Disclosure Day Trailer: Steven Spielberg Brings ’90s Paranoia into 2026
The most important words in the latest trailer for Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day are not words at all. They are a series of clicks and grunts that emanate from the mouth of a local newscaster played by Emily Blunt, a series of clicks and grunts that mean nothing to anyone except a secretive figure played by Josh O’Connor. The second most important words are also not spoken in the trailer, but they certainly come to the mind of any ’90s TV fan watching it: “The truth is out there.”
Unlike the more opaque teaser released a few months earlier, the full trailer for Disclosure Day leans into tropes made popular by The X-Files. O’Connor appears to be a government leaker who plans to release secret information about the reality of extraterrestrial life. That decision at least coincides with Blunt’s newscaster speaking the alien language on live television, an act that catches the attention of several other characters, including a nun played by Elizabeth Marvel and a young woman played by Bono’s daughter, Eve Hewson. Heck, we’ve even got Colin Firth as a tech mogul whose eyes blacken over and Colman Domingo shouting about hunger for the truth, neither of which would be unfamiliar to Mulder and Scully.
Of course, Steven Spielberg’s interest in aliens goes back to before the Clinton administration. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds are all defining films about humanity’s relationship to life on other planets. The same could be said of the paranoia driving the Disclosure Day trailer, as everything from the decrees of the mayor from Jaws and the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark to Minority Report and even The Post all show how the government hides secrets from the populace.
Yet, there’s no denying that Disclosure Day feels distinctly 1990s, which makes one wonder why it’s coming out now, when the government’s promise to release information about UFOs barely raises an eyebrow. We have so many more pressing and terrestrial concerns to deal with that, frankly, alien overlords seem like an improvement to our current condition.
Perhaps that throwback quality only makes Disclosure Day more appealing. Where The X-Files originally came from an era when the U.S. was enjoying so much peace and prosperity that we had to make up new enemies to fear, Disclosure Day arrives when the problems facing us are too real and too present, that fantasies about a distant threat provide some much-needed comfort.
At the very least, we can be assured that Disclosure Day will provide the awe and wonder he always does so well, as demonstrated by the trailer’s shots of nuns looking astonished and a little girl surrounded by forest animals. Whatever else Disclosure Day will do, it will for sure confirm one enduring and indisputable cinematic truth: that Steven Spielberg is really, really good at making movies.
Disclosure Day comes to theaters on June 12, 2026.
The Oscars Are About This Year, Not About All-Time
In his latest article, Deadline awards columnist Pete Hammond quoted a letter from an anonymous Academy member that’s sure to upset some Oscar enthusiasts. “I haven’t seen even half of the nominated films, nor do I care to,” the member wrote, citing several justifications, including irritation with a new rule that requires voters to watch all of the nominated films and a general desire to do something else with their time.
However, the most salient justification came at the end of the letter, when the member observed, “But really, the Oscars have become pretty irrelevant. Anora? CODA? Everything Everywhere All At Once? vs The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton? Which three movies will people still be watching five years from now? It’s all about the film, not the award. Rather than watch the Awards, I’ll probably watch Singin’ In The Rain or North By Northwest or The Searchers – REAL best pictures which weren’t even nominated.”
To some, the letter reads like a tough truth made all the harder to accept at the height of Oscar discourse, just days before the awards ceremony. But instead, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of the Oscars, a misunderstanding held by everyone from Academy members like the letter writer to the lay speculator at home. The Oscars are never truly about cementing cinema history or the greatest films of all time. They are about capturing a snapshot of movies that year, both on the screen and the surrounding milieu.
Nowhere is that point more clear than with one of the films that the letter writer cites. When CODA released in 2021, first at Sundance and various festivals and eventually on Apple TV, it received a warm reception from critics and general audiences. The story of a hearing young woman (Emilia Jones) with deaf parents and a deaf brother, CODA offered a kind, realistic look at an underrepresented community. Written and directed by Sian Heder, who based her film on the French-Belgian movie La Famille Bélier, CODA features strong performances, good cinematography, and a compelling (if sometimes clichéd) story.
Very few people would call CODA a bad movie. Yet, even four years later, very few people would call it the Best Picture of 2021, even though it beat out the likes of Dune, The Power of the Dog, King Richard, and West Side Story.
Did the Oscar voters make a mistake? The above letter writer certainly seems to think so. And it’s not much of a stretch to say that most of the other Best Picture nominees of that year are revisited and more fondly remembered than CODA. Heck, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the ceremony that bestowed the honor on CODA has more of a cultural legacy than the big winner. So the answer must be, “Yes, the Oscar voters messed up in 2022,” right?
Well, no. Because CODA was the Best Picture of 2021, as we thought about that year in cinema at the time. We were still at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2021, which particularly impacted the way we view movies. Dune, West Side Story, and even King Richard, big blockbusters with big feelings and stakes work better on a giant screen, which the majority of people weren’t willing or able to do. More traditional dramas such as Drive My Car, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza, and Don’t Look Up were a bit too prickly, a bit too challenging for audiences already overburdened with the stresses of a global pandemic.
So it’s no wonder that so many voters went for a quiet, life-affirming, but still well-made drama that plays best on streaming TV. CODA reflected what people wanted out of cinema—not forever, not to stand the test of time, but right then, when they were reflecting on the past year during the spring of 2022.
The of-the-moment nature of the Oscars always results in misfires, and it’s definitely worthwhile to look back at an all-time classic being overlooked for something that has aged poorly. Yes, The Wizard of Oz is better than Gone With the Wind, everyone remembers Citizen Kane and no one remembers How Green Was My Valley, and choosing Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction will look bad for the rest of time, no matter what stupid thing Quentin Tarantino will say next.
But in 1940, 1942, and 1997, voters were reflecting on the cinematic year that just ended, not on the rest of movie history. It was the right call at the time.
This Sunday night, we’ll probably learn that Academy members have once again chosen the wrong film or performer, bestowing the award on some forgettable distraction instead of a defining work. While we can, and certainly will, talk about it on Monday morning, we have to remember that the 98th annual Academy Awards don’t define what films will matter in 2026 or 2027, let alone 2075. They just reflect what the Academy considered important about movies in 2025. No less, but certainly no more.
The 98th Academy Awards will air on ABC and Hulu on at 7pm EST on Sunday, March 15, 2026.
SXSW 2026: Music Spotlight
While the big brand activations and celebrity sightings often headline at SXSW these days, the true spirit of the festival remains its dedication to global music. From packed dive bars to scenic outdoor stages, the 2026 lineup once again shows that the music portion of the festival is more about creating trends than following them.
Per usual, this year’s lineup features an eclectic mix of styles and sounds where buzz bands mingle with avant-garde IDM performance artists and mainstays of regional scenes from around the world. Whether you’re searching for the next breakout artist or want to dive into Austin’s scene by catching local favorites, the sheer number of performances and showcases can be tough to navigate. To assist you in cutting through the noise, we’ve rounded up some essential artists and must-see acts that are guaranteed to define the conversation this year at SXSW 2026.
BigXthaPlug
If you’re a country fan, you’ve probably already encountered your favorite artists collaborating with Dallas MC BigXthaPlug, a former NFL hopeful who has left Southern trap behind to fully lean into the growing country-rap boom. With cosigns from Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, and Post Malone, the booming baritone rapper can both rave up and weave narratives about past mistakes with gravitas and grace. You can even count Beyoncé as a fan; she’s used the fellow Texan’s music during interludes on her Cowboy Carter Tour.
Whitelands
The surging London shoegaze band Whitelands—featuring Etienne Quartey-Papafio (vocals/guitar), Jagun Meseorisa (drums), Vanessa Govinden (bass), and Michael Adelaja (guitar)—pulls from the dreamy side of the subgenre, utilizing warm textures, jangly, swirling guitars, and a tight rhythm section. Unlike many of their peers, Quartey-Papafio’s vocals are front and center, unafraid to shine. The band is also fearless in its lyrical content, tackling themes of racial inequality and imperialism. Comfortably flirting with pop hooks while valiantly pushing past mere aesthetics, Whitelands appears to be the true torchbearer for its legendary label Sonic Cathedral.
Nezza
Spanglish pop singer and Bay Area native Nezza went viral last summer after performing the Spanish version of the U.S. National Anthem (“El Pendón Estrellado”) at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game to protest the disruptive presence of ICE in the city. The moment of dissent brought attention to her Y2K-inspired single “Classy,” a breezy self-empowerment jam that conjures memories of “Fergalicious.” A former backup dancer for Zendaya and Selena Gomez, Nezza’s bilingual bops always feel particularly danceable. It’s only a matter of time before Nezza is selling out Dodger Stadium on her own.
buffalo_farm
Reportedly “born from a nightmare and forged into a dream,” Austin’s buffalo_farm is a one-man trap-metal project that sounds like a logical mutation of nu metal mayhem. Distorted, screamy vocals, glitchy drums, blown-out bass, and horror movie aesthetics define the masked buffalo_farm. The enigmatic artist garnered a loyal following by touring with like-minded artists, such as TX2, and gaming social media, all while eschewing traditional media pathways. Praised for their gritty, bloodletting performances, they’re a sight to behold at this year’s festival.
Frankfurt Helmet
Frequently cited as the future of Chinese electronic music, IDM (intelligent dance music) transmedia group Frankfurt Helmet features renowned Wuhan drummer Hu Juan, formerly of the influential post-punk band AV Okubo, and philosophy PhD, guitarist, and modular synth wizard, Da Fei. The duo treats their project as a multi-sensory art form, designed to be as much a mental experience as a sonic one, combining avant-garde, ambient soundscapes with high-concept visuals and installation art. Their brainy club music will have you entranced.
Spacestation
Nordic post-punk indie rock band Spacestation are stars in their hometown of Reykjavík, ready to conquer the U.S. Creating a recognizable fusion of noisy effects, delayed guitars, and Krautrock-influenced grooves, they would have fit right in with Interpol, She Wants Revenge, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club during the early 2000s garage rock revival. Playing shows in the U.S. for the first time, be sure to catch their high-energy live set.
runo plum
Queer Minneapolis singer-songwriter runo plum creates lush, intimate indie rock-leaning songs that evoke images of snow-blanketed forests, appropriate given plum’s upbringing in rural northern Minnesota. With an angelic voice and a background studying jazz, her deceptively simple-sounding music packs an emotional wallop. Plum often incorporates environmental sounds into her mix, like rustling trees or bird calls, creating an immersive, woodsy vibe. When she does let the guitars turn up, like on the transcendent “Lemon Garden,” the earthiness of plum’s work lifts off into the atmosphere.
ultra caro
French-born, London-based experimental pop artist ultra caro is in a new era. Formerly known as caro♡, this lead singer of PC Music’s trailblazing neo-shoegaze band Planet 1999 has become a post-hyperpop mastermind, blending dreamy, ethereal synthpop with beautifully processed vocals that sound deeply human despite the futuristic sheen. 2025’s moonlight diaries is an appropriately titled, hypnotic collection of exquisitely detailed, shimmering pop that sounds like late-night longing after the club closes.
OOZ
A supergroup of the underground Toronto hardcore scene, featuring members of Hot Garbage, Possum, and Kali Horse, OOZ is bringing the noise and abrasive griminess to SXSW. With heavy distortion, blast beats, and an improvisational quality to their breakdowns, OOZ twitches and thrashes with the best of them, and co-vocalist Sam Maloney has an infectious energy and indignant swagger that takes tracks like the punishing “Meddle” to spellbinding heights.
Fine
Fine is the solo project of Copenhagen composer/producer Fine Glindvad Jensen. Her surreal, reverb-soaked music borrows from country, folk, trip-hop, and pop, and sounds like it wouldn’t be out of place being performed at the Bang Bang Bar in Twin Peaks. Jensen co-wrote three songs on NewJeans’ EP Get Up, so it’s no surprise her music is sneakily hooky. Hazy and ageless-sounding, Fine’s sound is supremely cool, and her torch songs evoke images of woozily dancing alone with a bottle of wine, smiling through the tears.
Bayonne
Last but certainly not least, Austin’s own Bayonne is the moniker of indie electronica savant Roger Sellers. Ten years into a prolific career, Bayonne deploys loops, cooing falsetto vocals, and majestic piano stabs to deliver arena-ready, indie-pop anthems. Mesmerizing repetition and eddying instrumentation combined with raw introspection on 2023’s Temporary Time, which channeled the loss of Sellers’ father into the most beautiful, successful music in Bayonne’s discography. Bayonne’s mesmeric, boundary-pushing live shows are sure to be a highlight of this year’s festival.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season Finale Review — Rubincon
The following contains spoilers for the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy finale.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academywraps up its first season with a finale that’s predictably grand in scope: The future of the Federation is at stake, multiple lives are at risk, and Caleb is forced to face some uncomfortable choices about the two halves of himself that have been at war for most of the season. There’s a prodigious amount of technobabble, a last-second save (because of course there is), and some important lessons about found family and community. It is, in short, peak Star Trek, and while it’s certainly possible to argue that its ending is more than a little pat, it’s also satisfying in the way that this franchise always is. An affirmation, if you will, that the good guys win in the end, not because they’re good, but because they’re willing to be accountable in ways that the bad guys are not.
Star Trek is largely so compelling simply because we want to believe in it. Not because of the cool technology or colorful aliens or strange, far-off worlds in distant galaxies, but because it’s aspirational. A linchpin of its entire existence is the idea that when we get down to it, we can still choose to be better today than we were yesterday. Sure, Chancellor Ake, the Federation, humanity writ large, have all made mistakes. But we aren’t bound forever by them, and it’s possible to both recognize when we’ve done wrong and try to mend it. That is, in a large sense, a lot of what’s at work in this episode, which sets a lot of its characters on something like a path toward healing,
Picking up where last week’s cliffhanger left off, Captain Ake, Anisha Mir, Reno, the Doctor, and six cadets are all the Federation forces that remain outside the massive ring of Omega-47 mines. They’re almost immediately intercepted by Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka, Anisha and Nahla are taken prisoner, and everyone else is left behind to die aboard the crippled Athena. Thanks to some crafty planning, a thousand-year-old training program, and the Doctor inserting himself into the ship’s mainframe, this crisis is almost immediately averted. But the skeleton crew of students is forced to take the world’s most literal final exam, working to solve the problem of how to take down Braka’s minefield without devastating the galaxy in the process.
Predictably, this involves a lot of ridiculous technobabble and other vaguely scientific-sounding nonsense, involving everything from Sam cracking a complex chemical algorithm to stabilize the compound to Tarima using her emotional connection with Caleb to essentially follow his feelings to where his mother is being kept. It’s all kind of ridiculous from a “should this be possible” perspective, but emotionally, it hits all the necessary beats to show us just how far these kids have come this year.
Like so many Star Trek episodes before it, “Rubincon” also revolves around a trial. In it, Nahla Ake, and through her, the Federation, is prosecuted by Nus Braka for the sins of the Burn, for both the broad choices that were made in its wake (who was given help and who wasn’t) and the specific decisions in the time that followed that saw women like Anisha swallowed up by a system that didn’t always live up to the ideals it so (loudly) espoused. The heart of the episode isn’t in the collective fight against Braka, or even the kids getting their respective chances to step up at various points throughout the area. It’s in the ridiculously gutted set of the Academy itself that’s on fire for some reason, as Anisha and Ake finally have a confrontation that has been building for over a decade.
