Humour and science fiction may not seem obvious bedfellows but a history of cinema will tell you different. Think Spaceballs, Mars Attacks! and Everything Everwhere All At Once to name but a few. And now Ryan Gosling is hopping on board. The 45-year-old is both the lead actor and producer of Project Hail Mary, a space adventure film based on the 2021 Andy Weir novel of the same name. While Gosling has showcased his comedy chops in films such as Barbie and Nice Guys, he tells the BBC he's always struggled as an actor because I would want to bring humour to something but has found opportunities to be funny limited with some projects.

This weekend, I succumbed to the pull of all the meme-y marketing and went to the theater to see the surprise horror-comedy hit M3gan. I generally enjoyed it--the jokes are funny, the jump scares effective, the robot-centric plot a rather smart addition to our fresh new wave of artificial intelligence anxiety. It isn't the goriest or most frightening flick--the blood streams had to stay PG-13--but the steadily paced tension and the references to horror classics do their job fine. Yet, to me, the most chilling aspect of the movie doesn't come from anything you might expect: the offscreen murders, M3gan's deranged humanoid face, the pressures of capitalism. It actually stems from a deceptively insignificant 10-second scene that comes about halfway through the movie, in which the titular bot takes to the house piano. To be clear, I don't find this scene so viscerally terrifying for the piano tune itself (in the film, a solid instrumental cover of Martika's 1989 No. 1 hit "Toy Soldiers"), or for the overall menace of the moment, a turning point in M3gan's development.

A video software firm has come up with a way to prevent people from sharing their account details for Netflix and other streaming services with friends and family members. UK-based Synamedia unveiled the artificial intelligence software at the CES 2019 technology trade show in Las Vegas, claiming it could save the streaming industry billions of dollars over the next few years. Casual password sharing is practised by more than a quarter of millennials, according to figures from market research company Magid. Separate figures from research firm Parks Associates predicts that by $9.9 billion (£7.7bn) of pay-TV revenues and $1.2 billion of revenue from subscription-based streaming services will be lost to credential sharing each year. The AI system developed by Synamedia uses machine learning to analyse account activity and recognise unusual patterns, such as account details being used in two locations within similar time periods. Netflix's recommendation algorithm is pretty sophisticated these days, to the point where it can probably determine not only what you want to watch next, but what you'll eat for breakfast 13 years on Wednesday and the thread count of your sheets. And yet, it still has a tendency to spit out some peculiar recommendations.

Artificial intelligence video tools make it relatively easy to put one person's face on another person's body with few traces of manipulation. I tried it on myself. The scene opened on a room with a red sofa, a potted plant and the kind of bland modern art you'd see on a therapist's wall. In the room was Michelle Obama, or someone who looked exactly like her. Wearing a low-cut top with a black bra visible underneath, she writhed lustily for the camera and flashed her unmistakable smile.

Science-fiction film costume designers create sartorial future worlds and, if they get it right, can influence current trends along the way. Here, we ask a few forward-looking costume designers to describe their favorite piece from each of their current films and, interestingly, the choices were anything but outrageously fantastical -- they ranged from the lovely and nostalgic to the manly and the fussy. Luis Sequeira's favorite costume is Elisa's (Sally Hawkins) enchanting dream-sequence dress. Set against the film's lush, dark, moody world of the early '60s, the black-and-white dream sequence "is pure light and love," says Sequeira. "It was amazing to create something so opposite to the rest of the film."

Oof, this one is rough. Over the weekend, despite good buzz and glowing reviews from critics, Blade Runner 2049 opened by bringing in a meager $31.5 million domestically at the box office, a figure well below expectations and one that looks particularly bleak when you factor in that the film reportedly cost more than $150 million to make. Were fans just unwilling to go back to Blade Runner's future 35 years after Ridley Scott's original film? Did women not want to see a movie where they had such limited roles? Or did the performance of Denis Villeneuve's Runner reboot just speak to the fact that not that many folks wanted to spend nearly three hours watching a moody--if stunning--sci-fi film when things are already so gloomy outside the multiplex?

For more than a year, "Blade Runner 2049" director Denis Villeneuve and star Ryan Gosling have been working under the cover of CIA-level stealthiness. On the film's Budapest set, copies of the script for the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi neo-noir classic were held so closely -- literally locked away in safes when not in use -- that many crew members never laid eyes on one. Actors would sign out their sides on the day they were shooting a scene and be required to sign them back in before going home, lest the merest hint of a spoiler leak. On a late-September afternoon, with the film's Oct. 6 release just days away, Villeneuve and Gosling sat in a windowless conference room in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, preparing to finally let audiences in on their secret -- and wondering what they will make of it. "When you make a movie as a filmmaker, it's like you bring people in a boat and you say, 'We will discover America together,' " said Villeneuve, the French Canadian director of such films as 2015's crime thriller "Sicario" and the 2016 cerebral sci-fi hit "Arrival."

"The key to the future is finally unearthed," Jared Leto somberly intones in the moody new trailer for "Blade Runner 2049," teasing mysteries yet to be revealed in the upcoming sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 dystopian sci-fi film. Fans will have to hold out five more months to learn what those mysteries may be when the film hits theaters on Oct. 6. But with the new trailer and a live-streamed Q&A Monday morning featuring stars Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling and director, Denis Villeneuve Warner Bros. pulled the curtain back a bit more on one of the year's most anticipated films. Set three decades after the events of the original movie, "Blade Runner 2049" centers on a young LAPD blade runner named Officer K (Gosling), who is tasked with hunting down renegade androids called "replicants." K uncovers a secret that leads him on a quest to find Ford's Rick Deckard, a blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.

Those were the fighting words Sony Pictures Chairman Tom Rothman threw out in front of hundreds of movie theater owners here Monday night, boasting about the studio's upcoming slate. While Sony unveiled footage from a handful of blockbuster hopefuls -- an adaptation of Stephen King's "Dark Tower," a reboot of the kids' flick "Jumanji" and the new "Spider-Man" flick -- the executive was most bullish about this summer's "Blade Runner 2049." Rothman made his Netflix diss after footage from the new Denis Villeneuve film played, insinuating that the movie's theatrical experience will exceed anything offered on the streaming site. A sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic, this time directed by Villeneuve, the film stars Harrison Ford and "an electrifying young star" -- Rothman's words -- in Ryan Gosling. Dressed in a hoodie and jean jacket, Gosling came out onstage to talk about his experience filming the movie in Budapest last year.