Boots Riley Skewers the Fashion Industry in First I Love Boosters Trailer
The trailer for I Love Boosters begins with Keke Palmer as a would-be store clerk who gives a very unique, but very honest, answer during her job interview. When asked about the challenges she would face in that position, her character admits, “I feel like I should have it all. I just want to take it all home, eat it up, and shoot it out of my eyes. It’s just feel, like, give it to me. It’s mine anyway.”
Even if Palmer’s declaration wasn’t accompanied by bold pastel images, shots of women breaking into a store, and a hip-hop infused soundtrack, the words alone would be enough to identify I Love Boosters as a Boots Riley project. The mix of Leftist politics, absurd imagery, and genuine sincerity have been the director’s calling card since his debut movie Sorry to Bother You.
In I Love Boosters, Palmer plays Corvette, leader of a shoplifting group calling themselves the Velvet Gang. Along with fellow members played by Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu, the Velvet Gang fights to liberate the fashion industry, advocating for what Paige’s character calls “Triple F: Fashion Forward Filanthropy.” The Velvet Gang’s revolutionary activities run afoul of fashion mogul Christie Smith, played by Demi Moore. Somehow getting even more unhinged than her character in The Substance, Moore spits lines such as, “They take my shit, and sell it to their low-class, urban bitches!”
Along the way, Smith and the Velvet Gang run into more outlandish characters played by LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle, and Will Poulter, all with distinctive hairdos.
The incredible cast gathered is a sign of Riley’s status in the film industry. Before releasing Sorry to Bother You in 2018, Riley was most well-known for his music, fronting the rap-punk group The Coup. In The Coup, Riley mixed together pop genres to take on everything from fighting the police (“Pork and Beef”) to the excesses of upper class youths (“Your Parents’ Cocaine”). No matter how strident his messaging became, Riley kept the music ecstatic and fun.
He brought that same aesthetic to the anti-capitalist satire Sorry to Bother You and to the weirdo superhero series I’m a Virgo. With its bright colors and over-the-top performances, I Love Boosters promises to do the same. The Velvet Gang’s approach of clothing theft as community service feels like a direct rejoinder to the hierarchy that Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) describes during her “cerulean” monologue in The Devil Wears Prada.
As played by Palmer, Corvette isn’t going to be just the result of millions of dollars and countless jobs. She’s going to take the fashion industry for herself. It’s hers anyway.
I Love Boosters comes to theaters on May 22, 2026.
Seth Rogen Says New Sundance Hit Is The Kind of Movie That Terrifies His Studio Character
The Sundance Film Festival is, of course, an opportunity for movie lovers to experience the best in independent cinema. It is also a chance, however, for distributors to discover or launch the next low-budget sensation. A few such movies can even trigger a bidding war when it wows enough festivalgoers and acquisition executives. Such is the phenomenon occurring right now around The Invite, a remake of the Spanish film The People Upstairs and a laugher about a married couple who finds themselves invited to the swinger parties held by their neighbors. After a reportedly uproarious world premiere over the weekend, The Invite has drawn offers from A24, Focus Features, NEON, Netflix, and Searchlight Pictures (with Deadline now reporting the final bids coming down to A24 and Focus).
Yet if there’s one studio player who would not be invited to The Invite party, it’s Matt Remick, the head of fictional Continental Studios on the Apple TV series The Studio. Just ask the actor, writer, and showrunner who created him.
“He would probably be too cowardly to make a film like this,” Seth Rogen tells Den of Geek contributors Geri Courtney-Austein and Harley Bronwyn out of Park City. “He’s more IP-oriented, known brands, known things. He would like to think he would make a movie like this, but at the end of the day, he probably would not.”
Hot off his Emmy win for playing Remick on The Studio, Rogen stars in The Invite as Joe, who begins to rethink his marriage to Angela (Olivia Wilde) when they’re invited to the orgies hosted by neighbors Pina and Hawke (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton).
The idea of Remick passing on The Invite is as humorous as it is emblematic of a Hollywood industry that rarely makes comedies anymore, and which leaves even well vaunted filmmakers like Olivia Wilde, who also directs and co-writes The Invite, to launch their vision at indie-friendly film festivals. Remember that her first film as a director, Booksmart, also broke out as an indie out of SXSW in 2018.
While speaking to Den of Geek, Wilde contends comedies like The Invite couldn’t be more important right now. “Comedy is medicine and it has been for thousands of years,” the director says. “People are dying for a release, and it brings us together and allows us to be vulnerable. It connects us. There is nothing better than that feeling of ‘I thought it was just me.’ That’s the best laugh, to realize ‘On no, that wasn’t just me [who felt that way]!’ So we hope that is what is delivered through the film.”
Writer Will McCormack, who co-wrote the screenplay with Wilde, would seem to agree.
“I’m so happy and proud to be a part of a comedy that’s here at Sundance and hopefully out in the world soon, because I can’t get through life without laughing,” says McCormack. “Even in the hardest and darkest times of my life has been some of the funniest, because we just need to excel and laugh. So I really hope comedies make a return to movie theaters, because we’ve been short on them in the last few years. So maybe The Invite is bringing them back?”
Hopefully, it does. And if it happens, it won’t be because of the Matt Remicks of the world, but we can be sure he’ll be tracing the trend in season 2.
Daredevil Born Again Season 2 Trailer Shows a City Gone to Hell
In 2022’s Daredevil #5 by Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto, Daredevil goes toe-to-toe with his sometimes-ally John Walker aka U.S. Agent. Walker is leading a new variation of the Thunderbolts, who have been turned by NYC mayor Wilson Fisk into a strike squad against costumed vigilantes like Daredevil. When Daredevil refuses to surrender, U.S. Agent gets ready to fight, boasting, “I’m right with God.” The observation brings a smile to Daredevil’s face. “If you were,” he answers, cutting out the lights and bathing U.S. Agent in darkness, “He wouldn’t have sent the Devil.”
Judging by the grin worn by Charlie Cox as Daredevil in the first trailer for season two of Daredevil: Born Again, New York City has gone to Hell, and the Devil is loving it. The trailer finds a city in chaos after the events of season one, with Wilson Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force holding citizens in lockdown while Matt Murdock launches a resistance, donning a new black version of his famous costume.
Daredevil’s darker duds come directly from the 2015 comic book run by writer Charles Soule and artists Ron Garney and Phil Noto, the same run that introduced the killer Muse seen Born Again‘s first season. However, much of Born Again adapts the Devil’s Reign storyline by Zdarsky and Checchetto, in which Mayor Fisk’s hatred of Daredevil drives him to wage war against the city’s vigilantes.
As seen throughout the first season of Born Again, the MCU version of Mayor Fisk, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, has a different approach. The MCU Fisk genuinely believes he can do good for the city, despite his past life as the Kingpin of Crime. The first half of the season two trailer reflects that worldview, as we see happy images of safe citizens laughing with police, patrons at an idyllic malt shop, and even Matt Murdock sharing a slow dance with Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll).
Yet, as demonstrated by the presence of Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), the sadistic assassin known as Bullseye, trouble is brewing. Dex was a loose cannon in Born Again‘s first season, killing Matt’s best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) in the premiere and later trying to assassinate Fisk. The fact that he’s out of prison and able to enjoy a dessert means only trouble for Fisk.
Bullseye is just one headache for Fisk in Born Again‘s second season. The trailer gives us our first look at Mr. Charles, a mysterious new character played by Matthew Lillard, as well as citizens protesting against his policies. And then there are shots of a boxing match pitting Fisk against an unidentified fighter. While this is presumably some sort of promotional event, the fight will surely force Fisk to call upon the brutal ways he keeps trying to leave in the past. At least he can count on help from right-hand man Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) and the upstart Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini), who are shown in the trailer getting ready to do some of their boss’s dirty work.
For his part, Daredevil has his own allies in the battle against Fisk. While the brief glimpse of Foggy Nelson probably comes from a flashback set before the Born Again premiere (we can still hope for a resurrection), Matt does have Karen Page by his side. Even better, Daredevil gets some super-powered help in the form of Jessica Jones, played again by Krysten Ritter. Jessica’s wry aside to Matt proves she still has the sparky attitude she showed in her own Netflix series, which will serve her well in their fight against Fisk in the Disney+ show.
But the most exciting image in Born Again trailer is that of Daredevil, standing in the middle of a maelstrom and smiling. If New York City has gone to Hell, it’s a good thing we have the Devil on our side.
Daredevil: Born Again season two streams on Disney+ on March 24, 2026.
Jason Biggs Discusses Directorial Debut, Playing Against Type With Untitled Home Invasion Romance
You know who Jason Biggs is. The actor has been a mainstay on our screens since the one-season Fox sitcom Drexell’s Class in 1991. But he really rose to prominence in 1999’s American Pie, when playing the sexually-curious Jim Levenstein made Biggs a household name and launched a career that continued with projects like Orange Is the New Black and Outmatched.
Now he’s back for the action comedy Untitled Home Invasion Romance. But there’s a twist this time, and not just because the movie finds Biggs stepping behind the camera as director. “It felt a little unexpected,” Biggs tells Den of Geek about his decision to make Untitled Home Invasion Romance his directoral debut. “I don’t think that people would necessarily associate me as an actor with this kind of material.”
The film stars Biggs as Kevin, a husband in a rocky marriage who plans both a romantic trip to his wife Suzie’s (Meghan Rath) childhood home upstate and a stunt to show her his worth. Kevin has hired an acting buddy (Arturo Castro) to pose as a home invader, hoping he can fight off the threat and reignite Suzie’s love for him. But when Suzie proves to be perfectly capable of taking care of herself, her complicated past comes to light, forcing both partners in the marriage to rethink their relationship.
“Originally, I was offered this project just to play the role of Kevin and I’ve been looking for something to direct,” says Biggs. “This came across to my agent, who is Meaghan’s as well, and he called me and said, ‘I have this indie you’ve been offered to act in, and I think you’re going to like it, but I think you’re going to want to direct it.’ And he was right.”
A veteran of Being Human and Hawaii Five-0, Meaghan Rath certainly knows how to play a character in high-pressure situations. But as even Kevin’s surprised to learn, there’s a lot more to Suzie than one would assume, and synthesizing those layers presented an irresistible challenge for Rath.
“There was a lot of discussion about the tone for her, especially because there were moments that are very comedic on the page,” Rath explains; “but we decided that we should play it as grounded as we could because of this crazy turn that she takes. You don’t want to seem broad, you want to be able to believe Suzie. Jason and I spent a lot of time going over the moments we wanted to bring out and the colors in the character.”
Part of the challenge comes from the fact that Suzie is at the center of the film’s twists and developments. While Kevin clearly wants to save his marriage at the start of the film, Suzie is more ambivalent. But when Kevin’s home invasion goes sideways, Suzie becomes a very different character, all of which drew Rath to the part.
“She’s confronted with not just this invasion, but she’s also in the house that she grew up in, she’s in a familiar environment, and she’s meeting old friends. All of that brings out different parts of her, and that was exciting for me to play. I strangely related to this character,” Rath says with a smile, before assuring “That’s not to say that I would kill anyone…”
“But it’s not off the table,” points out a laughing Biggs.
It’s a good thing that Rath could relate to her character because she even had to portray some of Suzie’s more action-packed scenes. “That is actually all me doing the stunts, except for a scene where Suzie’s jumping out of the canoe,” she says. “The last week and a half of our shoot, our entire crew was struck by a terrible flu. It took out most of them, including the entire stunt team. And so I had to do almost all of it. It was fine because I have a background in action and I love the rush of it. And, you know, stupidly, I feel very safe and protected on set.”
“You should never get hurt on set. Especially not a Jason Biggs set,” Biggs adds.
It’s not the first time that Rath’s thrown herself into an unexpected role. She portrayed the Legion of Super-Heroes‘ resident genius Brainiac 5, a character usually played by her brother Jesse, in two episodes in the fifth season of the Arrowverse series Supergirl. How did Rath play a beloved superhero who had been defined by her own brother?
“I did what he was doing,” she says. “I didn’t do an impression because what he did was very specific. But he’s a massive comic book nerd and I’ve had my entire life informed by that. All I had to do was ask him literally every question I had and he guided me.”
Biggs also has a nerdy credit on his IMDb, having voiced Leonardo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles between 2012 and 2017, and he also had some feedback from family, but not in quite the same way.
“I didn’t do a whole lot in terms of affectations or anything. I might have gone up a few octaves higher than usual,” he recalls. “But my kids have watched it. They usually don’t care about anything I’m in but that they really, really loved that. The other day, they asked me to do Leonardo. And I said something and they’re like, ‘No, that’s not the voice!’ I didn’t know what they meant because I literally didn’t change much. But they insisted I changed it.”
