Despite its compressed episode run—the final season of Game Of Thrones is only six episodes—the show is taking its time. Season eight’s second episode let us bask in the presence of most of the show’s remaining characters, gathered at Winterfell and passing a long existential night of the soul before taking their…
Warm weather and an assortment of springtime holidays—some religious, some weed-based—kept Americans too busy to go to the movies this past weekend, resulting in what Variety says was the worst Easter weekend in nearly 15 years at the domestic box office. And those who did go out to the theater went with a thirst for…
“That’s because he’s a drug dealer.” With those plainspoken words, writer-director Nia DaCosta tells us everything we need to know about Ollie (Tessa Thompson), a young woman who’s just been awakened in the middle of the night by an acquaintance banging on her back door who wants to know if she’s still in the…
Three years after breaking into the popular consciousness (if not the Billboard charts) with “Good As Hell”—a song that you’ve probably heard, even if you don’t recognize its title—Lizzo’s time has come. Freshly signed to Atlantic Records, Lizzo specializes in R&B/pop empowerment anthems in the Beyoncé mold, with a…
“Seth Rogen dates way above his pay grade” is practically a comedy subgenre of its own at this point. This time around, he’s playing Fred Flarsky, a political writer who reconnects with his unrequited childhood crush, Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), who also happens to be the sitting U.S. Secretary of State, in…
After a festival run that began with its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2017 and stretched out for nearly a year and a half, Mexican writer-director Issa López’s excellent magical realist horror-fantasy Tigers Are Not Afraid is finally set to make its U.S. debut. It will do so courtesy of AMC’s horror streaming…
The rest of the episode was perfectly fine, but this week What We Do In The Shadows featured a guest star whose first appearance on screen prompted a row of exclamation points and some enthusiastic underlining in my notes. Nick Kroll is always hilarious, and his one-episode arc as Manhattan vampire king Simon the…
From its opening frames, Rafiki is bursting with life. Introduced riding her skateboard through the streets of Nairobi, Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) observes the sensual delights that surround her. Bright red peppers being chopped into juicy bits at a food stall. Cassava root being peeled and pounded into flour. The…
What makes a religion, anyway? Historically, Christian churches have served as community centers for their congregants, provided those congregants conformed to a certain moral code. More recently, thanks to the evangelical movement’s (re)positioning of itself as the “moral majority” in the wake of Roe v. Wade, those…
Earlier this year, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan completed a film trilogy that was technically 19 years in the making—except no one really knew it was supposed to be a trilogy until 2017, when the connection between Split and 2000's Unbreakable was revealed in one of the filmmaker’s signature third-act twists.…
Preston Fassel’s novel Our Lady Of The Inferno marked the return of Fangoria magazine’s storied book imprint back in September. Now, the book, which we said “transfers the punchy midcentury pulp aesthetic to the equally grimy milieu of New York City in the early ’80s,” is preparing to bring its grimy…
There were a lot of parallels between season eight’s premiere and the very first episode of Game Of Thrones. Royalty arrives in Winterfell. Someone asks where Arya is. Jaime and Bran meet. The White Walkers arrange body parts into designs. We even get a throwback sexposition scene (sex + exposition, a hallmark of…
Box-office receipts are often sobering reminders for critics that our opinions maybe aren’t as powerful as we like to think they are. But it’s tempting to wonder if the underperformance of Hellboy at the domestic box office this past weekend had anything to do with the gleeful dunking Rotten Tomatoes (and, therefore,…
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and what can only be described as a nonviolent, Star Wars-themed gang of “Mandalorian Mercs” welcomed Jon Favreau on stage for The Mandalorian panel at Star Wars Celebration Chicago, a presentation that gave attendees a first look at the upcoming Disney+ live-action series.
Day three of Star Wars Celebration Chicago kicked off with a panel about the Galaxy’s Edge attractions Disneyland and Disney World are preparing for launch later this summer. Hosted by a geeked-out Josh Gad, the presentation was about as high on branding and corporate partnerships as one might expect—one of the big…
After spoiling us with new Star Wars movies in December 2015, 2016, and 2017, Lucasfilm and Disney sat out the end of 2018 without substantial hints about what our friends Rey, Finn, and BB-8 have been up to since The Last Jedi blew up everything we thought we knew about Star Wars. Finally, though, we have our first…
The title of the ninth official chapter of the Star Wars saga—and the final chapter in the Skywalker series—was announced today in Chicago, at an arena presentation that marked the main event of this year’s Star Wars Celebration. The full title of the film will be Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise Of Skywalker.
Lord Petyr Baelish, a.k.a. Littlefinger, Lord Protector of the Vale and a real sneaky bastard, finally gets what’s coming to him.
