Movies & TV Gen V Gen V Goes Back to Supes School With Season 2 Reset With the death of a lead series actor, Gen V has a lot of ground to cover in its second season premiere. By Ben Francisco | Published on September 19, 2025 Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video Gen V has returned with its three-episode premiere of season two, nearly two years after the first season reached its cliffhanger conclusion. That’s not an exceptionally long gap for the streaming era, but production was delayed by the unexpected and tragic death of Chance Perdomo, who played the magnetically powered Andre. Rather than recast the role, the producers rewrote the storyline around the character’s death, making these opening episodes something of a homage to both Perdomo and the character he played.  “New Year, New U” Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video The season begins with a flashback to 1967 in a laboratory labelled “Odessa Project.” Five white men in suits and lab coats inject themselves with a serum and immediately suffer gruesome side effects ranging from exploding intestines to catching on fire. A sixth man, who turns out to be Dr. Godolkin himself (Vought scientist and founder of Godolkin University), tries to stop them from taking the not-ready serum but ultimately seems to get consumed by the fire along with the rest. Back in the present day, size-changing Emma (Lizza Broadway) and energy-blasting and gender-shifting Jordan (Derek Luh and London Thor) are violently trucked out of the prison where they’ve been languishing since last season. They’re surprised to find themselves back at Godolkin University, greeted by Cate (Maddie Phillips), the last person they want to see after her betrayal last season. Cate scans their minds with her telepathic powers and is shocked to learn that Andre died in captivity. Emma and Jordan learn that their release comes with conditions: they have to tow the latest Vought propaganda about supe superiority, starting with a press conference for the whole school and close-ups for the cameras.  Cate confronts Cipher, the mysteriously super-abled new dean of Godolkin University (deftly played by Hamish Linklater), and demands to know how Andre died. He displays an impressive capacity to avoid her mental control and reminds her she has to find Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair).  Marie, who somehow escaped from prison between seasons, is on the run, living off convenience store snacks and motels as she searches for her sister. With the country more violently divided than ever after the events of the last season of The Boys, a gang of fascist Hometeamers attacks a group of pro-freedom Starlighters. Marie uses her blood-controlling powers to rescue them – but is caught on video, tipping off Vought to her location. Following her scent from a bag of chips, the bounty hunter Dogknott tracks her down to her motel and nearly subdues her – but is stopped by Starlight (Erin Moriarty), hero of the resistance amidst Homelander’s rising super-fascist regime. Starlight asks Marie to accept the same Faustian bargain as her friends did and go back to Godolkin to find out more about “Project Odessa,” which she says is a weapons program that’s recently resumed its research. At a party back at school, Emma has a difficult conversation with Sam (Asa Germann), her super-strong former love interest turned fascist sympathizer. She gets so distraught she shrinks—a new twist on her size-shifting powers. After a game of beer pong with tiny Emma as the ping pong ball, she sees the video footage of Marie. Emma and Jordan Uber off to find their friend. The three heroes are reunited outside the convenience store. Jordan confronts Marie about abandoning them in prison—and tells her that Andre died trying to escape after she did. Before Marie can process the sad news, Cate appears. With her telepathy, Cate clocks Marie’s secret conversation with Starlight about Odessa. Cate tries to take control of Marie, but Jordan blocks her with an energy blast, knocking her into a wall and leaving her bleeding from the skull. “Justice Never Forgets” Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video The second episode opens with Marie awkwardly (and humorously) recording a TikTok-style video about her mental health healing journey bringing her back to Godolkin University. Emma, who’s directing the video, reasons that the more public they are the safer they’ll be. But it’s clear that Emma, Marie, and Jordan are not yet on the same page, and Jordan in particular still has sore feelings about Marie leaving them behind. The TikTok gambit works, and Marie meets with Dean Cipher about returning to school. He reveals he knows she saw him working at the Elmira detention facility but seems unconcerned about it. He drops the further bombshell that Andre had been suffering from the same illness as his