Glen Powell: Murder Can Have ‘An American Quality’ in How to Make a Killing

Not until the day we sit down has Glen Powell fully appreciated his knack for playing charming, winsome, and morally flexible protagonists capable of getting away with murder. Granted, he co-wrote one such bloke in Hit Man, the beguiling romantic comedy he made with Richard Linklater a few years back that (SPOILERS) ends with his character and the object of his desire discovering how to commit to marriage over the death and cover-up of a bully.

That’s bush leagues though when compared to Powell’s newest dark comedy courtesy of A24, How to Make a Killing. The latest film from writer-director John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal) sees Powell’s Becket Redfellow learn that the easiest way to get ahead on Wall Street is by offing the estranged and dynastic family line he was ostracized from before birth—but never so fully disowned by that he can’t inherit their billions once they die. It’s a gallows humor premise which Powell savored from the jump.

“It’s something that not until today I really unpacked, so you’re catching me at a weird time where, obviously, I’m going to have to talk to somebody about all this,” Powell quips. “[But] true crime is such an interesting thing, our fascination with the darker sides of ourselves, and I was always intrigued by how John viewed this movie as just American ambition. It’s a going-into-business movie about a young scrappy kid making it in the world, yet he’s stepping over the bodies of his own blood to get there.”

There is indeed something acutely all-American, perhaps even more so in the 21st century, about the setup. As Powell muses, “It’s a very American quality, just the lengths that we go in hustle culture—the lengths that you would go to become what you need to be.”

This facet is also intriguing since How to Make a Killing is ostensibly a film noir throwback as well, complete with its own femme fatale (Margaret Qualley) and a root in 1940s cinema, albeit of the British variety since it is loosely inspired by the 1949 English comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets.

“It’s funny how the original is so deeply entrenched in British classism, yet how incredibly John has made it feel so American,” observes Jessica Henwick, who plays Ruth, a woman Becket is also drawn to despite her lacking the cutthroat ambition of a Wall Street bro.

And the actor who plays the man between her and Becket, Zach Woods as the Redfellow ne’er-do-well Noah, even points out that the Global Social Mobility Index of 2020 ranked the UK as having a higher degree of class mobility than the U.S. (although both are, notably, not even ranked among the top 20 these days).

Says Woods, “There’s less barriers to socioeconomic advancement in a place where you can grow up three hundred yards from a place and have a totally different accent than your neighbor, yet still even there it’s easier to get ahead.”

Given both How to Make a Killing’s own lineage and stereotypes about UK culture versus the U.S., it’s a topic director Ford has a lot of fun with. But then, the whole movie features a curious joie de vivre despite offing new characters left and right. One such target includes Topher Grace in the delicious role of a Redfellow who’s gone into Christian rock evangelizing, and has the mega-church cult following to prove it.

“I’ve always been fascinated, even before I got the role, with not only religious leaders but also self-help gurus,” Grace reveals. “Basically it’s under the banner of anyone who gets up in front of the rest of the world and says, ‘I can show you how to lead a better life.’ I always thought that was hilarious, and then on top of it, there were a couple real specific people that I watched closely, and to me it’s endlessly hilarious because it’s so ironic.”

The appeal of doing this is playing marks whom the audience is willing to root against while we follow heroes of dubious ethics. It’s been a staple of cinema from at least the early days of noir to modern favorites. For example, Henwick is quick to point out how great Park Chan-wook’s recent Korean dark comedy of similar terrain, No Other Choice, can be. Grace, meanwhile, notes that some of his favorite movies are the Martin Scorsese films like Taxi Driver or Goodfellas. And for his part, Woods darkly suggests he always rooted for Man in Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942).

“He’s got to eat!” Woods insists with a twinkle in his eye. “And they’re overpopulated in this region! It’s a cult, goddammit!” And culling the cult might just be the most American thing you can do.

How to Make a Killing goes into business only in theaters on Friday, Feb. 20.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – Bella Shepard Discusses How Fear Drives Genesis Lythe

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 7.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is, as its name implies, the story of an institution. But it’s also the story of the cadets who make that institution worthwhile, and its sprawling cast is full of a wide variety of characters from different backgrounds, cultures, and life experiences. From humans and Klingons to Betazoids and holograms, the series has explored traditional coming-of-age themes through a wide variety of character perspectives. But, somehow, despite everything that’s happened so far in the series’ first season, we still know relatively little about overachieving Dar-Sha cadet Genesis Lythe. Seventh episode, “Ko’Zeine,” attempts to change that, with a story that takes a dive into the pressures and fears that motivate her behavior.

“This episode really uncovered so much about Genesis,” Bella Shepard tells Den of Geek. “I almost felt like I got to step outside of her a little bit and have a new perspective on her. I wasn’t given much to work with for the character as a whole when I first booked the project, so getting the script for episode 7, I was like, “Yes, finally.” Before that, it’s like I got little easter eggs about who she is and where she comes from.”

An hour that explores questions of duty, expectation, and self, “Ko’Zeine” reveals that Genesis isn’t exactly the perfect student we’ve all been led to believe. She altered her Starfleet Academy recommendations during the application process and removed the criticisms they contained to ensure she was accepted as a student. To a one, her recommendations all noted that while Genesis is incredibly driven, her drive comes from a place of fear, from an inability to accept her own successes or trust her own ability.

“She’s afraid of failure,” she says. “But that’s such a big umbrella: failure to uphold your image, failure to achieve what you want, or failure to love somebody the way they deserve to be loved. She thinks her value comes from her achievements, because that’s really what she’s known her whole life. So to have something other than achievements, which could be love or friendship, those don’t mean as much to her because she thinks that that’s not what people want from her or want to see from her. Her fear is really driven by not being who she thinks people want her to be.”

Ostensibly, her dream is to follow in the footsteps of her famous father, a Starfleet admiral who sounds as if he’s not exactly in the running for Dad of the Year when it comes to being present as a parent. But “Ko’Zeine” gives us plenty of reasons to question whether this path is one she truly wants. 

“I think it’s so easy to do something familiar, and, obviously, her father being in a high position within the Federation, that’s familiar to her. Pressure’s familiar, and authority is very familiar to her. Because she’s afraid to step out of her comfort zone too much, she’s stuck with what’s familiar. Following in his footsteps, that’s what’s comfortable for her. If he’d been something really boring, like a librarian, she probably would’ve just worked at the library, but she would have been the best librarian. She would’ve had all the books in order perfectly and they would’ve been dusted and cleaned. Again, I think, it’s her being afraid of failure. And she talks about how, ‘Oh, I’m hoping that people don’t correlate my achievements to my father’s,’ but really, she set that system up herself. She needed the security of her father’s position to be able to fall back on and be like, ‘Well, that’s the guy I’m learning from. So if I’m doing it wrong, it’s because I’m just learning from him.’”

Thankfully, Starfleet Academy is allowing Genesis to open herself up to lots of new people and experiences, which often challenge her own perceptions of herself. In “Ko’Zeine,” she finds herself spending a holiday weekend sequestered in the Academy with Caleb, and though she’s technically using him to commit some mild crimes to help her break into her own records, their friendship is a genuine one.

“I think what Genesis and Caleb see in each other are both things that they lack,” Shepard says. “Genesis sees Caleb’s ability to just be free. He always says what’s on his mind. He does what he wants. He doesn’t follow the rules, and he doesn’t have any kind of structure in his life. He never has. That for him is his comfort zone, and for Genesis, her comfort zone is structure. It’s rules, it’s following things by a book. It’s almost like they both have something that the other wants, and I like to think they vibed right off the bat because they saw that reflection in each other. They’re so similar in so many ways, but they got there through opposite paths.”

“I like to think of them as platonic soulmates in a way,” Shepard continues. “They can finish each other’s sentences. I like to imagine them being on the same bridge one day and sharing a captain’s chair because they think so much alike, and they’re so good at problem-solving, and what one lacks, the other one makes up for. It makes a lot of sense to me why they feel so connected to each other, because it’s almost like, ‘I’ll be your crutch if you’ll be mine.’”

Shepard is not only spending Starfleet Academy’s first season introducing a new character, but an entirely new alien species as well. She’s the first actor to play a member of the Dar-Sha, a humanoid species characterized by thin ridges above her eyes instead of eyebrows. 

“Knowing the impact that this franchise has had on the world and then being able to come in and — I’m not playing a human, of course, but all of these characters are human at heart. They all have real, true humanity. And to be able to develop something from scratch was just so liberating as an actor, because it was like…I can’t really do anything wrong here. I can have fun with this. And even down to little details. I got to work with the costume department on her jewelry, and we’ve created this whole backstory on where and how she gets it.”

While we haven’t learned that much about the Dar-Sha onscreen, one has to assume an episode about this is coming in the not-too-distant future, if only because they’re a new species that could be or do pretty much anything. But Shepard herself has clearly thought about it a lot. 

“The Dar-Sha being nomadic and not having really a home planet, I like to imagine that they’re just overly resourceful. Like they just gather everything from every culture, because they’re constantly moving through space,” she says. “They’re meeting people of different cultures and different species, so I like to just pull from everything that I can research in this real physical life and put that into, “Ooh, I like this piece of culture, I feel like we can integrate that into the space, into the future version for the Dar-Sha story,” and it’s just been so fun. My job is to play pretend, and now I get to do it to the fullest extent.”

The question of what Genesis’s Academy career will look like going forward is one only the rest of the season (and series, to be honest) can answer. But to hear Shepard tell it, “Ko’Zeine” is just the beginning.

“The thing about Starfleet [Academy] is this is a great opportunity for all the characters to really discover themselves, and they’re all so young. It’s a great opportunity for them all to learn the hard lessons and to fall and get up again. And we get to see Genesis discover more of her flaws later in the story and use a lot of her strengths again. She’s such a good team leader because she’s able to utilize other people’s strengths And I think for myself personally, I’ve been told as a child that I’m very bossy, or I’m too confrontational and I’ve integrated a lot of that into Genesis. I want to speak my mind, and I want to lift my friends up and tell them how they can keep going through life. And I think Genesis does a lot of that through her story, and we get to see more of her in-depth in season 2, which I’m so excited for people to see. I can’t wait for everyone else to follow on her journey.”

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 7 Review — Ko’Zeine

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 7.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy slows things down this week, a move that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone given the high-stakes events that unfolded in “Come, Let’s Away.” And, to be fair, “Ko’Zeine” isn’t a bad hour. In fact, it offers some much-needed insight into two of the show’s most underserved characters. But after a string of three truly excellent episodes, it’s jarring to settle for one that feels… just okay. 

As the spring semester holiday looms, everyone’s basically just trying to hold it together. Caleb’s fretting about whether to contact Tarima, now relocated home to Betazed to recover from removing her implant and melting a squad of menacing aliens with her mind. (At least she’s seemingly out of her coma? Yay?) Sam’s still a bit glitchy — literally – as a result of her injuries. And everyone’s still in mourning, not just for the death of War College cadet B’Avi, but the sort of consequence-free cocoon they’d all been living in up to this point. Nus Braka’s scheme forced them all to grow up in sudden and uncomfortable ways, to confront the idea that this path they’ve chosen has real and occasionally deadly risks. But other than a few throwaway comments here and there, “Ko’Zeine” doesn’t really deal with much of the fallout directly. 

Part of the reason for that is that there’s been a time jump. Roughly a month has gone by since the events of “Come, Let’s Away,” so we’ve missed out on their immediate aftermath. We didn’t get the information dumps that would have provided more detail about what, precisely, Braka stole or how he might intend to use it. We didn’t see the Federation’s initial response in terms of trying to hunt him down. Even the immediate shock of grief has passed. Tarima’s already woken up and returned home. Everyone’s trying to get on with things because that’s what people do, even and especially in the face of tragedy. It’s All Worlds Day — the most hilariously bland-sounding of holidays — and there are celebrations to be had. Obligations to be met. Families to be visited. So that’s what everyone does. Mostly. Which, yeah, makes sense, but still kind of feels like we missed a step somewhere. 

