Look how far Thor has come! When the Marvel Cinematic Universe ended its first Phase with 2012’s The Avengers, few could have guessed that he would be the only of the team’s trinity to get four movies, let alone that they would be comedies. But with Thor: Love and Thunder, Chris Hemsworth once again teams with Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi (who co-wrote the movie with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson) for another two hours of cosmic goofiness and enough brightly colored crackling to do Jack Kirby proud....

With a reincarnated Sabrina Spellman now on Netflix, and cheap satin costumes aplenty cluttering up the aisles of your local shops, we have witches on our minds. That’s a risky place to keep a witch, and this lot are dangerous to begin with… well, some of them are, others are made from pipe cleaners. (That’s still scary though, especially if you’re a pipe.) Here’s a celebration, in no particular order, of fifty great television witches....

Top New Fantasy Books April 2021 The Light of the Midnight Stars by Rena Rossner Type: NovelPublisher: RedhookRelease date: April 13 Den of Geek says: It’s always good to see more Jewish voices in fantasy. This book sees the root of superhero stories made specific as a threat can only be defeated by a cast of Jewish miracle-workers. Publisher’s summary: Deep in the Hungarian woods, the sacred magic of King Solomon lives on in his descendants....

While December is normally packed with theatrical releases that range from buzzy awards contenders to end-of-the-year blockbusters and holiday-themed comfort films, this year is not business as usual. Sure, Oscar hopefuls abound, such as Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Nomadland, but two of those three will be on Netflix. As for the tentpole contingent, well, only Wonder Woman 1984 is still opening in theaters–and you can also watch that on HBO Max right after opening your presents on Christmas morning....

It’s tough to write a spoiler-free review of a show like Vikings, especially here at the show’s conclusion where it won’t be surprising to learn that the blood flows like wine. Who lives, who dies? Who returns, who stays away? Even acknowledging the presence or absence of a surprise within a certain context could constitute a massive spoiler. As a consequence, much of this review will read like the ravings of the show’s very own seer, a web of insinuations and mystical mumbo jumbo designed only to make sense once the prophecy has been made flesh....

On Feb. 7, 1997, Universal Pictures released Dante’s Peak, in which Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton try to save a small Washington town from being obliterated by a long dormant and suddenly active volcano. Just over two months later, on April 25, 1997, 20th Century Fox delivered Volcano, with Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche leading the efforts to stop a newly formed underground vent from erupting and wiping out all of Los Angeles....

Last week’s WandaVision took a break from our regularly scheduled programming to check in with Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo, and Darcy Lewis as they studied the Westview Anomaly. It provided a much-needed dose of explanations and exposition. This week, however, WandaVision thrusts us right back into the sitcom world of Wanda Maximoff’s making. Sure, the cracks in Wanda’s facade are beginning to show a little more consistently. But even among Agnes’s fourth wall breaking, Norm’s mortal terror, and Vision’s sleuthing, episode 5 contains a truly impressive amount of sitcom homages....

All first looks at the show have revealed that much of it will be paying homage to classic sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Roseanne, and more. Now the show’s unusual approach has been confirmed in a sprawling EW feature. According to EW’s reporting, WandaVision isn’t just a take on sitcoms, it basically is one (with some Marvel twists thrown in of course). For starters, WandaVision actually filmed portions of its six episodes before a live studio audience in the traditional network sitcom style....

Watchmen Episode 5 There used to be (and maybe there still is) a long running misconception in Hollywood that a comic book is pretty much the same thing as a movie. To the untrained eye, a comic book is just a series of kinetic images with some dialogue and occasional stage direction attached. What is that if not a storyboard or even a frame of film itself? Of course, that is very much not the case....

Watchmen Episode 9 Near the end of “See How They Fly,” the superb Watchmen finale, Angela Abar leaves all the silliness behind. Frozen baby squids rain down from the sky – the latest destructive gambit from a genius vrigin to save the world. Angela picks up a surprisingly resilient lid container, holds it above her head and makes her way to the Dreamland Theater in Downtown Tulsa. She leaves behind a truly impressive tableau of chaos: two dead would-be gods in the streets – one turned into a slushee of blood and another crushed under the weight of her own egg-like quantum subterfuge....