father, and likely knew his attempted escape would cost him his life. Cate has survived her head injury but remains unconscious in the hospital. When Sam visits her there, her powers go haywire, as she says the name “Emma” through a nurse and causes hospital employees to attack each other. In a new “hero optimization seminary,” Dean Cipher pushes Jordan, Marie, and other students to level up their powers through a series of trials by combat that don’t seem to have any safety protocols. Jordan and Marie save each other from a hammer-wielding attacker, then go back to the dorm to process their grief and anger over imprisonment and the loss of Andre. As they kiss, Marie assuages Jordan’s doubts by saying, “Anything and everything you do is okay,” affirming her affection for both of Jordan’s gender identities. She also says “I love you” for the first time, which Jordan awkwardly does not reciprocate. Meanwhile, Andre’s father, Polarity, has realized that the best way to honor his son’s legacy is to investigate Dean Cipher and the Odessa Project. He and Emma team up and charm their way into Thomas Godolkin’s archives. Despite Emma accidentally rolling on Molly, they find a secret room stocked with Godolkin’s disturbing collection of Nazi paraphernalia—and the Odessa files. Emma’s excitement at the discovery causes her to grow to giant size—for the first time without having to eat. Vought’s corporate propaganda machine pins Cate’s injury on an innocent Starlighter, leading to celebrations of supe supremacy and chants of “fuck humans” across campus. Amidst the fireworks and revelry, Emma shows Jordan the secret she’s uncovered: Marie is Odessa. Back in the hospital, Cate wakes up, surrounded by the bloody bodies of several medical staff. Enter Dean Cipher, who is characteristically nonplussed. “H is for Human” Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video We follow a university cafe employee as she goes through the humiliating paces of entering the university as a human: wearing an “H” identification card, entering the “Human entrance,” and enduring an X-ray vision scan by a prurient super-abled security guard.  At Polarity’s home, our heroes puzzle over the Odessa revelation. Why did Starlight recruit Marie to uncover Odessa if she is Odessa? Is Marie a weapon? Marie resists the idea of being a “chosen one,” a role she ascribes to “baby-faced white dudes” like Harry Potter, Neo, and “fucking Frodo.” She resolves to learn more about Odessa from her aunt Pam, a long-lost family friend who’s in a baby photo of Marie that they found in the Odessa files.   Cate returns to campus, greeted with cheers and smiles by Hometeamers and the head of student life. In the power optimization seminar, Marie overcomes another opponent, but Dean Cipher presses her on why she cuts herself to gain access to her powers, saying she’s capable of much more than she knows. In Cate’s absence, Sam’s hallucinations are returning, since he can no longer rely on her mental pushes to eliminate them and more generally flatten his feelings. He goes to Cate to ask her to do it again, but she can’t since her powers are on the fritz. Frustrated, Sam trashes a dorm room. Jordan intervenes and they battle, leaving a trail of smashed walls throughout the dormitory. Eventually, they shift from punching to talking, and bond over their shared love for Sam’s deceased brother. “There’s been enough death,” Jordan says. Meanwhile, Emma goes for muffins at the cafe, where she encounters the human from the episode’s opening sequence. Someone puts up a Starlighter flier at super-speed, a recurring problem for the human employee, who repeatedly gets assaulted by anti-human students who blame her for the fliers. Emma lets her know that “some of us actually do give a shit.” She chases the supe and loses them in the boy’s locker room, but tracks them down later, leading her to a duo of students who engage in small acts of vandalism in protest of Homelander’s fascist agenda. Emma gives a speech encouraging them to do more, implicitly invoking Andre’s legacy of moving others to find their own heroism. Marie visits Aunt Pam. After some awkward moments, Pam shows her a stack of old photos—including one of Dean Cipher holding Marie as a baby. He’s also known as Doctor Gold, the doctor who delivered Marie. But things get even more awkward when Marie stumbles into a bedroom that once belonged to her little sister. Marie demands to talk to her sister, but Pam says she doesn’t want anything to do with her.  