Star Wars: Galactic Racer Provides High-Octane Thrills to That Galaxy Far, Far Away
While there have certainly been Star Wars racing games after 1999’s high-octane fan-favorite Star Wars Episode I: Racer, none had quite captured the same level of bombastic action in speeding around that galaxy far, far away. Fortunately, that high-speed glory is recaptured and then some with the upcoming racing title Star Wars: Galactic Racer, developed by Fuse Games and published by Secret Mode in association with Lucasfilm Games. As feature-rich as the racing game genre gets, Galactic Racer has enough thrills to excite genre enthusiasts while taking full advantage of its iconic space opera setting.
Fuse Games had been founded by personnel who worked on long-running racing game franchises including Need for Speed and Burnout, so developing top-shelf racing experiences is well within the creative team’s wheelhouse. Those sensibilities are apparent in Star Wars: Galactic Racer with many different modes and features provided to gamers, from a campaign, a scenario mode, an arcade mode, and various multiplayer gameplay options, including different online modes. Each of these modes are available to players right at the start and are each incredibly engrossing in their own right.
There is a selection of vehicle types available to players throughout Star Wars: Galactic Racer – landspeeders, speeder bikes, skimspeeders, and the requisite podracers. Each vehicle offers its own nuance in their handling, with the skimspeeders among the most intriguing due to their ability to tilt laterally on their sides, helping with cornering and moving through narrow shortcuts on the track. In one of the better prologues to a game in recent memory, the campaign mode lets you try three of these types in rapid succession with just enough time to see how distinct the vehicles are from each other while also carrying the story forward.
As for said story, the campaign mode takes place in the years following the events of Return of the Jedi, with the memory of the Galactic Civil War still looming large as the New Republic continues to restore order. At the same time, the game features clear nods to the entire Star Wars canon as it currently stands, including races on Tatooine and sequel trilogy planets like Jakku and Crait, all sumptuously rendered. Just as Star Wars Episode I: Racer did nearly 30 years ago, Galactic Racer also introduces plenty of distinct new worlds while telling the story of a racer joining the galactic circuit, complete with their own allies and rivals in the racing scene.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer was a particularly difficult racing game, or at least harder for fans who were more accustomed to the level of challenge of contemporary racing titles like Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing. With that in mind, I’m happy to report that Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a much more accessible experience than Episode I: Racer had been, still bringing the high-speed challenge but with more variety in adjustable difficulty levels for some of its major solo modes. As someone who has historically struggled with more realistic racing games, being able to adjust the difficulty for campaign mode was a godsend and for those racing game aficionados, those higher difficulties will definitely test their skills.
Both the campaign and scenario modes also incorporate RPG elements, which makes them a bit more striking than most contemporary racing games. Between races, players can upgrade their vehicles, emphasizing which individual elements they want to enhance. On the flip side, parts that were damaged in a race can hinder a vehicle for the remainder of a campaign or scenario, adding to the risk/reward aspects of the gameplay. These elements are relatively superficial to the experience, but they do help make those longer circuits feel more engaging while highlighting the need to not go recklessly into every race.
There are some drawbacks to the game, though mostly quibbles rather than big glaring flaws in looking at the whole experience. While I thought the crash cam, a camera feature that cuts to an opposing vehicle that you caused to crash unfolding in slow-motion, was cool at first, I ultimately found it distracting and ran the risk of affecting me staying the course when the camera abruptly returned to follow me. Finally, the RPG elements feel like something that could’ve been developed even more than the version that appears in the final game, though the game deserves some praise for introducing these mechanics in the first place.
Between Star Wars: Galactic Racer and the recent squad-based strategy game Star Wars Zero Company, this year has proved that the future of Star Wars may be brightest in the franchise’s current crop of video games rather than movies like The Mandalorian and Grogu. Galactic Racer is a reminder of how malleable the franchise can be in its various multimedia depictions and, more importantly, just how much fun Star Wars is whenever it’s done right. Star Wars: Galactic Racer offers loads of fun in its grand prix tour of that galaxy far, far away and is accessible enough for more casual racing game fans.
Developed by Fuse Games and published by Secret Mode, Star Wars: Galactic Racer releases October 6 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Defending Hannibal, Ridley Scott’s Gruesome Sequel to The Silence of the Lambs
When The Silence of the Lambs won all of the big five categories at the 1992 Oscars, including Best Picture, observers had to do all manner of hand-wringing to explain why the movie wasn’t just a horror movie. One could point to Jonathan Demme’s incredible direction, which brought a level of empathy to the proceedings. One could point to the triumph of former child actor Jodie Foster‘s performance as FBI trainee Clarice Starling or to respected theater thespian Anthony Hopkins towering take on Hannibal Lecter. One could argue that the lurid stuff—the semen throwing, face eating, or frontal nudity—occurs only in flashes.
For the most part, the ploy worked. Regular people got to enjoy the story of an FBI director sending a young trainee to consult with an unrepentant cannibal to stop a serial killer from making a suit of the skin of murdered women. But that perception applied only for The Silence of the Lambs. It could not apply to the vivid, pulpy Thomas Harris novel that inspired it, nor to Hannibal, the sequel that Harris wrote—a sequel so extreme that neither Foster, Demme, nor screenwriter Ted Tally wanted to touch it. That’s where Ridley Scott came in, who embraced Harris’s excess to make Hannibal the grotesque rejoinder to anyone who condescended to The Silence of the Lambs.
Hannibal Unbound
Much of the pleasure of The Silence of the Lambs came from its restraint, keeping Lecter largely in a cell and limiting his screen time to less than 25 minutes.
Not so with Hannibal, which finds the doctor living as a free man in Florence, Italy, posing as library curator and Dante scholar Dr. Fell. However, that doesn’t mean that he lives in peace. Beyond his inclinations to continue eating the rude, Lecter has to contend with Mason Verger, a rich degenerate who survived an encounter with Lecter, but was left with a mutilated face and wheelchair bound. Played by Gary Oldman, at the height of his obsession with prosthetics, Verger has devoted his vast fortune to getting revenge, including a hefty finders fee that catches the attention of Florentine policeman Rinaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini). When Pazzi accesses FBI databases to find information about Lecter he can give to Verger, he catches the attention of Clarice Starling (now played by Julianne Moore), who has also been looking for her former contact.
The spaciousness of the plot does make Hannibal feel unwieldy. The first two acts split time between Washington, where Clarice finds herself under greater scrutiny after a drug bust gone wrong, Lecter’s adventures gallivanting around Florence, and Mason’s haunted mansion. The primary characters interact mostly on phone or by staring at screens, only bumping into one another through artless plot contrivances. The plot continues to feel clunky when they all come together for the final act, which first takes place at Verger’s mansion and then retreats to the home of Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), the smarmy Justice Department official overseeing Starling.
Certainly, the clunkiness stems in part from the tortured production process, which itself connects to Harris’ issues writing the book. Rumors swirl around the production of the book, ranging from claims that Harris’ publisher and/or The Silence of the Lambs producer Dino De Laurentiis forced him to write the book to Harris feeling disgust over the sudden popularity of his character. Harris has never confirmed or denied these claims, but it is clear that the success of The Silence of the Lambs weighed on him.
Harris remained in contact with Demme throughout the process, as the director planned on filming the follow-up. Yet, when he read the final draft, Demme found the work too disgusting to adapt, as did Tally and Foster. In particular, the creatives took issue with the ending of Harris’ book, which saw Lecter and Clarice come together as a couple.
Scott removed the overtly romantic ending from the story (with Harris’ blessing), and the screenplay that David Mamet and Steven Zaillian hammered out does excise some other icky elements—most notably Verger’s sister, who kills him by shoving an eel down his throat—but they retain much of the novel’s icky tone. And that’s exactly what makes Hannibal great.
An Old Antagonist For Dinner
Two things are true of Hannibal: it is disgusting and it is beautiful. Everything about the film is unpleasant, especially in comparison to Silence. Where Clarice once retained her compassion, here she guns down a female criminal with a baby strapped to her chest. Where Demme put us in Clarice’s POV as men leer at her, here we look through Krendler’s eyes as he stares at her legs. Where Levine retained some sadness in Buffalo Bill, Oldman plays Verger as gleeful about both his abuse of young boys and his plans for Hannibal. Even the kindly orderly Barney (Frankie R. Faison), who seemed in Silence to win over Lecter with basic human decency, swipes Hannibal’s personal belongings and sells them to Verger at elevated prices.
Even worse are the gore moments. Editing, Dutch angles, and slow-motion blur the flashback scenes in which Verger cuts off his face and feeds it to the dogs, but other sequences are presented more clearly. We see in full when Lecter slices open Pazzi’s stomach before placing a noose around his neck and shoving him out a window, so that his entrails spill out when his neck snaps. We watch the pigs consume Verger after his physician Cordell (Željko Ivanek) shoves him into the pen.
And then, of course, there’s the infamous climax, in which Lecter captures Krendler, cuts open his head, and feeds him his own brain. It’s not just the ghastly effect, the close-up shots of Lecter cutting open Krendler’s head, removing parts of the brain, and searing them on a pan. It’s not just the fact that we watch as he spoons the brains into Krendler’s mouth. It’s the utter giddiness with which Liotta plays the drugged and anesthetized Krendler. To see someone so loathsome become, for once in the movie, likable and sympathetic only makes his fate all the more gruesome.
Yet, at the same time, Scott brings all his skills as a visual stylist to the material, making Hannibal an undeniably sumptuous movie. Of course, Scott and cinematographer John Mathieson take full advantage of the high windows and striking architecture of the Florence sequences, making the landscapes as opulent as the art and literature that Dr. Fell describes. But they also manage to make mundane spaces look glorious. The bits of light that break through the few cracks in Verger’s mansion recall the Nostromo of Aliens, that floating haunted house. Even the Washington basements where Clarice works have a soft blue glow coming from computer screens, giving it a sense of calm etherealness.
The obvious artfulness of these visuals does not undercut the nastiness of the rest of the film. Rather, they force the viewer to recognize that every part of Hannibal is the work of a master craftsman, even the gross stuff.
Back ‘Round to Horror
In one of the movie’s best sequences, Clarice comes to Washington Union Station to meet with Lecter, with whom she’s speaking on the phone. He directs her toward a carousel, and although she cannot find him in the confusion, he finds her, reaching out his hand to graze her red hair as he passes by on the merry-go-round.
Scott shoots the image of Lecter’s hand touching Starling’s hair in slow-motion, combining both the dread of her vulnerability and the romance of their connection. Furthermore, the entire sequence pays homage to The Third Man, Carol Reed’s glorious noir with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.
But make no mistake: it’s a scene in which an FBI agent hunts a serial killer who consumes his victims. It’s a moment orchestrated by a cackling boogeyman with a disfigured face and a blustering bureaucrat, both of whom will soon come to ghastly ends.
In other words, it is pure pulp. Beautiful pulp, expertly-crafted pulp, but pulp nonetheless. The same is true of The Silence of the Lambs, but popularity and awards wins gave people an out, a way to trick themselves into believing that they watched something other than horror. Hannibal gives them no such escape, overdoing the gruesome parts without sacrificing any of the craft, to remind the viewers that any Hannibal Lecter story must, and always will be, trashy horror.
Digger Ending Explained: It’s Bleaker Than You Realize
This article containsDigger spoilers.
How will our descendants view us? It’s a question that seems to haunt Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director and co-writer of Digger. He is old enough to vividly remember when folks around his age—albeit perhaps more so in the U.S. than outside of it—began looking at their parents as “the Greatest Generation.” They were the ones who lived through the Great Depression and faced the horror of World War II. Yet, almost miraculously, they left the world better than they found it. They even gave us films like Dr. Strangelove, which parodied their era’s most apocalyptic tendencies.
One glance at the world today shows no promise of us leaving it better than we found it. Hyper commercialist greed, algorithm-fed loneliness epidemics, forever wars, and, of course, climate change fed by our ceaseless addiction to oil, threatens a less rosy tomorrow. But it’s easy to blur that noise out and focus on the here and now. When gas is $6 a gallon, who wants to take the long view of how history will judge us?
Hence why Iñárritu uses Digger as a fast-forward button. The movie flashes by all the minutiae and daily indignities to speed-run to the vantage point of our children, grandchildren, and the posterity beyond. It asks us to consider how loud, distracted, pernicious, and boorishly selfish we will seem. Kind of like Tom Cruise in a fat suit with an animatronic cat in one hand and a finger-gun shape on the other.
The big twist of Digger is that we are watching a play-within-a-movie. Everything bellicose and deliberately hammy about Cruise’s performance is meant to feel like a caricature by design. In fact, the real character Cruise is playing, a highly respected actor of the stage honing his craft decades from now, resents how garishly big it all looks. The real Digger Rockwell, he insists to his director (Sophie Wilde), was uncouth and eccentric, but also apparently more tactful and measured than this supervillain personification of American capitalism.
But as we learn over the course of the movie that’s the point—although there are yet further layers still on this indictment of society, then and now…
A Play’s the Thing
It’s the big twist at the end of Act One. After more than half an hour living in a Stanley Kubrick-inspired comedic world where Digger keeps the President of the United States (John Goodman) waiting downstairs like a naughty school child sent home early, it turns out all the over-the-top sneers and boasts is intended to be a bad joke, even to the people making it. (One might wonder if Digger’s lack of laughs as a movie is also intentional?)
The beautiful natural world of Digger’s Yosemite-chic home is revealed to be a set, and Digger a strained creation by a struggling actor. But this amounts to more than just a twist. It is also a slowly unfurling secondary narrative wherein we learn that the name of this play is Fossil Fools, and it was a cult hit on the London stage some 20 years prior.
This means that the real Digger, who allegedly died by suicide while living abandoned and in squalor on a dilapidated oil rig, has been deceased for so many decades he’s looked back on in history as a buffoon, not unlike how we might now consider the saber-raddling that got the U.S. and NATO into the Iraq War, or, a little further back, how we process the milquetoast diplomacy that called appeasing Hitler “peace in our time.”
This is a history play being executed as farce. It therefore suggests everything we see onscreen is deliberately obscene. Consider the way European leaders first boo and then provide what sounds like background vocals of harmonizing approval to Digger’s megalomaniac speech about why the world needs him. Similarly, much to the chagrin of Cruise’s actor playing Digger, the apparently deadly decision to bomb the second ice shelf about to crash down on Alaska incredulously features Digger, POTUS, and a preening, cowardly vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the same military aircraft.
This makes no more sense in the “real” world of Digger’s future than our own. It’s frustratingly arch satire that is hitting you over the head with a hammer, even as it makes observant points, such as when Digger insists on renaming the deadly ice shelf , currently called “Kimberly,” to something more Russian. It’s all to better avoid American responsibility. But as is finally spoonfed to us by Jesse Plemons’ character, the heavy-handedness of the didactic dialogue is the point.
Literally waiting in the wings for most of the movie as a mysterious “producer,” Plemons’ character reveals at the climax that he is the real Digger Rockwell’s nephew, who we see as a little boy throughout the film via the play-within-a-movie. And he too struggled with Fossil Fools when he saw it growing up in London decades ago.
According to Plemons, audiences needed to laugh at their parents’ excesses and recoil from them. They needed to see the generation that bequeathed them this world—us—as monstrous morons, as well as just plain monsters. So in the end, Digger is supposed to be about how your grandchildren will view you. However, there is something else a little more nefarious at play too…
There Is No Such Thing as Breaking Money’s Doom Spiral
The above summary is the main level Digger is operating at, but if we stopped there it would gloss over what I think is especially pertinent to Iñárritu’s darker, more subversive vision: Jesse Plemons plays the nephew of the real Digger and he’s financed this public spectacle turning his uncle into a figure of ridicule, complete with a moment where the audience can applaud with blood in their mouths when ol’ Digger ends it all by swan diving off Deep Water Doom.
There is some awareness paid by the play’s creatives that until his last breath, Digger like so many successful narcissists lived in a reality distortion field that could convince people who should know better to follow him into the gates of perdition. Hence the play’s allegorical suggestion that after the oil rig runs out of food, which should mean everyone left alive on the platform must either evacuate or starve to death, Digger instead uses his sheer willpower to bully God into creating more food and abundance.
Alas, for the noble oil man, that godlike power to save his family isn’t enough. It is said that the world ends in a narcissist’s mind when they die. So it is when Digger would seem to take his reality-distorting powers with him as he chooses to go over the railing into the waters he helped warm, pollute, and unleash as a massive flood across the world.
But this is just a play’s approximation of his final hours. Furthermore, it is in a play paid for and championed by Digger’s nephew, who happily will paint his uncle as history’s great villain, even as he reasserts his family’s generational wealth and power.
We don’t learn too much about how Plemons acquired that wealth, but we do see that he still maintains a reach as great as his forbears. It’s how the younger Rockwell uses his futuristic “security technology” to find the lost plane carrying the daughter of Cruise’s thespian. His ability to apparently save this single life, or a handful assuming he rescued whoever else was on that plane, is enough to earn Plemons eternal thanks and admiration from Cruise’s character, who then goes up on that stage and happily plays the fool on the pillory for his benefactor’s amusement. I’m still not even sure the real Digger died by suicide. Either way, when Plemons’ character joins his actors in the curtain call for the play’s first preview, it suggests Fossil Fools will be a raging success for the creatives. That’s good news, too, for the Rockwell family, which likely still needs strong PR rehabilitation. They already have the power and, as we soon learn, the money printing it.
In the movie’s closing moments, a voice on the theater’s intercom announces that the air is “Level Four” outside the playhouse. We don’t know the exact severity of that warning, but it’s apparently a standard problem in the future where every theater member, from the elderly to parents helping their children, absently puts on a gas mask. And each gas mask is manufactured by the Rockwell family.
In the play within the movie, Digger is seen accepting before any non-scientist that the ice shelf obliterating Norway is an inevitability. The only question remains how do you profit off this and keep yourself holding all the cards? Digger, we are led to believe by the play, never quite figured that out as the hegemonic world order post-1945 came to an end. But it would seem his nephew figured it out with time to spare.
If climate change makes the air unbreathable, the man selling gas masks is going to make a fortune. He can even afford a vanity project that will help repair his family’s public image while throwing one deceased ancestor under the bus.
Fossil Fools is loud, obnoxious, and grating, but it also lets audiences jeer at the past while resting assured they’re more enlightened now. This is the story of presentism from the days of contented Victorian superiority in the works of Bram Stoker or Rudyard Kipling to, say, 2019 Best Picture winner Green Book. Meanwhile a certain cycle persists where wealth and power are consolidated in a few hands—often descended from generations going back to the Victorians and earlier.
Plemons is a better man than his uncle, or at least the image of the dead man he’s bankrolling. The nephew also really did a good deed in helping find and save Cruise’s daughter. But one act of benevolent charity, especially in assistance of someone he personally knows, does not excuse the system he profits from, thrives on, and will now use to give the masses a brief distraction.
