Bugonia Cements Emma Stone as One of the Greatest Actresses of Her Generation

This article contains spoilers for Bugonia.

Anyone looking at any of the promotional materials for the Oscar-nominated sci-fi comedy Bugonia can safely assume the movie’s tone, if not its plot. After all, it’s the latest collaboration between idiosyncratic Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, who previously starred in The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness. The poster and trailer prominently featured Stone’s character Michelle Fuller staring out at the camera, her head shaved and her body covered in white goo. Clearly, it seemed like Stone would once again give a brave, weird, and otherworldly performance in another Lanthimos oddity.

Bugonia is weird, there’s no doubt. And Stone certainly gives it her all, allowing herself to be vulnerable and disparaged on screen. But the most impressive part of Stone’s work is the humanity she brings to Fuller, enriching the film’s themes and establishing her as one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood today.

A Real Human Being

A remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, Bugonia follows conspiracy theorist Don (Jesse Plemons) as he and his autistic cousin Teddy (Aidan Delbis) kidnap high-powered CEO Michelle Fuller. Don is convinced that Fuller belongs to an alien race called the Andromedans, and that she uses her position atop the pharmaceutical corporation Auxolith to transform Earthlings into slaves, a plot he uncovered by studying the planet’s dying honeybee population.

Against expectation, Stone is at her broadest in the first act of the movie, before Fuller gets abducted by Don and Teddy. She sashays into boardrooms and stumbles while recording a video on work/life balance as if she’s in a Saturday Night Live skit about girl bosses. None of these scenes give credence to Don’s theories, but they do establish Fuller as an unlikable, out-of-touch rich person. Even the scenes in which Teddy and Don abduct Fuller are played for laughs, with Stone varying between precise martial arts moves and frantic flailing to escape her attackers.

As soon as she wakes up in Don’s basement to find her head shaved and her limbs in chains, Stone changes her approach. Initially, she allows Fuller to register some shock and confusion as she tries to make sense of the situation. Next, she plays a woman very used to getting her own way, as Fuller lays out, in very plain language, security protocols for Don and Teddy. Finally, after realizing that Don truly believes that she is an alien, she plays sympathetic and understanding with him, even as she insists that he’s wrong.

In the span of five minutes, Stone gives her character three different communication styles. But none of them goes over the top, none of them involves the easy hysterics that a lesser actor would use when playing an abductee. Instead, she keeps playing real, playing it like she’s a human interacting with humans—which is the entire point of the movie, even if it’s not the point of the scene.

Compassion in the Chaos

As in the original Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia ends with a terrifying reveal. Don and Teddy were right. Fuller is an Andromedan, and she has been using her company to experiment on humans. However, her people were not, in fact, turning humans into slaves. Rather, Andromedans created humans in their image, an act of apology to the Earth after accidentally killing off the dinosaurs.

As much as they hoped the humans would flourish on Earth and make it better, the Andromedans watched in horror as people destroyed the planet and each other. Fuller has been on a mission to guide Earth’s residents toward enlightenment and happiness. But they just keep acting like Don, wallowing in hatred and fear.

After a wonderfully retro sequence in which Fuller returns to her ship, declares the Earth experiment a failure, and pops the atmosphere, we’re treated to shots from all around the world, all immediately dead after Fuller’s actions.

While that ending is indeed darkly funny, and could be read as mean-spirited, Lanthimos and his screenwriter Will Tracy retain a sympathy toward people, even deeply flawed people like Fuller’s captors. Beyond the inherent sweetness in Delbis’s performance, there’s the reveal that Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) has been in a coma since she participated in a drug test for Auxolith. Even a shocking admission by local sheriff Casey (Stavros Halkias) that he molested Teddy when they were younger comes across in deeply sad, humane ways. It never justifies the harm that Casey did, but it acknowledges that a flawed human being acted upon another human being.

Taken together, Bugonia plays like a wild plea for people to be good to the planet and to each other, to stop acting the way we’ve been acting for millennia. But that plea would be easily laughed away if Stone ever allowed the viewer to dismiss her as a weirdo, as something wholly unknowable and unrelatable. Instead, Stone retains Bugonia‘s empathetic core by keeping Fuller as a real person.

Real Award-Worthy Work

Of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture, Bugonia feels the most unlikely. Yes, The Favourite and Poor Things established Lanthimos as an Oscar player, but a film involving kidnapping, alien invaders, and the end of the world hardly feels like it fits alongside One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, or Sinners. Yet, its message is just as relevant as any of those, urging for systemic change and compassion.

That message would fail without Stone’s work as Fuller. Even though she faces a stacked Best Actress category, against four other women who have done incredible work, no one had a challenge quite as demanding, or succeeded so marvelously, as Emma Stone, truly one of the best actresses of our generation.

Bugonia is now streaming on Peacock.

 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Stars Discuss Season 2’s “Tragic Throuple”

This article contains plot details from the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 premiere.

For a show that has both Godzilla and King Kong in it, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a surprisingly human story. Yes, giant Titans occasionally fight each other and destroy a bunch of presumably expensive property along the way, but the Apple TV series’ real hook is its characters, who are all tied together in a sort of time-wimey web that’s very hard to explain. 

Set across two distinct timelines and in between the events of several other franchise properties, Legacy of Monsters has a little bit of everything: kaiju, worlds between worlds, an interdimensional rift, multi-generational family drama, and an incredibly tragic love triangle that’s tangled up in the foundation of the organization that gives the show its name. Its second season leans hard into its human element, a choice that the show’s creators say is a deliberate one. 

“We always talk about the fact that the monsters are so oftentimes a metaphor for what we’re facing as humans,” executive producer Tory Tunnell tells Den of Geek. “Monsters are this existential threat. They represent the things that are out of our control. We’ve talked a lot about how in our show we’ve really felt like this season we’ve earned the title Legacy of Monsters, and how are the choices that we make, how do those create the monsters in our own life? What are the consequences that our actions have? We see that both literally and figuratively.”

Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in the relationship between scientists Bill Randa (Anders Holm) and Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and army sergeant Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell in separate timelines). Much of the show’s first season explored the early days of the group’s friendship, Keiko’s romantic feelings for both men, and the lead-up to their founding of Monarch, with a kaiju sighting or two along the way. But what makes their relationship so compelling is that all three of them form deep and very real bonds with one another, outside of anything romantic that may or may not be going on. 

“I think Billy and Keiko are powered by passion, and I think that Lee is more task-oriented,” Anders Holm, who plays Billy, says when asked about the group’s unique dynamic. “Lee’s given a task, and it’s like, ‘I’m either going to complete the mission or not.’ And then he meets the two of us and is linked up into our passion, and he’s like, ‘Oh, there’s more than just completing the task. There are living, breathing aspects of the journey that become part of you.’ I don’t think he expects that. And I think that’s what he clicks with Keiko about, and I think that Keiko and Billy share the passion aspect.”

But in a rare move, Legacy of Monsters’ primary love triangle isn’t constructed in a traditional “who will she choose” kind of way. Yes, Keiko ends up marrying Bill, but their relationship doesn’t make her feelings for Lee go away, nor does it damage the two men’s friendship with each other. In fact, things just kind of get more complicated all around, as the three chase Titans and butt heads about what kind of organization Monarch is supposed to be. At least until one of them is pulled into a pit by monsters in Kazakhstan. 

“I think that the problem is that they all love each other, like Lee and Billy too, all the same — probably intensely — and that’s what makes it complicated, but also compelling and tragic,” Yamamoto says. “The throuple [vibe] is something that we’ve accepted. It’s baked into the name. It’s just … supposed to be tragic.”

The connection between all three only gets deeper and messier in the series’ second season, especially now that Keiko has returned from the interdimensional portal world known as Axis Mundi to find that over 50 years have passed in her absence. Bill is dead, Lee has grown old, she has a pair of grandchildren, and is now technically younger than her own son. It’s kind of a lot. And though it’s evident she still loves Lee — after all, only something like 60 days have passed for her — she is also confronted with the fact that he’s not entirely the person she remembers.

“It’s interesting. Looking back at how I played it, I think there’s a lot of disorientation around who Lee has become because she’s expecting him to be the same person [she left],” Yamamoto says. “But there are things that she hears and snippets of things she sees, which isn’t who he used to be. So there’s an adjustment that happens, and more and more as the season goes on, I think she understands that he’s lived a whole life that she doesn’t know about. Ultimately, I think she finds that he’s become a different person — but I think, maybe the core of who you are never really changes. But in some ways, he’s not who she remembers him to be.”

Yet, despite everything, the two remain drawn together, and it is their complicated reconnection — as well as the search for a series of interdimensional portals that was once Billy’s life’s work and answers about what really happened to him on Skull Island — that powers much of the season to come.  

“In the end, I feel like it’s beyond love,” Yamamoto says. “It’s just some karmic thing. The tragic throuple. They talk to each other and are connected over space and time, and that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

New episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premiere Fridays on Apple TV.

What Hollywood’s Hays Code Era Can Teach Us About the Warner/Paramount Merger

Things have gone from bad to worse in the pop culture landscape. After months of worry about what Netflix and its antagonism toward movie theaters would do with Warner Bros., the streamer has withdrawn its bid and now Paramount is poised to acquire its longtime rival. While it would be somewhat better for another studio that has silent era roots and at least an appreciation for the cinematic experience to take over Warner, Paramount’s current CEO David Ellison has been quite open in his plans to create material that pleases the current administration.

If there’s a sliver of hope to be found in this turn of events, it can be found in the early days of Hollywood. In 1922, Adolph Zukor, who ran the studio Famous Players-Lasky and recently acquired smaller competitor Paramount, met with other Hollywood heads to discuss the rising public outcry against immoral movie content. Hoping to stave off government interference and to protect their profits, Zukor and the other studio heads formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. They appointed as head of the group Will Hays, former postmaster general and President Warren G. Harding crony to help clean up Hollywood’s image.

What followed was a decade of mass censorship in the movies. But a contradictory and creative spirit also followed, resulting in some of the best movies in Hollywood history.

Sanitizing Cinema

Five years after the MPDAA formed, the organization agreed on a list of guidelines, a collection of “Don’ts” and “Be carefuls” intended to help filmmakers avoid public scrutiny. The former included bans on profanity or nudity, as well as “miscegenation” (romantic interactions between people of different races), and ridicule of the clergy. The latter spanned from use of the American flag and religious ceremonies to depictions of safe-cracking or law-enforcement officers.

Certainly, the studio heads encouraged their filmmakers to follow these rules… as long as they didn’t interfere with profits. But if the public wanted to see violent gangsters gunning down their enemies, the Warner Bros weren’t about to tell Darryl F. Zanuck not to make The Public Enemy. They would just hope that the other studio heads would be more faithful to the rules, and they certainly wouldn’t fear any reprimand from Hays.

Despite the big box office returns from The Public Enemy, Scarface, and Little Caesar in the early ’30s, religious and community groups demanded more attention, and the MPDAA had to amend the code to create the Motion Picture Authority in 1934. From that point on, no movie theatre—which were then owned by the studios—would play a film without MPA certification.

That addition of real consequences to the MPA coincided with the assent of a man who was willing to wield them, Joseph Breen. All film scripts made their way through Breen’s office, and everyone from studio heads to directors to actors complained about the battles they had to wage against Breen to get their movies made.

And what kind of films did Hollywood release during this two decade era of increased censorship? Only some of the best movies ever made.

Encoded Resistance

While some certainly recognized its significance, most moviegoers in 1941 didn’t leave the theaters after watching Citizen Kane thinking they’d just watched one of the greatest movies ever made. Heck, some didn’t get to see it at all, as exhibitors feared reprisal from Nelson Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst, the latter of whom inspired Orson Welles‘ character Charles Foster Kane. And yet, despite pressure within and without, Citizen Kane did make it to theaters as both an angry polemic against the strength of the rich and a dazzling technical achievement.

That same year, audiences could watch Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade lech on grieving women, grouch about incompetent police, and down copious amounts of alcohol in The Maltese Falcon. Writer and director John Huston, adapting the hard-boiled novel by Dashiell Hammett, had to fight Breen about Spade’s sexual activities and his hard drinking, losing the battle about the former but winning the right to keep plenty of the latter. But even with those concessions, Huston brought to the screen a moody, bleak bit of work with no reverence for authority.

