New Odyssey Images Remind Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland Fans to Manage Their Expectations
Summer 2026 will welcome one of the most anticipated blockbusters of the decade: Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, a big-budget adaptation of the foundational Greek heroic tale from the man who made the Dark Knight trilogy, filled with A-list stars and shot on IMAX cameras! The mind reels to think about the images we’ll see: clashes with mythical beasts, gods and goddesses interceding in human affairs, an incredible archery challenge!
Which is, in fact, true to Homer. As exciting as it is to have such big names in The Odyssey, fans of those two particular actors need to understand that Penelope and Telemachus have a very different role in the story.
Set after the decade-long Trojan War, The Odyssey mostly follows Odysseus, King of the city-state Ithaca, trying to make his way back home. Along the way, he’s beset by various forces that prevent him from returning, from the nymph Calypso, who has fallen in love with him and wants to keep him for herself, to an island full of cannibal giants.
His wife Penelope, however, has her own difficult task. She must wait in Ithaca for her king or pronounce him dead and move on, a task made more difficult by an onslaught of suitors who arrive and want to take her place. The impatience of her son Telemachus only further complicates things, as he doesn’t not know what his role should be in his father’s absence.
At first glance, it sounds like Hathaway and Holland got a raw deal. They have to lounge around a big party, while Damon and his co-stars get to do all the adventure. But that reading misses the thematic importance of Penelope and Telemachus.
The suitor plot that takes up half of The Odyssey isn’t just a simple question of romantic devotion. The question isn’t whether or not Penelope will stand by her man or dump him for any one of the hot guys who have come to woo her. Rather, it’s a question of social order, decorum, and hospitality. She must decide if she should maintain the status quo by holding place for Odysseus or if she should allow a new king to take his place, all while navigating the complexities of the host/guest relationship.
Likewise, Telemachus isn’t just a brat who isn’t going to respect his mom’s new boyfriend. He is told by the gods early on about his father’s heroics, yet still feels the call to action, to take up his own heroic quest. To do so too early or too late would have horrible ramifications not just for himself, but for all of Ithaca, as would Penelope’s decision.
Important as these roles are, they aren’t always the most visually stimulating. That’s why the two just seem to be standing about in the movie stills. But if Nolan has proven anything, he can make even a conversation exciting, which is good news for fans of Hathaway and Holland.
The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026.
The Quiet Decision That Made Drive a Masterpiece
Nicolas Winding Refn’s mid-budget crime drama Drive was released to positive reviews back in 2011. Its mix of graphic violence and minimal dialogue, combined with stylized visuals and an intoxicating synth soundtrack, led to a solid following with audiences looking for something different from the standard blockbusters at their local multiplex.
Ryan Gosling, who starred in Drive as a subdued LA getaway driver who gets tangled up with the wrong woman, had very few lines to say in the movie, which allowed the actor to use subtle physicality to convey his driver’s thoughts and emotions. However, on the page, the character was supposed to have much more dialogue, until Gosling made a significant change when discussing the script on the first day of shooting that would alter the movie’s vibe for the better.
“Ryan, who has a very specific process, said, ‘This is a character that doesn’t speak much, so I don’t think I’m going to say much of this dialogue,’” Drive producer Marc Platt told THR. “It was an independently financed movie, and I froze for a moment because I thought ‘people have put all [this money in].’ So I sweat it a little bit, which never happened to me [before].”
Platt says he understood Gosling’s choice to ditch most of the script’s dialogue as soon as the camera started rolling. “I knew in an instant that he’d made such a smart, intuitive, truthful decision. That character didn’t speak, and it made him so much more powerful.”
Gosling’s star power grew considerably after he delivered a strong central performance in the film. He would go on to star in La La Land and Barbie, both of which landed him Academy Award nominations. He’s only made one movie since Barbie, but he has two big sci-fi films on the horizon: Lord and Miller’s Project Hail Mary next year, and the standalone Star Wars movie, Starfighter, set for release in 2027.
New Steven Spielberg Trailer Has a Real War of the Worlds Feel
Something is very wrong in the world of Disclosure Day, the latest film from Steven Spielberg. The first trailer for the film gives us very little detail about the plot or even nature of the threat facing its characters. Instead, the teaser establishes an ominous tone, from the uncanny noises coming out of the mouth of a newscaster played by Emily Blunt to the sci-fi equipment surrounding Colin Firth.
But in our world, things are very right, at least for a moment, because not only is Spielberg re-teaming with blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, but the duo are evoking the mood of one of the filmmaker’s mid-period masterpieces War of the Worlds.
For those who have forgotten about 2005’s War of the Worlds, or perhaps were turned off by the ending and thus put it out of mind, Spielberg turned the classic sci-fi tale into a powerful piece of post-9/11 art. Written by Koepp and Josh Friedman, War of the Worlds sets the H.G. Wells story in modern day Brooklyn, where deadbeat dad Ray (Tom Cruise) has his kids for a weekend, the same weekend in which Martians attack the Earth.
Even more than dramas such as Spike Lee‘s The 25th Hour or Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, which openly evoked 9/11 to great effect, Spielberg’s sci-fi tale captured the feeling of the attacks. The scenes of Ray and other Broolynites treating the first signs of invasion with bemusement, the total social breakdown that puts Ray and children in constant danger, even the hyper-militarization of the final act all reflect the unreal feelings of that era.
Powerful as it is, War of the Worlds suffers from a lack of conviction in its final act, in which Tom Cruise’s character pulls off an incredible feat and the American military fights the aliens. However, some (read: this writer) find the ending of the film discordant in a way that highlights the false triumphalism of the presidential administration of the time. War of the Worlds showed why it’s not the aliens that we needed to fear in the 2000s.
With Disclosure Day, Spielberg and Koepp seem ready to do the same for the 2020s. Instead of any plot details, the trailer introduces a variety of characters, including Blunt’s newswoman, Firth’s rich-looking guy, Josh O’Connor as a very earnest-looking man with a backpack, Colman Domingo as someone with an incredible voice, and more. The characters talk vaguely about people needing to know the truth and how there must be more out there than just “us.”
This combination of some nebulous truth hidden from the people, lots of screens, and combinations of the super rich and the devout cannot help but resonate in our time, when we can still mistrust media enough to know images aren’t always truth, and we feel the pull of various economic, religious, and ideological forces on our daily lives.
Yet, we often fail in trying to articulate what those forces are or what we should do about it. When we open our mouths to speak about it, only indecipherable noises come out… not unlike Blunt’s character in Disclosure Day.
Disclosure Day arrives on June 12, 2026.
It: Welcome to Derry Creator Reveals Season 2 Story Details
This article contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry season 1.
While HBO’s gruesome prequel series It: Welcome to Derry hasn’t officially been renewed yet, it almost certainly will be. The show has been averaging around 10.7M U.S. and 18.3M global viewers, so it’s pretty much nailed on for a second season at this point.
If you’ve already got a Welcome to Derry-shaped hole in your viewing schedule and are wondering what will go down in season 2, rest easy, because creator Andy Muschietti already has some details on what you can expect to see when the show inevitably returns to our screens.
First up, you can definitely expect that big, timey-wimey Pennywise twist to be explored further. In the series finale, it was revealed that Pennywise knows that Margaret will become the mother of Richie Tozier, played by Finn Wolfhard and Bill Hader in the movies, and that he has knowledge of both present and future events. Muschietti says that the series plans to flesh out how and why the villainous clown experiences time in a non-linear way over the next two seasons.
The story will be unraveled as we travel farther back in time, matching Pennywise’s 27-year feeding cycle. Season one covered 1962, 27 years before It: Chapter One. Season 2 will jump backward by another 27, and season 3 will be another 27-year jump.
“The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint,” Muschietti told Deadline, adding that future seasons will clarify whether Pennywise is travelling backwards in a linear way, or whether he’s omnipresent. More importantly, we’ll discover if any actions Pennywise takes affect the events of the It movies.
According to Muschietti, we also haven’t seen the last of the original Pennywise, Bob Gray, nor his daughter, Ingrid Kersh. There will be a lot more to discover about the pair in seasons 2 and 3.
“We are going to know more about the Bob Gray of things, and we are going to know more about Ingrid, because Ingrid was around in the 30s,” he explained. “I think it’s a pretty tragic character. She’s a very specific, very unique character, because she’s a victim, but she’s a perpetrator too. She’s tricked into thinking that her dad is still there somewhere in the shadows of that monster, and she wants to liberate him, but the only way to see him and try to liberate him is by creating all these baits [and] all this pain, because she knows that he will show up.”
All eight episodes of It: Welcome to Derry season 1 are available to stream on HBO Max now.
Rian Johnson Urges Star Wars to Take More Creative Risks
Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, who has been out promoting his Knives Out threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, has also been chatting about the current state of Lucasfilm’s sci-fi fantasy franchise and what it might need moving forward.
The director understands that his 2017 flick remains one of the most debated installments in the Star Wars saga. To many fans, The Last Jedi’s bold decisions to paint Luke as a reluctant hero, kill Snoke off without much fanfare, and declare Rey’s parents as ordinary slid too far from expectations and tore down the franchise’s mythos instead of building on it. To others, those were all plus points, and The Last Jedi was right to risk alienating some of the audience to do something, well, different!
Johnson, who grew up a Star Wars fan himself, says he understands that when the franchise gets challenging, there’s “recoil” against it. “I know how there can be infighting in the world of Star Wars,” he told Polygon. “But I also know that the worst sin is to handle it with kid gloves.”
He added, “The worst sin is to be afraid of doing anything that shakes it up. Because every Star Wars movie going back to Empire and onward shook the box and rattled fans, and got them angry, and got them fighting, and got them talking about it. And then for a lot of them, got them loving it and coming around on it eventually.”
Indeed, some are old enough to remember the backlash to George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, but for many younger fans at the time, those movies were their first exposure to the franchise, and there remains plenty of nostalgia for them. There will be a section of Gen Z and Gen Alpha whose love for Star Wars is really rooted in The Mandalorian. The upcoming Starfighter movie also aims to breathe new life into the franchise – set in a new era with new characters.
As for his own involvement in Star Wars, Johnson has moved on to other projects, but he’s still a fan of the franchise, and being a vocal advocate for risk-taking and creative evolution within the galaxy far, far away can’t be a bad thing in a Hollywood landscape where even big franchises like the MCU are falling back on legacy to keep fans interested.
Welcome to Derry’s Big Pennywise Twist Is an Absolute Headache
This article contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry season 1.
The season 1 finale of It: Welcome to Derry was heading towards a resolution of sorts over much of its runtime, at least within its 1960s setting. The good guys teamed up to put Pennywise back in his box for another 27 years, aiming to right the wrongs of the pillar-destroying military and save all the kids they could from his Pied Piper-esque Deadlights parade before guiding him into his big old nap.
Everything seemed to be unfolding with that aim in mind, until one particular moment when Marge (Matilda Lawler) ran into the blood-soaked dancing clown. Isolated from the others, Marge was vulnerable, and Pennywise was in a chatty mood, ready to deliver a twist so staggering it would reshape everything we know about the malevolent entity.
During the confrontation, Pennywise taunted Marge with knowledge she shouldn’t yet have. He addressed her as “Margaret Tozier,” a name that confused her because it wasn’t hers. He then continued, predicting her future: “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Richie in a baby carriage.”
Yes, Pennywise revealed that Marge is the mother of Richie Tozier, one of the Losers Club in the It films and novels, who ultimately kills It in the future. With this revelation, Pennywise established several things: It knows Marge’s future, and It also knows the sequence of her life events and how they lead to Its defeat.
While it might be more straightforward to assume that It can time-travel, that doesn’t appear to be the case here; it’s more than It doesn’t experience time the way that humans do. When Pennywise told Marge that “tomorrow, yesterday — it’s all the same for little Pennywise,” he revealed It’s non-linear perspective on time. For It, the past, present and future are all equally accessible, and It perceives its own future defeat by the Losers Club as already known and co-existing with current events.
Does It have this overview of time in the book? Mmm, yes and no. In Stephen King’s massive source tome, there’s a brief hint that It experiences time differently from humans, but King never explains this idea, let alone explores it. The creators of the show decided to pick up this suggestion and run with it, deliberately developing the creature’s non-linear time perception in that direction as a driving force for the show’s story.
Welcome to Derry is telling Pennywise’s story in reverse and is set to continue this narrative over two more seasons. As Pennywise goes back in time, he will try to kill the Losers Club’s ancestors so that they never exist, and they never kill him. He thinks he can undo his own demise by rewriting history.
This opens up the classic “Grandfather” time-travel paradox. If Pennywise had managed to actually kill Marge, he would have prevented Richie’s birth and ensured his survival. But if the Losers Club never kills It, why would It then try to kill Marge? If It succeeds, the events that motivated It to take action in the past never happen. If It fails, they do. This is precisely what makes “ancestor-killing” time-travel plots such a headache.
Of course, there are definitely ways to tackle the Grandfather Paradox in Welcome to Derry. A fixed timeline could be established where anything It does already happened, so It can’t actually prevent Its own death because any attempts to do so are already part of history. Then there’s alternate timelines or the multiverse, where killing an ancestor creates a branch universe where It lives, but the original timeline still exists where It dies. Perhaps It is so omnipresent that It can even retain knowledge of events that never come to pass, rendering the Grandfather Paradox somewhat moot.