The story just goes to show that Biggs is committed to upending the expectations people have of him, even if those people are his own children.
Untitled Home Invasion Romance is now available to rent on all major digital platforms.
Ranking Every Season of Stranger Things
Stranger Things amassed a huge fan base after it hit Netflix in 2016, and that fan base only grew as more people joined in on the supernatural fun. Over five seasons, the series evolved from a little mystery about a missing boy and a strange girl with a shaved head into the epic saga of the Upside Down and the monsters who dwell there, but not every season landed equally well with fans and critics.
Now that it’s over, we’re taking a look back at Stranger Things and ranking every season, from the slam dunks to ones that didn’t quite hit the spot.
5. Season 2
In the second season of Stranger Things, Will Byers is back home, but clearly, all is not well. He’s having weird episodes and seeing visions of the Mind Flayer that are truly distressing. Meanwhile, Eleven is frustrated hiding out with Chief Hopper and seeks out her “sister” figure, Kali. In an effort to stop the Mind Flayer’s plans to take over the world, the season wraps up with a confrontation where Eleven uses her powers to defeat it (or maybe not). There’s also a lot of wheel-spinning with the military that will become a recurring issue as the series chugs along.
Season 2 had some definite high points. The introduction of Max (Sadie Sink) and Billy (Dacre Montgomery) significantly freshened the story up, as Max was intriguingly imperfect and Billy was a complex antagonist. Whether you loved it or hated it, Eleven did make some progress by exploring her past, and the lore behind her powers expanded. It also really felt like the Mind Flayer raised the stakes in Hawkins – the Lovecraftian beast seemed like a genuine threat that might never be truly beaten.
Ultimately, the negatives outweighed the positives, though. The season was paced poorly, with Will’s visions becoming repetitive. They spent too long teasing out his connection with the Mind Flayer, a villain who often felt quite abstract. Characters like Nancy and Jonathan were also getting sidelined in favor of new blood, while Kali’s introduction distracted us from the main story and only feels more annoying retrospectively, given how long it took her to show up again and how little she had to do when the Duffers finally remembered she existed.
4. Season 5
Vecna’s back, and he’s wearing a hat! At least, he is when he’s Henry Creel, the version of Vecna who is capturing children for his evil plan to merge Earth with the Abyss, a dark dimension apparently filled with horrors (though we don’t see any, except the Mind Flayer). Thus goes the endgame of this smash hit series.
Season 5, dragged out on Netflix over several release dates, gave us a Will Byers who was finally able to control the Hive Mind, Max waking up and …not a lot else, when you think about it! However, it did have an ending, and that’s all that really seemed to matter. To be fair, at this point, Stranger Things had done basically everything it’d set out to do. The story had outgrown Hawkins and its gang, who were now being played by actors a lot older than their characters.
This season was heavily criticized by critics and a chunk of the show’s fan base, but it delivered on some levels. There was an epic, cinematic finale with a big battle. Vecna finally got what was coming to him, and we found out what happened to all our faves in the final episode, except for Eleven, whose fate was left a little ambiguous. Were it not for the season being so undercooked and full of repetitive, awkward dialogue, the series may have ultimately stuck the landing without that big old wobble.
3. Season 4
We expanded beyond Hawkins in season 4, as our gang was split between there and California. We also learned that Hopper had survived his apparent death in season 3. This is where all the Vecna stuff started and where we met metalhead Eddie Munson, a character who would become hugely popular thanks in part to endless edits and discussions on social media.
Vecna seemed quite a terrifying new villain, one with a distinctly human element that tied in nicely with Eleven’s past and the military’s experiments. There were also iconic moments aplenty, including Max’s Kate Bush-induced capture at the graveyard and a version of the Upside Down that finally started to feel fleshed out.
The season was dark and ambitious, but sometimes overly so – episodes seemed longer because they were, and it wasn’t always a good thing. Jumping between California, Russia, Hawkins, and the Upside Down led to a sense of overstuffing and occasional disjointedness, and the visual effects sometimes drowned out the story and characters, leaving some episodes lacking substance and straying into music-video territory. Overall, it felt more like a setup for the final season than a standalone story, but it certainly had some good stuff to offer along the way.
2. Season 3
Season 3 seemed like a partial reset for the show, which was well reflected in its story. Everything felt colorful and vibrant as the kids hung out in the new Starcourt Mall, worked summer jobs, and the dating drama kicked off in earnest. The story was still grounded in Hawkins, despite the whole “secret Russian base” scenario. There was also a solid monster for the gang to team up against, and its possession and control of Billy dialed up the terror on a very human level.
The mall was a relatable place that brought in genuine 80s nostalgia, while the costume design stepped up with a new vision for the characters’ looks. Those Scoops Ahoy outfits, the jazzy casual wear, and a glowing neon aesthetic really elevated the show to a new level in season 3, while Robin and Steve’s friendship was a solid, thoughtful highlight instead of what could have been a lacklustre subplot.
Though this season was perhaps a little goofier than the others, its lack of seriousness in some areas helped balance the show’s tone after the previous two seasons, when everything tended to get a little too glum.
1. Season 1
A boy named Will Byers mysteriously vanishes after riding his bike home from a friend’s house, and a TV sensation is born. Yep, we reckon the first season of Stranger Things is still the best, almost six years after it debuted on Netflix and became a phenomenon that, in the end, perhaps ended up a little too big for its small-town roots.
Everything about Stranger Things felt fresh and interesting back in 2016, despite its rose-tinted nostalgia for the 80s. The Duffers created this new series with tight, compelling storytelling. It was well-paced and culminated in a satisfying finale. It had everything, really! A small-town America with period-accurate visuals, well-rounded characters (kids that weren’t annoying!), and at the heart of the story, the intriguing mystery of Will’s disappearance used classic sci-fi and horror tropes expertly to draw us in. Season 1 was simply a slam dunk.
15 Must-See Book Adaptations Headed to Screens in 2026
Is the book always better than the movie? The eternal question readers must answer rages on in 2026, with a ridiculous number of films and TV shows based on popular novels and short stories headed to screens both large and small.
Some heavy hitters have already arrived, with HBO’s A Knight of theSeven Kingdoms giving us a look at the world of George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas, Netflix revamping lesser known Agatha Christie story The Seven Dials Mysteryfor a modern audience, and feature film H is for Hawk. But the book to screen pipeline isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. In 2026, we’ll also see multiple adaptations of classics from the literary canon to new contemporary hits, with a hefty dose of horror, sci-fi, and even romance along the way.
Here are some of the biggest books you’ll be able to watch on your screens this year.
An Offer from a Gentleman by Julia Quinn
Release Date: January 29 on Netflix as Bridgerton season 4
The third novel in author Julia Quinn’s popular Bridgerton romance series will become the fourth season of the hit Netflix show this winter. After getting bumped down a slot in favor of Colin and Penelope’s romance from Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, An Offer From a Gentleman puts second son Benedict Bridgerton firmly in the spotlight.
Though it’s likely the Netflix series will take a fair amount of liberties with the specifics of the plot, the broad strokes of the story involve a Cinderella-esque meet-cute between Benedict and a woman disguised in silver, a kind but overlooked heroine, and a sweet cross-class love story that helps remind everyone it’s what’s inside that counts. Yerin Ha makes her debut as the racebent Sophie Beckett (here known as Sophie Baek), Luke Thompson is back as Benedict, and most of the major family members are too. (Sorry if you were hoping to see Rege-Jean Page or Phoebe Dynevor, folks. Simon and Daphne are nowhere to be found.)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Release Date: February 13 in theaters
Academy Award-winner Emerald Fennell’s long-awaited Saltburn follow-up is a take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and if the pre-release discourse is anything to go by, this whole experience is going to be positively unhinged. Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as literature’s most toxic yet strangely compelling romance, the melodrama inherent in Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship is clearly a feature, not a bug.
While Fennell’s interpretation of Brontë’s classic will likely not be for purists, what with its anachronistic costumes and (really) overt sexuality, it certainly looks like a lot of fun, and the trailers thus far have certainly leaned into the story’s obsessive Gothic romance vibes. Whether that means it’s also planning to delve into the original’s abundant themes of cruelty, classism, and revenge remains to be seen.
Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell
Release Date: March 11 on Prime Video
Patricia Cornwell’s massively popular series following the investigations of medical examiner and forensic consultant Kay Scarpetta is so dense and sparwling— the 29th installment was released in 2025 — it’s a shock that it hasn’t gotten a TV adaptatio prior to right now.
Prime Video’s attempt is appropriately buzzy, starring Nicole Kidman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bobby Cannavale, Simon Baker, Ariana DeBose, and more. But if you want to start at the beginning, pick up Postmortem, which follows Scarpetta’s hunt for a serial killer in Richmond, Virginia.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Release Date: March 20 in theaters
The last Andy Weir novel to be adapted for the big screen (The Martian) racked up seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor, so one has to assume the expectations are sky high for Project Hail Mary, which is, if anything, a story that’s even nerdier and more grounded in our human ability to solve seemingly impossible problems through things like grit and science.
Ryan Gosling stars as a small-town scientist who is sent on a mysterious space mission to save humanity. A sort of scientific hail mary, if you will. (Yes, that’s purposefully vague, but if you don’t know the twist going into this movie before you see it — or before you read the book — try not to find out.)
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Release Date: March 22 on PBS
PBS Masterpiece’s new adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ most underrated work stars The Hunger Games’s Sam Claflin as Edmond Dantès, a well-liked young sailor who is betrayed by his friends and falsely imprisoned for treason. After many years of captivity, he manages to escape and sets an elaborate plan to get revenge on all those who have wronged him into motion. (With a little help from a fellow prisoner, a hidden treasure, and an extremely flexible moral compass.)
A tale grounded in the real-life injustices suffered by Dumas’s own father, it’s a revenge story with a deeply personal twist. Jeremy Irons, Blake Ritson, Ana Girardot, Mikkel Følsgaard, Harry Taurasi, and Karla-Simone Spence also star.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Release Date: April 15 from Apple TV
Apple TV’s eight- episode series adaptation is based on Rufi Thorpe’s offbeat (and bestselling) novel of the same name. It follows the story of a young woman struggling to make ends meet after an affair with one of her professors leaves her pregnant, and she decides to keep the baby. With some help from her estranged father, she hatches a plan to secure her future by launching an OnlyFans account — and crafting a narrative using rules from the world of wrestling.
Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer star, alongside Nick Offerman, Thaddea Graham, and Nicole Kidman.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Release Date: May 8 on Netflix
A charming and heartfelt story of the unlikely friendship between a widow who works at a local aquarium and a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a meditation on grief, found family, and love that spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
Oscar winner Sally Field is set to play widow Tova Sullivan, joined by a cast that includes Lewis Pullman, Colm Meany, Joan Chen, Cathay Baker, Beth Grant, and Sofia Black-D’Elia.
The Odyssey by Homer
Release Date: July 17 in theaters
Christopher Nolan takes on one of the foundational epics of Western literature this summer with the help of a star-studded cast and a vast network of IMAX theaters ready to project Scylla and Charybdis on a 70-foot IMAX screen. Matt Damon stars as the Greek hero Odysseus, who spends a decade trying to get home from the Trojan War and encounters everything from cyclops and sentient whirlpools to angry gods and cannibals along the way.
A predictably all-star cast supporting cast is involved, including Tom Holland, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, and Mia Goth.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Release Date: September 11 in theaters
A new adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic Sense and Sensibility is coming to a multiplex near you for the first time in nearly 30 years. The 1996 Ang Lee version racked up awards season hardware, including seven Oscar nominations, so the bar for director Georgia Oakley’s new take is already incredibly high. Particularly when the original’s story of love, heartbreak, and duty has been such a favorite for so long.
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles star as Dashwood sisters Elinor and Marianne, joined by an ensemble that includes Caitriona Balfe as Mrs. Dashwood, George MacKay as Edward Ferrars, Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon, Frank Dillane as John Willoughby, Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach as the youngest Dashwood, Marianne.
Verity by Colleen Hoover
Release Date: October 2 in theaters
One of two Colleen Hoover adaptations hitting theaters this year — the other is the more emotional romance Reminders of Him — Verity is a star-studded domestic thriller starring Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Hartnett. The story follows a writer (Johnson) who is hired to become a ghostwriter for a bestselling novelist named Verity Crawford (Hathaway) after she’s unable to finish her latest book following an accident. But when Lowen moves into her clients’ home to work on the book, she realizes that everything is not what it seems. What secrets is Verity really hiding?
If you’re at all familiar with Colleen Hoover’s addictive works, you already know that anything’s possible.
Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman
Release Date: October 9 in theaters, titled Other Mommy
Josh Malerman’s creepy postapocalyptic thriller Bird Box was adapted into a massive hit for Netflix back in 2018, and now his 2024 horror novel Incidents Around the House is headed to theaters later this year. Produced by James Wan and retitled Other Mommy after the sinister entity at the story’s center, it follows the story of a young girl and her troubled family who are haunted by a dark creature determined to take up residence inside her. It’s as creepy as it sounds.
The film stars Jessica Chastain alongside Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark, and Dichen Lachman (Severance).
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
Release Date: November 20 in theaters, as The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
An origin story for District 12 Hunger Games victor Haymitch Abernathy, Suzanne Collins’ second Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, is an emotional character study, a dense piece of lore, and a shrewd exploration of the power of propaganda all rolled into one.
The story of Haymitch’s victory in the Second Quarter Quell, the narrative deftly threads the needle between what we already know about Katniss’ alcoholic mentor — the specifics of how he won his Games, the sickening tragedy that awaited him after he was a victor — and the person he was before he became a victim. Joseph Zada plays the young Haymitch, alongside Mckenna Grace, Ben Wang, Molly McCann, and Percy Daggs IV as an assortment of (largely doomed) supporting characters. Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Jesse Plemons, and Ralph Fiennes are all on board as younger versions of familiar faces like Cesar Flickerman, Effie Trinket, Plutarch Heavensbee, and Coriolanus Snow.
The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
Release date: November 26 in theaters, followed by a Netflix release
On the surface, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia may be a strange choice for blockbuster director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie follow-up, but given her lifelong love of the source material, religious upbringing, and feminist bona fides make for an intriguing mix as a storyteller. (Look, few characters in children’s literature deserve the reinvention of Gerwig’s Amy March treatment as much as poor Susan Pevensie.)
Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Gerwig’s striking out on her own path, eschewing the obvious choice of adapting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe et again and starting her franchise with The Magician’s Nephew. Though the book is technically the sixth in Lewis’s Narnia series, it’s actually the first story chronologically, providing a crucial origin story for many of the world’s most familiar and powerful elements.
The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow
Release Date: TBD 2026 on BritBox
Everyone knows who Elizabeth Bennet is, even if your only real exposure to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is video edits featuring Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy doing that infamous hand flex. Most who’ve read the book or seen an adaptation probably remember Lizzie’s older sister Jane, who marries Mr. Bingley. Wild younger sister Lydia and her closest confidante, Kitty, are memorable for the trouble the former gets into. But what you might not remember is the fact that there’s actually a fifth Bennet child. And the BBC and BritBox are aiming to finally give this often-ignored character her due in their adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, which allows middle sister Mary to finally step into the spotlight on her own terms.
The 10-episode series will follow the story of the least well-known member of the Bennet clan as she steps out of her sisters’ shadows in search of her own identity. (And of course finds herself in the middle of a love story of her own.) Ella Bruccoleri stars as Mary, alongside Maddie Close, Poppy Gilbert, Grace Hogg-Robinson, and Molly Wright as her sisters Jane, Lizzie, Lydia, and Kitty, respectively. Other familiar faces in the cast include Ruth Jones, Richard E. Grant, Indira Varma, Richard Coyle, Laurie Davidson, and Dónal Finn.
Carrie by Stephen King
Release Date: TBD 2026 on Prime Video
Prime Video’s forthcoming series adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie hails from the mind of Mike Flanagan, the man behind such successful (and emotionally devastating) recent horror series as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunting of Hill House. The general gist of its story of high school bullying and deadly consequences is probably familiar to many who’ve never even picked up King’s novel, but Flanagan intends to put a modern spin on its continually relevant themes.
The eight-part series stars Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, joined by Siena Agudong as Sue Snell, and Joel Oulette as Tommy Ros. Other notable faces include Josie Totah, Arthur Conti, Alison Thornton, and horror veteran Matthew Lillard, who’ll be playing Carrie’s principal, Henry Grayle.
Gus Van Sant Sees Unlikely Precedent for Cinema’s Future in a Post-Streaming World
Gus Van Sant has always been drawn to stories seeped in truth and reality, even when he’s making fiction. One of the defining voices of independent cinema over the last 40 years, beginning with breakout work in movies like Drugstore Cowboy and My Favorite Idaho, the filmmaker has essayed everyone from gay rights activist Harvey Milk in the Oscar-winning Milk to, perhaps more daringly, a thinly fictionalized account of the then novel phenomenon of school shooters via the 2003 Palme d’Or winner, Elephant. Yet whether true stories or ostensible Cinderella yarns about a couple of buddies from Southie ready to show the world these apples, it is an underlying authenticity which Van Sant insists makes his films sing.
“You want to stick to the original realities, because usually they are more intense and more dramatic than fiction,” Van Sant tells us over a Zoom call from his West Coast home. “I’ve done a lot of stories that are coming from reality, like almost all of them. Maybe EvenCowgirls Get the Blues was completely devoid of reality, but almost every other script had real characters that were being drawn from, including Good Will Hunting.”
Van Sant points to his first major awards-winner that partnered him with a then couple of unknown wunderkind actors/writers named Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a sharp example of finding truth in stories as sensational as that of an MIT janitor who winds up solving the unsolvable equation at his school.
“There were experiences and characters that existed for Matt and Ben when they wrote it,” Van Sant says. “It wasn’t a documentary, but it had origin stories.”
The origin story of Van Sant’s latest film, however, is a bit unusual even for him. Coming to the filmmaker largely through the prism of a finished script by Austin Kolodney, Dead Man’s Wire approaches a breathless verisimilitude while telling the story of either the best day or worst in the life of Tony Kiritsis. Tony was a real, self-styled Midwest entrepreneur who, after feeling he was manipulated and preyed upon by a family of mortgage brokers, decided to kidnap the son on a February morning in 1977 by wiring the muzzle of a 12-gauge shotgun to the back of the man’s head.
In the ensuing aftermath of a two-day hostage situation, Kiritsis became a folk hero to some quarters of Indianapolis… including a jury.
“It was all new to me,” Van Sant says of the story that first came across his desk as a screenplay. “And as I was reading the script, I was learning that the scriptwriter had put hyperlinks within it, so that you could go to a YouTube page and it would bring you to a site that would play recordings or footage from the actual event. I realized it was super real.”
As a consequence, Van Sant found himself eager to stay relatively close to the historical record, including drawing from the 2018 documentary about the same event, Dead Man’s Line. In Van Sant’s version, Tony is played by Bill Skarsgård while the man he takes hostage, Richard Hall, is portrayed by an unrecognizable Dacre Montgomery; there are even tips of the hat to its 1970s cinematic inspirations with Al Pacino portraying Richard’s mortgage tycoon father as heartless and unforgiving—so the opposite of Pacino’s Nixon era antihero in Dog Day Afternoon (1975)—but the reality of the situation was paramount on Van Sant’s mind… even when he was taking liberties.
“Bill was quite a different physiological person, so we thought that going in a different direction was good,” Van Sant says about the central characterization. “I wanted him to be a sort of antic, changeable, moody, and funny character.” Van Sant left the voice and other acute physical choices to Skarsgård, perhaps feeling comfortable since it is the Swedish actor’s range in movies as varied as Barbarianand Nosferatuthat convinced the director he could play one viewer’s madman as another’s Robin Hood.
The parallels between the anger in the culture of 50 years ago documented by Dead Man’s Wire and today are unmistakable, yet Van Sant would seem to caution reading too much into it.
“Right now, because of [Luigi] Mangione, yes, there are some similar things,” Van Sant acknowledges. “But I think just like Dog Day Afternoon is based on a real story, there are hostage-taking stories that have similar processes to them that just go back in history.”
Nonetheless, the way other processes are changing weighs as strongly on Van Sant’s mind as it does old collaborators like Damon and Affleck. When we catch up with Van Sant, it is shortly after comments were shared by Affleck and Damon about the ways Netflix has changed storytelling, including on their very own Rip. In effect, they seemed to suggest, we might be seeing the language of cinema shift.
“There’s a lot of observations to be made because of the streaming business and technology affecting cinema,” Van Sant considers. “I’m a big fan of a book called A Million and One Nights [by Terry Ramsaye], which was written in the 1920s. It’s kind of explaining the birth of cinema and the advent of sound, and how that affected the form. There was then an addendum to the book when sound came along, and it was about the change that happened between silent and sound films. We’re sort of going through that again with this technology change.”
Van Sant makes special note of how the format of film exhibition was always dictated, for better or worse, by commercial interests.
Says the director, “The reason I think that films were projected in the first place was that they were like originally on [kinetoscopes] or nickelodeons, which was a small screen that you would see in like an arcade or a shopping area. People would look at little passion plays on a small screen, and it was on a small screen because they didn’t really know how to project film without burning it. It would melt. So when they figured out how to [exhibit it in a larger format], it made sense business-wise that every time you showed it, to fit in as many people as you could. It made sense to have a crowd and to make it like a play, and now it makes a different sense to be able to send it to everyone’s personal computers. It’s a different technology.”
He continues, “We’re living in a different age where we don’t necessarily gather in the same place. So I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I don’t think that people knew if it was good or bad when it was created. It was a business, and the businesses are usurping how we are used to cinema.”
Ultimately Van Sant compares the current transition to a bit like listening to music. One will have a very different experience when listening to a piece of music performed live by an orchestra versus listening to a recording of that same orchestra on their headphones. It’s still the same piece of music, however. For now though, Van Sant seems happy that by remaining a dedicated fixture of the indie landscape, he has avoided some of the same constraints and pressures that Damon described as being placed on other filmmakers.
“I feel like I’ve sort of [spent] my whole career outside of the commercial demands of, say, a movie that you might be spending $100 million on. With that movie, there’s a financial need to make the money back. Usually if my films are low-budget enough, the demands are less. So I haven’t been pushed into any decisions that I couldn’t accept.”
At the moment, the only sawed-off shotguns against the predations of capitalism in Van Sant’s world remain elements of Dead Man’s Wire. It is playing in cinemas now.
Alexander Skarsgård Reveals Role as a Sexy Wicker Man ‘Intimidated’ Him at Sundance
Alexander Skarsgård can do anything on screen. The Swedish actor, son of Stellan and brother to Bill, has portrayed everything from a thousand-year-old vampire on True Blood to a tech mogul in Succession, to the dominant half of an BDSM relationship in the new A24 film Pillion. But there’s one challenge that Skarsgård has yet to take on. And it’s a challenge posed by his latest movie, the romantic, fairy-tale like fantasy of Wicker.
At a panel that followed Wicker’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, which Den of Geek contributors and Horrored Girl hosts Geri Courtney-Austein and Harley Bronwyn attended, Skarsgård admitted that the story scared him.
“I was quite intimidated when I read it,” Skarsgård said of his role as the Wicker Husband in the film, which is exactly as it’s described: a husband made out of pliably weaved wicker. Although, the reasons it scared him might surprise: “I tend to be drawn towards more conflicted characters with more internal turmoil and darkness, and to play this good-hearted, good-natured, sweet, morally righteous character was scary to me. I’m not really comfortable doing that.”
The admission got a chuckle out of Skarsgård’s co-stars, Olivia Colman and Peter Dinklage. Written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Wicker draws from Ursula Wills-Jones’ 2008 short story, “The Wicker Husband,” which very much involves the magical creation of a made-to-order spouse of high quality weaving. In the film, Colman plays an outcast in a fishing village who commissions the lover to be created by a basket maker (Dinklage) in order to escape the judgment of her neighbors. Meanwhile Elizabeth Debicki and Richard E. Grant play said neighbors, who are baffled by Colman’s Fisherwoman and the devoted husband who suddenly appears beside her.
Skarsgård is hardly the only person forced to stretch their acting muscles for Wicker. “The Wicker Husband” has already been turned into a musical with music and lyrics by Darren Clark and a book by Rhys Jennings. The stage production has been mounted across the U.S. and the UK, often with impressive effects to bring the titular spouse to life.
That aspect isn’t what worries Skarsgård. The actor has certainly been part of big productions in the past, even beyond the false fangs and fake blood he used in True Blood. In addition to acting besides CGI creations of the King of the Monsters and the Eighth Wonder of the World for 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, Skarsgård was in lavish productions such as Brandon Cronenberg’s stomach-churning Infinity Pool and Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman. More recently, Skarsgård got a warm-up for Wicker by portraying a different inanimate object that gains sentience. On the Apple TV series Murderbot, Skarsgård portrays the titular android, who begins to develop a sense of self that puts him in conflict with the creators who designed him as a security apparatus.
Based on his comments at Sundance, the Wicker Husband may have a similar personal journey as Murderbot, but starts in a very different place than someone called, well, Murderbot. Wicker appealed to him because “it wasn’t heavy-handed or didactic or preachy. It was so funny and sweet and obviously a very interesting character to play,” he revealed. “It was a stretch, as an actor,” he added.
