Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i SFX

How do you maintain distinctiveness for the show, but yet ensure that it’s still very much a part of the Game Of Thrones universe? Ultimately it just comes from getting to run these George RR Martin books through your own processor. David Benioff and Dan Weiss [the showrunners of Game Of Thrones] had theirs: very funny, it had everything. Ryan [Condal] was obviously doing his with House Of The Dragon, and this felt very natural, didn’t feel like a reach. It was just what came out. I think we can all find a lot to relate to in our one leading character, Ser Duncan. Certainly, I put a lot of myself into him. He’s treading this strange world – he’s from the ass-end shithole of Westeros, the slums of Westeros…

→ The power of Christ compels her! Scarlett Johansson will lead Blumhouse’s fresh take on The Exorcist, set to be written and directed by Doctor Sleep’s Mike Flanagan. Mind how you go with that projectile vomit, ScarJo… → Star Trek Beyond’s Justin Lin will helm an adaptation of interplanetary combat game Helldivers, from a script by It’s Gary Dauberman. → A new series of Stargate is in development at Amazon MGM, showrun by franchise veteran Martin Gero. Expect a “bold new chapter” in the saga that began on the big screen in 1994. → Alien: Earth has been renewed for a second season. → The next Sonic The Hedgehog movie arrives 22 December 2028. → Paramount have handed the Star Trek movie franchise to Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley,…

Ex Astris, Scientia – From the stars, knowledgeStarfleet Academy motto STARFLEET ACADEMY HAS LONG HAD mythological status in Star Trek circles. It’s the training school where Wesley Crusher attempted a dangerous stunt that got a classmate killed, and Jean-Luc Picard lived out some of his post-Enterprise retirement years as chancellor. It’s also where two incarnations of James T Kirk cheated on their Kobayashi Maru tests. But even though almost every major character in the 60-year-old franchise is a graduate of the famous San Francisco campus, its actual screen appearances have been limited. Until now, that is, because the latest Star Trek TV show is heading to the classroom. The idea of sending the franchise back to school is decades old. Following the critical and commercial mauling dished out to Star…

IT WASN’T QUITE 28 YEARS IN real time, but there was a hell of a wait for the third film in the series that revived zombies’ big-screen fortunes, once again making them scary and giving them something to say. 28 Days Later was unleashed by director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland in 2002, though the duo had less involvement with the (decent) 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later. They reunited, however, for 2025’s legacy threequel 28 Years Later, a critical smash that focused on a small band of survivors living on the island of Lindisfarne. For all the carnage on display, it was post-Brexit Britain that got the biggest savaging. Well, you wait decades for a Rage-infected sequel, then two come along almost at once. 28 Years Later: The Bone…

What was it about the We Bury The Dead script that first grabbed your interest? I have an interest in a lot of different things. I love all sorts of different films. I love all sorts of different books. I don’t go into something having a preconceived notion of what the script is going to be, or even if the logline implies that it’s a genre. I just let myself enjoy the story. What was funny with this was, I read it and said yes immediately. But I didn’t realise that the zombies were as present as they were, because it feels so human and because I think Ava’s internal life is mimicking the zombies that she’s coming across. It feels so much part of her story that it was…

“THE ISSUE WAS TEENAGE MUTANT Ninja Turtles sounds ridiculous, who’s going to go and see that?” says Steve Barron. TMNT started life as a humble black-and-white indie comic spoofing the popular trends of the ’80s. A kids’ cartoon debuted in 1987, before Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest, the company where Bruce Lee found kung fu stardom, bought the rights and approached Barron about directing a big-screen adaptation with a $3 million budget. “They weren’t sure whether it was going to be animation or whatever for the Turtles,” says Barron, who set out to attract distributors to bump up the tight budget, but in 1988, no one was interested in comic-book movies. “The studios were running scared from Howard The Duck. That was a hit as a comic and had a big…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 96 minutes ▸ Director Mike P Nelson ▸ Cast Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, Mark Acheson, David Lawrence Brown → What do Malcolm McDowell, Mickey Rooney and two-time Bond girl Maud Adams have in common? The answer is they have all featured in instalments of the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise, the latest of which now appears some 41 years on from the 1984 original. That film, about a toy-store Santa who goes on a killing spree, was controversial enough to have protesters picketing movie theatres. Mike P Nelson’s reboot might be no less bloody, but it’s an altogether cannier animal that tempers its excesses with humour and a surprising amount of sweetness. The basic set-up remains the same, with drifter Billy (Rohan Campbell) arriving in…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15 | SVOD NETFLIX An-Na (Kim Da-mi) wakes up in her apartment just as it starts to flood. As the water inexorably rises, she must carry her little boy up countless flights of stairs to reach safety on the building’s roof – although her journey is more complex than it seems. This South Korean movie – co-starring Squid Game’s Park Hae-soo – is impressively staged, but doesn’t fully work as either an action film or a highbrow sci-fi concept movie, ending up a bit soggy in the middle. When it does click, however, it’s genuinely chilling.…