Some might dismiss the previous year’s His Girl Friday as a breezy screwball comedy, thanks to the rapid pace that director Howard Hawks shot the one-liners that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell fire at each other as reporters and former lovers Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson. But driving their will they/won’t they energy is an upsetting story about anarchists, dead cops, and sleazy reporters. There’s just as much ill-repute and excellent filmmaking at work here as in the other greats of the era.

And that doesn’t even get into the nastier noirs, the more absurd Marx Bros comedies, or the innuendo-laden Preston Sturges films. In some ways, Breen and the Hays code made movies better, because they forced directors to get more creative with the way they told their stories.

Audience Autonomy

As we stare down the prospect of another corporate merger shrinking the potential to make movies and deal with the ramifications of conservative politics being prioritized over art, that last sentence seems foolish. Certainly, Welles, Huston, and Hawkes would have preferred to have simply made the movies they wanted to make, without having to deal with Breen and the Production Code Authority. Perhaps saying that the movies are better is just apologizing for a horrible regime.

But even if we don’t want to say that the Hays Code made for better movies, we can at least agree that the code didn’t destroy movies. No matter how much control those in power wanted to exert over the creation and reception of films, moviemakers and movie watchers continued to find meaning in the cinematic arts, even meaning that directly resisted those power brokers.

So while Paramount may very well acquire Warner Bros. and David Ellison may very well use his clout to create a right-wing media empire, the Hays era reminds us that no rich person can control what we as humans do with the art we create.


Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz’s New Mummy Movie Will ‘Push PG-13 Boundaries’

In 1999 director Stephen Sommers made The Mummy, an action romp starring Brendan Fraser as treasure hunter Rick O’Connell and Rachel Weisz as librarian turned Egyptologist Evelyn Carnahan. Together they woke the mummified remains of high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo). Adventures and peril followed, as well as two sequels— one of which saw Weisz replaced by Maria Bello as Evie.

The first two are beloved. The third, not so much.

Now almost two decades later, horror mavens Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, best known for Ready or Not, Scream VI, and Abigail, are resurrecting the series, bringing Weisz and Fraser back together again to star. And while recently chatting with us, the direction portion of the Radio Silence collective was ready to unearth some of their own mummified past with Den of Geek.

“One of the first projects that Tyler and I did was called ‘The Treasure Hunt,’ and it’s a little online YouTube interactive adventure thing; it’s Indiana Jones and Mummy adjacent,” says Bettinelli-Olpin, talking ahead of the release of their own gory sequel, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. “That whole genre is in our DNA. It’s ingrained, we just love it so much.” 

The two are absolutely stoked to be able to bring the franchise back to life, having grown up with the original. They’re also keen to make it a bit of their own, bringing their unique sensibilities to the material.

“We want to push that PG-13 rating, because that’s how the first movie was for us,” Gillett smiles. “It had all of the fun action-adventure flavors but it also wasn’t afraid to be scary and cut away right at the nick of time. So bringing our genre sensibility into that has already been just really fun. There’s a level of magic and mythology that has created a lot of opportunities to do fun things.”  

If their slate is anything to go by, we can expect big set pieces, thrills and as much horror carnage as the rating will allow.

A thread that comes across through must of their work including Ready or Not, Abigail and even their first feature, Devil’s Due, is a marrying of ancient and modern; the mythical with the grounded. Ready or Not and its sequel, for example, follows ultra-rich people who control the world as we see it today, who have made a pact with a primeval evil. 

“We’ve already been talking a lot about that on The Mummy,” Bettinelli-Olpins says. “How do we bring a modern feel to stuff within the world of the movie? Not like modern filmmaking, but how do you get a sense of something that at the time would be extremely modern? We love that idea, we love it in everything we do, there’s something about that clash of institutions and foundations, and then the modern interpretation crashing into that.”

The two say it’s amazing to have Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz back together, “their chemistry is so lovely,” they agree.

The script for the new Mummy movie will be by David Coggeshall, which Gillett described to Empire as “very beautiful and sweeping and scary and fun,” and the film, which is currently in preproduction, is slated for a May 2028 release.

Before then we’ll get more mummy action with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a supernatural horror produced by Jason Blum and James Wan—Cronin made Evil Dead Rise for Warner Bros./New Line Cinema in 2023. 

Ahead of that you can satisfy you’re genre itch with Ready or Not 2 premiering at SXSW next month before opening in theaters on March 20.

Cressida, Eloise, Hyacinth: Who Is Bridgerton’s Next Lady Whistledown?

The following contains spoilers for Bridgerton season 4.

One of the most unexpected twists in Bridgerton season 4 was Penelope’s decision to retire as the infamous Lady Whistledown. Her decision makes a certain amount of sense, if only because she’s so happily settled in her own personal life. But the ton abhors a vacuum, and the reveal that someone had simply taken over her mantle probably shouldn’t feel as surprising as it does. (Outright stealing Penelope’s brand and reputation like that is something else, though.) 

“Are you perhaps feeling a little shock?” asks the new Whistledown (still voiced by Julie Andrews, thank goodness.) “You thought I was gone for good, but far too much transpires for this author to remain silent. It is assuredly a reunion rooted in care and love. Though this time with a very different author.”

Of course, this naturally leaves us all wondering once more: Who is Lady Whistledown? Here are a few of the most likely choices to pick up the infamous gossip monger’s quill. 

Eloise Bridgerton

Honestly, it’s kind of amazing that Eloise isn’t regularly publishing her own newsletter already. Though season 4 saw her soften some of her most vehement criticism of marriage as an oppressive institution that controls women, she’s hardly chomping at the bit to enter into it herself. She’s also certainly got the free time to pick up a quill and the level of access to society that would allow her to discover most of the same information her best friend did. 

Still, Eloise is perhaps the unlikeliest of our options, if only because now that we’re back in book-accurate romance order, season 5 should be her turn as the series’ main character. And since we’ve already seen Penelope attempt to juggle love alongside her secret pen name, such a twist would involve retreading fairly familiar ground. Now, should the show’s fifth outing turn out to be about Francesca instead, all bets are off. But it’s likely Bridgerton will give her some time to mourn before throwing her back into a romance. 

Cressida Penwood

The woman formerly known as Cressida Cowper has already claimed to be Lady Whistledown once. Sure, it was a lie, but we shouldn’t put it past Bridgerton to pull a sneaky switch and make her lie eventually turn out to be true. And, to her credit, Cressida was smart enough to figure out that Penelope was Lady Whistledown before she announced herself. Yes, she tried to blackmail her with that information, but isn’t that just good business?

However, season 4 seemed to be somewhat leaning into the idea that Cressida is reformed. She’s seen the error of her ways, settled down, and has even made a point of proactively apologizing to Eloise and Penelope for all that she did to them. Furthermore, there’s no real reason for Cressida to take up the Whistledown mantle, other than sheer love of the gossip game. (Which admittedly isn’t nothing.) But she’s married now, and to someone who isn’t old enough to be her father, thankfully, meaning that she no longer needs the independence (or money) that her original scheme would have brought her. 

Hyacinth Bridgerton

In all honesty, Hyacinth Bridgerton would make a perfect Lady Whistledown. She’s young, obsessed with society, desperate to be part of things, and a huge fan of the OG scandal sheet. Her upset at Penelope’s decision to quit is both loud and evident. (How will anyone name her the season’s diamond when it’s her turn to debut if there’s no one writing about it?)  The show is unlikely to get to her book for at least three seasons, which means Hyacinth needs something to do with no romance on the horizon. And her new sister-in-law, Sophie, has already taught her how to blend in: Pretend to be of the lower classes. Hyacinth’s delight at realizing that she can pretty much do anything as long as she pretends to be a maid feels an awful lot like it could be foreshadowing how she’ll collect information in the future. 

The only downside is that Hyacinth is quite young and hasn’t technically entered proper society yet. She’s unlikely to hear much good gossip from her younger compatriots and would surely be missed if she were constantly sneaking off to infiltrate her way into balls dressed as a servant. But it surely would be fun to watch her try. 

Mrs. Varley

Bridgerton season 4 is the series’ most class-conscious yet, acknowledging both the privilege most of its main characters exist in and all the ways that the servants are who really make the proverbial trains run on time. That a servant — a maid, a footman, a butler — might decide to pick up Penelope’s mantle makes a ton of sense. After all, they’re uniquely positioned to both have access to the upper-class elites they’d want to cover and to be able to move among them largely unnoticed. (Hyancinth ably proves this point for us in season 4.) 

The most obvious candidate among the regular servants has to be Mrs. Varley. The Featherington housekeeper is lauded multiple times this season for her ability to suss out information and find out things her employers need to know. She’d be an amazing Lady Whistledown from a gossip-gathering perspective. And the concept of making her broadsheet a servant’s commentary on those around them is an appealing one. It would allow the show to still pretend to care about some of the class issues it raised in season 4, while keeping its focus firmly on the ton’s elite. But does the show still care about those issues now that Sophie’s rags-to-riches romance has it’s happily ever after? It’s probably too soon to tell. 

Penelope Bridgerton

What if this is all one big bait and switch? Penelope mentions several times over the course of the season how frustrated she is by what Lady Whistledown has turned into. Everyone knows who she is now, meaning that they either blame her for everything she writes or are somehow angry with her for what she doesn’t include in her broadsheets. She gets manipulated by the queen, has to deal with people constantly trying to use her formerly secret identity for their own ends, and doesn’t even get all that much good gossip anymore, since it’s not like she can hide who she is while she’s out and about. If Penelope wanted to fully reclaim her gossip empire and decouple it from her personal life, there are certainly worse ways to go about it than to fake a death of the author, if you will. 

That said, her surprise at the arrival of a new Whistledown seems genuine enough, as do her reasons for hanging up her quill. She’s got a young child and a hot husband at home, and doesn’t need the independence and safety net the role once offered her. Plus, she’s still writing and has even started a novel.  She’s truly achieved the best of both worlds. Would she risk all of that to reclaim her secret identity?

Matthew Lillard on the Legacy of Scream, ‘90s Hollywood and the Tarantino Incident

Back in the day, Matthew Lillard planned to be Billy Loomis before he became Stu Macher. Either way you slice it, he was on the precipice of making a killing when he first arrived in Hollywood as a hungry young actor and was handed a Kevin Williamson screenplay called Scary Movie (later Scream). When we sit down with Lillard 30 years after the fact, he reveals he still remembers the first time he met Billy and Stu, and their fateful phone tag games.

“It’s totally clear,” Lillard says with a conspiratorial smile. He was in the Hollywood Hills, staying in the additional dwelling unit—a fancy term for a dilapidated pool house in the back—of film critic Bill Harris. The At the Movies TV reviewer was an acquaintance of Lillard’s mother, who actually raised the young burgeoning thespian not too far from the City of Angels. But that was before Lillard had seriously pursued acting, moving as far as the prestigious Circle in the Square Theatre School in Manhattan to become a stage performer.

“I was a New York actor, and it was just so much harder to get auditions,” says Lillard, “so I came out to LA for a week, and after landing, my agency out here was said, ‘We want you to meet people.’ So I got these two really great auditions immediately.” One of them was the aforementioned Scary Movie, which Lillard read alone at night, with only two lights and the sounds of the city creeping through a pool house’s wooden slants.

“I’m in the hills, so it’s like coyotes everywhere, and I’m reading the opening sequence, and I finished [the part where Casey Becker is gutted], and I remember shutting it because I was too scared to read on. That’s how terrifying that first sequence was in the movie.”

It also would change his life when he auditioned to play one of the two high school kids who did the gutting, specifically chief secret psychopath Billy Loomis. Yet when Lillard auditioned for the part with casting director Lisa Beach, she didn’t see it. She flatly told Lillard “you’re not Billy,” but she was curious what he could do with Stu—a character he hadn’t rehearsed or studied but who he would be allowed to audition for in a couple hours when Scream’s director, Wes Craven, swung by the office. Lillard did exactly that, apparently improvising a lot of the infectious tics and spasms now synonymous with the character.

Says Lillard, “I had that same energy that I’ve always had, and at the end of the audition, Wes looked at me and said ‘Well, that was pretty fantastic. Do you think you’d want to play this part?’ I’m like, y-eah!”

It was a turning point in Lillard’s career, one which he confides has seen long peaks and valleys when we meet up at a jazzy New York brasserie the night after a blizzard. These days he might even feel like the experience is turbo-charged since, along with Paul Dano and Owen Wilson, Lillard was on the receiving end of Quentin Tarantino’s inexplicable surprise attack on actors the director does not care to watch. Yet by Lillard’s own telling, the amount of support he immediately experienced throughout the industry from co-stars he works with to this day like Neve Campbell of the Scream franchise, or those he worked with once more than a decade ago, such as George Clooney on The Descendants, was an out-of-body experience.

