Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2021 in SFX

A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS Keith Tudor, email Watching the last episode of Supernatural was emotional. I’d been hooked on the show since it first started on ITV2 back in January 2006. Fifteen years on and the finale delivered a very bittersweet conclusion. To me it felt fitting, and it was great to have a proper conclusion rather than a cliffhanger like some shows have had. It’s been an incredible run with some brilliant comedy, strong characters, excellent drama, great music and fun meta moments along the way. Supernatural will be missed. SFX: Fifteen years? It seems like only yesterday it was the new demon-hunting kid on the block… How long till the inevitable reboot, though? OH MANDY Rob Graham, email The Mandalorian is turning into one of the all time great…

SCI-FACT! After three movies and 30 episodes of the TV series, Rodriguez is now working on an animated version of From Dusk Till Dawn. FAMILY IS AT THE HEART OF filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’s most recent works – The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lavagirl was based on a story by his then seven-year-old son Racer. But in the years following, his own children (five, count’em!) have become even more integral to the plot. And the design. And the soundtrack. But before we get to the kids behind the scenes, there’s the small matter of the ones leading his latest film, We Can Be Heroes, which he wrote, directed and produced. “People are calling it a sequel, but they’ll see that it’s kind of a new tale,” Rodriguez tells Red Alert. Sharkboy and…

SCI-FACT! Kathryn previously worked with Freaky director Chris Landon on 2012’s Paranormal Activity 4. JAMIE LEE CURTIS IS MY FAVOURITE FINAL girl, and Drew Barrymore is my favourite scream queen!” says Kathryn Newton. “That scene alone I’ve watched so many times…” Girl’s got taste. But when you’ve been touched by the hands of acting greatness – in Newton’s case, she was once hugged by her Big Little Lies co-star Meryl Streep (more on which later) – it stands to reason you’d look to slasher movie icons from the likes of Halloween and Scream when creating your own entry into the canon. True to form, Newton’s character Millie in Freaky – the new horror-comedy from Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon – is no forgettable final girl, instead combining the pluck and smarts of…

SCI-FACT! From its West End debut in 1941, Blithe Spirit notched up nearly 2,000 performances – setting a new record for a non-musical show. “I’VE ALWAYS LOVED THE PLAY and loved the premise – the idea of being unfaithful to a dead person,” director Edward Hall says of Noël Coward’s 1941 creation – which has gone on to play in theatres worldwide, as well as finding new life in film, television and radio adaptations. Hall’s new film makes some alterations to the tale of Charles Condomine, who’s haunted by the ghost of his first wife – but he says the script kept as much of Coward’s dialogue as possible in order to “keep the DNA, I hope, strong of the original”. But he also took the opportunity to expand on existing storylines…

Great Balls Of Fire Ahead of a re-release of Barry Gray’s full soundtrack to 1962 series Fireball XL5 (due 22 January), this limited release pairs two tracks – the theme and “Zero G” – on orange 7” vinyl. £12.99, roughtrade.com Lord And Master Doctor Who: The Collection bounces back next month when season eight makes its Blu-ray debut on 23 February. As well as the first appearance of the Master, it also blessed the world with Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It features five stories and, as you’d expect, a slew of new bonuses. £44.99, amazon.co.uk We Have Spoken Why does everything look cooler as a vintage-look Star Wars toy? A no-brainer, then, that Hasbro has announced a Mandalorian set for its Retro action figures series. Due in July, they’re…

SCI-FACT! Ricky Whittle finished second in the 2009 series of Strictly Come Dancing. SHADOW MOON (RICKY Whittle) spent the first two seasons of American Gods dealing with the unreasonable demands of his employer, Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane). Their relationship is about to shift significantly in the new season, however, now that Shadow knows that Wednesday (aka Norse god Odin) is his dad – and that he arranged the death of Shadow’s wife, Laura (Emily Browning). Don’t expect to see Shadow giving his old man a hug… “This is not something that he’s going to get over very well,” Whittle tells Red Alert. “It’s very well known that Shadow didn’t have the best life growing up. He lost his mother at 15, bounced around America and finally met Laura. Then she died…