However, if we were to consider this non-linear time-perception twist cynically, the most genuine way it makes sense is for the It franchise as a whole. If the creators of Welcome to Derry can wrap up the series with It undoing the future or creating an alternate timeline where It lives, the possibilities of expanding the story are limitless: more It movies, more It TV shows, more Pennywise, more franchise dollars.
Do fans want more, or could Welcome to Derry choose to scratch that Pennywise itch for good? Much like the dancing clown, time could be on our side either way.
Avatar: Fire and Ash Review – James Cameron’s Shallow Spectacle Still Earns Your Money
There is a moment early in Avatar: Fire and Ashwhere the copious and three-dimensional CG vistas of James Cameron’s Pandora are not picture perfect. It is after an action sequence in which one group of renegade Na’vi firebomb another tribe. Our heroes are thus blasted out of the sky and laid low along a heavily forested jungle floor. It is in this precise breath, or perhaps a blink that occurs between breaths, where a bioluminescent vine reaches out for the children of Jake Sully and Neytiri, that I clocked it: an incongruity; a computer-generated image which does not look quite photorealistic. As it turns out, even gods bleed.
Pointing this out, of course, is the definition of nitpickery. When so much else of Avatar 3 is as gorgeously realized and methodical as this third trip to Pandora tends to be, it can admittedly be jarring to catch imperfections out of the corner of one’s eye. But like a microscopic flaw in a jewel, it is only worthy of commentary to a point. The thing still shimmers in its king’s scepter when he waves it around declaring himself ruler of the world. In fact, there might be more visual inconsistencies that my feasting, 3D-bespectacled eyes simply missed while being overwhelmed. If there are any aesthetic quibbles to be had, though, they vanish like mist beneath a neon-tinged sunrise in a movie this uniformly rapturous across its gargantuan 197-minute runtime.
Whatever else you make of Avatar: Fire and Ash’s narrative cul-de-sacs about blue aliens once again rising up against the ravages of the human race, the threequel remains an aesthetic triumph and simultaneous indictment of so much else churned out of the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Why can’t the plains of Minecraft, or the wastelands of Deadpool and Wolverine’s Void look this eye-poppingly wondrous?
Then again, I am left to also wonder why I take it all for granted—so much so that I get distracted by the most trivial of blemishes when considering what to write about a movie with a running time longer than Oppenheimer and a stone’s throw away from Return of the King. It might be because while this has the scale of an epic, it frustratingly maintains the thematic depth and complexity of a children’s fairytale picture, and Disney’s Pocahontasto be specific.
To be absolutely clear, Fire and Ash is a good movie. It is also a step up from second film The Way of Water, which in many respects felt more like a showcase on a tech convention’s floor of what James Cameron’s digital innovations can now do with H20. One of the most damning critiques I’ve heard from colleagues about Fire and Ash is that it is The Way of Water all over again, but if so, it is a better iteration of the same story. This time we have some semblance of narrative momentum due to the travails of the only Sully child with any dimensionality: the adopted child Spider (Jack Champion).
Fire and Ash is genuinely Spider’s movie since he is the impetus upon which the entire plot pivots. After the events of The Way of Water, where the eldest son of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) died during a replay of Titanic, Neytiri has come to despise their humanoid “Sky Person” son, Spider. Also unable and unwilling to return to his Homo sapien heritage in the “civilization” corner of land that’s been deforested into a Blade Runner-esque hellscape, young Spider is effectively being banished by all sides to live with distant Na’vi relations. That is until the Sully clan’s floating transport is attacked by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a witchy Na’vi whose Mangkwan clan worships the flames of war and nihilism after a volcano wiped out their homes and neighbors some years ago.
It is this crossing of the paths which leads to the Christlike member of the Sully kin, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, still bizarrely cast as a teenager), to call on Eywa to save Spider’s life after his oxygen mask is broken. Enter those aforementioned glowy vines and some New Age mysticism which turn this young man into an—ahem—half-breed who resembles a human but physiologically mirrors a Na’vi. It also captures the attention of Spider’s dastardly biological father, the returning sourpuss Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who continues to insist on his hatred for all things Pandora and Na’vi. But after so many years spent trapped inside a Na’vi avatar’s body, the crusty army man is starting to protest too much as he finds a soulmate in Chaplin’s Varang. The pair turn out to have a lot of the same interests in common: sweet nothings like genocide, no-quarter battle tactics, and maybe a dabble of blood stuff in the bedroom.
Their union is what truly endangers the waterbending tribes within which the Sullys now live, leading inevitably to another climactic battle between the technologically advanced Sky People, now with their own Na’vi death cult providing air support, and the virtuous aquatic tribes and their space whale bestie battalions.
It is an often remarked critique that the Avatar movies seem to generally lack the same lasting relevancy of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings in the cultural imagination, despite Cameron’s films making more money (at least when you do not account for inflation). But the density of Reddit posts and fan art notwithstanding, the charms of Avatar: Fire and Ash are obvious to anyone with eyes.
The CG worlds are sumptuous, even without the three-dimensional gimmicks added on. In an age where tentpole spectacles dominate the multiplex, here is a vision that honestly invites the audience to inhabit its daydream for maybe a quarter of your waking day. It’s a steep time investment, but its lack of self-awareness or self-effacement remains as novel and refreshing in 2025 as it did at the dawn of irony-drenched blockbuster “comedies” in 2009. It’s just a pleasure to visit Oz once in a while.
If the movies lack staying power in the imagination, it is probably because the screenplays that Cameron co-writes for this wonderland never match his visual inventiveness. Sixteen years since its inception, the Avatar films remain a pastiche of colonialist and white savior fantasies in the Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and literal O.G. Pocahontas legend vein, the latter fanned by English soldier of fortune, John Smith. But those derivative roots do not mean you cannot do interesting things with the fantasy, problematic though it might be.
In the case of Fire and Ash, Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver introduce a variety of interesting wrinkles that would seem to channel real, troubling histories between European explorers/conquerors and Indigenous peoples in North and Central America. The villainous temptress Varang and her followers flirt with being a metaphor for the complicity and/or cooperation of some Native tribes and nations siding against their longstanding enemies during colonial inflection points. Think of the rival communities who sided with Cortez and the Spanish against the Aztec (mind you, in actual history it was the standalone Aztecs who did blood sacrifices, as opposed to their native enemies). Similarly, the potential tragedy of Spider, a young person caught between two worlds and civilizations that both reject him, is one of the most poignant narratives of frontier history. Look to the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, or for that matter, the real historical Pocahontas.
Avatar: Fire and Ash flirts with some substantively big ideas that could undergird its visual splendor. However, as with most Cameron screenplays, any dramatic or historically knotty idea is mostly straightened out or glossed over in favor of the commercial beats that he knows how to play to the hilt: star-crossed lovers on a doomed vessel! A grieving mother renewing her maternal instincts with a surrogate daughter! And yes, another iteration of the proud and noble Indigenous people, led by their own adopted white man, calling on mother nature herself to defeat the technologically advanced white devils who run the world.
Cameron plays those well-worn, and lucrative, beats incredibly well again, it’s just the novelty has worn a bit thin after a third bite at the apple. That isn’t to say it’s poorly done. It is, again, superior to The Way of Water if for no other reason than Chaplin’s evil sorceress Na’vi matches Lang’s scenery-chewing as Quaritch, and the two have some diabolical fun as Quaritch begins going native enough to be redressed by his superiors a la Lawrence of Arabia. The climactic battle is also more satisfying this time around since all of Pandora’s ecosystems get in on the anti-human action, suggesting that when the time finally comes, Cameron will definitely side with the orcas in their anti-yacht uprising.
Some of the audience-servicing still seems a little forced to a critic’s brain—especially the addition of another star-crossed young romance that this time involves one half of the coupling being played by a septuagenarian—but for family audiences looking for a visual distraction this holiday season, it will matter naught.
This thing is meant to be admired, consumed, and then like holiday lights forgotten about in a box until roughly the same time next Avatar season. One can be a grinch and wish for more—or, like a certain holiday movie classic, grouch that a few of those little lights are not twinkling—but such petty qualifications in the face of this million-watts-light-show leads to pedantry. Fire and Ash is more of the same, and in some areas better. Overwhelm your senses and then go back to forgetting about the blue people until Cameron and 20th Century Studios need to collect a couple more billion dollars from us in three to 20 years.
Avatar: Fire and Ash opens on Friday, Dec. 19.
The Best TV Shows of 2025
When it comes to the media landscape, a lot can change in 365 days.
Around this time last year, TikTok was banned in the U.S. (and still technically is if you believe Congress is a thing), Max was a couple months out from realizing that it’s good to have “HBO” in an entertainment brand name, and Netflix was not yet eyeing Warner Bros. with a lustful gleam. Meanwhile, you, dear reader, might have been on the couch, flipping through the streams and stumbling upon a new TV program where Noah Wyle plays a doctor. But wait, didn’t he already play a doctor in that ’90s thing? That was pretty good so maybe this will be as well. Lo’ and behold The Pitt was good. In fact, it might have been the best show of the year.
Point is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even as the market-movers play their corporate game of thrones and consolidate, there is always good television to be found for those who care to find it. And thanks to show’s like the aforementioned Pitt, that more than held true in 2025. Here are the best TV shows of the year – Pitts, Peacemakers, Pluribuses, and all.
25. Doctor Who
Look, we all know that the Doctor Who season 15 finale was objectively not a great episode of television, even though it’s possible to argue that some of its worst sins were not entirely its fault. (Showrunner Russell T Davies is still on the hook for the way he wasted the return of the Rani, though.) But we also shouldn’t let a bad ending erase the fact that the rest of the season was actually pretty darn great. After all, before “The Reality War” came along and harshed everyone’s buzz with Ncuti Gatwa’s surprise regeneration into Billie Piper, most would have likely agreed it was, at least collectively speaking, one of modern Who’s best!
After all, season 15 features some all-time bangers that run the gamut in terms of tone and subject matter. “Midnight” sequel “The Well” was a deliciously tense horror story, the Ruby Sunday-centric “Lucky Day” gave former companion Millie Gibson a chance to be a hero on her own terms, and meta-episode “Lux” was as much a love letter to the show’s fandom as anything else. But the real highlight of the year was “The Story and the Engine,” a fresh and visually striking hour that uses magical realism to explore how we (and the cultures we live in) are all defined by the stories we tell. A less-than-perfect ending to the season doesn’t erase all the good stuff that has come before it, and we should all take a moment to remember and appreciate that. – Lacy Baugher
24. The Eternaut
The Eternaut (El Eternauta) was a surprise global hit for Netflix when it launched on the streamer in April 2025, becoming the top non-English-language series worldwide. The Argentine sci-fi series was critically acclaimed, but more importantly, audiences everywhere became intrigued by its premise and locked in for the journey.
The show is set in Buenos Aires and tracks what happens after a mysterious snowfall wipes out most of the global population. We follow one friend group as they struggle to survive in the aftermath. They don’t know why it happened, but the dynamics between them are slowly shifting as they get closer to answers, so we’re never sure who will turn out to be a good guy or cause enough problems to spark further catastrophe.
The Eternaut is based on the comic by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López, published in the 1950s. You wouldn’t be able to tell, though, because many of the book’s themes carry over seamlessly into the modern day, and the show’s world feels realistic and lived-in, even when monsters populate it. Oesterheld was “disappeared” by the Argentinian military dictatorship in 1977, but his work lives on. If you haven’t checked out this hidden sci-fi gem yet, we can’t recommend it enough. – Kirsten Howard
23. Daredevil: Born Again
Daredevil: Born Again shouldn’t be as good as it is. Not only does it come to an audience that has forgiven and forgotten any problems in the original Netflix run, but the series also underwent an extreme change in direction during production. Although new showrunner Dario Scardapane and the directing duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead got to shoot plenty of new material, they had to use much of what the previous regime shot. The result is an uneven season of television, with even more visible seams than the usual MCU product.
And yet, Born Again still manages to be powerful superhero fiction. Part of the appeal comes from its incredible core cast. Charlie Cox moves from charming to guilt-ridden to furious so effortlessly that we fully understand why people fall for the obviously not-okay Matt Murdock. Vincent D’Onofrio gets to put new spins on his take on Wilson Fisk as a baby in a giant man’s body as the Kingpin becomes the Mayor of New York. But the most incredible part of Born Again is the way it takes seriously Matt’s guilt about being a vigilante, making the audience actually fear for his soul when the series finally gives us what we want, Daredevil in costume. A devil’s bargain has rarely felt so rewarding. – Joe George
22. Such Brave Girls
One of the perils of the streaming era is that there’s simply more quality television out there than anyone could feasibly hope to watch in a 365-day period. So don’t feel bad if you’ve never actually heard of the Hulu comedy Such Brave Girls — just take this as an invitation to please fix your life immediately. But, to be clear, this isn’t a show for the faint of heart. A bleak, biting, often deeply uncomfortable story of a dysfunctional pair of sisters beset by mental health crises, financial woes, relationship dramas, and the emotional malaise that often goes hand in hand with figuring out the person you’re supposed to become; it’s chaotic, brutally honest, and frequently unhinged in all the best ways.
