Movie Review | The Verge

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is beautiful but a little too busy

2026-04-04T12:08:24-04:00

With The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo entered the next phase of its plan to become a different kind of entertainment giant. Though it wasn't the company's first go at putting its iconic plumbers on the big screen, the film demonstrated that Nintendo could collaborate with partners like Illumination to produce box office hits. The first movie supercharged game sales at a time when the original Switch was nearing the end of its life cycle. And with Nintendo also looking to drive interest in its theme park experiences, it was a foregone conclusion that another Mario feature was in the pipeline.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is more of a re …

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Red Rooms makes online poker as thrilling as its serial killer

2026-03-30T05:56:20-04:00

Juliette Gariépy’s Kelly-Anne is an uncomfortable mystery. | Image: Nemesis Films Productions

It's rare for a movie to get technology right. And it's even rarer for that movie to be a thriller or horror, where realism takes a backseat to scares and tension. But Red Rooms mostly gets it. Nothing takes me out of a film quicker than a tech MacGuffin that might as well be literal magic. Yes, the phrase "dark web" will always sound a bit silly, but at no point during its 118 minutes does the tech become a distraction.

It's not the tech that makes Red Rooms great, though. It's just something that could have easily tanked an otherwise excellent movie. What carries the film is the expert tension building by director Pascal Plante. The perf …

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Project Hail Mary is popcorn sci-fi at its best

2026-03-21T11:58:27-04:00

Have you ever wondered what Arrival would be like if it was also a goofy buddy comedy? Me neither. And yet the strange combination somehow fits together in Project Hail Mary. The movie follows a scientist who travels to the far reaches of the universe to save humanity and is forced to work alongside an alien in the same position. It's silly and heartfelt, tense and hopeful. It may be a seemingly odd mixture - but the strangest part of all is how well it all works.

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of Spider-Verse fame, and based on the novel of the same name from The Martian author Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling …

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The AI Doc is an overwrought hype piece for doomers and accelerationists alike

2026-03-09T05:38:08-04:00

Co-director Daniel Roher. | Image: Focus Features

We are in the thick of a massive push to incorporate generative AI into almost every aspect of our lives, but it is still easy to be confused about what it is and how it works. It doesn't help that many of gen AI's proponents and detractors both speak about it with a feverish hyperbole that comes across like fantastical ad copy. And the rate at which AI firms release new iterations of their products can make it hard to keep track of what's going on in the industry as a whole.

In The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, codirectors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell attempt to make sense of this moment in gen AI's rise to prominence. The …

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You need to watch the intensely surreal cult classic Possession

2026-02-15T12:28:47-05:00

This isn’t one for the squeamish. | Image: Metrograph Pictures

Let me just say that I highly recommend you go into Possession blind. Don't watch a trailer. Don't even finish reading this. Go watch it now over on Shudder, Criterion, or Metrograph. It's also available through Kanopy or Hoopla if your library provides access. Then come back so we can talk about it in the comments. Though this probably isn't one for the squeamish.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Possession is the sort of film that, even if you've had the whole plot spoiled for you, can be difficult to follow. After watching it twice, listening to three different podcasts, and reading multiple articles about it, I'm still not 100 percent sure wha …

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a rollicking parable about this moment in tech

2026-02-12T12:59:30-05:00

We are all guilty of pulling out our phones and doomscrolling through stressful headlines or mindnumbing videos when we should be doing anything else. We know it's bad, but we still do it because it's hard to resist when much of our time is spent living and working on our devices. And even though we understand that we'd be better off with less screen time, our extremely online society doesn't exactly encourage that kind of healthy behavior.

These are some of the familiar ideas at work in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, director Gore Verbinski's new sci-fi film about a man's desperate fight to save humanity from an apocalyptic future where m …

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Arco is a brilliant and beautiful sci-fi film inspired by animation legends

2026-01-29T09:44:53-05:00

Classic 2D animation may not be as prevalent as it once was, but some of the stuff we're getting over the last few years has been incredible. That includes future classics like Mars Express and Scavengers Reign, and now you can add the Moebius-inspired Arco to the list. After making a splash on the festival circuit last year, the film is finally hitting theaters more widely on January 30th, so you can see it for yourself.

Arco's story is split across two time periods. In the distant future, humanity lives in cities elevated above the surface due to rising sea levels, but they've also developed the ability to time travel in order to scour th …

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Send Help is an ode to every worker who has had a bad boss

2026-01-27T21:58:04-05:00

When it comes to director Sam Raimi's films, you have to go into the theater understanding that you're about to experience a piece of cinema that vacillates between being absolute batshit and utterly sublime. Though Send Help is much more grounded than the projects he's best known for, like The Evil Dead or Drag Me to Hell, it's a quintessential Raimi film that makes no pretense of hiding how unhinged and disturbing its story is going to be.

On more than one occasion, Send Help almost feels like a live-action cartoon. Its heavy-handed foreshadowing and ridiculous set pieces are meant to leave you wincing in horror before making you laugh a …

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All You Need Is Kill is a dazzling movie with the soul of a video game

2026-01-24T16:06:34-05:00

While Hollywood has repeatedly tried adapting stories from Japanese manga, vanishingly few of them have been as good as Edge of Tomorrow - Warner Bros.' 2014 live-action film based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's sci-fi light novel All You Need Is Kill. Edge of Tomorrow wasn't a one-to-one translation of All You Need Is Kill's original story or its manga adaptation by Takeshi Obata, Ryosuke Takeuchi, and Yoshitoshi Abe. The movie was more militaristic and focused on humanity rallying against an alien invasion.

But Edge of Tomorrow understood that what made its source material so powerful was its imaginative exploration of what it means to be tenaci …

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The Bone Temple turns 28 Years Later into a terrifying crisis of faith

2026-01-15T12:05:56-05:00

Because there was such a long gap between the releases of 28 Weeks Later and 28 Years Later, it was surprising to hear that writer-director duo Alex Garland and Danny Boyle already had plans for their latest collaboration to be the first chapter of a new horror trilogy. Sony seemed keen on fast-tracking the pair's idea, as 28 Years Later and its sequel began shooting back to back. But it also felt like the studio wanted to bring a different kind of energy into the franchise when it tapped Nia DaCosta to direct the new film.

That energy and its distinctness from Boyle's directorial voice is palpable in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - a fil …

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