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Andy Serkis Talks Knull MCU Return (Photo Credit – Instagram)

Whenever there is talk of a mo-cap character, Andy Serkis is always mentioned. Despite not being from the technology industry, Serkis is still a motion capture pioneer. He has played roles in The Jungle Book’s Baloo, King Kong, Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars, Caesar in Planet of the Apes, and Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies.

After his directorial work on Venom: Let There Be Carnage and his portrayal of Ulysses Klaue in the MCU, Serkis has returned to Marvel in Venom: The Last Dance. In typical Serkis fashion, he took on the role of a non-human character. This time, he portrayed Knull, the main antagonist of the movie. Fans now wonder whether Knull will eventually enter the MCU, and the actor has reacted to it.

Andy Serkis’s “Let’s See What Happens...

Few Hollywood duos are as iconic as Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron. The two have had quite the journey together; creating some of the biggest movies in their careers over the course of a decade. Starting in 1984, they made one of the most iconic action films of all time, The Terminator.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Terminator in the film series The Terminator | Credit: Carolco Pictures

Soon after, they made the much-anticipated 1991 sequel to the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In 1994, they collaborated once more in their cult-classic film, True Lies. With how much success they have seen together, one cannot help but wonder if they could have done more work together.

However, it would seem that they almost got the opportunity to collaborate again in one of Hollywood’s most iconic franchises, Planet of the Apes.

Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Rescue

The 80’s and 90’s were the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career.

On December 4, 1993, Charlton Heston hosted Saturday Night Live. While the show was solid overall, the start of the episode — including the cold open, opening montage and monologue — was something truly unique among SNL’s 900-plus episodes. Rather than try to describe it myself, however, I’ll leave it to the man who wrote and conceived of it: veteran TV writer David Mandel.

Mandel later worked on Seinfeld and Veep, but before that, he was a writer on Saturday Night Live where the opening of the Heston episode was his crowning achievement.

The Night ‘SNL’ Went to the Apes

I love format-breaking. I did the documentary episode of Veep, and I did the backwards episode of Seinfeld. Over the years, Saturday Night Live had done some very cool format-breaking that a lot of people had forgotten about. In the Charles Grodin episode, the concept is that Charles Grodin did all this...

Steven Soderbergh's 2001 Las Vegas heist movie "Ocean's Eleven" is a whole lot of fun. Taking cues from the original 1960 film of the same name, which starred the Rat Pack as various skilled criminals working with con artist and thief Danny Ocean, "Ocean's Eleven" is one of the ultimate heist flicks of all time. A big part of what makes it work, aside from Soderbergh's skilled direction and a whip-smart script (courtesy of Soderbergh and co-writer Ted Griffin), is the incredible cast who surround George Clooney's version of Danny Ocean. His team is made up of Brad Pitt as his best friend Rusty, Bernie Mac as conman and gambling enthusiast Frank, Elliott Gould as former casino owner Reuben Tishkoff, Don Cheadle as explosives expert Basher Tarr, Casey Affleck and Scott Caan as mechanics Virgil and Turk Malloy, Quin Shaobo as acrobat "The Amazing" Yen, Eddie Jemison as tech expert Livingston Dell,...

Box Office: For The First Time In Cinema’s History, Sequels Rule Top 10 Highest-Grossers List, With Deadpool & Wolverine & Dune 2 In Top 5 (Photo Credit – Instagram)

2024 is about to end as the last month, December, is just around the corner. Multiple movies have been released in the theatres; some did exceptionally well, while others failed to win hearts. But from those tons of movies, we have got the highest-grossing films of the year, and interestingly, all the top 10 films are sequels, including Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Dune 2, and Despicable Me 4 are a few names. It has reportedly happened for the first time in a long time. Scroll below for the deets.

The MCU movie is the second highest-grossing film of the year and achieved utter success when it was released on Disney+, its home streaming platform. The film brought Hugh Jackman back as Logan, and it was...

Exclusive: On the back of Smile 2‘s box office success, Raúl Castillo has come aboard for a supporting role in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, 20th Century Studios’ remake of the classic 1992 psychological thriller, starring Maika Monroe and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Castillo takes over the part of Michael Bartel as the architect husband of Winstead’s character, portrayed in the original film by Annabella Sciorra. Claire Bartel is happily married and pregnant for the second time when she becomes the target of a dark plot on the part of a nanny — originally portrayed by Rebecca De Mornay, and now by Monroe. Directed by Curtis Hanson, the original watches as Peyton infiltrates the lives of the Bartel family after experiencing personal and professional ruin, slowly gaining their trust while manipulating them from within. Her ultimate goal? To destroy Claire and assume her place within her family.