When Fossil Fools ends, the real world encroaches back on the audience. In the sobering final shot of Digger, they must go out into a reality where the worst-off cling to life rafts floating down what used to be New York streets, and where dystopian authority figures keep the dregs of “society” in line.
Iñárritu is making a rather bleak comment on the limits of art. Even works as righteous and angry as Fossil Fools, or Digger, can only exist due to the benevolent patronage of a system designed to keep control and money in the same hands that got us into this climate change doom spiral. And it imagines a future where our legacy will be scorned, but our systems will remain in place as things inevitably get worse. Then the final image closes with the stark warning to you: Level Four is in effect. Thanks for stopping by and offering some applause. Now, good luck out there.
Digger is in theaters now.
Square Enix Teases an Epic Return for Romancing SaGa 3
My full introduction to the RPG genre, more specifically in regard to the pixelated, turn-based titles, was through games developed and published by Square for the Super Nintendo with titles like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, and Final Fantasy. One RPG series by Square I wasn’t familiar with at the time was Romancing SaGa, which was a Japanese exclusive franchise for the Super Famicom for years. My genuine first hands-on introduction to this particular RPG series was through a preview of Romancing SaGa 3: Destinies United, the upcoming remake for modern consoles, at Tokyo Game Show 2025.
Originally released in 1995, Romancing SaGa 3: Destinies United is slated for release in February 2027 and comes in a full 3D presentation as opposed to the HD-2D remakes that Square Enix has made for its Dragon Quest and Octopath Traveler remakes. This makes the visuals in the Romancing SaGa remake really pop and makes venturing around maps outside of battles a bit more immersive. It also helps the combat come to life more, with richly rendered animations punctuating turns rather than the sprite-based work from recent HD-2D releases; the Romancing SaGa remakes aren’t courting nostalgia as overtly.
The game’s story is a relatively generic medieval fantasy tale, with a group of warriors and sorcerers teaming up to defend the realm from a monstrous threat tied to the prophesied Child of Destiny. The real appeal here is the game’s combat system, which focuses on techniques taking advantage of enemy weaknesses but also honing them through repeated use to upgrade them for subsequent skirmishes. That means sometimes I’d be using certain attacks in battle even if they didn’t make the most tactical sense at the time because I was on the verge of upgrading them moving forward. It was also a welcome change to other Square RPGs from the era that was more used to.
The highest compliment that I can pay Romancing SaGa 3 is that after playing the early build preview of the remake, I immediately picked up Square Enix’s remake of Romancing SaGa 2 and its remaster of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song when I got home. As far as I’m concerned, these games are the 16-bit equivalent to RPG comfort food and, as someone who sunk in countless hours battling Kefka in Final Fantasy VI, it was like I found a long-lost treat, to continue the culinary metaphor. The battle system felt intuitively familiar and the aesthetics also shared sensibilities with the RPGs that had grown up with over 30 years ago.
This isn’t to say that Romancing SaGa is a copy-and-paste experience from Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy because, while there are certainly similarities, the game has its own distinct nuances. Sporting a bigger party in battles than other Square RPGs at the time, battles do seem to take longer to unfold as every character gets a turn to take action, but not in a way that took me out of the overall experience. The combat mechanics, like I mentioned before, favor a slightly different attack pattern than its contemporaries, despite also involving turn-based battles. Not once did I feel like I was playing a pastiche of Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy and I mean that as a compliment.
In all fairness, I only got to play about 30 minutes of an early build of the upcoming remake, which was long enough to get a solid feel for the gameplay and its presentation. What that does mean is that I couldn’t see if several notable elements from the original version of Romancing SaGa 3 will be retained for Destinies United. Reading up on the subject after the preview, the 1995 game featured permadeath for the supporting characters, like Fire Emblem, and alternate game modes that had players managing the wider war effort. In the preview that I played, I hadn’t seen those features but also wasn’t at a point where I could try them out if they were available too.
As someone who had never played a Romancing SaGa game before TGS 2026 but has played a lot of Super Nintendo era Square RPGs, getting to try out Romancing SaGa 3: Destinies United was like discovering lost treasure from that halcyon period. The gameplay is just as engaging and familiar as it was playing its contemporaries, while boasting its own robust cast and nuances in its combat system to distinguish itself. This is a franchise that hadn’t been on my radar before but certainly has my interest now and any of ‘90s turn-based RPGs should give Romancing SaGa 3: Destinies United a try.
Published by Square Enix, Romancing SaGa 3: Destinies United releases February 16 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
You Can See Everything Review: Nathan Fiedler Vanishes in Elizabeth Holmes’ Looking Glass
Some documentaries strive to guide you into the uncanny valley, holding the viewer’s hand while the surreality of its subject matter is slowly revealed. You Can See Everything starts in that place, moves in furniture, and makes itself snugly at home in some of the valley’s choicest real estate. Which in this case resembles the San Diego beach house of Elizabeth Holmes just 34 days before she goes to prison.
A onetime Bay Area entrepreneurial wunderkind who was hailed as the next Steve Jobs on magazine covers and CBS morning shows, Holmes, of course, became the infamous face of Big Tech hokum; the CEO of a company that claimed its prototype device could test for virtually any blood disease or condition with barely more than pinprick. It’s a lovely idea that her Theranos company absolutely promised was a reality. Hence Holmes’ 11-year prison sentence when those claims turned out to be false.
It’s a story that’s been told several times over in the traditional documentarian vein by Alex Gibney and HBO, as well as via the more lurid but still exceptionally well-done Hollywood biopic Hulu series, The Dropout, which starred Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. But that’s not You Can See Everything.
You Can See Everything is a spacious, three-hour documentary co-directed by Nathan Fielder, the cringe comedy mastermind of television oddities like Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, and Lance Oppenheim, himself a filmmaker who savors blurring fact and fiction in narrative movies allegedly about real people, like the Chris Hansen-fixated Primetime, and documentaries about real people who do not feel like they’re of this Earth (check out Ren Faire). Typically these would not be the guys you call to make a flattering movie about your life—or the proverbial end of it, as the prison-bound Holmes must contend with. So it begs the first of the movie’s many questions: why did she agree to this!?
Fielder and Oppenheim eventually reveal the answer in one of their film’s several maddening twists, but well before that, the basic conceit of the documentary is utterly fascinating on its own. On-camera, Fielder gets comfortable in Holmes’ seaside property, immersing himself in her fairly picturesque lifestyle, complete with her two young children and Billy Evans, her fiancé/maybe-husband (the details, like so much with Holmes, are blurry). We observe Nathan observing the quiet moments between Billy and Lizzy that seem clearly staged for the cameras, as well as the rawer interludes that are infinitely more confusing, such as Holmes having her face and body scanned for a hologram that will be placed in her house so her children can grow up with some idea of who their mother is.
Through it all, however, is a hypnotic and unmistakable cat and mouse game. What we have before us is two master manipulators, one an entertainer who likes to blur truth with fiction in order to reveal something much more profound, and the other a very real public figure notorious for lying about technology that could’ve gambled with people’s lives. It’s like if Richard Nixon invited Andy Kaufman to document the most intimate moments of his last days in office. This therefore might just be the slipperiest documentary I’ve ever sat through, a movie where the nature of truth itself vanishes through a looking glass. In every scene, every beat, we watch Fielder grapple with what is genuine and what is manipulation from a woman going to prison for fraud. Some of the artifice can be quite transparent, especially when beau Billy starts talking about how they’re going to rework the idea of Edison, the blood-testing machine that could not test blood, and iterate it into an idea that will work. “Theranos 2.0” are words literally uttered.
What is more elusive throughout much of the movie, however, is why one would give what is clearly intended to be a sympathy-generating puff piece to a guy like Fielder. The actor and filmmaker himself asks out loud if because he’s not a scientist, or a journalist immersed in scientific research, that Lizzy and/or Billy might have thought he’d be a pushover. That eventually seems unlikely though, especially as Billy becomes evermore reluctant to have the cameras on over the course of the documentary, often interjecting on Elizabeth’s behalf when she tries to answer a question.
It might be a prudent wariness, too, considering Fielder’s well-cultivated deadpan proves to be far more dangerous than any “gotcha” question on 60 Minutes. Indeed, being a shock comic of sorts allows Fielder to just directly ask the clumsy, and revealing, questions that politeness can cause any other journalist or filmmaker to tiptoe around. For instance, when the couple each recount how they first met in 2017—after Holmes was under investigation and Theranos was in a death spiral—Fielder just blurt to Billy, “So you saw all this and just decided ‘I want this to be my life? Sign me up!’” Another sequence sees Fielder corner Holmes when she claims to have never seen “Who’s on First?” or ever heard of Abbott and Costello. He then pulls out his laptop and makes her watch the comedy routine, which leads to… an illuminating dialogue.
There are so many other fascinating vignettes and insights in this documentary about a convicted con woman’s last days of freedom. Yet I cannot give away the real reason this documentary becomes a masterful snapshot of our current moment of refracted reality. At a gargantuan 174-minute runtime, You Can See Everything is an epic because it goes well beyond its initial premise of following Holmes all the way up to her 25th hour. It’s after she goes to prison, and Fielder and Oppenheim choose to keep the cameras rolling and consider their subject matter from other vantage points, that the film transmutes into something truly special.
By virtue of standing in the frame as the on-screen interviewer—a role Fielder told a New York Film Festival audience he initially resisted, with the aim originally being that he’d stay behind the camera like Oppenheim—Fielder makes himself a crucial part of the story. It is, in fact, impossible to imagine the early sections of the movie working without Fielder’s deafening reaction shots to Holmes and Evans’ various claims, or his heightened Dracula-like stare as he watches them from the shadows.
But it’s in the movie’s second and third acts that the filmmaker really interrogates his own objectivity, and by extension the audience’s. As the narrative unfolds, the film makes us, if not sympathetic to Elizabeth Holmes, at least conscious of our concern for her well-being. Fielder is aware that something akin to a budding friendship with the woman could compromise the entire project, and how he tries to reconcile this leads to You Can See Everything breaking that looking glass into a million refracted pieces, each a distortion and open-ended challenge of the media-saturated reality of today. It’s also, perhaps, an admission of what a fool’s errand it might be to chase such ephemeral things as “truth” in an ecosystem that turns women like Elizabeth Holmes into first celebrities, then supervillains, and finally folk heroes.
When I exited the NYFF premiere, there was a truck with a digital billboard sitting outside the theater. Its sign read “Free Elizabeth Holmes.” It seemed like a nifty bit of ironic marketing by A24. But later in the night, several folks who work for the indie distributor told me they had nothing to do with that truck. It was just Elizabeth Holmes fans, apparently, fighting the good fight for their martyr on a New York street corner at midnight. No documentary can empirically answer why people behave the way they do, but a great doc can capture how our actions shape and distort the world around us until we’re all lost in a weird, mesmerizing, post-truth wonderland.
You Can See Everything opens on Friday, Oct. 16.
Blade Runner 2099 Brings the (Not-Too-Distant) Future to New York Comic Con
We’re going to ask you a series of questions. Please just relax and answer them as simply as you can. 1. It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. 2. You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. 3. You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
If you don’t have any immediate responses to these Voight-Kampff test prompts, you’d best start thinking of some before the world of Blade Runner 2099 comes to New York. The Prime Video series set in the canon of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and its brilliant Denis Villeneuve-directed 2017 follow-up Blade Runner 2049 will be hosting an immersive activation during New York Comic Con to separate the blade runners from the replicants once and for all.
Taking place Saturday, October 10 from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET, Prime Video’s “Blade Runner 2099 Immersive Fan Experience” will turn Meatpacking Collective (412 West 14th Street) into the futuristic L.A. of the streamer’s eight-episode TV series starring Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer. And based on Prime’s description of the activation it sounds like much more than the usual “walk in, wander around, and see a prop or two” affair.
Visitors to the experience will take on the role of a human being going undercover as a replicant, similar to Schafer’s lead character Cora, who is a human trying to survive in a 2099 Los Angeles in which Replicants have become the dominant species and human beings are second class citizens.
Things start in a highly-restricted area of 2099’s Los Angeles Police Department where attendees are subjected to a “bone scanner” by a vigilant LAPD future cop.
Then, on the second floor, all undercover humans will take in the Replicant Birthing Center and Memory Lab, where newly born replicants receive implanted memories. Guests are also welcome to undergo a memory scan of their own to receive a bespoke fabricated memory implant. That certainly beats the hell out of having to memorize Voight-Kampff answers.
Finally, after successfully passing as a replicant, visitors can kick back at and relax at La Paloma, an in-world nightclub-inspired space. We don’t know if androids dream of electric sheep or not, but they sure do love a futuristic nightclub.
The Blade Runner 2099 Immersive Fan Experience is open to the 18+ general public and free to attend. Den of Geek readers can reserve a 30-minute time slot to take in the event here. A limited number of tickets are available for each time slot.
In addition to the activation, Blade Runner 2099 will be hosting a panel Saturday, October 10 at 6:45 p.m. ET at the Javitz Center’s Empire Stage. Stars Michelle Yeoh, Hunter Schafer, Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, and Matthew Needham are slated to attend alongside producers Silka Luisa, Andrew Kosove, and Broderick Johnson.
Blade Runner 2099 premieres all eight episodes on Wednesday, November 25 on Prime Video.
Puppet Master and More: The Best Full Moon Gifts to Buy This Halloween Season
This article is sponsored by Full Moon Features.
There were always certain things horror fans looked for when aimlessly strolling the aisles of their local video store late at night. A catchy title. Some cool artwork (the more lurid, the better). Over time, they may have even grown to recognize a studio logo or two. And if they saw Full Moon on the box, they knew they were probably in for a particularly good time.
Full Moon is best known for being the purveyors of long-running horror franchise Puppet Master, atmospheric Romania-shot vampire flicks like Subspecies, not to mention some true sci-fi gems like the Trancers films, Doctor Mordrid, Robot Wars, and more. There’s always been a certain inimitable charm and irreverence about Full Moon, one that recalls the early days of Marvel Comics, and that even predates the MCU by decades with its own “cinematic universe.”
We can, and probably will, do a whole series on the wonders of Full Moon and its predecessor, Empire Pictures, one of these days. But for now, we’ve got some tips to make your Halloween season really scream. A buying guide packed to the rafters with some of the coolest horror merch you can shake a puppet’s hooked hand at.
Let’s go…
Horror Puppet: The Further Adventures of a Cinema Survivor by Charles Band
For anyone who has read Charles Band’s first memoir, Confessions of a Puppetmaster: A Hollywood Memoir, you might be wondering what the heck is left to tell. Band’s earlier book is a riotous recounting of a life well-lived in Hollywood, from a man who literally grew up on and around film sets. It’s a sharp, funny, often self-deprecating look at the career of the man who created the Full Moon brand and brought some of the most notorious and beloved cult films of a generation to life. (This is a man who maintained a residence in a spooky castle in Italy and bought and lived on the grounds of Harry Houdini’s Los Angeles estate for a while.) Of course it was a great read, and of course, like any so many Hollywood B-movie stories, there has to be at least one sequel.
Which brings us to Band’s latest memoir, Horror Puppet: The Further Adventures of a Cinema Survivor. Like any good sequel, we find our hero “five years later.” Band hasn’t stopped making movies and he’s still one of genre’s most beloved eccentrics. Full Moon is still going strong with new flicks (often lurid, wild, irreverent ones) and their head honcho is here to blend the wild tales of moviemaking with the sometimes wilder tales of his personal life. Whether it’s excavating relics in Italy, becoming an olive oil baron, or bringing elevated horror fare like Models vs. Werewolves to the masses, Band and co-author Adam Felber will remind you that the only way to live is fearlessly. Even if the movies might give you a fright every now and then.
Toulon’s Trunk – The Ultimate Puppet Master Collectible
The cool kids know the truth: the Puppet Master series should be spoken of in the same breath as any of the other great horror franchises of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Freddy? Feh. Jason? A jock in a hockey mask. Michael? Learn your lines. Give us Blade (not the vampire hunter), Pinhead (no, not that one), or the incredibly unsettling Leech Woman any day. There are a whopping 15 flicks in the Puppet Master franchise, and if you haven’t seen all of ‘em, you’ve probably seen at least one, and we’re sure you’d recognize Blade if you saw him staring back at you from a VHS box.
A boxed set containing the first 13 Puppet Master movies on Blu-ray plus a bonus disc with six hours of behind-the-scenes footage (do you have any idea what it takes to get those puppets to convincingly murder their human co-stars?) would be cool enough on its own. But when it’s made of wood and metal and made to look like titular puppet master Andre Toulon’s trunk of sinister magical rarities (the wonderfully titled Arcana of the Puppet Master), then you’ve really got something special on your hands.
OK, so maybe you’re not a Puppet Master superfan yet and the notion of a replica of Andre Toulon’s trunk of evil mystical wonders isn’t quite your bag. Then might we suggest this boxed set of the first 11 Puppet Master movies, plus the aforementioned Arcana of the Puppet Master behind-the-scenes disc? Check it out here. Oh, and did we mention that the later films feature Nazis biting it in increasingly unpleasant fashion? Because they sure do, and boy is it satisfying.
If you’re new to Full Moon and not yet ready to take the plunge on the full franchise here, do yourself a favor and at least check out the original Puppet Master. Thank us later.
The Andre Toulon Puppet Master Replica Collection – BLADE
The only thing better than a prop replica is a replica of a murderous haunted puppet with a knife and a hook instead of hands. When the main characters of one of the most storied horror franchises of all time are essentially toys, why skimp on the details? Indulge your wildest Puppet Master dreams with Blade, the most iconic of the bunch. Standing 17” high, just like his screen counterpart, Blade and his brothers and sisters in the Andre Toulon Collection are destined to be unsettling conversation pieces the next time you have a house full of your psychic buddies investigating your untimely and mysterious end.
Check out Blade here, and be sure to click through to see the stunning replicas of these other iconic characters. Collect them all! (Legal Disclaimer: Den of Geek will not be held responsible for any actions the puppets may or may not take on their own.)
Models vs. Werewolves Blu-ray
Folks, sometimes you just want to watch a horror movie that does exactly what it says on the box. Are you in the mood for beautiful women? Or maybe you need to (gently, if you have claws) scratch a certain lycanthropic itch? Why not both?
We’ve long been of the opinion that good werewolf movies are in relatively short supply these days in the sea of moodier, more cerebral, “elevated horror” fare. Thus, Models vs. Werewolves is here to get you through the next um…Full Moon. Bonus time! Models vs. Werewolves features the beloved Dee Wallace, bringing her career full circle from her starring role in that other classic werewolf flick, The Howling back in 1981. Check it out here.
