News Pluribus Pluribus: You Can Now Read an Excerpt From Carol’s Winds of Wycaro Romantasy Series It includes a steamy passage with Raban, in case you were wondering… By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on November 17, 2025 Courtesy of Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Courtesy of Apple TV Vince Gilligan’s new show, Pluribus, is deservedly getting a lot of attention. It’s a fantastic series that will make you ask all sorts of questions… to say more would spoil it, but in my opinion, it’s well worth a watch. One thing we did know going into the show’s premiere is that the lead, Carol Sturka (played by Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn) is a romantasy author. We get a bit more detail about her writing in the first episode, where she’s on a book tour for the latest novel in her Winds of Wycaro series, which centers on Lucasia, the captain of a boat that sails on slipsand. Lucasia is a ruthless leader apparently, though she can’t help but get entangled with the roguish Raban. The fans of the books (aka Wycarians) who we meet in the Pluribus’ premiere are excited for the next installment in the series, but are also upset that Raban isn’t on the cover. Lucasia ordered Raban to walk the plank at the end of the last book, you see, and as such must be presumed dead… unless he isn’t?! Carol, who holds some (a lot of?) disdain for her fans, grins and bears it during signings. Winds of Wycaro comes up intermittently throughout Pluribus, and perhaps one of the many, many thoughts you might have while watching is, “I wonder what those books are all about.” Reader, I have good news for you: Apple has put out an excerpt from the latest Winds of Wycaro book, which is called Bloodsong of Wycaro. It includes a foreword from “Carol” herself, and shows Lucasia finding out that sexy Raban is, indeed, alive. The text is an enjoyable read; it includes in-world terms like cyclocane and moonsburn, and also includes passages such as: “She would know that voice anywhere. As smooth as wyld bourbon and deep as the Robrionian Trench.” You can read the full excerpt here, and watch Pluribus on Apple TV. [end-mark] The post <i>Pluribus</i>: You Can Now Read an Excerpt From Carol’s Winds of Wycaro Romantasy Series appeared first on Reactor.

News Black Panther 3 Ryan Coogler’s Next Movie Will Be Black Panther 3 Coogler is also working on an X-Files series. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on November 17, 2025 Image: Marvel Studios / Disney Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Marvel Studios / Disney Ryan Coogler’s latest movie, Sinners, has justifiably received critical and commercial acclaim. The writer-director isn’t taking much of a break, however, and is already reportedly working on an X-Files TV series. But what movie he’ll be working on next was unclear… until yesterday. Coogler took part in a Sinners panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles yesterday. During that discussion, the moderator asked if he was working on Black Panther 3. This was his answer: “If it was anybody but you, I would say, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny,’” he said. “But we’re working on it hard… Yeah, it’s the next movie.” The third film in the trilogy would come after 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which came out roughly two years after Chadwick Boseman, who played the Black Panther, T’Challa, died. The film grappled with Boseman/T’Challa’s death on-screen, and saw Shuri (Letitia Wright) take on the mantle. We don’t have any details about Black Panther 3’s story, though Denzel Washington shared that he is expected to have a part in the film. When the feature will go into production is also unclear, given that Coogler is presumably still working on the X-Files series. Hopefully the wait won’t be too long, however, before the third film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe trilogy makes its way to theaters. [end-mark] The post Ryan Coogler’s Next Movie Will Be <i>Black Panther 3</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala is an Ambitious Eco-Horror Alex Brown reviews a “taut, tense YA eco-horror novel.” By Alex Brown | Published on November 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Anchor’s Mercy is a small island of a couple hundred residents just off the coast of Maine. Visitors descend on its shores all summer, but off season is so quiet that locals know if the tourists stop coming, the island will die. Ollie and his mother Gracie arrive at Anchor’s Mercy along with a ferry full of partygoers, prodigal residents returned. After Gracie’s months-long battle with cancer on the mainland, the two are finally able to return to the safety of their community. His mother is determined that everything goes back to normal, so much so she’s overflowing with toxic positivity. Ollie already tried to pretend everything was normal, to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to talk to his friends while he was gone. He knows nothing will ever be the same as it was. On the ferry, Ollie meets a mysterious boy, Sam, who claims to have a wealthy aunt with a vacation house on the island. Sam is pulled into Gracie’s orbit, and Ollie can’t help but be drawn to Sam in turn.  