In its second season, the show takes even bigger swings, allowing its characters to unapologetically be the absolute worst versions of themselves in subplots that range from cruel to cringe. Real-life siblings Kat Sadler and Lizzie Davidson deftly navigtate the combative, occasionally hateful, but strangely moving bond between their onscreen counterparts without forcing either character to fit into the pre-determined boxes a lesser series might require them to, and the gloriously messy result is a series that feels unlike virtually everything else on TV at the moment. – LB
21. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
It’s true, the shining star in Paramount+’s larger Star Trekuniverse got a little tarnished this year. Yes, Star Trek: Strange New Worldsseason 3 was pretty uneven towards the end, what with that terrible documentary-style episode and the one where half the main crew got turned into Vulcans and subsequently became huge jerks for no real reason. Yes, there was often a frustratingly uneven sense of pacing throughout. And yes, the season’s larger arcs (literally everything involving Captain Batel’s condition) were repeatedly sidelined in favor of adventure-of-the-week style antics that didn’t always tie back to the show’s larger themes. And yet, despite these flaws, it seems important to acknowledge that most of this season was actually pretty great.
The “Space Adventure Hour” Holodeck murder mystery. The creepy, almost unnameable evil at the heart of “Through the Lens of Time.” Ortegas getting stranded on an alien planet with a Gorn, a la Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Enemy.” These are genuinely great episodes — all for different reasons — which once again shows us the depth that this series is capable of when it tries. Successfully balancing weekly adventures and ongoing character subplots that frequently mix in fan favorites from The Original Series era is no small feat, and the fact that Strange New Worlds so frequently makes it look so effortless while having to serve so many masters is something I suspect a lot of us have begun taking for granted. If you ask me, any show is allowed a few clunkers when the bulk of its offerings are this strong. – LB
20. Peacemaker
How do you follow a universally-praised blockbuster reboot of the world’s first superhero? If you’re James Gunn, and only if you’re James Gunn, the answer is obviously “With another season of Peacemaker.” Further, anyone who wasn’t Gunn would have probably used Peacemaker as little more than an expansion of the new DCU from Superman and as set-up for the sequel Man of Steel. While some of that does appear in Peacemaker’s second season, in cameos from the Justice Gang and Lex Luthor as well as the introduction of the planet Salvation, Gunn keeps the attention on the show’s main cast, including its Z-list protagonist.
Peacemaker season 2 uses comic-book multiverse shenanigans as a tool to challenge the maturation Chris Smith (John Cena, showing remarkable range) underwent in season 1. Offered the chance to simply go to a reality where he is adored by the public and loved by his family, Smith can avoid the hard work of repentance and reconciliation before him. Adding to the complex character work is a fantastic supporting cast consisting of Jennifer Holland, Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, and more, as well as a heavy dose of superhero humor. Peacemaker will never challenge the Man of Steel as an A-list hero, but in the hands of James Gunn, he’s just as compelling and complex. – JG
19. Ludwig
Cozy British mysteries are having something of a moment lately, their picturesque settings, rich character relationships, lack of overt gore and violence, and smart humor offering a welcome and convenient escape from… well, everything that’s happening in the real world. While 2025 saw several outstanding entries in this particular sub-genre of British crime television, including Death Valley, Art Detectives, and Murder Before Evensong, the buzziest of the bunch was almost certainly BBC One’s Ludwig (available on BritBox in the U.S.).
A mystery series that’s firmly aimed at non-mystery fans, it follows the story of a socially awkward puzzle setter named John Taylor (or “Ludwig” as he is known in the papers) who is forced out of his comfort zone when his police detective twin brother disappears and he must assume his identity to try and figure out what happened. Peep Show’s David Mitchell plays the oddball eponymous lead, whose logical mind (surprise!) also turns out to be remarkably skilled at solving murders. Yes, it’s the sort of mystery show whose premise you require to suspend a great deal of disbelief, given that multiple people are repeatedly required not to notice when John-pretending-to-be-James starts acting as though he’s never seen an episode of Law & Order before, let alone been to a crime scene. But the result is such fun you won’t care. – LB
18. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Few shows airing a 17th(!) season find their way onto a best-of-the-year list. Then again, not many shows make it to their 17th year in the first place. Thankfully FX comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has and TV is all the better for it. After a stretch of funny but ultimately dispensable installments in the show’s late teenage years, Rob Mac, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton’s demented creation became the best version of itself once again in 2025.
Save for the second half of its charming yet inessential crossover with Abbott Elementary, Always Sunny season 17 features nothing but bangers. Everyone is at the top of their game here. Mac (Mac) salsa dances while under the influence of hot peppers. Dee (Kaitlin Olson) slaps some people. Dennis (Howerton) becomes a waxy-faced vampire. Charlie (Day) shaves his head. Frank (Danny DeVito) is cake. It all culminates in another one of the show’s hilarious, yet oddly touching finales. – Alec Bojalad
17. Murderbot
Apple TV‘s Murderbot features one of the most slam dunk elevator pitches of the 2025 TV season. They’ve got Alexander Skarsgård … and he’s a murderbot. Ok, the titular cyborg (made from machine parts and cloned tissue) at the center of Murderbot isn’t actually called that. He’s an anonymous security tool known as “SecUnit” who is purchased to assist some egghead hippies on a dangerous scientific mission. Unbeknownst to both his creators and purchasers, however, Murderbot has achieved autonomy and given himself a colorful new name.
Just like Martha Wells’ beloved book series upon which Murderbot is based, this is easy-breezy sci-fi capable of entertaining mass audiences. Skarsgård is as likable as ever as he balances the needs of protecting his charges and keeping up his ruse all the while bingeing episodes of his favorite show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. The first season’s 10 episodes flow together nicely, ending in a finale that promises expanded Murderbot adventures (or Diaries) to come. – AB
16. Task
A slow-burn affair for HBO, Task nevertheless became must-see TV by the time it wrapped its first season, which pit Mark Ruffalo’s priest-turned-FBI agent Tom Brandis against a gang of violent robbers. Focusing on three groups – the FBI task force headed up by Ruffalo, the stash house robbers, and the motorcycle gang they both despise – Task is a worthy prestige follow-up from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby.
He’s very good at getting under your skin by creating flawed heroes and villains. Ruffalo is also on form throughout as a guy trying to work out how to live after his adopted son murders his wife. Despite its bleakness, Task is riveting. By the time you get halfway through it, you’ll be ready for 10 more seasons of misery as long as you get a couple of moments of levity along the way. – KH
15. Death by Lightning
While Americans, as a general rule, love period dramas, we don’t necessarily make all that many of them. Neither, for that matter, does anyone else. That’s slowly starting to change, thanks to the success of shows like The Gilded Age and Manhunt, but mostly, period dramas focused exclusively on American history are few and far between. This is a big part of why the Netflix drama Death By Lightning feels like such a breath of fresh air.
Turning the story of a presidential assassination that almost everyone seems to have forgotten about — President James Garfield was shot less than four months into his first term and died of sepsis several months later — into a genuinely entertaining television series with real stakes and tension is an accomplishment enough on its own. But with the help of an all-star cast that includes Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford, and Betty Gilpin, Death By Lightning manages to feel as contemporary as anything on TV at the moment, wrestling with questions of power, progress, and political violence in ways that feel incredibly relevant to the moment we find ourselves in now. – LB
14. Slow Horses
Rolling into the fifth season of Apple TV’sSlow Horses, you’d assume it might be starting to lose some of its charm, but the combined power of the returning cast and Will Smith’s sublime adaptation of Mick Herron’s spy thriller novels is still overwhelming.
In season 5, a bloody massacre in London is paired with the hilarious trials and tribulations of obnoxious computer nerd Roddy Ho’s love life. It sounds like a recipe for tonal disaster, but somehow it works. Case in point: there’s an episode where Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) takes Ho to hide out in a glamorous rooftop restaurant. Complaining about the prices as they discuss how to take down a Libyan terrorist gang, Lamb is asked why he picked a place so out of whack with his character to lie low. As Lamb bluntly replies, no one who’s ever set eyes on him would expect to see him there. All this is taking place just a few moments after Ho has gone through yet another assassination attempt. It’s ridiculous, but it couldn’t be more fun if it tried. That’s the Slow Horses way. – KH
13. Alien: Earth
“There is surprisingly little mythology in the Alien film universe,” Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley observed in an interview with Den of Geek. “All we really know is that there’s this company called Weyland-Yutani, and it has a knack for putting its employees in terrible danger.” Hawley is right. Much of the appeal of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic comes down to the simplicity of letting an apex predator loose in a confined space amid a vacuum where no one can hear your scream. How can such a cinematic, elemental concept stand up to the episodic rigors of television? Pretty well it turns out!
Thanks to Hawley’s vision, a capable cast, and FX’s newfound Disney money, Alien: Earth presents some of the most compelling worldbuilding from an Alien story yet. Set just two years before Scott’s film, Earth imagines its title location as a playground for five megacorporations looking to achieve immortality. Young trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and his Prodigy Corporation believe they’ve reached that goal with the creation of powerful, child-brained hybrids, led by the indestructible Wendy (Sydney Chandler). Those ideas combined with some genuinely thrilling and bloody action have made for a heady, enjoyable sci-fi experience. – AB
12. Squid Game
Thanks to Netflix’s creative (and frankly annoying) release strategy, Squid Gamecame close to airing two full seasons of television this year, with season 2’s Dec. 26, 2024 release date missing the cut by only six days. The fact that only season three’s six episodes premiered in 2025 might make its inclusion on this list controversial. The concluding arc to creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s modern dystopian masterpiece was divisive to say the least.
We would argue it shouldn’t be, however. Aside from the aforementioned release model that made it feel like half a season, Squid Game season 3 was another pitch perfect round of dark storytelling. The central games, which are always equal parts thrilling and revolting, took on an added foreboding resonance as viewers were forced to contend with the introduction of the ultimate innocent contestant and the lingering question of whether Player 456 could actually survive the brutal gauntlet twice. Somehow a very cynical, at times angry show found room to get even angrier while still introducing the slightest bit of hope for a brighter future. – AB
11. Dying for Sex
FX miniseries Dying for Sex didn’t receive quite the same attention as its franchise and IP-centric television peers and that’s a shame. This funny, touching, and bittersweet eight-episode series was one of the more pleasant and human experiences for the medium this year. Based loosely on a real-life story, Michelle Williams stars as Molly Kochan, a woman who receives a Stage IV breast cancer diagnosis. Faced with the prospect of death, Molly sets off on a journey of sexual self discovery.
Williams shines with a vulnerable performance and Jenny Slate chips in superb supporting work as Molly’s friend Nikki Boyer. Dying for Sex is ultimately a refreshingly blunt look at the most taboo of subjects – death and sex. By the time Rob Delaney enters the proceedings as a neighbor Molly finds herself equally repulsed and turned on by, it’s clear the show has something to say about both. – AB
10. The Lowdown
FX’s The Lowdown pulled off the near impossible in 2025: it made a journalist seem cool. Sure, it helps that said journalist is played by Ethan “I Once Rizzed Up Rihanna” Hawke. And sure, said journalist prefers to call himself a historian or, more haughtily, a “truthstorian.” But he writes investigative stories for printed publications so we’re going to take the W.
Created by Sterlin Harjo of Reservation Dogs fame, The Lowdown is clearly the work of someone who loves and cherishes detective fiction. Hawke’s Lee Raybon is an immensely appealing sleuth, his ability to suss out a rat being second only to his ability to take punch after punch from the local riff raff. As the central mystery surrounding the dynastic Washberg family and their corrupt dealings continues to unfold, Lee and the show around him never lose sight of what matters: the underdog. – AB
9. Pluribus
While the question of whether Apple TV’s Pluribus is the best TV show of the year is worthy of debate, we can likely all agree that it’s certainly the weirdest. (Complimentary.) The story of an apocalypse that brings about world peace and universal happiness by way of joining all of humanity into a single hivemind, it’s the sort of sci-fi series that delights in asking big philosophical questions about free will, individualism, and change.
Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn stars as Carol, a cynical romantasy author who is one of a handful of humans who are mysteriously unaffected by the great Joining that has changed the world. Desperate to find a way to reverse what has happened, she is forced to reckon with deep personal truths — like whether she may have actually been, in some part, responsible for her own misery in the world that used to be. – LB
8. The Rehearsal
The first season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal was a worthy follow-up to the Canadian satirist’s landmark Nathan For You docuseries. Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that the narrative, in which Fielder attempts to rehearse every encounter in his life, could have benefitted from a little more focus. That focus arrives in The Rehearsal season 2, with Fielder locking in to save the American aviation industry.
Over the span of six brilliant episodes, The Rehearsal season 2 identifies a problem (plane crashes), diagnoses its solution (lack of pilot communication), and rolls up its sleeves to fix everything (through rehearsal, of course). By the time you get to Fielder’s “Miracle Over the Mojave,” The Rehearsal‘s second season has truly entered into the “social advocacy comedy docuseries” genre Hall of Fame alongside pretty much just other Nathan Fielder projects. It’s a narrow category. – AB
7. Long Story Short
It’s hard to make an animated comedy series more personal, elegiac, and melancholy than BoJack Horseman. With Long Story Short, BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg gives it a shot anyway. This 10-episode effort puts its viewers through the emotional wringer. Following the middle-class Jewish American Schwooper family over a span of 30-some years, Long Story Short doesn’t let the perpetual forward movement of time interrupt with its storytelling mission.