Luke Skywalker, upon successfully resisting the Dark Side of the Force, defiantly declared himself to be a Jedi, like his father before him. Poetically, his onscreen portrayer, Mark Hamill, has revealed himself to be a fan of director George Lucas’s divisive cinematic story, to which his climactic quote refers. While J.W. Rinzler’s recently-released biography on a Star Wars Original Trilogy producer, titled Howard Kazanjian: A Producer’s Life, already provided Marcia Lucas’s stinging, headline-making mic-drop on the recent Sequel Trilogy, it also happens to contain an interesting analysis (via IndieWire) from Hamill regarding the generally-unsung artistic merit of the preceding prequel films....

It’s a striking departure from the youthful exuberance that opens the previous (and iconic) West Side Story movie of 60 years ago. But perhaps that’s why Spielberg, a filmmaker who never previously made a full-length musical in his 40+ year career, has gravitated toward walking on Robert Wise’s sacred ground, and finding something that’s just as provocative and poignant in Sondheim’s lyrics now as when the first film came out....

Eternals arrived at the Marvel Cinematic Universe table with a grandiose cosmic tale involving immortal titans and celestial beings, bearing stakes consequential to the very nature of the world. Yet, since the film represents an entirely unseen avenue of a vast canon consisting of 25 films and several television shows, one had to wonder how it would fit into a timeline in which Thanos used the Infinity Gauntlet to reduce half the population of the universe to dust, only to be revived five years later....

You might not – he was a tall, grizzled fellow – wore a brown stetson, carried a Colt Python revolver, and killed lots and lots of zombies. As played by Andrew Lincoln, erstwhile Kentucky sheriff Rick Grimes was the lead on The Walking Dead for more than eight seasons, culminating in his departure midway through season 9. Lincoln was understandably tired from a grueling shooting schedule in the Georgia heat and, as a native Londoner, was eager to spend more time with his family....

Now that WoW Dragonflight has finally been released, fans can get their first full taste of the expansion that some hope will “save World of Warcraft.” It remains to be seen if the expansion will live up to the hype, but the early changes the update offers already have players scrambling for the best class builds. Since Dragonflight utilizes a dynamic talent tree rather than a (mostly) set path of available talents, building classes in WoW is as complicated as it’s been since the game’s earliest days....

Before we jump into the games, let’s talk about the hardware itself. I covered the console’s physical attributes more closely in my unboxing article, but the short of it is that the Xbox Series X is a big, hefty piece of hardware. At about 5.9 inches wide and 11.8 inches tall, and weighing in at 9.8 pounds, the Xbox Series X isn’t quite PC tower size but it’s still massive when compared to most other home consoles....

Yellowstone is so successful that the series, created by ascendant writer/director Taylor Sheridan, is set to be spun off several times. The first spinoff is prequel 1883, which is streaming on Paramount+. The next will be another modern day tale called 6666. Paramount knows a good thing when it has it and soon there will be more Yellowstone than you can shake a cattle prod at. Justified Ozark Watch on: Netflix...

Young Justice Season 3 Episode 8 “Triptych” is exactly what the title implies: three adjacent stories that tell one bigger tale. It plays a little loose with the passage of time, but it also moves the ball further down the field than any episode yet this season and looks at the overarching story of Young Justice: Outsiders from a different angle, expanding the world in interesting ways. The three stories are fairly straightforward: Nightwing and his Outsiders get a lead on where to find more information about Brion’s sister and the League, so they head for a Detroit airport hangar where Shade, Live Wire, and Mist are waiting for their teammate, Cheshire, to get sewn up after taking a bullet at Star Labs, where they were stealing something Reach-related....

After years of chasing ways to build its own coveted blockbuster shared universe, such as with its failed attempt to launch a superhero universe based on Mark Millar’s Jupiter’s Legacy, the streaming service finally seems to have the foundation it was looking for with Snyder’s return to the genre that turned him into an A-lister back in 2004. In fact, Army of the Dead was originally conceived as a sequel to Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, but almost two decades later, it’s grown much bigger than that....

With the release of Resident Evil Village and the arrival of nine-foot-tall vampire Lady Dimitrescu, we thought it worth ranking the 15 scariest monsters in Resident Evil history. That’s right – not even a top 10 would be good enough to do the creatures of Capcom’s iconic survival horror franchise justice. 15. Ustanak – Resident Evil 6 Resident Evil’s much maligned sixth entry has a lot of problems, we’ll admit, but one area where it does succeed is in its litany of boss fights....