Singer and actor Evan Rachel Wood has been captivating audiences since she was a teenager, but somehow she still manages to be full of surprises. She's done a little bit of everything, starring as the leader of the android uprising in HBO's "Westworld," performing the hits of the Beatles in the musical "Across the Universe," and now, she's playing Madonna opposite Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story," debuting on the Roku Channel this week.

"Weird" was written by director Eric Appel and Weird Al himself, and it's a send-up of rock 'n' roll biopics, sharing DNA with something like "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" while still having a signature Weird Al silly sensibility. For more on that, you can read our review. The movie is fun and fluffy and very funny, held together by pitch-perfect performances by Wood and Radcliffe. 

I had the opportunity to chat with Wood via Zoom about her time portraying the Material Girl, and we had a blast discussing the costumes, the music, and of course, Weird Al himself. Hopefully when audiences see just how wonderful and "Weird" Wood can get, she'll start getting more opportunities to go truly wild. 

'The First Thing I Saw Of His Was The Like A Surgeon Music Video'

This interview has been lightly edited for content and clarity.

Were you a Big Weird Al fan before you signed on for the movie? What are some of your favorite Weird Al songs?

I was a huge Weird Al fan. I think, actually, the first thing I saw of his was the "Like A Surgeon" music video. So quite fitting. [Note: The song is based on Madonna's "Like a Virgin," and Wood plays Madonna.] But yeah, I really underestimated just how loved he was until doing this film and seeing just the outpouring of people and fans that he has inspired and that adore him. It's really wild to see.

'Oh, No. I'm Only Going To Want To Do Comedies Now'

Other than your cameo on "What We Do in the Shadows" and your episode of "Drunk History," you don't really get a chance to do a lot of comedy, which is a shame.

I know.

How is it different filming something weird compared to something like "Westworld" or these other big dramas you do?

It's really fun. Yeah. I loved getting to do "Drunk History" and the comedy that I have been asked to do. "Doll & Em," I got to do a little bit. But this was a whole other level of comedy that I've been wanting to do and was so excited that they asked me. And I looked at Dan [Radcliffe] halfway through filming and thought, "Oh, no. I'm only going to want to do comedies now. This is so much fun." I was like, "What do you mean you just show up on set and make people laugh all day, and you don't have to get dragged through the mud or cry or scream or anything?" I was like, "Oh, my God. This is great." So yes, I do hope that this actually opens the door for some more character acting and some more comedies.

'It Was Like Lightning In A Bottle'

Radcliffe absolutely goes for broke as Al in this, and the two of you together are just a blast of kinetic energy. How did you approach Madonna and Al's whirlwind romance?

We just dove headfirst into it. We both fully committed. It was just amazing to watch Dan every day on set go all out. And I think we all knew that we had a limited amount of time to film, and we all just had to not overthink it and jump in and stick the landing. And luckily, it was like lightning in a bottle where everybody involved was just really good at what they did and were able to pull this off in 18 days.

Can you tell me a little bit about that 18-day shoot, just how you got involved with it and what was it like?

It was so fun. We said constantly on set how fun it was. And then the joke was always like, "Well, yeah. If you're not having fun doing the Weird Al movie, what the hell are you doing with your life?" [laughs] So it was hilarious to see all the crazy cast of characters recreating all of these famous people and all the iconic looks from the '80s. Hair and makeup every day was just a blast. It was like, "What Weird Al song is going to be playing? What Madonna song is going to be blasting?" For as quick of a shoot as we had, we did still manage to joke around a lot. It was just a lot of really lovely people coming together for the sake of Al. It was just made with love and with fun and with the utmost admiration for this person.

'You Didn't Have To Question Whether Or Not He Was Going To Like It'

Did you get to work with Al much in person? I know you don't have a lot of scenes together, but did you at least get to see each other on set?

We did, yeah. I don't think I knew that he was going to be on set until my first day. I kept seeing, out of the corner of my eye, somebody who looked like Weird Al. So I finally asked. I was like, "Is Al here?" They're like, "Yeah, man. He's been here every day." And I thought, "Oh, the pressure!" But after my first day of filming, he came up to me and told me how well everything was playing and how impressed everybody was with the Madonna impression. So that was a great safety net, having him there and knowing that he was approving of everything. So you could relax a little bit. You didn't have to question whether or not he was going to like it.

'It Just Was Not Complete Until We Put The Beauty Mark On'

What was it like putting that Madonna costume on for the first time? Were there any little bits of the costume that really helped you feel more in character?

Yes. Honestly, showing up for that first fitting, me, the costumers, everyone was just skipping into work that day because we just knew we were about to have the best time. And so we put on "The Immaculate Collection" and just had a blast recreating a lot of our favorite Madonna looks, and then putting our own spin on it. I never wanted to take it off. It felt so good. I don't know a person that hasn't wanted to cosplay that look. But it was the beauty mark going on that solidified everything. It just was not complete until we put the beauty mark on, and then game over.

'She Is Controlling Every Room That She's In'

I love that. How did you approach your Madonna performance? I just imagine dancing in your kitchen singing "Lucky Star," but how did you tap into her, exactly?

Well, I did watch a lot of her early '80s interviews, because she's evolved and changed so much. I tried to focus on the time period that we were doing for accuracy. So yeah, I watched a lot of her interviews and how she was in a conversation, how she carried herself, her mannerisms. So it was a real treat for me, because I got to revisit a lot of the incredible Madonna material and be reminded what a genius she's always been. I think the main thing I had to get over and work on was just her -- I feel like a nerd sometimes and [I'm] sometimes modest. And she is just fully confident, completely self-assured. She is controlling every room that she's in. So that was a switch I had to lean into and flip, I think.

I imagine you probably pulled from Sophie-Anne from "True Blood" a little bit, that same villainous-ness, because this Madonna's a villain.

Yeah. I think there probably were some moments where she could definitely slip into some Sophie-Anne territory. Absolutely. She starts off as the Madonna we know and love, and then slowly morphs into, yes, a total Maleficent, villainous, sociopathic version of Madonna from another dimension. So we get to have a little fun.

'I Would Love To Play A Disney Villain'

Do you think that you would be interested in playing another villain again? Another really villainous villain, not so much a complicated one like you have before?

Oh, man. I would love to. If there was another live-action Disney film, I would love to play a Disney villain or something along those lines. But it's funny, I don't like playing the villain most of the time. A lot of people say it's more fun, but I don't like being mean. [laughs] So it can be hard for me at times. This is the amount of villain I can do without feeling terrible.

You are a musician yourself as one half of the duo Evan + Zane. Did your experience performing in real life help you with any insight playing one of the world's biggest pop stars?

Yeah. In a way, I think it helps. Being a singer my whole life, I think, helps me have an ear for accents or the way people speak. And so definitely helped me when I was trying to get Madonna's voice and cadence right and the way she pronounces certain words. I think the musical ear certainly helps. And now weirdly, I'm better at singing her songs than I was before, because I think I studied so hard. And so now we've started doing Madonna's songs at our Evan + Zane shows. So it just keeps growing.

'I Don't Think Even I Realized That I Could Sing Madonna Until Doing This'

Would you ever be interested in doing a musical again, like "Across the Universe"? I almost expected you to sing as Madonna in this!