Whether it’s experiencing young Yoshi’s (Max Greenfield) bar mitzvah, checking in with an adolescent Shira (Abbi Jacobson), or jumping forward to a middle-aged Avi (Ben Feldman) after experiencing multiple personal tragedies, Long Story Short examines the quiet desperation of American family life from every angle. And of course: it’s very funny… as all families are. – AB
6. The Chair Company
When you click “play” on a new series from I Think You Should Leave creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, you know you’re about to see something baffling, but The Chair Company exceeds all expectations in that regard. The show’s inciting incident sees Ron Trosper (Robinson) falling to the ground after giving an important speech at work, thanks to a faulty chair. He’s so embarrassed by the humiliation, he decides to investigate the chair manufacturers and tumbles into a sprawling conspiracy.
Each episode is like a 12-layer dip of cringe, surreal moments, and relentless twists, with Robinson at the center of a story that barely makes sense but still leads you to places you wouldn’t go with a gun. Of course, it’s been renewed for a second season. That’s just what Tecca wants. Don’t you get it? – KH
5. Severance
Viewers want answers when it comes to mystery box storytelling. In the case of Severance season 2, that means resolutions to questions like “Who was Kier Eagan?,” “Why is Lumon doing all of this,” and of course “What’s with the goats.” At the same time, however, wrapping up any mystery just ends that mystery. How can a show like Severance keep its audience engaged without stringing them along?
Season 2 makes that tightrope act look absurdly easy. Yes, some questions are answered in this batch of 10 episodes on Apple TV (including the goat one, believe it or not!). But the season’s real strengths lie in the quiet moments between those discoveries. Between Ben Stiller’s revelatory direction, immaculate production design, and a pitch perfect cast led by Adam Scott, there is truly never a dull moment on the Macrodata Refinement floor. – AB
4. Adolescence
Extended single-take shots or “oners” are all the rage on television nowadays. So much so that another 2025 show (that you’ll be reading about on this list soon enough) built an entire episode, fittingly called “The Oner,” out of the technique. With so many talented filmmakers and performers getting in on the action, the standards for what makes an effective oner have been raised. It can’t just all be about logistical mastery – the lack of interruption within a scene has to play emotionally as well. Enter Adolescence.
Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, this four-episode Netflix series represents the most effective and affecting use of single take storytelling in some time. At the beginning of one unassuming day in an unspecified northern English town, police arrive at the doorstep of the Miller family to deliver unthinkable news: 13-year-old son Jamie (an astonishing Owen Cooper) is wanted for the murder of his classmate Katie. What follows are four excruciating installments examining a family and community’s pain, all without the relief of a single cut. – AB
3. The Pitt
It might be hyperbole to say that The Pitt saved television this year, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t think that more than once while watching it. Amid a sea of low-effort streaming sludge and long-in-the-tooth franchise storytelling, only HBO Max’s The Pitt had the courage to step forward and say “what if it we just made an awesome ’90s medical drama?”
The Pitt obviously owes a lot to its med drama forefathers, particularly ER from which it borrows star lead Noah Wyle (and according to the Michael Crichton estate: a bit more than that). But its dedication to real-time storytelling and relentless plot movement is an entirely modern invention. These 15 episodes (released weekly obviously) just absolutely fly by. There’s always something going on at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Glance down at your phone for a second and you’ve missed no fewer than 14 intubations. Take that, second screen TV culture! – AB
2. The Studio
Despite feeling as though his job is to destroy them, Continental Studio head Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) really loves movies. The TV show built around him, The Studio, also loves movies… but maybe not as much as it loves television. In addition to being a satirical love letter to Hollywood, even in its imperfect IP era, The Studio has a deep appreciation of what works for its small screen brother. In this case that means gags…lots of ’em.
Save for arguably the premiere and a two-part finale, The Studio‘s 10 installments are wonderfully episodic. One episode finds Matt continually ruining a “oner” on Sarah Polley’s film. Another finds him tussling with Ron Howard over the indulgent end of his flick. Then, just when he thinks he can have a breather on a date with a pediatric oncologist, suddenly he’s suffered a gruesome injury. It’s almost as if this story about movies continues to present situations saturated with comedy. If only there were some kind of term for situational comedy. Maybe then Continental Studio could break into the TV biz. – AB
1. Andor
The success of Disney+’s Andorcan be observed by its frequent use as a measuring stick. Across the entertainment landscape, any studio introducing a fresh new take on an existing IP plainly states that it’s intended to be the “Andor of [INSERT-FRANCHISE-HERE].” Marvel’s Secret Invasion was teased as the Andor of the MCU (and hooboy, that was a swing and a miss). More successfully, the aforementioned Alien: Earth has been pitched as the Alien’s Andor. Truthfully, however, there’s only one Andor and the show’s second and final season proved why.
Andor season 2 is quite simply a masterpiece of sci-fi genre storytelling. Imbued with authentic revolutionary spirit, the “conclusion” to Cassian Andor’s story (give or take a Rogue One) was a triumph. Diego Luna once again embodied Cassian as an unwilling folk hero who’s always there for the rebellion when it needs him. Meanwhile, the political analogies at play were more astute than ever with the villainous Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) finding out how little use fascism has for its adherents. Andor season 2 had friends everywhere and we count ourselves among them. – AB
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – The Strange Klingon Tick Paul Giamatti Brings to His Villain
Star Trek has given popular culture some of its most memorable villains: Khan Noonien Singh, Q, and the Borg. With the new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, veteran actor Paul Giamatti hopes to extend that run with his character, Nus Braka. As a character of both Klingon and Tellarite descent, Nus Braka allows Giamatti to draw from the whole history of Star Trek, but there’s one aspect of the character’s most honorable ancestry that struck the actor.
“I remembered reading something about Klingons standing too close to people,” Giamatti told TrekMovie. “And I thought, ‘I’m going to stand too close.’ So I’m always getting way too close to people, like the physical body space.”
Close-talking may be something that most viewers associate with a Seinfeld annoyance more than they do anything from Qo’noS, but Giamatti’s not wrong to identify it. The first Klingons seen on The Original Series were haughty and imperious, and while John Colicos wouldn’t exactly get in William Shatner‘s face when his character Kor challenged Kirk, he certainly filled up the space. After their redesign in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Klingons became more aggressive, and then close-talking became more common within the empire.
A bonafide Trekkie, Giamatti’s not limiting his inspiration to just the series’ most well-known enemy race. “I think I probably had in my head a lot of different villains,” he continued. “I probably had some Khan. I had sort of Chang [from Star Trek VI] and Gul Dukat [from Deep Space Nine], these kind of guys who love the sound of their own voices. These guys who love to kind of ‘blahblahblah,’ just bulls—ing, constantly. I thought of the chaoticness of Q and stuff like that.”
It’s easy to see what all those characters have in common. Each one is imperious and domineering, a military leader who openly challenges the Federation and its adherents. But Giamatti adds another, unexpected layer to Nus Braka, something he found in two other classic villains.
“The thing that I think is interesting about this guy is that—as it goes along, and by the end of it, you really see it—he is very much a kind of malformed child inside. He’s this very angry, angry, psychopathic child inside,” observed Giamatti. “Which actually made me think of Trelane, who is kind of a child a little bit. And even Q has a kind of child to him. So whether it’s unique or not, what I bring to it, I don’t know, but that’s something that became more and more important to me as I went on with it. That he’s arrested as a little boy.”
Of course, there will be more to Nus Braka than just impressions of other characters. According to early solicitations, he has a deep connection to Nahla Ake, the academy chancellor played by Holly Hunter.
How that connection will play out still remains to be seen, if it will be a lot of monologuing in the model Gul Dukat or pranks in the form of Trellane. But whatever, he does, it sounds like Nus Braka will be doing it just millimeters from his opponent’s face.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.
Zach Cregger Is Bringing a Classic Indie Horror Comic to the Screen
With his solo debut Barbarian, Zach Cregger revealed the secrets lurking underneath Michigan homes. For his next film, Cregger will be exploring the dark side of the mitten state’s rival Ohio. Cregger is set to produce Torso, an adaptation of the 1998 indie comic by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko.
According to TheHollywood Reporter, Cregger will co-produce with Roy Lee from Vertigo Entertainment, along with Alex Hedlund and Nick Antosca. The latter two may give us an idea of what the finished product will be, as the duo’s production company Eat the Cat also made true crime series Candy and A Friend of the Family. Given that Cregger and co. will be making Torso for Netflix, it sounds like the adaptation will go for more of a lurid thriller tone, rather than match the grounded horror of the comic.
Which might not be a bad thing at all. As Bendis famously recounted in his 2000 miniseries Fortune and Glory, Hollywood has long had its eyes on Torso, as well as his previous hardboiled mystery comics Jinx and A.K.A. Goldfish. Despite getting attention from David Fincher and Paramount Pictures, the film never left Development Hell, leaving Bendis more than a little disillusioned. Bendis’ work did see live-action adaptation, both in the form of the many Marvel stories that have been reimagined for the screen (especially on Netflix’s Daredevil and Jessica Jones series) and his indie series Powers, which was turned into a series for the short-lived PlayStation Network in 2015. And yet, Torso has heretofore been unadapted.
It’s easy to see why the series would gain so much attention from Hollywood. Published by Image Comics between 1998 and 1999, Torso has an irresistible hook: the true story of Eliot Ness, after his showdown with Al Capone in Hollywood, investigating a series of grisly murders in 1930s Cleveland, Ohio. In each case, all that investigators find is a torso, free of limbs or head, making it difficult to even identify the body, much less find the killer, in the days before high-tech forensic science.
Moreover, Bendis and Andreyko make the book read like a movie. Bendis has become infamous for his quippy, chatty form of comic book dialogue, which replicates the banter found screwball comedies, for better or for worse. Moreover, the duo uses mixed media, integrating photographs and newsprint into Bendis’s moody illustrations, all emphasized by thick black inks. Even the way the story unfolds recalls a movie more than it does a comic, as in an early scene in which the words “pop pop” appear over panels of kids discovering a body and continue into panels of Ness giving a press conference, as if sound effects overlayed between two scenes in a film.
Despite all the misfires, this current group seems particularly well-suited to bringing Torso to screen. Not only is there an appetite for true crime stories about horrible things happening in mundane places, but Cregger is riding high after his triumphant 2025 film Weapons.
Can Cregger be the one to finally bring Torso together? Or will this outing end in failure, adding just one more dark turn to an already despairing tale?
A Brief History of Hideo Kojima’s Passive-Aggressive Movie Reviews
Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima loves cinema. The legendary Japanese game designer, who says his body is 70% made of movies, is known for posting about upcoming releases and his reactions to current ones on social media. Less a critic than an observer, Kojima’s reviews have become required reading, not so much for his comments, but for their perceived depth.
When posting about movies that he really likes, Kojima will happily write a lengthy, thoughtful mini-essay on their themes or visuals. For those he doesn’t care for, a minimal post awaits. Sometimes, this simply means saying he saw a film without elaboration, but he’s been reporting his thoughts online for long enough that the latter has accidentally become shorthand for “movie bad.”
Kojima might prefer not to post negative remarks about other people’s art. That doesn’t change the perception that a post without depth can now come across as passive-aggressive to his fans, bringing a little anguish to those who loved the movie in question or were looking forward to seeing it.
Take the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, which Kojima described as “great”, adding “Within the absurdity of this game, the youths help each other, understand one another, reflect on their past, and come to realize the ‘path’ that stretches toward tomorrow. Dropping out isn’t just the end of one person—it’s passing the baton and entrusting their ‘will’ to the winners. It’s a meta, philosophical film about friendship and growth and also a declaration of war against the adults.”
Now compare that to his famously brief post about the highly anticipated Marvel movie between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame: “Saw Captain Marvel.” Or, there’s his comment about 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: “Went to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
There are plenty more. He also “saw Madame Web at the theater”, “watched 65 since Adam Driver and the dinosaur are starring”, and “Finally got to see” X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but had no further comments on any of them. Since all those movies were divisive at best and critically panned at worst, Kojima’s short remarks spoke volumes and showed a commitment to the bit for his fans.
However, all this seems like bad news for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery in terms of a Kojima stamp of approval. The latest Rian Johnson flick got a dreaded “watched” from Kojima this month, and the reactions were swift.
“I know this means he hated it but for those curious it really was the best one in the Knives Out series so far,” responded one person over on X, while several simply posted “uh oh”, knowing this might be a clear thumbs down from Kojima.
It’s possible that Kojima will have more to say about the movie, which marks a more philosophical shift in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out trilogy. But for now, fans of Kojima’s movie reviews must learn to live with the possibility that Wake Up Dead Man might have been another Madame Web-level disappointment for him.
It Sounds Like Marvel Is Cooking Up Something Big for Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Release
Doom is coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But how it will come is still something of a mystery. And Avengers: Doomsday directors Joe and Anthony Russo aren’t helping things. The duo posted a strange image to their instagram with the hashtag #avengersdoomsday, a blurry black and white image with what appears to be a “V” in the center.
What does it mean? We have no idea. And it’s just the latest bit of confusing information in the lead-up to the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, rumored to be releasing with Avatar: Fire and Ash this Thursday.
Here’s what we do know so far about Avengers: Doomsday. The movie will star Robert Downey Jr. as Victor Von Doom, the arch-enemy of the Fantastic Four who will challenge the heroes of Earth-616 while dealing with Incursions, calamities across the Multiverse that lead to the destruction of multiple Earths. We know that several groups of heroes will appear, including the two sets of Avengers teased in Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, the Fantastic Four seen in First Steps and a variation of the Fox X-Men team, both of which will may or may not make their way to Earth-616. And we know that Doomsday leads into Avengers: Secret Wars.
