Steven Spielberg’s new film, a Russian family comedy, a prestige crime series and a Tom Hiddleston documentary about Pompeii give audiences plenty of options for the last weekend of summer.
Spielberg sends Emily Blunt to find the aliens
In the new Spielberg film, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a former cybersecurity expert at a shadowy agency called Wardex who goes on the run with his girlfriend (Eve Houston) after stealing classified files. The materials include footage purporting to show contact between American military personnel and extraterrestrials going back to the Roswell crash, and Wardex will do anything to keep the truth buried.
Meanwhile, a Kansas television weather presenter named Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) begins inexplicably speaking Russian and Korean without controlling herself and starts reading minds. When she goes on air, she produces strange clicking sounds instead of discussing rainfall. Doctors find nothing wrong, and she concludes she needs to find Kellner.
Spielberg has said the film is closer to fact than fiction. Among the secret materials is a purported video of President Richard Nixon showing actor Jackie Gleason the bodies of dead aliens. The alien appearance in the film is deliberately familiar, the source notes, because that look was supposedly leaked to the public by witnesses long ago. The film runs 2 hours 26 minutes and carries a rating of 6.2 on Kinopoisk.
Blunt flatly refused to use artificial intelligence to simulate the alien sounds her character makes, saying she is deeply afraid of AI. Instead she went to a recording studio and produced the clicking, clucking and guttural sounds herself. She also spent several months studying Russian and Korean with tutors for the role, and for a time listened only to music in those languages rather than English. To prepare to play a weather presenter, she spent time with working meteorologists.
Tom Hiddleston steps inside Pompeii
A three-part documentary mini-series puts Hiddleston inside cinematic reconstructions of the final 24 hours before Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD. Viewers follow the disaster through the eyes of a frightened teenager, a wealthy townswoman and a Praetorian soldier. Hiddleston works alongside archaeologists, geologists and disaster experts, with each episode running 44 minutes.
The makers used neural networks and DNA analysis to reconstruct everyday Roman life, and also expanded previously unreadable charred scrolls from Herculaneum. Scientists were able to study the diets of residents and found that ancient society was deeply concerned with inequality, health and quality of life.
Rather than conventional narration, Hiddleston steps directly into the reconstructed scenes, functioning as a kind of time detective watching the catastrophe from inside. The series also challenges the view that the destruction was inevitable, arguing that residents had a real chance of survival. Its focus, the source notes, is on human resilience and the importance of individual choice.
A cosmodrome kid arrives in St Petersburg
Russian family comedy Space Masha (12+), directed by Nikita Vladimirov, follows 11-year-old Masha (Azarell Senlis Lafey), who has spent her entire life at a cosmodrome with her father (Mikhail Troinik). She can fly a plane and drive a car and a boat, but has never made a friend her own age. When her father goes into orbit, she enrolls at an ordinary St Petersburg school and finds ordinary life far harder than anything at the launchpad. Classmates are unwelcoming, her grandmother (Tatyana Dogileva) ends up in hospital, and social services want to place her in a children’s home. The film runs 1 hour 38 minutes.
Vladimirov is the grandson of Soviet cinema legend Alisa Freindlikh and this is his fourth feature. The young lead actress underwent extensive preparation, training on a flight simulator and working with coaches on cartwheels and skateboarding. The film was conceived, the source notes, as a story about a child who carries a vast inner world but does not fit the usual social framework.
A kidnapping unravels a powerful family
The 12-part Russian crime series The Kidnapping (18+) follows a relentlessly demanding investigator, Vsevolod Kosinsky (Timofei Tribuntsev), and his partner Aglaiya Mezentseva (Marina Vasilyeva) as they investigate the disappearance of the five-year-old grandson of celebrated conductor Mark Krechetov (Artur Vakha). The boy vanished during a walk with his nanny (Evgenia Madzhieva), who suffered a blow to the head and lost her memory. Every member of the family turns out to have had a motive. The conductor’s son (Rinal Mukhametov) is addicted to controlled substances, his mother (Natalia Kurdyubova) is terminally ill and cannot stand her daughter-in-law (Isabelle Eidlen). Each episode runs 48 minutes.
Director Kirill Pletnev said he was drawn primarily to a script that puts human relationships ahead of the crime, with the investigation serving as a tool for revealing family complexity rather than as an end in itself. Pletnev also said he believed Tribuntsev’s performance as the investigator would enter acting textbooks.