AFTER 13 YEARS OF dominating the attention spans of global cinemagoers with its string of 23 box office successes, no one would hold it against Marvel Studios if it decided to lay off the gas a bit. But that’s not how the President of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, or his team of storytellers operate. As Spider-Man: Far From Home closed Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2019, there was no rest for the weary. By the end of that summer, at both San Diego Comic-Con and D23 Expo, Feige had announced their even more aggressively ambitious slate for Phase Four, including an added slate of in-canon limited series to air exclusively on streaming service Disney+. Among those series was WandaVision, featuring the return of Elizabeth Olsen and Paul…

ALISON WRIGHT IS standing in the middle of a silent soundstage in Vancouver. The English actress, who plays Ruth in Snowpiercer – one of the crew of a miles-long train that’s been circling the globe since an icy apocalypse befell the Earth – is masked up and holding an iPad on the end of a selfie stick. Behind her, a couple of similarly masked crew members go about their work, and we catch a glimpse of a number of plush train interiors. “Welcome to the set of Snowpiercer,” Alison beams. “We’re so sorry we couldn’t have you here in person, but welcome to our virtual set visit for season two.” Set visits transformed in the year 2020. In the past, SFX would have been invited to nose around the set…

I WAS AT A PRE-SCREENING OF SHAUN OF THE Dead and two of the film’s producers came up to me and said, ‘We have your next movie’,” remembers director Edgar Wright. “They had the rights to this new comic book and thought it was right up my alley – they said it was like a cross between John Hughes and Kill Bill.” It’s been a decade since Wright crossed paths with Scott Pilgrim, the slacker hero of Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series, which follows a guy forced to battle his new girlfriend’s seven evil exes. The British director behind cult series Spaced had already taken a bite out of the big screen with 2004’s rom-zom-com, swiftly followed by 2007’s police actioner Hot Fuzz. However, with a new…

RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 106 minutes Director Ben Falcone Cast Melissa McCarthy, James Corden, Bobby Cannavale, Brian Tyree Henry The films Melissa McCarthy and husband Ben Falcone have made together are hit and miss affairs, and none have made SFX radar’s until now, with this story of an AI (voiced by James Corden) that picks “the most average person” – McCarthy’s Carol Peters – as a case study in whether humanity is worth saving. On the basis of this, that’s a question still up in the air. It’s one-part War Games, a shard or two of Black Mirror and plenty of the usual McCarthy comedy welded on to a rom-com (part of the AI’s mission is to get Carol back together with her ex, played with low-key charm by…

EXRTAS RELEASED 4 JANUARY (download out now) 2019 | 15 | DVD/download Director Keith Thomas Cast Dave Davis, Lynne Cohen, Fred Melamed, Malky Goldman From Der Golem to the fabled MacGuffin in Raiders Of The Lost Ark – with a sidestep for Madonna’s Kaballah-crazed phase – Jewish mysticism has long been tapped for inspiration. Keith Thomas’s debut movie adds to that canon, delivering what feels like a Hebraic counterpoint to The Exorcist. Produced under the Blumhouse banner of economical nerve-janglers, it sees a young man hired to watch over the body of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor. This shroud-wrapped corpse soon proves to be an unquiet presence, seemingly the locus for a demonic presence in the man’s home. Filled with stuttering lamps and things that skitter and slither, half-glimpsed, this…

RELEASED 14 JANUARY 2020 | SVOD SHUDDER This Belgian-made effort has more to it than your usual psycho-hunts-woman thriller – but not much. Lucie Debay is Eve: kidnapped, freed, then chased through the woods, recaptured with grim regularity. An encounter with some paintballers that leaves the now crazed heroine looking like a woad-daubed warrior is a neat touch. So’s a faint fairy tale vibe. And Arieh Worthalter is memorable as a misogynist shit. But it all boils down to lots of running about a forest, and the scales tip towards abuse, not retribution.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 4 JANUARY 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD Director Josephine Decker Cast Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young WithThe Haunting Of Hill House still fresh in people’s minds, a biographical drama about Shirley Jackson – widely recognised as one of the greatest horror writers ever – is a timely treat. But how to bring to life a genius and wit with a sharp tongue in a way that does her justice? Director Josephine Decker, working from Sarah Gubbins’s screenplay of Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel, has chosen a semi-fictional look at the time Jackson was writing her second novel Hangsaman, and turned it into a Gothic horror of its own. It’s intoxicating, if occasionally frustrating. Elisabeth Moss plays Jackson as a demon with a drunken sneer, a tortured recluse, and a…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1997 | 18 | Blu-ray Directors Jim Gillespie, Danny Cannon, Sylvain White Cast Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Brandy Norwood It’s hard to imagine anyone picking I Know What You Did Last Summer as their favourite horror movie. A basic slasher where a creepy “Fisherman” slashes up selfish teenagers with his hook, it felt like an also-ran even back in 1997 when it was released. Now that it’s been reissued in a swish new trilogy box set… it’s still not great, but it’s a fun time capsule of an era. With its chunky laptops, chunkier highlights, Dawson’s Creek references and a quintessentially ’90s cast, it’s good for a blast of nostalgia, if nothing much else. The sequels, though, lack even that glimmer…

