Legion Season 2 Episode 1 I wonder if Noah Hawley keeps looking over his shoulder to see if David Lynch is going to appear out of nowhere. It feels like the first season of FX’s Legion, with all of its aggressive strangeness, stylistic wonder, and batshit story ambition sort of had its thunder stolen by Twin Peaks: The Return. Until David Lynch decided to one-up Hawley’s bizarro foray into the superhero genre by way of psychedelic, psychological horror, Legion was by far the weirdest, and quite possibly the most brilliant, series on TV....

“It’s been nearly a full decade since the original Guardians of the Galaxy film blessed us with Groot, the talking tree man voiced by Vin Diesel who can only say three (well, technically four) words. Though Groot later sacrificed himself in that movie and has since re-grown up to the point of being a teenager by the time Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame come around, it was Guardians 2‘s sickeningly cute Baby Groot that stuck with folks....

“In a post-Game of Thrones universe, HBO is still looking for its next huge hit. Is the answer more Game of Thrones? After initially announcing plans for several spinoffs only to cancel all of them except House of the Dragon, HBO signed a new five-year deal with George R.R. Martin in late March of 2021.” Read more at Inverse. The newest Spanish-language crime thriller on Netflix, Sky High, is a lackluster heist movie not worth your time....

“Have we reached the tipping point of comic book pop culture saturation? It’s a question I asked myself after watching the first three episodes of Marvel’s Helstrom, the horror-themed new series that premiered on Hulu this weekend. After a record-breaking run at the box office, Marvel Studios is looking to match their big screen success with several new series across multiple platforms.” Read more at The Mary Sue. How did pumpkin beer come about?...

“Game preservation and backward compatibility have been foundational pillars of Xbox’s next-gen plans since the project began more than five years ago. It’s a refreshing, consumer-friendly approach in an industry that traditionally hasn’t batted an eye at the prospect of making players buy multiple copies of the same title — or flat-out abandoning classic games in an attempt to further the adoption of new hardware.” Read more at Inverse. Donald Trump had apparently declined to meet with Chris Evans as a part of the actor’s effort to bridge the gap between Democrats and Republicans....

“Eagle-eyed Redditor u/yunggravyintern noticed a huge reveal within the grounds of Jabba’s palace. The palace itself isn’t new. We know from The Mandalorian that Boba and Fennec take over Jabba’s entire operation. But Jabba’s hangar, the star of a map in the seminal Star Wars game Star Wars: Battlefront, is faithfully recreated in the teaser.” Read more at Inverse Agatha actress Kathryn Hahn learned about the title of her own Marvel spinoff series, Agatha: House of Harkness, at the same time the public did....

“In an homage to the completely made up (yet incredibly influential and highly acclaimed) jazz musicians Paul Bufano, Marcus ‘The Worm’ Hicks, and Mookie Kramer from the game night skit, we’ve imagined a world where not only do these musicians exist, they left behind these faux-vintage-letterpress-style concert posters.” Buy the posters on Redbubble. Nomadland, now available to stream on Hulu, is a close look at modern America’s relationship with the American Dream....

Netflix has found their Fire Lord Ozai for the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action remake! “Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, She-Ra, and the Princesses of Power) has been cast in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, a live-action adaptation of the acclaimed Nickelodeon animated series, as Fire Lord Ozai. Well, Ozai is technically hot, so this is excellent casting. On Instagram, his fellow young cast members, Dallas Liu and Gordon Cormier shared their excitement over this news in the comments of Kim’s Instagram post....

Troma was founded in 1974 by Yale film society buddies Kaufman and Michael Herz. Their movies were produced on tiny budgets and were proudly proclaimed to make only “the most offensive, tasteless films in the history of cinema.” Even the lowest of low budget studios aspire to the highest of standards, and those without any at all shoot for the moon. Troma’s newest film disembowels the classics. #Shakespeare’s Shitstorm is a diarrhetic skewering of modern hypocrisy masquerading as a scatological spoof of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest....

Give the clip, which premiered during the MTV Movie Awards, a look below to see what we mean. “What does that mean?” Loki wants to know about Mobius’s statement that “time passes differently in the TVA.” Thankfully, Loki asked the right man for an explanation because by the time the pair exit the elevator, the God of Mischief has a shockingly thorough understanding of just what the Time Variance Authority does....