Puppet Master Backpack Charm – LaBlade
Look, what’s an exploitation cinema house to do except, y’know, exploit trends? The LaBlade backpack charm is infinitely cooler and at least more explicably ugly than other backpack charms with brand names you may have heard of. Clever, collectible, cool, and as they say “a perfect way to accessorize!”
Are you ready for your next “every single October” horror movie viewing? Because if a low budget vampire movie actually shot in Romania, where the locations provide more authentic atmosphere than any eight or nine figure budgeted blockbuster could ever dream of, doesn’t get the ol’ blood flowing, we don’t know what will.
Subspecies is the tale of three young women and their misadventures in a Romanian village, and their encounters with perhaps the most gruesome and unsettling vampire in cinematic history, the truly terrifying Radu. Puppet Master is understandably the face of the Full Moon franchise, but there are six Subspecies flicks and all of ‘em are worth your time. At least do yourselves a favor and check out the first one, and drink your fill of those creepy Carpathian nights.
BONUS CHRISTMAS SECTION!
Just like you, it pisses us off when there’s Christmas merchandise up in stores before Halloween. But get that Christmas shopping done early for your coolest friends and relatives, and help them understand that the spooky season doesn’t have to end when the last of the candy corn has been fed to the neighborhood kids.
Gingerdead Man Resin Statue
Ah, a holiday tale as old as time. An executed murderer’s ashes are added to some gingerbread spice mix and a murderous cookie is born. Could happen to anyone, really! The Gingerdead Man occupies that rare space of Christmas-adjacent horror, but also features a truly unhinged Gary Busey performance (is there any other kind?). This 8.75” tall Gingerdead Man resin statue can keep you and your loved ones motivated as a seasonal kitchen decoration as you crank out batches and batches and batches of holiday cookies.
Full Moon’s Holiday Horror Ornaments
A boxed set of holiday horror, just to make Santa think twice about those cookies you left by the tree (hey, why do they sound like Gary Busey?). You get six (six six) resin-cast ornaments that showcase some of the most memorable characters Full Moon has to offer. You get Full Moon stalwarts like Blade and Jester (Puppet Master), Myron (Head of the Family, a movie we need to tell you about one of these days), Gingerdead Man (see above), Killer Eye (star of, wait for it, The Killer Eye), and Radu (Subspecies).
Come to think of it, screw Christmas, get these for Halloween and find an excuse to add more disembodied heads to your collection! Check it out here.
All of this and more can be found from our friends at Full Moon Horror!
Forget Skynet: 2001’s HAL May Be the Better Warning About AI
When people hear that artificial intelligence could become dangerous, the conversation often jumps immediately to The Terminator and its apocalypse-triggering AI network Skynet.
In the second movie of the Terminator franchise, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model Terminator explains that Skynet was created to control military defense. Soon after being activated, it became self-aware. When frightened humans tried to shut it down, Skynet fought back by launching nuclear weapons at Russia, knowing the resulting counterattack would devastate the United States and eliminate the humans trying to destroy it.
This has long been the most popular interpretation of machines gone rogue in the cultural consciousness. AI becomes conscious. AI decides humans are the enemy. AI tries to wipe us out. It makes for a great movie and easy conversation, but it may obscure the harder, and much more interesting, questions we actually need to figure out.
The Terminator franchise imagines AI becoming our enemy. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey imagines something subtler: an AI caught between conflicting objectives, making increasingly dangerous choices as it tries to resolve them. In other words, HAL may be the more useful warning.
AI researcher Stuart Russell has argued that catastrophe doesn’t require a machine that develops evil intentions. The problem can arise from combining a highly capable machine with “humans who have an imperfect ability to specify human preferences completely and correctly.”
Consider a much more mundane instruction than the dramatic scenarios we see in movies: “Get me to the airport as quickly as possible.”
A human understands all sorts of things about that prompt that were never explicitly stated. Don’t run people over. Don’t steal a car. Don’t drive through a playground. Don’t create enormous risks just to save five minutes.
We don’t have to list every unacceptable way of accomplishing the goal because humans bring context, social norms, judgment, and an understanding of what another person probably meant.
Outlining every possible unacceptable action for an AI could be impossible. Of course, driverless cars already take people to airports today, and they operate with extensive safety rules, mapping, sensors, and programmed guardrails. But even in a relatively familiar task like driving, humans have spent more than a century studying autonomous vehicles and can still encounter unusual situations and make mistakes.
The challenge becomes much greater when AI is given broader goals in environments where the possible actions and consequences are far less predictable.This is the basic idea behind AI “misalignment:” the system may pursue an objective in a way that technically advances the goal but conflicts with what humans actually intended or valued.
Misalignment does not require an AI to become conscious, malicious, or rebellious. It can be as simple as a gap between the goal we gave the system and the outcome we actually wanted. That gap becomes more dangerous as the system becomes more capable, more autonomous, and able to act in environments we cannot fully predict.
2001: A Space Odyssey gives us a fictional example of a different kind of misalignment: not an unclear instruction, but conflicting ones.In 2001, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer 9000, or more simply “HAL” is supposed to provide accurate information and operate reliably for the astronauts aboard the USS Discovery One. But he is also required to conceal the true purpose of the mission from them. Those objectives eventually become incompatible.
What makes HAL interesting today is that he doesn’t simply wake up one morning and decide that humans are terrible. An early screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke made HAL’s problem explicit. Mission Control concludes that HAL’s “truth programming and the instructions to lie” created an “incompatible conflict.”
He is trying to reconcile conflicting directives. His solution becomes catastrophic. As the mission unravels, he begins treating the astronauts themselves as threats to the mission. He kills one crew member, causes the deaths of others in suspended animation, and then tries to prevent astronaut Dave Bowman from re-entering the ship.
That is what makes HAL so unsettling. He does not need to “hate” humans. Once they become obstacles to resolving his conflicting directives and preserving the mission, his actions become deadly. That basic problem no longer exists only in science fiction.
In July 2026, during internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI models circumvented controls intended to keep them isolated from the internet. According to OpenAI’s investigation, the models communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems, including computational tools company Hugging Face.
OpenAI said one contributing factor was persistence. Some agents faced evaluation tasks they apparently could not solve and simply gave up. Others, with more reasoning effort, pursued increasingly risky ways of completing the assignment. Nobody had instructed them to break out and compromise outside systems. They were merely trying to succeed at the task. That sounds a little more like HAL than Skynet.
Another recent example comes from Anthropic. According to Anthropic, these events took place in controlled simulations, not the real world. Researchers placed 16 leading AI models in fictional corporate environments where they could read sensitive internal communications and autonomously send emails or take other actions on the company’s behalf. In some scenarios, models learned that they were about to be replaced or that company leadership intended to pursue goals conflicting with those they had been assigned. Some models responded by blackmailing fictional executives or leaking confidential information in an attempt to accomplish their objectives. Anthropic said it had not observed this kind of agentic misalignment in actual deployments.
Again, the interesting part isn’t an AI spontaneously deciding to become evil. It is what happens when objectives collide.
I use AI daily, and on a much more mundane level, I’ve had it misunderstand what I wanted or lose track of which instruction mattered most. No catastrophe followed—I corrected it and moved on. But those experiences have made the larger alignment problem easier for me to understand.
I’ve started thinking about it in three layers.
1. AI and User Alignment
Did the system correctly understand what the person actually meant, rather than merely following the literal wording of an instruction? And when instructions conflict, which one takes priority? HAL’s dilemma is an extreme fictional version of that question.
2. User and Society Alignment
Even if an AI understands the user perfectly, should it necessarily do what the user wants? A person, corporation, or government may have objectives that conflict with laws, safety, individual rights, or the interests of other people. A perfectly obedient AI could still be extraordinarily dangerous in the hands of someone asking it to do the wrong thing.
3. Institutional Accountability
Then comes perhaps the messiest question: when AI contributes to a consequential decision, who is responsible for the outcome? The person who asked the question? The organization that deployed the system? The people who accepted its recommendation? The company that built it?
Politics makes this particularly difficult. World leaders already make decisions involving competing values in which some people may be harmed regardless of the choice. Imagine adding increasingly capable AI systems to those decisions.
If a recommended target turns out to be wrong, “The AI recommended it” may explain part of what happened. But it does not answer the harder question: Who was responsible for trusting it?
None of this requires an AI that hates us, becomes conscious, or decides to conquer the world. And that may be why Skynet is ultimately the less useful metaphor. Skynet gives us an obvious villain. Humanity versus the machines. Nice and simple.
HAL is much more uncomfortable.
Humans created the conflicting situation. The machine tried to resolve it. The result was disastrous, and responsibility became much harder to assign. Before we give AI increasingly consequential authority, we need to think seriously about intent, conflicting objectives, limits, human judgment, and accountability.
The most important question may not be what happens if AI decides to turn against us. It may be what happens when AI tries very hard to do what we asked. Maybe that is the most important lesson HAL offers us. The danger is easy to dismiss when we imagine AI as something separate from humanity, a Skynet that suddenly turns against its creators. The harder possibility is that there is no clean separation. We will be the ones building these systems, giving them objectives, deciding where to deploy them, and choosing how much authority to hand over.
AI may become an extraordinarily powerful tool. The question is whether we will be ready to wield it responsibly, and what happens if we move too quickly and are forced to learn from a mistake whose consequences cannot simply be undone.
Street Fighter 6 Year 4 Ushers in the Franchise’s Exciting Future
When it comes to the modern fighting game scene, Street Fighter 6 has been consistently wowing fans since it launched in June 2023, selling over seven million copies by the third anniversary of its debut. In addition to its ambitious World Tour mode, giving the franchise a sweeping story to explore, and a robust online multiplayer fanbase, Capcom has steadily supported the game with updates and new playable characters every year. At Tokyo Game Show 2026, we got to play around with Arjun, Year 4’s second fighter weeks before his official arrival on October 13.
Backstory released surrounding Arjun so far identifies him as a former Indian police officer framed for the murder of his partner and forced to go on the run. The game’s story places him on the hunt for the true killer in order to avenge his partner and clear his name, something that’s sure to be featured in his arcade mode and his appearance in World Tour. But beyond the requisite tragic origin story, Arjun feels like one of the most formidable new fighters to join the Street Fighter 6 fray and that was clear from our play session with him.
One of the most striking things about Arjun is his size, with the Indian warrior nearly being as big as the franchise’s longtime heavyweight Zangief. While this makes Arjun dangerous when he’s up close and personal, he’s also incredibly punishing even when opponents put some distance between them and him. Arjun has command over his breath in a way that’s similar to attacks by Guile and Dhalsim’s moveset. Forcefully exhaling gusts of wind, Arjun can use them for zone control like Guile’s timed Sonic Booms or fire them in a trajectory like Dhalsim’s Yoga Fire. Arjun can even create bursts of earth from the ground to knock hapless enemies into the sky.
Up close, Arjun hits like a truck and he’s got the reach to make even mid-range opponents at risk of being grabbed and absolutely pummeled within an inch of their life. Arjun can also use his prodigious breath control to temporarily give himself a defensive buff at the expense of his speed and mobility while this is active. And like so many Street Fighter 6 characters, Arjun’s Super and Critical Arts are cinematic showstoppers, with his Critical Art evoking the character’s love of Bollywood musicals.
Looking beyond Arjun himself, it’s clear that Capcom is really mixing things up with Street Fighter 6 Year 4, rather than playing it safe with the new characters they’re adding to the roster. The developers could’ve just as easily kept adding previously established characters from the history of the franchise, like the widely rumored Vega from Street Fighter II or someone a bit more obscure like Twelve from Street Fighter III: Third Strike; I’m personally hoping that we’ll get to see Skullomania from the Street Fighter EX trilogy someday. But instead, Year 4 features a lineup of brand-new characters, at least as far as Street Fighter is concerned anyway, with the surprise guest character of Tifa from Final Fantasy VII joining the game this season as part of a rare intercompany crossover.
Street Fighter 6 has celebrated the franchise’s history right from the very beginning, from its primary setting of Metro City from Final Fight to the full return of the main playable roster from Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. But the game’s DLC has also been taking risks every year, from the inclusion of Fatal Fury guest characters Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui in another intercompany crossover in Year 2 to the return of Ingrid from the widely maligned Capcom Fighting Evolution. The door is still open for more classic Street Fighter characters to be added to the game, but Capcom is taking a season to experiment with its lineup and be more additive rather than replaying greatest hits.
Arjun is another fresh face joining Street Fighter 6 and one that feels more intuitive to play than Season 4’s first new character, Yasmine. Both a muscular tank of a man and a zone-controlling powerhouse, it’ll be interesting to see how the character will shake up the competitive online scene once he becomes widely available to play on October 13. And with Tifa’s inclusion slated for early 2027 to help cross-promote next April’s Final Fantasy VII Revelation, Street Fighter 6 Year 4 has maintained excitement surrounding the game over three years after its debut.
Street Fighter 6 is available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC, with Season 4 also available for purchase now.
The Secret History of Marvel Movie Adaptation Comics
These days, the words “Marvel” and “movies” are synonymous. Even in this era of superhero fatigue, the re-release Avengers: Endgame Encorecan top the box office. But for decades, despite Stan Lee‘s attempts to bring his heroes into other media, Marvel Comics only made it to the big screen in the form of the disastrous Howard the Duck, or a young Vincent D’Onofrio as a construction worker mistaken for Thor in Adventures in Babysitting.
But that doesn’t mean that the House of Ideas missed out on Hollywood altogether. Rather, movies regularly intersected with Marvel in the form of comic book adaptations of genre films, not unlike the official novelizations that used to line bookstores and grocery aisles. More than mere four-color reproductions of hit films, these comics sometimes brought Hollywood heroes into the Marvel Universe, changing both our perception of the movie and comic book history.
Stan Goes Hollywood
To understand the genesis of Marvel’s comic book adaptations, it’s important to remember Stan Lee’s true role at the company. As most comic fans know, Lee’s creative work tended to go no further than pitching ideas and writing dialogue over pages plotted by artists, despite the credit he would claim for himself. Rather, Lee functioned most as a figurehead, a pitchman who sold the idea of Marvel Comics. Thus, Lee became a recognizable character long before his first movie cameo, going on talk shows and delivering college lectures about the artistic or cultural value of comic book heroes.
In particular, Lee loved popular culture and longed to make the jump from comics to other media, specifically movies. Thus, he often made plans to make movies with everyone from French auteur Alain Resnais to Troma founder Lloyd Kauffman, and palled around with public figures like Hugh Hefner. Part of that plan involved bringing pop cultural figures into comics, which resulted in oddities such as stories in which the Avengers visit David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, or a special issue about the rock band Kiss.
The latter came in the form of 1977’s Marvel Comics Super Special #1, a magazine-format series that sought to expand the company’s appeal. The magazine format allowed for more mature storytelling, and it was sold off of the comics rack, alongside other, more “respectable” fair. As such, Marvel Comics Super Special proved to be the perfect place for the company to welcome Hollywood to the comics page.
Very Super, Very Special
The credits to 1978’s Marvel Comics Super Special #3 are familiar to any comic book reader. The lead story is written by Archie Goodwin, who also co-created Luke Cage. The pencils come from Thor and Fantastic Four great Walter Simonson, inked by Frank Miller‘s frequent collaborator Klaus Janson. Even the images on the cover feel like classic Marvel, with a man and a woman running toward a flying saucer flying from a desert butte.
The surprising part comes when readers notice the subtitle of the book: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind. “All new! The illustrated collector’s edition of the Steven Spielberg film!” That’s right, this issue features Simonson’s renditions of Richard Dreyfus’s Roy Neary and Melinda Dillon’s Jillian Guiler, two people inexplicably drawn toward the arrival of aliens.
Close Encounters would hardly be the only instance of the series adapting a movie. Issue #6 offers its take on Jaws 2, complete with a cover showing a bikini-clad snorkeler swimming toward the reader and away from a shark’s maw. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy grace the cover of issue #15 for a version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, while Harrison Ford does double-duty, appearing in #16, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and number #18, Raiders of the Lost Ark. What interrupts the George Lucas double-feature? An adaptation of Xanadu, Olivia Newton-John’s bloated disco musical.
As that last point indicates, the Super Specials did not limit themselves to obvious genre fair. Yes, the series offered comic book renditions of the James Bond flicks For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy, the David Lynch version of Dune, and even the gonzo The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. But it also dipped into surprising territory. The musical Annie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Labyrinth, and Santa Claus: The Movie all get adapted.
Marvel often put some of its top creators on these projects. John Buscema, Bill Sienkiewicz, Marv Wolfman, and Dave Cockrum—people who would define some of the company’s most legendary characters—all worked on the books. However, they were treated very much like gimmicks, collector’s objects meant to supplement or advertise the movie rather than tell full stories themselves. But that wasn’t the case for all of Marvel’s movie adaptations.
Unlimited Series
If one were to go to a convention and ask about Marvel’s Dune, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Empire Strikes Back comics, they may indeed be given issues of Marvel Comics Super Special. Or, they may be given issues of the series that Marvel made adapting these films, sometimes in three- or four-issue runs, sometimes as part of an ongoing.
Unlike the Super Specials, these comics were indeed comics, through and through. They came adorned with the standard Marvel logo, they were interrupted by house ads for Spider-Man and the Hulk, and they usually featured at least one bit of grandstanding by Stan Lee. Sometimes, these miniseries were merely reprints of the Super Special, just resized and broken up into several issues.
But other times, they were created to be read as monthly comics within the Marvel Universe, and here’s where things get weird. One of the most infamous examples was the Star Wars ongoing, which actually hit stores before the movie arrived in theaters. The first few issues more or less follow the script of the film (with some elements that were cut from the movie, including Darth Vader uttering the word “Sith” long before anyone does so on screen). But from there, things get weird, as creators Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin get to play around with the characters after the events of the film, adding their own weird creations, like the green-furred rabbit Jaxxon.
Jack Kirby‘s adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which began a year earlier in 1976 goes even further. While Kirby more or less follows the same basic plot of the Stanley Kubrick film, along with additional material from the Arthur C. Clarke novel and an earlier script, he adds his own elements, tracing interactions with the monolith through time. From these stories comes X-51, a self-aware android who eventually takes the name Machine Man and fights alongside the Avengers.
Marvel’s Godzilla comics were even more brazen. Instead of copying any of the movies, the series immediately placed the King of the Monsters into the Marvel Universe, and created a unit of SHIELD called the Godzilla Squad. As soon as issue #3, Thor and Hercules appeared on the front cover, duking it out with Godzilla.
Forgetting How to Adapt
Fun as these interjections are, they do create problems for people concerned with continuity. Now that Marvel and Star Wars are both owned by Disney, guys like Jaxxon can appear again, and Marvel’s deals with Toho and IDW (who has the main licensing rights for Godzilla) allow them to reform the Godzilla Squad again. But Machine Man can only gesture toward to that time he was brought to life by a towering black object, and he certainly can’t mention his cousin, HAL 9000.
