Late Night With The Devil, nostalgic ghost bustin', and more from this week in film

Fall further in love with The Fall Guy in new trailer

Action fans, rom-com lovers, Ryan Gosling devotees, and stunt performer supporters alike, rejoice! There’s a new trailer for what is becoming one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, The Fall Guy. David Leitch’s big blockbuster romance premieres in theaters May 3, but it debuted to warm reviews out of SXSW. Much of that is due to the charm and humor of Gosling and Emily Blunt, who proved their chemistry at this year’s Oscars. But it’s also due to Leitch’s vision for a “love letter to action movies and the hard-working and under-appreciated crew of people who make them.” Read More

Road House review: Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t have the charm to carry this wannabe action comedy

Jake Gyllenhaal’s first appearance in Road House is a joke that tells the audience exactly what to expect. He appears, in shadows shot from behind, shirtless with a sinewy muscled physique in a fighting ring. The camera comes in close to capture his physical perfection; he looks sculpted like a marble statue. His opponent takes one look and concedes. And that’s the movie, all looks and bluster and no substance.Read More

Late Night With The Devil review: a stunning, high-concept 1970s nightmare

There’s a certain quality that select horror movies can conjure, something with a high degree of difficulty that gets even higher when said horror movie is trying to evoke a very specific time and place. We’ve seen it with found footage films like The Blair Witch Project, films about found footage like Sinister, and even flat-out works of historical fiction like The Witch. It’s hard to identify, but you know it when it hits you: The sense that what you’re watching really happened, and you were never meant to see it.Read More

Anya Taylor-Joy fights the world (but mostly Chris Hemsworth) in new Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga trailer

If 2023 cinema was defined by bombs and bows, 2024 is shaping up to be the year of all-out action and miles and miles of sand. We’re not sure if there’s anyone out there who hasn’t at least heard of George Miller’s decade-defining Mad Max: Fury Road at this point, but if you’re one of the 1% and you were jazzed about the excellent early buzz for Ryan Gosling’s TheFall Guy and thought Dune: Part Two could have benefited from even more dunes, oh boy do we have a franchise for you.Read More

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire review: A serviceable franchise entry that tugs on ‘80s nostalgia

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire opens with what’s meant to be a thrilling car-chase ride through lower Manhattan, where we get to see the new Ghostbusters—that’d be the Spengler family (plus Gary!)—in action. Mom, boyfriend, and kids (one now 18, he’ll have you know) are clearly settling in just fine in New York City. They’ve taken over the old fire station that used to house those old Ghostbusters. And in that frenetic first scene, where they all band together to trap a Hell’s Kitchen sewer dragon, we are invited to see how the old has become new again. It’s the old firehouse and the old Ectomobile, but this is a brand new team in a New York City that, actually, feels not that different from the kind Spengler Sr. and his crew roamed in the 1980s. Therein lies the appeal, however limited, of Gil Kenan’s latest franchise entry: it’s gone back to basics—it’s playing the hits!—with only a sprinkling of new or modern or even fresh energy.Read More

Horror at SXSW: Five standout scary movies from the 2024 festival

The film festival portion of South by Southwest is always packed with stars, bringing their would-be blockbusters out to Austin, Texas, for splashy premieres. But it’s also a festival that’s never lost sight of the power of genre. Through its Midnighters section and beyond, the annual movie extravaganza makes quite an effort to deliver the best in sci-fi, fantasy, and, of course, horror to audiences. This year was no different.Read More

Karen Gillan talks Doctor Who, Guardians Of The Galaxy, and playing a femme fatale in Sleeping Dogs

Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.

The actor: Karen Gillan might not have known for sure which roles we’d be asking her about for this Random Roles feature, but she could have made an educated guess about two of them. And, of course, she’d be right. When you’re part of two of the biggest franchises in popular culture, those characters are bound to come up in a career-spanning interview. But if Gillan is tired of talking about either Doctor Who’s Amy Pond or Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Nebula, she doesn’t show it. And if she has any say in it, we haven’t seen the last of them. Read More

20 (or so) movies you need to see on the big screen

There are artists who work on such a large scale that seeing their art in person for the first time can completely change your impression of a piece, no matter how many times you’ve seen it before in reproduction. Some filmmakers are like that too. Take Denis Villeneuve, for instance, who is currently wowing theatrical audiences with the massive scope of Dune: Part Two. He’s just one of a handful of directors, including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, and Christopher Nolan, with big ideas and even bigger executions of them. If you’ve only seen their films on a TV screen, you’re missing out on a unique sensation. They may not have a say in how their films are viewed once they’re out in the wild, but their artistic intent is clear—they were meant to be seen on the largest screen possible in a theater with ideal viewing conditions (minimal stray light, a proper projection system, and state-of-the-art sound, for starters). Read More

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon saga drags on with Scargiver trailer

Say what you will about Zack Snyder, the man loves to craft multiple movies out of a single idea, whether 300 or Army Of The Dead. The latest victim is Netflix’s Rebel Moon, his critically panned 2023 space saga that somehow snagged a continuation—even if the director’s math of millions of people watching part oneisn’t necessarily accurate. Think of it as his own little SnyderVerse because Rebel Moon—Part Two: Scargiver is almost here. Read More

Sleeping Dogs review: Russell Crowe forgets the plot, and so will you

It’s been 24 years since Christopher Nolan made a name for himself with his second feature Memento, so enough time has probably passed that heavily borrowing from it won’t be seen as a major crime. Sleeping Dogs doesn’t unfold in backward chronology, but covers similar territory plotwise: Russell Crowe’s amnesiac ex-cop Roy Freeman doesn’t go so far as to tattoo reminders of important details on his body, but he has labeled everything throughout his house with simple instructions for use, and makes sure to end the day putting his TV remote, or anything else he needs as badly, in places where he knows he’ll need to look for the basics. Read More