For longtime movie-lovers Ryan Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni, the 2020 lockdowns turned a New Jersey attic into a welcome creative pressure cooker. The pair always dreamed of making a movie, but the uncertainty of the moment — not to mention the tight quarters — created a sense of urgency. Under duress, vibes came pouring out.  The result was Gazer, an icy, paranoid neo-noir thriller peppered with elaborate horror visuals. It...

The hook of Exquisite Corpses — a huge new collaboration from 10 heavy-hitting horror comics creators — is that the citizens of Oak Valley, Maine, must band together when the richest families in America drop 12 of “the deadliest people in the world” into their town for a one-night-only, last-man-standing free-for-all to the death. But while the comic series follows those innocent citizens, Exquisite Corpses: The Game, developed by artist...

Up until recently, the only Black Mirror episode I’ve watched in full was “San Junipero,” where two queer women find unexpected love in a simulation and decide to remain there together. It’s famously known as one of the only Black Mirror episodes with a happy ending. I don’t think I’m the only person out there who is a fan of that episode of Black Mirror and that episode only.  I...

What’s the best movie I can watch on Netflix? We’ve all asked ourselves this question, only to spend the next 15 minutes scrolling through the streaming service’s oddly specific genre menus and getting overwhelmed by the constantly shifting trend menus. Netflix’s huge catalog of movies continues to expand day by day, week by week, month by month. This makes keeping up to date with best the service has to offer...

It doesn’t feel quite right to call Warfare a war movie. At least not in the traditional sense. War movies generally have arcs and scope; they search for meaning in the violence. Warfare’s aims are more direct. According to co-directors Alex Garland (Civil War, Annihilation, Ex Machina) and ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, the goal of the film was to put viewers in the shoes of its soldier characters, and communicate...

“Chicken jockey,” take a step back — it’s time for the official music video of “Steve’s Lava Chicken” to have a moment in the Minecraft movie spotlight. And by “official music video,” we mean “The Warner Bros. folks have released a 50-second clip from A Minecraft Movie and comically labeled it as an official music video.” As Steve, Jack Black sings a few little songs in A Minecraft Movie, but...

Black Mirror’s strain of science fiction is known primarily for three things: a bleak tone, twist endings, and a point to make about the current moment.  How creator Charlie Brooker checks those boxes isn’t always unpredictable; with a freshly released seventh season on Netflix, Black Mirror fans certainly know there’s something coming, and part of the trick to a good Mirror episode is how it feels like it boxes a...

There are two kinds of messy big-budget movies, and as of 2025, Ryan Coogler has made them both. There’s the Marvel kind (seen in Coogler’s Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), where directorial vision comes second to the studio machine, and to shared-universe requirements, VFX constraints, notes from audience test screenings, and a restrictive house style. And then there’s the Sinners kind, where no matter the studio process, the...

Jurassic Park III hails from a very different time in franchise moviemaking. When sequels could just have numbers, not increasingly long and abstruse subtitles, and the credits scene was but a twinkle in the eye of Kevin Feige. The first Jurassic Park movie to neither be directed by Steven Spielberg nor based on the plot of a Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park III made baby Brontosaurus steps into the realm...

A sequel to a beloved anthology TV episode might seem like a cash grab; two in one season could reek of desperation. Yet Charlie Brooker bests the skepticism in Black Mirror season 7 with a double whammy of “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” a follow-up to season 4’s Star Trek spoof, and “Plaything,” a sci-fi tragedy that returns to the timeline of the interactive special Bandersnatch — complete with a new...