Ironically, this also applied to more than just the Terminator’s onscreen antics. In the summer of 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was an indestructible money-sucking machine that conquered the box office four weekends in a row in July, and then miraculously hung on to its boffo target long enough to also become the number one movie in America for a weekend in September. It was an R-rated entertainment that was technically a sequel, yet also a standalone science fiction thriller that captured the imagination of adults as readily as teenagers....

Xena: The Warrior Princess is a spin-off of the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, but Xena and Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor) are no Laverne and Shirley. Xena was a guest character on three episodes of Hercules in an arc which was supposed to leave her dead. But she was too popular to go without a fight. The first season of Xena established it as a rising cult favorite, and by its second season it reached the top slot for weekly syndicated hour long drama....

The Affair Season 4 Episode 9 “I have lived this entire story before and it doesn’t end well.” Goddamn leaky faucets. Now this is how you do an Affairepisode. I went from absolutely hating this episode to quickly thinking it’s my favorite episode the show has ever done. This is the prototypical, perfect way to incorporate The Affair’s bifurcated perspective structure and it’s all the more bittersweet that it comes as a send off to Alison....

As the director behind Episode 5, “Show Me Who You Are,” and 6, “The Heart is An Arrow,” of Shadow and Bone, Mairzee Almas was behind the camera for some of the major turning points of Season 1. These episodes see Alina and General Kirigan’s romantic interlude, Baghra’s reveal that Aleksander is actually the Black Heretic, and the coming together of the Crows and Alina for the first time. It’s when the season really kicks into a higher gear....

Twelve months later, things obviously didn’t go as smoothly as we all hoped. While multiplex business has rarely been bigger for superheroes and big balls of alien goo, most other kinds of film have taken a hit, at least on the big screen. Even so, it’s been a significant year for movies as a whole, with audiences still being treated to an abundance of excellence be it in theaters or streaming at home....

By episodes, of course! Episodes are one of the last remaining hallmarks of what makes the entity known as television distinct. Though we largely watch all our entertainment on the same kinds of screens nowadays, it’s television that lays claim to distinct episodes and distinct seasons as part of their larger gestalt. The Best TV Shows of 2020 deserve our commendation (and they will receive it very soon), but so too these smaller stories and pieces within them....

Indeed, recent iterations of the character have vanished in a red mist, yet followers of the iconic fiend can never forget the basics. A Carpathian serpent and tragic figure descended from Transylvanian royalty, Dracula has cut a bloody path across pop culture with his fangs, appetites, and image as a Byronic hero in the same bloodless vein as Heathcliff or Lord Rochester. He may be a monster, but he is a lovelorn one who is often seeking the reincarnated soul of his lost love from centuries past....

The Flash Season 5 Episode 18 Well, hello there, Godspeed. This might not have been the way I expected to see perhaps the greatest Flash villain of recent years introduced, but I’m willing to set all my preconceived notions aside in the service of the season. And in this case, “Godspeed” the episode is more important to those than Godspeed the actual villain needs to be at the moment. This was a desperately needed excellent hour of The Flash, and one that I really hope is enough to shake the show completely out of the rather safe rut it has been in for much of the season....

The Flash Season 6 Episode 1 “Meet the new Flash. Same as the old Flash.” OK, so I’m paraphrasing The Who, certainly not the classic rock band of the hour (we’ll get to them soon enough), but trust me when I say that I mean this in the best way possible. If I’m waxing nostalgic about “the old Flash” I’m usually talking about the very best moments of the first season, or the first half of the (otherwise dreadful) season two, or the tonal balance of season three....

Since The Game Awards is currently one of the biggest game-centric celebrations outside of E3, it’s a tradition for companies to fill in the gaps between awards with ads for their upcoming games. Last year alone, gamers got announcements like long-awaited reveals of Alan Wake 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, as well as debuts like Slitterhead. It’s a foregone conclusion that this year’s Game Awards will also be full of trailers, but nobody is entirely sure which reveals to expect....

