The budget of Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is ridiculous. The budget is as high as $500 million in American money, which is extreme given how risk-averse Hollywood has gotten. In India, it’s already the country’s most expensive movie. The two-part epic has imported top-tier Western talent to bring Valmiki’s poem to life—a vision as ambitious as Peter Jackson’s
Read MoreBy now, it’s tradition: whenever Yeon Sang-ho does something truly great, he immediately follows it with something so unwatchable you might question why you appreciated the filmmaker in the first place. This was the case between Revelations and The Ugly, and we’re seeing the same pattern again a year later, from Colony to Paradise Lost. While not as egregious as The
Read MoreThere are still so many Game Boy classic games I wish Nintendo would put on the Classics line on the Switch and Switch 2. Pokémon Pinball, Dragon Warrior Monsters, and Final Fantasy Adventure, just to name a few. That goes for all catalogs in the Classics library, from the NES to the GameCube. It seems when one is announced, the fanfare
Read MoreWildwood is an extremely mystifying experience. For most of the runtime, Laika Studios kept me in a constant state of questioning. Not in terms of plot or character beats, but in how exactly any of this is possible. As a studio, Laika has always been in a league of its own, creating exceptional visual masterworks in stop-motion animation. However, their 2026
Read MoreBeing called a coward, or “lâche,” as the French equivalent, is probably one of the greatest insults that one soldier could volley towards another during a World War I setting. Within Lukas Dhont’s third film, Coward, this slur carries added significance by equally describing those men who risked everything during a failed escape attempt in a bid to avoid the horrors of
Read MoreShudder continues its yearly streak of V/H/S releases with V/H/S/Mixtape. As a follow-up to last October’s V/H/S/Halloween, the horror streaming platform’s ninth installment goes for a new theme in mind. I assumed that the subtitle would dive into music, but that isn’t wholly the case. On the one hand, fans of the genre have films like V/H/S/Halloween, which are announced a
Read MoreAs flawed as Jennifer Peedom’s narrative feature debut, Tenzing, might be, something undeniable about her filmmaking instantly makes me keen to explore her earlier mountain-related documentaries, Mountain and Sherpa. The way in which she visualizes Tenzing Norgay’s (Genden Phuntsok) connection with Mount Everest, or, as he calls it, Chomolungma, is so emotive (almost reaching spiritual awareness). It immediately positions the audience
Read MoreCyberpunk: Edgerunners is a standout anime that launched on Netflix in 2022. It was a collaboration between CD Projekt Red, the developer of the video game Cyberpunk 2077, and Studio Trigger, one of the best anime studios. Slick animation, mature stories, gruesome deaths, and, by all accounts, a wonderful take on Night City. Four years later, Studio Trigger and CD Project
Read MoreThe embrace of artificial intelligence in mainstream cinema has been the most depressing sight the medium has ever seen. It’s a total abdication of creativity at every turn as high-profile filmmakers use a technology built on theft to “craft” images that are both unappealing and emotionally hollow. Many might say that “X movie feels like it was made by AI,” but
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