Dan Stevens

While he’s not donning the vibranium suit and saving the world as Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman has been moonlighting as Thurgood Marshall, the first-ever black Supreme Court Justice who rose to fame when he took on one of the cases that defined the Civil Rights Movement.

The big bad of FX’s Legion has several forms by nature, but Season 2 may introduce us to the original. The X-drama’s Comic-Con 2017 panel reveals that Wonder Woman hero Said Taghmaoui will break bad as a familiar and shadowy presence when the series returns in 2018.

When special effects do their job, they create an illusion so seamless we forget we’re looking at something that’s not really there. The Beast in Disney’s hit live-action retelling of Beauty and the Beast is such an impressive work of motion-capture technology that it can be easy to overlook the amount of effort, energy, and looking incredibly stupid in a giant gray unitard required to turn Dan Stevens into a feral creature.

To a certain extent, first-person cinema has always been Hollywood at its most uninspired. “What do kids like? Video games. What do video games have? First-person camera angles. Therefore, if we create first-person movies, then all that sweet, sweet video game money is ours for the taking!” The truth, of course, is a little trickier than that. The format can work when a filmmaker finds a way to give its perspective narrative importance  —  Unfriended is a strong example of this  —  but too often, the first-person perspective is a neat trick that quickly tired audiences out (sorry, Hardcore Henry).

Back in 2009, director Tim Smit released What’s in the Box?, a first-person short film about a mysterious government quarantine. The film was an instant hit with audiences, especially those looking to form connections between the short and established franchises such as Half-Life or Lost; Entertainment Weekly even ran an entire feature breaking down the connections between Smit’s film and Damon Lindelof’s series. And while nothing much came of those rumors  —  hey, sometimes a cool video short is just a cool video short  —  What’s in the Box? has been given its own big-screen adaptation set for release the summer.

Only two episodes remain in FX’s Legion after tonight, at least for this year. Yes, David Haller and his merry band of mutants will be back for Season 2 in 2018, and your head is already hurting just thinking about it.

Logan is understandably geared toward saying goodbye to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine moreso than Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier, but there’s a certain finality to this chapter of the X-Men universe regardless. Stewart in particular is open to the idea of returning for a Deadpool sequel, but perhaps more pressingly, now says he’d be willing to drop by FX’s Legion.

To say that the first trailer for Beauty and the Beast was evocative of the 1991 animated classic would be an understatement; it was a live-action carbon copy, and if Disney’s remake of Cinderella was any indication, we were in for yet another tedious — if visually stunning, well-acted and beautifully-designed — exercise in nostalgia-based capitalism. But Bill Condon’s live-action update of Beauty and the Beast is more reimagining than remake, a lavish and lovely take on a familiar tale (as old as time, no doubt) that enriches its source material without betraying it, embellishing a cherished antique with modern ideas.

If Colossal isn’t on your radar, it should be. The new film from Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes, Open Windows) is his best yet — and the first full trailer hardly does it justice. Featuring an absolutely phenomenal performance from Anne Hathaway, Colossal offers a hilarious, thoughtful and strangely poignant twist on the classic kaiju movie, and is easily one of the most surprising films of 2017.

For someone just now having his moment, Dan Stevens has already accumulated a pretty diverse group of fans. Art house audiences already knew and loved his work thanks to a breakout role in Downton Abbey. Meanwhile, the genre crowd already declared his 2014 film The Guest as one of the best John Carpenter movies to not actually be made by John Carpenter. And now, with Legion, Colossal, and Beauty and the Beast all set to hit our screens in the next few months, Stevens is on an upward trajectory that few actors can match.