Superheroes are built around iconography: individual heroes’ familiar silhouettes, color palettes, and oft-repeated mantras about power and responsibility are just as important as longstanding relationships and nemeses. As studios churn through superhero comics, looking for movie and TV fodder, it becomes clear what creators consider too iconic and essential to...
Tom Bombadil is the Stan Lee of Lord of the Rings
There are two kinds of Lord of the Rings book fans. The ones who despise Tom Bombadil, hands down the weirdest character in The Lord of the Rings, and the ones who have memorized every word of his silly rhyming songs. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th...
Spider-Gwen just got her own Carnage, and it’s Mary Jane
The Marvel Universe is in the thick of the Venom King in Black crossover, and that can mean only one thing: You get a symbiote! You get a symbiote! Everybody gets an evil-mind-controlled-by-a-space-god symbiote! But there’s one new symbiote on the block that’s actually got a pretty cool editorial story...
Soul is out, so let’s rank the Pixar movies
Ever since Toy Story hit theaters in 1995, movies from Pixar Animation Studios have been radically raising the bar for American animation, from pushing the technological envelope on CG films to addressing big emotional topics that used to be taboo. Over the course of more than 25 years, Pixar has...
Netflix’s live-action Winx Saga goes all in on the magic, but not the Magical Girls
Cartoons made specifically for girls often emphasize friendship. Whether that means powerful fairies teaming up to save the day or glamorous super-spies on a covert mission, these shows are usually built around the kinds of fulfilling relationships between young women that are all too rare on the big screen. While...
The Old Guard gets a star-studded anthology sequel in Tales Through Time
In a year when blockbusters were in short supply, Netflix’s The Old Guard made a massive impression, introducing millions around the world to the immortal warriors of Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez’s comic book series. These characters have seen the world go through seismic changes, from the fall of ancient...
First Mortal Kombat movie photos: Sub-Zero, Jax, Sonya, and Liu Kang revealed
The years-in-the-making Mortal Kombat movie reboot is almost here. On Friday, Warner Bros. revealed the first images of director Simon McQuoid’s upcoming film, which is slated to hit movie theaters and HBO Max in April. It’s our first look at iconic Mortal Kombat characters Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Liu Kang, Kung Lao,...
Tenet fails so Tenet’s ending can succeed
Christopher Nolan’s script for Tenet is its own sort of temporal paradox, built on a structure that is both essential and also the worst way to experience it on first viewing. Characters go on and on about time inversion, admit they’re confused themselves, or just state they don’t know what’s...
Netflix’s archeological drama The Dig gets caught in a bad romance
Robert Preston’s 2007 historical novel The Dig was inspired by a little-known but historically significant British event: on the eve of World War II, in 1939 Suffolk, a self-taught yet well-experienced excavator, Basil Brown, was called to the country estate of Edith Pretty, a widowed mother of one. Mrs. Pretty...
11 best movies new to streaming to watch in January
Welcome to 2021, which isn’t that different than 2020, except all the streaming platforms have entirely different movie line-ups. Really, that’s the only difference. It’s early. We’ll see what happens. January finds Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow’s bumped-to-VOD comedy The King of Staten Island finally hit HBO, a few decidedly...