Michelle Garza Cervera...

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This November, Tubi is bringing you a lot of entertainment from the time-travel mystery thriller series 11.22.63 to a dark medical drama series Nip/Tuck. However, for the purposes of this article, we are only including the films that are coming to Tubi this month and have a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score. So, check out the 10 best films that are coming to Tubi in November 2024 with a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

Licorice Pizza (November 1) Credit – United Artists Releasing Rotten Tomatoes Score: 90%

Licorice Pizza is a romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The 2021 film is set in 1973 and it follows the relationship between Gary Valentine, a teen actor, and Alana Kane, a directionless young woman as they try to grow up and fall in love in California’s San Fernando Valley. Licorice Pizza stars Alana Haim,...

For about a decade, Leonardo DiCaprio was attached to produce a big screen reboot of the classic genre property The Twilight Zone through his company Appian Way. Multiple drafts of the script were written and Joseph Kosinski was set to direct the film… but it never made it into production. The Twilight Zone got a small screen reboot from producer Jordan Peele and his company Monkeypaw Productions instead. But DiCaprio isn’t leaving the Twilight Zone behind entirely, as IndieWire reports that he is now producing a documentary about the show’s creator, Rod Serling!

Appian Way is teaming up with Goodlight, Grub Street Films, and Verdi Productions to make this documentary happen. DiCaprio is producing alongside Chad A. Verdi, Jennifer Davisson, Phillip Watson, Taylor Digilio, Blake J. Harris, Michelle Verdi, Chad Verdi Jr., Paul Luba, and Jonah Tulis. Tulis, who previously directed GameStop: Rise of the Players and Console Wars,...

The year 2024 has seen an ever-growing list of biopics about legendary figures being portrayed by phenomenal actors. Dennis Quaid, Angelina Jolie, Timothée Chalamet, and many more actors joined the biopic bandwagon.

Seems like another semi-biopic film is on the horizon, but this one has a non-conventional actor. The upcoming Robbie Williams biopic movie Better Man employed a CGI Monkey to portray the British pop icon. The singer allegedly justified the move by stating that he always felt like a performing monkey when he walked on stage.

Another one joins the list: A bizarre creative choice Robbie Williams in Angels Mv | Credits: @robbiewilliamsvideos

Dennis Quaid portrayed former President Ronald Reagan in his biopic film Reagan. Timothée Chalamet will portray the table tennis player Marty Reisman in Josh Safdie’s upcoming sports drama Marty Supreme.

Sebastian Stan too joined the list by stepping into the shoes of the president-elect Donald Trump in...

Tim Burton At The Worldwide Box Office: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Enters Top 3( Photo Credit – Instagram )

Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice recently crossed a major milestone at the worldwide box office, and with that, it has become one of the director’s top 3 highest-grossing films. The director is known for bringing the Goth culture into American movies and is famous for his gothic horror and fantasy flicks. A few weeks back, the Michael Keaton starrer became the actor and director’s highest-grossing film in their collaborative career. It surpassed Batman’s $410 million+ global haul, and now it has entered the director’s top 5 biggest films list. Scroll below for the deets.

Burton made his film debut with the comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure but gained prominence with this 2024 movie’s predecessor, Beetlejuice. It was released in 1988, and the sequel arrived after over three and a half decades. The studio was skeptical about the film’s box office performance,...

Forget jam-packed, this week's episode of the Empire podcast is positively marmaladen with great guests, folks! To kick things off, Chris Hewitt talks to Paddington In Peru stars Hugh Bonneville and Emily Mortimer (the new Mrs. Brown) about tarantulas, Paddington tantrums, and shooting in the wilds of Basingstoke [20:47 — 35:27 approx]. Then, that man Hewitt peels back the layers of magical-social-realist drama Bird with the great British director Andrea Arnold as the duo discuss working with non-actors, switching between TV and filmmaking, and shooting in Gravesend [51:56 - 1:07:39 approx]. And as if that weren't treat enough, we've also got an extended excerpt from our spoiler special interview with Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer, in which we learn all about [Spoiler], [Bigger Spoiler] and shooting in [Spoiler] [1:34:29 - 1:50:10 approx].

Then, Chris is joined back in the podbooth by Helen O'Hara, James Dyer, and Alex Godfrey for a merry old show in which this week's listener question has the podding quartet breaking down...