Time for our rundown of recent theatrical releases coming to shiny disc. In the dreamy romantic fantasy A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY (out now, Blu-ray/DVD), Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie’s characters pass through doors that are portals into pivotal moments in their lives. We said: “The leisurely pace will be a problem for some, but there’s much to admire in its controlled tonal balance, from the vivid lighting to the thought-provoking scenarios.” Extras: three features (16 minutes). In HIM (5 January, Blu-ray/DVD), a quarterback invited to train with his idol is drawn into a boot camp that’s all creepy hangers-on, skull-heavy decor and punishing practices. We said: “The hallucinogenic visuals can be entrancing… But it doesn’t build like you might expect it to.” Extras: director’s commentary, an alternate ending, six…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 260 pages | Paperback ▸ Editor Philip Bates ▸ Publisher Candy Jar Books → “Have you met Miss Smith?” asks the Doctor in “The Seeds Of Doom”. “She’s my best friend!” Generations of fans can relate. Entering the TARDIS in December 1973, Sarah Jane Smith remains, for many, the archetypal Doctor Who companion. This collection of essays celebrates both the icon and the equally cherished, much-mourned Elisabeth Sladen, who played her. The title’s a bit of a misnomer: this isn’t just Sarah. Some pieces use the character as a launch point, more engaged in exploring her debut season as a whole or staging a spirited defence of fellow companion Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter). Elsewhere, the focus is firmly on the subject – though there’s a genuinely…

▸ RELEASED 15 JANUARY 546 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Dave Rudden ▸ Publisher Hodderscape → Colonialism, faith and identity lie at the heart of Dave Rudden’s Sister Wake, an epic fantasy inspired by the English occupation of Ireland. The oppressed in this instance are the Croi, whose homeland is under the control of The Answering nation. The latter fancy themselves as rational and scientific, banning the Croi’s indigenous religion, a conviction sorely challenged when the Croi’s gods reappear to trail chaos and destruction across the land. The story unfolds from three perspectives. Sister Wake is the saint of the Goddess Of Death, possessing the necromantic power to animate the dead; Abelard is a member of the Answering aristocracy searching for answers about the gods’ return; and Talasa is stepdaughter…

