There has never been a better time to love gaming and Lego, with the brick building company continuing to partner with the great and good in the field. We've seen a Lego NES, Atari 2600, Sega Mega Drive and Game Boy over the last few years, and now there's something special to add to that list.

The Lego PlayStation is a faithful recreation of Sony's original machine – the console that effectively changed the whole industry. Having reviewed the original on its release in the 90s, I am of the firm belief that it marked the time when gaming grew up.

Games like WipEout, with its hardcore dance soundtrack, saw consoles find their way into clubs for young adults. It widened the audience and gaming has never looked back since.

Its shape and styling is also iconic, and thus the new Lego set is as great to look at as it undoubtedly will be to build.

Hidden under the disc tray and around the sides of the finished build are dioramas and Easter eggs that nod back to the console's glorious games (such as Ape Escape and Gran Turismo).

There are other nices touches too, such as controllers that use similar connectivity shapes to the original DualShocks. And a reassuringly clicky power button.

The set is also reasonably priced in comparison with some of the other retro console builds we've seen. It'll be available from Lego's own website from 4 October 2026 for just £139.99 / $179.99.

Lego Insiders will be able to order it a touch earlier, on 1 October, while it'll be available on the official PlayStation store around that time too.

All you need to do in the meantime is figure out where you'll display it. At 1,911 pieces, it should fit in a compact area. But just you wait until the Lego PlayStation 5 arrives somewhere down the line.

I'll admit up front that this isn't a compunction that applies to everyone out there, but the simple fact is that when a massive streaming service announces an adaptation of a classic novel I haven't read, I go into fight or flight mode. I'm a big reader, and I have a rule that I'll almost always read the source novel before I watch any adaptation, since the original is almost always the best.

Well, Netflix is putting me in quite a spot with its latest big-budget series, starring none other than Florence Pugh. It's an adaptation of East of Eden, a classic by John Steinbeck (he of Grapes of Wrath), and crucially I haven't read it. The series arrives on 1 October, which really doesn't give me long to get up to speed, given it's an objectively chunky novel.

Frankly, the start of October is way too soon for me to readjust my to-read pile, so I'm a sunk before I've even begun, which means I now have a secondary objective – showcase this series for you without accidentally spoiling a quite old novel for myself. Here's what I know for sure:

East of Eden is a massive story that spans the generations of an unhappy family, the Trask clan, in their relationships and fortunes. It famously has one of literatures great villains, if you're to believe at least some of those who've read it – Cathy. Now, though, writer and showrunner Zoe Kazan is reframing this long-established story and telling it moreso through Cathy's eyes.

That means that a story that might (perhaps) have previously served to demonise Cathy, not without some reason, might now instead serve to humanise her. We'll get more interiority from her, and you'd be hard pressed to argue with casting Pugh, who's already demonstrated a huge amount of range in her career.

Crucially, she's also something of a star, so Netflix will be hoping that she drawns in a crowd for what otherwise could be mistaken for a pretty traditional slice of programming. Honestly, if you want more details than that I'd recommend heading to Wikipedia or some other source to see plot information – that's a sacrifice I'm not willing to make right now!

Here in the UK we've just enjoyed a long weekend thanks to the late-August bank holiday, which means it's a shorter week than usual. Thankfully, though, Prime Video and Netflix have both stepped up to the plate with a pretty interesting slate of additions through the rest of the week, in case you're wondering what you'll be watching in the evenings to come.

In fact, as a trio of additions, these will make for one of the highest-profile weeks I can remember from Netflix and Prime Video in a joint capacity. If you're a subscriber to either (and they're both among the best streaming services going), then you'll probably want to check out the highlights below. Each is showcased with a trailer and its release date for your convenience!

The Gentlemen Season 2

• Streaming on: Netflix from 3 September

Guy Ritchie has found a real renaissance in a TV career, although that's not to say he's done with movies by a long stretch. The Gentlemen proved with its first season that his snappy dialogue and fast action can work terrifically when elongated over the course of more time for streaming, and now it's back for a second season that promises to be a big deal for Netflix.

The show will return to the story of Theo James' reluctant drug kingpin, a Duke who found himself inheriting a weed empire last time around. Now he's fully used to the idea and indeed the market, he's starting to get ideas about expansion, and that means conflict. Expect dirty dealing and plenty of action when this drops midweek.

The Runner

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 2 September

If you want a thriller that's open and shut in a couple of hours, rather than offering up an entire season of episodes to get through, then you might want to turn to Prime Video this week for The Runner. This Gal Gadot film is a one-off release and looks like it could spin a really quite entertaining yarn through the streets of London.

Gadot plays a bigshot lawyer whose life gets put in the tumble dryer when her son is kidnapped. The criminals want to change the outcome of her biggest case (which is ongoing) and they're happy to force her into submission with twisted theats. She'll have to run through some crazy sequences to keep her son safe, and it looks like pretty hair-raising stuff.

The Grand Tour

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 4 September

One of the biggest early swings that Prime Video took was poaching Top Gear's talent after the implosion of that show on the BBC, and repackaging it into The Grand Tour. Now that era's over and there'd been some anticipation building about what would follow it. The answer? Francis Bourgeois. It's not just the trainspotting sensation, though, but also YouTube powerhouses from Throttle House.

The show will be pretty fascinating to observe, with the chemistry of those three new faces being key to its potential success. Either way, this season looks really high-budget and globetrotting, which is basically the whole point of a motoring show like The Grand Tour. Prime Video will be hoping this is the start of something huge.

Every month is a big month when you're one of the biggest and best streaming services on the planet – and Netflix most certainly ticks both of those boxes. It knows that it has to keep up a steady cadence of releases if it wants to keep its subscribers locked in, which means never having a slow month.

So, now that we're looking down both barrels at September, you might be wondering what's coming down the pike from Netflix this month. Well, it's good news, since this is going to be a really busy few weeks on the streamer, with some of its biggest shows dropping new seasons, and some very intriguing brand-new additions, too. You'll find the five key highlights below with trailers and release dates.

The Gentlemen Season 2

• Streaming from: 3 September

Guy Ritchie created something of a sensation when he took the British gangster material he's best known for, and transplanted it into a longer-form TV setting. The result was a blockbuster hit for Netflix, and it's absolutely no surprise to see it get a swift second season.

The Duke (Theo James) is back and he's just as keen as ever to keep his weed empire on top of the various other criminal cartels he's so far interacted with. In fact, the more experienced he gets, the more he seems likely to start lashing out at those who think they can control him. The stage is set for him to start some hostile takeovers, and the trailers we've seen suggest the show will go from strength to strength.

Crew Girl

• Streaming from: 10 September

Another guaranteed hit for Neflix comes in the form of Crew Girl, which takes the tried-and-true format of high school sports and romance blended together. This makes it probable a little tamer than the more mature Off Campus, which was set at college, but there's still every chance that things will get pretty heated in this one.

Crew Girl makes rowing its sport of choice, which is a great excuse to put its lead characters in skintight aerodynamic rowing suits. Our main character Teagan is new to a high-end school, but has a talent that takes her right into the men's rowing squad as their new cox, and which also fires up an almost immediate love triangle.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

• Streaming from: 17 September

Netflix is making a real thing of its Monster shows, which dramatise real-life killings and give us a look at the psychology of the world-famous killers in question. This time around it's Lizzie Borden, a famous potential axe-murderer whose case has long lived in the collective imagination of Americans (she's less famous here in the UK).

We'll get to see her domestic environment and the challenging situation she lived in, all with a huge dose of creative license. Since this story is from well before the time of TV news or documentary footage, expect this to be the loosest and potentially most colourful Monster yet.

Unabomber

• Streaming from: 25 September

Jacob Tremblay became a sensation for starring in Room as just a precocious 8-year-old, but now he's 19 and getting to choose his own projects – and Unabomber is definitely an interesting choice. He'll star as the eponymous bomber in his younger days, giving us a look at the origins of a man who did terrible things.

The show itself, though, will seemingly jump into two timelines. In one we'll see the bomber's adolescence, and in the other we'll follow the enormous manhunt that eventually located him, with the perspective of police but also at times his victims. Expect some harrowing stuff, but what a treat of a month for true-crime fans.

Stranger Things: Tales From '85 Season 2

• Streaming from: 17 September

Although the first season didn't get the most rave write-ups from critics, it clearly got enough viewers for Netflix to keep going with this animated spin-off from Stranger Things. Where the show got darker and darker as it unfolded, this one stays a lot lighter and promises more concise stories, too.

It has a really fun art style that emphasises the character of all the gang's faces, and gives us a bit more time to get to know some of those who only joined it after a season or two. If you loved your time in Hawkins and want some more of that nostalgic vibe, this could be perfect for you.

September is one of those months that sometimes feels like the start of autumn, but in other years can very much just be a dose of late summer vibes. Who knows which it'll be for you this year, but you're guaranteed one thing, at least – a significant set of additions to Prime Video if you're a subscriber.

Amazon knows that it can't rest on its laurels where new content is concerned, since the only way it'll keep the subscriber numbers it needs is if it can keep adding new stuff on a regular basis. To that end, it's got an impressive month in the planning, with new series and movies on the way. I've gathered five that you should know about, with trailers and release dates for your convenience.

Neagley Season 1

• Streaming from: 16 September

You know a show's done exceptionally well for its creators when it gets a spinoff, and that's what Neagley is to Reacher, the uber-popular Prime Video show based on Lee Child's long-running series of mystery novels. This series will focus on Reacher's old colleague and sometime ally Frances Neagley (Maria Sten).

She's always been a cold and calculated operator, and part of what's so fun about her character is that it's heavily implied that she gets up to plenty of mischief in Reacher's absences between their interchanges. So, this time around we'll get to watch as she gets entangled with some proper wrong'uns before inevitably sorting them out (violently).

The Runner

• Streaming from: 2 September

Gal Gadot stars in a London-set movie that looks heavily inspired by films like Run Lola Run and others, as a mother who's about to participate in a huge legal case but finds her life turned upside down by a conspiracy surrounding it. On her morning run the day of a big moment in the trial, her son's kidnapped.

She's forced to follow instructions to avoid harm to her child, and that takes her down some dark paths. It looks like this will be a textbook fast-paced thriller that will only ramp up the action as it goes on. Whether Gadot can finally score a hit after a string of iffy streaming releases will be very interesting to observe right at the start of the month.

The Grand Tour

• Streaming from: 4 September

A show that's gone through a few different iterations for Prime Video gets its most radical transformation yet with an all-new crew helming it, including the really interesting swing that is Francis Bourgeois, who became so famous for his viral trainspotting antics. He's also a proper motorhead, though, so will hopefully undercut the blokishness of everything.

He's going to be joined by James Engelsman and Thomas Holland, creators of YouTube's Throttle House, and the key will be whether they have chemistry as a trio. If so, then the motoring antics of this season could secure a long future for the show as a globetrotting showcase of all the makes cars great.

The Love Hypothesis

• Streaming from: 23 September

This charming romance has a really classic hook at its centre – what if two colleagues pretended to be in a relationship for reasons of their own, but started to fall for each other as they spent more time together? It's really quite a clever idea to kick things off, but it too will thrive or shrivel depending on the on-screen chemistry.

The film will star Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith opposite Tom Bateman as Adam Carlsen, her boss in the lab she's studying in. That makes even their fake romance a little dramatic, but that's nothing compared to the drama they'll cook up once they start to catch feelings. This looks like a great cozy September watch.

Drawn Together

• Streaming from: 9 September

If you want your romance to be just that little bit steamier, then perhaps this is the one for you, earlier in September. A Spanish-language movie, its main character Marfil Cortés is born into a life of privilege. That's shattered when she's kidnapped then released mysteriously, which ends up with her needing a bodyguard.

What do you know, though, he's a beauty himself and there's immediate sexual tension between them. It's another fairly textbook setup for romance, but there might be some major twists in the plotting eventually, if Drawn Together has anything like the inventiveness you'd hope for.

Prime Video has made it pretty clear over the last couple of years that it has every intention of being the steamiest streamer on the market – at least in mainstream terms. From My Fault to Off Campus, it's already delivered multiple heaping servings of romance, but there seems to be no end to either the demand or its ability to supply it.

