News

Ryan Lambie Nov 4, 2016

What was Prometheus all about? What can we expect from Alien: Covenant? Ryan looks at the series' inspirations to build up a theory...

Nb: The following contains spoilers for Prometheus, and possible spoiler-filled conjecture for Alien: Covenant.

See related  Joseph Kosinski on Tron 3 and The Black Hole remake

On one level, Prometheus was everything you might have expected from an Alien movie: a space slasher film where a bunch of explorers are pursued and physically invaded by something slippery from beyond the stars. Yet Ridley Scott's Alien prequel also seemed to have lots more on its mind: aliens fiddling with the building blocks of life, meditations on what lies beyond the curtain of death, and copious dollops of silky black goo.

Prometheus toyed with weighty themes, yet left plenty of specifics frustratingly obscure. What happened on the planetoid Lv-223 that led all those Engineers to die in a heap?...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Hard to Be a God is playing on Mubi in the Us through January 2.Hard to Be a GodRussian director Aleksei German spent the final 15 years of his life working on Hard To Be A God (2013), a brutal medieval epic adapted from a 1964 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky, dying just before he could complete the job in February 2013. Happily, his son and widow were able to oversee the final sound mix. The result is one of the most immersive and harrowing cinematic experiences going, three hours of being put to the sword and mired in the mud, blood and viscera of a nightmare alternate reality.Although German's characters are dressed in the clanking armour, chainmail and robes of the European Middle Ages, Hard To Be A God is in fact set on a distant planet,...

Across the land, minor celebrities are downing vitamin pills and drinking lots of milk. With shards of famous bones scattered across the Alps after the carnage of The Jump, Gemma Collins's bruised breasts implanted in our memory forever after Splash!, and Davina gingerly putting herself back together after her heroic trek for Sport Relief, everyone needs to make sure they're in tip-top condition before their agents call nervously about the next celebrity reality show.

But with these shows getting more and more dangerous - we're talking broken bones now - what on Earth will Sinitta and Mark Wright be putting themselves through next? Digital Spy has looked into its crystal ball to find out...

Celebrity Lion Taming

Hosted by Wagner off of The X Factor - who, as we all know, has no fear when it comes to lions - Celebrity Lion Taming would see Leo Sayer, Lionel Blair,...