News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Lord of the Rings Returns to Theaters Because It Is… 25 Years Old?! By Molly Templeton | Published on January 16, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share To put it mildly—absurdly mildly, really—this year is off to a rough start. If you want to spend your weekend lying around in soft pants and rewatching old favorites, I understand completely. But if you want to leave the house, or try something new, there are options! There are also a million options if you want to do something to help those who are suffering in this cold, icy winter. Stock up a little free pantry near your house, if there is one. Send some money to one of the many groups in Minneapolis who are working to support their neighbors—or find similar groups in your own area. It is hard to watch what’s happening in this country right now. It feels better to help, if and where you can. And, as ever, don’t forget to call your reps.  They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard: The Lord of the Rings is back in Theaters Do I have the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings films at home on DVD? Yes. Do I still have a great desire to go see them in theaters while they’re back this week? Yes. Yes, friends, the latest return-to-cinemas release is the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Fellowship of the Ring turns 25 this year—in December, mind you—which means, I expect, that there will be a whole host of re-releases and new book editions and who knows what else. Not that I’m complaining.  The Two Towers might be my favorite of the movies—Helm’s Deep!—but I’m thinking about going to Fellowship just so I can get extremely weepy when Gandalf says the line. You know the one. The one that feels extra relevant right now? “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Sorry. Something in my eye. Perhaps a slight change in tone will alleviate the feelings I’m now having. An Anthology of Hope and Stories: We Will Rise Again Books published in December historically have it pretty rough. The year’s best-of lists have largely already happened; people are distracted by the holidays; people are distracted, period, in this particular day and age. This past December, a lot of air was taken up by a memoir—by all accounts truly terrible—that no one needs to read. So it’s entirely possible to have missed some of the month’s more interesting releases, including the all-star anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, edited by Malka Older, Annalee Newitz, and Karen Lord. This book couldn’t really be more timely. I keep thinking about the writer Karen Russell saying in essence, that at this point, everyone she knows can lie awake at 4 am and create a dystopia. It’s not hard to imagine. (I’m paraphrasing, but if you want to hear her and her fellow genius Omar El Akkad in conversation, you can listen here.) Hope is a little harder these days.  We Will Rise Again includes stories by R.B. Lemberg, Nicola Griffith, Samit Basu, N.K. Jemisin,  Izzy Wasserstein, and many more. Reactor’s Christina Orlando called it a book that “should be read by anyone who cares about the world around them and believes that sci-fi and fantasy can help us imagine real possibilities.”  There’s Coffee in that Nebula: Happy Anniversary, Star Trek: Voyager If multiple sources are to be believed, today, January 16th, is the anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager. I love this little fact, because Voyager was the first show I remember wanting to see at its premiere: A lady captain? In space? I was so excited. It’s funny to look back now and think about how young Janeway looks, even though they put Kate Mulgrew in that stodgy hairstyle to make her seem older. (Now there was a captain who had her priorities straight.) At any rate, Voyager still has its charms, and is especially relevant given that the ship’s Doctor (Robert Picardo) is now on the just-premiered Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. What’s old is new again, what goes around comes around, and if Stars both Trek and Wars are struggling in the cinematic arena, at least the shows keep coming. You can get all your Trek fixes on Paramount Plus; Voyager is also on Pluto TV. A Daily Reading Habit I did not in fact succeed at any of the reading and watching plans I had for the holidays. I didn’t go to a single movie. I am an abject failure at movies. I read entirely different books than the ones I was supposed to read, but at least one of those was fully justified: I’d gone all of 2025 without reading any poetry, somehow? So I read Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé on New Year’s Eve, and started all three of the translations of the Tao Te Ching that I somehow have in my house. (They’re by Stephen Mitchell, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ken Liu.) I’m reading one page per day, in all three versions. I’m reading these pages alongside the daily selection from John Darnielle’s This Year: 365 Songs Annotated; these things make total sense in my brain, if perhaps not everyone else’s. My point here, though, is that having a small thing that I read every day is just really, really nice. I do a lot of other reading! But these brief selections break up the day, and help cement a habit, and also the specific things I’m reading just feel good as a break from all the fiction and, let’s be honest, crap on the internet. Once I’m through the Tao Te Chings, I’ll go back to Mason Currey’s two Daily Rituals books and read an entry in each of those each day. The Darnielle will keep me company all year. Maybe there’s something you can find that’s like that. It’s fun! I promise![end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: <i>Lord of the Rings</i> Returns to Theaters Because It Is… 25 Years Old?! appeared first on Reactor.

