests of today’s entertainment enthusiast. The brand reaches over 75 million users per month across all platforms and has become known for exclusive high-profile entertainment interviews and deep dives into geek culture. Den of Geek focuses on the hottest movies and TV shows, and explores the latest in games, books, and comics. Our magazine celebrates the buzziest releases on the entertainment calendar with beautiful layouts, exclusive imagery, and in-depth long reads. 

Final Fantasy VII Revelation Is Shaping Up to Be the Biggest Final Fantasy of All Time

“One of the goals of the series was to scale up with each successive title,” observes Final Fantasy Remake trilogy director Naoki Hamaguchi ahead of the April 2027 release of Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the trilogy’s concluding installment. “Rebirth was big and each individual area was connected but one of the things about it was that it was wide. For Revelation, rather than just making everything feel wide, we really wanted to create this sense of scale and verticality with everything.”

To confirm, having played an early build of Final Fantasy VII Revelation at Tokyo Game Show 2026 where I spoke to Hamaguchi for this interview, Revelation is indeed still very wide but also very vertical, both in its depth and its gameplay. This is most saliently seen with the addition of the Highwind, a large airship that can fly around the planet and drop protagonist Cloud Strife and his fan-favorite friends in environments in an instant, with the party members exhilaratingly parachuting down to resume their exploration and battles on foot. This verticality has also extended to the return of the chocobo mounts, offering even more navigation options and activities than they had in 2024’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

But more than just navigation and exploration, the combat feels deeper and more engaging than it had in 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth as well. Sure, the overarching combat system from the preceding games carries over to Revelation, but there are so many new features, customizations for all the playable characters, and brand-new party members joining Cloud as he seeks to stop the villainous Sephiroth from destroying the world. The synergy system, which has two characters perform a devastating joint technique returns here as well, but deepened and more varied than it had been in Rebirth.

“One thing we’re concerned about is if people approaching the game are using the same tactics over and over again,” Hamaguchi shares. “One of the goals of the synergy system is to experience different tactics and refresh the experience. People always ask about three-character synergy abilities. While they do exist, they can’t be spammed over and over because otherwise the battle would just be over if they would be relied upon constantly. Instead of being available for every battle, they’re available for key moments and key fights to bring the party together, ramp up the events, and make them more exciting.”

Just as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth saw the player party grow considerably from Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Revelation adds two new playable characters to the mix and we got to try both of them out. Cid Highwind, an ace pilot, and Vincent Valentine, an elite soldier experimented on by the mad scientist Hojo, both join the party early on in Revelation and each with their own distinct playstyles compared to the returning characters. With Cid, players can time their button inputs with the on-screen hits to optimize his techniques while Vincent can transform between different physical forms reflecting how he was changed by what Hojo did to him.

“We didn’t want Vincent or Cid to replace any of the other characters,” explains Hamaguchi. “We wanted them to feel separate but both special in a certain way. A good example with Cid is that, while Red XIII can fight exclusively on the ground, Cid fights really well in the air. For Vincent, he’s a very unique character. He can combat in close and long range, kind of like Cloud and Barrett. But in close range, he turns into Beast Mode. In Beast Mode, he becomes a little bit like a glass cannon, with his overall health reduced, so he can’t rely on that mode for too long.”

One of the coolest additions to Final Fantasy VII Revelation is the introduction of the FITS (Function Integrated Tactical Suitwear) system, changing up the characters’ outfits and combat roles within the wider party. The developers didn’t want to go with something as rigidly defined as the jobs system from past Final Fantasy games like Final Fantasy III, but something that added to further the customization options available to players on how they each prefer to play. Tying into the act of changing up character costumes adds a visual variety to the game that had been missing in its predecessors.

“It all stemmed from rather than having fixed roles for every single character, letting players customize them. They’re customizable into four different types, rather than just random jobs, using what was already there in the battle system,” shares Hamaguchi. “Originally, we did call it a job system internally. But we realized that if you call it a job system, it implies a lot of different things and we didn’t really want that. We came up with this concept of changing costumes. In Japanese, it’s called the wear system and, in English, it’s called the fit system to bridge the gap between the costumes and the customization.”