Jordan and Sam continue their bonding, watching the children’s show “Avenue V,” getting stoned, and talking about the friends they’ve lost. Jordan realizes that you never know when you might lose the chance to tell someone you love them. As the entire campus gathers to celebrate Thomas Godolkin Day, Jordan finally tells Marie they love her too. Dean Cipher announces that Jordan is the new number one in Godolkin’s student rankings and calls them up to give a speech. At first, Jordan delivers the Vought-scripted propaganda about Godolkin University being “trans-tastic,” but stops. Shifting to their female form, they reveal that Andre died in prison, heroically trying to free his friends. Then Jordan confesses to being the one who attacked Cate – and is met by jeers from the increasingly supe-supremacist Godolkin student body.  Commentary Credit: Prime Video These three episodes have a lot of work to do: setting up the transition from one season to the next while also covering some backstory from the most recent season of The Boys—and explaining the disappearance of Andre in a way that fits the story and gracefully honors the legacy of the character and of Chance Perdomo. The show largely manages to fulfill that tall order. It’s especially effective when Cate learns how Andre died by reading Jordan’s mind, a speculative variation on the disorientation and chaotic absorption of information that so often comes after a death. Throughout all three episodes, various characters pay tribute to Andre’s heroic death, but the most powerful moments come when the writers allow the story to lean into the complexity of grief, with characters experiencing not only sadness but also anger and blame, with themselves and with each other. The leading actors all give strong performances here, and it’s easy to imagine that some of the more tearful moments drew on real-life sadness over the unexpected loss of Perdomo. While Andre’s death is handled as deftly as possible, some of the other transitions to the status quo of the new season feel more abrupt. It’s still not clear how Marie escaped a high-security prison, and even less clear why she is searching desperately for her sister but so easily gave up on her best friends and former love interest, all wasting away in a cell. (Jordan’s anger about that issue seems pretty reasonable to me!)  More generally, the fast shift from being imprisoned to a full reset of the kids being back at school feels forced, more at the service of the plot than an organic evolution. That said, the writers manage to convert even that flaw into a strength. A string of awkward press conferences and social media moments highlights just how jarring it is for the characters to go back to the school that imprisoned them – to disturbing and hilarious effects. Linklater is an excellent addition to the cast, with a subdued portrayal of Dean Cipher that’s just the right balance of mysterious, creepy, and intimidating—always seeming to know more than he’s letting on. I’m not sure whether his power is some sort of omniperception or if he just has a Batman-like ability to plan for everything, but either way I’m here for it. Jordan continues to be a stand-out character for me, with Derek Luh and London Thor both playing the character skillfully. (I’m so curious what their collaborative creative process is like to jointly depict the character!) They feel slightly more integrated this season than last, when, as Marie noted, Jordan would routinely shift to their male form any time they wanted other people to pay attention. I was glad to see the rebuilding of trust between Jordan and Marie, and the moment when Marie affirms the fullness of Jordan’s gender identity is one of the sweetest in the show’s run. In contrast, Godolkin University’s self-promotion of how trans-affirming they are, after the institution consistently has repressed Jordan’s bigender identity, was disturbingly true to life.  This season of Gen V, like its parent show The Boys, leans even more heavily into the themes of rising fascism and “supe supremacy.” Given the state of the world, there are times where it’s almost uncomfortably accurate, especially the way that the vast majority of students have so enthusiastically embraced Homelander’s fascist regime and casual re-writing of history. But that also makes it resonate all the more, particularly as our heroes try to find ways to fight back, love each other, and simply live their lives amidst such a horrific context. For the most part, the shared continuity with The Boys offers an additional layer for those who watch both shows. As with the first season, Gen V offers a more ground-level view of this world, with details like a segregated back-entrance for humans hinting at just how bad things have gotten since Homelander basically took over everything at the end of season four of The Boys. Guest appearances like the frat ritual facilitated by Godolkin alum the Deep (Chace Crawdord) provide occasional fun and amusing Easter eggs. Other crossover moments, like Starlight’s appearance in episode one to provide Marie with “her assignment,” feel a bit more forced. But hopefully that balance will work out over the course of the season. Being in the world of The Boys, blood-spurting violence and nude scenes