It’s about Caleb, of course — the woman who lost him versus the woman who found him and the specter of lost years in between that hovers them both — but also it isn’t. It’s about the Federation, sort of, but also really about responsibility and accountability, both in what we owe to one another and what we owe to ourselves. “Rubincon” is remarkably even-handed in its presentation of both Ake and Anisha’s failures, the choices they’ve made, the regrets they carry, and the ways they’ve chosen to frame their actions to center themselves as doing things for the right reason. It’s an hour that lets neither woman off the hook, yet simultaneously doesn’t condemn either. Every villain, after all, is the hero of their own story, and it follows that everyone who thinks they’re the good guy is too, even when the truth sits firmly in shades of grey.
Hunter both commands and conveys immense sympathy throughout, largely through little more than shifts in facial expressions. Nahla Ake is not a particularly demonstrative or even emotionally expressive woman, but Hunter somehow makes her eyes seem ancient, full of competing griefs all snarled together. Maslany gets the showier part, allowed to rage and scream in a way that Hunter is not, yet both feel equally matched against each other in terms of both emotion and argument.
Even Braka himself is given some unexpected humanity, his story of growing up on a starving mining colony doing a lot to explain, if certainly not excuse, his hatred for the institution he views as having personally left his people behind. Unfortunately, we don’t really have time to dig back into his over-the-top hate for Ake herself. Instead, she’s more of a convenient stand-in for the Federation writ large, as she’s old enough to have been alive before the Burn and the devastation that came after. (And, to be fair, perhaps that’s always been the case, but they certainly felt more immediate and personal back in “Come, Let’s Away”.) At any rate, the lesson here is something along the lines of everyone carries their own tragedy, and it’s how you allow it to shape you that matters.
Thankfully, by the end of the hour, the kids really are alright. Caleb’s speech in the wake of Ake’s guilty verdict buys everyone enough time for Sam and the Athena to take down the wall of mines encircling Federation space, the cavalry quite literally arrives, Braka’s arrested, and all is well. Sam and Genesis have patched things up, Tarima has embraced her abilities, and the Doctor’s garbled demeanor is put right again. More importantly, perhaps, Caleb has finally understood that he doesn’t have to abandon who he once was in order to fully embrace who he is now — he’s allowed to love both his mothers, so to speak, by choosing himself and the larger world he’s made at the Academy. Ake and Anisha seem to have reached a detente of sorts, and Caleb’s off on a summer adventure during the break between school years. It’s a happy ending because this is Star Trek, but it’s one that comes with a real sense of growth and accomplishment for almost every character on the series’s canvas. Top marks, all around.
Bring on sophomore year.
Unsevered: Adam Scott Talks Hokum Horror, Severance’s Success, and Wanting to Host SNL
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
Severance star Adam Scott takes a detail-oriented approach to his showbiz career—right down to the very name he pursues it under.
Eager to stand out as a “serious actor” in the vein of Robert De Niro or Al Pacino, a young Scott once considered changing his relatively common surname to the more flowery “Quardero,” a shortened version of his mother’s Sicilian maiden name “Quartararo.” He ultimately opted against the rebrand and embarked on an acting career successful enough to condemn all other Adam Scotts to “for other uses, see Adam Scott (disambiguation)” status on Wikipedia.
Still, when Scott sits down with us to discuss the success of his hit Apple TV sci-fi series Severance, a starring role in upcoming SXSW midnighter Hokum, and his career at large, we ask him to consider a “sliding doors” scenario in which the first moniker stuck.
“I wonder what Adam Quardero would be doing right now,” he muses. “Hopefully, the exact same thing… except everyone would always be asking him how to pronounce his name.”
Indeed, Adam Quardero would be immensely fortunate to have Adam Scott’s career. After getting his start as high school bully Griff Hawkins on coming-of-age sitcom Boy Meets World, Scott transitioned into the world of comedy: appearing as the douchey Derek Huff in the film Adam McKay’s Step Brothers, struggling as actor-turned-caterer Henry Pollard in Starz’s comedy Party Down, and former boy mayor, Ben Wyatt, in NBC’s Parks and Recreation.
But it was the premiere of the Dan Erickson-created, Ben Stiller-directed Severance, in 2022, that elevated Scott to dramatic leading man status. Over two critically and culturally acclaimed seasons, Scott has embodied Mark Scout, a Lumon Industries employee who has undergone the “severance” procedure to bifurcate his consciousness between his work life and home life.
Now, between seasons at Apple, Scott is set to dip his toe into the world of horror (he appeared in Krampus and Piranha 3D back in the day), starring in Irish auteur Damian McCarthy’s latest feature, Hokum. The project takes Scott’s troubled novelist character, Ohm Bauman, to a honeymoon suite in a remote Irish inn where he’ll encounter all manner of…well, hokum.
What intrigued you about Hokum as a project?
I love Damian and I loved Oddity. That movie burrowed itself in, in ways that we’re not seeing much currently in horror or suspense. It’s an incredibly patient movie and entirely character-driven. The script [for Hokum] itself was super interesting, and I liked that the lead character wasn’t asking for any sort of sympathy or forgiveness. In fact, quite the opposite. You get to kind of go through it with him and learn along the way why he is that particular way.
Much of Hokum is fairly claustrophobic for your character and presents a lot of upsetting imagery. I know it’s a job, and you’re just “playing pretend,” but was there any element on set that was genuinely horrifying to you?
It was more or less one large room we were working in. It’s dark in the film, and it was literally dark when we were in there making it. It was pretty clear that this was going to be unsettling. I thought the witch was frightening. To see her kind of go in and start running around is genuinely unsettling.
But more than anything, it was exciting to see what would be frightening. I knew that this was going to be effective because the set was so beautifully made. Damian had his eye on every single detail, down to those little guys that strike the bells on the clock, and the unsettling expressions on their faces. As an actor, since your control is limited, you never know really how something is going to turn out at the end of the day. Having so much faith in Damian and seeing all the components they put together on set, I knew there was a chance that this could work.
Are you usually drawn to horror? I believe your first major movie role was actually in Hellraiser: Bloodline, right?
It was, yeah. And I’ve been in a few horror movies over the years, but I’m not particularly drawn to them as an actor more so than any other genre. As an audience member, I do like horror movies, but it all depends on whether they actually frighten me or not. If I’m gonna see one, I want it to be something that really, really freaks me out. Hereditary was a perfect example of that, or The Strangers—movies that really pinpoint these nightmarish scenarios and then don’t look away. I’m not there to just see the most imaginative kills (which I also enjoy). I like them in the context of something that’s really working, character- and story-wise.
What does your work life look like between seasons of Severance? It seems as though you’ve kept very busy this year with Hokum, The Saviors, which is also premiering at SXSW, and the upcoming crime thriller, The Whisper Man, with Robert De Niro.
Severance is something we’re always discussing and getting ready for, which is what we’re doing right now, actually. I like working, and I enjoy being busy. My wife and I have a [production] company we run together, so when I’m not acting in something, we’re busy developing a lot of TV and movie stuff. We have an office that we go to; it’s like an actual job.
It’s great because I never want to go back to my early years of sitting in my apartment twiddling my thumbs, never knowing where that next job is going to come from. Every actor who started out from nothing has that in the back of their head as the thing they never want to go back and touch again.
How has Severance changed the way that people interact with you? It’s a very popular show that invites a lot of interpretations and feelings, and you’re the lead of it.
It’s funny, because I was in the States for the first two episodes [of Severance season two] and then I went off and made Hokum in Ireland. When I came back, right when the finale aired, I could tell Severance had really broadened out. People usually recognize me from Parks and Rec or Step Brothers. You get to know the pockets of people that come up and say hello, which is always really nice. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the demographics that I’m used to; it was everyone.
The show has really reached out and grabbed a lot of people, which is terrific. But it was certainly an adjustment. We kind of all collectively stopped and took a breath in London once when we were in the midst of the press over there. We all looked at each other and were like, “Holy shit, this is crazy.” It’s exactly what you want when you work as hard as we do. You want as many people as possible to see it.
What was your hardest day on set for Severance so far? [Director] Ben Stiller has you running around a lot!
Probably the fight that I have with Mr. Drummond in the [season two] finale. Darri [Ólafur Darri Ólafsson] and I really went for it because it was fun, and we had a blast choreographing it with the stunt team. It was completely my fault, but as Darri was swinging me around into the wall, I didn’t get my arm up in time to absorb the slam. I hit it head-first and got a bit of a concussion. That was probably the hardest day, but the whole thing was challenging. We were exhausted by the end of it. For me, “challenging” isn’t negative. I love things that look impossible at first. That’s often what Severance is.
Are there any lessons that come to mind from playing Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation? I imagine learning experiences abound on the set of a well-executed sitcom like that.
[Creator] Mike Schur is a master of storytelling. It sounds like I’m talking about [screenwriting guru] Robert McKee. I would love it if that comparison stayed with him because he stapled calzones onto me for life. He and the writers had this economic way of telling a story that was able to squeeze into 22 minutes every week and not take any shortcuts, so you never felt short-shrifted.
There was this trick that Mike taught me early on, and I think of it constantly when I’m working on something. In any successfully written TV show (and some movies), you should be able to take all of the characters’ names off any page of the script and know exactly who is saying what. If you’ve drawn these characters properly, like in Cheers or Golden Girls, or any of these great comedies or dramas, that is what you’re trying to achieve. That’s one of the many lessons I learned over there that I’ll never forget.
I’ve always found your Starz comedy Party Down to be an oddly resonant viewing experience. Because at the end of the day, it’s a series about young actors trying to make it in Hollywood—who are all played by young actors trying to make it in Hollywood. What emotions are associated with that show for you?
It was a really special time. A lot of us were in a similar position to the characters, so not in the midst of these flourishing, incredible careers. We were all lucky to be there and felt a bit like outsiders in showbiz. We found each other on this show and didn’t quite know if it would work or what it would be. At the time, Starz wasn’t making TV shows, so we weren’t even sure who was going to see this.
It really came together in the “Singles Seminar” episode. That is when we all really locked in. We looked at each other and were like, “Oh, this is great. This is fun, and who cares if anyone sees it? This is about each other; defining ourselves for ourselves. It’s the most fun we’ve ever had.” We all really just started making the show for each other.
I think it’s important to have moments like that in any business, but particularly in show business where you’re always perceiving yourself or being forced to perceive yourself according to how others perceive you. When you start finding yourself with a group of people, you come to realize it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Your self-worth changes.
Do you think doing Step Brothers added a lot to your comedic toolbox? There are still certain “Derek from Step Brothers” moves I can see in your work to this day, even the dramatic stuff.
I didn’t even really have a comedic toolbox at that point. It was before Party Down, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to be in a big comedy like that. Getting that role was a bit of a fluke. When I got there, I didn’t totally know what I was doing; I had to learn on the job. But I slowly came to realize that I never wanted to go back to anything else. This is where it was at. Seeing how [director Adam] McKay and Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly work, by the time it ended, I felt like I had figured it out a little bit. I realized this was what I wanted to do. That was an incredibly instructive moment.
Is there a role in your career that you look back on particularly fondly that doesn’t often come up in interviews like this?
Something that was a huge deal for me and sort of changed the way I perceived myself was a movie called The Vicious Kind. This really talented writer-director, Lee Krieger, cast me in his movie, and I didn’t even know why. I had just finished shooting Step Brothers, but it hadn’t even come out yet. Then I got the lead role of this little indie, and I loved making it. It was a really emotional role and it had everything I always wanted to do in movies.
When it was done, I was like, “Oh God, I wonder if this is going to be embarrassing.” I remember inviting everyone in the Party Down cast and sitting down to watch it with everybody and realizing, “Wait, I think this might actually be good. I might have pulled this off.” That really changed everything. That period of time had me doing The Vicious Kind, Step Brothers came out, Party Down was out there, and I had just gotten the Parks and Rec job. That was when an actual career came together and solidified.
Your name tends to come up frequently when the internet comments on people who have not yet hosted Saturday Night Live but should. Would you be interested?
Of course! The funny thing is, people often think that I already have. It’s probably because of the people I’ve worked with or am friends with, and they just assume that I’ve hosted SNL. But yes, I would love to, of course.
I think you have a good sense for men’s fashion. You attended the InStyle Imagemaker Awards last year and Comedy Bang! Bang!’s Scott Aukerman once said you were the only person he knew who owned a tux. Who taught you to tie a tie so cleanly and snugly?
YouTube, honestly. I’m sure my dad taught me a long time ago, but I remember needing to tie a tie, and it had been 15 years since I had. I learned a few different knots on YouTube, and they made it pretty easy. You could do a double Windsor or whatever, but I like a smaller, tighter knot. You see a lot of Wall Street guys with this big fat triangle at the top. Or a lot of the MAGA politicians have that big knot, like [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth. It’s a pet peeve of mine, seeing people on television with sloppily tied ties. I’m like, “Did no one see that that thing is about to come loose? You just gotta give it a tug, and it will look 70 percent better!”
I assume that you consented to this interview because you fondly remember talking to Den of Geek back in 2017 for a magazine feature about your Fox sitcom Ghosted. How does it feel to return to the pages of Den of Geek magazine, and more importantly, should Ghosted be rebooted?
It feels great! [Laughs] First of all. And should Ghosted be rebooted? Absolutely. I think it should be rebooted every year. It should be a national holiday every time they reboot it. That goes without saying.
Hokum premieres on May 1 nationwide.
The MCU Must Use This X-Men Story to Guide Their Adaptation
The X-Men are coming to the MCU. Mutants have long been the most significant missing piece that the big screen shared universe has yet to bring over from the comics. A lot has happened to set up the X-Men, including Disney acquiring former rights holders 20th Century Fox, reshaping Ms. Marvel into a mutant, and putting Deadpool and Wolverine into alternate-reality MCU films. The studio has even announced that Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier will helm the mutants’ first entry.
But outside of that, we have no idea how the X-Men will appear in the MCU. Worse, the X-Men have a long and (appropriately) evolving history in the comics, which means that there’s no one definitive story to guide Schreier and his screenwriter Michael Lesslie.
Yet, the comics aren’t without options. The 2011 graphic novel X-Men: Season One by writer Dennis Hopeless and Jamie McKelvie provides the clearest introduction to the team, retelling the 1960s stories by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby through a modern lens.
A Mutating Legacy
Who are the X-Men? That question is surprisingly hard to answer, even for hardcore comic book readers. The basic premise describes the X-Men as a team of mutants—people born with incredible powers—who fight to protect a world that hates and fears them. But the line-up is harder to pin down. Wolverine and Storm have to be members, right? What about Gambit and Rogue? Younger fans might insist that Kamala Khan and Namor be on the team.
When they began back in 1963, the X-Men consisted of five teenagers, all brought to study at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, operated by Charles Xavier aka Professor X. Cyclops, Beast, Marvel Girl, Iceman, and Angel all wore matching blue and yellow uniforms and fought one-note baddies like Magneto, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and the Vanisher.
Famously, those Silver Age X-Men comics were among the weakest of Lee and Kirby’s offerings, and the series only got marginally better when writer Roy Thomas and artist Neal Adams came aboard, adding Banshee, Havok, and Polaris to the roster. The X-Men truly became the X-Men with 1974’s Giant-Size X-Men #1, written by Len Wein and penciled by Dave Cockrum, and with Chris Claremont writing the main book shortly thereafter. That period added or introduced Wolverine, Storm, and Nightcrawler to the roster, leading to great and oft-adapted stories such as The Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past.
So important is that era that it’s easy to disregard the first X-Men stories. Normally, it’s fine to pick and choose, but ignoring the earliest days of the X-Men presents challenges to those who want to adapt them for other media. That’s where X-Men: Season One comes in.
