When an illicit trade deal goes wrong and Quandary is blamed for it, she goes on the run to avoid the crosshairs of a bioengineered killer that only lives for 24 hours. If Q can evade it for that long, she just might survive.
A night of food, fun, and festivities quickly turns sour. But what else can you expect when your ancestors say you will choke?
An unexpected encounter with a mysterious life form turns a simple trip to Mercury into a historic event. Both for ship Captain Victory Citrus and human civilisation as we know it.
The Hero journeys across the desert to capture The Thief Of Memory and retrieve her stolen memories. What she finds in the end may destroy her.
When the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can’t find a solution to the city’s worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.
An artist’s work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer.
But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist fears his reaction to the final product.
* I am not actually good at life.
I was ready to fight Calamity Ganon. I had my Master Sword. I had the power of all four Divine Beasts and their ghostly masters on my side. I had a full inventory of restorative homecooked meals. This was the beginning of the end. It was now or never.
So I stopped, paused the game, and went on the internet to look up how to use my shield.
I’d made it through the entire game—probably some hundred hours of playtime—without ever using a shield after a few early skill-acquisition trials. Not on purpose, mind you. I occasionally thought it would be very nice to be able to block enemy blows in battle. I just couldn’t ever remember which button to push. I did a lot of desperate sword-smashing and running away instead.
I am so bad at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And you know what? It’s great.
Movies that are known for being so bad, they’re good form a loose genre, but it is one that can be hard to define. Sometimes these films are classed as guilty pleasures or cult classics, but straight-up terrible movies can occupy the former category, while genuinely great movies can occupy the latter. Often they are B-movies, but sometimes big budget films slip in too—I’m looking at you Moonfall (2022). Perhaps the most well-known examples of this type of film are Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003) and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).
Although there isn’t a snappy label to perfectly capture this category of movie, there are some clear features shared by the films that qualify. Their bad elements—things like bizarre acting, poor special effects, a clunky script, and weird plot points—are so strange and offbeat that they become funny. They can’t be merely mediocre in their badness, and purposefully bad, intentionally cheesy films (like the Sharknado series) are a different beast entirely. To be worthy of being called a good-bad movie, a film needs to have attempted to be good, but the end result has to be so weird or campy or hopelessly full of faults that it becomes enjoyably watchable (particularly with company).
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
How many of us can recite this line from memory? I admit, I get tripped up in the details, but the first sentence is gold, and the image it conjures up is even better. For me, it’s one part Peter Jackson, one part Rankin/Bass (pictured above), one part the way I imagined a hobbit-hole before I’d seen any movies. Tidy. Cozy. Warm. Wood-lined. Part of a tree, part of the earth, close to all the things I cared so fiercely about when I was a small kid hearing The Hobbit read aloud for the first time.
Martha Wells’ bestselling Murderbot works are justly famous. Given their instant popularity, it’s possible that some fans, new to her works, may have assumed that the first Murderbot book, All Systems Red, must have been the author’s publishing debut.
Not so.
It is pointless to fight with the franchise machine, as the franchise machine always wins. It wins even for franchises that were last seen making baffling films such as 2018’s The Cloverfield Paradox, which, yes, I stayed up to watch after the Super Bowl. Yes, I regretted that choice. (The cast was great! The movie was not.)
But here we are again! Deadline reports that Paramount, hot for revived franchises in the wake of the latest Sonic and Top Gun films, has another Cloverfield project on deck. This one will be directed by Babak Anvari (I Came By) and written by Joe Barton, with the original Cloverfield team of producer J.J. Abrams, writer Drew Goddard, and director Matt Reeves among the producers.
A lot happens in this week’s episode of The Rings of Power. Some of it is redundant, but all in all the show continues to gather steam, and does a particularly good job in “Partings” with developing themes of hope, help, and facing difficult choices.
It’s time to hang out in kind-of Australia?
It was a given that Wednesday would arrive on a Wednesday. But Netflix took its sweet time letting us know exactly which one, teasing only a fall release date—and, of course, the many perks of attending Nevermore Academy, the alma mater of Wednesday Addams’ loving parents, Gomez and Morticia.