RELEASED 19 JANUARY 608 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Joshua Johnson Publisher Titan Books It’s tempting to imagine that the rolling prairies of his Minnesota home lit the fuse for Joshua Johnson’s impressive debut novel. His heroine, Kindred, lives in a world covered by the Forever Sea, a plain of grassland extending both away to the horizon and down into the dark depths, where monsters lurk and from which no one has ever returned. The ships sailing over the grassy seas are kept afloat by magical hearthfires and Kindred works as a keeper, responsible for managing the vital flames. But she finds herself drawn to the mysteries of what lies beneath the surface after hearing that her beloved grandmother, a famous ship captain, walked off into the sea, never to be…

RELEASED 12 JANUARY 274 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Tim Pratt Publisher Angry Robot Some people dream of other worlds; Zax Delatree actually travels to them when he sleeps. Each time he wakes up he finds himself on a new world – and he has no control over the matter. It’s the kind of high concept that would have made a great ’90s sci-fi TV series in the style of Quantum Leap or Sliders, with Zax righting wrongs on his various stops. He even picks up companions and has a recurring villain. To make this work as a book, though – albeit one which promises more to come with its cliffhanger ending – Tim Pratt pulls off some clever literary legerdemain to stop the novel becoming relentlessly repetitive, including many sections…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Boom! Studios Writer Al Ewing Artist Simone Di Meo ISSUES 1-3 Al Ewing’s first creator-owned series brings to mind the Kirby-esque cosmic wonder of his outer space-set Marvel books such as Empyre rather than the more satirical tone of his 2000 AD work. The “them” in the title refers to the corpses of apparently dead gods that litter the galaxy. However, the Galactus-like beings may not be as dormant as they initially appear, as the crew of “autopsy” ship Vihaan II discover while pillaging various body parts for meat and other valuable goods. With its crew’s conversations monitored by their oppressive corporate masters, the Vihaan II’s claustrophobic surrounds neatly evoke the ramshackle spirit of Alien’s Nostromo, while Ewing also channels vintage Star Trek and Star Wars.…

RELEASED 7 JANUARY Publisher Rebellion Writers Matt Smith, Cavan Scott, Chris Weston Artists Neil Googe, Davide Tinto, PJ Holden COLLECTION An all-ages take on 2000 AD may sound like a bad idea, but Regened is every bit as subversive and bizarre as you’d hope from the Galaxy’s Greatest – there’s just a little less nihilism and gore. Combining 2018’s Free Comic Book Day issue and progs 2130 and 2170, it’s a packed volume, with stories for Cadet Dredd, Judge Anderson, Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog, alongside fan favourites DR & Quinch, the Gronk and three Future Shocks. Dredd is naturally the most prominent character, though his four stories are a mixed bunch. The best is “Cadet Dredd vs. Grudzilla” by Chris Weston and Chris Blythe, which pitches the young Dredd (even…