Those last words, Skarsgård delivered with a big smile, proving that his practice playing the Wicker Husband is paying off already. And indeed, it will be an interesting departure from a blood-soaked Viking (The Northman), a vain author full of self-delusion (Infinity Pool), or a BDSM dom (Pillion).
Wicker premiered Jan. 24, 2026, at the Sundance Film Festival.
Sam Raimi Explains Why He Won’t Make Spider-Man 4
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies are still considered highlights of the superhero genre (well, maybe not the third one), and fans of his Tobey Maguire-led web-slinger flicks have often cheered for his return to the franchise. Both Raimi and his star have made Marvel returns in recent years – Raimi as director of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Maguire reprising the role of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home – but a fourth movie from the duo has long seemed out of reach.
Raimi argues that this is the way it should be. In a new interview with ScreenRant while out promoting his new movie Send Help, which has Raimi reteaming with his Multiverse of Madness star Rachel McAdams, the director claims that Marvel Studios is “better than ever,” but it wouldn’t “be right for me to go back and try and resurrect my version of this story.”
“[Stan Lee] created the character, but so many people contributed, so many artists, that for a brief time, I was handed the torch to carry on after 40 years of Spider-Man comics,” Raimi explained. “And then after my three movies, I handed the torch off to someone else. And I think they’ve got to keep running with the storyline and the audience that is now following the torchbearer.”
Though Raimi’s work on the Spider-Man franchise seems to be over, Maguire is more than up for returning as everyone’s friendly neighborhood wall-crawler, which has only added fuel to the rumor fire about an appearance in the upcoming Avengers: Secret Wars.
“I love these films and I love all of the different series,” he said on the record with Marvel. “If these guys called me and said, ‘Would you show up tonight to hang out and goof around?’ or ‘Would you show up to do this movie or read a scene or do a Spider-Man thing?’, it would be a ‘yes!’ Because why wouldn’t I want to do that?”
In the meantime, a new MCU Spidey movie will be along this summer. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Spider-Man: Brand New Day will see Tom Holland don the red and blue suit again. He’ll be joined by Jon Bernthal as the Punisher and Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, as well as Stranger Things star Sadie Sink, who plays a mysterious new character in Peter Parker’s world.
Taika Waititi Says His Work on Thor Was for the Greater Good
Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love & Thunder may have tipped the scales for Marvel fans who thought it leaned too far into comedy, but the director doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings about it.
During press for the Sundance premiere of Fing!, which is unfortunately a David Walliams adaptation co-written by and co-starring Walliams, Waititi was on hand to chat about Star Wars and Marvel, describing his work on the franchise as “for the greater good”.
“Thor was around before me,” Waititi said (via Variety). “The stuff that Chris and I did and how we shaped him into that new version… that was for the greater good of the franchise as a whole. I can’t wait to see these Avengers movies. I was just watching Infinity War and Endgame two weeks ago. They’re so good. I’m good friends with the Russos and will love to see what they’re doing.”
Like the sport at the heart of his 2023 movie Next Goal Wins, Waititi’s Marvel experience ultimately seemed to be a game of two halves. After the release of Thor: Ragnarok, the cheeky Kiwi was riding high as franchise fans responded well to his more comedic take on the God of Thunder, but a follow-up movie that saw the character bickering with his old hammer, being stripped naked in front of Zeus, and coping with a midlife crisis fared less well with critics and fans alike, although the movie made a profit at the box office (personally, I enjoyed Love and Thunder, but appreciate I’m in the minority).
Post-mortem, Thor star Chris Hemsworth has also shared some thoughts on the divisive Marvel fourquel, telling Yahoo that he and the rest of the Love and Thunder gang were “having so much fun” making the movie, and “that’s sometimes too much of a good thing.”
“I still love the film,” Hemsworth stressed. “You have to critique and look at what worked in case you do it again on a different film. The lesson I took was have fun with the comedy and so on, but what’s the emotional drive and component here? Is this something relatable? Then you can add on all the jokes and the fantastical special effects and the elements. But if there’s not a strong enough throughline, sometimes you’re just having too much fun.”
Hemsworth’s Thor will return in Avengers: Doomsday later this year, while Waititi’s next directorial project, the Jenna Ortega-led sci-fi movie Klara and the Sun, is still without a release date after wrapping production back in April 2024.
Does A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Explain Brienne of Tarth’s Ancestry?
The following contains spoilers for the A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS episode 2 and details from the larger A Song of Ice and Fire canon.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Ser Duncan the Tall is pretty tall.
Described as an inch shy of seven feet in George R.R. Martin‘s “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas and played by 6’5″ actor Peter Claffey, the hedge knight known as “Dunk” tends to tower over most in Westeros. Through the first two episodes of Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Dunk’s height has become a bit of a running joke with the lovable galoot having not yet met a door frame he didn’t want to accidentally crash his head into.
Longtime readers of Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, however, will know that Dunk is far from the only preternaturally prominent individual in the Seven Kingdoms. In addition to the literal giants that populate the far north beyond the Wall, the continent is home to altitudinous folks like the 6’6″ King Robert I, the 7’1″ Hodor, and even the titanic 8’0″ Gregor “The Mountain That Rides” Clegane.
Westeros being home to so many unusually tall people naturally raises questions like “What’s in the water over there?” “Why aren’t the doorways bigger?” “And are any of these tall people related?” While answers to those first two questions remain elusive, we might actually be able to address the third. That’s because Martin has left some breadcrumbs suggesting that Ser Duncan the Tall does have an equally tall descendent. You might know her as Brienne of Tarth.
Born on the island of Tarth some 70 years after A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place, Brienne has many unambiguously heroic traits that made her a Game of Thrones favorite. Like a certain Ser Duncan before her, Brienne takes chivalry and her obligation as a warrior far more seriously than her contemporaries. In fact, one might argue that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is named after the Thrones episode “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” in which Brienne takes her knightly vows. She’s also unusually statuesque for a woman of Westeros (or really for anyone on a Medieval diet), coming in at well over six feet tall and played by the 6’3″ actress Gwendoline Christie. For Dunk actor Peter Claffey, Dunk and Brienne’s shared height and values alone is compelling enough to confirm some sort of familial connection.
“[Martin] hasn’t confirmed it to me, but yeah I think there’s probably some lineage, for sure,” Claffey tells Den of Geek. “There are a lot of commonalities between Brienne and Dunk. They have a very similar sort of moral compass, similar sort of demeanor, similar sort of almost vulnerability and gullibility with speaking and interacting with people. I absolutely loved Brienne and Gwendoline Christie in the show. I hope I get to meet her some time, it would be so cool.”
The evidence for Brienne being a descendent of Ser Duncan the Tall goes beyond the cosmetic. In one of Brienne’s chapters in the book A Feast for Crows, she recalls coming across a shield adorned with a sigil depicting an elm tree and a falling star in her father’s armory. That should sound familiar to those who just watched A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 2. In that installment, Dunk must choose a new sigil for himself since he is not a blood relation to the man who knighted him, Ser Arlan of Pennytree.
With his squire Egg’s help, Dunk requests that a Dornish painter named Tanselle (Tanzyn Crawford) craft him a sigil featuring “an elm tree, a big one like the one by the river. Brown trunk and green branches. But with a shooting star above.” The similarities between Dunk’s sigil and the sigil found in Brienne’s Evenfall castle home on Tarth isn’t so much of a “hint” that the two are related as it is an outright confirmation. Martin himself agreed, affirming Brienne and Dunk’s familial connection in 2016.
But if Ser Duncan is Brienne of Tarth’s grandfather or great-grandfather then who is her grandmother or great-grandmother? Well, would you believe that the aforementioned Dornish painter named Tanselle is another one of Westeros’ Very Tall Individuals? And would you believe that Ser Duncan the Tall appears to be absolutely smitten with her? Sure, Dunk displays absolutely zero rizz when interacting with “Tanselle-Too-Tall” but his story is far from finished. And Martin has entrusted A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker with the blueprints to many future Dunk and Egg stories. It’s entirely possible that Tanselle will be revealed to be a part of Brienne of Tarth’s family history as well. The actress who plays her certainly hopes so.
“Everybody’s so connected and intertwined in this show, so I mean, that would be my dream, honestly,” Crawford says. “Gwendoline Christie, oh gosh, she’s so amazing. I’d love to carry on the tall girl legacy. That’s my honor.”
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Daniel Ings on the Scene That Best Explains Lyonel Baratheon
This article contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 2.
According to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker, one character in the Game of Thrones prequel series was particularly challenging to cast. The role wasn’t that of the seven-foot-tall hedge knight Dunk (Peter Claffey) nor his adolescent squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell). Instead it was a bombastic tourney competitor with a very familiar surname: Ser Lyonel Baratheon.
“I had begun to think that I had written [the part] poorly because we were getting auditions that just weren’t doing the scenes how they were in my head,” Parker tells Den of Geek.
Lyonel Baratheon is a deceptively hard figure to nail down. Simultaneously magnetic, intimidating, and sensual, he appears to synthesize all the best and worst qualities of his Game of Thrones descendants: brothers and rival kings Robert, Stannis, and Renly. Thankfully, an actor stepped forward to accept the challenge.
“Danny Ings came in and it was like I had scored the script for him or something,” Parker says. “He got the ups and downs. Lyonel’s cadence. When he speaks, his words just rip through the air like Al Pacino. George [R.R. Martin] said, when he saw him in the first episode, ‘You gotta be careful. This guy might steal the show,'”
British actor Daniel Ings has steadily climbed the TV ladder over the last decade with roles in notable projects such as Lovesick, I Hate Suzie, and Guy Ritchie’s surprise 2024 Netflix hit The Gentlemen. Now he’s embodying the knight they call the “Laughing Storm,” a bon vivant who arrives to Ashford Meadow with a level of curiosity and empathy that’s unusual for a Westerosi nobleman… let alone one who is in line to be Lord of Storm’s End one day. For Ings, the key to understanding Lyonel begins with his look, highlighted by a conspicuously gaudy earring that Game of Thrones fans have latched onto since the trailer first arrived.
“This is a guy who’s traveled the high seas and taken little trinkets from everywhere he’s been,” the actor explains. “He’s been to Dorne, he’s been east, he’s been west. He probably plucked [the earring] off a dead body and was like ‘Oh, that’s pretty I’ll take that.’ It was fun finding those little flourishes in prep. He’s pretty battle hardened. He’s lived. He’s got some scars. But he’s not afraid of a bit of flair.”
That colorful personality emerges in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ first episode when Lyonel is drawn to the novelty of a very tall hedge knight who enters his private party tent not with gifts but a simple desire to have dinner. The subsequent dance shared between Dunk and Lyonel served as a highly reshared highlight of the premiere.
“He sees this Dunk guy as like ‘Yeah, you’re interesting, you’re weird. You’re big too, so I can use that… that’s fun for me. Bring your little pal with the bald head over, let’s go.”
Episode 2 “Hard Salt Beef,” however, presents an even more illustrative Lyonel moment. For as interested as he is in others, Ser Lyonel Baratheon is always most fascinated with himself. Who else but Lyonel Baratheon would organize a game of tug of war among all the knights of Ashford Meadow only to abandon it midway through for a drink? Then, after wetting his whistle and trash-talking, Lyonel returns to the front of the line to deliver the decisive yank of the rope.
“It does distill the character to his barest elements, which is like hyper masculine and wanting to win and fight and do man shit. But also, at certain point, being like ‘Carry on, boys, because I’m gonna go and have a little sip of beer, and then I’ll be back in a minute,'” Ings says.
The hardest part of Lyonel’s tug of war wasn’t the pulling, it turns out, but the talking.
“It’s quite hard screaming Westerosi insults and making them up on the fly. Ira would come up and whisper to me ‘call them c*nt-strapped daisies.’ It was fun having to figure out the language while having [at the time 10-year-old] Dexter there on set. Can we do it? Can we not? Do we have to?”
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 2 Review: Hard Salt Beef
The following contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 2.
The Targaryens arrive on the scene in the second episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but much like almost everything else about this show, they’re not entirely what you expect. Part of the reason for that is, at this particular moment in Westerosi history, the Targs are kind of not having a great time. Yeah, the family is still on the Iron Throne, but all their dragons are dead, and King Daeron II just had to put down a rebellion by his own illegitimate half-brother, Daemon Blackfyre. In short, the whole Fire and Blood thing really just isn’t as impressive as it used to be.