If you thought Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was a tremendous increase in scope and gameplay depth over Final Fantasy VII Remake, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Final Fantasy VII Revelation offers the most comprehensively sweeping Final Fantasy experience to date while offering an ambitious retelling of Final Fantasy VII’s final act and last stand against the villainous Sephiroth. While Naoki Hamaguchi has been working in this world and with its fan-favorite characters for years, he’s not finished with them yet, getting Revelation and its post-launch DLC ready to share with the world. That means the acclaimed game director hasn’t quite said goodbye to the characters just yet.

“Rather than feeling sad, there is a sense of reassurance once the game is out that we’ve done these characters proper,” Hamaguchi notes reflectively. “These characters are obviously very beloved, so we want to make sure that we’re doing them right and there’s a sense of reassurance that we did. At the moment, ‘sad’ is not the emotion that I would choose. But maybe later down the road, after it’s all said and done, I’ll want to pick it up and see these characters again.”

Developed and published by Square Enix, Final Fantasy VII Revelation releases April 8 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Lanterns Creators Sort of Clarify John Stewart’s Status After the Finale

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 8.

To the surprise of no one, the season finale of Lanterns ends with John Stewart taking the ring and saying the oath to become the next Green Lantern of Earth. Well, that’s sort of what he does. He does have Hal Jordan’s old ring, and he does charge it on a Lantern, and he does say an oath. But the oath he recites isn’t the one that Jordan has said throughout the series, and the lantern he uses comes from Sinestro, not the Guardians, and even has fear laced into it. So what does that mean for Stewart and the future of Green Lantern?

Tom King and Chris Mundy, who created Lanterns with Damon Lindelof, have taken to Hollywood Reporter to kind of clarify. “John is not a hundred percent a Green Lantern anymore. He has an unsanctioned lantern that has a bit of yellow and a bit of fear in it,” King explained. “So he’s not saying the same oath as every other Green Lantern — just like a Yellow Lantern or an Orange Lantern says something different.” Citing an observation by series writer Justin Britt-Gibson, Mundy adds that John is “remixing” the oath. That’s an apt choice of words because, as surprising as John’s decision was, it does have precedent from the comics.

Before John recites his oath, he has one last confrontation with Guy Gardner, which sets the stage for the future of the character. John explicitly states that he won’t be part of the Green Lantern Corps, that he’ll be using the unsanctioned lantern that Sinestro forged for the Manhunter Noah. Moreover, John tells Guy that he’ll be patrolling Earth and that Guy—and, by extension, the Corps—are no longer welcome.

For King, John’s oath represents his distinction from the other Green Lanterns. “John is this utterly unique creation that he chose for himself. So getting his own unique oath seemed to line up very much with the lore and where we’re going from here,” he explained.

What this means for the future of the DCU is still unclear. We know that Aaron Pierre will be back as John Stewart for the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, as will Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner. Whether or not that means that the two GLs will clash or work together while dealing with the threat of Brainiac—or that John will be sent to the off-planet prison of Salvation by Rick Flag and ARGUS—remains to be seen.

However, we can get some sense of future plans by looking at instances in the comics where Lanterns deviated from the Guardians or the rest of the Corps. John himself became a Guardian in his first solo series Green Lantern: Mosaic, in which he was tasked with protecting a planet made up of cities from different worlds. In recent series, especially Geoffrey Thorne’s Green Lantern run and Green Lantern: War Journal by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Montos, John’s power scaled up even more, so that he could pull off feats far beyond the average GL.

That power upgrade matches what we saw in Lanterns, particularly John’s ability to maintain a bird construct without his ring. However, the real swerve in Lanterns comes from the fact that John’s new lantern has, as King observed, “a bit of yellow and a bit of fear in it.” The yellow impurity and role of fear in Green Lantern lore is complicated, but generally, no one who feels fear will get chosen to be a GL. That changed in the 1994 storyline Emerald Twilight by Ron Marz and Darryl Banks, which saw Hal Jordan turn into the villain Parallax and destroy the Green Lantern Corps. In a desperate move, the one surviving Guardian forged a ring, went to Earth, and gave it to the first person he met: Kyle Rayner.

Throughout the ’90s, Kyle operated as the sole Green Lantern and, as such, acted a lot like John’s promising to act. He didn’t have a Corps, he had no oversight from the Guardians, and mostly stayed on Earth. Moreover, he experienced fear, and was told by several people—including Batman, the Dream Lord Orpheus, and even Hal Jordan himself—that the ability to feel fear would allow him to become the greatest Green Lantern.

