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Another week is over and it's again time to answer reader mail at The Hard Pass. And thank you once again for being a subscriber. This newsletter only exists because of you. (Okay and, I guess, to a lesser extent, me.) This is a big one and this
A couple of weeks ago I rewatched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I unabashedly love this movie. It is somehow both a great Star Trek movie and a Star Trek movie that non-Star Trek fans like. Over the years a lot of Trek fans have dismissed The Voyage
I have returned from Toronto with an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, as if my body is trying to tell me, "Some of the things you do may not be a good idea anymore. Or never were, really." Ah, what's the difference, it was still fun. Though,
It makes no sense, but also somehow makes perfect sense that Zach Cregger would want to make a Resident Evil movie, a video game based film franchise that has somehow been around for 24 years now. Though, notably and understandably, this new Resident Evil has nothing to do with any
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Obviously with this headline I'm doing a bit of "a bit" here. A bit that, for people who don't know me, think is me being dead serious. On social media, someone replied to me, "Oh, so it's better than The Night
Earlier this week, I published a film festival preview in which I told quite a few behind the scenes stories about what it's really like covering a major film festival as press – the good and the bad. The one I didn't share in that piece, but
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"You have to care a lot to not give a fuck." This is profound poetry, spoken by Liam Gallagher during Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger, the new documentary by directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern that chronicles Oasis's 2025 concert reunion tour. A
Last June, my girlfriend Kate and I were at a premiere party for a movie you probably don't know, but it was directed by and starred a famous person who has a lot of famous friends and they were all there. At one point, Kate pointed at a
There are two things I remember distinctly about putting this piece together. First, that it took a surprisingly long time. I remember my editor always checking in on Slack, asking, "What are you working on this week?" And for over a month straight this would always be part
A version of this post published on September 3, 2021 on Uproxx, but is no longer on the internet. With this one I did, let's say, tidy it up a little bit. In 2021, we were still very much feeling the affects of the pandemic and I edited
This was a piece that published on February 28, 2018 when I worked at Uproxx. I would just link to it, but Uproxx has removed its archives before 2022, so this piece has been lost to the internet. But, today, I am here to save it. The funny thing about
This is a newsletter you can read, written by Mike Ryan.
This week, I will fly on an airplane from New York City to Toronto to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, which will be my 13th in Toronto. My first was in 2011, which is, somehow, 15 years ago now. It is an extremely well run film festival staffed with
"I want you to ask Mike Leigh if he'd ever make a superhero movie." These are 14 terrifying words. These are the words from my editor at Movieline, Stu VanAirsdale, right before I interview the director most known for not suffering fools of any kind. At
Han Solo is a fascinating character (yes, I know, Harrison Ford¹ would disagree), which is why I love writing about him so much. Not so much his character traits, but more his relationship to the Rebel Alliance in the Original Trilogy and why he's even there in the
It is the last Friday of August and, gosh, what a brutal week. I wrote two obituaries. One about Dolly Parton, then another at IndieWire about Peter Cullen. Right as I published the Dolly Parton piece, the news broke that Tim Curry died. Again, just a brutal week. This particular
On Wednesday, Sylvester Stallone paid tribute to his Rhinestone co-star, Dolly Parton, who died this week at the age of 80. It's been a nonstop outpouring of love for Parton since the news broke on Tuesday.¹ But Stallone's tribute about the two of them almost
The day I'm typing this, Tuesday, August 25th, is the ten-year anniversary of one of the funniest random encounters I've ever had. The gist: I was on a shuttle bus from NYC Port Authority to MetLife stadium to see a Bruce Springsteen concert when a
Back in 2010, during the final season of Lost, I did the weekly, post-episode interviews with cast members throughout that final season for Vulture. This was not an easy gig for a few reasons. First, for the first half of that season they were still filming in Hawaii. Which
I was watching the original Star Wars the other day and a line between Han and Luke on the Death Star hit me a different way. Han asks Luke, "Where did you dig up that old fossil?," referring to Ben Kenobi. Luke fires back, "Ben is a
Every now and then, the 2011 Green Lantern movie pops up on cable and I watch some of it thinking, well, how bad could it have been? I wouldn’t call it “unwatchable,” but I certainly can’t watch it. Just everything is wrong, starting with Ryan Reynolds' jovial,
Admittedly, it’s pretty exciting to watch a movie I thought I’d never get a chance to see. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Coyote vs. Acme was filmed back in 2022, then Warner Bros. decided not to release the film. Now, that doesn’t
In 2023 I went to the New York City premiere of Air, the Ben Affleck directed film about the creation of the Air Jordan shoe. It was held at Warner Bros. NYC offices at Hudson Yards, a somewhat muted affair for a movie starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. But
The Hard Pass turned six months old this week. In celebration, I commissioned some stickers with a logo that I spent way too long learning how to make. My goal was I wanted it to look "pleasant." Which, for me, is something that would be on an overpriced