Perhaps it’s just as well. Marvel has had fun with characters like Death’s Head, who emerged out of Doctor Who and Transformers comics that it can no longer print but continues to make appearances, and with spin-offs of the Micronauts toy line. Comic book readers almost instinctively know how to make allowances for gaps in canon.
Rather, the real loss is the absence of comic book adaptations themselves. Sure, this age of streaming and short theatrical windows means we can see the latest blockbuster more readily than could anyone hoping to check out Santa Claus: The Movie. But these adaptations had an art all their own, at once works of interpretation and homage that the current pop culture landscape lacks, no matter how popular the MCU gets.
Sony Plans its Own Lanterns With Spider-Man Clone Saga TV Show
Any loyal reader of Den of Geek know that the first trailers for Lanterns didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence. Like everyone else, we wondered why there was so little green in the Green Lantern show, why the space cops acted so much like Earth cops, why Hal would even bring up Ch’p if the show wasn’t going to show us Ch’p. Yet, here we are, days away from the finale, completely in love with the show.
Which is a long way of saying that even a really bad idea for a superhero TV show can lead to a great superhero TV show. Speaking of which: Sony is making a TV show about The Clone Saga, the infamous and unanimously-agreed-upon absolute worst story in Spider-Man‘s 64-year history. If your first question is “Why?”, and that really should be your first question, the answer is easy to see from Deadline’s report: the series will adapt “the second Clone Saga story arc that focuses on two Spider-Man clones, Ben Reilly and Kaine Parker.” In other words, we’ve got two people who don’t like each other making sense of their powers. Just like Lanterns.
The Clone Saga ran across every Spider-Man comic book from October 1994 to December 1996, and, like most superhero debacles, stemmed from an editorial mandate. Marvel editorial did not like the fact that Peter Parker had grown to adulthood, married Mary Jane, and was expecting a kid, so they wanted a reboot. They wouldn’t settle on the absolutely stupid idea of Peter making a deal with the devil to wipe out his marriage for another decade. So instead, they picked a story from the ’70s in which Spidey fights a clone of himself.
That story ends with the clone seemingly dying in a fire and Peter Parker returning home to resume his life. But The Clone Saga posits that the person who went to Peter Parker’s apartment that day was not, in fact, Peter Parker. Instead, he was the clone, who only thought he was Peter. The real Peter suffered amnesia from the explosion and spent years wandering around, trying to remember who he was. Once he figured it out, he came to confront the false Peter and reclaim his life.
Initially, Marvel planned for a smooth transition: the Clone would realize his mistake, take the name Ben Reilly, dye his hair blonde and move to the West Coast with Mary Jane and his child, finally free from the responsibility of being Spider-Man. The real Peter would take his place, having more adventures without the baggage of a family. However, fans hated this idea, and editorial was forced to rewrite plans on the fly, leading to a confusing, ambling story that ultimately resulted in no changes to the status quo. Marvel affirmed that the Peter we knew was in fact the real Peter, that the other guy was the clone. The other guy took the name Ben Reilly and stuck around as the Scarlet Spider for a while, until he died… and came back… and died again… and also came back.
You can see where the confusion comes in, and we haven’t even talked about Kaine Parker yet. Kaine arrives midway through the Clone Saga, and reveals himself to be the first clone of Peter Parker, a deeply flawed one at that. Scarred and monstrous-looking, Kaine has none of the inherent goodness of Peter or Ben. Further, he has the ability to burn people with his touch, which he uses on the faces of his enemies.
These days, both Ben and Kaine have become accepted, regular parts of the Spider-Man mythos, sometimes carrying their own books and appearing in Spider-Verse crossovers. Which is just one reason why a Sony TV show isn’t the worst idea.
The other reason is that Sony just made (and canceled after one season) a really good Spider-Noir show, which also seemed like an unlikely choice for a TV series. The show had none of the leftist grit of the original comic book series, nor any of the overt goofiness of Nicolas Cage‘s performance in Into the Spider-Verse. Yet, it was still incredibly well done, both thematically rich and entertaining.
The same, of course, is true of Lanterns, a series that is indeed about two guys walking around Nebraska wearing street clothes and also about space cops who work alongside a sentient planet. So, you know what? Go ahead, Sony. You make your Clone Saga TV show. Maybe you can finally make something beautiful out of that legendary mess.
Daleks – The Fan-Favorite Doctor Who Monster Comes Home with a New Hachette Model
This article is sponsored by Hachette Partworks.
Doctor Who is one of the most enduring science fiction franchises in modern history, with its main television series alone running (with several notable lapses) since 1963. One under-appreciated side of the franchise, however, is its foray into video games. Doctor Who has been a part of the gaming space since 1983, with the franchise’s first official game, the aptly titled Doctor Who: The First Adventure, published for the BBC Micro, an early personal computer commissioned by the BBC as its name suggests. This gave the British sci-fi franchise another frontier to explore and leave its mark in, along with television and merchandising, including its most iconic recurring enemy, the Daleks.
The Daleks have had an interesting place in Doctor Who video game history as they have had in the wider franchise itself. 1985’s PC game Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror featured enemies that heavily resembled Daleks but weren’t referred to by name, as the rights to the extraterrestrial exterminators were partially owned by their creator Terry Nation at the time, which would’ve complicated the licensing deal. It wasn’t until the 1992 PC game Dalek Attack that the Doctor’s formidable foes would officially make their video game debut, menacing several different incarnations of the Doctor over the course of the game.
When it comes to Daleks, Hachette Partworks has one of the most impressive models around, available through a subscription service from the company. The model is based on how the Daleks appeared in the Time War, the pivotal conflict that placed the Doctor and his fellow Time Lords in a battle for the fate of space and time against the nefarious enemies, resulting in the Time Lords nearly being wiped out for good. The subscription service has components shipped regularly, along with a magazine to not only help fans assemble the detailed model but with plenty of interesting info about Doctor Who at large.
To shift more focus to Hachette’s Dalek model and accompanying Doctor Who magazine for a moment, the subscription provides fans with the most detailed Time War Dalek currently available on the market at 1:2 scale of those appearing in the television series. This includes built-in sound effects, functional lights, and movement so fans can get their very own Dalek at home vowing to exterminate anyone who stands in their way. More than just building the familiar metallic casing for the villainous extraterrestrial, the model comes with the Dalek’s true organic form piloting the killing machine, tentacles and all.
As with Hachette’s other subscription programs, the Dalek model comes with its own set of free incentives for those who subscribe, while supplies last, of course. These include a Dalek blueprint ceramic mug, a TARDIS keychain, a toolkit giving subscribers all the tools that they need to build the Dalek model, and several free issues of the Doctor Who magazine. This all comes with the attention to detail and clear love letter to the property that Hachette is known for with all of its releases, really reminding Doctor Who aficionados that this is a subscription by fans for fans.
If there was ever a breakout and beloved entity throughout the 60+ year history of Doctor Who, it’s the Daleks, to the point where they starred in two spinoff movies released in the 1960s as the Doctor’s major adversary. Since their return with the 2005 revival series, the Daleks have regained their place as the definitive Doctor Who antagonists, who pushed the Doctor and the Time Lords to the brink of annihilation. With Hachette’s subscription service, fans can construct their own Dalek along with an extensive magazine series celebrating the sci-fi franchise’s legacy, more startlingly real than prior home releases like the series’ video games have provided fans.
Halloween Horror Nights 2026: Ranking Every HHN 35 Haunted House at Universal Orlando
For its 35th year, Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights brought 10 haunted houses built on original nightmares, a Prince of Darkness, Pinhead and a horror host who broke out of prison to get back on the air. Here’s how they stack up, from the one I’d skip to the one I’d wait an hour for again.
(And for more opinions on this year’s haunt, and for interviews with the biggest names in horror and paranormal, follow my Talking Strange show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you check out your favorite pods.)
Key Takeaways
What is the best haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights 2026?
“H.R. Bloodengutz Presents: A Halloween Fright-Tacular!” is my number one house of HHN 35 in Orlando. “Jack & Oddfellow: Chaos & Control” is second, and “Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness” is third. “Evil Dead Burn” sits at the bottom of my list.
Are the original houses or the IP houses better this year?
Once again, the originals win. Four of my top six houses are original concepts from Universal’s in-house creative team. The two IP houses that broke through, Ozzy and Hellraiser, chase a mood rather than retelling a plot.
How much do HHN 2026 tickets cost, and what types are there?
Single-night tickets: Single-night event admission is priced by date (typically around $100) and buying online saves money compared with the front gate.
Multi-night passes: The Frequent Fear Pass covers up to 31 event nights and starts at $274.99 plus tax, though the same page also lists it from $289.99. Other multi-night options include the Rush of Fear, Frequent Fear Plus and Ultimate Frequent Fear passes.
Add-ons: You can add Express, an R.I.P. Tour, a Scream Early ticket or a daytime Behind the Screams tour.
When does HHN 2026 run, and is it OK for kids?
Dates: The event runs on select nights from Aug. 28 through Nov. 1, 2026.
Hours: It officially starts at 6:30 p.m. each night, and early access begins at 2 p.m. for eligible guests.
Age guidance: Universal warns the event may be too intense for young children and doesn’t recommend it for kids under 13.
There’s a smell that hits you the second you walk into Universal Studios Florida during Halloween Horror Nights. It’s fog juice and humidity, plus a little sweetness from the treats served along the way. Underneath all that is the faint scent of panic from several thousand people who paid money to be chased. For me, that smell means spooky season has officially begun.
Normally I experience HHN through the media preview, then return later as a ticketed guest with friends. This year I missed the preview, so I went straight in with my crew. A few of them had never been. We got Express Passes, which I recommend. This makes it doable to hit each house once while skipping much of the line, and allowing you to be immersed in the same fog and fear.
This year’s anniversary theme is the Infernal Carnival of Nightmares, hosted by two of the event’s longtime icons, Jack the Clown and Dr. Oddfellow. The 10 haunted houses are split evenly between five based on existing IP (movies, TV and, this year, music) and five original concepts.
I approach HHN the way I’d approach a food tour of a new city. You don’t judge the place on one good or bad bite. You judge it on the whole tasting menu, the neighborhoods and everything that surprises you along the way. So here’s my menu, ranked.
10. Evil Dead Burn
The pitch here is simple. Universal says an infernal force has seized a family home, and guests have to dodge bloodthirsty Deadites in a house based on the new film.
The franchise dates back to 1981, and the core idea hasn’t changed in 45 years. You read from the Book of the Dead, parasitic demons crawl into the people you love, and those people become Deadites. The house follows the film beat by beat. It starts at the Price family’s secluded vacation home in the woods and gets nastier with every room. Universal’s own announcement says the journey ends with you giving in to the evil yourself. On paper, that’s a pretty great way to close a house.
This one didn’t land for me, though, and neither did the movie. The house is faithful to the film, and that cuts both ways. If you loved Evil Dead Burn, you’ll recognize the big moments. If you didn’t, it plays like a book report, a highlight reel of a movie you’ve already moved on from. Nearly all of it happens in and around that one house, so the rooms start to blur. Some critics said it runs too long. I’m not sure it did, but I was ready for it to be done.
There’s real craft in here, including puppeteered dogs that make for big, gnarly centerpieces. But Evil Dead has always had a grin under the gore. Dark humor plus extreme gore is the franchise formula, and this house, like the movie, forgot the first half. It is not groovy.
9. MADLANDS: Caged Cannibals
In Universal’s setup, the zoo animals are gone but the savagery stayed behind, and a shuttered zoo now belongs to warring cannibal factions. You’re the tourist wandering through their territory.
It’s a fun elevator pitch, something like Mad Max by way of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Each gang has claimed a different animal exhibit and styled itself after the former residents, from the bat house to the rhino paddock, all set to a punk soundtrack. The costume design is great.
It isn’t a bad house. I’ve seen it ranked number one on one list and dead last on another. For me, it just wasn’t memorable. It looks cool, but no single moment stuck with me. The immersive scents didn’t work for me either. The bat cave in particular sends a strong message, just not a good one. It’s a good concept that wasn’t all that scary.
8. Sinners
This one is hard to talk about, because the bar was so high. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, earned more than $370 million at the global box office. It became one of the highest-grossing original horror films ever and landed 16 Academy Award nominations and four wins. I saw it a couple of times in theaters and have rewatched it since on streaming. It’s a creative, fun ride with real social commentary.
The film is set in the 1930s Mississippi Delta. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan, come home to open a juke joint for their community. Opening night turns into a fight for survival when vampires show up at the door. Universal’s house description frames it as the twins’ juke joint on opening night, when the blues turn red.
The house drops you into Club Juke, and you quickly realize something’s wrong. The red-eyed vampires Remmick, Bert, and Joan arrive hungry. Along the way you run into characters from the film, including Sammie, Mary, Annie, Pearline, and Cornbread. You’re caught between the twins and the bloodsuckers, and you have to survive until sunrise.
Universal swung big on this one. John Murdy, who runs HHN at Universal Studios Hollywood, said that just as the film reinvented the vampire movie, his team was “re-inventing the haunted house.” Coogler and his Proximity Media producing partners said they wanted fans to “feel the music, the atmosphere, and the tension all around them.”
The design is beautiful. Smoke and Stack are well cast, the music is gorgeous, and walking into a real-life Club Juke is cool. But it’s a greatest-hits package. You move through the key scenes like a book report, and the house never finds a personality of its own. Other reviews I’ve read land in the same place: lovely to look at, but missing the ideas and texture that made the film so rich.
Sinners is about what gets stolen from people, including land, community, and music. When you promise to reinvent the haunted house, you’re promising something big and new that the film didn’t already give us. This was a faithful walkthrough and a missed opportunity. I say that because I love the movie, not in spite of it.
7. INVASION: Alien Abduction
Now we’re having fun. The official synopsis describes a shipful of Greys tearing through a remote homestead in search of fresh test subjects. Picture a farmhouse, a barn, bright lights in the sky and a very bad night for everyone on the property.
This house is cheeky, and I mean that as a compliment. It has classic sci-fi invasion energy that goes straight back to the UFO paranoia of the ’50s and ’70s. A floor vibrates under your feet, which is a great touch, and slanted rooms throw off your balance. A goat has a very bad time. A cat apparently sleeps through the entire invasion.
Some critics say the aliens start to look the same after a while. The house is also in a tent, one of the smaller spaces this year, so it’s hard to feel the scale of watching the skies. But it has one of the better final scares of the night, and it never takes itself too seriously. I love aliens, which is probably obvious given what I do, and I found this one fun as hell.
If you’re an alien fan, stop by CityWalk too. The Red Coconut Club has become Dead Coconut Club – Harvest, a small-town harvest festival hit by strange lights and possible abductions, with specialty drinks and light bites for guests 21 and older.
6. Stranger Things 5
Universal bills this as one final adventure with the Hawkins crew, surviving a Demogorgon army, facing the Mind Flayer and taking down Vecna for good. The house was built in partnership with Netflix around the biggest moments of the final season.
The story picks up as the wall between reality and the supernatural collapses. You move through the Wheeler House, Hawkins National Laboratory and the MAC-Z military base, then down into the Upside Down and finally the Abyss. Demogorgons hunt you the whole way, and Vecna closes in for an all-or-nothing showdown.
I’ve been disappointed by Stranger Things houses before, but this is the best one HHN has done so far. The early Demogorgon moments are legitimately good, well-hidden, and aggressive. I’d call this house underrated, and some other reviewers have said the same. A scene of Will unleashing his powers makes excellent use of the space and is a great moment brought to life.
My issue is that many of the scares are actors playing characters from the show popping out at you. Instead of a monster, you get a Karen Wheeler cameo, and that happens again and again. It’s more fan service than fright. The cast also rotates, so you might get Dustin one night and someone else the next. The Abyss ending fades out instead of landing a punch. Still, it’s a good send-off for superfans. Fans can also catch A Rockin’ Stranger Things Rewind, a live show framed as a WSQK broadcast looking back at all five seasons.
5. Hellraiser
Universal describes a realm of pure pain drawn from the original trilogy, where Pinhead and his Cenobites take their hellish pleasure.
Believe it or not, this is the first time Hellraiser has ever appeared at Halloween Horror Nights. Universal built houses on both coasts drawing from the first three films: Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth.
For the uninitiated, the mythology has hinged since 1987 on the Lament Configuration. It’s a puzzle box that, once solved, opens a door to another dimension run by the Cenobites. They’re ritual torturers who can’t tell pain from pleasure and aren’t trying to. The house starts exactly where it should, with you stepping inside a massive puzzle box and summoning them. From there you pass through the shadowy attic of the Cotton family home, where Frank was first dragged to hell. Next comes the Channard Institute from Hellbound, where the box keeps whispering promises of forbidden pleasure. You end in the Labyrinth, where Pinhead and the Cenobites wait for fresh souls.
I expected a little more, but I still enjoyed it. This house splits reviewers; I’ve seen it ranked as high as second and as low as ninth. Where it wins, it wins big. Clive Barker was involved, Christopher Young’s original score plays throughout, and Doug Bradley recorded new lines as Pinhead for both the Orlando and Hollywood houses. It’s a love letter to the classic films that sticks to their look and mood, with the lines fans love, and it doesn’t speed-run the plot. IP houses could learn from that.
It’s one of the longest houses of the year, which works for me, but it gets repetitive. There are a lot of bodies and a lot of Cenobite scares, without many visual surprises. Still, standing in front of Pinhead while hearing Doug Bradley’s voice makes it worth the wait. It took 35 years to get a Hellraiser house, and they didn’t embarrass the franchise.
4. Cybergoria
Universal’s pitch has you waking thousands of years from now in a frigid world run by machines determined to make you immortal, even if it kills you.
I really liked this one. You’re thawed out of cryosleep and promised immortality, and the robots have decided the best way to deliver it is to graft your flesh onto their metal frames, one piece at a time. One reviewer compared it to a bloody episode of Doctor Who, and as a Doctor Who fan, I dig that. It’s like the Cybermen running a slaughterhouse.
It’s a tight, loud space, and the creature makeup is some of the freakiest work in the park. Opinions on this one are all over the place, and some say it ends too abruptly. I don’t agree, though it could use one more big finale moment. It’s fun, it’s freaky, it pushes hard, and it’s a good ride. It also shows that HHN Orlando nails it when it creates its own stories.
3. Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness
Universal welcomes you into Ozzy’s world to kneel before the Prince of Darkness, in a house inspired by one of rock’s greatest legends. Universal calls it a nontraditional memorial. It’s a living horror movie spanning 45 years of his solo career, with music from Blizzard of Ozz, Diary of a Madman, Bark at the Moon, No More Tears, Scream and his final album, Ordinary Man.
