The bear

Plus more Reservation Dogs, The Sandman adaptation and a new instalment in the Marvel Comic Universe.

Nostalgia used to be a thing of the past; now everything popular in yesteryear is being regurgitated. Countless MCU productions however have conditioned us to expect the conventional and risk-averse. It is, if you believe the headlines, the great Chicago TV show, one of the year’s best small screen productions, a skewering of the wild male genius, a painfully real depiction of kitchen-related trauma, and on and on we go. One thing’s for sure about the first of nine (!!) GoT spin-offs: thar be dragons. However much has changed since 2011 (the year the original show premiered) and I’ll eat my hat if this series is anywhere near as successful as its predecessor. The pace finally picks up more than an hour in, when rescuers come up with a wild idea to knock the boys out with ketamine and transport them out of the cave like parcels. For other entertaining train-based action pictures check out Unstoppable, Snowpiercer and both versions (original and remake) of The Taking of Pelham 123. After the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue captured the world’s attention, and the soccer team trapped for more than two weeks were successfully retrieved, a movie or show dramatising the event was virtually inevitable. The boy who never ages grows up into an adult (Robin Williams), who has forgotten about his childhood and all that commotion in Neverland. Captain Hook (a deliciously wicked Dustin Hoffman) hasn’t, however, and lures him back. With its eerie symmetrical compositions and atmosphere of opulent menace, there are too many great moments to list: the elevator full of blood, those creepy identical twins, and that insane last-minute twist expressed entirely through a zoomed in shot of a photograph. The film industry is shamefully awash with unoriginal ideas, though there’s an obvious justification for remaking foreign productions: local film-makers can imbue an established concept with another country’s sensibilities (and, of course, dialect). The excellent Icelandic drama Rams provides material thoroughly befitting of a rural Australian setting, as Jeremy Sims demonstrates in this calm-tempered remake co-starring Michael Caton and Sam Neill as brothers who live on neighbouring farms but hate each other’s guts. But no book is unfilmable for the same reason one could argue every book is unfilmable: movies and books are entirely different mediums and require entirely different methodologies.