Loki episode 1 “Glorious Purpose” has a lot of exposition to get through. Throwing the Marvel franchise’s God of Mischief into the orderly bureaucratic nightmare that is the Time Variance Authority is a fun idea. But dealing with time travel on any level creates some storytelling headaches. Thankfully, Loki breakout star Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong) arrives early on in the proceedings to provide a helpful explanation on what the TVA is and how they keep the Sacred Timeline sacred....

Though the series is certainly timely, it’s also timeless. As evidenced by our helpful explainer article, it wasn’t immediately clear when Lovecraft Country even took place. That’s partly because the Jim Crow era of American institutionalized racism was a lengthy one. And the fact that Atticus “Tic” Freeman was a war veteran didn’t help out much. Which war coincided with “whites only” restaurants and sundown towns? World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War – take your pick, really....

Lucifer Season 5 Episode 10 “We celestials are pretty much the same as you.” It’s the bold series that takes on the demands of producing a musical episode that manages to not only seamlessly blend lyrically into the overall narrative arc but also give fans a peek into another side of the characters and actors. Like it or not, any attempt to blend singing and dancing with an active storyline will be somehow measured against Joss Whedon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Once More, with Feeling,” long considered the gold standard of musical episodes....

Despite Alexa’s former profession, the show shares more with Murder, She Wrote than police procedurals. Or, perhaps “Murder She Wrote crossed with something a bit sassy, because Alexa actually gets laid on occasion, so it’s not exactly Miss Marple,” Lucy Lawless says of the show. In contrast to the more historical and fantastic roles Lawless has played in the past, Alexa is “a modern urban woman who can wear elastic and use zips instead of being laced and hammered into an outfit every morning....

No matter what you think of James Wan’s Malignant, you have to give him this much: it’s pretty original. The filmmaker behind some of the biggest horror movies from this century—Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring in all under a decade—used that clout to pass on a sure thing like directing The Conjuring 3 and instead created something absolutely batshit crazy. In fact, it is on a hill of that batshit where Malignant will live or die for most viewers....

Talking is Lebowitz’s job. Her previous Scorsese collaboration, 2010 HBO film Public Speaking, followed the speaking engagements that have earned her a following, a reputation as one of America’s sharpest, funniest commentators, and, for the last forty years, a living. Starting as a columnist and movie critic in underground NYC newspapers including the Andy Warhol-founded Interview in the 1970s, Lebowitz published her last essay collection in 1981. One children’s book and two unfinished novels later, she’s shifted career from writer to speaker....

The first phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a simple mission: build up to the creation of the Avengers. The next two phases went further by setting the stage for Thanos and his quest for the Infinity Stones, culminating in one of the biggest movies of all time in Avengers: Endgame. While MCU Phase 4 is a mix of Disney+ TV shows and theatrical movie releases, there hasn’t been an established narrative goal just yet....

I did not love Chloé Zhao’s Eternals. This isn’t a controversial statement to make for the first Marvel Studios film to receive a negative “Rotten” score on the aggregate movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes. Despite its expansive pacing—which, believe it or not, is two minutes longer than Denis Villeneuve’s Dune—Eternals struggles to balance its competing impulses and obligations. The movie wants to be a superhero creation myth, but also a grandiose epic about the cyclical nature of violence; it attempts to be a melodrama about its dizzying cast of 10 broody protagonists, but it also must sell action figures with CGI beat ‘em ups....

Sure, there are outliers, such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 or Thor: Ragnarok, but too often, fans find themselves loving the movies despite their washed-out color palettes and unconvincing CGI. Even when directly copying an image from the comics that inspired it, such as Bruce Banner falling into the Sanctum Santorum in Avengers: Infinity War, the movies fail to capture the power conjured by the original artists. Turns out, fans aren’t the only people irritated by Marvel’s visual effects....

Dahmer (we’ll drop the rest of the tortuous title for now) was a mind-blowing true crime hit for Netflix. The 10-episode series that chronicled the saga of the Milwaukee Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer broke all sorts of record for Netflix en route to becoming its second most popular season of English language television yet (per Netflix itself). The streamer also boasts that the Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan-created, Evan Peters-starring series is on track to reach 1 billion hours of viewings in the coming weeks....