Well, that was a misstep on their part, which they realized after the movie had wrapped and one night we were all doing some karaoke. And of course, I sang Madonna. And Dan and Eric [Appel, the director] were just like, "Oh, we messed up. We messed up so hard not having Evan sing in this movie." But I don't think even I realized that I could sing Madonna until doing this. But I would love to do another musical. I would love to do musical theater in New York. That's where I started, was musical theater. And so that's really where I feel the most at home. It's funny, Hollywood pigeonholes people. [I'm seen as] this dark and brooding dramatic actress, but I can actually do multiple things.

'I Really Want To Host SNL Now'

This movie is chock full of cameos from Weird Al himself to Josh Groban as a waiter. Did you have any really funny cameo moments or anything that you were just beyond excited to see?

I was very excited to see Conan O'Brien as Andy Warhol. It's so brief, and I don't even know if some people would even recognize that's him, but it is. That one, I was stoked about. And the Josh Groban cameo made me laugh maybe more than any of them, because he was playing it so straight. He wasn't playing an iconic character from the '80s. He was just our waiter that just had to act quietly, super uncomfortable, and get food knocked out of his hand. It was just so funny watching somebody of his caliber play that role. [laughs] So that really made me laugh, honestly.

Is there anything that doing this really taught you about comedy?

Yeah. I think it gave me more confidence that I could do skits or sketch comedy or something like that. I was just like, "Man, I really want to host 'SNL' now, so that I can play a bunch of different characters and sing and be funny and wear funny disguises and costumes." So yeah, it definitely gave me a taste for sketch comedy, I think.

'We Were Going For Accuracy With This One'

What's next for you? You've done so much this year. It's been a lot.

It has been a lot. Yeah, it's been a lot. So I'm taking a bit of a break, but I'm still singing a lot. And Evan + Zane are finally able to perform live again after a couple years. So we're getting back into the swing of that. Hopefully, there'll be a tour and some things on the music side. I'm working on an EP of my own songs. I've got another music side project going on that should be coming out soon. So a lot of music happening, actually. And then we'll see if "Westworld" is going to come back or not.

Is there anything that you want the readers at /Film to know about "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story?"

It is absolutely true. 100% accurate. Very excited for people to learn about this romance that Weird Al had with Madonna. And yeah, we were going for accuracy with this one.

"Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" premieres on Roku on November 4, 2022.

Read this next: 14 Awesome Comedies That Never Got Sequels

The post Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Star Evan Rachel Wood Wants to Try New Things [Exclusive Interview] appeared first on /Film.

Linux magazine explores how to breath fresh life into old Android devices: Every mobile device needs its own Android build because of numerous drivers that are not available in the source code. The need to maintain every version of Android for every mobile device means that many manufacturers eventually stop supporting updates. Often, smartphones or tablets that still work perfectly can no longer be used without worry because the manufacturer has simply ceased to offer bug fixes and security updates.... The LineageOS project, the successor to the CyanogenMod project, which was discontinued in 2016, proves that it is not impossible to keep these devices up-to-date. Unpaid volunteers at LineageOS do the work that many manufacturers do not want to do: They combine current Android releases with the required device-specific drivers. The LineageOS project (Figure 1) provides Android systems with a fresh patch status every month for around 300 devices. The builds are released weekly, unless there is a problem during the build. The Devices page on the LineageOS Wiki provides the details of whether a LineageOS build is available for your smartphone or tablet.... I recommend the LineageOS project as the first port of call for anyone who wants to protect an older smartphone or tablet that is no longer maintained and doesn't receive Google security patches. The LineageOS derivatives LineageOS for MicroG and /e/OS make it even easier to enjoy a Google-free smartphone without too many restrictions. The article also describes how to use TWRP to flash a manufacturer-independent recovery system (while also creating a restoreable backup of the existing system) as an alternative to LineageOS's own recovery tools. And it even explains how to unlock the bootloader — although there may be other locks set up separately by the manufacturer. "Some manufacturers require you to register the device to unlock it, and then — after telling you that the warranty is now void — they hand over a code. Others refuse to unlock the device altogether." Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for submitting the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Welcome to Year of the Vampire, a series examining the greatest, strangest, and sometimes overlooked vampire movies of all time in honor of "Nosferatu," which turns 100 this year.)

Vampires may be fundamentally incapable of self-reflection (seeing as how they don't show up in mirrors and all), but that doesn't mean we can't reflect on them. And so we have, all throughout 2022. The Year of the Vampire is almost over now, and these last 11 months have been an educational, blood-spattered ride through one of film history's oldest genres.

With the first 50 articles in this series, we spotlit individual vampire movies, beginning with F.W. Murnau's original "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" and ending with Werner Herzog's 1979 remake "Nosferatu the Vampyre." However, if you've been following along at all, you might know we've jumped around in time since January and analyzed over two dozen 20th-century vampire films.

This list adds to that with 20 more titles, from our catacomb to yours, thereby closing out the 20th-century portion of our official Year of the Vampire coverage. (We'll have another list of additional 21st-century films out next month.)

Before we dive into further recommendations, here's the full alphabetical list of 20th-century vampire movies we've put under the microscope so far.

Every 20th-Century Vampire Movie We've Covered

"The Addiction" (1995)

"Blade" (1998)

"Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992)

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1992)

"Cronos" (1993)

"Daughters of Darkness" (1971)

"Dracula" (1931)

"Dracula: Dead and Loving It" (1995)

"Dracula's Daughter" (1936)

"Fright Night" (1985)

"From Dusk Till Dawn" (1996)

"Ganja & Hess" (1973)

"Horror of Dracula" (1958)

"The Hunger" (1983)

"Interview with the Vampire" (1994)

"The Last Man on Earth" (1964)

"Lifeforce" (1985)

"The Lost Boys" (1987)

"Martin" (1977)

"Mr. Vampire" (1985)

"Near Dark" (1987)

"Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" (1922)

"Nosferatu the Vampyre" (1979)

"Planet of the Vampires" (1965)

"Vampire Hunter D" (1985)

"The Vampire Lovers" (1970)

"Vampyr" (1932)

Different writers and editors here at /Film have left their bloody fingerprints on the features above, and I've personally perused each one of them, just as a reader. So should you, if you're a vampire true believer. Speaking of which, for anyone who feels better serviced, morally, by movies with the need to bleed (rather than the old "Top Gun" need for speed), here are 20 more 20th-century vampire movie bites, to consider for your eternal viewing pleasure.

Drácula (1931, Spanish)

Before dubbing and subtitles became the go-to practice for marketing Hollywood films to foreign countries, studios like Universal would shoot multiple versions of the same movie on the same sets with different actors. That's what happened with "Drácula," which had Carlos Villarías and a Spanish-speaking cast filming at night on the set where Bela Lugosi and an English-speaking cast had shot scenes during the day. They were the true vampires. Director George Melford consulted the footage Tod Browning was coming up with for the Lugosi version and relied on an interpreter to help translate for him as he had Villarías play "Conde Drácula."

The result was a film that some say is superior to the better-known English version, with more room to breathe, in terms of both low-cut negligees and a 29-minute longer runtime. It's in the National Film Registry now, but the Spanish edition of "Drácula" was forgotten for several decades, and it's still not streaming anywhere, though you can find it as a bonus feature on the DVD of Browning's "Dracula" and in the "Dracula: Complete Legacy Collection" Blu-ray set.

