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New trailers: Mythbusters’ spiritual successor, James Gunn’s gory thriller, and more

New trailers: Mythbusters’ spiritual successor, James Gunn’s gory thriller, and more

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The Belko Experiment

Maybe I'm just noticing it more right now, but several of the last two months’ biggest titles have all played with time in some really interesting ways. In Westworld, the timing of what we're seeing is one of the series' biggest mysteries. In The Handmaiden, replaying scenes creates tension as we watch events from a new perspective. And in Arrival, the flow of time ties together everything we've seen in unexpected ways.

Some of these twists and turns are more effective than others — Westworld's stubborn refusal to provide even a glimmer of clarity is a particularly odd choice — but they're all attempting to create this remarkable feeling of moments in life having multiple meanings, some we can't see at first, some we can't immediately understand, but all adding up to something greater later on. It can be a really wonderful effect; frustrating, but maybe a nice escape from 2016.

Check out nine trailers from this week below.

White Rabbit Project

Mythbusters may be over, but its spirt — and build team — live on over at Netflix. It's brought Kari Byron, Tory Belleci, and Grant Imahara back together again for White Rabbit Project, a new series that has them exploring strange questions in much the same way that they did over at Mythbusters. If you were a fan before, it looks like you'll be a fan here, too. The series premiers on December 9th.

The Belko Experiment

So what has James Gunn been up to since Guardians of the Galaxy? Writing and producing this absolutely insane horror movie about office workers getting locked in a building and being forced to kill one another. It looks ridiculous in all the right ways. It'll be out March 17th.

Sleight

Sleight premiered at Sundance nearly a year ago, and while it certainly wasn't the festival's biggest movie, it did walk away with some warm reviews — and this first teaser hints at what people seem to have liked about it. The film is about a kid who makes Tony Stark-like gadgets to pull off some wild “magic” tricks, which eventually seem to be put to some much less conventional uses. It comes out April 7th.

Big Little Lies

Big Little Lies, otherwise known as the show with commercials you have to fast-forward through before Westworld, finally has a proper trailer out — and there's a lot to like. The miniseries is about a group of rich, cliquey women who seemingly end up killing someone. The cast is fantastic (Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, and so on), and it's all directed by the same person who did Dallas Buyers Club. The series starts February 19th.

Lost and Beautiful

I don't even have the slightest idea what this is, but I think I really like it. The film came out last year in Italy and begins opening in limited showings in the US this month.

Spectral

NETFLIX MADE A MOVIE ABOUT GHOST SOLDIERS. This is like if that one battle from Return of the King was even longer and also in the future. This is like if a video game accidentally was made as a movie. Oh wait, you know what this is like? This is like if a marketing executive said, “Oh no, that country can’t be the villain because we want to screen the film there. I wonder what else we could— my God, I have it.”

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

This starts out looking like a campy horror film but very quickly turns into something that seems much much creepier — it’s sort of like an escape room, if the room was a morgue, the clues were inside a corpse, and also the corpse was probably an evil-spirit-zombie-white-walker-thing. It’ll be out December 20th.

Mad Shelia

Apparently someone decided to remake Mad Max: Fury Road in Chinese... and it kind of looks great? Okay fine, it's completely ridiculous. But there's something really fun about how its low-budget effects sort of make it look like what would have happened if Fury Road were done in the style of the original Mad Max.

Riverdale

I swear to you: this is a sexy teen Archie TV show. I don't know why.