Willem Dafoe

Regardless of how you felt about last year’s Blair Witch, Adam Wingard has earned more than enough goodwill with genre flicks like You’re Next and The Guest to ensure that we’ll be stoked to see whatever he does next. That would be Death Note, his American adaptation of the classic Japanese manga, starring Willem Dafoe as a spiky-headed and mega-creepy, self-described “death god” (I mean, what did you expect).

Yes, it’s true, that Netflix Death Note movie is still happening, despite the fact that it feels like a fever dream cooked up by someone not quite out of their goth phase. The movie is based on the popular series of manga and anime about a bunch of teens who stumble upon a mysterious book that kills people whose names are written in it. Inevitably, they’re tempted to misuse this power by a demon named Ryuk, who is featured on the film’s extremely edgy new poster.

One of the few upsides of living in our current political climate is the uptick in dystopian film and television we’re about to see. From the successful run of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu to HBO’s planned adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, we are quite possibly entering in a new golden age of dystopian fiction, with every screenwriter who ever jotted down an idea about a broken society pitching their brains out with their original idea. That may not seem like much of a silver lining, but hey, it’s better than nothing!

The game is afoot, chums. There’s been a murder most foul, and you are a suspect. That is, in the event that you happen to be Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, Daisy Ridley, Judi Dench, Josh Gad, Tom Bateman, Lucy Boynton, or one of the other travelers aboard the Orient Express. As the grand locomotive makes its hazardous journey through a snow-tipped mountain range, one of the riders commits a heinous crime, and it falls to none other than the great investigator Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh, who also happens to be directing this hullabaloo) to sort out the facts in pursuit of the truth.

Kenneth Branagh’s big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is no small affair. In fact, the cast of the film is so enormous that Entertainment Weekly had to rotate the cover featuring the cast to landscape to fit everyone in.

Any mystery is only as good as its suspects, and Kenneth Branagh’s percolating adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express — perhaps the greatest whodunit ever to have dun it —has rounded up a murderer’s row of potential murderers. He’s rounded up a cast that fits all the essential literary thriller archetypes: Branagh himself will assay detective of note Hercule Poirot, along with Johnny Depp (the oddball), Judi Dench (the princess), Lucy Boynton (the countess), Michelle Pfeiffer (the actress), Daisy Ridley (the governess), Josh Gad (the bumbler), and Leslie Odom Jr. (the military man). The scene is set, but what’s that? A newcomer appears, bringing a little fresh blood to this unfolding mystery.

While he was da foe of Peter Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, when Willem Dafoe joined the cast of Justice League, his role was, at first, kept a mystery. We later learned over the summer that he’d be playing Nuidis Vulko, one of the Aquaman comics’ mainstays, and now Dafoe has confirmed it himself, with a few interesting facts about his involvement in the Aquaman and Justice League movies.

After over 40 years of working in film, Paul Schrader remains as challenging as he was when he first caught Martin Scorsese’s attention with his screenplay for Taxi Driver. They made three more films together, but Schrader established himself as the more unconventional of the two when he took control of the camera. Decades later, Schrader’s filmography is just as prolific with singular titles like Hardcore, Cat People, and Dog Eat Dog — the latter is his most recent effort, a delirious crime thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe that is every bit as wild as that simple description implies, and the reason for our conversation with the veteran filmmaker.

This past summer's Finding Dory made a big splash at cineplexes (pardon me while I self-immolate), enchanting kid- and adult-aged viewers alike while running up the year's highest domestic gross. On the unfortunate side, however, the de rigueur short runtime of children's programming meant that some bits of the film had to be left on the cutting room floor like so many discarded fish eyeballs. Today, one lost sequence from Pixar's latest smash has been recovered and brought to the viewing public's attention.

If the first teaser for The Great Wall piqued your interest, you’re in luck: Universal Pictures just released the first full-length theatrical trailer for The Great Wall as part of their New York Comic-Con panel on the film. Unlike the first trailer, here we actually get a good look at the monsters and an explanation for why Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal are fighting in China in the first place.