At this point, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, everyone can recite the origin story of Superman. Born Kal-El on the planet Krypton. Sent to Earth by his parents before that world goes boom. Grew up in a typical middle-American small town named [checks notes] Smallville. Moves to Metropolis …
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HBO’s new comedy series The Franchise is about the making of Tecto: Eye of the Storm, a superhero movie for a barely-disguised version of Marvel Studios. In short order, it becomes clear that the only person in the cast and crew who actually cares at all about the movie’s subject …
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“When someone’s dead, they can’t come back, can they?” It’s a pretty straightforward line of dialogue. But when it was spoken near the end of The Crow, audiences silently shivered. All of us who saw the anticipated comic-book action movie when it opened on the weekend of May 13th, 1994, …
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What do you remember most about the 1994 movie The Crow? Is it the soundtrack, a semiperfect hodgepodge of industrial-music MVPs (My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Machines of Loving Grace, Nine Inch Nails), next-gen alt-rock (Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Stone Temple Pilots), and goth royalty (the Cure)? …
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Superhero films didn’t start with Robert Downey Jr. declaring “I am Iron Man” — there were blockbuster hits, huge swing-and-a-miss failures, and pockets of comic-book cinematic universes way before the MCU came along. The history of Marvel at the movies is long, complicated, and a virtual multiverse of copyright ownerships …
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In the new Netflix drama Supacell, a group of young Black men and women from South London discover that they have superpowers. One is now strong enough to smash open a cash machine with his bare hands, while another can run from London to Edinburgh in only a few seconds. …
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We were supposed to get our first trans Joker 35 years ago. In 1989, DC Comics published Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, a narrative exploration of Batman’s psychological problems, as well as those of his foes. Its scribe was an up-and-coming Scot by the name of Grant …
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Anthony Carrigan was supposed to die in the first episode of Barry. And yet, his cheerful Chechen mobster in the crime-comedy series managed to survive for four seasons. “I was really rewarded with the opportunity to have this arc with Hank in which he starts off as this lovable goofball …
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You’ve read the stories. You’ve debated the casting announcements. You’ve watched a handful of artists try to do justice to a legacy of iconic characters that’s now just short of a century old. Maybe you even demanded that Warners release the Snyder Cut. (If so: Um, thanks?) By now, we …
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Across his grand filmography, Martin Scorsese has weighed up the deadly sins that make us all too human. Greed, wrath, envy, pride — name the flaw, he’s made it visceral on the screen. That he’s 80 years old and bringing out the epic Killers of the Flower Moon, based on …
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