News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: January Was a Rough Year, So Here’s Ian McKellen Reading Shakespeare Plus: A fantasy retelling of Charles Dickens and a rare chance to recommend Venom: The Last Dance By Molly Templeton | Published on February 6, 2026 Photo: Lionsgate Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Lionsgate The sign for a bar near me currently reads “January was a rough year.” February isn’t off to a much better start; this short month promises to be at least as long as the previous one. There are the horrors, and then there are the people facing and fighting the horrors. And there are many ways to address the horrors, as Ian McKellen reminded me this morning when I watched his Colbert appearance. That’s below, because I think everyone should see it. It’s a reminder that history repeats, that art is powerful, that people can be moved—and maybe changed—by the unexpected. Stay warm, call your reps, and tell your friends you love them. Ian McKellen Is an International Treasure Last night, Ian McKellen—currently appearing on stage in New York—sat down with Stephen Colbert for a long conversation. I’m sure it is all wonderful, and I’ll listen to it eventually, but so far I’ve just watched one key clip. In it, McKellen performs a monologue. It’s gorgeous. It’s impossibly gorgeous. He is impossibly good, making the most of his somewhat unlikely stage, staring at the audience, into the camera.  I saw the clip without context; it just said “a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More,” which was somewhat perplexing. Shakespeare’s what? But in the longer video, McKellen introduces the monologue, explains how he originated the role, why it’s believed to be written by Shakespeare—all just beautifully deftly and succinctly. I’m kind of not telling you what’s in the monologue on purpose. I think you should watch it. It’s from 400 years ago and it is crushingly timely. He got a few lines in and I teared up. (Colbert clearly did too.) Whoever at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert decided to ask him to do this—they’re a bit of a genius. McKellen, returning to a speech he first gave 50 years ago, is a master.  Good Luck, Have Fun, Appreciate Some Actors’ Previous Films Next week, Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die arrives in theaters. Presumably the name will take up entire marquees. While not a huge fan of Verbinski, I am a huge fan of many of the actors in this film’s cast, all of whom have previous movies that are worth spending time with.  I don’t need to tell you that Sam Rockwell is a genius, and has been at least since he turned up on Galaxy Quest. Zazie Beetz made a splash in Deadpool 2, but is also delightful in Bullet Train, a movie that was never quite as fun as it should have been but is still diverting enough for a weekend watch. I cannot actually recommend Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, but I can tell you that Michael Peña was very good in it. Juno Temple is, of course, in Ted Lasso, but she’s also in Venom: The Last Dance, which is not as charming as the first Venom, but irresistible in its way. And then there’s Haley Lu Richardson, who I first saw in Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, a quiet indie about one very long day in the lives of some women working at a sports bar. It’s also about the incompatibility of compassion and capitalism. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, except that everything is out of the ordinary. It’s so good, and Richardson is great in it. I can’t wait to see her face the apocalypse (maybe). Dickens + Faeries = A Far Better Thing February 7 is Charles Dickens’ birthday, which means this is as good a time (perhaps a better time) than any to recommend H.G. Parry’s A Far Better Thing, which rewrites A Tale of Two Cities with faeries and changelings. Frankly, it made a lot more sense to me this way: Sydney Carton was taken by the faeries, and Charles Darnay is the changeling left in his place. (Lucie is also a changeling.) Parry effectively weaves a whole faerie world into Dickens’ fabric, and it works astonishingly well. She’s not writing over Dickens, not trying to one-up him, but putting a different spin on his classic tale. (Her first novel also involved Dickens; she has a PhD in English literature and knows of what she speaks.) If you want to know more, Strange Horizons has a great review. We Need Way More Independent Media and We Need It Now A lot of layoffs have been announced recently, from Pinterest cutting staff and leaning in to AI to Amazon cutting a huge number of employees (as CNBC notes, also in conjunction with a push to invest in AI). But this week’s cuts at The Washington Post hit especially hard. A correspondent in Ukraine was laid off while working in a war zone. “The layoffs affect every corner of the newsroom,” NPR wrote. That includes the entire books section, which has been closed.  Yes, you read that right: Closed. Gone. No more books coverage. No more SFF column from Charlie Jane Anders. A lot of book folk took to Bluesky yesterday to talk about what this means, and how bad it is for books; as Meg Reid wrote, “Every national book review outlet that closes feels like a death knell for independent publishers.” You can find a lot of obituaries for the Post as we knew it, but I particularly appreciated this one, from former Post employee Ashley Parker, which is intimate, personal, detailed, and a reminder of how meaningful a truly supportive workplace can be.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: January Was a Rough Year, So Here’s Ian McKellen Reading Shakespeare appeared first on Reactor.