Meeting the Mutants
Anyone glancing at a synopsis of X-Men: Season One would see little difference between the graphic novel and the first few issues of the original series from 1963. It begins with new student Jean Grey coming to Xavier’s school, meeting the firm but supportive headmaster and making friends with her oddball new classmates before being forced to join them in stopping the mutant terrorist Magneto from launching nuclear weapons against the humans. Shortly thereafter, she encounters other villains, including the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and Unus the Untouchable, the man with the power to not be touched.
Goofy as all these concepts are, Hopeless and McKelvie ground them in emotion that feels real. As a teen who wants nothing more than to be normal, Jean at first resents her parents sending her to a boarding school instead of getting to finish her education at her regular high school. She gets swept away by the rich and charming Warren Worthington III aka Angel, she gets annoyed by the juvenile Bobby Drake aka Iceman, and she makes fast friends with the exuberant and brilliant Hank McCoy aka Beast. Jean doesn’t know what to make of the serious and awkward Scott Summers, who wants so badly to be the great leader Cyclops and believes earnestly in Xavier’s dream, but doesn’t know if he can pull it off.
The framing above makes it sound like Season One uses Jean as an accessory to the men around her, which would be very much in line with the uncharitable way Lee wrote the characters in the Sixties. But Hopeless and McKelvie make Jean very much her own person, and let her perspective and desires drive the way she interacts with her classmate.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the book’s romance arc. Almost immediately after entering the Xavier Mansion, she gets knocked over by Cyclops, who freezes while lying on top of her. Jean defuses the situation by making a joke, which only freaks out Cyclops more, sending him running from the room in embarrassment. Conversely, Angel gives her a proper greeting and introduces her to the others, doing his best to make her feel comfortable.
Jean is immediately attracted to the confident and handsome Angel, even more so when he removes his shirt to prepare for their first training session and reveals both his chiseled physique and his incredible wings. Those feelings only increase when Angel shares his insecurities with her, drawing attention to anti-mutant bigotry that she, as an outwardly “normal” attractive young woman, doesn’t experience.
Yet, when Angel fails to return her affections, Jean finds herself more drawn to the serious Cyclops. Her attraction to him stems less from initial good looks and what others would expect a pretty girl to like and more from how she sees herself. Cyclops cares about things, and Jean also wants to be someone passionate about a cause. She chooses Cyclops because he matches her goals and needs.
Through Jean’s arc and maturity, we’re brought into the larger world of the X-Men. As she learns about the bigotry facing mutants, we understand how people would love the Avengers and the Fantastic Four but hate the X-Men. As she develops her abilities, we understand how the X-Men are different from other superheroes. And as she bonds with her teammates, we see what binds the X-Men together.
To Screens, My X-Men!
Although much of the MCU’s future is currently muddied by leaker speculation and only drips of information, it seems likely that the team won’t properly appear until sometime after Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027. However, it also seems likely that we’ll get to see our first proper X-Man later this year, as Sadie Sink is heavily rumored to play Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
If Brand New Day is indeed Jean Grey’s first day in the MCU, then X-Men: Season One makes even more sense as the perfect story to adapt. Through Sink as Grey, the average viewer can finally understand how the X-Men can be feared and hated in a world filled with superheroes, and—even better—understand why the X-Men are one of comics’ most enduring and important franchises.
X-Men: Season One is available on Marvel Unlimited.
Five Lessons the CW Arrowverse Can Teach James Gunn’s DCU
Fans of live-action DC Comics properties are feeling pretty good right now. Superman was one of the most critically loved and financially successful films of 2025. Peacemaker and Creature Commandos brought obscure weirdos to the masses, and Jason Momoa is playing Lobo in an upcoming Supergirl movie. But even those who didn’t love Zack Snyder‘s take have to admit that DC was doing well, thanks to the success of the Arrowverse on the CW Network. In fact, the Arrowverse was so entertaining that it should not be forgotten as James Gunn and Peter Safran continue building their new universe.
Now, to be clear, this article does not contend that the Gunn DCU is doing anything wrong (well, it would be nice to have some green in a Green Lantern show…). But as we embrace the new, big-budget world of the DCU, we shouldn’t forget how Greg Berlanti and his co-creators created an entire superhero universe on television for teens.
Be Silly
For a franchise that began by turning a guy who dresses up like Robin Hood and yells about fat cats into a brooding Batman wannabe with great abs, the Arrowverse sure did get silly. The roots of silliness were always there, even when the first season played like a budget version of Batman Begins; how else can you explain the salmon ladder or whatever Roy Harper was doing in that flipping gif?
The Arrowverse became something special when it stopped treating its silliness like an unfortunate byproduct of the superhero genre and embraced it as a core concept. Even leaving aside the beautiful moments in which Gorilla Grodd attacks a young Obama or Beebo becomes an angry god on Legends of Tomorrow, you had Manu Bennett and John Barrowman devouring the scenery with smarm and charm on Arrow, a musical crossover between Flash and Supergirl, and Black Lightning put nearly 50-year-old Cress Williams in a goofy costume. And you know what? It was glorious every time.
Superheroes are Soap Operas
The open secret of the Marvel revolution in comics isn’t that Stan Lee had some insight into moral complexity and inner darkness that he could apply to superheroes. It’s that he spent a lot of time writing teen melodramas, and carried those same character dynamics into the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the Hulk. Superheroes and soap opera go together like capes and cowls, and the Arrowverse’s home on the CW practically required dramatic speeches and love triangles.
The DCU has no such requirement, but the Arrowverse reminded us what Lee and Chris Claremont taught us, that superheroes work best when they’re being dramatic. Superman had some wonderful smooches between Lois and Clark, and John Cena certainly didn’t mind shedding tears on Peacemaker, so hopefully this won’t be a lesson that James Gunn needs to relearn for later DCU entries.
If It’s Broke, Fix It
The first season of Legends of Tomorrow featured not one, but two Hawkpeople. Batwoman began as an even more pale imitation of Batman. The Flash failed to make either Ronnie Raymond or Jason Rusch a compelling pairing with Martin Stein.
Rather than continue to try to fit these square pegs into round holes, the Arrowverse consistently changed direction to make their shows better. Ditching the Hawkpeople (and Vandal Savage and Rip Hunter) allowed Legends to become the fun romp we love today, Javicia Leslie’s casting as Ryan Wilder freed Batwoman from its awkward Bruce Wayne connections, and adding Franz Drameh as Jax took the Firestorm concept in a direction unexplored in even the comics.
The Arrowverse understood the folly of throwing good money after bad. Granted, that’s a lot easier to do on television than in movies, but it’s an important lesson for DC Studios to keep in mind. If, for whatever reason, Supergirl doesn’t work or if people want more space opera than grounded detective work in their cosmic cop series, Gunn and Safran should take a page from Berlanti’s book and make changes when needed.
Dare to Defy (The Comics)
This writer bows to no one in his love for the Legion of Super-Heroes. So I understand the viewers who are irritated that the Imra Ardeen on Supergirl is some mix of Invisible Woman and Marvel Girl and has no resemblance to the Saturn Girl from the comics. But that’s also okay! Even when the non-comic accurate version isn’t a clear improvement—as was the case when Justice League embarrassment Vibe was reimagined as lovable nerd Cisco Ramon or the big metal nothing that was Commander Steel became charming doofus Nate—the changes made sense within the Arrowverse.
Gunn clearly loves his comic book deep cuts, and he’s shown a willingness to change from the comics when, say, Ego the Living Planet made for a better daddy story for Star-Lord than J’son of Spartax. But as he has more say over A-listers in the Justice League, Gunn should remember how the Arrowverse used comics not as scripture to be faithfully recreated but as inspiration for new stories in a new medium.
It’s About the Friends We Made Along the Way
Even a successful TV show had a TV show budget. More specifically, the Arrowverse had a B-tier TV network budget, far below the gobs of money Warner Bros allows DC Studios to use. As such, the costumes sometimes look wonky and the fight scenes (Arrow and Batwoman excluded) often looked funky. So instead of focusing on action, the Arrowverse had to focus on likable characters and interpersonal dynamics. And it worked like gangbusters.
Nothing demonstrated that better than the Arrowverse’s gigantic Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. Forget the fun cameos from Burt Ward, Kevin Conroy, and the cast of the Birds of Prey TV show. The true pleasure of the Crisis was watching all our friends get together. There was Barry with Mia and John Constantine, Black Lightning hanging out with J’onn J’onzz and Sara Lance, and so many Supermen and Flashes.
So far, the DCU entries have looked great, more than delivering on the spectacle one wants in a superhero story. But as exciting as it is to see Superman battle a kaiju or Emilia Harcourt go through multiverse doors, we really just want to see characters we like bounce off one another.
Hokum Trailer Features the Scariest Bunny Since Donnie Darko
In the 2024 movie Oddity, Irish director Damian McCarthy places a man-sized wooden doll with the most terrifying face you’ve ever seen at a kitchen table and then just lets the story proceed. Throughout the entire film, the various characters will acknowledge that the scariest thing you’ve ever seen in your life is just sitting there, but they don’t let the terrifying wooden doll disrupt their day.
After watching the trailer for his latest film Hokum, one has to wonder if McCarthy plans to repeat the trick. The trailer introduces us to Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an American author visiting the Irish country town where his parents spent their honeymoon. Once there, he checks into an old-timey hotel so scary that not even Barton Fink would stay the night, and lots of townspeople say cryptic things. But the absolutely terrifying moment occurs right at the end of the trailer, when we’re treated to an image of some ungodly human/bunny hybrid.
Hokum is McCarthy’s third film, after Oddity and his 2020 debut Caveat. Both films deliver exactly what horror fans want from atmospheric folk horror: memorable characters, a general sense of dread, and excellent use of place. Neither film has a plot that makes much sense, but what it lacks in precision it more than compensates with mood.
For some horror fans, that balance of mood and plot is a feature, not a bug, and those are exactly the audience members that Hokum targets with its trailer. Hokum is not only McCarthy’s first Hollywood movie, but it’s his first with Neon, the distributor that has joined A24 in being the go-to source for what some call elevated horror. In recent years, Neon has released the Oz Perkins films Longlegs and Keeper, YouTuber Chris Stuckmann’s debut Shelby Oaks, and Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence.
But if that terrifying rabbit is any indication, Hokum‘s clearest forerunner is Frank, the other-dimensional nightmare rabbit who advises Jake Gyllenhaal in 2001’s Donnie Darko. One would not think that a creature best known for reproducing a lot and absolutely freezing when it gets scared would be capable of creating dread in moviegoers, but rabbits have often been the subject of cinematic scares. Sometimes, they’re ineffective (Night of the Lepus), sometimes they’re comical (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and sometimes they’re utterly heartbreaking (Watership Down). But Frank and Donnie Darko captured a primal sense of unease the little critters cause better than any movie before or since.
If Neon and McCarthy can follow suit, then the scary bunny of Hokum could join Frank as not just one of cinema’s best bunnies, but one of the most iconic monsters in movie history.
Hokum hits theaters on May 1, 2026.
James Wan Is Adapting an Undersung Korean Action Movie
Horror maestro James Wan hasn’t directed a movie since 2023 DC flop Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, but all that’s about to change because he’s taking on a remake of a fantastic but still largely obscure Korean action movie that Sylvester Stallone’s production company, Balboa Productions, has been trying to get moving since 2019.
According to THR, Saw and The Conjuring director Wan will helm a “reimagining” of The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil for Paramount. Wan and the studio are also keeping original star Ma Dong-seok (Train to Busan, Eternals) in the cast as they begin working on their English-language adaptation of the film. Shay Hatten, who wrote John Wick: Chapter 4 and the upcoming Resident Evil movie for Zach Cregger, will handle the screenplay.
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil follows an unlikely partnership between mob boss Jang Dong-soo (Ma Dong-seok) and detective Jung Tae-seok (Kim Mu-yeol) as the pair reluctantly join forces to hunt down a serial killer. Having become the only survivor of an attack by the mysterious killer and fearful that his reputation would be in tatters if people found out he was nearly murdered, Dong-soo begins searching for his attacker but fails. When hot-headed detective Tae-suk realizes he also can’t find the killer before he strikes again, he accepts Dong-soo’s help, and the two combine their criminal network and police resources to track the killer down.
Though their efforts lead them to the perpetrator of the horrific crimes, the men disagree on how he should be dealt with. Dong-soo is dead set on personal revenge while Tae-seok wants him put in jail, setting up a final brutal confrontation for the ages.
Critics and audiences alike praised both the humor and action in the slick, odd couple cop thriller when it was released in 2019. Though this reimagining has been a long time coming, it seems like it’s still a worthy endeavor with James Wan attached and Ma Dong-seok back for more stylish violence.
Ranking the MCU’s Biggest Battles
The MCU loves a big, explosive battle. Starting with The Avengers in 2012, Marvel aimed to put the MCU on the map by creating a truly iconic team-up battle using the most advanced effects of the time, but that was just the beginning.
Since then, most Marvel movies have at least one pricey and action-packed fight sequence to keep superhero movie fans happy, but not every MCU installment pulls out all the stops to make them truly memorable.
Let’s look back at all the biggest MCU battles and decide which one now reigns supreme…
7. Statue of Liberty Face-Off (Spider-Man: No Way Home)
This one slides into the bottom of the list. Though it’s not an Avengers-level battle, the sheer number of Spider-Man villains and Peters Parker involved in the Statue of Liberty fight at the end of No Way Home means that it does amount to one of the bigger scraps in the MCU, which largely end up being against one bad guy or girl.
It’s fun to see Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men tussle with the likes of Electro and the Green Goblin, but the visuals are also hampered by the nighttime setting, cannily hiding some of the more ropey Sony-Marvel CGI. Still, it’s a solid sequence elsewhere, with high personal stakes for the Peters as they try to save rather than destroy the villains bent on wiping them out. Garfield’s Peter saving MJ from a fatal fall remains a standout moment in all the chaos.
6. Sokovia Fight (Avengers: Age of Ultron)
Age of Ultron‘s final showdown suffers from some of the same issues as the Battle of New York because Ultron’s army amounts to a generic stream of metal bots that need to be dispatched as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they can take him out. At the end of the day, they’re just …things. The film succeeds in making it feel like it matters by intercutting key moments for Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, while Black Widow and Hawkeye’s “another day at work” attitude keeps the pace light. Vision’s weird new powers also keep everyone in the game as he banters with Thor about wielding Mjolnir and straight up baffles Rhodey with his mere presence.
When the Avengers gather at the heart of Sokovia to protect the core, the iconic 360 shot we remember from the first team-up movie evolves as new allies like Wanda, Quicksilver and Vision join the fray. At this point, you realize these films and their battles are only going to get bigger, and you can’t wait to see what’s coming next.
5. Avengers vs. Avengers (Captain America: Civil War)
Captain America: Civil War was basically Avengers 2.5, so it was bound to deliver something special. As Tony and Steve’s disagreement over the team’s accountability heads towards an Avengers vs. Avengers battle, it’s intriguing to see how it will play out. When the film finally unveils its big fight, it is indeed great stuff, but the setting is so dull and uncinematic. An airport awash with gray and beige buildings does nothing to amplify the action against an uninspiring cloudy sky. They might as well have kept the green screen in there, given how unremarkable it is!
The fight between the Avengers pretty much makes up for it. Spider-Man’s arrival and Star Wars battle plan, Bucky and Sam forced to work together in a less-than-ideal situation, Giant Man freaking everyone out, the tease that Wanda is more powerful than literally anyone else there by a lot, and Vision accidentally taking out Rhodey, making sure everyone understands the real cost of these shenanigans, all contribute to Civil War‘s fantastic battle sequence.