The episode follows a pair of dual storylines. The first sees Darem hauled back to the Khonian Realm to celebrate his sealing, the fulfillment of an engagement we’ve never heard about before to a woman we’ve never met. Jay-Den gets carried along for the ride after incorrectly assuming his classmate was being kidnapped. What follows is an introduction to both Khonian culture and a side of Darem we’ve never seen before — he’s… surprisingly nice and accommodating? — as Jay-Den is suddenly forced to serve in the role of his “Ko’Zeine,” a.k.a. Best Man. 

This is all fraught in a typically young-adult-fiction sort of way, as Darem and Jay-Den’s scenes continue to crackle with the kind of chemistry that’s certain to be problematic when one of them has an alleged fiancé waiting to marry them and the other’s got a boyfriend back home. But once again, Karim Diané and George Hawkins are great together, as Jay-Den serves as Darem’s sounding board and cheerleader, stepping up to give a top-tier best man speech about the way that his classmate — and friend —  not only helped him find his own voice, but has become a self-assured leader amongst their Academy crew.  

Elsewhere, the episode also follows Caleb and Genesis, who have both, for very different reasons, opted to stay behind in the locked-down Academy rather than journey elsewhere. Caleb turned up his nose at the host family Ake found for him to stay with and Genesis is so obviously lying when she says her father had a last-minute obligation come up that it’s almost commendable how long the episode commits to the bit that she’s just down for a weekend of random competitive rulebreaking hinjinks with her favorite no consequences classmate who also happens to be the school’s best hacker. What a coincidence!

Seven episodes in, Genesis is still the member of our core crew that we know least about, and “Ko’Zein” gives us something that feels almost like a reason for it: She doesn’t technically belong at the Academy. She altered her recommendations to land a place in this cadet class, and really isn’t sure that she’s capable of being the person that her father so clearly wants her to become. Ake wants to submit Genesis for the Academy’s pre-command track, a sort of pre-med style crash course in captain’s training for those who’ve displayed particular skills.

As part of this, the committee will re-review all of her initial application materials and speak with her references, which all seems innocuous enough… at least until Genesis freaks out about it, and concocts an elaborate plan involving Caleb, Ake’s captain’s chair, and a cloned key to try and cover up the fact that she altered the originals. Her crime is, in the grand scheme of things, hardly the worst thing in the world, particularly given how eminently capable she’s already proven herself to be as a student and a leader. But maintaining her can-do, ready for anything, constantly striving image comes at a very real personal cost, and this is the first we’re really seeing of how her fear of failure has shaped her.

Much like in “Vitus Reflux,” Genesis and Darem’s stories are used as mirrors for each other, as each wrestles with the pressures of expectation, fear, and self-doubt in different ways. Are either of them on paths of their own choosing? Are they making themselves smaller or lesser to fit into preconceptions of who they’re meant to be? What do they each really want out of their lives, and how does their Starfleet Academy experience help them figure out what that is? These are, of course, precisely the kinds of questions that college is meant to force you to face, and it’s nice to see that’s still true even hundreds of years in the future. The episode ends with Darem annulling his new marriage and abdicating his throne, while Genesis is removed from the captain’s track. It’s a failure on a technical level, for both of them, or at least a man like Genesis’s father would probably say so. But it’s also a fresh start, and there’s something awfully promising in that.

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

A Sonic the Hedgehog Character Is About to Sound Like Princess Anna

As befitting a video game franchise that has somehow spanned fan art featuring main characters doing everything from experiencing religious conversions to birthing babies (just google it; or better yet, don’t), the Sonic the Hedgehog movie series has had a strange evolution. What began as a ’90s style adaptation that downplayed game elements in favor of a human/animal adventure set on Earth has grown increasingly faithful to the Sega Genesis games and the expansive lore that followed.

So when the post-credit sequence of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 introduced both Metal Sonic and the hedgehog Amy Rose, fans demanded to know who would be voicing the latter. Paramount has heard those demands and said, “Let it go,” as they’ve announced that Kristen Bell will be voicing Amy Rose for Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

To those who don’t know Sonic the Hedgehog, or to those who love Frozen, it might sound like Bell’s taking on a role far below her station. After all, Bell has been a pop culture mainstay for as long as Sonic has been around. As a young actress, Bell worked on the stage and popped up for upsetting stories in Deadwood and The Shield before breaking out as teen detective Veronica Mars. Veronica Mars made Bell a star, which she’s parlayed into films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Frozen and another hit series in The Good Place.

But to those who love Sonic, it’s Bell who’s lucky to get the part. Amy Rose first appeared, alongside the robot Metal Sonic, in the 1993 Sega CD game Sonic CD. Originally, Amy barely transcended the old Ms. Pac-Man trope of “male character, but a girl,” as she was a pink hedgehog whose only defining features were her love for Sonic and her weapon, the Piko Piko Hammer. However, over several games, cartoons, and comics have turned Amy into a three-dimensional character with her own distinctive interests and motivations.

Those motivations will certainly be part of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, the latest entry in what has been a series that manages to get better and do better at the box office the more that it embraces the weird parts of the game series.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Sonic movies also have a cast of big names. In addition to Jim Carrey, who recovers the manic energy that made him such a hit in the early ’90s, the movies feature voice vocal performances from Ben Schwartz as Sonic, Idris Elba as Knuckles, and Keanu Reeves as Shadow.

By adding Bell’s star power, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 has license to delve even deeper into the video game weirdness that fans love. Or, at least, Bell can bring in fans not prepared for just how strange the world of Sonic truly is.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 plays in theaters on March 19, 2027.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Makes Ancient Egypt Spooky Kid Scary

Is there a classic monster more outdated than the Mummy? Sure, it’s scary to be covered in bandages and buried alive. But as the Orientalism that made the idea of a mummy’s curse so scary to Westerners fades (or at least mutates), it’s harder and harder to sell a beastie that’s essentially a zombie covered in gauze. If you can’t go the adventure route used for the Brendan Fraser movies, how do you make the mummy interesting to modern audiences?

If you’re Lee Cronin, you use that most cutting edge of horror tropes: scary, probably dead, kids. Spooky youngin’s are all over the latest trailer for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which introduces us to two loving parents played by Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, who learn that their missing daughter has been found. It turns out that Katie has been gone for eight years, and she was discovered within an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. Worse, she looks less like a darling little girl and more like, well, like someone who has spent eight years inside an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.

Where the classic Universal Mummy was a romantic whose love transcended the bounds of death, and where Fraser’s Rick O’Connell battled a supervillain version of the mummy, Cronin is drawing inspiration from his most recent film, Evil Dead Rise. The trailer is filled with not just the types of audacious split diopter shots that Sam Raimi would love, but also with icky bits like gooey bandages, bloody teeth, and limbs that creak as they twist into unnatural configurations.

Most of all, the trailer for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy features kids being dead and/or scary. Creepy kids and child endangerment aren’t exactly new to cinemas: after all, Frankenstein’s Monster tossed a little girl into a lake in 1931 and eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark terrified her mother in The Bad Seed in 1956.

But lately, moviegoers have taken a renewed interest in seeing kids come to terrible ends on screen, and sometimes return to do new terrible things. The It franchise and its TV spinoff Welcome to Derry, the Terrifier series with its exploding child bits and creepy Art the Clown girl, the tykes with mutilated faces in Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, and the midnight runners of Weapons have ignored all taboos to enjoy critical acclaim and/or big box office returns.

One might feel that Cronin is jumping on a bandwagon for his kid-centric take on the mummy, if the concept didn’t seem like something that fits the premise. As outrageous as the imagery gets, the trailer promises to ground the horror in emotional fears of the parents. That very real anxiety gives Cronin and other filmmakers room to go a little harder with the horror.

And if Evil Dead Rise is any indication, Cronin certainly will go hard with The Mummy, reanimating the tired old monster and making him something all too terrifying.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy arrives in theaters on April 17, 2026.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Book Announcement Reveals First Plot Details

When we last saw Peter Parker, nobody knew who he was. The end of Spider-Man: No Way Home brought Peter (Tom Holland) to what seemed to be his lowest point. His Aunt May had died, he lost access to both his Avengers allies and Tony Stark‘s money, and he spent his time sewing a suit in a crappy NYC apartment. Since then, we’ve been waiting on bated breath to see how much worse things would get in the follow-up, Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

And, we’re still waiting. The movie’s only months away, the Super Bowl has come and gone, and we still don’t have a trailer. However, thanks to a blurb for the book Spider-Man: Brand New Day—The Art Of The Movie, we have an idea of the film’s plot.

“Four years have gone by since we last caught up with our friendly neighborhood hero. Peter Parker is no more, but Spider-Man is at the top of his game keeping New York City safe,” the blurb declares. “Things are going well for our anonymous hero until an unusual trail of crimes pulls him into a web of mystery larger than he’s ever faced before. In order to take on what’s ahead, Spider-Man not only needs to be at the top of his physical and mental game, but he must also be prepared to face the repercussions of his past!”

Okay, that’s not the richest thing in the world, but it does contain some surprises. Most notably, the blurb tells us that things aren’t so bad for our friendly neighborhood wall crawler. That’s actually a refreshing change for the MCU version of Spider-Man. In the comics, Spider-Man may be the Charlie Brown of the superhero set, but he does occasionally have things go his way. I mean, the guy was married to a supermodel for years.

The MCU Spidey may have had instant access to Tony Stark’s billions, but he’s never been respected as a superhero. If he’s the one keeping New York City safe, then that must earn him some respect, even if nobody remembers that it’s Peter Parker behind the mask.

Of course, the blurb also mentions “an unusual trail of crimes” and a “web of mystery,” which probably refers to the host of guest stars set to appear in Brand New Day. We know the film will feature minor baddies such as Boomerang, Tarantula, Scorpion, and Tombstone—the last of whom is rumored to be the ultimate villain of the movie—as well as fellow heroes Hulk and the Punisher.

Then there’s Stranger Things star Sadie Sink, whose role is still undisclosed. If she is, as many hope, playing Jean Grey of the X-Men, then the arrival of feared and hated mutants in the MCU will certainly be a web of mystery unusual for Spider-Man. And Spider-Man may know a thing or two about webs, but that’s going to make life much, much worse for Peter.

Oh well, at least it sounds like Peter will have a few good months.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31, 2026.

Tom Noonan Gave the Scariest Performance in Any Hannibal Lecter Movie

Writer Thomas Harris gave the world Hannibal Lecter, one of the greatest on-screen monsters in cinema history. In novels such as The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, the erudite psychiatrist-turned-cannibal terrified audiences, even more so when brought to the screen by Anthony Hopkins. Yet, Hopkins wasn’t the first person to play Lecter in live action, as he was preceded by Brian Cox in Manhunter. Moreover, Manhunter featured the scariest moment in any adaptation of a Harris work.

Directed by Michael Mann and based on the 1981 novel Red Dragon, Manhunter follows FBI agent Will Graham (William Petersen) as he tries to find Francis Dolarhyde, a murderer dubbed “the Tooth Fairy.” Played by Tom Noonan, who passed away on February 14 at the age of 74, gives a chilling performance, one that outdoes even Hopkins’ work as Harris’s most famous creation.

Released in 1986, Manhunter marries Mann’s cool, neon aesthetic to Harris’ overheated form of psychological horror. Most of the film focuses on Graham, an incredibly empathetic profiler who has retired from the FBI after capturing Hannibal Lecktor (as the name is spelled in this film). However, Graham’s desperate superior, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), convinces him to investigate a series of murders carried out by the Tooth Fairy, the soft-spoken man Francis Dolarhyde.