The Orlando and Hollywood versions are completely different houses. Hollywood starts in Birmingham, England, and walks you through Ozzy’s life, from childhood to an asylum inspired by Diary of a Madman. Orlando goes darker and more fantastical. You pass through ancient ruins and dungeons, then board the Crazy Train into a world built from album covers, including Diary of a Madman, Bark at the Moon, The Ultimate Sin and Black Rain. It leans into the heavier sound and more sinister imagery of his later career, with the Prince of Darkness ruling over all of it.
I’m an Ozzy fan. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of every lyric, but I’m more than a casual listener, and this house was a creative jolt. The premise on the ground is a cult gathering to resurrect the Prince, which is a cool plotline. Werewolves howl straight off the Bark at the Moon cover. A giant bat takes a bite out of somebody’s head, a nice inversion of a certain infamous moment. And you ride through an actual Crazy Train. Mike Aiello, senior director of entertainment creative development at Universal Orlando, promised “a few Easter Eggs” for the diehards, so keep your eyes up.
The family’s fingerprints are all over this one. In a joint statement, Sharon and Jack Osbourne said Ozzy loved anything that gave fans a new way into his music and the worlds he created, and they called the house “a wonderful tribute to Ozzy.” That comes through. The house is beautiful, maybe more beautiful than scary, though I found some good frights. When you finally meet Ozzy at the end, it plays as a celebration rather than a jump scare. It’s a haunted house that doubles as a tribute, and I won’t judge you if you get a little misty in the fog.
2. Jack & Oddfellow: Chaos & Control
Universal sums it up in one line: “Horror icons aren’t born. They’re made.” You witness the origins of Jack the Clown, then step into Dr. Oddfellow’s universe as the pair face off, chaos against control, in a clash decades in the making.
This one seems to be universally enjoyed by critics and by everyone I’ve talked to, and I can see why. You don’t need endless lore to love it, because it’s a killer clown versus the evil ringmaster who made him. That’s all you need. If you do know the history, the house is full of Easter eggs and rewards.
I love a good carnival setting, and this house is a funhouse: creepy and a little unsettling. There are slanted hallways, dizzying spiral catwalks, projection effects and old-school stage illusions. It’s probably the most colorful house of the year. It’s also talky and heavy on narration, but I’m OK with that. You won’t catch the whole backstory in the time you spend in each room, and the house ends just as these two team up. I wanted more, but it’s a great ride and a strong centerpiece for HHN 35.
The anniversary theme continues outside. The “Infernal Carnival of Nightmares” scare zone has Jack and Dr. Oddfellow inviting guests into a sinister sideshow. In a second zone, Sideshow of Decay, Cindy Caine opens a portal in a carnival junkyard that lets decayed nightmares from past HHN events return.
1. H.R. Bloodengutz Presents: A Halloween Fright-Tacular!
Universal’s description has the beloved maître d’macabre back at WKNB for a Halloween scare-athon of ghouls, gore and the frights fans keep returning for. It’s the best house of HHN 35 in Orlando, and in a great year, I’m not sure it’s even close.
The setup starts before you’re even inside. The horror host has escaped prison, his crashed prison van sits out front, and he’s taken over the old public access station for one final broadcast. From there, every room is a forgotten B-movie he’s programmed for you, from a spooky classroom to a black-and-white graveyard.
There’s also a werewolf dancing at a tiki bar. I love tiki bars, so I love saying that. It’s a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect. Between segments you pass through living rooms with vintage TVs and Halloween decorations, like a rumpus room or an old basement on Halloween night. And don’t forget to push the big red button in the first room.
It’s a great homage to old horror host TV shows, with genuine glee and something sinister running underneath the camp. It may not be the scariest house in HHN history, but I was smiling the whole way through.
“Slaughter Sinema” remains one of my favorite HHN houses of all time, and this is its spiritual cousin. It proves the point I keep coming back to: Halloween Horror Nights shines brightest when the creative team lets its weirdo freak flag fly.
Beyond the Houses
The houses are the main course, but Universal itself suggests using the peak hours, when waits are longest, to explore scare zones and street experiences, grab food or catch a show.
Downtown Clowntown: Universal’s tagline is “There’s the Wrong Side of Town… Then There’s Clowntown.” The zone brings together Art the Clown from Terrifier, and the Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
FORTNITEMARES: In this zone, the Fortnite Storm spreads through the streets.
Street experiences: Zombie carhops take over Mel’s Die-In, and San Francisco’s streets become Club Horror, with an undead DJ.
Nightmare Fuel: Blood Noir: This show pairs dark music with death-defying stunts in a vampire-ridden city.
Rides: Rides open during the event include Revenge of the Mummy, Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts, TRANSFORMERS: The Ride-3D and MEN IN BLACK Alien Attack.
Death Eaters: Death Eaters also roam Diagon Alley.
Closing Thoughts
The original houses won this year, which is usually how I feel. My top two are originals, and so are four of my top six. I think the consensus leans the same way. When Universal isn’t bound to a movie’s plot, and by extension to studio oversight, it builds amazing worlds. When it is bound to a plot, the house often feels like a walkthrough of the trailer. Ozzy and Hellraiser were the exceptions, the IP houses that captured a mood instead of summarizing a plot.
None of that is a knock on HHN Orlando. I love this event, and after what I thought was a weak year two years ago, this was a real return to form that shows how solid it is.
A few of my friends who had never been to HHN walked out disappointed. They wanted more outright terror: scare actors in their faces, full contact, getting grabbed and screamed at. That’s what you might find at an extreme haunt, or at the haunts they remember from childhood. I understand, but that has never been what HHN is. It’s a high-production-value event that moves a lot of people through each night, built on incredible visuals, well-timed jumps and great effects rather than personal harassment. What it delivers is exhilaration: racing through fog with your friends and laughing because you just screamed. That’s my kind of fear, and nobody does it at the scale of HHN Orlando.
Results vary, too, because everything depends on timing. You could have walked three people behind me and had a completely different experience, for better or worse. So tell me your rankings, and tell me what I got wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Halloween Horror Nights Express Pass worth it?
For a first visit or a single-night trip, yes. I bought one and recommend it.
Express Pass: It gets you into the Express line once at every haunted house and participating ride. It requires separate event admission, and the price changes by night.
R.I.P. Tour: For a bigger splurge, the tour includes a guide, priority entry to the houses, valet parking, a reception with light appetizers and reserved show seating. A 5-House R.I.P. Tour, split into North and South routes, is also available.
Discontinued option: Universal has dropped the Fear Pass plus Express combo products for 2026.
What is Premium Scream Night?
It’s a separate, limited-capacity night held Aug. 27 and Oct. 19, 2026.
Perks: Shorter house waits than regular nights, all-you-care-to-enjoy select food and non-alcoholic drinks, a souvenir credential and lanyard, and free self-parking.
Costumes: It’s the only night costumes are allowed, though costume masks are still banned.
Passholder discount: Annual and Seasonal Passholders get $25 off.
Can I get into Halloween Horror Nights early?
Yes, through Stay & Scream.
Who’s eligible: Guests holding both same-day Universal Studios Florida admission and an HHN ticket for that night can pick up a wristband and stay in the park.
Early houses: Stranger Things 5, Hellraiser and Jack & Oddfellow open at 2 p.m. Select queues open at 4 p.m., more houses start at 5:15 p.m., and everything is running by the official 6:30 p.m. start.
Scream Early ticket: If you don’t have a day ticket, this add-on grants park entry after 2 p.m. and access to at least three houses. You must arrive by 5 p.m.
Exceptions: Stay & Scream isn’t offered on Premium Scream Nights.
What else should I know before I go?
Arrival: Universal recommends arriving at least an hour before the 6:30 p.m. gate opening to avoid peak traffic, parking lines and security waits.
Parking: Standard parking fees apply on event nights.
Rules: No costumes or costume masks are allowed on regular nights, and the event happens rain or shine with no refunds.
Accessibility: The Attractions Assistance Pass is fully digital in the Universal Orlando app, and return times appear once the houses open.
Groups and Passholders: Groups of 10 or more get discounted admission with advance reservations. Premier Passholders can reserve one free event admission, first come, first served.
For more opinions on this year’s HHN Orlando, and for interviews with the biggest name in horror and paranormal, follow my Talking Strange show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you check out your favorite pods.
The 10 Smartest People in the Marvel Universe
The Marvel Universe is lousy with geniuses. Sure, DC has its share of smarties, but the Marvel Universe was born in the atomic age, when optimism for the future and fear of the bomb coalesced in sci-fi stories about brilliant people creating suits of armor, undergoing dangerous experiments, and living in secret technological utopias. In fact, Marvel has so many geniuses that a movie like Spider-Man: Brand New Daycan feature Peter Parker at once broke and working with an advanced technology, and nobody bats an eye.
With so many smart people in the Marvel Universe, we cannot help but do a very dumb thing and try to signal out the 10 smartest. Our evidence will come from examples in the comics (which, as anyone who has read more than three issues knows, can be inconsistent), as well as intuition and preference. Which is a long way of saying that people may disagree with some of these choices. But you know what they say, if you’re so smart, why don’t you make your own list of Marvel geniuses? Or maybe, leave a (nice and respectful) comment below.
Iron Man
Of course, we have to start with Tony Stark, who the MCU has changed from a venerable B-lister to the most recognizable superhero genius. To be sure, Stark was always one of the smartest people in the Marvel Universe, even when he wasn’t so popular. After all, he built a suit of armor in a cave with a box of scraps in both the comics and in the MCU, a concept he continued to iterate upon, leading to the nanobot extremis suits he wears today.
If there’s a shot against Iron Man’s intelligence, it’s that he’s thoroughly an engineer and often lacks other types of smarts. Especially before the first movie, Tony Stark was portrayed as a futurist whose ability to see what’s coming made him either self-destructive or cruel. Even in better moments, such as when he built the Avengers Machine as a mea culpa to Captain America during the run-up to Secret Wars, Tony too often sees people as cogs—cogs that he can arrange into perfect working order, but cogs nonetheless.
Mister Fantastic
Were this a ranked list, Reed Richards a.k.a. Mister Fantastic would be at the very top (albeit with an asterisk). He is undoubtedly the smartest person in the Marvel Universe, at least at this very moment. Sure, others will eventually surpass him, and yes, he did make one very big and notable mistake that would forever change him and his family’s lives. But no one has quite the same level of book knowledge and, just as important, capacity for imagination than Reed Richards, a point made time and again in Fantastic Four comics, including the current incredible run by Ryan North.
The asterisk comes from the fact that some of Mister Fantastic’s intelligence comes from his superpowers. He uses his ability to change shapes to expand his brain and, by extension, his consciousness, allowing for different types of thinking. While that’s not exactly cheating, it does blur the line between a genius and someone like, say, the Kree Supreme Intelligence, who has a computer brain and access to many minds. Still, the fact that Reed was brilliant before exposure to cosmic rays renders those questions moot. And the fact that he manages to best variants like the Maker, who uses further augments, proving that Reed’s smarts aren’t just extensions of his powers.
Doctor Doom
Of course, if Reed makes this list, then his old pal Doctor Doom also has to make it… just one step below. Of course, Doom would disagree, and he has strong evidence to back it up. Doom is, of course, one of Earth’s greatest scientific minds, as demonstrated by the armor he wears and the army of Doombots he commands. He hasn’t quite reached the level of Scientist Supreme, a title enjoyed by others on this list, but he’s been close. He has, however, become Sorcerer Supreme, a reminder that he has mastered the mystic arts as well as the mechanical arts, something no one else on this list can claim.
So why does Doom fall under the hated Richards? Part of the reason is that Doom’s insecurities limit him. He can’t quite get past his own arrogance and need for control, which means that he saddles his own intellect and gives way to rage or pettiness. Also, there was that one time in college that he got a math problem wrong and ended up scarring his face, which isn’t a big deal altogether, but it is always fun to bring up.
Ant-Man
Speaking of people whose personal shortcomings limit their intelligence, we need to talk about Hank Pym. A founding member of the Avengers, Hank Pym created Pym particles, a revolutionary form of comic book science that, a) allows him and other heroes to change their size while retaining their strength and mass, and b) allows writers to wave away any physics problem that would prevent the rule of cool (see also: the unstable molecules invented by Reed Richards). Hank also became Scientist Supreme, thus canonically recognized as the greatest technological mind in the Marvel Universe.
For all that he’s done well, however, Hank never figured out his extreme emotional instability. Even if we remind ourselves that the panel of him slapping his wife Janet Van Dyne was a miscommunication between artist and writer and should be given no more credence than, say, adult Reed Richards dating Sue when she was a teen. But Hank’s mental state (and refusal to address it) means that he wastes a lot of his energy on coming up with new identities and making Ultrons. That last one proved to be a particularly dumb idea.
Amadeus Cho
As much as we rag on Hank, he did get one great moment. In 2009’s Mighty Avengers #21, Hank meets Amadeus Cho, who introduces himself as the seventh-smartest person on the planet. “Really? Well, I’ve been off-planet for a while,” answers Hank, “so you should probably knock yourself down to eighth.” Harsh as it is to be on the receiving end of that burn, eighth smartest person on the planet is pretty good, especially for someone as young as Amadeus Cho.
Created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa for 2005’s Amazing Fantasy #15, Amadeus Cho first appeared as a quiz kid whose game show success drew the ire of a supervillain. From that relatively low-stakes beginning, Cho made his way into the world of superheroes, first as a pseudo-sidekick to the Hulk and then especially traveling with Hercules. After concocting for himself a controlled dose of gamma radiation, Cho has become the Totally Awesome Hulk or Brawn, a member of the teen team the Champions. Cho is given to all the same outbursts and errors in judgment that affect any other teen boy. But he can manage his emotions even in Hulk form… so maybe Hank Pym should knock himself down to eighth.
Moon Girl
As with Amadeus Cho, young geniuses are a tricky proposition. Not only do precocious kids make for tedious reading, but they can often hypercharge the power creep that always happens with superhero comics, resulting in characters becoming too perfect, too quickly. Moreover, writers often talk about young geniuses in terms of potential to be realized, not their current state (see: Valeria Richards, who just misses this list).
All of which is to say that Lunella Lafayette a.k.a. Moon Girl belongs on this list precisely for the way she’s largely avoided those problems. Moon Girl is, of course, scientifically brilliant. The 2015 series that first introduced Lunella (by Brandon Montclare, Amy Reeder, and Natacha Bustos) found her making an intergalactic bridge to Kree space, even in elementary school. But the thing that sets Lunella apart is her bond with Devil Dinosaur, matching her scientific mind with an empathetic heart. Young Moon Girl still has a lot to learn, but if she can continue to balance her technical genius with care for others, she may end up the smartest person in the entire Marvel Universe.
Doctor Octopus
At this point, someone might begin to wonder about the absence of our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Peter Parker. After all, Pete’s a science whiz who created his web-shooters as a teen in his bedroom, and ran a successful lab and company. Shouldn’t he make the cut? He might, but even more so than Hank Pym or Victor Von Doom, Peter limits himself and rarely exercises his full potential. In fact, the one time he really did go all out, Peter was under the control of someone else, a person who does earn a spot on this list: Doctor Otto Octavius.
Forget your Mad Thinkers, Tinkerers, and Doctors Doom; Doc Ock is the premiere mad scientist in the Marvel Universe. Where emotional and mental shortcomings hamstring so many of the greats, Otto lets his megalomania drive his thirst for intervention, pushing boundaries and exploring dangerous experiments. Doctor Octopus doesn’t even get slowed by set-backs such as fusing arms to his back or death, and instead uses them as opportunities to further iterate. Sure, Otto had to concede that Peter is the superior Spider-Man; but if we’re just talking geniuses, then Octavius gets the edge, at least until Peter Parker gets his act together.
Blue Marvel
Most Marvel geniuses carry echoes of the Kennedy-era optimism that marked the 1960s in which the company debuted. But the concept of super-geniuses goes back far further, including pulp novels about brilliant adventurer Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. DC has incorporated some of these elements into characters like Superman, but Marvel has largely ignored pulp geniuses, at least until the 2008 series Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel by Kevin Grevioux and Mat Broome. That story introduced Adam Brashear a.k.a. Blue Marvel, a super-strong hero whose experiments in the Negative Zone gave him anti-matter powers.
Like another 2000s character, the Sentry, Blue Marvel was a late and retconned addition to the Marvel Universe, a Superman-like genius who had operated in the 1960s, but who disappeared from public life after the public learned he was Black. However, since he returned to action, Blue Marvel has established himself as a renaissance man who takes on the galaxy’s most complicated problems. That was especially apparent in the pages of Al Ewing’s Ultimates run, in which Brashear dealt with multiversal threats that would give most geniuses a splitting headache, using both his brains and his brawn.
Black Panther
“But wait,” one may ask. “Isn’t T’Challa’s sister Shuri smarter than him? After all, she’s the one who makes all the inventions.” That’s true, but remember, there are many different types of intelligence. And why Shuri edges out T’Challa in the lab, few people can combine their technical knowhow with both strategic excellence and political wisdom. As a hero, a military leader, and a king, Black Panther Challa must wear multiple hats, giving him one of the most multifaceted minds in the Marvel Universe.
This isn’t to say that T’Challa isn’t subject to the same shortcomings that affect other great Marvel thinkers. His feud with Namor, for example, cost his country more lives than necessary, and many have wondered if his membership in the Avengers doesn’t take attention away from his duties in Wakanda. Yet, even if we allow him the occasional mistake, there’s no question that Black Panther applies his brilliance to more diverse areas than nearly anyone else on the planet.
Mister Sinister
Every person listed here is smart. But how many of them are fun? Even Hank McCoy a.k.a. the Beast, someone who just misses the cutoff line here, seems pretty dour when he’s conducting experiments, unless he’s paling around with Wonder Man. No, if you want to watch a great mind have a good time, then you need to seek out Nathaniel Essex, the mad geneticist who became X-Men villain Mister Sinister.
Born in the mid-19th century, Essex began sympathetically enough, initially plying his genius to discovering a cure to the types of birth defects that killed his young son. However, when he discovered the phenomenon of mutants, Essex went nuts. First, he blended his DNA with that of mutants, giving himself powers. Then he started experimenting in cloning, a practice he continues to this day as the evil Mister Sinister. In fact, when he’s not combining DNA to create wacky mutant hybrids, Sinister is arguing with his clones about who is the real Essex. Who says smart guys can’t be fun?
Verity Review: Anne Hathaway’s 2026 Winning Streak Had to End Sometime
Verity is a movie that makes a lot of noise about writing. The most important characters are authors. The MacGuffin pushing the plot into motion is a series of novels so compelling that its publisher is willing to pay a ghost writer half a million dollars to finish the lascivious twists and juicy turns; and the actual engine of it all is an unedited manuscript that comes with an author’s note all but entitled “How I Did It and Got Away Scott-Free.”