This moment, specifically, feels like a new peak for Lillard who 30 years after seeing Stu Macher die by having a TV dropped on his head is seemingly back in Scream 7. And when we chat, it is right before a long celebratory dinner with fellow Circle in the Square Theatre alumni following a marathon reading of Tracy Letts plays.

All of which gives Lillard perspective, especially of those early days when he was coming up with peers and classmates in the 1990s Hollywood horror scene: contemporaries like Paul Rudd, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr. Looking back now, he surprisingly reveals his mindset from that era was “bleak,” especially when some were getting the leads and he was being cast in supporting roles. But he also describes that time as “lovely” and informative. We discuss that time and place, Lillard’s appreciation for his community’s support after Tarantino’s dismissal, and just what his real reading is on Stu and Billy’s relationship in the conversation below, which has been edited for length.

I wanted to begin by asking you something that has been on my mind for nearly 30 years. If Stu Macher had lived, what would he say when his parents got home?

“I’m sorry, I blew it. I followed the wrong influence.”

And do you think he might have meant that?

It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever played that out. “I did it all for love” is probably what he would have said. 

Was it love in your mind?

I don’t really know. He’s got that line about “peer pressure, I’m far too sensitive.” So I definitely think there’s that high school thing that for Kevin Williamson is a cheeky moment. But you know, over the years it’s developed that we are these two young gay boys. Somebody called us “the First Husbands of Horror,” and I think the two of us [Lillard and Ulrich] really glommed onto that because in the current situation we’re living in politically—with the religious right pushing their authority over people who are different, people with different sexual identities, different genders, this idea of pushing back against wokeness—I think we both hold onto that moniker because it’s important to us.

If there’s a kid out there that needs these two characters to be gay because they’re a horror fan, and that somehow makes them feel seen, then I will stand chest-out and say they’re two gay young men and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it. 

How would you describe that energy you brought to Stu and maybe other characters you’ve played? 

Certainly early on there’s a youthful exuberance about my work that was really about trying to be the best actor I could on every line I had. New York at the time when I was coming up, the craft was such a big deal, the work was such a big deal, right? And I think that back then, it certainly differentiated actors in New York versus LA. It’s one of the reasons I came to New York. I wanted that next level of credibility and I wanted to be pushed. 

So back then, I think in those early days, I tried to be brilliant every line. Every line I tried to have a reason packed with meaning, packed with motivation, making bold choices, and it’s funny as I would always come to work with this whole arsenal of choices, and the reality is that a lot of times, directors are paying attention to a million things, and number six or seven or eight on the call sheet isn’t one of them. So a lot of times early in my career, directors just let me do what I wanted to do. They’re more interested in getting shots, making sure the leads are right. So I feel like a lot of the stuff I did just sort of snuck past. 

When Scream came out it was a big deal for horror, but it was also a big deal for Hollywood. What was it like being a young actor coming up in that scene in the ‘90s?

That’s a good question. I always wanted to be—and I still want to be—number one on the call sheet. I want to be the guy carrying whatever I’m doing, right? Nobody wants to play in the NBA and be the guy on the bench that doesn’t play. So for me, I always wanted more, and for the longest time, especially in the early ‘90s, I don’t think I was ever really satisfied because I was always in competition with other people. I was constantly in competition with Freddie Prinze Jr. I was constantly in competition with Paul Rudd. They don’t know that, but in that moment, I wanted their jobs. And every time I was the second, third, fourth, or fifth banana, I took it like an indictment on my work in a lot of ways because I was like, “Well, why don’t I get a chance to be number one on the call sheet?”

Is it my work? Is it because I don’t have great abs? What is it about me that wasn’t getting that job? So for the longest time in the early ‘90s, I was eternally jealous and it was a horrible place to live a career.

Also, for me, acting was more than just a job. It was like everything I was about. I started two theater companies. I’ve been acting since I was 14. I am surrounded by all these incredible artists. All these people are incredible actors. My life’s acting. So when I wasn’t working, I would be calling my agent, my manager, like, ‘What’s next? Did I get that job? When’s my next audition?’ I would just be desperate for work. So I would say that during the ‘90s, it was pretty bleak, even though it was wildly successful. It was never enough to satisfy anything. 

Was there any camaraderie as well in the horror scene? You mentioned Paul Rudd, famously of Halloween 6, of course, and you obviously were friends with Freddie and Sarah, and Neve.

Yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, Neve and I dated for a hot minute, so that thing of gathering and going to parties, or having friends over, or going to a bar or grabbing dinner, that was super relevant because we were all friends. This idea of the Hollywood scene is hilarious. It really just ends up being who are you friends with? Your friends are the people you work with, and they just happen to also be working actors. 

So we would go and play games, we would go and play pool. You would go to dinner and we’d all hang out and bullshit. It’s not like we were doing drugs and bouncing around town. We were just fucking friends that happen to have weird jobs. So I do think there’s a world where people are there to be seen or trying to status-climb, or be in the right scene. But the reality is that back in the ‘90s, it was all people we hung out with because we were just friends. It’s a very different thing. 

It’s interesting, nobody’s ever asked me about the ‘90s scene, so I don’t have any reflection on it, but my memory of it is that it was super lovely. There’s no Instagram, there’s no TikTok, you know, the world was just a simpler place. And to me, it was about working. If I wasn’t working, I didn’t know who I was. 

To jump ahead, one of your more recent co-stars, George Clooney, said some very nice things about you recently. You’ve since said his and other coworkers’ comments were like reading your own wake. Did anyone you’ve worked with personally reach out and specifically say something that meant a lot? 

Being validated by industry peers out loud meant a lot. James Gunn doesn’t have to say anything. Mike Flanagan doesn’t have to say anything. George Clooney certainly doesn’t have to stand on stage and defend all three of us. Not that we needed defense, but I’ll tell you that the thing I have really deeply appreciated is the person on the street or who at a bar will come over and be like, ‘Hey, F that guy.’ It’s one thing to read it from anonymous people online, it’s another for someone to break human barriers, come into space, and say, ‘FYI, you mean a lot to me and my family.’ That to me is super rewarding.

You know, I’ve been around a long time. And I’ve had moments of great performances and great bounties. I’m in one right now. I’ve had moments where I don’t know if I’m ever gonna work again. So the great thing about being older is that you have a depth of appreciation that you never had as a young man. So these moments remind you that you have an impact. 

We were speaking about camaraderie with your peers starting out earlier. Do you feel it even more so today?

Yeah, because there’s a rallying call, right? You could be driving along blissfully and have no idea anyone’s thinking about you, and all of a sudden a pebble drops in a huge ocean, and it’s like everyone comes running. This bell went off that said it’s time to remember this person.

Somebody once asked me what is the performance you want people to remember most. And the reality is that I’d actually rather people remember who I am on set, how I treat fans, how I treat actors, how I treat my students when I teach. That to me is way more important than if you liked Stu Macher.

You mentioned your students. What is the most important lesson about this craft you want to pass on to the next generation? 

That’s a great question. Every time you work, you’re collecting hours and you’re collecting experience. It’s not about what’s next, it’s about duration and longevity. And the greatest thing teaching taught me is that it allowed me to put language to my own beliefs around my own craft and practice.

I went to Circle in the Square Theatre School. I’m an alumni of the school. I’m very proud of the work that school does but I was given thought bubbles to what great acting meant, and it’s not until I have to live it, articulate it in others, and then in a laboratory, which is the classroom where I see it in practice, that I understand really what my beliefs are. If you’re arguing politics or religion and at some point you don’t feel connected to the argument, you know you’re not arguing based on your beliefs. You’re arguing based on what you think are facts. 

And it’s when you are arguing full-chest with everything you have that you know that this is a core tenet of who you are as a person. Same thing with teaching. What am I as an artist? What do I believe? Well, I’m going to apply those beliefs directly to people in the process. 

You mentioned longevity, and you’ve had longevity. What is the greatest lesson you’ve learned from that?

That it doesn’t matter. Whatever Scream 7 does on this upcoming Friday, or Thursday starting at midnight, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that on the other side of this bar, I have fucking 10 actors who I am so excited to go spend the next three hours talking to. It is who you travel with in this job, in this career, that gives you joy.

I have zero fucks to give about a box office number, but we did a reading of Tracy Letts’ plays, in which I sat in a room and read scripts for five hours on Friday and I’ve never been happier. The community and the people you gather with is the reason to do anything.

AKOTSK: Dunk’s Knighting Remained Ambiguous at George R.R. Martin’s Request

Any universe as sprawling and full of lore as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is bound to be full of unanswered questions, narrative gaps, and unconfirmed theories. Granted, the smaller scale of something like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t lend itself to the scope of the theories fans regularly debated so vigorously on Game of Thrones (R + L = J, Maggy the Frog’s prophecies, Cleganebowl), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t similar lingering questions from the original novellas that readers are hoping the show might one day clear up. And one of the biggest (no pun intended) centers around Ser Duncan the Tall.

No, it’s not whether he’s actually an ancestor of Brienne of Tarth, one of Westeros’ other famous tall knights. (That seems pretty well confirmed, actually.) It’s the question of whether he’s actually a knight at all. The show opens with the death of Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the knight whom Dunk served as a squire. But while he almost immediately begins referring to himself as a knight in his former master’s place, we never actually see the ceremony that made him one. This is, of course, because it may not have happened at all. Or, it might have. We just don’t know. And that’s on purpose, apparently by way of a direct request from Martin himself. 

“There is no confirmation, one way or the other, coming out of that scene.” Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker said during a recent interview with Collider. “That’s exactly how Mr. R.R. Martin requested it. It remains [ambiguous], and people can decide for themselves.

The series is very careful to never commit to either answer. Dunk tells people Ser Arlan knighted him, but offers no actual proof. He’s called away before he has to knight Raymun Fossoway prior to his trial of seven, leaving the duty to Lyonel Barathoen and allowing the show to neatly avoid the question of whether he can even perform the task legitimately. In the season finale, we see a flashback in which Dunk asks an ailing Ser Arlan why he’s never knighted him, a question Pennytree doesn’t answer. But that’s not the end of Ser Arlan’s life or of their story together. There’s every possibility he knighted him later, in the gaps between this moment and the one in which we saw Dunk bury him. In short, it really could go either way. 

“At that moment, Dunk had never been knighted by Ser Arlan,” Parker explains. “He says, ‘Why did you never knight me?’ And then, Ser Arlan dies, and we think it’s over. But then, he’s back and, as far as we know, the continuation of that scene is, ‘Boy, go get me my sword,’ and then he knights him.”

Of course, if the first season of this show has taught us anything, it’s that the answer to this question doesn’t really matter. Sure, it’s possible that Dunk is regularly referring to himself using a title he never received. But when it comes down to it, he still chooses to behave like one, whether he technically is or not. He defends the innocent, honors his friends, and tries to do right by the least fortunate around him. What’s all of that stacked against a ceremony?

“This whole journey is going to be about what makes a true knight,” Parker says. “Whether or not you’re given the title, or if you have to earn the title even after you’re given it. Can you earn it, even if you’ve never been given it?”

Starfleet Academy: Mary Wiseman Breaks Down Sylvia Tilly’s Star Trek Return

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 8.

Since Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is set during the years immediately following the events of Star Trek: Discovery, it’s natural that the former should reference the latter fairly regularly. Admiral Vance makes frequent appearances, Commander Jett Reno is an instructor, and there are frequent references to the U.S.S. Discovery helping out on various missions and rescues. In “The Light of the Stars”, another familiar face returns: Sylvia Tilly, the sunny former Discovery crew member turned Academy instructor, whose infectiously bright personality was such a highlight of that series.

Tilly’s return is just one piece in the larger puzzle of this episode, an hour that explores grief and healing through the lens of communal experience, all filtered through Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town. But while we may not spend as much time with her as some of us (read: me) might like, “The Light of the Stars” offers fans a lovely glimpse at how much Tilly has grown since we last saw her.

“I felt like she’s really settled into herself,” Mary Wiseman, who plays Tilly, tells Den of Geek. “In Discovery, I thought she was always battling some level of imposter syndrome being on the ship, and I didn’t detect that in the writing of this. And I love it that she really did find her place here and has found a deep comfort and confidence in being a teacher. It’s satisfying that she really has landed somewhere where she can feel like she belongs and use her skills effectively.”