Rendered deeply self-conscious by the abuse his mother heaped on him and concerns about his physical appearance, Dolarhyde witnesses perfect families in the film he develops and then murders them. After each killing, he leaves bite marks on the women, earning his Tooth Fairy nickname, and replaces their eyes with mirrors.

Despite these over-the-top elements from the source material, Mann emphasizes the gumshoe, workaday nature of the FBI, which restricts even Dolarhyde from being too outrageous. It’s a difficult assignment, yet somehow Noonan pulled it off. A hulking man who stood 6’5″, Noonan cut an intimidating presence, which also led to him being cast as Frankenstein’s Monster in The Monster Squad. However, he balanced his intimidating physique with a gentleness, accentuated by his soft tone of voice and warm eyes.

In his best roles, Noonan played those two elements off one another to create a complex figure. He emphasized the gentleness of Frankenstein’s monster and made the Satanist Mr. Ulmer in The House of the Devil someone the main character would believably trust. He used his size to make actor Sammy Barnathan in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York all the more pathetic when he gets vulnerable.

But his best moment came as Francis Dolarhyde in Manhunter. Noonan gets us to feel sorry for Dolarhyde as Graham and Lecktor uncover the trauma that made him into a killer, and we’re even moved by his romance with a blind coworker played by Joan Allen. None of those feelings go away when Dolarhyde first reveals his diabolical nature. Rather, Noonan uses them to accentuate the horror.

Midway through Manhunter, a botched operation results in Dolarhyde capturing the tabloid reporter Freddie Lounds (Stephen Lang). With Lounds bound to a chair, Dolarhyde reveals himself in his person as the Red Dragon, Satan as imagined in the poetry and etchings of William Blake. He monologues to the captive Lounds about his power, about how Lounds owes him not fear but “awe.” At the beginning of the monologue, Dolarhyde shows Lounds images of Blake’s drawings and photographs of victims, punctuating each image with the question, “Do you see?”

In the Harris novel Red Dragon, and the later substandard adaptation by Melania director Brett Ratner, Dolarhyde uses this moment to reveal his muscular body, prosthetic sharp teeth, and large dragon tattoo. But Mann chooses a more conventional approach, dressing Dolarhyde in regular street clothes. In this version, he wears a nylon stocking over the top half of his head and does not put in the teeth until the final moments.

However, the scene still chills because of the subtle way Noonan plays Dolarhyde as both imperious and nervous. He remains calm throughout his speech, only slightly raising his voice when Lounds’s eyes close. While the calm could be interpreted as confidence, especially as Noonan towers over the seated Lang, it instead reads as reverence. Dolarhyde truly believes that he has transcended the body that he hates, that he’s become a vessel of the Red Dragon. Noonan never overplays it, never gets into the campiness that sometimes overtakes Hopkins’s work as Lecter. He plays it gentle, human, and utterly horrifying.

In that one scene, Tom Noonan’s ability to be both powerful and gentle brings a unique terror to a Hannibal film, a terror unmatched by any other Harris adaptation.

10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees from the ’90s That Should Have Won

Whoa there, pardner! Hold yer horses. See, what you’re about to read needs to be prefaced by a very particular piece of information. It would be unwise to scroll further without this here knowledge, so rest up yer spurs and prepare to yield on any scufflin’ or tarnations.

Right, looky here. Art surely is subjective, and film award voters usually have to pick just one winner to declare as the best. Now, is that really the “best” film? Or are there other, just as worthy films that could have taken that there award? Yessir, you’re darn tootin. Sometimes, voters’ll even be choosin’ a winner that don’t even really go on to endure in our cultural lexicon, so to speak, when every man, woman, and child knows that a good fence should be pig-tight, horse-high, and bull-strong!

So, when we were out here lookin’ through some movies from the 1890s that didn’t win big, we got to thinkin’ that maybe some of them were just as worthy of winnin’, if not more, while some of the actual winners might be about as welcome as a rattlesnake at a square dance.

…oh, wait. The 1990s? That changes everything. Okay then, let’s take a look at just 10 Best Picture nominee losers from the decade that totally had the juice to snatch the statue, which you’ll be glad to know will not be written up in the parlance of an old-timey prospector.

Dead Poets Society

Driving Miss Daisy is a fine character study with truly great central performances by Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman, so it’s not surprising that it picked up the Oscar for Best Picture in 1990. Still, some feel its take on race relations – focusing on friendship rather than systemic injustice – has dated quite a bit, especially since Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing failed to even pick up a nomination in the same year. Interestingly, when Oscar voters were polled by THR in 2015, they said they’d choose My Left Foot instead ofDriving Miss Daisy, but we have to give a shout-out to an entirely different loser: Dead Poets Society.

If its continued rediscovery across new generations has taught us anything, it’s that Peter Weir’s coming-of-age drama taps into something timeless. It’s about that one moment when someone finally makes you feel seen, pushing you to be brave enough to think for yourself. Its themes still resonate with young people navigating expectations from all sides, and its “carpe diem” ethos has legit become cultural shorthand. Arguably, Dead Poets Society would have endured as a Best Picture winner because finding your voice never really goes out of style.

Goodfellas

1991’s Best Picture nominees are all pretty solid. Ghost, Awakenings, The Godfather Part III …Christ, okay, not that one, but the others! All solid. The winner that year, Dances with Wolves, is also a decent flick. James Cameron must have thought so at least; he’s already remade it three times, ayooooo.

Ahem, anyway, despite the general solidness of Kevin Costner’s directorial debut, it’s still a bit surprising that Goodfellas didn’t take the statue that year, isn’t it? I mean, of course Academy voters were gonna go for the wolf guy over Joe Pesci saying “fuck” 300 times; it makes perfect sense, but Goodfellas is a stone-cold classic. Scorsese’s movie completely redefined the gangster movie, for crying out loud. The kinetic camera work, the legendary Copacabana tracking shot, the wall-to-wall needle drops – it’s all still influencing filmmakers. Do you think the solid-gold anxiety cinema of Marty Supreme would be hitting the same way today if Goodfellas hadn’t set the blueprint in its final stretch? Ehh, well, at least Scorsese won the long game here. Modern crime storytelling just wouldn’t be the same without this one.

JFK

This is tough because the 1992 winner was The Silence of the Lambs, one of the greatest horror movies of all time. It’s a good choice for Best Picture, and it’s so rare that the horror genre gets its due at the Oscars! I can’t be mad about that. But what if there could have been two Best Picture winners from that year’s lineup? Well, JFK would probably be the other one.

Admittedly, it would have endured as a controversial choice. Though bold and provocative, Oliver Stone’s political conspiracy thriller looks back at the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy with a mix of fact and fiction that has infuriated plenty of historians and critics. However, JFK remains a fascinating exploration of a pivotal moment in American history that enraptures viewers even as it plays with the idea of presenting unverified claims as the truth. In many ways, it was an ominous portent of what was to come.

A Few Good Men

The 65th Academy Awards ceremony was a good time for Al Pacino enjoyers, as he had standout performances for Scent of a Woman and Glengarry Glen Ross in the running, but voters’ hearts finally settled on Unforgiven when they were choosing Best Picture, sweeping aside Scent, The Crying Game, Howard’s End, and the absolute banger that is Rob Reiner’s legal drama A Few Good Men.

In terms of lasting (the U.S. military getting up to all sorts of shady crap at Guantanamo) and cultural relevance (Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!” rant is endlessly quotable) A Few Good Men has stood the test of time. Fueled by an electrifying Aaron Sorkin script and further propelled by Tom Cruise at the peak of his 1990s dominance, it’s sometimes easy to forget that it also boasts many other strong performances. Kiefer Sutherland’s sneering First Lieutenant Kendrick, the late and great J. T. Walsh’s defeated Lieutenant Colonel Markinson, Demi Moore’s ambitious yet flailing Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway. Even Noah Wyle, now in the middle of a renaissance on HBO Max’s The Pitt, gets a piece of the action in what could have been just a throwaway role. It all adds up to a classic courtroom showdown of a movie that is easily more rewatchable than Unforgiven. Fight me.

The Fugitive

Ok, it’s time to settle down a bit, because I’m not about to be out here claiming that Schindler’s List shouldn’t have won Best Picture in 1994. Schindler’s List is an incredibly good and genuinely significant movie that deserved to win. What I am going to ask, though, is how many times you’ve watched it. Is it one? I’m going to guess that for most of you who have watched it, it’s one. Because it’s a tough watch, isn’t it? Great movie. Important movie. But brutal subject matter based on real, horrifying events. Unlike, say, The Fugitive.

I’m not going to compare The Fugitive to Schindler’s List; that would be ridiculous, but The Fugitive is still a great flick that could just as easily have won Best Picture in any other year, simply by being a terrific, edge-of-your-seat thriller that features not only a compelling turn by Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble but also Tommy Lee Jones’ relentless energy and humor as the U.S. Marshal out to get him. Tight pacing and great chase sequences make The Fugitive a textbook example of a thriller done right.

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction ultimately fell to Forrest Gump when it was nominated for Best Picture, but it wouldn’t be the last time Quentin Tarantino felt the Oscar slip through his fingers because Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would later meet the same fate.

Tarantino might be somewhat comforted by the movie’s massive cultural impact, though, which still reverberates today. With its nonlinear storytelling and pop-culture-saturated dialogue, everyone and their mom thought they could make their own version of Pulp Fiction after its release. The results varied, to say the least. No one could quite match Tarantino’s choice needle drops and hyper-stylized violence while also managing to revitalize and launch careers (Guy Ritchie fans, your sign won’t stop me because I can’t read) but it sure says something that even the attempt to do so became a cinematic template.

The Shawshank Redemption

It’s wild to think that The Shawshank Redemption, a movie that often tops “best of” lists everywhere, didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar in 1995, but it was up against some real competition that year in Pulp Fiction, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Quiz Show. Can we really blame Oscar voters all these years later for noping out and choosing the twee “life is like a box of chocolates” fare of Forrest Gump just to keep the peace? Yes, we absolutely can; this is the internet. People can say anything. But we’d argue that saying The Shawshank Redemption should have won Best Picture over Forrest Gump isn’t exactly ragebait these days. It’s a flawless Frank Darabont masterpiece, people!

Fargo

If there’s a definitive, cut-and-dried, “bad” Best Picture choice on this list, it’s gotta be picking The English Patient (a fine film, don’t get me wrong) over friggin’ Fargo, a movie so good it went on to spawn an also-great five-season TV show. Voters accepted that Frances McDormand should win Best Actress and that the Coen brothers should win Best Original Screenplay for this stellar black comedy crime caper, but it does feel a little bit like when it came to choosing Best Picture, their collective fingers slipped when they were trying to hit the Fargo button.

You see, there are plenty of memorable moments in Fargo. Marge’s “Oh, you betchas,” literally anything with William H. Macy trying to weasel his way out of the bind he’s in, the woodchipper scene, the local girls recalling their encounter with Steve Buscemi, but I’m gonna be real with you here: the only thing I can remember about The English Patient is Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche’s pained expressions. I can’t be alone.

Good Will Hunting

Nothing was going to get in the way of James Cameron’s Titanic winning Best Picture. Nothing. But damn, there were some phenomenal contenders that really lost out in 1998, weren’t there? First up, Good Will Hunting, which famously won young BFFs Ben Affleck and Matt Damon a screenplay Oscar but couldn’t quite snatch Best Picture out from under the strains of hearts going on and such.

Though the “apples” scene has been parodied to death at this point, Good Will Hunting remains a charming crowdpleaser that builds its foundations out of Affleck and Damon’s raw talent but also gets a particularly wonderful performance out of the late Robin Williams, as his grieving psychology professor deftly breaks down the walls of a literal genius who still doesn’t quite have the confidence to leave behind the familiar and embark on his own journey of discovery.

LA Confidential

L.A. Confidential was another of 1998’s losers that didn’t stand a chance against icebergs being right ahead and whatnot. Generally, it’s now considered one of the best neo-noir crime thrillers ever made, but it wasn’t enough to stop Cameron’s heart of the ocean.