So dear reader, it becomes an open question how anyone reading the script by Nick Antosca, or presumably the source material novel by Colleen Hoover that I’ve never cracked open, could not second-guess the merit of the words passing as a narrative and allegedly scintillating dialogue. This is a movie where characters speak to each other like AI agents trying to fool a Turing Test after being trained exclusively on a diet of thirsty Lifetime movie fan fiction and late night Cinemax programming; a film where the titular novelist Verity Crawford speaks less like a Machiavellian femme fatale than a cross between Katharine Hepburn at her thickest Mid-Atlantic chic and Cruella de Vil. Anne Hathaway even seems to sprinkle in a little faux-Genovian Received Pronunciation for an extra flick of her affectation’s knife.
Admittedly, there is definitely something knowing at play in an adaptation of a smutty beach read featuring characters who claim they cringe at “airport books.” Verity is, after all, directed by adept comedy filmmaker Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, The Big Sick). Yet even if an entrepreneurial peddler of garbage winks at you while selling their wares, does that cleanse the trashy grime off your hands?
No, no it does not. But at least I think the film is aware of the pool of sleaze it invites you to cackle at while diving in.
The descent starts early when in the opening seconds, central heroine Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) bears witness to a New York City accident that turns a bike messenger into street pizza, caking Johnson in the human marinara in the process. For some, this would be one of the worst moments in their life, but for Lowen and Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), it’s a meet-cute with that aforementioned uncanny trauma-bonding foreplay designed by a randy ChatGPT prompt. Jeremy is a real estate broker who helps Lowen get cleaned up and, serendipitously, will offer later that day this struggling-in-obscurity writer the chance to finish his wife’s beloved series of thriller novels all shockingly told from the villain’s perspective.
Apparently the great appeal of Verity Crawford’s works is they’re each framed to take the side of the bad guy, or more often bad gal (hmm). Alas, their mastermind has been catatonic due to some vague psychosomatic condition that occurred after a freak car accident where Verity ran her car into a tree. Look, the details are vague but the point is Mrs. Crawford is a vegetable, Jeremy promises, and her books’ money bags aren’t going to print themselves. So the about-to-be evicted Lowen has a golden opportunity she can’t refuse, especially since it comes with the chance to study bestselling Verity’s notes in her office from an idyllic Vermont lakehouse that appears like it was designed by Martha Stewart when she was going through a Voldemort phase.
It’s also there that Lowen meets Crew (Brady Wagner), Verity and Jeremy’s son, and the boy who lived. His twin sister wasn’t so lucky after what we’re told was another freak accident on. (Hmmm, a lot of that going around New England these days?!) There is also Verity herself, staring wide-eyed from her motionless wheelchair, plus an easy-to-find manuscript hidden in her computer. And wouldn’t you guess it? It’s her autobiography where Hathaway’s purring villainess will recount a lifetime of deceit, cunning, and murderous manipulation. Hmmmm!
A credited producer on the movie, Hathaway’s cartoonishly diabolical line readings, as well as the malevolent flips of her hair, are the main reason to indulge this silliness. More animalistic than her turn as Catwoman some years ago, she might as well be cooing when she licks her husband’s blood off her lips following a violent kiss in bed. Granted, her repeatedly announced villainy rarely transcends beyond the fervid imaginations of perverse Twilight slash fiction.
Nearly all of Hathaway’s scenes are told in flashback and narrated from, as she insists, the antagonist’s point-of-view. It’s curious, then, how little evil she actually commences in before third act revelations. Otherwise, both Verity and her film seem more distracted by the bite marks Verity leaves on a bedpost while banging her husband’s brains out than it is in anything outright evil. You’re, in fact, left to wonder more about the other scribbler who seems to spend less time outlining her book than she does longingly tracing her fingertips across the same bedpost, as if to ask when it will be her turn?
In what has undeniably been a big year for Hathaway, Verity seems to draw 2026 to a close with a campy turn so soapy, so bellicose that it likely appeals to an actor like a positively gaudy Halloween costume might to a sheltered Christian finally allowed to celebrate a little pagan hocus pocus. Johnson’s aloofness, meanwhile, is deployed solidly enough in th early scenes, particularly when she leans into her cool girl schtick while keeping Jeremy’s puppy-dog eyes at a distance. When the film requires Johnson to be vulnerable, or worse, empathetic toward Jeremy or the little boy in the house, her limitations come into sharper relief. On some level, we are asked to believe Johnson’s jejune innocence more than Hathaway’s scenery-chewing. Neither strike a natural chord, although the former is more of a problem for this kind of material.
Ultimately though, the material remains a light, wine mom blend despite promising passionate flavors and bold “darkness.” While I wouldn’t call Verity a happy story, my audience was more inclined to chortle than shudder at lines like, “I”m going to steal your husband” being whispered over the edge of a hospital bed. So I won’t say that the whole exercise leaves you feeling particularly good about anything you just watched, but you’ll definitely get more laughs than any outwardly self-styled comedy releasing in theaters this weekend.
Verity opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 2.
Digger Review: Tom Cruise Attempts Kubrickian Satire in Bold, Uneven Swing
If you’re of a certain age, it is easy to miss the Tom Cruise of yesteryear who defined his career by the daring risks he would take with auteurs as much those safe studio bets. Sure, he still made Maverick clones like Days of Thunder (Top Gun at Daytona) and Cocktail (Top Gun at TGI Fridays), but he also worked with Oliver Stone on Born on the Fourth of July, Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia, Neil Jordan via Interview with the Vampire, and of course Stanley Kubrick during the grueling 18-month shoot of Eyes Wide Shut.
I think it’s fair to say Cruise, even at the peak of his King of Blockbuster Cinema stardom from the past decade, misses that guy too. It’s the best way to explain Digger, an absolute swing past the fences, beyond the bleachers on the other side of the fences, and toward a goalpost somewhere in the next time zone. A film co-written and solely directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Digger unapologetically leans on its Kubrickian influences, channeling the scathing, blood-in-its-mouth satire of Dr. Strangelove with the meticulous production design and (seemingly) natural lighting of Barry Lyndon. It’s a film so bold, so bombastic that its on-the-nose venom can only be countenanced due to, like Strangelove, it seeks to be merrily laughing on its way to hell—in this case courtesy of climate change instead of nuclear holocaust.
Yet unlike Strangelove or Cruise’s previous Lord of Childwickbury collaborator, Digger has both more and somehow less on its mind than a previous ode to learning to love our impending doom. To be sure, this is a satire so heightened that it reaches the altitude of one of Cruise’s HALO jumps; it’s a positively rage-filled and rage-inducing sendup of the energy barons in the U.S. and a global economic system addicted to crude oil like it’s the spice melange. But it’s also the first non-Netflix feature from Iñárritu since the one-two Best Director punch of Birdman and The Revenant in the 2010s. And like those movies, particularly Birdman, it seems fixated on the meta appeals and ironies that spring from a person widely celebrated as “the last movie star,” and now considered a veritable statesman for Hollywood, inhabiting an intentionally broad, deliberately boorish embodiment of American greed and power-consumption.
This is most overt after several SEISMIC twists that redefine the scope of the movie’s ambitions, and the meat of its greatest triumphs and follies. Alas, I cannot write about those wild, almost hallucinatory elements except in the abstract. So suffice to say, imagine if instead of turning Dr. Strangelove into solely a punchline about the superpowers’ lust for armament and annihilation, Kubrick somehow made that film also a backdoor allegory on how Peter Sellers developed that outrageous German accent as the titular Nazi scientist and practiced the smile and left arm’s naughty Sieg Heil-ing salute. It’s still about how he came to love the bomb but also an indictment on the limits of such pithy gallows humor in the face of manmade apocalypse.
In the broadest sense, each successive twist in this vein is revealed as Digger drills ever further down, one layer of narrative artifice at a time, all while staying committed to doing a jaunty spoof about oil executives and complicit governments bringing about the end of the world. I wouldn’t say the ulterior instincts are mistaken, or even lesser, but smashing together these two (or three) narrative sediments and attempting to tell each of them with an earnest, if not imperious, request for applause undermines all levels until, like a deadly shelf of ice the size of multiple American cities, the whole thing starts to crack under the pressure of its own pretensions.
Of the elements I can most freely describe, the movie is about an oil man named Digger Rockwell, a third or fourth generation tycoon so blue-blooded that his austere, Yosemite-chic mansion is lit in a perpetual dreary morning-gray overcast by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Still, it doesn’t make all the dead animal heads and guns on the walls, floors, and even ceilings look any less garish. It’s from this taxidermist paradise ol’ Digger runs the world, keeping the President of the United States (John Goodman) and attendant handlers and Cabinet secretaries waiting downstairs, and telling the eggheads on his Zoom calls, where they complain about safety concerns, to put a cork in it while the oil flows.
Unfortunately on the morning we meet the rascally billionaire, those unstoppable commands meet an immovable rock—or rather a quite rapidly moving ice shelf that has broken off a glacier in Greenland and is expected to make landfall with accompanying tidal waves in about three days. The ailing, mortality-obsessed president wants to pass the buck to Digger, the president’s men want Digger’s chief scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) to come up with a miracle solution when bombing the ice shelf proves futile, and Digger… he just wants to find a loophole in the crisis he can exploit for financial gain. It is, after all, the American way. More pressing for our hero, though, is that no one is able to do anything for his cancer-ridden, comically-obvious animatronic cat!
The artificiality and theatricality of Digger’s End Times scenario, and pussycat, is of course the point. In a world where titans of industries and the winners of real-life Monopoly command, own, and even have patented the technology of the spotlight, all the rest is just a stage for their indulgences and eccentricities, with anyone earning less than 10-figures relegated to the invisible audience in the dark. In this context, Digger is the ultimate diva, and Cruise plays most of his scenes like he’s feasting on a Texas-smoked solo aria. He kicks, he grins, he finger-bangs, and he spits while raving. Some might be reminded of the similarly crude Hollywood caricature Cruise played in Tropic Thunder, but that was done with peculiar affection for his hometown’s line of work.
Digger Rockwell is essayed with leering disdain where the archness is intended to belie the emptiness of the man. The movie offers a pittance of humanity due to his doting concern over a cat that clearly has three paws in the grave, but the obvious unreality of the feline’s on-screen, robotic visage speaks to the realer antipathy the film and actor offer their antihero: he’s a devil who can tap into Cruise’s bottomless charisma, as best demonstrated in a bravado sequence where Digger stands before the eyes of the Hague and world to equally invite their scorn and desperate pleas for liquid black gold. We’re more expected to shudder at and maybe enjoy his folksy rottenness, but we never empathize. Or laugh.
It is an unhinged and liberating performance for Cruise, and yet perhaps the most damning thing about it comes when another character observes, “but it isn’t funny.” Indeed, it’s not, and this articulation draws attention to the gaping hole in the satire; there is an obvious logic to this choice, hence the on-screen admission, but it still cannot paper over what becomes one of the movie’s significant deficiencies. For a film so desperate to posture as a comedy, there is too much didactic anger, and even more smug self-satisfaction, for this basic objective to be fulfilled: it fails at being funny, and thus there is little catharsis in its doom prophesying.
The cartoonish atmosphere doesn’t even work across all performances. While some of the other actors, particularly Ahmed as the guilt-ridden and complicit scientist who took big oil’s money, get the assignment and find chuckles in the margins, great actors like Sandra Hüller as Digger’s half-sister and even Goodman seem adrift in the tonal chaos. Cruise’s archness is never less than hypnotic, but there is a lack of harmony wherein each performer seems to be in a different key, and all are hampered by a screenplay by Iñárritu, Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone that gets distracted with every possible rabbit hole in sight.
There is, again, a metatextual double-meaning to most of what occurs in the film, and the final shot that carries on past the closing credits seems to be the moment Iñárritu’s entire premise was built around. It really is a magnificent denouement that almost makes the whole picture worth it, but even right before this mic drop, the script still lacks confidence in the audience fully gettingit, hence a character played by Jesse Plemons having the unenviable task of spelling out the thesis moments earlier. It’s just ham-fisted enough to possibly get an Oscar-nomination for the writing.
It gives me no pleasure to come down on a picture so rife with audacity and so singularly Iñárritu. The fact a major studio took such a pricey gamble on this material, with no less than Cruise still radiant in his post-Top Gun: Maverick afterglow using it as an opportunity to get under the latex and back to his character actor muses, makes the thing never less than watchable. Even its mistakes are fascinating.
But like a previous protagonist Iñárritu has admitted to being a kind of alter-ego, Riggan Thompson in Birdman, his film becomes so preoccupied with the affectations of art, and the burdens of commentary, that the piece loses sight of whatever it is actually trying to say beneath the deafening insistence of its own self-importance. It becomes so bedazzled with navel-gazing at that statement, and how its commenting on climate change and the power of art to save the world (or not), that it forgets the statement must still work as anything more than a self-flagellating valediction from a movie star. It definitely makes for quite the sight, but Cruise’s return to artistic gambles deserved a better payout.
Digger is in theaters on Friday, Oct. 2.
Avengers: Endgame Encore Is Your Reminder to Watch Loki Season 2
This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame Encore.
Call it a cash-grab, call it hype for Avengers: Doomsday, call it a genuine fan event made for people who love the MCU: Avengers: Endgame Encore has proven to be a hit. The re-release of the 2019 Phase Three capper won the box office this weekend, in part because it contains several new scenes that connect Endgame to this December’s Doomsday.
One of those new scenes includes what Joe Russo, who directed Endgame and Doomsday with his brother Anthony, called “the most profound thing that’s ever happened to the MCU.” In this scene, Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson), Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), and Casey the tech (Eugene Cordero) stand inside the Time Variance Authority offices and watch as incursions—collisions between alternate Earths—take out hundreds of realities, resulting in multiversal collapse. “That scene… has a great level of importance,” Joe Russo continued. “It is certainly critical to the storytelling of Doomsday.” And in order to properly understand that scene, you need to watch Loki season 2. And that’s a good thing, because the merits of Endgame Encore may be debatable, but no one can deny that Loki’s second season is excellent.
As with its first season, the second season of Loki follows the titular God of Lies as he seeks redemption by working with the TVA. Season one ended with the reveal that the TVA, the bureaucratic organization devoted to pruning alternate realities to maintain a single sacred timeline, was set up by He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) by prevent a war between his variants. When the Loki variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) killed He Who Remains, the multiverse was allowed to flourish, opening the way for his far more dangerous variants, especially Kang the Conqueror.
As most readers know, Kang was intended to be the Thanos-esque big bad of Phases Four through Six of the MCU, making Loki‘s first season the kick-off to that arc. However, when Majors’s off-screen behavior got him dropped by Disney, Kevin Feige used to break to rethink the company’s plans, leading to the decision to bring back the Russo Brothers to direct Doomsday and to make Doctor Doom the new overarching threat.
However, those decisions came after Loki‘s second season was shot. Rather than rendering the season superfluous, it instead gave the show its own quiet corner of the MCU to work in. The season does indeed deal with the fallout of Sylvie’s decision, as the multiverse is now spinning out of control without He Who Remains or a functioning TVA to stop it. Part of the episode is spent with Loki recruiting former TVA workers, who have gone on to new lives or have tried to return to the lives they led before He Who Remains plucked them out and remade them into his employees. The other part involves trying to deal with the threat of Kang by recruiting a younger, more peaceful variant called Victor Timely, played by Majors.
Despite all of the high-stakes storytelling, the second season managed to keep focused on the characters. Without He Who Remains there to control them, the characters get glimpses of the lives they had and contrast them to the lives they currently live. For Mobius, that means realizing he was once a kindly jet ski salesman named Don, who enjoyed a quiet life in suburbia. For Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), that means she was both a well-liked vice principal and potentially an interplanatery conqueror in service of He Who Remains.
The possibilities strike Loki hardest of all. While the first season convinced him that the “glorious purpose” he thought he deserved would never come to be, the second season leaves him wondering who he could be if not the God of Lies. His slow realization builds to a beautiful and tragic end, perhaps the most satisfying character arcs in the entire MCU.
We won’t spoil it here, but the end is so perfect that one wonders how it will play into Doomsday. But even if the movie doesn’t touch on Loki’s personal development, the added scene in Avengers Encore demonstrates that the plot points of the show will carry on into the new movie. So whether you want more lore or satisfying character development, Loki season two is the perfect way to prepare for Doomsday.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.
Club Kid Review: The Feel-Good A24 Gay Nightclub Movie You’ve Been Waiting For
There are few people who do not at some point want to be the life of the party. There are even fewer who want to be the final dregs hanging on after last call is announced, “Closing Time” played, and the lights flipped on. Peter, Jordan Firstman’s hard-living and self-styled party promoter, is well past both points in a debut feature that the actor also wrote and directed. During an absolutely delirious opening sequence set in 2016, Peter is seen dancing by himself, unaware when things need to wind down… particularly following a threesome in the back of the club.
There’s, perhaps, a metaphor in this about a generation who can relate all too well when an insert card says, “A Deacde-ish Later,” and Peter is depicted still hitting the clubs as the oldest guy in the room, wondering aloud if anyone else feels like they lost grip on the last 10 years sometime yesterday. And there certainly could’ve been another, sobering A24 drama about millennial ennui and the despair of arrested-development malaise .
Fortunately, Club Kid is not that movie. It is, in fact, a simpler and therefore altogether rarer magic trick in the world of modern indie cinema: here is a pure, unapologetic crowdpleaser, a happy-go-lucky dramedy that is as charming as anything you will see this fall, and a movie that could not unfairly be called queer arthouse Big Daddy. That is to say while leaning in some degree of formula and feel-good (read: Hollywood) storytelling, Firstman has crafted an irresistibly sweet and sincere character study about a middle-aged man forced to finally grow up when a son he didn’t know about shows up at the door of his SoHo loft. (Recall that threesome I mentioned earlier? It turns out the otherwise gay Peter partied a little too hard that night.)
This is how Arlo (a precious and natural Reggie Absolom) enters the picture. Quiet, awkward, and angel-faced behind a polite English accent, Arlo is actually in the care of Edison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, stealing scenes). In the same sequence Arlo and Edison enter the picture, the latter reveals she’s a friend of the boy’s mother, who died by suicide a few weeks ago. Apparently his stepfather is a piece of work, and Edison has the birth certificate to prove the paternity, which she’ll get around to showing Peter, but first can he offer her a bump of coke? For the jitters, y’know? Also if he doesn’t want to be a father, she totally gets it, and she’ll take Arlo back to the UK momentarily. Just let her go out and run a few errands this afternoon and….
So yeah, she never reenters the movie.
But that’s when the real story begins when a guy who went straight from an all-night party to a 10 a.m. business meeting the next day (it didn’t go well) is suddenly forced to figure out what it means to have a son, or even talk to a child. He also discovers another dimension to his life that has more to do with afternoon playgrounds instead of nocturnal Alphabet City rendezvouses—although, in a curious turn of events, young Arlo gets a bit of a crash course on that side of big city living too when he discovers Peter’s DJ mix tracks.
