Movies

The Mandalorian and Grogu
The galaxy’s most reluctant hero — a bounty hunter by trade but softie at heart — finally leaps from the small screen to the big one in The Mandalorian and Grogu. Pedro Pascal, fresh off Fantastic Four: First Steps and the romcom Materialists, straps the silver helmet back on as Din Djarin, aka the Mandalorian. He is joined by his tiny green ward, Grogu, better known to the internet as Baby Yoda.

This time, the Mandalorian’s mission sends him after Rotta, son of Jabba the Hutt and reluctant heir to a crime empire Djarin wants no part of. It should be simple: track him down, bring him in, no questions asked. Naturally, nothing about Rotta’s rescue turns out to be simple, and he may not even want saving.

Joining Pascal on the cast are Jeremy Allen White, voicing the surprisingly sympathetic Rotta, and Sigourney Weaver as Colonel Ward, a New Republic officer with a past of her own. Keep an ear out, too, for a cameo from a veteran director whose voice you’ll probably recognise before you place it — think Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Mortal Kombat II
Blood, martial arts, and button-mashing nostalgia collide in Mortal Kombat II, the follow-up to 2021’s blockbuster video game adaptation. This sequel is a case of bigger and better: it comes with an expanded roster and even more brutal mayhem.

This time it’s Hollywood heartthrob Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) who gets dragged into the world’s most violent tournament by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) — and who might just be humanity’s last, most unlikely hope against the tyrant Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford).

Kahn’s enforcers and monstrous minions are all gunning for Raiden’s team, ready to finish the fight for good. Urban, also known for his role as Butcher on the superhero series The Boys, is a riot as washed-up Johnny, armed with nothing but rusty martial arts skills and sharp verbal jabs.

Scary Movie (2026)
Movie parodies are a dying art, so leave it to the Wayans brothers to remind everyone how it’s done. In an age of horror ‘requels’ — sequels that double as franchise reboots — the return of Scary Movie couldn’t be better timed.

Here’s the twist: 2026’s Scary Movie is technically the sixth instalment in the franchise, but it’s the first since 2001’s Scary Movie 2 to come from the comedic minds of Marlon and Shawn Wayans. Twenty-five years is a long time to wait.

Many of the original cast members are back. Cindy (Anna Faris) lives in isolation, still haunted by the traumatic events of past films, while Brenda (Regina Hall) has settled into suburban life, back together with her longtime partner Ray (Shawn Wayans). But when a familiar threat resurfaces in their neighbourhood, the gang — plus Brenda’s stoner brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans) and a fresh batch of unlucky teens — must reunite to stop the killing spree.

Along the way, a whole lineup of modern horror films gets the spoof treatment: Get Out, Longlegs, Ma, Smile, Terrifier, and plenty more.

Unexpected Family
It’s hard to believe Jackie Chan has reached his golden years, but Unexpected Family proves he’s still going strong in the acting department. And that he’s not just about throwing punches or delivering kicks.

Chan stars as Ren Jiqing, a retired, lonely weightlifting coach whose life is upended when he develops dementia. He mistakes his young tenant, Zhong Bufan (Peng Yuchang), as his long-lost son, and Bufan decides to play along after a doctor advises him that Jiqing needs the support of family.

So Bufan recruits the neighbours to fake it. The unlikely household must keep up the ruse while juggling their own lives, all as Jiqing’s condition steadily worsens. Chan took on the role hoping to “raise public awareness of this condition, encouraging people to learn about it and understand it,” he wrote in China’s Global Times earlier this year.

Backrooms
2026 has witnessed a horror renaissance — one led by a new generation of filmmakers. Exhibit A: Backrooms, now A24’s biggest box-office hit ever, directed by Kane Parsons.

In January 2022, at the age of just 16, Parsons gained fame for adapting the Backrooms creepypasta into a viral YouTube analogue horror series. At age 20, he adapted the series for the big screen, making him one of the youngest directors to helm a box-office hit.

Brought to feature length, Backrooms plunges deeper into its maze of endless, mundane corridors. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a depressed business owner, stumbles into a labyrinth one night in the basement of his furniture store. What starts as curiosity spirals into obsession, dragging in his young employees and, eventually, his increasingly concerned therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve).

Backrooms’ success doesn’t just ride on the popularity of the shorts (which have clocked hundreds of millions of views since 2022), but owes largely to the film’s unnerving scares and slow-burn suspense. Turns out an empty hallway can be more frightening than any masked killer.

The Furious
Asia has quietly produced some of the decade’s best action cinema, and The Furious throws talent from across the region into one gloriously violent melting pot. It fuses elements of kung fu, muay thai, silat, wushu, and modern MMA. The result? The action event of the year.

The plot’s simple: Wang Wei (Xie Miao), a Chinese handyman, sets out to rescue his daughter, who is kidnapped by a child trafficking syndicate. To get her back, he teams up with Navin (Joe Taslim), a journalist hunting for his own missing wife, and together they cut a bloody path through an army of thugs and mercenaries for answers.

Director Kenji Tanigaki — a veteran stunt coordinator from Hong Kong action cinema — swaps out frenetic cuts for longer shots that allow the action to unfold in a fluid, balletic manner, making the fight sequences feel more immersive.

TV

House of the Dragon S1-3
Westeros’ tale doesn’t just end with Game of Thrones. Based on George R. R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, HBO’s fantasy drama House of the Dragon plunges us back into the medieval realm. Set more than a century before Daenerys Targaryen sought to reclaim her family’s glory, the series traces a chapter in House Targaryen’s early history. King Viserys (Paddy Considine) must choose an heir, with his daughter Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy and Milly Alcock playing her at different ages) the presumptive favourite — but his ambitious younger brother Daemon (Matt Smith), feared and respected in equal measure on the battlefield, has his own eyes on the crown. Complicating matters is Viserys’ marriage to Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke, Emily Carey), whose children also have a claim to the throne.

What follows is pure Game of Thrones: political, bloody, and dragon-y.

By Season 3, the battle for the throne has turned into a full-scale Targaryen civil war (known in the books as the ‘Dance of the Dragons’), with the action, stakes, and suspense at a series-high.

Tucci in Italy S2
Stanley Tucci has always worn his love of food on his sleeve, and Tucci in Italy is his deepest dive yet into gastronomy. It’s a warm, wandering look at the country’s culinary soul, far off the well-trodden tourist trail.

Beyond his culinary-adjacent film work (Big Night, Julie & Julia), Tucci opened up about food’s deeper meaning in his 2021 memoir Taste: My Life Through Food, which traced how his battle with cancer reshaped his relationship with eating. This season, he heads from the islands of Sicily and Sardinia to the lesser-known corners of Le Marche and Campania, tracing recipes passed down — sometimes proudly, sometimes secretly — through generations.

“Our relationship with food now is [that] it’s just something you eat to feed your belly, but that’s not what it is,” Tucci tells the BBC. By the end of Tucci in Italy, he might just convert even the toughest sceptic.