The latest in that long lineup looks like it could be a hit even by the inflated standards of Prime Video and Netflix. The Love Hypothesis has a classic, inventive twist at its heart, and looks like a potentially excellent rom-com that errs on the steamier side. That positions it to be quite a hit for Prime Video when it arrives on 23 September.

Lili Reinhart stars in the movie as Olive Smith, a gifted PhD student who finds herself in some complicated territory in an attempt to help her friend find the right partner. Convinced that she needs a fake boyfriend of her own to reassure her bestie that it's okay to shack up with someone, Olive kisses the first man she sees – not realising until too late that it's her boss: Tom Bateman as Dr. Adam Carlsen.

He's a character so stiff and formal that Olive and the other PhD students have seemingly nicknamed him "Dr. Evil", but that doesn't stop him from agreeing to her furtive proposal. He needs an apparent partner to make his department realise that he's committed to the university, so it's possibly a win-win for both their aims.

If that all sounds like a fairly classic setup for a rom-com, you'd be right – it's a meet-cute of classic proportions, and a textbook way to set up some funny situations. The two of them will have to mug their way through various performances for their friends and colleagues, all while they inevitably start to fall for each other despite themselves.

The movie probably ends in a way that you can predict, but that's the fun of a rom-com – it's all about the journey, as well as the destination. The Love Hypothesis is also based on a best-selling novel, so it's likely to be impressively well-plotted. You'll be able to find out for yourself in a few weeks, though.

I'm sorry, but there are some rules that just shouldn't be broken. Whether it's the order you put your jam and cream on a scone, or whether you put your loo roll on so it falls over or under the holder, there are things you just know are right, and when Apple unveiled a new series called 12 12 12 I had a similar type of certainty.

The moment I saw that numerical title, and the fact that its first teaser trailer was nothing more than a "date announcement", I just knew in my soul that this would be a fun one – with the series premiering on 12 December, to make it 12 12 12 on 12/12. Then Apple went ahead and decided to ruin my day by launching it on 13 November.

Now, I'm obviously not saying that Apple is obliged to follow my personal instructions to the letter when it comes to the release schedule of a show that it doubtless spent millions to make. Still, I can't quite believe it's ignored the potential for one of the most satisfying release dates of all time, especially to get the show out just a month before that point.

Regardless, you might be curious about what 12 12 12 is actually about. The title of the show refers to a theory that a great heist takes 12 months of planning and 12 hours to execute. That third 12 refers to the idea that any robber who hasn't been caught inside 12 days is unlikely to ever be apprehended for their crime. It's all explained by Anthony Mackie's character in the very brief trailer.

He seems to be explaining the theory to Jamie Dornan, the other lead in the show, although at this stage we're in the dark about which one of them will play the criminal and which one will be law enforcement. Apple says the show will play out across three timelines, suggesting it'll be a zippy and fun watch that jumps around in time to keep audiences guessing about how it'll end.

Still, I'm going to remain hung up on that release date fumble for quite some time – we really could have been celebrating one of the best release day timings ever. We'll doubtless see more of 12 12 12 in the next month, though, as Apple builds the hype.

I've been having a lot of fun this year with my '4K Blu-ray Club' New Year's Resolution, which has seen me buy a new or classic movie on the best-quality physical format to watch each month.

Having missed Toy Story 5 at the cinema during its summertime run, and as a long-time fan of the series – there's not a bad one, which is good innings! – I was pleased to see that it would get a proper physical release.

That includes a 4K Blu-ray edition (backed by a Blu-ray in the box, too), for the utmost quality. Disney Pixar isn't messing around with this one, either, as the disc – I'm told by a trusted T3 freelancer – is a 100GB mega-capacity, to ensure the absolute best quality and lowest compression.

For a CG-rendered movie like Toy Story 5 that capacity is going to mean a whole lot. Expect the brightest colours, the smoothest gradations, and biting detail in this high dynamic range (HDR) presentation – best viewed with one of the best OLED TVs.

Sure, I could watch Toy Story 5 right now via streaming – it's available at various outlets in its pay-for format, ahead of its arrival on Disney+ later down the line – but I'm happy to pay for the ownership, for that utmost quality. The disc will hands-down beat the streaming services.

The disadvantage, of course, is that physical media arrives later. The US release in Steelbook format will hit the shelves on 22 September – almost a month after the digital release. Here in the UK, however, Amazon is telling me that me pre-order will arrive on 12 October, so even later.

That'll add to the anticipation, though, so I'm happy to wait it out. There are a batch of featurettes on the disc, too, which tend to be better on physical releases – I said the same of the Project Hail Mary 4K Blu-ray, too, which was also well worth waiting for.

We're living in a time when, despite the enormous spending power and production capacity of the biggest and best streaming services, many of the biggest shows in the world take years out between seasons. Whether it's House of the Dragon or Stranger Things, we're all used to these huge gaps, making it quite a pleasant surprise when a network like HBO manages to avoid them.

Sure, House of the Dragon might be a bit of a crawl, but in The Pitt the network has discovered a format that it can make reliably and to a high quality, on an annual schedule. That's been proven by the release of a teaser trailer for the show's third season, ahead of its premiere in January 2027, exactly a year after the second season.

The trailer confirms much of what we would already suspect about the show's return – namely, that Dr Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) is coming back after his extended break from the emergency room, which started at the end of the second season. He left that shift looking like basically a broken man, so it'll be interesting to see whether the show brings him back in the same state, or feeling more resilient.

Don't bet against the former, though, since he does look mighty harrowed in the glimpses we get of him during the trailer. We also get to see brief looks at some of the other central members of the cast, and from their new hairstyles and appearances I think it's a safe bet that Robby's been gone for longer than was first anticipated when he booked his time off.

Given that the last two seasons both showcased shifts where things went hugely sideways at a certain point (one because of a mass shooter event, the other because of power failure), we're almost certainly going to get another disaster of some sort. I'm hoping that the show can keep things realistic, though, and perhaps give us a little more time to breathe this time around.

I've really enjoyed both seasons of The Pitt, but can't help but feel that the medical side of the show is stronger than the more personal writing, which can sometimes be a little blunt and direct. Still, when we get it reliably once a year, and with the pace that it offers in its drama, it's hard to hate on it much – here's to more shows that can actually be produced at this cadence.

Last month, the 1993 cult classic thriller, Falling Down, was released on a limited edition 4K Blu-ray – and I have finally now got around to watching this home cinema gem.

This is an upgrade far from ordinary, with Arrow Films working with cinematographer, Andrzej Bartkowiak, for an approved restoration from the original 35mm film negative.

It's presented in 4K high dynamic range (in Dolby Vision and HDR10 flavours) and is closest to its original theatrical release – dropping the muddy, colour-cast of the 2009 Blu-ray transfer.

Even more special is that you cannot view this 4K version via the best streaming services. Those are pay-for and revert to the older HD version with stereo sound, marking this Limited Edition disc out as extra special.

Falling Down 4K remastered trailer

Cult classic – with lasting relevance

Falling Down is arguably Michael Douglas' finest portrayal in his acting career. Not that the movie achieved any Oscar nominations – it wasn't mainstream enough for that – but it paints a visceral picture of one man's spiralling psychopathic journey.

Douglas plays an unnamed character – best referred to as 'D-Fens', reflecting his car's licence plate – who, amid the sizzling heat of downtown Los Angeles, abandons his vehicle in traffic and decides he's "going home".

The 'home' to which he refers, however, is no home of his at all. It's that of his ex-wife – who he abused, leading to their divorce – and young daughter, who he so desperately wants to see. Which is where director, Joel Schumacher, creates this push-and-pull tension in the way we view D-Fens – he's both villain and hero.

Having watched the movie a number of times previously, I still find it profoundly relevant today. Its portrayal of gangland violence, of domestic abuse, of neo-Nazi racists, of corporate society, still hits head-on – in the 33 years since the movie's original release, nothing has really changed.

Yet among such dark issues explored – however fleetingly – Falling Down's characters and dialogue sometimes venture into comedy, ensuring the movie succeeds in being entertaining, not just a one-way descent into Douglas' progressive mania.

Economically viable

It's never looked or sounded better either. With the 4K Blu-ray disc loaded into my PlayStation 5 and fired up on my best OLED TV, from the very moment the pin-sharp sweat on Douglas' lip is shown, Falling Down's latest remaster looks superb.

It sounds good, too, with a 4.0 surround – that's a quadrophonic setup, with front left, front right, rear left, rear right – really relaying the viewer's experience as being in Douglas' shoes. You're right there with him along this whole journey, whether you like it or not – and my Bose surround system made that clear.

Extras include previous audio commentary (from director Joel Schumacher, editor Paul Hirsch, screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith, and more), plus brand new interviews with screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith and, separately, composer James Newton Howard.

A mini-featurette, Going Home, also highlights the real-life Los Angeles locations used in the movie, revisited today – and, again, cementing that ongoing relevance that the movie possesses.

Falling Down has an 84% rating on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing. It's a strong score for a strong movie – one that has stood the test of time as a cult classic, but has just as much relevance now as it did then. And in this Arrow Films 4K Blu-ray remaster it's never looked or sounded better for home cinema viewing.

I say this every week, but it never stops being true – there's no such thing as a slow week in the world of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, two titans of the streaming world. Each platforms knows it needs constant additions to hold people's interest, let alone their hard-earned subscription cash.

That means that nary a week goes by without them both adding something pretty interesting to their respective libraries. This is a great example, too, with Netflix adding one of its biggest new series of the year, and Prime Video serving up some properly steamy romance – two shows that are sure to be hits. Check them out, with one surprise extra, below, along with trailers and release dates.

The Whisper Man

• Streaming on: Netflix from Friday 28 August

This dark thriller, based on a best-selling novel, has a pretty stacked central cast, in the form of Adam Scott, Robert De Niro and Michelle Monaghan. It looks impressively twisty and unpredictable, too, with a plot that revolves around the question of what would happen if a notorious serial killer, imprisoned for life, somehow got out and started out for revenge.

The show theorises that he'd probably go after the family of the cop who put him in prison – and in this case that means taking on his son, since De Niro plays the older retired cop, and Adam Scott is his estranged adult child. Watch the trailer and you'll get a pretty quick sense of how the movie's going to feel to watch, which is to say, grimy and scary.

The Last Sunrise

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from Wednesday 26 August

If you want something a little more encouraging to pick you up midweek, then Amazon's got a romance that could do the trick. The Last Sunrise is also a movie, so it's a one-off binge to fill an evening, and stars Maia Reficco as Ry, a young American who relocates to Spain with her mother in the hope that it could help her chronic illness.

She discovers a coastal wonderland that promises a whole heap, along with a specific boy who she can't help but be magnetised towards. Their relationship will start out testily thanks to her outsider status, but it clearly won't take long for them to fall for each other, even despite some complications.

All the Truth in My Lies

• Streaming on: Netflix from Friday 28 August

This one won't capture the same number of eyes and headlines as the other two on my list for the week, but it still looks like a pretty charming addition to Netflix's library. It's a five-episode miniseries in Spanish, portraying the chaotic hen party of a bride with her friendship group. What's meant to be a campervan trip in a small group soon balloons past that.

As new additions join the party and love triangles start to take centre stage, this looks like a fun exploration of how relationships and friendships change as we age. I think it's a safe bet that it'll end in a heartwarming way, even if there's some emotional strife on the way to that conclusion.

Netflix has made a whole heap of original productions in the last decade, starting from a modest position and rapidly growing into one of the biggest TV producers in the world. Now it has its fingers in all sorts of pies, including the ability to make genuinely brilliant animated shows like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Blue Eye Samurai.

With that first show getting a second season very soon, it's fitting that Netflix has taken this opportunity to also unveil a second outing for Blue Eye Samurai, one that takes the story in a really interesting new direction. The first teaser trailer dropped this week, and makes it clear that you can expect new things from the new material when it arrives in early 2027.

The show's taking a big swing by putting its main character Mizu in a whole new world – as she travels from Japan all the way to London, in search of answers and the continuation of her path of revenge. She continuing to hunt down the white men who ruined her young life, and this time she's going to have to do so in unfamiliar environments.

The teaser actually shows us very little of that, of course – it gives us a glimpse of the London skyline and confirms that Mizu is on her way there, but is more concerned with the harrowing voyage she'll take to actually make it. This will clearly involve a huge storm and a near-death experience on the high seas, but we can only assume she'll make it through.