▸ RELEASED 15 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Rhett Davis ▸ Publisher Fleet → Some stories give readers lots of information on how their high concepts work and what their worlds look like. Others, well… they’re mostly just vibes. Here’s an early contender for Most Vibes Book of 2026. People are turning into trees. At first, it’s laughed off like an urban legend, but then it happens in some undeniably public contexts and becomes big news. Caelyn, an early believer, is catapulted to fame for her academic research on the phenomenon. Her partner Bren is left behind, caring for his parents and watching the world change. How does it work? Vibes. What is Caelyn’s expertise? Vibes. How much time is passing? Vibes. Should I know who this person…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher IDW Publishing ▸ Writer Christopher Cantwell ▸ Artist Megan Levens ISSUES 1-5 Rather than famous figures such as Captain Kirk, this five-parter (set during the first year of The Original Series) refreshingly gives a voice to the usually anonymous security officers whose sole purpose is to serve as cannon fodder – although given the high body count, it’s hard to get attached to any of the 12-strong cast. With #1 opening with Ensign Chip Miller almost getting his eyeball ripped out by a Mugato, Christopher Cantwell’s script contains more visceral violence and gallows humour than most Star Trek comics. There’s also a darker undertone, as the crew of the USS Warren embark on a mission to a snowy planet to track down some spies who…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Image Comics ▸ Writer James Tynion IV ▸ Artist DaNi ISSUES 1-4 The Image Comics reinventions of legendary movie monsters just keep on coming, and the latest is a reinterpretation of the classic tale of invisibility, with James Tynion IV returning to script duties after his success on Universal Monsters: Dracula. Unlike the more radical comic remixes like The Mummy or Creature From The Black Lagoon, this miniseries plays as a moody, unsettling prequel to the 1933 film (itself adapted from HG Wells’s 1897 novel). We follow Jack Griffin, quietly egomaniacal scientist, as his desire to break out of society’s rigid structures and rules leads him towards the discovery of invisibility. These four issues track his descent into full-on madness, and as in the original…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 ▸ Also on Nintendo Switch ▸ Publisher Nintendo VIDEOGAME Samus Aran returns after almost two decades for this long-awaited revival of Nintendo’s first-person-shooter sci-fi series. “FPS” doesn’t quite do these games justice, however. While this bounty hunter can win energy-blaster firefights against space pirates or angry wildlife like the best of them, just as much emphasis is placed on exploring alien environments and taking in details as there is in wrecking them. For Samus, scanning ancient ruins and the ecology around her can be just as vital for pushing forward as a barrage of rockets. On Nintendo Switch 2, these spaces are gorgeous, full of colour and delightfully weird, with each discovery combining to tell a story of how a…

▸ RELEASED 8 JANUARY ▸ Running time 78 minutes ▸ Format CD/download ▸ Publisher BBC Audiobooks AUDIOBOOK Don’t let the title mislead you. This original audiobook isn’t a sequel to Patrick Troughton story “The Mind Robber”, even if it features the same TARDIS team – and makes a plot point out of Zoe’s silver catsuit from that 1968 adventure. Veteran Who novelist John Peel instead pits the Second Doctor against Markan the Tinkerer, a scientist imprisoned by his own people in a fiercely defended orbital platform with only a robot for company. Markan, we discover, possesses the power to create persuasive psychic illusions, and the obligatory itch for vengeance… David Troughton narrates and, as you’d expect, makes a decent stab at capturing his dad’s cadences, by turns mischievous, flustered and…

UDO KIER 1944-2025 → “I SEND OUT A VIBRATION,” actor Udo Kier once confessed. A striking, magnetic presence, he brought a chillingly dissolute vibe to the screen in a career that straddled both arthouse and exploitation cinema and found him collaborating with everyone from Wim Wenders to Rob Zombie to Madonna. Born Udo Kierspe in a Cologne maternity ward bombed mere hours after his arrival – he and his mother had to be rescued from the rubble – Kier moved to London at 19 to not only pursue an acting career but “get out of the misery I was born into”. Vogue crowned him “a new face of cinema” for his debut in 1966 short “Road To Saint Tropez”, while graphic West German/Austrian horror Mark Of The Devil secured him…

MATT DUFFER (co-creator): The first emotional moment was writing the final script, because it was Ross and me writing these characters for the last time ever. Writing Mike’s last line, then Steve’s last line, it was hard. But that was nothing compared to what it felt like shooting the last day. The last day of production was one of the most emotional days of our lives. It’s been a quarter of our lives. It was hard for the cast, too, because they’ve been with this show for half their lives. I think Millie [Bobby Brown, who played Eleven] doesn’t even remember life before Stranger Things. Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield): I remember at the table read, I didn’t think I would be emotional. But then, of course, we were all crying…

FOR KEVIN CONNOR, IT’S ALL about belief, especially when you’re wrangling a plesiosaur on a Shepperton soundstage. “Nobody said, ‘Oh, we’re making some hokey movie,’” the veteran director tells SFX, looking back on his Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, The Land That Time Forgot. “When you do this kind of movie, you’ve got to play it absolutely straight. You can’t laugh at the genre. You can’t take the piss out of the genre. You’ve got to get the audience to believe that you’re on that submarine, and there’s some dinosaur snapping at the conning tower!” As a marauding mass of rubber, this particular prehistoric predator might have confounded paleontologists, but it thrilled a generation hungry for big-screen dino action in the decades before the Jurassic franchise. “You don’t set out to…

