TV reviews: The Living and the Dead – spooky metaphors and terrified ducklings

Joyfully, we are removed from reality to 19th-century Somerset, where supernatural doings and malevolent spirits abound

Reviews, the first episode of the new six-part drama The Living and the Dead (BBC1) opened in a Somerset vicarage, in 1894 and I was already sold. “Anywhere but the here and now, my loves,” I whispered at the screen. “Anywhere but here and now.”

Soon, joyfully, we were even further removed from reality. Partly by the ethereal beauty of Colin Morgan – off whose cheekbones the entire production hangs – as Nathan Appleby, a pioneering psychologist returned from London to the family pile to make A Go of Things after the death of his mother, and partly because supernatural doings are afoot. Sixteen-year-old Harriet has started hearing voices and feeding ducklings to pigs. Is she about to get her first period? Is she haunted? Or is her psychic upheaval emblematic of the industrial changes about to sweep through bucolic England?

After fishing Harriet out of the lake, Nathan decides that he will psychologise the ghosts and murder-most-fowl (I daren’t tell you how hysterically I have made myself laugh. Forgive me – these are difficult days) out of her. “I think she’s afraid of her own sexuality.” You think she’s afraid? You should speak to the ducklings.

He needs to get cracking. As well as forcing Harriet to try and baptise/drown any country maidens she sees acting unmaidenly up against a tree, the malevolent spirits around the place induce sturdy labourer John Roebuck to throw himself under the horsedrawn plough. I know, Remainers, I know. Everywhere is metaphor.

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Eventually, Nathan hypnotises Harriet with his cheekbones and a watch and baptises her while she is possessed by the spirit of Abel North, the unloved son of a preacherman who never had him christened and possible murderer of a woman in a workhouse. Abel may also know something about the death of Nathan’s son by his first wife, but we’ll have to wait and see about that.

And then – spoiler alert, for all those of you who apparently read reviews in the full expectation that they will give no information about the programme under discussion, and who really should go and stand in the corner with all those who voted Leave as a protest and are now protesting vociferously about the fact that we’ve left – right at the end, there was a twist I didn’t see coming and which I heartily enjoyed.

It’s shaping up to be a nice six hours of spooky fun and games and there’s the Lyke Wake Dirge over the opening credits, which I might petition to have as our new national anthem. Christe receive thy saule.

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Inside Porton Down (BBC4) was an odd proposition. To mark the Defence Science and Research Laboratory’s 100th anniversary – it was founded in 1916 after the Germans used their new weapon, chlorine gas, in the trenches – the cameras, led by Dr Michael Mosley, have been invited in for the first time. I don’t know – it just seemed a bit … needy, to me. Which is not really what I look for in my scientific or military institutions. I’d prefer to think of everyone and everything concerned with overseeing national security as emotionally robust. Maybe even a little bit defiant. Secure enough not to need lots of birthday fuss, anyway. Your job is to do secret things secretly? STAY SECRET THEN.

The programme itself was a depressing, unsettling hour in an already depressing, unsettling week. A brief outline of the history of chemical, biological and nuclear warfare; a quick trip through some anonymous-looking corridors, where no viewer has ever trod, to see people creating and testing nerve gases that have killed thousands of people across the globe and will almost certainly kill thousands more as rogue states and terrorism proliferate. 

And copious reminders at every turn – via footage of sarin-sown rabbits, disavowed deaths and child corpses on the streets of Syria – of the ever more terrible things we invent to do ever more terrible things to each other.

It tried to leave us on a happy note. Spider webs are being used to trap the ebola virus for researchers to work on. Alas, what they have discovered so far is that ebola does remain contagious in the air long enough for it to be usefully weaponised. What endless bounty nature gives us.

This ae night, this ae night, every nighte and alle, fire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christe receive thy saule. For more information you can check out new free games to play and dowload 

Reviews: Book of the day - What we Cannot Know by Marcus du Sautoy review – the seven edges of knowledge

Book reviews - Among the frontiers identified are time, the cosmos, consciousness and God, but aren’t swaths of knowledge concerned with meaning rather than scientific fact?

Scientists like to see themselves as modern counterparts of the great explorers, sailing off into the unknown and coming back with marvellous tales of adventure and discovery. But the heroic age of exploration lasted no more than 500 years: after the so-called conquest of the poles there was not much terra incognita left to conquer. Does a similar fate await the sciences? Will nature yield up its last secret one day? Will our questions all be answered? Will scientists abandon their laboratories and take up poetry, painting or tap dancing instead?