Case in point: The fact that they’re attending this tourney at all. Let’s face it, and no shade to House Ashford or whatever, but nothing about this event suggests that they or it are important enough for this many Targaryen heirs to the throne to be attending. The entourage includes: Prince Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvell), the heir to the Iron Throne, his younger brother Prince Maekar (Sam Spruell), and Maekar’s son Aerion (Finn Bennett). Two of Maeker’s other sons are also meant to be part of the group, but they’re missing at present, and everyone’s pretty much just hoping they aren’t dead in a ditch somewhere. But, currently missing kids aside, that’s still a lot of Targaryen royalty for this particular tournament. (It’s Aerion, for his part, who somehow at least seems aware of this, and is predictably snotty about being forced to attend.)
Their arrival is suitably dramatic, with fluttering banners, lots of attitude, and several members of the Kingsguard in tow. Baelor is immediately striking, if only for all the ways he doesn’t look like a conventional Targaryen. Dark-haired and stocky rather than white-blonde and willowy, he very visibly takes after his Dornish mother rather than his father, the king. But his appearance isn’t the only thing that goes against our expected understanding of how Targaryens are supposed to be and behave. Because Baelor is kind. When given the chance to rage at Dunk for eavesdropping or humiliate him for his clearly desperate request, he listens. He’s even sympathetic. He vouches for Dunk so that he can enter the jousting tournament, even though it’s not entirely clear whether he actually remembers Ser Arlan at all. And, to be fair, I kind of love the idea that he may have chosen to just do this big dumb kid a solid, knowing that no one else would remember whether or not what he said was true. It’d be such a non-Targaryen-coded move.
But with his admission into the tournament finally secured, it’s time for Dunk to get ready. Unfortunately, weird knight rules mean that he can’t wear Ser Arlan’s colors or armor, which leads him to having to go buy some of his own, which, of course, he can’t afford. (It probably doesn’t help that he’s also gigantic. He’s not shopping off the rack.) Cue him selling his beloved white palfrey, and their goodbye is pretty much straight out of a Disney movie, with Dunk promising to reclaim her if he manages to win, and making the guy who buys her promise to give the animal extra oats and an apple. It feels like we’re seconds away from bursting into some sort of farewell song. (It’s not ineffective, to be clear. If Dunk doesn’t get that horse back, I’m sending someone hate mail.)
On the plus side, needing to get the crest on his shield repainted does give Dunk an excuse to talk to the pretty puppeteer girl he’s been admiring at one of the tents surrounding the jousting pitch. Her name is Tanselle, and she was teased about her height as a child. (Tanselle Too Tall!!) They’re so adorable, it ought to be illegal, and you can easily picture the giant, sweet but dumb children they’ll produce. Egg, who has spent most of the episode being kind of an enormous nerd, also turns out to be an excellent wingman, asking Tanselle the sort of get-to-know-you questions that Dunk is truly not equipped to manage. We’re all rooting for you, ser.
The episode closes with Dunk and Egg off to watch the first competitions on the pitch. The party atmosphere is infectious, and the event itself is raucous and wild. And it all looks nothing like the more sedate jousting we’ve witnessed elsewhere in this universe. Six jousts seem to be running simultaneously, featuring knights from all the big houses bearing shields with familiar crests: Targaryen, Tully, Lannister, Baratheon. Lances are splintering wildly, horses are crashing into one another, and men are gleefully riding each other over. It feels dangerous and violent, particularly when it’s shot from the perspective of the crowd of commoners, who gleefully cheer every slice and injury. No one’s performatively giving out roses to pretty girls in the audience, not this time around.
Afterward, Dunk’s strangely melancholy, reflecting on the life that Ser Arlan lived, and the success he chased but never achieved. He was never a champion in the lists. Most of the nobles don’t remember him anymore — if they ever did — and don’t seem particularly grateful for any service he may have done for them. What was the point of his life, of being an honorable man? Well, the episode makes it pretty clear: Dunk is the point. Arlan didn’t have to, but he raised a lost kid to be a good person, and that’s no small thing in this world of death and vipers.
“I am his legacy,” Dunk says, and it sounds like a promise. What that legacy will turn out to be, well. I guess we’re about to find out.
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.
Ethan Hawke Is Right About the Actors Who Deserve Oscar Noms This Year
Ethan Hawke is no stranger to awards praise. In addition to his recent Best Actor nomination for playing Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, Hawke has earned Best Supporting Actor noms for Training Day and Boyhood and even two writing noms for Before Sunset and Before Midnight.
Yet, as an actor who has been on our screens since 1985, Hawke also knows that a lot of incredible work often goes unnoticed by the Academy. Hawke remembered that fact even while accepting his nomination for Blue Moon, drawing attention to the fine acting that didn’t get awards attention.
“At 55, I’ve spent so many of these kinds of mornings disappointed throughout my life, so it’s hard for me not to think of all the people who did great work, even in my category alone,” he told Variety.
Even better, Hawke gets specific, naming names of great actors who he thought deserved more attention. “Jesse Plemons is absolutely brilliant in Bugonia. Lee Byung-hun was staggeringly great in No Other Choice. Dwayne Johnson was phenomenal in The Smashing Machine. George Clooney in Jay Kelly. Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein,” he listed. “My brain does flips over how many people deserve it.”
More than just a gracious gesture, Hawke’s statement is an important reminder about the art of cinema, something that can get lost in all the Oscars hype. Unlike the 10 slots for the Best Picture category, the acting categories only have five nominees, which means there’s less room for variety. And in a year that includes an glowing movie star performance from Michael B. Jordan in the blockbuster Sinners, veteran actor Leonardo DiCaprio being both captivating and pathetic in the thrilling One Battle After Another, and Timothée Chalamet cementing himself as one of the greats with his multifaceted work in Marty Supreme, there’s only room for two others.
Hawke is absolutely right to give those names praise, especially Plemons in Bugonia and Lee in No Other Choice.
Plemons has been doing fantastic work on screen for years, playing everything from the coldest killer in Breaking Bad to the biggest sweetheart in The Power of the Dog to a divorcee very concerned about Frito-Lay’s profit margins in Game Night. He seems to combine all those facets for Bugonia, in which he plays a seemingly good-hearted man who allows a family tragedy to drive him into a paranoid delusion. Even when he’s tormenting the CEO who insists is an alien (played by an always incredible, and Oscar-nominated, Emma Stone), we still sympathize with him.
Lee has an even longer and more varied filmography, even if most of it is in his native South Korea. he began working with Park Chan-wook with 2000’s Joint Security Area, playing a South Korean guard who strikes up a friendship with his Northern counterpart (Song Kang-ho) and, a few years later, showed up on American screens playing ninja Storm Shadow in 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Lee’s American fanbase increased with Squid Game, in which he played the Front Man, and for voicing the monstrous Gwi-Ma in last year’s animated hit Kpop Demon Hunters. Even though his latest work with director Park, No Other Choice, pushes his character to desperate and murderous ends, Lee keeps him grounded, making him feel like a real person, no matter how outrageous his decisions are.
These are just two of the great performances that Hawke mentions, and even that list leaves out other incredible lead acting turns. There’s Joel Edgerton‘s taciturn take in Train Dreams, Vahid Mobasseri’s layered work in It Was Just an Accident, Liam Neeson poking fun at his screen person in The Naked Gun… the list goes on, far beyond five, far beyond even ten.
So while it’s fun to give attention to the five performances that got nominated for awards, Hawke is right to remind us that there’s so much more good acting out there, more than any one award could represent.
The Muppet Show Trailer Is a Welcome Mix of Fuzzy Nostalgia and Contemporary Bite
In the year of our Lord 2026, everything old is new again, but sometimes that’s not actually all that much of a problem. Case in point, Disney’s forthcoming revival of The Muppet Show, which is arriving at precisely the moment we all really, really need it to. It’s exactly a secret that the world isn’t doing all that great at the moment, and what better antidote for our collective anxiety could there be than the return of the famous Jim Henson characters who’ve held our hands through uncomfortable moments before. (No, I don’t have “The Rainbow Connection” playing in the background right now, why do you ask?)
The original The Muppet Show technically only ran between 1976 and 1981, but it’s a series that still casts a long shadow, with its famous guests, mystical numbers, puppet-based stunts, and behind-the-scenes antics. Henson’s famous felt creatures have gone on to star in everything from television one-offs and specials to feature films (The Great Muppet Caper is untouchable, and I will not be taking questions at this time). Disney’s been trying to bring the franchise back into the mainstream pop cultural zeitgeist for several years now, with varying degrees of success. The 2011 film The Muppets (a.k.a. The One with Jason Segel) was cute enough, but The Office-style mockumentary series Muppets Now largely felt tonally wrong for the franchise we all loved and hands up if you even remember that
Happily, Disney’s taking things back to basics with this pilot, which feels like nothing so much as a slicker, more expensive (and expansive) version of the original we all loved. This pseudo pilot episode, clearly a test run to see if the format can still attract viewers, will feature guest appearances by Sabrina Carpenter, Maya Rudolph, Seth Rogen, and pretty much every Muppet you can think of.
The tone is perfect, the clip full of backstage commentary and familiar Muppet-based antics, like Gonzo’s death-defying stunts and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s disastrous experiments. But the trailer also indicates a sly self-awareness about who’s most likely to be watching the show, including some contemporary humor right alongside its silliest and most old-school antics. We see Carpenter, Kermit, and Pepe the King Prawn share an arch exchange that references the singer’s slightly racy stage shows, signaling that everyone involved knows the audience is full of grown-ups who are not only all in on the joke, but generally unbothered by a hint of adult humor.
But, honestly, this whole thing could have just been several minutes of Miss Piggy swanning around backstage in a turban, and I suspect we would have all been fine with it. Play the music and light the lights, indeed.
The Muppet Show premieres February 4, 2026, on Disney+ and ABC.
James Gunn Reveals Jason Momoa As a Comic Accurate Lobo (Sans Space Dolphins)
The Main Man has come to the DCU. We’ve known for a while now that Jason Momoa would be sticking in the world of DC Comics once James Gunn and Peter Safran took over. And we’ve also known that he would be trading in the orange skivvies of Aquaman and taking the role of Lobo, the bounty hunter for Supergirl. But outside of a smoky silhouette in the Supergirl trailer, we have not yet seen what Momoa’s take on the Last Czarnian would be.
But now we know. A reel that Gunn released to his Instagram follows a giddy Momoa as he drives to the set and ends with a close up him driving his motorcycle through flames, hooked chain in tow. A close up on his face reveals everything you’d expect: dirty hair, unkempt beard, a blue domino pattern around red eyes, and a stogie protruding from his pointed teeth. Yep, that’s Lobo. Except… where are the space dolphins?
Okay, in all fairness to Supergirl and Gunn, Lobo did not have a love of space dolphins when he first appeared back in 1983’s Omega Men #3, written by Roger Slifer and penciled by the great Keith Giffen. Of course, little of the Lobo who became a cult hit in the ’90s was present in that first issue. Sure, he was still an intergalactic bounty hunter with a space bike and a bad attitude, and he did have his distinctive ‘stache and eye markings, but that version of Lobo wore purple and yellow tights, hardly the most intimidating look.
Over the years, Giffen would return to Lobo and develop him further into a parody of the extreme edge-lord superheroes that became all the rage in the 1990s. In the two miniseries that Giffen did with co-writer Alan Grant and illustrator Simon Bisley, along with the 1991 Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special—in which the Easter Bunny hires the Main Man to slaughter Santa Claus because Christmas is more popular than Easter—Lobo brought to DC Comics a level gratuitous violence one previously only found in British superhero satires like Judge Dredd and Marshal Law.
Those storylines established Lobo as a completely amoral person who lives by one code: he always keeps his word. Outside of that, he’ll kill any bastich (to use his preferred epithet) for money and, thanks to his ability to regenerate from a single drop of blood (a power intended as a joke about Wolverine‘s healing factor… introduced about 15 years before Wolverine canonically regenerates from a single drop of blood), he can never be killed.
But just because Lobo couldn’t die didn’t mean that his stories lacked for killing. We learn that the name Lobo means “he who devours your entrails and thoroughly enjoys it” on Czarnia and that he’s the last survivor of his planet, not because it exploded like Krypton but rather because Lobo murdered every inhabitant in grade school after a teacher flunked him.
Lobo’s predilection for extreme cartoon violence made him a hit in the ’90s. However, it also kept him feeling fairly one-note, and the character fell out of favor in the 2000s. So unpopular was the character that DC tried to reboot him in 2011, introducing a thin, serious-minded and somewhat honorable version who claimed to real Lobo and introduced himself by beheading the Lobo we’ve known for decades. Ironically, that take went over so poorly that when the hulking psychopath Lobo returned to kill the spindly imposter, his fan base grew again.