abound. Some of these, like the hero optimization seminar battles, feel like they advance the story, while others seem a bit extraneous. Your mileage may vary. Twice, the head of student life has pointed out that her bee-like stinger would leave both her and its victim brutally dead, a Chekov’s gun that will undoubtedly go off at some point this season, hopefully in a way that does something useful for plot or character development. The storyline around Project Odessa and Marie honing her powers brought me a little bit of geeky joy. She shares her blood-controlling power with Victoria Neuman, the Vice President Elect who died in the season finale of The Boys. Neuman had been set up to be one of the most powerful supers of this universe, using her ability to control not only the blood in her own body, but in others as well, with devastating effects. I’d been a little disappointed her character had been eliminated, and am interested to see them continue exploring the many possibilities of blood-control powers through Marie. Let’s see where the rest of the season takes us![end-mark] The post <i>Gen V</i> Goes Back to Supes School With Season 2 Reset appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays astronomy Bad News From Alpha Centauri A… There’s a planet in the habitable zone… but not an Earthlike planet. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on September 19, 2025 Credit: NASA/Caltech/IPAC Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: NASA/Caltech/IPAC Astronomers report that there very well might be a planet orbiting in or just outside Alpha Centauri A’s habitable zone. Alas, ordering the stokers to start shovelling seetee into the photon-drive may be premature. Alpha Centauri Ab is an interesting world but it isn’t Earth 2. But first, a refresher. At 4.3 light years1, Alpha Centauri is currently the closest star system to our own2. Alpha Centauri is a triplet star system, whose most distant component, Alpha Centauri C, is small, dim, distant from its two companions3, and irrelevant to this essay. Alpha Centauri A (whose proposed world is the subject of this essay) is slightly more massive than the Sun and half again as bright. B is a little less massive than the Sun and half as bright. A and B have an eccentric orbit around each other4, but not so closely as to preclude planets in either star’s habitable zone5. At least not directly. Because Alpha Centauri is nearby, because two of its components are Sun-like, and because SF authors have heard of the star system, SF authors have populated A and B with many habitable planets, some of which I’ve mentioned in an earlier essay6. Alas, nothing known about the exoplanet Alpha Centauri Ab (A is the star, b is the planet) suggests that it’s habitable. To begin with the minor issues, Ab is actually a bit outside A’s habitable zone, thus its estimated temperature of 225 K or about -50o C. Not necessarily a deal-killer. The estimate excludes, as far as I can tell, the impact of any greenhouse gases. As you know (Bob) without its atmosphere, Earth would be about 255 K or about -25o C7. The next issue is that Ab’s orbit is far more eccentric than that of Earth; it’s comparable to Pluto’s. This means the amount of light Ab receives from A varies considerably over the course of a single orbit. Ab spends a lot more time traversing the outer part of its orbit than it does the inner8. So, longer, colder winters than Earth and because the issue is distance and not axial tilt, all of Ab goes into the deep freeze at the same time. No migrating to the summertime hemisphere. This paper observes that “The S1+C1 candidate is in a highly inclined (≈50∘ or ≈130∘ with respect to the α Cen AB binary orbital plane) and eccentric (∼0.4) orbit, not unlike other S-type planets in close binary systems (e.g., HD 196885 Ab and γ Cep Ab), and is expected to undergo large amplitude von Zeipel-Kozai-Lidov (vZKL) oscillations.” This isn’t great, because it means that the eccentricity isn’t just extreme, but evolving. All of which is minor compared to the final detail: Ab is somewhat more massive than Saturn, which means it’s probably composed of hydrogen and helium. Maybe it’s an extremely large ice giant (ice giants are worlds like Neptune or Uranus, which have a significant amount of water, in states of matter unlike any with which we’re familiar) but probably not. In any case, Ab would be as uninhabitable as our Solar System’s gas or ice giants. Ab’s mass has another annoying consequence, which is that it’s clearing out adjacent orbits that might otherwise (assuming a multitude of counterfactuals) be taken by an Earth-massed planet. Perhaps Ab has Mars-plus massed moons and maybe one or more of them is a potential abode for life? The first thing that comes to mind is that no gas or ice giant in our system has moons quite that large in comparison to the primary. Still, if there’s one thing exoplanets have taught us, it is that our solar system is not the default model. Yet… even if such an Earth-like moon existed it would be subject to the very un-Earthlike conditions mentioned above. Ah, well. There’s always Alpha Centauri B… except that if B is large enough for to induce von Zeipel-Kozai-Lidov oscillations in Ab, then surely the more massive A will do the same for any hypothetical Bb? There are a lot more ways for a world to be uninhabitable than habitable, so it’s not that surprising9 that Alpha Centauri Ab seems to be a dud from that angle. It’s still an interesting system from an orbital dynamics perspective, but for habitable worlds, we will have to look elsewhere.