And that’s about it. While the three Secret Wars storylines published in Marvel Comics might provide some clues about the overall plan, the casting of Downey Jr. as Doom completely changes the dynamics of the character. In the comics, Victor Von Doom is the despotic but beloved ruler of Latveria, who is driven by insane jealousy of his former University classmate Reed Richards. But not only was Doom absent from Fantastic Four: First Steps, save for a post-credit scene that was actually taken from Doomsday, but the Russo Brothers have said that there is a specific reason that Doom looks like Tony Stark, hinting at a connection between this version of the character and the MCU Avengers.
Rumors surrounding the film and its marketing only further muddy things. Even by MCU standards, leaks have been frequent and uncorroborated. For every hard bit of information we get, such as Kelsey Grammer talking about a scene with Beast and Reed Richards that he shot with Pedro Pascal, there’s some AI-generated nonsense or a would-be influencer throwing out speculation as news (see: the many people certain that the Doomsday trailer would drop last week).
However, the following rumors about the trailer seem to have coalesced to the point that they seem likely, though still unconfirmed. Marvel will be releasing four trailers for Doomsday, starting this Thursday. The first three are teasers focusing on a specific character, each one ending with a countdown, before the release of a final, proper trailer for the entire movie. The first two teasers will be about Captain America and Thor, while the third will be about Doom himself.
The countdown motif matches the comic book lead-up to the 2015 Secret Wars event. Each of Marvel’s comics published before July 2015 had a banner reading “Time Runs Out” at the top, building tension as the Avengers and other heroes tried and failed to save their Earth from increasing incursions.
But the decision to lead with Captain America and Thor veers from the comics. While both certainly play big roles in every Secret Wars storyline in the comics, they are less important to Doom than the Beyonder, the godlike being who drives the first two Secret Wars stories from the 1980s, and certainly less so than Reed Richards, Doom’s classical arch-nemesis and the hero of the 2015 Secret Wars.
Rumors suggest that Doom will have a personal grudge against Steve Rogers, perhaps something involving Cap traveling across time to replace the Infinity Stones at the end of Endgame. But that still leaves the question of Thor, and why he would earn Doom’s ire? And what about Tony, does he get a trailer? And isn’t Doom’s whole thing that he hates Reed Richards, a guy who hasn’t even been on screen with him in the MCU yet?
In short, we probably won’t know what the teasers will be or what Doomsday will be until Marvel officially releases them. Until then, any attempts to see the future are doomed.
Avengers: Doomsday finally arrives to theaters on December 18, 2026.
James Gunn Addresses “Irritating” Superman 2 Rumor
James Gunn can’t sit online all day and debunk rumors about what is and isn’t going to happen in his rebooted DC Universe, but it seems some chatter is just too annoying to let slide.
Recently, there have been unofficial reports that Braniac will be the main villain of Gunn’s Supermanfollow-up, Man of Tomorrow. There have also been plenty of casting rumors about who might play him, with anyone from Matt Smith to Sam Rockwell on Gunn’s supposed shortlist. The director seems aware that these rumors will naturally spread amongst fans, but one particular rumor that singled out Guardians of the Galaxy alum Dave Bautista as a potential Braniac was a bridge too far for Gunn, who took to social media to set the record straight.
“Oh boy,” he posted on Threads. “Let’s forget a moment I’ve never said Brainiac was in the movie. I freaking love @davebautista & I have many ideas for who he could play in the DCU. But he & I have never discussed a role in Man of Tomorrow, nor have we discussed it amongst ourselves at DC. In addition, truly, NONE of the names, from the six or seven I’ve seen rumored for a role, have auditioned or been discussed at all.”
Gunn added that in general, he’s letting the “silly” rumors go, but that “Dave is a friend and that makes it more irritating.”
There are reasons behind fans’ hopes that Brainiac will turn up in Man of Tomorrow. The villain has long been considered one of Superman’s greatest adversaries. If Gunn is considering pitting him against Clark Kent, this would mark his first proper live-action cinematic debut as a primary antagonist.
However, Gunn says he’s holding off on any deeper confirmation for now, preferring to focus on Superman’s relationship with Lex Luthor in the upcoming sequel, where the pair will have to work together “against a much bigger threat”.
Whether that threat will be Brainiac, only time (and Gunn) will tell.
Rob Reiner: One of the Great Directors Who Defied the Myth of Auteurs
When most people think of the great directors of the ’80s and ’90s, they’ll probably list names such as David Lynch, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott. These filmmakers all had distinctive styles, so much so that their work could be identified in a single frame. The same could not be said of Rob Reiner. He doesn’t fill his movies with surreal dream sequences, moments of characters looking on in awe, or even a little dry ice. And yet, Rob Reiner did what any great director should do. He made great movies. Some of the best of all time, in fact.
Reiner’s run from his directorial debut via This is Spinal Tap in 1984 through A Few Good Men in 1992 stands as one of the most impressive streaks in cinema history. Nor did his great work stop at the end of that run, as he still had The American President and Ghosts of Mississippi come out in 1995 and 1996, respectively. What made these films classics wasn’t a series of easily recognizable tics or bombastic camera work. It was just an innate understanding of how to bring a story to life, no matter what the genre may be.
Another Type of Auteur
For evidence, let’s look at the four films that concluded Reiner’s miracle run: The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally… (1989), Misery (1990), and A Few Good Men (1992). All four live forever in cinema history, each with oft-quoted lines—”I’ll have what she’s having;” “you can’t handle the truth!”—and iconic moments, such as Wesley’s battle of wits with Vizzini or Annie hobbling Paul. Yet all four belong to wildly different genres and have starkly different tones.
How did Reiner manage to do justice to them each? By putting the story and characters first—which isn’t always considered a priority, at least not to cinephiles discussing their favorites.
Too often, discussions about great directors subscribe to the simplest version of the auteur theory, that famed approach that compares the director of a movie to the author of a book. While the specifics of the term have been debated since even before critic Andrew Sarris crystalized it Stateside in 1962, auteur theory tends to treat individualist and distinctive works as inherently good on at least some level. Thus Rob Zombie‘s The Devil’s Rejects or Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland earn some sort of respect simply because they reflect the vision or demonstrable sensibility of their directors, even if the actual stories they tell are trash.
Character Over Action
Reiner always put the story first, and constructed his shots to emphasize the clarity of the character’s emotions and the plot beats unfolding. Take for example the great fight sequence between Wesley (Cary Elwes) and Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) in The Princess Bride. The scene provides all the necessary information that viewers need to understand the conflict. We know where the two combatants are in relationship to each other, where they are in the geography of the arena, and what they want from the fight: Wesley wants to get by to rescue Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Inigo wants to kill him on the orders of his boss.
Even though fight scenes have become hyper and kinetic over the past decades, this 1987 clash still thrills. Reiner takes time to show how the two fighters tease one another out, how they gain and lose advantages. He sets up each reveal that the combatants have been using their non-dominant hands so that it creates maximum effect, allowing the stakes, humor, and finally tension to build.
But best of all, Reiner uses the fight scene not just as an entertaining diversion, but as a way to build character. Of course the fight shows how both men have incredible skills. But we also learn about their fundamental decency, despite one working for a braggart who hires his services to an evil prince, and the other apparently being the Dread Pirate Roberts. They are honorable men with legitimate pathos, whose fundamental goodness is only enhanced by their skill and cunning.
In other words, Reiner shoots the sword fight in The Princess Bride not just as the requisite genre pleasure expected from a swashbuckling fairy tale, although it is very much that. He also shoots it as a character drama.
A Subtle Signature Style
That approach drove all of Reiner’s best movies. A Few Good Men had thundering Aaron Sorkin-penned speeches and high-stakes legal maneuvering acted out by movie stars like Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, but it gave space for Lt. Kaffee to doubt himself, for Ross to wear the weight of the conflict. Misery is one of the bleakest Stephen King adaptations to hit the screen, but it never lets Annie Wilkes just be a crazy person. Instead it finds moments of humanity in her. When Harry Met Sally… takes its time to allow the title characters, played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, to be fully formed people, not just soon-to-be lovers on a direct course to an inevitable coupling.
To successfully pull off these feats, Reiner often had to get out of the way, so to speak, and let the story unfold. Flashy camera work would have distracted from the sparkling dialogue he got from writers such as Sorkin and Nora Ephron, and it would have diminished the themes that William Goldman and King established in their original works. The movies are better for Reiner’s restraint and prioritization of tone and character.
Sadly, such restraint means that Reiner rarely got the praise he deserved, even in his prime. It often felt more like an interesting bit of trivia than a recognition of greatness when cinephiles pointed out that the guy who made Misery also made The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, and A Few Good Men. All back to back.
But anyone who brought such enduring classics to the screen deserves praise, even if no one style or image defines his work. The word “auteur” doesn’t capture what he did so well, but “magic” just might.
Stranger Things’ Priah Ferguson on Why Everyone Loves (Fears) Erica
In the world of Stranger Things, nerds are heroes and bullies are baddies. Anyone who makes fun of Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas clearly aligns with Vecna, while even a prep like Steve wins us over by joining with the nerds. Yet, there’s one great exception to that rule, one person who can toss out an insult and make us love her for it: Erica Sinclair, Lucas’ spunky little sister.
For Erica’s actor Priah Ferguson, there’s a simple secret behind Erica’s power.
“I think that someone needs to say what people are thinking on the show,” Ferguson tells Den of Geek. “Her intelligence is her own little personal weapon. She’s the smartest one in the room, and it’s great to have her there in the midst of confusion all the time.”
Erica certainly established that dynamic in her first appearance, interrupting Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) showing off his (frankly incredible) Ghostbusters costume in season two by observing, “God, you are such a nerd.” When her mother (Karen Ceesay) pushes back, Erica refuses to relent. “Just the facts,” she insists.
Lines like that not only made Erica a fan favorite, but also kept her on the show. “Originally, Erica was written just to have one appearance in season two,” Ferguson reveals. “But the Duffers kept finding ways to write her back in a little in season two, wherever they could. Then in season three, she came back with a lot, you know, the whole ‘You can’t spell America without Erica’ speech, which was great.”
Grateful as she is for the continued work, Erica’s popularity comes as a surprise to Ferguson. “I definitely wasn’t expecting the fans to like her so much,” she enthuses. “I knew she was written well, but I wasn’t expecting such a huge fan base for her. But it was so exciting!”
“She comes in at a perfect time, especially when everything is going on and people just want answers to stuff,” Ferguson adds. “She comes in with the answers, says what people are thinking and wants to handle straight business. So I think that’s why people like her so much. She’s relatable.”
Erica certainly gets a chance to handle straight business in the most crowd-pleasing moment of season five’s first volume. Enlisted to help capture Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) before Vecna can take him, Erica joins her frenemy and Derek’s older sister Tina (Caroline Elle Abrams) for dinner, ready with pie laced with a sleeping agent. When Tina refuses, Erica has to get resourceful, forcing everyone to partake before beasties from the Upside Down can arrive.
Tense as the scene was on screen, Furgeson had a delightful time shooting it. “Oh, my gosh, that scene was so much to film!” she exclaims. “We had a lot of laughs But we also just wanted to tell a great story, so we weren’t laughing super hard to where we weren’t focused. And Frank [Darabont] who directed the episode, was amazing. He made sure to affirm us, and he made sure we were doing a great job.”
And, of course, Ferguson did her part to maintain solidarity with castmates where the pie was involved. “I did eat some of the pie, and I didn’t fall out from eating it,” she confesses. “The pie was pretty good!”
Willing though she may be to blend fiction and reality when it comes to baked goods, Ferguson points out that she doesn’t share her character’s sharp tongue.
“I’m definitely not a bully or as blunt as her, but me and Erica have some similarities. I would say she’s very confident in who she is. She kind of fills up any room, she goes into, and I think that that’s me as well.”
Becoming a fan favorite in a show full of fan favorites proves that Ferguson has certainly earned the right to be confident. Equally exciting is what the young star has planned as she moves out of Hawkins, Indiana. In addition to appearing in the Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic Samo Lives, alongside Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Jeffrey Wright, Ferguson is lending her voice to the scripted podcast series Hard Drive, from The Umbrella Academy producers the Neese Brothers. “It’s basically about this girl named Dasha who discovers her grandfather’s hard drive and finds out about this secret life he had,” she explains, teasing another sci-fi adventure.
But for right now, Ferguson is focused on saying goodbye to Stranger Things.
“It’s definitely emotional,” she admits. “It’s a tender feeling for me because I started doing the show when I was nine. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’m more familiar with the show being part of my life than being without it, so I’m kind of saying goodbye to my childhood. That can be bittersweet, but she’ll always be a part of me.”
And Erica Sinclair will always be a part of fans’ lives too, as long we need someone to say what we’re thinking amidst the chaos.
Stranger Things season 5 volume 1 is now streaming on Netflix. Volume 2 premieres Thursday, December 25 at 8 p.m. ET.
Dustin and Steve Make an Upsetting Vow in the New Stranger Things Season 5 Trailer
There are so many epic moments teased in the first trailer for Stranger Things season 5 volume 2.
Set after Will’s fist-pumping power grab in episode four, we hear him say that the gang has ultimately failed. Max and Holly continue their journey through Henry Creel’s confusing mindscape. Eleven watches the Upside Down turn downside up, and we hear that everything the gang thought they knew about it has been “dead wrong.” Meanwhile, Vecna saunters around, setting up his mysterious endgame. There’s also a shot of Nancy firing an automatic rifle like she just stepped out of an ’80s Sly Stallone actioner that should go directly on a t-shirt.
