Minus Zero = Everything

I am seeing Godzilla Minus Zero in just eighteen -- EIGHTEEN -- days when it World Premieres at the New York Film Festival and as if I wasn't already wetting myself they went and unloaded a longer trailer for the film than we'd seen previously (click here to see the first teaser) and I AM SO EXCITED. There is a moment mid-trailer when the aspect ratio changes that straight up had me levitating out of my office chair. No new sightings of NYC in this trailer (we saw the Statue of Liberty in the teaser) but they do let on that Godzilla has a foe showing up -- who do you think it will be? You can't really say that the first film in this series was necessarily "realistic" like Nolan did with his Batman movies but it was more realistic than they usually are, so I'm curious which of Godzilla's foes fit into that framework. Which is to say I would be very surprised to see twin lounge-singer sprites serenading a gigantic moth just yet. But who knows! Director Takashi Yamazaki no doubt has the freedom at this point to do whatever the hell he wants to. Let's hope that works out like it did last time!

Godzilla Minus Zero is in U.S. theaters November 6th.

OH MY GOD WHEN THE ASPECT RATIO BLEW OUT I ORGASMED www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw0Y...

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) September 8, 2026 at 10:47 AM

Godzilla Takes New York (Film Festival)

Today will have to be a very very good day news-wise to top the news that  Godzilla Minus Zero, the new Godzilla movie from Takashi Yamazaki director of the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, will be having its World Premiere at the New York Film Festival in October. And "very very good days news-wise" are rare enough beasts in 2026 that I'm just gonna go ahead and state that this is the best news of the day. The week. Hell the year probably! The news is super-sized surprising at first, but then you realize that 1) the film hits U.S. theaters on November 1st so the timing is perfect and 2) Godzilla is actually coming to NYC in the film itself, as briefly glimpsed in the very first teaser trailer which you can watch right here. I personally won't be watching any more trailers after that -- I know all I need to know, and now I've got a date for when I'll get to see it all with my Godzilla-loving eyes! NYFF is killing it this year! I haven't mentioned the other announcements that they've made so far but you can keep track of them all on their website. The big expensive passes are on sale right now but individual tickets start going on sale at the end of the month. NYFF runs from September 25th through October 12th! Roar!

Give Me Your Huddles Masses Yearning for...

... GODZILLA!!!! 

I'd had this NYC reveal spoiled for me yesterday when this trailer premiered at CinemaCon and the news flew everywhere, so I felt fine just now tossing aside my general No Trailers rule and just watching this very brief one minute teaser for Godzilla Minus Zero -- if you didn't want to know this little tidbit and feel spoiled by me I apologize but I seriously doubt you'd have been able to make it to November 3rd without seeing at the very least this image. I'm planning on stopping here if possible -- just embrace the shock and awe of the sight of our big bad lizard friend sidling up to Lady Liberty like a lover-to-be and let your cells tingle with the thrill of it! We deserve this! (And here is my review of the incredible Godzilla Minus One if you missed it.) 

Happy Biollante Day!

It's the day we've been waiting for since it was announced in December -- and before that, forever in our dreams -- Criterion has released the 1989 kaiju delight Godzilla vs. Biollante on 4K today! Pick it up here and while you're over there Criterion is celebrating our person-plant-monster hybrid baby Biollante by also having their bi-annual Flash Sale, meaning every in-stock disc is priced at 50% off! I ordered my own whopping heap of discs the second they sprung the sale at Noon -- it runs until Noon tomorrow. I always think I've got all I need of theirs and then I do something stupid and google, "Underrated Criterion Releases" and I find a pile more that I somehow don't already own. It's endless! Endless but wonderful. 

Kaiju Criterion Attack!

The sound that emitted from the depths of my soul when I opened this afternoon's email from Criterion about the March 2025 new releases and the first thing I saw was the 1989 classic kaiju delight Godzilla vs. Biollante! This is one of the greatest of Godzilla movies that aren't you know the first one or the most recent one -- it is very very silly but the part-plant part-Godzilla part-human genetic hybrid Biollante as a monster is my all-time number two after my childhood and forever fave Ghidorah. Biollante is a baller and director Kazuki Omori shoots the hell out of this movie. It is so much fun. And this disc appears to be loaded with extras -- not to mention it's a 4K upgrade! Quickest purchase ever! Pre-order it right here -- this one is out on March 18th.