THOUGH ARCHIVE IS GAVIN Rothery’s first film as a director, his involvement in the world of movies goes back to the early ’00s, when he and then-housemate Duncan Jones together cooked up the idea of what was to become Moon. However, it was Jones who ended up directing that indie classic, while Rothery went on to become one of the videogame industry’s big-name concept artists. Now, finally, Rothery is ready to unveil his debut feature, a thoughtful SF drama that tells the story of George Almore, an obsessive scientist (played by Theo James) who has spent nearly three years attempting to build a “true human-equivalent android”, which he plans to use as a shell for the computer-archived memories and personality of his dead wife. While Archive shares some conceptual DNA…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST international animation hits you probably don’t know about is Iginio Straffi’s Winx Club. A co-production between Italy’s Rainbow SpA and Nickelodeon, since 2004 Winx Club has amassed a whopping 208 episodes (and four specials), an obsessed global fandom and now a much-anticipated liveaction adaptation, Fate: The Winx Saga, coming to Netflix. What in the animation world was a candy-coloured, frothy, coming of age tale about teen fairies coming into their own at the Alfea College for Fairies has been translated into a decidedly more adult take on the same mythology. Both series revolve around Bloom, a 16-year-old first year at Alfea. In the Netflix series, Bloom (Abigail Cowen) is a typically angsty US teen at odds with her parents, who suddenly discovers that she possesses some…

SCI-FACT! MacKinnon says the writers have already broken down season three of A Discovery Of Witches with author Deborah Harkness. DIANA BISHOP (TERESA Palmer)’s quest to unlock the depths of her witch powers takes a historical turn in season two of Sky’s A Discovery Of Witches. Together with her vampire/scholar boyfriend, Matthew Clairmont (Matthew Goode), she journeys to 1590s London to seek out the powerful Book of Life. Based on author and series executive producer Deborah Harkness’s novel Shadow Of Night, the second season of the supernatural romance dives into its historical roots and takes them very seriously. “The one thing that’s always really important to stories is authenticity, because in order for you to believe a story, you’ve got to feel that it’s real. And that’s something that we’ve really leant…

IF CYBERPUNK IS ANYTHING, IT’S stubborn. Besides carving out a niche for itself in an industry overshadowed by the likes of Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop roleplaying game survived an attempt by its creator to blow it up. Quite literally: having decided to move onto other things, he went one better than Conan Doyle’s attempt to bump off Sherlock Holmes and dropped a nuke at the end of the last plot, obliterating the game’s setting and most of its characters. But you can’t keep a good story down. Fast forward to the present day and the franchise is becoming a global phenomenon. It’s just welcomed Cyberpunk 2077 for consoles and PC, not to mention a brand-new TRPG edition dubbed Cyberpunk Red. For creator Mike Pondsmith and his team at R…

SCI-FACT! Prowse claimed he was also considered for the roles of Conan the Barbarian and Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me. HIS FACE WAS NEVER seen, his true voice never heard. But as the man inside the armour, Dave Prowse, imbued Darth Vader with a physicality that made him an indelible screen presence. From the moment he steps aboard the Tantive IV in A New Hope, a satanic giant in the smoke and chaos of interstellar war, it’s this Bristolian former bodybuilder who brings the dark lord alive. The mask is blank but the body language – ominous and regal – tells us everything. A competitive weight-lifter who had served stints as a lifeguard and a bouncer, Prowse parlayed his brawn into showbusiness, usually cast in parts that demanded a…

THE MISADVENTURES of Sam Vimes and the coppers of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch have been thrilling and amusing readers for more than 30 years now, ever since the 1989 publication of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! The Discworld novels had many recurring characters, of course, from Rincewind to Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching. But it was always clear that Vimes held a special place in the author’s heart. Over the course of eight core City Watch novels (and appearances in numerous other Discworld books), we saw him grow and change from a washed up flatfoot to a happily married Duke and leader of a fully functioning police force that helped move the city into a more modern age. A TV show based on the City Watch books was first announced…