4. Wakanda Showdown (Avengers: Infinity War)
The Avengers have an entire Wakandan army behind them as Infinity War comes to its shocking climax. Tentatively assuming they’re safe behind the country’s high-tech barrier, it ultimately proves no match for Proxima Midnight’s sacrificial pawns, and Black Panther and Captain America have to lead the charge as things get really dangerous.
In the lush Wakandan landscape, there are some great moments as Thor finally arrives with Stormbreaker, Groot, and Rocket Raccoon. Bucky swinging Rocket around and using him as a second gun is downright genius, and it’s fun to see Bruce get in the Hulkbuster and see how he can fight without being the big green guy. But the battle doesn’t culminate as we would expect. In fact, the effort to take out the big bad behind it all, Thanos, comes to a crawl as the Avengers try and fail in slow motion to prevent The Snap. Concurrently, we’ve also been witnessing Iron Man and the gang on Titan flop. We can only watch helplessly as the Avengers’ first big loss impacts the entire MCU.
3. Battle of New York (The Avengers)
The first, but not quite the best, the Battle of New York felt groundbreaking at the time and is still enormously fun to watch as the OG Avengers finally put their egos and issues aside to take down Loki’s incoming Chitauri army, but it’s an infantry that doesn’t dial up the fear as much as it does threaten with sheer numbers.
The gang have been at it for a while before Bruce Banner pulls up on his sputtering motorcycle and heads into the scrap as the Hulk, who is thankfully on their side this time around. Hawkeye and Black Widow get to prove they’re clutch in key moments, while Cap is just Cap, seamlessly taking on the leadership role in a chaotic group of individuals that includes a literal God. Hulk punching the Leviathan out of the sky is a real showstopper, but it’s his hilarious face-off with Loki that takes the cake. This invasion from space changed everything for the Avengers and set the benchmark for every major MCU battle to come.
2. Titan Attack (Avengers: Infinity War)
Where Infinity War‘s Wakandan half of the battle against Thanos involved hundreds, if not thousands, of people, the concurrent fight on Titan was a smaller but more impactful affair that went on for a while but barely slowed the purple bastard down.
Star-Lord’s plan to get the Infinity Gauntlet actually turned out to be a good one, as the Guardians, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, and Spider-Man hit the mad Titan with everything they had so that Mantis could make him go sleepytime. As a result, we got to see magic blend with pure firepower and Spider-like cunning, all set against an eerie sunset among the crumbling monuments of a fallen planet. If this were an optional stage in Mortal Kombat, you would 100% pick it.
Unfortunately, the ragtag team proves no match for Thanos, thanks to Peter Quill’s explosive rage when finding out that Gamora had been sacrificed. But for a moment, when Tony is left to take Thanos on alone, we believe he might be able to do it. Until we don’t. All that for a drop of blood.
1. Saving Earth (Avengers: Endgame)
It’s hard to see how they’re going to top the climax of Avengers: Endgame, where basically every Marvel hero from over a decade of storytelling joins forces to stop Thanos from once again snapping away half of existence and undermining all the Avengers’ efforts to reverse what he did at the end of Infinity War.
From the initial three-on-one scrap with a stoneless Thanos, where Cap weilds Mjolnir and still can’t beat him, to his brave walk onto the battlefield armed with a broken shield, it’s already been an amazing fight that nonetheless feels hopeless until those portals open and the movie becomes a cinematic comic book splash page.
There’s so much happening it’s hard to know where to look, so repeated viewings of the battle sequence offer us details that are easy to miss, like Drax attacking Cull Obsidian from behind while Korg beats him mercilessly across the face. Meanwhile, Okoye easily takes out Corvus Glaive. But the big hits are also fist-pumping stuff as Giant Man takes a leaf out of the Hulk’s book and punches down a Leviathan, Captain Marvel puts the fear of god into Thanos, and Scarlet Witch shows she is a hair’s breadth from becoming the most powerful being in the universe. Even though Doctor Strange decides to busy himself with some encroaching water for the entire battle, everyone is working together to try to stop Thanos, and they emerge triumphant thanks to Tony’s final sacrifice.
This remains the biggest and most explosive of all the MCU battles. It’s simply thrilling.
From Season 4 Trailer Teases Boyd’s Descent Into Darkness
It’s been well over a year since we caught up with the denizens of From’s nameless town, but it doesn’t look like things have become any safer for them. In a brand-new trailer for the cult MGM+ show, the horrors persist, and The Man in Yellow looms large as de facto leader Boyd (Harold Perrineau) tries to make sense of things, only to be pulled further into the darkness.
When we last left the township, even major characters were no longer safe as we watched Jim’s fatal encounter with The Man in Yellow, while Tabitha and Jade found out they’d already been reincarnated a couple of times (wasn’t it great to finally have some real answers in season 3?!) We also discovered that the town’s monsters can’t really die; they just get reborn. Yikes.
Ahead of the show’s return next month, a welcome but extremely unnerving trailer for season 4 sees the townsfolk gathering for the burials of not one but two people, new arrivals pulling up to the fallen tree, and Boyd on a dark path. “Something’s different,” he says at his wife’s grave. “I’m changing, and I don’t know if I like who I’m becoming.”
Check out the trailer below…
It seems that Boyd is reaching a breaking point after the events of season 3. Where once the town looked up to him, they now fear him and what he’s capable of. Boyd can’t quite escape the insidiousness that lurks in the shadows, and it’s creeping into his dreams. All knowledge comes at a cost, but Boyd also knows they’re running out of time and that they’re losing.
We also see Boyd taking out his anger on Acosta (Samantha Brown,) who has never properly trusted him. “You think you’re some kind of hero,” she tells him. “You’re a monster.” It definitely looks like Boyd is being positioned as the unexpected villain of season 4, teasing an emotional time ahead for everyone who relies on him to help solve their problems.
From season 4 will premiere on Sunday, April 19 on MGM+.
SXSW 2026 Documentaries Preview: Docs to Watch in Texas
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
SXSW is a festival celebrated for its music, as well as its innovation. Pricy Hollywood movies open alongside indies, and panel discussions from the minds leading the AI revolution play right next to some triumphant trap revival. Yet what can often be overlooked is what a goldmine the festival is for winsome and thought-provoking documentaries. And this year has a rich collection, running the gamut from documentaries that unpack the troubling roots of zombie fiction to inspiring true-life stories about a woman who, despite missing her legs, is able to scale Mount Kilimanjaro.
Below is a round-up of some of the most intriguing and compelling options.
The Ascent
At the age of 21, Mandy Horvath lost both of her legs under mysterious circumstances in an event that led her down a path of mistrust and disillusionment. Ten years later, she’s making a record-breaking attempt to crawl to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro using only her hands. This is the inspiring true story told in The Ascent, directed by Edward Drake, Scott Veltri, and Francis Cronin. The film follows Horvath as she pushes her body to its limits on Africa’s tallest mountain while simultaneously reckoning with what happened to her and what she can do to heal.
Black Zombie
From the pop culture appeal of horror movies to the haunted cane fields of colonial Haiti, Black Zombie unearths the buried origins of the zombie, reclaiming it as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance. Directed by Maya Annik Bedward, this Documentary Spotlight entry explores the long-term consequences of cultural appropriation by tracing the evolution of the zombie from its origins in Haiti to its dominance in Hollywood, ultimately revealing its little-known connection to slavery and Vodou practices. The film seeks to restore the zombie to its true identity, where it can serve as a cautionary tale and an inspiration for ongoing resistance.
The Last Critic
The Last Critic takes a sharp, affectionate look at Robert Christgau, the man who practically invented modern rock criticism and then spent 60 years shaping how we talk about pop music. Director Matty Wishnow highlights the role Christgau played in canonizing legends like the Ramones and Public Enemy, while simultaneously infuriating icons like Lou Reed and Billy Joel. Also, with a bit of urgency, the doc seems eager to remind that Christgau, now in his 80s, is still writing with his trademark bite and craftsmanship despite facing a landscape where albums are irrelevant, print is dead, and algorithms rule taste-making.
My NDA
Non-disclosure agreements are touted as routine legal safeguards to protect secrets and proprietary ideas. But in the wrong hands, they can become blunt instruments used to intimidate workers and bury misconduct. In My NDA, three people bound by non-disclosure agreements face extreme personal risk to go public with their stories about how simple intellectual property contracts can be weaponized to silence whistleblowers, manipulate employees, and control public perception.
Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real-Life Superhero
In an era where masked men still dominate the multiplex, this doc tells the story of a costumed vigilante in a black-and-gold suit who once fought crime on the streets of Seattle during the 2010s. The tools of choice for Phoenix Jones were pepper spray and a taser, and he was accompanied by a team of costumed crime fighters. Director Bayan Joonam follows the story after Jones’ true identity was exposed, tarnishing the perceived heroic image of Jones and causing his team to abandon him. Also, perhaps tapping into the moment, the doc will telescope forward a decade, when Phoenix reemerges during the Seattle protests to rekindle that superhero spirit despite continuing legal troubles and public skepticism.
Stormbound
Stormbound drops viewers directly into the heart of the world’s most powerful hurricanes with amazing footage of the storms, seen from the inside. Director Miko Lim follows legendary storm chaser Jeff Gammons, who has spent more than 30 years documenting the most dangerous hurricanes in the U.S. The visceral spectacle is balanced with a more intimate look at Gammons’ battle with a near-fatal disease while continuing his important work at a time when larger environmental forces are at play. Gammons reckons with the physical and emotional toll of a life spent chasing nature at its most violent, creating a high-stakes, immersive experience on a global and personal scale.
2026 SXSW TV Preview: The Comeback, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and More
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
“It’s harder to program TV because they get finished later and they are moving their dates even more wildly than the film release schedule.”
As someone who maintains this website’s TV premiere dates article, I certainly empathize with Godfrey’s logistical TV woes. And yet, she and her team have defied the odds by bringing some honest-to-goodness bangers to the fold this year. While Apple TV’s star-studded Margo’s Got Money Troublesand HBO’s triumphant return of Valerie Cherish with The Comeback season 3 are the undeniable headliners, 2026 is also playing host to plenty of other compelling TV projects.
Here is every TV show making its debut at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Margo’s Got Money Troubles represents the confluence of some very powerful forces in the entertainment industry. Produced by premier indie studio A24 and set to be released on prestige streamer Apple TV, the series is created by TV legend David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies) and based on Rufi Thorpe’s best-selling novel of the same name. Add in the acting talents of Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, and Greg Kinnear, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a creative behemoth.
So what attracted all these heavy hitters to a TV series with a charmingly mundane title? Probably the fact that the premise sounds great! Fanning stars as the titular Margo Millet, the disaffected daughter of a Hooter’s waitress and former wrestler. After getting pregnant from an affair with her English professor, Margo begins to experience, you guessed it, money troubles. Margo starts an OnlyFans account, decides to get creative with it, and heartwarming comedy-drama ensues.
The Comeback Season 3
While Friends might be the biggest television series of all time, real TV-heads know that the NBC sitcom was a mere warmup for Lisa Kudrow’s true episodic masterpiece: The Comeback. After premiering with a single season in 2005 and returning for a follow-up in 2014, the Kudrow-created and starring HBO comedy is set to come back for its third and final bow in 2026.
As embodied by Kudrow, Valerie Cherish is an aging B-list sitcom veteran who continually tries to find a fresh foothold in a Hollywood that has long passed her by… all while documentary cameras film the futile attempts. Armed with only her bright smile and immaculately constructed hair, the guileless Valerie will get to work on her biggest challenge yet in season 3: acting in an AI-written sitcom.
The Audacity
SXSW isn’t just the best place to experience the latest and greatest in tech innovation; it’s also the best place to satirize it. Created by writer Jonathan Glatzer (who knows a thing or two about the rich and powerful thanks to his time on Succession), The Audacity examines the… well, the audacity of our Silicon Valley overlords. Billy Magnussen stars as Duncan Park, an ambitious tech CEO who with a chip on his shoulder and a questionable plan to harvest people’s personal data. In addition to the magnetic Magnussen, The Audacity boasts a cast of TV all-stars like Sarah Goldberg (Barry), Rob Corddry (Children’s Hospital), and Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory), and is set to premiere on AMC on April 12.
Monsters of God
After uncovering the dark side of the exotic animal trade with hit docuseries Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, director Eric Goode returns to his first love: creepy crawlies. Monsters of God follows smugglers Hank Molt and Tommy Crutchfield as they launch a billion-dollar criminal enterprise by selling some of the world’s rarest reptiles to zoos. The only thing more grim than the smuggling empire’s beginning, however, is its end, with the feature-length doc set to venture into Tiger King-esque true crime territory as well.
Are We Still Married?
Does “till death do us part” apply to undeath as well? That’s the question facing Laura (Taylor Misiak) in Are We Still Married? as she ponders whether to let the right one in when her newly vamp-ified husband Jack (Dustin Milligan) comes knocking. The indie pilot is created by Kit Steinkellner and produced by Barry Galperin.
Birth Is for P*ssies
Inspired by creator and star Hannah Shealy’s experiences as a birth doula, Birth Is for P*ssies sounds likeThe Pitt for pregnancy. The 13-minute pilot follows a rookie doula (Shealy) through her very hectic first day on a job filled with at-home IUD removal, cervical dilations, and extended labor. Through it all, she’ll gain an appreciation for life’s beautiful, messy beginnings.
In My Blood
Baseball has a long and storied history on film, but when it comes to television, there’s really only Jim Brockmire, Ken Burns, and little else to represent America’s pastime. Perhaps the Alex Bendo-created In My Blood can change that. Daniel Diemer stars as a minor leaguer desperate to make his father proud, even if it means poisoning his blood with performance-enhancing drugs.
Cold Call
Ever wonder what kind of person tries to steal someone’s credit card info? Cold Call, from showrunners Emma Lenderman and Elise Kibler, posits that the hypothetical scammer might not be a person at all. This pilot follows the Ergons, a cult of potentially extraterrestrial office workers trying to return to their home planet the only way they know how: by cold calling and scamming people.
Codependent
Hailing from twin creators Wade and Weston McElhaney (no relation to AFC Wrexham owner Rob Mac), Codependent follows dysfunctional brothers Tristan and Max (the McElhaneys) as they move to New York after accidentally applying for the same job. It’s a shame the codependent duo can’t just share the role, unless…wait a minute, they’re identical!
Son of a Bikram
In Son of a Bikram, hot yoga enthusiast Raag is devastated to discover that his hero, yoga guru Bikram Choudhury, is the subject of numerous sexual assault claims. He’s then even more devastated to discover that Bikram Choudhury is his literal father. How Raag responds to this unwelcome news is up to him (and Son of a Bikram showrunners Ash T and Johnny Rey Diaz).
SXSW 2026 Film Preview: Movies to See in Austin
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
It might be the culmination of Oscars week in Hollywood, but down in Texas a new year of moviegoing is in full boom. The SXSW festival is here and with it comes the greatest intersection between film, television, technology, and music on this side of the Atlantic. And such a feat can be attested by the eclectic and wide-ranging line-up of cinema making up the narrative film component of the festival.
There are Hollywood films in town, as well as splashy sequels like Ready or Not 2 (which you might have heard about already on this site…). There are also indie films from modern auteurs like Boots Riley, who is kicking off the festival opening night with the iconoclastic-looking I Love Boosters, as well as genre-benders like Wishful Thinking, Graham Parkes’ romantic dramedy where the fate of the world really does hang in the balance when a young couple (Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman) consider calling it quits. Jorma Taccone, one-third of the Lonely Island, has a new original comedy starring Samara Weaving and Jason Segel, and John Carney is imagining a world where Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas are bros. So without further ado, below is a preview of just some of the riches awaiting you alongside tacos and BBQ in Austin.
