The only genre piece I could find this week is the fantasy Inferno, based on the Dan Brown book. But there are a lot of great films coming out this season, some very soon indeed. I think this weekend would be a good time to catch up on some binge streaming while I wait for them.
While there doesn’t seem to be any actual genre movies or TV this week, Nerve comes pretty close, and is an edge-of-your-seat kind of adventure. Skiptrace is a Jackie Chan action/comedy worth checking out as well.
In Anime In Search of the Lost Future: Complete Series is the 12 episode story of a time traveler hiding out in the Astronomy Club, sent from the future to save a life that ended too early. Owarimonogatari Part 1 is just as surreal as anything else in Nisio Isin’s Monogatari series of light novels, and they transitioned that to the anime rather well. This package has the first 7 episodes of the 12 episode series. The Perfect Insider: Complete Series has an architecture professor and a math prodigy teamed up to solve a locked room murder of a genius programmer.
Goro Miyazaki created an Anime version of Astrid Lindgren’s fantasy novel Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, and Amazon has picked it up for their Amazon Prime streaming service. Gillian Anderson will be narrating the story for them, and as a fan of all things Studio Ghibli I am looking forward to watching it. My only question now is when it will be available; they only finished dubbing the English audio in the last week or two, and searching the US and UK Amazon sites reveals no information.
No way to know yet, but if the trailer is any indication, this could be the best film of the franchise to date. ‘Nuff said!
There really aren’t any genre movies this week, but Keeping Up with the Joneses could be amusing if they didn’t go too over the top. Or it could be a good week to catch up with something you missed that is still in the theaters.
In Movies the two primary winners, both sequels. Tim Burton’s Alice Through the Looking Glass can be picked up by itself, or in a two-pack with the earlier film Alice In Wonderland. I saw both of them in the theaters, and I highly recommend each of them. Independence Day Resurgence is all about the action visuals, more than the plot or dialog, although a few of the actors were able to make something out of what the writers gave them to work with. There is also the kid-centric Nessie & Me for those looking for something to share with your children.
Anime doesn’t really have any new genre titles this time around, but the classic series The Vision Of Escaflowne is being re-released, both the complete series and the movie in a single boxed set. For those who already own some portion of it they are also coming out with the movie separately, and each 13 episode season in its own box. Finally, a 4 movie set made up of Memories, Paprika, Steamboy, and Tekkonkinkreet is being released, four of the finest anime feature films ever made.