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Christmas may be several months away, but moviegoers can expect one new holiday flick during the 2024 Christmas season, featuring sights from Indiana.

What does God look like? It’s an eternal question with which fiction has tussled on plenty of occasions, from the standard-issue “bearded white guy clad in flowing robe” to the off-beat “wordless flower child Alanis Morisette” to the factually accurate “Morgan Freeman chilling.” The upcoming faith-based drama The Shack takes a rather unusual tack in its depiction of the Lord; the film adapted from William P. Young’s best-selling novel splits the divine presence into the Trinity, with Jesus Christ as a carpenter of Middle Eastern descent, the Holy Spirit as a meek Asian-American woman named Sarayu, and God portrayed by none other than Octavia goddamn Spencer. Let the record show — God’s real, she’s black, and she’s got an Oscar.

Paramount hasn't been historically known for their baller moves, but when it comes to their bold anti-promotional campaign for Martin Scorsese's Silence, game must recognize game. Keeping a major awards horse almost entirely on the down-low until one month before its December 23 release is one thing; when that movie also happens to be a passion project decades in the making from what very well might be our greatest living filmmaker — American or otherwise — well, that's just showing off. A Martin Scorsese movie sells itself, and Paramount has now reminded the moviegoing public of why that is.

The opening of Bad Santa 2 feels exactly right The first movie gave its degenerate, safe-cracking mall Santa a glimmer of a happy ending, an absurd outcome for a man who had screwed and robbed and drank and cursed his way across a large swath of the Phoenix metro area. 12 years later, Bad Santa 2 finds its antihero back at rock bottom; alone, drunk, and broke. In a despairing voiceover, Billy Bob Thornton croaks out a treatise on the absence of happy endings in life — or any endings at all. Life, his Willie Soke muses, just goes on and on, consistently sucking forever. Then he writes a suicide note on an old pizza box and sticks his head in an oven.

When you’ve been fortunate enough to land the headlining role in a potentially lucrative film franchise, the least you can do is give a little back. Superhero actors making guest appearances in hospitals to spread a little cheer to bed-ridden children has become an increasingly common practice in recent years, with Chrises Evans and Pratt both leveraging their celebrity as Captain America and Star-Lord, respectively, to brighten sickly youngsters’ days. It’s a harmless PR stunt — the movie gets some positive, feel-good publicity while making some kid’s day/week/life, and everyone walks away smiling.

Have we mentioned that the official Logan Instagram is gorgeous? Have we said that enough? Because it is, and two new photos show off a couple more small details of the film. We’ve seen the trailer, and while it’s in color and not black and white like the Instagram account, I certainly hope that the movie keeps some of the atmospheric-ness of its photos to give us a more contemplative superhero movie that the Instagrams hint is possible.

The Black Panther solo movie just added another acting heavyweight to a cast that already includes Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Forest Whitaker, Lupita Nyong’o, and more. Per Marvel’s announcement, Angela Bassett “who currently stars in American Horror Story, will play Ramonda, mother of T’Challa, aka Black Panther.”

Remember that movie about the murders of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur that Johnny Depp is in, for some reason? Depp is playing a detective who tries (and, obviously, fails) to crack both cases, and Forest Whitaker has just joined the cast as Depp’s journalist buddy who is also interested to find out what actually happened to the hip hop icons.

The first trailer for Kong: Skull Island debuted at Comic-Con back in July, offering a sneak peek that was more visually exciting and intriguing than we could have possibly hoped, clearly evoking classic war films like Apocalypse Now and The Thin Red Line — you know, but with a giant ape. After a week of teasers and images preparing us for Kong’s revival, a new official trailer has arrived online heralding a bigger, badder return for the legendary movie monster.

If sci-fi movies and shows like Black Mirror and Westworld have taught us anything, it’s that humans tend to be irresponsible with technology — especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, which often develops a mind of its own. The results of which can either be deeply unsettling or totally hilarious, and it’s the latter that Paul Feig is concerned with for his next film project.

Following yesterday’s Darth Vader-heavy trailer, Lucasfilm has released another international trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. As an added bonus, there’s also a new TV spot, both of which offer some previously unseen footage from the upcoming spinoff / prequel story — along with some much-needed optimism for the end of this stressful week.

2017 is already shaping up to be more exciting for new blockbuster films than 2016, and one of the most intriguing titles is Kong: Skull Island, from Kings of Summer director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. We’ve already seen one impressive trailer for the film, which stars Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson and takes the legendary ape back to his titular home. That trailer offered a tantalizing tease of the creature, but today brings our first full look at the all-new Kong — still kind of the same as the old Kong, but maybe a bit grumpier.