Happy New Year and happy watching! 2023 is off to a wonderfully demented start with the artificial intelligence horror film with Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN about a young girl who’s gifted a lifelike doll who quickly goes from friend to fiend. Christian Bale and Harry Melling team up as detective Augustus Landor and soon-to-be literary master of macabre Edgar Allan Poe for Scott Cooper’s dark and dismal mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye. If you are still craving some bleak content, look no further than the upcoming Anne Rice adaptation Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches that puts Alexandra Daddario at the center of a witchy situation. Plus, the series finale of George & Tammy, and series premieres of the Fox series Alert starring Scott Caan, the sports docu-series Boys in Blue on Showtime, and the Scottish oil rig mystery series The Rig on Prime Video.
Here’s a closer look at five exciting titles to check out on the big and small screens this weekend!
Copenhagen Cowboy
Release Date: January 5 on Netflix
Okay, cheating a little bit with this title because it was released earlier in the week, but Copenhagen Cowboy should definitely be on your radar this weekend. Created by Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde and Nicolas Winding Refn, the latter of whom directed Pusher, Drive, and The Neon Demon, this crime thriller follows Miu (Angela Bundalovic), a young heroine who’s ready to restore order to the sketchy underworld of Copenhagen. This dark yet colorful and stylish series also stars Andreas Lykke Jørgensen, Zlatko Buric, and Li Ii Zhang.
M3GAN
Release Date: January 6 in Theaters
Have you seen this thing dance? Produced by Jason Blum, horror mastermind behind Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Get Out, and Happy Death Day, and with a story by Saw and Malignant director James Wan comes M3GAN, the source of your nightmares. The sci-fi thriller follows Gemma (Allison Williams), a toy company roboticist who creates M3GAN (Amie Donald), an artificially intelligent child-sized doll to give to her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), who recently became orphaned. At first, M3GAN is everything a child and parent would want. Agreeable, sweet, attentive. However, this delightful demeanor does not last, and M3GAN not only becomes increasingly possessive, but also increasingly violent. But seriously, the dancing. What is that about?
The Pale Blue Eye
Release Date: January 6 on Netflix
Edgar Allan Poe: Poe-tic Detective? Writer-director Scott Cooper takes us back to New York’s Hudson Valley in 1830 to investigate a string of calculated murders. Based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name, The Pale Blue Eye follows Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a jaded detective who agrees to solve the mystery behind the hangings of cadets at the United States Military Academy in West Point. The code of silence at the academy makes it difficult for Augustus to make any substantial headway on the case, but thanks to the assistance of Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), an observant, vivacious, and artistic cadet at the academy, the pair works together to uncover the truth, forming an unlikely bond along the way.
Filmmaker Scott Cooper recently spoke with our very own Perri Nemiroff to detail Bale and Melling’s wildly different performances and how they both enhanced and informed the words on the page. “Their performances are so different as I mentioned. Christian’s is quite restrained and observant, and he isn’t giving anything, whereas Harry Melling’s portrayal, which is very accurate, is larger than life almost, and quite poetic, and exuberant.” Cooper also describes the film as an origin story of sorts for the macabre writer, who is quite exuberant in the film. “We have very entrenched ideas about who Edgar Allan Poe was, and that’s from later in life,” adding, “This is about who he was before, so it was really about understanding Harry’s tone.”
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches
Release Date: January 8 on AMC | AMC+
“Evil comes in many forms.” The Anne Rice universe is expanding! Last year, AMC debuted Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire gothic horror series starring Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid as vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt respectively, based on the popular 1976 novel of the same name. Now, Alexandra Daddario gets witchy in Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, a fantasy series about Dr. Rowan Fielding (Daddario), a woman whose carefully curated life is jeopardized when unexplainable and uncontrollable phenomena occur around. She isn’t overreacting. She’s actually the heiress to a family of witches and has generations of lurking evil to contend with in the form of Lasher (Jack Huston). The series, which was created for television by Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford, also stars Beth Grant, Harry Hamlin, Tongayi Chirisa, Jen Richards, and Hannah Alline.
George & Tammy (Series Finale)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKm8JWUbf4c
Release Date: January 8 on Showtime
Oscar winner Jessica Chastain and two-time nominee Michael Shannon have been country singing their hearts out for the last few weeks over on Showtime for the limited series George & Tammy. The historical drama recounts the powerful professional and romantic relationship that country legends George Jones (Shannon) and Tammy Wynette (Chastain) shared on and off-screen for a number of years as they contended with alcohol and drug abuse, intense fame, and toxic love. The sixth and final episode of the series explores the undeniable connection the singers share even a decade after their divorce, and how they handle it during one last tour together. Where does their love stand? Jessica Chastain was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her heartbreaking and impressive portrayal of the First Lady of Country Music.
New Episodes
Friday
The Mosquito Coast (Apple TV+)
Mythic Quest (Apple TV+)
The Rig (Series Premiere, Prime Video)
Boys in Blue (Series Premiere, Showtime)
BMF (Season 2 Premiere, Starz)
Fire Country (Season 1 Mid-Season Premiere, CBS)
S.W.A.T. (Season 6 Mid-Season Premiere, CBS)
Blue Bloods (Season 13 Mid-Season Premiere, CBS)
Lopez vs. Lopez (Season 1 Mid-Season Premiere, NBC)
Young Rock (Season 3 Mid-Season Premiere, NBC)
Sunday
Tulsa King (Paramount+)
The Simpsons (Fox)
Yellowstone (Season 5 Mid-Season Finale, Paramount Network)
The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime)
George & Tammy (Series Finale, Showtime)
1923 (Paramount+)
Alert (Series Premiere, Fox)
Miss Scarlet and the Duke (Season 3, PBS)
All Creatures Great and Small (Season 3, PBS)
NCIS: Los Angeles (Season 8 Mid-Season Premiere, CBS)
East New York (Season 1 Mid-Season Premiere, CBS)
Family Guy (Season 21 Mid-Season Premiere, Fox)
Bob’s Burgers (Season 13 Mid-Season Premiere, Fox)
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches (Series Premiere, AMC)