While animated shows can sometimes be niche pursuits for the best streaming services, Blue Eye Samurai became a huge critical and audience darling – its Rotten Tomatoes scores prove that point. Critics gave it 97% on average, while audiences basically agreed, at 94%.

Those are the sort of numbers that Netflix executives probably dream about at night in their LA mansions, so it's perhaps not a huge surprise that we're getting more of the show more than three years on from its first run. Hopefully it can maintain that level of quality, too.

Prime Video's made quite a few big bets in recent years, in terms of major series with big stars in starring roles – and it can actually be quite hard to work out which ones have been hits or misses. After all, it's pretty guarded about the number of views that its shows are getting, and it's not always that easy to tell whether a show has another season on the way or not.

Suffice it to say, I thought The Terminal List might be on the ropes, after its first season got a pretty lukewarm reception, but Prime Video has just proved me wrong pretty comprehensively. It's released a trailer for a new season of the show, with Chris Pratt front and centre reprising his role as James Reece, who might just be about to come back in from the cold.

In fairness to me, given the first season of the show came out way back in July 2022, we're now over four years later, so my assumption that the show had been quietly canned wasn't exactly kneejerk. This is one of the biggest gaps between the first two seasons of a show that I can remember ever seeing.

The trailer makes it clear that it'll pick up Reece's story in an interesting way, though, as he lives the sort of inglorious anonymous existence that can keep him away from the watchful eyes of the international intelligence community. Inevitably, though, the US needs to turn to him at some point, and is seemingly willing to extend a full pardon to get it done.

Don't bet against there being some major caveats attached to that pardon, though. Still, it'll seemingly be enough to get Reece to shave off the rather massive beard he's grown out in the wild, and return to his surgical tactical training. That means tracking down terrorists and taking them out before they can escalate their plans, naturally.

We don't get a huge amount more information at this point, but with the show now confirmed for a premiere date of 21 October, there's only a couple of months to wait before it all comes tumbling out.

The biggest show on earth is back – and it might feel like just yesterday that the World Cup ended, too. Football waits for nobody, though, which means you've got a matter of hours before the Premier League is back in action, with Arsenal kicking off at home to Coventry on Friday evening.

Every year I find myself doing the same scramble this week of the year, realising that I don't have a deal lined up to avoid paying the maximum price for the next 10 or so months of football.

Thankfully, it's pretty reliable that every year there are some last-minute deals from the big broadcasters as they look for subscribers. My provider of choice is Now, since it offers me the flexibility to access sport without needing to sign up for a bigger contract or commitment.

This year, its deal is actually looking pretty excellent – giving you a full 12-month option on the Sports pass, with its Boost package included to give you proper 1080p streaming, at £27.99 a month.

Of course, if you're already a Now subscriber, like me, you might want to check in on something else first. When I went to cancel my current Sports pass, since it had reverted to the maximum price of £34.99 a month, I was eventually offered 12 months of £19.99 a month for the pass alone.

As someone who already had Ultra Boost in my package, getting me 4K quality on my streams, that was a no-brainer, and you might find a similar offer in your account when you push through to cancellation. It's definitely worth checking!

More good news came this week for Sky and Now users, too, in the form of a new multiview mode that will debut this week on Sky and later in the season on Now. It'll let you select multiple channels to watch at once, with your choice of which audio to foreground.

That could be huge for big matchdays where multiple games coincide, or just for giving yourself sensory overload if you prefer.

While I quietly think that the last couple of seasons dipped a little in quality, there's still no doubt that Apple TV's Slow Horses is the single streaming show I look forward to most each year. For one thing, the fact that we get an annual season instead of waiting multiple years between outings is a huge boon.

Now, its sixth season is imminent, and we've finally got a proper trailer to hint at what's to come for River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and the rest of the gang. As it happens, though, this is one of the most surprising trailers I've seen in years, and features a massive surprise that could feel like a big spoiler, right at the end – be warned!

The trailer establishes that this season the Slow Horses themselves will be in the sights of some mysterious assassins. They have a list of all those who've worked at Slough House, and they're making their way down it killing them off. That puts the team on high alert, and forces them to round up colleagues to hole up in a safe house.

River, as is his custom, doesn't seem best pleased about the whole affair, and it doesn't help that his dad (Hugo Weaving) seems to be back in the picture again. An even bigger surprise, though, comes at the end of the trailer (SPOILER WARNING), when Olivia Cooke pops up to renew her role as Sid, who was thought dead at the end of the very first season (but crucially was never shown dead).

Sid coming back felt like a crackpot theory at times, but with long-running series like this you always have the hope that it'll happen, so it's thrilling to see that it's actually real. Lowden and Cooke's on-screen chemistry was also impressive in that first season, so it bodes well for the vibe taking a more optimistic turn.

That said, I'm amazed it's in the trailer, and I can't quite work out whether I feel like it's been spoiled for me. Even writing this piece has made me realise I would have loved to watch the show without knowing she was coming back, and that means it's probably closer to a spoiler than I thought. It made me gasp, though, which very few trailers can say.

The show's back on 16 September, so there's still a few weeks to build the hype, but I'm not sure it needs any more building, at this point.

Marvel's in an odd spot right now, I think it's fair to say. After the storming cinema success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it's still a little hard to gauge whether Avengers: Doomsday is going to be a blockbuster hit when it arrives, or a weirdly-timed failure to launch. Disney's got at least one interesting project coming for the MCU even before then, though.

VisionQuest promises to pick up the story of Vision, left in a bit of limbo after recent events like the end of WandaVision in his new White Vision version. The show's first trailer arrived as part of D23 this past weekend, and gives us a fairly thorough look at what to expect, including one huge addition to its cast that gives it some genuine flavour.

The trailer makes it look like Vision has put himself into a sort of cyber-exile, powering down and existing inside his own extremely powerful mind. He's trying to figure out his reason for existence, and his place in the universe – and it looks like he'll somehow be joined by Ultron (James Spader). That vanquished AI might be a figment of Vision's imagination, though, to help him process things.

Either way, though, it looks like there will be action in the real world, too, as Vision realises that the children he had with Scarlet Witch back in WandaVision were not only real, but have now grown up (timeline's getting fuzzy, eh?). His son, in particular, might be in genuine danger, which could be the prompt for Vision to re-enter the fray.

The show's coming on 14 October, and that makes it important – it'll be just before Doomsday, so it might well be the final last-minute bit of storyline prep that people need to watch before they catch the new Avengers outing. After all, a full-strength Vision is a huge power in the MCU, and if he's not in Doomsday, this might explain why.

Conversely, it might explain why he's back in the movie, so either way, it's probably a key watch for Marvel fans. Whether this is all enough to build the hype, given that Doomsday drops the same day as Dune: Part Three, is fairly hard to decide!

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are in a basically never-ending battle to be not just the best streaming service, but crucially the biggest, and that means that both platforms need constant additions to keep subscribers sated. There's a pretty good chance that you have access to one of those two massive streamers, frankly.

So, each time a week starts, I take a look at everything (and I mean everything) that's being added to these two huge platforms, and filter that long list right down. Below, you'll find the three additions you should know about – rather than the dozens you can safely ignore. They've got trailers and release dates, too, for your convenience.

Outer Banks Season 5

• Streaming on: Netflix from 20 August

Outer Banks is something of a mystery to me – a show that's got all the way to a fifth season on Netflix, and which has a fairly big fanbase. I've never seen it, but having watched multiple seasons' trailers it looks like a really fun treasure-hunting adventure, a bit like The Goonies aged up for a more teenage audience and with quite a lot more edge to it.

The show's heroes, a gang of friends that style themselves The Pogues, are always on the back foot, with nasty forces and law enforcement typically teaming up to try to rob them of their hard-earned treasure, and this seems to be their last hurrah. They'll go out doing what they love – searching for more mysterious lost booty, and having a great time together.

Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 20 August

The world isn't short of magnetic personalities, but when it comes to the sporting arena, we do live in an era of increasingly guarded and media-trained athletes. That's why it could be fascinating to get a proper look behind the curtain at Novak Djokovic, unquestionably one of the all-time greats of tennis, but quite a private individual.

He's got a documentary with Prime Video coming this week, and it promises to give some insight into the psychology of a player who's managed to stay at his peak for an absurd length of time. He's not just an also-ran nowadays, often still penetrating to the late stages of major tournaments, so this could be a really fascinating behind-the-scenes profile for fans of the game.

Blood Sacrifice

• Streaming on: Netflix from 20 August

There's nothing like a good Scandi-noir to get the blood pumping, and Blood Sacrifice could be a great example of the genre done well. It's a whodunnit, effectively, playing out around Stockholm as a serial killer methodically targets police officers for murders then arranges their bodies artfully.

That's enough to make any other police officer nervous, let alone the detective tasked with chasing the killer down with few leads. He'll enlist the help of his father, a retired investigator, and soon find himself drawn into a typically dark and frankly scary game. This looks like it could be a breakout hit, and Netflix's success with previous subtitled shows should stand it in good stead.

When it comes to creating a sweeping historical romance and sustaining it over the course of a season of prestige TV, a pretty good starting point is to adapt a classic novel. So many of the most popular and enduring stories ever told have already been adapted, of course, but that doesn't mean they're not ripe for a new version with modern techniques and sensibilities applied.

MGM+ seems to be taking that approach, anyway, given that it's just unveiled a pretty stellar-looking adaptation of Charles Dickens' seminal A Tale of Two Cities, one of the most popular novels ever and a really compelling story. Anyone who's read Dickens knows that he does do plot really well, after all – it's not all just pretentious literary stuff. The show's first trailer underlines that.

It introduces us to Kit Harington in the show's lead role as Sydney Carton, a London lawyer who's extremely gifted but struggling to find happiness. He's given the case of a lifetime when Lucie Manette walks into his office to hire him, with a brief that's almost impossibly complicated. She needs him to defend a young man, Charles Darnay, from charges that are difficult to dispute without getting into Paris, a city engulfed by the rising tide of revolution.

It's a timeless setup that's ironically extremely rooted in the politics and movements of its time, of course, which is probably why it's not a plot that's often been updated and moved into other locations. MGM+ is taking a traditionalist approach, too, with full period drama trappings and some lovely costumes.

Sydney's big problem, of course, is that as well as trying to build a hugely complicated case that could cause ripples in various societies, he's also falling for Lucie, whose heart might not be all that free to suitors. It's a beautiful and quite heart-wrenching love triangle, in short, and I won't spoil how it turns out.

The show looks pretty sumptuous and comes at a good time for MGM+, since it hasn't necessarily always managed to string together many eye-catching shows at the same time compared to bigger streamers like Netflix and Prime Video. This could be just the ticket to get people subscribing when it arrives on 6 September.

The 'romance set in the surroundings of high school or college sports teams' genre is quickly becoming one of the biggest sub-genres in the streaming world – people can't seem to get enough of steamy locker-room love affairs. Heated Rivalry really kicked things off, but Off Campus underlined the trend this year, too.

Neither of those shows were made by Netflix, notably, so it's perhaps not a huge surprise that it's been working on something of its own – and this time it's going for a new sport. Crew Girl sets up a fairly familiar love triangle, but where the school athletes are all elite rowers, with all the training and discipline that comes with the territory.

The show stars Miku Martineau as Teagan Tao, a hugely talented young rower who's forced to move schools when her parents' home life falls apart for depressing reasons. She's enrolled into a fancy new school by her mum, but soon discovers that it only has a men's rowing program, with no way for her to have a boat of her own.

That is, until she starts to realise that the men's team is having trouble finding a reliable cox to steer and organise them through competitive races. The first trailer makes it clear that she'll make it her mission to become their cox, and in the process she'll find sparks flying with more than one member of the team.

There's no point in a good romance like this without a triangle, after all, and it seems like Teagan will have her affections split between two different men. One, as tradition dictates, is the bad boy who starts off aggressive with her, while the other seems to have no flaws but perhaps lacks a little edge.

Who can say who'll she'll end up with? Part of the fun of this sort of show is the journey, rather than the destination, which can generally be guessed at pretty easily. Netflix viewers in need of some steamy fun can check out Crew Girl when it arrives on the streaming service on 10 September, in a little under a month's time.

