Charles Bramesco

After traveling to Wakanda with Black Panther, jet-set to five more fictional kingdoms with these streaming picks.

The celebrated writer speculated on the difficulties of translating his work to the screen.

Everyone just wants to escape with their lives and return to their original bodies in the new remake.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that in the film A Bad Moms Christmas, there will be moms, they will be bad, and it will be Christmas. The sequel to 2016’s sleeper hit has now gotten its first trailer, and if nothing else, I can confirm for you beyond any shadow of a doubt that A Bad Moms Christmas will star a collection of moms, all of whom will indulge in varying levels of badness. This year, the reason for the season is mom-ing, and doing it badly.

Adam Schumann isn’t doing so well. During his time serving as a soldier in Iraq, he had a sense of purpose and importance, but he’s currently struggling to adjust to life as a civilian. Nothing seems to matter quite as much as the death-defying work Adam did at the front, and he’s having a hard time finding someone who can relate to the specific, intense emotional pain he brought back with him. Memories of the atrocities of combat keep killing the mood when he tries to get intimate with his wife (Kaboom star Haley Bennett), he’s practically a stranger to his own daughter, and he can’t help but feel a bit purposeless on the home front.

Spider-Man’s a true New Yorker: he understands when to take the 6 train versus rolling the dice on the 2nd Avenue subway, he knows where to get the Bronx’s best chopped cheese, and when he needs a snack in a pinch, he hits up his friendly neighborhood bodega. In the latest promotional spot for the umpteenth reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming, the web-head is late to a big NBA Finals watching party at Tony Stark’s place. (The commercial was written to air specifically during the basketball playoffs this year.) But when he ducks into a nearby bodega — for those uninitiated, it’s really just a corner convenience store, but immeasurably better in every way — he has a chance encounter.

In one of the Trump administration’s more agreeable defilings of decades-long tradition, the White House’s ritzy move theater will now be available to those visitors touring the building’s East Wing. Say what you will about the new Commander-in-Chief — that he’s a pudenda-grabbing, fact-resistant demagogue, for instance — but at least he’s going to allow the general public a glimpse of how the most powerful man in the nation took in Finding Dory.

Now that Austin Powers has safely moved past its “overexposure through incessant quoting” phase, there’s a lot to love about the movie. The peppy flute theme from Quincy Jones, Myers’ screwloose double-turn as the International Man of Mystery and his pinky-brandishing nemesis, the kitschy ’60s-by-way-of-’90s design, it‘s all a pretty good time. (Not to mention that the tactfully obscured nude scene is a marvel of blocking and composition.) A recent oral history has gotten Myers’ most beloved comic creation back in the public eye, and amidst rumors that a sequel may be in the cards at some indeterminate point in the future, another surprising discovery has been made.

The ennui of suburban life can drive a middle-aged man to do crazy things. Usually, it’s something like having an affair or purchasing a flashy compensatory car. For Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, it meant a return to his teenage habits of blazin’ it and kickin’ out the Guess Who jams. And in E.L. Doctorow’s 2008 short story Wakefield, a family man breaks free from the shackles of everyday drudgery by abandoning his family and then watching them react to his disappearance from the attic of the house next door. But, like, in a poetic way.

Alien Vs. Predator. Freddy Vs. Jason. Kramer Vs. Kramer. Plessy Vs. Ferguson. Soon, a new rivalry shall join the ranks of the great cinematic grudge matches. You saw Bradley Cooper plumb new depths of moral compromise with American Sniper in 2014. Now, he’ll go up against his greatest nemesis yet: it’s American Sniper Vs. American Assassin — Battle of America.

In appearances at film festivals or the occasional blockbuster exhibit at the Whitney Museum, documentarian Laura Poitras gives the impression of a pretty collected, cool-headed woman. Which comes as a surprise, seeing as few people on Earth would have more justification for turning into a raving paranoid lunatic. Poitras wowed the world in 2014 with her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, wherein she risked life and limb to gain access to the classified intelligence whistleblower and ran afoul of the United States’ far-reaching surveillance programs in the process. A few years later, and she’s prepared to unveil her latest stunning exposé on the shady business of federal watching, the lightning rod Risk. If you weren‘t feeling uneasy about the virtual eyeballs monitoring your every move, now would be a fine time to get started.

As the director of the poorly-reviewed but highly lucrative Jurassic World and slated helmer for Star Wars: Episode IX, Colin Trevorrow has become Hollywood’s new go-to guy for massive franchises. But when he’s not somehow making dinosaurs boring or giving Star Wars fans nervous breakdowns, Trevorrow likes to reconnect with his roots in the indie world, where he first got his start as the man behind the middling sci-fi/romcom Safety Not Guaranteed. As a little breather between studio tentpoles, Trevorrow’s going back to basics with another small-scale, small-town adventure. And this time, he’s got an adorable secret weapon.