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▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 104 minutes ▸ Director Emma Tammi ▸ Cast Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard → Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 (er, shouldn’t that be Ten Nights At Freddy’s?) strives to up the ante on its 2023 predecessor, and largely succeeds. There are three sets of rogue animatronic creatures this time, with a new antagonist in the form of an evil marionette that turns its human hosts into grinning simulacra of Saw’s Billy the Puppet. There are knowing nods to Alien, Predator and A Nightmare On Elm Street, plus new cast additions in Ghostbuster Mckenna Grace, Wayne Knight and a cameoing Skeet Ulrich. For all that, FNAF2 ranks as only a marginal improvement on its tame and torpid predecessor, with too many storylines jostling…

▸ UK Streaming now, BBC iPlayer ▸ Director Mark Gatiss ▸ Cast Tobias Menzies, Joanna Lumley, Ben Mansfield → Mark Gatiss’s latest televisual mince pie tackles EF Benson’s 1912 story “The Room In The Tower”, which sees a man plagued by a recurring dream – an appointment with a space holding “something awful” arriving with grim inevitability. The fundamentals are all present and correct: a gathering of an upper-class clan; a card game with ominous all-black deck; the titular room and its sinister painting of the family matriarch. But as usual, Gatiss makes some wise amendments: a cornily sinister gravestone is snipped from the dreamscape. Not for the first time, he also supplies a tale which peters out on the page with a more satisfying sense of completion, pushing the…

▸ RELEASED 2 FEBRUARY 2025 | TBC | Digital → An elevated take on zombies, this melancholy Aussie indie is heavy on big skies and watery eyes. After an electromagnetic pulse-weapon test kills thousands in Tasmania – a few of whom then “reboot” – Daisy Ridley’s plucky physical therapist volunteers to help clear up the bodies, but soon strikes out to find her husband. CGI is used effectively to create a sense of scale, and the undead’s penchant for grinding their teeth is an unnerving touch. But don’t expect your heart to be broken.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | N/A | SVOD ▸ Directors Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani ▸ Cast Fabio Testi, Yannick Renier, Koen De Bouw, Maria de Medeiros SHUDDER From a gleaming Jaguar E-Type to the sun-kissed coast of the French Riviera, this stylish, tricksy thriller declares itself an homage to the Eurospy genre of the ’60s, all those glamorous, kitschy capers that arrived in 007’s wake. Fabio Testi is Diman, John Diman, a 70-something former “agent special” now living beyond his means on the Côte d’Azur, dining on Martinis and memories. The disappearance of a fellow guest at his high-class hotel retreat forces the ageing adventurer to confront his past, in particular an old female nemesis, Serpentik. Homages abound: Serpentik’s mask is clearly inspired by Italian fumetti icon Diabolik, the…

▸ RELEASED 20 JANUARY 386 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Shen Tao ▸ Publisher Gollancz → Feuding princes, dying emperors and a magical system based on poetry are not especially original concepts, but they’re given fresh life in this China-inspired debut. Tensha is a country ravaged by famine, so when the call goes out for potential concubines to the notorious Prince Terren, heir to the throne, Wei puts herself forward. Desperate to gain royal favour and help save her family from starvation, she tells herself she can withstand his tortures, but quickly becomes convinced that the land needs to be saved from such a cruel leader. Terren has many magical defences, but there is one poem-spell that could kill him. The twist is that it’s a poem that must be…

