Enlarge / A young prodigal tomboy returns home from war and finds herself framed for murder in Renegade Nell . (credit: Disney+)

Award-winning British TV writer Sally Wainwright is best known for the dramatic series Happy Valley (2014–2023) and Gentleman Jack (2019–2022), the latter produced jointly by BBC and HBO. Wainwright partnered with Disney+ for her latest series, the resolutely PG-13 Renegade Nell , which is a different beast altogether: a good old-fashioned, swashbuckling comic adventure with a supernatural twist, featuring a sassy cross-dressing heroine forced to turn to highway robbery to survive.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Set in 1705 during the reign of Queen Anne (Jodi May, Gentleman Jack ), the series stars Louisa Harland ( Derry Girls ) as Nell Jackson. Nell is a headstrong young woman with tomboy flair and a taste for adventure who returns home to her village of Tottenham after running off five years before to marry one Captain Jackson against her father's wishes. She's now widowed and possessed of occasional supernatural skills whenever someone threatens her, courtesy of a fairy sprite named Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed, aka Nathan from Ted Lasso ), who has been tasked to protect Nell. Nell's family thought she'd been killed on the battlefield alongside her husband, so her homecoming is a bit of a shock.

Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his portrayal of a failed stand-up comedian struggling with mental illness in the 2019 film Joker , director Todd Phillips' controversial interpretation of the classic Batman villain. The honor was richly deserved. In my review , I called it a "masterful performance" that "transforms the narrative into something more than a competent-but-unremarkable tale of hard knocks driving a troubled man to violence." The film ended up topping $1 billion globally at the box office—the first R-rated movie to do so, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film ever.

Now Phoenix is reprising that role in Phillips' follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux , costarring Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. It's hard to imagine Phillips matching his earlier achievement, but Warner Bros. released the first teaser last night, and quite frankly, the film looks fantastic.

(Spoilers for the 2019 film below.)

Enlarge / Legendary Pictures has confirmed that it plans to make Dune: Part Three with director Denis Villeneuve. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Dune: Part Two is still raking in the moolah at the box office, and deservedly so. But judging by my various feeds, fans are already swooning over the prospect of director Denis Villeneuve extending his vision into a trilogy by adapting Frank Herbert's 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah , for the next installment. Will there be a Dune: Part Three ? Most signs currently point to yes, with a couple of caveats. Exactly how soon we'll be seeing a return to Arrakis depends a lot on Villeneuve.

Variety confirmed that Legendary Pictures is working with the director on developing Dune: Part Three , although it remains unclear from the wording of the plethora of news items whether the project has officially been greenlit. ("Development" can mean a lot of things.) Naturally, the studio is eager, as are we: the film is the biggest hit of 2024 thus far, with global earnings of $630 million (although the hotly anticipated Deadpool and Wolverine this summer might give it a run for its money).

That confirmation sent fresh frissons of excitement across the Internet, although Villeneuve had been talking about the prospect as far back as September 2021 . Those plans always depended on the success of Part Two , and that hurdle has obviously been cleared. By August 2023, the director was on record saying there were "words on paper" for a third film. And we learned just last month that composer Hans Zimmer was already working on the score for Dune: Part Three .

Heads up, Whovians! We've got a newly regenerated Fifteenth Doctor in Ncuti Gatwa and a new season of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who on the way. Judging by the latest trailer, we're in for another wild ride of time-traveling hijinks, punctuated by an irresistibly charismatic Gatwa sporting some very colorful outfits with confident aplomb.

(Spoilers for most recent seasons and specials below.)

Look, I loved Jodie Whittaker's incarnation of the Doctor , but her tenure was hampered by the unavoidable fact that showrunner Chris Chibnall just didn't give her a lot of great material to work with. Among other issues, there was an unfortunate tendency toward didacticism and preachiness in the writing at the expense of genuine emotional resonance. While there were a number of notable episodes, and Chibnall gamely trotted out all the fan-favorite monsters and tropes, nothing ever fully captured the imagination in quite the same way as the show has always done at its best. Whittaker deserved better.

Enlarge (credit: iStock via Getty Images )

OpenAI has launched a charm offensive in Hollywood, holding meetings with major studios including Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros Discovery to showcase its video generation technology Sora and allay fears the artificial intelligence model will harm the movie industry.

Chief executive Sam Altman and chief operating officer Brad Lightcap gave presentations to executives from the film industry giants, said multiple people with knowledge of the meetings, which took place in recent days.

Altman and Lightcap showed off Sora, a new generative AI model that can create detailed videos from simple written prompts.

It's been a long wait for the second season of HBO's House of the Dragon , in which House Targaryen descends into civil war over the heir to the Iron Throne. It's set to premiere in June, and HBO is ramping up its marketing with a rather clever twist: not one official trailer, but two, each presenting the perspective of one side in the bloody conflict. And we get to choose which trailer we'd like to view—although if you're like us, you'll elect to watch both.

(Spoilers for the first season below.)

As I've written previously, HBO's House of the Dragon debuted in 2022 with a solid, promising pilot episode, and the remainder of the season lived up to that initial promise. The series is set about 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen's reign. The primary source material is Fire and Blood , a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. As book readers know, those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along.

We learned way back in 2019 that horror director Fede Alvarez ( Don't Breathe , Evil Dead ) would be tackling a new standalone film in the Alien franchise . Personally, I had mixed feelings on the heels of the disappointing Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). But the involvement of Alvarez was a hint that perhaps the franchise was returning to its stripped-down space horror roots. Now we have the first teaser for Alien: Romulus , and yep—that seems to be the case. And that's very good news for those of us who adored the original Alien (1979) and its terrifying sequel, Aliens (1986).

(Spoilers for Alien and Aliens below.)

Alien: Romulus is set between the events of Alien and Aliens . That is, after Ripley, as sole survivor of the Nostromo , destroyed the killer Xenomorph and launched herself into space in the ship's lifeboat—along with the ginger cat, Jonesy—and before she woke up after 57 years in hyper sleep and battled more Xenomorphs while protecting the young orphan, Newt. Per the official premise: "While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe."

We got the first trailer for the spinoff prequel film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in December, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the younger incarnation of the character immortalized by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road . We're now just a couple months away from the film's much-anticipated release—i.e., the perfect time to drop a second trailer to keep that anticipation high.

(Spoilers for Fury Road below.)

As previously reported , we met Furiosa early on in Fury Road , working logistics for Immortan Joe (the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), who charged her with ferrying oil from Gas Town to his Citadel with the help of a small crew of War Boys and one of the war rigs—basically tractor trailer trucks souped up with armor and novel weaponry. Furiosa stole the war rig instead, taking Joe's five wives with her.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Galactic Republic and its Jedi masters symbolized the epitome of enlightenment and peace. Then came the inevitable downfall and outbreak of war as the Sith, who embraced the Dark Side of the Force, came to power. Star Wars: The Acolyte is a forthcoming new series on Disney+ that will explore those final days of the Republic as the seeds of its destruction were sown—and the streaming platform just dropped the first trailer.

The eight-episode series was created by Leslye Headland, who co-created Russian Doll with Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler. It's set at the end of the High Republic Era, about a century before the events of The Phantom Menace . Apparently Headland rather cheekily pitched The Acolyte as " Frozen meets Kill Bill ," which is an intriguing combination. She drew on wuxia martial arts films for inspiration, much like George Lucas was originally inspired by Westerns and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa.

(Some spoilers for the prequel trilogy below.)