The Good Lord Bird Episode 3 It’s right there in the title. This week’s episode is all about Mister Fred—including how you must remember to call him Mr. Douglass at first meetings. His rather puffy reaction to “Fred” likely took some viewers off guard, but imagine if Onion had called him what he was taught by Old John Brown: Frederick Douglass, the King of the Negroes. Indeed, it is with that lofty title that Daveed Diggs’ swaggering and delightfully subversive interpretation of Fred is introduced....

Road trip! There was a brief moment in The Handmaid’s Tale’s first season, right after Fred Waterford and the other Commanders were blown up in that Red Center explosion, when this story move felt inevitable. June and Serena: two enemies cast together against a common foe, Thelma and Louise-ing it on the run from Gilead together in the ultimate act of female solidarity. (Okay, solidarity is pushing it. The stage though, is at least set for a ceasefire now that Serena appears to be in labor and June has previous when it comes to delivering babies alone in the wilderness....

It falls into the stressful subgenre of movies where someone makes a mistake early on and everything unravels from there–if the outcome is obvious, it’s the journey that provides the pleasure. Or in this case, the pain, as one dreadful and maddeningly implausible decision follows another. Peter Sarsgaard plays Jay, divorced father of Kayla (Joey King) and who stops to pick up his daughter’s friend Britney on the way to a dance camp....

Critics have not been kind to The Little Things, the new Warner Bros./HBO Max psychological thriller starring Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as two Los Angeles cops obsessed with catching a vicious serial killer. Although the film is apparently doing very decent business–especially on the streaming end–it sits at a mediocre 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with many comparing it to the 1995 classic Seven. In that juxtaposition, The Little Things is coming up short....

Williams, by this stage of his career, was already hugely popular on television, courtesy of Mork & Mindy. But the genesis of the movie that would ignite his film career actually lay back to even before then, in 1979. That’s when the real-life Adrian Cronauer, on whose story the film is based, pitched a sitcom based around his experiences as DJ in the Vietnam War. It got the interest of agent Larry Brezner, who bought an option on the story....

Oh, that last one doesn’t seem as bad? Have you ever considered how many deaths and injuries could have been prevented by the simple addition of handrails? The poor stormtroopers fighting Luke and Leia in the Death Star shaft. Darth Maul and his better half fading away in The Phantom Menace. Han Solo plummeting after reuniting with his son Ben. Sure, extenuating circumstances played into these events, but the lack of guardrails surely made things worse....

“I’m storyboarding at the moment on Meg 2,” Wheatley says when we catch up with him for the release of In The Earth. “It’s been going on for four months, five months. It’s my happy place, I love storyboarding. So yeah, I’m cutting storyboards and watching animatics, and slowly constructing the movie. It’s really exciting. It’s just action on a massive, massive scale.” The first film, based on the popular 1997 novel Meg by Steve Alten, reached the screen in 2018 after more than two decades of development....

The Orville Season 2 Episode 4 I’m not going to make any bones about this: I like The Orville. It’s fun, it’s occasionally smart, and it does a great job poking old Star Trek tropes with a stick and often making them smarter. However, the latest episode seems like an unnecessary rip-off of Star Trek: Discovery’s big season 1 twist. Is The Orville trying to make Trek loyalists mad? What was the point of this twist?...

Chris, played by Martin Freeman, is going mad. He knows that’s not the right language to use, not on a shift, or in one of the scant counselling sessions he’s been given to fix what his wife calls the “lifetime of shit in his head”, but mad is what he means. Chris is losing it – his temper, his grip, his dying mother, his marriage – and, depending on how a plot involving a homeless heroin addict and a stolen bag of cocaine winds up, perhaps also his life....

If you’ve already watched the shocking season 1 finale of The Rings of Power, it should come as no surprise that the Lord of the Rings series has plans to really dig into its main villain when the show returns for a second season. In fact, while speaking to Empire, Halbrand/Sauron actor Charlie Vickers shared that he has already filmed an important sequence that will define a bit of the Dark Lord’s backstory on the series....