The Flash Season 6 Episode 1 “Meet the new Flash. Same as the old Flash.” OK, so I’m paraphrasing The Who, certainly not the classic rock band of the hour (we’ll get to them soon enough), but trust me when I say that I mean this in the best way possible. If I’m waxing nostalgic about “the old Flash” I’m usually talking about the very best moments of the first season, or the first half of the (otherwise dreadful) season two, or the tonal balance of season three....

Since The Game Awards is currently one of the biggest game-centric celebrations outside of E3, it’s a tradition for companies to fill in the gaps between awards with ads for their upcoming games. Last year alone, gamers got announcements like long-awaited reveals of Alan Wake 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, as well as debuts like Slitterhead. It’s a foregone conclusion that this year’s Game Awards will also be full of trailers, but nobody is entirely sure which reveals to expect....

The Good Lord Bird Episode 3 It’s right there in the title. This week’s episode is all about Mister Fred—including how you must remember to call him Mr. Douglass at first meetings. His rather puffy reaction to “Fred” likely took some viewers off guard, but imagine if Onion had called him what he was taught by Old John Brown: Frederick Douglass, the King of the Negroes. Indeed, it is with that lofty title that Daveed Diggs’ swaggering and delightfully subversive interpretation of Fred is introduced....

Road trip! There was a brief moment in The Handmaid’s Tale’s first season, right after Fred Waterford and the other Commanders were blown up in that Red Center explosion, when this story move felt inevitable. June and Serena: two enemies cast together against a common foe, Thelma and Louise-ing it on the run from Gilead together in the ultimate act of female solidarity. (Okay, solidarity is pushing it. The stage though, is at least set for a ceasefire now that Serena appears to be in labor and June has previous when it comes to delivering babies alone in the wilderness....

It falls into the stressful subgenre of movies where someone makes a mistake early on and everything unravels from there–if the outcome is obvious, it’s the journey that provides the pleasure. Or in this case, the pain, as one dreadful and maddeningly implausible decision follows another. Peter Sarsgaard plays Jay, divorced father of Kayla (Joey King) and who stops to pick up his daughter’s friend Britney on the way to a dance camp....

Critics have not been kind to The Little Things, the new Warner Bros./HBO Max psychological thriller starring Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as two Los Angeles cops obsessed with catching a vicious serial killer. Although the film is apparently doing very decent business–especially on the streaming end–it sits at a mediocre 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with many comparing it to the 1995 classic Seven. In that juxtaposition, The Little Things is coming up short....

Williams, by this stage of his career, was already hugely popular on television, courtesy of Mork & Mindy. But the genesis of the movie that would ignite his film career actually lay back to even before then, in 1979. That’s when the real-life Adrian Cronauer, on whose story the film is based, pitched a sitcom based around his experiences as DJ in the Vietnam War. It got the interest of agent Larry Brezner, who bought an option on the story....

Oh, that last one doesn’t seem as bad? Have you ever considered how many deaths and injuries could have been prevented by the simple addition of handrails? The poor stormtroopers fighting Luke and Leia in the Death Star shaft. Darth Maul and his better half fading away in The Phantom Menace. Han Solo plummeting after reuniting with his son Ben. Sure, extenuating circumstances played into these events, but the lack of guardrails surely made things worse....

“I’m storyboarding at the moment on Meg 2,” Wheatley says when we catch up with him for the release of In The Earth. “It’s been going on for four months, five months. It’s my happy place, I love storyboarding. So yeah, I’m cutting storyboards and watching animatics, and slowly constructing the movie. It’s really exciting. It’s just action on a massive, massive scale.” The first film, based on the popular 1997 novel Meg by Steve Alten, reached the screen in 2018 after more than two decades of development....

The Orville Season 2 Episode 4 I’m not going to make any bones about this: I like The Orville. It’s fun, it’s occasionally smart, and it does a great job poking old Star Trek tropes with a stick and often making them smarter. However, the latest episode seems like an unnecessary rip-off of Star Trek: Discovery’s big season 1 twist. Is The Orville trying to make Trek loyalists mad? What was the point of this twist?...

