Tag: movie preview

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Street Fighter Review: Momoa Leads Epic 2026 Reboot

Round one. Fight.

On October 16, Paramount Pictures brings Street Fighter back to the big screen, and this time the people making it clearly grew up feeding quarters into the arcade cabinet. Directed by Kitao Sakurai, produced by Legendary Entertainment with Capcom, the film is the third live-action take on the fighting game series, and it looks determined to be the first one that feels like the game.

The roster

The cast list reads like someone rage-drafted their dream character select screen. Andrew Koji, the breakout star of Warrior, plays Ryu. Noah Centineo plays Ken Masters. Callina Liang plays Chun-Li, the Interpol agent who recruits the estranged fighters for the next World Warrior Tournament. Around them: Jason Momoa as Blanka, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i as Akuma, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as Balrog, Cody Rhodes as Guile, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Orville Peck as Vega, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Olivier Richters as Zangief, Hirooki Goto as E. Honda, Mel Jarnson as Cammy, Rayna Vallandingham as Juli, plus Eric Andre, Andrew Schulz, Kyle Mooney and Alexander Volkanovski in supporting roles.

The story is set in 1993, the year Street Fighter II owned every arcade in America. Ryu and Ken, once brothers in training, are pulled back into combat by Chun-Li for a tournament that turns out to be a brutal clash of fists, fate and fury. Behind the spectacle sits a deadly conspiracy tied to their past. If they do not face it, it is game over.

Why this reboot has a real shot

Two things separate this from the 1994 and 2009 attempts, and both are encouraging. First, the director. Sakurai made Bad Trip, the hidden-camera comedy that proved he can stage chaos with a straight face and an athlete’s timing. A Street Fighter movie needs exactly that: total commitment to the absurd, played without a wink.

Second, the fidelity. The teaser that debuted at The Game Awards played like a lineup of statement poses, each fighter introduced the way the arcade game introduced them. One sequence recreates the famous car-smashing bonus round, sedan and all. Another has Rhodes’ Guile hitting Vega with a leaping kick that sends him through a wall. The film leans on music, crowd noise and color-saturated lighting rather than exposition. That is a director who understands the assignment: this is not prestige drama, it is Saturday night.

The 1993 setting is smart too. It lets the film live in the era when these characters were mythology, before irony got its hands on them. And the production has real muscle behind it: Mary Parent producing, Ken Seng shooting, music by Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson. The film wrapped in Australia late last year, and everything since has suggested confidence.

The tournament movie formula

Tournament movies live or die on casting, and this cast is a fever dream in the best way. Momoa as Blanka is inspired. Roman Reigns has the physical presence to make Akuma terrifying. Dastmalchian, one of the great character actors working, will chew every scene as Bison. And Rhodes and 50 Cent bring the kind of larger-than-life charisma the games always promised.

The risk, of course, is bloat. Seventeen fighters is a lot of screen time to share in 120 minutes. But the premise is built for it: a tournament is a machine for introducing characters fast and making you care faster. Sakurai’s job is to keep the fights legible and the stakes human. If he does, this could be the rare video game movie that plays to the faithful and the curious alike.

What to watch for

Watch the Game Awards teaser again and notice what is not there: no grim origin story, no apology for the source material, no attempt to make this respectable or important. Just ring lights, pyrotechnics and a cast that looks thrilled to be there. Sometimes the best version of a movie is the one that trusts the fun.

Make it a fight night. Stock up on NYC’s best hot chicken beforehand, and if you need something with real heat for the post-movie debate, these spicy tofu spots will do the job. Street Fighter opens October 16. The arena is truly waiting. Hadouken.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Other Mommy Review: Chastain’s Chilling Halloween Horror

“Can I go inside your heart?”

That is the question at the center of Other Mommy, and if it does not chill you a little, read it again slowly. Universal Pictures releases the film exclusively in theaters on October 9, and horror fans have already crowned it the Halloween season’s best bet. After watching the trailer, it is not hard to see why.

The setup

The film is adapted from Josh Malerman’s bestselling 2024 novel Incidents Around the House. Malerman wrote Bird Box, so he knows how to find the soft spot in a reader’s chest and press on it. The story follows Bela, a young girl played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who forms a bond with a supernatural entity inside her home. The entity looks uncannily like her own mother. It keeps asking to get inside her heart. What begins as an unusual friendship turns sinister as Bela realizes the presence she welcomed may be hunting her family.

Jessica Chastain plays both roles: Bela’s protective mother and the thing wearing her face. It is a dual performance built on small, awful details. Chastain has described finding the character’s unblinking smile and shaping every physical choice around what the entity would offer a lonely child: the mother Bela wishes she had. Jay Duplass plays her father, Daddo. The supporting cast includes Dichen Lachman as a paranormal scientist, Arian Moayed as a family friend, and screen legend Karen Allen, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame, as Bela’s grandmother.