Part of the reason Colin Farrell wanted to pursue a television series about Oz Cobb (a.k.a. The Penguin) is because the character "kind of was a little bit of comic relief" in The Batman, the actor explains in a new interview with SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show With Julia Cunningham.

Last year, it was announced that Nintendo and Arad Productions were in the process of making a live-action movie based on the iconic video game franchise The Legend of Zelda, with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes director Wes Ball at the helm. The Legend of Zelda is a classic fantasy tale where a young swordsman named Link fights the forces of evil to save the Princess Zelda and Kingdom of Hyrule; the details change a bit with each game, but the overall story remains more or less the same. Zelda is a long-running video game series that's been around since the 1986, and its fans are legion. Suffice to say, the announcement of a movie was a big deal.

Now we have a little bit better of an idea of when we'll get to watch it...kind of. The sleuths over at IGN always have their nose to the ground for video game news,...

This article contains mild spoilers for "The Simpsons" season 36 episode "Desperately Seeking Lisa."

"The Simpsons" season 36 is well underway, and the longest-running American animated show is still going strong. Sure, it may not have an all-time best episode airing weekly and it is no longer revolutionizing comedy and animation as we know it, but it is still impressive that "The Simpsons" is delivering entertaining episodes after so many years. Also impressive is that the animated sitcom can still deliver cool new bits of lore for Springfield and its surroundings, like how Sideshow Bob is now wealthy after starting a rake business or revealing how Homer manages to mess up at his job without causing a nuclear meltdown every day.

Similarly, the third episode of season 36 of "The Simpsons," titled "Desperately Seeking Lisa," has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Easter egg teasing the in-universe return of a fan-favorite musical gag.

In the episode, Lisa...

Snoop Dogg says he’s working on a movie inspired by his love for Planet of the Apes but with a twist.

The rapper is taking his creativity to new heights by venturing into filmmaking, drawing inspiration from one of his favorite film franchises, Planet of the Apes. Recently, the iconic rapper shared that he’s in the early stages of developing a movie inspired by the classic sci-fi series, but with his own unique twist.

“I can’t really give up the storyline,” Snoop teased, “but I’m going to share the idea.” He explained that his love for Planet of the Apes had always fueled his imagination, especially the immersive world and social themes.

However, Snoop felt one major drawback: the lengthy wait between installments. “Planet of the Apes made me wait too long to see the next one,” he joked, hinting that his project would take a...

For a long-running TV show, child actors are almost always a headache. Putting aside all the ethical ramifications of thrusting someone into the public eye at such a young age, there's the simple fact that kids grow and change in ways that often contradict what the series itself is going for. Sometimes the actor hits puberty and starts getting too self-conscious, or sometimes they simply hit puberty too soon (or too late) and that changes the sort of storylines the writers can do with them.

"Mad Men" lucked out: it only had two main child actors to deal with, and they struck gold with one of them. Kiernan Shipka, who plays Sally Draper, sticks around for the whole series, getting plenty of her own storylines to work with. But with the actors who played Bobby Draper, who's about three years younger than Sally, it was a different story. The first...

It's truly a great time to be a fan of classic sci-fi creature horror films. Last year, the Predator franchise got a huge shot of adrenaline in the form of Prey, which saw the alien hunter face off against the Comanche warrior Naru (Amber Midthunder) on the Great Plains in the early 1700s. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, Prey revitalized the franchise in a huge way; if you ask me, it's arguably the best Predator movie in the entire series, and I say this as someone who grew up obsessed with the first two films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover, respectively.

Then, this year, we got two more big sci-fi sequels from 20th Century: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Alien: Romulus. And similar to Prey, both were huge hits that have the studio keen to capitalize on the momentum and make sequels.

That's no longer just conjecture.

20th Century Studios boss Steve Asbell recently spoke with THR about various upcoming projects, including several new Predator movies, a sequel to Alien: Romulus, and another Planet of the Apes movie. However, Asbell also gave an update on one project that has flown under the radar: a prequel to Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

“I’m trying so hard. It’s the first movie I worked on at Fox twenty years ago,” Asbell said of the Master and Commander prequel. “We have a great script. It just needs the right director.“

Based on the novels by Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was released over twenty years ago, and although the sea-faring adventure was intended to launch a franchise, it didn’t happen. Over the years, the film has developed a passionate fanbase who are eager for more. Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls...

Apes together strong indeed! After earning close to $400 million bananas with the Wes Ball-directed Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, news about another movie in the evolutionary franchise is swinging our way! According to 20th Century Studios president Steve Asbell, another Apes film is in the works for a 2027 release. Details about the project are scarce. However, it’s a fair assumption to think it’s a sequel to Ball’s box-office blockbuster, starring Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy, and more.

