Table of contents for June 2023 in SFX

JEAN-LUC WHO’S TALKING Liam Lionheart, email I loved the third season of Picard and am looking forward to what Terry Matalas will do next. This is what fans wanted all along. Sean Alexander, email Much as I’m the party pooper, Picard series three has been an exercise in nostalgia over storytelling, Easter eggs over characterisation. New additions like Captain Shaw and Vadic aside, this was a slow build to two episodes of fan-pleasing button-pushing. Television as Comic-Con gathering: made by the fans, for the fans and only for the fans. Which is fine, but should have been earned by a better plot and less reliance on brand familiarity. Like Star Wars, Trek is now an exercise in nostalgia and reformatting for the next generation. There’s little new but everything is shiny.…

“FIRST OF ALL, NOTHING ABOUT this movie was easy,” Peter Sohn, the longtime Pixar creative, tells an audience. Someone has just asked about how The Good Dinosaur’s director incorporated political themes into Elemental, his new animation about Ember – a shopkeeper’s daughter made of fire – falling in love with a city inspector, Wade, who’s made of water. The two live in the wonderfully colourful Elemental City, but because of their clashing elemental natures they do not normally mix. “The themes of the film are very personal for me,” Sohn continues. “My experiences of growing up in New York and some of the xenophobia that my parents and I faced were all issues that were personal, all things that I, to this day, struggle with. But that’s on the darker…

♦ The BBC has announced new cast for Ncuti Gatwa’s upcoming debut season, including Bhav Joshi (Tetris), Millie Kent (The Split), Eilidh Loan (England’s Forgotten Queen), Pete MacHale (Gangs Of London), Sophie Ablett (A Brixton Tale), Miles Yekinni (Doctors) and Hemi Yeroham (The Amelia Project). ♦ An undisclosed guest star from 2005 is also scheduled to return. ♦ The second part of the Big Finish 60th anniversary audio adventure has been announced as Once And Future: The Artist At The End Of Time. Released in June, it will star Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Georgia Tennant as Jenny and Colin Baker as the Curator. ♦ The world’s longest-running children’s programme, Blue Peter, partnered with Doctor Who for a 60th anniversary competition. Viewers between the ages of five and 15…

THERE’S MORE TO TRANSFORMERS: Rise Of The Beasts than meets the eye. Based on the ’80s cartoons, the seventh instalment in the movie franchise promises to deliver all the explosions, bombastic action and giant robots that audiences have come to expect. But, despite its epic scope and scale, Rise Of The Beasts also provides more character-driven arcs for not only the humans, but the leader of the Autobots himself, Optimus Prime. “Something I really wanted to bring into this was a lot of heart, with a lot of culture and a lot of us,” director Steven Caple Jr tells SFX. “I felt like the Transformers, especially the Autobots and these new factions, they emote like they never have before in any other movie. I wanted to dive deeper into Optimus…

FOR ROB MARSHALL, DIRECTING a live-action version of The Little Mermaid felt something like destiny. “In 1989, when [the animated movie] came out, it really was the return of the movie musical,” he tells SFX. “When I did [directorial debut] Chicago, I felt a deep connection with Mermaid, because they had kicked the door open for movie musicals, and we then pushed the door even further with a live-action musical. Audiences were ready to accept actors actually moving from scene into song. So when they came and asked me to do this, it felt like fate.” The original Little Mermaid was, at the time, a bold move for Disney, the company putting its weight behind an untested female-led animated picture. The result kickstarted a decade-long period known as the Disney…

What was your own journey to Secrets Of The Mogwai? ■ It was just a regular audition where they were looking for someone who sounded like Gizmo. The weird thing is, I thought, “Well, anyone can do this.” So when I got the callback to do an animation test, I kind of freaked out because I thought, “Why did they choose me?” How did you find Gizmo’s voice? ■ It’s a voice that I used to do when I was a kid with my dad, because we used to imitate Bobby’s World, the show that [original Gizmo voice actor] Howie Mandel did. My dad and I used to do the Bobby voice, which is the same as Gizmo, essentially. So it’s just a noise or a voice I’ve done since…

ASK A LONG-TIME THE Walking Dead fan for a specific scene that broke them and the season seven premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” is likely to be cited. Not only did it usher in the brutality of villainous Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and the Saviours, but it also featured the horrific exit of fan favourites Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun). The comic book readers knew that the seminal moment of Negan putting his baseball bat, Lucille, through Glenn’s head was coming, and would be the pivotal catalyst in Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) arc as a leader and single mum. But watching it play out with the actors so viscerally remains an all-time darkest entry in 11 years of storytelling. So much so that,…

