News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: There’s Nothing Scarier Than the Modern Internet Plus: A new Nia DaCosta movie, knights of legend, and returning spider monkeys. By Molly Templeton | Published on October 31, 2025 Photo: Wikimedia Commons Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Wikimedia Commons Some wishes for Halloween weekend: I hope kids get piles and piles of all the best Halloween candy and no toothbrushes; I hope parents have to deal with a minimum of sugar-induced meltdowns; I hope every adult Halloween partygoer has the best time and no hangover. (I was going to make a joke about hanging up your costumes come November 1st, but they do turn out to have other uses.) I hope everybody who has an election to vote in on Tuesday can exercise their right to vote with ease. I hope people continue to find ways to support their neighbors in this rough, rough time. And now for some suggestions about how to spend your surely copious free time this weekend! The Everlasting: Bring on the Lady Knights and Powerful Stories I have been hearing about Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting for so long that I genuinely thought it came out months ago and I’d just missed it. But no: it came out this week! Which means we can all finally read this highly praised novel about a knight so beloved her tale has become legend, and the scholar who follows her story. “Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs,” says the description. I am not entirely clear what this means, but the book’s first chapter begins with a series of terse and amusing telegrams, and I am hopeless in the face of anything epistolary. Olivie Blake said this book is “pure magic,” so there you go. We could all use some magic these days. Tessa Thompson and Nia DaCosta Tackle a Classic Play Hedda is a new version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, adapted and directed by Nia DaCosta (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) and starring Tessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok, Sorry to Bother You) as the title character. According to The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “It’s not essential to bone up on Henrik Ibsen’s drama Hedda Gabler before seeing Hedda, because the movie meets the crucial standard of adaptation: it’s a formidable cinematic experience independent of its source.” It sounds like a deliciously fraught tangle of schemes and heartbreak and betrayals, with Thompson at the center of it, in what Brody calls “an imposing, screen-filling performance.” The critic is shocked that Thompson has never been nominated for an Oscar. Maybe this is her time? Hedda is on Prime Video now.  It’s Not That Everything Was Better, But the Internet Used to Be Different Perhaps this is a me problem, but sometimes it’s hard not to think about how being online used to be a very different experience—in part because it was simply not so commercialized, and your attention span wasn’t for sale in the same way; in part because the internet used to be a place you had to make an effort to go, and so a certain kind of weirdo spent a lot of time there (as opposed to everyone having it in their pocket); in part for a million different reasons that are a little bit different for everyone. But Elizabeth Spiers takes a pretty good crack at a general overview of one difference in her Talking Points Memo piece “What Made Blogging Different.” There’s a lot to like here, if you were online in the pre-dominant-social-media era, but this one line especially struck me: “I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face.” Does this make you miss blogs? It makes me miss blogs. At least a little bit. Tricks, Treats, Aliens, Vampires: It’s a Good Weekend for Movies If your Halloween plans are being rained out, you could make a waterproof costume—or you could just go to the movies. This weekend brings the latest from the powerfully weird (complimentary) filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, whose film Dogtooth remains one of my favorite movies that I am incapable of explaining to everyone. (You will never look at airplanes overhead in the same way after seeing it.) His new film, Bugonia, is not exactly a remake of the Korean film Save the Green Planet! but it is inspired by that movie. In both, a couple of dudes kidnap a CEO who they are convinced is an alien. In Lanthimos’ film, said CEO is played by the director’s frequent collaborator Emma Stone, who “spends much of Bugonia bald and lathered in bone-white antihistamine cream, resembling Klaus Kinski’s Dracula but less plagued by centuries of loneliness.” (Thank you for that line, Portland Mercury!) The trailer is great. My hopes are high. But speaking of vampires, the Twilight films are all enjoying a quickie theatrical run this weekend. Those talking wolves are terrifying, though perhaps not in the way the filmmakers intended. ParaNorman and Back to the Future are also briefly back in theaters. Nostalgia or Greek weirdness! That’s something for everyone, right?[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: There’s Nothing Scarier Than the Modern Internet appeared first on Reactor.