These are the questions raised by an engaging new book in which Marcus du Sautoy promises to lead us to “the edges of knowledge”. He begins by recalling a speech given by the physicist Lord Kelvin at the end of the 19th century. “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” Kelvin said, “all that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Albert Einstein soon proved him wrong, but scientists carried on dreaming of the day when they could declare mission accomplished. Fact of life, In September 1930, for instance, the distinguished mathematicianDavid Hilbert addressed a meeting in his honour in Königsberg. Nothing could hold out against the progress of science, he said: “We must know – and we shall.” Unluckily for him, a young logician called Kurt Gödel had demonstrated the exact opposite in a paper delivered in the same city on the previous day. Every conceivable system of mathematics, Gödel showed, must contain statements that cannot be proved, so the idea of scientific closure was a quixotic fantasy.

Taking his inspiration from Gödel, Du Sautoy has ranged across the scientific disciplines, interviewing leading scientists and eventually reaching the conclusion that there are seven “edges” that science will never be able to cross. First up is the phenomenon of chaos, which ensures that even our best-founded predictions can always go wrong: an undetectable alteration in initial conditions, such as the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wing, may be about to throw a spanner in the works.

Then there is a barrier to our attempts to probe the furthest reaches of the cosmos: parts of it are so far away that information from them will never have time to reach us. When we look in the opposite direction, however, there does not seem to be any comparable difficulty: early pioneers of particle physics suspected that the limitations of optical microscopes would soon put an end to their inquiries, but they were mistaken. Their successors would develop techniques that enabled them to open up a sub-microscopic realm of electrons, protons and neutrons, and then a world of muons, bosons and quarks – and for all anyone knows further investigation may reveal new species of particles lurking underneath the quarks. But the fact that there is no obvious terminus to the science of small things can also be seen as an “edge”, according to Du Sautoy: however deep the physicists dig, they will “never know for sure whether they know it all”.

In any case they face another formidable barrier in the form of the “uncertainty principle”, which postulates that the behaviour of subatomic particles is essentially random, and set to baffle scientific calculation for ever.

The remaining “edges” are rather more elusive. If Du Sautoy is right, then recent inquiries have shown that time is an “emergent phenomenon”, that it is “fluid” rather than “absolute”, and that some particles are immune to it. On top of that, he maintains that we will never be able to understand how the firing of neurons can generate “consciousness” and “a sense of self”. Finally, he comes back to his home discipline to argue, in the spirit of Gödel, that mathematics contains truths we cannot know. In an eye-catching conclusion, he then takes issue with those who regard science as a vindication of atheism: God may have died as a supernatural being with a personal interest in our welfare, but we might as well resuscitate him, according to Du Sautoy, by equating him with “the abstract idea of the things we do not know”.

Du Sautoy makes a lucid and beguiling companion as he guides us along the byways of contemporary science, but his argument about the seven edges of knowledge remains patchy, elusive and deeply obscure. In the first place, he fails to recognise that vast swaths of human knowledge are concerned with human meaning and interpretation rather than scientific fact and explanation: with beauty, for instance, or with history, poetry and memory, or love, ageing and mortality, or what words can and cannot express. He assures us in passing that judgments of beauty arise from dopamine rushes controlled by our genes, but if we disagree about whether something is beautiful we ought really to have a discussion about how it looks rather than trying to compare our dopamine levels. And if we want to investigate the significance and viability of religious belief, we might be well advised to start from the ambiguities of human experience rather than following Du Sautoy in appealing to the latest results of scientific research. Plant facts 

In any case, his seven “edges” are more like a ragbag than a well-formed set. Some of them arise from practical problems of observation, others are deductions from theoretical and mathematical models, and others still seem to be consequences of the conceptual scaffolding of knowledge in general. But Du Sautoy lumps them all together, tacitly assuming that the only truths worth knowing depend on acquaintance with pre-existing facts. For him, time is not so much a presupposition of meaningful experience as a pervasive physical substance, rather like air or water but harder to pin down. In the same way, he thinks that the truths of mathematics are reflections of eternal entities that “exist” apart from any human activities – objects that would still be there even if “there was no universe, no matter, no space”, and which we might, if so inclined, identify with God, or with “the god everyone is chasing”.

Science is a heroic attempt to give expression to impersonal natural truths, and by some reckonings it is the most successful enterprise in history. But it is still a human institution, beset by human weakness; and if there are inherent limits to its growth, they have as much to do with human spite, obtuseness and complacency as with the intractability of the non-human world.