But my baby Biollante is just scratching the surface of March's drops -- there is also Arthur Penn's 1975 classic Night Moves with Gene Hackman (pre-order it here) and Alan Rudolph's 19854 erotic drama Choose Me (pre-order that here) -- I can only vouch for Night Moves since that's the only one I have seen (and it's very good with one of Hackman's best performances) but Rudolph's film sounds fascinating and stars Geneviève Bujold and Lesley Ann Warren, two of my faves from that time period. Looking forward to checking it out. 

And then more more more! Charlie Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (pre-order it here), Henri-Georges Clouzot's action classic The Wages of Fear -- which was remade as William Friedkin's equally awesome Sorcerer -- (pre-order it here), and then a 4K upgrade of Michael Mann's Thief (pre-order it here), which is... well more everyone else's taste than mine, but then that's true with most Mann movies. (Except Manhunter -- Manhunter is perfect.) That's one hell of a line-up for our favorite house of physical media come March! But it could just be Godzilla vs Biollante and I'd be dancing in the streets, if I'm being honest. F'ing amazing!

Criterion's Great Big November Stomps Ahead

November is typically a pretty epic month for Criterion releases because they're no doubt hoping for cinematic stocking stuffers to be all the rage over the approaching holidays (it's also the month when Barnes & Noble has another 50% off sale typically for that exact same reason) and sure enough they've announced a great big slate today. Starting with the king of the monsters itself, Godzilla! Ishiro Honda's original 1954 kaiju masterpiece Gojira that is -- they're dropping it in a brand new 4K restoration! I suppose to depends on your mood and what you want from a movie about a giant monster stomping on tiny people -- sometimes you want that to be goofy and have little ones blowing bubbles while the big guys do Pro Wrestling movies, and I judge no one for wanting such a thing. But the 1954 film is seriously excellent, a proper horror film explicitly wrestling with Japan's post-WWII experience, and remains the greatest film in the series til this day. Although Godzilla Minus One did give it a run for its money last year!

That's not the only horror movie getting the Criterion treatment in November -- Guillermo Del Toro's Oscar-winning The Shape of Water is hitting the collection too! Whether TSOW is really horror or more of a romance I'll leave to people who care about such distinctions to tussle over -- what I do know is that winning Best Picture did a number on this lovely movie's reputation, and I hope we can re-embrace it now, with the benefit of time, because I think it's super. And this is also a new 4K release -- I cannot wait to luxuriate in Del Toro's details. 

Criterion is really ramping up the 4K upgrades now that they've started with them -- the 1932 version of Scarface from director Howard Hawks and Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai are both being upgraded in November, as is William Wyler's Funny Girl starring that Streisand woman. And then there is Peter Bogdanovich's phenomonal 1973 comedy Paper Moon -- I have never been Bogdanovich's biggest fan but most of his earliest movies (this, The Last Picture Show, and Targets) I do fully endorse. Madeline Kahn in Paper Moon alone is worth the purchase price. 

Six titles is more than Criterion usually drops in a month, but those are of course not all -- as was announced last week they're also celebrating their 40th anniversary with an asbolutely monumental box-set of 40 (!!!) films called CC40 which consists of the films most chosen by people who've visited the legendary Criterion Closet. I'm not even going to begin listing off the titles because there are 40 of them and I'd want to list every goddamned one. They are all classics, they are all worth seeing. The set ain't cheap -- it's 650 bucks -- but that works out to less than $17 for each movie, so if you've been wanting to start a Criterion collection of your own then this is a one-stop shop means to do so! Absolutely epic shit!

Godzilla Minus One Stomps Home At Last

Funny enough when I posted my "Today's Blu-rays" post about an hour ago I thought about Godzilla Minus One (click here for my review) and how annoyed I am that the movie hasn't gotten a U.S. physical media release yet -- well my annoyance grew wings, turned into a kaiju monster, and woke the asses at Toho up, because they just dropped the pre-order! Click here to order it. Be aware that this is a massive limited edition set for right now -- the same one that got released in Japan in May, just with English subtitles et cetera. It's got four discs including the original movie on 4K and blu-ray, as well as the black-and-white version, and heaps of extras. If you want to wait for a smaller less elaborate set I'm sure it'll probably be dropping around the same time -- this hits some time around September, they're saying. Me I want the big box!