Of all the movies on this list, L.A. Confidential is probably the trickiest to discuss without acknowledging that it stars Kevin Spacey in a plum role, and remarks about his conduct on set have also recently been made. Co-star Guy Pearce calls him an “amazing” actor whom Pearce says he had “a difficult time” with, describing Spacey as “a handsy guy.” Not amazing context through today’s lens, but at the time, people definitely thought L.A. Confidential deserved to be among the Best Picture nominees, and it was even championed as a potential underdog to win the Oscar, which is no surprise given that Curtis Hanson’s attempt at adapting James Ellroy’s seedy novel is enormously successful.

Take it to the comments section, people; there’s no more to see here!

Colossal Woolly Mammoth ‘On Track for 2028’ as Perception Around De-Extinction Evolves

Ben Lamm, the CEO and co-founder of the technology firm Colossal Biosciences, does not want to play favorites with the company’s various de-extinction projects. One look around a newly finished headquarters in Dallas, Texas speaks volumes for how proud the company is about their dire wolf—or a functional recreation of the Pleistocene predator using the genetically-edited code of gray wolves to match the genome of the extinct creature of prehistory. And they have various projects, including the thylacine (the Tasmanian tiger), the dodo, and great moa of New Zealand, in various stages of development.

Still, at the end of the day, the one he seems most eager to cross the finish line remains the woolly mammoth, an animal which Colossal does not only wish to recreate by editing the genetics of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant, but to also rewild—returning the furry giant to the arctic tundras that mammoths once roamed.

“I think that the mammoth conjures probably the most excitement,” Lamm muses inside a dire wolf-bedecked conference room. “Of anything we’re working on, it’s like people almost put it in the Jurassic Park age. It wasn’t, but people still have this view. We were making pyramids while mammoths were still here.”

Indeed, the last known mammoth population to walk the earth died out roughly 4,000 years ago, about six centuries after the Egyptians started putting up their monuments. It is a creature in (distant) human history, but one mythical enough to trigger the imagination. That myth is also what first made Colossal a reality after Lamm got inklings in the 2010s about George Church, a Harvard geneticist who made it a life’s dream to bring back the woolly mammoth. And according to Lamm today, they’re as close as a mere two years out from having that calf in the world.

“We’re certified by the American Humane [Society], we’re certified by Global Humane,” Lamm says. And they’re more than two and a half years into the process of working on oval egg retrieval in elephants—a crucial aspect in developing the IVF process for safely birthing a mammoth calf with an Asian elephant surrogacy that will last 22 months. “We’ve made a lot of progress on that one. I’m not announcing anything today, but I think we’re going to show some really interesting progress on that this year that people will get excited about, and which has huge applications to captive breeding programs and elephant conservation. [It will] ensure that this is repeatable, exciting, and impactful in a way that has no negative impacts on elephants.”

The founder further asserts once they can 100 percent confirm the transfer process of elephant embryos is safe, it could have an immediate impact in both the mammoth project and endangered elephant populations.

“[The limiting factor] won’t be a technology factor,” Lamm says, “it will be [getting] everyone around the table, including our animal rights partners, and everyone feeling we’re okay to put these in here. So I think they will.”

While Lamm is confident they’re “on track for 2028,” already the company is preparing for where mammoths would go in two years. Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, cryptically confirms that significant nature preserves have been earmarked with partners to rear mammoths.

“It’s a northern climate, not south, I can tell you that,” he chuckles. Additionally, the experience of studying the dire wolves in their own undisclosed captivity has helped James begin writing and rewriting animal care and rewilding manuals for a creature most associated with the Ice Age.

“I think a lot of the regulatory stuff has been really interesting for us, as we’re uncovering what are the regulatory pathways to eventual rewilding of a genetically modified animal,” James explains. “That’s something nobody’s ever done before, so even going through this exercise is more hypothetical with dire wolves, it has been really good about us finding the connections of the people that are sort of experts in those areas… that’s been really good for building our network of expertise, because this isn’t a thing that happens in a silo at Colossal. It’s going to take a whole village of people to help us develop these strategies.”

It’s also bringing to fruition a dream that 40 years ago might have seemed fanciful, but in 2026 is seeing opinions rapidly evolve, even within the scientific community.

Dr. Beth Shapiro would know. The evolutionary molecular biologist and geneticist has been studying Ancient DNA since her graduate school days at Oxford in the early 2000s. By then, the first academic paper on Ancient DNA was well-known, with Allan Wilson’s UC Berkeley extinct study group publishing its findings in 1984. The document is often cited as an influence on Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and also prompted the first question a journalist ever asked a scientist in this field: Can you one day bring back a woolly mammoth?

“My first book was actually called How to Clone a Mammoth [published in 2015],” Shapiro tells us, “which was a long-form answer to why it was really hard, and all of the technological, ethical, and social challenges one would need to solve to get to the point where you can bring a mammoth back to life. So the idea of de-extinction has been circulating in Ancient DNA, but I think what’s changed is the technology has advanced to the point where all of the foundational tools that we need to make it happen exist. Now they just need to be accelerated and be pushed to the extreme.”

Consider that one of the breakthroughs has been advancing and scaling up multiplex-genome engineering. With their dire wolf, Colossal pinpointed about 20 edits needed in the gray wolf genome to functionally recreate the dire wolf in appearance, behavior, and ecological function. Some of the other species Colossal aims to de-extinct next will demand thousands, tens of thousands, and possibly a million edits. All of it is on the table.

Such rapid advancement has led to a fair amount of skepticism, both among the press and perhaps more acutely in the world of academia where scientists like Shapiro hail. (She is technically on a three-year sabbatical from the University of California, Santa Cruz while now working as the chief science officer at Colossal.) But a colleague of hers who’s also been fascinated by the potential of de-extinction for just as long—Dr. Andrew Pask, Colossal’s chief biology officer and head of the company’s research efforts in Australia—says such perceptions are changing given recent breakthroughs in combatting the fatal EEHV in elephants and the potential of the dire wolf project offering coattails in engineering newfound biodiversity within American red wolf populations.

“This big shift has happened as we’ve also proven that we’re having real conservation outcomes,” Pask explains. “I talk at a lot of conservation conferences, and I think initially people were just really skeptical. They would always come up and be like, ‘I just don’t see how this is actually going to lead to conservation outcomes.’ And we kept on saying, ‘Here are all the things we’re projecting will happen.’ But I think now, as we’re actually achieving those goals and showing these things, people are going, ‘This is actually an important path forward.’”

Right now, Pask is helping progress a genetically-engineered quoll—a small nocturnal, and extremely endangered marsupial in Australia—into becoming the first controlled release “ambassador project” in his native country where the Colossal quoll can help introduce the attributes needed to survive a changing habitat.

“I think people are much more accepting that we do have to take these kind of measures if we want to save biodiversity on our planet,” says Pask. “We absolutely have to. There is no other technology that can bring back lost biodiversity. You have to engineer it back in. It can happen over evolutionary time, but we would need hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years for some of these populations that we whittled down to 10 individuals to become healthy again. And they won’t. They’ll go extinct before that can happen. But we can bring those things back with conservation.”

Pask claims he’s achieved more tangible results in the past three years than in the 20 that preceded them. He likens such exciting progress to the world collectively driving full speed off a cliff and, having only now noticed there’s a path off the suicide ride, folks in the backseat are shouting, ‘No, no it’s too risky!’

But as his colleague Shapiro notes, choosing not to do anything due to risk-aversion is itself a risk that will invite dire consequences.

“The idea of de-extinction is exciting,” Shapiro says. “It brings new people in, brings new money into conservation. The money that’s gone to support Colossal would have otherwise gone to something like Bitcoin. Who knows? This is not money that would’ve supported traditional approaches to conservation. So I think it’s a huge win that Ben has been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and push it to developing tools for conservation.”

Right now the woolly mammoth is still at least two years away, but already benefits from researching how to replicate and rewild a mammoth are being implemented in living elephant populations.

“What’s crazy is all those works are helping elephants today,” says Lamm, “but selfishly we need all that to then build synthetic herds of mammoths and rewild mammoths. So we’re learning great things and helping today, but we’re also selfishly learning for our de-extinction project.”

Life finds a way, indeed.

The Mandalorian and Grogu Will Feature a Directing Great… As an Alien Shopkeeper

The Mandalorian and Grogu boasts not one, but two big names behind the camera. First, there is Jon Favreau, who directed Elf and Iron Man, created The Mandalorian, and helmed several episodes of the series. Then there’s the guy who helped Favreau write the screenplay, Dave Filoni. Not only is Filoni about to rise to co-head of Lucasfilm, but he also created The Clone Wars, the fan-favorite animated series that has increasingly been the focus of Star Wars media.

Yet, despite their achievements, neither of those two men are the most impressive director involved in the project. As seen—or, rather, heard—in the latest trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, Martin Scorsese lends his voice to an Ardennian who closes up shop when he hears that Din Djarin is tangled up with the Hutts.

To be honest, Scorsese’s involvement seems to make no sense. After all, this is the guy who created some of the grittiest and most upsetting movies of all time, grimy classics such as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. This is the guy who spoke dismissively of superhero movies, a guy who not only offered a withering response to Todd Phillips’s Joker (which was a clear riff on Scorsese’s The King of Comedy), but compared the entire genre to amusement park rides. Scorsese makes complex movies about crime and God and sin and redemption. What the heck is he doing in a Star Wars flick?

The answer is more simple than you’d think. First of all, even if Scorsese was an East Coaster who went to NYU, he still palled around with West Coast movie brats like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and, yes, George Lucas. He saw Star Wars back when it was a little independent movie that his buddy was doing outside the studio system.

And then there’s the fact that Martin Scorsese really, really likes movies. Even if he’s best known for his grown-up fare, the director has indulged in kid-friendly spectacle himself, making the 3D romp Hugo. He regularly champions films of various genres, and even previously lent his voice to Shark Tale, a film that even the biggest Star Wars hater can admit is probably worse than The Mandalorian and Grogu.

Finally, Scorsese is hardly the most unlikely filmmaker to get involved with The Mandalorian. Season 1 featured regular appearances by Werner Herzog, the German director best known for documenting nature at its most meaningless and violent. Herzog made for a striking addition for the series and famously demanded that Favreau and company use a puppet instead of CG for Grogu, creating the cultural phenomenon that was Baby Yoda.

Will Scorsese’s Ardennian shopkeeper become an equally beloved pop figure? Well, probably not. But at least Star Wars marketing team got a good “Absolute Cinema” joke out of it.

The Mandalorian and Grogu and Martin Scorsese arrives in theaters on May 22, 2026.

KPop Demon Hunters Stars Recall Dull First Introductions to the Characters

KPop Demon Hunters is a bona fide phenomenon. Since the Sony Animation film hit Netflix on June 20 of last year, it has broken streaming records, moved tickets at theaters, sold toys and records, and garnered awards recognition. More importantly, the film and its themes of acceptance have resonated with viewers from all sorts of walks of life.

But to those voice actors who brought Huntrix’s songs to life, the initial idea wasn’t that exciting. “The only information I got pertaining to the movie was very generic,” remembered singer and rapper Rei Ami, who provides the singing voice of Zoey. Regarding the trio in Huntrix, she told Variety that the casting notice just said, “KPop girl group, also demon slayers by night, powerful music, and they’re badass and cute.” For Zoey in particular, it read, “the only description I got was that this person needs to be able to sing in Korean and English, but they need to be able to rap extremely fast.” Yet, despite that bland description, Rei and her co-stars soon discovered something special.