News Tesseract Sam Esmail’s Next Sci-Fi Movie Will Star Glen Powell And that’s about all there is to know about Tesseract—so far By Molly Templeton | Published on January 16, 2026 Screenshot: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Universal Pictures If you, like me, are a lightly obsessive fan of Sam Esmail’s series Mr. Robot, you are probably always curious about what the man is going to do next. He didn’t get far with his Battlestar Galactica reboot (which I very much wanted to see). His take on Metropolis got scrapped during the 2023 writers’ strike. He did manage to make an eerie adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind—a movie which crops up in my mind every time I see too many Teslas on one block. But that was in 2023. I have been waiting for a new Esmail project ever since. And now that, if slightly vague, news has come. The Hollywood Reporter says that Esmail has a new sci-fi project in the works called Tesseract, and it’s set to star the now-ubiquitous Glen Powell (Twisters, pictured above). Esmail will write and direct, and the film “has landed at Amazon MGM and United Artists” (producer Scott Stuber recently signed a deal with Amazon MGM). THR offers only one other detail: “The project does call for two other lead roles, both females, according to sources.” The movie is not greenlit, but may shoot over the summer in Europe. It’s not a lot to go on, but that title is intriguing, at least to Marvel fans and Madeleine L’Engle readers (and, I guess, geometry fans?). This is simply Tesseract, not The Tesseract; that title belongs to an existing film based on an Alex Garland novel. Esmail has one project to finish before Tesseract gets going: the thriller Panic Carefully, which he also wrote and directed. It stars Julia Roberts, Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth Olsen, Joe Alwyn, Aidan Gillen, Brian Tyree Henry, and Ben Chaplin, and reportedly involves the hunt for a cyber-terrorist. No release dates have been announced for any upcoming Esmail projects. Yet.[end-mark] The post Sam Esmail’s Next Sci-Fi Movie Will Star Glen Powell appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Wars Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy Shares Star Wars Movie Updates Ahead of Her Retirement Star Wars movie musical chairs will continue until morale improves By Molly Templeton | Published on January 16, 2026 Credit: Lucasfilm Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lucasfilm As has been rumored for a long time now, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy is retiring—though only from Lucasfilm, not from the business of making movies. (Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan will take over running the company.) Her exit interview with Deadline is full of enthusiasm about returning to producing films (and some questionable enthusiasm about “new technology”). The interview is also somewhat full of tidbits about the various Star Wars films we’ve heard about over the last decade or so, and their status. It has been somewhat difficult to keep track of exactly who is and isn’t making a Star Wars film since The Rise of Skywalker. Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron was happening, and then it wasn’t, and then it was again—but there’s no mention of it in Kennedy’s rundown. Notably, there’s also no mention of the Rey-centered film set to be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, which last got an update in early 2025. Kennedy doesn’t say much about Star Wars TV series, other than that Dave Filoni “just finished directing some of Season 2, and writing all the episodes” of Ahsoka’s second season. The Mandalorian and Grogu and Star Wars: Starfighter (pictured above) are definitely happening. The Mando movie is mere months away, somehow. Filming on Starfighter has wrapped (in her interview, Kennedy repeatedly says that Starfighter is a standalone, but hedges about it just enough that one might begin to suspect that it will not stay that way if it’s successful). “I’ve got to tread a bit carefully here,” Kennedy says when asked about the progress on the many Star Wars films that have been announced. Here’s what’s what: Taika Waititi, whose Star Wars film was announced in 2020, has turned in a script that Kennedy calls “hilarious and great.” Donald Glover has turned in a script. Kennedy does not offer any details on that one. James Mangold and Beau Willimon “wrote an incredible script, but it is definitely breaking the mold and it’s on hold.” This may be the most frustrating bit of news; Mangold’s Star Wars film was