Brian
The titular character is having a tough go of it in the Mike Scollins-written, Will Ropp-directed Brian. Played by Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends), the poor lad is prone to panic attacks, struggles to find an identity, and yes, has an unrequited crush (on his teacher no less). That’s why in a desperate attempt to find his true calling, Brian decides to run for the most hallowed position in all of high school politics: class president.
“At its core, Brian is a coming-of-age story about learning how to survive yourself; about realizing that being ‘too much’ isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s something you learn to live alongside,” Ropp says. “I wanted to honor the kids, and adults, who walk around feeling like they missed a class everyone else took about how to be a normal person. This is the kind of movie I wanted when I was 17. So I made it now.”
NEON
I Love Boosters
When it’s that SXSW time of year, it must be Boots Riley season. At least that’s proven true in the best years where the iconoclastic, multi-hyphenated filmmaker, musician, activist, and all around cool dude came to town with visionary acts of subversion like Sorry to Bother Youand I’m a Virgo. And he’s back at this festival with the opening night film.
An apparently kaleidoscopic and candy-colored heist movie set in the San Francisco fashion scene, I Love Boosters follows the three Fs: Fashion Forward F(Ph)ilanthropy. That’s the motto of the eponymous boosters who steal from the bougie and give to the proletariat. It’s a hell of a setup unto itself, but following on the magical realist flourishes of Riley’s previous work, we’re sure there is more going on in a film bursting at the seams with onscreen talent, including Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, Eiza Gonzaléz, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, and Demi Moore fresh off kicking The Substance.
Over Your Dead Body
Following the smashing success of Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun in 2025, another one-third of legendary comedy troupe the Lonely Island is set to bring a fresh action-comedy into the world, and this one from the maestro of the cult beloved MacGruber, Jorma Taccone. A remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, the Jorma Over Your Dead Body follows a couple (Samara Weaving and Jason Segel) as they attempt to reconnect on a vacation, blissfully unaware that each is planning to kill the other. Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Paul Guilfoyle also star.
“This ‘film’ is a blend of many genres, and I had an absolute blast making it with this amazing cast,” Taccone says. “The level of commitment was something other directors can only dream about. I feel lucky to have been part of this production and I hope the tremendous fun we all had making it is reflected in every scene, and the audience feels that love and sense of joy. If they don’t, I’m fucked.”
Power Ballad
How lucky are we to live in a time when John Carney has a new film coming to cinemas, and its first stop is Austin, Texas? The singular Irish filmmaker of bittersweet musical love stories like Once and Sing Street has now finished what we’re sure will be a swooning Power Ballad. The film also partners the writer-director with Paul Rudd in the role of Rick, a washed-out wedding singer who lost his best years to ‘80s nostalgia trips.
Also in another bit of canny casting is Nick Jonas (you know the one) as Danny, a former pop star also past his sell-by date. The pair kindle a friendship that proves productive but also, perhaps, predatory as Danny winds up turning one of Rick’s unsold songs into an international hit. Will Rick get any credit for it? It might be hard seeing Rudd down on his luck, but knowing Carney, there will still be plenty of uplift too.
Sender
Have you ever received an unsolicited package from an online retailer containing some sort of small, trivial item you didn’t order? This is an annoying but harmless real-world phenomenon called “brushing” that online sellers do to generate fake online reviews of their product. But what if those packages never stopped coming? And what if the items inside those packages started to feel unsettlingly relevant?
That’s the horrifying scenario facing Julia (Severance’s Britt Lower) in the Russell Goldman-directed thriller Sender. When an anonymous sender from the online market Smirk won’t stop shipping items tied to Julia’s traumatic past, she tumbles down an online rabbit hole to unmask them. Jamie Lee Curtis, David Dastmalchian, Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Rhea Seehorn (Pluribus) also star, with the lattermost actress’ presence making Sender a meeting of Apple TV’s two most beloved sci-fi leading ladies.
They Will Kill You
Festival headliner Ready or Not 2 isn’t the only film in this year’s “everyone’s coming to kill you” genre. Joining it in Austin is the fittingly titled They Will Kill You. The blood-soaked thriller finds cultists played by Myha’la, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and Patricia Arquette trying their darndest to capture and sacrifice Zazie Beetz to sweet, sweet Satan.
Catching Ms. Beetz is easier said than done, however, as the hunt takes place in swanky Manhattan hotel the Virgil. Built in 1923, the structure was designed to be a death trap for the poor would-be human offerings to the Dark Prince. But that design might prove as useful to the hunted as it is to the hunters. Directed by Kirill Sokolov and produced by Andy and Barbara Muschietti (It), They Will Kill You has the feel of a hide-and-seek game set in the Continental from John Wick.
Wishful Thinking
As Marvel’sBob Reynolds, a.k.a. Sentry, and Stranger Things’ Robin Buckley, respectively, actors Lewis Pullman and Maya Hawke dominated the pop culture landscape in 2025. Now they’re looking to keep the good genre vibes going with Graham Parkes’ sci-fi rom-com, Wishful Thinking. The duo star as Julia and Charlie, a couple from Portland, Oregon going through a rough patch in their relationship.
After attending a seminar led by twin healers who claim to use energy to fix relationships, Julia and Charlie discover that the state of their union suddenly affects the world around them: earthquakes, stock market crashes, the whole nine yards. With the literal fate of the world now in their hands, the couple has to figure out what to do with the power of their connection. You know, with great power comes… all that stuff.
Friday the 13th Part VII Should Have Been the Model for the Franchise
By 1988, Jason Voorhees was a shambling corpse without purpose, both literally and metaphorically. Paramount Studios, who released the original 1980 film by director Sean S. Cunningham and writer Victor Miller, had ordered Jason’s death for the third entry, 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. When that too proved a money-maker, Paramount allowed the franchise to continue, first by putting another person behind the mask for 1985’s A New Beginning and then resurrecting Jason as a zombie for the comedic, self-aware Jason Lives (1986).
In 1988, Paramount found something new to do with the late Mr. Voorhees: pit him against another monster, a troubled teen named Tina Shepherd, who had telekinetic powers and an abusive parent, just like Carrie White of the Stephen King novel and Brian De Palma film. The monster mash gave Jason a level of excitement and direction that he would not have again until Freddy vs. Jason, proving that the Friday the 13th series could have, and should have, evolved into a monster fight franchise.
Jason Lives, Barely
By this point, it’s no slander to say that originality was never part of Friday the 13th‘s origin. After seeing the profit turned by John Carpenter’s Halloween, Cunningham decided to make his own holiday-based slasher. Writer Victor Miller stuck closer to the giallo model that inspired early slashers like Halloween and Black Christmas, with a whodunnit based around Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) seeking revenge for the drowning death of her son, Jason. Throw in some great effects by Tom Savini and a surprise ending stolen (by Cunningham’s own admission) from Carrie, and Friday the 13th served its purpose, making $59,754,601 worldwide off a budget of no more than $650,000.
And that’s where things start to get messy. Obviously, a movie that successful calls for a sequel. But Pamela Voorhees was beheaded at the end of the first movie, and her entire motivation was revenge for her son’s death. So who would haunt Camp Crystal Lake now?
Turns out, it would be Jason, who was not in fact dead, but was living in the woods and just watching his mom from afar? It’s not clear.
Which is, of course, the secret pleasure of the franchise. Nothing really makes sense in Friday the 13th, certainly not between films. The amount of time that’s passed, the actual day on which an individual entry takes place; these things are explained about as well as Jason’s apparent ability to teleport to his latest victim.
As with the teleportation, no fan of the series really needs an explanation of the timeline or of Jason’s status among the living. They just want to see Jason kill people in spectacular ways. Jason did that best in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a tightly-constructed slasher with interesting characters and memorable kills. After the misfire of A New Beginning, Jason Lives added humor and classic Universal scares into the mix, making Jason a gothic monster.
Both of these movies evolved Jason, bringing him to his full culmination with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
Jason vs. Carrie… er, Tina
The New Blood opens like every other Friday the 13th sequel, with a series of flashbacks from previous movies, giving the illusion of a coherent narrative. After the credits, however, we get something very different. Young Tina Shepherd (Jennifer Banko), a blond moppet who resembles Carol Anne Freeling from Poltergeist more than any of the franchise’s doomed counselors, runs from her lakeside home and into a canoe after witnessing her father (John Otrin) beat her mother (Susan Blu). When her father comes out to console her, he gets no farther than the dock before Tina uses her telekinetic abilities to collapse the dock, drowning her dad.
The movie then jumps several years ahead, to a teenage Tina living with her mother and trying to cope with her powers and her trauma. Working closely with the Shepherds is Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser), who hopes to turn his study of Tina’s powers into a bestselling book. Pretending to care for Tina, but rather hoping an extreme move will trigger her powers, Dr. Crews brings Tina and her mother to a cabin at Crystal Lake, the same place where her father died. And, because this is Crystal Lake, it’s also the same place where a bunch of teens are partying.
The return to the lake does indeed trigger Tina’s powers, and her memories of her father lead to a telekinetic explosion that frees Jason from the chains that have been holding him at the bottom. As Jason arises and does what he does so well, Tina wonders if she’s not the one responsible for all of the carnage.
All of this builds to a stand-off between Tina and Jason, giving the unkillable zombie a true challenge (sorry, Tommy Jarvis). Using her powers, she stands up to Jason better than even the plucky Ginny Field (Amy Steel) from Part II. Even better, it gives us a glimpse of what would have happened if Carrie White would have left the prom and went to Crystal Lake to relax, a concept that appeals to horror nerds of any stripe.
In short, The New Blood did exactly what it said it would do, injecting the franchise with new energy—energy that was immediately squandered.
Bad Old Blood
At this point, some readers may point out that The New Blood is hardly the best Friday the 13th movie, a point no one can dispute. Director John Carl Buechler, a special effects great who is also known for lesser horror films such as Troll (the predecessor to the infamous best worst movie), struggles to balance the character work and even the kill scenes with his forte, the special effects. The effects are good, but like most Friday movies in the second half of the Paramount era, they were so heavily censored that the good stuff didn’t make it on screen.
But the idea behind The New Blood stands out, even if the execution is lacking. Need proof? Just look at what followed. Unable to actually bring Voorhees to NYC, Jason Takes Manhattan plays as a tired retread of better mainline Friday movies. The first two New Line Cinema movies completely reinvented the character, first unsuccessfully (Jason Goes to Hell) and then successfully (Jason X). Even the 2009 remake fails to make much of an impression, outside of some truly nasty kills.
No, only the uneven Freddy vs. Jason has any juice, and for one good reason: it pits Jason against another monster. We could have had so many more exciting, if not exactly good, Friday the 13th movies if only the franchise had learned its lesson sooner and followed the lead of The New Blood.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood is now streaming on Paramount+.
Best Picture Nominee Train Dreams Is a Beautiful Movie About America’s Sins
The Best Picture nominee Train Dreams features a rarity in Western fiction: a protagonist with little agency and even less interior life. Where most stories, especially American stories about men, the heroes are strivers and individualists—the untamable Huckleberry Finn, the self-made Jay Gatsby, the indomitable Charles Foster Kane—Robert Grainier of Train Dreams simply seems to float on the periphery of his life in late 19th century and early 20th century Idaho. As played by Joel Edgerton, Grainier is a man most comfortable when working felling trees, and seems to do his best to push away thoughts rather than exploring them.
One particular memory that Grainier wants to avoid comes from a moment from his boyhood, when he witnessed the Chinese citizens in his town forcefully removed. The narrator, voiced by Will Patton and reading directly from the Denis Johnson novella the film adapts, tells us that the violence of the moment confused the young Grainier. Yet, as much as he tries to forget about that and other unpleasant moments of his life, Grainier cannot completely avoid them—nor, crucially, can we viewers. This combination of lyrical narration and obstinate protagonist allows director Clint Bentley to make Train Dreams into a beautiful, heartbreaking film about the sins that America cannot forget, no matter how much it tries.
Blazing a Solemn Path
Co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, Train Dreams follows 80 years in the life of the logger Grainier. With its lush nature photography, meditative pace, and heavy use of voiceover, Train Dreams has drawn comparisons to Terrence Malick films such as Days of Heaven. But Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shot the film in Academy ratio, underscoring a more limited scope than most of Malick’s work, which can sometimes span from the dawn of creation to the 1960s.
Moreover, Grainier is hardly as soulful as even the murderers of Malick’s debut Badlands. He wants only to work and to spend his time with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their infant daughter Kate. Even the former becomes less interesting after the birth of Kate, as he and Gladys make plans to build a sawmill, which would allow him to spend less time felling trees with teams of laborers and more time with his family. However, when he returns from one final lumbering job to find his home destroyed and Gladys and Kate missing, Grainier returns to logging. He only stops when younger men and heightened technology render him obsolete, forcing him to work as a carriage driver for a time and then to finally retire and spend his days in his secluded cabin.
Despite the simplicity of its main character, Train Dreams feels rich. Some of that depth comes from the narration, with Patton’s warm, inviting voice bringing out the best in Johnson’s prose. Some comes from the beauty of the cinematography, which fills the boxy frame with the lushness of nature, and some comes from the score by Bryce Dessner of The National, all warm crescendos and tinkling harpsichord and tentative violins.
Train Dreams‘s ability to create depth beyond the limitations of its main character reveals a theme running throughout the film, one that uses Grainier’s work aiding the Westward expansion of the United States and his proximity to racial violence to draw attention to America’s national sins.
Guilt By Association
The expulsion of Chinese workers that Grainier witnessed as a child has an echo later in adulthood, in a scene that occurs mere minutes from the first. While Grainier works on a portion of the Spokane International Railway, the narrator tells us that he took comfort in the easy coalition of the various men who came together there. To illustrate the point, the camera captures Grainier and a Chinese worker called Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) sawing in perfect rhythm, each on either side of the tool.
Their work comes to an end when a group of men grabs Fu, drag him up to the bridge, and hurl him off the edge. As soon as the men take Fu, Grainier begins asking “What’s he done?” and he even grabs Fu’s legs, potentially to free him or potentially to help with the execution. But after Fu kicks him away, Grainier simply watches, neither supporting nor stopping the atrocity.
In the very next scene, the overseer who led the lynching gives a pep talk to the workers. “You boys have shown this old river valley who’s boss,” he bellows. “You have helped save Spokane International. Eleven miles it used to take to get around this gorge. And you opened up a new part of the country.” Some men scoff at the boss’s declaration, others cheer along. Grainier simply stares.
Grainier may not be able to make sense of the combination he just experienced, but we viewers can. We understand that we saw American expansion in miniature, both the destruction of natural spaces for the sake of industry and the elimination of a non-white person whose labor had been deemed no longer worthwhile.
Even if we read Grainier as a willing participant in the murder of Fu, he does not present himself as a virulent racist. Even though he spends much of his life cutting down trees for the sake of the railroad, he isn’t a committed capitalist. Grainier is just a man trying to exist.
Yet the Grainier’s proximity to the events indicts him in the nation’s larger sins. He may not have caused racism or rampant industrialization, but he’s certainly haunted by them, as demonstrated by the visions of burning trees and of Fu’s ghost that visit him throughout the film.
Quiet Condemnation
As in their previous collaboration, the excellent 2023 drama Sing Sing, Bentley and Kwedar are clear, but not strident, in their politics. They’re more interested in the human drama of a person caught in an unjust system than they are having those people declare their anger against systemic wrongs.
That approach allows Train Dreams to be a beautiful, quiet movie. The combination of natural imagery, subtle music, and Johnson’s prose allows the audience to invest in the emotional depth of the story, and even lets them leave the film thinking they’ve just watched a simple life, well lived, forgetting all of the themes after a good cry.