Now you can mark your calendars: Wednesday arrives on November 23rd.
One of the most unforgettably chilling moments in Number One Fan, Meg Elison’s gender-swapped update of Stephen King’s horror classic Misery, happens in the opening pages: Urban fantasy author Eli Grey has just gotten into a rideshare with a male driver, only to get a notification that her female driver has cancelled her ride. Rather than note that red flag, Eli automatically assumes that she must have booked two rides—whatever makes it her fault for the mixup, and not worth confronting why a strange man might have picked her up at the airport. As the ride stretches on uncomfortably, Eli twists herself into mental knots justifying her mistake rather than looking for any malevolent intent. And then she gets roofied and wakes up in the basement of—you guessed it—her number one fan.
It’s pretty much impossible to read the description of Space Cadet and not think, “Ah, so kind of like Legally Blonde but with space?” As Variety puts it, writer/director Liz W. Garcia’s film is about “a Florida party girl who turns out to be the only hope for the NASA space program, after a fluke puts her in training with other candidates. They may have better resumes, but not her smarts, heart and moxie.”
(To be fair, though, Elle Woods’ legal success was no fluke.)
Emma Roberts (Scream Queens) will star as this moxie-filled cadet, and the cast has just filled out quite interestingly.
Elisa A. Bonnin makes a powerful debut with Dauntless, a lush and emotive Filipino-inspired fantasy centered on three very different girls reimagining the entirety of their world. This is a book about reckoning with the humanity in our mentors, our heroes, our lovers, and ourselves, especially in times of great trauma and impossible choices. Bonnin weaves cinematic action with emotive sapphic romance and thoughtful friendships to craft a propulsive fantasy.
We’re thrilled to reveal the cover of bestselling author L.R. Lam’s new epic fantasy, Dragonfall, coming in May 2023 from DAW / Astra. Long-banished dragons, revered as gods, return to the mortal realm in the first book of this riveting trilogy. Long ago, humans betrayed dragons, stealing their magic and banishing them to a dying world. Centuries later, their descendants worship dragons as gods. But the “gods” remember, and they do not forgive…
Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow, a book that has been described as a mashup between Pacific Rim, The Hunger Games, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, has been optioned for feature adaptation, which means we may see Wu Zetian helming her monster-mech sometime in the near future.
It’s rare that a book title so perfectly communicates the breadth of its story at a glance. But when R.F. Kuang’s book deal was first announced in 2021, how could we not spend the intervening year eagerly waiting to crack the spine on Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution? It tells us everything to expect tonally but also nothing of the emotional journey that will take place in this alternate-history fantasy doorstopper.
This is a scrupulously researched, ruthlessly cutting rejoinder to books like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, except that the murder around which this cohort of students is bound in blood is the attempted fall of colonialism. (Well, and also a literal murder. Several, really. It’s a very bloody book.)
Is Peter Capaldi a serial killer or a time traveler? That’s one of the questions that’s posited in the new trailer for Prime Video’s The Devil’s Hour, a show that features Capaldi as a guy named Gideon who may or may not be murdering people.
Back in “First First Contact,” Rutherford got a stray memory that indicated that his cybernetic implants were not obtained voluntarily, but that whoever put them in programmed him to believe that it was an elective surgery.
This week’s Lower Decks gives us a lot more background on Rutherford, and it’s not pretty, though it does provide us with some actually really good character development.
It’s a self-contained wedding episode! With a fourth-wall-breaking joke about how it comes at an inconvenient time because weddings always do!
Do they? Don’t you generally get a lot of time to plan to attend a wedding? Did Lulu put this together in two weeks? With that elaborate of a bridesmaid-invitation box?!?
A powerhouse team is bringing David Cronenberg’s 1981 film Scanners back to life—this time as an HBO series. Black Mirror and Stranger Things writer William Bridges is the writer and showrunner for the in-development series, and Yann Demange is set to direct. Demange directed the pilot episode of Lovecraft Country, for which he was also an executive producer.
Cronenberg himself is also part of the production as an executive producer.
