Thor: Love and Thunder is almost here, featuring the return of Taika Waititi as director and voicing the large Thor pal Korg, plus the long-awaited scene of Chris Hemsworth′s Thor and his hammer Mjolnir passing him over for Natalie Portman′s Jane Foster to become the next Thor, as envisioned in the 1970s by Donald Glut and Rick Hoberg in the pages of What If…? and re-introduced only recently by writer Jason Aaron in the monthly Thor comics. Now we have the second trailer, featuring glimpses at even more fun–and Christian Bale and his black-and-white-toned villainy.
Here it is, the next trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder:
You have two days left to get in on Free League’s Kickstarter for the new Blade Runner roleplaying game (check that out here). It’s already achieved unprecedented success (nearly $1.5 million pledged!), and if you sign up by May 26 you can get in on a stunning supply of unlocked stretch goal extras. If you haven’t tried a FL RPG yet, you might want to start with the FL’s officially licensed rule book to Alien: The Roleplaying Game (available here at Amazon). For anyone who loves the Alien franchise movies and novels (reviewed here) and its Colonial Marines, anyone who wants to see Weyland-Yutani get their just desserts, or anyone just willing to jump into the realm of horror roleplay–where you don’t always make it out alive–let’s dig into this recent RPG release.
The officially licensed roleplaying game for Blade Runner is almost here, and you have less than three days left to get in on its Kickstarter and some unlocked stretch goal extras. Fully funded in just three minutes, the Kickstarter from RPG publisher Free League is approaching a whopping $1.5 million in pledges. Set in the year 2037, Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game begins with a core rulebook of more than 200 pages featuring an adventure set shortly after the Wallace Corporation debuts a new cyborg: its Nexus-9 Replicants, giving players the choice to play as either human or Replicants.
Check out the Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game Kickstarter here and its website here now for more information, and below is a look inside the first release, its core rulebook.
Sometimes a movie is exactly as advertised and exactly what you want. If you love a good John Carpenter movie and are intrigued by a director’s ambitious attempt to create a worthy homage to Carpenter’s most memorable early work, then Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is for you. With pacing, cinematography, music, and characterizations found in Carpenter’s Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, The Thing, and Escape from New York, writer-director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) delivers more mood than scares, but it’s the perfect beginning to a video game franchise movie series and a fantastic throwback 1980s-style horror romp. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is available on physical media here at Amazon and currently has a $9.99 sale price for digital streaming at Vudu.
The seventh movie in the Predator franchise is coming this summer. Unfortunately it’s not coming to theaters or Netflix. Hulu will be hosting this one, and to get us interested the streaming provider and 20th Century Studios have revealed the barest of sneak peeks. This won’t continue ahead with the super-Predator unveiled in Shane Black’s 2018 vision, The Predator. Instead in his movie Prey, Dan Trachtenberg, a director with only one film in his credits (10 Cloverfield Lane) will do what all franchises do at this point: give us a prequel. Even with less than a minute to see, it provides the overall impression of Predators, the third entry in the franchise from 2010.
Get a brief look at the next Predator movie, Prey:
A British-led counter-intelligence operation calculated to deceive Nazi Germany during World War II that involved Allied coordination among the likes of Winston Churchill, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and British intelligence officer Ian Spelling sounds like the stuff of a suspense-thriller, right? That’s not quite what you get in this weekend’s direct-to Netflix war movie Operation Mincemeat. As genre movies go, count this spy movie as purely historical fiction, primarily a mix of the mundane steps of pulling off even the most unlikely–but true–adventures in international trickery with some romance thrown in for the legion of Colin Firth swooners. Detailing the plot to throw the Axis off the scent of Britain’s invasion and liberation of Sicily using a dead body with faked documents dropped off the coast of Spain, the movie lands in the same league as all the other 21st efforts to re-conjure World War II–its bland, sentimental account doesn’t match the drama of contemporary Hollywood of the 1940s. But if you like watching your favorite British genre actors chewing up the screen, it’s worth the time.
We first previewed the big-budget Death on the Nilehere at borg back in 2018, possibly the most pandemic-delayed film of any. Based on Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel, it’s the second in Branagh’s series of opulent, major cast, big-screen films after 2018’s Murder on the Orient Express (reviewed here). That movie was far more spectacle, more Hollywood, a faithful, exciting film filled with genre stars including Branagh as Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot, plus Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Josh Gad, Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, and Penélope Cruz, with a particularly engaging performance by Tom Bateman as Poirot’s friend Bouc. Bouc, a new character brought along by Branagh is the only returning character with Poirot for Death on the Nile.
A sort of Christie twist on Romeo and Juliet, the story and its core murder plot on Egypt’s great river remains identifiable, but Branagh updates nearly everything else, unlike in his first Christie adaptation. So like Branagh’s Frankenstein, this really is Branagh’s Death on the Nile, although also credit the changes to writer Michael Green (Logan). After a theatrical run beginning in February, it’s now available on Vudu and digital and other home media.
A year ago here at borg we reviewed the intriguing Star Wars tie-in book The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. For fans who have been lucky enough to experience firsthand Disney’s Black Spire Outpost,Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: Treasures from Batuuwill take readers back to Oga’s Cantina and Savi’s Workshop, and take home some souvenirs, too. The new “vault” type book is coming in July from Titan Books in the UK and Insight Editions in the U.S. and available for pre-order now here at Amazon.
A little more than twenty-five years ago, Star Trek: First Contact arrived as an iffy proposition: A Star Trek movie directed by Number One aka Commander Will Riker aka Jonathan Frakes? And then it proved what fans had been begging for for years. If you put Star Trek’s reins in the hands of someone who knows the universe, who has lived it week after week for years–who really gets it–you might produce a movie that gets it all exactly right. Star Trek: First Contact has long been recognized as the best of the Next Generation cast films, and for many, the best trek of them all. All these years later fans can see how it was done in Joe Fordham’s long overdue examination of the film in Star Trek: First Contact–The Making of the Classic Film. It’s available for pre-order now here at Amazon, arriving in July.
Take a look inside this long-awaited, behind-the scenes view of the making of the action-filled First Contact:
The Lost City arrived in theaters a little more than a month ago, but it’s already made its way to streaming provider Paramount+. It’s a step above your average rom-com, a better than average new release and a worthy unofficial remake of the 1980s classic Romancing the Stone. If you miss classic rom-coms steeped in adventure and lighthearted fantasy, this should be your next watch, a Sandra Bullock star vehicle with 16 years younger actor Channing Tatum as the potential love interest, a rare and welcome Hollywood choice–when was the last time you saw an older woman with a younger man in a major production? Add Brad Pitt and Daniel Radcliffe, and some goofy humor and high adventure and The Lost City is movie that would have been difficult for anyone to get wrong.