Whispers about a new Planet of the Apes movie arrive alongside confirmation that 20th Century Studios is developing more Alien and Predator films. We already know Predator Badlands will be unleashed on November 7, 2025. However, Asbell says we’re getting two additions to the Predator franchise in 2025. The studio also plans to develop a sequel to Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus and...

Back in February, it was announced that Prey director Dan Trachtenberg would become the first filmmaker to take the helm of two films in the Predator franchise, as he was moving ahead with a new Predator film titled Badlands, working from a screenplay by Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison (based on a story crafted by Trachtenberg himself). That movie started filming in New Zealand earlier this year, with Super 8‘s Elle Fanning in the lead – and earlier this week, it was revealed that Disney / 20th Century Studios will be giving Predator: Badlands a theatrical release on November 7, 2025. Now, during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, 20th Century Studios president Steve Asbell let it slip that we’re actually getting two additions to the Predator franchise in 2025! They’re also plotting an Alien: Romulus sequel with that film’s director, Fede Alvarez – and they’re “probably” going to make another Alien vs. Predator movie.

This article contains minor spoilers for "Venom: The Last Dance."

As we inched closer to the release date for "Venom: The Last Dance," supposedly the final film in Sony's Marvel-adjacent "Venom" trilogy, the marketing began to play up an appearance by a villainous character named Knull. I'm only a casual comic book reader (and barely that), so I must confess I've never heard of this character until about two or three weeks ago. To me, the name Knull means nothing. But as it turns out, Knull is an established Marvel villain, although he hasn't actually been around very long. Knull first appeared as an unidentified character in the pages of "Thor: God of Thunder #6" in 2013 before making his first full appearance in "Venom vol. 4 #3" in 2018. An ancient deity, Knull is a very powerful bad guy, and "Venom: The Last Dance" marks his first big screen appearance.

It's clear that...

Tubi, Fox’s free streaming service, has announced its list of November titles. The Tubi November 2024 slate features new Tubi Originals, some series, and numerous action, art house, Black cinema, comedy, documentary, drama, horror, kids and family, romance, sci-fi and fantasy, thriller, and Western titles.

As a leading ad-supported video-on-demand service, the company engages diverse audiences through a personalized experience and the world’s largest content library of over 250,000 movies and TV episodes, a growing collection of exclusive Originals, and nearly 250 live channels.

You can watch the Tubi November 2024 lineup for free on Android and iOS mobile devices, Amazon Echo Show, Google Nest Hub Max, Comcast Xfinity X1, and Cox Contour.

You can also watch the service on connected television devices such as Amazon Fire TV, Vizio TVs, Sony TVs, Samsung TVs, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, Android TV, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and on the Tubi site.

Tubi Originals...

Happy Halloween from The B-Side! Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.

Today we talk about Tim Burton! The man! The brand! The artist! The director! The lothario (complimentary)! The B-Sides today include Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, and Frankenweenie. Our esteemed guest is Maria Lewis, “best-selling author, screenwriter, film curator, and pop culture etymologist currently based in Australia.”

As Beetlejuice Beetlejuice still rakes in money in theaters, we discuss Burton’s influence, whether or not he’s actually a good director (something Burton himself has questioned in the past), his best films and his worst films, his inspirations, and the love-and-hate relationship with Disney from the very beginning of his career. There is also the observation that most of Tim Burton’s films are some version of Alice in Wonderland.

Amazon Prime has lately shown a penchant for the kind of wacky action comedies studios aren’t flooding theatres with like they used to do. With films by Peter Farrelly, Paul Feig and others, the genre is alive and well in Culver City, and its acquisition of Palm Springs director Max Barbakow’s sophomore feature Brothers not only fits right into the mold but also manages to be a wildly entertaining example of how to do it.

What also makes this all work as well as it does is an exceptionally well-chosen cast of A-list actors working against type. What more do I have to say except that Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage are playing fraternal twins and Glenn Close is their conniving grifter mother! Throw in a X-rated love scene with a CGI orangutan and you have the recipe for madness, which Brothers delivers in the best slapstick style.

Finally, Rick and Morty will take on the genre that’s been begging for a masterful, Dan Harmon-style parody – true crime podcasts.

