142 Best Releases From the Genre Sci-Fi & Fantasy (Page 4)

If Keith Raniere and the story of NXIVM didn’t creep you out enough, consider our picks for some of the past decade's best documentaries about cults The Vow Part II, premiering on HBO Max this week, still doesn’t make it any easier to believe that a professional bullshit artist like Keith Raniere, based on such outrageous lies as claiming he had the second highest IQ in the world, was able to create his own "executive success" cult, with an all-female inner circle who committed sexual assault and branding rituals to prove their devotion to him. Nothing about a cult seems believable from the outside, which is perhaps what makes documentaries about cults both so intriguing and chilling to watch – how can something so bizarre make perfect sense to some people?  With that, here’s some suggestions for additional documentaries based on real life cults, covering both the infamous and the lesser known: Continue Reading →

The first season of Avenue 5 premiered in January 2020. The comedic show about a large group of people stuck in the same location for an extended period of time seemed to resonate with audiences who suddenly found themselves in a somewhat similar situation with the emergence of COVID-19. The show’s second season was delayed due to the pandemic and logistical scheduling hurdles of corralling its stacked roster of talent. Nevertheless, show creator Armando Iannucci and company persisted, and 2+ years later, we’re treated to another season of clever space satire in the second season of Avenue 5. Continue Reading →

After fifteen seasons, ever-escalating seasonal arcs, and literally thousands of trips to the afterlife for both Winchester brothers, Supernatural closed its final chapter. Once you’ve killed God, Lucifer, and Death, is there anywhere else to go? The CW, faced with the prospect of losing it’s biggest moneymaker, was already laying the groundwork with Jensen Ackles (who played older brother Dean) for a new spin-off/prequel focusing on John and Mary, the ill-fated parents of the Winchesters. A bold move, considering the story of Mary and John was well-trod ground in Supernatural, even featuring the boys time traveling back to the days of their parents' courtship. Bold, too, because who would want to watch a show about two of the most reviled characters in the show’s history? Supernatural historians will tell you that John was neglectful, with some heavily implied physical abuse. Mary, only getting to know her children as adults, was distant and cold, not the sainted paragon of motherhood she’d been painted as. Continue Reading →

The difficult thing about reviewing a reboot/reimagining/update/sequel of an older property with plenty of accumulated goodwill is taking the new series on its own merits. It may be tempting to simply declare, “it isn’t as good as the original!” and call it a day. However, that isn’t exactly playing it fair. And yet, the temptation is there. Continue Reading →

Mike Pondsmith, creator of the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk—which video game studio CD Projekt Red adapted into Cyberpunk 2077 and which in turn led to the creation of Studio TRIGGER (Promare)'s 10-episode anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners—said this: Continue Reading →

Thanks to all the pre-release press with show creator and head writer Jessica Gao, viewers already know what She-Hulk: Attorney At Law won’t be: a courtroom dramedy. Unfortunately, after the first episode, “A Normal Amount of Rage,” it isn’t clear what kind of show it will be either. Continue Reading →

The recent Marvel Cinematic Universe movies have gotten enormous in scale. It’s no longer only Avengers installments that span multiple planets and involve countless superheroes. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness explored multiple alternate dimensions, while Eternals concluded with a massive robot emerging from one of Earth’s oceans. Even the Earthbound Spider-Man: No Way Home made room for multiple Spider-Men. Continue Reading →

What is it about living through cataclysmic times that makes us crave apocalyptic entertainment? Are we just clinging to the hope that humanity gets plucky and figures shit out before it’s too late? AMC’s new sci-fi adventure Moonhaven, an uneven but…well, plucky creation of Peter Ocko tries to answer just that. Set some 200 years in the future, Moonhaven shows humanity at two very divergent stages. While things like climate change, war, famine, and plagues continue to rage on unchecked on the Earth, it’s forever Opposite Day on the Moon, where a small chunk of humanity has been living under the protective eye of IO, an artificial intelligence tasked with helping those people fix Earth, somehow. Continue Reading →

The one thing that no one can deny is Stranger Things Season 4 remains aggressively itself right up to the end. Its final two episodes, feature-length films onto themselves, serve everything that one could enjoy about the first seven episodes with a side of everything that frustrates and annoys. The good news is that the bad bits remain a side dish, not the main course. The better news is that ratio tips even further in favor of what’s enjoyable. Continue Reading →

“Time is a flat circle.” So said Rust Cohle, one of the icons of modern prestige television. Our pasts and our presents bleed into each other like paints colliding on a canvas. At its best, the new Apple TV+ program Now & Then recognizes and reflects this truth through memorable, bombastic visuals. Unfortunately, too much of Now & Then is weighed down by lackluster storytelling and filmmaking, both of which will lead your mind to wander away from the show you’re watching in the present. Continue Reading →