IN HIS DAY JOB, CHRIS HILL IS A DIRECTOR AT a scientific research organisation that supports the US government. By night, he hunts Daleks. Toy Daleks. It’s not unusual for fans of Doctor Who to collect the tie-in merchandise. But there are few who go to such extremes as Hill, a devotee of the show since the mid-’60s. “I’m told that I was one of those kids who was watching from behind the sofa, peeking my head out,” he tells SFX. “I had a plastic Dalek by a company called Herts Plastic Moulders, and a Dalek shooting game. “But I wasn’t a collector then. I became one in February 1971 when my dad brought home the first issue of a comic called Countdown. There was a Doctor Who strip in…

UK/US Apple TV+, Fridays Showrunner Graham Yost Cast Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Tim Robbins, Chinaza Uche EPISODES 1.01-1.10 Though a series of books provided the template, anyone who gets a wistful feeling on hearing mention of the DHARMA Initiative should be hooked by this show. That said, it has a much more epic (though equally mysterious) project lurking beneath its hatch: an underground society with a population of 10,000, housed in a mile-deep silo containing everything needed for survival. How long it has existed, who built it and why is unknown. What the inhabitants do know is that the surface is a barren, toxic wasteland, as is confirmed every time some unfortunate is sent out to clean the camera that transmits to screens in every canteen. It’s a great hook – a…

EXTRA RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Amy Seimetz Cast Kate Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Kentucker Audley, Tunde Adebimpe BLU-RAY DEBUT This profoundly anxious film isn’t about Covid-19, but it’s hard not to view it through that lens, and especially the fear that contact with others – no matter how fleeting – brought at the height of the pandemic. The fact that the movie’s 2020 release was delayed precisely because of it feels weirdly apt. Jane (Jane Adams) visits her friend Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), but finds her in a strange mood, morbidly convinced that she only has hours left to live. Disturbed, Jane leaves and goes to a party, but by the time she arrives, she too has become infected with the conviction that she is soon…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 15 | Download Writer/director/star Franklin Ritch’s thoughtful, relentlessly talky meditation on AI probably belongs on the stage. Over three chapters, it reveals the existence of Cherry, an AI child created as bait for online predators, then time-jumps to explore how (and if) she feels about it. Its largely basement-bound physical limitations get faintly comical, but good performances keep you engaged: Ritch rattles off reams of technical dialogue, and Lance Henriksen is, for once, handed material worthy of his gravitas.…

RELEASED 22 MAY 2021 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD/Download Giant sentient plants have taken over in this ecological-minded Chinese action movie. When a widowed dad and his daughter join forces with a bunch of soldiers to save what’s left of humanity, the result is a mess of barely passable CG flora, unnecessary slow-mo and lots of noble sacrifice. The English subtitles are functional to the point of hilarity, while the plotting is so ridiculous it makes The Core and Geostorm seem plausible. + Extras None.…

RELEASED 29 MAY 2023 | 15 | Download Director Remy Grillo Cast Katherine Hughes, Josh Plasse, Vince Hill-Bedford, Frank Grillo The thing with 78-minute horror movies is they never feel 78 minutes long, because they’re almost always meandering and confused. The Resurrection Of Charles Manson is a prime example: if anyone involved knew how to tell a story, it’d probably have landed at around 90 minutes. Instead, it’s an underbaked mess; a premise in search of a story, some characters and probably some basic human empathy into the bargain. Here’s the premise: a grieving wannabe actress drags her new boyfriend out to the middle of nowhere so she can film an audition tape. She wants to play one of Manson’s murderous acolytes, and needs to get in the zone. Problem…

RELEASED 25 MAY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Christopher Priest Publisher Gollancz Airports, it’s sometimes said, are liminal spaces. They lie between home and a resort, a business hotel and the next conference or appointment. Then there are the corridors and stairways through which we have to move to reach a departure gate, a border official’s booth or a luggage carousel. In an airport, we seem always to find ourselves in a non-place between places. Except what if that’s the wrong way to look at airports? What if we should rather see airports as concrete-and-glass actualisations of what the academic David Pascoe has dubbed airspace, a distinct if discrete place in itself that extends from terminal to terminal, crisscrossing time zones? “The airport is a locale of anxiety and chance…