Once on the island, Ollie, with Sam in tow, tentatively reestablishes contact with his (ex?) friends Bash and Elisa. Before they can sort out their feelings, people start falling ill. They smile uncontrollably and sing without realizing it, and all the liquid in their body thickens into slime. Coral sprouts from their bodies, and the infected fuse together into terrifying mutant monsters. Trapped on an dying island, Ollie, Bash, Elisa, and Sam must survive at all costs. But what can they do when the very people who rescue them are the ones who caused this all in the first place? The plot of The Dead of Summer doesn’t happen chronologically but loops back and forth in time, changes narrators, and plays with format. About a third of the narrative appears as interview transcripts, diary entries, and other documentation gathered after the plague takes over the island. It’s a clever way to tell this story, and one that turns a plot full of well-worn tropes into something fresh. Without those additions, the story would have been much less exciting. The coral eco-horror parts are exciting, but we’ve seen this plot a zillion times before. La Sala of course puts his own spin on it, but this territory has been explored to death (pun intended). Through the extra narrative elements, he’s able to shape these old tropes into something new and bold. Buy the Book The Dead of Summer Ryan La Sala Buy Book The Dead of Summer Ryan La Sala Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget One of my ongoing complaints in speculative YA is that many books feel like they’re either one book stretched out into two books even though the narrative can’t support it or two books that have been poorly stitched together into one. The Dead of Summer is well-paced and just the right length (even though it tops out at 400 pages). The reason it works as the first book in a series? The extra narrative elements. There is a lot of smart literary craft coming from La Sala on the backend. I don’t know that this is La Sala’s strongest novel—that’s probably The Honeys or Reverie—but it is his most creatively ambitious one. This is a taut, tense eco-horror that builds from a quiet start to a roaring crescendo. It opens two days before all hell breaks loose with Ollie and Gracie’s less-than-triumphant return to Anchor’s Mercy, then jumps to a redacted journal entry from an unknown doctoral student, Querent 1, 23 days into hell. I was desperate to find out what happened not just to Ollie but also his friends and family.  Some characters we get to know pretty well while others, mostly the adults, come and go. La Sala imbues even the ones we don’t spend as much time with with layered personalities. Everyone feels like they have lives off the page and outside our protagonists, no matter how little we know about them. The antagonist is deliciously complex and morally gray, as per usual with this author. He doesn’t do the typical Big Bad, the kind that is evil for the sake of being evil; instead he develops characters who do bad things for what they think are good reasons, even if everyone else disagrees. They make choices that hurt others but find ways to justify that hurt in real (if not entirely honest) ways.  Ultimately, this is a story about community and found family. In his acknowledgements, La Sala describes how the real world “beachy queer haven” of Provincetown, Massachusetts was the inspiration for Anchor’s Mercy. I’ve never been to that part of Cape Cod, but La Sala definitely got the haven part down. Anchor’s Mercy is full of townies who work together and love each other even through the other’s worst. Bad behavior isn’t excused, but people are given the grace to mess up as long as they try to make up for it, as we see with Ollie and Gracie. But that desire for community can also drive some to choose blissful ignorance. It can make it hard to address systemic problems, and those who don’t stop pushing are often pushed out of the safety net, as we see with Elisa’s mother. The real tension in this novel comes not just from the mutant coral monsters terrorizing the town but the community itself. It’s arguable whether or not the community could’ve prevented this tragedy, but by refusing to even consider the possibility, the tragedy became so much worse. The best thing I can say about Ryan La Sala’s The Dead of Summer is that I can’t wait to find out what happens in book two. The second best thing I can say is that I hope this book kicks off an eco-horror trend in YA fiction. With everything going on in the world right now, eco-horror is the ideal playground for YA horror.[end-mark] The Dead of Summer is published by PUSH. The post <i>The Dead of Summer</i> by Ryan La Sala is an Ambitious Eco-Horror appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV It: Welcome to Derry IT: Welcome to Derry Worms ITs Way Into Our Eyes in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” Worms, turtles, snails, Koi, demonic moose—Derry’s fauna is a rich pageant. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on November 17, 2025 Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO This week’s episode of IT: Welcome to Derry has the fabulous title “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function”, and was written by Helen Shang, and directed by Andrew Bernstein once again. As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow The episode opens with the new New (Old) Losers Club taking their photos to the cops, who of course can’t see any of the ghosts, mock the children, and then stop mocking them to threaten them instead. The interesting thing is that they DO see Pennywise in Will’s photo, but they refuse to consider that there’s anything weird about a person with glowing eyes dressing in like a 17th Century jester’s outfit living in a cemetery and menacing passing children. Ah, Derry. Will suggests they do some research into the town’s history, and asks Lilly to talk to her mom, who grew up in Derry. Lilly instead talks to her friend, the Juniper Hill housekeeper, who assures her that nothing like what she’s describing happened before—except kids did go missing during the Depression, but it was probably just that they ran away because of the Depression, but either way, she believes that Lilly believes what Lilly believes. I find it odd that this fully adult woman who works in a mental hospital is meeting an 11-year-old former patient at a diner. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Rose visits Charlotte, the two talk, and Charlotte tries to figure out if there’s anything weird about Derry, but Rose just says that she should keep anyone she cares about close. Which isn’t that helpful. But she also talks about her people’s history in the area, and how they would move back and forth between Derry and Novia Scotia “before Manifest Destiny” and refers to the Canadian border as “what they call a border, anyway—to us it’s just a line on the map”, both jabs I appreciated. The General made good on his promise to Dick, and has given the Black soldiers an abandoned storage unit to turn into a club. It looks like a Quonset hut, and it’s a MESS, but the guys start cleaning it up and thinking through how they can decorate it. Hallorann seems nervous. Meanwhile, at school, the kids watch Burt the Turtle Duck and Cover, and I once again despair of humanity past and present. It’s astonishing that any of us are still here. But the important bit is that after school, Charlotte confronts Will, because after Rose left she searched his room and found the cemetery photos. He tells her that he and his friends were cutting through the cemetery and someone chased them—so, technically true, but he wisely leaves out the supernatural element. Charlotte believes him immediately, begins to think there’s a child predator in town, and tells him that he has to either be at home or at school from now on. At dinner she tells Leroy about Ronnie (not cool, Mom!) and Will pleads homework and runs back to his room—and Charlotte encourages Leroy to take the kid out to do something fun over the weekend.   The “fun” thing that Leroy thinks of is fishing, and Will is not into it. But then he catches something, it steals his hook, and that means that when Leroy goes to get him a new one from the car Will is vulnerable to IT. First he sees a beautiful koi, which would most likely not be swimming wild in a Maine river—then he sees his father under the water, horrifically burned, and the figure grabs him and tries to drag him under, screaming “YOU’LL BURN TOO!” When Leroy reaches him he sees that his son is hysterical, and his arms are cut up and bruised. Will tells him what he saw, “You were burnt up like in a plane crash!” and then tells his father, finally, that there’s something bad in Derry. Leroy looks like he’s about to reply when both of them notice the red balloon floating along on the other side of the river. They both see it. Charlotte goes to the cops to tell them about Will being chased, then asks to see Hank Grogan. The Sheriff gets snippy, and she reminds him that she’s from the South and has seen terrible things—appealing to his Northern pride to try to get him to be an ally. Of course, the Chief is a Bowers, and it doesn’t work. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Charlotte, who is GREAT, responds by visiting the Grogan home and speaking with Hank’s mother. “The only one, other than my son, who knows where he was, is God. And neither one of ‘em’s talking.” The show cuts back to the men cleaning the Quonset hut. Hallorann still looks haunted, and then he’s actually haunted when his grandmother appears to him, telling him to “keep that lid on tight!”