Mark Of The Vampire (1935)

By 1935, vampires were already old hat for the aforementioned Tod Browning and Bela Lugosi. They reunited on this film after "Dracula," trading on Lugosi's image in a meta murder mystery that involves actors masquerading as the undead. Lugosi's Count Mora is accompanied by Luna (Carroll Borland), who influenced the look of Lily Munster in the mid-1960s "Munsters" sitcom. One gets the sense that Browning was bored with bloodsuckers by now and hamming it up a bit, and in his limited screen time, Lugosi also lapses into vampire self-parody here. The actor's Hungarian accent had become synonymous with Count Dracula, and he faced typecasting as a result.

With a 60-minute runtime, "Mark of the Vampire" is a holdover from the days when feature films could be as short as the length of some modern TV episodes. Earlier this year, we examined how Dracula and vampires influenced other movie monsters, and that influence extends here to Ghostface, whose first victim in "Scream" was played by Drew Barrymore, the grandniece of "Mark of the Vampire" star Lionel Barrymore.

Isle Of The Dead (1945)

The 1940s were a fallow period for vampire films, as the real-life horrors of war eclipsed the make-believe horrors of movie monsters. Audiences knew Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy, but in "Isle of the Dead" — which hit theaters just five days after World War II ended — he played a Balkan War general under the grips of superstition about the vorvolaka, a kind of Greek vampire that "drains people of their strength and vitality until they die."

Quarantined on an island where a breakout of septicemic plague has occurred, the general and other characters face the same fears about shaking hands and gathering in groups that people living through the pandemic now have faced. At one point, we see them scrubbing up in an actual hand-washing montage. Karloff spouts the apocalyptic quote, "The horseman on the pale horse is Pestilence. He follows the wars."

Citing its premature burial scene as one that "never fails to scare" him, Martin Scorsese named "Isle of the Dead" his second favorite horror movie of all time. It may have helped inspire his own island-set psychological thriller, "Shutter Island."

Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

With all due respect to Glenn Strange's creature, "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" is named for the wrong Universal Monster. The real mastermind here, the one hypnotizing people, turning them into vampires, and plotting a brain transplant for Lou Costello's character, is the boss of all bloodsuckers: Bela Lugosi's Dracula. His castle, we see, is located on a Florida island, and as a native of the Sunshine State, I can confirm the existence of vampires in the State Capitol and the "Winter White House" (Mar-a-Lago), despite their aversion to sunlight.

Though his image became forever entwined with the character, and he milked that with appearances in other low-rent vampire movies, "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" was the first and last time Lugosi officially reprised his role as Dracula in a Universal film. Frankenstein and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.), the latter of whom was no slouch in the horror department, either, each headlined sequels to their solo films. Yet Dracula, the monster who paved the way for all those others, was left canonically dead until he had his run-in with a couple vaudeville comedians in this classic horror comedy.

The White Reindeer (1952)

A reindeer, you say? In a vampire movie? In this economy? But that's the beauty of it: "The White Reindeer" had already thought of the idea 70 years ago. We've seen Dracula transform into all manner of creatures, from wolves to bats to rats, so what's to stop a Finnish woman from sprouting vampire fangs and morphing into a reindeer? Absolutely nothing.

Keep in mind, Dracula often serves as a bloodsucking bigamist with three wives in his crypt. Newlywed Pirita (Mirjami Kuosmanen) would be happy just to have her one husband home with her, and she's willing to sacrifice a living thing to do it. Once upon a time, the Cannes Film Festival had an award called "Best Fairy Tale Film," and "The White Reindeer" won it in 1953, though it's sometimes classified now as an early work of folk horror. It was shown in the documentary "Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror," and we also featured it this year as one of the international titles in our own folk horror world tour.

The Brides Of Dracula (1960)

Christopher Lee's Dracula was a serial monogamist, living from bride to bride in "Horror of Dracula," so the title of this first Hammer Horror sequel is a bit misleading. This isn't a movie about the three classic brides in Dracula's castle. In "The Brides of Dracula," Dracula is dead, "but his disciples live on," courtesy of the new blonde head vampire, Baron Meinster (David Peel). Lee sat this movie out, but in his absence, Peter Cushing returned to deliver what Bloody Disgusting calls "the definitive Van Helsing performance as a beacon of righteousness" against evil.

"The Brides of Dracula" deftly maneuvers between well-worn tropes, like the arrival of a foreign guest at a vampire's castle, to deliver scenes of pure dread, where the forces of darkness are set free from their leg irons and beautiful undead brides rise from the ground and their coffin. You may have seen one of them, the unforgettable Gina (Andrée Melly), on TV in the background of "The Matrix Reloaded."

Black Sunday (1960)

The English version of "Black Sunday" opens with talk of "those monstrous beings thirsty for human blood, to whom tradition has given the name of vampires." However, much like "The White Reindeer," the film throws both vampire and witch ingredients into the same cauldron, so that you're just as likely to see Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele) being burned at the stake as repelled by a cross.

In the opening minutes, Asa also has an iron-maiden-like Mask of Satan hammered into her face (the film's Italian title translates as "Mask of the Demon"), but 200 years later, she's ready to rise from her coffin and take her revenge. Giallo filmmaker Mario Bava, who later helmed "Planet of the Vampires," made his official directorial debut with this black-and-white shocker, which makes a strong impression with its camerawork as it takes the viewer down into a cobwebbed tomb and gives a full 360-degree tour of it.

Black Sabbath (1963)

Mario Bava and Boris Karloff were at it again in 1963 with the horror anthology that supplied the rock band Black Sabbath with its name and later provided Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary with inspiration for the tripartite structure of "Pulp Fiction." Only one third of "Black Sabbath" — the spooky, Karloff-led segment "The Wurdulak" — qualifies as a vampire film, but it sees him graduating from the vorvolaka witch hunt in "Isle of the Dead" to a genuine undead feast.

He doubles as the anthology's host, and as Motion Bitcher notes, this is the only time Karloff himself inhabited a bloodsucker role. The wurdulak is a Russian vampire that forms a coven out of family members it has fed on. So much of existing vampire mythology involves fear of an external threat, the foreign invader, the inhuman outsider. In "The Wurdulak," the vampire call is coming from inside the house. It's your own flesh and blood, and it wants a bite of your neck.

Dracula: Prince Of Darkness (1966)

"Why should a dead man be interested in entertaining guests?" asks the original trailer for "Dracula: Prince of Darkness." Answer: because reports of his death by sunlight in Hammer's "Horror of Dracula" were greatly exaggerated. In "Dracula: Prince of Darkness," Christopher Lee returned to the title role for the first time, though he doesn't speak a single word of dialogue before they put him back on ice.

Forget Jonathan Harker; in this movie, it's a whole adult family of four that a rude, knife-wielding coachman abandons in the Carpathian Mountains. There's already a table waiting for them at Dracula's castle, and the only one capable of reading the tea leaves and reacting with appropriate fright is vampire-to-be Helen Kent, played by "Village of the Damned" star Barbara Shelley.