Based on that description, it’s not hard to imagine the type of movie that Rei Ami and her co-stars thought they were getting. KPop Demon Hunters follows the titular musical trio, consisting of not just rapper Zoey (her speaking voice provided by Ji-young Yoo in the English dub), but also dancer Mira (speaking voice by May Hong and singing voice by Audrey Nuna) and frontwoman Rumi (spoken lines by Arden Cho and singing by Ejae).

When not selling out stadiums, the three women battle demons. However, Rumi must hide the fact that she too is part demon, a fact made harder to conceal by the arrival of a human-turned-demon named Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop in spoken dialogue, singing by Andrew Choi) who leads a male act called the Saja Boys.

The film’s hit songs, especially “Golden” may be misconstrued as a generic “believe in yourself” anthem, the same sort of themes peddled by kids movies for the past several decades—the same sort of themes that could easily be delivered by characters who are, in the blank description, “badass and cute.”

But to her credit, Rei and her co-stars pushed further and found something richer and stuck with it. “I don’t know what this movie is going to do, but it’s everything I love in terms of animation. It’s a Netflix film. It’s music, and it’s based in Korean culture. It’s everything that I am,” she told herself. And even though she drew the line at one particular high note in the hit “Golden”—”I told my manager, Aaron Tropf, ‘Tell them Rei cannot hit this note. She does not want to hit this note'”—she put her strength into the part.

And now, Rei recognizes that the dare was with it, because the performers are experiencing validation. “It’s long overdue,” she declared. “We worked our asses off. We’ve had the door shut in our faces. We were told we were too little, too much.” And all that from a cast description for KPop Demon Hunters that was too little, but so much.

KPop Demon Hunters is now streaming on Netflix.

The Mandalorian and Grogu Will Bring a Star Wars Fan Favorite from The Clone Wars

For most people watching the latest trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, the exciting stuff is everything that’s always been great about Star Wars: the spaceships, the power of the Force, all the cool sci-fi updates to classic genre elements. But for a certain group of people, the best part of the trailer is the appearance of a gangly guy with a wide-brimmed hat on his head and a mutt by his side. For them, it’s all about Embo.

For the uninitiated, Embo is the frightening-looking figure who removes Din Djarin’s helmet midway through the trailer, breaking Mandalorian law but also revealing the handsome face of star Pedro Pascal. Even the neophyte viewer knows that the situation doesn’t look good for Mando. But for fans of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Mando’s bad luck is going to lead to a good time.

Embo made his debut in “Bounty Hunters,” the 2010 season 2 episode of The Clone Wars animated series. The episode finds Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka arriving at a village where the desperate farmers have hired a quartet of hired guns for protection from local warlords. Although Embo is just one of the four new faces introduced in that installment, his stoic demeanor and general nobility—holding to a deal but willing to accept help from the heroes—won over fans.

After another appearance in season 3, Embo popped up several times in the show’s fourth season, truly standing out in “The Box,” which involved a competition between bounty hunters. Watching Embo hold his own against established killers such as Cad Bane cemented his legend.

For most fans, Embo carries a mystique that recalls the love original trilogy fans had for Boba Fett. As difficult as it is to remember now, Boba Fett was little more than a cool-looking guy standing in the background of The Empire Strikes Back who had to be warned by Darth Vader against going too far. Not even his ignominious end in Return of the Jedi, getting bumped into the sarlacc pit by a blind and bumbling Han Solo, or participation in the Star Wars Holiday Special could diminish his appeal.

For that reason, fans aren’t coming to The Mandalorian and Grogu looking to learn more about Embo. As long as he keeps looking cool, with his bowcaster on one side and his dog Marrok on the other, and as long as he makes Mando’s life difficult, that will be enough.

But will it be enough for everyone else? Created by Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian proved to be a hit for Disney+, in part because of the pop culture sensation around Baby Yoda and in part because the show went back to pulpy basics. But as The Clone Wars creator Dave Filoni developed a stronger voice in the series, it became more indebted to lore from that cartoon series and its sequel Rebels. Thrilling as that shift was for those who grew up with those shows, everyone else fell off of The Mandalorian.

As a major motion picture playing in theaters, The Mandalorian and Grogu cannot afford to cater to a select group of fans who loved a certain cartoon show fifteen years ago. So while the movie can absolutely bring in deep cuts like Embo, the reference alone won’t sell tickets. Then again, Embo has always make a strong first impression. That impression alone might be enough to make believers of everyone who watches The Mandalorian and Grogu.

The Mandalorian and Grogu comes to theaters on May 22, 2026.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – Jimmy Crystal’s Funniest Moment Was Cut from the Movie

Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later sequel, The Bone Temple, has no shortage of darkly comic moments. Though the film is also peppered with some absolutely brutal scenes of violence and gore, the director seems to understand how uniquely silly some of the characters are, as tragic as their circumstances might be. Still, one of the main characters’ funniest moments ended up on the cutting room floor.

The latest movie in the franchise focuses on the villainous Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) who fashions himself after the late, disgraced U.K. entertainer Jimmy Savile. The Bone Temple explores what happens when Jimmy happens upon the sweet-natured Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and becomes convinced that he’s the devil who’s been encouraging him to torture and kill countless people across Britain, along with his gang, the Fingers.

But in a new deleted scene from the film, Jimmy’s daytime encounter with Dr. Kelson is cut short by the appearance of the roaring Alpha, Samson, who terrifies Jimmy enough to have him scarpering in a truly hilarious way.

Arguably, this would have ended up being the funniest Jimmy Crystal moment in The Bone Temple, but you can see why it was ultimately cut from the film, as it somewhat undercuts the seriousness of the conversation between Jimmy and Kelson. It also squashes Jimmy’s surprise at seeing Samson towards the end of the film, when he also mistakes him for the Devil.

The Bone Temple is the second movie in a planned trilogy written by Alex Garland. Danny Boyle, who directed the first movie, is planning to return to helm the third, which will see the return of Cillian Murphy’s character from the original film, though there has been some uncertainty around whether a third film would even happen, as The Bone Temple received critical acclaim but a disappointing box office haul. However, Sony still seems to be behind Boyle’s final entry in the franchise, and the director is reportedly planning a summer 2026 shoot.

Terminator Zero Cancellation: Creator Mattson Tomlin Shares Unfinished Plans

In 2024, the animated series Terminator Zero premiered on Netflix and did the seemingly impossible: it presented a thoughtful, well-structured story set in the Terminator universe that vastly outdid many of the live-action sequels.

Positive reviews soon poured in for the eight-episode show, which was developed by The Batman Part II writer Mattson Tomlin and featured animation by the esteemed Japanese studio Production I.G., but fans of the show were unhappy to find out this month that there would be no more of it, as Netflix has cancelled Terminator Zero after just one season.

Tomlin took to X for a post-mortem after the news broke, saying he might write a thread in the future about his planned five-season run of the show. “The series finale was special,” he said. “It was part of my pitch to get the job. I’ve written all of the season two scripts and outlined pretty much all of season three.”

There don’t seem to be any hard feelings between Tomlin and the streamer, however, despite the show’s upsetting cancelation.

“Netflix was really great about supporting the show and giving me tremendous creative freedom to do what I wanted to do. Good partners,” Tomlin wrote, explaining that the decision was down to the show being “expensive and very time-consuming” and that making more of the series depended on it snagging a bigger audience. “The only way they could justify it was if the audience showed up for it, and they just didn’t.”

Tomlin also noted that Netflix did offer to let him wrap up the Terminator Zero story with two or three additional episodes, but that he turned them down: “I felt the story I wanted to tell was much longer, and the finale of season one actually left things in a good place.”

Set around 1997 in Tokyo, Terminator Zero follows a resistance soldier named Eiko, who is sent back from 2022 to stop a looming catastrophe by protecting Malcolm Lee, a scientist developing a new Skynet rival called Kokoro. But as Judgment Day nears, Malcolm’s work also draws the wrath of a Terminator (voiced by Timothy Olyphant in the English dub), forcing Eiko to keep Malcolm and his family alive. Season 1 ended with Kokoro deciding to defend humanity from Skynet, and another attack looming.

The Mandalorian and Grogu Trailer Adds Baby Greedo to Star Wars

When The Mandalorian debuted in 2019, it leaned hard into the pulpy origins of Star Wars. Set to a Ludwig Göransson score that borrowed heavily from Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western music, The Mandalorian followed the titular character as he walked into watering holes full of disreputable characters and sought out his bounty. But people didn’t really care about that. They cared about Baby Yoda, the popular (and frankly better) name for the creature he protects, the creature officially named the Child and then Grogu.

Creators Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni don’t use the name Baby Yoda in the title of their upcoming film The Mandalorian and Grogu, but they know what the people want. That’s why the trailer features a brief glimpse of an infant Rodian, a character we are going to call “Baby Greedo.” No, this child doesn’t shoot first, but he does look scared before being whisked away by his mother, and he does it adorably.

Baby Greedo is just one of the many creatures on display in the trailer. Sure, there’s a bit about a plot involving the bounty hunter Embo from (unsurprisingly) The Clone Wars cartoon series, as well as the Mandalorian Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) facing off against Jabba’s son Rotta the Hutt (The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White), who also comes from The Clone Wars, because of course he does.

But really, it’s all about the monsters. We get to see Hutt gladiators, a cool white sea serpent thing, some dinosaur-looking dude. Clearly, Favreau and Filoni have taken the lessons of the Mos Eisley Cantina and applied it to the entire film.

That aesthetic includes leaning into the cuteness of Grogu and Baby Greedo. As Djarin’s voice over suggests, Grogu is maturing into the powerful Force user we knew he’d become, and even if his attempts to lift a vehicle inspire more slapstick chuckles than they do awe, he clearly has great power. To underscore the point, the trailer features images of Grogu meditating serenely in a swamp, bringing to mind Yoda, or as we like to call him, “Grown-up Grogu.” And if that wasn’t enough, there appear to be multiple Anzellans like Babu Frik, bringing to mind the one redeeming feature of Star Wars: Episode Nine—The Rise of Skywalker.

But will it be enough? As Baby Yoda has matured into Grogu and as The Mandalorian became more a sequel to The Clone Wars, its appeal has been limited to Millennials who love the prequels and Filoni’s cartoons. Dedicated as they are, that audience may not be enough to make a major motion picture worthwhile. But maybe the sheer cuteness of Baby Greedo will make up the difference.

The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22, 2026.

Dreamcatcher Is Exactly the Stephen King Movie It Should Be

“I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much,” Stephen King said of his bestselling sci-fi horror book back in 2014. Written in longhand under the heavy influence of OxyContin, a medication that the author was taking after a car accident had left him severely injured, the book was certainly …something. Mind you, this remark about him not liking his book came more than a decade after it had already been adapted for the screen and he’d declared the movie version “one of the very, very good adaptations” of his work. Perhaps, then, we should view this as a very strange kind of compliment.

Indeed, the Dreamcatcher movie is also certainly …something. A largely faithful adaptation of King’s tome, it was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who had previously found success writing Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Bodyguard. He co-wrote Dreamcatcher with legendary screenwriter William Goldman, and the film features a stacked cast that includes Timothy Olyphant, Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, and Damian Lewis. It’s no surprise that people were excited to see how it turned out.

However, there was still the actual King story to contend with, and what a story it is! We follow four lifelong friends – Jonesy, Beaver, Pete, and Henry – who share a mysterious psychic bond after saving a troubled boy named Duddits in childhood. Years later, they reunite for an annual hunting trip, only to find the area gripped by a deadly alien infection. Stumbling upon a disoriented stranger, they soon discover he’s carrying a parasitic extraterrestrial lifeform that violently bursts from the assholes of its human hosts. This “shitweasel” infection spreads rapidly, so the U.S. military quarantines the region to contain the threat.

The leader of the alien force is also revealed to be capable of possessing human bodies. It takes control of Jonesy (Lewis), using him as a host to finalize its evil plan. Jonesy battles the invader in a surreal “memory warehouse” inside his own mind, trying to regain control. Meanwhile, Henry (Jane) teams up with the adult Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) to stop the aliens from contaminating a major water supply.