If you're going to reel in a massive star to front a new movie for your giant streaming service, why not get them to play two roles at once? I'm not talking about on-screen twins, either – Ben Affleck is pulling double duty in Netflix's newly unveiled movie Animals, since he's both playing the lead and actually directing the whole thing.

Affleck isn't a prolific director, but he has a few good movies to his name, and many critics think very fondly of The Town, which he made back in 2010 – so there's plenty of evidence to suggest that he could do a great job here. Like that film, Animals looks like a gritty portrayal of crime and criminality, but it has its focus on the apparent victim, rather than the criminals.

Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a politician who's fighting a mayoral election in Los Angeles while trying to balance his home life – but it looks like that home life is in for a reckoning. The teaser trailer uploaded by Netflix this week doesn't outright confirm that his kids are going to get kidnapped, but it does everything but say that explicitly.

It looks like he's going to be haunted by phone calls from the kidnappers as they try to presumably extort something out of him, and we can see the growing strain this'll exert on him and his wife (Kerry Washington) as the trailer unfolds. Stephen Yeun looks like he plays Kimball's fixer or security man, but there's at least one fascinating figure in the trailer.

We don't really know who she is, but Gillian Anderson gets an extremely glamorous entrance, and seems to be running the rule over Kimball. Is she a crisis manager? A fixer herself? Part of the criminal element? Any number of options could be accurate, and she might just be the movie's ace up its sleeve.

Intriguingly, the film's getting a rare simultaneous release – Netflix is putting it in cinemas as part of a limited run on 9 October, but it's also going to put it up for streaming subscribers on the very same day. That's a curious strategy, but we can't really know how it'll play out until that day arrives.

Welcome back to another edition of T3's Quiz. This is the place to test your knowledge of the tech world this week.

There's lots of news about this week, including smart toasters, posh Porsches, luxury coffee machines and new Google Pixel phones.

Have you been keeping up to date? Give the quiz below a go to see if you can top the leaderboard:

How we put the T3 Quiz together

Here at T3, we publish hundreds of articles each week looking at the latest and greatest products from the world of technology and gadgets. The answers to each of the questions in the quiz above can be found in an article on the website, meaning you can bolster your score by simply having a read.

That means whether you learn about the new Honor Magic V6, changes to the iPhone launch schedule or even a new British EV, you'll stand a better chance of topping the leaderboard.

Previous T3 Quizzes

If you enjoyed that one, there's more to try your luck with. Here are some of our other recent quizzes:

• Quiz #12, 24 July
• Quiz #11, 17 July
• Quiz #10, 10 July
• Quiz #9, 3rd June
• Quiz #8, 26th June
• Quiz #7, 19th June
• Quiz #6, 12th June
• Quiz #5, 5th June
• Quiz #4, 29th May
• Quiz #3, 22nd May
• Quiz #2, 15th May
• Quiz #1, 8th May

Further reading

If you're looking to brush up even more, here are some extra pieces of reading which might give you a helping hand:

• Breitling's new chronograph is made to celebrate an unexpected sporting legend
• New headphone brand hopes to take on AirPods Max with premium metal design but cheaper price
• Samsung Galaxy Ring 2 is coming – company exec confirms new wearable ahead of Unpacked and it might even work with iPhone
• Samsung confirms Galaxy Z Fold 8 launch date early – here's when pre-orders should start

Cinema is in a really interesting place right now. When Project Hail Mary began its theatrical run back in March of this year, I wasn't able to get hold of a decent ticket.

That's because the movie, which was part shot on large-sensor Alexa 65 cameras to benefit from the taller IMAX 1.43 aspect ratio, could only be shown in a limited number of theatres to can show off said format.

It's been a summer of IMAX mania, with Christopher Nolan's latest epic, The Odyssey, which was shot on IMAX 70mm film for the same 1.43 aspect ratio (albeit for the totality of the runtime), also selling out and extending its calendar to try and meet demand.

Resigned to the fact I'd have to wait for Project Hail Mary's release, I vouched to bypass the best streaming services for the sake of quality. After all, this kind of detailed capture process deserves the best – and the limited compression of 4K Blu-ray was worth waiting to obtain.

How does 1:43:1 view on a 16:9 TV?

Having watched the movie this week – which made me laugh, yet brought a tear to my eye at other moments – I was as impressed by its message as I was by the on-screen puppetry-and-visual-effects combination and, indeed, the image quality.

Watching on one of the best OLED TVs in a blackout room at home was essential for a movie set in space. Stars dotted on black backgrounds can bleed light on lesser TVs and dilute the contrast and richness of the image.

I did have a slight concern about how the movie's 1.43 aspect ratio would be portrayed on a home cinema setup, but was pleased by how it's handled. The movie flits between letterbox 2.39:1 shots (with black bars top and bottom), while the 1.43 shots elect to fill a 16:9 display entirely (no black bars left and right).

Project Hail Mary 4K Blu-ray extras

Sure, those slight crops mean I might never get to see the movie in true IMAX style. Project Hail Mary's digital capture was transferred to 15-perf IMAX 70mm film, but only 16 reels were ever made for a handful of select non-digital cinemas that can show the format.

Interestingly, there's no 'making of' to tell you about that part of the movie's technicalities and production. But the 4K Blu-ray disc does bring some other extras that streaming can't match, including a Special Features section with five Deleted Scenes.

My favourite, however, is Earth's Favorite Eridian, which is a 7-minute featurette about Rocky, who effectively plays Ryan Gosling's faceless co-star, and how teams went about creating his character, voice, and used puppetry, animatronics and visual effects to bring him to life.

It's those little extras that make the 4K Blu-ray even more special. And what a special movie Project Hail Mary already is. I'm so glad I waited to watch in the utmost quality – it was worth every penny, and I can see why the movie remains 95% rated by audience and critics alike.

Every so often, one of the biggest and best streaming services will drop a trailer that makes me stand up and pay a little more attention than usual. Sometimes that's because it's managed to reel in an even bigger star than the norm, and sometimes it's because the film's been showered in awards on the festival circuit. Gentle Monster is another type entirely.

While it was shown as part of the competition at both the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, it didn't come away with any major prizes – but the first trailer for the movie is out now on YouTube, and makes it look pretty phenomenal. It's coming to Netflix on 18 November, after a couple of weeks in cinemas starting on 30 October.

The film stars Léa Seydoux as a young mother whose world is absolutely rocked when the police turn up at her house one day to take custody of her partner and to search his belongings. While the trailer is understandably vague about exactly what they're looking for, it's not hard to draw some conclusions about the matter, and it's easy to see how it would make for a compelling drama.

As Seydoux's character attempts to process what's happening, it looks like much of the film will concern itself with how a relationship changes and is strained by a betrayal like this. As she says to her mother at one point in the trailer, it's not like a long-term love has an off switch that you can flick when it's no longer convenient to have deep feelings for someone.

While she tries to figure out where her life goes from here, there's apparently another subplot that's not featured in the trailer to the same degree, since this is just a teaser. The lead investigator in the case turns out to have her own dramas unfolding, reckoning with the trauma of caring for her elderly father as his dementia advances.

It's all extremely emotional-sounding, and the teaser makes the movie look really considered and careful, so I'll be fascinated to see how it's received when it arrives later this year. Netflix generally only puts safe bets into cinemas, so that alone suggests it thinks it could have a critical darling on its hands.

One of the big strengths of the current streaming ecosystem is that it can put the best streaming services in position to spotlight shows and movies from countries that don't necessarily have the same clout as Hollywood. Whether that's the wave of hugely successful Korean shows on Netflix, or in this case, an Australian drama series that Apple TV just trailed.

Last Seen looks like a potentially fairly harrowing mystery story, centring around the disappearance of a young girl and the obsession that her father develops with finding her. It has a neat set of twists, from the look of the trailer, but we're also left with plenty still to learn.

Patrick Brammall stars as Ian Ridley, a father whose daughter Mags disappeared some years ago. Since then he's tried and failed to move on, including by taking a job as an emergency dispatcher to help people in bad situations. One night, though, he gets a call from a distressed young woman who seems confused as to whether her name is Sarah or Mags.

When he hears that second option, Ian becomes frantic, and is almost immediately convinced that his daughter is still alive, having been kidnapped and possibly brainwashed into believing she's part of someone else's family. He's clutching for proof, though, and it looks like he'll butt up against plenty of scepticism from the police who first investigated her disappearance.

In fact, it looks like possibly the most compelling part of Last Seen will be how it deals with the tension between parental concern and dangerous obsession – is Ian a righteous investigator who's right to doubt the authorities? Or is he a vigilante clutching at straws and harassing strangers with crackpot theories.

Obviously, there's probably going to be something to his ideas, but we'll have to wait for the actual show to find out more. It's premiering on 9 September, and we'll be really interested to see how it performs, and whether it could kick off an Aussie obsession for streaming fans.

It's not exactly new to viewers of US shows here in the UK that there's an unhelpful gap between when an episode becomes available over the pond, compared to our experience. Still, House of the Dragon's third season has been a salient reminder.

Every Monday for the last eight weeks, I've had to wait through a workday on a Monday, after the episode went live on Now (my streaming service of choice for HBO right now) at midnight, to coincide with the air time in the US on Sunday evening. That wait has been made way harder by HBO's dedicated Game of Thrones YouTube channel.

After each episode airs, that channel uploads two different behind-the-scenes features. One is generally a short, seven- or eight-minute reel of actors and producers talking about the episode and what it means for the story of the show. The other is a far longer affair, generally around 20 minutes long and showcasing all of the craft and practical work that went into the episode's stunts and sequences.

They're both interesting and give real insight into how the show is made, but I've got a real axe to grind with their thumbnails and titles. Those longer practical featurettes, in particular, have routinely had titles and thumbnails that give away major plot points for episodes that only became available within a few hours of their upload.

From here on, beware spoilers if you haven't watched the last few episodes of the show – because I'm going to give some examples of those titles!

Scroll back to the sixth episode of this eight-episode season, and within a few hours of the episode becoming available, HBO had published a two-minute video titled "Ser Criston Cole's Final Farewell" with a thumbnail of that character's bloodied face. That basically confirms the fate of a major character during said episode.

Just after the eighth episode aired, we got a 20-minute featurette titled "Setting an Army Ablaze", this time saving the spoiler for the thumbnail rather than the title, since it showed Aegon Targaryen looking triumphant, sword aloft and lit by fire. Again, a massive plot development spoiled.

Finally, even for the season finale, the 20-minute video is this time called "Torching Tumbleton", and while that might not seem an obvious spoiler given that half of this season has built up to a battle at Tumbleton, the question of whether dragonfire will engulf the city has been a huge variable. Again, that spoiler bell ultimately goes "ding".

I understand that HBO wants to capitalise on the interest in the show while it airs, and I'll be clear – I'm glad these extra featurettes are being made. They showcase the level of craft and set building and prop work that the show is committing to, and underline why so much of it looks so good.

My issue is with a social media strategy that brands it fine to publish spoilers for your own show before around half the viewing world has any realistic chance to see an episode for itself. I've done my best to stay away from YouTube on Mondays, but my job means keeping on top of streaming trailers, and the algorithm ruthlessly pushes me HBO's content, so I've had minor and major spoilers put in my path left, right and centre.

So, this is me registering some feedback – don't do this, HBO. Upload the videos, by all means, and keep the same tight cadence with the show itself, but put a little more thought into the titles and thumbnails. You can edit them a few days later, after all, if you're that keen on your more attention-grabbing versions. So long as you stop making it so hard to avoid spoilers in the immediate aftermath of your broadcasts, I'll be happy.

I'm not saying there are hard and fast rules that you have to stick to if you're one of the biggest and best streaming services on the planet, but it's always interesting when those rules get ripped up. We've rated Apple TV as the best pick for most people for multiple years running, now, but it's fair to say Apple doesn't always play by the same rules as everyone else.

Case in point – even though Ted Lasso's fourth season is already ongoing right now, with the first episodes available to watch, Apple's just dropped a trailer for the season. Sure, you might think it's a sort of "in the weeks to come" style thing, but really it's just a traditional season trailer with no real twist.

It underlines that this fourth season of the show, which many people had assumed was over after its third a few years ago, will switch the script up in quite a big way. Rather than trying to keep the men's team above water for Richmond AFC, Lasso's back this time to turn around the fortunes of its women's team.