Given that Kyle is currently fighting intergalactic restaurant mascots in this month’s issue of Green Lantern, things didn’t exactly pan out that way. Since Hal Jordan and the Corps were resurrected, Kyle’s been a supporting character at best, and he’s completely absent from the DCU. However, it seems like John Stewart will be carrying on that legacy in live action. Or, at the very least, he’ll be remixing it.

Lanterns is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max.

The Best Coen Brothers Movies, Ranked

Ever since their debut feature Blood Simple, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have demanded the attention of moviegoers. And since that movie, the Coens have baffled us. Everyone agrees that the Coen Brothers are among the greatest filmmakers in America, if not the world. Even their lesser entries, like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty have their defenders. But that doesn’t mean that film fans understand the Coens. A pair of philosophically-minded, slapstick-loving siblings from a Jewish suburb of Minnesota, the brothers defy all categorization.

And their movies reflect that defiance. Across their filmography, they have covered everything from stoner comedy to existential Western to classic Hollywood homage and more. They’re just as comfortable making a wacky and broad movie like Raising Arizona and a quiet, almost emotionless film like The Man Who Wasn’t There. Such range means that there’s vast disagreement about ranking their movies. Yet, like poor, beleaguered Larry Gopnik of A Serious Man, we’ll try to sort out the top 10, fruitless though the task may be.

10. Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Throughout their career, the Coens have been accused of condescending to their characters. Critics such as Roger Ebert charge the brothers with throwing doofuses and bumpkins on the screen and then inviting us to laugh at their misfortune. One might argue that reading Søren Kierkegaard and Cormac McCarthy through the lens of Judaism accounts for the fatalism of their movies, but the answer is probably a lot more simple: they just like silliness, especially the silliness of classic Hollywood movies.

Nothing in the Coen’s oeuvre makes that argument better than Hail, Caesar!, an old Hollywood farce starring Josh Brolin as real-life studio fixer Eddie Mannix. Hail, Caesar! follows Mannix through a day of dealing with stars who pose problems for the studio, including an Esther Williams-like swimmer’s (Scarlett Johansson) latest love affair and a doofus matinee idol (George Clooney) getting kidnapped by leftists and converting to communism. In between, we get all manner of heady debate, including a delightful scene of religious leaders dithering about depictions of God in a biblical epic. By the end of the film, it becomes clear that the Coens may not care about anything, but they really do care about the movies.

9. A Serious Man (2009)

The other great rejoinder to claims about the Coens’ anger toward their characters comes with A Serious Man. Part autobiography, part retelling of the book of Job, A Serious Man stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a math professor living in 1960s suburban Minnesota. Despite being no one of any importance, Larry begins to endure a series of misfortunes: a student first demands and then extorts him for a higher grade, his sad-sack brother (Richard Kind) has moved in with him, and his wife (Sari Lennick) wants to leave him to marry Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).

Larry seeks guidance from his rabbis, but he gets only rambling stories with no clear answers, which mirror the scene that opens the movie, in which a beloved rabbi who visits a couple may or may not be a dybbuk. Like these tales, A Serious Man offers no morals or answers, no reasons for Larry’s suffering. But even though it contains several funny scenes, A Serious Man doesn’t invite the viewer to just laugh at him either. Instead, it asks us to be serious ourselves, to recognize that we’re all like Larry, trying to make meaning from the nonsense that surrounds us.

8. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Speaking of relating to characters in a Coen Brothers movie… throughout The Hudsucker Proxy, which the brothers wrote with their friend and sometimes collaborator Sam Raimi, corn-fed Indiana boy Norville Barnes shows someone at Hudsucker Industries his brilliant idea. The lanky doofus Barnes (Tim Robbins) fishes a slip of paper from his pocket, unfolds it, and proudly displays it to whomever will listen, showing them what appears to be just a circle. “You know,” explains Barnes, “For kids!”