Of course, the exploitative murder porn podcasting sphere is such an easy target that Rick and Morty needs fewer than fifteen seconds to tear it apart, so, in the Rick and Morty Season 8 sneak peek that Harmon and his team debuted at New York Comic Con earlier today, the series tackles a popular and significant subgenre within the science fiction canon that was long overdue for a part-parody-part-pastiche in the Rick and Morty fashion. After spending the last seven seasons dissecting and satirizing so many tropes, literary devices, genres and franchises ranging from Terminator to Die Hard to the entire idea of a heist movie, Rick and Morty Season 8 will return to its roots as it lands on a classic sci-fi set up after wandering aimlessly towards...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Bam

Films by Warren Beatty, Mike Judge, and more play in Facing the Future; the restoration of I Heard it Through the Grapevine screens.

Roxy Cinema

Gummo, Love Streams, and Dancer in the Dark play on 35mm, while Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro screens screens on Saturday and a 16mm puppet program shows Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive retrospective of Portuguese cinema begins, featuring films by Paulo Rocha and Manoel de Oliveira, among many others.

Museum of the Moving Image

A highlight of the 1969 Directors’ Fortnight includes prints of Oshima’s Death By Hanging and Garrel’s The Virgin’s Bed; a Frank Oz retrospective continues.

Anthology Film Archives

Dreyer’s Ordet plays in “Essential Cinema.”

IFC Center

The black-and-white restoration of Johnny Mnemonic plays, as does a 40th-anniversary restoration of Paris, Texas and Bennett Miller’s The Cruise; The Company of Wolves,...

With “Palm Springs,” first-time director Max Barbakow achieved the kind of whirlwind debut most filmmakers only dream of.

The time-loop rom-com, which starred Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti as wedding guests forced to relive the same day over and over again, was the hit of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Neon and Hulu acquired it in a record-breaking sale. The looming pandemic was serendipitous timing for a streaming debut, and “Palm Springs” ended up setting Hulu records when it came out that summer. Barbakow had a bona fide cultural phenomenon on his hands and seemingly became an established Hollywood director overnight.

How do you follow a once-in-a-decade success like “Palm Springs”? Barbakow decided to pivot to a good old-fashioned American heist comedy. His sophomore feature “Brothers” (now streaming on Prime Video) stars Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage as siblings who went in very different directions after their troubled youths. Dinklage’s...

Performance capture is one of the most exciting new tools available to filmmakers this century. But, if you’re an up and coming cinematic storyteller, how can you use it in your own filmmaking? IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking Summit, taking place in Los Angeles on November 2 has you covered.

We are honored to welcome the team behind this year’s blockbuster smash, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” for a dynamic panel about the ins-and-outs of performance capture. At the heart of the conversation will be how they used these innovative tools to elicit profound emotion, to create deep connections between the film’s characters and the audience. Roger Ebert always said movies are an empathy machine: The performance capture artistry in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” showed how true that is.

In attendance from the film will be director Wes Ball, visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist,...

Over the course of four films, the reinvigorated “Planet of the Apes” franchise has become synonymous with photoreal digital effects which bring the titular primates to life. Visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist asserts that his team’s job is to connect audiences with “the soul of the performances.” In the fourth film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” that soul is captured clearer than ever. Gold Derby recently sat down with Winquist, animation supervisor Paul Story, head of facial motion Stuart Adcock, and sequence VFX supervisor Stephen Unterfranz, who walked us through the painstaking detail required to create these digital creatures. Watch the video interview above.

“Kingdom” is set some 300 years after the events of the third film, and by this point the primates have evolved from using sign language to having a robust spoken language. “They’re speaking now,” says Winquist of the apes, “but biology still doesn...

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It's possible that the best "Star Trek" movie of all time could be the one that never existed. Before Gene Roddenberry's hokey but heartfelt '60s sci-fi series made the leap to the big screen with a series of wildly inconsistent movies beginning in 1979, the franchise nearly went in an entirely different direction. If not for a studio exec who hated science fiction, and creative differences in the writers' room, the first "Star Trek" film would have been "Planet of the Titans," an incredibly ambitious project that was developed over 7 months before being shelved for good, according to the book "The Fifty-Year Mission."

The first "Star Trek" oral history book from Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, subtitled "The First 25 Years," sets the record straight on many moments from "Trek" history that have become the stuff of legends, but...

Hey, theater chains: let us in now (to see The Monkey) and it can be nice! We'll come back not once, not twice, but as many times as we'd like! Despite having a markedly different tone than his smash hit Longlegs, the promo for director Osgood Perkins' next project, The Monkey,...

“Monkey Man” was already taken as a title, so Robbie Williams’ unconventional biopic is called “Better Man.” Just kidding, it’s named after his 2000 single — but he is a monkey man in the film, as the new trailer makes clear.