However, as prevalent as Lobo has been in DC comics over the past decade, he did not appear in the miniseries Supergirl: The Woman of Tomorrow, which is the source of the upcoming Supergirl movie. So how, exactly, do they plan to bring him into the film?
The most obvious answer is that Lobo has probably been hired to kill Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), the murderer that young Ruthye Marye (Eve Ridley) is trying to find, with the help of Supergirl (Milly Alcock). Probably, Lobo will cross Supergirl’s path, the two will duke it out, and Supergirl will have to find some way to convince Lobo to change the terms of his agreement.
All of that is fine, and Momoa certainly has both the look and the attitude to make a remorseless killer fun to watch. But however Supergirl plans to use Lobo, they had better get his space dolphins on screen, if only to help Momoa better transition from hanging out with an octopus in Aquaman to hunting down bastiches as Lobo.
Supergirl (and Lobo) arrives in theaters on June 26, 2026.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Ratings Prove Audiences Aren’t Tired of Westeros Just Yet
HBO’s Game of Thrones is, without question, one of the most successful fantasy properties of all time. It’s also one of the most controversial, thanks to its hotly debated final season, which featured everything from pacing problems and character deaths to big twists that felt almost completely unearned. (Save one, anyway.) But while many of us may never stop complaining about how the flagship series wrapped its story up, we’re also apparently still eager to see more stories set in George R.R. Martin’s world of Westeros.
Per Deadline, the first episode of the new Thrones prequel series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, drew 6.7 million viewers over the three days following its premiere on HBO and HBO Max. According to Warner Bros. Discovery, that makes the show “a top three series launch” in the history of the HBO Max streaming platform, though the company did not share the other two titles on this particular list.
Given that the show has already been renewed for a second season, the specific numbers themselves probably don’t actually matter all that much. What’s more important is what this result says about the people watching. Because this series success firmly indicates that viewers are apparently not as over Game of Thrones as many would like to believe.
A lower-stakes, scaled-down version of the Thrones universe, Seven Kingdoms follows the story of a loveably dumb hedge knight (Peter Claffey) and his squire (Dexter Sol Ansell) during a chaotic tournament in the Reach. It’s a story that’s lacking in many of the elements we consider central to this world: There are no dragons or magic, and characters from big, influential families hover on the edges of the story rather than drive its actions. And viewers are clearly into it anyway. If anything, Seven Kingdoms is a proof of concept that HBO can take some risks when it comes to this universe and audiences will still tune in.
Though it’s set nearly 200 years before the events of Thrones, House of the Dragon often feels like a fairly close approximation of the original series, with its intense politics, near-constant betrayals, and massive dragon battles. Seven Kingdoms is very deliberately not that, and its initial success must be a balm to the studio execs who are trying to find ways to further expand this fictional world onscreen.
We already know that more spinoffs are coming, and some of the rumored projects in the works include everything from a rumored Arya Stark follow-up and a retelling of Aegon’s Conquest to an animated series following the seafaring adventures of Corlys Velaryon. But the subject matter may not really matter in the end, not when there’s so much lore and history in this universe that’s worth exploring and clear evidence that audiences are willing to come along for the ride, no matter what.
Invincible Season 4 Will Feature its Own Red Hulk, Who’s Also a Dinosaur
In issue #80 of the Invincible comic series, Mark Grayson and Samantha “Eve” Wilkins, better known as the heroes Invincible and Atom Eve, have a difficult conversation about their living arrangements interrupted by an emergency call. “There’s a big red guy—tearing the whole city apart,” Eve tells Mark. “Big red guy?” Mark responds while pulling on his mask, “I can’t narrow that down to less than four people.” Neither can most comic book fans, as cape and cowl are filled with scarlet superpeople, ranging from Red Hulk to Devil Dinosaur to Red Bee.
Anyone who watches the trailer for season four of the Prime Video series Invincible can narrow the list down to one. In between bits of dialogue about Mark’s unresolved trauma and shots of a fresh wave of Viltrumite invaders (including Lee Pace’s Grand Regent Thragg!), we see the big red guy who’s going to make trouble for Invincible, the delightfully named Dinosaurus. A Hulk pastiche (with a little bit of the Lizard and Devil Dinosaur thrown in), Dinosaurus is an example of what Invincible does best, riffing on comic book concepts and taking them in directions that Marvel and DC cannot.
Dinosaurus Is Against Us
When Dinosaurus first appeared in 2009’s Invincible #68, he plays like just another one-off riff on an established hero, in part because writer Robert Kirkman and artist Ryan Ottley focus more on Mark’s wavering moral compass than it does the new threat. The story takes place in the aftermath of the Viltrumite war, with Mark trying to assuage his guilt by helping to a repair a destroyed city. His do-gooding gets interrupted when Dinosuarus arrives, not only preventing Mark from rebuilding but also lecturing him about the evils of humanity in the process.
After trading a few punches, Dinosaurus changes forms, revealing himself to be a chilled-out guy called David Anders. Anders begs Mark for help, explaining that he has no control over Dinosaurus and that Dinosaurus will not stop until he’s destroyed humanity. So Mark does the only reasonable thing when given the one way to stop a all-powerful monster. He wraps his hands around David’s neck, and…
Well, given the Invincible show’s tendency to hew closely to the comics, we won’t get into the details here. But suffice to say, Mark knows he needs to take extreme action against such an imposing threat, which sets it apart from Dinosaurus’s Marvel forerunner.
Marvel’s Monster Problem
The Hulk has always been a problem for the Marvel Universe, especially as the world gets smaller. In his initial appearances by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Hulk is a Jekyll and Hyde analogue modeled on Frankenstein’s Monster. When the sun goes down, Banner turns into the Hulk, who creates some sort of trouble. The creative decision to tie Banner’s transformations to his anger certainly complicated things further, but Marvel found ways of keeping the audience’s sympathies with the Hulk. Most of the time, he just wants to be left alone, but he keeps getting hassled by the Captain Ahab-like Thunderbolt Ross or encounters some type of commie saboteur or supervillain, which makes his freak-outs justified.
But every once in a while, Marvel has to deal with the fact that the Hulk is a big, rampaging, and uncontrollable monster. The most famous example is the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk storylines designed by writer Greg Pak, in which the Illuminati—Marvel’s secret group of geniuses and power player such as Reed Richards and Tony Stark—send Banner off-planet, where he becomes a heroic gladiator. Pak played into the tragedy of it all and made Hulk’s vengeful return to Earth feel exhilarating and just, but it only worked at the expense of making Richards, Stark, Professor X, and other Illuminati members seem villainous—something common in those days of Civil War and Deadly Genesis, but not sustainable long-term.
The excellent Immortal Hulk series by Al Ewing and the great current Incredible Hulk run by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Nic Klein return Hulk to his monster roots, making him less of a superhero who pals around with Captain America and Spider-Man and more of a Godzilla-like beast who battles other creatures when not leveling cities.
Great as these are, the solutions are short-lived. Eventually, Marvel’s going to want Green Genes back with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and his cousin She-Hulk (the usual stand in when Bruce is indisposed) won’t cut it. Which means that they can never let the Hulk be a pure monster, nor can they kill Bruce or the Hulk for good. He’s the monster they’re stuck with.
Sincerity and Suffering
When Mark puts his hands around the neck of David Anders, we readers believe that he won’t remove them until that man is dead. And while we may be sad for Mark for having made such as choice, we won’t blame him for it either.
Which is exactly what we love about Invincible. To be certain, Kirkman, Ottley, and original penciler Cory Walker acknowledge the weird and sometimes terrifying parts about superheroes. The entire concept of Omni-Man and the machinations of the Global Defense Agency underscore the scary side of Superman and SHIELD, while oddballs such as Dupli-Kate and Allen the Alien remind us that superheroes are unabashedly silly.
But while satires such as The Boys and The Tick have covered that ground with tongue in cheek, Invincible remains fully sincere in its love of heroes in a way that only Kurt Busiek’s majestic Astro City has matched. It loves the superheroes it deconstructs and reimagines, even while putting them through the wringer.
The coming of Dinosaurus means that the animated Invincible gets another goofy take on an established character. But it also gives the show to take that character to its most logical extreme, testing Mark Grayson’s moral code in the process—which is exactly what makes Invincible one of a kind.
Invincible season 4 premieres March 18, 2026 on Prime Video.
15 Stars Who Broke Out at Sundance in the Last 15 Years
The Sundance Film Festival may be the kick-off for every New Year’s lineup of indie cinema players, but it has movie star roots. After all, the festival was co-founded by Robert Redford as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in 1978, back before the actor drew from the name of his famous cowboy character and rechristened it the Sundance Film Festival in 1978.
It’s fitting, then, that Sundance has been a launching ground for new movie stars ever since, a tradition that it continues to this day. Some of the most exciting young actors of the last decade had their first major roles in films that premiered at Sundance, including these 15 future screen legends.
Michael B. Jordan – Fruitvale Station (2013)
As demonstrated by Sinners‘ march through awards season, director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan are one of the most exciting creative pairs in cinema today. Before the two worked together for stories about vampires or Wakanda, they did a more grounded, realistic project. Fruitvale Station recreates the last day in the life of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old who was murdered by police at the titular train stop.
Coogler and Jordan restore humanity to a man too often reduced to a news item, putting Jordan’s movie star charisma to good work. Fruitvale Station went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at Sundance that year, fully transforming Jordan from the kid in The Wire to a cinematic talent to watch.
Brie Larson – The Spectacular Now (2013)
Like Jordan, Brie Larson first appeared on screen as a kid in a TV show, appearing as one of Bob Saget’s kids in the sitcom Raising Dad and later putting in supporting roles in Hoot and Scott Pilgrim vs the World. But it was a pair of independent films in 2013 that transformed Larson from an able secondary player to exciting lead, starting with The Spectacular Now.
Directed by James Ponsoldt and based on the novel by Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now follows a charismatic high school senior (played by an actor we’ll talk about in a moment), whose alcoholism gets the best of him when he’s dumped by his girlfriend. As the girlfriend who sets off the chain of events and not the one who puts the protagonist back together—that job went to Shailene Woodley—Larson has the difficult task of keeping viewers on the side of a complicated person, a talent she’ll only further develop in her other 2013 movie, Short Term 12. Which, by the by, also got its start at a festival, albeit SXSW.
Miles Teller – The Spectacular Now (2013) / Whiplash (2014)
As great as Larson is in The Spectacular Now, she did have to play support to another young star making his major movie debut at Sundance. Miles Teller has the role of destructive cool kid Sutter Keely, and must keep the audience pulling for him despite his shortcomings.
Teller returned to Sundance the next year, too, to build on the heat generated by The Spectacular Now with what still remains his best work. In director Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Teller puts in an electrifying turn as a talented but arrogant drummer who faces off against a cruel teacher (J.K. Simmons). It put Teller and Chazelle on the map, leading to bucolic musicals in the Hollywood Hills and a trip for Teller straight into the danger zone.
Tessa Thompson – Dear White People (2014)
Over the past decade, Tessa Thompson has played everything from an Asgardian warrior to a physicist who turns into flowers in Annihilation to, most recently, an upper-class malcontent in Hedda. While she showed hints of such range in early projects such as Veronica Mars and For Colored Girls, they truly came to the fore in the Justin Simien-directed comedy, Dear White People.
As the wry author and sharp-witted radio host Sam White, Thompson gets to play high status and embody the transgression implied in the film’s title. But she really showed off her skills in the movie’s second half when Sam has to confront some truths about herself and her school.
Anya Taylor-Joy – The Witch (2015)
Ten years later, it’s hard to remember just how challenging The Witch seemed upon release (and 11 years ago for Sundance-goers). Robert Eggers’ film certainly had some traditional horror elements but its use of period-accurate language and its punishingly-bleak tone set The Witch apart from other movies about creepy, cackling women. Much of the movie’s success therefore came from Anya Taylor-Joy‘s ability to ground the movie as the Puritan girl Thomasin. With her uncanny wide eyes and ability to convey both fear and interest with just a lift of the eyebrows, Taylor-Joy made The Witch a hit, which in turn cemented her to one of the most reliably great young actors in Hollywood.
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth (2016)
Okay, we’re fudging a bit here since Lady Macbeth opened at TIFF in September 2026 and then BFI London Film Festival in October before making its U.S. premiere at Sundance in January 2017. But since we’re talking about Florence Pugh, we’ll gladly make an exception. Pugh’s legion of fans may love her turns in Midsommar and Thunderbolts, but the internal resilience and passionate depths she brings to her characters were already present in Lady Macbeth.
In this adaptation of the novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov, directed by William Oldroyd and written by Alice Birch, Pugh stars as a 19th century woman who rebels against her loveless marriage to a cruel older man. It’s familiar ground for a period piece, but Pugh made it all feel new and undiscovered.