That team is languishing in the second division and needs a major kickstart, and Ted's brand of kindness might be just what the doctor ordered. In many ways, this is a sort of soft reboot for the series. Many of the biggest characters are back, but quite a few of them are in slightly smaller roles to make room for new cast members.

Chief among those new characters is an ornery coach played by Tanya Reynolds, who made her name so memorably in Netflix's Sex Education. She's sure to find Lasso an annoyance at first, but don't be surprised if she starts to respect him after prolonged exposure – she won't be the first or the last to follow that trajectory.

The show's ongoing right now, with four episodes already out, and a new one being added each Wednesday, so if you're an Apple TV subscriber you can check it out immediately. Maybe that's an advantage of such a weirdly late trailer – there's no gap between sparking your interest and letting you watch.

The pace of the streaming world is sometimes something to behold. While the rest of us hunker down for yet another heatwave here in the UK, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video presumably sniff another opportunity to own our eyes and attention spans. If you're wondering what that means for you, the answer is more movies and shows coming to the best streaming platforms.

I've gone through the whole list of what's coming to both Netflix and Prime Video this week (and it's a long list), to pick out three total highlights for you. These new arrivals are the ones I think you'll want to know about, and all of them might make for a lovely bit of mid-week watching in the August heat.

Reacher Season 4

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 12 August

While it might not be the single biggest one in terms of budget or numbers, I do think that Reacher might nonetheless be Amazon's best original show ever. That's because it's incredibly true to the source material that it's adapting, giving us an on-screen version of Jack Reacher who really feels like a proper fit (as opposed to Tom Cruise, about a foot too short).

This time around he's going to find himself embroiled in quite a conspiracy, all kicked off when he tries to be a good samaritan after spotting a woman in distress on the subway. When she dies dramatically, he's unable to let sleeping dogs lie, and starts digging into the circumstances she found herself in. You won't believe this, but it won't take long until he's beating people up – hallelujah!

My Brilliant Career

• Streaming on: Netflix from 13 August

This looks like a really spirited new show for Netflix, adapting a beloved Autralian novel that might not be quite as well-known on other shores. It tells the story of Sybylla, a young woman in search of a direction for her life, at a time when the standard solution would be to simply get married. She decides instead to pursue her gift for writing, and to see the world.

Little does she know, though, that her attempts to get out and about will put her in the path of more than one suitor, meaning we're going to get plenty of steamy romance from My Brilliant Career despite Sybylla's apparent feminism. That's a great setup, and the costuming and performances seem top-notch. Could this be a new Bridgerton-level hit?

Don't Say Good Luck

• Streaming on: Netflix from 14 August

For a more traditional coming-of-age story, this movie starring Adam Sandler's daughter Sunny seems like it's going to be heartwarming and potentially tearjerking in equal measure. Sandler plays Sophie Birenbaum, who is desperate to make it in her high school's musical for the year, with all the social benefits it would bring.

That aim seems to become a little more modest when her home life starts to deteriorate thanks to her mother getting sick – throwing her own desires into perspective. It's a classic recipe for some life lessons, and the movie seems to be nice and sympathetic to how teenagers can be battered by these emotional situations. It looks charming, and comes out at the end of the week.

When Lego dropped the Smart Brick and debuted it at CES earlier this year, it wasn't hard to start imagining the many ways in which it could leverage its new tech-enabled system. In the end, it started with Lego Star Wars, which was no surprise, but now there's a new wave of Smart Play sets, and it's very much focused on Pokémon.

The idea of Smart Play is to enhance kids' instincts to play, with more feedback and systems for them to discover, and some observers and testers felt that side of things was a little lacking in the Star Wars sets. Having built a couple of the latest Pokémon sets, though, it looks to me like Lego's heading in the right direction.

Lego has actually dropped a huge range of new Pokémon sets in the last few weeks, having started off the partnership with vanishingly expensive adult collector sets. It now has dozens of kid-friendly sets at lower prices and brick counts, but only a few of these come with Smart Brick functionality in the box, although almost all of them will work with Smart Bricks bought separately.

The biggest set of the new wave is Charizard vs. Jolteon Ultimate Battle, and I built it this weekend to get a better sense of how the Smart Brick works when Pokémon is concerned.

The build is pretty fun, too, although as an 8+ set it's obviously less involved than something from an Ultimate Collector Series or similar. The play-scale Charizard, in particular, is really quite excellent, with poseable joints and a jointed tail that makes it equally playable on foot or flying through the air.

Jolteon is simpler but still cute and well-realised, while the training structure they can interact with is a little more simplistic and framelike. The key, though, is that Smart Play functionality.

Each of these Pokémon, like almost all of the others in the current range, has a part of its body that can be removed to swap in a Smart Brick. Doing so pretty much instantly gets you some feedback, with the brick lighting up and the Pokémon making a noise to fit its in-game cry.

Once they're in, the gyroscope sensors will give you feedback on a variety of actions. In this bigger set's case, you can initiate a battle between the two monsters, complete with music that syncs and comes from both Pokémon (regrettably, though, it's not a recognisable tune from the games, probably for licensing reasons).

While battling, you can swoosh the Pokémon towards one another to register attacks, and colours on the Smart Brick will indicate each one's health. If that runs low, you can top them up with an included Potion, built during the set, and this gives the Smart Play functionality some depth and staying power.

If you're feeling cynical, it's probably fair to point out that the Smart Brick inclusion does clearly make the bricks-to-price ratio a little steep in this set and the Training House with Pikachu set that also brings a Smart Brick in the package, but the prices are still more approachable than I feared they'd be.

That said, the nature of a kid's fandom for something like Pokémon does make me think that the best starting point for choosing one of the Lego Pokémon sets would be to pick their favourite monster from those available on the Lego store. If it's Smart Play compatible or even comes with the system included, happy days; that's some extra fun for them to figure out, but if not, then they might well never really miss its absence.

I think that's an important approach – making the Smart Brick additive, rather than definitive, and it looks like Lego's got the direction right with these Pokémon sets. If a kid in your life is a fan of the franchise, this could be an ideal gift, and I'd expect more waves to come in the next couple of years, too. Perhaps there'll be a whole Pokédex's worth, eventually.

In the modern world of movies there are myriad ways to promote a new release, and we're all now pretty used to the hype cycle of release date reveals followed by teaser trailers followed by longer full trailers. Prime Video has taken a slightly different approach for one of its biggest upcoming movies, though.

It just confirmed a streaming date later this year for Madden, its biopic of one of American football's biggest icons, and did it in a way I can't remember seeing before. The video features the film's star, Nicolas Cage, talking a bit about the project and what it means to him, before confirming that all-important date.

So, thanks to Nic we now know that the film will debut on Prime Video on 18 November this year, making it a few months away right now. What's surprising to me, though, is that the video really is something of a hybrid, since we also get some meaningful glimpses of scenes from the final film.

As Cage talks, we get to see him in character in a few different phases of Madden's career, most easily told apart thanks to the different fashion and amounts of weight borne on his face. We also get to see Christian Bale as Al Davis, Madden's long-time coaching partner and friend.

Perhaps the key thing to know about Madden, other than Cage's starring role, is that it's directed by David O. Russell, best known for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, so this is a production with some real pedigree attached. Russell's also well-known for a reportedly abrasive directing style, having alienated some previous stars, but there are no rumours of a rift with Cage at this point.

In fact, Nic seems thrilled by the movie, and invested in its subject matter, which might make it slightly interesting that Amazon's going with a streaming-first release (or seems to be at this point). With this level of directing and acting talent in the film, it'l be curious to see whether it's a reflection of its final quality that it isn't being given a wider release.

A Netflix Premium subscription is not cheap. At £18.99 / $26.99 per month, it's one of the priciest streaming tiers there is. And that includes competitors.

Disney+ Premium is £4 / $8 cheaper, so £48 / $96 less expensive per year, for example. So, as a Netflix Premium subscriber I really want to make the most of my membership. That includes the ability to watch 4K content wherever I want.

However, that's not really been possible. While most apps support 4K HDR, including Dolby Vision where possible, viewing through a Chrome browser hasn't. Until now, at least.

Netflix finally streams 4K video through Chrome, allowing Premium subscribers to view Ultra HD shows and movies without having to leave the browser window. There are limitations and caveats still, but it's a welcome start.

As discovered by @saurax04 on X (via The Mac Observer), Chrome on Windows 11 now supports 4K (3840 x 2160) streaming. PC owners have previously had to use Edge or the dedicated Netflix app for Windows to get the best quality. But now Chrome users can watch UHD content without having to switch browsers or load additional software.

Sadly, this hasn't yet arrived on Mac, and you will require a decent enough Windows 11 laptop or desktop – ie. with a minimum of GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 400 graphics. It's a sign of things to come though.

It's also worth noting that some Mac models will already run Netflix in 4K (and Dolby Vision) through Safari. Surely Chrome will soon follow.

How much does Netflix Premium and the other tiers cost?

Netflix recently simplified its tier structure, with just three plans available generally.

Standard with adverts is priced at £5.99 / $8.99 / €7.99 / AU$9.99 per month and gives you access to 1080p streaming with 5.1 surround sound. As the name suggests, content is ad-supported and the number of devices you can stream on / download to is limited to two.

Standard costs £12.99 / $19.99 / €14.99 / AU$20.99 per month and is the same as the above, but without the ads.

And finally, Netflix Premium will set you back £18.99 / $26.99 / €21.99 / AU$28.99 per month. It ups the simultaneous device count to four and the picture quality to 4K HDR (Dolby Vision). You also get Dolby Atmos audio where supported.

I didn't realise how much the World Cup was disrupting my movie-watching habits until it was over, and I realised that I'd barely watched anything except football for about a month. Now, a few weeks on, I'm luxuriating in getting through the 4K discs that I've collected recently without having time to watch them.

A perfect case in point is Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first Indiana Jones movie, and one that I've had on 4K Blu-ray for quite a while without ever quite being in the mood to watch it. That changed this past weekend, and I had a total blast watching it with a friend who claimed to have never seen it (crazy, for someone in their 30s).

I have a rule now – if I see a Spielberg movie on 4K for less than £20, I'll try to buy it. It's not hard and fast (some that I've seen and don't rate, I can leave), but I've found it a huge success. He's a director who's earned that trust, and so many of his movies are just so good-looking. Raiders is no exception, even without the introduction of one of cinema's great characters.

Right from the iconic opening sequence, set in the deepest jungle and concluding with an unforgettable flight from a rolling boulder all the way to a waiting seaplane, it's a film with unbelievable momentum and adventure. On 4K, though, it becomes one that I almost felt I hadn't seen properly before.

For the longest time, Raiders was a film I'd watch on TV, often around Christmas when this sort of nostalgic movie tends to hit the schedules. That meant, growing up, SD resolution and ad breaks, and in the latter years generally a cap at HD at whatever bitrate iPlayer or another streamer was willing to offer.

This weekend, watching it in 4K with gorgeous surround sound (I've got a Sonos Beam with a Sub Mini and some Era 100s as rear channels), I couldn't stop pausing the movie to marvel at how damn good it can look.

Dappled sunlight through jungle canopies; a carefully-judged shaft of light on Indie's sweaty jawline; a tracking shot across a drinking game in a rowdy bar; a long crane shot through a busy camp in the Egyptian desert. It's wild how great these scenes all look, in a format without any compromises to bring down the detail or the vividness of the colours.

Then, of course, there's the soundtrack – one that has to be in the conversation when it comes to the greatest scores ever produced. Sure, Star Wars has some unbelievably iconic themes, but I think in terms of summoning up the spirit of adventure that the movie embodies, there's a shout for this being John Williams' best ever work, in a ridiculously crowded field.

Don't be surprised if I forget that take next time I hear the Imperial March, but it's still so impactful when Williams' melodies come in during exciting or emotional moments, and I've never heard it sound better than this Dolby Atmos mix.

It's a salient reminder of why I keep buying these 4K discs, even if the economics of collecting them doesn't really add up from a brutal standpoint. Every time I watch one, I'm enamoured with the quality on show, and Raiders is a perfect example of how slightly older films can still shine on the format.

I pride myself a little bit on my ability to navigate online queuing systems. If that sounds like quite a faint bit of self-praise, I'd remind you how often hot tickets require running that gauntlet. I didn't expect getting IMAX tickets to be my toughest challenge of 2026, but nabbing an IMAX 70mm for The Odyssey did prove pretty tricky.