▸ RELEASED 15 JANUARY 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Solitaire Townsend ▸ Publisher Bedford Square Publishers → Welcome to an alternate 17th century, where the Roman Empire’s still going strong, mainly thanks to the early discovery of oil and the creation of the combustion engine. In a heavily polluted London, a gladiatrix-turned-indentured governess called Arrow (there’s a lot of backstory here, revealed in flashbacks throughout) attends to Livy, the adopted daughter of a powerful patrician. When Livy is kidnapped by hairy pagans, Arrow ignores her master and gives chase. Calling in help from an old gladiatorial sparring partner, she embarks on a journey that takes her halfway across the world to the Amazon. There she learns the truth about Livy’s parentage, and discovers a clean technology that threatens the…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 432 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Samantha Sotto Yambao ▸ Publisher Bantam → When Raya dozes off on the subway, she doesn’t simply end up at the end of the line – she finds herself on the mysterious Elsewhere Express. This magical locomotive hurtles through infinity, powered by dreams, songs and spells, filled with people who’ve checked out of their mundane existence and into another life. Once aboard, Raya meets troubled painter Q and a conductor named Lily, who asks for their help in tracking down a stowaway. And so they bounce from carriage to carriage – breaking laws of physics, common sense and reality – in a curious melding of Snowpiercer, Spirited Away and Murder On The Orient Express. There’s no denying author Samantha Sotto…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 224 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Adrian Tchaikovsky ▸ Publisher Tor → Good things often come in small packages, as this latest Adrian Tchaikovsky release demonstrates, both textually and metatextually. Because it’s a novella and it’s about small things: animate dolls known as homunculi, who make themselves from various materials – wood, metal, paper, cloth, wax – and live secretly alongside humans in a fantasy city where magic is divided along class lines. It’s a beguiling curate’s egg of a novella. Written in the style of a dark fairy tale, with elements of heist fiction, social satire and horror, it’s packed with intriguing, evocative imagery and quirky characters (the main human character is a thief and puppet maker called Coppelia, which kids today would probably call…

▸ RELEASED 13 JANUARY ▸ Publisher Top Shelf Productions ▸ Writer Abbey Luck ▸ Artists Abbey Luck, Ruka Bravo GRAPHIC NOVEL This hefty debut from Abbey Luck is a bold and sometimes bewildering epic that feels a little like Alice In Wonderland meets Barbarian. Teenage Mary is wary when she, her mother Vee and overbearing stepfather Roger visit a dilapidated mansion in a remote mining town that once belonged to Roger’s late aunt Pearl. He’s landed himself in a sticky financial situation and is hoping that finding Pearl’s missing will might provide him with the money needed to get out of trouble. When an argument between the three spirals out of control, however, Mary flees into the night, eventually tumbling into a labyrinth of abandoned mines. There she meets Ed and…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Booking until 25 October ▸ Venue Troubador Canary Wharf Theatre ▸ Production company Runaway Entertainment STAGE PLAY This live adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s original The Hunger Games novel also takes many visual details – and sometimes characterisations – from the Lionsgate movie. The original premise remains the same: children are chosen from the regional districts of the dystopian nation of Panem and forced to fight to the death for the amusement of viewers watching at home. There are some very minor changes that fans might nitpick at, plus plenty of Easter eggs for the hardcore, but all in all it’s business as usual, just sometimes hanging above you in mid-air. Much has been made of the “brand-new, state-of-the-art venue” – it’s a theatre, but not like…

Buck Up Your Ideas 30 AUGUST 1980 At 6:15pm on Saturday 30 August 1980, ITV declared interplanetary war on the BBC. The aim? Dethrone Doctor Who. In truth it was just the latest salvo in an ongoing conflict. Over the years the splintered ITV regions had pitted everything from Space: 1999 to Man From Atlantis against the Time Lord. Now the commercial channel was united behind a single networked schedule, combining its firepower in a concerted challenge to the Beeb’s traditional dominance of Saturday evening telly. The key weapon was Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, the flashy revival of the veteran space hero that had launched in America the year before. Produced by Battlestar Galactica’s Glen A Larson, it brought post-Star Wars FX dazzle to the small screen as defrosted…

QUESTION 1 In the Fantastic Four’s origin story, what space phenomenon transforms their bodies? QUESTION 2 The group’s early adventures take place in a different city from New York. Name it. QUESTION 3 Issue four of Fantastic Four reintroduced which Golden Age superhero? QUESTION 4 Picture Question Name this artist, who had a classic ’80s run on the title. QUESTION 5 Doctor Doom is monarch of which fictional European country in the Marvel Universe? QUESTION 6 Due to rights issues, which member of the group was missing from the 1978 cartoon series? QUESTION 7 Who is the superpowered son of Reed and Sue Richards? QUESTION 8 Picture Question This supervillain has challenged the Fantastic Four many times. Who is he? QUESTION 9 What was the Fantastic Four’s new HQ after…