So what we have here is a lot of nonsense peppered with classic King dialogue motifs (“SSDD,” “fuck me Freddy,” “fuckarow.”) There are alien butt monsters, the U.S. military, a snowstorm, scenes set entirely in a character’s mind, and jarring Maine flashbacks that have to keep explaining who Duddits is and why his supernatural bond with the lads matters, because he’s going to come back at the end to save the day. To say all of this is messy would be an understatement, but when you know that King wrote this story while high as balls on OxyContin, I’d argue it’s all pretty easy to understand.

The movie also springs one bonkers filmmaking decision after another on us, as it should. “Sometimes you can underestimate what can be in a movie,” Kasdan told In Focus. “There were things in the book that I wanted in the movie that [Goldman] felt maybe couldn’t be in – and I sort of added them back.” He absolutely did, yes. And then some. For example, the character of Jonesy is an American, but when the alien leader, Mr Gray, possesses his body almost halfway into the movie’s runtime, it turns out that the alien has a clipped, Laurence Olivier-esque, 1930s British accent, which Lewis admits was “a kind of wild and surreal” decision, adding, “People jumped online afterwards and said, ‘Oh God, I really loved the film. But that Damian Lewis guy, what is that English accent? It’s totally unbelievable.'”

That’s right, the audience didn’t think Lewis – who is actually British – managed to pull off what was essentially his own accent. That’s how much whiplash Jonesy’s “tally ho!” handbrake turn into Mr Gray inflicts on viewers. And that’s hardly all. Jonesy’s mental memory warehouse, kept from the book, is also envisioned as a real warehouse where Lewis is seen pottering around, retrieving files full of exposition and plot twists. When we jump there, we don’t know if we’re about to see a deus ex machina or a flashback that derails the movie’s momentum. Elsewhere, Jason Lee’s performance as the somewhat underwritten Beaver is so surprisingly good that he blows everyone else off the screen. When he’s eaten alive by a toilet monster at the end of the first act, it leaves a sudden gaping hole (no pun intended) in the movie’s vibe.

Then there’s the U.S. military duo of Freeman and Tom Sizemore, who feel like they’re in a completely different movie. Dreamcatcher needs us to understand that Freeman’s Colonel Abraham Curtis is unhinged and that Sizemore’s Captain Owen Underhill is the only one who can stop him from nuking the infected site from orbit, but these roles are woefully miscast – Sizemore is not a natural straight man and Freeman seems extremely uncomfortable with the dialogue he’s been given as he rants about everything from his gun (he got it from John Wayne) to the reverence he has for American citizens “they never miss an episode of Friends,” all while trying to sell dialogue like “Bucko, I think we’re on the same page – pissing in the same latrine” with classic Freeman gravitas (he fails spectacularly.) Though Freeman said he got input on everything we see him do in Dreamcatcher, he also joked, “What if I said ‘paycheck’?” when asked what kind of genre it falls into.

We haven’t even gotten to Wahlberg’s performance as the adult version of Duddits. Here, the New Kids on the Block icon-turned-actor has the unenviable task of playing a powerful alien entity hiding inside the body of someone with a disability. Wahlberg said he prepared for the role by watching videos of kids with Down syndrome. Your mileage may vary with this one, folks, to put it mildly.

Taking all this into account, it will not shock you to learn that Dreamcatcher bombed both critically and financially. Not only that, it “wounded” Kasdan’s career considerably; it would be almost a decade before he directed another movie (the Diane Keaton-led dog rom-com, Darling Companion.)

Still, there’s something decidedly bold about Dreamcatcher that invites a reassessment, especially in the wacky, Scooby-Doo-riffing era of Welcome to Derry. You’ve got to admire (and dare I say, respect) Kasdan’s certainty that a story about a group of psychic friends dealing with an alien shitweasel invasion in the middle of a snowstorm, from the decidedly drug-fueled mind of Stephen King, would work on the big screen. I mean, it didn’t, but the movie remains massively entertaining because everyone seems to be having such a lot of fun with the deranged material. “I loved making that movie,” Lewis said, reflecting on the experience. “I loved working with Larry. It was a wild ride of a film; that script was a lot. But we had a great group of guys.”

Sometimes, that’s all you need. Sure, Dreamcatcher remains an unsubtle clusterfuck of a movie, yet at least it swings for the fences. With so many genres crammed inside it – alien invasion, body horror, psychic friendship drama, military thriller – it is absolute chaos, but that’s a feature, not a bug. And y’know what? With everything it’s got going on, at least you’re never bored.

Colossal Is Using New AI Tools That Might Just Save the Gray Wolf

The tooth-billed pigeon, which is sometimes referred to as “the little dodo” of the Pacific, is a variety of fowl indigenous only on the islands of Samoa. For more than a decade, it was also thought to be lost, if not outright extinct, after its last confirmed sighting occurred in 2013. That changed in 2025, though, when the Colossal Foundation—the conservation arm of the Texas technology company—introduced a new device to Samoa.

Described as a bioacoustics array derived from sound censors and a 360-degree camera mounted on top, this “classifier” is an AI-powered machine that has only begun to be deployed over the past 13 months at sites and national parks around the world. And according to Matt James, the chief animal officer of Colossal Biosciences as well as the executive director of the Colossal Foundation, it pinged the tooth-billed pigeon 43 times on its first deployment in Samoa alone.

“We know it’s out there,” James smiles while sitting across a conference room in Dallas. “So the next step [was] to get teams out there, go get eyeballs on them. And they’ve now seen them for the first time a month ago. It’s the first time in 13 years the bird’s been seen by a human, so the next step is can you begin to grab these animals and put them back into human care, so we can create captive breeding and release programs?”

That last bit might prove especially prudent considering one of the reasons the bird is virtually extinct is because an invasive breed of feral cat has flooded the island. It’s hardly an ideal situation, but according to the Colossal officer, it’s a chance to “bring them to human care, remove the cats, begin to build the population, and put them back in the wild, all because an AI tool is able to find it where nobody else could find it.”

It’s also a sample of work that might be less flashy than the de-extinction project that’s made Colossal famous after they brought a version of the dire wolf back from prehistory last year, but it has profound and immediate implications for species already here, from this relatively large pigeon in the South Pacific to elephants in Africa, and the much debated American gray wolf inside the continental U.S.

When we catch up with James, it’s during the recent grand opening of the Colossal Biosciences headquarters and laboratories in Dallas. We previously toured the campus last year when Colossal dominated social media with images of baby dire wolves—and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm remains adamant that the goal of having a woolly mammoth calf walking the earth again by 2028 remains on track. But it’s clear the technology company is at a pivot point following the last 12 months. The closest thing to a real-life Jurassic Park is now open to school tours, the world’s first permanent BioVault dedicated to preserving endangered or extinct genetic genomes is being established in Dubai, and as James muses, “[If] ’25 was about growth… ’26 is about delivery. It’s time.”

The foundation’s  “bioacoustics classifier” and the AI system it implements seems like one such device that can deliver sooner. Already its systems are being implemented in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where it is being used to monitor gray wolves, and in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, where it is intended to study and protect the African elephant.

“We’ve developed it and we just give it to our conservation partners for free,” James explains. “The hardware is a piece that we will buy for them and then deploy it.” In Yellowstone, they’ve already deployed 55 classifiers, which create a grid system monitoring five kilometers each. “They’re really far spaced out,” James continues, “you don’t need a ton of them to do that, and so for $55,000, you essentially can cover all of the world’s largest national park.”

First deployed at Yellowstone in January 2025, the devices work by remotely connecting with a cell network which uses bioacoustics that record the sound of an animal’s cry to build and analyze spectrogram data, deciphering what is, say, a gray wolf instead of a coyote. The goal is for Colossal AI engineers to match that with a machine-learning tool that is able to individually distinguish a specific elephant or gray wolf, or pigeon, from another with a single drone image. According to James, when the bioacoustics classifier was first tested, it had a 96 percent accuracy rate, and that score has only gone up since it’s been refined.

The applications for such tools also expand far beyond just finding hard-to-seek species. The plan is to enhance the study of living animals, as well as mitigate potentially dangerous encounters with humans.

“So we now have a tool that basically can look at drone imagery, track elephants, and say we know exactly who this elephant is,” James notes. “What it begins to create is ethogram data, so it’s telling you behaviorally what they are doing. Right now they’re muddying, they’re flapping their ears, they’re all directing their attention to one individual in the herd. So [in our] partnership with Save the Elephants in Samburu, that’s giving them a lot of data to work on management.”

He continues, “But if you think about one of the biggest issues with elephant conservation and wolf conservation, it’s conflict with humans. If you can begin to identify, basically, the troublemakers in each group, you can create early warning systems for cattlemen in Montana or for crop co-ops in Kenya and say, ‘Hey, just so you know, there’s a troublemaker in your area, you should be deploying your mitigation tools tonight and avoid some of the conflict that results in elephant or wolf death.’”

The technology has so far not actually been used to mitigate conflict between ranchers and gray wolves in the American West—one of the continued flashpoints which contributes to the ongoing debate about delisting the gray wolf as an endangered species in 44 states—yet the intent is there to both improve relations with those worried about wolves attacking livestock, as well as a general public that might still view the timber wolf as a nuisance or monstrous beast.

“I’m hoping it creates an opportunity to understand wolf language,” says James. “When we start talking about language, it’s a great way to anthropomorphize a species that’s severely persecuted, wrongfully persecuted. And if you can create some compassion for this species, hopefully you’re reducing some of the persecution. Cattlemen probably don’t really care for that part, but if we can say, ‘Hey, it’s a great conflict mitigation tool,’ they care about that. [Meanwhile] the mass public says, ‘Okay, well, maybe wolves aren’t as bad as we thought they were,’ and I think that’s the winning combination.”

The technology already exists, and in fact appears to be the tip of the spear in introducing AI tools into conservation efforts. After all, James muses that Abhishek Jana, a senior scientist working in the Colossal Foundation’s AI unit, retrofitted the bioacoustics tech from being a “bird classifier” to a wolf-based device in a single weekend. “We literally said on a Friday, ‘Hey, can you make a wolf classifier?’ And on Monday, I had an email where he said ‘try this.’”

It makes the mind wonder about the implications a decade from now.

Wuthering Heights: Why Does Book Fidelity Seem to Matter Only for Emerald Fennell?

This article contains Wuthering Heights spoilers (as well as for Frankenstein and Dune).

Emerald Fennell’s relationship to Emily Brontë appears to be an estranged and distant thing. The Millennial iconoclast who once filmed Barry Keoghan getting intimate with the grave of his lost love in Saltburn would at a glance seem perfect for the English author’s portrait of multigenerational degradation. What is Wuthering Heights if not an godseyed view of several great houses slowly falling to ruin, which becomes complete when the Byronic antihero Heathcliff likewise digs up the remains of his great love? It’s about clinging tightly to the past until you’re in the ground with it.

Curiously though, that is not the movie Fennell chose to make. As was initially hinted by the filmmaker and Warner Brothers cheekily bringing back the title quotes on posters favored by Golden Age Hollywood publicity departments—think one-sheets for Gone with the Wind (1939), Warners’ own Casablanca (1942), or even William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights circa ’39—this “Wuthering Heights” is an unapologetic reinterpretation; a deviation; an outright reevaluation, even, which took the basic outline of Brontë’s story and reframed it in a narrative that better represented the themes Fennell wanted to explore: lust, love, and the maximalist ecstasy of a soul set free.

