Reuben Baron

Most of "Secret Level" feels like an assortment of video game advertisements, though there are a couple of standout elements.

2024 was a tough year for the film industry. The effects of the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were noticeable in the year's slimmer-than-usual release schedule, and more worryingly, production remained slow to pick up, even after the strikes were resolved. With threats of even greater media consolidation on the horizon, AI still threatening creative jobs even post-strikes, and executives and agents growing ever more cautious about anything that could be even remotely controversial, there are plenty of reasons to worry about the future.

There are several new science fiction movies coming out in 2025, and some of them are follow-ups to existing films. Here's every sci-fi sequel heading your way.

Since "The Animatrix" hit video store shelves in 2003, anime spinoffs of major Hollywood properties have become a common sight... in video stores and on the streaming services that ran them out of business. Not so much in theaters. It's not surprising that Warner Bros. would produce a "Lord of the Rings" anime — what is surprising is that it's getting a full-blown theatrical release.

One common misconception about cinema history is that color film was invented sometime in the 1930s. It's easy to understand why people assume this — the films most commonly identified as classics of early color cinematography come from the late 1930s or later, and black and white films still outnumbered color ones until the 1960s.

Adding up all the seasonal TV anime listed on AniChart, 199 anime series either premiered or returned to Japanese TV in 2024 — and that number doesn't include shorts, movies, direct to video-slash-streaming releases, and ongoing series continuing from previous years. Simply put, there is too much anime for anyone to watch all of it, and there's reason to fear this high quantity might be approaching too much for anyone to make under current conditions. On the positive side, all this anime being made means there's something for everyone to enjoy from the past year's bounty.

"Squid Game" was originally intended to last just one season ( and almost had a very different ending ). Then it became the most popular show on Netflix — and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk needed the money Netflix wasn't giving him from the first season's success — so now "Squid Game" Season 2 has arrived three years after the death game K-drama first took the world by storm. Season 3, produced simultaneously with Season 2, will conclude the story sometime in 2025.

Bill Skarsgård is no stranger to transformative performances as monstrous villains — anyone who had nightmares over Skarsgård's version of Pennywise in the "It" movies can attest to this. Yet even with his prior forays into horror acting with heavy prosthetics, playing Count Orlok in Robert Eggers'2024 remake of "Nosferatu" presented a series of fresh challenges for the actor.

"Better than 'Night Swim' but less entertaining than 'M3GAN'" isn't the worst place for a January Blumhouse horror movie to rank, but the new "Wolf Man" is just good enough that it becomes disappointing that it's not better. This is writer-slash-director Leigh Whannell's second go-round with a gritty R-rated reboot of one of the classic Universal Monsters, following "The Invisible Man" in 2020. However, where

Not only are most of these movies not very good, but they also contain some of the worst lines of dialogue ever spoken on the screen.