SOME SEE AI AS AN existential threat. Others glimpse transformative potential. So just what is this headline-stealing revolution that’s come to define our fractured, uneasy times? Apocalypse or promise? “It’s both!” offers filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov. “It’s very painful and a tragedy for many people. And it’s also an opportunity for many people. But there’s a third interpretation. It’s not an evil, it’s not an angel. It’s not an enemy, it’s not a friend. It’s a child. We created it and we will continue to educate, train and teach it, in the same way we are teaching our children to be like us, to be better than we are.” In Bekmambetov’s near-future thriller Mercy, AI has chillingly ascended to other roles in society: judge, jury and executioner. As embodied by Rebecca…

SINCE WANDAVISION launched the era of Marvel Studios series on Disney+ four years ago, there has been no shortage of variety: animated series, comedies, a sapphic dramedy and a Netflix series reimagining, and now with Wonder Man, their 17th series, their first attempt at prestige TV. Co-creator (with Destin Daniel Cretton)/showrunner Andrew Guest (Hawkeye) tells Red Alert that from the moment he came onto the project in 2023, Wonder Man was intentionally developed to feel different. “We always internally talked about it like, ‘What if FX did a Marvel series?’,” he explains. This is not a surprise, considering that a big part of what became Wonder Man started as Cretton’s idea to make a meaty character vehicle for acting legend (and now 13-year MCU veteran) Sir Ben Kingsley. “Destin was…

WITH ITS VARIOUS titles, including Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Black Panther, all finishing with issue 24 in the next few months, the Ultimate Universe’s latest iteration is coming to a sensational conclusion in five-issue miniseries Ultimate Endgame, which Marvel confirms really is the final bow for its latest alternate dimension. “There are a lot of spinning plates to manage with something at this scale, and it’s new for me – but also really beautiful,” says writer Deniz Camp, who also scripts The Ultimates. “I’ve never really gotten to do anything on this scale before, with this many characters and this big a scope. I’ve got a lot of stories I’ve set up I want to pay off, making sure to do justice to the other books’ characters and…

Christophe Gans is coming home. Like so many souls before him he’s been lured back to the nightmarish environs of Silent Hill. It’s the town that burns forever, after all. But for once the vision didn’t come in some fogbound dream, crawling with deviant, demonic entities. Gans felt the call during the existential tedium of lockdown, shortly after his true dream – a movie adaptation of Italian adventure comic Corto Maltese – had crumbled with the death of long-time production partner Samuel Hadida, financial architect of the project. “The pandemic came and I didn’t know what to do,” says Gans, who first brought the fiendishly immersive survival game to the big screen in 2006. “I knew that we still had the rights to Silent Hill, so during the lockdown I…

ZOMBIES HAVE BEEN DONE TO death, pun intended. With George A Romero to The Walking Dead and everything in-between, finding a fresh take on undead storytelling is no small feat these days. But Australian writer/director Zak Hilditch found success by going personal in his latest feature, We Bury The Dead. Hilditch tells SFX that after losing his mother to breast cancer in 2017, he found himself in the “awful” yet “cathartic” space of packing up her personal belongings in an eerily silent home. The experience stuck with him, and in 2020 he started writing a script with grief as its central theme. “I didn’t want to make the world’s saddest, Debbie Downer of a movie, like a kitchen-sink drama about a dude dealing with the death of his mom,” he…

