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12/01/2025

What would the Marvel Cinematic Universe be without its share of romance? Lesser, that’s for sure.

While the cinematic universe hasn’t always been so great at telling love stories (probably because it hasn’t always been so great about prioritizing fully-fleshed-out female characters… not that you can’t have a love story between two men ), it has traded in mostly half-hearted “obligatory” romances for meatier stuff in recent flicks.

Let’s look at the canon romances—sorry, Stucky, you know you’d top this list, if it were based on subtext and fandom alone—of the MCU, from worst to best.

12/01/2025

Gene Roddenberry’s vision of space-age utopia has always been one of idealism and intelligence, of peace and prosperity.

From the start, he wanted Star Trek to showcase the best of humanity, confronting modern-day issues and appearing as an aspirational model for society. So, naturally, when it came time to hurl us 300 years into the future, he did it by building on stories from 400 years in the past.

Having cut his teeth writing on early Westerns and police procedurals, Roddenberry wanted to elevate his sci-fi weekly into something more than typical genre television – he wanted to appeal to intellectuals. (Something he may have been a little too good at; Trek’s original pilot, “The Cage,” was turned down for being “too cerebral.”) And how better to appeal to the thinking person than with a library’s worth of bookish influences.

Classic literature was right there in Roddenberry’s original pitch: Captain Kirk was described as a Horatio Hornblower-type, while the show itself was referred to as Gulliver’s Travels in space. His sequel series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, went even farther, bringing in Raymond Chandler, Sherlock Holmes, and Mark Twain.

But no authorial influence is felt anywhere as strongly as that of William Shakespeare. The bard’s works have been an integral, foundational part of Star Trek from the very beginning.

11/30/2025

J. Robert Oppenheimer's life played something like a Frankenstein story, which might be why sci-fi movies were never the same after the man in the porkpie hat went to Los Alamos.

When we recently compiled our list of science fiction movies based on true stories, one film that didn’t make the list was Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer. After all, the technology behind the nuclear bomb can no longer be said to be undiscovered, sadly. Nonetheless, Oppenheimer remains the archetypal science fiction story—one about a mad scientist who devises a new machine that changes the world through terrible unforeseen consequences. He is an an American Prometheus, yes, but also a regular Yankee Frankenstein. More than that though, by ushering in the nuclear age, Oppenheimer may have lit the fuse on the genre of cinematic science fiction.

It is hardly a new observation, but walk into any cinema in the 1950s and you will find no shortage of creatures, monsters, or occasionally people grown to giant size by the mysterious power of radiation. You don’t need to look too closely to figure out what very real fears lie behind the flying saucers laying waste to American monuments.

But even so, looking back from our vantage point in 2025 it can be hard to appreciate how much the shadow of the mushroom cloud completely transformed science fiction movies, and the genre as we knew it, forever.

11/30/2025

Yes, True Detective: Night Country knows all about the Dyatlov Pass incident.

True Detective season 4, subtitled True Detective: Night Country, isn’t shy about acknowledging its influences. In the first episode alone, the series showcases a DVD copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing, a well-worn edition of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and even several instances of the swirly “Carcosa” symbol from True Detective season 1.

There’s another major influence at play, however, and it comes directly from the terrifying annals of history. While episode 1 didn’t explicitly shout it out as an inspiration, showrunner Issa López mentioned it when speaking to Den of Geek and other outlets before season 1 premiered.

“Some mysteries that obsessed me as a child were the Dyatlov Pass incident and the Mary Celeste,” Lopez said.

If you’re like me and you spend an inordinate amount of time reading creepy “AskReddit” threads, you’ve undoubtedly already heard of the Dyatlov Pass mystery. Any time a thread in Reddit’s r/AskReddit forum comes forward with a prompt akin to “What’s the creepiest real life mystery we know of?”, Dyatlov Pass is sure to pop up in the replies and it’s not hard to see why. The Dyatlov Pass incident is the stuff of nightmares. Be sure to read the Wikipedia entry in full over here (really: it’s like a top 10 Wikipedia page of all time), but here’s a brief recap of the spooky events.