[end-mark] That is about the height of 10^16 giraffes, stacked one on top of each other, and ignoring that such a mass of giraffes would collapse into an extremely (if only very briefly) distressed sphere. Yes, obviously the giraffes are in space suits. I’m not a monster. ︎Stars move. ︎C is almost 9000 times as far from AB as the Earth is from the Sun. I too am boggled that the star has not been stripped away from AB over the five billion plus years the system has been around. By the way, case matters. If I say A or B, I mean the stars but a lower-case b is an exoplanet. AB would be both Alpha Centauri A and B, but Ab would be the proposed planet orbiting A and Bb an exoplanet orbiting B. ︎The distance between A and B varies from about the distance between the Sun and Neptune and the Sun and Jupiter. ︎Looking at you, Procyon. ︎Or sometimes, in the case of authors who knew the name but nothing else about Alpha Centauri, the planet orbiting a singleton star called Alpha Centauri. ︎Back when the Sun was young, it was much dimmer than it is now. A back of the envelope calculation says the Earth, other factors aside, would have had about the same temperature as Alpha Centauri Ab. Why everything wasn’t frozen solid is a bit of a mystery. Alpha Centauri A being more massive than the Sun, its luminosity would have evolved even more and faster than the Sun’s. Ab might have been even farther from the habitable zone than it is today… except we know the orbit would have been very different billions of years ago. ︎Because A and B’s orbit around each other is eccentric, climate on Ab would be further complicated by B’s small but not negligible input as it varies over an eighty-year cycle. ︎What is astonishing, at least to me, is the number of red dwarfs, such as Alpha Centauri C, that have exoplanets in their Goldilocks zone. Red dwarfs are very dim and their potentially habitable zones are tiny. Is there something that favours planetary formation in or near that region of stellar systems? ︎The post Bad News From Alpha Centauri A… appeared first on Reactor.

News The Batman: Part II The Batman: Part II Villain Tease Sparks Speculation About Hush, Court of Owls, and More But seriously, it’d be cool if it was Hush. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on September 18, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. The Batman: Part II is now officially moving into production, with filming set to start in April or early May 2026, according to director Matt Reeves. Reeves, who wrote the script for the sequel with Mattson Tomlin, also shared a teaser for who the villain might be when talking on the Emmys red carpet with Josh Horowitz of Happy Sad Confused.  Reeves shared that, for his Batman movies, he wanted to push “even further into the character of Bruce Wayne because the first story is so much about The Batman.”  He added, “I always wanted the movies to be focused on his character… I never wanted to lose [Robert Pattinson, who plays Bruce Wayne] as the center of these stories and so that is what we set our aim on—so picking the villain that digs into what that does, that goes into his past and his life—that was what drove that discussion.”  If that wasn’t enough to intrigue fans, he also said that what we’ll see in The Batman: Part II has “never really been done in a movie before.” The rogues gallery is vast, but there are a few villains that could fit the description Reeves laid out. The most direct, perhaps, is Hush. Hush, aka Tommy Elliot, was childhood friends with Bruce. Unlike Bruce, however, he is a sociopath who tried and failed to murder his parents for money and, once he and Bruce were grown-ups, he concocts a revenge scheme on Bruce because he blames Bruce’s father for saving his parents’ lives and thus ruining his moneymaking endeavor.  Hush is far from the only candidate, of course. Reactor’s Slack was abuzz with other possibilities, including the criminal syndicate The Court of Owls, which has been around since Gotham’s founding, as well as Hugo Strange and Red Hood. Other names that popped up include Scarface, Calendar Man, Mad Hatter, and Man Bat (you never know!).  