But there’s one upsetting moment that sticks in the mind more than any other, and that’s a back-and-forth between Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve “The Hair” Harrington (Joe Keery) that calls back to a previous season and may even foretell the fate of the beloved duo.
The trailer features multiple moments between Dustin and Steve, who seem to team up as the final battle approaches. “You die, I die,” Steve tells Dustin gently, who repeats “You die, I die” back to him, echoing his words in season 3 when he refused to budge and let Steve take the hit when he was opening a mysterious crate in a Russian-controlled elevator.
Dustin and Steve’s friendship seemed so unlikely at the start of the series, but it’s grown into one of Stranger Things‘ most touching dynamics by shaping the abrasive Steve into a patient big brother to Dustin. Their sarcastic, argumentative banter has turned into genuine loyalty over time, and Steve has often been the mentor Dustin needed when dealing with his confidence issues. In return, seeing Steve through Dustin’s eyes has made him more of a hero to fans than the one-note jerk he started as.
Their “you die, I die” vow feels right in some cosmic way, but a lot of people will be pretty upset if it comes to pass. Though we won’t find out whether either of them dies until the final volume is released later this month, it’s not looking good for Stranger Things‘ most iconic brosephs right now.
Stranger Things season 5 volume 2 premieres to Netflix at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 25. Volume 3 premieres Wednesday, December 31 at 8 p.m. ET.
The Coppola Deep Cut That Shaped Paul Feig’s New Sydney Sweeney Thriller The Housemaid
Paul Feig did not love thrillers when he was growing up. In fact, drama itself was verboten to a Detroit kid who loved comedy first and always. Considering he is now a surprise auteur of salacious suburban potboilers like A Simple Favor and this week’s The Housemaid, that might be something of a surprise. But then again, he was the guy who directed Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spyfirst (the latter of which he also wrote).
But before any of that, or even Freaks and Geeks, he was a comedy nerd—and one who happened to see on a whim a revival of arguably Francis Ford Coppola’s most underrated masterpiece, The Conversation.
“I was probably 16 or 17, and I had started college a little early in Detroit,” Feig explains in our video series In the Den. “And movies in Detroit were like from another planet. You didn’t think you could get to make movies.” At the time, he was mostly enamored with broad high-concept laughers like What’s Up Doc? or anything starring the Marx Brothers. But that changed after he met Gene Hackman in a translucent raincoat.
“When I saw The Conversation, it just had an effect on me. The weird paranoia of it all, and how David Shire’s solo piano score interplayed with the lonely sadness of the Gene Hackman character, and just how unique the idea of an eavesdropper and how he’s using technology to eavesdrop and gets sucked into something he’s being set up in… it was just this thing that blew my mind.”
The eavesdropper he is referring to is a Hackman character named Harry Caul. Harry considers himself to be a surveillance expert in the Coppola movie and detests the term “bug man.” Nonetheless, Harry does earn his living by placing wiretap bugs inside phones and other ingenious locations. The way Harry sees it though, he’s not responsible for what his clients do with the conversations he records. That bit of rationalization is only possible because of how repressed Harry seems to be, a character trait that Hackman famously struggled with, although it eventually earned him rave reviews and a BAFTA nomination.
“I wasn’t that familiar with Gene Hackman when I saw it, because I hadn’t seen The French Connection or anything at that age,” Feig recalls. “I almost thought he was like a real guy. He wasn’t an actor, you know? I really was like, ‘Did they just hire a real man off the street and have him do it?’ Because it was so understated, and then I just loved the choices. Like he’s always wearing that raincoat, which shows how disconnected he is and how he needs a kind of safety net around him.”
It might seem odd to call The Conversation, a film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, underrated, but when it lost to another film Coppola directed in the same year, The Godfather, Part II, it’s had a legacy of being overshadowed since the jump. And as Feig points out, “I love that [Coppola] shot this between the two Godfathers, and I actually read he handed off a lot of the editing to Walter Murch because he was so busy putting that other one in, and it is so expertly edited that it’s crazy.”
Murch would indeed write one of the foundational books on modern film editing via In the Blink of an Eye, and in The Conversation, he creates a sense of mounting dread and disorientation as the film increasingly takes on Harry’s frazzled point-of-view as he realizes that he is himself being watched. Worse, the titular conversation he records at the beginning of the movie might incite a murder.
That sense of perception versus reality is a theme that has stayed with Feig all the way into making films like A Simple Favor and The Housemaid.
“I like people who are just trying to figure out their place in the world,” Feig explains. “With the thrillers, I’m drawn to facades and what people present versus who they are. I think right now we are in the age of the conman. All the stuff you watch on these crime documentaries, it’s all people pulling one over on someone else, and sometimes it can go to the nth degree and be terrible, but I find that fascinating. I never want to be a cynical person who never believes someone is on the level, but at the same time, you do have to dig deeper these days, especially because of social media. Everyone is trying to present this other side of themselves that may or may not be true.”
In the case of The Housemaid, we are introduced to a character named Milly (Sydney Sweeney) who out of desperation agrees to become the live-in housemaid of what appears to be an eccentric rich housewife, Nina (Amanda Seyfried), and her handsome husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar). But as with Harry in The Conversation, there are layers to Sweeney’s Milly that lead to some sordid places in a story originally written as a bestseller by novelist Freida McFadden.
“What I loved the idea of the script and the book is getting to spend a solid hour making the audience root for everything they should not be rooting for, and then going, ‘Okay, that’s what you wanted and are happy about? Well guess what, ‘here’s the real story!’” Feig muses. ““Milly is definitely hiding who she is, and what I love about Syd’s performance is she plays it as this innocent, down on her luck girl who is just kind of stuck in this situation, and you worry about her because she seems kind of defenseless. Like there’s a scene in the restaurant… where you go, ‘This poor thing, she’s not that bright.’ But what you find out later is she has this crazy past; there’s this person inside of her that’s strong and terrifying at the same time, and I love that’s hidden inside this innocent girl outer shell.”
Casting both Sweeney and Seyfried in the central roles seemed natural to Feig. He cites Sweeney’s ending one-take scream in Immaculateas one of the best closing shots he’s seen in recent memory (a shot that Sweeney also told the director she did in only one take), while he thinks audiences are only beginning to see the breadth of Seyfried’s talent, as indicated in her Emmy-winning role in The Dropout.
“We had so much fun figuring [Nina] out,” says Feig. “Even little directions of ‘just stare really long before you give a line and just unnerve the shit out of Milly.’”
For Feig, finding the line between moments of humor and tension is the key to giving a scene texture, be it comedy or drama. Take Harrison Ford’s small but memorable part in The Conversation. In that movie, Ford was supposed to only be on the production for a single day but he brought his own wardrobe and cookies that he thought the character would bake to set, and Coppola liked the details so much he expanded the role.
“It’s fun when you watch it now with an audience to see people go, ‘Oh my God that’s Harrison Ford!’ because he’s so young but he plays such a mean guy. He’s so intense, and he keeps showing up, and the cookies thing I didn’t realize that was something of his, because those are those little touches that I love. I think movies that keep a sense of humor about themselves, even though they are really tense—that’s what Hitchcock used to do and that’s what I try to do with these thrillers I do—just have these quirky moments where you go, ‘huh?’ It weirdly makes a character more three-dimensional, and it also signals to the audience that it’s okay to have fun in this movie.”
He also might be channeling Coppola in subconscious ways. After all, The Conversation famously features Harry discovering the truth of his complicity when a normal-seeming toilet in a hotel room erupts with blood, and the unexpected sight of sudden gore is also key to The Housemaid.
“When I called everyone when we were putting this together, I said, ‘This is a Nancy Meyers movie that goes horribly wrong,’” Feig laughs. “We gotta make this house look perfect and aspirational, and then we’re just going to slowly tear it apart, and I loved introducing into this white house blood. Like by the end, there’s a lot of thick red blood, and it’s so stark against this beautiful kitchen and this beautiful hallway, and this white attic.”
At the end of the day, comedy and suspense aren’t that different to Feig, it’s all about staying true to the fundamentals.
“I always say my comedies are dramas, because I plot them out very seriously so that the character arcs and stakes are very high, and then you bring the extremeness of the characters and the situations in for the fun; and then with my thrillers/dramas, I still kind of call them comedies, because they’re just very dark and you just have to stay true to the moments that matter.”
The Housemaid brings the laughs, and the darkness, on Friday, Dec. 19.
Wake Up Dead Man Cast: Ranking the Knives Out Characters By Scenery Chewing
This article contains major spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man.
The Knives Out films are known for their all-star ensembles, each packed with actors who rarely, if ever, share the screen. These ensembles are always playful but skilled, with everyone happy to lean into Rian Johnson’s blend of mystery, satire, and emotional nuance. Performances aside, it’s still thrilling to watch each star simply play a convincing suspect in a more modern, Agatha Christie–style puzzle!
Wake Up Dead Man is the latest installment of Johnson’s Knives Out franchise. It’s been very well received by critics, but now that it’s streaming on Netflix, it’s time to take a look at who got a chance to knock it out of the park in the threequel’s ensemble cast, and who got lost in the pile of inevitable red herrings.
12. Cailee Spaeny as Simone Vivane
Honestly, it’s quite surprising to see Cailee Spaeny in this movie, considering she’s just put in a string of acclaimed performances in films like Priscilla and Civil War. You’d imagine she’d have quite a few leading lady offers on the table, but when Rian Johnson comes knocking, you aren’t likely to say no!
Spaeny is decent as Simone, a former concert cellist who (literally) buys into what Monsignor Wicks is selling, but this feels like a bit of an underwhelming role for the actress at this point in her career. We’re used to seeing her do a lot more.
11. Andrew Scott as Lee Ross
Andrew Scott knows how to chew scenery, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. You only need to have seen his larger-than-life performance as Moriarty in the BBC’s Sherlock to understand that! But he can also do subdued, and his turn as sci-fi writer Lee Ross in this movie is definitely more of a subtle one from Scott, stepping aside to let O’Connor’s new “hot priest” take up the mantle.
Still, Scott plays Ross perfectly as a writer who’s lost his edge and is desperately trying to find it in someone else, even if he has to isolate himself beyond the realms of creativity. Many of the laughs stemming from Scott’s character come from the sets and props around him in Wake Up Dead Man, with his silly but convincing tomes and his ludicrous moat being the more standout stuff.
10. Kerry Washington as Vera Draven, Esq.
The town’s lawyer doesn’t have much to do in Wake Up Dead Man, but Kerry Washington certainly sells a mean take on cigarette smoking as Vera Draven. She can smoke in frustration, smoke in boredom, smoke in exhaustion, and she can also smoke in satisfaction, conveying a lot of Vera’s emotions without dialogue.
9. Mila Kunis as Geraldine Scott
Mila Kunis is just fine as Geraldine Scott, a local police chief in the movie’s rural town. The actress’s performance doesn’t break the mold, but yep, she’s just fine. However, most of her screen time is spent in exasperation as she chases after Benoit Blanc and Reverend Jud Duplenticy, so she doesn’t really have a chance to wow audiences with anything else.
8. Daryl McCormack as Cy Draven
Peaky Blinders star Daryl McCormack gets Cy Draven’s irritating wannabe politician-turned-influencer just right. With his camera always ready to capture the “drama” of the mystery so he can spin it to his advantage, Draven’s failson persona reaches its natural conclusion when he misses the family inheritance that he has in no way earned, only to storm out ready to start another infuriating line of grift. McCormack does the most with the character, but at the end of the day, he’s just another Knives Out red herring.
7. Thomas Haden Church as Samson Holt
It may be true that Samson Holt was just a pawn in the killer’s plot during Wake Up Dead Man, but he comes across as a truly unwitting one, inspired by his earnest love for the churchgoing Martha (Glenn Close). There’s no one better to play the part of groundskeeper Samson as gently as Thomas Haden Church, but he doesn’t get much more than puppy dog eyes and the sense that life is slipping away to play with. Nevertheless, it’s a testament to how great Haden Church is in the movie that his death is so upsetting.
6. Jeremy Renner as Dr. Nat Sharp
Dr. Nat Sharp is pathetic. Luckily, Jeremy Renner’s pretty good at being pathetic. Here, he’s playing a town doctor whose wife has left him (probably because he’s pathetic), and so he’s turned to the bottle as a result. Nat’s easily manipulated at the mere hope of getting his wife back, to the point where he happily murders three people, including – hilariously but accidentally – himself.
Johnson’s decision to cast Hawkeye actor Renner as the film’s killer, only to reveal he’s a pawn, is actually a masterstroke. No one expected Renner to play just another red herring in this movie, but they also weren’t going to buy him as the ringleader. Ultimately, that leaves Renner spending most of his screen time grizzling and moping, though.
5. Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc
Daniel Craig lingering somewhere in the middle of this ranking? Surely we jest! Well, Craig is perfect as always as legendary detective Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man. We’ll never get sick of that accent and his exhausted reactions to the ludicrous characters Blanc investigates, but Craig’s performance is overshadowed here by some of the other cast members. He’s rather playing second fiddle to Josh O’Connor, even when the pair team up to solve the main murder. Craig’s best moments in the movie are when he’s vibing with O’Connor as their characters meet in the middle between belief and logic.
