Brad Pitt

Unless your name happens to be Kathryn Bigelow (and if it is, then may I say that it’s a pleasure, Ms. Bigelow, big Point Break fan), Hollywood has had a lot of trouble figuring out how to portray the Global War on Terror. The odd movies that have succeeded critically or financially — Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper — take an ambivalent stance on a complicated and nuanced geopolitical situation, but many more have attempted the same and floundered. So it’s with memories of the high-profile failure of one-time Oscar hopeful Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk that we greet the trailer for War Machine, Netflix’s latest foray into this risky genre.

While Brad Pitt has been in a metric ton of movies over the years, it might blow your mind to learn that he’s never been in one set in space. While he’s certainly done plenty of supernatural tales like World War Z and Interview with a Vampire, Twelve Monkeys is probably the closest he’s gotten to big, brainy sci-fi, and all of those have been firmly Earthbound. That might change if, since his World War Z sequel has been put on hold and possibly cancelled, Pitt decides to board James Gray’s Ad Astra.

2016 began with a new Terrence Malick movie then gave us two versions of his first documentary effort. Then we got not one but two versions of his first documentary effort, and New Yorkers were treated to special screening of The Tree of Life accompanied by a live orchestral performance of Alexandre Desplat’s score. And now, Christmas has come early for Malick fans: we’re getting a third version of Voyage of Time this weekend.

By now, Se7en has become one of the most beloved thrillers of the 1990s. But did you know that in the big chase scene in the rain, Brad Pitt really fell and severely hurt his arm? The injury was so serious Pitt required surgery, and he had to spend the rest of production with his hand in a cast. The broken arm was written into the script, but you might notice that Pitt spends a lot of the film hiding his arm behind various objects — because those scene were shot after Pitt broke his arm, but before his character breaks his arm. That’s just one of the facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

Film may still be barely alive, but zombies are dead, according to resident undead authority George A. Romero. (That is, authority on the undead. Romero’s fine.) He singlehandedly brought the zombie genre back to life in 1968 with the now-classic Night of the Living Dead, whose rotting subjects have been a horror staple to this day. But the director doesn’t much care for how they’ve evolved, and claims they’re a lot less scarier than they used to be.

Halloween is very nearly upon us, and there’s hardly any film more appropriate for the season than Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming Allied. Though it may be set for a release on November 23, the suspenseful account of intelligence officer Max Vatan (Brad Pitt), who’s forced to investigate rumors that his beloved wife Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard) may be a Nazi spy, fully embodies the spirit of the ‘ween season. In her layers of deceptions and intrigue, Marianne wears a mask not unlike the rubbery monster-faces children don for trick-or-treating every year. That’s a valid connection, right? Yeah? Timely lede!

Hollywood’s troubling pay gap problem doesn’t only apply to gender; it also applies to people of color. And when you’re both a woman and a person of color, that salary discrepancy can be twice as offensive. Just ask Empire star Taraji P. Henson, who detailed her egregious experiences with Hollywood’s pay gap in her new memoir, which reveals that she was paid about two percent of what Brad Pitt made on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — and that’s just the start.

“Deception is an art. Truth is a test. Is love a lie?”

The last teaser we saw for Brad Pitt’s espionage thriller Allied came at an oddly coincidental time, released online just hours after news hit of Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s divorce. It begged the question of just how much Allied‘s reception may or may not be affected by Pitt’s real life news. But either way, the latest trailer has enough twisty romance drama on screen to keep your attention.

Centuries from now, when the world is covered with water and humanity is extinct and the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence becomes a documentary, the future computers trying to understand our civilization from the pop culture we’ve left behind will scratch their robo-heads at Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Ancient records speak of the rise of some kind of symbiotic organism known as “Brangelina,” and then some years later its dissolution. The robots uncover an enormous amount of fascination in this creature. There are thousands of pictures of this two-headed being smiling, looking glamorous, in front of backdrops festooned with corporate logos. Separately, the individuals that comprised Brangelina made many movies, but they appeared together only twice: In 2015’s By the Sea and in 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Then and now, the film is one of the stranger works made in Hollywood in the 21st Century.