RELEASED 25 MAY 592 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Temi Oh Publisher Simon & Schuster Opposites attract. Or at least, within the conventions of romantic fiction, people from very different backgrounds often make the deepest of connections. We mention this because Temi Oh’s second novel is a big-hearted cyberpunk romance. Its protagonists are Moremi, a young dancer who longs to connect to the Panopticon – a supercharged digital social network where you can see inside other people’s mind and dreams – and Orpheus, an only son raised by a renegade neo-Luddite father. Of course they fall in love. It’s a relationship that plays out at a time when the authorities are trying to legislate for everyone to be connected to the Panopticon – the idea being that when the whole population…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 191 pages pages | Paperback/ebook Author Agustina Bazterrica Publisher Pushkin Press Given the nature of her 2017 novel Tender Is The Flesh, in which, when a virus renders animal heat unfit for consumption cannibalism is industrialised, it comes as no surprise that Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica’s short story collection is a bleakly morbid affair. Its 20 slices of Lit Fic horror generally end in a death, and self-annihilation is a common theme. A sense of revulsion at humanity – for its vacuity, vulgarity or physical repulsiveness – also recurs. They’re brief affairs, with sometimes only the most embryonic characterisation or narrative development. A few might better be described as prose poems. There aren’t any supernatural entities here – with the possible exception of “The Solitary Ones”, an…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 320 pages | Paperback/ebook Author SA Harris Publisher Salt Publishing You know that old cliché about how the heroine in horror movies always falls over at a crucial moment? Evie, the narrator of Seahurst, really seems to have taken it to heart. If there’s a trip hazard anywhere in the vicinity, she’ll go flying. Clumsiness is the primary source of tension in this uninspiring supernatural horror. Some years earlier, Evie’s father fell to his death from the cliffs beyond their spooky old house; now, her brother has gone missing, likely having met a similar fate. Both of them had been researching a local legend about a witch, without much luck. Now it’s down to Evie to figure it out, before she or her son take a fatal…

RELEASED 25 MAY 512 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Megan E O’Keefe Publisher Orbit Humanity’s attempts to conquer death are going a lot better than its efforts to exploit exoplanets in this first book of trilogy The Devoured Worlds. In a future that’s Altered Carbon meets 3D printing, humans – those with enough dosh, anyway – can repeatedly download their “map” (or memories) into newly printed bodies. But the technology – along with other costly body mods – is dependent on a particular element, the mining of which is controlled by one ruling family, the Mercators. The trouble is, the worlds they mine keep ending up as dead planets, consumed by a relentless lichen called shroud. Eco-terrorists blame the Mercators, and they cop the blame when a Mercator ship blows up,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Hibernia Books Writer M Scott Goodall Artist Eric Bradbury COLLECTION As his name indicates, there’s nothing subtle about Simon Strong, the astronaut-turned-spy hero of this fourth volume of The Fleetway Files, who’s gifted with super-strength after being caught in a radioactive galactic nebula. The uncredited scripter – most probably M Scott Goodall – cleverly blends elements of James Bond and The Six Million Dollar Man with Get Smart-style humour in the form of Strong’s air-jet shoes, which prevent him from crashing through the floor due to his tremendous weight. With Strong’s first three adventures originally serialised in two-page instalments when they first appeared in Valiant in 1975, Goodall packs in a lot of plot, although he tends to over-explain in captions what we can already see…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writer Danny Lore Artist Karen S Darboe ISSUES 1-3 Though there’s more than a shade of Buffy about Brielle Caulder, Blade’s previously hidden daughter also boasts enough individuality to make her stand out from other teenage vampire hunters. A dhampir, like her father – offspring of a vampire and a human – Brielle is not actually referred to by her titular codename in these first three issues. Danny Lore’s script wisely dials back on the superheroics, instead focusing on her relationships with her mother and schoolfriends, interspersed with encounters with some feral bloodsuckers. Harking back to Brielle’s appearance in last year’s Crypt Of Shadows, issue one’s pace is hindered by some expository dialogue detailing her past exploits. The emergence of her nascent powers is linked…

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ANTHONY RAMOS IS NOAH Introduce us to your character Noah. Who is he and how does he become aligned with the Transformers? ■ Noah is ex-military and was dishonourably discharged. He goes back home and deals with the reality of living with his brother and mother, and finding a job. Noah is a hustler, so he’s like “I am good at fixing things. I can fix cable boxes. I can fix cars. I can fix things.” He gets offered to go on a bigger job, where Noah meets our other main character, Mirage. The story goes from there. All he cares about is protecting his family and doing right for them. Noah gets partnered with Mirage. What does that dynamic look like? ■ At first, it’s apprehensive. Noah doesn’t trust…

