Scarlett Johansson

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets proved that perhaps not all passion projects are meant to come to fruition. Director Luc Besson may be pleased with how his ambitious (and horribly miscast) sci-fi epic turned out, but it was a total bomb at the box office, effectively nixing any plans for a sequel…for that film, anyway. The French filmmaker has apparently entered the rebound stage of his big-budgeted heartbreak, returning to his last successful cinematic relationship in the hopes of rekindling that box office magic.

Sorry not sorry about that headline, folks, but a trailer for a new Wes Anderson movie is something to get super-silly-stoked about. For his second stop-motion animated film, the director who’s made a habit of killing dogs in his movies finally gives canines their due. The first trailer for Isle of Dogs has arrived, and I regret to inform you that it’s going to make the wait until next March that much more painful.

It’s been three years since Wes Anderson released The Grand Budapest Hotel, but fans of the director (Fandersons? Is that a thing?) will have to wait a little longer to see his next film. Isle of Dogs doesn’t hit theaters until next spring, but we’ll have the first trailer tomorrow — until then, Fox Searchlight has released a brief teaser to get you ready for Anderson’s new stop-motion animated film.

Think you know the star of ‘Avengers’ and ‘Lucy’? Test your knowledge with the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

The exact number of Marvel characters who will appear in Avengers: Infinity War remains a topic of great speculation, and surely will be until the movie opens in theaters and someone sits there in the theater with a pen and paper, counting each hero and villain who appears in what will almost certainly be the most heavily populated comic-book movie in history.

In just a few short weeks, Scarlett Johansson will band together with a group of the funniest women in showbiz for the nuttiest bachelorette party of their lives. It’s honestly astonishing we haven’t seen Kate McKinnon and Ilana Glazer in a movie together yet, but the time is now, and a new Red Band trailer shows us exactly the kind of hijinks we can expect.

For every review praising the fun and artistry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are three more thinkpieces bemoaning the fact that we still haven’t gotten our Black Widow movie. And for good reason: She’s a character with a fascinating history whose arcs in the comics are always dynamic and interesting and grounded in current events, plus she’s the only one on the core team who hasn’t had her own movie yet. Every time the prospect is brought up, the folks at Marvel are usually neutral-to-positive about the idea — even her costar Chris Evans thinks she should get her own.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving!, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving! is all about.

Kyle Davies, the President of Domestic Distribution for Paramount Pictures, is not having a great week. The early eruption of a backlash to his studio’s newest release (the generously-budgeted Ghost in the Shell remake) and its whitewashed casting was cause for concern. But up until recently, he could assuage his shareholders’ worries by clinging to the notion that hackle-raising on the Internet would not have any tangible effects on the box-office receipts. That changed after this past weekend, when the Scarlett Johansson vehicle mustered a piteous $19 million in wide release. Left to answer for the film’s commercial failure, Davies has placed the blame on the controversy over tapping confirmed white woman Johansson to portray an Asian role, to which the whole of the Internet will now respond with a hearty “DA-DOY.”

There’s a huge problem at the center of Ghost in the Shell. You already knew that, though. You’ve heard about the whitewashing controversy and the problems of co-opting Asian culture for western audiences. But as bad as you might have heard that whitewashing problem is, it’s even worse. It’s impossible to discuss the movie’s troubled treatment of identity politics without spoiling some big reveals, but before we get into those, there are plenty of other things that make the live-action remake a disappointment.