Chris, played by Martin Freeman, is going mad. He knows that’s not the right language to use, not on a shift, or in one of the scant counselling sessions he’s been given to fix what his wife calls the “lifetime of shit in his head”, but mad is what he means. Chris is losing it – his temper, his grip, his dying mother, his marriage – and, depending on how a plot involving a homeless heroin addict and a stolen bag of cocaine winds up, perhaps also his life....

If you’ve already watched the shocking season 1 finale of The Rings of Power, it should come as no surprise that the Lord of the Rings series has plans to really dig into its main villain when the show returns for a second season. In fact, while speaking to Empire, Halbrand/Sauron actor Charlie Vickers shared that he has already filmed an important sequence that will define a bit of the Dark Lord’s backstory on the series....

Even before stepping into the legendary shoes of DC Comics adventurer Lady Johanna Constantine, Jenna Coleman was already a pop culture icon. After all, Coleman brought to life one of the most beloved characters in Doctor Who history, the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors’ trusty companion Clara Oswald. Coleman’s run as a companion is one of the longest ever, debuting in 2012’s “Asylum of the Daleks” and making her final appearance in 2017’s “Twice Upon a Time” (although she made her official exit from the TARDIS in 2015’s “Hell Bent”)....

The Simpsons Season 34 Episode 8 After 34 seasons, The Simpsons knows the things which truly unite people: childhood trauma and unregulated slumber parties. “Step Brother from the Same Planet” separates these universal rites of passage into two fully satisfying storylines, each of which land with silly subversion, and serious evasion. The main plot involves Homer’s less-than-delicate relationship with his father. Abe sums up his entire character, up to this point in his timeline, with his opening line....

If there’s anyone who knows what The Walking Dead needs, its series producer and zombie effects expert Greg Nicotero. Aside from perhaps series creator Robert Kirkman himself, no one else is as responsible for the series’ iconic undead look than the makeup effects enthusiast-turned-director. Nicotero dates his Walking Dead journey all the way back to before the beginning when original showrunner Frank Darabont brought him aboard before the pilot was even sold....

The Walking Dead: World Beyond Episode 5 When the Endlings left Campus Colony, they were four kids who didn’t really know each other. Even Hope and Iris, the two sisters, had secrets from one another. Silas kept the secret of why he ended up at Campus. And Elton, the quirky little fellow in the corduroy suit, had secrets of his own. On a show littered with traumatic stories, perhaps none is quite as traumatic as Elton’s, and The Walking Dead: World Beyond puts that trauma, as well as his mother’s manuscript, to great use in explaining Elton’s current character....

“When I did test screenings of the film, a lot of filmmakers were saying, ‘I don’t know, this stuff seems kind of random,’” Eggers recently explained. “‘Maybe he can offer her things that make more sense thematically with the rest of the film.’ That was a pretty consistent note, so I kept trying to find something better.” There was just one aspect the director couldn’t get past though: “Those were things the devil actually promised....

Until now. Doctor Who: Time Fracture, newly opened in London’s Bond Street, is an immersive theatre experience that pits its participants against a smorgasbord of baddies across space and time, giving them the chance to team up with, or become, their greatest heroes in a race to save the very universe. But what exactly is it; how does it work? What can people expect? And how did it come to be?...

Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary Type: Novel (reissue)Publisher: Valancourt BooksRelease date: Dec. 7 Den of Geek says: Anything recommended via Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell is an auto-read. And to be honest, we could all use a dose of vintage eco-horror… Publisher’s summary: After receiving a large insurance settlement, young couple Gwen and George fulfill a dream by buying their own little island, a secluded, private paradise surrounded by a lush green landscape of plants....

Reclaim the Stars by Zoraida Córdova et al. Type: AnthologyPublisher: Wednesday BooksRelease date: Feb. 15Den of Geek says: We know Córdova from her Star Wars books, but the wide range of authors here on display promises a neat collection of fantasy and science fiction.Publisher’s summary: From stories that take you to the stars, to stories that span into other times and realms, to stories set in the magical now, RECLAIM THE STARS takes the Latin American diaspora to places fantastical and out of this world....