STAR WARS: AHSOKA The Padawan strikes back We’ve already met the live-action incarnation of animated icon Ahsoka Tano in The Mandalorian and The Book Of Boba Fett. Now Rosario Dawson rocks the montrals in her own show as the former Padawan and rebel spy confronts a deadly new threat to a galaxy that’s just witnessed the fall of the Empire. “I felt really blessed to have such volumes of history to actually reflect back on,” Dawson told the crowd at Celebration. “Ashley Eckstein [voice of the cartoon Ahsoka] bringing this character from a teenager up until the present did such a remarkable job in developing her. She was hot-headed – she’s still stubborn now – but the complexity that she brought to it and the nuances were something to build…

RELEASED 2 JUNE 15 | 88 minutes Directors Peeter Ritso, Mikk Mägi Cast Mikk Mägi, Oskar Lehemaa, Märt Avandi, Jan Uuspõld If your only experience of stop-motion animation is Aardman’s works of gentle brilliance, then this Estonian comedy should prove quite the eye-opener. Based on a web series by Peeter Ritso and Mikk Mägi, it’s an adults-only affair that aims to elicit grossed-out groans from its audience. Three kids have gone to stay with their grandad in the countryside. Everyone in the village is obsessed with milk, and the old man appears to own the only local cow. However, a psychopath with a grudge against all things bovine is on the loose and determined to slaughter the animal before its backed-up udders explode and cause milky devastation. Cue lots of…

UK/US Disney+, streaming now Showrunners Various Cast Daveed Diggs, Maxine Peake, Cynthia Erivo, Anjelica Huston EPISODES 2.01-2.09 Having given Japanese anime studios the run of the galaxy first time out, this second batch of Visions broadens its scope by bringing in animation houses from all over the world. To Lucasfilm’s credit, they’ve granted the filmmakers even more creative freedom than before, resulting in an eclectic – and adventurous – anthology of Star Wars-themed shorts. Whereas Volume One got a tad preoccupied with Jedi-on-Sith action, these episodes remember that there’s much more to Star Wars. “The Spy Dancer” (from France’s Studio La Cachette) plays out like a wartime resistance drama, for example, while the unmistakably Aardman “I Am Your Mother” focuses on a race at a Rebel pilot school – Denis Lawson…

EXTRA RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 15 | Blu-ray & DVD Director Mark Jenkin Cast Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe, John Woodvine Enys Men is a film that you feel rather than understand. Shot on gloriously grainy 16mm, with its soundtrack entirely overdubbed, it has the hyperreal quality of a dream. Mary Woodvine’s Volunteer roams an island following the same ritual day after day. She observes the growth of flowers, drops rocks down a mine shaft and reports her findings in a log book. And, for the first hour or so of the film, that’s kind of it. As it progresses, however, you get the sense that time has shifted out of joint. Certainly there are ghosts here – though whether they are phantoms of the mind, literal spirits…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | TBC | Download Supersoldier turned bounty hunter Captain Mo Harrington comes out of retirement to help save Supercity Europe from being overrun by crime, only to discover his shifty employers are part of the problem… With its cheesy title, enhanced beefcake hero, synth score and “future” setting of 2002, this micro-budget British sci-fi noir is clearly intended as a homage to futuristic ’80s action flicks. Sadly, the film is low on the kind of wit that could have overcome its financial constraints.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | TBC | SVOD Director Michelle Garza Cervera Cast Natalia Solián, Alfonso Dosal, Mayra Batalla, Mercedes Hernández SHUDDER Though it’s set in Mexico City and makes use of a figure from Mexican folklore, Michelle Garza Cervera’s directorial debut also taps into J-horror, featuring as it does uncannily jerky, bone-cracking, crawling female figures in the lineage of Ring’s Sadako. (At one point the manga Uzumaki can be glimpsed on a bookshelf, which seems a bit of a giveaway.) Natalia Solián plays Valeria, a young woman with a pleasant aspirational lifestyle (hand-makes furniture, husband in advertising, chic apartment). Her happiness at discovering she’s pregnant is soon interrupted by apparent hallucinations – a neighbour leaping from their window, a figure under the bed grabbing her foot. So far, so…