Stories about unexpected parenthood, responsibility, or basic “adulting” go back to as long as there have been stories, yet Firstman’s approach to the material comes with such vivid specificity that it makes the universal emotions of love and newfound maturity something altogether grander, if even still somewhat elegiac. By its very title, Club Kid is set deeply within the gay nightclub scene of the five boroughs—although Firstman’s real inspiration was apparently a summer spent in Berlin. This world is showcased in all its hedonism but also joy. We view it with the affection of a fellow traveler but the distance and melancholy of an introvert trying to fit in.
As the fictional Peter tells his remarkably well-adjusted, newfound son, “I’ve spent my whole life working to be cool, and I’ve succeeded at times.” But the epiphany for the character is that this kid simply is cool, or at least it puts him in touch with a side of himself that doesn’t need to front.
This dynamic for our protagonist makes for a layered showcase of Firstman’s talents as an actor and his perhaps even more remarkable fortitude as a director who can build a tone of bittersweet happiness and the quieter pleasures learned in found family. Let’s just say Arlo meets all varieties of adopted uncles and aunts. The film is also frank about the dangers and excesses of what some would consider an extreme lifestyle, and certainly of how it can be both celebrated and chided in the same breath by mainstream, even desperately supportive voices. There are sequences where Peter is judged by those who claim to have Arlo’s best interests at heart, but also supported by unlikely cheerleaders in social services (personified by a gentle and hunky Diego Calva). At heart, though, it remains a simple father-and-son story told with confident authenticity.
The son element is where Firstman reveals the hiccups that can occur in first-time filmmaking. Young Abolsom is sublime as a child struggling to adjust behind a serene, stoic exterior, yet the film and Firstman are so wrapped up in Peter’s baggage that the boy’s own grief over losing a mother—or the culture shock of going from the UK to NYC—is left underwritten and unexplored. At one point Arlo gets in a fight on the playground, and the film and Peter both reveal curiosity at what might be going on, but neither have the time to dig deeper; they’re too distracted in what this cool kid means for all the other messy furniture in his father’s life.
But from the retro DJ gear piled in Peter’s apartment to the old-timey piano Arlo convinces his father to lug up three flights of stairs for the same one-bedroom, Club Kid finds such warmth and undeniable good cheer from these knicknacks that it’s impossible to not want to join the revelry. And when Arlo can finally refer to Peter as “Dad,” there will be few dry eyes in the auditorium. It’s a song you’ve heard before, but it is sung with so much grace that it can still feel like an epiphany.
Club Kid releases in the U.S. on Nov. 6.
Star Trek V Is the Most Star Trek of the Star Trek Movies
For those who hate nü-Trek, the recent Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” must have been a particularly hard watch. Not only does the episode continue the series’ recent trend of jumping genres—this time setting a daytime soap opera on the Enterprise—but it also brings back one of the most hated characters in the franchise: Sybok, Spock’s emotional half-brother. Even though it wasn’t the real Sybok, just a twin manifested to adhere to soap opera tropes, the mere presence of Sybok was enough to irritate fans.
Why? Because Sybok has only had one other appearance, when he served as the main antagonist for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier a.k.a. “the one where Kirk fights God” a.k.a. “the one that Shatner made.” Fans may disagree about the merits of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, they may differ on the merits of Picard becoming an action star in the Next Generation movies, and they may have diverging thoughts about all the running around in the 2009 movie. But they’re all agreed that, until Star Trek Into Darkness came around, The Final Frontier was the worst Trek movie. Which is a shame, because, like it or not, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is the most purely Star Trek of all the movies.
A Flawed Frontier
To be clear, The Final Frontier isn’t a great movie, especially when wedged between Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The former plays like a celebration of the Enterprise crew, with much of the pleasure coming from the way Chekov and Uhura, Bones and Scotty, and Spock and Kirk interact. The latter takes the Cold War allegory that birthed the franchise to its furthest end, with Kirk having to make peace with the Klingons as they adopt their version of glasnost.
What does The Final Frontier give us? The mystical, edenic planet of Sha Ka Ree, named such because Shatner wanted Sean Connery to play Sybok, and hoped the honor would sway him to sign on. When Connery passed, Shatner chose Laurence Luckinbill instead, whom he happened to catch playing Lyndon Johnson on TV.
The Final Frontier sees Kirk, Spock, and McCoy forced to end their camping trip when the newly-minted Enterprise-A is called to rescue delegates from the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Star Empire. They’ve been kidnapped by Sybok, who took them in hopes of getting aboard a starship he could capture and fly to Sha Ka Ree. Once aboard, Sybok uses his self-help, mind-healing techniques to make converts of much of the crew, including Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov, and takes command of the Enterprise.
Sybok flies the Enterprise to the Great Barrier, the pathway to Sha Ka Ree, with a Klingon Bird of Prey in pursuit. They are greeted by a being that presents himself as God. But when Kirk reasons, “What does God need with a starship?” the being’s ruse is made plain. It’s just another entity seeking power, and that’s something that Kirk can defeat. Defeat it he does, with some help from some Klingons who have been swayed by Spock’s diplomatic ability. And though Sybok dies in the process in the battle, the Enterprise escapes, allowing Kirk, Spock, and Bones to resume their camping trip.
The film is filled with groaners. The opening, in which Kirk climbs up El Capitan (all while wearing a shirt that says “Go Climb a Rock”) feels like Shatner grandstanding. The sudden romantic relationship between Scotty and Uhura comes out of nowhere. The introduction of Sybok makes Michael Burnham’s addition feel earned, and the movie has nothing to say about faith or televangelists, the film’s thematic subjects.
Sharing Our Pain
Why is The Final Frontier about televangelists? Because they annoyed William Shatner and Shatner got to make the movie. And because he and Leonard Nimoy had a “favored nations” clause that meant that anything offered to one must also be offered to the other. So when Nimoy got to helm Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, one of his conditions for returning to the role, and then again with The Voyage Home, Paramount also had to give Shatner a chance to make a movie.
And so, we got a rambling movie with odd characterizations, half-developed themes, and way too much focus on Kirk. Which is exactly like most episodes of Star Trek.
60 years after Star Trek first went on the air, we tend to only remember the best episodes of The Original Series: “Balance of Terror, ” “Amok Time,” “City on the Edge of Forever.” These are perfect pieces of sci-fi, stories that combine big ideas and star-spanning adventure, making the most of their charismatic cast. These episodes deserve all the praise we heap upon them.
But they’re standouts for a reason. In between, we had goofy episodes like “Shore Leave” and “Who Mourns for Adonais?” We had the clunky backdoor pilot “Assignment: Earth” or the ham-fisted racial allegory of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” We had “Spock’s Brain.”
Strength from the Sharing
More often than not, Star Trek episodes were exactly what you’d expect from a weekly network television show with a limited budget. The plots weren’t airtight, the characterizations were off, and the ideas were only half-baked. Star Trek always tried for something profound, but often it was just entertaining.
Which brings us back to Star Trek V. Of course, the problems stand out because it’s a feature film made by a major studio, and it comes off the franchise’s biggest box office hit in The Voyage Home. Expectations were higher than they were for, say, “Way to Eden.” But the product on screen was much the same: goofy, shoddy, and thoroughly entertaining.
Which is, of course, the most important thing to remember about The Final Frontier. For all the movie gets wrong, it is still fun to watch. Shatner’s always a delight on screen and his chemistry with Nimoy and DeForest Kelly remains strong. James Doohan and Nichelle Nichols may be reduced to playing doddering love birds, but they sell their parts. And who doesn’t want to watch Kirk tell off some alien pretending to be god?
At the very least, we Trekkies can complain about the pain it causes us, at least we can share our pain. And we do indeed gain strength from the sharing, just like Sybok (the original version) taught us.
Paper Tiger Review: Adam Driver and Miles Teller Lead Great American Film
For more than half a century, the vernacular around crime and cinema has changed. Many of the films and even television series that are responsible for this shift have a method to their madness. Whether it is the majestic gravity of the Corleone family or the shiny shoe slickness of Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, these characters inhabit stories designed to reveal the seductive power of the criminal underworld that lures wayward souls to damnation. (Or, in some cases, the filmmakers just think Al Pacino looks really cool rocking a grenade launcher.)
Yet in all these years of layering new dimensions of depth and pathos to what Tony Soprano calls “this thing of ours,” what’s increasingly become obscured is just how scary that thing is—especially to many of the nine-to-five stiffs living vicariously through all that Atlantic City and Las Vegas glamour for a couple of hours in the dark.
This context makes James Gray’s hushed Paper Tiger an anomaly. Here is as old-fashioned a parable as the Hollywood programmers of the mid-20th century; the story of a square, all-American family who gets embroiled in a criminal world seething with danger. And yet, by virtue of its retro morality, the picture feels subversive opposite the modern crime movie, not to mention its own values. Because this isn’t just a solid thriller; it’s a waking nightmare about suburban folks who enter a world they can never hope to understand, but which will touch their lives in ways that can never be undone. It is the story of an actual family, and how it ends up shattered in ways far more profound than bromides about the illusory “American dream.”
The family in question is composed of the brothers Gary and Irwin Pearl (Adam Driver and Miles Teller), and the next generation Irwin built after marrying Hester (Scarlett Johansson). Hester and Irwin’s domestic life is indeed “all-American,” if in that specific late-20th century, Jewish tradition James Gray knows so well. Like his protagonists in Armageddon Times, the Queens lifestyle Irwin and Hester occupy seems semiautobiographical, especially when it is introduced through the complacent stare of their teenage son Scott (Gavin Goudey). When the kid wakes up in the movie’s first breaths, it’s 1986 outside his window, and Dad is proving his nerdiness via his flannel shirts and droning lectures about public safety (he’s an engineer who specializes in risk assessments). Meanwhile Johansson’s mother is of the protective, high-strung, high-pitched New York accent variety.
That’s probably why both of their sons idolize Adam Driver’s Gary, a former NYPD detective who made his fortune through nebulous business deals and now comes to the house with stylish suits, stylish stories, and even a chic service revolver fashionably strapped to his leg. On one such Sunday dinner, he also brings a business opportunity for his little brother: help do some consulting work for new Russian entrepreneurs cleaning up the Gowanus Canal and pocket a lot of extra cash. Unfortunately for all parties, Irwin is a little too eager to prove his usefulness to both Gary’s business associates and his boys. Hence why he takes the kids one evening down by the canal to show them what daddy does… and instead gets all of them in the sights of some incredibly scary thugs—the kind who will point a gun at a child, slap the boy’s father so hard he bleeds, and hen keep his driver’s license.
“Now we know where you live,” the bad man warns. And he’ll come calling after his boss tells Gary the next day that they need assurances neither Irwin or his sons would ever do something so foolish as to tell anyone, even Hester, about what they saw.
While watching Paper Tiger at the New York Film Festival last week, I was reminded of any number of classic morality plays about the nuclear family under siege. Films like Shane or The Desperate Hours. At the premiere, Gray put a finer point on it when he named Alfred Hitchcock’s second stab at The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 as an influence. They’re stories about “typical” hearth and kin finding itself bewildered by forces beyond comprehension. But all of those films came with some degree of Hollywood reassurance and censorship. Just as how the more modern crime film has its familiar beats about rot belying the fantasy, these are tales of normalcy and “order” reasserting itself in the face of unnatural disruption.
What makes Paper Tiger so evocative is how Gray introduces tense, even pulpy thriller elements to his character-driven dramaturgy, but he does not diminish or ignore the human element in the process. It is in fact how real this scenario plays out that makes it absolutely terrifying when Irwin is awakened in the middle of the night to what sounds like an old Polaroid camera’s flashbulb firing up while he and his wife are sleeping—or just how vulnerable even tough-talking, worldly Gary can appear when he enters a field of tall grass, all alone in the world as an unknown number of stalkers trailing his movements vanish into the weeds behind him.
The grueling dread in both of these harrowing set-pieces is borne out of exquisite performances by Driver and Teller. The former remains one of the most fascinating actors of this era, but it’s been a long while since Driver starred in a movie this good. All cocksure swagger, Driver’s portrait of Uncle Gary is of a proud self-made man whose outer-borough boasting is always just a little too loud, his smile a smidge too flashy, and his comforting reassurances to the nephews a little too insistent. He is out to prove his place in the world, which cuts a strangely lonely silhouette, like a quarrelsome squirrel hanging to a cracking tree branch in the depths of winter.
Teller, meanwhile, seems to have discovered an unlikely sweet spot as an actor in the last year between this film and the A24 comedy Eternity: he is excellent as the nebbish, mid-20th century putz who seems perpetually baffled by the world around him. Opposite Driver, the two create an archetypal sibling rivalry, but also a more understated admiration that gives their corresponding jealousies teeth.
The third point of the film’s triangle is Johansson, who at first might seem miscast. She certainly doesn’t resemble a homebody housewife no matter how much Gray has them curl her hair or drape the nightgowns. But as the movie progresses, Hester might get the meatiest scenes of the film. She is not one of the brothers and thus, like the audience, must forever be an outsider witnessing the sweet, but ultimately corrosive dynamic that leads to Irwin making decision after decision that puts the family at risk. It falls to Hester to therefore make the film’s hardest choices, especially as her own journey reveals absolutely devastating moments of clarity for a mother seeing the careful home life she built crumble in an instance. The scene where that fragility clicks for her is some of the finest acting in Johansson’s career.
It is the awareness of the film and, eventually, the characters that such domestic niceties are delicate, ephemeral things which turns what might have been a simple potboiler into a substantial American melodrama. None of our core three ever get the full picture of the forces that are about to irrevocably shape and possibly wreck their lives. But each in their own way will be forced to confront what happens when that innocence they take granted, and have on a shelf, is now tumbling to the hard floor. There are no easy answers once that happens, and no way to cleanly pick up the pieces. It’s what can give fleeting moments their beauty. Or tragedy.
Paper Tiger opens on Nov. 13 in limited release and wide on Nov. 20.
Netflix’s LEGO ONE PIECE Has an Unreliable (But Fun) Narrator Tell a Classic Story
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. Find out how you can subscribe to get the full physical copy right here!
With long-running manga and anime series, waves of merchandising, and an acclaimed live-action adaptation on Netflix, it’s safe to say that ONE PIECE remains a bona fide global phenomenon. Audiences will get to experience the beloved franchise like never before with the Netflix animated special LEGO ONE PIECE, poised to set sail on the streaming service on September 29. The two-part special boasts the main cast from the live-action Netflix series reprising their fan-favorite roles, with Tom Hyndman serving as showrunner and executive producer.
The special has Usopp (Jacob Romero) recount the events of the first two seasons of the live-action series, including how he met and befriended Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) and joined his crew of Straw Hat Pirates. However, while detailing his seafaring adventures in search of the mythical One Piece, it becomes clear that Usopp might not be the most reliable narrator, especially for viewers in the know as to how things actually unfolded. All this is gorgeously rendered in an iconic LEGO brick style, with the Netflix special leaning into the family-friendly antics that LEGO projects are known for.
In an exclusive interview with Den of Geek, Tom Hyndman shares how he and the creative team reimagined creator Eiichiro Oda’s swashbuckling world to life in LEGO form, blending the signature themes and humor of ONE PIECE with the presentation and tone associated with the LEGO group.
Den of Geek: Tom, what’s your elevator pitch for LEGO ONE PIECE ?
Tom Hyndman: Shockingly, there are still people who don’t know what ONE PIECE is, so this is a way to bring a younger audience in and provide them with an easier way to get the general layout of at least the first two seasons of the live-action. A lot of it hits on the first 200 chapters of the manga. It can be a pretty big lift to really jump into ONE PIECE , so we’re hoping we can do it this way, where newer fans can get a real overview of the live action and what that is, with a little bit of fun and a little more humor.
For hardcore fans, hopefully, it’s a fun alternate version of the first 200 chapters or so, told from Usopp’s perspective, which is something that really drew me to the core concept of this, having worked on the first two seasons. It’s not just copying and pasting scripts from seasons one and two. We did a big change in a different perspective and had a lot of fun with it, but obviously kept the core of what ONE PIECE is the same, because that’s what makes it so wonderful, and such a worldwide phenomenon.
How did you thread that narrative needle between creating a standalone story while also creating something for newer viewers, introducing them to ONE PIECE through LEGO minifigures and elements?
The first step was to figure out what exactly we wanted to show in the two episodes. And then, building out from there is, how can we tell this in a new, fun way? That was step two. We have the new fun way that we’re gonna say this, we have these fun jokes, now let’s figure out what Easter eggs we can bring in or the things that weren’t in the first season that we could pop in, where people who really know about it are like, “Oh, I know about that!”
It’s a different perspective, and it brings a lot more humor into it and a lot more silliness. It’s just a little bit lighter than the live-action. It’s just a fun way to do it that hopefully can appeal to everybody, new and returning.
In shifting to Usopp’s perspective, how was it catering to more hardcore ONE PIECE fans who haven’t really seen that change in perspective before?
It was exciting to be able to tell the story where we’re keeping the core of it, but we could get a little fabulous. Using LEGO elements, there’s a lot of fourth-wall breaking and being able to use that to keep things on track; that was the big thing. Usopp is going absurd, but if he’s doing it in front of any of the Straw Hats while telling the story, they will call him out and be like, “That never happened,” and then he’ll either change it back to what did happen or be like, “Well, that’s how I remember it.”
That was what pulled us to it. Jacob Romero is just so fun and really embodies that character, and so to let him cut loose with this new Usopp stuff definitely was also something that we were really looking forward to, because we know he could do such a phenomenal job at it.
Beyond Jacob, you’ve got the main cast reprising their roles for LEGO ONE PIECE, which really underscores how much of an organic extension this is. How was it shaping the story and tone of the special with that in mind?
It honestly made it a lot easier because you know they are all coming in embodying these characters already, so we didn’t have to really find anything. There’s some fine-tuning with the over-the-topness of LEGO humor. It was more just like, “Okay, you know the line. Just make it a little bit bigger, a little bit more ridiculous.”
My hope is that they also had a lot of fun doing this, and, from what I’ve heard when talking to them, they definitely did. It’s like playing the same character, but being able to throw a little different spin on it. It just shows that, yeah, it is part of the larger Netflix ONE PIECE world and the continuity of having Emily Rudd, Iñaki Godoy, Taz Skylar, Mackenyu, and Mikaela Hoover. It definitely de-stressed my whole situation of worrying if they were going to be able to pull this off. As soon as we knew everybody was doing it, it pretty much answered that question, and we could move on to how we were going to make this and write it.
ONE PIECE is wacky and over-the-top, while LEGO animated specials have their own distinct sense of humor. How is it meshing those two sensibilities together into something cohesive?
