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Olympic Winter Games (NBC and Peacock, February 6)

If you’re a sports fan, this is the only big athletic event happening this weekend. I scoured the internet trying to find some other competition of strength and endurance for you to watch, but there’s nothing. So, you might as well tuck into all the snowy, icy action coming to us from Milan and Cortina, Italy, where Dickie Greenleaf was supposed to go skiing until Tom Ripley took an oar to his face in San Remo. 

On Friday, of course, there is the opening ceremony, in which all of neo-fascist Italian might will be on display, Giorgia Meloni borne into the stadium upon a golden litter designed by Dolce & Gabbana. Or, I don’t know, there will be funny Euro song and dance before the great parade of nations, scores of beautiful, fit young people in their country’s finest regalia—Ralph Lauren for the Americans, Le Coq Sportif for the French, decoupaged garments made up of cutouts from extreme hardcore pornography magazines for the Germans, blue IKEA bags carefully stitched together for the Swedes—waving to the crowd as they take aim at their lifelong dreams. It’s exciting! I know the Olympics are deeply flawed, and that there’s not much national pride worth having these days, but I can still get quite swept up in it all. 

And the new Peacock Olympics zone or whatever it’s called is genuinely great. You can watch by event or watch live on several feeds. It does indulge addictive behavior, I’ve found, but it’s vastly preferable to the regular old primetime package, which is too heavily focused on American athletes and cynically crafted narratives. (Though, that still has its charms.) 

This coming weekend there is curling, luge, freestyle skiing, snowboarding, hockey, the recently embattled ski jumping (read all about Crotchgate if you haven’t yet…). But really, the main focus will be on figure skating. The team event begins this weekend, with both boys and girls taking to the great gay ice in the hopes of bringing collective glory to their homelands. And that includes Americans. Which, of course, includes one Ilia Malinin. 

Do you know about this kid? Ilia Malinin is a 21-year-old elf from a deep, dark wood that some American skating coaches found after their plane crashed in the wilderness. They caught him in a net and brought him to the United States where he has become the phenom of all phenoms. This youngster does like 90 quad jumps per skate, he regularly scores about 50 points higher than his second-place competitors, he does his own spin move called the Raspberry Twist, and his current free program routine (which I think he’ll do at the Olympics) is set to a track that features his own moody-poetic voiceover. Malinin will finally restore pride to this beleaguered republic and he will do it in high-Gen Z style. He’s going to win everything, and the revolution(s) will be TikTokked. Watch with me! It’ll be fun. 

The ‘Burbs (Peacock, February 8)

The 1989 movie this show is based on has its fans, but it’s really not very good, and was poorly received in its day. So, as far as cultural grave-robbing goes, this doesn’t rankle as much as some other wholly unnecessary (and sometimes damaging) reboots. 

The general premise of the series, from Celeste Hughey, is the same as the movie: the creepy house on the block becomes a locus of fascination for one bored resident of a chipper little street in Any Tract Development USA. But the series introduces some new dimensions. In this version, the bored suburbanite is a recent transplant from the city who’s just had a baby, and she’s Black in a largely white community. Some of those added dynamics are treated a bit heavy-handedly, but for the most part I enjoy what I’ve seen of the series, largely because of its cast. 

Keke Palmer is the lead, bringing her usual effervescence to a fairly cookie-cutter role. (She’s the one interacting with weird or otherwise interesting people; she herself is not really either of those things.) It’s a delight to have the Palmer charm on tap for episode after episode, and she grooves well with costars Paula Pell, Julia Duffy, and Mark Proksch (of Tim Heideckerverse fame). I’m less into the always faintly smug Jack Whitehall as the husband, but he’s mostly innocuous. 

I am also at least mildly intrigued by the show’s central mystery, which involves a spooky house haunted by rumors surrounding a teenager’s death some 20 years prior. Though, in a scene in which Keke goes mama let’s researching, she asks a librarian for newspapers from a date in… 2005. Look, I know that was mathematically 20 years ago, but there is nothing spooky about 2005! At least not in the fun spooky way. The 1950s were spooky, the 1960s were too. Certainly the drab and earth-toned 1970s and ’80s were frightfests. But the aughts? No, come on. I really think that everything that is at least partially about a town or a family’s dark past can’t be set in contemporary times anymore, because trying to mine mysterious, ancient horror from the cellphone and internet age is just not doing it it, old-fashioned creep-factor–wise. What, we’re supposed to think that something sinister and eerie happened while Rumor Has It was in theaters?

Oh well. I was nonetheless entertained by the first three episodes of this show, and will continue to watch. And I swear this whole letter is not Peacock sponcon. That’s just how things shook out this week. 