The team behind the dread

Director Rob Savage made his name with Host, the lockdown horror film shot entirely over video call, then proved he could go big-studio with The Boogeyman. He knows how to build dread out of nothing and how to spend a budget. Producer James Wan, the architect of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring, backs the film through his Blumhouse and Atomic Monster banner. The screenplay comes from WGA Award winner Nathan Elston.

Savage recently told Entertainment Weekly the film contains around 50 jump scares, then immediately complicated his own count: a great scare, he argued, does not need the classic quiet-quiet-loud formula. What he promises instead is dread, set pieces and a deep paranoia where the audience can never quite tell whether they are looking at Mommy or Other Mommy, or whether any grown-up in the frame can be trusted. For a 93-minute horror film, that is a tight, mean machine.

Why it might actually get you

The trailer did something unusual. It played before The Odyssey in theaters and went properly viral, with audiences reporting genuine unease. That matters. Trailers are engineered to startle; this one reportedly left people sitting in the dark feeling wrong. The second trailer shows restraint too, holding back how the entity actually operates. In an era when marketing routinely spoils the third act, that discipline is encouraging.

There is also the Malerman factor. Incidents Around the House is told from a child’s perspective, and the novel’s power comes from the gap between what Bela understands and what the reader does. If the film keeps even half of that, it will be the rare horror movie that works as a drama too. Chastain does not do paycheck roles. She picked this one.

The scares, on paper

Savage’s recent interviews suggest a director thinking hard about craft, not just shocks. He talks about building scares without the classic quiet-quiet-loud formula, about dread as a sustained pressure rather than a series of pops. The final trailer hints at set pieces with real imagination: one sequence has the entity hunting Bela through an indoor play park, galloping down twisting slides before cornering the child in an endless ball pit. A ball pit. The most innocent place on earth, turned into a trap. That is the kind of image that lodges in your head and stays there.

The film’s best trick may be its ambiguity. Chastain herself has leaned into the question of whether Bela is seeing a monster or a darker side of her own mother. A horror film that keeps you guessing about reality for 93 minutes, led by an Oscar winner playing against herself, is exactly what October is for.

Plan your scare night

Horror this good deserves a full evening. Brave one of the 20 haunted houses in and around NYC to warm up, catch Other Mommy on October 9, and then cleanse your palate with something cheerful, like the city’s 2026 holiday tree and lights celebrations. Just remember the question. Can I go inside your heart? Answer carefully.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Digger Review: Tom Cruise’s Wild New Comedy Arrives Oct 2

Tomorrow, October 2, Tom Cruise stops running. He starts digging.

Digger, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s satirical black comedy for Warner Bros., opens in theaters and IMAX this Friday, and it might be the strangest big swing a major studio has taken in years. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful man in the world: an aging oil tycoon who sets off on a frantic mission to prove he can save humanity from the very disaster his drilling unleashed. The tagline says it all. A comedy of catastrophic proportions.

If that sounds like a lot, good. It is supposed to.

The setup

The film is a Legendary Pictures production, directed by Inarritu from a screenplay he wrote with Oscar winners Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, his Birdman collaborators, plus Sabina Berman. The story is credited to Berman, Inarritu and Jez Butterworth. It runs 129 minutes, cost somewhere between $160 and $180 million, and was shot entirely in VistaVision, the wide, lush format Inarritu favors.

The premise reads like a dare. The richest man alive breaks the planet, then demands credit for trying to fix it. Around him orbits an ensemble that most directors would trade a kidney for: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, with Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Robert John Burke and Burn Gorman in support. Behind the camera, the cavalry is just as stacked: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, editors Stephen Mirrione and Conor O’Neill, production designer Dennis Gassner, composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Count the Oscars in that paragraph and you will run out of fingers.

Why this one is fascinating

This is Cruise’s first film under the Warner Bros. deal he signed in January 2026, and his first real collaboration with the studio since Edge of Tomorrow more than a decade ago. It is also Inarritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant. Two heavyweights, both overdue for a new chapter, choosing to make a wild comedy about an oil baron trying to outrun his own mess. Nobody saw this coming, which is exactly the point.

Inarritu has described the shoot as joyful chaos. At Cannes he called it “insane” and said Cruise made him laugh every day, praising a comic range he had never seen from the star. A poster designed by artist Ed Ruscha was recently celebrated at LACMA. The studio is treating this like an event, not a release.

Early reactions are genuinely divided, and Warner Bros. is leaning into it. A new ad runs contradictory pull quotes side by side: masterpiece next to unpleasant, brilliant next to baffling, tied together with the line “Same film, different truth.” You can read that as marketing spin or as honesty. Either way, it takes confidence to sell a movie this way.