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‘If you wanted to have sex in the middle of the club, you could. No one cared'

Pepe Rosello, founder

Fact of life, In 1958, I was running a restaurant in Ibiza called El Refugio, before moving on to La Reja, a jazz club. After years of repression and dictatorship in Spain underFranco, music offered freedom, dancing, physical contact. Hippies, the Woodstock generation, came over from the US, fleeing the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and bringing music that filled the venues: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon – all forbidden in Spain at the time.

In 1962, I took over the Capri club and renamed it Playboy. I was being rebellious, as the magazine was banned. But the area, San Antonio, ended up getting a bit vulgar, so in 1989 I took over Space. People thought I was mad to move to Playa d’En Bossa: the area had no personality, the tourists didn’t leave the hotels, and it was mostly for family holidays.

So the first thing I did was put a wall around the club for privacy, even though you could still jump over it. The authorities had over-regulated night-time, but there was no problem with opening in the morning. So we started Breakfast in Space, where you could dance and welcome the planes passing 30 metres above your head. People started coming directly to Space with their suitcases, even before checking into their hotels. Full video game reviews

When it comes to making a successful club, if you manage to attract a tribal group who fight the establishment, you’ve already done most of your work. The masses then absorb that transgressive elite, enhance it and give it an identity. The British are the most devoted audience of all: they’re always polite and respect the rules. Music helps them express emotions that have been pent up by their culture and education.

I’m 80 now and this will be my last year owning the club. I’ve got so many good memories. The night I turned 75, my friends blindfolded me and sat me down in the main room. When I opened my eyes, I found myself in front of Dita Von Teeseperforming on stage, with soprano Tiziana Fabbricini singing La Traviata.

‘The best nights of our lives’ … Space Ibiza.

Carl Cox, resident DJ

I was curious: a club that opened at seven in the morning? You’d been out atPacha and you’d think: I’ll get some breakfast, wash, have a shave, then go to Space until two in the afternoon. You felt like a naughty schoolboy: you’re meant to be going to bed, or just waking up from the night before.

The club had people from everywhere: Venezuela, Japan, Portugal, the Netherlands. Hearing an aeroplane fly over a club was a first – it would drown out the music on the terrace and you’d all be cheering, because there were more people coming to the island.

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Back in the 1990s, if you had a camera, you had to leave it in the cloakroom. So if you wanted to have sex in the middle of the club, you could. No one would care. These were the ideals of the place: be flamboyant, be as free as you want. The Manumission night in the 1990s, which had a live sex show on stage, used to get 10,000 people every week.

Ibiza has become more conservative now. At DC-10 people used to dress up as aeroplanes or as Catwoman, for no reason. Elrow is bringing that back, but it’s forced and staged. And at Richie Hawtin’s recent nights, everyone dressed in black – like, who died? We grew up in the summer of love, where it was all about colour and having a smile on your face. I want to walk away from it all now and just remember that we’ve had some of the best nights of our lives in this club.

• Carl Cox’s weekly residency, Music is Revolution, runs until 20 September at Space Ibiza. Click fun facts about dogs to explore the mysteries of dogs

Empty gesture? Renzo Piano's €600m cultural Acropolis for austerity Athens

Reviews, it was launched to great fanfare. But now the 20-hectare temple to culture stands vacant, its shelves built for 2 million books empty, its gates locked. Can this wildly ambitious civic gesture succeed?

A wafer-thin canopy floats at the top of a hill in Athens, hovering like a sheet of paper caught in the coastal breeze. Held in place by a gossamer grid of columns and wires, and crowned with a central mast, the structure has more in common with the world of sails and rigging in the nearby harbour than the weighty domain of buildings on land – a feeling that might be explained by the preoccupation of its designer, Renzo Piano.

“What I really do in life is sailing,” says the 78-year-old Genoese architect, standing on the roof of his latest €600m cultural complex, which combines a new national library and opera house in one gargantuan artificial hillside, topped with the thinnest concrete roof the world has ever seen. “The ingredients are the same in architecture: light and air and breeze.”

As ever, Piano makes the decade-long process of raising this cultural acropolis sound as effortless as taking a dinghy out for a paddle. Yet the challenges the building now faces are rather more weighty. As Greece descends ever deeper into crushing levels of national debt, with the culture ministry’s budget slashed by half since 2010, it is a fraught time to be unveiling one of the biggest cultural projects of the century – especially one that will require 900 staff. Full games review

“We had the idea for the project when Greece was flying high,” says Andreas Dracopoulos, co-president of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the private charitable fund formed from the fortune of the late shipping magnate, which bankrolled the entire project. First planned in 2007, the complex is now being gifted to the state at a time when many other museums and cultural institutions are closing their doors. The new National Museum of Contemporary Art, just down the road, has been completed but remains unopened.