In early February 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers, led by Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov, were making their way through the northern Ural Mountains in Russia when … something bad happened and they died. What happened exactly? Well, that’s where all the shrug emojis begin. When no one in the group had made contact with the outside world by February 20, the hikers’ friends and family requested a rescue operation from the Soviet Union. Searchers were dispatched and happed upon the Dyatlov party’s tent on Kholat Syakhl (which creepily means “dead mountain” in Russian). And that’s where the horror began.

11/30/2025

It is hard to recall a more vocal or stunned reaction at the movies than when my theater echoed with a hundred different gasps in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

You know the scene. Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris Washington has finally realized just how sinister the Armitage family’s designs for him are: the doorway is blocked by snide little brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), the patriarchal Dean (Bradley Whitford) has finally stopped bragging about how he voted for Obama and is now speaking about how white people are gods, and Chris’ white girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), is desperately searching her massive purse for the car keys that would be Chris’ salvation.

Peele ratchets up the tension of the sequence like the classic paranoia thrillers that influenced him in his youth. Everyone is out to get Chris. But the character and the audience are only clued into how devastatingly true that is when Rose finally reveals she’s known where her keys were the whole time.

She is, in fact, one of them—a white person who’s exoticized Chris’ Blackness with malevolent intent. Some audience members gasped out of shock that the one “good” white person in the movie was in on the conspiracy; others because they knew the she-devil could not be trusted all along. Most just felt the obvious sense of betrayal though. The one person Chris thought he could trust was working to exploit and commodify his Black skin.

This is why the Get Out ending feels so viciously intimate. After learning that Rose’s family intended to trap him in the “sunken place,” where he’d be trapped in a mental limbo while an elderly white man took control of his young Black body, Chris goes on a rampage, killing all of the Armitages, except Rose, in a blood-soaked escape. Only then, at the end of things, while being faced with the woman who manipulated him and her Luciferian smile, does he put his hands around her throat and squeeze… before letting her breathe.

It’s a bleak ending, however, it could have been much grimmer than that! In fact, the ending of Get Out is fairly triumphant as it reveals a feel-good twist. As it turns out, we were watching a bro movie all along when Chris’ pal Rod (Lil Real Howery) shows up to drive Chris home. “I’m TS, mo*********ng, A,” Rod says. “We handle s**t. That’s what we do. Consider this situation fu***ng handled.”

The audience I saw Get Out with reacted loudly to that scene too, albeit this time with applause and cheers. It’s the ending we wanted… although it’s about a million miles away from where Peele and Kaluuya originally planned.

11/30/2025

Harrison Ford has only been nominated for an Oscar once in his career. It’s a strange thing to remember when considering one of the most prolific and defining movie stars of his generation.

This is the man who was Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and Rick Deckard, to name but a few. For many he also remains the best Jack Ryan, and emanates a world-weary grumpiness that is like a blast from the Humphrey Bogart past—a comparison that Steven Spielberg and Sydney Po***ck both invited by casting Ford in Bogie-inspired roles.

Yet unlike Bogart, who won an Oscar for The African Queen and was nominated on two other occasions, Ford only garnered the Academy’s attention once, and it was for a superb if regrettably less-than-fully-appreciated thriller, which released 40 years ago this month: Peter Weir’s Witness.

As a sophisticated and surprisingly economical thriller with a hard R-rating and a downbeat ending, Witness is a textbook definition of the type of movie they don’t make anymore. It’s a medium-budgeted studio programmer for adults that somehow cultivated enough class and humanity to be remembered by the Academy almost a full year later after its release. In addition to Ford getting a Best Actor nomination, Witness was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography—albeit the only award it won was for Best Original Screenplay, courtesy of William Kelley, Pamela Wallace, and Earl W. Wallace.

The screenplay in Witness is excellent, yet it is the quiet authenticity cradled by the film’s Australian director, and his ability to recognize that same stoic naturalism in one of the 1980s’ biggest movie stars, which made Witness such a striking film, as well as one of the most important in Ford’s career.

Witness is nominally a thriller, but in practice it’s a doomed romance. And the nature of that ruination is written entirely in Ford’s performance and its equal measures of sensitivity and wrath, intelligence and barbarism. It was a turn worthy of an Oscar nomination. Forty years later, it remains a gem in Ford’s catalog, and perhaps an indictment of the Academy since more of its ilk, including from this star, have gone so unrecognized.

11/30/2025

Over 50 years later, the original 1968 movie Planet of the Apes still feels revolutionary.