—but is that his grandmother, coming to warn him, or is it a manifestation of IT trying to undercut his abilities? The vision is interrupted by Leroy turning up to ask Dick what the hell’s going on in this town, and what the hell the military is trying to dig up, Dick tries to put him off with a cheery invitation to the new club, and then Leroy tells him what happened to Will. Dick goes from looking haunted to straight-up terrified, but still insists that “I do what I’m told, when I’m told, just like you.” Meanwhile, Will is at the Derry Tower with the kids, and hits upon the idea that IT isn’t trying to kill them—yet. He floats the idea that, like other predators, IT enjoys the taste of their fear, and is essentially trying to season them before eating them. Rich freaks out, but Lilly comes up with a hilarious plan that I’m sure won’t backfire at all—she sneaks some of her mom’s mood suppressants (would it have been Valium in the early ‘60s?) and gives one pill to each of them. The next time IT comes after them, they’ll pop one under their tongue and the fear won’t be as bad. It’s brilliant, really, but there are a lot of ways this plan can go wrong. During the next class the teacher tells them about the 20,000 species of worms on the Earth, who are part of “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function”—including a type of worm that infects snail’s eyes and makes their stalks swell. Margie asks Lilly to meet her for lunch, just the two of them, but it’s clearly a set up by the Patty Cakes. The set up is interrupted with a brief check-in with Charlotte, who has a note from Mrs. Grogan that she’s allowed to visit Hank. The Chief is out, and when an underling cop tries to stop her, she points out that all it’ll take is a couple phone calls to “MLK, JFK, RFK, all the other FKs” and they’ll have a bus full of civil rights protestors swarming all over Derry. He wisely relents. It turns out that Hank’s rights were violated, and he could be on house arrest waiting for a bail hearing instead of being stuck in jail, with his most-likely-one-way-ticket to Shawshank waiting to be punched. She presses him about where he actually was on the night of the Capitol Massacre, and he finally admits that he was with a woman, and not just a married woman, but, say it with me now: “A married white woman”—because what other secret could possibly be so dire? And Hank, being Hank, isn’t only thinking of a mob attacking him, he’s also thinking of “what her husband will do to her” if he finds out about an affair with a Black man. So Charlotte has at least made some progress… but Paulie saw her going into the police station, and of course tells Leroy, who is angry that Charlotte’s “stirring up trouble” again. But back to Margie and Lilly, and our first full horror setpiece after Will’s vision. Margie and the Patty Cakes have planned some sort of humiliation ritual. Margie acts like she wants Lilly back as a friend, but also plants the seed that a cute football player “likes” Lilly. She supposed to nudge her into talking to him, at which point he’ll do something terrible to get the whole cafeteria to laugh at her. What happens instead is that Margie goes to the bathroom to help her “freshen up” before she talks to the boy, and once she’s away from the Patty Cakes she breaks down and starts to confess the whole awful plan. But then, IT takes over, and her eyes turn into horrifying gelatinous stalks and grow out of her head, and THEN she runs into the woodshop classroom and bandsaws her own eyestalks off. Goddamn when this show commits it commits. And of course poor Lilly tries to help her, accidentally drops her Valium down the toilet Trainspotting-style, chases Marge into the shop classroom, and wrestles a screwdriver (I think? I don’t know tools) out of her hands—just as all their classmates burst into the room and see Lilly, covered in blood, wielding a sharp thing right over Margie, who has had an eye gouged out. It sure looks like Lilly attacked her in retaliation for the prank that the Patty Cakes will probably now admit to, and Margie’s too traumatized to do anything but scream. I think we’re going back to Juniper Hill, everyone. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Back at the Hanlon’s that night, Will can’t sleep—not because clowns will eat him, yet—but because every time he closes his eyes he sees his father’s charred screaming body. Fair enough. He gets up and looks through his telescope, because apparently he finds comfort in the black uncaring nothingness of space, but then he points the telescope down a bit, and THERE’S FUCKING PENNYWISE, lurking in the yard. Leroy, naturally, thinks that the man Will saw is someone retaliating for Charlotte’s activism, but when he runs out into the street (with a katana, I think???) there’s no one there. But. He does see a single red balloon, caught in their tree. The next morning he storms into the General’s office, demanding to know: “What the hell do you have us chasing?” Which is why I love Leroy Hanlon. Rather than doubting his son, or continuing to blame his amazing wife, he puts the clues together and realizes that something uncanny is afoot. And the General, to his credit, seems to genuinely respect him. He leads him to an interrogation room, where they’ve handcuffed Rose’s nephew Taniel to a chair. Dick Hallorann sits across from him and asks him to just tell them what he knows, since what Dick has to do will be unpleasant for both of them. The kid answers succinctly by spitting in his face. “I’m so sorry about this,” Dick says, and seems to mean it. Dick goes inside Taniel’s mind. He’s standing in a circle of doors, a memory hidden behind each one. He hears what we recognize as Rose’s voice, and when he walks through