“Better Man,” which opens in U.S. theaters on Christmas Day, is a “satirical biopic” in which the British pop superstar is depicted as a chimpanzee. Why? Because it’s “an extraordinary journey that can’t be told in an ordinary way,” according to Paramount, which is distributing the film in the U.S. Jonno Davies (“Hunters”) performs the motion capture for the ape-man and the voice work, while Williams provides his singing voice. The film is directed by Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) and written by Gracey, Oliver Cole, and Simon Gleeson. The monkey VFX were provided by Weta, the same company that does the “Planet of the Apes” films.

Every major religion has inspired classic movies. On the other hand, Star Wars and other classic films took things a step further by inventing religions of their own. Some of these phony faiths were more true to life than others.

5. The Jedi from ‘Star Wars’

The Jedi are the most famous fictional religionists. They follow a faith that combines elements of two real-world Eastern religions: Taoism and Buddhism. The Jedi believe in a light-dark dualism reminiscent of yin and yang, the most famous concept in Taoism. In addition, they seek to cut themselves off from worldly attachments, as many Buddhists do.

The Star Wars films, especially the prequels, are also awash in Christian imagery. They include the devilish Darth Maul, the hellish planet Mustafar, a virgin birth, and a focus on redemption. However, the Jedi don’t seem to have any Christian elements in their theology.

4. The cult from ‘Children...

The actor who has reportedly been cast as the villainous Knull in Venom: The Last Dance was revealed last night, and we may now know how he will bring the character to life on screen.

Since this is something the studio may be attempting to keep under wraps until the movie is in theaters, we're still being careful about (potential) spoilers.

According to Daniel Richtman and several other online scoopers, Knull will played by none other than Andy Serkis. 

Serkis - who directed Venom: Let There Be Carnage - is "expected to reprise the role in future Sony/Marvel projects, which means we could be seeing a whole lot more of Knull." This gels with previous rumors that Knull will be the main villain of Spider-Man 4, with Venom (Tom Hardy) joining forces with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) to battle the potentially world-ending threat.

Thanks to his acclaimed turns as...

Well, that's one way to kick off your Wednesday morning. If you came away assuming Coralie Fargeat's goopy body horror flick "The Substance" would end up being the strangest film of 2024 ... you're probably right. But 2025 already has a strong contender in that arena in the form of "Better Man," a musical biopic about the life and times of English pop music superstar Robbie Williams. As Paramount's official synopsis explains, the movie follows Williams as he goes from "being the youngest member of chart-topping boyband Take That, through to his unparalleled achievements as a record-breaking solo artist -- all the while confronting the challenges that stratospheric fame and success can bring." Sounds like your average, cookie-cutter musician biopic right?Before you start pulling out your box of old "Walk Hard" references, though, here's the big thing this summary conveniently leaves out: Williams is depicted as a CGI chimpanzee in the film.

Come on, come on, come on, come on. A pop star as swaggering as Robbie Williams – the British ‘90s icon who rocketed out of Take That to his own mega-fame – was never going to fit the standard rags-to-riches biopic treatment we’ve seen hundreds of times over. But admit it: you didn’t exactly expect this. Better Man is, indeed, a Robbie Williams biopic, depicting his rise as a pop provocateur, chart-smasher, and general troublemaker. Except, the part of Robbie Williams is played by… a CGI ape, Planet Of The Apes style. No, really. Not a bad fit for the man behind ‘Me And My Monkey’. Watch the bonkers first trailer here:

Amid a deluge of by-the-numbers music biopics, it’s thrilling to see Better Man take a totally different tack – along with the Lego Pharrell film Piece By Piece, it’s the most original idea since Rocketman remixed Elton John...

Robbie Williams fans will go bananas over the trailer for “Better Man” — literally.

Paramount released the first trailer for the musical biopic from Michael Gracey, director of “The Greatest Showman,” which uses a CGI monkey as a stand-in for the British pop singer. Yes, really.

“I know what you’re thinking. What’s with the monkey? I’m Robbie Williams. I’m one of the biggest pop stars in the world. But I’ve always seen myself a little less evolved,” Williams narrates in the trailer. The first look at the musical film appears to be like any other musical biopic about a superstar, but every scene with Williams replaces him with a “Planet of the Apes”-like monkey double.

The trailer shows Williams’ early life growing up and playing soccer, where he’s shown as a monkey wearing clothes. It then gives a highlight reel of Williams performing on...

