What to Watch this Week (31 Oct-6 Nov)

Feature by The Skinny | 31 Oct 2016

The best things to watch this week on the big screen, the small screen and your laptop screen, including Stranger Things does Peanuts, bite-sized horror on Film4 and Amy Adams in Nocturnal Animals

A Stranger Things Christmas: Merry Christmas Will Byers

The love for Stranger Things, Netflix’s homage to 70s and 80s sci-fi and horror, rages on. Just as enjoyable as the show itself, however, has been the creative fandom that has gathered around it, and Leigh Lahav and Oren Mendez's new short animated film Merry Christmas Will Byers might be the most delightful tribute to the Duffer brothers’ series yet.

Mashing up Stranger Things with Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts characters, and specifically the perennial holiday favourite A Charlie Brown Christmas, they’ve created a note-perfect take on the aftermath of Will Byers' abduction to the Upside Down, which drove events in the first season.

The short opens with Charlie Brown stand-in Will Byres leaning against a wall feeling blue. “I think there’s something wrong with me Dustin,” Will says to his curly-haired buddy. “I like that I’m not trapped in the Upside Down and hiding from monsters anymore. But I’m still not happy.”

Dustin suggests Will tries therapy, which leads him to Eleven, who’s manning Lucy's 5¢ a session psychiatry booth, but she’s no help. Neither is Will’s Mom, who, in typical Peanuts fashion, speaks exclusively in adult "wah wah wah". There’s also a classic Peanuts dance number and a surprise to find that it isn’t Snoopy asleep on the dog kennel.

Make sure to watch all the way to the end for a brilliant payoff from a cult Stranger Things character who has much more to complain about than Will Byers. Watch the video above.

Film4 Fright Bites

Film4 have pulled out all the stops this Halloween. Not only have they been running FilmFear on the movie channel all week, showing classic and new horrors in the runup to Halloween, and screening films at HOME in Manchester, they’ve also a collection of six chilling shorts free to stream online.

We particularly recommend mini-masterpiece Tickle Momster, which is sure to put the willies up anyone of a ticklish nature. Watch all six shorts at channel4.com/programmes/fright-bites

Nocturnal Animals

November looks to be quite a month for Amy Adams. As well as giving a commanding and emotion-filled performance in Close Encounters-style sci-fi Arrival, she’s also the lead in Nocturnal Animals, the second feature from designer Tom Ford. 

We hear it’s a dark, twist-filled, multi-strand narrative, with one story following a successful LA gallery owner (played by Adams) and another the fiction story she’s reading, which seems to be from her estranged novelist husband and features parallels with their life together.

Reviews have been mixed, but we’re intrigued to see how Ford approaches a more thriller-like material after moving tragic drama A Single Man. Released 4 Nov by Universal

Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny

Who says the auteur theory is dead? After De Palma from earlier in the year, we have another excellent documentary paying tribute to one of our favourite filmmakers: Richard Linklater.

Like his films, Linklater proves a laidback subject, but with a lot going on beneath that easygoing surface. Released 4 Nov by Dogwoof

Kate Plays Christine

Typical! You wait a lifetime for a film about Christine Chubbuck, the 29-year-old news reporter who committed suicide on live television in 1974, and then two come along at once. Ahead of Antonio Campos’s drama Christine following Chubbuck (played by Rebecca Hall) on the lead-up to her suicide, there’s the DVD and VOD release of Robert Greene’s take, Kate Plays Christine, which takes the form of a slippery doc following actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she researches to play the part of Chubbuck in a narrative film that doesn’t exist.

Which one will be the Deep Impact to the other's Armageddon, the Dante's Peak to the Volcano? Grab your copy now to find out. Released on DVD 31 Oct by Dogwoof – order your copy at shop.dogwoof.com/products/kate-plays-christine-dvd