Considering that "Dracula: Prince of Darkness" came out over 50 years ago, it's somewhat shocking to see the Count's manservant hang a bloke upside down and bleed him out like drip coffee over a powdered vampire. "Let the Right One In" pulled a similar trick, while Gary Oldman adopted Lee's chest-slicing fingernail move. Who knew a vampire could be drowned in running water?

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

If you've never seen a Sharon Tate movie ("Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" doesn't count), she's luminous in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," though you wish they wouldn't withhold her so much and would give her something more to do besides Baroque dance and take bubble baths. "They" really means her future husband, Roman Polanksi, who directed, co-wrote, and co-stars as one of two bumbling vampire killers, the other being Jack MacGowran ("The Exorcist"), made up to look like Alfred Einstein.

As a horror comedy, "The Fearless Vampire Killers" isn't particularly funny; in his one-star review, Roger Ebert observed that nobody in the audience laughed when he saw it. That's not to say it's a mirthless affair, just that it's dull in parts. There's talk of vampire "grooming" here, and Polanski himself has a reputation for being something of a vampire at large. However, as a piece of film history, this might be worth watching for Tate and its early intimations of Polanski's recurring interest in Satanists, as when Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne) horns his fingers and says, "With Lucifer's aid, we might look forward to a more succulent occasion."

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968)

"Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" shows further overlap between Hammer Horror and early British folk horror, not only with Christopher Lee, who would play Lord Summerisle in "The Wicker Man," but in the presence of Barry Andrews, who would show up again soon in "Blood on Satan's Claw." His character's open atheism in this film adds a new wrinkle to the mythos, leaving him beholden to blind luck in lieu of religious weapons against vampirism like prayer.

Dracula still jumps straight out the window at the sight of a cross, but wooden stakes offer no guarantees, and those with faith are as vulnerable as those without it, as we see with the priest he puts in his thrall. Women back away from Drac yet eventually submit to his will, offering up their bosoms and necks to him in vampire POV shots. Buxom bar wenches and nasty, snake-like bites also characterize Lee's third outing as the red-eyed Count, which picks up right where "Dracula: Prince of Darkness" left off.

The Omega Man (1971)

"Is this the conclusion of all our yesterdays?" The second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel, "I Am Legend," has onetime NRA president Charlton Heston's character, Robert Neville, mowing down albino mutants with a submachine gun. There are a lot of guns and afros in this movie.

The "half-dead" mutants, who form a cultish, Manson-like Family, only emerge after sunset, but they still complement their black robes with dark sunglasses to hide their vampire eyes. Don't be fooled, though, because they're more well-spoken than the usual Darkseekers and indeed fully capable of catapulting fireballs at Neville until he starts sniping them with an automatic rifle like the trigger-happy, Hippocratic Oath-breaking doctor he is.

In "The Omega Man," the camera pulls back to show the empty streets of a progressive post-apocalypse with interracial romance. Yet the mutants, somewhat questionably, can only be cured through a white man's blood transfusion—and he's not opposed to going out in military get-up and a Jesus Christ pose.

The Night Stalker (1972)

Midway through the vampire movie century, another Richard Matheson teleplay based on a then-unpublished Jeff Rice novel about a bloodsucker on the loose in Las Vegas became the most-watched TV movie ever. Intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) initially thinks the city has a serial killer on its hands. The opening credits of "The Night Stalker" play out from the POV of a victim being autopsied, but it turns out this victim and others have been drained of blood.

This is the perfect story for an "amateur bloodhound" and night editor like Kolchak. If it bleeds, it leads, and if it bites at night, it's probably a vampire (one who might go on the rampage and raid the hospital fridge for blood, throwing subtlety out the window with a hapless orderly). "The Night Stalker" and its follow-up series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" inspired "The X-Files," which is why creator Chris Carter cast McGavin as the father of the X-Files, Arthur Dales. Fifty years later, this movie still rings true in its depiction of a police bureaucracy that would rather suppress the news than see it reported truthfully.

Blacula (1972)

"We can't ignore what the world characterizes as the black arts." So sayeth the African prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall), but is he talking about the surface-level topic, the occult, or the Black arts as in Black cinema? At the outset of "Blacula," Mamuwalde's wife refers to him as "the crystallization of our people's pride" as he negotiates with Dracula about ceasing the slave trade. The year is 1780 and the setting, naturally, is Transylvania, but when his evil vampire host insults him, bites him, and locks him in a coffin for 200 years, Mamuwalde soon emerges in the blaxploitation era.

In the Shudder documentary "Horror Noire," filmmaker William Craine recalled the experience of being a Black director working with an all-white crew and facing studio resistance when he wanted to de-segregate the dancing couples in the nightclub in "Blacula." The movie has its issues; instead of a Black person being the first to die per horror movie cliché, it's two gay guys, which seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul, representation-wise. But with lines like, "Strange how so many sloppy police jobs involve Black victims," "Blacula" already knew the score 50 years ago.

The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

The seven titular vampires have poor complexions, and apart from Hsi Ching (David Chiang), the seven brothers who fight them don't have very distinguishable personalities besides the weapons they're assigned. But the final entry in Hammer Horror's Dracula series, "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires," is a Shaw Brothers co-production that earns points for attempting cross-cultural relations with Hong Kong—where it was made entirely on location.

This was Peter Cushing's last hurrah as Van Helsing. Three years later, Cushing would play Grand Moff Tarkin in the original "Star Wars" movie. The way Van Helsing's son enjoys another Eurocentric interracial romance while Ching and Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege) are punished for theirs betrays an undeniable double standard in "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires" (which is nothing if not a product of its time). Hong Kong ultimately fared better with its own vampire/kung fu mashup, "Mr. Vampire."

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

Nicolas Cage is set to appear as Dracula next year in "Renfield," but it won't be the first time he's worn fangs or played the boss from hell. Imagine Cage as a cockroach-gobbling version of Patrick Bateman who thinks he's a vampire instead of a serial killer. Now, imagine him bulging his eyes as wide as they'll go and adopting a voice that sounds like a wacky pre-impression of Keanu Reeves' English accent in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (which Cage's uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, directed).

Ladies and gentlemen: "Vampire's Kiss." This movie, written by Joseph Minion ("After Hours"), was an early indicator of Cage's over-the-top, Nouveau Shamanic acting inclinations. Anyone who thinks those only developed later when he started churning out more meme fodder in direct-to-video 2010s films owes it to themself to watch this bizarre, horrific '80s flick, which costars María Conchita Alonso, Elizabeth Ashley, future "Eve's Bayou" director Kasi Lemmons, and Jennifer Beals as a kind of energy vampire born of a man's disturbed psyche.

Nadja (1994)

The New York indie film scene in the mid-1990s was a veritable vampire catacomb, yielding "Nadja," "The Addiction," and the next entry on this list in rapid succession. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda, "Nadja" is the black-and-white bridge between "Dracula's Daughter" and "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night." The title character, played by Elina Löwensohn ("Schindler's List"), actually is Dracula's daughter, and she's got a sweet tooth for the blood of shark embryos. Jared Harris plays her vampire brother and Peter Fonda plays a long-haired, bicycle-riding Dr. Van Helsing. Where else are you going to see that?

"Nadja" costars Suzy Amis, Martin Donovan, and Galaxy Craze, but you won't always see their faces clearly because the movie makes heavy use of pixelated scenes, shot on a toy camcorder, whenever Löwensohn's character uses her vampire powers. Sitting through that kind of arthouse affectation might test the patience of some viewers, but if you're in the mood for something like early David Lynch, he executive produced "Nadja" and makes a cameo in it as a morgue receptionist.

