News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Bask in the Glory of The Mummy Returns and Early 2000s CGI The Rock Plus: Sled dog racer Blair Braverman says goodbye By Molly Templeton | Published on March 27, 2026 Image: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Universal Pictures I don’t generally go in for those “Well, we made it to the weekend!” sentiments, in large part because the weekend comes whether we’re waiting for it or not. But this was somehow A Week, with capital letters and everything. About once a day I think of the part in the documentary Eno where Brian Eno talks about realizing that you can’t do input and output at once. You can’t take in the news and the world and your email and whatever else while simultaneously creating your own output (whatever form that may take). Eno used to do input over breakfast, so he says he just stopped eating breakfast (and doing all the associated inputting). To which I say, well, we cannot all be Brian Eno. But sometimes, taking a break from input is a good idea. A necessary one, even. That said, here are some things to read and watch! And one more thing you could read this weekend is a lot of protest signs, as the next No Kings protests take place Saturday, March 28th. If you can’t make it to a march, you can of course call your reps. Hug your friends, stop to admire the flowers, and catch a sunrise if you can. I swear it helps. The Mummy Returns This Weekend! No, Not That Mummy, the Other Mummy April showers bring … April mummies, apparently. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy skitters into theaters later this month, but first it’s nostalgia time: The Mummy Returns has one of those cheery re-releases this weekend. It is not the utter masterpiece, The Mummy, but it’s also not the third Mummy, a movie that I literally forgot existed. No, The Mummy Returns is a perfectly capable Mummy, still stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz and John Hannah and Oded Fehr and the rest of the gang, and, yes, it introduced moviegoers to the Rock (then still going by his wrestling name). If you have seen images from the live-action Moana, you may feel this movie needs to apologize. (You could watch Fast Five to cleanse your Rock-palate.) But still! In theaters. This weekend only. You know what to do. The North Wind, the West Wind, the Helm Wind Funny, I was just thinking the other week about genre, and genre boundaries, and whether it matters what genre something is, and then I read Sarah Hall’s new novel Helm, and I simply couldn’t tell you whether it “counts” as SFF or not. There’s a personified wind! Helm is a real wind in England; in Hall’s hands, Helm is a somewhat mischievous being with opinions and desires. But most of Helm is about regular people who live near Helm and Helm’s incredible clouds—people of many generations, from a tribal girl who sees a vision to a Christian priest who wishes to defeat Helm; from an early meteorologist to a modern-day scientist worrying about all the plastic in the air. Helm sees all, weaving through all these stories, and Hall writes with her usual richness—though her novels usually settle deep into the bones of a character, and this one feels almost like a series of short stories, sliced up and scattered (perhaps by a wind). Some SFF readers will love it; some will find it boring. In a slow-moving, big-scale kind of way, it’s a climate fiction novel, but like most Hall novels it is also a book about a place, richly drawn and full of characters. It leaves a curious feeling. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Maybe you’ll read it and feel the same. I Know You Like Dogs, and These Are Some Very Good Dogs Would you like to get in your feelings today? Look, I can help. It just takes one article: Blair Braverman writing in the New York Times about her last journey with her sled dogs. Braverman has been writing about her dogs and her life for years—I remember following her on Twitter, before that website died and we never talked about it again, ha ha—including in the book Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North. But now she’s hanging up her sled. Her essay about it is beautiful, and heartbreaking, and absolutely full of love for her dogs (and full of great photos of said dogs). “I wasn’t a natural racer; I sought adventure more than speed,” she writes about her career. “But I had two main strengths. Like the dogs, I didn’t quit.”  You don’t have to have ever set foot near a sled pulled by huskies to appreciate Braverman’s elegy for this part of her life. It probably helps if you’ve ever loved a dog or several, though. Hey, Hey, Let’s Read More About/Related To/Around Sinners; Let’s Never Stop Talking About Sinners, Okay? Ryan Coogler’s Sinners didn’t win as many Oscars as it should have, but that’s okay. It’s still the winner in my heart. (A local theater has it back on big screens again, which is also very winning.) If, like me, you cannot get enough of Sinners, here is something very cool: Black Perspectives has put together a Sinners syllabus. As the introductory text says, “This syllabus delves into the multifaceted historical, cultural, and social contexts depicted in the film, providing audiences with a deeper understanding of its layered narratives.” The list is epic. It begins with books giving historical context about the Mississippi Delta and Jim Crow South, and then it travels through history, music, art, gender, activism, Black horror, and more, before winding up with a list of other films, music, and series to watch. You could probably spend years with this syllabus. If you have already read all the articles about Sinners, well, here you go. Lots more to read.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Bask in the Glory of <i>The Mummy Returns</i> and Early 2000s CGI The Rock appeared first on Reactor.