But anyone who pays closer attention to Grainier’s dreams and the thoughts he tries to hard to avoid will see something different. There, they’ll find a tragedy that goes far beyond the unremarkable life of one man, a tragedy at the roots of the American experiment.
Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix.
Project Hail Mary Review: Hard Sci-Fi That Goes Down Easy
Too often storytelling treats science like magic, a hand-waving variation of “abracadabra” for the modern world. This might be one of the reasons Andy Weir’s novels have proven such fertile ground at the movies. Despite penning wildly outlandish scenarios set almost entirely in space, the one-time video game programmer drills down into the nuts and bolts of his flights of fancy in a way that makes nerds swoon at the page. And even on a screen, where Weir’s zippy first-person narration is generally absent, it can still provide enough wonk fuel for a genuine movie star to cross the celestial heavens.
In 2015 that star was Matt Damon, and the adaptation, Ridley Scott’s light-footed The Martian. Eleven years later, it works almost as well for Ryan Gosling in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s similarly charming Project Hail Mary. Despite Gosling playing largely the same character as Damon’s Mark Watney—except that Gosling’s even more bookish Ryland Grace cannot remember why he’s alone in space when he wakes aboard a spaceship, five years from earth and traveling in the wrong direction—the page-turner premise remains a winner. It’s a showcase for an actor who can hold the camera without another soul in sight (at least of the human variety); and it’s an opportunity for filmmakers who enjoy breaking the abstract and erudite down into addictive popcorn entertainment.
That ability of transforming the complex into the accessible is doubly appropriate here since we learn in flashback that Gosling’s Grace was a schoolteacher back on Earth, a gregarious big kid geek who just happens to wear a tie and facial hair while excitedly explaining the way the world works to younger curious minds. He also reveals how it doesn’t when Grace is forced to exposit for his class the chillingly ingenious villain of the film: astrophage, or “dots” as the kids (and most assuredly the viewers) will call them. These are microscopic alien lifeforms that travel the cosmos in search of stars’ heat. When they find one, they feast on the gas giants until their light is put on a proverbial dimmer.
These little space bastards have apparently made our sun their next meal, and while only a faint problem right now, in about 30 years, the temperatures of the Earth will drop a clean 15-20 degrees, ushering in a new ice age. Hence the Hail Mary, Grace’s rocketship which was designed to send three scientists out to the only verifiable star the astrophage has visited but didn’t dim. The goal is to learn what makes that sun special and discover a way to replicate the trick back home.
Yet by virtue of the movie’s setup, something transparently went wrong between the flashbacks and the present. Grace is alone when he wakes up with only a groggy notion of who he is, and his mission seems close to hopeless in the present tense. And all of that is before the movie’s real penny drops with Grace learning this isn’t a solo act; it’s a two-hander, and an alien ship from another solar system is right outside the Hail Mary’s hull.
When I read Project Hail Mary in 2021, the publisher had concealed the fact that this save-the-world premise was secretly a launch pad for a first-contact yarn. Amazon MGM has been more forthcoming in their marketing. That’s liberating for lowly film critics who like to convey what a movie is about without speaking only in euphemisms and riddles. And indeed, the sheer pleasure of Project Hail Mary as a moviegoing experience derives from its “when worlds collide” meet-cute. Rather than the twist transitioning the story into the realm of the fantastical, it creates cosmic real estate for first Weir, and now Lord and Miller, to brazenly replicate the hard science fiction that made The Martian a feast for wonks in the most outlandish context imaginable. The results elevate the inherent optimism of Weir’s storytelling to an interspecies degree.
Beyond all the science jargon and merits of theoretical soundness in the author’s books, there remains his clear-eyed and unapologetic celebration of expertise and hard-earned wisdom saving the day. He envisions futures where rationality and the universal language of math, or at least respect for those who speak it by running the numbers, triumphs over fear, division, and selfishness. And in spite of such musings seeming increasingly remote from our daily reality in the decade since The Martian, that rosy belief in the scientific method has not faded. It’s just pivoted to the stars in what becomes the most unlikely buddy comedy this side of Turner and Hooch.
Without giving away what the extraterrestrial looks like here, or how exactly its relationship with Grace plays out, the creature is a visual coup of puppeteering and discreet digital add-ons for Lord and Miller, who create a sheltie-sized sidekick that is equal parts pupil and the unknowable heptapod from Arrival. Its dynamic with Grace is the heart of the movie, providing a parable about the benefits of cooperation trumping cynical self-interest.
The high-concept beguiles, but the human element remains present since Project Hail Mary continuously fixates on Grace’s sense of dread from being alone amongst the stars, as well as his dawning memory of how he got there being revealed by numerous flashbacks that introduce us to the people who put him onboard this vessel, including a coolly practical German project leader (Sandra Hüller). Hüller’s Eva sees the potential in Grace’s school teacher and is given just enough humanity to echo the canny political players and public servants of The Martian, but the chilliness of her utilitarian logic is never really developed beyond the familiar German efficiency stereotype that the movie leans heavily on.
It is these same flashbacks that ultimately overpack Gosling’s space odyssey. Running at a healthy 156 minutes, Project Hail Mary is not a short film. Before it is over, you will get the sensation you’ve been up there too long as well. And yet, despite the indulgent running time, Lord and Miller never let the pace lag or dither. The movie is just as propulsive and engaging as their best animated films—including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verseand The Lego Movie—and gets a lot of mileage out of playing with aspect ratios and filming techniques, with cinematographer Greg Fraser (Dune, The Batman) shooting the digital photography in the space scenes on a 1.43:1 frame, which is designed for the verticality of IMAX. Conversely, the earthbound flashbacks are presented in a more traditional 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio.
The film is, in other words, as visually thoughtful and pleasing in its imagery as Gosling’s many monologues about solar luminescence and selective microbiological breeding tend to be. So it is hard to ever be overwhelmed when there is always something engaging to reel you back into orbit, be it the aesthetic or extraterrestrial. It’s hard science fiction that goes down easy. So you can even forgive it when the picture over-imbibes on its vices, because even those are covertly its virtues.
Project Hail Mary opens only in theaters on March 20.
Best Picture Oscar Nominees from the ’00s That Should Have Won
As Oscar season heats up, we’ve been taking a critical eye to the Best Picture winners of the past, and having already tackled the ’80s and ’90s, we’re now moving on to the ’00s, where we will not be disputing the recognition that Gladiator, Chicago, and Slumdog Millionaire got from the Academy. We will, however, be risking it all on some thoughts elsewhere.
Without further ado, brace yourself for some potentially controversial opinions, as we take a look back at some of the Best Picture winners of the 2000s and decide who really should have won…
The Sixth Sense
We’re kicking off at the awards in 2000, which celebrated films released in 1999. It was a different time. Literally, but also culturally. American Beauty won Best Picture that year, and Kevin Spacey won Best Actor. So, you see what I mean. A different time! Looking back at the nominees, there are definitely some options that would have aged better than American Beauty: The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules, and The Insider were all vying for the statue. As was M. Night Shyamalan’s iconic horror movie, The Sixth Sense.
I genuinely love most of Shyamalan’s subsequent projects (I’ll even go in the ring for Signs if I have to) but still think The Sixth Sense remains his best, with every element of the movie coming together perfectly to create a wonderful, scary, and touching ghost story that would still blow someone’s mind today if they had no idea how it ended. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment both give great performances here, but it’s Toni Collette who makes the whole thing work as well as it does, putting in a gut-wrenching turn as a gifted young boy’s frantic mother. Horror rarely gets its due at the Oscars; a win for The Sixth Sense would have been a nice change of pace.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
A Beautiful Mind proved way too Oscar-baity for voters in 2002. Ron Howard also snagged Best Director for his emotional biopic about the life of mathematician John Nash, which is absolute friggin scenes when you consider that he was up against David Lynch for Mulholland Drive (one of the greatest movies ever made!) and Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which should have easily taken Best Picture that year.
Russell Crowe’s powerful performance as Nash carries A Beautiful Mind, a movie riddled with historical inaccuracies that also simplifies schizophrenia and culminates in one of the most predictable twists of all time. It’s simply no match for the epic storytelling and Middle-earth worldbuilding that The Fellowship of the Ring gives us.
Moulin Rouge!
Sometimes, there’s more than one nominee in the running that deserved the Oscar more than the ultimate winner, and that certainly feels like it was the case in 2002, where A Beautiful Mind triumphed over not just The Fellowship of the Ring, but Baz Luhrmann’s entirely different but utterly audacious Moulin Rouge!. With as many influences on its sleeve as edits per minute, Moulin Rouge! courts elements of the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, vaudeville, and even La bohème as it tells the tragic tale of Ewan McGregor’s English poet Christian, who falls in love with Satine, a waning courtesan at the heart of the Moulin Rouge caberet.
It’s a postmodern musical that weaves some more contemporary pop bangers into the aesthetic of fin de siècle France and pounds with an energy that thrills some people and gives others a proper bloody headache. I’m in the former camp, but whatever you think of Moulin Rouge!, it’s a fair bit more exhilarating than Howard’s formulaic A Beautiful Mind, and dug its nails into pop culture with a much more enduring severity.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Since we’ve just spent a while theoretically removing a Russell Crowe movie from our Best Picture winners, let’s add one in to make us square: Peter Weir’s epic period drama should have beaten The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the Best Picture race. Putting aside its eye-watering attention to detail and its immersive and practical action (the kind you rarely see anywhere anymore) it feels like Master and Commander largely lost out that year because every nominee that wasn’t Return of the King was doomed. Having lost the statue on the previous two installments of the LOTR trilogy, the Academy seemingly felt obliged to recognize Jackson’s efforts in making it, despite Return of the King perhaps being the weakest of the bunch.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is high-key the favorite movie of that one person you know who watches every historical TV documentary and owns more books about naval warfare than there are endings in 2004’s actual Best Picture winner. Given the chance, they will also bang the drum that Master and Commander deserved to win that year, and y’know what? They’ve got a good goddamn point.
Sideways
Voters were once again faced with a couple of worthy biopics in 2005, as Martin Scorsese’s glossy The Aviator and Taylor Hackford’s Ray jostled for attention. They seemed to cancel each other out in the end; Million Dollar Baby walked away with Best Picture and a slew of other awards that congratulated Clint Eastwood and co. on a job well done in bringing their depressing sports drama to the screen. Yet, the project that lost out the most that year was Sideways, a movie packed with sharp dialogue and unlikable characters that proved too divisive for some but has actually stood the test of time.
Over two decades later, I reckon that general audiences are better at coping with unlikable characters in their comedies, but Sideways was released in a pre-Breaking Bad, pre-Succession world. A couple of selfish, immature men going on a road trip through wine country would easily be an 8-episode HBO series these days. We wouldn’t be able to get enough of Miles and Jack’s nonsense! And we would still not be drinking any fuckin Merlot.
Brokeback Mountain
Welp, we’ve hit what I consider to be “the big one” on this particular list. A travesty so wild that people were justifiably yelling about it for years. After winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director awards, Ang Lee’s incredible Brokeback Mountain seemed sure to grab Best Picture, too. And then it didn’t. To a gasp heard around the world, Crash won instead. Not the David Cronenberg car sex movie, of course. No, that would have been cool (if belated.) The heavy-handed and reductive Paul Haggis ensemble flick.
Look, maybe you love Crash. I’ve never met someone who does, but I guess anything’s possible. But Brokeback Mountain is not just one of the best films of the 2000s, or of the 21st century. It’s one of the best films of all time. It’s so good that you can even forget Randy Quaid is in it. What the hell were they thinking that year? Sweet lord.
Little Miss Sunshine
I know deep down in my heart and bowels that I’m about to make some people very cross, but I have to follow my own truth on this one: The Departed isn’t close to being the best Martin Scorsese movie. I mean, he’s made some great ones, hasn’t he? Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, After Hours. I could go on. It’s not that I don’t think a Scorsese movie should have won Best Picture. I just don’t think this should have been the one. The Departed is… fine. It’s fine. But it’s a remake of a better Chinese movie, and I stand by that. Andy Lau and Tony Leung are phenomenal in Infernal Affairs, a benchmark of Hong Kong crime cinema that is much more tightly paced than Scorsese’s less subtle, tonally messier version of the story.
The idea of a dark indie comedy going toe-to-toe with The Departed tickles me, even now. Little Miss Sunshine is such a strong ensemble movie, featuring a standout performance by Paul Dano (stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Tarantino) that hits deep in a way that Scorsese’s star-studded crime drama just doesn’t. Was it the “best” film of the year? Debatable, but the only movie that could have beaten Little Miss Sunshine in terms of awards contenders for me was Pan’s Labyrinth, which didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. So here we are.
There Will Be Blood
The 2008 Academy Awards were absolutely brutal. In line for Best Picture were Atonement (good), Juno (good), Michael Clayton (underrated as hell), and No Country for Old Men (also good.) The thing is, all those movies may be really good, but There Will Be Blood is great. I get that Oscar voters must have felt like they were scoffing their faces at the fine cinema buffet that year, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s period drama was the main course; the bloody, buttery steak that they should have been pacing themselves for!
Daniel Day-Lewis dishes up an acting masterclass in Anderson’s morally complex character study. He got Best Actor for that, but his performance never overshadowed a sublime movie across the board. Robert Elswit’s stunning composition and natural lighting make you feel as if you are actually there during the California oil boom, Jonny Greenwood’s score is positively haunting, and Anderson’s direction is meticulous. There Will Be Blood is a memorable, modern classic that unfortunately lost out in what was simply a great year for cinema.
Hamnet’s Power is in Its Emotional Immediacy, Not Historical Accuracy
Each of these complaints has merit. Any viewer who finds themselves distracted by historical inaccuracies should take that into account when discussing their reception of the film. However, there are many other viewers who do not come to Hamnet looking for an accurate representation of the past. Rather, they enjoy the movie for the way it makes them feel, for the immediacy and depth of emotion on display. In that regard, Hamnet succeeds better than any other film in recent memory.
The Bard, Barely
Hamnet irritates the history nitpickers right away, opening with a title card that seems to state the obvious. “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” it declares, citing the 2004 article “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet,” but not, strangely, its author Stephen Greenblatt.
Even those who haven’t Greenblatt or any other work of new historicist literary criticism could probably guess that Hamnet and Hamlet are pretty much the same name. And they could have guessed that the death of young Hamnet affected the creation of Hamlet as much as Danish politics, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or anything else that influenced Shakespeare.
Rather than act as a statement of purpose, however, the title card acts as a lightning rod. It gathers all the expectations for historical accuracy that its viewers might have and dissolves them by stating the obvious. It gets those expectations out of the way, so that Zhao—who co-wrote the script with O’Farrell—can move onto the cathartic purging that she really wants to do.
Big explosions of feeling begin immediately afterward. There’s Will firing back at his father (David Wilmot) for failing to take glove-making seriously, followed by him shouting at his mother (Emily Watson) over his relationship with Agnes. There’s the courtship of Agnes and William, which consists of one quick flirtation followed by a retelling of the myth of Orpheus, leading to a pagan tryst in the woods. There’s the couple’s first argument, a typical artist breakdown and Will shouts about his inability to finish his play. And all that in the first twenty minutes.
Were the scenes nothing but characters shouting about their passions, then Hamnet would not receive the criticism leveled against it because it wouldn’t be successful enough to warrant much attention. But the film does resonate with viewers, and not just because they’re easily manipulated. Rather, they are affected by the unique way Zhao presents the film’s big emotional moments.