The possibilities are many, and the speculating is fun while we wait for more news on the sequel, including who will eventually be cast as said villain. [end-mark] The post <i>The Batman: Part II</i> Villain Tease Sparks Speculation About Hush, Court of Owls, and More appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: A Football Horror Movie You Might Hate and a Brian Eno Movie You’ll Watch (At Least) Twice Plus pictures of beautiful bookshelves! By Molly Templeton | Published on September 18, 2025 Photo: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Universal Pictures The first day of fall is Monday. I’m really sorry to bring this up—unless, of course, you’re one of the people for whom this is very welcome news. (How about both? Can I be both?) In Portland, we’re in that stretch of time where leaves might fall into your drinks when you’re sitting outside enjoying the high-70s perfect weather. It’s crossover season. Unintentionally, this week’s recommendations are a little crossover-y, too: sports and horror, books and architecture, satisfying and unsatisfying versions of a similar plot. And Brian Eno, who crosses over most things, come to think of it. Settle in with your beverage of choice, and don’t forget to call your reps. Football Is Horrifying, Though: Him Okay, so, the reviews for Justin Tipping’s football horror movie Him are far from glowing. “Style to burn and not much else,” says Vulture’s headline. But I still want to watch it. Honestly, this movie deserves my time just for the gory beauty of its first teaser. It’s 10,000 percent a sports ad (“If you want to transcend the game, you have to dig deep”)—one that goes absolutely haywire. And the effectiveness of that trailer choice made me think about bodies, and sports, and all the ways that a body, put through great physical stress, can go haywire in all kinds of “normal” ways. Bodies are weird, no? At least, if you think about them too much. Anyway. I grew up in the kind of small American town where there is so little to do that everyone goes to the high school football game, even if they—like me—have zero interest in football. I’ve seen the clichés. I want to see the actually-making-it-weird version. But it might not be great. Is it worth it? You can only do that math for yourself. Just Look at the Pretty Books as a Palate Cleanser I don’t even remember where this link came from, because it erased all the thoughts in my mind when I clicked it. (Bliss, for a half a second.) “57 brilliant bookshelf ideas for every type of space,” a post from the UK’s House & Garden, requires nothing of you. You can just scroll and admire bookcases. Bookshelves. Beautifully arranged books in tasteful houses. There is, I admit, a preponderance of beige and white walls, and not as much artful chaos as some may wish for. (There is some, though, like the shelves with art hanging on the front of them.) There is a green book nook that I would very much like to read in. There’s a gorgeous cat on a red sofa in a room with red shelves and colorful rugs. There’s so much. I am only halfway through and saving the rest for later. Which Older Fantasy Books Meet Modern Expectations? My favorite online discussion this week was definitely the conversation Eddie Clark started when he asked, “what 80s & 90s epic fantasy holds up best to modern eyes and why?” I am constantly wishing I had more time to go back and read my old favorites—partly because I want to see what does hold up, and partly because I want to see how differently I might feel or think about those books now. The answers to Clark’s question vary, though there is a lot of agreement on Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series (serieses?) and quite a few mentions of Kate Elliott, Melanie Rawn (specifically her Exiles series), and Janny Wurts. We can nitpick about whether Tamora Pierce’s books are epic fantasy or not—and there are several similar arguments in the thread!—but I just read Alanna: The First Adventure this week and it was such a joy that I got mad at myself for not having the next three books to hand. There are a few things to quibble with, but Alanna’s fear and frustration and determination are just perfectly depicted. What holds up for you? What do you want to reread? Is fall the perfect time to do just that? I’m Going to Go Have a Good Cry with The Magicians I was not alone in finding the just-ended season of Strange New Worlds underwhelming. The humor wasn’t as sharp as it needed to be; the characters didn’t get enough focus or time to develop; and the finale asked us to be deeply invested in a relationship that’s never quite clicked (and I’m still not over all the unfortunate bioessentialism). But a certain part of the season finale—if you’ve seen it, you know—reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of television of all time: The Magicians’ “A Life in the Day.” In the midst of a quest for some magic keys, Quentin and Eliot wind up living out a whole life while trying to solve a mosaic puzzle. That’s the meat of it. And just thinking about that episode makes me a little teary. It’s beautiful, and in the big picture of the show, it’s meaningful. It also comes at a point when we know these characters, their flaws and foibles and big cracked hearts. It makes sense; it builds things, and it undoes things. And if you would like a good cathartic cry, it will probably give you that.  