UK Sky Atlantic/Now TV, now US HBO Max, finished Showrunner Aaron Guzikowski Cast Amanda Collin, Abubakar Salim, Winta McGrath, Niamh Algar EPISODES 1.01-1.10 Unsurprisingly, given the genre’s roots in the work of humanists like HG Wells, God is often missing from the picture when it comes to SF – particularly on the small screen. There are exceptions. Battlestar Galactica made great play of its singular Cylon God and multiple Colonial Gods, with prophecies repeatedly bringing into question whether its characters were really exercising free will or merely fulfilling their predetermined destiny. Raised By Wolves, executive-produced by Ridley Scott (who also directed the first two episodes, and whose work the series has various echoes of) treads a similar path. Not that this is initially evident. Before the story’s grander mythic dimensions…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | YouTube video Directors Peter Caddock, Jon Doyle Cast Nicholas Briggs, Joe Sugg, Anjli Mohindra, Ayesha Antoine Ever thought that Doctor Whowould be much better without all the pesky organic lifeforms? Good news: there isn’t a single humanoid face to be seen here. Pitting a Dalek line-up led by the swollen-headed Dalek Emperor of the ’60s comics and his two sidekicks – the Strategist and the Executioner – this five-part animation is tied into the Time Lord Victorious event, but perfectly digestible on its own. Told on an epic scale, and featuring the sort of massed ranks of Daleks and their saucers that were first brought to the screen by Russell T Davies, it sees the pepperpots threatened by a mysterious cloudy entity from another dimension.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2019 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Combining elements of Transformers, The Matrix and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, this Russian sci-fi actioner labours to find its own identity. With most of the world’s communications knocked out by malevolent ETs, it’s up to a gung-ho military to shoot first, ask questions later, against massively superior forces. The comparative lack of aliens is a disappointment, as is a script that lurches from cliché to cliché, but you can’t fault it for city-trashing spectacle. Extras Subtitled/dubbed versions.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1981 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Richard Franklin Cast Stacy Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, Marion Edward, Grant Page BLU-RAY DEBUT Sold to audiences as a straight slasher, trading on the presence of Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis and pimped by a giallo-style poster, Road Games is a movie with an identity crisis. Openly infatuated by Hitchcock, director Richard Franklin aims for Rear Window on wheels as long-haul trucker Stacy Keach encounters a serial killer along the desolate highways of the Australian outback. While Franklin’s earlier movie Patrick conjured with the paranormal, the boogeyman here is strictly flesh and blood, the scares second fiddle in a whimsical romp whose sassy tone keeps it entertaining but rarely thrilling. Extras This 4K restoration comes with a truly expansive selection, including…

It took nine years for credit-crunch psychological thriller THE GLASS MAN (out now, download) to make it from FrightFest to wider availability. Andy Nyman plays a businessman who hasn’t told his wife he was sacked, James Cosmo the debt collector who offers to let him off if he’ll help with a job… The central dynamic is appealingly offbeat, with Cosmo’s character amiably chatting one moment and issuing dire threats the next. But the final twist is one that about 10% of thrillers seemed to have at the time, and the whole production feels noticeably low-rent. Anthology horror A NIGHT OF HORROR: NIGHTMARE RADIO (out now, download) uses the linking device of a DJ fielding calls from listeners as an excuse to glue together eight pre-existing horror shorts. Unsurprisingly, tone, style…

RELEASED 21 JANUARY 496 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Derek Miller Publisher Jo Fletcher Books Post-apocalypse stories often focus just on the nitty-gritty of how to survive when the world ends, but there’s a more challenging question: what happens when familiar knowledge gets left behind? Radio Life tackles this question head-on, and has new insights into what could easily have been familiar territory. Strongly influenced by the classic post-apocalypse novel A Canticle For Leibowitz, it’s the tale of the Commonwealth, a society eking out an existence centuries after nanotech accidentally devastated the world. The Commonwealth’s mission is to excavate and preserve all the knowledge it can find, but when one of their explorers happens upon an archived version of the internet, it sets off a conflict with the Keepers, a rival…

RELEASED 21 JANUARY 432 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Louise Carey Publisher Gollancz One very telling detail of Inscape is that the word “London” appears nowhere in the book, yet that’s where it’s set. Louise Carey’s smart worldbuilding hints at the events of the Meltdown Wars, a conflict which appears to have made governments a thing of the past: stability and structure is now provided by enormous tech corporations. The area south of the Thames is controlled by InTech, which sends two operatives – Tanta, a fiercely loyal teen agent, and Cole, a middle-aged hacker with parts of his memory missing – north of the river into territory occupied by rivals Thoughtfront. Their mission is to investigate an act of corporate terrorism. After an arresting opening, the pace slows a little while…