4. Josh O’Connor as Rev. Jud Duplenticy
Josh O’Connor’s rise to the A-list can’t be stopped. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to stop it, but anyone who was expecting Daniel Craig to be at the center of this Knives Out movie got quite the surprise when they witnessed how much of it revolves around O’Connor’s Jud Duplenticy! Craig doesn’t even show up for the first half an hour, and O’Connor is deliberately positioned as the central character – the one the audience follows and roots for in this mystery.
O’Connor smashes it as usual, but Johnson understands that the Challengers actor doesn’t really need scenery to chew on, getting several tight closeups as he experiences the fallout from his diabolical new mentor’s murder. The scene where Duplenticy performs a full-body hand break turn into empathy during a frustrating phone call is also simply outstanding.
3. Jeffrey Wright as Langstrom
Every time Jeffrey Wright’s bishop pops up in Wake Up Dead Man, he’s an absolute delight. Wright makes the most of his short screen time as Langstrom by subverting expectations. He’s supportive of Jud after he punches a rude deacon, suggesting that pretty much everyone he knows wishes they’d had the balls to do it. He’s also one of the sweariest bishops we’ve ever seen, and his default understanding of how much restraint it takes to deal with life’s relentless nonsense is heartwarming.
Wright is good in everything, but it’s brilliant to realize that he’s now so universally beloved that he can just show up in a movie occasionally and immediately steal all the laughs and attention.
2. Josh Brolin as Msgr. Jefferson Wicks
When has Josh Brolin ever put in a bad performance? We can’t think of one! Such is his mammoth screen presence, two of the highest-grossing movies ever made hinged on how well he delivered lines in a mocap suit, so it’s no surprise to see him sell the charismatic but domineering character of Monsignor Wicks expertly here.
Brolin’s Wicks comes out swinging when he encounters Jud, and their churchyard confession scenes are so engaging you can barely blink, let alone look away. Wicks’ final thoughts on why he treats people the way he does are a classic spin on villainous reasoning: Brolin has to make us believe that Wicks thinks he’s totally right to abuse and manipulate his congregation. The only catharsis we get from it all is knowing that the old bastard’s already dead.
1. Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix
If you’ve seen Wake Up Dead Man (and we certainly hope you have if you’re reading this!), you know that Martha is the story’s master manipulator. Martha didn’t technically kill anyone; she just plotted it in the first instance, accidentally put a loved one in the line of fire in the second, and prevented her own death in the third. Still, none of those deaths would have occurred if she hadn’t schemed to stop Wicks from retrieving his grandfather’s diamond in the first place.
Close plays her devout church lady deftly, with the kind of skill you’d expect from an award-winning actress. Her wailing, gnashing, and general melodrama draw attention to Martha as a suspect, but her confession is a great payoff to all her theatrics. Close makes sure you understand why and how Martha planned the crime, but also reveals the flaw at the heart of her own diamond: an inability to let people get close enough to reveal their own flaws. It’s her undoing and her life’s regret, making Martha the most sympathetic villain of the entire Knives Out trilogy.
Star Wars Is Bringing Back One of Its Most Goated Glup Shittos
One of George Lucas’ most beloved Glup Shittos made a surprise appearance at the 2025 Game Awards when a trailer for Lucasfilm and Fuse Games’ high-speed racing game Star Wars: Galactic Racer dropped.
The trailer’s initial focus seemed to be on new vehicles and races across planets like Jakku, promising high-octane action, but the final frame stole the show when an older Sebulba, now sporting a full beard, appeared.
“There’s so much love for Sebulba on the team and across the Star Wars community,” Matt Webster, the co-founder of Fuse Games, told StarWars.com. “There are particular reasons why he finds his way into our trailer, as well as a detail in this shot that may lead to even more questions…the answers to which we’ll have to leave to another time!”
For anyone who doesn’t remember every random character from the Star Wars prequels, a Sebulba appearance might simply lead to a “who?” and that’s fine. Only a small percentage of people alive today would be able to pick Sebulba out of a lineup, but he was key to Lucas’ Boonta Eve Classic podrace sequence in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
A cantankerous Dug who repeatedly cheated and sabotaged the race in a desperate attempt to beat a young Anakin Skywalker, Sebulba ultimately failed. Still, from a particular perspective, his dubious shenanigans could be viewed as heroic: he tried to take down one of Star Wars’ biggest bads before he would go on to become Darth Vader and kill countless innocent people. It would have been a good day for “kill baby Hitler” supporters everywhere if he’d actually managed to take Anakin out.
The better news (for Sebulba at least) is that Galactic Racer appears to be set after Return of the Jedi’s Battle of Jakku, unlike the game he previously popped up in, Star Wars: Beyond Victory. Since Darth Vader died during the Battle of Jakku clash, it means Sebulba outlived his racing rival, even if he failed to destroy his dreams back on Tatooine. Good for him!
Star Wars: Galactic Racer will be released next year. You can check out the trailer below…
The Most Anticipated Albums of Early 2026
While the holiday season is usually a time to reflect on all of the best media consumed in the last calendar year, we’re busy looking ahead at the marquee music releases coming in Q1 of 2026. From heartland troubadours to club-dwellers trading strobe lights for Emily Brontë’s prose, the next few months promise a masterclass in artistic reinvention. So here are the records we’ll be spinning in the new year.
Warner Records
Zach Bryan – With Heaven on Top
January 9
Since he began uploading music to YouTube as an active member of the Navy in 2017, prolific alt-country troubadour Zach Bryan has been on a tear, releasing five LPs, two live albums, and four EPs of twangy, emo-influenced torch songs. He’s collaborated with heavy hitters like Bruce Springsteen, Kacey Musgraves, and John Mayer, and in September he broke the record for largest attendance at a ticketed concert by a single headlining act in the U.S.. It stands to reason that a lot of folks are eager for his next EP, With Heaven on Top, out in January. However, the new release does not come without controversy; in October, Bryan released a plaintive, reverb-soaked song snippet titled “Bad News,” which featured lyrics seemingly critical of tactics used by ICE agents in the U.S. No word on whether “Bad News” will appear on With Heaven on Top, but expect the new batch of songs to make waves regardless.
Interscope
Lana Del Rey – Stove
January 2026
Lana Del Rey is preparing to release her 10th studio album in January but the enigmatic singer-songwriter is aiming for a departure with the upcoming Stove… or is she? Previously announced under the titles Lasso and The Right Person Will Stay, with release dates set for September 2024 and May 2025, respectively, Stove has been sold as Del Rey’s first foray into traditional country music.
Working once again with collaborator Jack Antonoff, Del Rey told Pitchfork that she was inspired by her singles “Ride” and “Video Games,” saying, “I went back and listened to ‘Ride’ and ‘Video Games’ and thought, you know, they’re kind of country. Maybe the way ‘Video Games’ got remastered, they’re pop—but there’s something Americana about it for sure.” But as always, Del Rey may be obscuring things a bit; she told Vogue that the album will not be a “heavy departure” from her previous work but would still be a “classic country, American, or Southern Gothic production.” Whether she’s wearing a 10-gallon hat or staying in her widescreen lane, we’ll be seated.
Piccadilly Records
Daphni – Butterfly
February 6
Canadian polymath Dan Snaith is better known as Caribou, the introspective folktronica act, but when Snaith wants to increase the BPMs and get people on the dancefloor, he releases music under the moniker Daphni. After a string of kinetic singles throughout 2025, he’s ready to release Butterfly, a 16-track record set to drop in February. In press materials, Snaith says, “Daphni music is still music that I’m making primarily for the purpose of playing in my DJ sets.”
Still, there are new wrinkles in this collection of Daphni tunes, chief among them Snaith’s voice, which has never appeared on a Daphni track but features for the first time on “Waiting So Long,” with “feat. Caribou” cheekily credited. “I don’t agonize about what track ends up under what alias—in fact, the opposite. I worry about it less than ever and just go with my gut instinct. On a practical level, I just felt like this was a track that both Daphni and Caribou fans might want to hear.” Count us in that batch.
New West Records
Ratboys – Singin’ to an Empty Chair
February 6
Chicago indie rock band Ratboys received rave reviews for 2023’s The Window and are ready to level up once again with February’s Singin’ to an Empty Chair. The quartet, featuring Julia Steiner (vocals/guitar), Sean Neumann (bass), Dave Sagan (guitar), and Marcus Nuccio (drums), blends infectious pop hooks with increasingly ambitious, jammy guitar lines and a hint of heartland country.
Working with acclaimed journeyman producer and former Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla, Steiner said in a press release: “A big, overarching theme of this record is my attempt to document my experience being estranged from a close loved one. The goal is to update this person on what’s been going on in my life and to try to bridge that impasse and reach out a hand into the void.” We’ll be reaching a hand back out when the record launches this winter.
Atlantic Records
Charli XCX – Wuthering Heights
February 13
After the colossal success of her last record Brat, which spawned countless remixes, “Brat Summer,” and even a thinly veiled Taylor Swift diss track, Charli XCX will be back relatively quickly with her soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel of the same name. In a Substack article announcing the record, the hard-partying chanteuse described feeling overwhelmed with creativity yet unable to create new music in Brat’s wake.
That all changed when Fennell sent her a script for Wuthering Heights, allowing Charli the chance to be inspired by a pre-existing, non-personal story. She says the album will have a nostalgic, Gothic, cyclical sound reminiscent of her first album, True Romance, and cited John Cale’s description of The Velvet Underground’s sound, “elegant and brutal,” as a sonic rule of the land. She’s even teased a collaboration with the iconoclast. Time to trade that neon green for gloomy black.
Shop The Hottest Collectibles On Your Holiday Gift List at Walmart
This article is presented in partnership with Walmart.
Whether you’re a fan of rare coins or are shopping for that special comic book collector on your list, Den of Geek has compiled the hottest deals and options for your holiday wishlist from our friends at Walmart. Now’s the chance to find the perfect Pokémon booster set with complementary foil cards featuring Zactian V and Zamazenta V, or to spin out in style with a 2022 era Monster Jam truck rocking some mean Triceratops horns that are out of this world. Need a Labubu for the big energy monster lover? We got ya covered.
From premium collections and booster boxes to deluxe comic-based figurines, we picked our fan-favorite collectibles for the geeks in your life.
Based on the role-playing video game, Fallout boasts a two season run full of versatile characters and futuristic world building. This holiday season, fans of the TV series or the game can move Maximus out of the Wasteland and onto their shelves. This adjustable figurine comes with a collectible art card, alternate head and hands from his second season getup and would be a stellar edition to any Fallout figurine collection. Price: $34.99
For those looking to memorialize the discontinued penny, it only takes 8,999 of them to purchase this Lincoln-embossed bullion coin. The Commemorative Proof silver dollar is accompanied by four copper one-cent coins, all enclosed in a U.S. Mint box that has a home in any coin collectors reserve. Price: $89.99
Few objects have dominated the culture of 2025 quite like the Labubu. These collectible dolls come in all shapes and colors, including the six options in this blind box. Each box contains a half-foot tall toy from the Big Into Energy series, all assigned a different pastel color and quality (love, hope and serenity, to name a few). With each purchase, shoppers also have a chance to find a secret “chase” figure. Price: $32.99
This assemblage of prequel, first, one-shot and annual comic book issues, dating from the ‘90s to the present and comprising a variety of publishers, is a jackpot present for superhero comic collectors. Including the stories of DC and Marvel Comics, all 25 issues in this smorgasbord of action and adventure are exciting reads and will help round out any collection. Price: $23.99
Spider-Man in a Santa Hat. Mary Jane and Santa Claus. Queens dusted with a wintery mix. And a Todd McFarlane cover with a 9.8 CGC grade. Honestly, you better snatch this book up before we do. Price: 142.99
This collection of John Byrne’s complete run of Wonder Woman stories was released earlier this year and aided in the completion of comic collections en masse. The hardcover edition features Wonder Woman Issues #101-136, Annuals #5-6 and select additional stories. The omnibus not only commemorates the powerful Amazonian character, but also the legendary DC creator. Price: $47.82
This deluxe two-pack contains a lot more than just movable figurines of the titular characters. The Mortal Kombat original God and ninja are accompanied by alternate hands, heads, face plates, lighting effects and tools. Both figurines can be placed on their provided flight stands, designed for fight scene recreations complete with reversible backdrops. Price: $69.99
This premium collection of special edition Pokémon includes two foil cards featuring Zactian V and Zamazenta V, two foil cards featuring Zactian and Zamazenta, one oversize foil card featuring Zacian V, 14 Pokémon TCG booster packs and a code card for Pokémon TCG Live. Not only do these cards make for legendary trades, but they provide a code for online play and open up a multi-dimensional trading world.
Whether you are looking for a rugged addition to a Jurassic shelf display or want to off-road on your living room floor, you can’t go wrong with the Monster Jam Jurassic Attack miniature monster truck series. Each purchase comes with a chance to add the Grave Digger, Megalodon, El Toro Loco or Max-D trucks to your collection, all including an exclusive collector poster. Price: $11.79
These 180 cards not only include over 50 Pokémon and Trainer cards with special illustrations, but also a collection of Mega Evolution Pokémon ex. The extra powerful, high HP cards were designed for the Pokémon TCG Mega Evolution series, which expands the realm of battle and teamwork in the quest to “catch ‘em all.” Price: $264.27
The Biggest Upcoming Games of 2026
This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
Between the Nintendo Switch 2 entering its first full year on shelves and developers looking to max out everything they can do with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S ahead of the next generation of consoles, 2026 is shaping up to be a massive year for gaming. Even with plenty of titles still to be announced, we’re looking forward to exciting new entries in some of gaming’s biggest franchises, along with brand new titles looking to make names for themselves. So far these are looking to be the six biggest games of 2026.