Backed by the might of private philanthropy, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre was launched at the weekend to a grand fanfare of concerts and fireworks. Except it hasn’t actually opened, nor has an opening date been announced. Both the national library and opera house have been gifted a further €5m to relocate here, but funding beyond that remains up in the air. The library’s shelves, sized for two million books, stand empty. The park’s gates remain locked. “In difficult moments like this, you need hope,” says Piano. “Making a good building is an important civic gesture. It makes you believe in a better world.”

So what kind of post-crisis world has the architect imagined? Judging by the scale of the building, it will be one inhabited by giants. Arriving at the 20-hectare site, visitors are greeted by a 400-metre long reflecting pool, along which they must process in the blinding sun, flanked by a blank concrete wall, to a new “agora” or square. The 30-metre high glass facades of the opera house and library face each other across this new stone square, while two monumental staircases rise up to the rooftop on either side. It feels like arriving at a national parliament, built on a scale to rival the Acropolis – in fact, the white temple at the summit of it all dwarfs the Parthenon four and a half times over.

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This shaded belvedere awaits at the top of a vast new park, which rambles up the roof of the library and opera house on a gentle slope, bringing people up from the street through groves of olive and almond trees, carob and pomegranate, fig and lemon. During the evenings of the opening weekend, once the 40C heat had subsided, this tilted landscape was thronging with children playing in its handsomely equipped playgrounds, pensioners licking ice creams to a backdrop of live jazz, andyoung couples scampering through the bushes, stirring up scents of rosemary and lavender.

“We might have had the agora, but we lost our tradition of public space in Greece long ago,” says one visitor. “This will be a fantastic new place for the city, if we can afford to maintain it.”

The crowning glory of this new park is the spectacular terrace at the summit, imagined as an open-air reading room, which feels like being on the deck of a yacht, floating above the city. The Mediterranean sparkles to the south, while rooftops roll out to the Acropolis in the distance, the whole thing covered by a glossy white umbrella.

Engineered by London firm Expedition, the roof is a tour de force of ferro-cement and clever seismic technology. Subtly curved like the wing of a plane, it is formed from a shell of concrete just 2cm thick, reinforced with a dense cage of fine steel mesh, which encloses a 3D steel truss, all held up on a sprung suspension system that allows it to move in the event of an earthquake. It is the largest ferro-cement span in the world, a material Piano first used in 1971 – to build the hull of his first yacht.

More nautical details emerge within the cavernous volumes of the library and opera house below, where access decks and staircases are hung from tensile wiry rigging and edged with glass balustrades, while the auditorium balconies are made from curved wood echoing little boat hulls. The whole place is exquisitely crafted, a testament to both the Greek builders and Piano’s team (his practice isn’t called “building workshop” for nothing).

Maybe it’s the lack of books and all the expanses of marble, steel and glass, but in places it feels a little sterile – more lab than library. From the outside, it also lacks some of the warmth you might expect from a house of culture. Encountering the thing from the sea, it looks more like a maximum security prison. A blunt cliff-face of concrete greets the harbour, in a defensive response to the eight-lane highway that roars along the seafront, from where the rooftop piazza looks more like an elite corporate events space than an accessible agora. With a yawning funding gap, one can only hope that won’t end up being its primary function.

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Across the highway, reached by a land bridge, lie the poignant relics of a time when the regenerative power of architecture didn’t quite live up to its promises. The swooping Pringle-shaped roof of a taekwondo arena faces off against the rusty steel frame of a beach volleyball stadium, separated by the derelict walkway of the media centre – the forlorn ruins of the 2004 Olympic Games, an event that left the country on the brink of bankruptcy.


Dracopoulos is adamant this will not be the legacy of his foundation’s gift. “Look at the buildings built during the Great Depression in the US,” he says, referring to the Empire State and Chrysler buildings among, others. “We have built the cultural centre, but now it is the obligation of the state to run it. If a country can’t run a national library and an opera – the basic pillars of a nation’s culture – then we might as well lock everything up and jump into the Mediterranean.” 

Portishead release Abba SOS video in tribute to Jo Cox

Reviews, in a tribute to Jo Cox, the Bristol trip hop band have released a video for their downbeat cover of Abba’s pop classic

Jo Cox, the Batley and Spen MP who was tragically killed last week, would have been 42 today. In honour of her tireless campaigning in support of refugees, iconic Bristol trip-hop band Portishead have released a video to go alongside their cover of Abba’s SOS.