RELEASED 23 MAY 544 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Thomas D Lee Publisher Orbit Ancient myths and very modern problems collide in Thomas D Lee’s Perilous Times. In the near future, the world teeters on the brink of ecological collapse. In northern England, an eco-warrior called Mariam blows up a fracking site, accidentally unleashing a dragon in the process. Simultaneously Kay, a former Knight of the Round Table, is awakened from magical slumber to answer the call to protect the realm – but realises it’s hard to protect a kingdom from rising temperatures, division and greed. Lee’s adventure could easily read like a Guardian article about the evils of late-stage capitalism; fortunately, a sharp, cynical sense of humour (not to mention river goddesses and scheming wizards), prevents any such pitfalls. Similarly,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 576 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Mark Lawrence Publisher HarperVoyager The scale of Mark Lawrence’s vision in this first volume of The Library Trilogy is positively daunting. The story is built around a library that reaches across time and space, holding uncounted secrets within its cavernous chambers, while the plot begins in two separate strands. A ferociously intelligent young girl called Livira comes to Crath City, which houses the entrance to the library, as a refugee. She becomes an apprentice librarian as her insatiable hunger for knowledge drives her to break every rule in trying to divine the library’s mysteries. Meanwhile, Evar has been trapped within one chamber of the library since childhood, alongside his brothers and sister, searching for a way out. This is a work of…

RELEASED 8 JUNE 352 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author EL Norry Publisher Bloomsbury Who fancies a children’s book that’ll make you nostalgic for post-Second World War, Famous Five-style adventuring? There’s also a dash of Arthurian legend and characters who aren’t all a) posh or b) white. No complaints here. The titular Fablehouse is an orphanage in a small British village which mostly houses the children of African-American GIs who dallied with local ladies during the war. Rejected by their parents and stigmatised by society, Heather, Lloyd, Arlene and Nat find a family in each other instead. Then they stumble across a mysterious injured man beside a magical clifftop cairn. Being kids, they decide to keep him secret, hiding him away in a barn (Whistle Down The Wind is, fittingly, namechecked as…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Daniel Polansky Publisher Angry Robot For many readers of fantasy, our first encounter with the genre was a portal fantasy – the sort of story in which characters from our world travel, through magical means, to another world. While many of these stories centre on children – think Narnia, or His Dark Materials – Daniel Polansky’s is multi-generational. The Harrow family have ruled as monarchs of the March since time immemorial, holding together its various peoples against the dread forces of the End. The March is a dazzling array of fairy courts, sentient machines and insect hives. The steady, creeping invasion of the End is brilliantly unsettling in the way that it corrupts this fantasy; the End-poisoned Toytown, in particular, is the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 272 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Nadia Attia Publisher Serpent’s Tail While we’re starting to feel the effects of Brexit, from economic upheavals to missing tomatoes, Nadia Attia’s debut novel imagines a future a little further down the line. In Verge, the country has fully reverted to superstition and intolerance. Rowena is cursed, or so she believes, following the deaths of her father and boyfriend. The only way to cure her, it seems, is to visit her mystic grandmother, who lives far up north. Accompanying her on a perilous road trip through the many disunited counties of the Kingdom is Halim, a young Egyptian farmhand who faces racism (of both the physical and verbal kind) wherever he goes. The relationship between Rowena and Halim is at the core…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Rebellion Writer Mike Butterworth Artist José Ortiz, Luis Bermejo COLLECTION Set in the then fashionably futuristic year 2000, this obscure Lion strip from the late ’60s makes the plagues of the Old Testament look like a cakewalk. Earth is being targeted by Ratta, lizardly ruler of Dort, a world doomed to collide with its sun. Seeking a new home, Ratta threatens that 10,000 catastrophes will befall our planet, wiping out humanity and freeing up some real estate. Only lantern-jawed boffin Mike Dauntless stands in his way. The cavalcade of widescreen-worthy disasters gives the strip a propulsive appeal. The Manhattan skyline is smashed on the first page, while subsequent instalments see a malevolent weed take down the Eiffel Tower and a giant rhesus monkey on the rampage.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Reviewd on PlayStation 5 Also on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S Publisher Deep Silver, Plaion VIDEOGAME Few games have nailed the sloppy practical-effects gore of a good zombie movie in the way Dead Island 2 manages it. The undead here shatter and tear in a way that’s as funny as it is disgusting, under a battery of blows from whatever axe, stick, hammer or machete you happen to be swinging. You’ll laugh. You’ll hurl. You’ll try again with a bigger stick. This first-person, semi-open-world horror adventure is a cavalcade of splintered bones, missing jaws and eyeballs hanging out of eyes. As you fight to escape an LA overrun by corpses you can also unlock elemental effects like fire, electricity and acid, which only add…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 200 minutes | CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA Three very different types of pioneer are explored in the latest Ninth Doctor set, which marks a solid start to the range’s third season. In “The Green Gift”, the TARDIS lands on a starship covered in trees. The Doctor is searching for a home for Callen and Doyle, but instead finds a lot of suspiciously familiar grubs – yes, this is a sequel to “The Green Death”. Louise Jameson is good value, not as Leela, but as a cynical captain with a secret, in a pacy and exciting opening story. “Northern Lights” is terrifically atmospheric. The Doctor arrives in the Arctic in the late 1880s and quickly stumbles across explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen. He’s there to resolve…