Artificial Scene, Real Catharsis
The standout scene in Hamnet occurs in the final ten minutes, when Agnes attends a performance of Hamlet. By this point in the movie, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) has died, in a surreal sequence that sees him apparently trade his life for that of his twin sister Judith (Olivia Lynes). The death leaves Anges wracked with guilt, but Will spends his time in London, working on his plays and apparently refusing to acknowledge his wife or what happened to their son.
Upon learning that Will is mounting a play named after Hamnet, Agnes travels to London and pushes her way to the front of the Globe’s stage, where she watches the play unfold. At first, Agnes refuses to engage with the play, asking aloud obvious questions to her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) obvious questions about the staging and paying no attention to the annoyed hushes of those around her. But as soon as the actor playing Hamlet (Noah Jupe, older brother of Jacobi) takes the stage, Agnes becomes transfixed.
She watches the story about death, about madness in indecision, about a father who leaves the afterlife to speak to his son, about the tragedy that ends with so many corpses, and she interprets it all as Will finally acknowledging the grief he could not speak directly. And through his art, he allows her to find meaning and peace, helping her make sense of a senseless loss.
Of course, the thousands of essays written on Hamlet demonstrate that there are many, many other ways to read the tragedy. But that’s not the point of the scene. Instead, Zhao focuses on Agnes’s specific experiences, showing how her feelings override everything: the words, the actors, even the other viewers. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal shoots the scene in hand-held, almost entirely in close up on Buckley’s face, breaking occasionally to let us see what she’s watching. Zhao and sound designer Maximilian Behrens give equal attention to almost everything in the mix, making the shuffling of feet and the shushes of audience members as loud as anything spoken by the actors. Max Richter’s score stays silent until the play nears its end, entering as a low rumble as Hamlet fights Laertes.
That approach changes at the moment that Hamlet succumbs to poison and injury and collapses onto the stage, right in front of Agnes. After screaming, “I die!” Agnes reaches out into the stage area and grasps the actor’s hand, which the actor accepts and holds. At that point, the music grows louder, with Richter’s score becoming rich and sumptuous, drowning out almost all other sounds. The audience follows Agnes’s lead, and they all reach out for the boy too, an image that Zhao captures with an overhead shot.
Nothing about that moment is subtle or real or historically accurate. It’s all artifice, downplaying the demands of reality to celebrate the power of false and the pretend. With the shift comes an invitation for the movie-watching audience to join with Agnes and let themselves cry, if only because the movie demands that we cry. And if reports from theaters across the country are to be believed, viewers answered that demand.
For Crying Out Loud
Hamnet has one goal. It exists to make the audience cry, and every line, performance, image, and sound works to that end. For some critics, this single-minded pursuit of a particular response is even worse than its disregard for historical accuracy, as if making people cry is useless.
For some, it certainly is. They come to art for some other form of experience, and that’s certainly valid. But Hamnet is adamant that art has the ability to create catharsis, to move the audience beyond words, to help them make sense of emotions that escape expression in every other form. Moreover, Hamnet insists that art’s ability to make us cry matters.
Some will disagree with that claim, just as they dismiss Hamnet as a film. And that’s fine, not every movie works for every person. But the powerful reactions to Hamnet demonstrate that many others disagree, proving that the film’s ability to reduce viewers to tears is not a drawback; rather, it’s proof of the movie’s claim that strong feelings matter.
Hamnet is now streaming on Peacock.
Thirty Years Later, Fargo Remains the Best and Most Beguiling Coen Bros Movie
In 2013, former Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman began his review of Inside Llewyn Davis by declaring Joel and Ethan Coen as masters of the “art of contempt.” Where forerunners such as Marcel Duchamp or Johnny Rotten only dabbled in the medium, the Coens perfected it. “An undeniably talented two-man band of brothers, the Coens take pleasure less in confronting their audience or authority in general, than in bullying the characters they invent for their own amusement,” Hoberman wrote. “Theirs is a comic theater of cruelty populated by a battered cast of action figures and a worldview that might have been formulated not from a Buick 6, à la Dylan but the Olympian heights of a bunk bed in suburbia.”
Hoberman is hardly alone in his assessment of the Coens’ talent and taste for condescension. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Roger Ebert, and other stalwarts of film criticism have heard a condescending giggle behind the travails of self-destructive folk singer Llewyn Davis, would-be parents H.I. and Ed McDonnough, and even the laid back Dude. Strong as the arguments are, they all dissolve at the sound of one short monologue, delivered by Frances McDormand as police chief Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo. Released thirty years ago today, Fargo remains the Coens’ best movie and, because of that sweet and sincere speech, their most beguiling film.
Minnesota Nice and Minnesota Nightmares
By the end of Fargo‘s climax, several people have died, some in horrific ways. Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) gets shot in the face and shoved into a wood chipper. A traffic cop gets shot in the head for pulling over Carl and his partner Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). Gaear kills two more passers-by because they saw the two with the cop’s body, while Carl murders businessman Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell) and a parking lot attendant (Bix Skahill) for getting in his way. And Jean Lundegaard (Kristin Rudrüd), the housewife whose husband Jerry (William H. Macy) came up with the whole fake ransom plot to bulk his father-in-law Wade, dies off screen.
That’s a lot of death for a movie that immediately entered the zeitgeist, in part because of the thick Minnesota accents the main characters use. If one only knows Fargo from Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons, then they would reasonably expect the film to be a bit of folksy comedy, celebrating the weird and wonderful antics of people in a unique community.
That’s not a completely wrong reading of Fargo. Minnesota natives themselves, Joel and Ethan Coen do clearly take pleasure in putting their home state on the big screen. The rhythms of the accent and especially the practice of “Minnesota Nice”—a cultural emphasis on superficial politeness even over deep despair—drive much of the film’s dialogue. A scene in which Marge interviews two local sex workers about Carl and Gaear ends with the former asking, “Oh yah?” and the latter responding, “Yah!” with the camera holding for to give the audience place to laugh.
The movie knows that there’s something offbeat about the way the people of Brainerd, Minnesota, and the nearby metropolis Fargo, North Dakota. But the film never forgets their rich inner lives, as demonstrated in Marge’s standout moment.
A Beautiful Day in an Ugly World
After the climax of Fargo, with all the dead bodies discovered and Gaear Grimsrud in her custody, Marge tallies up the count and drives him to the police station. “And for what? For a little bit of money?” she asks, disbelieving. “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.”
Read on the page, Marge’s response falls in line with both the cultural understanding of Fargo and with the critical consensus of the Coens. Marge seems hilariously out of touch with the bleakness of a world in which so much murder could happen. Her declaration that there’s more to life than money, delivered to a man as cold and uncaring as Gaear Grimsrud, seems at once obvious and useless. To those who insist that the Coen Brothers hate their characters and want us to laugh at their suffering, “I just don’t understand it” is the truest line that Marge speaks in the movie.
And that’s the point: Marge doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t misunderstand because of naiveté. Throughout the movie, she demonstrates her understanding of the evil that people can do, as demonstrated by her clear-eyed analysis of the murder scene that Carl and Graear left after shooting the traffic cop. Nor does she trust people blindly, as shown by her handling of former classmate Mike Yanagita (Stephen Park), who makes an unwelcome pass at her. She’s a good enough detective to keep putting pressure on Jerry Lundegaard and to not back down when he gets defensive, even if she’s a bit too slow to realize that he’d rather run than give her the information she needs.
Rather, Marge doesn’t understand how Carl and Graeer and Jerry can cause so much destruction because she chooses to not understand. When she finishes the death tally in her monologue and looks in the mirror to see that Graear refuses to acknowledge her point, she chooses to look away from him and up at the sky. She pronounces the day beautiful because she chooses to believe that it’s beautiful, because that’s the type of world she’s trying to create, no matter what people like Carl and Graear and Jerry do.
Choosing a Good Life
The very last scene in Fargo could be its most laughable. Throughout the movie, Marge’s husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) submits a nature painting to a state contest. At the end, he announces that he lost to the Hauffman brothers, that their work would adorn the new 29-cent stamp while his would be relegated to the 3-cent stamp.
Compared to the pile of bodies accumulated throughout the movie, the stakes are so low and quotidian that they make the moment laughable. But Marge isn’t laughing. Instead, she snuggles closer to Norm and reminds him that people will need the 3-cent stamp to supplement the 26-cent stamps they already have, a point that Norm accepts. The two snuggle together, warm in their bed, and instead of looking at the evil around them or even their small embarrassment, they look to the future, reminding each other that Marge will give birth in two months.
The need for 3-cent stamps does not negate the fact that Norm lost to the Hautman Brothers. The birth of the Gundersons’ child does not undo the many deaths throughout the film. The warmth of their bed doesn’t stop the Minnesota cold outside.
But the decision that Marge and Norm make to choose that small bit of sweetness has value, not only within Fargo, but also within the larger Coen oeuvre. The Gundersons’ decisions reveal the Coens’ characters to be more than bumpkins to whom bad things happen. Rather, they are people who try to make a life in a cruel and uncaring world. Sometimes, those decisions are inexplicably self-destructive, as seen by every selfish thing that Llewyn Davis does. Sometimes, those decisions are as unlikely as they are hopeful, as when H.I. takes one of Nathan Arizona’s many kids. Sometimes, the Dude just chooses to abide.
Obviously, these decisions rarely work out for the characters, and we can laugh at them as much as we can feel sympathy or horror at their outcomes. But any viewer who feels contempt for the characters and their decisions cannot blame the Coens. They’re missing the sympathy and dignity the Coen Brothers give their characters, none more so than Marge Gunderson.
Ready or Not 2: Exclusive Look Inside Radio Silence and Samara Weaving’s BBQ of the Rich
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
The future of horror is spontaneously combusting bodies! You heard it here first.
Arriving seven years after Ready or Not saw Samara Weaving’s new bride engage in a deadly game of hide and seek, the sequel Here I Come ups the ante with more blood, more kills, more locations, and higher stakes that include no less than the future of the entire known world. And yes, there’s another exploding body or two.
Back in the dress to see it all is Weaving’s Grace, who we catch up with seconds after the gloriously gory ending of the last film, with the newly widowed bride sitting on the steps of the mansion where she was hunted. She’s won the game, but there are consequences to her survival.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who work as part of the Radio Silence collective, also return in the directors’ chairs with Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy once again on scripting duties. The Radio Silence team say they had an appetite to take a second dip into the Ready or Not universe after the first film became such a hit with audiences, but only if they had the right story to tell.
“The idea that we could expand the mythology and build another story in that same universe and in that same tone was really exciting to us,” explains Gillett. “It was exciting because it wasn’t premeditated, we didn’t go into the first movie planning on something else, and so there was a feeling of freedom in that.”
Since the first movie, the helming pair had been off making raucous vampire-ballet horror, Abigail (with Kathryn Newton), and Scream 5 and VI (which briefly, but memorably, also featured Weaving). Meanwhile, Weaving was making, among other things, the sequel The Babysitter: Killer Queen, high-end TV show Nine Perfect Strangers, and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon opposite an all-star cast. The planets would need to align to get the gang back together.
The Story So Far
Shot in 2018 and released in 2019, Ready or Not saw former foster child Grace marry into the affluent Le Domas family. On her wedding night, she takes part in a family tradition—an initiation ceremony where she must pick a card from the box of a mysterious figure named Mr. Le Bail. Grace’s card reads “Hide and Seek,” but far from a fun kids’ game, this is a deadly cat-and-mouse chase. The Le Domas family must hunt and kill Grace to fulfill their demonic pact with Le Bail. If she survives till dawn, they all die. Sure enough, Grace does, and the Le Domas family explodes into a morning red mist.
The Radio Silence team considers themselves fortunate to be able to brazenly pick up seconds after the last movie, despite it being more than half a decade later since they were on that set. “Obviously, we lucked out that Sam literally hasn’t aged a day in seven years, which I know we certainly can’t say the same for ourselves,” Gillett laughs. Grace is in fact still sitting bloodied and broken on the steps outside the Le Domas house as the interior burns. Merging the first movie seamlessly with the second in that opening shot was a complicated affair that could fill an hour-long “making of,” according to Bettinelli-Olpin, and involved all departments.
“The linchpin that holds it all together is Samara,” he says.
Again in that blood-splattered gown, Weaving’s Grace is about to suffer another 24-hour ordeal.
“I had to remember what I was doing all those years ago,” says Weaving, chatting to us from LA. “It was tricky because where, emotionally, does she go from here? I thought in the first one I’d been stretched and seen a rainbow of emotions, and now, how do we make this interesting for the audience so it’s not repetitive at all? I think Kathryn [Newton] is so helpful in that.”
Sister Act
Enter Faith, Grace’s estranged younger sister played by Newton. Grace is cuffed and in the hospital when Faith walks back into her life, mad as hell because Grace abandoned her as a teenager. But all that drama will have to be dealt with later since Grace’s survival has had major repercussions for the elite group of families who have made deals with the literal Devil for untold power and influence over the world.
It hasn’t escaped the cast and directors how horribly current that last plot point is with the movie coming after the staggered release of the Epstein files: “They’ve always been a satire, but I don’t think we imagined that they would be quite as sharp a satire as the two Ready or Not movies currently feel,” says Gillett.
Newton’s been an actor since she was four years old but describes working with Radio Silence on Abigail as giving her “a new sense of wonder all over again.” So when the duo approached her to play Faith, she “was jumping up and down and screaming.”
Radio Silence say they “Parent Trapped” Newton and Weaving, inviting Newton along to a Ready or Not reunion screening and encouraging the two to bond and hang out. It clearly worked. On screen, their chemistry is infectious. Not only do the two look like siblings—“If you think we look alike, I’ll take it!” laughs Newton—but they easily slip into a rhythm.
“She is one of my favorite people, I’m obsessed with her,” Weaving smiles when we ask about her co-star. “We very quickly fell into a sisterly relationship where I just was making fun of her all day and doing impressions of her on set, embarrassing her. I was like texting boys for her because I don’t understand how she doesn’t have a boyfriend. We need to remedy this…”
Newton is equally enamored of Weaving, saying she started to copy her tastes and habits.
“She’s way cooler than me,” Newton says. “She’s a little older than me, she’s a little more worldly. I’m still growing. I’m still kind of in eighth grade in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to boys and stuff, but she’s just really cool. Sam made it really easy for me to be myself and to shine in my own way, which only makes her shine too.”
The Dark Council
Handing off the Scream Queen baton is no less than Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Not a final girl this time, she’s Ursula, one half of a pair of evil twins with Shawn Hatosy’s Titus as her brother. The two are the offspring of patriarch Chester Danforth (played by legendary horror director David Cronenberg), holder of the “high seat.” But after the demise of the Le Domas clan that claim is contested. Titus and Ursula will have to compete against other powerful families to be the first to destroy Grace and claim back the most powerful spot in the world.
Ursula is beautiful, cold, callous, and violent, and Gellar looks like she’s having a blast in the role of villain. While she might be best known for playing Buffy, she’s been on both sides of the spectrum plenty of times.
“It’s so funny because I first got some notoriety in my career when I was a teenager and I was on All My Children, and I played this very bad character,” she says. “I thought that’s what my future was. It took me a while to convince people that I could be Buffy. I was originally cast as Cordelia. Then Buffy was such a success, and when I wanted to do Cruel Intentions, everybody kept trying to talk me out of it and say, ‘Don’t you want to play [good girl] Annette?’ I’m so incredibly grateful to be accepted in both roles.”
With the various different factions competing to murder Grace first, it was a large ensemble cast, and Gellar says it was a joy how much everyone wanted to be together between takes. Newton describes Gellar as a massive influence in her career and recalls a special moment.