the door, he’s in Taniel’s childhood bedroom. Rose sits in front of the boy and asks him to tell her the story of the “Galloo”, a story every child in the tribe has been made to memorize. “Some of our stories are real,” she tells him. The Monster of the Western Wood fell to Earth from the darkest part of the night sky, an evil spirit bound in a falling star. The people knew to avoided the Western Wood, and worked out a sort of truce where the monster used that as ITs hunting ground, and they had a shard of the asteroid carved into a knife that could keep IT at bay if it threatened them. But then the settlers came, and ignored the warnings, and soon the Galloo fed on them and grew stronger. The people’s mightiest warrior was a woman named Seski. She knew that the people would need to move farther away from IT, but her daughter, Nakani, gathered some of her friends and went after IT herself. This plan ended in disaster when IT attacked the search party sent after them, including Seski herself. But Nakani and her friends were able to find ITs cave, and ITs asteroid. The tribe caved twelve more blades, marked them with sigils, and buried them in a circle around the Western Wood, marked with pillars of smoke. As Taniel finishes the story, Dick stands up from behind Rose and applauds. Then he smiles wide and asks Taniel to take him to the pillars. “Follow the tunnels and you’ll find the pillars,” Taniel says, and he leads Dick through an open door into the light, and there we see ITs dilapidated well house on Neibolt Street. Oh no. Do We All Float? Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Taniel’s vision is a trap, right? I feel like this whole episode is full of traps, but this is just Taniel fighting back, and luring Dick to the Neibolt house, right? That would make for a great mirror to Margie’s attempted prank abuse of Lilly—we thought we were about to see social horror, but instead we were given SNAIL EYESTALK BANDSAW HORROR. Here, Dick thinks he’s used his powers for evil because he doesn’t have much of a choice, taken advantage of a vulnerable person, and will now take the military one step closer to something they should absolutely NOT do. But instead, I wonder if he’s set himself up for the horror of being face-to-face with IT. We’ll see—maybe I’m wrong and he actually did get information out of Taniel, but obviously they’ve all bitten off more than they can chew. But my two big thoughts, coming away from this episode, are thus: First, the Hanlons are great parents—none of the usual Derry gaslighting with them. I love that Charlotte protects Will’s graveyard secret to keep him out of unneeded trouble with Leroy, but also that she listens to him, takes his fear seriously, and marches straight into the police station to float the idea that someone is menacing children. (You would think that, since Hank Grogan’s locked up, this would raise some questions about the Capitol Massacre, no?) Meanwhile Leroy is able to see the balloons, and recognizes them immediately as Weird Shit, and figures that they must be related to his mission with Hallorann. Second: I think we’re about to watch Dick Hallorann Learn To Use His Powers For Good. He’s doing what he’s told, he’s not asking questions, he’s enjoying his special privileges—and he’s weaponizing a gift that should never be weaponized. For the U.S. MILITARY, no less. I’m guessing that the show has folded him into the story of IT to show us how he gets the wisdom he imparts to Danny Torrance a few decades hence. But in the meantime it’s fascinating to see someone who I’ve had warm feelings for since the first time I watched The Shining (when I was probably about Danny’s age, actually) be cruel and merciless with his supernatural abilities. I think the apology to Taniel makes it even worse? And of course in both cases—the Hanlons are good parents to Will because they’ve learned, as Black people in America, that they have to be alert to the first prick of fear, the first uneasiness, the first clue that shit’s about to go down. And Hallorann is selling the Shine out to terrible people, because it’s the only way he can get a shittier version of the privileges that all the white soldiers get. There may not be many turtles in this episode, but it’s racism all the way down. #JustKingThings I didn’t catch as much stuff in this episode, but I do have to ask: did people say “boss” in the 1960s? I didn’t think that was a big slang term then. But the bigger improvement on a King Thing: I love how the show continues to weave real horror into ITs cosmic horror. We see Charlotte trying so hard to fight the town’s baked-in racism, in a variety of ways, only to run into a boys’ club that wants to suppress her efforts. We see how the Black soldiers are given their own space… a rundown, filthy shack, way away from the spaces that have been made for the white soldiers, that they’ll have to clean and refurbish themselves, with their own money, in their own free time, before they can even use it. We see how the Native Americans are treated respectfully… right up until the moment they’re handcuffed in a front of a two-way-mirror. We see how the popular kids torment the outcasts, and how the teachers ignore all of it, even as the town institutes a curfew and talks about keeping its kids safe. Turtles all the Way Down We see Burt the Turt in all his horrifying glory.   