11/30/2025

1989’s The Punisher is Marvel’s first superhero movie.

When you see it written out this way, it is really weird, isn’t it? But it’s true. The Punisher, the 1989 movie starring Dolph Lundgren as Marvel’s premiere vigilante, really is the first Marvel superhero movie. While other Marvel superheroes (most notably Hulk and Spider-Man) had shown up in TV movies and series, they weren’t big screen concerns.

The 1944 Captain America movie serial doesn’t count, because it’s a serial not a feature film. The 1986 Howard the Duck movie is technically the first Marvel film, but he isn’t a superhero. None of ’em check all the appropriate boxes. The Punisher, for better or worse, does.

The Punisher was written by Boaz Yakin (who eventually went on to direct Remember the Titans and co-write Now You See Me) and directed by Mark Goldblatt (Dead Heat, a zombie cop moviewhich starred the immortal team of…ummmm…Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo). Robert Mark Kamen of the Karate Kid and Taken franchises (as well as plenty more) produced. Along for the ride with Dolph Lundgren are Louis Gossett Jr. and former Bond villain Jeroen Krabbe.

Its shortcomings, are, of course, well-documented all over the internet. The $11 million budget, modest even by the standards of the late ’80s, means the cracks start to show pretty early. Shooting in Australia was likely a cost-saving measure, but it makes for some amusingly strange discrepancies–like when Frank arrives at a tiny, dilapidated amusement park with a sign that proclaims this is “Coney Island” (it most certainly is not), or the hilarious attempts at Italian-American gangster speak from some of the goons, all of whom make Fat Tony and his guys on The Simpsons sound nuanced.

On the other hand, The Punisher can almost be applauded for deliberately avoiding the over-the-top nature of superhero movies. When you take away the Marvel brand and the famous name, it plays like virtually any other low-budget action movie, which is exactly what you want for this character at this time.

There’s nothing on display from Marvel lore. None of the mobsters are taken from the Marvel Universe, nor are the Yakuza. There’s a cigar-chomping bartender who faintly resembles Jack Kirby, one could imagine the old man who misses his stop when Punisher commandeers a city bus would make for a fine Stan Lee cameo (he didn’t do them back in those days), and perhaps you can pretend that the Yakuza who are here to make life difficult for the Italians are, in fact, a branch of Marvel’s famed ninja clan, The Hand. The movie does have its charms, however

11/30/2025

Long before Elphaba and Galinda, Return to Oz gave us dark Oz and did it best.

Thanks to the release of Wicked: For Good, thousands of moviegoers are learning what Broadway fans have long known and book readers have known even longer: Wicked is an incredibly dark take on The Wizard of Oz.

Starting with Gregory Maguire’s 1995 revisionist novel, continuing through the smash hit musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, and now to the pair of films directed by Jon M. Chu, Wicked builds sympathy for the Wicked Witch Elphaba (until it suddenly doesn’t) by making Glinda a shallow backstabber, the Wizard an autocrat, and Dorothy’s friends victims of body horror.

Wicked is hardly the first or last story to cast a shadow of the world of Oz, as even Baum’s work had darker tones than anything in the 1939 musical. But few have done it better than 1985’s Return to Oz, the infamous Wizard of Oz sequel that scarred an entire generation of ’80s kids.

Return to Oz often feels more like horror than it does a MGM musical, which is ironic since the ’85 film was produced by Disney during a low point, but the follow-up nonetheless achieves that tone without ever sacrificing the fundamental decency of its main characters.

11/30/2025

A lot happens in the first four episodes of ’ final season.

Vecna’s back to his old, overly complicated tricks, rounding up a gang of (now even younger!) kids in the service of some nefarious plan to remake the world. Max is still in a coma, but her mind is hiding in a cave in the midst of Henry Creel’s memories.

Will finally gets his big hero moment, tapping into the Upside Down’s hive mind, literally crushing his enemies with his newfound powers, and wiping blood off his nose, Eleven-style. And of course, there’s a surprise return — though it’s probably not one that anyone was really hoping for.

Season 5 reveals that Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) and her fellow military scientists have developed some sort of weapon that seems to weaken Eleven and neutralize her powers. Hopper refers to it as her “kryptonite,” because this show is nothing if not obsessed with pop culture references, but no one’s really sure what it is or how it works.