announced in 2023 and was expected to be set years and years before any existing Star Wars movies, in the early days of the Jedi. Willimon, a writer on Andor, came on board the project in 2024. “It was just great,” Kennedy says of the Scott Burns script turned in by Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver. That would be The Hunt for Ben Solo, a script which reportedly was greenlit by Lucasfilm before getting canned by parent company Disney. Star Wars Rebels co-creator Simon Kinberg, whose potential Star Wars trilogy was announced in late 2024, is working. Kennedy says, “He wrote something that we read in August, and it was very good, but not there. We’ve pretty much upended the story, and then spent a great deal of time on the treatment, which he finished literally about four weeks ago. And it’s a very detailed treatment, like 70 pages. And so he is expected to give us something in March.” When asked about Rian Johnson, who was at one point expected to direct an entire Star Wars trilogy, Kennedy evades the question pretty neatly. “Once he made the Netflix deal and went off to start doing the Knives Out films, that has occupied a huge amount of his time,” she says, adding that she thinks Johnson was “spooked by the online negativity.” (She also says that he “made one of the best Star Wars movies.”) Kennedy’s main point—that Knives Out took over Johnson’s time—lines up with what the director himself has said. Last summer, he told Rolling Stone of the potential trilogy, “Nothing really happened with it. … The short version is Knives Out happened. I went off and made Knives Out, and was off to the races, busy making murder mysteries. It’s the sort of thing if, down the line, there’s an opportunity to do it, or do something else in Star Wars, I would be thrilled. But right now I’m just doing my own stuff, and pretty happy.” In summary, Kennedy says, “Mangold’s is really on the back burner as is Soderbergh’s. I think the ones by Taika and Donald are still somewhat alive. That’s going to really be up to the new team to figure out. Dave, I know that Dave and Lynwen are very much on board with what Simon’s doing, and that would be a new trilogy. In the timeline of things, that takes you well into 2030 plus. So that’s really what’s up next.”[end-mark] The post Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy Shares <i>Star Wars</i> Movie Updates Ahead of Her Retirement appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is Wild, Brutal, and a Perfect Middle Child in the Trilogy And might just feature the best performance of Ralph Fiennes’ career? By Leah Schnelbach | Published on January 16, 2026 Credit: Sony Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Sony Pictures I wasn’t expecting the new 28 Days Later trilogy to become one of my favorite things in 2025 and 2026, but here we are. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a tense, brutal, fantastic follow-up to last year’s 28 Years Later. Director Nia DaCosta and screenwriter Alex Garland add to that film’s worldbuilding, deepen a couple of characters we already know, and tee up a third film in a way that left me satisfied with the story so far, and extremely excited for what’s coming next. In order to talk about this movie I’ll need to spoil a few things from the last movie, as it picks up immediately after the previous one ends, so if you still need to see 28 Years Later, and want to, maybe skip this review until after you’ve watched it. For now, I’ll just say that both films are emotionally gripping works of post-apocalyptic worldbuilding—but also that The Bone Temple is often brutal and truly horrific in a way that 28 Years Later was not. We pick back up with 28 Years Later’s young lead, Spike (Alfie Williams), as he’s undergoing an initiation ceremony with the Jimmys—the unhinged Teletubbies-meets-Power Rangers parkour cult we met in the last two minutes of 28 Years Later. From there we follow the Jimmys as they rampage across what used to be England. In lighter moment, we check back in with Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson, still tending his cathedral-sized memento mori, the Bone Temple, and now actively working to forge a relationship with the “alpha” Infected whom he dubbed Samson. Credit: Sony Pictures What can I say without spoiling anything? You know how the previous film was dotted with moments of surprising warmth, kindness, and empathy, that were almost shocking given the post-apocalyptic genre of the film? Wellllll, this movie… isn’t like that. At least not as often. The Jimmys are a Satanic cult that doesn’t see much value in empathy, and The Bone Temple becomes a story of how to survive the Jimmys as much as anything else. But I will say that the moments of humanity, when they come, glow all the brighter for being in a harsher story. The cast are all amazing. This thing only works if everyone commits, and boy do they. Alfie Williams continues to be an incredibly impressive newer actor in a role that basically requires him to radiate terror and grief unceasingly for two hours. Ralph Fiennes has one extraordinary, showy scene that might be the coolest thing he’s ever done—I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But he also, always, finds