It features singer Beth Gibbons, shot alone in monochrome, reaching out towards the camera before ending with Cox’s quote from her maiden speech in parliament: “We have far more in common than which divides us.” 

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You can view it using the player below. 

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Apple’s Big Security Upgrades Will Save You From Yourself

Reviews during this week’s WWDC keynote, executives touted improvements to popular services like Siri, iMessage, and Apple Music. They demonstrated exciting new uses for nascent features like 3D Touch. Amid all the fuss, though, they neglected to talk much about the security measures coming to MacBooks and iPhones this fall. That’s a shame, because there are lots. And they’re going to significantly alter how you interact with your Apple devices.

While Apple appears to have delayed some of its bigger security projects—most notably, encrypting iCloud backupsso that not even Apple can access them—it’s still showing serious ambition, sometimes in surprising places. The result will be an iOS and macOS experience that trades convenience for protection in a few key ways. Apple will introduce small frustrations now, to prevent large, even unfixable, frustrations down the road.

So Long, Flash (And Everything Else)

Apple’s crusade against Flash dates back to 2010, when Steve Job famously penned an open letter banishing it from the iPhone. Since then, plenty of others co-signed. Facebook’s security chief called for a Flash end-of-life date last summer, and Google has taken multiple steps to limit its viability on Chrome. Even Adobe has lately distanced itselffrom its most notorious product.

It took until macOS Sierra, though, for Apple to bring its Flash fight to the desktop. And in fact, it’s not stopping at Flash: the next version of Safari won’t support popular plugins like Java, Silverlight, and even Apple’s own QuickTime. But, y’know, mostly Flash. Instead, it’s embracing the much more secure HTML5 standard whenever and wherever it can.

“On websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 implementations of content, Safari users will now always experience the modern HTML5 implementation, delivering improved performance and battery life,” writes Apple’sRicky Mondello. “This policy and its benefits apply equally to all websites; Safari has no built-in list of exceptions.”

No Flash, no exceptions—even on sites that don’t offer an HTML5 alternative. When Safari runs into sites that require Flash or any other plug-in, it will act as though the plug-in is not installed on your computer. Instead, it will show you a notice that Flash is not installed, and serve up a link to where you can download it. Only after you click that link will Safari let you know that well, actually Flash is, in fact, on board. You’ll have the option to either activate it that one time (the default) or every time that particular site is visited. Sounds annoying? Yeah, it will it be.

The newfound peace of mind, though, is worth the occasional extra click or three. Though plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Java, and QuickTime are still fairly common across the web—Amazon Video, for instance, leans on Silverlight in Safari—they are notoriously easy targets for hackers. Flash in particular is and continues to be a security nightmare; just this week, another critical vulnerability hit it, which could “allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.” So yeah, it’s more annoying for you, but extremely important for your digital well-being.

And it’s important that Apple doesn’t stop at Flash; even if and when Flash is minimized, bad actors will just move onto the next popular plug-in to cause havoc. Like, say, Java, which itself is consistently rated as one of the biggest security threats to US computers.

A Stronger Gatekeeper

Similarly, Apple’s Gatekeeper is digging a deeper moat. First introduced in 2012, Gatekeeper lets Mac users specify whether they allow their computer to download only applications from the App Store, or from the App Store as well as applications signed by certified Apple developers, or from anywhere at all consequences be damned. In macOS Sierra, that last option no longer exists.

You’ll still be able to run unsigned apps by right-clicking and selecting “Open.” Power users can also shut down Gatekeeper entirely in the terminal. But it means that most casual Mac owners wind up only using apps for whose security Apple can vouch.

Think of it like this: Your iPhone and Mac are a house, and Apple’s covering up as many outlets as it can. That’s a pain when you need to plug something in, but at least you won’t wind up electrocuted.

HTTPS All of the Apps

We’ve talked about the importance of HTTPS, and at WIRED we’ve lived it. And while it’s been encouraged in iOS before, as of next year it’s going to be mandatory for any app that connects to the web.

Apple introduced App Transport Security, which makes sure apps are using encrypted HTTPS connections whenever they access web services, last year. And to be fair, a lot of developers have already boarded that train. That’s partly because it’s such a relatively small ask on the part of iOS developers. “We use HTTPS across the board,” says Adam Grossman, co-founder of popular weather app Dark Sky. “The fact that Apple is enforcing this ‘best practice’ is a good thing.”