RELEASED 14 JANUARY 432 pages | Hardback/ebook Author CK McDonnell Publisher Bantam Press In the brave new digital world, it’s sometimes not seen as enough to have just a paper-and-ink novel. No, what people want, we’re told, is a full brand: a way to immerse yourself wholly in a world. That’s exactly what author and comedian Caimh McDonnell has created with The Stranger Times. It’s a novel about a newspaper of the same name – but if you want more, there’s also an ebook of short stories by a variety of authors, In Other News; a short story podcast; and a website packed with news and classifieds from the world of the book. Of course, you can still just read the novel; happily, it’s a pretty good one. Hannah is…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Viz Media Writer/artist Junji Ito MANGA Featuring the likes of Uzumaki, about a supernatural curse involving spirals, and Gyo, in which undead fish sprout metal legs to attack the mainland, Junji Ito’s oeuvre is surely the most surreally ghoulish of any mangaka. Remina – originally published in 2005, but here receiving its first English translation – matches them for madness. The title refers to both to an astrophysicist’s winsome 16-year-old daughter, and the rogue planet he names after her when it emerges from a wormhole to another dimension. Bad move: soon this living hellworld is heading for Earth at the speed of light, chewing up every planet in its path with its giant puckeredanus mouth. Who gets the blame? The girl, denounced as a witch and threatened…

RELEASED 2 JANUARY 180 minutes | CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA One of the many highlights of “World Enough And Time” was finally seeing how different versions of the Master interact when they meet – though compared to the Doctor’s anniversary episodes, the turnout was fairly small. Not one to waste an opportunity, Big Finish is marking 50 years since the Master’s on-screen debut by bringing together nearly all his incarnations for a celebratory banquet, where it appears that the Doctor’s best enemy has finally triumphed. The Doctor is imprisoned, the Master finally owns all of the few remaining stars in the sky, and now he wants to decide how to rule them, with the advice of his predecessors. But given that the last time Masters crossed paths they…

There are tons of fun and interesting ways that The Mandalorian ties into Star Wars canon. Are you aware of all the Easter eggs when you’re working on the show? There’s plenty that are pointed out to me and there’s plenty that are obvious, but I think it would be impossible for me to remember them all. On top of the Easter eggs, what I love the most is the reference to very specific genres of cinema. Can you give us an example of that from the second season? For season two, the set of the second episode [“The Passenger”] was the first set that I walked on to. It was this shipwrecked Razor Crest on this snowy set, and I’d seen the illustrations of the spiders that were so…

IF YOU CAN GET PAST THE fashions (cravat city) and the out-of-date attitudes (Simon Oates’s womanising Ridge pinches the secretary’s bum in the first episode’s opening minutes), there is still much that is relevant to Doomwatch. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, this peak-time 1970 show was created by scientist Kit Pedler and writer Gerry Davis – the men whose imaginations also spawned Doctor Who’s Cybermen. By the end of the ’60s, after five adventures the Cybermen were on hiatus, freeing Pedler and Davis to develop Doomwatch. The show explored all manner of environmental catastrophes, capitalising on the early–’70s high profile of the nascent Green movement. The stories came from the headlines of the day, and in several cases even anticipated real-world events. Unofficially dubbed “Doomwatch”, the series’ small team…

RELEASED 15 JANUARY (also on Sky Cinema/Now TV) 12A | 99 minutes Director Edward Hallo Cast Dan Stevens, Judi Dench, Isla Fisher, Leslie Manno If there’s one thing Noël Coward was known for, it was wit. His joyful wordplay is the reason 1941’s Blithe Spirit has spent decades on West End and Broadway stages – and of course there’s also the iconic 1945 film adaptation, in which Margaret Rutherford had the time of her life as psychic Madame Arcati. The play is, to this day, a scream: dripping with laughs, slapstick and brilliance. All of which makes this 2020 remake all the more baffling, because it certainly isn’t. The fault doesn’t lie with the cast. Dan Stevens stiff-upper-lips rather well as the writer haunted by his ex-wife (Leslie Mann) and…