Wanna Watch a Movie You Can Never See the Same Way Twice? Please forgive me, because I’m about to talk about a movie you probably can’t actually watch right now (though it is coming to streaming eventually!). But the thing is, you should know about this movie so that you can watch it when it is available to you—and then maybe watch it again, because the odds of it appearing the same way twice are infinitesimal. I’m talking about Eno, the documentary about Brian Eno, for which director Gary Hustwit “and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music.” (You can read more about the creation of the film at The Verge.) Listen: Maybe you think you don’t care about Brian Eno. Fair enough. But if you care about art, and creativity, and the creation of some of the last century’s most enduring music; if you care about how people move through the world and make art and keep being curious; if you could use a straight shot of hope—well, then you should watch this movie when you can. The critic Carl Wilson watched it (almost) five times in a row, and wrote, “It was replenishing because while it lasted, Brian Eno made it seem possible to be hopeful without being oblivious or gullible.” If you would like to watch a music documentary now, though, may I also suggest the wonderfully chaotic Pavements, which also takes a variety of approaches to its material (though not quite as many as Eno). I cannot emphasize strongly enough the excellence of 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary that gives backup singers like Darlene Love and Merry Clayton their due (seriously, you will never listen to “Gimme Shelter” the same way again). On Sunday, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery—The Untold Story hits Hulu, and I can’t wait. (This oral history of the Fair can tide you over until the premiere.) One of the producers on Lilith Fair is critic Jessica Hopper, who also directed the excellent series Women Who Rock. You should watch that, too. If you like good things.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: A Football Horror Movie You Might Hate and a Brian Eno Movie You’ll Watch (At Least) Twice appeared first on Reactor.

News Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Now You See Me 3 Trailer Pits the Four Horsemen Against Gen Z Magicians Magic spans generations. Except when it doesn’t. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on September 18, 2025 Credit: Katalin Vermes Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Katalin Vermes We’ve got another trailer full of magical moments for Now You See Me: Now You Don’t!  That’s right, the third film in the franchise about four magicians who seem to break up crime syndicates in their spare time is set to premiere in a couple of months. The movie’s latest trailer sees them walking through an upside-down room, using playing cards as a projectile weapon, a really large MacGuffin diamond, and having generational clashes with a group of magicians twenty-plus years younger than them. Here’s the official synopsis for the film, in case you need more details on what the movie is actually about: The Four Horsemen (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher) are back—to unite with a new generation of illusionists (Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt) for their most global, high-stakes magical adventure yet. Their mission: Expose the corruption of Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a powerful diamond heiress with ties to arms dealers, traffickers, and warlords. Aided by the legendary Thaddeus (Morgan Freeman), the two generations of magicians must overcome their differences to try and defeat their cunning and dangerous adversary, in this magic-fueled heist filled with the franchise’s signature twists, turns, and thrilling reveals—along with some of the most thrilling illusions ever captured on film. Magic, it’s not just for entertainment anymore! The movie is directed by Ruben Fleischer (Venom, Uncharted) and has a slew of writers—Seth Grahame-Smith and Michael Lesslie and Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese—credited as having a hand in the script. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t magically appears in theaters on November 14, 2025. Check out the latest trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>Now You See Me 3</i> Trailer Pits the Four Horsemen Against Gen Z Magicians appeared first on Reactor.