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.
The era of video game adaptations is well and truly upon us—but if they all look as good as this one, I for one welcome our new adaptation overlords. A series adaptation of The Last of Us was announced in 2020, and it was clear from the start that HBO was going to take this pretty seriously: Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin was selected to develop the show along with Neil Druckmann, the writer and creative director of the original game.
Then they went and cast Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) as Joel and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) and Ellie, both of who seemed like impossibly perfect choices—and all the more so now that we can see them in action.
When breaking into a nefarious and/or mysterious science facility, one should always come prepared. And in the case of They Cloned Tyrone, one should always come prepared… with the right song for the lengthy elevator ride into the depths of a creepy building.
The trailer for the upcoming movie from writer-director Juel Taylor (Creed II, Space Jam: A New Legacy) lingers on the scene of Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris, and John Boyega’s entrance into a dark lab—a moment that might seem excruciatingly stressful. Or it might seem like a great time to break into song.
It’s a pretty effective way to set the tone.
“Cease Fire”
Written by Chris Black
Directed by David Straiton
Season 2, Episode 15
Production episode 041
Original air date: February 12, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. For a hundred years, Vulcan and Andoria have fought over a world, which the Vulcans have named Paan Mokar, and which the Andorians call Weytahn. The Andorians colonized it and terraformed (Andoria-formed?) it, but then Vulcan annexed it, and they’ve been fighting over it ever since.
[“We need to reduce our speed.” “The ground is going to do that for us.”]
“Am I allowed to say ‘fuck’ on Netflix?” Robert Sheehan asks at one point in this utterly delightful Umbrella Academy blooper reel. The answer seems to be no, given that little birds (sparrows, one assumes) blot out all swears—even the middle fingers Colm Feore holds up at one point.
But we don’t need swears to have a good time with these folks. Especially not when we’ve got creaky desks, stiff suits, a misbehaving treadmill, and a serious case of the giggles.
The game isn’t over. The first season of Netflix’s Alice in Borderland, adapted from the manga written and illustrated by Haro Aso, premiered in late 2020—and ended with a bit of a cliffhanger. It’s been a long wait, but answers (at least some of them, presumably) are just around the corner with the release of a “super teaser” for season two!
Return to the world of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn as its second era, which began with The Alloy of Law, comes to its conclusion in The Lost Metal.
Tor.com is serializing The Lost Metal from now until its release on November 15. New chapters will go live every Monday at 12pm ET. We’re thrilled to also share selections from the audiobook edition, narrated by Michael Kramer—find chapters three and four below!
Seats are upright and tray tables are locked on the final season of Manifest. After being cancelled by NBC and rescued by Netflix, the mysterious series will return in November, picking up two years after the events of season three’s finale. The survivors of Montego Air Flight 828—thought dead for the five years in which their plane went missing—are nearing their “Death Date,” and things are getting very weird indeed.
There’s a particular subgenre of speculative fiction that scratches an itch for me like no other. It’s where you find yourself in a world very much like our own, except one thing is slightly… off. Perhaps there’s a movie theater that plays only memories, or the story centers on a child who learns the language of cats. Or in this familiar-yet-unfamiliar world, everyone wears electronic bracelets that monitor their moods.
These stories place the fantastic alongside the mundane, yet their speculative elements feel subtle compared to other works classified as fantasy or science fiction. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, for example, has a contemporary setting that features one distinct speculative element: the titular midnight library, which is a manifestation of purgatory that allows the main character to travel along alternate life paths.
It’s a fantasy novel, certainly, but to group it with the fantasy worlds of Brandon Sanderson or Robin Hobb feels akin to calling cereal a soup. They’re related but distinct categories.
The Witcher empire is ever-expanding; at the moment, we’re awaiting season three of The Witcher; the debut of The Witcher: Blood Origin; and, at some more distant date, a family-friendly Witcher spinoff and another anime Witcher film.
But first comes Blood Origin, the Michelle Yeoh-starring prequel series that details the creation of the first Witcher and the Conjunction of the Spheres. Does that sound festive? One hopes so, as it arrives on Netflix on December 25th.
Henry Cavill shan’t return as Geralt until summer 2023, though.
A few years ago I was trolling Netflix, as one does, looking for something to watch. The algorithm threw up an odd title, but the summary looked interesting. Russian-language film, subtitles, fantasy about dragons. I could try that.
I am so glad I did. It’s not your usual medieval-zoid dragon movie at all. No big battles. Minimal violence. Just one really flamey bit.
It comes from the deep heart of the fairy tale, from traditions that go all the way back into antiquity: the marauding dragon, the terrorized people, the maiden sacrifice.
He was raised to kill his sainted father, giving him plenty to talk about in group therapy…
We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Vajra Chandrasekera’s debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors, a richly imagined postcolonial fantasy—available July 11, 2023 from Tordotcom Publishing.
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?