Better still, you shouldn’t see much impact in your day to day app usage. “HTTPS requires an extra ‘handshake’ between servers, and there’s a bit of a CPU overhead, but in practice this isn’t a big deal for performance in a lot of, if not most cases,” says Grossman.

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“Apps could crash when they’re launched, or ads that are served within the app could fail, neither of which is great for the overall user experience,” says Brad Wright, an executive with Phunware, a company that specializes in app development and mobile experiences. “But the likelihood of those scenarios is extremely low. The development community has had ample time to make this change.”

It’s especially important to know that apps are operating on HTTPS because there’s often no visual indicator (like the green lock icon in the upper-left corner of a desktop browser) to let users know how secure their connection is. As of January 1, 2017, they’ll all be secure, full stop. You won’t have to even think about it.

An Exciting File Management System (No, Really)

It’s hard to get hyped about a file management system. But if you were ever going to, it should be about Apple’s new APFS. There’s a ton to like here; it works across all of Apple’s platforms, supports both Flash storage and solid-state devices, and clones files rather than copies them (which should save a ton of room). Best of all, it isn’t 18 years old, like the system it will replace next year is.

That’s a quick gloss of a complicated subject, but all in the service of getting to the real bones of APFS: file-level encryption.

While full-disk encryption has been an OS X feature since 2011, APFS lets you encrypt files with single-key encryption, multi-key encryption, or no encryption at all (but don’t do that!). This is a very big deal, not just for security, but for usability.

“Apple already has FileVault encryption in software. It’s not done by the file system, it’s done by the operating system,” says Greg Norcie, staff technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “In general, if you’re going to do something in software it’s going to be slower than if you do it at the file system level. It’s going to make everything more seamless.”

As for the encryption itself, on most devices APFS will use AES-XTS encryption, which Norcie notes is what’s used to protect top-secret government information.

APFS is still an early developer preview (translation: a lot of it doesn’t work yet) so it’s not quite ready for road testing unless you really know what you’re doing. When it takes over next year, though, it’s going to give you far more granular control over your security than Apple ever has before.

It’s understandable that these features didn’t make the keynote stage. They’re wonky, and technical, and don’t sound quite as cool as “differential privacy, a term that was touted on stage—which is, in fairness, actually pretty cool. In terms of how they impact your safety day to day, though, each represents serious, tangible progress. The best part? When these updates are working best, you won’t notice them at all. See more video game reviews

Cape Watch: The Next Wolverine May Have a New, More Feral Wolverine

Reviews don't panic, but we’re only about a month or so away from this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, where attentions will formally shift from the superhero movies of 2016 to what’s to come in 2017 and beyond. There is oneexception to that rule, but we’ll get to Suicide Squad soon enough. That said, looking into the future and trying to piece together tomorrow’s superhero movie landscape? That’s what we do here, every week! Does that make this column mini-Comic-Con?! While we ponder that all-important question, here’s the round-up of the week’s superhero movie news.

SUPER IDEA: Wolverine 3 Featuring an All-New Wolverine

It’s beginning to look like Laura Kinney—the comic book clone of Wolverine also known as X-23 and, as of last year, the “All-New Wolverine” in the comic of the same name—will show up in Hugh Jackman’s final Wolverine movie. TheHashtag Show obtained a casting breakdown for a character called Zoe in the movie, described as being “a temperamental, impulsive and feral creature” who requires an “extremely physical” actress who is “able to improvise scenes without necessarily resorting to speech.” That might be who appears in these set photos from the movie… she certainly looks like the comic book X-23, albeit a little younger. Also, if the rumored title for the movie turns out to be true, it’d make some sense for X-23 to show up. After all, she is another product of Weapon X herself.

Why this is super: Bringing in the comic book replacement for Wolverine in the last movie for Wolverine suggests that Fox might be thinking about future plans for the franchise after all. If Laura turns out to be as good a character on screen as she is on the page, this might end up being the best thing that’s happened to the Wolverine movie franchise in quite some time.

SUPER IDEA: Doctor Strange Breaking the Marvel Mold. See more animals for kids

If you ask Mads Mikkelsen, Doctor Strange is going to be unlike any other Marvel movie audiences have ever seen. “If you look at the comic books, the comic books are quite different [to other Marvel stories],” he told Yahoo! Movies. “I think that the film will be different from the other [Marvel] films that we’ve seen, but not as different as the books are, because that was basically the ‘60s and ‘70s—it was more like an acid trip.” That doesn’t mean that he’s any closer to sharing details of his character, however. When asked, he simply said, “He’s not a villain in that way—he’s a man who believes in something else than the hero. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to make the planet look wonderful or he wants to save the world as well, but he has a different way of doing it. He is the antagonist, of course, but he’s not necessarily wrong.”