After a lot of refreshes and a few false starts, though, I did eventually grab a booking at the BFI IMAX near Waterloo here in London, and saw the movie at last this week, after being forced to wait for a couple of weeks by the impossibility of getting earlier tickets.

I've got plenty of thoughts on the film, now that I've been able to digest it, and plenty of disagreements with that semi-viral Emily Wilson review, too. Nolan's interpretation of a classic story is full of interesting choices, and while I don't think they're all the same decisions or omissions that I'd have made, I can understand the reasoning behind most of them pretty easily.

What I didn't expect, though, because I guess I'm not paying quite as close attention as I thought, was a surprise before the film even started. It turns out that if you can track down an IMAX 70mm screening of The Odyssey, you'll also get a few minutes of an IMAX 70mm preview from Dune: Part Three before the movie starts.

The preview opens with a thank you from Denis Villeneuve to Christopher Nolan, then dumps the viewer into what can only be a sequence from the intergalactic crusade that Paul and his men embarked upon as the second Dune film ended. It sees Stilgar, one of his most devoted followers, leading the assault on a rain-drenched planet.

In terms of imagery, it's a very clear and deliberate echo of the D-Day landings, made so famous by Saving Private Ryan, as waves of landing vehicles are met with enormous amounts of machine-gun fire and resistance, and it makes the task of being one of Paul's soldiers look frankly terrible.

It also confirms that Dune: Part Three will be just as mesmerising to look at as its predecessors, with CGI that's designed so carefully that it looks photoreal. In this case, a giant defence ship, erupting from the ground and then spraying death, is a great example of how focus and visual design can help the eye see something as genuinely there.

It looked nuts, basically, and confirms that I'm going to have to try to get another IMAX 70mm booking for Villeneuve's film before the year is out. That said, when The Odyssey began, it was a stark reminder of how expert Nolan is with the format by now – the detail in the frame, and the lighting it employs in certain sequences, is really quite breathtaking.

The stark light in the Calypso scenes, in particular, makes me confident that The Odyssey will be a staple testing 4K disc for TVs when it comes out later this year, with the night-time scenes of Troy's destruction fulfilling the same brief but for darkness and contrast.

Its soundscape, too, is likely to be a good one for soundbar and surround sound testing, with all of the din of the sea and battle, but also some delicate moments. Even in an IMAX screening, it was hard to make out the Cyclops' crooning once wounded, for instance, and I look forward to revisiting it.

So, that two-week wait for a screening feels worth it right now. Laughably, though, the amount of demand for this highest-fidelity IMAX still way, way outstrips the supply. I recently booked another screening of The Odyssey, in the same format but this time at the Science Museum (the other venue with a compatible projector in London), for my second viewing. When? Late October, naturally, and it's still selling out fast.

When you're one of the biggest and best streaming services on the planet, there's no such thing as a week off. Both Netflix and Prime Video's execs know that their subscribers expect pretty much constant new arrivals, and rightly so after a few years of price hikes and the arrival of ads.

So, if you're a subscriber to either or both of these platforms and you're eyeing up some empty evenings this week, you're in the right place. I've taken a fine-toothed comb through everything being added to each streamer, and I've picked out three highlights that I think are particularly interesting. These are the additions to Netflix and Prime Video to know about this week.

The Last House

• Streaming on: Netflix from 7 June

I really like the look of this one – a horror movie that also has clear sci-fi themes but seems to potentially contain two distinct parts. In the first, a family wakes up on a regular day only to discover that their house has been mysteriously sealed so they can't leave. They're not the only ones, either, with all their neighbours similarly locked-in.

The trailer then shows us a period some time later, with the world overgrown by plants and few survivors managing to stay alive in their homes. It's entirely possible that the family will finally be able to venture outside, but also that they might encounter the beings responsible for their imprisonment, and I'm eager to learn more about either.

Sterling Point

• Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video from 5 August

All the biggest streamers have realised that romantic shows and movies are a huge attractor for audiences right now, and Sterling Point looks like an interesting twist on that format. Rather than being purely about finding love, it's also about discovering that your family might have more stories swirling in it than you realised.

The show's main character is a young woman who's surprised by a major bequest when her grandfather dies – a cottage in Sterling Point. When she gets there, she discovers that another young woman has also been left the property: a half-sister she never knew about, from the mum who died when she was younger. Secrets won't take long to spill out from there.

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Part Two

• Streaming on: Netflix from 5 August

This sensational South American series is midway through adapting one of the most celebrated novels of all time, and the second part promises to take the story to soaring new heights (and the depths of drama). Netflix is clearly proud of the series, since it's breaking out the final part to give it a premiere laster in the month.

Until then, though, this week will see the arrival of the rest of the second season, which continues the story of the Buendía family as eras pass and characters age and have families of their own. If you were into the first part of the show, this will be a must-watch when it arrives midweek.

Lego and retro gaming have proved a match made in heaven over the years. The brick building brand has released sets based on Nintendo consoles, the Atari 2600 (VCS), and even the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis. And now it seems another classic machine is on its way.

A Lego PlayStation has leaked. We don't yet know the exact specifications of the build, nor do we have an image, but a post on the Legoleak Reddit does reveal some interesting details – not least a price, release date and the free add-on that'll be available from Lego.com.

Posted by BrickTap (via VGC), the Lego PlayStation (72306) will allegedly come with 1,911 pieces in the box. It is likely to include a build of the console itself and, if previous sets are any marker, an original DualShock controller.

It'll cost around $160, it is claimed, and will be available to order from 1 October 2026.

The post also reveals that, excitingly, an Astrobot gift will be available to redeem when purchasing the Lego Playstation from the brand's official site.

It often includes GWP (gift with purchase) releases that are exclusive to Lego itself, and they can become very collectable soon after. It's therefore worth keeping an eye out for an official announcement and pre-order details. We'll keep you informed with anything further we hear too.

As for the main set, I'd personally be surprised if it doesn't have an Easter Egg or two in the construction – such as a famous PlayStation scene that's revealed when you lift the disc cover, for example.

This has been a trademark of some of the other sets. The Nintendo NES came with a CRT TV featuring an animated Mario, while the Lego Atari 2600 sports an 80s gaming room hidden in the front.

This is also not the only retro gaming set coming this year. A Lego Donkey Kong build was launched soon after it too had leaked. That's currently on back order at Lego.

When Apple dropped its Neuromancer trailer at the start of this week, it reminded people that it's undoubtedly the reigning monarch of sci-fi in the streaming world. It just can't stop churning out high-quality, high-concept fare, and this looks like the latest example.

The teaser trailer also had me scratching my head, because I know that I've read Neuromancer, the novel by William Gibson that the show will be based on. I know that I've read it, but can't remember a thing about it, which means it's easily been long enough to get a re-read in without feeling over-familiar with the text.

I'm a hundred or so pages into that re-read, and having a great time with a novel that I actually bounced off slightly as a teenager, possibly because it's more sparsely written and deliberately unclear than I realised. What stood out in that first section most, though, was how some of the imagery in Apple's trailer seems extremely faithful to the novel, in the best way.

The first couple of chapters of the novel feature Case (the hacker played by Callum Turner in the show) basically realising that he's at rock bottom after a virtual heist gone bad. He's infected with a virus that means he can't surf cyberspace, and it's frankly baffling when he gets a job offer from a stranger called Molly.

She features pretty heavily in the trailer, complete with the mirrored eye implants that Gibson describes – like sunglass lenses grafted to her face. What really jumped out, though, is the moment when she unsheathes the nail-knives she has implanted in her fingers.

Gibson says they're like little scalpels, and they underline the fact that she's not some damsel or maiden, but a threat in her own right. In the teaser, that brief moment when Molly (Briana Middleton) shows off her knives looks incredibly faithful to how Gibson wrote it.

That's what any fan of the novel will be hoping, of course – whenever a big-money adaptation like this is announced, the fear is that it'll trample all over the source material or use it to jump off into its own stories. Apple's track record is really good on that front, but this teaser has me thinking it's about to put another feather in its already full sci-fi cap.

Netflix seems to have a bit of a thing for recapturing the hysteria that greeted Jaws way back when it came out. While there have been movie sensations since then, of course, the sense that a film could genuinely change a generation of movie-goers' attitude to the sea seems like a taller order.

After already scoring one huge hit earlier this year with Thrash, reminding people that sharks are indeed terrifying, Netflix now has a new series on the way centring on a threat in the water. Below is a slightly different proposition, though, as its first teaser trailer makes clear – this might not even be a shark movie at all.

Below stars Josh Hartnett as a dad living in a rural fishing community, eking out a soulful existence. When his daughter comes home to visit, he's thrilled to see her, and it looks like she might have a new boyfriend in tow, too. Introducing him to the world of hard work and seafaring graft that he lives in could be a challenge.

What's even more of a challenge, though, is finding out that there's something stalking the boats and swimmers in the area – something causing disturbances that can't really be explained. The teaser goes out of its way to avoid clarifying what that might mean, and while the natural assumption is that it's a shark (or more than one), that's hardly confirmed.

In fact, the weird imagery in the teaser includes an extended sequence involving a floating house, and it all seems to suggest that there might be something a little more supernatural going on. Again, I don't have any confirmation of that, and Netflix's own blurb about the movie is intentionally vague, but there's definitely more than a whiff of the horror genre about how the trailer is cut.

That all makes Below quite intriguing, as does the fact that it's a limited series rather than a movie. We should get a few hours of mystery and thrills from it when it arrives on 8 October, so drop a reminder in your calendar if you're curious to find out just what is going on.

Netflix has a big month ahead of it – August brings a whole new list of films and shows being added to the service, and anyone who's looked over the full range knows that there are too many to really process. That hasn't stopped me, though. I've taken a deep look into what's coming and filtered out all the chaff.

That means you'll find five genuine highlights below, each one worthy of your interest. Check them out with trailers embedded for your convenience, as well as details of when they'll start streaming, so that you can circle the relevant dates in your diary if you're really motivated.

The Last House

• Streaming from: 7 August

This is a wild-looking one – a horror movie that definitely has elements of sci-fi playing around in its web. The Last House stars Greta Lee and Wagner Moura as a husband and wife who wake up one day, get their kids ready like normal, then discover that they've been sealed in their house.

In fact, it doesn't take too long for them to realise that this might be happening to everyone, a sort of pandemic-style lockdown being enforced by seemingly supernatural forces. Whether the source is alien or paranormal, I can't be sure, but the trailer makes the movie look properly unsettling, and it could be quite a hit when it arrives early in August.

The Whisper Man

• Streaming from: 28 August

Another scary-looking thriller rounds out the month on Netflix's side, but it's probably the most high-profile addition of the whole month. The Whisper Man makes me think of Zodiac every time I watch its trailer – something about the oppressive atmosphere of Fincher's film is summoned up by the rain and grottiness of this new movie's setting.

Adam Scott plays a father whose son goes missing, and he soon realises that it's the work of a serial killer who'd been locked up for a long time but might now be out and about. He's forced to turn to his estranged dad (Robert De Niro, no less), who once put that killer away, and there are clearly plenty of secrets to be spilled about what happened all those years ago.

My Brilliant Career

• Streaming from: 13 August

If you want something a little more light-hearted, don't worry – Netflix isn't exclusively making scary stuff this month. This lovely series set in Australia, for example, might scratch the itch of any costume drama fan. It's the story of a spirited young woman who doesn't want to conform to expectations.

Rather than simply waiting to be courted and married, she decides to see the world as best she can, and to make the most of her talent for writing while she does it. Of course, that's too simple – the fact that love is going to land in her lap while she does so should make things more complicated.

Don't Say Good Luck

• Streaming from: 14 August

Another romantic-looking movie, but set in a very different time, Don't Say Good Luck pits all the normal travails and challenges of adolescence against a common but no less sad tragedy. Adam Sandler's daughter Sunny stars as a teenager whose mother is extremely sick, but who has her own regular problems to compartmentalise at the same time.

That's a familiar story for so many of us, and it looks like the film's approach should be really heartwarming, as she goes through moments that are normal but also at times extraordinary. Growing up can be brutal, as most of us know, but this looks like it might do a good job of capturing some of the sheer joy that comes our way during the process.