Invited to campus to help the struggling cadets try to process their lingering grief and trauma in the wake of a classmate’s death during a training mission (as well as the fact that several of them were attacked and held hostage by a vicious gang of aliens at the same time), Tilly turns to the unifying and emotional power of performing theater. An unorthodox method to be sure, but one that turns out to be surprisingly effective.

‘There is something about engaging with theater, acting in it, and buying into it that is allergic to having walls up,” Wiseman says. “You really have to open yourself and be vulnerable and give in to the text and the world that’s created there. The sense Tilly has when presented with the issue the cadets are facing right now is that they need to move through this experience, but they’re already [building] walls to try to batten down the hatches and move through it. But what needs to happen for them to experience real growth and for them to develop resiliency against these kinds of events is to [face] them openly and with vulnerability. In Tilly’s mind, this is the perfect challenge to get them through this. And I think she models a kind of anti-coolness, an anti-toughness approach to processing really difficult emotions.”

Tarima, particularly, is struggling with the aftermath of everything that happened on the wreck of the U.S.S. Miyazaki, which saw her not only unleash the full extent of her heightened empathic abilities, but also wipe out a squad of alien enemies in the process. Forced to transfer from the War College into Starfleet Academy, she’s not adjusting well, and although everyone is doing their best to be supportive and caring, it’s not helping her to process what’s happened and Tilly susses that out almost immediately.  

“I think it’s interesting because the way she gets through to Tarima is by not being a doormat, it’s by pushing her a little bit, which is not always Tilly’s way,” Wiseman says. “Tilly tends to lead with a lot of softness. She does not mind making herself the fool, but I think she’s got a strong emotional intelligence and can sense that Tarima wants to shut down. So what Tilly senses in that moment is that she has to push and needle her to elicit these big feelings so that Tarima can actually deal with them. And once those feelings are up and out, then the softness comes and the empathy and the shared vulnerability.”

Tilly, perhaps better than most, is very aware that this won’t be the first tragic event or personal loss these students will have to navigate over the course of their Starfleet careers. And, for Wiseman, part of her time with the cadets is about helping them learn to survive them.

“I think the way you move forward is by letting things move through you,” she continues. “You have to process the emotion so it’s not still clamped down in you. You have to move with it, not against it, to really develop the grit necessary to keep encountering difficult situations again and again.”

While Wiseman can’t tell us whether we’re likely to see Tilly reappear in Starfleet Academy’s second season. “You’re allowed to hope,” she says with a laugh. But, for the moment, the actress sounds pleased with her character’s emotional and professional journey.

“What I really wanted for her was that she find a place where her skills and what she loves can really sing. She’s settled into being a teacher in a way that makes her really happy, she has a real talent, and it’s given her confidence,” she says. “That’s what I was trying to bring to it, that she’s been out in the Beta Quadrant with the third years working hard, making friends, and having fun, and feeling real good about Starfleet Academy.”

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


The Rookie Crossover with Game Changer Is a Fan Convention Geek’s Dream

Nathan Fillion built plenty of credibility with sci-fi fans back in 2002 with his starring role as Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds in the one-season cult hit Firefly, and his geek star has never really fallen since. From his role as Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog to his turn as Guy Gardner in Superman, he’s the superhero of every cosplaying Comic-Con attendee out there. But that doesn’t necessarily mean all of his adoring fans have watched many episodes of his long-running ABC cop dramedy The Rookie.

That may be about to change with the March 2 installment, which will feature improv comedians from Game Changer, a hilarious and varied game show on the niche streamer Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor). Dropout operates at peak geekdom with shows like Dimension 20 and its compelling live D&D campaigns and Um, Actually in which hardcore fans of video games, fantasy lore, and all of the nerdiest IPs nitpick their favorite franchises. Having Dropout regulars like Vic Michaelis, Jacob Wysocki, and CEO Sam Reich on The Rookie with geek royalty like Fillion seems like a match made in fan heaven.

The crossover is not without controversy, however. Besides being hardcore nerds, the typical Dropout demographic leans to the left, and many of the streamer’s chronically online viewers have been very vocal about their disappointment in seeing their beloved comedians appear on a “copaganda” show like The Rookie. It’s possible that Fillion fans had similar feelings when Captain Mal signed onto the cop show in the first place, never mind his eight-season run as an NYPD consultant on ABC’s Castle.

But Dropout’s star is on the rise, and exposure on a mainstream network like ABC could bring in plenty of new subscribers. Some of its regular stable of comedians have springboarded into bigger projects already with Very Important People host Vic Michaelis starring in Ponies on Peacock and Game Changer veteran Jeremy Culhane joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, among others. And the premise of the crossover episode as depicted in the latest trailer seems genuinely hilarious.

Plus, let’s not forget that The Rookie has another regular cast member that sci-fi fans may recognize. Melissa O’Neil, who plays officer Lucy Chen on the cop show, originally gained recognition as a Broadway performer before landing her television debut on Syfy’s Dark Matter (not to be confused with the more recent show of the same name on Apple TV) from the makers of Stargate SG-1.

Will genre fans become regular viewers of The Rookie because of Game Changer‘s involvement in the show? If nothing else, they might just watch the crossover episode, but even if viewers tune in just to witness their favorite improv comedians doing their thing, the fan convention regulars will probably enjoy seeing their beloved Firefly captain again. And who knows? Maybe some of the Dropout employees geeked out a little on set, too.

The Rookie season 8 episode 9 “Fun and Games” airs Monday, March 2 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Sinners Is More Than a Horror Movie, But its Not Less Than a Horror Movie

With a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations under its belt and certainly some wins in its near future, Sinners has been at the center of cinephile discussions. As moviegoers think about what the movie means for the past and future of the medium, some have resisted the temptation to describe the film as a “horror movie.”

That group includes star Delroy Lindo, who earned a Best Supporting Actor nom for his turn as bluesman Delta Slim. “The vampire aspect is only one of [the various narrative strains in the movie], albeit a very fundamental and necessary component,” he told EW. “But I felt that the vampires represented outside forces infiltrating a community, and we see what happens as a result of that infiltration.”

Certainly, Lindo’s not wrong in his assessment. But horror movies have long used monsters to represent some sort of outside force or deeper issue. Sinners does it exceptionally well, but that doesn’t mean Sinners isn’t a horror movie.

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners tells the story of twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), who return from Chicago to their Mississippi hometown in 1932 to open a juke joint. On its first evening, the juke is beset upon by vampires led by Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell), turning a night of musical celebration into a fight for survival.

As Lindo correctly notes, Remmick and his undead are just one of the threats that Smoke and Stack must deal with. Even before the vampires arrive, Smoke and Stack must deal with unscrupulous white people who, despite the insistence to the contrary, are indeed members of the KKK. Young Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) struggles with his father’s religious beliefs, alcoholism and war trauma wracks several of the characters, and that’s beyond the systemic racism that affects them all. Moreover, the opening sequence and the film’s standout musical scene frames artistic work as a cosmic, spiritual battle.

Coogler and his co-creators deserve all the credit they’ve earned for taking those themes and more and turning them into a wildly entertaining picture, a rare case of a Hollywood blockbuster that’s smart, relevant, and a ton of fun to watch. And part of that fun comes from the fact that Sinners is a horror movie.

All of those various threats come to a head when Remmick and his thrall come knocking on the juke joint door. While he wreaks havoc on Smoke and Stack and everyone around them, Remmick isn’t pure evil, as Coogler takes time to acknowledge that he, as an Irishman, is also victim of oppression, an oppression that he repeats after being turned. Sinners visualizes that turning and repeated oppression with Remmick’s glowing eyes, with the sharp teeth that he sinks into the necks of his victims.

It’s scary stuff, which hits viewers on an immediate, gut level. Horror can get a quick reaction out of viewers, and filmmakers have been taking advantage of that fact to churn out cheap, disposable horror entertainment for as long as Hollywood has existed. Horror has a stigma around it as some lesser form of movie making, so even incredible films and performances get overlooked.

With that history in mind, it makes sense that Lindo and others would want to keep Sinners from getting lumped in with Friday the 13th or Saw. But like those movies, Sinners deals with monsters. The fact that those monsters reflect monsters in real life doesn’t make Sinners any less of a horror movie. It just makes it a rich, powerful, and excellent horror movie.

Sinners is now streaming on HBO Max.

One Battle After Another’s Perfidia Beverly Hills Doesn’t  Fit in Easy Moral Boxes

In the very first shot of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Oscar-nominated One Battle After Another, Perfidia Beverly Hills pulls on a ball cap and strides toward the camera. Casually pulling the hat over her face as trucks pass by, but not so obviously that she attracts attention, Perfidia stakes out the detention center below. Back with her fellow revolutionaries in the French 75, Perfida acts with decision and precision, so much so that we viewers think we know what she’s all about.

Of course, over the next two hours, we’ll find that Perfidia Beverly Hills is so much more than just a single-minded revolutionary. She gets angry, she has sexual desires, she gives birth to a child, and she makes some huge mistakes. In short, she’s a human being, but that has led some to criticize the film’s depiction of Perfidia, a criticism that her actor Teyana Taylor rejects.

“She is so misunderstood, but most importantly, human, and so raw. And she is unapologetically herself,” Taylor told EW. “I feel like sometimes people just write her off as like, she’s just horny,” she observes, before getting to the heart of the character. “Perfidia became a revolutionary because of the things that she believes in. You see her mom saying Perfidia comes from a long line of revolutionaries. That in itself, to any woman, any person, is also a pressure. So not only is she carrying it on, it is instilled in her, and now it’s become a part of her identity.”

On one hand, it’s easy to see why people would take issue with Perfidia and, in particular, Anderson’s depiction of her. Stereotypes about the sexuality of Black women have long persisted in American culture, especially in stories told by white men like Anderson and Thomas Pynchon, whose 1990 novel Vineland served as inspiration for the film.

Further, Perfidia initially has a moral clarity that one rarely finds in the real world, and which audiences long to see. When she and the French 75 liberate an immigrant detention center at the opening of the film, they show a decisiveness that we audience members wish we had. In light of all the misinformation about immigration in America in general and detention centers in particular, it’s refreshing to see characters on screen acknowledge them as wrong and do something about them.

But One Battle After Another isn’t propaganda. Its sympathies are certainly with the revolutionaries more than with right-wing characters such as Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) or the Christmas Adventurers Club. But it’s primarily interested in the humanity of the characters, which means that it cannot reduce them to simple moral figures.

Nowhere is that more clear than in Perfidia’s decision to abandon her partner Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and her newborn daughter Willa (played as a teen by Chase Infiniti). “Getting pregnant and becoming a mother wasn’t exactly part of [Perfidia’s] plan,” Taylor allowed, but she also notes the reality of other factors. “If people understood the weight of postpartum depression, we wouldn’t even be seeing half of the discourse that we see in regards to Perfidia,” she contends. “Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s a compassion there. There’s an empathy there. Because we see this woman who was in survival mode.”

In other words, Perfidia is a human being trying to survive, a human being with all the same flaws, inconsistencies, and complexities as everyone else. But that humanity is exactly what the revolutionaries in One Battle After Another are fighting to preserve.

One Battle After Another is now streaming on HBO Max.

Scream 7 Review: They Finally Made a Bad One

The knives have been out for Scream 7 since well before its Ghostface was cast. They were unsheathed years ago when an entirely different version of this movie, starring a different pair of actresses and with another director at the helm, imploded into a million angry tweets. Given the controversy around Melissa Barrera’s dismissal from the series, and the online acrimony that followed, being able to evaluate the movie which was hurriedly made in its place with a murderer’s row of returning faces—and we do mean murderers—might on paper be a tricky thing.

But in practice it’s turned out to be painfully easy. While Neve Campbell makes a welcome and spirited return as the central star by which most Ghostface killers orbit—after she sat Scream 6 out over a pay dispute—the new movie they have built around the star proves to still be quite beneath her worth. Even with the director’s chair now filled by no less than Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter who started it all by writing the clever words “Scary Movie” at his typewriter during a long weekend in ‘94, there is nothing particularly scary or clever in Scream 7.

The sequel largely does away with the story threads of the last two movies, with “the killings in New York” mentioned often but the Carpenter sisters played by Barrera and Jenna Ortega not at all, yet what also has been disposed of is the wit, metatextual irony, and visual flair that’s marked nearly every other installment to date, including the first two films Williamson wrote solo 30 years ago. I would argue that until now, there has not been a bad Scream movie, but the ones a cut above had something pointed to say about either their genre, their industry, or the fan culture such long running series invite.