Resident Evil Requiem
February 27
Resident EvilRequiem, the ninth game in the long-running series, looks to be an interesting mix of classic ideas and more modern sensibilities. After the last two titles moved to first-person perspective, Requiem will let you play in either first-or third-person as new character Grace Ashcroft, a FBI technical analyst who returns to the ruins of Raccoon City 30 years after its destruction
We still don’t know exactly what she’ll encounter there, but Capcom has promised a new unstoppable stalking monster similar to previous baddies like Mr. X and Lady Dimitrescu.
007 First Light
March 26
If you haven’t yet played the Hitman World of Assassination trilogy, you absolutely need to stop what you’re doing and play through them all immediately. They’re a fantastic collection of missions that allow for near limitless strategies that mix both stealth and action. Honestly, all IO Interactive really needs to do is build on that foundation for 007 First Light to be a surefire hit. The game features a young James Bond (played by Patrick Gibson) as he ventures off on early MI6 missions that will grant him his legendary 00 status. Bond has had a mixed legacy in gaming, but with IO Interactive’s recent history, 007 First Light could be the start of a gaming renaissance for the super spy.
Grand Theft Auto VI
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Grand Theft Auto VI isn’t just the most-anticipated gaming release of 2026 but quite possibly the biggest release of the decade. So the question isn’t “will GTA VI be good?” but more, “How mind-bogglingly amazing and genre-defining will it be?” We know the game stars a Bonnie and Clyde-style couple on the loose in a huge map based on the state of Florida, and the graphics look better than almost any other game currently out there. But beyond that, confirmed details are relatively sparse at the moment. Still, it’s a lock that GTA VI will sell millions, dominate the pop culture conversation, and quite probably win numerous Game of the Year awards.
Marvel’s Wolverine
Fall 2026
After making a trio of Spider-Man games widely considered to be the wallcrawler’s very best efforts, Insomniac Games is now turning its attention to the ol’ Canucklehead himself, Wolverine. The gameplay shown off so far looks absolutely brutal, with Logan digging his adamantium claws into skulls and chest cavities with impunity. Marvel’s Wolverine may be based on the comic books, but this definitely isn’t a kids’ game. And speaking of comics, with Insomniac working on an original story that will dive deep into X-Men lore and feature characters like Omega Red and Mystique, the game is already shaping up to at least be on par with the Spidey titles.
The Duskbloods
TBA
While FromSoftware’s Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods looks to be aesthetically similar to its classic Bloodborne, the studio is promising a very different gameplay experience.
Players will choose from eight different characters called Bloodsworn—who are similar to vampires but not quite the classic bloodsuckers of fiction—to take on a variety of challenges in both PvP and PvE. A lot of gamers are still waiting on a killer app to pick up a Switch 2, and given the studio’s recent track record, this could be the title that makes the hybrid console a must-buy.
Fable
TBA
Amidst a litany of high-profile cancellations, Microsoft’s upcoming slate of first-party games is looking a little light, but the long-awaited Fable reboot is still on track for release in 2026. The last time the game was shown off, it featured impressive graphics, the series’ trademark cheeky humor, and if the game isn’t fully open-world, the levels at least look much larger than what we explored in the older Fable titles. Developer Playground Games has consistently put out some of the very best games on Xbox through the Forza Horizon series, and if they can bring that level of quality to Fable, it could be the game that changes Microsoft’s fortunes.
Ranking the Knives Out Movies: The Best of Benoit Blanc
Is three movies enough for a ranking? Absolutely. Ask any Star Wars fan old enough to have lower back pain, some memory of watching live-action Ewok adventures on VHS, and a suspiciously disappointing pension fund. They’ll usually tell you that their Original Trilogy ranking hasn’t changed in decades: Empire at one, New Hope at two, and Jedi at three. Not a very controversial ranking, but they did it. Some will even mix it up by switching Empire and New Hope. A few absolute renegades will put Jedi in first place. Always keep one eye open.
Anyway, we feel fine about ranking Rian Johnson’s Knives Out trilogy now that all three movies are available to stream. If you disagree with the ranking itself, that’s fine. It’s just our opinion, and others are available, including the most important one: your own!
Here it is, then…
3. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Back in 2022, Johnson brought his Knives Out sequel to streaming, and there was plenty of fun to be had with it because Glass Onion is a legitimately entertaining romp.
It’s great to see Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) again as he rolls up to a private Greek island owned by Miles Bron, a flamboyant, infuriating tech billionaire who might as well be called “Mlon Eusk.” Bron pulls in Blanc, along with a gang of his closest friends (who invariably can’t stand him), for a lovely weekend on his island, where they are set to play a puzzle game that tests their intelligence and loyalty. Of course, the twists and laughs are often to be found in how unintelligent and disloyal pretty much everyone is, with Bron finally singled out as the biggest and most twisted fool of all.
While still critically acclaimed, Glass Onion proved quite divisive. It has a broader comedic tone that sometimes feels a bit too broad, and that tone occasionally overpowers the real grief and loss at the heart of the story, deftly retold by Blanc’s helpful assistant on the island, Helen Brand (Janelle Monáe). By the time the end credits roll, it all feels like a lot of spectacle with not enough focus on the core mystery. Glass Onion is a fun film, but, as Blanc quite succinctly puts it when calling out Bron, “It’s just dumb!”
2. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Wake Up Dead Man is both the latest installment of Knives Out and the most ambitious one yet. The movie’s story shows a lot more maturity than the two previous entries, but, much like Glass Onion, Johnson’s decision to do something different – this time by exploring deeper themes and making Blanc more of a side character – has delighted some and disappointed others who would prefer a more lighthearted flick.
The movie follows Josh O’Connor’s Reverend Jud Duplenticy before and after he arrives as the new associate priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude church. Duplenticy represents the more spiritual side of the film, while Craig’s Blanc is the one who will use logic and reason to try and solve the murder of Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), who may or may not have been miraculously resurrected after being stabbed in the back during a sermon.
The dynamics between Duplenticy and Blanc are definitely compelling, as is O’Connor’s fantastic central performance. Wake Up Dead Man genuinely feels like an evolution of the Knives Out franchise. Still, it lacks the pure charm of the other two movies, and the central murder mystery falls a bit flat, playing second fiddle to Johnson’s more thoughtful exploration of religion and belief. That said, one moment that spotlights a brief connection between Duplenticy and a woman whose mother is dying is so devastating that it achieves an emotional effectiveness that the other movies never really aspire to.
1. Knives Out
The original Knives Out still stands as the undisputed benchmark. Back when it was released, critics and audiences praised it for its clever plotting, tightly woven mystery, and its perfect balance of suspense and humor. Nothing’s changed in that respect, and we certainly wouldn’t be here talking about the “Knives Out trilogy” six years later if it hadn’t been a standout movie!
Knives Out ended up being part of a slew of “eat the rich” movies coming out of Hollywood of late, including The Menu and Ready or Not. Released in the same year as Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won Best Picture at the Oscars, Knives Out captured a time in our zeitgeist just before the pandemic, which was perceived in some ways as a kind of “equalizer” among the classes. Following the entitled Thrombeys, who are feuding at their mansion after the family patriarch’s death and his decision to bequeath the family fortune upon humble nurse Marta. Good for her!
The introduction of Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn-accented Blanc was like a breath of fresh air for the tired murder-mystery genre, with Craig himself seemingly delighted to spice up an excellent ensemble cast that already included the likes of Michael Shannon and Chris Evans. Since then, there’s been a renewed interest in delivering high-quality murder mysteries, not least by Netflix, which acquired the rights to the Knives Out sequels for an eye-watering $469 million.
The first flick remains the best of the trilogy because it balances everything in a way the others can’t quite top. It still feels fresh and tight, with every clue placed perfectly and every character instantly memorable, never taking itself too seriously. The story also unfolds with a perfect “aha!” payoff that leaves you grinning. Six years on, it still hits the sweetest spot among all three movies.
Holiday Gift Guide: The Best Collectible Card Gifts in 2025
This article is part of the Collector’s Digest Holiday Edition powered by:
The holiday season is upon us, and that means lots and lots of shopping. As one would expect, we here at The Den have got your back, with gift guides for all things nerd, including the wonderful world of trading cards! Both the “look at how cool this art is” kind and the “look at how cool this art is, also it’s a game” kind.
We’ve got something for everyone on this list, from inexpensive fun products to highly collectible, limited-print-run gifts, so let’s take a look!
Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy Scene Boxes
Do you love the art on Magic: The Gathering cards and wish you could fit them together to form a whole scene? Then these Scene Boxes are just perfect for you. Every time there’s a Magic crossover, we get a fresh batch of these, and they look great. The latest round of Final Fantasy cards includes key scenes from four of the games (I, VIII, IX, and XV), with mechanically unique cards and great art. And at $42 MSRP, they’re very reasonably priced for a friend gift. Or for an office white elephant gift exchange that you want to end up taking home yourself…
East Continental Gems Limited Edition Marvel Trading Cards
East Continental Gems has taken two cool variant covers – Mark Brooks’ variant for Avengers Forever #14, paying tribute to Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and Steve Skroce’s Infinity Saga variant cover to Doctor Strange #1 – and put real, actual gemstones in them where the Infinity Gems were drawn. The Mind Gem on the Avengers cover is citrine, while the Time Gem on Strange’s necklace is peridot.
This is very different and also VERY collectible. These are retailing for $199.99 and are limited to 200 cards each, so while the price is high, it’s almost certain to go up. And these will look super cool on a shelf with highlight lighting. If you’ve got friends who love showing off their collections, this is for them.
Star Wars Unlimited is a game with a bit of a learning curve. But the characters, settings, and cards in the game help guide you through it in a straightforward way. Also, if you are a Star Wars fan, chances are pretty good that someone in your life already plays this and can help walk you through it. Especially when you have a gift box like this that is pretty close to pick up and play – you get an oversized leader card, two variant cards, and eight booster packs to build from. This is very affordable at $35, an easy pick for the Star Wars fans in your life.
Phantasmal Flames has only been on shelves for a short time, but it’s already flying out the door, and these boxes easily show why. They have nine booster packs, a shiny foil Charcadet, a fancy box and sleeves for your cards, and lots of exciting art and new gameplay. This is a great high-end gift for a Pokémon player who also has a taste for collecting.
Magic: The Gathering – Avatar: The Last Airbender Beginner Box
Beginner Boxes are a relatively new Magic product that lay out, step by step, card by card, how the game works. But what makes these Beginner Boxes really great is how thorough they are about the experience. You get spindown dice, you get packs to crack, you even get mats to use. And this goes extra for the Avatar set. It’s a joy to play, with gorgeous art and fun cards and a level of craft and love of the source material that shines through on every card. The box is priced at $34.99, but because the packs are jumpstart, there’s a good chance that you’ll open more in value than that. Either way, it’s worth every penny.
When we talked to Upper Deck about this set in the spring, they refused to give us any details about who or what might be in it. So we didn’t know there would be a 1/1 special foil card for Batman’s emergency backup personality, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh. This is wild. Believe it or not, $10,000 for a 1/1 isn’t that ridiculous, so if you’ve got 10-large just lying around and are a Batman fan – specifically a fan of Morrison Batman (hi, it’s me) – you should grab this.
Magic: The Gathering Tarkir: Dragonstorm Booster Box
Booster boxes are usually on the pricey side, but with good reason. Each box of Magic play boosters comes with 30 packs. That’s 420 cards. Most of them are going to be chaff, but there’s one really great way to make that chaff playable: drafts.
You and seven friends (or three, if you want to do a Pick Two draft) sit at a table with three packs each. Everyone opens pack one, picks the best card, and passes their cards to the person on the left, and that continues until the cards are gone. Then you build a deck out of what you pulled and play against the rest of the group. This is a ton of fun when you do it at your game store, and even better when it’s all friends. Tarkir: Dragonstorm was the best set from 2025 to draft. It has everything iconic about Magic, and it’s intuitive and fun to draft. It’s expensive at $110, but worth it.
This Elsa Gift Box has “new player” written all over it. Disney’s Lorcana is one of the most beginner-friendly trading card games out there, with deep gameplay but a very straightforward onramp for new players. So what better way to help guide someone to the world of card games than by giving them this box, which comes with a sparkly Elsa card, five packs, and a deckbox to protect all your new cards? For under $25, this gift goes a very long way.
Magic’s next set in 2026 returns to Lorwyn, a plane full of fun fantasy nonsense – elementals, elves. and faeries – where the sun never sets and it’s always spring. So, naturally, the iconic card from the set is a painting of a faerie crawling in an elf’s ear.
There are a million reasons why this card is an iconic Magic card besides the art, and each of those million reasons is also an argument for an original Lorwyn version holding its value when it’s inevitably reprinted on Magic’s return to the plane. Bottom line is, for $12, you can have a little piece of history and a supremely playable card.
A Complete Set of the 1995 Fleer Ultra X-Men Cards
Let’s be 100 percent real here: these cards rule. They often get swept up in derisive criticism of ‘90s comics’ excess, but they’re just great. Bright, colorful art from artists at the peak of their game, and characters from an utterly bonkers era of X-Men comics mean you’re going to get some wild pulls in here, and you know what? You’ll probably love every one of them. Be prepared for Albert (the android clone of Wolverine) to become your new cherished possession, because $60 is dirt cheap for this.
