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7 Best Movies Like ‘The Power of the Dog’ for More Gorgeous Outsider Stories

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7 Best Movies Like ‘The Power of the Dog’ for More Gorgeous Outsider Stories

When Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog graced the big screen this fall, many viewers may have been expecting a conventional Western. After all, the bones are there: One brother, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), rough and rugged; the other, George (Jesse Plemons), formal and shy; both trying to run a ranch in Montana, both unable to communicate with the other. Then there are the interlopers –– George’s fragile new wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and her aloof, observant son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But the perception of Rose and Peter as ignorant outsiders, ill-equipped for the rigors of ranch life, gradually begins to falter, even amid Phil’s mockery of his brother’s new family.

Instead, the homoerotic tension between Phil and his new nephew, Peter, takes precedence. While Phil hides his homosexuality and bullies Peter for his perceived effeminacy and flamboyance, Peter remains utterly cool and confident, eventually wearing down his step-uncle’s nastiness. In the end, it’s Peter who is the greatest threat to Phil’s sense of himself as all-knowing and ultra-masculine.

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The Power of the Dog becomes first and foremost a movie about masculinity, the price of belonging, and the burden of being an outsider. For those who enjoyed this surprising subversion of Western themes, here are seven more films like it.

RELATED: ‘The Power of the Dog’ Named Best Picture by the Southeastern Film Critics Association


East of Eden (1955)

Elia Kazan’s overblown Technicolor rendition of California author John Steinbeck’s Cain-and-Abel story is at times grating. But the conflict between Cal (James Dean) and his favored brother, Aron (Richard Davalos), against the backdrop of the pre-war Central Valley turns a classic sibling rivalry into something more complex. As in The Power of the Dog, we have an outsider figure. In this case, it’s the hotheaded Cal, who wins over viewers as he is constantly vying for his father’s (Raymond Massey) love even when faced with brutal skepticism from him and outright rejection from his estranged mother (Jo Van Fleet). With James Dean tapping into his potential as an up-and-coming actor, East of Eden is a colorful, melodramatic timepiece, replete with romance and yearning for a lost way of life on a California ranch.


The Big Country (1958)

When James McKay (Gregory Peck), a cultivated Easterner, goes West to visit his fiancée, Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), he refuses to be drawn into competition with Steve Leech (Charlton Heston), the rival for Patricia’s affections. He also avoids direct conflict with the vicious neighboring Hannassey family, much to his future father-in-law, the Major’s (Charles Bickford), disapproval. Though McKay eventually brokers peace by buying the Big Muddy, a ranch with crucial access to water that belongs to school teacher, Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), he must outmaneuver his foes in a shootout and reconsider his engagement to the petulant Patricia. Peck’s cerebral performance as the seemingly fish-out-of-water McKay prevents Wyler’s beautifully shot epic from lapsing into cliché or adhering too rigorously to Western tropes. For once, it is an Easterner who saves the day.

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The Piano (1993)

Campion’s mysterious magnum opus toys with the ever-present notion of women as outsiders, particularly on the frontier. When the mute Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is sold into marriage by her father to an uptight New Zealand farmer, Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), she clings to both her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), and her piano for support. Struggling to adapt to her wild and wooded surroundings, she attempts to teach the illiterate John Baines (Harvey Keitel) to play piano. When it turns out that Baines wants something more, Ada finds herself intrigued by the possibility of love, but her husband is outraged by her deviation from marital norms and commits a devastating act. Hunter wonderfully captures her character’s transformation from a cruelly silenced bride to a woman capable of both love and speech.


Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Ang Lee’s epic love story, set in 1960s Montana, features Jake Gyllenhaal as the open-hearted Jack Twist and Heath Ledger as the shy and wary Ennis del Mar. Jack and Ennis’s romance becomes strained due to ever-present homophobia and crushingly limited notions of what it means to be a man in the 20th-century West. Jack and Ennis, both outsiders masquerading as cowboys and family men, nevertheless attempt to bear these extraordinary burdens at the cost of broken marriages and other family relationships. While Lee’s tragic epic isn’t for the faint of heart, his disarming glimpse into the long-term effects of sexual repression in a heteronormative society is well worth watching.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

In the dry and unforgiving West, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) attempts to track down psychopathic hitman, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who, in turn, has been hired to recover money from Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Moss has impulsively stolen the funds from a failed drug deal. With Chigurh hot on his tail and an anxious wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), waiting at home, Brolin’s character must deal with the brutal consequences of his actions in an environment devoid of morality or inhibition. Here, as in The Power of the Dog, vengeance and creeping lawlessness prevails.


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Jane Eyre (2011)

While this Gothic classic doesn’t bear an obvious comparison to The Power of the Dog, Mia Wasikowska’s performance as the titular character allows viewers to sympathize with Jane’s absolute aloneness as she arrives to work at Thornfield, intermittently inhabited by the Byronic Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). Jane, ever the outsider, challenges Rochester’s egotism and bitterness while dealing with her own suspicions about the secretive household. Jane’s inner rebelliousness frequently clashes with her Calvinist education and her exposure to Rochester’s shallow class contemporaries, yet she refuses to compromise her dignity throughout. Unlike Rose in The Power of the Dog, she is more than a match for the terrors of the house, even when she must reconcile her love for Rochester with the secrets he has been hiding. Cary Fukunaga’s camera frequently puts Jane at the mercy of natural elements, at odds with both the English wilderness and a wholly indifferent society.


God’s Own Country (2017)

The lonely and angst-ridden Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) struggles to maintain his father’s farm in Yorkshire and resorts to alcohol and casual sex to pass the time. He is rattled by the arrival of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker whose benevolence he initially rejects. However, Johnny and Gheorghe soon fall in love, not simply staving off the loneliness of the Yorkshire moors but finding respite in an environment chronically absent of care. Their relationship is put to the test by the illness of Johnny’s father (Ian Hart) and his grandmother’s (Gemma Jones) newfound reliance on her grandson to help run the farm. Director Francis Lee’s examination of Johnny and Gheorge’s conflicts and eventual reconciliation is not only erotically charged but full of respect for men who must make their way in a world often devoid of tenderness.



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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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