One of the shardblades is concealed inside a turtle shell! Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album I assume that Quonset hut the soldiers are fixing up becomes The Ink Spot? Which is, well, brutal to watch, given what’s going to happen. It’s interesting to me that we’re getting this in the same year as Sinners—watching a Black community creating a space for themselves, a pocket universe away from white bullshit, but knowing from the start that it’s going to end in tragedy. Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown? Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO OK. OK OK OK. Will’s vision of his dad is incredibly upsetting, as is Pennywise’s blurry appearance. Margie growing snail eyestalks, and then attempting to Lucio Fulci her own eyeballs is extraordinary work. But we have to talk about Taniel’s tale of “The Monster of The Western Woods”, and Seski’s vision. Here, tucked inside a nested story unfolding in Taniel’s mind as Dick Hallorann uses the Shine against him, we see how IT appears to Seski, a warrior of a fictional Native American tribe. While IT often appears as a demonic moose (a perfect fit for the forests of Maine) for other members of the tribe, when Seski faces off with IT, IT takes a human form. Specifically a Catholic missionary, Deadlights revolving above his head like a perverted halo, whose torso splits to reveal a vicious infant Jesus, crowned with thorns, who stabs her with the Spear of Longinus as the priest unhinges its mighty jaws and reveals row upon row of teeth. Goddammit, television show. You’re just gonna shove that in, in the last ten minutes, in a nested story that’s most likely a trap to lure Dick Hallorann into ITs haunted house??? You’re going to do this to me, at 10pm on a Sunday night, when I have work in the morning????? I love you, television show.[end-mark] The post <em>IT: Welcome to Derry</em> Worms ITs Way Into Our Eyes in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV movie reviews Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Is All Flash and Little Substance The Four Horsemen franchise’s third installment dresses up old tricks as something newish and mostly entertaining By Natalie Zutter | Published on November 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Nine years ago, I quoted Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige in my review of Now You See Me 2, as the magic heists franchise was solidly acting out the first two steps as described by Michael Caine: First they established The Pledge, or introducing something seemingly ordinary—a fun adventure starring Robin Hood-esque magicians. Then they executed The Turn, making the ordinary extraordinary—more elaborate tricks and raising the question of whether they’re actually wizards. After disappearing for the better part of a decade, the Four Horsemen finally get to act out the third part, The Prestige, by reappearing in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t… but it’s unclear what exactly they’re proving by coming back. In 2013, the Four Horsemen were a fledgling team of illusionists empowered by the secret magicians cabal Eye to steal banker and benefactor Arthur Tressler’s (Caine again) fortune. Among their motives was to rectify how his insurance company mistreated victims of Hurricane Katrina; for that and other twist reasons, the heist was personal. In 2025, the baddies are crypto bros and a blood diamond Nazi heiress—timely, yes, but also wincingly on-the-nose. (One wonders why the writers reached back to World War II for their villain’s context instead of more modern events.) But this movie also opens with deepfake holograms of the Horsemen, who have disbanded since their last great heist. The Gen Z magicians behind the digital curtain are this quasi-legacy sequel’s new cast: impressionist Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa), parkour-ing pickpocket June McClure (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith), tech wizard who secretly wants to take the stage. After their stunt with the aforementioned crypto bro, they gain the attention of J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, having fun returning as the cocky genius), who has himself been drawn out of retirement by the Eye for the motherlode of all heists. In contrast to the tiny microchip in Now You See Me 2, the latest target is the Heart Diamond—but also its owner, Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a South African diamond magnate who is offering up her family heirloom to the highest bidder, a.k.a. the richest arms dealer. As Atlas assembles a new Four Horsemen with himself and Bosco squabbling over who’s the leader, it becomes a bigger family reunion as the rest of the former Horsemen join up with their hypnotism, card-throwing, and escape know-how. The elder Horsemen teach the colts some tried-and-true stage magic, while the kiddos prove they have some clever tricks up their own sleeves. It’s fine? It’s