FIRST LOOK US BBC America, from 3 January UK TBC Director Simon Allen Cast Richard Dormer, Marama Corlett, Samuel Adewunmi, Lara Rossi EPISODES 1.01-1.04 It’s taken a decade, but Discworld adaptation The Watch is finally here. And, thank the gods, it’s good. Not perfect, but a fun and funny fantasy adventure series. The Ankh-Morpork City Watch are tasked with protecting the streets from crime, but Commander Sam Vimes (Richard Dormer) is usually far too drunk. When an old foe returns and a dragon attacks the city, Vimes is forced to pull himself and his team together to save the day. It takes a moment to get used to this more modern Ankh-Morpork, with its electricity and steampunk flourishes, but it works. The world’s filled with lovely Pratchettian details, like CCTV…

EXTRAS RELEASED 4 JANUARY 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Dimitri Logothetis shamelessly borrows from Predator in this tale of an alien that visits Earth looking for a challenge. Alas, instead of Arnie, Jiu Jitsu has Kickboxer: Vengeance star Alain Moussi, who looks utterly vacant. Of the supporting cast, only Nicolas Cage brings any life to his role, although the big reveal about his character is miserably mistimed. Action scenes are hamstrung by excessive slow motion and underwhelming sound design, but it’s the script that really lacks punch. Extras None.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 11 JANUARY 2020 | 15 | DVD/download New kid in town Chris gets roped into a mean prank on a local “witch”… then it all starts to feel like a late Nightmare On Elm Street sequel. The Call’s strengths include striking production design, pretty neon lighting, and some satisfying stunt casting – Saw’s Tobin Bell shows up as an angry old man who wants to play a game. Weaknesses, however, include most of the script, particularly the third act. Still, it’s been a while since there’s been a spooky landline in a horror movie… Extras None.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | PG | SVOD Director Robert Rodriguez Cast YaYa Gosselin, Pedro Pascal, Priyanka Chopra, Vivien Lyra Blair NETFLIX Back in 2005, after a brainstorm with his kids, Robert Rodriguez threw their wacky superhero ideas onto the screen in the form of The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lavagirl. The result, while well-intentioned, was surely one of the worst films ever made. Thankfully this belated sequel is galaxies better. We Can Be Heroes features an array of fun characters, inventive effects and set-pieces, and – Lord have mercy – an actual plot. The original duo are background characters, clearing the way for a new generation of superpowered children led by YaYa Gosselin’s Missy, daughter of Pedro Pascal’s Marcus Moreno… who, along with all Earth’s other superheroes, have been…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2000 | 12 | VOD Director Hyun-seung Lee Cast Jun Ji-Hyun, Jung-jae Lee, Seung-yeon Jo, Mu-saeng Kim TERRACOTTA Remember that soppy time travel romance The Lake House, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock? Il Mare (or Siworae as it was known in its homeland) is the Korean film from which it was adapted. And while The Lake House isn’t half as bad as the description “soppy time travel romance starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock” makes it sound, the US film does comes across as rather unsubtle, cheesy and superficial in comparison to its source. The key difference is that while the time travel shtick in both films – a man and woman living two years apart fall in love via letters posted in a time-warping mailbox…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 374 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Ernest Cline Publisher Century Ready Player One was never high literature, but it was fun. By setting a relentless stream of pop culture references against a fast-moving quest to recover a dead tech billionaire’s fortune, Ernest Cline found the spot on the Venn diagram where nostalgia and page-turners intersect. Which is why Steven Spielberg chose to turn it into an unashamedly geeky movie – and why this follow-up is considered such a big deal by its publishers that SFX wasn’t allowed near it until release day. The thing Ready Player One didn’t need, however, was a sequel. The last time we saw Wade Watts (aka Parzival), he’d tracked down James Halliday’s Easter egg, become the owner of virtual reality playground the OASIS,…

RELEASED 14 JANUARY 352 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Jenni Fagan Publisher William Heinemann Sometimes a building just feels wrong, like it’s been tainted by the bad things that have happened within its walls. That’s certainly true of 10 Luckenbooth Close, the Edinburgh tenement at the heart of Jenni Fagan’s third novel. Jessie, the Devil’s daughter, moves in during 1910. Despite her unholy heritage she is not evil. Still, something terrible happens to her, and echoes of the crime will be felt for decades to come. Luckenbooth largely eschews a conventional plot and structure, instead focusing on snapshots of the lives of nine people who live in the tenement over almost 100 years. It’s an extraordinary cast of characters: as well as Jessie there’s a psychic medium, a murderous madam, and…

