The Agency

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. Last weekend saw the release of "Solo: A Star Wars Story," a movie that at least one critic maintains is salvaged by the introduction of a brilliant new droid. On that note, what -- or who? -- is the greatest of all movie robots? The only reasonable answer is Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet." A trailblazer for android-kind, he was the first instance of a bag of bolts that actually had personality, charm, a sense of fully-formed character.

The highly intelligent synthetic has been created to serve. The video claims that Walter is an artificial intelligence powered by AMD, Ryzen and Radeon. READ: 4 major spoilers we learned from the official "Alien: Covenant" trailer Fassbender will be playing not one but two roles in "Alien: Covenant." Apart from Walter, the 39-year-old actor will be reprising his role from "Prometheus" as the robot named David. The first movie made us distrust David so it's no surprise if fans are skeptical of Walter.

Fassbender also cautions against colonisation, while Kurzel speaks about mainstream snobbishness towards the gaming community.

"What the fuck is going on?" mutters Michael Fassbender's character through clenched teeth, reasonably early on in the course of this interminable film, based on the lucrative video game series Assassin's Creed. You can imagine each of its stars – Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Essie Davis – saying much the same thing while looking through the script, before being directed to the fee on the last page of their contract. It's an action movie, with dollops of thriller and splodges of Dan Brown conspiracy; and hardly five minutes go by without someone in a monk's outfit doing a bit of sub-parkour jumping from the roof of one building to another. And yet it is at all times mysteriously, transcendentally boring. I bet playing the game is much more exciting.

Jake Gyllenhaal is set to star in a big-screen adaptation of record-breaking video game Tom Clancy's The Division. Gyllenhaal will also act as producer on the project, according to Variety. The video game, a third-person shooter, is gaming giant Ubisoft's fastest-selling product, making 330m ( 229m) within five days of its release in March. The game is set in New York City during the outbreak of a virus, with the player taking on the role of an agent investigating while avoiding increased criminal activity. Related: Can Michael Fassbender's Assassin's Creed save the video game movie?

The first trailer for December's Assassin's Creed dropped last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Based on Ubisoft's long running videogame franchise, the film stars Michael Fassbender as a former death row inmate forced to step into the shoes of an ancestor of his who lived during the Spanish Inquisition. This all probably makes a lot of sense to you if you've played any one of the eleventeen Assassin's Creed videogames published by Ubisoft over the last decade. If not, you're likely left with a lot of questions as to what exactly is going on here. Fortunately, we have sunk hundreds of hours into various Assassin's Creed games and feel qualified to answer said queries.

It's a phrase likely to strike fear and dread into the heart of most gamers, and indeed most moviegoers. All of these classic, hugely acclaimed video games have been thrust onto the big screen (or the straight-to-DVD shelves) by people whose knowledge of the source materials seems to have been passing at best. The results have been ... horrible. Assassin's Creed, we are being told, is a different story. Produced by Ubisoft, the company that developed and published the bestselling games, it has actual star actors (Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons) and a talented director in the form of Justin Kurzel, who made the award-winning Snowtown and helmed Fassbender's gritty Macbeth movie.

Along with Duncan Jones's Warcraft it's been billed as the video game movie that might just make us forget all about the cinematic crimes of Uwe Boll and his ilk, that can induce glorious amnesia for those struggling to wipe clean memories of Prince of Persia, Hitman or Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. The omens so far are good. Assassin's Creed comes from the team behind last year's blistering new take on Macbeth, with director Justin Kurzel bringing back his stars Michael Fassbender (also a hands-on producer) and Marion Cotillard. Here are five takeaways from the first trailer for the film. How strange that the cute copine from France's hit Taxi comedies has developed into one of the most sublime screen beauties of modern Hollywood.