Habit (1997)

In 2021, Larry Fessenden made a return to the vampire genre with "Jakob's Wife." Twenty-five years ago, he wrote, directed, and starred in the Independent Spirit Award-winning "Habit," which throws his character, Sam, into a relationship with a possible vampire. Her name is Anna (Meredith Snaider, who never made another movie after this), and she tends to bite his lip and suck blood from it and other places during the throes of passion. He's a beer-swilling slob who's missing a front tooth; she's the beautiful stranger who's out of his league but first takes interest in him at a Halloween party.

Filmed on an estimated budget of $200,000, "Habit" is set against a backdrop of recognizable Manhattan landmarks and a self-destructive society where "vampirism is everywhere." It's not only "at the bottom of a bottle or a needle in the arm," but in "500 channels of insipid cultural drivel, the advertising and gluttony, draining of us of our ability to think." Face it: it would probably have a field day during the streaming age.

John Carpenter's Vampires (1998)

B-movie fans might dig it, but it's hard to root for the vampire hunters in "John Carpenter's Vampires." Jack Crow (James Woods) wields a crossbow and an attitude as he leads his squad into a nest while his Baldwin-brother lieutenant winches bloodsucking "goons" into the sunlight. The Catholic Church sponsors them, but you wouldn't know it from the way they act: whoring it up in a motel like it's the Titty Twister, bribing a lawman, jacking Frank Darabont's civilian car at gunpoint, smacking around Sheryl Lee's character and even tying her naked to a bed (did they not see "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me?" Give the woman a break), beating up and torturing a well-meaning priest, and just generally being aggressive, misogynistic, and homophobic.

After hearing their laundry list of crimes against humanity, you'd think they were the vampires, but no, that's the inverse-exorcised goth Valek ("Cobra Kai" baddie Thomas Ian Griffith). The blues-guitar sounds in this vampire Western belong to Carpenter's Texas Toad Lickers.

Immortality (1998)

It was either this or "Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood," and let's face it: that movie is pure trash. This one has Jude Law playing a London pseudo-vampire named Steven Grlscz, who might appeal to your inner hopeless romantic if, like Nadja herself (Elina Löwensohn again, playing a human here rather than Dracula's daughter), you "like a man with a bit of mystery about him." Grlscz lacks fangs and the traditional vulnerability to sunlight, but he casts a long, "Nosferatu"-like shadow and moves much quicker than any human. He believes we have three brains: "one that is human, built over another that is mammalian, built over yet another that's reptilian." Hence the movie's alternate title, "The Wisdom of Crocodiles."

I was first exposed to "Immortality" through one of my university professors; she had an office full of DVDs like this and had co-edited a book called "Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms," with a chapter she co-authored about "The Compulsions of Real/Reel Serial Killers and Vampires." That's a clue to the nature of "Immortality," which lies somewhere between a vampire film and an episode of "Dexter."

Stay tuned for our final 21st-century list and Year of the Vampire wrap-up in December.

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The post Year of the Vampire: 20 More 20th-Century Films to Quench Your Thirst for Blood appeared first on /Film.

Guy Ritchie is keeping pretty busy these days. In addition to his role directing the live-action and somehow TikTok-inspired adaptation of Disney's "Hercules," he's also set to start production on the series spin-off of his film "The Gentlemen" for Netflix. In the 2019 film, Matthew McConaughey starred as Mickey Pearson, an American living in England who oversees a massive marijuana empire hidden in the estates of members of the British aristocracy in need of some fast cash. We called "The Gentlemen" a "stylish but empty Guy Ritchie gangster romp" in our own review of the film, but the box office success of the action-comedy crime film was enough to constitute a follow-up series. The film is set in the same world as "The Gentlemen," but as reported by Variety, promises to be a story all its own. Here's everything we know about the series so far.

When And Where To Watch The Gentlemen

"The Gentlemen" is slated to begin production in the United Kingdom starting November 7, 2022, so it'll be some time before we see the series arrive on Netflix. It's unlikely that "The Gentlemen" will require as much turnaround time from production to delivery as something like "Stranger Things." Still, as it stands, we probably won't see "The Gentlemen" until late summer or early fall in 2023.

What We Think The Gentlemen Will Be About

"The Gentlemen" will focus on an entirely new cast of characters, so apologies to anyone hoping for a return from Matthew McConaughey or Charlie Hunnam. Theo James, who currently appears in "The White Lotus," is set to star as Eddie, described by Netflix as "the estranged son of an English aristocrat who inherits the family pile -- only to discover that it's sitting on top of the biggest weed farm in Europe."

"The world of 'The Gentlemen' is a little bit of me," Ritchie told Variety. "I'm thrilled that with Netflix, Miramax, and Moonage we have this opportunity to inhabit it once again." He continued by saying, "We're looking forward to bringing fans back into that world, introducing new characters and their stories and I am excited to be doing it with this extremely talented cast."

What We Know About The Cast And Crew Of The Gentlemen

In addition to Theo James, the cast of "The Gentlemen" includes Kaya Scodelario ("Crawl," "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City"), Daniel Ings ("I Hate Suzie"), Joely Richardson ("Lady Chatterley's Lover"), Giancarlo Esposito ("Better Call Saul," "The Mandalorian"), Peter Serafinowicz ("The Tick"), and Vinnie Jones (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," "The Midnight Meat Train"). The show will also mark the reunion of Jones and Guy Ritchie for the first time since "Snatch."

Ritchie created the series and co-wrote the pilot with Matthew Read ("Peaky Blinders"). Ritchie is also an executive producer and will direct the first two episodes, with Read also executive producing along with Marn Davies, Ivan Atkinson, and Marc Helwig for Miramax TV, as well as Will Gould and Frith Tiplady for Moonage Pictures. The series producer is Hugh Warren with Miramax TV also producing as Miramax released the original film.

Read this next: 14 Sequels That Truly Didn't Need To Happen

The post The Gentlemen: Everything We Know So Far About Guy Ritchie's Netflix Series Spin-Off appeared first on /Film.

When we started out with Mean Streets, we wanted a vintage, hard-boiled detective from the 1930s and 1940s. You know, the Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Chandler classic character. But since then, we’ve changed our picture of [our detective] Tex [Murphy]. We want to see some human vulnerability. We don’t want the superhero. Too much of the videogame genre is just these invincible characters. They aren’t real; they don’t have texture; they don’t have any kind of fabric to their personality. It’s not very interesting really, dealing strictly with such a one-dimensional character.

For us, the idea was to make this person seem more real. Whether he’s fumbling around or whatever — okay, let’s give him a talent, but let’s put a few defects in his character. He’s still a good guy, but he screws up a lot and says the wrong thing. He’s really from a different time period. We set it in the future because we wanted to give it the gadgets and get it out of today. So we take this man out of time. The general focus of Tex is this: I’m this guy who’s got these problems, who tries to date women but has a hard time with it, and ends up dating the wrong women. If someone good actually likes Tex, well, he figures there must be something wrong with them.

But now, to take Tex down three different paths… this is very interesting.