Scream 7 has none of that, not even the ability to descend into navel-gazing camp like the previous weakest link in the chain, Scream 3, or the self-consuming, ouroboros that eats its own tail, a la the movie-franchise-within-a-movie-franchise, Stab. The opening of Scream 4, which was also written by Williamson, sharply satirized how unwieldy such-referential sarcasm can be when characters die at the beginning of a movie by watching characters die at the beginning of a movie within a movie.

Still, even that imagined smugness seems better than something as flavorless and banal as Scream 7, an off-the-shelf, stock-itemed legacy sequel that previous Screams would’ve skewered for its timidity. A carbon copy of the original 1996 movie except where it counts, Scream 7 ultimately plays closer to other ‘90s knockoffs that faded into obscurity. It’s the Halloween H20 of Scream movies, a heartless cash-grab sequel that brings back a genre legend in something that wants so badly to be Scream that it bleeds itself dry.

That becomes clear during an opening sequence which returns for the fourth time to Woodsboro, and the third time to the Murder House used by Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) in ‘96. Previous reprises had a wink and nudge that this is what fans and studios want in their legacy sequels, or “requels.” This time, however, it’s really just pro forma as we watch a pair of generic Stab fans get, uh, stabbed by a killer who promises he’s going to be different by burning down the old haunt for good.

And yet, 30 seconds later we are in another small, privileged Californian suburb, following a new group of teens with a presumable serial killer in their midst—this one likewise fixated on Sidney Prescott (Campbell). After only having hints of what her home life is in recent installments, we get a real good sense in Scream 7 of what Sid has been up to in the 15 years since Scream 4. She’s a happy wife to the local sheriff Mark (Joel McHale) and mother to Tatum (Isabel May), her moody 17-year-old daughter with a boyfriend who likes to come in through the window. You’re probably not supposed to dwell on the math with a daughterless Sid in Scream 4.

She also is keeping things low-key as a small business owner who doesn’t talk about her past when a phone inevitably rings. It’s Ghostface. And he promises he’s changing the game by using FaceTime and MAYBE deep-fake AI tech since he looks a whole lot like someone who died a long time ago. This has the potential of being a canny twist on the formula, but the setup ultimately is window-dressing, an affectation while Campbell runs around interchangeable houses with creaky garage doors, and Courteney Cox returns—this time with Scream 5 and 6’s Mindy and Chad (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) as her assistants—to point the finger at the usual suspects of sketchy teens.

Scream has never been a saga above formula. It’s in fact famous for broadcasting it, beginning in the original movie when Mindy and Chad’s long-departed uncle screamed about it while discussing “the rules” of surviving a slasher movie. Yet in that film, it looked damn good while both making and breaking those rules under Wes Craven’s direction. In the running for the greatest filmmaker to play in the slasher sandbox, Craven made the original Scream a sleek, charming little studio daydream that could at times resemble a John Hughes teen comedy.

The two more recent installments, directed by the Radio Silence wunderkinds behind Ready or Notab and Abigail, had a slightly darker and more sinister presentation (as well as amount of bloodletting), but that also meant they could feel incredibly fresh when they put Ghostface in a Harlem bodega, wielding a shotgun.

Scream 7 conversely has the flat, desaturated aesthetic of a thousand streaming films you might spy on Netflix or Paramount+. While Williamson is the mind who birthed Scream, it should be noted the only other film he directed before now was Teaching Mrs. Tingle nearly 30 years ago. It shows in a horror movie where the set-pieces wither and drag until the inevitable fake-outs and jump scares fall into place. One special exception involves a sequence where Williamson dabbles with his inner-Argento in a high school auditorium that also makes, perhaps, an unintentional gag out of young Mckenna Grace being rumored for various Disney princess roles. She certainly checks off another franchise box here after already adding Ghostbusters, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and soon the Hunger Games to her repertoire.

The rest of the younger cast who stick around for longer than a cameo don’t enjoy enough screen time or, perhaps, presence to make much of an impression at all. There is some lip-service paid to Isabel May’s Tatum becoming a Final Girl like her mother, but there isn’t much onscreen to prove it. And by having Brown and Gooding make glorified cameos after Scream 6, one further appreciate how good Radio Silence’s casting was—keep in mind, those directors also hired Ortega and Anora’s Mikey Madison years before their breakouts. Comparatively, the list of suspects here don’t amount to more than a Core Snore.

McHale has a few nice moments with Campbell, but only enough to make you wish they had more scenes together, and there are a couple of monologues Cox dines on while passing through on her way to the bank. But this is ultimately Neve Campbell’s show, and it is genuinely nice to see her again. She was the emotional heart of the original three movies and she still can deliver lines with as much steel as the Golden Gate Bridge when the occasion arises. So getting her back prevents Scream 7 from being a total waste for longtime fans of the franchise. But it will only be the most diehard who go along with the third act revelations of who the killer is and what their motivation turns out to be.

By the time all the cards are on the table, and the last Ghostface mask is removed, it’s pretty evident Sidney’s storyline ended decades ago, and it’s almost an unkindness to the character that we’re still doing this after all these years. If the closest thing Scream 7 has to a thesis is true—that this series is Sidney Prescott—maybe it’s time to leave the poor thing alone.

Scream 7 is in theaters Friday, Feb. 27.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 8 Review — The Life of the Stars

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academyepisode 8.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s first season returns to excellent form with “The Life of the Stars,” an emotionally complicated hour about healing and growth in many forms. A satisfyingly layered, creative installment that sees the return of a Star Trek: Discovery fan favorite and the creation of a unique new bond for the show’s Star Trek: Voyager alum, it’s a love letter to the power of community, found family, and, strangely enough, Thornton Wilder. Yes, this is an episode that’s targeted like a laser at theater kids everywhere, but it’s also a much better follow-up to the tragic events that unfolded aboard the shipwreck Miyazaki than last week’s frequently clunky “Ko’Zeine”. 

For one thing, “The Life of the Stars” actually tries to confront the long-tail impact of everything these students have been through. They had to fight for their lives. One of their friends is dead. Another revealed she can basically melt people’s heads. Their idea of the world as a safe place has been fractured. It makes sense that many of them are struggling to find meaning in these kinds of events or fully understand the ways they’ve been changed by them. 

What makes slightly less sense is the Chancellor’s decision to combat their PTSD with the power of theater, but it’s such a perfectly Ake-coded weirdo move that it’s hard to be mad at it, particularly when it allows Discovery’s Mary Wiseman to pop in for a guest spot. If anyone is going to forcibly cheer up these kids, it’s Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly, who has somehow grown even more aggressively sunny since the last time we saw her. (Teaching really suits her.) She plans to coerce the struggling cadets into facing their collective trauma by making them perform a play together, and honestly, it’s hardly the weirdest group bonding activity we’ve seen folks forced to do in this franchise. Sadly, however, Jay-Den’s campaign to do a murder-filled Klingon opera is passed over in favor of Sam’s pick, a piece from Ancient Earth times called Our Town. 

Wilder’s classic is a bizarrely perfect fit for this moment, a story that wrestles with themes of existential dread, fear of death, the inevitability of change, and the importance of appreciating life while we’re living it. The episode itself adopts a quasi-Our Town framing, opening and closing in darkness, with both the Doctor and Ake playing the role of the Stage Manager who exists outside of both time and the play’s main story. Fitting — and bittersweet — since they’re both functionally immortal, with lives that will extend well beyond any of the cadets they’re so desperately trying to help at this moment. 

The hour deftly draws parallels between various elements of the play and the experiences of the Starfleet cadets and staff, allowing Tarima to find a kind of camaraderie with Wilder’s Emily in her fear of losing herself and Sam to be charmed by the hopeful resilience at the core of his take on village life. Even the hour’s B-plot, which sees Ake and the Doctor escort Sam to her homeworld of  Kasq in the hope that her Makers will be able to fix the debilitating glitching still impacting her, reflects the larger themes of this central work. Kasq is rendered in black and white, a greyscale planet that lacks the emotional context that Wilder insists both colors (literally) and gives meaning to living. (The Kasqs, being holograms, do not see the world that way.)

It is the Doctor who ultimately changes that. Longtime fans will particularly enjoy the way this plot ties back to the Voyager episode “Real Life,” in which the Doctor creates a holographic family of his own and must watch his young daughter die. His still-present grief from that loss is the reason he’s been so rude and standoffish toward Sam ever since her arrival at the Academy, fearing what it might mean to experience that kind of emotional connection and eventual heartbreak once more. 

“The only thing that allows me to bear my infinity is not having to love anyone,” the Doctor says. “You mean not having to love anyone again,” Ake replies, she herself one of a scant handful of people who actually have personal experience in this kind of thing. (If we do not get some sort of broader Ake backstory episode this season, I’m going to lose my mind.)

But to save Sam’s life, the Doctor, like Tarima, must find a way to become part of the story of his own life again. He essentially ends up becoming Sam’s father, raising a new version of her from childhood that will have the learned resilience to process the trauma her teenage self has faced without her programming breaking down. (This is possible thanks to the way time works on Kasq, where seventeen years is the equivalent of about two Earth weeks.) The last eight minutes of the episode are a montage of the rebooted Sam growing up from infancy, interspersed with shots of the Starfleet cadets’ impromptu performance of Our Town. Set to a voiceover of Tarima’s brother Ocam reading the Stage Manager’s lines, we follow Sam’s growth from a baby to a young woman, and see joy return to the eyes of our formerly miserable cadets. 

It’s a surprisingly moving sequence for many reasons, not the least of which being that Sam’s “birth” is the act that brings color to the Kasquian landscape. Gone is the greyscale when life steps onto the stage, in a physical manifestation of an internal transformation that reflects the emotion of the choice the Doctor has made. As he himself said earlier in the hour, a moment is just a moment. It is when a moment becomes a memory — infused with context, emotion, nostalgia, regret, and joy — that it becomes something larger than itself. He is, quite literally, making memories. And they are beautiful to watch unfold.

“The Lives of the Stars” is an episode that works on multiple levels: Yes, it’s the story of a group of college kids putting on a play. It’s also the story of an ancient hologram opening his heart again, building an entirely new and different life to save a young woman he was afraid to admit he cared about. But it’s also a story of making meaning in a large and frightening world. The hour’s title comes from a line in the play: “the life of the village versus the life of the stars.”  Humans, of course, are the village, living tiny lives of little consequence when held up against a vast unknowableness. Our lives are all a brief blip in the larger scheme of the universe, so what can we do besides live them to the fullest while we can?

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

Mortal Kombat II Trailer Gives Johnny Cage His Hero Moment

When you think of the great characters in the Mortal Kombat franchise, who comes to mind? Warring ninjas Sub-Zero and Scorpion? Monsters such as Goro and Kitana? Or is it martial arts master Liu Kang or special forces soldier Sonya Blade? Well, if you’re B-movie action hero Johnny Cage, then the answer is obviously Johnny Cage. But as long as Mortal Kombat has jumped from video games to the big screen, Cage has been relegated to the background.

All that is about to change. The latest trailer for Mortal Kombat II puts Johnny Cage front and center. Played by reliable genre star Karl Urban, Cage begins the trailer fully washed up, sitting alone at a convention table that not even nerds want to visit. But that’s when he gets recruited for the titular tournament, Cage finally gets his chance to shine, even if it will kill him.

Cage’s addition to Mortal Kombat II is just one more example of the new franchise taking steps to please its audience. Today, fans have embraced the 1995 movie by Paul W.S. Anderson and its infamous 1997 sequel Mortal Kombat Annihilation. But for decades, they were an embarrassment to those who loved movies as much as games, something on the level of the first bizarre Super Mario Bros. film.

For the most part, 2021’s Mortal Kombat was a step in the right direction. Not only did it feature the expected regulars such as Sub-Zero and Scorpion, alongside lesser known folks like Reiko and Kabal, but it had an impressive cast, with Johannes Taslim and Hiroyuki Sanada as the aforementioned ninja. However, that film made the surprising decision to focus on a new character, MMA fighter Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan. And, most surprisingly of all, the movie follows the heroes preparing for an interdimensional tournament, but the movie ends before that tournament actually takes place.

Moratal Kombat II will give the fans what they want, and not just because it features the Mortal Kombat tournament. As seen in the trailer, returning director Simon McQuoid has crafted absurd and over-the-top two-on-two battles, and the use of the phrase “Finish Him!” promises more of the gory fatalities that made the series infamous.