The circle turns out to be a hula-hoop, and does indeed become a sensation for Hudsucker. The same can be said of The Hudsucker Proxy, a broad Preston Sturges homage that baffled viewers for years, but has since become a fan favorite. The story of an idiot who becomes a top-level executive because of scheming businessmen (led by Paul Newman), The Hudsucker Proxy‘s screwball sensibilities are a required taste. But, like those who finally figure out what Norville’s circle means, you’ll be richly rewarded once you accept the wacky comedy on its own terms.

7. Miller’s Crossing (1990)

Most great filmmakers do one thing great and everything else really well: they tell good stories, but their visuals are flat, or they have compelling dialogue, but the movies lack thematic weight. Early in their career, the Coens established themselves as masters at dialogue, visuals, and theme, all of which are on display in their third feature, the gangster picture Miller’s Crossing.

The story of genius Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) negotiating his way through volatile gangsters in 1929, Miller’s Crossing offers a compelling look at the destructive nature of power and the cost of a moment of humanity. It opens with an incredible monologue from Jon Polito, who lectures on the nature of ethics in language at once true to noir and utterly idiosyncratic. And midway through the movie comes a jaw-dropping action sequence, as Irish boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) escapes a mob hit on his home. In most filmographies, Miller’s Crossing would be the clear number one, a work of such bravado that it would be impossible to replicate. For the Coens, it’s number seven.

6. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)

Despite all the masterpieces on this list, the Coen Brothers greatest contribution to cinema may simply be figuring out that George Clooney, perhaps the most handsome and charming star in all of Hollywood, is really, really good at playing a buffoon. O Brother Where Art Thou? takes its name from the 1941 Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, features a bluegrass soundtrack that became a genuine sensation, and it is an adaptation of The Odyssey. But it is fundamentally a slapstick comedy about three bozos on a quest.

Clooney stars as Ulysses Everett McGill, a fast talker and slow-thinker who convinces cellmates Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) to break out of prison and come with him to find the money he stole from a bank and buried in a field. The trio encounters all sorts of oddities as they make their way across the Depression-era South, all digitally colored to dusty yellow, long before learning that Ulysses simply wants to prevent his wife Penny (Holly Hunter) from remarrying. That reveal gives O Brother some genuine pathos, but not at the expense of the movie’s true pleasures: watching Clooney, Turturro, and Nelson execute incredible comic bits.

5. The Big Lebowski (1998)

Can we now, in Year of Our Lord 2026, finally admit that The Big Lebowski is a masterpiece, full stop? You wouldn’t think that a movie so oft-quoted, so fully ingrained in the American consciousness, would need such a defense. But The Big Lebowski has had such an unlikely journey that, even today, it feels risky to include it in the Coens’ top five.

A riff on The Big Sleep and other film noirs that puts aimless stone the Dude (Jeff Bridges) in the Humphrey Bogart role, The Big Lebowski infuriated theater-goers in 1998, who expected the precision of their previous film, Fargo. However, the movie soon found an audience on college campuses, where the Dude’s love of weed, bowling, and coitus seemed relatable. Rather than stay among the likes of Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams and Half-Baked, The Big Lebowski received another reassessment, and is now recognized for what it truly is: a brilliant piece of anti-detective fiction, anchored by incredible performances by Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, and others. But honestly, it doesn’t matter what people think of The Big Lebowski. Through it all, the Dude abides.

4. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

With O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers had already adapted The Odyssey. But they return to the format in a very different way for Inside Llewyn Davis, which takes place within the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s. On a literal level, the object searched for here is an orange cat, who escaped from the apartment where down-on-his luck folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) had been allowed to stay for a night. But really, Davis looks for some sort of peace, a peace that he so often denies himself.

Still reeling after the death by suicide of his singing partner, the incredibly talented, but incredibly flinty Davis tries to make his way through the world. His sweet singing voice and solid fundamentals draw people to him, including fellow folkie Jean (Carey Mulligan), who is pregnant with his child, and her affable husband Jim. Yet, Llewyn refuses to take any sort of comfort from them, in part because he fears it will corrupt his art. As a result, Inside Llewyn Davis stands as the Coens’s most difficult film, a portrait of someone who can’t seem to get out of his own way, but we love him anyway.