Dr. Kelson’s humanity, the moral core he’s held onto despite everything, and that core is backbone of the movie. But also also, that one scene, by itself, justifies the cost of a ticket to the theater with the best sound design in your area, and I really really need people to go see it so I can yell about it. Samson was treated as the final boss of the Infected in the previous film, and of course became the star of a lot of “28 inches later” jokes due to his prosthetic bodysuit that Chi Lewis-Parry wears as the character. But here Samson also becomes a real person—a human being, not a joke or a monster—and watching Lewis-Parry bring more and more of Samson’s personality into his face is a gorgeous experience. (It also throws an interesting light back across the whole series, if all of the Infected have been people the entire time.) Finally, I kind of want to found a church so I can hang Jack O’Connell’s picture in it? Between his take on Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal and his work as Remmick he’s rapidly becoming my favorite actor. He veers between terrifying and hilarious as naturally as breathing, and it’s easy to understand why people are entranced by him, and follow him no matter how violent his demands are. He could have easily been a cartoon villain, but, as with his turn in Sinners, you always know there’s a person under all the theatricality. Credit: Sony Pictures As I mentioned, The Bone Temple is often a brutal watch—but there is a point to it. Rather than focusing on the Infected as the main antagonist, Nia DaCosta and Alex Garland make it clear that the Jimmys are the biggest danger people face now. Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal and his followers rampage across the land, casually taking out Infected as they go, but also targeting regular people for torture and murder. These acts are framed as “charity” by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal—because he claims to be working the will of his dad, Old Nick, on a world that was abandoned by God and plagued with demons. But does he actually believe that? Or is he just a savvy cult leader spreading fear to hold onto power? Obviously that question doesn’t mean a whole lot if you’re the one hanging upside-down in a barn, but for those of us watching the movie from a safe distance, it’s the heart of the film. What the 28 Days/Years movies are really about is how people respond to catastrophe. Do you respond by building a new kind of community, by seeking power, by giving into your basest instincts, by playing on the fear of weaker people? I was pleasantly surprised to see how much this post-apocalyptic horror film became a conversation about faith, science, reason, zealotry—Wake Up Infected Man?—because it takes its world so seriously, and really grapples with what sorts of beliefs and communities would spring up among the surviors of the Rage Virus. Like a lot of other films that have come out recently (Wake Up Dead Man, Marty Supreme, The Running Man, HIM, One Battle After Another, The Long Walk, The Secret Agent, Superman, even The Phoenician Scheme, kind of) The Bone Temple is about toxic leaders and cults of personality, and the lengths people will go to submit their own wills to a powerful person. We don’t see how Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal fought his way to the top, but we see how he stays there, and it’s the classic tactic of creating an in-group, making that in-group fight all outsiders, and constantly threatening members of the in-group with being cast out—although in the world of the Jimmys, “being cast out” means fighting a new potential Jimmy to the death. Why don’t the newer Jimmys rise up? Because they believe that Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal really is the son of the Devil, and he gives them no reason to doubt that. Or course, the fact that his followers are all quite young, and have only known this brutal, terrifying world, goes a long way toward explaining their complicity. Credit: Sony Pictures While The Bone Temple is much more insular in its worldbuilding than 28 Years Later, we do get to see an alternative Britain that’s completely cut off from the outside world, but because we’re following two characters with real power and agency this time, we’re able to see how that plays out. The Jimmys all follow Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal’s lead, and he was about 8 when the Rage Virus killed everyone he loved, seemingly in the early 2000s. So he and his cultists dance like Teletubbies, fight like Power Rangers, and dress like Jimmy Savile, the popular British DJ and television host—who turned out to be a worse monster than any of the Infected. (What they reminded me of most were Alex and his Droogs from A Clockwork Orange, but presumably none of the Jimmys got to see that before they lost electricity forever.) Meanwhile when we see more of Dr. Kelson’s life, he’s singing Duran Duran and Radiohead to himself while he pores over medical texts that are at least 30 years out of date, because that was the music of his 20s and 30s, before the world ended. One of my favorite films of recent years is Tim Mielants’ and Enda