Kris Kristofferson, the legendary country star turned superstar actor, has passed away at 88. No cause of death has yet been revealed, but Kristofferson retired from public life in 2021. While some of you reading this may know him best for playing Whistler in the Blade trilogy, his career goes much deeper than that, making him one of the most fascinating pop culture icons of his time.

Before he ever became an actor, Kristofferson was famous as a writer of country hits, including the immortal “Me and Bobby McGee,” later launching his own recording career, which included multiple Grammy wins and Gold records. But, even before that, he was quite accomplished, being a former Rhodes Scholar and captain in the U.S. Army. He famously turned down a teaching job (in English Lit) at West Point to focus on his musical career. He was seen as one of the leading figures in the Outlaw Country movement,...

Kris Kristofferson has died at the age of 88.

The Country Music Hall of Fame singer-songwriter and Golden Globe-winning actor passed away “peacefully in his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, September 28th, surrounded by family,” according to a spokesperson.

“We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all,” his family said in a statement.

Kristofferson was best known for songs such as “Me and Bobby McGee”, his work in the supergroup The Highwaymen alongside Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson, and his starring roles in films like A Star Is Born, Blade, and Heaven’s Gate.

Hailing from the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Kristofferson was a true multi-dimensional talent. Prior to moving to Nashville to pursue songwriting, he was a star football player and Golden Gloves boxer,...

Kris Kristofferson has died at the age of 88.

The Country Music Hall of Fame singer-songwriter and Golden Globe-winning actor passed away “peacefully in his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, September 28th, surrounded by family,” according to a spokesperson.

“We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all,” his family said in a statement.

Kristofferson was best known for songs such as “Me and Bobby McGee”, his work in the supergroup The Highwaymen alongside Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson, and his starring roles in films like A Star Is Born, Blade, and Heaven’s Gate.

Hailing from the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Kristofferson was a true multi-dimensional talent. Prior to moving to Nashville to pursue songwriting, he was a star football player and Golden Gloves boxer,...

Producer and director Wes Ball addressed the possibility of a Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes sequel.

Following the 2010s Planet of the Apes trilogy, Kingdom relaunched the franchise, taking place many generations after the death of the franchise's previous main character, Caesar.

After earning $397.3 million at the global box office, some believe this was enough to greenlight two more films to complete a trilogy under Ball's tutelage. This should not be too surprising as Ball confirmed with The Direct that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes cost "less" than the previous three films.

Read full article on The Direct.

Renowned for bringing uncanny and fantastical worlds to life on-screen, filmmaker Tim Burton is equally known for having one of the most eccentric relationships in Hollywood with two-time Oscar nominee Helena Bonham Carter.

Tim Burton | Credit: Gage Skidmore/Cca By-sa 2.0/Wikimedia Commons

And the former celebrity couple, who share two children, gained attention not just for their romance but also for their distinctive living arrangement in neighboring houses, as they never lived together during their relationship.

Tim Burton And Helena Bonham Carter’s Unconventional Twin House

Throughout their long-term relationship, Tim Burton and actress Helena Bonham Carter became a fan favorite, with many fans still convinced that the two were made for each other.

Helena Bonham Carter | Credit: Siebbi/Cca 3.0/Wikimedia Commons

The former couple was together for over a decade after they met on the set of the 2001 film, Planet of the Apes. They welcomed two children during their long-term relationship,...

Terminator Zero Showrunner Defends Terminator Salvation - Main Image

Any longtime Terminator fan knows that the fandom has long held the belief that the last good Terminator film was Terminator 2, and everything else between Terminator 3 and Dark Fate has been a poor entry in the story of Humanity vs. Skynet.

With Terminator Zero receiving sparkling reviews, showrunner Mattson Tomlin defends what he thinks is an underappreciated Terminator entry.

“People Were Tough on Terminator Salvation”

Talking to DiscussingFilm, Tomlin talks about previous entries in the franchise that he liked, and besides the first movie, he singled out 2009’s Terminator: Salvation, which McG directed. Tomlin says:

“I really love Salvation. I think people were a little tough on that movie and you look at it, the physics of it—the gunfire, the explosions, any time that there’s a terminator that—the skeleton—it really feels like it has a...

Labor Day weekend has come and gone, and that can only mean one thing – it’s TIFF time, baby! Once again, I’ll be attending the Toronto International Film Festival on behalf of JoBlo.com. I’m looking forward to getting an early look at some of the prestigious awards fare we’ll all be hearing plenty about in the coming months. Crazy enough, this will be my sixteenth year in a row covering the festival!