— Chris Jones in 1995, speaking about plans for The Pandora Directive

Under a Killing Moon, the first interactive full-motion-video film noir to feature the perpetually down-on-his-luck detective-out-of-time Tex Murphy, didn’t become one of that first tier of mid-1990s adventure games that sold over a million copies, captured mainstream headlines, and fomented widespread belief in a new era of interactive mainstream entertainment. It did become, however, a leading light of the second tier, selling almost half a million copies for its Salt Lake City-based developer and publisher Access Software over the course of the year after its release in late 1994. Such numbers were enough to establish Tex Murphy as something more than just a sideline to Links, Access’s enormously profitable series of golf simulations. Indeed, they made a compelling case for a sequel, especially in light of the fact that the second game ought to cost considerably less to make than the $5 million that had been invested in the first, what with the sequel being able to reuse an impressive game engine whose creation had eaten up a good chunk of that budget. The sequel was officially underway already by the beginning of 1995.

The masterminds of the project were once again Chris Jones and Aaron Conners — the former being the man who had invented the character of Tex Murphy and who still played him onscreen when not moonlighting as Access’s chief financial officer (or vice versa), the latter being the writer who had breathed new life into him for Under a Killing Moon. The sequel was to be an outlier in the novelty-driven world of game development, representing a creative and writerly evolution rather than a technological one. For the fact was that the free-roaming 3D adventuring engine used in Under a Killing Moon was still very nearly unique.

Conners concocted a new script, called The Pandora Directive, that was weightier and just plain bigger than what had come before; it was projected to require about half again as much time to play through. It took place in the same post-apocalyptic future and evinced the same Raymond Chandler-meets-Blade Runner aesthetic, but it also betrayed a marked new source of inspiration: the hit television series The X-Files, whose murky postmodern vision of sinister aliens and labyrinthine government conspiracies was creeping into more and more games during this era. Conners was forthright about its influence in interviews, revealing at the same time something of the endearingly gawky wholesomeness of The Pandora Directive‘s close-knit, largely Mormon developers, which sometimes sat a little awkwardly alongside the subject matter of their games. Watching The X-Files in secret, away from the prying eyes of spouses and children, was about as edgy as this bunch ever got in their personal lives.

Everyone else in the development team is a family man, and X-Files is a little heavy for the kids. So they all ask me to record it. I bring it in and we watch it during lunch. I really like the show. It’s been nice because we watch carefully to see what they do with music and lighting to portray a mood. Their production is closer to what we do than to a cinematic feature — tighter budget, working faster. So we found the show very informative.

If anything, The X-Files‘s influence on The Pandora Directive‘s plot is a little too on-the-nose. Like its television inspiration, the game revolves around the UFO that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, the wellspring of a thousand overlapping conspiracy theories in both real life and fiction. If the one in the game is ultimately less intricately confounding than its television counterpart, that is only, one senses, because Conners had less space to develop his mythology. It’s all complete nonsense, of course, but The Pandora Directive is hardly the only game to mine escapist fun from the overwrought fever dreams of the conspiracy theorists.

But Jones and Conners were as eager to experiment with the form of their game as its content. Like the vast majority of adventure games, Under a Killing Moon had draped only a thin skein of player agency over a plot whose broad beats were as fixed as those of any traditional novel or film. You could tinker with the logistical details, in other words — maybe do certain things in a different order from some other player — but the overall arc of the story remained fixed. Conners’s script for The Pandora Directive aimed to change that, at least partially. While your path to unraveling the conspiracy would remain mostly set in stone, you would be able to determine Tex’s moral arc, if you will. If you played him as a paragon of virtue, he might just win true love and find himself on the threshold of an altogether better life by the end of the game. Cut just a few ethical corners here and there, and Tex would finish the game more or less where he’d always been, just about managing to keep his head above water and make ends meet, in a financial and ethical sense. But play him as a complete jerk, and he’d wind up dissipated and alone. Chris Jones on the bad path, which was clearly a challenge for this particular group of people to implement:

It’s a gradual fall. Bit by bit. Bad decision here, another there. As Tex sees it and the surroundings begin to change, he realizes that he blew it. His opportunity’s gone; this other girl is dead because of his mistake. And that darkens the character. So if each step gets you just a little darker, then it’s believable. It starts to have a real texture to it. That’s what we’re trying to do. Tex makes choices, tripping down the dark path, and starts to question himself: “Do I want to save myself? Or maybe this is what I want.” And then eventually you’re trapped. And that’s when it gets very interesting. We start to give Tex some options where the player will say, “Whoa! Can I make this choice?” By the end of the game, he turns into a real cynical bastard. If he chooses to stay on the darker side — each choice is just a shade of gray really, but all those shades of gray add up to a pretty dark character by the time you’re done. Just like in life.

I’m a bit uncomfortable about the way the [dark] path turns out. That was never my vision of what Tex could be. On the other hand, we have this medium which allows you to do such a thing. It is our competitive advantage over movies and television to be able to say to our audience, “Sit in this seat, make different decisions, and see how it turns out.” If we can pull it off with our characterizations and acting… well, now, that’s a very powerful medium. And so I feel like we have a responsibility to do that, to provide these kinds of choices. As I said, as an actor, I feel uncomfortable with this portrayal of Tex. But I feel it would shortchange people who buy the game to say, no, this is Tex, do it my way. If you’re kind of leaning down the dark path, take it and see what happens. You become the character. I’m in your hands.

In addition to the artistic impulse behind it, the more broad-brushed interactivity was intended to allay one of the most notable weaknesses of adventure games as a commercial proposition: the fact that they cost as much or more than other types of games to buy, but, unlike them, were generally interesting to play through only once. Jones and Conners hoped that their players would want to experience their game two or three times, in order to explore the possibility space of Tex’s differing moral arcs.

They implemented a user-selectable difficulty level, another rarity in adventure games, for the same reason. The “Entertainment” level gives access to a hint system; the “Game Players” level removes that, whilst also removing some in-game nudges, adding some red herrings to throw you off the scent, making some of the puzzles more complex, and adding time limits here and there. Again, Jones and Conners imagined that many players would want to go through the story once at Entertainment level, then try to beat the game on Game Players.

But the most obvious way that Access raised the bar over Under a Killing Moon was the cast and crew that they hired for the cinematic cut scenes and dialogs that intersperse your first-person explorations as Tex Murphy. While the first games had employed such Hollywood actors as Margot Kidder, Brian Keith, Russell Means, and even the voice of James Earl Jones as its narrator, it had done so only as an afterthought, once Jones and Conners had already built the spine of their game around local Salt Lake City worthies. This time they chose to invest a good part of the money they had saved from their tools budget into not just “real” actors but a real, professional director.

The official resumé which Access’s press releases provided for Adrian Carr, the man chosen for the latter role, was written on a curve typical of interactive movies, treating the five episodes he had directed of the cheesy children’s show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, his most prominent American credit to date, like others might a prestigious feature film. “He has directed, written, and/or edited work in almost every genre, from features to documentaries, television drama to commercials,” Access wrote breathlessly. All kidding aside, Carr really was an experienced journeyman, who had directed two low-budget features in his native Australia and edited a number of films for Hollywood. He had never seriously played a computer game in his life, but that didn’t strike Jones and Conners as a major problem; they were confident that they had a handle on that side of the house. Carr was brought in not least because professional actors of the sort that he’d seen before on television or movie screens tended to intimidate Chris Jones, who’d directed Under a Killing Moon himself. He “didn’t know how to handle them exactly,” allowed Conners.