Why is it that of all the great moments in Stand By Me, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Body”, the line that’s stuck with me ever since seeing the film has always been “You think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?” When Vern poses this deep thought to Teddy, perhaps it resonated so strongly with me because that was precisely the sort of question that filled my head as a kid. The Thing vs the Hulk, Thor vs Hercules, Mighty Mouse vs Superman – who was the strongest? What Mighty Mouse had going for him that none of the others possessed was that beautiful singing voice. “Here I come to save the day!” was catchier than “Avengers assemble!” or “To the Batmobile, Robin!” I was glued to the…

“If you ever stop experimenting with the form, then where are you, right?” IF YOU READ ANY OF the reviews of Ari Aster’s third feature Beau Is Afraid, you’ll likely encounter the word “departure”. In Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster gave us a pair of instant-classic horror movies; Beau is a three-hour comedy (of sorts) which its writer/director has flippantly referred to as “a Jewish Lord Of The Rings”. But is it really such a hairpin turn? Like his first two films, Beau is obsessed with the themes of guilt and family, as Joaquin Phoenix’s eponymous “hero” – a man so crippled by anxiety, he struggles to leave the house – must travel cross-country to the funeral of his mum (Patti LuPone), the woman largely responsible for his splintered psyche. And…

“THERE’S SOME SURPRISES IN THERE…” TEASES Star Trek: Strange New Worlds showrunner Akiva Goldsman of the show’s second season. Luckily for all the spoilerphobes among us, he’s not giving up anything too major. “Yeah, there are more Gorn in season two,” he’s happy to reveal. “I think one of the big swings is out there, right?” he laughs when SFX tries to push for more hints and teases. “We do a crossover with Lower Decks and that’s fun. We had a really good time doing that and got to work with our extended family from the other show, both on camera and off. And of course Jonathan Frakes directed it. So in many ways it’s a Star Trek melting pot, that episode. And there are more, but far be it…

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE Spider-Verse was a revelation; a cinematic masterpiece that pushed the boundaries of animation. “It just opened up what is possible, what is acceptable, what the audience is willing to take in,” says animator Joaquim Dos Santos. “I came in at the tail end and there were still some screenings where executives were going, ‘I don’t understand, why does it look blurry? I don’t know why these dots are all over the place.’ And it’s like, ‘I promise you, when it’s all together, you will understand.’” CRAWL TOGETHER NOW The world certainly understood what was going on. Into The Spider-Verse brought the multiverse into the mainstream, paving the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to introduce multiple versions of the same character. Not only that, but many of…

ASIDE FROM A FEW COMPUTER game attempts, some cartoon cameos and a 2021 Mountain Dew advert, Gremlins has survived – both as malevolent creatures and a franchise – relatively untouched since sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch in 1990. One might almost say the mythos of the creatures has been something of a secret. Executive Producers Tze Chun and Brendan Hay will finally change all that with new animated prequel series Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai. This origin story shows how the 10-year-old version of Sam Wing – who grows up to become owner of the antiques shop where we first meet the Mogwai in 1984 – meets Gizmo, and begins a series of adventures for the pair. Hay says that they “just tried to find ways to translate that…

THE SHINING IS OBVIOUSLY THE scariest Stephen King adaptation,” Rob Savage tells SFX over a call, “but I don’t think there’s been a King adaptation that’s as viscerally scary as this movie.” It’s a bold claim from the filmmaker behind pandemic breakouts Host and Dashcam, and whose next project – his first for a major studio – is an adaptation of King’s short story “The Boogeyman”. “This movie attacks the source material in a way that’s different from any other King adaptation,” he continues. “We wanted this to feel true to his writing. Me and [co-screenwriter] Mark [Heyman] were always going back to the warmth of character that you feel in King’s novels. Even when the subject matter is dark, there’s that glimmer of hope. He’s not a cynical writer.”…