Here’s what I’m most excited to check out at this year’s edition:

Conclave:

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the biggest surprises of the 2022 edition of TIFF, as that new adaptation of the classic novel/ film proved to be one of the most dazzling war films in recent memory. It put Berger on the map in a big way, with him tipped as potentially taking...

It is sometimes amazing to see what directors who have made a successful movie can get away with. One hit, and studios are willing to hand these people a fortune for their dream projects. Heaven’s Gate comes to mind as one archetypal example, but there are many other misfires from award-winning filmmakers. A few years ago director Michael Gracey scored a surprise smash with an original musical, The Greatest Showman. And now he has a new musical film about British pop star Robbie Williams — with a CGI monkey in the leading role.

That’s right, a monkey. This fact was kept under wraps before the first Telluride screening of Better Man. But I guess now the ape is out of the bag. Good luck to Paramount, who will release the movie in December.

In the past there have been classic movies with monkeys as central characters — King Kong, of course,...

Michael Gracey’s wildly inventive musical biopic of superstar British entertainer Robbie Williams rolls the dice on a unique star casting decision to play Williams that separates it from every showbiz biopic that has come before. A CGI monkey (actor Jonno Davies) plays the singer in what is otherwise a recognizable cradle-to-comeback story so familiar to those who rise to the top, only to fall and rise again. This is the equivalent to casting Lassie to play Frank Sinatra.

Ok, maybe not that crazy, but close enough. So guess what? It really works, even if in America the subject of this major studio film (Paramount picked up the independently produced production) is not widely known, but an icon who has sold over 80 million albums across the rest of the globe, and was recently the subject of a four-part Netflix docu series. It had its world premiere this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival.

When Robbie Williams told an interviewer that he felt like a performing monkey, he didn’t mean it literally. But that’s exactly how “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey interprets the remark in “Better Man,” an off-the-wall musical biopic that surely would have seemed banal — as opposed to downright bananas — had it featured a flesh-and-blood actor in the Robbie Williams role.

Gracey takes audiences through all the expected beats of Williams’ career, from his breakthrough as a member of Take That to his record-breaking solo concert at Knebworth, but does so with a CG chimpanzee standing in for the Britpop bad boy. Against all odds, that gimmick works, distinguishing the project from so many other cookie-cutter pop-star hagiographies. If you want to fawn over this boy-band backup singer-turned-solo superstar for four hours, check out the “Robbie Williams” doc series on Netflix. But if you want to see a chimp doing coke with Oasis,...

Four mythical hairy creatures, communicating in grunts, inhabit what could be a post-apocalyptic world in the Zellner brothers’ witty and unnerving film

The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, take their absurdism and futurism to the next level with a brilliant and radical comedy about the secret life of the legendary Sasquatch, Aka Bigfoot, creatures rumoured to be living in the North American wilderness. Sasquatch Sunset is a film to compare with Planet of the Apes, or Watership Down, or even the days of silent cinema. Nonverbal cinema anyway. It’s a plaintive, echoing wail of fear in that big empty forest where no one is around to hear a falling tree; fear of climate catastrophe, fear of the ongoing environmental destruction in which we don’t even fully know what’s getting destroyed; fear of humanity’s own extinction.

And as the movie begins, maybe humanity is already extinguished. We...

Despite controversy over its use of a prosthetic nose to turn Bradley Cooper into Jewish composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, “Maestro” has emerged as the Oscar front-runner for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Will it win first at the Make-Up Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Awards? It has three nominations there: Best Period and/or Character Makeup, Best Period and/or Character Hair Styling and Best Special Makeup Effects.

Based on the combined predictions of Gold Derby users, “Maestro” will win two out of the three. For Period and/or Character Makeup it’s up against two of its Oscar rivals, “Poor Things” and “Oppenheimer,” with “Poor Things” posing the greater threat. “Maestro” is backed by seven out of nine Expert journalists we’ve surveyed from major media outlets as of this writing. The other two are betting on “Poor Things.”

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Adding to his awards season accolades, Paul Giamatti was honored with the Cinema Vanguard Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Wednesday, where he sat down for a conversation about his long career and journey to The Holdovers.

In a 75-minute chat moderated by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Giamatti walked the Santa Barbara audience through his pivot from wanting to study primate anthropology to pursuing acting after his father died. He reflected on early roles in Private Parts, Planet of the Apes (“I was really disappointed I couldn’t play a gorilla. I was like, ‘I can’t be a gorilla, why not?’ They’re like, ‘You look more like an orangutan'”) and eventually American Splendor, where he said, “I remember at the time thinking, this is probably the first and last time I’m gonna lead [a movie] like this.”

Despite the critical success of that film,...