Category: Features
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‘Dune’ (1984) An Odd Slice of ’80s Sci-Fi
I first saw David Lynch’s Dune several years ago, and let’s just say that I was unimpressed. But, after watching Dune: Part Two, I rewatched it, wondering if it was really as bad as I remembered. It was. It’s hard to know where this movie actually goes right, there’s just…
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‘Star Wars’ Has More Problems Than Just Kathleen Kennedy
Whether Kathleen Kennedy leaves Lucasfilm or not, the problems facing Star Wars go much deeper
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What Does the Poor ‘Brave New World’ Box Office Mean for the MCU?
We now have the numbers for Captain America: Brave New World’s second weekend at the domestic box office, and it’s not good news. Over the weekend of the 23rd February, the movie brought in $28 million dollars. This is a drop of 68% from its debut, when it had an…
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Let James Bond Retire With Dignity
We’ve just had the news that Barbara Broccoli is stepping down as producer on the James Bond movies, giving creative control over to Amazon MGM. She’s the daughter of Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, and has been producing the series since Goldeneye in 1995. Naturally, there’s a lot of concern about…
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What Effect Will AI Have on Movies?
If you’re on the internet much nowadays, one thing you’ll not have been able to avoid is the topic of AI. Artificial Intelligence, GenAI, or Large Language Models, as it’s also known. Whatever you call it, it’s there: the images and videos, the attention seeking fake posts, the fan films,…
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Could ‘Thunderbolts’ and ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Be Big Hits This Year?
Two big franchises are making their return to the big screen this year, the MCU and the Jurassic World franchise. The former has a pretty stacked slate after only releasing Deadpool & Wolverine last year. Captain America: Brave New World lands later this month, with Thunderbolts* following in May, and…
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What Makes a Good Adaptation?
For quite a long time, almost as long as cinema has existed, movie studios have turned to adaptions to bring them their next big blockbuster, taking stories from the page and putting them on the screen. But despite the practice they’ve had, Hollywood still doesn’t seem to have found a…
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The Need for New Ideas in Hollywood
The figures for the domestic (US) box office in 2024 were down just 3% on 2023, which doesn’t sound too bad, all things considered. It’s a total of over $8 billion all told, which sounds like a good number, until you start to look a bit deeper, and see what…
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Why is “binge watching” so popular?
One of the things I hate most about streaming is the ‘binge drop’, where an entire season’s worth of episodes are dropped all at once on streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video. They are bad for storytelling, bad for building fandoms, and don’t even seem like the most logical…
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Nostalgia and Self-Reference in Movies
Watching any recent sequel to a legacy franchise can feel like you’re playing nostalgia bongo, with the amount of references and callbacks to previous moments from the franchise’s history. Think the mini Stay Puft marshmallow men in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Frozen Empire, or the reuse of famous quotes in Alien:…
Films and Fiction 