As the dad-daughter duo infiltrate Kay’s military base in the Upside Down, El steals a glimpse from a soldier’s mind that something — someone — powerful is being kept behind a locked door. She assume’s it’s Vecna, and that he must have something to do with the supposed kryptonite that renders her helpless almost as son as she enters the mysterious lab.

But it’s not Vecna waiting for her behind that super secret door. Instead, she discovers Kali Prasad (Linnea Berthelsen), otherwise known as “Eight,” one of her fellow experiments from the Hawkins lab that El had always viewed as her sister. Sporting a shaved head and hooked up to a bunch of ominous-looking medical equipment, the girl definitely doesn’t look like she’s been living her best life since the last time we saw her back in season 2.

For those who don’t remember — which I have to assume is probably most viewers at this point, thank god for the quick flashback that reminded us all who this kid even is – Kali was introduced back in season 2 episode “The Lost Sister.” Like Eleven, she was one of the many psychic children taken by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), with the unique ability to project illusions and cause people to see what’s not there. She eventually broke out of the Hawkins lab, ending up as the leader of a gang of teen misfits and eager to take revenge on those who wronged her. Though she helped her adopted sister learn to use her own rage and trauma to tap into her powers — and her introduction foreshadowed many aspects of Vecna’s origins — Kali wasn’t interested in helping Eleven save her friends back in Hawkins, and the two parted ways. We haven’t heard from (or about) her since.

How she fits into the series’ endgame is… well, let’s just call it an open question. On some level, Eight’s return makes sense. The Duffer brothers have been insistent that this final installment of the series is all about going back to the beginning — closing loops, answering lingering questions, filling in all the gaps they’ve left for viewers to speculate over along the way. But while almost everyone is certainly eager to find out the answers to things like “why Will Byers was taken in the first place,” or “is Max ever going to wake up,” it’s hard to imagine that anyone was all that eager to see Kali again, given that the episode in which she originally appeared is almost universally considered to be one of the series’ worst.

It also doesn’t help that the whole “kryptonite” angle really doesn’t make any sense. Sure, Kay and her goons appear to have some sort of… something that can neutralize Eleven’s powers, but it’s not entirely clear what it actually is. Is it Kali herself? Is Kay using the girl’s abilities to somehow suppress Eleven’s? Or was Eight simply experimented on so much that the military finally hit on some kind of universal psychic suppressant? And why does any of this require Kali to be strung up in a sealed room in a position that so deliberately mirrors Vecna’s pose in the Upside Down last season?

It seems likely that Eight is going to have a fairly key role to play in the series’ final episodes — whether we want her to or not. Is she the kryptonite that can stop Vecna? Who will somehow neutralize Will’s newfound, vaguely dark abilities when they go too far? We’ll have to wait for Christmas to find out.

11/30/2025

A good franchise is hard to kill. Bad ones, like the seven-film torture device Police Academy, can be even harder to exterminate. But sometimes doomed series are finally put out of their misery. Up on the shelf they go, doomed to a future of languishing on lists like this one.

The murder weapon is usually money. More specifically, the lack thereof. A big enough failure means a franchise won’t get another chance to pull their act together, and the most spectacular bombs get to live on as warnings to future film students. Even more interesting are the ones that aren’t total flops, the movies that maybe made a profit, but one so small or negligible that their studios decided to put that old franchise to bed, anyway. Here are 15 movies that killed their respective franchises.

11/30/2025

Let's look back at the highs and lows of the MCU's most chaotic phase of movies and shows.

For those who don’t remember, Marvel’s fifth phase came sooner than initially intended, as franchise boss Kevin Feige decided to bring a quick end to the more experimental Phase Four by introducing Kang the Conquerer as the new big bad in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. No sooner did that movie release than news leaked of Kang actor Jonathan Major’s misdoings, not only tampering any excitement but forcing Marvel to once again restructure.

The desperation of that restructure can be seen all over Phase Four. In the span of two years, Marvel had to change its plan from building to a battle against Kang and his variants in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty to setting up Doctor Doom and the destruction of the multiverse with Avengers: Doomsday.

Without a doubt, the chaos resulted in some lackluster entries, with Marvel relying on an increasingly tired formula instead of exploring something new. At the same time, Phase Five saw the release of some real standouts, which prove that the period wasn’t a waste of time. Here is every film and TV show from the MCU Phase Five ranked.

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