“We were sitting on set one day [in costume], I had the ball gag in my mouth… and she’s like, ‘Hmm, this looks familiar,’ and she pulls up this picture of her as Buffy, and she had on a denim shirt, hair up in a bun just like mine with the bangs and a sword. I had chills, like full-body chills.”
Seeing Gellar, Weaving, and Newton share screen time is a treat, even when they are trying to kill each other.
“Her doing this movie is such an honor because she’s a scream queen,” says Newton. “Now we have Samara, I’m a baby scream queen. We’re all coming together, and she’s opening the door and continuing that legacy.”
Factions and Families
Other families competing for the “high seat” are clans from London, Spain, China, and more. The rules of the game are thus:
The head of the family must be the first to attempt to kill Grace. If they die, the next in their bloodline must take over.
Members of the council are not allowed to kill each other, a crime punishable by death.
Each family must use a weapon contemporary to when their blood line first made their pact. Grace, meanwhile, must simply survive until dawn again.
The person to enforce these rules is Elijah Wood’s character, known only as “the Lawyer.” He works for Mr. Le Bail, and while his backstory isn’t conveyed in the film, Wood and Radio Silence discussed what it could be at length, leaving the audience with tantalizing questions.
“It’s toeing that line between being someone who is neutral, to articulate the rules, but also giving him some personality in regards to what he is observing internally,” Wood says. “He’s probably seen this process through multiple times, and maybe even has his own opinions about these individuals that are ultimately irrelevant in regard to what his task is.”
Though it’s a relatively small role, Wood relished working with Cronenberg’s Chester Danforth. While Gellar says she was tempted to ask for tips from her on-screen father—“It was funny, after every take, I would say, ‘What do you think? Do you have any notes for me?’ And he would look at me and he’d be like, ‘I’m not the director.’”—horror nut Wood, who has his own genre production studio, SpectreVision, was nervous to ask for stories from the genre auteur.
“He was incredibly forthcoming, really lovely, and such a sweet individual,” Wood says.
Gore Galore
With the players in place and the rules established, the game is afoot. What results is massive carnage, including notable setpieces dubbed “death by washing machine,” “bride on bride,” and what Radio Silence refers to as “the paffening.” No spoilers here, but there are complex stunts and a lot of gore. Specifically, 325 gallons of blood, with 100 gallons for the “paffening” alone, which required 14 huge pneumatic cannons, according to Radio Silence.
The two say that they are sticklers for practical effects, meaning the set becomes hard to be in after some of the major moments (“you don’t wear your nice shoes to work,” jokes Gillett).
Weaving and Newton bear the brunt of the onslaught, but both knew what they were getting into after Ready or Not and Abigail.
“You just have to be in acceptance. Otherwise, why are we doing a second one?” Weaving considers. “I think a big reason why we wanted to do another one was that we had so much fun. It’s camp, you’re gonna be cold and sticky and uncomfortable, but it’s also gonna be fun.” Indeed, Weaving lost the security deposit on her apartment after the first film due to the blood stains she left behind.
“They must have thought some serial killer had lived there!” she laughs. “The bathtub was stained pink from all the blood coming out of my hair, and there were just trails of fake syrup blood everywhere. Fair enough, by the way, it’s really hard to get out. They were going, ‘You’re not getting your deposit back because that apartment is pink now.’ Yeah, sign of a good time.”
Fun with Frights
At the end of the day, on top of the politics and kills, Ready or Not 2is a really good time. It’s the kind of good time that Radio Silence have developed as their calling card over the last decade and more.
“We want to put our characters through something really tough, and we want to see them make it out the other side having learned something about themselves. The world is a scary place, and I think we want our movies to be an escape from that,” Gillett says.
It’s an emerging trend in horror where stories can be taken seriously while also being gory, funny, and wild.
“There’s nothing silly about this movie,” Newton says. “That movie is hilarious, the original, but it’s also very grounded. So we had to be careful not to go too big.” The actor even recalls one of her main notes from Radio Silence was not to be “too funny.”
The GOAT Goat
The final showdown in Ready or Not: Here I Come is as massive and outrageous as anything Radio Silence has done, with most of the cast gathered together, decked out in spectacular costumes, not least of which include the Lawyer’s incredible hat and Grace’s new dress.
“It’s one of the best dresses I’ve ever worn,” Weaving says. “The train was so long, though, and I had to work with a goat.”
Ah, yes, the goat. Adding to the general melee is a farm animal, which has to kneel on command.
“The goat was terrified of the dress, thought it was like a long snake or something,” Weaving continues. “So it was a little tricky when it was 4 a.m., and the sun was coming up, and we had to get this shot, and this goat was not a fan of this dress at all.”
Crowd Pleaser
At the time of our interviews, the cast and team hasn’t yet seen the film with a theatrical audience. The movie premieres at SXSW, and the gang cannot wait to witness the reactions of the crowd. Bettinelli-Olpin equates it to being in a band.
“When you’re in a band and you play a live show, that’s the moment. It’s not the recording, it’s the interaction with the audience, and I think that we’re always searching for that feeling with our movies. Hopefully they play great at home, but they play much differently in a theater when you’re surrounded by people having the same experience, and where there is a very real moment-to-moment interaction with the audience.”
Contemporary and grounded, but also exploring ancient mythology, there could even be scope for a third installment.
“We didn’t save any good ideas to use later,” says Gillett. “We want the audience to feel like they are getting a complete and satisfying story from beginning to end, and there’s no tease or tag, or ‘to be continued.’ [But] given the way we expand the mythology in this one, there’s certainly a bonkers, absurdist way of continuing the saga, and we’re here for it should it happen.” For now, sit back, enjoy, and let the combustion commence.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come premieres at SXSW on March 13 and opens wide in theaters on March 20.
Daredevil: Born Again’s Central Romance is the Most Comic Accurate Part of the Show
You might think that the Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Againshould be about Matt Murdock putting on a bright red devil costume and leaping along the rooftops of buildings to fight supervillains like Stilt-Man and Mr. Hyde. After all, the show is based on a Marvel comic book, and superhero comics are primarily concerned with good guys and bad guys punching each other in the face.
But like all the other comics that began with the dawn of the Marvel Age in the 1960s, Daredevil has always been just as much about Matt’s romantic relationships, something that will be a focus in season two of Born Again.
Deborah Ann Woll told The Direct that her character Karen Page and Matt Murdock, played by Charlie Cox, will find themselves getting even closer in the show’s second season, not necessarily in the way they would have hoped. “I think from where we left everything off last season, they have a really big job ahead of them. Matt and Karen are both loners, and so they are pretty much the only other person that the other one has left,” she explained. “And so I think there’s a dependence and a reliance and a support of one another that you know will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
That will probably play out badly, for a number of reasons, not least of is that Matt is dating therapist Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva). The two certainly seem to be headed for a breakup at the end of season one, for reasons that include Heather’s new job working for Mayor Fisk and her research, which takes a skeptical view of masked vigilantes in general. But the biggest reason they’re going to end is the same reason that Karen and Matt find themselves together again: because Matt Murdock sucks at relationships.
Matt’s inability to keep a steady girlfriend comes directly from the comics. Unlike Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, or Superman—people who more or less always end up with Mary Jane, Steve Trevor, or Lois Lane—Matt Murdock has never truly had a single partner. Karen Page was introduced in that role way back when 1964’s Daredevil #1 called her “Gorgeous Karen Page” on the font cover. Yet, she eventually fell away, replaced by various other love interests, including Heather Glenn (a troubled socialite in the comics, not a therapist), assassin Elektra Natchios, District Attorney Kirsten McDuffie, and more. And each and every time, the relationships end badly.
The relationships fail because of an aspect of Matt’s personality that Frank Miller underscored in his reinvention of the character in the 1980s, an aspect that’s driven all of the great Daredevil runs that followed. Matt Murdock is a man against himself, a guilty Catholic who dresses up like the Devil. There’s a self-destructiveness to Daredevil that makes him both alluring and untenable, someone who women cannot resist, but who they must leave for their own well-being.
As Woll’s comments indicate, leaving Matt is going to be difficult in the second season of Born Again. The first season ended with Mayor Fisk declaring martial law in New York and sending his Anti-Vigilante Task Force against anyone who crosses him, especially Daredevil. As she and Matt both continue to grieve their late friend Foggy Nelson, and as Fisk turns up the heat on both of them, Karen will once again be stuck with Daredevil.
They’re sure to have some passionate times together, but it will just as certainly end as badly as every other Matt Murdock relationship, in the comics or on TV.
Daredevil: Born Again season two premieres on Disney+ on March 24, 2026.
Corey Parker’s Most Underrated ‘80s Movie Feels More Relevant Than Ever
After news arrived that Corey Parker had died of cancer at 60 this March, loving tributes flooded in for the Memphis-born actor, who had starred in such ’80s movies as Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, Scream for Help, and Biloxi Blues, before also becoming an acting coach for shows like Ms. Marvel in later years. Less spoken about was the underrated How I Got Into College, in which Parker starred as Marlon Browne, an underachiever who pulls out all the stops to get admitted to the same college as his talented high school crush, Jessica Kailo (Lara Flynn Boyle.)
The film did not do well, critically or commercially, and curious cinephiles seeking it out in the decades since its release have found it hard to get hold of. That’s a real shame, because where the themes of other ’80s teen comedies like Revenge of the Nerds and Porky’s have aged like milk, How I Got Into College deals with a coming-of-age scenario that feels more relevant than ever.
In Savage Steve Holland’s lesser-known 1989 movie, we follow a group of young characters whose post-high-school worth is suddenly defined by their academic achievements. The endearing Marlon seems to be a hopeless case, while two African-American seniors from Detroit also have to fight for consideration by the admissions team at Ramsey College. On the team is the sneering Leo (Charles Rocket) who is entirely focused on SAT scores and clashes with former students Kip and Nina (Anthony Edwards and Finn Carter) who want to take a more holistic approach to admissions.
Satirizing a system that prioritizes credentials over character and attempting to break the myth of “the perfect applicant,” How I Got Into College explores whether the will to push forwards into higher education is enough and whether the ladder is being pulled up by those who have already benefited from it. The students applying to Ramsey College feel they need to stand out, whatever it takes, but this tale of their efforts still seems pretty quaint compared to today’s college admissions arms race.
The film certainly understood the problems of its time, yet it also became a harbinger for worse to come. The competition among students and their families to build the most impressive college applications has only escalated. These days, colleges receive far more applications than they can admit. Academic credentials alone are no longer enough to stand out from the crowd, but not in the idealistic way that How I Got Into College fantasized about. The movie also touches on the desire to pile up skills and the need for extracurriculars, like honors courses, internships, and volunteer experiences, that now plague so many college applicants. So much so that more than half of them rank the process as their most stressful academic experience.
The level of competition is just one problem for students who are pursuing increasingly ambitious activities to differentiate themselves. Some suggest that personal growth and genuine learning are declining as they race to outperform their peers, and as some fight to be noticed, they may also discover that there are even more factors beyond their control influencing the outcome. Federal prosecutors unearthed a major U.S. college admissions scandal as recently as 2019, where wealthy parents were paying millions of dollars to fraudulently secure their children’s admission to elite universities. Manipulating a path into higher education was apparently an option for some wealthy and influential people, so what chance did regular kids who bent over backwards really have in a scenario like that?
Ultimately, How I Got Into College’s dismissal of “the perfect applicant” myth was indeed well ahead of its time. It remains a sweet movie with a great performance by Parker, and more people should discover it on their hunt for underrated ’80s gems. Though the college admissions process has evolved since its release, it should hit home for anyone who has had to face this kind of intense, exhausting competition, or those who have noticed that privilege and connections can just get some people further in life. Almost 40 years later, these often-questionable ethics of success endure.
Elain, Azriel, Mor: Which Characters Will the Next Two ACOTAR Books Be About?
Rejoice, romantasy lovers! After five long years, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series is finally set to continue, with not one but two new books headed our way. Releasing in October 2026 and January 2027, respectively, the next installments in her sprawling story of a magical kingdom of High Fae, bonded mates, political intrigue, and ancient grudges are set to set the publishing world on fire.
No information has been shared about the content of these next two books — we don’t even have titles yet — but that doesn’t mean we can’t start speculating wildly about what (and who) they’re likely to be about. During her appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Maas indicated that ACOTAR Books 6 and 7 would be closely connected, pieces of a larger four-part story that will span several titles. (Yes, this also means an ACOTAR 8 is in the works. Buckle up.)
Here are some of the most likely options for the characters Maas might focus on next.
Elain
Elain Archeron is certainly the most likely pick for the lead character of ACOTAR 6. She’s tied to the bulk of the series’ current ongoing stories, and we’ve all been wondering about how the whole Lucien/Elain/Azriel triangle is going to play out for ages now. Lucien is technically Elain’s mate, but her deep and complicated connection with Azriel means that she’ll have to choose between the two sooner or later. (Preferably sooner.) Plus, it might be interesting to find out what happens to those who reject that powerful mating bond we’ve spent so much of this series hearing about.
She’s also the last of the three Acheron sisters to have her story told. The first three books (and a novella) focused on Feyre, and A Court of Silver Flames was Nesta’s story, which just leaves Elain to go. Maas has said for years that all three sisters would get their own books, and with so many outstanding plot threads connected to Elain, it just seems like the most natural choice. (Not to mention the right time.)
Azriel
While Azriel is almost certain to play a huge role if either of the next two ACOTAR books is focused on Elain — in much the same way that Cassian was prominently featured in Nesta’s story — wouldn’t it be interesting if Maas just surprised us all by giving the most mysterious member of the Inner Circle his own story outright?
It’s certainly possible. Though most of us have assumed that the bonus Azriel POV chapter from A Court of Silver Flames is a hint that Elain’s story is coming, it could just as easily be a sign that the book will focus on the Shadowsinger himself rather than Feyre’s sister. Or that it will be the focus of the seventh book, which Maas has said is connected enough to the sixth to warrant such relatively close release dates. After all, there are plenty of intriguing plot threads to dig into that have nothing to do with Elain, from his unrequited feelings for Mor and his growing closeness with Gwyn to the strange connection he (and his weapons) shares with Bryce Quinlan from Maas’s Crescent City novels.
Mor
Mor is an intriguing figure in her own right within the world of Prythian. Third in command at the Night Court, a trusted member of Rhysand’s Inner Circle, and the overseer of both the Court of Nightmares and the Court of Dreams, she’s got a whole lot going on without the messy business of Feyre and her sisters crashing into her life.
Beyond her role in the larger story of ACOTAR, Mor has a tremendous amount of personal trauma and history worth unpacking in greater detail. She’s got mysterious powers we don’t actually know all that much about, has survived both assault and abandonment, and is such a badass fighter that she’s still a legend to the Mortal Queens in the human world. (Don’t believe me? Google “Morrigan” sometime.) She has complicated personal relationships with almost every other major character on the series’s canvas, and a demeanor that implies she’s much more than she initially appears to be. (Plus, who doesn’t want to see if all those Mor and Emerie relationship hints pay off?)
Amren
This is almost certainly not happening (or at least, not right now), but a girl can dream.
Surely we deserve to finally see the backstory of this bizarre, incredibly powerful (dare I say angel-like) being from another world who has somehow bound herself to a High Fae body? Is she, as the most popular fan theories attest, actually an Asteri from the Cresecent City universe who has fled to the world of Prythian? The people want to know.
Nesta
Yes, yes, technically, the series’s fifth book, A Court of Silver Flames, was already about Nesta. But Feyre got a three-book trilogy dedicated to her story, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that her sister might too. (Especially since Nesta was involved in the ACOTAR/Crescent City crossover that took place in that series’s third book.)