Outer Banks (Season 5)

• Streaming from: 20 August

One of Netflix's most long-running ongoing shows is coming to an end this month, with Outer Banks finally taking a bow. Its story of treasure hunters and fierce rivalries has taken some surprising twists over the years, and had some shocking enough moments, but now it looks like it's all about to end.

The Pogues have one last heist in their sights, but with more power than ever arrayed against them, they're going to have to rely on each other and their wits to get through everything. The big question is whether they'll all make it, or whether some of them will be left behind while the others ride off into the sunset once more.

We're sitting right at the very end of July, which can only mean one thing – we're about to start a whole new month of streaming. If you're a Prime Video subscriber wondering what's coming down the pike for you, you're in luck, because I've taken the time to check out everything on the way.

There are some big arrivals, too, with one of Prime Video's most popular shows returning, and more than one steamy romance arriving to ensure that you can get hot under the collar if you so choose. Check out the five highlights that you need to know about below, each with a trailer and release date for you to plan around.

Reacher Season 4

• Streaming from: 12 August

Shows don't really come any bigger than Reacher – or, should I say, characters don't. The biggest crime-solver out there is back for a fourth season, and by now the template shouldn't need much introduction. Reacher always manages to find trouble, and almost always manages to sort it out by the end of one of his stories.

He generally does so while accumulating a new coterie of locals to help him, and this season looks like no exception. When he happens upon a distressed woman on a train, his attempts to help her can't save her life. This leaves him unable to move on until he understands what she was going through, and that means he'll tug at the thread of a criminal conspiracy, as always.

Sterling Point

• Streaming from: 5 August

If you want a coming-of-age story with a few more twists and turns than the average, then Sterling Point could be ideal. It's the tale of a young woman who discovers that her grandfather and her mother had secrets she could never imagine. When she inherits a remote cabin in Sterling Point, she goes to see what it's like.

Little does she know, she'll soon encounter a half-sister, and will realise that her mother had episodes in her life that she can hardly imagine. With romance and self-discovery all blended into the mix, Sterling Point seems like a great little option if you want a heartfelt drama with plenty of intriguing plot details.

The Last Sunrise

• Streaming from: 26 August

For those in the mood for a purer slice of romance, though, the end of August will introduce The Last Sunrise, which is set on the beaches of Mallorca. Oriah is a young woman in search of a direction for her life, dealing with some difficult circumstances of her own. She goes to Mallorca with her mum, a property developer looking to build a hotel in the area.

Little does Oriah know that she'll soon meet the man of her dreams, with the only big complication being that she's not intending to stay in Mallorca beyond the summer, and that her mum is buying up his family's land for the hotel. That kicks off some broody moments, from the looks of things, as well as some seriously steamy scenes.

The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls

• Streaming from: 9 August

If you didn't know that Bear Grylls had found god, you'll know after this trailer. This show is a crossover between his usual survivalist stuff and Amazon's The Chosen, a retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. That show has been running for quite some time now, and this is clearly a way to promote it.

Grylls will take some of the core cast of The Chosen out on amazing adventures in the wilderness. They'll find their limits and in some cases push past them, to get a bit of a sense of what living in the wild could really mean. Don't be surprised if there are some themed parts, too – like Jesus living in the desert, which would be an obvious choice.

Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter

• Streaming from: 20 August

One of the greatest tennis players to ever grace the court, it's remarkable that Novak Djokovic is still playing at the highest level, even if his career is in its twilight era now. He just reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon, to underline the fact that his longevity pretty much defies belief, and this all-access doc will hopefully give some interesting insight into his psychology and journey.

We know that he's prickly, and we know that he's taken unbelievable care of himself over the last two decades and more, but getting a sense of what he's like off the court could be fascinating. These titans of sport aren't all that common, so any profile of them can be a really scintillating watch.

Sky has finally added access to Hayu for subscribers, bundling in a catalogue that includes some must-watch reality shows like Below Deck and Real Housewives.

The addition of Hayu was first announced alongside Sky's restructuring of its content off the back of the UK launch of HBO Max. That saw Sky lose some of its exclusive access and in response, Sky bundled in HBO Max, Disney+ and Hayu instead.

While access to Disney+ (Standard with Ads) happened in March 2026, subscribers on the Sky Ultimate TV package have been patiently waiting for Hayu to land. The move integrates Hayu content into the Sky TV homepage, without the need to open the app or sign-in.

The wait feels like it has been a long one: Sky previewed some Hayu content in March, but the loose timeframe of "July" for wider access has seen Sky members hammering the Sky Community forum, with the sentiment basically being "There are 31 days in July. Today is the first. It could be any of them."

Interestingly it took Sky until the end of July to actually make this move, with confirmation on 29 July that Hayu was now accessible.

The free content comes to Sky Ultimate TV customers, while Sky Q (except Essentials and Basic) as well as Sky+ customers get access to the new content. Those who already subscribe to Hayu can cancel their subscription, because you now have access to it all - including in the Sky Go app.

The Hayu integration not only includes the back catalogue, but most new episodes will land on Sky at the same time as in the US, so they won't be spoilt by social media while you're waiting for them to go live.

Hayu is packed with binge-worthy entertainment, with Below Deck being one of the highlights, tracking the adventures of the crew aboard private charter yachts, where the guests are as much part of the show as the captain and the on-board stewards.

Then there's a Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules and Summer House. If you want to peek into the world of the wealthy, follow dating drama and love trysts, Hayu is probably the destination for you.

Fortunately, it's all now bundled into Sky's £24 a month Ultimate TV package.

When the Barbie movie hit so spectacularly in 2023, it was pretty immediately obvious to some observers that we'd probably get more movies based on nostalgic toys in its aftermath. In fact, Barbie creator Mattel was quick to confirm that it had more plans on that front, including a movie based on its Matchbox cars.

Whether you thought that sounded preposterous or not, fast-forward by a couple of years and here we are – Matchbox The Movie has a trailer, and it's coming to Apple TV on 9 October, so it's very much real. That trailer won't really surprise you if you've thought about what a Matchbox movie might look like, but it does have some interesting touches.

The biggest selling point, you'd imagine, is John Cena in the lead – the WWE superstar has long since proved that he can helm a movie capably, and his comic timing remains underrated. He had a cameo in Barbie, as you might remember, so it fits that Mattel tapped him up this time.

That said, he's not alone. Rounding out the cast are Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Arturo Castro and Teyonah Parris; they're playing the grown-up versions of a friendship group that Cena was part of as a young boy, with fond memories of playing with toy cars together. Now, Cena's character is a spy who needs to track down a missing warhead, and somehow needs his friends' help to do it.

It's all relatively preposterous, of course, and more than a little reminiscent of the Fast & Furious franchise – but that's what Apple will be hoping for. After all, with that mega-series on basically a hiatus right now, there's a gap in the market for gas-fuelled action movies featuring many, many car crashes.

That said, this is a Skydance production, which is becoming something of a warning label in this streaming era. The fact that it's heading straight to Apple TV instead of hitting cinemas first isn't the best sign, but we might know more when forthcoming trailers give us more to go on.

Disney has started heavily promoting Infinity Vision with the release of the latest Avengers: Doomsday trailer, encouraging moviegoers to book tickets for the new premium format.

The name might sound like an all-new cinema technology, but that's not actually what's happening. Infinity Vision is Disney's own certification programme for premium large-format cinemas. It's designed to help audiences find the best screens available regardless of which cinema chain they visit.

So what exactly is Infinity Vision, how does it compare to IMAX and Dolby Cinema, and where can UK film fans experience it?

Infinity Vision isn't a new projector

Unlike IMAX or Dolby Cinema, Infinity Vision isn't a proprietary projection or sound system.

Instead, Disney has created a certification that premium cinema screens must meet before they can carry the Infinity Vision branding. Those auditoriums need to deliver huge screens, laser projection, high brightness and immersive premium audio, ensuring films are presented to a minimum technical standard.

That means the actual technology may vary depending on where you watch. One Infinity Vision screen might use Dolby Atmos sound, while another could rely on a different premium audio system, as long as it meets Disney's certification requirements.

Why Disney created Infinity Vision

Avengers: Doomsday launches in December at the same time as Dune: Part Three, which has reportedly secured the coveted IMAX exclusivity window. That means Marvel's biggest film won't enjoy widespread IMAX availability during its opening release.

Infinity Vision allows Disney to highlight hundreds of other premium large-format auditoriums around the world instead of relying solely on IMAX branding.

It's also a useful way to simplify what has become a confusing landscape of cinema brands including IMAX, Dolby Cinema, ScreenX, 4DX, Cineworld Superscreen, Odeon iSense, Everyman XL and many more.

Is Infinity Vision better than IMAX?

IMAX remains a complete end-to-end system, with its own cameras, mastering process, projection standards and specially designed auditoriums.

Infinity Vision doesn't replace that. Instead, it certifies existing premium auditoriums that meet Disney's technical requirements.

In practice, an Infinity Vision screening could look and sound superb, but the experience will depend on the specific cinema rather than a single standardised format. That's why many industry commentators see Infinity Vision as a complement to existing premium screens rather than a direct IMAX competitor.

Where can you watch Infinity Vision in the UK?

Disney hasn't published a definitive UK cinema list yet, but Infinity Vision works with participating premium large-format screens rather than creating new auditoriums.

That means UK viewers should expect participating premium screens at major chains to be certified where they meet Disney's standards. As bookings roll out for Avengers: Doomsday, supported locations will be identified during the ticket booking process.

If you're planning to see Marvel's biggest film of the year, choosing an Infinity Vision screening should mean you're getting one of the biggest, brightest and best-sounding presentations available, even if it doesn't carry the IMAX logo.

Reacher's back, and he's just as gigantic as ever – as if anyone would expect anything different. Lee Child's iconic lone wanderer has become perhaps Prime Video's biggest star, and his show also helpfully proves that it's possible to put seasons out without waiting years between them (like some other, bigger-budgeted franchises).

We have a proper trailer for the show's new season now, ahead of its premiere on 12 August, so you don't have to wait too long before you'll be able to start crunching through it yourself. Alan Ritchson's back and it looks like he might have a very twisty story to take part in this time around.

Like all good Reacher stories, this one starts with Reacher making a journey, but things rapidly take a turn when he spots a woman looking very distressed on her own in his train. When he approaches her, she pulls a gun, but it doesn't take long for her to end up dead. Reacher's nature compels him to pull at the thread and figure out why any of this happened.

This swiftly brings him to the attention of various federal law enforcement agencies, along with a criminal element, and many of the clues seem to point towards political involvement. It's a conspiracy, basically, and Reacher's going to make some new friends as he tries to figure it out with whatever level of violence is required.

He'll clearly recruit the dead woman's brother, who's a cop himself and is just as keen to understand what happened to his sister. More importantly, though, the trailer makes it very clear that we're going to get plenty of intense fight scenes for Ritchson to show off his now obvious commitment to the role.

He continues to inhabit the character really nicely, while also saying a whole lot of sensible things in interviews – US politics is clearly annoying to him right now, and who can blame him? Reacher returns in a couple of weeks, so expect to see more of him as he promotes what might just be Amazon's biggest show going by volume of biceps, if nothing else.

Here at T3 we've long since crowned Apple TV as the reigning monarch when it comes to sci-fi streaming. It's past the point where you even really need to prove this to anyone – most people know accept that it's clearly the best streaming service for sci-fi fans, but that hasn't stopped Apple from keeping going.

We've known for a good long while that it was working on a Neuromancer series, adapting the hugely influential novel by William Gibson, but now we've finally got a trailer. The show stars Callum Turner, but this teaser makes it nice and clear that we're going to have a wider cast of interesting characters to meet.

To be honest, although I've read Neuromancer, it's been nearly two decades since then, and I remember pretty much none of its plot. I'm torn over whether this means I can watch the show blind again on 22 January 2027 when it starts, or if that means I have time to re-read it before then.

Either way, I know from Apple's synopsis that Turner stars as Case, a gifted hacker living in the far-flung future, in a dystopian society where cyber-heists are some of the only ways that people can climb out of their social strata. Corporations basically rule the world, with little to no checks on their power.

What's really exciting is that this does look like it's going to attempt to be faithful to Gibson's descriptions of some fairly mad sights and sounds, and we get looks at moments that are as cyberpunk as anything that's been put on screen recently. Whether it can nail the wry, dark tone of the novel is anyone's guess at this stage.