FEW FANTASY FILMS MADE IN THE last 30 years present a world as richly realised as that of 1995’s The City Of Lost Children (La Cité Des Enfants Perdus), which unfolds in a retro-styled harbour town where local kids are going missing. The malevolent Krank (Daniel Emilfork) is responsible; unable to dream himself, he’s struck a deal with a cyborg cult known as the Cyclops to abduct the children, whose dreams he then extracts. Keeping Krank company out at sea in his abandoned oil platform lair are various simple-minded clones (Dominique Pinon); a dwarf named Martha (Mireille Mossé); and Irvin, a disembodied brain in a bubbling fish tank (voiced by French cinema great Jean-Louis Trintignant). After his three-year-old “little brother” is kidnapped, strongman One (Ron Perlman) teams up with urchin…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 103 minutes Director Julius Avery Cast Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney Looking to answer the question “What if The Exorcist was dialled up to really, really ridiculous levels?”, The Pope’s Exorcist throws every demonic trick at the screen, but very few of them stick. Russell Crowe, clearly still on an accent acting tour following his turn as Zeus in Thor: Love & Thunder, skews dangerously close to ’Allo ’Allo! territory here as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, author of memoirs such as An Exorcist Tells His Story, and previously the subject of a documentary by William Friedkin. Given the fascinating true history of the man, it’s almost a shame that his legacy is being used for such a cheapo shocker – one…

EXTRA RELEASED OUT NOW! 1972 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Juraj Herz Cast Iva Janžurová, Josef Abrhám, Nina Divíšková, Petr Čepek BLU-RAY DEBUT Juraj Herz, director of Czechoslovak New Wave classic The Cremator, tried his hand at 19th century Gothic with this darkly ironic adaptation of a novel by Russian author Aleksandr Grin. It’s a tale of two sisters, one of whom decides to poison the other for her share of an inheritance. Both are played by the same actress, though Iva Janžurová does such a fine job of distinguishing the naive Klára and the pantomimically wicked Viktoria that you’d be forgiven for not realising. With their preposterous wigs, heavy eye make-up and extravagant dresses, the two almost seem like drag creations. Featuring acid-tinged sequences, it’s a film which toys with…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | TBC | Download Director Patrick Read Johnson Cast John Francis Daley, Austin Pendleton, Colleen Camp, Neil Flynn Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77 is certainly a passion project. Not only did it take a staggering 18 years to produce – filming began in 2004, which surely qualifies as a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – but it’s powered by an unmistakable love for SF cinema itself. Introduced as a mostly true story, this is a coming of age tale set in ’70s Illinois. Pat is a nascent movie maker, staging a Super 8 Jaws sequel in the family swimming pool. Chasing such Starlog-hymned heroes as Spielberg and Trumbull, this intense, nerdy dream-head wangles his way to LA and catches a rough cut of Star…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 6+ | SVOD Director David Lowery Cast Ever Anderson, Jude Law, Alexander Moloney, Yara Shahidi DISNEY+ The story of the boy who never grew up is well over a century old now, and has been told in a myriad of different ways. Taking inspiration from both the original novel (Peter And Wendy) and the classic 1953 Disney movie, this new version corrects the racism of the latter while also restoring Wendy to (co-)title character status. You know the basics: boy who never grows up entices the three Darling siblings away to Neverland, where he fights the evil Captain Hook with the help of the Lost Boys, accompanied by devoted fairy Tinkerbell. There’s plenty of potential here, but the film never quite fulfils it. From lines of…

RELEASED 22 MAY 2023 | 15 | Download This sort-of-home-invasion thriller is impressively taut and twisty, with a terrific cast. A family on an isolated Scottish homestead encounter two strangers desperate for help, and grudgingly let them inside. Something is going to go wrong, but the film does a decent job of keeping you on your toes about what, how, why and who. The second half trades tension for reveals and is less gripping, but a couple of set-pieces are impressively nasty.…

Hot on the heels of the cinematic release of COCAINE BEAR (29 May, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD), Elizabeth Banks’s gory horror-comedy romp about a nose candy-fuelled killer bear is coming home. Bonuses on the “Maximum Rampage Edition” include a director’s commentary, alternate ending, deleted scenes, a Making Of and a featurette on the kill scenes. We said: “It’s not quite as funny as you might have hoped for, but still has memorable moments.” Antonio Banderas’s swashbuckling feline quests for a magic star in Shrek spin-off PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH (out now, Blu-ray/DVD/download). New four-minute Puss short “The Trident” leads a decent spread of + Extras, which include a director’s commentary, deleted scenes and child-friendly features on how to draw the main characters. We said: “A lightweight, kiddie-friendly adventure… Largely inconsequential, but…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 306 pages | Hardback/audiobook/ebook Author Genevieve Cogman Publisher Tor The Scarlet Pimpernel with vampires is the pitch for Genevieve Cogman’s new French Revolution-era trilogy. Cogman’s adventure features many characters from Baroness Orczy’s classic story, including the aristocratic spy Sir Percy Blakeney and his nemesis Citizen Chauvelin. However, Scarlet’s protagonist is an original character: Eleanor, a maid recruited by Sir Percy for a perilous mission to save the deposed French royal family from the guillotine. Cogman has a lively narrative voice and writes engaging prose; however, the novel struggles to blend the fantastic with the historical. The worldbuilding casts the vampires as parasitic nobles, but they play a surprisingly small role in the plot. The most compelling encounter with a vampire comes when Eleanor is trapped with a…