The Lizard Came For Love

While I was disappointed to hear that we weren't getting a Shin Godzilla 2 at first -- given how great that 2016 movie was -- it turns out that Toho knew what they were doing by instead going retro and making a post-WWII flick called Godzilla Minus One after all. It kicks ass. And not just in the monster-mayhem department -- it's got real human characters, ones whose stories we actually care about, and actually uses the monster to inform and enliven their conflicts! As much as I love Godzilla movies this is not what they are typically known for. Click over to Pajiba to read my full review, and if you can find a big theater near you showing this movie this weekend -- I do blieve it's only playing here in the U.S. for a week? -- do so. It might be an emotional experience but that monster mayhem doesn't disappoint either!

Get Excited, Godzilla Nerds

Here's some excellent news for those of us who worship at the altar of the original monster lizard -- a 256-page Toho-approved book called Godzilla: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide is hitting shelves in September, and it looks fairly boss. You can pre-order it right here. Here's the description:

"Godzilla: The Ultimate illustrated Guide unites fascinating information and stunning imagery from more than 60 years of movie mayhem to show off the Earth's most enduring monster as never before. This book is the ultimate illustrated reference work to all things Godzilla, from the early days in black and white in Japan to the biggest blockbusters of the 21st century. Never before has a work united the full gamut of Godzilla incarnations. Facts and figures, actors and locations, co-starring monsters and plenty of superb illustrated material add up to make this a rampaging beast of a book!"

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

I'm not one hundred percent sure that this is the first time for this series that I've done back-to-back death scenes from the same movie, but I couldn't help myself -- I'm still buried hard mentally inside the MonsterVerse movies and I really wanted to giggle about this moment from Kong: Skull Island today. An even funnier death than the one I shared two weeks back -- I hope that actor Shea Whigham dines out on this death-scene often, because it's a classic. If I was an actor I'd want all the death-scenes -- fuck being a Final Girl. Give me a good death! Even better give me a violently destroyed dummy replica of myself to keep as a souvenir! That's reason enough to become an actor. (Although I wouldn't want to have to sit under the plaster mask, god forbid.) 

For the record they go:

1) Godzilla vs Kong
2) Kong: Skull Island
3) Godzilla (2014)
4) Godzilla: King of the Monsters

That said Shin Godzilla is better than all of them pic.twitter.com/Qbu1q36gLx

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 30, 2021

Anyway have we all seen Godzilla vs Kong by now? You wouldn't have seen it when I did that post two weeks back but by now I assume you have -- it had great numbers in theaters and on HBO Max and every damn person had an opinion. So what's yours? I reviewed it over at Pajiba if you missed it; my opinion was high. So high that I've gone back and started watching (or in some cases re-watching) all of the 1980s-90s Godzilla movies, called the "Heisei Era" of films, which have been a blast. There's even a Twitter thread for that...

Hit the jump for links to Previous Ways Not To Die...

Big Go Boom

Everybody do a Reverse Marlene Dietrich and strip back into your favorite ape costume, because the clock has officially struck Monkey O'clock and my basically-spoiler-free review of the latest MonsterVerse movie Godzilla vs Kong has just gone up over at Pajiba. Have you picked your side yet? The movie hits HBO Max and movie theaters tomorrow so you'd better pick now...

survey service

Godzilla Vs Skarsgård

I look forward to the day when I have a clue what movies are "out" on a Friday again (if such a day ever comes again, anyway) but today is not that day, so I can't ask you what you're planning on watching this weekend. Myself, though, I just got a screener for the Godzilla vs. Kong movie starring Mr. Alexander Skarsgard, Mrs. Rebecca Hall, and some Great Big CG Monsters -- and which is out in theaters and on HBO Max next Wednesday, March 31st! -- so that's what I will be watching. Y'all can suck it! (And yes I was then speaking to Alexander Skarsgard directly.) That aside if y'all do manage to see something you dig this weekend please tell me about it in the comments. I miss your beautiful voices!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Gojira (1954)

Kyohei Yamane-hakase: I can't believe that Godzilla was the only surviving member of its species…But if we continue conducting nuclear tests, it's possible that another Godzilla might appear somewhere in the world again.