Whatever the initial impulse behind it, it proved to be a very smart move. Adrian Carr may not have been the film industry’s ideal of an auteur, but he was more than capable of giving The Pandora Directive a distinctive look that wasn’t just an artifact of the technology behind the production — a look which, once again, stemmed principally from The X-Files, from that television show’s way of portraying its shadowy conspiracies using an equally shadowy visual aesthetic. Carr:

We started lighting darker, and putting in Venetian blinds and shadows and reflections to create texture. And the poor people who render the backgrounds moaned, “But it’s so dark!” And I’d say, “But it’s a movie!”

This has been one of my contributions, I guess. The technicians have been learning about mood. Like when Tex comes home and the room is only lit from outside, or there’s just one lamp on — see, guys, the murkiness is actually good, it creates a certain texture for the mood that we want.

The cast as a whole remained a mixture of amateurs and professionals; those returning characters that had been played by locals in the previous game were still played by them in this one. Among these was Tex Murphy himself, played by Chris Jones, the man whom everyone agreed really was Tex in some existential sense; he probably wasn’t much of an actor in the abstract, probably would have been a disaster in any other role, but he was just perfect for this one. Likewise, Tex’s longtime crush Chelsee Bando and the other misfits that surround his office on Chandler Avenue all came back to make up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in acting-school credentials.

On the other hand, none of the professional actors make a return appearance. (I must admit that I sorely miss the dulcet tones of James Earl Jones.) The cast instead includes Tanya Roberts, who was one of Charlie’s Angels (in the show’s last season only), a Bond girl, and a Playboy centerfold during the earlier, more successful years of her career; here she plays Regan Madsen, the sultry femme fatale who may just be able to make Tex forget his unrequited love for Chelsee. Also present is Kevin McCarthy, who had been a Hollywood perennial with his name in every casting director’s Rolodex for almost half a century by the time this game was made, with his role in the 1956 B-movie classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers standing out as the one real star turn on his voluminous resumé; here he plays Dr. Gordon Fitzpatrick, the former Roswell scientist who draws Tex into the case. And then there’s John Agar, who first captured international headlines back in 1945, when he married the seventeen-year-old former child star Shirley Temple. He never got quite that much attention again, but he did put together another long and fruitful career as a Hollywood supporting player; he appears here as Thomas Malloy, another would-be Roswell whistleblower.

But the Pandora Directive actor that absolutely everyone remembers is Barry Corbin, in the role of Jackson Cross, the government heavy who is prepared to shut down any and all investigations into the goings-on at Roswell by any and all means necessary. Whereas McCarthy and Agar built careers out of being handsome but not overly memorable presences on the screen — a quality which served them well in their multitude of supporting roles, in which they were expected to be competent enough to fulfill their character’s purpose but never so brilliant as to overshadow the real stars — Corbin was and is a character actor of a different, delightfully idiosyncratic type, with a look, voice, and affect so singular that millions of viewers who have never learned his name nevertheless recognize him as soon as he appears on their screen: “Oh, it’s that guy again…” At the time of The Pandora Directive, he was just coming off his most longstanding and, to my mind anyway, defining role: that of the former astronaut Maurice Minnifield, town patriarch of Cicely, Alaska, in the weird and beautiful television show Northern Exposure. In Corbin’s capable hands, Maurice became a living interrogation of red-blooded American manhood of the stoic John Wayne stripe, neglecting neither its nobility nor its toxicity, its comedy nor its pathos.

Although The Pandora Directive didn’t give Corbin an opportunity to embody a character of such well-nigh Shakespearean dimensions, it did give him a chance to have some fun. For unlike Maurice Minnifield, Jackson Cross is exactly what he appears to be on the surface: a villain’s villain of the first order. Corbin delighted in chewing up the scenery and spitting it in the face of the hapless Chris Jones — a.k.a, Tex Murphy. Jones, revealing that he wasn’t completely over his inferiority complex when it came to professional actors even after giving up the director’s job:

It’s already a little intimidating to work with people who are just consummate professionals. Then the first scene we shot together, Tex was supposed to be grilled by Barry’s character, Jackson Cross. I’m sitting in this chair, and he just came up and scared the hell out of me. Really, he looked through me and I just melted. Fortunately, that’s what my character was supposed to do. I truly felt like I was going to die if I didn’t answer him right. It was frightening.

The Pandora Directive was released with high hopes all around on July 31, 1996, about 21 months after Under a Killing Moon. It shipped on no fewer than six CDs, two more than its predecessor, a fairly accurate gauge of its additional scope and playing time.

Alas, its arrival coincided with the year of reckoning for the interactive movie as a viable commercial proposition. Despite the improved production values and the prominent placement of Barry Corbin’s unmistakable mug on the box, The Pandora Directive sold only about a third as many copies as Under a Killing Moon. Instead of pointing the way toward a new generation of interactive mainstream entertainment, it was doomed to go down in media history as an oddball artifact that could only have been created within a tiny window of time in the mid-1990s. Much like Jane Jensen in the case of The Beast Within, Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were afforded exactly one opportunity in their careers to make an interactive movie on such a scale and with such unfettered freedom as this, before the realities of a changing games industry sharply limited their options once again.

Small wonder, then, that both still speak of The Pandora Directive in wistful tones today. Developed in an atmosphere of overweening optimism, it is and will probably always remain The One for them, the game that came closest to realizing their dreams for the medium, having been created at a time when a merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood still seemed like a real possibility, glittering and beckoning just over the far horizon.

And how well does The Pandora Directive stand up today, divorced from its intended role as a lodestar for this future of media that never came to be? Pretty darn well for such an undeniable period piece, I would say, with only a few reservations. If I could only choose one of them, I think I would be forced to go with Under a Killing Moon over this game, just because The Pandora Directive can occasionally feel a bit smothered under the weight of its makers’ ambitions, at the expense of some of its predecessor’s campy fun. That said, it’s most definitely a close-run thing; this game too has a lot to recommend it.

Certainly there’s more than a whiff of camp about it as well. As the video clip just above amply attests, not even the talented actors in the cast were taking their roles overly seriously. In fact, just like Under a Killing Moon, this game leaves me in a bit of a pickle as a critic. I’ve dinged quite a few other games on this site for “lacking the courage of their convictions,” as I’ve tended to put it, for using comedy as a crutch, a fallback position when they can’t sustain their drama for reasons of acting, writing, or technology — or, most commonly, all three. I can’t in good faith absolve The Pandora Directive of that sin, any more than I can Under a Killing Moon. And yet it doesn’t irritate me here like it usually does. I think this is because there’s such a likeability to these Tex Murphy games. They positively radiate creative joy and generosity; one never doubts for a moment that they were made by nice people. And niceness is, as I’ve also written from time to time on this site, a very undervalued quality, in art as in life. The Tex Murphy games are just good company, the kind you’re happy to invite into your home. Playing them is like watching a piece of community theater put on by your favorite neighbors. You want them to succeed so badly that you end up willing them over the rough patches with the power of your imagination.

