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  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Anthony McCoy, a visual artist who moves into the gentrified Cabrini-Green neighborhood in Chicago. [credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures ]

With thought-provoking films like Get Out and Us , writer/director Jordan Peele has already cemented his status as a master of smart, socially relevant modern horror. His influence is even broader as a producer, bringing fresh voices, directorial visions, and diverse perspectives to a genre badly in need of all three. His latest production is Candyman , director Nia DaCosta 's imaginative sequel (of sorts) to the 1992 horror classic, Candyman . This is only DaCosta's second feature film, yet she handles the material with deft assurance, transforming the singular slasher known as Candyman into an ageless malevolence whose curse reverberates through time.

(Spoilers for the 1992 film below; mostly mild spoilers for the new film.)

As I've written previously , the original 1992 Candyman was based on the Clive Barker short story " The Forbidden ." The film starred Virginia Madsen as a Chicago graduate student in sociology/semiotics whose thesis deals with urban legends. She hears about a series of brutal murders in the Cabrini-Green public housing project. The killer is rumored to be the ghost of a late 19th-century artist named Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) who was lynched because he fathered an illegitimate child with a white woman. The mob cut off his right hand and smeared him with honey to attract bees to sting him to death before burning his corpse and scattering his ashes over what is now the project's grounds.

An ambitious young knight of King Arthur's Round Table makes an ill-advised bargain and embarks on a personal quest in the new trailer for The Green Knight , a forthcoming film by director David Lowery ( Pete's Dragon , A Ghost Story ) adapted from the famous 14th-century medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Originally meant to debut at the 2020 SXSW festival, with a May 2020 theatrical release, the film was shelved in the face of the global pandemic. With theaters slowly reopening around the country (and the world), The Green Knight is finally being released this summer.

(Spoilers for the 14th-century medieval poem below.)

The original poem falls into the chivalric romance genre, relating a well-known story from Arthurian legend. (I highly recommend J.R.R. Tolkien's translation from 1925 or Simon Armitage's 2008 translation, recently revised .) On New Year's Day, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table gather at Camelot to feast and exchange gifts. A mysterious Green Knight disrupts the festivities and proposes a different kind of exchange: any one of the knights may strike him with one blow with his axe; in return, the Green Knight will come back in a year to return the blow. Sir Gawain, the youngest of the knights and nephew to Arthur, accepts the challenge and beheads the Green Knight. Everyone is shocked when the Green Knight picks up his severed head. He says Gawain must meet him at the Green Chapel one year hence to receive a similar blow, per their bargain.

Tom Hardy ( Mad Max: Fury Road ) returns as intrepid reporter Eddie Brock, infected with a parasitic alien symbiote that gives him super powers, in Venom: There Will be Carnage. Directed by motion-capture icon Andy Serkis, it's the sequel to 2018's box-office smash, Venom . After being delayed for nearly a year due to the ongoing pandemic, Sony just dropped the official trailer, in which Brock/Venom must battle serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson, Zombieland ), infected with another alien symbiote dubbed Carnage.

( Some spoilers for first film below.)

A Venom film was in development at New Line Cinema back in 1997, although the project didn't really get off the ground until Sony acquired the rights to the character, as well as Spider-Man. Sony initially planned for Venom and Spider-Man to inhabit a shared universe, given their history in the comics. (Spider-Man was Venom's first host, before moving on to Brock, and the character gradually evolved from villain to more of an antihero.) The disappointing box office performance of 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 changed those plans, and Venom was re-conceived as a standalone film, with Tom Hardy signing on as the star and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer agreeing to direct.

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  Lewis Tan stars as Cole Young. [credit: YouTube/Warner Bros. ]

Warner Bros. has released the red-band trailer for its forthcoming Mortal Kombat reboot, which had long languished in development hell. A Russian-dubbed version of the trailer initially leaked on reddit, according to Eurogamer , before being pulled . It's basically a nonstop, blood-soaked fighting fest, featuring all the fan favorites from the popular video game franchise .

(Some spoilers for the games and earlier films below.)

Midway Games released the first Mortal Kombat game in 1992, which proved hugely influential for many a teenager who frequented video arcades during that era. There have been 11 main games and multiple spinoffs in the franchise thus far, all set in a fictional universe of eight different realms. The greatest warriors from the various realms must compete in a series of Mortal Kombat tournaments to conquer other realms.

A young couple fights to hold its relationship together in the midst of pandemic, where a memory loss virus is robbing everyone of their memories in Little Fish , a new science fiction romantic drama from IFC Films. Directed by Chad Hartigan , this thoughtful, genuinely moving film explores themes of memory, self, and the power of shared experiences to forge strong bonds between us, all through the lens of an otherwise average, ordinary Everycouple.

(Some spoilers below.)

The film is loosely based on a short story by Aja Gabel , about a young couple dealing with the man losing his memories in a fictional pandemic, although screenwriter Mattson Tomlin ( Project Power ) substantially rewrote and fleshed out this core idea. This was well before the current pandemic, but even in the Before Times of 2018, Hartigan was struck by the concept of the world metaphorically crumbling around two people who clung to optimism for the future—and each other. "We never could have imagined or predicted that this would be the case," Hartigan told Ars. "It always felt to me like an emotional story with a science fiction backdrop."