Did y'all catch the news several weeks back that Criterion is releasing a ridiculously comprehensive boxed-set of the "Showa Era" Godzilla movies? Meaning fifteen films that stretch from the original film in 1954 all the way up to Terror of Mechagodzilla in 1975. 

Twenty years and countless monsters, all gathered up in Criterion's typically meticulous, glorious way. The set is released on October 29th, just in time for a Halloween marathon, and this week they released a trailer for the set which has got my gooses good and pimpled. Watch:

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I'll share the whole shebang of outlandishly awesome specs

for the great big monstrous set for you right here after the break...

King of the Posters

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I know we're getting the new Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer some time today and I should wait for that but eff it, this movie's gonna be worth two posts in one day, and this new poster (via) is pretty enough to have its own moment. I've watched the first trailer for this movie dozens of times since it was dropped a few months ago - I could probably play-act it out from memory at this point. Needless to say my enthusiasm is up Mothra tall, y'all.

ETA I said all that about Godzilla being worthy of two posts earlier but now the trailer is here and I'm indecisive about whether I should even watch it or not! Perhaps I should forsake more footage, keep the spoilers at bay? Oh who am I kidding, I won't be able to hold off too long on this, but in the meantime I'll just share it for you people right here:
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Good Morning, Godzilla

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It was too hot to go anywhere or do much of anything this weekend so I spent a good chunk of it holed up in my air-conditioned bedroom watching Godzilla movies, as one does, and I have to say I found Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah, from 1991, super crazy enjoyable. And not just because they were constantly finding excuses for their star Kosuke Toyohara, seen here, to be coming to or from changing his clothes. (Was he a well-established heartthrob at the time? I am not complaining but it was super gratuitous, especially in the context of a Godzilla movie.) Anyway Godzilla vs King Ghidorah was all about time travel, and the goofy origins of Godzilla & Ghidorah, with some shameless Terminator 2 rip-offs sprinkled on top (but shot like a scene from Benny Hill). In other words, perfection! I give this film, "Three King Ghidorah Heads Up!"

Aaron Johnson On All The Magazines

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I guess it's new magazine day - earlier we saw Tom Hardy and his inky torso spotting the cover of the latest issue of Esquire, and now here's the lovely Aaron Johnson all over the pages of not one but two new rags - Men's Health and Nylon. Godzilla bless. Hit the jump for more from the former and all of the latter!

Yup That's Definitely Rodan

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What we saw the first full-length trailer for the new Godzilla movie we theorized via a couple of hyper-quick shots that we were seeing Big G's winged nemesis Rodan - a flash of something in the sky here, some talon there - but now as you can see above thanks to the new international trailer we have no doubts left. Totes Rodan! Also thanks to the trailer, a cute shot of Aaron Johnson.

The funny thing about that shot is how gratuitously crammed into the trailer it is. These are the two shots that surround that shot of Aaron being adorable - a shot of serious Army people being serious...

... then we see Aaron and Elizabeth Olsen giggling...

... and then we see Godzilla stomping a city to bits.

It leaves the impression that Aaron and Elizabeth are selfish nitwits having a cozy date night while the world outside is crumbling to pieces. I don't really think is what's happening; I'm guessing they just wanted us to know besides monsters and stomp-stomp seriousness there are adorable people in this movie being adorable too, which is cool - it's part of why I am going. But they might want to finesse their messaging a bit. Here's the trailer:

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Oh and one last thing here's Aaron in his uniform:

Things Don't Look Good For Juliette Binoche...

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... in the first trailer for the new Godzilla movie! Getting shut behind an air lock is never ever a good sign. I've seen Battlestar Galactica. I know how this stuff works. Anyway it makes sense now, Juliette Binoche being in this movie. They needed somebody to cry! We all know Juli's the world's greatest crier, it's only right she get paid handsomely for her World's Best talent.

Moving along, there's that hot piece. There's not a lot of Aaron in the trailer - to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm it starts with the ooh and the ahh (that parachuting opening is crazy killer) and then there's the running and the screaming. Anyway here behold the thunder lizard for yourself! I think it looks fantastic, I'm crazy excited.

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Have A Great Weekend, Everybody!

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Don't do anything I wouldn't do.

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