fun! But the movie suffers from too much self-awareness; it performs with such hyper-focus on the fact that it’s being watched that it’s more about showing off than about successfully pulling off the trick. The second-act set piece is not as clever as the film thinks it is, more of a detour to a French version of the Winchester Mystery House than anything else. It illustrates how there are simply too many cooks (seven, by that point) to achieve anything more than a couple of punny bits in various trick rooms, though one in particular is fun, especially if you had “Inception fight scene homage” on your Now You See Me bingo card. Not surprisingly, the newbies get more opportunities to show off their group dynamic as well as their individual skillsets, while the old guard gets to resolve some interpersonal issues from the last two movies and the past decade. For a movie co-written by three men, there are some heavy-handed attempts at filling in the blanks regarding the Four Horsemen’s “two girls, one role” between Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and Lula May (Lizzie Caplan). With Fisher having had to miss the sequel because of a real-life pregnancy, Henley calls out how her pregnancy forced her to opt out of some of the group’s riskier stunts; there’s almost a point there about a gendered double standard, but it’s gone again like a flick of flash paper. The runner of Lula struggling to catch up with all of the heist’s details and context is wonderfully skewering thanks to Caplan’s delivery; but the other ongoing jokes about the three female magicians starting their own girl group bring us back to the same problem of these women not existing on their own merits.  Meanwhile, Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) perform their same old tricks without the fun of Now You See Me 2, in which they traded roles and trained each other on their specialties. And while the younger set’s apathy is understandable—wondering why they should care about a world that doesn’t care about them—the trio has a surprising lack of tension. They tell us that they’re found family, but we don’t really see it in action because there’s so much else going on. Image: Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate There’s been a lot of talk about the moviemakers’ tension with using as many practical effects as possible for their tricks, so that the stage magic can’t just be attributed to movie magic. There are certainly winning moments here that play upon expectations—both the characters’ and the audience’s—to create narrative improbabilities, like a conveniently waiting helicopter as escape route. But then these smaller tricks get thrown back out of balance by the franchise’s need to up the ante with shooting locations. To wit, the final showdown ends up in Abu Dhabi for nothing more than plot reasons (and to show off a cool racecar). Yet the setting is mere spectacle when compared to the Horsemen’s flair for tricking villains into seeing what they want to see. And let me add that Pike is a high point in this film for sheer campiness—her shifting accent, her hatred of (ironically) the camp of magic, her use of tricks against the Horsemen—which makes it all the more fun to see her get taken down. These movies love their complicated magical lineage and secret heirs, and so too do they love their last-minute reveals of masterminds more comfortable with controlling the behind-the-scenes yet able to step into the spotlight when the moment is exquisitely theatrical. It’s no coincidence that in the absence of Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Shrike—the way in which they write him off-screen is eye-rollingly obvious that it’s just an excuse to save him for the next movie—the movie employs both narrative tricks to much less shocking effect. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is intended as a hinge point in the franchise, a proof-of-concept that the Horsemen have evolved into something closer to the Avengers, in which four (or more!) magicians at a time can occupy the roles on a rotating basis. And that’s exciting, Horsemen as a career aspiration—or even just a short-term gig before moving on to other performances and/or retirement. The fact that the OG Horsemen leave suburban security or high-paying gigs in order to reunite for old times’ sake shows what a hold that time in their lives has on them. It also leaves the door open for one or more to return for the already-greenlit fourth movie. Horsemen, assemble! There’s a recurring (unintentional?) bit in which Veronika barks “Bring me my heart!”—with at least the audience, if not also her, aware of the irony. She’s so desperate to reclaim this Heart Diamond, intended not for the empty cavity in her own chest but for a vault beneath the Arabian Desert. Yet she still begs, threatens, and bargains for a heart that we all know has nothing to do with love. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is like that Heart Diamond: it dazzles, but when the sparkles clear from your eyes, there’s nothing left.[end-mark] The post <i>Now You See Me: Now You Don’t</i> Is All Flash and Little Substance appeared first on Reactor.