Why this is super: Based on the first trailer, Doctor Strangewill look more like Inception than other Marvel movies, which is… well, different, if nothing else? But as to who Mads is playing, that’s still a mystery. Someone who’ll save the world, but be at loggerheads with Strange? Who could that be?

SUPER IDEA: Two More Actors Coming Home to Spider-Man

Add two more actors to next year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, with Kenneth Choi and Donald Glover both signing on to Jon Watts’ reboot movie for the Marvel hero. Choi will reportedly play the principal of Peter Parker’s high school, while Glover’s role remains a mystery for now.

Why this is super: This is good news on a number of levels. Not only does it bring in a more diverse cast than we normally see in Marvel movies, it also adds two great actors in Choi and Glover. As to Glover’s role, let’s just pretend that he’s playing the same mystery character as Mads Mikkelsen in Doctor Strange, purely for the intrigue.

SUPER IDEA: Comic-Con Getting the Full Suicide Squad

Those heading to Comic-Con next month, prepare to go to jail. Or, really, the Belle Reve Penitentiary, home of DC Entertainment’s Suicide Squad. As part of a promotional push for the August movie at the annual pop culture event, Warner Bros. will be transforming part of the Hard Rock Hotel near the convention center into a replica of the Squad’s jail base, with a VR experience that’ll put users in the middle of a scene from the movie. Additionally, the cast will show up for the Warners Hall H panel, as well as take part in a signing event at the DC booth on the show’s main floor.

Why this is super: Warners seems to be going big withSuicide Squad at Comic-Con, suggesting that perhaps it’s OK to get our hopes up for this one. With all this promotion coming to the con, it should be wondered whether the studio will try to sneak in a few preview showings during the weekend as well.

SUPER IDEA: Rising Stars Heading to the Big Screen. For more information click here video game reviews 

Fresh from working on Netflix’s Sense8, J. Michael Straczynski is staying in the superhero business. His comic book series Rising Stars, about the lives of more than 100 children born with super powers after a meteor strikes their Illinois hometown, has been optioned by MGM. Straczynski will remain attached to the project when it jumps to the big screen as producer, and will also write the screenplay.

Why this is super: Rising Stars was well received by critics and fans alike during its run, and this news offers something that’s almost unheard of in superhero movies: the chance for the comic’s creator to play a significant role in the movie’s creation. As to whether audiences will be willing to embrace yet another spin on the superhero genre when there are more Marvel and DC movies than people know what to do with, well, that’s an entirely different question altogether. Of course, that’s assuming that the project goes from development into production, which isn’t necessarily a done deal.

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Helen Mirren revealed that she's joins Fast and Furious 8

The Oscar winner revealed that she’s joined Charlize Theron in the latest film in the long-running franchise – although her role still remains a mystery

Click reviews to get more her sharing. Helen Mirren is the latest female Oscar winner to join the Fast and the Furious franchise, following the casting of Charlize Theron as the villain in the upcoming eighth instalment.

The actor revealed the news in an interview with Elle magazine, while promoting the home release of Eye in the Sky, her 2015 thriller about drone warfare. She said she accepted the role in the sequel for “the fun of it”. Character, as well as plot details, are still under wraps. 

Asked if she’s a fan of cars, Mirren said: “I’ve always rather loved driving.

“I said, ‘I’ll be in it, but only if I’m allowed to drive if I do drive in it,’” Mirren told Elle. “But we’ll see. We’ll see how it transpires.”

This marks her first major role in an action franchise since her involvement in Red and Red 2, in which she starred opposite genre veteran Bruce Willis.

Mirren and Theron will be joined by Fast and the Furious stalwarts Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris and the last movie’s official villain: Jason Statham. Straight Outta Compton helmer F Gary Gray is on board as director.

The film is set to open on 14 April 2017, and is the first of a new trilogy taking the series forward following the death of leading man Paul Walker. See more video game reviews

Hot movies in June: The Conjuring 2

The conjuring 2 reviews, after his billion-dollar diversion with Fast & Furious 7, it would have been all too easy for James Wan to stay away from horror; to show that there was more to him than an ability to create scary monsters and super creeps. But the man who created the Saw, Insidious and Conjuring franchises doesn’t see horror movies as a ghetto from which to escape. He sees it as home.