RELEASED 23 MAY 416 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Marian Womack Publisher Titan Books On the surface there’s a lot to like about this novel set in London at the turn of the 20th century: illusionists, seances, occult rituals, women detectives. But it can’t hide how rudimentary the writing feels, or how lacklustre the plot. It doesn’t help that the characters are ciphers. Helena and Eliza are colleagues running their own detective agency, aided by Helena’s innate psychic talents. While such a duo sounds like it would be thrilling to follow, the ways these girl bosses take charge of their lives feel annoyingly fanciful. Helena carries a knife disguised as an umbrella, quarrels with policemen, saves little girls from their pimps and helps women in need like an avenging angel. While…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 376 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Sebastien de Castell Publisher Jo Fletcher Books Déjà vu? No glitch in the Matrix here: you’re thinking of 2021’s The Maleficent Seven, by Cameron Johnston. This unrelated book features a fantastical team-up too. Its distinctiveness lies in its arch tone and meticulously-crafted magic system. It’s a first-person account by spellcaster Cade, a mercenary “wonderist” paid to fight battles for unscrupulous lords. Fleeing from his past and manipulated into joining a quest north to defend Mage’s Grave, Cade makes unlikely allies, dodges zealous inquisitors, and unravels a conspiracy on a celestial scale. Knowing winks at the reader and earthy language make for a tone somewhere between Terry Pratchett and Deadpool. If it occasionally feels forced, there’s a playfulness to it that keeps the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Michael Bond Publisher Picador If you’re looking for a comprehensive examination of genre fandom, this book (subtitled A Journey Into The Psychology Of Belonging) is not it. While followers of Star Trek, Star Wars and Harry Potter get their moment in the spotlight – along with conventions, fan fiction and other popular ways of expressing your devotion – science writer Michael Bond’s scope is much broader, taking in everything from pop music to sport, political movements and beyond. There’s an impressively academic rigour to much of the book, particularly when Bond explores the history and psychology of fandom – most notably how it ties into humans’ instinctive desire to belong. He’s also admirably non-judgemental – not always the case when mainstream media…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writer Steve Orlando Artist Sara Pichelli ISSUES 1-4 For the longest time, Wanda Maximoff has been defined by her past. It’s understandable – a tragic villain is often a more interesting archetype than a straightforward hero – but there’s something wonderfully hopeful about this ongoing comic from Steve Orlando and Sara Pichelli. A redeemed Wanda has (literally) set up shop in New York. She now runs an occult store with her friend Darcy Lewis (yep, that Darcy, from the Thor films and WandaVision). She’s also installed a unique spell, the Last Door, which instantly transports anyone who is desperately in need of help to the Emporium. This simple premise allows the book to be appealingly episodic, with new characters regularly popping through the door. Meanwhile,…

RELEASED 25 MAY 73 minutes | CD/DOWNLOAD Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA 1975’s “Genesis Of The Daleks” is a bulletproof classic in the Doctor Who canon. Here’s a chance to discover its own genesis as Big Finish mount a full cast version of Terry Nation’s original script for episode one, accompanied by readings of his plot synopses for the other five instalments. It proves a fascinating exercise in creative archaeology. The bones of the story are essentially the same, but some deviations are striking. The TV opening put the Doctor directly on war-torn Skaro; here he receives his mission from the Time Lords in a tranquil, garden-like limbo, anticipating a similar summons from the White Guardian in 1978’s “The Ribos Operation”. Nation’s stage directions – read by Nicholas Briggs – ram…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 286 minutes | CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA For a certain generation, Dark Season is legendary. Today, the series is notable as both an early set of Russell T Davies scripts and for marking Kate Winslet’s first appearance on TV. In 1991, however, it simply felt thrilling to have a kids’ TV show that didn’t talk down to its audience. Dark Season was Buffy before Buffy and it perfectly filled the gap left by the then recently deceased Doctor Who. What a delight, then, to return to this world all these years later. This quartet of seasonally themed audio plays introduces us to a new set of young characters, while also bringing back the original adventuresome three in supporting roles. Evil has returned to Bishop Grave School.…