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."

Enlarge / Tom Sturridge has snagged the coveted role of Dream, aka Morpheus, in the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman . (credit: DC Comics)

At long last, Netflix has announced several cast members for its hotly anticipated adaptation of Neil Gaiman's award-winning graphic novel series Sandman . As Deadline Hollywood reports , Tom Sturridge ( Being Julia, Pirate Radio ) snagged the coveted role of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, while Game of Thrones alums Gwendoline Christie and Charles Dance will play a gender-swapped Lucifer and the charlatan magician Roderick Burgess, respectively.

(Mild spoilers for the graphic novel series below.)

As we've reported previously , the titular "sandman" is Dream, aka Morpheus, among other names. He is one of seven entities known as the Endless, and he is seeking to set right his past mistakes. The other Endless are Destiny, Destruction, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death, portrayed as a perky punk/goth young woman. They became almost as popular as Dream himself (especially Death) and were featured in several spinoff comics.  The series opens when Morpheus, the King of Dreams, escapes from a 70-year imprisonment by an occultist (who actually wanted to capture Dream's sibling Death but trapped the Sandman by mistake).

Disney has released the official full trailer for its upcoming animated film, Raya and the Last Dragon , with Kelly Marie Tran and Awkwafina voicing the titular characters. It has the distinction of being the first Disney animated feature to be remotely developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, working with home equipment and mostly communicating via Zoom. The pandemic also caused the film's release date to be shifted multiple times. It's now slated for a March 5 release, both in theaters and on Disney+ with premier access.

Disney first announced the film during its 2019 D23 Expo and presented co-directors Don Hall ( Big Hero 6 , Moana ) and Carlos Lopez Estrada ( Frozen II , Blindspotting ) at D23 the following year. The fictional fantasy land of Kumandra was inspired by several different Southeast Asian cultures—Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Laos, and the Philippines—and the production team traveled extensively to most of those countries to research the film. A Lao visual anthropologist also reviewed the final designs.

Per the official synopsis:

Enlarge / Omar Sy stars as Assane Diop, looking every bit the contemporary version of Arsène Lupin, famed French fictional gentleman thief. (credit: Netflix )

Netflix has kicked off 2021 with a bang, thanks to its new series, Lupin , starring French actor and comedian Omar Sy. This delightful contemporary reimagining of a classic character in French detective fiction, Arsène Lupin —a gentleman thief and master of disguise who was essentially the French equivalent of Sherlock Holmes—is a massive hit. According to Deadline Hollywood , Lupin is on track to top 70 million households in its first 28 days of release, beating out two other recent Netflix smash hits, Bridgerton (63 million households) and The Queen's Gambit (62 million households).

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

As I've written previously , Arsène Lupin is the creation of Maurice Leblanc , who based the character partly on a French burglar/anarchist . Leblanc was also familiar with the gentleman thief featured in the work of Octave Mirbeau as well as E.W. Hornung's famed gentleman thief, A.J. Raffles , and he also knew about Rocambole , a character whose adventures were recounted in a series of stories published between 1857 and 1870 by Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail.

Apple TV+ has dropped the trailer for the second season of For All Mankind , its science fiction drama about an alternate history where the space race never ended. The series was the linchpin of the Apple TV+ launch in 2019, and proved popular enough with viewers to warrant a second season.

(Some spoilers for the first season below.)

Series creator Ronald D. Moore ( Battlestar Galactica ) has made a point of trying to keep the show reasonably close to reality, despite the science fiction concept, often consulting the original NASA plans for guidance, and incorporating archival footage throughout the season. Moore said the following during a 2019 panel Q&A after an IMAX screening of the first two S1 episodes at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC:

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  Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is a half-human, half-witch teenager facing the coming of the Eldritch Terrors. [credit: Netflix ]

Our favorite half-human/half witch teenager took on eight timeless menacing entities to avert the apocalypse (again) in the final season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina . I've championed this weirdly captivating supernatural horror show from the beginning, and for three seasons the strengths have always outshone the occasional weakness. Unfortunately, S4 turned out to be the weakest of all, despite including one of the best episodes of the entire Netflix series, and what should have been a strong unifying narrative arc. It's still pretty entertaining, but there was just a little too much pointless fan service and sloppy plotting this time around for S4 to really work.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below. Major spoilers for the series finale are below the second gallery. We'll give you a heads up before we get there.)

As we've reported previously, the show was originally intended as a companion series to the CW's Riverdale —a gleefully Gothic take on the original Archie comic books—but Sabrina ended up on Netflix instead. The show retains some of the primetime soap opera elements of Riverdale, but it incorporates more full-blown horror without bowing to the niceties imposed by network television. As I wrote last year, "Ultimately, the best thing about The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is how gleefully and unapologetically the show leans into its melting pot of the macabre. It's quite the high-wire act, exploring serious themes while never, ever taking itself too seriously—and never descending into outright camp."