And so, at the first opportunity, he returns to doing what he does best with this sequel to 2014’s surprise smash, The Conjuring. Like that movie, this follows the adventures of real-life ghostbusters, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) as they poke their beaks into a nasty case of demonic possession.

Unlike the first movie, which took place in 1971 in an isolated Rhode Island farmhouse that seemed built specifically to house horrific goings-on, this time the Warrens rock up in the London of 1977. Or, specifically, Enfield, North London, to investigate a poltergeist that seems to have set its sights on Janet Hodgson, a teenager living out a normal life with her mum and siblings in a terraced home. At first the drabness of this house seems antithetical to spooks and scares, but the normality of the environment only accentuates the horror. It’s likely that, if we didn’t grow up in a house just like this one, we had friends who did. It’s all too easy to let your imagination run wild when the events unfolding on screen do so in a location that feels so familiar.

The shift in milieu is also interesting because the end of the first movie hinted heavily that the sequel would focus on the Warrens’ involvement with the Amityville Horror. Indeed, fact of life that’s where we first meet them, as the more spiritually gifted Lorraine is immersed in a terrifying vision from which she barely emerges.

However, perhaps because that story has been so well documented as to contain little in the way of surprises, Wan zips beyond that to the Enfield case which, although famous, perhaps isn’t as played out as Amityville. For a while, as with the original, we get two movies running on parallel tracks, flitting between the Hodgsons, as Janet and her mum Peggy (Frances O’Connor, excellent) try desperately to cope with constant spectral invasion; and the Warrens as they recuperate at home, waiting for the calm to turn into a storm. But when the Warrens pitch up in London, the intensity is driven up a notch.

While Wan plays fast and loose with the facts of the case, placing Ed and Lorraine at the centre of events here (they didn’t appear at all in last year’s excellent Sky 1 drama, The Enfield Haunting), he also creates an escalating series of superb shocks. Jump scares are often sneered at, and they are often the easy way out: something leaps out from the edge of the frame, accompanied by LOUD NOISES, job’s done. Yet when they’re done well, they can turn a horror film into a wonderful communal experience – as you scream, you’re also laughing because you know that you’ve been had; conned, even, into jumping out of your seat. Very few modern horror filmmakers can time a jump scare as effectively as Wan, and he delivers here, his constantly roving camera finding all kinds of nooks and crannies in which evil can lurk. There are some great ideas – the shot where Janet finds herself in a room filled with crucifixes, only to find them turning slowly upside down is a belter, and it’s often enormous fun, best seen with a crowd. The standout moment, though, comes when Wan bolts his camera to the floor and lets a conversation between Wilson’s Ed and the demon, which calls itself Bill Wilkins, play out in a single shot. see more video game reviews

As events unfold, ending in an operatic showdown between the Warrens and the demonic entity, it does get a little hokey (the dull, drab house just happens to have a massive cellar), and clichés aren’t exactly inconspicuous. However, the performances are excellent across the board, while Wilson and Farmiga are tremendous as a married couple utterly devoted to each other. Their relationship is the movie’s emotional anchor, and proves that horror films can be sweet, surprising, and even charming. Even ones with demonic nuns.

Glastonbury 2016 to introduce women-only venue

Fact of life, the Sisterhood, in the festival’s Shangri-La zone, will offer live music, workshops and DIY classes to female festivalgoers

The 2016 Glastonbury festival will feature its first ever women-only venue. Called The Sisterhood, it has been described by the organisers as a “revolutionary clubhouse” open to “all people who identify as women.”

The Sisterhood will be an “intersectional, queer, trans and disability-inclusive space” and will be staffed entirely by people who identify as female, from performers to security staff.

In a statement, the venue’s organisers said: “The producers of The Sisterhood believe that women-only spaces are necessary in a world that is still run by and designed to benefit mainly men. Oppression against women continues in various manifestations around the world today, in different cultural contexts.”

They continued: “In the UK, the gender pay gap in the workplace, cuts to domestic violence services and sex worker rights are current talking points that highlight this issue. Sisterhood seeks to provide a secret space for women to connect, network, share their stories, have fun and learn the best way to support each other in our global struggle to end oppression against women and all marginalised people, while showcasing the best and boldest female talent in the UK and beyond.” plant facts

You’ll be able to find The Sisterhood in the festival’s Shangri-La zone, where there will be live music, DJs and workshops on intersectionality, diversity and inclusion.

There will also be daily dance classes and, surely best of all, a DIY power tools workshops with carpenter Rhi Jean.