3. No Country For Old Men (2007)

At first glance, No Country For Old Men represents a hard split in the brothers’ filmography. The duo loves making broad comedies, goofs and farces such as The Big Lebowski and The Hudsucker Proxy. They also love bleak serious works, including the Cormac McCarthy adaption No Country For Old Men. The story of a desperate man (Brolin), who swipes money from a drug deal and goes on the run across 1980s Texas, pursued by both an honest lawman (Tommy Lee Jones) and the seemingly supernatural killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), No Country seems like a serious work that reduces the comedies to mere larks.

Yet, No Country shares much in common with the rest of the Coens’s filmography, and not just because it is, itself, very funny (come on, just look at Chigurh’s haircut!). Rather, because No Country has the same pessimistic, nihilistic outlook of the comedies. The gut punch of a final scene, in which Jones’ Sheriff Bell describes a troubling dream and then calls upon God to explain it, only for the screen to cut to black, captures the Coens’s driving belief. Everything is meaningless, whether you’re laughing or crying.

2. True Grit (2010)

There are many remarkable things about True Grit, the Coens’ 2010 adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, previously made famous by John Wayne. One is Hailee Steinfeld‘s performance as Mattie Ross, perhaps the greatest acting ever done by a child on screen, and she in her film debut. Another is the rich Carter Burwell score, which turns the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” into something, at turns, mournful, rousing, and frightning. Yet another are Bridges and Matt Damon as those hired by Ross to hunt down Tom Chaney (Brolin), the man who killed her father.

But the most remarkable thing about True Grit is how perfectly suited the Coens are for Portis’s writing. An early scene in which Mattie out-haggles a businessman to procure a horse and a saddle plays like something out of The Big Lebowski or Miller’s Crossing, with its stylized dialogue and quick wit. But it comes directly from the novel, word for word. However, Portis’s novel does add one thing often missing from the brother’s films, a redemption narrative for Cogburn that at least makes him acceptable, if not heroic.

1. Fargo (1996)

Outside of Rooster Cogburn, only one other Coen Brothers character deserves the title “hero,” and she’s a very pregnant police chief in Brainerd, Minnesota in Fargo. As Marge Gunderson, Frances McDormand plays a rarity in the Coen’s universe, a person driven by simple human decency, decency that matters. As Marge investigates a set of seemingly random murders, she gets pulled further into a plot concocted by sad-sack salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who hires a pair of criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife (Kristin Rudrüd) and extort money from his father-in-law (Harve Presnell).

From the exaggerated accents to the absurd image of a foot sticking out of a wood chipper, Fargo is often very funny. And, as critics at the time pointed out, the laughs often come at the expense of the characters, inviting us to condescend to the pathetic Jerry and guffaw at criminals’ rants about the Pancake House. But when Marge delivers a heartfelt speech about the beauty of the day, and then crawls into bed alongside her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch), we have no choice but to agree with her assessment that she’s got a good life. And it’s hard to imagine that the Coens don’t agree as well.

Bucking Fastard Review: Kate Mara and Rooney Mara as The Shining Twins (But Funny!)

Kate and Rooney Mara are not twins, nor are their characters Jeanie and Joanie Holbrook in the new, odd Werner Herzog movie Bucking Fastard. Joan and Jean, in fact, get aggressively perturbed when they’re mistaken as identical siblings, or otherwise described in any terms as a double act. That’s because they’re so singularly one person; one characterization; a single performance told via two Maras. To suggest a differentiation is akin to effrontery.

And yet, the symmetry of both real-life Mara sisters’ performances and the way that Herzog almost always frames them, with Rooney to the left and Kate to the right, suggests an undeniable achievement in performance. The Sisters Mara are like a winking inversion in this movie of the spooky Grady girls and their matching dresses seen in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and a reversal of old-timey Irish fairy tales about doppelgänger changelings.

There’s something uncannily unnerving at play, but also unexpectedly wholesome and jejune. As befits Herzog’s naturalist and documentarian instincts, it is when Kate and Rooney are allowed into the literal Irish wilderness of County Kildare (doubling for Wessex) during the third act, and away from the prying, voyeuristic eyes of society, that the performances seem the most at ease. Like a certain literary metaphor about mockingbirds and the morality of killing them, theirs is a wild thing energy that is best left to follow its own sisterly muses.