LARISSA WEEMS The return of principal Larissa Weems (Gwendoline Christie), albeit in non-corporeal form, also heralded the return of her most glorious wardrobe staple: the Maison Schiaparelli accessory. The fashion house, founded in 1927 by Italian surrealist Elsa Schiaparelli, has maintained her flair for the unconventional in a way that feels right at home for Nevermore Academy. “The sculptural, kind of otherworldly quality of Schiaparelli is so Larissa Weems,” costume designer Colleen Atwood says. “We figure she’s sent every fashion magazine there is in the world. You didn’t know where she’d been before, but you knew that she saw every book, every Harper’s Bazaar, every fashion magazine, and she was up to date on what was happening.” “Gwendoline loved the bracelet that had eyes, the brooch that was like a…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A |195 minutes ▸ Director James Cameron ▸ Cast Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang → If Avatar: The Way Of Water’s Cameronic reference point was Titanic (see Kate Winslet as Metkayinan matriarch Ronal and its sinking boat finale), then Avatar: Fire And Ash’s must surely be Aliens. At numerous points in James Cameron’s third visit to the distant moon of Pandora, various characters are given tutorials in firearm usage that inevitably recall the one Michael Biehn’s Hicks gave Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in his earlier foray into epic space action. In her rather peculiar mo-cap role as 14-year-old Na’vi Kiri, meanwhile, 76-year-old Weaver gets a callback of her own with a line that self-consciously apes the famous one she delivered to Aliens’ Alien Queen.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 108 minutes ▸ Directors Byron Howard, Jared Bush ▸ Cast Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Ke Huy Quan, Idris Elba → Snakes have always proved notoriously difficult to animate, which might explain why there have only been two notable examples – The Jungle Book’s Kaa and Robin Hood’s Sir Hiss – in Disney’s critter-crammed back catalogue. To their slitherhood we can now add Gary, a venomous pit viper whose sudden appearance in Zootropolis’s all-animal alt-world sets the cat among the pigeons in Byron Howard and Jared Bush’s follow-up to the former’s 2016 original. The nine years it’s taken Zootropolis to hatch a sequel have enabled DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys to steal its thunder, not least by having its own ophidian protagonist in Marc Maron’s Mr Snake.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1990 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Charles Band ▸ Cast Paul Ganus, Megan Ward, Bill Moseley, Eva LaRue BLU-RAY DEBUT Another month, another 88 Films Blu-ray of a cheesy flick from Charles Band’s Full Moon stable – and it feels terribly familiar. It’s by the same writer as 88’s September release Shadowzone – and boy, does it feel like it, being another post-apocalyptic “base under siege” tale which traps characters in a single location. This time it’s the staff of a dissident TV station, plus a George Michael-haired courier, confined by a “thermal storm”. One of their number is a killer “Synthoid”. Given the presence of Bill Moseley (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s Chop Top), it’s no great mystery… A blood-test scene echoes The Thing,…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2014 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Takashi Miike ▸ Cast Ebizō Ichikawa, Kō Shibasaki, Miho Nakanishi BLU-RAY DEBUT Regular readers of this section should need no introduction to Yotsuya Kaidan; one of Japan’s most famous ghost stories, it’s been adapted for the screen countless times. Takashi Miike’s 95th film takes a novel approach, mixing scenes of actors rehearsing a new stage version with glimpses behind the scenes, and also exploring their personal lives. So famous sequences from the story are played out. We see amoral samurai Lemon kill a woman’s father in order to marry her. Then, tiring of their life together, he agrees to a proposal to ditch her, passing on poison which deforms her face. In parallel with this we observe tensions in…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW!/5 JANUARY 2025 |15 | Digital/Blu-ray/DVD → This lo-fi horror-comedy earns goodwillforitsgonzo sensibilities and savage sense of humour. But as a pack of coyotes stalk the Hollywood Hills home of a comic-book artist (Justin Long) while a wildfire intensifies the situation, there’s nothing close to resembling genuine peril. Decent visual effects and Long’s razor-sharp delivery (and chemistry with real-life wife Kate Bosworth) provide a lift, but Coyotes lacks bite. + Extras Making Of (19 minutes).…