RELEASED 14 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Richard Flanagan Publisher Chatto & Windus How do you convey the enormity of what’s happening in the Anthropocene epoch? For Australian author Richard Flanagan, winner of the 2014 Booker Prize, the answer is to turn to magical realism. Not that this is immediately obvious. Instead, Flanagan seems to be setting up a family drama, as the children of 87-year-old Francie gather at their mother’s hospital bedside. Francie has suffered a bleed on her brain. Surely the kindest thing would be to let her quietly die? Only failed artist Tommy, the sibling most at ease with his mother’s infirmity, thinks so. Wealth manager Terzo and high-flying architect Anna, used to getting their own way, instead opt for more and more high-risk interventions, which…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Paperback/ebook Author SJ Morden Publisher Gollancz To adapt Leo Tolstoy’s observation that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, each member of such a family is uniquely unhappy in his or her own particular fashion. In the case of the young man who will reinvent himself as Jack Astrogator, his misery is rooted not just in the way his oligarch parents hold ruthlessly to their privilege, but to their adoption of transhumanism. If Jack’s control freak parents plan to live forever, how can he ever escape them? By running away to space. In a book where environmental concerns are to the fore, this also represents an escape from a late-21st century Earth being ravaged by global heating. But out in the Solar…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics Writer James Tynion IV Artist Martin Simmonds ISSUES 1-3 Once in a blue moon comes a comic so fully formed that you know you’re holding an instant classic. The Department Of Truth starts impossibly strongly and gets stronger still, with issue one’s final panel so perfect that it’ll give you goosebumps. And as for the endings of the second and third issues… The story follows Cole Turner, an FBI agent who studies alt-right internet habits – the kind of dude who could probably tell you the complete history of Pepe The Frog. When he stumbles across a world-shattering secret, he’s dragged into an interrogation room by an agency who’ll do whatever it takes to keep it a conspiracy. It’s basically The Matrix meets The…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 6 x circa 25 minutes | Podcast Broadcaster BBC Sounds AUDIO DRAMA It’s taken over two decades for something to come along that plays in the same sandpit as Chris Morris’s peerless Radio 1 show Blue Jam – or threatens to match it. Narrated by Alice Lowe in the manner of a patronisingly cheery meditation guide, the shtick of Natasha Hodgson’s podcast is that each of its six short “sessions” uses “Nanomesh sleep tech” to play back bad dreams so that you can “plunger your brains toilet”. Initially, The Sink very much feels modelled on Morris’s trippy, boundary-pushing series, as it slides from sketch to sketch, woozily drifting through an ambient soup. As in Blue Jam, the sketches tend to drop the listener in at the deep…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Number of players Two Publisher Games Workshop TABLETOP GAME Blood Bowl is one of Games Workshop’s most iconic titles, and yet it languished out of print for 22 years before being rebooted in 2016. This new edition gives the current rules a bit of a polish and comes packaged with two teams of Orcs and humans. Fundamentally, it’s the same fast-paced game of fantasy rugby with kicks, punches, stabs and dirty tricks. Existing players will find refinements to the statistics bars, most notably a new Passing Ability stat. The double-sided pitch is longer, and there have been lots of smaller tweaks throughout. Pleasingly, all of the many available teams are covered in the rulebook, so there’s no need to buy extra supplements if you play Elves, Dwarfs,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Number of players Two/up to four with Mega-Mania Publisher Rebellion Unplugged BOARDGAME Block Maniawas originally published by Games Workshop back in the mid ’80s. Over the years it’s gained a bit of a cult reputation that feels deserved, but also a little rose-tinted. Based on the early Judge Dredd “Block War” storyline, it sees each player take control of a City Block (a massive skyscraper teeming with thousands of lairy citizens) and try to defeat the other. You win the game by having the least Defeat Points at the end (no one really wins a Block War). One way to ensure this is by inflicting so much damage that the enemy’s building comes crashing down – very satisfying. You marshal forces of Dredd-verse factions (Juves, Fatties, City-Def…