Mystery Men clumsily spoofed superhero movies before the genre even really took flight

Photo: Universal/Getty Images With Age Of Heroes, Tom Breihan picks the most important superhero movie of every year, starting with the genre’s early big-budget moments and moving onto the multiplex-crushing monsters of today. For whatever reason, a lot of the early superhero movies were also superhero-movie parodies. Before the genre was fully formed—before it was even…

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Fire And Fury doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know—and that’s why it’s important

Photo: Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images Photo: Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images “You’ve got the LeBron James of money laundering investigations on you, Jarvanka,” Steve Bannon yells at the apex of Fire And Fury, Michael Wolff’s gossipy book about the first year of the Trump White House. “My asshole just got so tight!” Thus starts nearly 2,000…

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Will Smith’s Netflix blockbuster Bright is stunning in its audacity—and its stupidity

Photo: Netflix C- Bright Cast Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, Lucy Fry, Noomi Rapace Availability Netflix December 22 Finally, high fantasy for the sunglasses-on-the-back-of-the-head set. If nothing else, you have to admire the audacity of the Netflix executives who greenlit Bright: The core conceit of this film—a violent, R-rated cop movie that just so happens to…

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Part Kurosawa, part Wile E. Coyote, The Last Jedi boldly rewires Star Wars’ origins

Photo: Disney This article contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson’s stylized contribution to the Star Wars mythos, returns to the series’ root influences—samurai films, pulp serials, 1940s wartime dramas—to create the most idiosyncratic Star Wars film to date. The humor is wacky and Spaceballs-and-Looney-Tunes-ish, the staging stark…

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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is as subtle as punching a Nazi in the face

Screenshot: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus/Bethesda Softworks Welcome to our Game In Progress review of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Over the next two weeks, William Hughes will be playing through this over-the-top, overtly political follow-up to 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order, working his way through a Nazi-dominated America full of crazy superscience, foul-mouthed revolutionaries,…

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Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults may have been written into his contract

Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images It turns out Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault may not have been supported solely by an endemic, institutionalized power structure based in exploitation and abuse that’s as old as showbiz itself. It may have also been literally written into Weinstein’s contract, according to the latest revelation to this story…

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