A comedy built like an epic

The craft here deserves its own paragraph. Inarritu shot the film over six months in the United Kingdom, entirely in VistaVision, a format that gives the image a depth and grain modern digital rarely manages. Lubezki’s involvement alone guarantees it will look like nothing else in the multiplex this fall. Even the marketing has an art-house streak: the key poster was designed by renowned American artist Ed Ruscha and was recently celebrated at LACMA, which is not a sentence you usually write about a Tom Cruise vehicle.

Cruise himself looks unrecognizable in the materials released so far: paunchy, weathered, clutching a decrepit cat on the poster. For a star whose brand is control, letting himself look this undone is the boldest special effect in the movie.

Should you go?

Here is the case for yes. Studios do not make $170 million original comedies anymore. They make sequels, and prequels, and sequels to prequels. When one of the last true movie stars and one of the great living directors decide to spend that kind of money on something nobody asked for, the only correct response is curiosity. The worst version of this movie is still more interesting than the safest franchise entry of the year.

See it big if you can. Lubezki shooting VistaVision is reason enough, and whatever you think of the satire, you will not be bored. Cruise, famously, does not do bored.

Make a day of it. Grab one of NYC’s best breakfast sandwiches before the show, then argue about the ending over hot chicken after. Digger opens October 2 in theaters and IMAX. Go decide for yourself.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Treasure Island: Ridley Scott’s 2027 Pirate Epic Preview

Some release dates are routine calendar housekeeping. Then Sony drops Ridley Scott and Hugh Jackman on a pirate movie and suddenly the whole industry is paying attention. This week the studio confirmed that its new take on Treasure Island will hit theaters on November 11, 2027, anchoring a late-year one-two punch alongside the newly dated 24 Jump Street.

It is the newest major announcement on the board, and frankly the most interesting one. Scott, at 88, keeps choosing projects like a man with half his career ahead of him. Jackman keeps picking roles that dare people to underestimate him. Put them together on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel and you get the kind of old-school movie event that doesn’t come around often anymore.

What Sony actually confirmed

The details that are locked in: Scott directs and produces. Jackman leads the cast. The screenplay comes from Jack Thorne, who co-created Netflix’s acclaimed Adolescence and wrote the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The cast also includes Hugh Grant and Adolescence breakout Owen Cooper, whose roles have not been specified yet.

The story is the one every schoolkid knows. A young boy finds a map to a legendary buried treasure, sets out on a perilous sea voyage, and ends up locked in a battle of wits with the charismatic, treacherous Long John Silver. Different outlets disagree on exactly which pirate Jackman is playing, with some naming Silver and others Blackbeard, so we will wait for Sony’s official word on that. What is certain is that this is a serious, grown-up treatment. Forget the felt pirates. The Muppets had their turn.

Why this pairing matters

Scott does not make small pictures, and he does not make them for long. His filmography is a wall of epics: Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Napoleon. He shoots fast, he builds worlds you can smell, and he has a particular gift for making history feel like it is happening right now, with dirt under its fingernails.

Jackman, for his part, has spent the back half of his career proving range is not a rumor. Wolverine made him a star; The Greatest Showman made him a song-and-dance man; Logan made him an actor critics had to take seriously. A pirate role under Scott’s direction gives him a stage big enough for all of it. He has played a pirate before, in 2015’s Pan, but that was a cartoon villain in a cartoon movie. This sounds like something else entirely.

And then there is Thorne. Hiring the man who wrote Adolescence, one of the most talked-about television events of 2025, tells you Sony wants this to be a character piece with a pulse, not a theme-park ride with sails. The best pirate stories were always about greed and loyalty wearing costumes. Thorne knows how to write that.

The pirate competition

Here is the wrinkle. Scott’s Treasure Island will not be the only version in town. A six-part series starring Hayley Atwell, with David Oyelowo as Long John Silver, is headed to streaming this October via MGM+ and Paramount+. That puts more than a year between the two adaptations, and honestly, the contrast could help both. Television does the slow burn. Scott does the spectacle. Audiences who binge the series in October will be primed for the big screen version in November 2027.

It is also worth noting the calendar company Sony is keeping. 24 Jump Street lands December 10, 2027, with Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Ice Cube reportedly returning and Rodney Rothman directing. Two wildly different films, one month apart: pirate epic, then self-aware comedy sequel. That is a studio with confidence.

The bottom line

We are more than a year out, and plenty can change. Productions shift, dates move, casts evolve. But the bones of this are strong: a master director, a star at the height of his powers, a writer with genuine literary chops, and one of the great adventure stories ever written. If you only follow one 2027 release date, make it this one.

Until November 2027, there are plenty of adventures closer to home. This week’s lineup of books, jazz, salsa and night markets will keep any explorer busy, and the city’s 2026 holiday tree and lights celebrations are already on the calendar. Yo ho ho, indeed.