Category: Feature

Two things particularly stand out about Hanna Bergholm’s creepy horror feature Hatching: the emotional performance from Siiri Solalinna as a wide-eyed preteen under the thumb of a perfectionist mother, and her co-star Alli, the dripping, toothy, gradually mutating bird monster she hatches from a giant egg. Where it’s been standard...

Is there a hell in the MCU? And does that imply the existence of demons, God, Lucifer, and who knows what else? All these things certainly exist in Marvel Comics, but the MCU has been fuzzier on the question. Black Panther makes it clear that Wakandan rulers go to a...

[Ed note: This article discusses attempted rape and sexual violence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.] Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 25th anniversary is this year, but this May presents another, darker milestone. Twenty years ago this month, UPN aired the 19th episode of season 6, “Seeing Red,” in which a beloved...

With a decade’s worth of content to explore, Warframe can be intimidating, especially for those who are just starting out. However, players who are patient enough to delve beyond the high-octane ninja flipping and space-mech murder gameplay will find one of the most compelling plots in all of gaming. The...

The world is dedicated to franchising, and every day it seems like a popular new game sweeps through the cultural landscape. Major brands exist not so much to create consumers as to consume audiences. Tech billionaires and acclaimed “geniuses” have become a new breed of celebrity and influence everything from...

Anyone who’s looked into the behind-the-scenes processes on Robert Eggers’ movies knows that authenticity and strict realism are paramount obsessions in his work. 2015’s The Witch required five years of research into period dialogue, clothes, tools, and architecture, and Eggers had his craft team build the primary set using hand...

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Pixar’s newest film, Lightyear, is not about “the real Buzz Lightyear,” in the sense of an actual human astronaut who inspired the beloved toy that co-stars in the Toy Story movies. Within the Pixar fiction, Lightyear is a science fiction feature film...

For two decades now, American computer-generated animated films have more or less followed a similar visual template. While their character designs aren’t necessarily hyper-realistic, everything else usually is, from the characters’ expressions and movements to the textures and effects, and especially the backgrounds and scenery. The bar for a good...

Annalise Baker is a 17-year-old MMO player running WarCore on her Windows XP clunker of a computer. It’s an hour before dinner — and an hour before the MMO goes offline for good. She’s reached her level cap, shown off her prized crimson-alligatorskin-brogues, and now spends her final hour on...

The World of Warcraft has been going on for over 16 years, so it’s no surprise it’s become enormous. The game spans several continents, planes of reality, and thanks to the addition of World of Warcraft Classic and Burning Crusade Classic, even previous iterations of itself. For some fans, though,...