In my review of the film, I suggested it felt less like a 19th century story about tragic longing and repressed desires curdling into hate than it is a teenage daydream ocurring while listening to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (also with the quotation marks) and imagining what the book is about. That apparently was not too far off the mark. In several interviews, Fennell has talked about coming to the novel at 14 years old and feeling transformed by its effect on her mind. She even said, “I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real. So there’s a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

That tracks since so much of Fennell’s film deliberately evokes a fevered dream and the artifice of cinema classics of yore. There are the old Hollywood flourishes but also bits of surrealism, German Expressionism, and imagery that might look at home in a music video for the aforementioned Kate Bush. And whether you love Fennell’s indulgent sense of artifice, or find it simplistic since it glorifies a romance between two people who remain genuinely awful—with Cathy still played with self-absorbed vanity by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff staying gloomily transfixed by his grudges and hatreds for everyone around him—it is nevertheless a valid work of art from an artist who chased her own muses.

Yet so much of the criticism I have seen directed toward Wuthering Heights 2026, and Fennell in particular, seems less concerned about engaging with what she put onscreen than what she left out. Admittedly there are missed opportunities worth acknowledging. The loss of the central ghost story framework of the tale robs Cathy and Heathcliff’s doomed and damnable love story of some of its ethereal charm, as well as oblique perversity. Also while Heathcliff’s racial background is intentionally ambiguous on the page, refusing to let Heathcliff to appear as a changeling perceived as the “other” within the strictures of the landed English gentry deprives the story of the 19th century imperial desires and anxieties that Brontë exploited.

While Australian Elordi’s Heathcliff is lily white, Fennell intriguingly takes a “color-blind casting” approach to the characters who would seek to cast Heathcliff out into the cold: the rich aristocrat Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and Nelly (Hong Chau). The latter is Cathy’s maid and confidant who, in Fennell’s telling, proves to be as duplicitous as any of them. It is, in fact, this Nelly who deliberately betrays Cathy and Heathcliff’s trust at various points. Yet this shift does not evidently court any commentary on perceptions of race in Britain at the height of imperialism. Rather it seems designed to push the film further into the realm of distant fairy tale, where it is as divorced from a historical time and place as Cathy’s plunging necklines.

To critique the changes, or find them inferior, is fair game. But the vast majority of discourse around this Wuthering Heights seems specifically derived from the personal umbrage that the changes exist at all. The narrative seems less about whether Fennell made a good movie and instead that she had the audacity to make a movie tailored to her own tastes instead of that of English literature departments.

“Everyone hates the new Wuthering Heights trailer, and here’s why,” The Spinoff published five months before the movie came out. “Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is objectively not Wuthering Heights,” opined CBC in a review that suggests the film’s changes are so head-scratching that they may eventually “lead to a brain injury.” Collider, not unfairly, surmised that Brontë is “rolling in her grave.”

Brontë probably is, to which I ask… so what?!

Why does it matter so much that Emerald Fennell personally deviated from an oft-adapted novel to craft her own maximalist fantasia? She is not the first filmmaker to take striking liberties with Brontë. In fact, it was not until the 2011 Andrea Arnold miniseries starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson that a major adaptation attempted to cover the full multigenerational breadth of the book. Until then, most followed William Wyler’s lead from the classic 1939 Hollywood version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon by ending the story with Cathy’s death and Heathcliff’s plea she haunt him forevermore. Arnold’s miniseries also holds the distinction of being the first version to cast a Black actor as Heathcliff. Still, before and after we’ve had Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, and Timothy Dalton, among others, play Heathcliff, and films like the ‘39 version which conspicuously soften Cathy’s selfishness or Heathcliff’s sadism.

Beyond Wuthering Heights, some of the most celebrated films of the last few years have taken just as much, if not greater, liberty with their source materials. Jacob Elordi indeed stars in another of them via Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeously realized vision of Frankenstein, for which Elordi might very well win an Oscar. His and del Toro’s interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Creature is full of pathos and elegant acting choices. They also choose to intentionally downplay the Creature’s flaws and failings. Hence in del Toro’s film, it is Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) who accidentally kills the woman he is in love with instead of the Creature cruelly and deliberately murdering Elizabeth on her wedding night to Victor.

Similarly, the year before, nerd culture generally was in geek cinema nirvana when Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two ended in tragedy as the Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) refuses to accept Paul Atreides’ wedding betrothal to a galactic princess as a political necessity. Instead she sees Timothée Chalamet’s Paul for the burgeoning tyrant most book-readers miss entirely when they finish Frank Herbert’s first Dune volume on the high of Paul defeating his enemies, and Chani happily accepting her lot as Paul’s concubine.

These are just a few of far more significant structural changes made both by del Toro and Villeneuve, whose shifts ran the gamut from changing the location and period (Frankenstein on the page is set in late 18th century Switzerland, not mid-19th century England) to omitting entire details like the tidbit of Paul and Chani having a young son who is murdered by their rivals in a novel that spans years, not months.

It is easy to wonder whether Fennell is held to a different standard than other filmmakers, perhaps because of her tendencies for decadence and excess (and questionable class subtexts) courting acrimony from a specific, popular lens of modern online criticism. Or, perhaps, it is because she’s a woman. Truthfully, though, it might be less about Fennell than the source material. While del Toro and Villeneuve, like Fennell, had intense formative experiences growing up with the novels they adapted, Wuthering Heights is a far more universal foundational text for thousands due to being on the English curriculum of most secondary or high schools on either side of the Atlantic.

Wuthering Heights has been read by more modern audiences than Frankenstein or Dune, or Dracula, or probably even Huckleberry Finn. To let Cathy and Heathcliff have sex on the moors is a bit like revealing to audiences that Ebenezer Scrooge is married. That’s just not the way things are supposed to happen!

But at the end of the day, art is much more fulfilling when engaged on its own terms versus comparing it side by side with a text. The best films based on books generally make mincemeat of their source material—The Godfather, Jaws, The Shining—and as del Toro himself once said, “At the end of the day, I say adapting is like marrying a widow. You can pay respect to the late husband, but on Saturdays, you gotta get it on.”

Being able to get it on is one thing Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has no trouble with, especially when Charli XCX ballads drift across the 19th century moors.

Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.

10 Times De-Aging Graced Our Screens, For Better or for Worse

Digital de-aging has become a common tool in modern filmmaking. Studios use visual effects to make actors appear decades younger, whether for flashbacks, sequels, or full-length performances set in the past. The results vary. In some cases, the technology blends seamlessly with live action footage. In others, audiences notice stiffness, lighting inconsistencies, or uncanny facial movement. As visual effects budgets grow and software improves, de-aging has shifted from novelty to standard practice in major franchises. Here are 10 notable examples where filmmakers used the technique, with mixed reactions from viewers and critics.

The Irishman

Digital de-aging allowed decades to be shown on a single actor. The effect worked very well, staying mostly natural, though some facial movements look slightly off.

Gemini Man

Will Smith played both his current and younger self. The effect was visually impressive, but some critics found facial expressions slightly unnatural.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Brad Pitt ages backward across the film. The de-aging was effective and contributed meaningfully to the story.

Tron: Legacy

Jeff Bridges appeared as a younger version of his character in certain sequences, blending CGI with performance capture, and the result was effective for action sequences.

Ant-Man

Flashback scenes used subtle de-aging to show younger versions of supporting characters without breaking visual continuity. The effect was barely noticeable, which worked in its favor.

Black Widow

David Harbour was digitally de-aged in flashback scenes alongside Florence Pugh, maintaining continuity without distracting from the story.

Captain America: Civil War

Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes was de-aged in flashbacks to depict events during World War II. The effect was subtle and visually coherent.

Captain Marvel

Samuel L. Jackson was de-aged to play a younger version of Nick Fury, maintaining continuity with the character’s earlier backstory in the MCU. The result looked natural and consistent.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2

Kurt Russell appeared de-aged briefly in a flashback scene to portray a younger Ego. The effect was limited but effective for storytelling.

Star Wars: Rogue One

Peter Cushing, who had passed away decades earlier, was digitally recreated to reprise his role as Grand Moff Tarkin.

Robert Duvall’s Most Famous Line is Richer and Sadder Than You Remember

The news that Robert Duvall has passed away at the age of 95 will certainly bring remembrances of the actor’s memorable performances. Films such as The Godfather, Tender Mercies, and Newsies will be mentioned alongside great TV work in Lonesome Dove and The Twilight Zone. And surely, someone will mention the most famous line that Duvall ever uttered, in his role as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now.

After storming a Vietnamese beach with Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) in tow, a shirtless Kilgore surveys the carnage and makes a declaration that has been quoted and parodied time and again: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” So famous is the line itself that people tend to forget what Duvall does after his declaration, in which he does some of his best and most subtle acting.

A Man for All Movements

Robert Duvall began his career in television, jumped to films with the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, and continued doing great work well into his 90s, turning up in everything from Tony Scott‘s Days of Thunder to the Steve McQueen crime drama Widows. But he’ll always be best remembered as the ideal New Hollywood player. Duvall starred in George Lucas‘s film debut THX 1138, originated the role of Frank Burns in Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H., and played a studio boss in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.

Duvall’s most famous work may be with Coppola, appearing in all four of the masterpieces that the director made in the 1970s. While he went uncredited in The Conversation (1974) and his role as Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) are legendary, Apocalypse Now (1979) may be his best work.

A loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness transplanted into the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now follows Captain Willard on a mission deep into the Vietnamese wilderness to assassinate the AWOL Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Along the way, Willard introduces viewers to the absurdities and excesses of America’s actions in Vietnam, none more absurd and excessive than the Ranger unit led by Duvall’s Kilgore. Willard describes Kilgore as a leader beloved by his men for his commitment to fun, trying to make the front feel like home. For example, when Kilgore learns about incredible waves in the area where Willard needs to go, he dismisses concerns that the Viet Cong (“Victor Charlie” in G.I. slang) control the point by bellowing, “Charlie don’t surf!”

It’s Kilgore who sends his choppers over the beach, set to the strains of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” It’s Kilgore who strips off his shirt and orders a napalm strike, all while stopping to hurry a Vietnamese mother and young child to safety and to urge a champion surfer in Willard’s charge to hit the waves. And it’s Kilgore who pauses a moment to enjoy the smell of napalm.

Quiet Within Kilgore

His chest puffed out and his arms on his side, Kilgore is all American pride. “That’s napalm. Nothing else in the world smells like that,” he tells his men, before crouching down to get closer to them. He almost casts aside the line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” getting it out of the way so he can recall for his men a napalm attack that wiped out the enemy before they could even fight them. Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro push the camera in on Duvall’s face as Kilgore wraps up his story, his vocabulary running out as he tries to come to the point. “It smells like…” Kilgore says, pausing and twisting his face as he looks for the right word to capture the magnitude of the moment. Finally, satisfaction fills his face and he allows himself a smile. “Victory,” he declares.

Kilgore follows up his statement with a small smile and nod, and then looks off into the distance to let the moment sink in. Despite, or because of, the mustard yellow smoke drifting past, Kilgore seems fully at home, if not happy, thanks to the twinkle that Duvall puts in his eye. A small explosion behind him doesn’t shock Kilgore out of his revery, but it does mark a change in Duvall’s body language. The beefy stance he once held has become limp, and the confidence on his face has dropped.

“Someday this war is gonna end,” he observes to Willard, with just a hint of frustration. He gives a consoling smile and nod, but even he can’t keep up the facade. Instead, he sulks away in frustration, tossing aside the bit of straw he had been chewing on, as if now embarrassed by all of his bluster.

The Real Within the Ridiculous

Apocalypse Now is an over-the-top take on a war film, and Colonel Kilgore is its most cartoonish figure. As much as writers such as Tim O’Brien have told us that the inexplicable happened in Vietnam, we viewers still have a hard time believing that the conflict would have someone who surfed in the middle of battle or blasted Wagner from his chopper. Even if an actor wanted to locate some humanity in Kilgore, they couldn’t find it with what was on the page.