Enlarge / The second season of His Dark Materials , starring Dafne Keen as Lyra Belacqua, concluded just before the new year. (credit: BBC/HBO)

The first season of His Dark Materials , the BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman's classic fantasy trilogy, had its share of critics, particularly with regard to its sluggish pacing. Fortunately, those shortcomings have been successfully addressed in the riveting second season. Freed from the creative burden of establishing an elaborate fictional world for viewers unfamiliar with the books, S2 was a briskly paced, yet still emotionally resonant experience, despite being one episode short because of pandemic-related production difficulties. Ruth Wilson's fiercely feral portrayal of the complicated Mrs. Coulter remains a highlight, and the heartbreaking season finale perfectly set the stage for the final showdown of S3, which has already been greenlighted by the studios.

(S1 spoilers below; also some S2 spoilers below the gallery, especially for audiences who haven't read the books.)

As we've written previously, the three books in Pullman's series are The Golden Compass (published as Northern Lights in the UK), The Subtle Knife , and The Amber Spyglass . They follow the adventures of a 12-year-old girl named Lyra, who lives in a fictional version of Oxford, England, circa the Victorian era. Everyone has a companion daemon in the form of an animal—part of their spirit that resides outside the body—and Lyra's is named Pantalaimon. Lyra uncovers a sinister plot that sends her on a journey to find her father in hopes of foiling said plot. That journey takes her to different dimensions (the fictional world is a multiverse) and ultimately to her own coming of age.

A drone pilot is sent into a deadly militarized zone where he finds himself working for an android officer tasked with averting a doomsday scenario in Outside the Wire , the latest high-profile feature film from Netflix. This one stars Anthony Mackie as the android protagonist, fresh off his stunning performance in the sci-fi indie film Synchronic (included in our roundup last month of the best films released in 2020). That, and Netflix's solid track record with its feature films, are reason enough to be intrigued.

Per the official synopsis:

In 2036, America serves as a peacekeeping force and human troops on both sides are supported by robot combatants called Gumps and drone pilots monitoring skirmishes from thousands of miles away. But after headstrong drone pilot Lieutenant Harp (Damson Idris) disobeys a direct order to intervene in a conflict, the Army deploys him to a military outpost to confront the human costs of his button-pushing.

Harp's expectations of guarding a fence are upended when his new commanding officer Captain Leo (Anthony Mackie) announces plans to infiltrate the demilitarized zone and apprehend Viktor Koval (Pilou Asbæk), a warlord who intends to launch a network of dormant nuclear weapons. Soon, Harp learns that his theoretical experience as a drone pilot means little out on the battlefield under enemy attack—especially after discovering that Leo is an A.I.-enhanced supersoldier whose strength, speed and demand for results promise to turn his real-world education into a trial by fire.

That pretty much sums it up. The trailer opens with Harp showing up for his reassignment, apparently because he has trouble following the rules—or, as Leo (the classified prototype supersoldier) prefers to think of it, an ability to "think outside the box." A bit of a buddy-cop vibe separates the two, with Leo teasing his subordinate about the mushy inscription on the back of Harp's girlfriend's photo ("Awwww... 'my gummi bear....'"). We learn that Leo is capable of human emotion despite his extensive combat training (or, er, programming), and has a neat trick of temporarily removing his tracker when he wants to go off the grid ("Sometimes you got to get dirty to see any real change"). Then the fisticuffs, property damage, and explosions kick in.

Enlarge / TV stepped in to fill the pandemic-fueled gap in new movie releases with a broad array of entertaining series. (credit: Photo collage by Aurich Lawson)

Warning: This story includes major spoilers for the series finale of The Good Place . Although we’ve otherwise done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list includes specific references to The Mandalorian , The Flight Attendant , Lovecraft Country , The Boys S2, Star Trek: Lower Decks , and The Queen's Gambit , among others.

This was the year that going to the movies suddenly became a rare event. As we observed in our roundup of the best films in 2020 , "The pandemic has ransacked reliable sources of new films, like theaters and film festivals. And any number of major titles we may have looked forward to on January 1, 2020 (from Dune to Top Gun ) have instead chosen to push back by at least 12 months." Fortunately, TV was there to pick up the slack and keep pandemic-weary viewers entertained at home with more quality content than ever before—much of it from streaming platforms rather than traditional broadcast television.

It's a trend that has been building for some time, but the streaming wars are now in full swing. Just two broadcast offerings made our year-end list, although CBS' streaming platform, CBS All Access, made its mark with two of its Star Trek franchise programs. Netflix dominates with nine entries, followed by HBO/HBO Max (5), Amazon (3), and Disney+/ESPN+ (2), with Hulu/FX getting a category all its own. Heck, even YouTube gets a nod this year with Philadelphia Sixers Matisse Thybulle's series of videos documenting life in the NBA bubble.