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name (2017)
As Marty Supreme reminds us, any movie that ends with Timothée Chalamet crying is going to be great. And with no disrespect to Marty Mauser’s kid, no movie has done that better than Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino and James Ivory’s soulful story about a teen boy’s romance with an older man (Armie Hammer) in 1980s Italy. Chalamet brings to life the curious adolescent from the André Aciman novel, making his unique experience seem universal—especially in the final shot, in which Chalamet quietly sobs in front of the fireplace while a Sufjan Stevens song plays.
Margaret Qualley – Novitiate (2017)
If there’s a recent actress who rivals Chalamet as a rising star, it might be Margaret Qualley of The Substance. The daughter of Andie MacDowell, Qualley had appeared in The Leftovers and The Nice Guys. But it was the Sundance film Novitiate that first put her in the lead. In Novitiate, Qualley plays a nun-in-training who doubts her faith, especially under the rigors imposed by the cruel Mother Superior (Melissa Leo). The conflict that Qualley embodies helped Novitiate earn a Grand Jury Prize nomination and another Jury Prize for writer/director Maggie Betts.
LaKeith Stanfield – Crown Heights (2017)
LaKeith Stanfield may have made his film debut alongside Brie Larson in Short Term 12, but he didn’t take the center stage until Crown Heights premiered at Sundance. Between those two projects, Stanfield had memorable turns in Selma, Dope, and Atlanta, but Crown Heights was the first to prove that this idiosyncratic performer can carry a feature film.
For Crown Heights, writer-director Matt Ruskin adapts a This American Life, a story the about wrongfully-convicted inmate Colin Warner and how he finally gets released through the work of his friend Carl King. Alongside Nnamdi Asomugha as King, Stanfield plays Warner as both rightly angry but resiliently hopeful, using his unique energy to keep the audience riveted.
Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats (2017)
Harris Dickinson hasn’t had quite the same big roles as some of the others on this list, but he’s electric in them all. In indie favorites such as Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl, and The Iron Claw, Dickinson brings a genuine openness while retaining a human element in even the most outre indie. He demonstrated that skill in his first major film role, the coming-of-age drama Beach Rats from write-director Eliza Hittman. In Beach Rats, Dickinson plays a wayward Brooklyn teen who avoids facing his homosexuality by engaging in increasingly reckless and dangerous behavior with his friends.
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out (2017)
Just because Sundance is associated with small, independent movies doesn’t mean that the festival cannot debut an Oscar-winning blockbuster. Such was the case when Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered there on Jan. 23, 2017 before it became a culture-defining horror film, thanks in part to an incredible lead performance by Daniel Kaluuya. While Kaluuya came to the part with memorable credits in Black Mirror and Sicario, it was Get Out that established him as one of the most exciting performers of his generation. As the conflict-adverse Chris Washington, Kaluuya proved that he could create a three-dimensional character with just the furrow of his brow and a widening of his eyes.
Thomasin McKenzie – Leave No Trace (2018)
Thomasin McKenzie hails from New Zealand, which means that her first film role came, of course, in a Peter Jackson movie, which for her was via an uncredited contribution to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. But it was a much smaller American film that really caught viewers’ attention, appearing alongside Ben Foster in Debra Granik’s sensitive drama Leave No Trace. McKenzie plays Tom, the teenage daughter and de facto caretaker of a PTSD-stricken veteran. Though playing younger than she actually was at the time, McKenzie was still a teen while shooting Leave No Trace. Nonetheless, she believably embodied a girl forced to abandon her childhood to help her troubled parent.
Emilia Jones – CODA (2021)
While not the first Sundance film to win an Academy Award, CODA feels like the most Sundance movie to ever get the honor. Written and directed by Sian Heder and based on the French movie La Famille Bélier, CODA stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, a child of deaf adults or a CODA. After that film became a surprise awards titan, Jones has gone on to build an impressive career, appearing just last year in Edgar Wright’s The Running Manand beside Mark Ruffalo in the HBO crime drama, Task.
Daisy Edgar-Jones – Fresh (2022)
Before playing Noa, a romantic hopeful who gets targeted by a charming cannibal (Sebastian Stan) in Mimi Cave’s horror-comedy Fresh, Daisy Edgar-Jones already had an impressive resume. In addition to acclaimed stage work in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Edgar-Jones had main cast parts on Cold Feet and War of the Worlds. But it was her ability to play both a woman falling in love and a survivor fighting against her attacker in Fresh that changed the course of her career. Since then, Edgar-Jones has chased tornadoes in Twisters and will try to find love and stability in a new version of Sense & Sensibility, coming this year.
David Jonsson – Rye Lane (2023)
For most readers, English actor David Jonsson caught their attention as a sensitive synth in Alien: Romulus and then truly became one to watch alongside Cooper Hoofman in last year’s The Long Walk. But Jonsson came to those films with a lead actor credit already under his belt, having starred in Rye Lane, from director Raine Allen-Miller and writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia. This gentle romantic comedy plays like a South London spin on Before Sunrise as Jonsson stars alongside Vivian Oparah as two strangers who spend the day together after a chance encounter.
Wonder Man Review: A Harmless Hollywood Diversion for Marvel
This Wonder Man review contains no spoilers.
It’s been two years since Marvel Studios released its first TV series under the Marvel Spotlight banner, with head of streaming Brad Winderbaum hailing it as a platform to create more “grounded, character-driven stories” that didn’t require as much MCU knowledge to enjoy.
That first Marvel Spotlight series, Echo, was a shaky first step in that direction. For a start, it followed its main character heading back home after the climactic events of another MCU show! It certainly helped to know what the character had been through before, but you could still basically follow the plot if you hadn’t the foggiest idea. New Marvel Spotlight series Wonder Man is more successful at separating itself from the MCU at large, which you may find either a breath of fresh air or a little underwhelming, depending on what you hope to get out of it.
Created for Marvel by Destin Daniel Cretton (Spider-Man: Brand New Day) and Andrew Guest (Hawkeye), Wonder Man centres on Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a struggling 30-something actor who also happens to possess mysterious, but clearly dangerous, superpowers.
Simon has felt different his whole life. He has no friends to speak of, his family finds him a worrying curiosity, and he can’t maintain a romantic relationship. When he finds out that a respected director is remaking Wonder Man, a superhero movie he enjoyed with his late father, he begins to fixate on landing the lead role and finds an unlikely ally in Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), a washed-up actor who portrayed the Mandarin terrorist in Iron Man 3 and popped up again in a pocket dimension during Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
The pair is an absolute delight to watch. Abdul-Mateen II’s neurodivergent-coded Simon is determined but hapless; an introverted guy who has set himself the goal of becoming a famous actor but keeps getting in his own way and undermines his natural talents as a result. Kingsley’s Trevor enters Simon’s life as the extroverted influence he’s badly needed for a while. It would be easy to imagine Trevor as Simon’s excitable imaginary friend if we didn’t already know he was real. He only adds to the feeling that Simon could lose control, pushing and exploiting his new friend in escalating, precarious circumstances as the duo trots around Hollywood trying to make their mark.
Meanwhile, Simon’s caught the eye of the Department of Damage Control (remember them?), who consider him a threat. His unexamined powers are truly a compelling problem across the board, because even though Simon genuinely couldn’t give a single fig about them, the MCU’s version of Hollywood has also banned people with superpowers from acting under something called “the Doorman Clause.” The question of how Simon can land the role of Wonder Man and keep a lid on his powers hovers over the series like a dark cloud – eventually, something will have to give.
For anyone concerned about making a weekly commitment to this story, the good news is that all of Wonder Man‘s episodes are arriving at once, and they average out to sitcom length. It will take less than four hours to get through the entire season, and most of the episodes (and their jokes) land perfectly well. There’s a standout episode in the middle that pushes the show a little deeper into its own lore, but there’s also a frustrating episode that feels like unnecessary running around and almost derails its momentum.
Luckily, it doesn’t. But for a while, it adds to the feeling that we’re stuck in a bit of an MCU segue. Wonder Man is indeed a character-driven project, so it is much less concerned with superhero fripperies. It takes place in a universe where Rogers: The Musical is still doing business, but audiences are still experiencing superhero fatigue, which is a meta approach from Marvel that may be part of its undoing – it’s rather unlikely that people who have become less interested in the studio’s output will see the show on their Disney+ menu and be thrilled enough by the premise to give it a go, while those who are still committed to the machinations of the MCU might find it charming but ultimately a bit forgettable.
If you’re looking for superhero cameos, CGI battles, and piles of easter eggs, this is definitely not the show for you, but if you feel like watching a wholesome, funny little show about friendship that happens to focus on someone with superpowers, you could certainly do a lot worse than Wonder Man.
All eight episodes of Wonder Man premiere at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday, January 27 on Disney+.
The Pitt Season 2 Episode 3 Review: Cooperation, Not Commitment
This article contains spoilers for The Pitt season 2 episode 3.
Bro, what is in the air on The Pitt season 2? It’s 9 a.m. on a typically busy Fourth of July shift in the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center emergency room – complete with dislocated shoulders, distended bellies, exposed brains, the whole nine yards – and everyone is horny. Not 20 minutes after Drs. Javadi and King have drained multiple syringes of blood from a dangerously erect penis, The Pitt season 2 episode 3 finds itself in a curiously randy mood. The sexual energy is subtle, in keeping with the show’s realistic style, but it’s there all the same.
Less than two hours after she complained that she needed to get laid, Dr. Cassie McKay appears to be giving off pheromones (or folks just realize that Fiona Dourif is very pretty). A kindly old patient who can’t sit still flirts with the good doctor in a playful, grandfatherly way. His romantic odes to McKay’s beautiful eyes are followed up by a more sincere expression of romantic interest from a fit stud in a U.S. soccer jersey. When things die down for a moment of quiet, dual attending physicians Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) and Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) resolve to go their separate ways with a curiously charged send off.
“Splitting up so soon?” Robby jokes. “Your’e free to see other people, Dr. Robinavitch. I’m looking for cooperation, not commitment,” Al-Hashimi grins back.
Ma’am. That is way too hot for 9 a.m.
The Pitt throwing itself an early Valentine’s Day is another example of the way it effectively establishes episodic themes even within its stylistic restraints. It’s also a helpful reminder of why the show’s fandom is Like That. Many well-crafted popular TV series lend themselves to some passionate shipping from the terminally online, but The Pitt‘s partisans have really found a way to stand out from the pack on social media. After the pure yearning presented in “9:00 A.M.,” I’m ready to join the fan-cam crafting masses.
Even the patients seem to be in on the simmering sexual tension. The agitated Mr. Williams (Derek Cecil) gets a diagnosis and it’s a grim one: a four centimeter mass in his frontal lobe that is likely a brain tumor. But his spirits are buoyed by the arrival of his ex-wife to the hospital thanks to an outdated emergency contact form. Not only does the now-Mrs. Lambdin seem quite concerned for Michael’s well-being, she’s also intrigued by the fact that his tumor may have been present years earlier and responsible for his sudden aggressive behavior. One can see her imagining a blissful life as Mrs. Williams once again once Dr. McKay supports her theory.
Then there are the Yees, a married couple that Robby and Al-Hashimi attend to following a car accident that killed a motorcyclist. (No, the motorcyclist wasn’t wearing a helmet. Yes, he is killed instantly. And yes, the doctors immediately seize upon that fact, causing Robby to lie and claim that he always wears his.) Mr. Yee (Eugene Shaw), it turns out, was experiencing hypokalemia, an incredibly rare condition that shifts potassium into cells and causes temporary paralysis. Once he wakes up, he bears witness to an explosive screaming match between Benny Connors and his girlfriend regarding the condition of Benny’s daughter Kylie.
Like Mark Yee himself, Kylie is the Pitt’s second “zebra” of the hour, diagnosed with the exceedingly rare Immune Thrombocytopenia (ITP). But Mark doesn’t know that. All he knows is that he doesn’t want to end up like that couple, so he asks for Dana’s (Katherine LaNasa) help in composing a filmed video to his wife. Unfortunately, Mrs. Nancy Yee (Angela Lin) has already been brought up to surgery to address internal bleeding that Robby and company missed – perhaps because she was ambulatory and alert, or perhaps because the doctors didn’t want to interfere with a loving wife’s care for her husband.
While romantic energy provides a thematic throughline, the rest of the installment keeps the baseline chaos levels high while introducing several new conflicts. The case of Jackson Davis (Zack Morris), the young man brought screaming nonsense into the Pitt at the end of last week’s episode, comes to a speedy resolution, if not conclusion. When Jackson’s tox screening comes up negative for any hallucinogens or psychoactive drugs, overzealous campus security officer Tony Chinchiolo (Kurtis Bedford) has to answer for his use of a Taser. Meanwhile, Dr. Langdon and the young’ns get an insightful look into what home life is like for the legendary stockcar racing family, the Hansens. It involves a lot of drug sharing.