However, the trailer also shows that Mortal Kombat II has more than blood and bone breaking on its mind. By tracing Cage’s journey from failed fake fighter to real life hero, the film will have real pathos, something that the goofy ’90s movies lacked. And few people are better suited than Karl Urban to make something special from otherwise one note character.

Most people coming to see Mortal Kombat II this summer will never had heard the name “Johnny Cage.” But when they leave, they’ll know that he’s a hero—perhaps even the hero that he is in his own mind.

Mortal Kombat II arrives in theaters on May 8, 2026.

I Saw the TV Glow Director Tackles ’80s Slashers in New Horror Trailer

Jane Schoenbrun makes horror movies. Exactly what type of horror movies? That’s hard to say. Their 2021 feature film debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and their 2024 breakout I Saw the TV Glow both have something akin to monsters and tense sequences. But the horror comes from something deeper, something inexplicable.

In some ways, the teaser for Schoenbrun’s latest film signals a turn towards more traditional horror concepts. Seconds into the trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a blade stabs through a frightened young woman. Later, a figure wearing what appears to be a television on their head stabs someone in a field, sending a geyser of blood into the air. Yet, these moments only come between lush shots of a filmmaker (played by comedian Hannah Einbinder) walking through a snowy field or Gillian Anderson emerging from the shadows and looking like Carmen Sandiego’s purple-clad cousin.

The trailer teaches almost nothing about the plot of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which is in keeping with Schoenbrun’s own comments about the movie. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is my best attempt at the ‘sleepover classic,'” they told The Hollywood Reporter in May, 2025; “An insane yet cozy midnight odyssey that beckons to unsuspecting viewers from the horror section at the local video store.”

According to the few plot details released thus far, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma stars Einbinder as a queer director hired to make the latest installment in the long-running slasher series Camp Miasma. When she recruits the star of the original film to reprise her role, the director begins undergoing a series of hallucinations, which will certainly create a sense of existential emptiness and ineffable horror. Also, there will be great music and surprisingly funny jokes.

The former comes via a punk rocker called Little Death, played by TV Glow star Jack Haven. The latter involves the many comedy ringers in the cast. In addition to Einbinder from HBO’s Hacks, the film features Zach Cherry (Severance), Saturday Night Live‘s Sarah Sherman, and Kevin McDonald from The Kids in the Hall. A bit of that humor shows up in the trailer, especially the comically strange Southern accent that Anderson adopts.

However, the real draw to any Schoenbrun film is the way they play with established tropes and concepts. Like recent meta-slashers Bodies Bodies Bodies and In a Violent Nature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will play with concepts made famous by Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, and other ’80s video store fare. But, as demonstrated by a fleshy VHS receptacle straight out of Videodrome and the repeated image of a face staring at a screen, Schoenbrun will also interrogate the viewers’ relationship to violent movies.

Although Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will have elements of movies that came before, there’s no doubt that it will be something completely unique, the type of movie that only Jane Schoenbrun could make.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases to theaters on August 7, 2026.

10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees from the ’80s That Should Have Won

You asked for it, and you’ve got it! Earlier this month, I looked back at all the great movies nominated for Best Picture at the 1990s Oscar ceremonies that should have won. It was an opinionated article about a very subjective thing, so naturally, you agreed with some of the movies I chose, disagreed with others, and a few of you even thought there should be more limitations on the concept itself (I’ll get to that in a bit).

However, one of the main requests I got was to travel further back in time, as it was suggested there were even more worthy Best Picture losers in the decade that spawned the NES, Tetris, and Prozac, so it’s time to fire up the flux capacitor, because it’s ’80s time, baby!

All That Jazz

We step out of our DeLorean at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, where the 1980 Academy Awards are about to go down. Squinting from the sunlight, we cast our eyes to the red carpet, where the stars are arriving to see who will win Best Picture. It’s a tense one, because Kramer vs. Kramer is tied with All That Jazz for nominations. It feels like it could go either way! In the end, it’s Robert Benton’s divorce drama that snatches the statue. Great movie! But so is All That Jazz, and in terms of cinematic daring, it could very well be considered a better movie.

Kramer vs. Kramer does a good job of capturing divorce culture and evolving gender roles at the last gasp of the ’70s, and its grounded realism soars thanks to incredible performances from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Still, All That Jazz is just straight up visionary. A daring musical drama that interrogated Bob Fosse’s life while it was still happening, it blends rhythmic, jagged editing with innovative Broadway sequences and themes that filmmakers are still “paying homage” to with their own meta movies about unraveling artists. Black Swan and the Best Picture-winning Birdman owe a lot to All That Jazz.

Apocalypse Now

Remember about 40 seconds ago when I mentioned those “limitations” on the ’90s list? Well, some of you thought that only one movie per year should be in contention for Best Picture in this theoretical list of losers that should have won. That’s fair, but why? In these alternate realities, anything is possible, and when you’ve got All That Jazz up for Best Picture in the same year as Apocalypse Now, they’re both viable choices!

Honestly, Francis Ford Coppola’s psychological epic was probably never in with a chance of winning. It may have redefined the war film, but it’s messy and abstract. An unhinged descent into madness with no clean morality to cling to. It’s also a masterpiece. If it were released today, it would stand a much better chance of wowing Academy voters, but they weren’t quite ready for this kind of fever dream about the American psyche back then (their kids are gonna love it.)

The Elephant Man

Ol’ Bobby Redford hit it out of the park at the awards in 1981, netting Best Picture and Best Director for his directorial debut, Ordinary People, another emotional familial drama that had Academy voters saying, “Spectacular. Gimme 14 of ’em right now.” And, once again, great movie! I’m not here to slate any of the Best Picture winners; they made the shortlist for a reason. But is it wild to suggest that the late, great David Lynch should have won a Best Picture Oscar at some point in his incredible career? Is it also wild to suggest that, aside from The Straight Story, The Elephant Man might have been his best possible shot at doing so, given that so many of his other movies were considered too “weird” to make the cut?

Featuring a truly unforgettable performance by John Hurt, Lynch’s black-and-white movie refuses to sensationalize its exploration of Joseph Merrick’s suffering and instead concentrates on being a masterclass in human empathy. Forty-plus years later, people are still talking about Merrick’s heartbreaking story and Lynch’s vision. Are they still talking about Ordinary People as much? Probably not, but The Elephant Man wasn’t the only black-and-white classic that lost out to Redford’s film that year.

Raging Bull

Here we are in another love triangle because Raging Bull was also up for Best Picture in 1981. Featuring jaw-dropping cinematography from Michael Chapman that perfectly captures both the brutality of the boxing ring and the bleakness of Jake LaMotta’s personal life, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is “absolute cinema” of the non-linear and impressionistic variety.

Today, many critics consider Raging Bull one of the greatest films ever made, yet the Academy played it rather safe that year with Ordinary People, and Scorsese had to settle for knowing he had made a movie with an enduring cultural legacy that impacted not only his own later films but also those of Steven Spielberg and David Fincher, to name just a couple. So hey, don’t be too sad for Scorsese. He got a Best Picture award later on for The Departed, and I see him smiling happily on TikTok all the time. He’s fine!

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Moving swiftly on to the 55th Academy Awards in 1982, where Chariots of Fire, Reds, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, and Raiders of the Lost Ark were gunning for the gold. All terrific pictures, I’m sure. I’m gonna be real with you: I have never seen Atlantic City, so if the Atlantic City hive rises up in the comments to take me down over this, I’ll take it on the chin.

I have, however, seen the others. One of them more than once. One of them about a hundred times, because it’s an absolute banger that has never lost its appeal. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a meticulously crafted, culturally iconic action-adventure that still feels fresh and thrilling today. I know The Last Crusade is a favorite for many Indiana Jones fans, but to my mind, Raiders is still the GOAT, with Spielberg, George Lucas, John Williams, Lawrence Kasdan, Douglas Slocombe, Michael Kahn, Karen Allen, and Harrison Ford teaming up to deliver a spectacular ride, along with some seriously eternal wisdom: punching Nazis is good.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

The Best Picture winner in 1983, Gandhi, was a proper worthy one from Richard Attenborough, and you can’t get much further away from Gandhi than E.T. for flip’s sake. It makes sense that Attenborough’s sprawling, historically and politically significant biopic dominated the awards over Spielberg’s lil alien dude waddling around saying “phone home,” but this type of snub is still enough to make you want to replace your gun with a walkie-talkie on some level.

E.T. changed the landscape of family films. It was a massive hit that influenced storytelling for decades. They’re still doing retrospective screenings of it at theaters everywhere. J.J. Abrams would be out here doing lens flares in the privacy of his living room without E.T.. Stranger Things wouldn’t exist without E.T.. Neither would Mac and Me! Er, forget that last one, actually. Never mind. Let’s go with “Paul Rudd wouldn’t end up showing the same clip from Mac and Me on Conan without E.T..” That’s better somehow.

The Right Stuff

This is gonna come as a shock, but in 1984, the Academy picked a moving, intimate family drama over a box office bomb that chronicled the early U.S. space program and Mercury astronauts. I know! Tough to see that one coming, huh? But unless I’ve just picked up enough tissues and eye-depuffing cream from Costco to last a lifetime, The Right Stuff is probably going to be the movie I’ll choose to rewatch over Terms of Endearment on any given day.

Juggling a huge ensemble cast, multiple storylines, and a buttload of complex historical events, The Right Stuff could have certainly been awarded the big one for its ambition and narrative daring. The sequences recreating test flights and rocket launches are as tense as they’ve ever been and set the template for later space epics that chose to embrace human storytelling, like Apollo 13 and even Damien Chazelle’s underseen First Man. This one’s got the right stuff. It’s not just a clever name!

The Color Purple

The Color Purple was no match for the glacially-paced Out of Africa in 1986, unfortunately. It might seem genuinely wild that a lazy colonial melodrama would ever get the nod over a powerful depiction of Black women’s lives in early 20th-century America, unless you know literally anything about America, I guess. Then, it’s sadly predictable.

In fact, The Color Purple was nominated for a staggering 11 Oscars and won exactly zero of them. Based on the 1982 novel by Alice Walker, it saw Steven Spielberg swerving away from a string of blockbusters to try something different. He softened some of the book’s radical themes and leaned into his own brand of sentimentality – this is Spielberg we’re talking about – but powerhouse performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey went a long way toward making up for at least some of that. It remains an inspiring if somewhat controversial movie that is still about a quadrillion times better than Out of Africa. I know I said I wasn’t going to slate any of the real Best Picture winners, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. It’s pretty bad, folks.

Fatal Attraction

Whatever aspects of Fatal Attraction have aged like milk, 1988’s winner, The Last Emperor, can likely match with its own problems (I won’t get into them here but feel free to google that movie along with “historical accuracy.”) Admittedly, I could quite happily go the rest of my life without hearing another perfectly sane woman called “a bunny boiler,” but I definitely miss more erotic thrillers popping up at the multiplex. These days, they’re largely consigned to streaming and don’t tend to have much of an edge, whereas Fatal Attraction had so much of an edge that it sparked a national conversation on a rather taboo topic.

The story, about a man cheating on his wife and ending up with a homicidal stalker, has been done to death since, but Fatal Attraction wasn’t afraid to go there during an era where the anxieties of infidelity were being sidelined. This was also a career-defining performance from Glenn Close as the movie’s spurned lover – her final jolt back to life pulled “the killer coming back for one last scare” trope into the mainstream from its roots in the horror genre. The movie really excelled at blending those kinds of horror conventions into a marital drama and was perhaps the best to ever do it.

Moonstruck

Is this a more controversial alternate choice for Best Picture in ’88? Maybe. This could potentially be considered a “hear me out” situation, unless you’ve already seen and love Moonstruck, a genuinely sweet picture about a widow who falls in love with her fiancé’s older brother.

It’s certainly a smaller movie – not a grand epic like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Blending comedy, drama, and romance seamlessly, it nevertheless features some of the decade’s most memorable dialogue. Playwright-turned-screenwriter John Patrick Shanley’s script sparkles, so the stacked cast, which includes Cher, Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia, gets to deliver lines like “I’ll say no more.” “You haven’t said anything!” “And that’s all I’ll say.” or “In time you’ll drop dead, and I’ll come to your funeral in a red dress.”