The Plague (on-demand rental) 

This grim little indie premiered at Cannes last May to solid reviews, went on to get some major Spirit Award nominations, and then was unceremoniously dumped in a few theaters at the very end of the year. Which is a shame; it’s a sturdily made film that’s worth more attention than it got.

I don’t love the movie, mind you. Many of its conclusions—about the brutality of young boys toward one another, about how toxic masculinity is cultivated—feel pretty hoary. The film covers well-trod ground while suggesting it’s all revelatory. That said, Charlie Polinger’s filmmaking is lush and assured and the central performances are knockouts. 

Everett Blunck, so terrific in last year’s Griffin in Summer, plays a shy, fey-ish middle-schooler who is sent to a nightmarish sleep-away water polo camp, where he is antagonized by his peers, led by a terrifyingly credible bully played by Kayo Martin. These kids clearly understand the specific ecosystem they are meant to be evoking, and they do so in exacting, dreadful, heartbreaking fashion. (Perhaps they are drawing on real-life experiences; though, it’s hard to believe that their adolescent boy peers would ever mock someone who wants to be in the performing arts.) They’re really remarkable performances, and worth seeking out. 

The title refers to something like cooties—a made-up disease the boys all fear, or pretend to fear—which actually could be a vague AIDS allegory. (Polinger grew up at a time when AIDS paranoia was much more prevalent than it is now.) But The Plague is not explicitly about that at all, nor is it a queer film—as I initially assumed when I read the description. I wrote in my Cannes curtain raiser that Polinger was a queer filmmaker, and received a correction email from a publicist. Whoops! Embarrassing. Then I met Polinger at a party a few days later and realized that, lol no, he is definitely not gay. But there are still some gay-ish implications in the movie, kinda! So, I wasn’t completely off. Either way, it was the better disease-as-youthful-ostracization-mechanism movie at Cannes last year. The other one, Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, was an unmitigated disaster. One of the steepest falls from a Palme d’Or win in memory.

Anyway, if you want a somber, tense evening at home recalling your own tweenage or early teenage social trauma, seek out The Plague. Or you could rent another big 2025 movie that was recently put on demand. You have your choice of The Secret Agent, Hamnet, or the fun but could be funner thriller The Housemaid. All are available to rent starting this week. Hell, watch ‘em all! What else are you going to do on Sunday before the Turning Point USA All-American Halftime Show? (Halftime of what, I have no idea.)

Dracula (in theaters)

It’s not the hippest thing to recommend a Luc Besson movie in 2026, but there is something dumbly entertaining about his warmed-over, romance-forward retread of Francis Ford Coppola’s opulent film version of what is definitely Bram Stoker’s most popular book. (Unless some literary nerd wants to argue that The Shoulder of Shasta, or The Watters’ Mou’, or the tawdry smut fest [I’m assuming] Miss Betty is more popular.)

There’s Caleb Landry Jones, done up in the demon makeup and white Sailor Moon buns just like Gary Oldman was. (Jones actually does a good job of playing a fruity old devil living alone in a castle, his own kind of Raspberry Twist.) And then there he is, supposedly looking dashing and young and handsome again, but it’s just Caleb Landry Jones looking extremely tired and on the verge of tears. (So, kinda just looking like Caleb Landry Jones.) 

Christoph Waltz plays the Van Helsing figure (not named that, but close enough), and you watch it thinking… Wait, surely Christoph Waltz has played the Van Helsing figure in a dozen other vampire movies. But no! He hasn’t. He somehow hasn’t. (I suppose his presence in Frankenstein is what causes that cognitive dissonance.) But he’s doing his Christoph Waltz thing effectively enough, and Zoë Bleu, daughter of Rosanna Arquette, is a perfectly pouty, miserable, eventually hot-and-bothered Mina Harker. 

The pleasure of this Dracula—aside from the Count’s terribly CGI’d gargoyle helpmeets—is just watching the very known beats of a famous story play out yet again. There’s something calming and comforting about that, the coziness of knowing exactly where things are headed, minus a few bobs and weaves here and there. I can’t really advocate for spending movie-theater money to see Luc Besson’s Dracula this weekend, but if you’re rich and bored and want to leave your poorly heated Transylvanian castle for a few hours, why not? Otherwise, a satisfying plane watch awaits you in a few months’ time.

But if you would rather see something else, something more worthy on the big screen this weekend, the great Spanish-Moroccan ordeal Sirāt (recently embroiled in some controversy) and the British BDSM romance Pillion are both finally opening in more theaters. You’d be better off with those, but I won’t blame you if Dracula’s psychosexual allure pulls you in that direction instead.