The trailer has a pumping soundtrack, though, which makes it all feel impressively momentous, and that bodes very well. It's gutting that we have basically six months to wait now until we get to see the show, but at least that's plenty of time for the anticipation to build.

Make sure your streaming doesn't fail with these top-pick routers

Nary a week goes by without a big addition to the libraries of the world's biggest and best streaming services – it's a vital part of their plan to become people's default destination for entertainment. While the summer months are sometimes a little slower in the TV world, on streamers it's a different story.

That said, this is an interesting week for the twin dragons of Netflix and Prime Video, and the shows and movies they're adding are arguably a little less high-profile than some recent weeks. I've taken a look at every new project they're uploading, to pick out three intriguing highlights that you'll want to know about regardless.

The Bombing of Pan Am 103

• Streaming on: Netflix from 30 July

This looks like quite a heavy one, but as a co-production between Netflix and the BBC, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 might be one of the more important shows released this year. It tells the story of the Lockerbie bombing, but does so from multiple angles. It'll take in not just those on the plane, but also those on the ground in the UK and US, trying to investigate an unthinkable situation.

With a long time span to focus on and plenty of sensitivity given the very real event that it's portraying, everything points towards this being an extremely memorable show. That said, it's not going to be the easiest watch, for obvious reasons, so factor that in while you plan your evenings.

Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2

• Streaming on: Prime Video from 31 July

Prime Video brings the caped crusader back for a second season of this animated series, and it's got a great reputation. Fans of The Animated Series have been waiting for a real successor for quite some time now, and this version might just be the closest thing we've ever got.

It shows a version of Batman set in the golden age, without all the technology and gizmos that became associated with the character in some more recent portrayals. That arguably keeps the show simpler and more faithful to the detective roots, with mysteries forming a key role in its drama.

Final Project

• Streaming on: Netflix from 29 July

This interesting-looking Spanish-language show takes a look at cyberbullying and the toxic environment that high school can become for students if they're targeted by malicious classmates. Tamara is an alternative teenager who has become the butt of constant jokes and abuse from some popular kids.

Her final project for the year takes a twist when tragedy strikes Tamara, but the trailer makes it pretty clear that this might all be part of her plan to get revenge on her tormentors. This might sink without a trace, but don't be surprised if it becomes a sleeper hit, either – Netflix has form on that front.

Are we past the nepo-baby era? By that I don't mean are we now fine with them, but I am curious as to whether people still care as much about the whole concept. Rightly or wrongly, it seems clear that they're here to stay, and Netflix's latest movie is a great example of that – starring none other than Adam Sandler's daughter in the lead role.

To do her proper justice, though, it's Sunny Sandler (what a name), and this isn't exactly her first rodeo. She's had roles in multiple of her dad's movies over the years, including You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah recently, and a small part in Happy Gilmore 2. Now she's the lead in Don't Say Good Luck, which looks like a very different proposition.

The first key point is that the movie doesn't star Adam Sandler – it's a totally fresh project, and Sunny Sandler seems to be the key to it. She plays Sophie Birenbaum, a high schooler going through all the regular stress of school life, as she tries to get a role in the school musical without making a fool of herself.

The real meat of the emotion in the movie, though, comes from the fact that Sophie's mum (Melanie Lynskey) gets what sounds like a cancer diagnosis. That's a devastating turn, and it clearly rocks her dad (Max Greenfield) too, as you'd expect. Sophie's attempts to maintain some normality while dealing with this traumatic process will clearly be pretty emotional to behold.

In fact, this first trailer makes the movie look incredibly sweet, and full of that adolescent lack of confidence that can be so affecting to watch when it's done right. Sunny Sandler might be in this position because of her father's fame (that's quite hard to argue with, to be honest), but from the glimpses we see here, she's clearly going to be quite a performer in her own right.

Plus, she might have the bravery to do what her dad did and pick some weird projects – that's the only way to end up in something magical like Punch-Drunk Love, after all. I'm not saying Don't Say Good Luck is in that bracket, but it'll be interesting to see how it's received. It hits Netflix on 14 August.

Welcome back to another edition of T3's Quiz. This is the place to test your knowledge of the tech world this week.

There's lots of news about this week, including LEGO sets, Breitling watches, new Range Rovers and free Xbox Game Passes.

Have you been keeping up to date? Give the quiz below a go to see if you can top the leaderboard:

How we put the T3 Quiz together

Here at T3, we publish hundreds of articles each week looking at the latest and greatest products from the world of technology and gadgets. The answers to each of the questions in the quiz above can be found in an article on the website, meaning you can bolster your score by simply having a read.

That means whether you learn about the new Honor Magic V6, changes to the iPhone launch schedule or even a new British EV, you'll stand a better chance of topping the leaderboard.

Previous T3 Quizzes

If you enjoyed that one, there's more to try your luck with. Here are some of our other recent quizzes:

• Quiz #9, 3rd June
• Quiz #8, 26th June
• Quiz #7, 19th June
• Quiz #6, 12th June
• Quiz #5, 5th June
• Quiz #4, 29th May
• Quiz #3, 22nd May
• Quiz #2, 15th May
• Quiz #1, 8th May

Further reading

If you're looking to brush up even more, here are some extra pieces of reading which might give you a helping hand:

• Breitling's new chronograph is made to celebrate an unexpected sporting legend
• New headphone brand hopes to take on AirPods Max with premium metal design but cheaper price
• Samsung Galaxy Ring 2 is coming – company exec confirms new wearable ahead of Unpacked and it might even work with iPhone
• Samsung confirms Galaxy Z Fold 8 launch date early – here's when pre-orders should start

This week on The Gadget Show Podcast, it's all about Samsung – which revealed its latest folding phones at its Unpacked showcase.

T3's Tech Editor, Mike Lowe, was at the event and took time out of the schedule to talk with Jason about the new products – and why this year could be the biggest for foldables yet.

The headline-grabber is the Galaxy Z Fold 8, given its new aspect ratio, but Samsung also revealed the 'business-like' Z Fold 8 Ultra (an update over the Z Fold 7) and 'trendy' Z Flip 8 (which updates the Z Flip 7).

Watch the full episode of The Gadget Show Podcast below or watch on YouTube.

• Check out The Gadget Show's YouTube channel for more

Your favourite lifestyle tech publication, T3, has partnered with the legendary TV and YouTube sensation that is The Gadget Show.

T3 has celebrated its print magazine's 30th birthday this year, while T3.com continues to grow and reach wider audiences year on year.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be bringing you all the latest news on tech and gaming from Jason Bradbury, Suzi Perry and members of the T3 team.

What is The Gadget Show?

The Gadget Show launched in 2004 on Channel 5 in the UK and has delivered previews and reviews of the latest gadgets since.

With a range of presenters and formats over the years, the new podcast sees the return of the original duo Jason Bradbury and Suzi Perry in a weekly episode, hosted on its YouTube channel.

It's worth subscribing and liking their weekly videos – and, of course, returning to T3.com to see other members of the team talk over the latest tech with The Gadget Show team.

Now that the World Cup is over, I'm finally redressing the imbalance in my viewing habits in recent times – meaning I don't have to watch multiple football matches every day. For one thing, I'm gagging to get back to actually watching movies now that my evenings are my own, but it's also allowed me to catch up on House of the Dragon.

I've been a moderate defender of the show in the last couple of years, since I think it's definitely maintaining a higher average quality than the last two or three seasons of Game of Thrones, and that makes it highly watchable. That said, its third season has been hit and miss, to me.

It opened with a great sense of momentum and some big battles, staged at the sort of scale that few other TV operations can match. Some truly crazy practical sets and backdrops make it look far better than most of its rivals, and the craft that go into it is hard to overestimate.

Still, a few episodes later and I can't help but feel we're back in the mire of plot conveniences, confusing timelines and locations, and a general sense that the showrunners don't know how to keep its war going credibly without basically having to remove characters (and dragons) from the board.

Now, the show has a mid-season trailer giving glimpses of what's coming in the second half of the season, and it's giving hope that the short answer will be "more action".

We certainly seem to get a look at battle formations and siege tactics, as the Targaryen forces encircle Tumbleton, where their enemies have taken root – a battle that looks set to decide much of the outcome of the bloody war of succession.

It's fairly clear that a whole heap of characters are going to converge on the town, but what I'd like is for some more clarity when we're not in the middle of big battles. It's all well and good having tentpole moments a couple of times a season, but the show's a little too blurry outside of these sequences.

Part of the genius of Game of Thrones' animated intro sequence was that it reminded you where everyone was in relation to each other as each episode kicked off, and that made it all the more frustrating when distances ceased to matter in later seasons (as the writing got lazier).

Now, I'd say House of the Dragon is committing the same sin, and without even a map to help viewers figure anything out, it's really confusing to try to work out where people are. That makes it all the more baffling when we're told that a dragon like Vhagar, the size of a jet plane, can't be found despite the number of sheep she seems to consume.

In the same way that Daemon (Matt Smith) was locked in purgatory in Harrenhal last season, it's also now Aemond's turn, and it's just as boring the second time around. Unpredictable characters who turn events on their head are the heart of this series' attraction, so putting them in a box for hours at a time to keep things simple is a dull solution.

I'm hopeful that the season can right that wrong and get Aemond and others back into more meaningful positions quicker than I'm worried about, but it's an unknown until those new episodes arrive. Still, from the trailer it's clear that I'll at least get some sort of denouement to enjoy in the next few weeks.

Over the last decade or so, Netflix has repeatedly succeeded in predicting what people want from the biggest streaming service on the planet, and one of its biggest successes has been knowing that romance is hugely popular. People want steamy love stories, and they want them regularly.

It's already got more than one giant franchise out of this tactic, with Bridgerton standing out as the jewel in its crown, and now we're getting another new one – My Brilliant Career. The story of a precocious young woman in Australia starts in 1900 and looks like a classic take on what it was like to be of marriageable age at a challenging time for women.

Philippa Northeast stars as Sybylla, that gifted young woman, who sees herself as an untameable writer, but has to contend with the expectations of her family, who see marriage as her only way to economic security. The problem for Sybylla is that they're not entirely wrong – her chances of becoming a writer are slim, despite her undeniable talent.

She decides to humour them and meet some young men, all the while intending to see as much of the world as she can to fuel her writing. Little does she know, though, that she'll meet more than one man who does indeed ignite something in her, which is the one twist she wasn't expecting.

One of those men is a familiar face – Christopher Chung from Slow Horses, in a role that's the polar opposite of his more famous one. Rather than a repulsive IT support worker, he's a hunky romantic lead, with Jake Dunn playing his main rival. It looks like a classic love triangle as Sybylla is faced with a choice between the two.

Her other option, of course, is to ignore them both and stick to her craft, so it'll be fascinating to learn how it all unfolds – as someone who obviously hasn't read the beloved Australian novel this is all based on. The show hits Netflix on 13 August and looks like it'll bring some stunning costumes with it: get this one in your diary.

After winning a grand prize on the Lego Ideas site earlier this year, The X-Files set from fan designer WetWired will soon be available to buy.

There have been a few tweaks to the design, but the Lego Ideas The X-Files set is remarkably close to the original submission. And it's a must-buy for collectors and sci-fi fans.

Lego has even enlisted the help of Dana Scully herself – Gillian Anderson – to launch the new set in a teaser video. She reprises the role from the show, while her minifigure is one of eight you get in the box.

She's joined, of course, by Fox Mulder, Walter Skinner, Mr. X, Alex Krycek, Carl Busch, The Flukeman and a grey alien. It makes me want to head back to watch all 11 seasons again (and the movies – well, the first one anyway).

They're all available on Disney+ to stream.

Back to the Lego set and you get 1,478 pieces to build a recreation of Mulder's office sitting underneath a forest scene, while a UFO hovers over head. Those who order the set on its initial release – between 1 and 10 August – will also get the Lego Ideas The X-Files: Scully's Lab for free.

The main set will first be available to Lego Insiders on early access, which starts on 1 August. General orders will then be accepted on the Lego Store from 4 August.

It will be priced at £179.99 / €199.99 / $199.99.

"I didn’t expect to be stepping back into Scully’s heels to investigate a Lego set," said Gillian Anderson. "It has been so much fun revisiting that world all these years later.

"This set is a wonderful celebration of the X-Files, and the fans who have kept its mystery alive."