At the end of the day, I reckon that a comedy with the intelligence and heart of Moonstruck is just as worthy of Best Picture recognition as a sweeping historical drama. And that’s all I’ll say.

Scream’s Genius Was Always its Final Girls

At the end of Scream 4, Sidney Prescott learns too late that her cousin Jill, played by Emma Roberts, is a Ghostface killer. Jill has grown up in Sidney’s shadow, forever jealous of the attention and fame that the older woman has received since surviving the first Woodsboro Murders from the original film. Jill bemoans and belittles everything about Sidney, calling her too slow, too out-of-date, and frames herself as the remake.

But before Jill can finish her off, Sidney (Neve Campbell) launches a counter-attack, frying her cousin with a nearby defibrillator. “You forgot the first rule of remakes, Jill,” Sid spits. “Don’t fuck with the original!”

That scene certainly works as a statement about Scream‘s position in the horror landscape, a rejection of the remakes of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th that came out just before Scream 4 released in 2011. However, the scene also works when played straight, showing how women are constantly forced to deal with weight of the generations before them and the expectations of the generations after them. More than its fun metatextual moments, that attention to final girls has always been the power of the Scream franchise.

Your Favorite Scary Movie Survivor

In one of the most memorable parts of the first Scream, Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) lays out the rules for surviving a horror movie. “You can never have sex,” he declares to a disappointed, disbelieving crowd. “Number two: never drink or do drugs,” he continues, once again incurring the wrath of his friends. It’s no accident that those two points come up while Randy and his friends watch 1978’s Halloween, the movie that features Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, a paradigmatic final girl.

Women survivors have been part of horror cinema from the beginning, going back to Mary Fuller as Elizabeth in Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) or Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter in Nosferatu (1922). But in her 1987 article “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” academic Carol J. Clover identified a particular type of female survivor in a horror movie, the final girl.

Where previous survivors such as Lila Crane (Vera Miles) in Psycho had to be saved by a man, the final girl fought back herself, survived on her own merits and defeated the killer. In addition to Laurie Strode, women such as Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from Alien used their own wits and strength to defeat the killer.

Without question, the figure of the final girl has deepened our appreciation of horror in general and slashers in particular, a subgenre often dismissed as disposable and crass. But as Randy’s monologue underscores, final girls were often understood to be pure and virginal—even if that wasn’t what we saw on screen, as demonstrated by Laurie’s pot smoking and her plans for Ben Tramer.

In short, final girls needed to be revamped. And that’s when Sidney Prescott picked up the phone.

Hello, Sidney

On the surface, Sidney Prescott could be read as a classic final girl. She defeats both Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulirch) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) through her determination and wits. She’s downright boring compared to victims Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) and Tatum (Rose McGowan), both of whom die by Ghostface’s blade. And she even rebuffs the sexual advances of her boyfriend Billy, at least at first.

However, where Laurie, Sally, and Ripley were victims of circumstance, being at the wrong place at the wrong time, Sidney is deliberately targeted. People have opinions about her behavior, or the behavior of her mother Maureen, and they want Sidney to pay for it.

Before Jill blames Sidney for being old and out of date, Billy Loomis tries to kill her because Maureen had an affair with his father and drove away his mother. Billy’s mother returns in Scream 2, masquerading under the name Debbie Salt (Laurie Metcalf) and hoping to end the destruction that began with Maureen by killing Sidney. Even Scream 3, which adds a convoluted backstory for Maureen, introducing her son Roman (Scott Foley), the product of her sexual assault, still ends up with Sidney being held responsible for what her mother did.

Although she receives more help from Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) than Clover would allow, Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) certainly has beaten up enough Ghostfaces to qualify as a final girl. The films don’t always ask viewers to approve of Gale’s unapologetic career climbing, but they never suggest that her rudeness or success make her a viable candidate for murder. Instead, they present her individualism, her no-nonsense attitude as cause for celebration, especially when she gets to punch someone in a Ghostface mask.

However, the most interesting revision came in the two reboot films, Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023). Both of those movies tie their Ghostfaces to the franchise’s central meta conceit, as Amber (Mikey Madison) and Richie (Jack Quaid) are superfans of the Stab franchise who dislike the direction of the recent movies and want to inspire a better film with a new set of murders. Richie’s family, led by father Wyatt (Dermot Mulroney), become Ghostfaces to get revenge for their boy’s death, using Stab iconography as a tribute to his passions.

However, the real tension in the movies comes from the relationship that new final girls Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega) have with their father, Billy Loomis. Throughout the franchise, Sam sees hallucinations of Billy, urging her to take up the family business and become a killer herself. The elaborate deception that Wayne and his children embark on in Scream VI inadvertently becomes a manifestation of those hallucinations, driving Sam and Tara closer to acting like the father—a plot point that surely would have been addressed in the now canceled third reboot entry.

In each of these cases, women endure the expectations of men. And in each case, they overcome and survive.

No More Rules

Obnoxious as he is, Randy Meeks is right. The classic final girls lived by rules. Even before they became targets, Laurie took on a babysitting job, Sally told her friends to lay off the hitchiker, and Ripley enforced quarantine protocols. They did the right thing, and they got to live to the end of the movie.

For Sidney, Gale, Sam, and Tara, the rules don’t matter. Ghostface tries to kill them because of what their mother did, who their father was, or just because they aren’t polite. And yet, they survive each time, beating the killers not because of their moral virtue, but because of who they are.

Absolute Green Arrow Will Be a Superhero Horror Comic For Our Time

Even though it’s barely over a year old, DC Comics‘s Absolute Universe has had its share of shocking moments. One of the best occurred in Absolute Evil #1 from October 2025, which introduced this universe’s take on Oliver Queen a.k.a. Green Arrow, only to kill him off a few pages later. The scene upset readers not just because it saw the immediate end of a much anticipated take on a beloved character, but because he died at the hands of Hawkman, one of Green Arrow’s (uneasy) allies in the mainline universe.

However, it turns out that death is just as permanent in the Absolute Universe as it is in the main DC Universe. “Oliver Queen may be dead. The Green Arrow is not dead,” DC executive editor Chris Conroy said at the ComicsPRO Annual Meeting 2026 (via Popverse). The upcoming series Absolute Green Arrow, written by Pornsak Pichetshote and penciled by Rafael Albuquerque will feature an undead Green Arrow, dubbed the Longbow Hunter by the press, killing the billionaires who sent Hawkman to kill Oliver Queen. “This is a slasher horror series,” teased Conroy. “This is Scream, Halloween, meets Green Arrow.”

As any CW fan knows, this isn’t the first time that Green Arrow has been called something other than Green Arrow by observers. But the term “Longbow Hunter” carries particular significance, as it refers to a well-regarded 1987 miniseries by Mike Grell. A pre-Vertigo Mature Readers tale, The Longbow Hunters separated Ollie from his superhero pals such as Green Lantern and turned him into a modern day Robin Hood on the streets of Seattle, where a serial killer has been terrorizing sex workers.

Although The Longbow Hunters broke from previous Green Arrow adventures, it retained a core aspect of Oliver Queen’s personality. Green Arrow is the loudmouthed liberal of the superhero set, willing to berate Green Lantern and the Flash for being cops and more interested in fighting fat cat landlords than he is petty looters.

Ollie retained his left-leaning politics when he appeared in Absolute Evil, marking a distinctive change from his other heroes. An alternate reality created by the New Gods big bad Darkseid, the Absolute Universe is a darker world, which strips its heroes of some of their most important qualities. Aboslute Batman fights without a fortune to aid him. Absolute Superman came to Earth as a young adult who remembers the destruction Krypton. Absolute Wonder Woman was raised in Hell, far from her fellow Amazons on Paradise Island.

Yet, when Oliver Queen showed up in Absolute Evil, he had all of his usual trademarks. He wore all green, sported a Van Dyke beard, and was pals with Roy Harper. More importantly, he had a passion for social justice, complaining to Roy about a secret island that billionaires visit via private flights to terrorize children. “I gotta do something… Somebody’s gotta do something,” Oliver insists, just pages before Hawkman presents his battered corpse to those who represent those billionaires.

The proximity between the Absolute Universe and the horrors of our real world supercharges Absolute Green Arrow. The miniseries may be about an undead superhero in a universe created by an evil god, but it channels the anger and helplessness we all feel when we read the news and see unspeakable crimes going unpunished. The series will help us deal with the things that shock us every day, at least until real heroes start doing something about it.

Absolute Green Arrow hits comic book shops on May 20, 2026.

Sony Reveals the Wild Reason Spider-Man: No Way Home Wasn’t Released in China

Spider-Man: No Way Home’s climactic battle wowed audiences (almost) everywhere at the multiplex when three different Sony-Marvel Spider-Men teamed up to battle some of their greatest foes. Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield both reprised their roles as Peters Parker alongside the latest incarnation of the eternally popular Marvel character, portrayed by Tom Holland, as the likes of the Green Goblin and Electro sought to bring the web-slinger to his knees in a Statue of Liberty-set showdown for the ages.

The film did phenomenally well at the global box office, so you’d imagine that Tom Rothman, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group, would be happy with its $1.9 billion haul – but not quite. During an appearance on Matt Belloni’s The Town podcast this week, Rothman seemed a little irked that the movie didn’t crack $2 billion instead, after being locked out of a theatrical release in China.

It turns out that China did engage with Sony about the possibility of releasing No Way Home there, but the edit they asked for was a bit of a stretch.

“They just [said] small thing,” Rothman revealed. “They said, ‘No problem. Just cut out the Statue of Liberty,’ which is where the climax takes place. That was the request.”

When Rothman was reminded that the Statue of Liberty is very much present in the last 20 minutes of No Way Home, he added, “Yeah, there was that. And also, I really didn’t look forward to standing up, sitting in there in front of Congress, telling them why I cut the Statue of Liberty out at the request of the Chinese Communist Party.”

A no doubt highly unrelated piece of information followed this revelation: the Statue of Liberty will not appear in this summer’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Maybe they’ll get that $2 billion this time.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Rothman also confirmed that Sony plans to reboot the SPUMC (stuff like Venom, Kraven the Hunter, and Madame Web) with new people. So, that’s something to look forward to…?

More Than Just Static Shock: Unpacking the Depth of Dwayne McDuffie’s Milestone Comics

In 1993 a shift happened in the comic book industry with the launch of Milestone comics. Founded by Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, Christopher Priest, and Derek T. Dingle, these Black entrepreneurs aimed to fill a void by telling complex stories with a diverse array of creatives. The Milestone superhero universe is set in the fictional locales of Dakota City and Paris Island with a range of colorful and fun characters. Milestone’s run deserves to be celebrated for its innovative approach to storytelling, lasting impact on the world of comics, and their newest appearance merging into the DC universe.  

Here are some of the brand’s most lasting titles.

Blood Syndicate

Written by Ivan Velez Jr., Blood Syndicate was ahead of its time, featuring morally ambiguous characters, complex team dynamics, and innovative story arcs. At the core of the original crew are Tech-9, Wise Son, Brickhouse, Third Rail, Flashback, Masquerade, Holocaust, Fade, and DMZ, along with Tech-9’s loyal talking canine, Dogg. Velez Jr. crafted a grounded and intense dynamic through the interpersonal relationships among members of the Blood Syndicate. They have groups within the group; they hook up, argue, and fight even to lethal means, but at the end of the day, all they have is each other and they make the most of it. The team dynamic showcases varying degrees of heroism as each member grapples with their newfound powers and the reality of their environment. Violent gang culture is ever-present, and the interactions between each member are seeped in tension.

At the epicenter of this world is the Big Bang, an incident that occurred at the Paris Island docks as a gang war erupted. Acting on orders from someone well above their pay grade, the police deployed an experimental gas they barely understood.

Within moments of the gas hitting the air, people in the vicinity, including the police force, started transforming in mind-boggling ways—melting, evaporating, elongating—an abomination of a scene. The majority of the people caught within this gas brutally died, but the rest were forever changed into what the public dubbed “Bang Babies.” The Big Bang challenges the reader to inspect how those above leave all below to suffer, who the real victims, are and how far is too far.

Milestone Comics Hardware

Hardware

Hardware, also known as Curtis Metcalf, is a super genius and former child prodigy who breaks the mold of the typical highly intelligent, tech-based hero. His unique background and origin, combined with his fighting style—a blend of high-tech weaponry with a brawler’s approach—set him apart. From hand cannons to a chained scythe and plasma whip, Hardware’s arsenal is both stacked and readily employed. His story begins in emotional turmoil, triggered by a profound personal betrayal leading him into a moral conflict that adds layers to his character arc. 

