David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is—in many ways—a misbegotten botch job. Still, as with more than a few ineffectively ambitious films before it, the artistic flourishes Lynch grafted onto Frank Herbert’s sprawling Machiavellian narrative of warring space dynasties have earned it true cult classic status. Today, fans of the …
Read More »'The Mandalorian' Is Getting a Movie—Which It Should Have Been All Along
Today in news we weren’t expecting in the second week of 2024: The Mandalorian is getting a movie. Titled The Mandalorian & Grogu, the movie, according to Lucasfilm, will begin production this year with Jon Favreau, who created the TV series and served as showrunner, set to direct. This is …
Read More »The 22 Most Anticipated Movies of 2024
All told, despite the fact that the industry was on strike for half of the year, 2023 was a pretty good year to go to the movies. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Fast X, Barbenheimer—all of them were big hits at the box office. Problem is, the real pain of …
Read More »Video Game Adaptations Could Keep Beating Marvel at the Box Office in 2024
One of the more amusing TikToks that followed the announcement of the forthcoming Legend of Zelda movie riffs on a scene from the animated series Drawn Together. In it, the blue-caped Captain Hero sits in a wheelchair at the bottom of a staircase next to the text “Zelda fans when …
Read More »The 15 Best Movies You Missed in 2023—and Where to Watch Them
While Barbenheimer was undoubtedly the biggest movie story of 2023, the year in film was one jam-packed with dozens of truly great movies—not all of which managed to generate the nonstop headlines or mainstream traction that an iconic doll and the “father of the atomic bomb” did. It was a …
Read More »The Hollywood Strikes Stopped AI From Taking Your Job. But for How Long?
Revolt against the machines began at Swingers. And at Bob’s Big Boy, where for weeks Drew Carey picked up the tab. Members of the Writers Guild of America, or WGA, met at both Los Angeles-area diners frequently during their 148-day strike, which hinged on protecting Hollywood’s scribes from being overrun …
Read More »'Ferrari' Is Michael Mann’s Cinematic Auto Biography
Midway through Ferrari, the iconic Italian motor-racing impresario sits at a table with his adolescent son, born of his mistress. Enzo Ferrari sketches a design for a 12-cylinder engine, in long, chalky swoops, like a seamstress designing an elegant gown. He explains to his boy that the curved, sweeping angles …
Read More »The 15 Best Movies of 2023—and Where to Watch Them
Put bluntly, picking the best movies of 2023 was tough. The double-whammy of Barbie and Oppenheimer gave the box office a long-overdue, post-Covid-19 jolt, only to be followed by a pair of months-long strikes in Hollywood that shut down production on nearly all the films in the works for 2024 …
Read More »In the Age of AI, 'Her' Is a Fairy Tale
When Spike Jonze’s Her came out in 2013, the film about a lonely man falling for an artificially intelligent operating system won widespread praise. Watching today, the qualities critics celebrated at the time are still there—it’s a gentle, enjoyably melancholy story, twee but not damnably so—but something else stands out. …
Read More »Netflix’s Big Data Dump Shows Just OK TV Is Here to Stay
Netflix just did the unthinkable: It released viewership numbers. After years of withholding information on how many hours subscribers spent watching its shows and movies, on Tuesday the streaming giant released a huge trove of data. It covers 18,000 titles, breaking them all down by how many hours viewers have …
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