And what would an episode of The Pitt be without a check-in with our beloved teddy bear, Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.)? The fluid has successfully been drained from Louie’s stomach (and seemingly shattering his previous record of over a gallon), but now the tooth pain is starting to flair up again. May the TV gods watch after the ailing alcoholic because we need him to continue to deliver Pittsburgh fun facts like he does regarding the Zambelli fireworks family.
Louie isn’t the only example of The Pitt putting its setting to good use. The most compelling patient introduced in this hour arrives rich with painful Pittsburgh history. Brought in with a severe burn to her leg, Yana Kovalenko (Irina Dubova) is a wonderful firecracker of a woman, delighting in Dr. Robby’s (albeit lapsed) Judaism, razzing his dangerous choice of transportation, and advocating for him to settle down. She also, however, is revealed to be suffering from PTSD due to her experiences with the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, a real life 2018 massacre that remains the deadliest attack on a local Jewish community in American history.
Yana’s conversations with Robby and nurse Perlah Alawi (Amielynn Abellera) are simple but affecting. They represent the show finding novel and unobtrusive ways to conjure up quick pathos. The scenes also serve as a reminder that not every American medical drama need be set in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Human tragedy isn’t confined to the coasts. The Pitt has plenty of it to go around. No wonder its doctors need a release.
New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.
Masters of the Universe Trailer Looks Like the Barbie Movie for Gen X Boys
Boys of the 1980s were taught that the world of grown-ups was one filled with paramilitary organizations who shot lasers at terrorists, cars that were actually robots in disguise, and humanoid cats that gave you confusing feelings. Turns out, real life is a lot more boring.
At least, that’s the assumption made by the first trailer for Masters of the Universe, the latest big screen adaptation of the toy line/cartoon series about sci-fi barbarians. The two and a half minute clip introduces us to Adam Glenn, a nondescript (save for his dreamy blonde locks) man who dreams of something more. What follows is a trip to another world, lots of deep cut toy references, and a healthy dose of self-awareness. All of which worked wonders for another movie about a Mattel toy, Barbie.
As any ’80s kid knows, Adam is Prince Adam of Eternia, even if he’s swapped his pink tunic for a pink button-down. Portrayed by Nicholas Galitzine, Adam seeks out a sword that will bring him to Eternia, a place that he left as a youth when his mother Queen Marlena Glenn (Charlotte Riley) sent away for his own protection. It’s no spoiler to say that he finds the sword and soon teams up with characters familiar to many a Gen X’er: Camila Mendes as Teela, Idris Elba as Man-at-Arms, as well as CGI creations of Beast Man, Spikor, and Battle-Cat.
Of course, the high fantasy imagery comes only after a few knowing jokes, including the pronouns “He/Him” on Adam’s nameplate and a shopkeeper who chides Adam for grabbing the sword. Certainly, after decades of Joss Whedon-style quippy dialogue and its lingering effects in the MCU, some cringe at the thought of Masters of the Universe mocking itself. But after Barbie found incredible commercial and critical success with gags about a pregnant doll or a doll with a camera in her chest, it’s easy to see why studio AmazonMGM would go this route.
However, fans should keep in mind that Barbie‘s wry humor came alongside with not just sincerity but a healthy bit of pride in its product, which the film positioned as not just a reliable birthday or holiday gift, but as a feminist breakthrough. Certainly, Masters of the Universe can do the same about restoring the power of myth and imagination to a lost generation.
Moreover, Masters of the Universe is directed by Travis Knight. In addition to being the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight and former rapper who called himself Chilly Tee, Travis Knight founded stop-motion animations studio LAIKA and directed the movie Kubo and the Two Strings. That movie, like all of LAIKA’s output, drips with both sincerity and whip-smart humor.
Still, fans have two causes for concern. One, of course, is that the villain Skeletor is played by Jared Leto, a man against whom “box office poison” is the least damning charge. Second is the strange overlap the 2026 movie has with the 1987 flop by the Cannon Group. In addition to casting the mostly non-English speaking Dolph Lundgren as He-Man (and a committed Frank Langella as Skeletor), the 1987 movie took place mostly on Earth, where He-Man hung out with a pre-Friends Courteney Cox and a pre-Star Trek: Voyager Robert Duncan McNeill.
While the 2026 trailer does have its Earth-based set-pieces, it clearly strives for accuracy to the toys and cartoons. Much like the Street Fighter movie also releasing this year, the film is correcting the wrong of an earlier adaptation by leaning into the silliness of the source material. Does Masters of the Universe have the power to follow in Barbie‘s footsteps? We’ll find out this summer.
Masters of the Universe will bring the power of Grayskull to theaters on June 5, 2026.
Sentimental Value Is the Quiet Best Picture Nom That Deserves Your Attention
This article contains no spoilers for Sentimental Value but does describe a couple of scenes.
As in most years, the Oscar nominations of 2026 reward big movies. There’s the spectacular horror of Sinners and Frankenstein. There’s the bravado filmmaking of One Battle After Another and MartySupreme. There’s big feelings of Hamnet and the big weirdness of Bugonia. But if there’s one movie that seems out of place in this celebration of all things bold and brassy, it’s Sentimental Value, the quiet, personal drama/comedy from Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier.
Sentimental Value mostly deals with family strife, particularly as it involves a house whose ownership of which comes into question after a matriarch’s death. It’s also about the shooting of a movie, and thus Hollywood does interject—mostly in the form of a glamorous American actress portrayed by Elle Fanning and in a hilariously prescient line about Netflix—but there’s little of the glitz usually associated with show business films. Instead, Trier devotes much of his screen time to conversations between family members, conversations that rarely escalate into high drama shouting matches. And yet, it’s that very lack of drama, that very quiet that makes Sentimental Value stand out in the Best Picture crowd.
Capturing an Uncomfortable Laugh
In Sentimental Value‘s most extravagant moment, respected but fading Norwegian director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) takes American actor Rachel Kemp (Fanning) through the final scene of the movie they’re shooting. As he walks her through the family house where the movie will be shot, he notes both the technical details of the bravado oner they’ll do and the emotional notes she’ll need to hit. To prepare herself to play a mother who hangs herself after sending her son to school, Rachel asks earnest, thoughtful questions.
The discussion brings the duo into the room where the suicide scene will take place, and Rachel sits on a stool to take it all in. When she asks if the hook she’s supposed to use for the hanging would support a grown woman’s weight, Gustav answers in the affirmative. “Well it happened like that,” he says with a bit of smile. “With my mother.” Rachel responds with shock at the information and when Gustav points out that his mother used the very stool on which she sits, she bolts up with discomfort.
The description above fails to do justice to the way Trier unfolds the scene. We viewers already know the relationship between the character that Kemp is playing and Gustav’s mother Karin, a holocaust survivor who formerly lived in the house. We also know that Gustav initially wanted his elder daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve, once again working with Trier after 2021’s excellent The Worst Person in the World) to play the part. Nora refused, in part because of her anger at Gustav, who abandoned the family to make his movies and has only returned after the death of their own mother to make his film.
In short, we viewers know the full weight of the scene that Rachel is doing before she does, and we watch her process the information like we watch a horror movie victim walk toward a hidden killer. Yet, we laugh when Rachel jumps up from the stool. We snicker when, at the end of the scene, Gustav and his other daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) laugh that stool is in fact from Ikea, while the earnest Rachel talks through her part in the background.
How could something so bleak and so real also be so funny? That’s the magic of Trier’s direction.
Assured, Unspoken Direction
Sentimental Value is a movie about a movie making family that cannot speak about its suffering. While it does include occasional snippets from movies that Gustav made earlier in his career, including one in which Agnes starred as a child, most of the struggle comes through in conversations. Yet, the characters refuse to address their feelings directly through speech, so Trier fills the film with conversations in which people talk past one another.
One of the best examples occurs right before Gustav and Rachel arrive at the house in the aforementioned scene. Nora and Agnes stand in the kitchen, and Agnes tries to talk kindly about their father. Nora doesn’t endorse the sentiments, nor does she explicitly rebuke them; rather, she just follows along with the conversation. That is, until Agnes mentions that their father has cast Kemp in the part Nora turned down, a part informed by their grandmother’s life.
Even more than the words she says, Nora expresses her hurt and betrayal with the look on her face, in her inability to fully express herself. Likewise, Agnes’s attempts to smooth over the tension doesn’t convey the depth to which she wants peace and belonging, her desire for both her sister and her father to be alright.
When Rachel and Gustav (along with Cory Michael Smith a.k.a. the Riddler from Gotham, who gets turned away without speaking a line) come to the house, Nora grabs a vase and shoots out the door. The shot of Nora running away from her father and toward the camera, vase in hand, looks ridiculous, and it should be. Trier allows us to laugh at her absurd desperation.
But the shot also captures the movie’s theme. Nora grabs the vase because it represents for her the house that’s being turned into a movie set, the memories of her recently passed mother, and the frustrations she has with her father. It has sentimental value.
Nora’s hardly alone in attaching feelings to objects or practices, feelings that she cannot speak or even acknowledge. Indeed, Gustav expresses his feelings through his movies, and sees the act of making a film in his family house and trying to cast Nora as a supreme act of paternal love. It’s for him both an admission of guilt and a plea for forgiveness, neither of which he can express through words.
Instead, these big feelings come out in objects, looks, and half-finished conversations, all of which Trier captures with his camera, like the vase in Nora’s hand.
The Value of Sentiment
Neither an actress getting awkward about stool nor a woman running with a vase are the most attention-grabbing parts of this year’s Oscars batch. Even F1, easily the most inconsequential of the Best Picture noms, at least has visceral racing sequences and a killer Hans Zimmer score.
But few Best Picture movies have the same complex character dynamics and eye for detail that we find in Sentimental Value. Trier shows what movies can do best, using images to capture the thoughts we cannot say, the feelings that we cannot express, and the sentiments we cannot forget.
Sentimental Value is available to buy or rent through all major platforms.
Doctor Who Director Says “Something Went Wrong” With Disney Deal
If the past is anything to go by, Doctor Who fans are going to be rehashing the fallout from the BBC’s failed partnership with Disney for a long, long time. There are still debates raging about why Doctor Who was originally cancelled back in 1989 and why the 1996 film failed, after all. But the mess that happened with the House of Mouse is genuinely next level.
After much initial hype, the much vaunted new production partnership fizzled out after just two seasons, leaving the franchise scrambling for a new direction and without a lead actor in its signature role. (And that’s not even counting the entire spinoff that Disney appears to have shelved in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.) And Peter Hoar, who directed season 15 episodes “The Robot Revolution” and “Lucky Day,” has a rather blunt view of the reasons behind the “well-publicized dropping off” of the series.
In a recent interview with Deadline about his plans to reboot the classic sci-fi series Blake’s 7, he cites the most recent era of Doctor Who as something of a cautionary tale, pointing out that neither the bigger budgets that came with the Disney partnership didn’t necessarily improve the series’ quality.
“I don’t think anybody would doubt the skills at the front line of that show, but something went wrong,” he said. “I think there were lots of areas you could point fingers at, but ultimately it wasn’t a better show with more money,” he said. “And that’s a good thing, because we haven’t got the money anymore, nobody has.”
Most Whovians have likely suspected what Hoar says to be true for a while, in fact. Sure, the show has probably never looked better than it did during the Disney seasons, but a whole lot about this partnership just feels as though it was all extremely sus, particularly during star Ncuti Gatwa’s second year.
Per his own admission, showrunner Russell T. Davies was working on scripts for another season with the Fifteenth Doctor as early as the summer of 2024 and was “very confident” that the show — despite not having been renewed yet — would likely be shooting the following winter. Even Gatwa seemed to be planning for at least one more ride in the TARDIS. None of that happened — in fact, Disney became increasingly vague about their plans for the show’s future, hedging their bets about any potential renewal and refusing to comment one way or the other until season 15 finished airing.
It’s clear something happened. But what? Anonymous reports immediately following the break-up announcement pointed to everything from ratings woes and expensive budgets to Davies’s penchant for diverse storytelling as reasons for the partnership’s decline. The show also reportedly struggled to bring new viewers into the franchise, and negative fan reaction to both [admittedly messy] season finales certainly hasn’t helped matters.
Doctor Who will get a chance (yet again!) to reinvent itself later this year, with a Christmas special that must deal with the Billie Piper-shaped mystery that the finale “The Reality War” left behind. What the new iteration of the series will look like — or who will star in it — is anyone’s guess. But it certainly sounds like it’s past time for a fresh start.
