Special Features

“Driving folks to a theater is just not our business. Having big new desirable content drives value for our members and drives value for our business.”Those are the words of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos in the spring of 2023, speaking about his company’s plans for its film division on a corporate earnings call. Netflix doesn’t make

With each new week, audiences are given yet another sequel to watch in theaters. This past summer, there were sequels to John Wick, Fast and Furious, Spider-Man, Toy Story, and even more. This fall, we’re getting sequels to Frozen, Terminator, and sometimes the sequels don’t even get spaced out.October 18, for instance, marks the arrival

A couple of decades ago “streaming” meant something water did in a small river. Back then, you didn’t watching movies on streaming; no one had even conceived of such a thing. If you wanted to watch a movie, you went to a theater — or if you were too lazy to do that, you watched

When we separate successful movies from failures, we look at a few key factors. Sometimes the movie just isn’t very good. Sometimes it was a critical bomb but a hit with the everyman. Sometimes the box office take is enough to say whether a movie was worth its own budget. Plenty of cinema’s great classics

Based on the caliber of movies that are regularly released to theaters and streaming, it’s quite clear that producers will put out anything they think will turn a profit. Obviously, nobody sets out to make a bad movie, but at a certain point, quality no longer factors into the equation. You take what you’ve got, and you

There’s really nothing worse than a bad comedy. When a drama falls apart, it’s certainly an unfortunate state of affairs. When a horror movie isn’t scary, it can be a bummer, but it can also be quite amusing in the right context. When a comedy goes south, that is quite literally a tragedy — for the

Perhaps the only good part of the ongoing actors strike is the fact that the guy doing all of the press for Killers of the Flower Moon is writer/director Martin Scorsese himself. With no movie stars to work the publicity circuit, Scorsese has been everywhere doing interviews and making appearances. We would never get this much Scorsese

There are few things better than a movie that doesn’t overstay its welcome, clocking in at a tight two hours or anything under. It’s the average length of time a person can sit in a seat without having to stretch their legs or use the bathroom, and we as a culture have come to expect

There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a good comeback story, the type of dramatic death-defying drama that keeps us on the edge of our seats. Sometimes, the drama happens offscreen, so secret and subtle that we’d almost never know how close our favorite television shows came to being lost forever.It’s tougher for TV shows to

It’s like one of Billy Wilder’s characters said in the final scene of one of his best movies: Nobody’s perfect.Nobody is. And sure enough, Billy Wilder wasn’t either. As great a director as Wilder was — and he made more stone-cold masterpieces than almost any Hollywood filmmaker in history — he wasn’t immune to a