Nonetheless on a certain level, I cannot help but think Herzog was just tickled by the idea of seeing real-life sisters recite every line of dialogue in either unison or a shared back-and-forth that sees them effortlessly finish the other’s sentences. It is a joke, and a film, that lives in an eerie dreamlike space. And the picture is at its most bemusing when we just revel in the weirdness of, say, an opening courtroom sequence where Joanie and Jeanie insist on taking the stand together before His Majesty’s Tribunal Services. They’re apparently facing legal jeopardy after they fell in love with, and then became violently obsessed over, their limousine-driving neighbor (Orlando Bloom). That he went to bed with both of them at the same time probably wasn’t the wisest choice on his part either.

One can almost hear Herzog chuckle as Kate and Rooney’s faces flicker between sweet reverie while recalling meeting this cad in church to, not so convincingly, saying they had nothing to do with the fire that nearly immolated his house. When Bloom insists they’re crazy, the Maras scream “Bucking Fastard” with such synchronized fury, it creates a natural reverb echo in the ear.

For the first hour or so, the movie delights on this wavelength, even as it dutifully and almost obligatorily scaffolds a more bittersweet allegory atop the joke. There is, indeed, a method to Herzog’s madness, as revealed in an unexpectedly melancholic third act, but sometimes the matching clothes and four-pupiled wide-eyed stare is really all we needed.

Loosely based on a real pair of English sisters (who were, in fact, twins), Herzog’s Rooney and Kate deliberately occupy a kind of ethereal alternative reality. Theirs is a magical existence where Bloom can kick open the doors of church and storm through with a pint of beer in his hand like the Second Coming landed on Oktoberfest morning. Notably the story is also set in the UK, and yet both Maras make no attempt to hide their natural American accents. Increasingly a documentarian in his advancing age, Herzog returns to narrative storytelling in order to find the surreality of actual events.

It’s easy to see why the story of real-life Freda and Greta Chaplin appealed to the director of Aguirre and the most tender-hearted and weeping twist on Nosferatu we ever got. The Chaplins’ life reads like a bittersweet fever dream that was preserved in several docs I’m sure Herzog sought out. In his own peculiar manner, the filmmaker wants to use that truth to imagine a fiction interrogating the cost of being different. The filmmaker, Kate, and Rooney seek to celebrate the thinly-fictionalized Holbrook sisters’ iconoclastic singularity (times two), but Bucking Fastard ultimately becomes about the cost of going by the beat of a different drum.

In the film’s back half, the Holbrook girls are dispossessed by the culture around them. Their parents, whom we never see, want nothing to do with their now nationally notorious daughters; the only friends in their lives are intriguingly a rotating chorus of men, some of whom pity the poor things, and others like Bloom have obviously more lascivious things on their minds. None of them really get through to either Joanie or Jeanie about becoming their own person. There are occasional flashes of discordance, and curiously Herzog tends to foreshadow that danger whenever he has Kate move to the left of frame, and Rooney to the right. But these are less epiphanies than moments of disharmony, like the string of a fine violin snapping mid-concerto.

Soon enough, the sisters are always back where they’re happiest, which in the third act involves living out in the country with a kindly aunt, a fox they befriend, and a cave that becomes a not-so-subtle visual metaphor for the social destiny they built for themselves.

As an allegory, there is something wistful about the longview cost of being different. As a narrative, it becomes a lot like the sisters’ lives: unsatisfying and without the happy ascent you hope for in the glory days of youth—or Bucking Fastard’s much stronger first half. Rooney and Kate’s performances are too good of a gag to ignore, but the movie struggles to be worthy of their sis bliss.

Bucking Fastard premiered at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 30.

Five Things We Want to See in Lanterns Season 2

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns.

Look how far Lanterns has come. Just months ago, we were wringing our hands about HBO‘s Green Lantern adaptation, thanks to promotional materials that had as little green as the show’s title. Fans worried that the series would be embarrassed about the franchise’s weird mythology and instead try to sell the public a True Detective knock-off that was Green Lantern in name only, if even that.

Turns out, everyone was right and wrong. Lanterns did indeed mostly play like a True Detective riff, with Silver Age sci-fi sprinkled along the sides. But creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King told such a compelling story, and stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre had such presence that the show became a genuine hit. So even though the series ended with Hal Jordan’s definitive death, and even though a second season has not yet been greenlit, a second season of Lanterns seems possible—and that means that it’s time for making an irresponsible wish list!