And yet, Duvall plays Kilgore as a human. In those pauses, in the way he lets his eyes drift for a moment, in the way that his body goes from puffed up and proud to slack, Duvall reveals that there’s a vulnerable person behind all the bluster. Colonel Kilgore may desperately want to be the type of man who has so little fear that he can surf in a war zone, the type of man who doesn’t care about the devastation around him, but those tiny choices that Duvall makes reveal it all to be an act. Kilgore is in fact a human being, capable of empathy. It’s just that he’s a human being in a conflict where empathy is even more absurd than the battle itself.

Such decisions were the hallmarks of Duvall’s career. With just the movement of his eyes, Duvall could suggest layers, even with characters that feel like one-note jerks, loudmouths, and buffoons. Duvall always brought humanity to the screen and, without him, we are all a little less human.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Promo Leaks Reveal New Foes

The final moments of Spider-Man: No Way Home sure felt triumphant, but anyone who knows about the ol’ Parker luck that’s plagued Peter his entire life could tell that bad things were coming. Like his comic book counterpart, the MCU Spider-Man played by Tom Holland was living in a New York squalor, and no longer had the benefit of Tony Stark‘s fortunes or the Avengers, let alone other Spider-Men. If the villains decide to team-up again, then Peter’s going to have his hands full.

It sounds like that’s exactly what’s going to happen in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And thanks to some leaked merchandise material, we finally get to see some of the baddies making Peter’s life difficult in Brand New Day. In addition to an image of Spidey and the Hulk, we can see silhouettes of Tarantula, Scorpion, and Boomerang, which match leaked full-color images of the characters. The pictures also coincide with a leaked still of Spider-Man battling against Tombstone.

These deadly foes of Spider-Man are enough to get comic book fans excited, but your average moviegoer probably doesn’t know why they should care about this quartet. These aren’t headliners like Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, or Venom, the baddies who appear in just about every Spider-Man movie, TV show, or video game. These are mostly jobbers, but that’s the thing with Spider-Man: his jobbers are pretty fantastic.

Created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for Tales to Astonish #81 (1966), Boomerang first appeared as a hired gun for an underground group called the Secret Empire. An Australian pitcher called Frederick Myers, Boomerang turned to crime when his baseball career stalled out. Originally, he threw small red discs more than he did his titular weapon, but by the time he became a regular pain in Spidey’s neck, Boomerang primarily relied on his titular weapon.

Introduced in 1974’s Amazing Spider-Man #134, by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, Tarantula is just as unsuccessful as Boomerang, but far more serious. Born Anton Miguel Rodriquez, Tarantula was a freedom fighter who turned against the revolutionaries to join a fascist regime, becoming their version of a Captain America-type nationalist hero. However, Tarantula lacks any powers beyond being a really good fighter, which made his occasional trips to New York City unimpressive, as Spider-Man is also a really good fighter and he has spider-powers.

Of the three seen in the background image, Scorpion is both the most formidable and the most recognizable. In fact, we’ve already met Scorpion way back in Spider-Man: Homecoming, where the still fresh-faced Spidey thwarted an arms sale involving Mac Gargan (Michael Mando). In a post-credit scene, Gargan shared a bad guy moment with Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), but he’s been missing until now. If the leaked pictures are any indication, Gargan will finally be in a variation of the Scorpion armor he’s been wearing since his first appearances in Amazing Spider-Man #19-20 (1964), by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. In those comics, Gargan was given the armor by J. Jonah Jameson to take down the menace Spider-Man. We’ll have to see if the movies follow suit.

Although he doesn’t appear in the main leaked merchandise image, Tombstone deserves attention here too, if only because he’s rumored to be the major antagonist of Brand New Day. A background character in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and a major character in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Tombstone is a gangster with nearly invulnerable skin. Although he usually concerns himself with street-level crimes (and sometimes antagonizing his childhood friend Robbie Robertson, a top editor at the Daily Bugle), Tombstone’s strength, durability, and general nastiness make him a challenge for Spidey. In Brand New Day, Tombstone will be played by Marvin Jones III, who recently did supervillain duty as Tobias “White” Whale on the CW series Black Lightning.

At this point, one might raise a concern about Brand New Day. We’ve got four villains listed here, and we already know that the film will also feature Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Jon Bernthal as the Punisher, and Sadie Sink as another super-character, likely Jean Grey of the X-Men. On top of that, Sink’s character will be pursued by the Department of Damage Control, potentially led by the character played by Severance breakout Tramell Tillman. Won’t these baddies get overshadowed by the bigger names?

They probably will be overshadowed, and that’s okay. Minor baddies are all part of the Spider-Man universe. They serve as opportunities to show that Spidey cares about street-level stuff, and as opportunities for Spidey to show his compassion toward losers who decide to put on a suit and make trouble for people.

With all of these guys running around, Peter’s life won’t be easy in Brand New Day. But it will fully and finally cement him as a properly friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31, 2026.

The Silence of the Lambs Star Admits Movie’s Gender Issues “Don’t Hold Up Too Well”

As we enjoy the record-breaking Oscars season that Sinners is enjoying, we should look back at the horror movie that finally got the Academy to pay attention to the genre. Released in 1991, The Silence of the Lambs won all the major categories, bringing home Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, a rarity for any movie, let alone one about a guy who eats people’s livers with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Yet, as The Silence of the Lambs celebrates its 35th birthday, some issues do stand out. In particular, some have argued that the gender identity of primary killer Jame Gumb a.k.a. Buffalo Bill demonizes trans people. Those critics include Ted Levine, the actor who played Gumb. “It’s unfortunate that the film vilified that, and it’s fucking wrong,” Levine told The Hollywood Reporter. “And you can quote me on that.”

Based on the novel by Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lamb is best remembered for Anthony Hopkins‘s incredible performance as Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychologist who abides by a strict “eat the rude” policy,” and for his relationship to young FBI recruit Clarice Starling, played by an equally great Jodie Foster. However, Starling is sent to get a consultation from Lecter because the FBI is hunting Gumb, a serial killer who has kidnapped the daughter of a senator. Through Lecter’s analysis, Starling and her superiors learn that Gumb plans to make a female body for himself with the sinks of the women he killed.

“There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well,” Levine said of that plot line. “We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.” In particular, Levine states that his own process of maturing and learning has forced him to reconsider the film. “Just over time and having gotten aware and worked with trans folks, and understanding a bit more about the culture and the reality of the meaning of gender.”

The portrayal of Gumb stems in part from the source material, as Harris has a tendency to embrace the lurid, pulpy side of things. Where filmmakers such as Ridley Scott, who helmed the sequel Hannibal, lean into the upsetting aspects of Harris’ work, Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme tends to take a more humanistic approach, which made the connection between Gumb’s sexuality and his psychosis all the more upsetting. And while both the novel and the film explicitly state that Gumb is not trans, those lines alone do little to offset a long history of horrible portrayals of trans people, especially in pop culture. Movies such as Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and Sleepaway Camp have tied gender fluidity to murderous impulses.

Still, Levine isn’t the only person involved in the film to worry about its reception. During his lifetime, Demme had expressed regret over the way Silence of the Lambs invited further transphobia, and followed up that movie with Philadelphia, a far more sympathetic look at the lives of LGBTQIA+ people.

For his part, Levine still insists that his character wasn’t trans at all. “I didn’t play him as being gay or trans,” he pointed out. “I think he was just a fucked-up heterosexual man.” Maybe by the time it hits its 70th birthday, that will become the reputation of The Silence of the Lambs, that its not a portrayal of the dangers of a trans person, but rather a picture of a straight man who attacks women.

Halle Berry Recalls Her Showdown with Bryan Singer on X‑Men Set

Bryan Singer’s issues while working on the first two X-Men movies have been largely documented through revelations from various cast members over the years, indicating there were some tumultuous times on set with the director who first made a splash in the ’90s with the neo-noir crime thriller The Usual Suspects.

Singer hasn’t directed a movie since multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him were recounted in a report from The Atlantic in 2019, but the stars of his blockbuster X-Men franchise installments haven’t forgotten what it was like to work with him back in the day.

Halle Berry, who starred as the mutant Storm in four of Singer’s X-Men films, recently recalled a time when she finally stood up to him on set, saying she told him “just where to go and how to get there.”

“Everybody was mad, but they all said to me, ‘Halle, you go tell ’em,’ because they knew I would. And it’s one of the greatest days on a set, telling someone who was wronging the entire crew, the entire cast, exactly where to go. And then I got on a plane and flew home with my X-Men suit on,” Berry told EW, adding, “I’m sorry, that guy deserved it.”

Nightcrawler actor Alan Cumming also remembers Berry’s showdown with Singer during the filming of X2 in his autobiography Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life, claiming that Singer was using painkillers and would display erratic behavior that included disappearing from the set for hours. But when Cumming, along with co-stars Berry, Patrick Stewart, James Marsden, and Famke Janssen, staged an intervention in Singer’s trailer, he reacted so badly that Berry reportedly ended up saying, “I’ve heard enough. You can kiss my black ass.”

Singer also disappeared from the set of X-Men: Apocalypse circa 2015, according to star Olivia Munn, who said that he flew out to LA to see a doctor “and was gone for about 10 days.”

“He texted to the actors, ‘Hey guys. I’m busy right now. But just go ahead and start filming without me.’ And we’d be like, ‘OK.’ And I never thought any of it was normal, but I didn’t realize that other people also thought it wasn’t normal. And the other people who thought it wasn’t normal would be people at high levels, people who make decisions on whether to hire this person,” Munn told Variety, adding, “[I’ve] come to find out it is really strange and it wasn’t OK. But this person is allowed to continue to go on. Fox still gives him Bohemian Rhapsody, and then we all know what happened.”

Fox eventually dismissed Singer from the Queen biopic during production in 2017, citing his “unexpected unavailability.” He was then replaced by Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher, who completed the film. It went on to win four Oscars at the 91st Academy Awards.

What Went Wrong With Emerald Fennell’s DC Superhero Movie?

Back in 2021, Emerald Fennell was just starting her career as a feature filmmaker and had received fairly widespread acclaim for her directorial debut, Promising Young Woman. It was no surprise, then, that the world of superheroes came knocking, and the trades soon revealed that she was writing a Zatanna movie for Bad Robot and Warner Bros.

But as the years went by, it became clear that Fennell’s DC movie wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she poured her efforts into the 2023 psychological thriller Saltburn and this year’s Margot Robbie-led bodice-ripper, Wuthering Heights. Though DC fans have often been curious about what happened to Zatanna, it was widely believed to have been shelved during the DC reset that saw James Gunn and Peter Safran take over creative control of the studio.

Now, Fennell has revealed a bit more about her stab at Zatanna and why it might not have gained traction.

“I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time,” Fennell told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And the thing is, I think what I can’t help but—and then, I’d just finished Promising Young Woman, and there was this huge thing in this world I’d never operated in. And again, it was a kind of superhero movie, and I was like, ‘How do I make the version of a superhero movie that I would connect to emotionally?’ Which is sort of the woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown, so it’s a script reflective of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown. And in terms of what that means, I suppose it just meant that it was probably too far away from the genre.”

Zatanna Zatara has long been one of DC’s most iconic magic-wielders. Channeling sorcery by speaking spells backward, her powers range from teleportation and elemental control to reality-warping. Serinda Swan played a more low-key version of the character on the CW’s Smallville, but Fennell’s axed movie would have marked the first time she’d have appeared on the big screen.

Fennell describes her lost Zatanna movie as “really dark” and admits she hasn’t re-read her script for a long time because she found it “really difficult.”

“I love JJ [Abrams] so much, and he took a chance offering me to do it, and I really wanted to deliver something amazing for them,” she explained. “And I always felt like I hadn’t quite maybe delivered the thing that they wanted. So, I haven’t read it since, and I wonder if I read it now, I’d be more generous toward myself. But I felt like, I wished I’d been able to deliver the thing they wanted. They were really lovely about it, it’s even just remembering. You’re making me remember scenes, I’m like, ‘Nobody would have made that.’”

Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.