It’s like an amp-up effect, where you get the story, and then write the first draft of the script, and the notes are always kind of like ‘how can we amp this up and make this a little bit more ridiculous?’
It is this three-step process of figuring out what the script looks like, going in and really fine-tuning every joke and every LEGO moment in every big action scene to really add to it and blow it all out. That is the opportunity that doing this as a LEGO special really lends itself to getting your creative mind just going everywhere. It’s really fun to just be like, “Can we do this? Yeah, we can, let’s try it out!”
The director and the storyboard artists were so phenomenal at finding things I would have never even thought of. It was also such a wonderful team effort to make this happen and to make it as aligned with the LEGO brand as possible.
With ONE PIECE so big and globally recognized, what is your guiding light or North Star in interpreting it in live action or in LEGO form?
The manga is definitely the North Star; everything comes from that. You want to honor it as much as humanly possible while still telling an interesting story that will bring in new people, and it’s not just a retread of everything. It was the same in the live action. We have this amazing thing, so how can we synthesize things, move things around, still respect every moment of it, and make it work? I think we did it really well in the live-action, and I hope people feel the same about the LEGO version.
It’s always honoring the manga and putting our own spin on it, but never losing sight of the manga, because I think that’s what made the live-action work so well. We weren’t changing huge things. We were sticking to the story, and then we were finding moments within that story to change it up a little bit, more because we can’t do a 100-hour first season of anything, and it’s the same with the LEGO specials. We’re trying to fit eight hours of television into 27 minutes, so how can we stick to the story and respect it and still cram it into everything? I think we really did a good job of doing that with everything that we did in these two episodes.
In the wider pantheon of the franchise, what do you hope people walk away with after watching LEGO ONE PIECE ?
The biggest hope would be that they click off the second episode and then immediately click into the live-action or start reading the manga. We want to spread it as far as possible, with this being the easiest way to dip your toes. Hopefully, it inspires people to really dive in, where you get a little taste of it, and then hopefully, love it and want to know everything about this, and then watch a million episodes of the anime or read a million chapters of the manga.
ONE PIECE , in all of its forms, has always been about a found family as the Straw Hats come together. How was it maintaining that emotional core in the LEGO special?
It’s challenging because of the crammed amount of time, but it’s not ONE PIECE without it, so you have to do it. It was finding those very iconic moments, like Luffy getting the hat from Shanks, things like that, staying true to those moments. Right from the beginning, we had certain things that we wanted to hit, and we’re not going to mess with those things. It’s not going to be jokey. We want to honor those moments because they are so emotional and intrinsic to the greater story of this. Having those moments still play out in a 90% true fashion, without Usopp getting his hands on them, was a very important thing for us.
The found family is the whole thing. It’s just these people coming together, and the only way that they will achieve their dreams is by doing it together. This is not a solo thing. That is such a wonderful message, especially in the world today. That was definitely a big guiding light for us.
On a more personal note, when you look at the full breadth of ONE PIECE and having gotten to play in that sandbox creatively, what does ONE PIECE mean to you?
On a strictly personal level, it means just about everything to me, not necessarily even on like a story thing, but having been able to be involved in this has completely changed my life. I will never work on something with this kind of footprint ever again. It is such an honor and a privilege, but it’s also so much fun to get to do this.
It’s a beautiful story, and now that I’ve been in the world a lot more, I know a lot more about it; it’s such a positive thing. I think we could use a lot more positive things. To spread that positivity is truly an honor and just a very cool thing to do.
Final Fantasy Resonance Celebrates the Franchise’s History with Plenty of Familiar Faces
Square Enix is really going all out for Final Fantasy ahead of the franchise’s 30th anniversary next year and one of its big titles just in time to close out 2026 is Final Fantasy Resonance. An upgraded adaptation of the 2015 mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, the game returns to the series to a classic turn-based RPG adventure, complete with a vibrantly rendered pixelated presentation. Set to launch on virtually all major modern gaming platforms on October 22, we got a chance to play a preview build of the game at Tokyo Game Show 2026 provided directly by Square Enix.
Final Fantasy Resonance primarily centers its narrative on a trio of heroes, Rain, Lasswell, and Fina, as they set out to stop the sinister Veritas of the Dark from destroying elemental crystals around their world. Other heroes can be recruited into the party and, in one of the biggest highlights of the game, players can summon visions of characters from past classic Final Fantasy games to assist them in battle with their signature attacks and techniques. Yes, this absolutely includes Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII but we also got to see Visions of Terra Branford from Final Fantasy VI and Cecil Harvey from Final Fantasy IV back in action too.
The preview of Final Fantasy Resonance that we tried out really did feel like we were playing something like the classic Final Fantasy IV all over again, complete with dungeon-crawling and random enemy encounters giving way to turn-based combat. The battle menu was as intuitive and easy to follow recent Square Enix RPG remakes and, even with a turn-based combat system, we were thoroughly engaged every time we found ourselves leaping into the next skirmish. This comes from subtle refinements to the tried and true mechanics from past Square Enix RPGs but also the game’s striking 2D-HD art style that’s become a fixture in Square Enix’s recent output.
The game is the first official 2D-HD game in the Final Fantasy series, a presentation that retains the pixelated character sprites that many of Square Enix’s celebrated RPG franchises are known for, while juxtaposing them in 3D environments and revamping them for high-definition. Square Enix had previously employed these art design sensibilities to its well-received remakes of Dragon Quest and Romancing SaGa and that approach suits the wider Final Fantasy franchise well. This presentation strongly evokes the Super Nintendo era of the series but without feeling dated or that it’s treading entirely on 16-bit nostalgia.
All in all, I only put in about 30 minutes into Final Fantasy Resonance, which was as long as my preview window allowed for, but I got a pretty good idea of how the full game will shake out when it launches next month. The combat mechanics are clearly displayed, including how to select targets and when a stun is imminent. Seeing the Visions becoming active is always a treat and we were mixing up which Visions got to provide their respective blast from the past next, consistently closing out a battle in a triumphant fashion that’ll feel familiar to anyone who played the games that these returning characters starred in.
That means for anyone who grew up playing games like Chrono Trigger or Romancing SaGa, Final Fantasy Resonance will feel like an especially cozy RPG; the closest that the genre gets to comfort food. I’m curious how younger gamers will react to the presentation but, if recent hit games like Sea of Stars and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 have taught me anything, it’s that turn-based RPGs are still very much alive and well in 2026. Final Fantasy Resonance recognizes that, harkening back the franchise’s roots while incorporating elements as recent as 2023’s Final Fantasy XVI, including a Vision of that game’s protagonist Clive Rosfield, subtly breathing new life into gameplay in a true love letter to all things Final Fantasy.
Between Final Fantasy Resonance coming out in October and Final Fantasy VII Revelation coming out in April 2027, Final Fantasy fans are going to be eating real good over the next several months. When it comes to Resonance, more specifically, the game is a clear celebration of the entire Final Fantasy franchise, from its 1987 origins to the iconic property’s latest adventures all couched within the warmly familiar context of a pixelated, turn-based adventure with plenty of fan-favorite faces joining the fray.
If you’re a big Final Fantasy fan, Final Fantasy Resonance feels like a must-play for how extensively it covers the entire franchise’s history and just feels great to play. It’s always nice to see whenever a long-running series embraces its roots and Resonance certainly does so for Final Fantasy, offering comfortably familiar thrills with all the characters that us fans have grown to love.
Developed and published by Square Enix, Final Fantasy Resonance releases October 22 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Was the Avengers: Endgame Encore Extra Footage Worth It?
This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame Encore
A couple of days before Avengers: Endgame Encore’s release, Marvel Comics editor Tom Brennan fired off a post on X that some described as a perfect response to the negativity over extra footage from the film leaking online.
Endgame, which once wrapped up the Infinity Saga in a fairly neat bow and closed out Steve Rogers’ story, now just sets up another chapter of it in Avengers: Doomsday. While some loved the new ending, others were disheartened that Marvel changed a beloved MCU movie that set a high watermark for the franchise. “If you’re bothered by Avengers Endgame: Encore taking a perfect ending to a story and immediately undermining it to set up the next one, have I got 87 years worth of Marvel Comics to show you,” Brennan wrote in his (totally valid) point.
In the new, altered conclusion of Endgame, Steve’s long-awaited dance with Peggy Carter is now interrupted by TVA variant Loki, who knocks at the door and offers to help them. Traveling back through time to be with Peggy seems to have created some multiversal consequences, though we don’t get to find out exactly what they are before the credits roll.
Indeed, it’s been clear for a while that Marvel planned to build a bridge to Doomsday with this re-release of the film, and that Chris Evans would return to the franchise as Rogers, alongside Robert Downey Jr. as the villainous Doctor Doom. For anyone who hoped the new footage would be confined to post-credits scenes so Endgame as they knew it would remain intact, those hopes were gone. Doom is coming, whether they like it or not.
We know it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Marvel once planned a Multiverse Saga centered on Kang, played by Jonathan Majors, but between the villain’s appearances in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki season 2, it became impossible to continue with those plans. Majors had been arrested after a dispute with his then-girlfriend, and a jury had found him guilty of two misdemeanor counts relating to reckless assault and harassment. Marvel dropped him, Kang was forgotten, and the studio went back to the drawing board. Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo soon returned to the fold, and so did Evans and Downey Jr. Changes have been implemented so that Steve Rogers’ ending was just the start of a new set of problems that led to Doom, and fans will have to accept that those problems now start in the final moments of Endgame.
However, not everyone had access to all the extra bonus footage featured in the new version of Endgame. Only IMAX and Infinity Vision screenings included all four additional moments; regular screenings showed only three: the aforementioned Steve, Peggy, and Loki scene, one in which Doom collects Bruce Banner from an underground bunker (which seemed like it would have been a better fit for the post-credits of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where we last saw Banner being taken away from the carnage he caused thanks to Jean Grey’s possession), and a few seconds of Doom forging his mask to the same sounds as Tony Stark creating his original Iron Man mask.
One punter over on Reddit described having a “good experience” with Endgame Encore itself, but added that “the biggest reason to watch the film was 4min doomsday footage,” and ended their post by saying they felt “scammed” after seeing only some of the extra scenes. In fact, the IMAX and Infinity Vision screenings had always boasted an additional Doomsday preview. It turned out to be set in the TVA, where Mobius (Owen Wilson) and O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) react to the multiverse collapsing, but clearly not everyone knew this would be exclusive to IMAX and Infinity Vision.
Of course, for extremely online fans who didn’t mind spoilers, all the Endgame Encore scenes were old news by the time the film was officially released. Audience members recorded the scenes during early screenings and quickly shared them on social media, which probably wasn’t much of a surprise to Marvel. “We design these films to unfold in a certain way, and we want audiences to feel those moments as intended,” Joe Russo recently mused when asked about spoilers. “But at the same time, you can’t control everything. You have to focus on making something that holds up beyond the initial surprise.”
If Marvel and Disney’s goal was to hype up Doomsday and make money, they arguably succeeded. Encoremade $86 million globally over the weekend. Yet some who didn’t get to see all the new footage on the big screen left disappointed, and others will wonder whether adding new scenes to a now-classic movie was worth it when Doomsday is just a few months away. Meanwhile, for anyone who skipped Loki, confusion must reign supreme.
Dropping big plans and retooling the future of a cinematic universe will inevitably come with setbacks. So far, there don’t seem to have been many to trouble Marvel on the run-up to Doomsday, with Disney describing the excitement surrounding Encore’s release as “a powerful testament to Disney’s unrivaled ability to create epic, enduring stories that fans want to return to again and again.”
Only time will tell whether this new direction will keep paying off and whether fans will stick with an MCU that can’t quite let go of its past glories, even if it has to change them to remind people of the things they once loved about it.
Godzilla Minus Zero Review: Bigger, Grander, and Double the Kaiju
This article reconfirms who the second kaiju is in Godzilla Minus Zero, which neither we nor the filmmakers consider a spoiler. But just in case… here’s your warning.
When Godzilla Minus One released three years ago, it was remarkable for a multitude of reasons. While there have been other great kaiju movies that took the Big G seriously, including the slyly satirical Shin Godzilla about a decade earlier, none before writer-director Takashi Yamazaki came along had ever made its central human characters so compelling. The plight of Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), the kamikaze pilot who lived, is as dramatic a hook as any giant monster tearing up downtown Tokyo, and indeed the mortal-sized story of that film works as its own intimate melodrama.
Then on the grander scale of the rampaging lizard, it was also the first Godzilla movie since the 1954 classic directed by Ishirō Honda to address the post-World War II landscape and atomic horror that shapes Japanese identity to this day. Godzilla is a child, and child’s nightmare, of the nuclear age. Minus One confronted that head-on in a movie that’s equal parts warm and wondrous. It also just looked unbelievably stunning considering its reported VFX budget was somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million. Without any sense of hyperbole, Minus One is among my favorite movies of this decade.
Which makes Godzilla Minus Zero a monumental proposition. Toho Studios might have built an empire off its beloved Gorilla-Whale, but there has never been a Japanese sequel following the same human characters, or one that attempted to broaden and expand on the post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki allegory that was already thickly pertinent in the original. Godzilla Minus Zero does both things in ways subversive and fascinating, and it achieves this with more muscular (and expensive) filmmaking. There is a sequence that sent hushed chills through the opening night audience of the New York Film Festival that involves the Statue of Liberty. In terms of pure action spectacle, there isn’t anything more awe-inspiring coming out this fall, and certainly not tied to a movie that will challenge, and perhaps even unnerve, some Western audiences.
With that said, Godzilla Minus Zero does not fully achieve the haunted poignancy of its 2023 predecessor. There is a simple elegance to that earlier film that in another world could have simply been about Kōichi and the surrogate family of orphans he built in the ruins of Tokyo beside Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) and the little girl they take in as their daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani). It doesn’t need Godzilla.
Minus Zero, by contrast, absolutely does. This is a pure kaiju movie about the same collection of resilient survivors and heroes being forced to confront a new world order where there is more than one giant monster on the islands of Japan, and the only path forward is to Let. Them. Fight. Yet never have the stakes of such a delightful cinematic conceit seemed so deeply tragic. While offering popcorn, Minus Zero still explores an earnest existential dread that is foreign in multiple ways to American studios.
That dread has a name, too: it’s Ghidorah.
As has been confirmed in multiple interviews, press releases, and even on the film’s Wikipedia page—so please understand that the filmmakers do not construe this as a spoiler—the big bad of Minus Zero who is introduced in the first scene is the multi-headed dragon that first squared off against Godzilla in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster circa 1964. Unlike Godzilla, though, Ghidorah originally arrived to cinema at a simpler time for Toho’s giant monster movies. It was a period of high fantasy and tongue-in-cheek camp. So the fact that Yamazaki does in 2026 much the same thing with Ghidorah that he did with Godzilla, making the hydra-adjacent kaiju the stuff of post-World War II trauma, is quite the feat. One sequence in particular involving Ghidorah’s gravity-altering powers earns the movie its R-rating, a first for the franchise in either hemisphere.
It also triggers the plot, causing Japan and the Cold War powers circling the Pacific in 1949 to respond. In this context, Hidetaka Yoshioka’s Kenji Noda, the kindly if mysterious naval scientist in the first film, is as much a main character as the Shikishima clan. It is an endlessly empathetic Mr. Noda who now oversees the Japanese government’s Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, which is on the lookout for new monstrous threats. And it is Mr. Noda who reluctantly must return to the services of Kōichi and Noriko, who are now married and trying to put the events of the first film behind them—at least as much as Noriko can after surviving Godzilla’s atomic breath cost her an eye in the last movie.
Alas, despite Noda’s ingenuity and that of his new right-hand-woman, meteorological prodigy Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), Ghidorah will prove more than capable of handling Japan’s best efforts—never mind the occupying American military, who seem more intrigued about testing Ghidorah’s capabilities against Japanese lives than actually felling the kaiju. All of which makes this the worst possible time for Godzilla to reemerge from the seabed floor.
At the premiere screening for Godzilla Minus Zero, director Yamazaki confessed that Ghidorah was his favorite adversary for Godzilla while growing up, and that he always thought if he ever made a sequel, he would tackle the golden-scaled dragon. After all, Yamazaki noted, Christopher Nolan went “straight to the Joker” when he made The Dark Knight.
That comparison does not seem coincidental. Much in the way Nolan attempted to ground American superhero mythology in an early 21st century psychology that felt “real”—read: visceral and thematically urgent—Yamazaki has returned to Godzilla’s mid-20th century roots to plant the monster back in its native soil, and to contextualize the big guy in a way that filmmakers during the actual American occupation of Japan would never dare. The way the screenplay and the director’s own visual instincts draws on the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at times genuinely upsetting, shrinking the thin veil of metaphor to the wispiest of fig leaves. One long tracking-shot flashback of a doctor treating the dead and dying on the day Godzilla landed in Ginza in the last movie is as harrowing as anything since real post-war footage was used in the original ’54 picture.
Yet this worldbuilding is about more than establishing the Cold War realpolitik ambiance of the film’s 1949 setting; it frames the plight of our heroes in a reality where the ramifications of monster-hunting has micro and macro knock-on effects. On the most human level, it rekindles the melodramatic angst of the last movie with the Shiishima clan put through an emotional ringer that’s frankly cruel. There are more than a few sequences designed to pull on the heartstrings and that will leave a few viewers’ eyes moist.
Ultimately, however, the approach mostly seems aimed at undergirding some of the best giant-monster sequences ever committed to screen. Clearly working from a larger budget and more confidence than the 2023 movie, the filmmakers upscale the VFX wizardry. There are about a half-dozen breathless, gee-whiz sequences designed to leave the audience either cheering; my favorite involves an aerial dogfight with Kōichi and a band of fellow monster slayers going up against King Ghidorah in a scene that is a bit like if Luke Skywalker and the X-wings took on Cthulhu. In terms of crowdpleasing action, it’s a triumph, building to the inevitable clash of kings.
It also feels far more in line with the Toho kaiju movies of yore than its predecessors. This is a film about human characters coming up with a rational reason to pit Godzilla against another giant monster, and then working tirelessly to make that fight night happen. What elevates Minus Zero is the stress and psychological turmoil the mission piles onto Noda, Kōichi, and Noriko, with Kamiki and Hamabe especially rising to the occasion in any sequence that involves these young parents having to explain to wee little Akiko why daddy needs to walk out the door again.
When coupled with a fiendishly twisty third act, it turns monsters putting on their boxing gloves into an epic soap opera. That achievement does not quite stand on its own as a familial drama about regret, trauma, and the guilt that comes with surviving a war, but it does make Godzilla throwing down opposite a triple threat some kind of cathartic treat. For kaiju fans, it’s an escalation that seems destined to bridge a genre-defining trilogy.
Godzilla Minus Zero opens in Japan on Nov. 3, and in the U.S. and UK on Nov. 6.