Denys Cowan’s artwork significantly enhances Hardware’s badass factor. Intricate wiring and circuitry detail his suit, complemented by the metallic chrome finish on the armor and the sleek obsidian shell underneath. The contrast in stature between Curtis and Hardware is striking, as the hefty armor and obsidian shell gives him a statuesque and almost mythological presence. What stands out about Hardware are his inventive combat choices during battle while delivering classic superhero action at an action movie pace.

Static

Known as the titular character of the WB cartoon Static Shock, Static a.k.a. Virgil Hawkins is a witty teenager attending Ernest Hemingway High School with a love for science, pop culture and electromagnetic powers. Dwayne McDuffie’s physics background shines in these stories as Virgil grows, exploring the scientific innovation needed to realize his powers’ full potential. Virgil’s humor and nerdy personality shine at all times, whether in his own stories or in his appearances across other titles in the universe.

One of statics greatest attributes is his cool factor, Virgil’s style embodies ‘90s swagger, including an “X” hat and yellow trench coat over dark blue lightning-patterned spandex. Virgil’s style, abilities, constant quips, and scientific curiosity make him a timeless teen hero that is always a refreshing read.

Icon & Rocket 

Written by Dwayne McDuffie; Icon and Rocket are an extraordinary duo formed by an unusual encounter. Raquel a.k.a. Rocket grounds Augustus a.k.a. Icon in the perspective of everyday people, while he steps into a mentor role.

Their relationship offers commentary on generational and socioeconomic divides, with Augustus being an out-of-touch millionaire and Raquel a high school kid from an impoverished area of Paris Island within Dakota City. Icon’s abilities derive from his natural physiology, including enhanced strength, flight, and energy manipulation. Raquel’s abilities stem from the inertia belt Augustus gives her, granting flight, force fields, and inertia manipulation. Those powers lend themselves to  Noelle Giddings’ vibrant colors and M. D. Bright’s grand, operatic artwork. 

Milestone Heads to the DC Universe

Although publications officially ended in 1997, Milestone has had small appearances of their characters across DC mass media, most notably Statics’s WB series Static Shock. Now Milestone is set to return properly with DC announcing “New History of the DC Universe: The Dakota Incident” a story written by seasoned creatives Joseph Illidge, Stephanie Williams, Morgan Hampton, and Nikolas Draper-Ivey.

This one-shot is an addition to the Mark Waid written “New history of the DC universe,” a four-issue miniseries that chronicles the DC universe from the golden age to present day. Don’t miss out on DC officially folding Milestone into main continuity on February 25th. Don’t forget to show love to the original stories too through the Milestone Compendium. And though Dwayne Mcduffie passed away in 2011, his legacy lives on through his awe-inspiring work with Milestone and so much more. 

DC Writer Urges James Gunn to Consider Heated Rivalry Star for Nightwing Role

As far as we’re aware, there’s no live-action Nightwing movie in development in James Gunn’s new DC Universe, but if there were, Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams would like to be in the running for the role of Dick Grayson.

Williams posted an image of himself holding a copy of Nightwing: Year One to his Instagram story last December, tagging Gunn with the caption “let’s grab a coffee,” but Year One writer Scott Beatty has only just learned of the actor’s campaign – and he thinks Gunn should give Williams a shot.

Beatty cited the “fair amount of buzz” surrounding Williams’ performance in Crave’s queer ice hockey series, which has taken the world by storm, adding, “James, I think you should give Hudson your active consideration when casting the new DC film universe’s Dick Grayson… And I would be more than okay if you adapted Nightwing: Year One as the former Boy Wonder’s feature film debut.”

If this sounds like a lot of pie-in-the-sky nonsense, we hear ya, but let’s not forget that similar shenanigans prefaced Simu Liu getting the part of Shang-Chi in the MCU. On December 3, 2018, Liu tweeted, “OK @Marvel, are we gonna talk or what #ShangChi” to Marvel Studios before casting for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings even began. Though Marvel boss Kevin Feige has since claimed the tweet had nothing to do with Liu snagging the role, it sure made for a fun coincidence. And, like Williams, Liu was also starring in a hit Canadian TV show at the time, Kim’s Convenience. This kind of Canadian moxie is well documented. Who can forget Ryan Reynolds’ aggressive campaigning for the return of Deadpool? Three blockbuster movies later, no one is questioning it.

DC fans have yearned for a Nightwing movie since the character became popular enough to lead his own ongoing title in the mid‑1990s. He’s also been in plenty of major comic arcs, leading the Teen Titans and working with the Bat‑family. In the past, he’s even briefly become Batman. He’s also canonically known for his terrific butt. This appears to align nicely with Williams, who recently took Vogue through his bespoke butt workout amid plans to show the world his improved glutes in Heated Rivalry season 2.

Mamma Mia 3 Is a Terrible Idea, Which Is Why They Should Do It

It’s a great idea to make a musical based on the work of ABBA. Sure, they’re cheesy and wear space boots, but the Swedish quartet is responsible for some of the most persistent earworms in pop culture history. Having some of those songs be sung by Pierce Brosnan, a man whose seemingly unending attractiveness finds its limit in his vocal abilities, is a terrible idea. And yet, every time he belts out a line in his ungodly talk/sing hybrid, Mamma Mia! feels magical.

In short, Mamma Mia! operates according to its own rules. So in any other case, news that a studio head will do whatever it takes to get a beloved actor to return to a franchise that she’s left, cinephiles would cringe in horror. But since it’s Universal Pictures Chairwoman Donna Langley telling Deadline Hollywood (via EW) that she will “we will find a way” to bring back Meryl Streep for Mamma Mia 3, we can’t wait to see the wonderful mess that will follow.

Based on the jukebox musical by Catherine Johnson, the 2008 film Mamma Mia! starred Streep as Donna Sheridan, mother of bride-to-be Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). In advance of her nuptials, Sophie invites three men from her mother’s past to the Greek island where the ceremony takes place, hoping that one of them will reveal themselves to be her father. The men include upscale architect Sam Carmichael (Brosnan), free-spirit sailor Bill Anderson (Stellan Skarsgård), and tightly-wound banker Harry Bright (Colin Firth).

Singing of varying quality and lots of hijinks ensue, to be sure, but so does genuine emotional depth, thanks largely to Streep’s ability to ground Donna as she recalls her relationship with each man. She never overdoes it, never overwhelms the silliness of the story, but gives it the right amount of heft.

So integral was Streep to the success of the first movie, that the idea of a sequel without her seemed completely foolish. And yet, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again came to theaters in June 2018 with only a Streep cameo, and still managed to delight viewers. The film used a flashback structure borrowed from The Godfather: Part II to contrast Sophie in the present to Donna in 1979, where she was portrayed by Lily James.

Unwise? Yes. Incredible fun? Absolutely.

That should be the prime lesson as we look forward to a third Mamma Mia! film, nearly a full decade after Here We Go Again. Clearly, Streep has moved on from the series. Moreover, a now 40-year-old Seyfried would have to play a Sophie with very different problems than her wide-eyed newlywed. Could a musical as frothy as Mamma Mia! be able to handle heavy issues such as the movement into middle age and the weight of death?

To that question, I respond with one of my own: “Can Pierce Brosnan sing?”

The answer to both is obviously, “No.” But Mamma Mia! has never concerned itself with good taste before, and we’re all the better for it.

Mamma Mia 3 isn’t happening yet. But it should.

New A24 Horror Backrooms Looks Like Cube in an Ikea

In 2017, A24 started distributing trailers for a movie that appeared to be about a family being menaced by a spooky little girl. Of course, when people actually saw Hereditary the next year, they were horrified at what happened to that little girl, but they were also thrilled with A24’s ability to sell a film without ever really telling anyone what it was about.

That audience response has made room for trailers such as the one for Backrooms, the upcoming release from Kane Parsons, better known to some as the YouTuber Kane Pixels. The trailer consists of nothing but a camera panning downward through a building filled with yellow/beige rooms, several of which have a decrepit easy chair within them. In voice over, we hear a man describe to a woman a place that he discovered, filled with rooms that “remember.” At the end of the teaser, the camera stops at an empty space that resembles an office building, with the man saying, “The more times it remembers something, the less it does.”

What does that mean? I have no idea, and that’s the scary part. Like most horrifying things, Backrooms traces its roots back to 4chan, where users shared posts of “liminal spaces,” rooms and areas that seemed to exist at the borders of reality. In 2022, Parsons began releasing short films about a research institute called Async, which investigates a place called the Complex, which seems to be involved with missing persons cases.

The films have been a hit among younger users. But for older viewers, the trailer for Backrooms brings to mind to Swedish home store Ikea, with its streamlined designs. And the concept of scary rooms stacked upon one another recalls Cube, the Canadian indie horror film that did torture porn before the term “torture porn” annoyed everyone as the term “elevated horror” annoys everyone.

Released in 1997 and directed by Vincenzo Natali, Cube followed a group of survivors who find themselves in a single, empty room, with doors on each wall. After solving numeric puzzles on the doors, they exit and find themselves in another room, often with a death trap inside.

Even though it spawned two sequels, including the fabulously titled Cube 2: Hypercube, Cube‘s shoddy acting and extremely outdated portrayal of autism has aged poorly. Yet, the film stands as a testament to barebones filmmaking, as Natali and his co-creators were able to construct an entire feature by just redressing the same space in different ways.

That indie spirit is carried on by Backrooms. Sure, the phone Parsons carries in his pocket has more post-production abilities than anything available to the people making Cube. Furthermore, Parsons has a strong cast for his debut, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and mumblecore mainstay Mark Duplass. But the principle is the same: he’s got a scary idea and the ability to bring it to life.

Or so we hope. The trailer for Backrooms doesn’t give us enough to go one way or another. But when it’s an A24 picture, that’s a promise, not a warning.

Backrooms comes to theaters on May 29, 2026.

Tom Hanks Is About to Play His Most Heartbreaking Role Yet

Tom Hanks is America’s dad. For that reason, there’s something particularly moving about watching Tom Hanks play a sad character, as demonstrated by the utter shambles we were all in by the ending of Captain Phillips. For his next project, Hanks will play one of the most famous American dads, in one of the most moving stories in recent memory.

Hanks has joined the cast of Lincoln in the Bardo, the adaptation of the 2017 George Saunders novel by director Duke Johnson. Johnson will combine the approaches of his two previous features, the completely stop-motion Charlie Kaufman collaboration Anomalisa and last year’s live-action mystery film The Actor. Lincoln in the Bardo will be both live action and stop motion, as befitting the surreal story.

Lincoln in the Bardo follows three narrators who spend one evening in the bardo, the space between death and the afterlife. Each of the three narrators has themselves died, and each are at different points of acceptance regarding their fate. The printer Hans Vollmer refuses to believe that he has died, and repeatedly refers to his coffin as a “sick box.” Roger Bevins III died as a closeted gay man and his spirit transforms into a mass of eyes and ears and limbs, seeking all the sensory pleasures denied him in life. Reverend Everly Thomas acknowledges that he has died, but refuses to pass onto the afterlife, fearing that he will not receive the just reward about which he preached.

The only thing distracting the trio from their own situations is the young man who has come to join them, the eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln. Willie died of typhoid fever just one year after his father’s inauguration, one of several tragedies marking the legendary American president’s administration.

Although Lincoln in the Bardo is Saunders’s first full-length novel, it contains several hallmarks of the short story writing that have made him one of the best American authors of our time. The liminal state of the characters allows Saunders to indulge his absurdist side, finding both beauty and comedy in the strange situations. And while Saunders invites us to laugh at Vollmer’s stubbornness and to sympathize with Bevins’s loss, the book’s real power comes from its depiction of a father breaking down at his son’s grave.

Saunders brings the scene to life by melding prose with newspaper reports, mixing media and literary styles. Duke will do the same by combining stop-motion with live action, using puppets to underscore the uncanny nature of the scene. He’s already demonstrated that he can wring extreme pathos out of puppets in Anomalisa, so there’s little doubt he’ll be able to do it again here.

However, Duke’s greatest asset will be Hanks himself. The actor doesn’t resemble traditional images of Lincoln, certainly not as much as Rex Harrison or Daniel Day-Lewis. But Lincoln in the Bardo calls for Honest Abe to be a sad dad, which makes Hanks the best possible choice.

Lincoln in the Bardo is now in preproduction.