A New Lantern Pairing

Look, absolutely no one will be upset if Kyle Chandler wants to come back for a second season. Between the comic book logic baked into the premise and Damon Lindelof being Damon Lindelof, there are certainly plenty of ways that Hal could come back from getting shot in the head by his girlfriend. But the show sure seemed like it was done with him, and that’s okay, because there are a lot of other GLs in the Corps to pal around with John Stewart in season 2.

The most obvious pick is Guy Gardner. Not only does Guy have a history with John, but he also has a bone to pick with Earth’s unofficial GL. Still, it would be nice to see John forced to pair with another GL, possibly someone younger. Kyle Rayner is the most popular GL to not yet appear, and John has mentored him in the comics. But it might also be nice to see Lanterns get weird and to bring in some female GLs (something Hal memorably predicted in his eulogy). Jessica Cruz is always welcome, but it would be interesting to see John with Jo Mullein, especially if she gets something like the experimental ring she wields in the comics (and especially if they cast Janelle Monáe, whose look inspired Jo’s original design).

Sinestro

Despite much speculation, Lanterns did not end with Sinestro getting a yellow ring and forming the Sinestro Corps. But the series didn’t rule that out, either. The finale ends with Sinestro stranded on a planet that makes people afraid, where he was just talking about the power of fear, and where he forged a lantern that operates in part on fear. Time to just pull the trigger and let Sinestro be Sinestro, you cowards.

Okay, even if the Lanterns braintrust doesn’t want to make Green Lantern all about Corps of various colors, like the comics have become, season two has to at least give us more Sinestro in some form. Ulrich Thomsen had such a creepy, charismatic take on the character that he controlled the screen every time he showed up. We don’t care if he’s commanding an army or just behind bars again, we’ll take as much of the renegade Green Lantern as we can get!

More Villains

Beyond Sinestro, season 1 gave us variations of classic GL villains the Manhunters and Hector Hammond, which means that season 2 can go even deeper into the rogues gallery. Many online believed that Will Macon would turn out to be William Hand a.k.a. the Black Hand, but that fake out leaves room for a proper version to appear on screen, either as “the cliché criminal” from the Silver Age or the current zombie version with a Black Lantern Ring. It would be fun to see a second season go for some real weirdos like Shark or Sonar, especially if the latter can further flesh out the new DCU.

But the most obvious pick would be someone connected to the Guardians, if not a Guardian themselves. A second season could go deeper into Lantern lore to bring in Volthoom, the First Lantern, which would satisfy those who want more color Corps. Or they could just give us a mad Guardian like Old Timer, if not Krona, the guy who introduced evil into the world in the first place.

A Few More Planets

Look, we all liked Lanterns, and we’re sure Nebraska is a wonderful state. But we’d be lying if we said we wouldn’t have liked to see more outer space in a show about cops who work in outer space. Even if John has declared himself the terrestrial GL, you can’t keep dropping Mogo’s name without giving us at least a glimpse of Mogo.

If not Mogo, then at least some other planets. The cosmos of the DC Universe has been surprisingly underdeveloped, as Lanterns stayed largely on Earth and Supergirl only visited three planets, and three indistinct ones at that. Now that Lanterns has proven successful, HBO should up the budget so we can go places like Rann and Thanagar, visit Legion of Super-Heroes worlds like Braal and Winath. At least go to some other GL home planets, like Xudar or Bolovax Vik (provided Sinestro hasn’t blown it up in this universe).

More of the Same

As we Lanterns fans make all of these demands, we also have to face the facts. We did get a Green Lantern adaptation that was faithful to the comics, that had lots of canonical villains, that featured Sinestro and Kilowog and Tomar-Re, that even set up the Yellow Lantern Corps. That was the 2011 Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds, and it absolutely sucked. That movie reminds us that fan service is no substitute for good storytelling.

Lanterns had good storytelling in spades. So, more than anything else on this list, the thing we really want from season two of Lanterns is more of what we got in season one: solid storytelling, interesting characters, and strong emotional beats. If Lanterns season 2 can match the quality of season 1, then it doesn’t matter if it’s eight episodes of Kari Limbo and Tom Kalmaku wearing burlap sacks and walking around the Nevada desert, we’re going to watch it.

All of Lanterns is now streaming on HBO Max.