Warning: major spoilers ahead for “Stranger Things” season 4, volume 1. The worldbuilding in “Stranger Things” has always had its roots in horror, be it in the form of a parallel shadow realm known as the Upside Down that poses a continuous threat to the central characters or the kind of monsters that spring forth […]

Tom Cruise blew right past the danger zone and decided to land his plane in some very exclusive territory: the $100 million opening club. Believe it or not, one of the world’s biggest movie stars — whose career has spanned four action-packed decades — has never had an opening weekend hit the $100 million mark.  […]

Warning: there are spoilers for “Stranger Things” season 4 below. “Stranger Things” season 4 is here — and it’s bigger, more ambitious, and the scariest chapter set in Hawkins yet. Vecna, the sci-fi show’s latest big bad, is the most terrifying monster in the show’s history — and makes the previously introduced Demogorgons and Mind […]

Religion has always been integral to “Battlestar Galactica.” Glen A. Larson, the creator of the original 1978 series, was a practicing Mormon and his faith influenced the series. For instance, Kobol, humanity’s original home-world in “BSG,” is an obvious anagram of Kolob, which Mormons believe to be a celestial body close to the throne of God. […]

“Stranger Things” is back, and its new season is trading in super-malls and scrunchies for a much darker sign of the times: the Satanic Panic. While the show’s fourth season doesn’t get into the real-life gory details of the moral panic that swept North America in the 1980s, the specter of Satanic Panic finds its […]

Although the bulk of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” is set in a fictional Oklahoma town, the movie at one point returns to a familiar location from “Ghostbusters II”: namely, Ray’s Occult Books in Manhattan. As its name implies, this is the shop owned by Dan Aykroyd’s character, Ray Stantz. After chasing the metal-eating ghost Muncher through the streets of […]

It can be difficult to grasp just how influential “Smallville” was back in 2001. In 2022, a year when all screens big and small are dominated by superheroes, it’s strange to imagine a time when a Superman prequel show was anything but a safe bet. Somewhat miraculously, “Smallville” ran for a whopping 10 seasons, beginning […]

John McTiernan’s 1987 sci-fi actioner “Predator” is a clever, satirical, gloriously ultraviolent takedown of military-inflected supra-masculinity. The film is populated by sweaty, muscular, weapon-fetishizing soldier types who finally encounter something they cannot merely blast out of the trees: a strong, towering, laser-armed alien game hunter who picks off humans for sport. Ultimately the film’s Final […]

For the first time ever, Jackie Chan’s “Police Story” trilogy is getting a 4K UHD box set. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon’s U.K. site, but the set is region free, meaning that you can watch it anywhere with the player you already have. The title will be released on September 26, 2022 and it retails for […]

Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) has been queer-coded since “Stranger Things” began. When the sweet, sensitive kid went missing in the show’s first season, school bullies joked that he was off “in fairyland,” while his mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), revealed that his deadbeat dad used to call him homophobic slurs. When Will came back from the […]