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The first reactions to The Monkey are finally here, and the response has been almost universal. Based on Stephen King's short story, the movie revolves around a toy monkey with a thirst for blood. Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings), Theo James (Divergent), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), and more serve as The Monkey's stars. Directed by Osgood Perkins, it is currently preparing for its upcoming February 21 release.

Though the premise is somewhat absurd, The Monkey's early reviews are near-unanimously glowing. Critics adore the movie's sense of humor, shocking brutality, and performances. Theo James (Hal) earned praise, but the majority of the acclaim is directed at Perkins, who appears to have developed a laugh-out-loud critical darling. Many reviewers compared the movie to Final Destination, though it features a far more humorous look at those deaths. Check out some of the reactions below:

I just had the Best time watching The Monkey!

We all know that those little cymbal-crashing toy monkeys are some of the creepiest items to ever hit the market. They just look evil, so it’s no wonder that Stephen King was drawn to them as a source of terror. Now, Osgood Perkins is hoping to do justice to King and the source, with The Monkey arriving in theaters next month. As it turns out, the movie screened just this week. So, did Perkins deliver on the simian scares?

Fortunately for fans of both Stephen King and Osgood Perkins, it looks like The Monkey is just the level of horror fun that will be a crowd pleaser, with those that caught the screening praising it for combining blood and laughs. Check out some of the first reactions to The Monkey below:

Adored #TheMonkey. Oz Perkins has been one of the most exciting genre filmmakers since he started and his...

A new year means a batch of new movies on your favorite streaming service, and this month brings a mountain of new releases and originals in addition to terrific library additions. Below we’ve put together a curated list of some of the best new movies streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock and beyond this month, from streaming debuts of some of 2024’s best films to starry rom-coms to a good old fashioned Western.

Check out our list of the best new movies streaming in January below.

“Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever” Netflix

Netflix – Jan. 1

The latest must-see Netflix documentary centers around Bryan Johnson, a tech millionaire who is on an eternal quest to turn back the clock. Chris Smith, the filmmaker behind “Wham” and an executive producer of “Tiger King,” directs the new film, which Netflix says, “dives deep into his psyche,...

The year is almost at a close, but December is the perfect time to catch up on movies you missed earlier this year. This month brings a bevy of hit new releases to streaming as well as old favorites and streaming originals, all waiting to be consumed before, during or after the holidays. Below we’ve put together a curated list of some of the best new movies streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock and beyond this month.

Check out our list of the best new movies streaming in December below.

“Smile 2” Paramount

Paramount+ – Dec. 3

The sequel to 2022’s surprise hit “Smile,” which was originally meant to be a direct-to-Paramount+ title, “Smile 2” is bigger, stranger and more unsettling. Instead of a small town therapist, writer/director Parker Finn’s follow-up focuses on Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), an international pop star. That means that her encounter with the demon,...

TheWrap secured seven first place wins at the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards, including a Best Entertainment Blog win for founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman’s “Waxword.”

TheWrap as a whole also won second place in the category of Best Entertainment Website, Online.

Other first place winners included Alexei Barrionuevo, Adam Chitwood, Matthew Creith, Jeremy Fuster, Natalie Korach, Andi Ortiz and Drew Taylor. Barrionuevo and Korach took home the honor for Best Music Feature, Online for their deep dive into the aftermath of the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival, “Death in the Desert: When Hamas Came to an Israeli Rave, Friends Perished.” The piece was described as “A compelling and moving account of a music festival and its tragic aftermath through the words of those affected” by one of the organization’s judges.

In the Hard News category as it related to TV and streaming, Fuster won...

Now that we’ve made it through Thanksgiving, we are welcoming the colder winter months and all the exciting TV shows that come with it.

And though there’s plenty of holiday offerings to enjoy in December. Streamers, networks and streamers have plenty of other big new and returning shows to keep us busy before the arrival of spring. Genre TV will deliver in spades with the premieres of “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew” on Disney+ and “Creature Commandos” on Max. “Squid Game,” the most-watched Netflix show ever, finally returns for its anticipated second season right after Christmas; and “The Rookie” Season 7 headlines a packed broadcast schedule kicking off in January, while “The White Lotus” makes its long-awaited return. Then new series like “Doc” on Fox, “On Call” on Prime Video and Max’s “The Pitt” are a few of the new shows vying for our attention.