Armageddon was never just a movie. Beginning with its much-coveted Fourth of July Weekend opening, to its (now typically) Bayhem-infused Super Bowl commercial, through its screening of fifty minutes at Cannes and bizarre feud with Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (literalized in the film) over which movie would be the biggest of summer 1998, Armageddon positioned itself as nothing less than a pop-cultural event. It was the most expensive movie Disney had ever produced, starred Bruce Willis in his prime, backed him with a suddenly white-hot Ben Affleck, and was directed by blockbuster wunderkind Michael Bay. Add to all that the escalating success of 1997’s Lost World, Men in Black, and Titanic, and there was the sense that this would be a movie for the ages. Which it was. Kind of.  Continue Reading →

Motherhood, particularly new motherhood, is a lonely time. No matter how much help you have, there are still long, hard hours where you’re left with a tiny life, one for which you are wholly responsible, often after putting your body through a massive ordeal. Throw in a lack of sleep, a lack of meals, then add society’s pressures (are you feeding the baby properly?), familial pressures (your cousin never did things that way), and the all-too pressing personal pressures (is this it? Is this the thing that will mess up my child for life?) and it’s a miracle the human race has ever chosen to propagate. As I wrote this review, a banner ad invited me to buy (in my child’s stead) a personalized book called The World’s Bestest Mommy, because there’s nothing like the pressure of a gift to remind you what you have to live up to. Now, imagine that on top of all of this, your child has the supernatural ability to kill those around him and you have The Baby.   Continue Reading →

Much of the pre-release publicity about Moon Knight focused on the heightened brutality of the new MCU on Disney+ series. In doing so, all involved failed to mention how much stranger it would be than the average MCU streamer. Continue Reading →

Halo is a big deal. It's the game series that made the Xbox, the game series that drew the blueprint and set the standard for first-person shooters in the 21st century. Its most recent installment, Halo Infinite, drew rave reviews and was a major financial hit. In addition to the stories told in the games themselves, Halo also boasts an extensive transmedia presence—novels, audio dramas, and animated anthologies, amongst other mediums—that's beloved by the lore-digging side of fandom. That passion, and the infamously spotty history of video-game-to-other-medium adaptations, means that Paramount Plus' Halo: The Series faces an uphill battle. Continue Reading →

There’s no good time in history to make war into entertainment. This is possibly one of the worst times to try to do so. Now clearly, the creators of DMZ, HBO Max‘s newest miniseries, had no idea what was going to happen in history when they were creating the show, but there’s a faint bad taste in watching a woman search for her son in a war zone in a time when actual women are doing that actual thing.  Continue Reading →

Do you hate your work life infringing on your home life? Can you not stand having to deal with outside issues while at your desk? The Severance program just might be for you. Continue Reading →

Although his name and efforts are often diminished or ignored by many histories of 1970s American cinema, Ralph Bakshi was one of the most audacious filmmakers of the era. Not only did his films tackle issues regarding race, sex, and class in graphic and sometimes profane ways, he did so within the framework of feature animation—a format that many, particularly in the U.S., equated almost entirely with family entertainment.   Continue Reading →

Into every generation, a teen horror drama is born: one series in all the media landscape; a chosen show. It alone will wield the quips and metaphors needed to fight the supernatural villains, social pressures, and other various youthful troubles. To stop the spread of standard high school melodramas and the swell of their number. It is...the newest supernatural young adult T.V. series. Continue Reading →

30 years after the series’ creator passed, what remains of his message as Star Trek is bigger than ever. For Star Trek fans, there are two very important dates decades before the very first episode of the original series ever aired. On August 2, 1943, the B-17 “Yankee Doodle” overshot its runway in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu and crashed, killing two crewmen. The pilot went on to be a crash investigator, serving stateside through the end of World War II, but it wouldn’t be the last time he narrowly escaped death in plane crash. On June 19, 1947, a Pan Am flight crashed in the Syrian desert after a catastrophic engine failure, killing most of the crew and passengers. One of the few survivors was the flight’s third officer, the very same man, a then-35-year-old Texan named Gene Roddenberry. The world knows Roddenberry as the man who invented Star Trek and gave the world decades of deep space adventures. When you look at all of that in context with the early morning when he narrowly avoided death, there’s the obvious takeaway that Kirk and Spock and Picard and Data and all the stories and faraway worlds that spun off from them are a kind of miracle. For me though, it’s impossible not to think of that biographical detail every time the Enterprise-D (or the Defiant, or the Protostar) is being dragged into a singularity or scrambling to restore shields in a fight with the Borg, klaxons blaring and crew members gritting their teeth as stuff combusts around them. The miracle, I think, is that Roddenberry survived something like that and then went on to create a story like Star Trek, a story with plenty of ships on the brink of disaster that isn’t really about disaster, but rather overcoming it. Continue Reading →

When Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel hit shelves in 2014, it was a standout in science-fiction. HBO’s adaptation can’t help but hit differently in 2021. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale about what’s left of the world after a deadly flu ravages the populace. The parallels to current events are glaringly obvious.  Continue Reading →