Marvel’s new MCU installment Captain America: Brave New World was beset by production delays and big, story-shifting reshoots. The end result is kind of a mess. That mess was compounded during a “5D” screening of the movie I saw on Thursday night, which turned the traditional theatergoing experience into an...
The AI-generated movie What’s Next opens a fresh debate over AI filmmaking
These days, practically every technology employs artificial intelligence in one way or another, from the hodgepodge summaries at the top of Google search results to email programs auto-summarizing incoming messages and offering to compose outgoing ones. In Hollywood, machine learning tools and generative AI have been folded together under the...
The making of Severance’s incredibly unsettling John Turturro melon head
If it weren’t for the absurdity and mind-numbing grind of the corporate world, we wouldn’t have Severance. Series creator Dan Erickson has often recounted the inspiration for the hit Apple TV Plus show, citing “a really bad office job” as the creative fuel for the show.We can also thank Erickson’s...
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s accessibility doesn’t ‘dilute’ the game: ‘It’s the opposite’
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is designed to be hard. It’s also designed, from the ground up, to be accessible. These things aren’t at odds with each other. Ubisoft Montpellier integrated accessibility options into every part of the game from the start; there was no one team designated to...
In its season 3 finale, The Wheel of Time is promising to go cosmic in season 4
The Wheel of Time season 3’s finale isn’t short on big moments. By the time the credits roll, series protagonist Rand al’Thor’s taken his biggest — and most ominous — step yet toward embracing his destiny as world savior/destroyer the Dragon Reborn. His self-appointed mentor, Moiraine Damodred, squares up for...
The best Star Trek fan event of the year joyfully celebrates the franchise’s worst episode
Star Trek fans celebrate a lot of holidays. There’s Star Trek Day on Sept. 8, the anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek: The Original Series. There’s First Contact Day on April 5, the anniversary of the fictional date on which humanity made first contact with Vulcan visitors. One might...
J.R.R. Tolkien was fine with leaving War of the Rohirrim’s story untold
For Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, screenwriter Philippa Boyens, Jackson, and Fran Walsh took on the task of translating three expansive novels into three live-action movies. With the anime movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, Boyens and her co-writers took on a radically...
‘Think bigger’: The Victorian steampunk game that died so that Clair Obscur could live
If only every random scroll through Reddit was as productive as the one that changed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen’s entire life. Not too long after ditching the finance world to pursue creative dreams, but in the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown, Svedberg-Yen was wasting away an...
‘Let’s just live here awhile’: The Sherman-Palladinos on Gilmore Girls’ Twin Peaks reference
People have been noticing the similarities between Twin Peaks’ eccentric small town and Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow for years. There’s the shared cast (Sherilyn Fenn and Mädchen Amick, in Gilmore’s original run, with Ray Wise joining later in the revival). There’s the direct callouts to David Lynch’s work (now a...
The Scottish Gaelic translation of Still Wakes the Deep is deeply political
In the opening hour of Still Wakes the Deep, the acclaimed horror game set aboard a perilous oil rig in the North Sea, we hear the C-bomb no less than six times. Most come from the mouth of gruff protagonist Caz McLeary, an electrician, or “leccy,” from Glasgow. Caz possesses...