Check out TheWrap’s...

November is here, and with sunset falling sooner and sooner, what better way to spend your down time than snuggled up on the couch watching a great movie? A bevy of films are newly streaming in November and we’ve rounded up a curated list of the best ones added to Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock and beyond this month.

Check out our picks for the best new movies streaming in November 2024 below.

“Music by John Williams” “Music by John Williams” (Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd.)

Disney+ – Nov. 1

John Williams is the elder statesman of film music. His scores conjure memories and transport you to different times and places. Just think about what he’s contributed over the years, from “Jaws” to “Star Wars” to “Indiana Jones” to “Harry Potter” to “Jurassic Park” to “Home Alone.” Even lesser-known scores crackle with intensity, technical proficiency and creative flair (think Brian De Palma...

As the nation braces for another presidential election, many important questions have captivated social media, chief among them — is Taylor Sheridan a Republican?

Okay, so concerns about the Yellowstone creator’s politics might not be at the absolute center of the discourse at this moment.

But with his flagship show returning to Paramount Network in less than one week, Sheridan is very much on the minds of millions of viewers.

Taylor Sheridan attends the “1923” Las Vegas premiere screening the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas on December 03, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images for Paramount+) Taylor Sheridan Is TV’s Top Hand

For those who are unfamiliar, Taylor Sheridan is one of TV’s most powerful producers — the cable equivalent of broadcast heavy-hitters like Dick Wolf and Shonda Rhimes.

As the brains behind Yellowstone and its many spinoffs, as well as a handful of other successful...

The first reactions to “Venom: The Last Dance” are in, with members of the press calling the Sony Pictures film a “feast for the fans,” “monumental” and a “fitting end” to the trilogy.

Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, better known as the symbiote Venom from the “Spider-Man” comics, for “Venom: The Last Dance.” Per the official logline, “Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance.”

Screen Rant’s Joseph Deckelmeier wrote on X that the film “takes you on a wild and exhilarating journey from start to finish.” “It’s a fun popcorn movie that reminds me of the early 2000’s comic book movies. The action is great & is a tribute to action films from the 80’s.

My first trip to Pixar’s Emeryville campus was 13 years ago. That alone was enough to give me pause when I was invited to the “Inside Out” press day. I’ve done it. I’ve taken the tour. I’ve seen the campus. I’ve met the artists and I’ve seen their amazing work spaces and I’ve had a chance to walk through pretty much every department. I remember standing outside the server room my first time up, looking in at the brain of this remarkable company, amazed at how those racks of black technology represented this collision of all this amazing human artistry. My other hesitation, honestly, was because we were told that we’d be seeing “part” of the movie. I’ve grown wary over the years of seeing movies in chunks because you can’t really react in any meaningful way since you’re not seeing something that’s complete.

"Forty-one years young, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art's annual New Directors/New Films festival is committed to compiling a slate of artistically diverse films from every corner of the world," writes Ed Gonzalez, introducing Slant's collection of reviews. "Twenty-eight countries represent the 29 feature films (24 narrative, five documentary) and 12 shorts that make up this year's program, which kicks off on March 21 with a screening of Where Do We Go Now?, Nadine Lakaki's follow-up to Caramel, and closes with a special surprise screening that won't be revealed to the audience until it screens at Film Society on Sunday, April 1. Any guesses?"

Not from this corner, though the wish-list runs pretty long. "We weren't planning to do a surprise for New Directors," Richard Peña tells the Fslc's Jonathan Robbins, "but there is a unique situation with this film." As for Nd/Nf as a whole, Peña...

L Caldoran at Cinespect on Alice Rohrwacher's debut feature: "Corpo Celeste's heroine, 13-year-old Marta (Yle Vianello), grew up in secular Switzerland and has recently moved to a heavily Catholic town in Italy: naturally, she has difficulty adjusting thanks to the resultant culture clash. Though she enjoys a close bond with her overworked single mom, she also endures the constant haranguing of her older sister while at home. Already a quiet, shy girl, she's often little more than a silent observer in her new community: her inner life is closely guarded, frequently even from the viewer."