▸ RELEASED 19 JANUARY 2025 | TBC | Digital ▸ Directors Paul Gandersman, Peter S Hall ▸ Cast Kelsey Pribilski, William Magnuson, John Gholson → The title may fill you with a sense of anticlimax – it’s no Man Bites Dog – but this Texan-made indie is an above-average stab at the found footage genre. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are producers, and it has a whiff of the indie darlings’ oeuvre. Set in small town Larkin, it sees Kelsey Pribilski’s Lynn returning home at the request of screw-up brother Lucas (William Magnuson). He’s achieved a degree of viral fame after finding a tape which shows a figure entering his childhood bedroom at night. Now he’s unearthed CCTV of townsfolk inexplicably freezing – which none can remember. Is Lucas’s instinct…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Sarah Mughal Rana ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury Archer → Persian mythology and Islamic theology mingle in Sarah Mughal Rana’s Middle Eastern-flavoured fantasy. Khamilla is the neglected daughter of the Emperor of Azadniabad, a nation at war with their neighbours Sajamistan. When the Emperor is overthrown, Khamilla enrolls in the Sajamistani military, hoping to learn the enemy’s secrets to use against them, but finds her loyalty torn. Rana builds a rich world, with complex cultures and traditions. Her dialogue can be a little stiff, but the biggest challenges are the downbeat tone and impenetrable systems of magic and combat. Khamilla is a very dour narrator; while her young life is marked by loss and tragedy, she wallows in misery. Spurning all offers…

▸ RELEASED 22 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author India-Rose Bower ▸ Publisher Michael Joseph → They call them “witches”, but they’re nothing like your usual fairy-tale spellcasters. The so-called witches here are indescribable eldritch abominations: nightmares that emerged from the shadows one day and brought about the apocalypse. They’re all different – depending on their environment, they could be made from branches or binbags – but they all scream. As horror monsters go, they’re pretty inventive. The thing is, everything else about this too-brief novel is extremely generic. Our heroine Sara and her family are on the run from the witches, and all the usual survival horror tropes apply: they struggle for food, take shelter where they can, and have to be careful of outsiders. One day, another…

▸ RELEASED 8 JANUARY 374 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Van Jensen ▸ Publisher Bantam → Having an attention-grabbing “what if?” question is often a vital ingredient for a sci-fi/fantasy novel, and new thriller Godfall certainly delivers a doozy of a premise. The story takes place in Little Springs, a Nebraska town that’s utterly insignificant… until a three-mile-tall alien corpse falls from the sky just outside it. Two years later, the town is now a rapidly expanding research site, while local sheriff David Blunt is having to deal with a host of new problems – including a serial killer who’s somehow connected to the dead alien giant. Comics writer Van Jensen does a good job of tapping into a Stephen King-adjacent tone as the book evolves into a twisty murder…

▸ RELEASED 13 JANUARY 384 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Jared Poon ▸ Publisher Orbit → There’s more than a whiff of Slow Horses about this book’s premise, which focuses on a group of overworked and underpaid civil servants fighting bad guys with no thanks from their superiors. That’s where the similarities end, however, as this motley crew live in Singapore, aren’t fully human, and are Scooby-ganging their way towards saving the world from another dimension filled with giant piranha-things. Oh, and instead of being led by a grubby Gary Oldman, their leader is the tightly wound Ben – whose hunky boyfriend Adam may well be the key to everything. No farts here; just a sweet love story. Jared Poon can whip up gorgeously evocative prose, with his descriptions of…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher DC Comics ▸ Writers Various ▸ Artists Various ONE-SHOT The second of DC and Marvel’s big crossover issues is arguably more significant for its behind-the-scenes talent than its A-list heroes. Writing the headline story is Grant Morrison, one of the defining comics voices of the last 40 years, but someone who hasn’t done much work in the medium for a few years now. Their story, illustrated by Dan Mora, captures the motormouthed tone of Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool perfectly. What’s more surprising is Morrison’s positioning of Batman not as a weary straight man, but as a wry observer of the lunacy around him – as he points out at one point, given that his arch-enemy is a murderous clown, Wade Wilson’s bullshit isn’t likely to…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on PC ▸ Also on Nintendo Switch/2, PS 4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S ▸ Publisher Dotemu VIDEOGAME A new threat has emerged in the Marvel universe, as Annihilus has unleashed his army of bugs across the realms. Heroes from all corners of the Marvel canon are called upon to team up and drive them back. Reminiscent of the arcade heyday of gaming, Cosmic Invasion feels retro in the best ways, with modern touches that remove the sheer frustration of that era designed to eat your money. However, it’s not just classic brawlers, as another piece of Marvel royalty – its fighting game crossovers with Capcom – is a key inspiration. This makes for incredibly satisfying encounters as you take two heroes from the…