Walsh’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. I mention it not just because Cillian Murphy is a producer and actor in both that film and the 28 Days/Years series, but because that film turns on the story of a man living an impossibility: he witnesses a situation that he knows is wrong, everything in him tells him it’s wrong, but his entire life is built upon ignoring that wrong. What does he do? Does he risk his entire life to try to right the wrong? Or does he duck his head, turn his eyes away, provide for his family, remain an upstanding member of his community? The reason I love the film is that it never pretends the choice is easy. I’m thinking of it now because, as weird as it might seem, The Bone Temple is also about that. There are a few moments when characters are faced with terrible choices, and those choices change the world. What I love about 28 Years Later, and now The Bone Temple, is that both films seem to say that the collapse of society is no excuse for ducking your head and turning your eyes away.[end-mark] The post <em>28 Years Later: The Bone Temple</em> is Wild, Brutal, and a Perfect Middle Child in the Trilogy appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: Robert Picardo Talks Opera and Hand Props “I have to be honest, I wish I had more hand props.” By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on January 16, 2026 Photo Credit: Miller Mobley/Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Miller Mobley/Paramount+ “I love Voyager. I was so excited to meet Robert Picardo. I was embarrassed with how excited I was. It was embarrassing. So I’ve been in lifelong fan [of Star Trek and also Robert Picardo].” That quote comes from award-winning actor Paul Giamatti when asked at the press conference for members of the Television Critics Association (TCA) what his relationship was to Star Trek. Giamatti isn’t alone: Many a Trek fan adore Voyager’s Doctor, an AI manifesting as a holographic projection who adores opera and is still his cantankerous self after being alive for centuries, as we see in the first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I had the chance to talk with Picardo in the lead up to the show’s series premiere and asked the actor what he thought The Doctor was up to for all those centuries since Voyager: “I think he was waiting for the San Francisco Opera to ask him to be a guest performer. And it never happened, right? Hundreds of years of disappointment there, he probably took some voice classes, he certainly taught at the old Starfleet Academy as well. He probably was on a few other spaceships, and annoyed the captain too much they asked him to leave. So I think teaching was a natural way for him, a natural conclusion to his brilliant career, although, in theory, his brilliant career will never end.” Picardo is, of course, correct in how The Doctor would likely have faced the 900 or so years since Voyager. He also said, that he, the actor, missed the “very cool props” on his first Trek show. “There were an amazing variety of blinking devices that I could select from in order to cure whatever the problem was,” he said. “Now we just sort of have one device that you program, but I miss some of the other props… I have to be honest, I wish I had more hand props.” Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+ If you’ve seen the second episode of Starfleet Academy, you’ve seen The Doctor get his opera on. Trekkies know that The Doctor has sung opera since his Voyager days, something that Picardo said in the TCA press conference initially stemmed from a miscommunication. “The producers of Voyager misunderstood my suggestion that I listen to opera in sickbay while I was working, because I thought it was funny that a character with no emotion would choose incredibly emotional human art to listen to. And then they wrote a show where I’m singing and I went, ‘No, guys. No, you misunderstood me.’ But it was too late.” Picardo, however, was “was shocked and delighted” to sing in Starfleet’s second episode. “It was fun,” he added. “And our music director, Mark Russo [was] incredibly patient with me. And we really did it. I mean, I’ve heard it and I am delighted with how I sound.” In my interview with him, Picardo also gave a pitch to why Starfleet Academy is worth a watch. “[The show has] the most spectacular sets I’ve ever worked on, in anything, Star Trek or otherwise,” he said. “The atrium set for Starfleet Academy is the biggest set ever built for anything Star Trek. It’s on the largest sound stage in all of North America. It is just visually stunning to be in it, and then when you see it on film, it looks even more amazing because of the way it’s lit. “So I encourage anyone, even if you’ve never liked science fiction, just tune in to the pilot. And if you don’t like Star Trek, watch the set! You will still love this show—it’s unbelievably cool and futuristic. And I think that some of our performances, maybe even all of them, will captivate you once you’ve tuned in for the set. All right, is that fair?” New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere on Paramount+ on Thursdays.[end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i>: Robert Picardo Talks Opera and Hand Props appeared first on Reactor.