"But the film breezes past standard short-story-isms to focus on a non-hysterical portrait of people dealing with the widening gap between their attachment to religion as a social anchor and increasing skepticism about its value or relevance," writes Vadim Rizov at GreenCine Daily. "Twitchily shot by director Alice Rohrwacher and veteran Dp Hélène Louvart,...

Not even Moneyball could beat The Lion King 3D at the box office this weekend, as Anthony D'Alessandro reports, but it's for Moneyball that we've got a roundup rolling on and on beyond all reason. IndieWIRE's Peter Knegt notes that "the specialty box office had a clear winner in Weekend," and we've got a roundup on that one as well.

"Wholly unrelated to the 1975 Sam Peckinpah film of the same name, Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl, and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. A quick sketch from Time Out Chicago's AA Dowd: Jason Statham "plays an ex-special-ops agent yanked out of retirement when someone kidnaps his mentor (Robert De Niro, in the Liam Neeson role). The guilty party, a deposed dictator with a chip on his shoulder, wants our erstwhile Transporter to knock off a trio of British mercenaries. 'I'm done with killing,...

Vera Farmiga's Higher Ground "admirably tries, on a minuscule budget, to evoke the spirit of American cinema from 35 years ago: the age of Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, an era much more hospitable to serious roles for women than the current one." Melissa Anderson in the Voice: "As reported in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the actress in 2006 (three years before her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Farmiga has expressed her disgust with the roles offered her by setting scripts on fire: 'I stack up all those crass female characters, all those utterly ordinary women, all those hundreds and hundreds of parts that have no substance or meaning and turn them into a blazing pyre.' It's a shame, then, that Higher Ground never really ignites."

Farmiga plays "Corinne, a Midwest rural woman who embraces a hippie-inflected but paternalistic evangelical community with her high...

"Cars 2, directed (like several great Pixar films of the last two decades) by John Lasseter, finds itself in the unlucky position of the not-so-bright kid in a brilliant family," finds Slate's Dana Stevens. "No matter if his performance in school is comfortably average; he'll always be seen as a disappointment compared to his stellar siblings. There's nothing really objectionable about Cars 2, although parents of young children should be warned that a few evil vehicles meet violently inauspicious ends. It's sweet-spirited, visually delightful (if aurally cacophonous), and it will make for a pleasant enough family afternoon at the movies. But we've come to expect so much more than mere pleasantness from Pixar that Cars 2 feels almost like a betrayal."

Nick Schager for the Voice: "Pixar's Cars franchise takes a sharp turn from Nascar mayhem and rural red-state-targeted 50s nostalgia to 007 espionage with this upgraded sequel, though in its...

"With his Bud Cort haircut and morbid sensibility, Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is too smart for Swansea, Wales, an industrial city mired in some seriously mid-80s Thatcherite doldrums," begins Vadim Rizov at GreenCine Daily. "The trouble with Oliver is that he knows he's clever, which could justify anything: surreptitiously monitoring his parents' sex life, taunting an overweight girl to make local cutie Jordana (Yasmin Paige) notice him as a real livewire, or trying to trash the house of downhill neighbor Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine) who may be having an affair with mom (Sally Hawkins). Fortunately, Submarine, Richard Ayoade's feature debut, is aware of Oliver's self-justifying nature and the ways it could warp him…. Acutely aware of the long tradition of films about disaffected young men coming to terms with themselves, Ayoade doesn't duck the precedent: instead, like Oliver…, he nods to seemingly every single precursor. There's a 400 Blows-quoting dash across the beach,...

"Denis Villeneuve's Incendies — an operatic saga of intergenerational woe — is the cinematic equivalent of a Harlem Globetrotters game, with brazen contrivances and a preordained outcome repurposed as dazzling spectacle." David Ehrlich at Reverse Shot: "A strained melodrama that unspools like the bastard child of Homer and Alejandro González Iñárritu, Incendies devotes the brunt of its 130 minutes to earning the audacity of its resolution — it's a work of such unchecked ambition that it almost has to be excused before it can be appreciated at all. But if Villeneuve's film ultimately resolves itself as little more than a gaudy parlor trick, it's an expertly executed bit of chicanery whose punchline hits you square in the gut."

"It's a dual story," explains New York's David Edelstein, "of French-Canadian brother-and-sister twins compelled by the will of their dead mother to locate a father they thought died decades earlier and a brother they never knew existed; and,...