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When J.J. Abrams was wrapping up Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he showed a rough cut to Ava DuVernay, the Selma director he'd recently befriended. It needed something, she told him. Daisy Ridley’s Rey needed to have one more powerful moment, one more show of strength in her final battle with Kylo Ren. Abrams took […]

Thirty-three years. It's been thirty-three years since a female superhero has anchored her own movie—1984's Supergirl being the most recent example1. (Catwoman and Elektra? Both antiheroes. Don't @ me.) And as comic books' first female hero, Wonder Woman was long overdue for her full-length feature adaptation, which dominated theaters this weekend. But despite Diana of […]

R2-D2. Ewoks. BB-8. With nearly every addition to the Star Wars film franchise, there has been some new creature or droid that has delighted audiences and found its way onto lunchboxes and pajama bottoms. Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be no different. This time around, though, the fandom’s obsession with the movie’s creature du […]

More than a decade later, the thing I most remember about Okami is how color follows you wherever you go. Released in 2006, by the now-defunct Clover Studios, the game starred a wolf-god named Amaterasu in a vibrant world inspired by Japanese ink wash painting. The folkoric Japanese landscape Ameratsu finds herself in, though, is […]

If you asked me to list the ways I thought Elton John might one day announce his retirement from touring, "a splashy, CGI-filled VR retrospective" would have been nowhere near the top. Maybe in the low teens. Maybe. Yet, that's exactly what he did earlier today—and a few a weeks before that, it's exactly what […]

For a while there, It floats along nicely. Adapted from Stephen King's famously elephantine blockbuster, which pits a group of awkward Maine teens against a shape-shifting monster, the first stretch of this town-and-clown horror thriller makes for appropriately goony fun. That's partly because, for viewers of a certain age (ahem), It functions as an effective […]

Ana Lily Amirpour became a celebrated filmmaker her first time out. Her debut feature, 2014's black-and-white Iranian vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, got her more than Sundance buzz—it got her a deal to make a second feature with Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures and Vice. That film, The Bad Batch, hits theaters […]

Beginning to think that, post-D23 and San Diego Comic-Con, we wouldn't get any new information about Star Wars: The Last Jedi until it hits theaters this December? Then you hadn't considered the importance of publishing realities, with Entertainment Weekly dropping all kinds of fact bombs about the next installment of the saga from a galaxy […]

It’s such a simple question Rachael (Sean Young) asks Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner: “Have you ever retired a human by mistake?” They’ve just met in Eldon Tyrell’s opulent offices, and Deckard, a replicant bounty hunter, has come to interview Rachael as a means of testing the LAPD’s replicant-detecting […]

You already get a Star Wars movie every year. Star Trek is coming at you from at least two directions. A good chunk of the Marvel movies are basically space opera. Bigscreen fascination with science fiction and fantasy is nothing new—but now you can add the many flavors of TV network, from legacy broadcast to […]