The archetypal Access Software story for me involves a Pandora Directive character named Archie Ellis, a hapless young UFO researcher who, in the original draft of the script, stepped where he didn’t belong and got himself killed in grisly fashion by Jackson Cross. Barry Corbin “just dominates that scene,” said Aaron Conners later. “It was like we let this evil essence into the studio.” Everyone was shocked by what had been unleashed: “The mood on the set was just so oppressive.” So, Conner scurried off to doctor the script, to give the player some way to save poor little Archie, feeling as he did that what he had just witnessed was simply too “traumatic” to leave an inevitability. You can call this an abject failure on his part to stick to his dramatic guns, but it’s hard to dislike him or his game for it, any more than you can, say, make yourself dislike Steve Meretzky for bringing the lovable little robot Floyd back to life at the end of Planetfall, thereby undercutting what had been the most compelling demonstration to date of the power of games to move as well as entertain their players.

I won’t belabor the finer points of The Pandora Directive‘s gameplay and interface here because they don’t depart at all from Under a Killing Moon. The first-person 3D exploration, which lets you move freely about a space, looking up and down and peering into and over things, remains as welcome as ever; I would love it if more adventure games had been done in this style. And once again there are a bevy of set-piece puzzles to solve, from piecing torn-up notes back together to manipulating alien mechanisms. Nothing ever outstays its welcome. On the contrary, The Pandora Directive does a consistently great job of switching things up: cut scenes yield to explorations, set-piece visual puzzles yield to dialog menus. There are even action elements here, especially if you choose the Game Player mode; your furtive wanderings through the long-abandoned Roswell complex itself, dodging the malevolent alien entity who now lives here, are genuinely frightening. This 3D space and one or two others are far bigger than anything we saw in the last game, just as the puzzle chains have gotten longer and knottier. And yet there’s still nothing unfair in this game, even in Game Player mode; it’s eminently soluble if you pay attention to the details and apply yourself, and contains no hidden dead ends. Say it with me one more time: the folks who made this game were just too nice to mistreat their players in the way of so many other adventure games.

I would like to write a few more words about the game’s one big formal innovation, letting the player determine Tex’s moral arc. Jones and Conners deserve a measure of credit for even attempting such a thing in the face of technological restrictions that militated emphatically against it. Live-action video clips filled a huge amount of space and cost a lot of money to produce, such that to offer a game with branching paths, thus leaving a good chunk of the content on the CDs unseen by many players, must have cut Chris Jones’s accountant’s heart to the quick. Points for effort, then.

As tends to the be the case with many such experiments, however, I’m not sure how much it truly adds to the player’s final experience. One of the big problems here is the vagueness of the dialog choices you’re given. Rather than showing you exactly what Tex will say, the menus offer options like “insensitive but cheerful” or “pretend nothing’s wrong,” which are open to quite a range of overlapping interpretations. In not making Tex’s next line of dialog explicit, the designers were trying to solve another problem, that of the inherent anticlimax of clicking on a sentence and then listening to Tex dutifully parrot it back. Unfortunately, though, the two solutions conflict with one another. Far too often, you click an option thinking it means one thing, only to realize that Tex has taken it in a completely different way. This doesn’t have to happen very often before the vision of Tex the game is depicting has diverged in a big way from the one you’re trying to inhabit, making the whole exercise rather moot if not actively frustrating.

Aaron Conners himself admitted that “95 percent of the people who play will end up on the B path,” meaning the one where Tex doesn’t prove himself to be a paragon of virtue and thus doesn’t get his lady love Chelsee — not yet, anyway — but doesn’t fall into a complete moral abyss either. And indeed, this was the ending I saw after trying to play as a reasonably standup guy. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t succeed in saving poor Archie either.) Predictably enough, the Internet was filled within days of the game’s release with precise instructions on how to hack your way through the thicket of dialog choices to arrive at the best ending (or the worst one, for that matter). All of which is well and good — fans gotta fan, after all — but is nevertheless the polar opposite of the organic experience that Jones and Conners intended. Why bother adding stuff that only 5 percent of your players will see without reading the necessary choices from a walkthrough? The whole thing strikes me as an example — thankfully, a rare one — of Jones and Conners rather outsmarting themselves, delivering a feature which sounded better in interviews about the amazing potential of interactive movies than it works in practice.

Then again, the caveat and saving grace which ought to be attached to my complaints is that none of it really matters all that much when all is said and done; the B ending that most of us will see is arguably the truest to the spirit of the Tex Murphy character anyway. And today, of course, you can pick and choose in the dialogs in whatever way feels best to you, then go hunt down the alternate endings on YouTube if you like.

It may sound strange to say in relation to a game about sinister government conspiracies, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but playing The Pandora Directive today feels like taking a trip back to a less troubled time. It’s just about the most 1990s thing ever, thanks not only to its passé use of video clips of real actors but to its X-Files-derived visual aesthetic, its subject matter (oh, for a time when the most popular conspiracy theories were harmless fantasies about aliens!), and even the presence of Barry Corbin, featured player in one of the decade’s iconic television programs. So, go play it, I say; go revel in its Mormon niceness. The post-millennial real world, more complicated and vexing than a thousand Roswell conspiracy theories, will still be here waiting for you when you return.

(Sources: the book The Pandora Directive: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Electronic Entertainment of July 1995; Computer Gaming World of March 1996 and December 1996; Retro Gamer 160. Online sources include the now-defunct Unofficial Tex Murphy Web Site and a documentary film put out by Chris Jones and Aaron Conners in recent years.

The Pandora Directive is available from GOG.com as a digital purchase.)

According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO has "switched off Westworld" after its recent fourth season. From the report: It's an unexpected fate for a series that was once considered one of HBO's biggest tentpoles -- an acclaimed mystery-box drama that racked up 54 Emmy award nominations (including a supporting actress win for Thandiwe Newton). Last month, co-creator Jonathan Nolan said in an interview that he hoped HBO would give the series a fifth season to wrap up the show's ambitious story, which has chronicled a robot uprising that changed the fate of humanity. "We always planned for a fifth and final season," Nolan said. "We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them." Co-creator Lisa Joy likewise said the series has always been working toward a specific ending: "Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet." Yet linear ratings for the pricey series fell off sharply for its third season, and then dropped even further for season four. Westworld's critic average on Rotten Tomatoes likewise declined from the mid-80s for its first two seasons to the mid-70s for the latter two. Fans increasingly griped that the show became confusing and tangled in its mythology and lacked characters to root for. Looming over all of this is the fact Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has pledged aggressive cost cutting mandate, though network insiders maintain that saving money was not a factor in the show's cancelation. HBO said in a statement: "Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It's been a thrill to join them on this journey."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The soundtrack for the Weird Al biopic features new music by everyone's favorite accordion-playing comedic musician.

One of the stars of the first season of "The White Lotus" was undoubtedly Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya, an unstable heiress who struggles with personal relationships. Coolidge puts in a very funny performance as the mercurial vacationer, acting as a sort of comedic anchor for the show at times. When the first season closed out with Tanya deciding to shack up with Jon Gries' BLM (Bureau of Land Management) guy, Greg, it seemed like the character was riding off into the sunset with a relatively happy ending.

But apparently, Tanya and Greg's stay at The White Lotus isn't done just yet. When Coolidge's return to the show for its second season was announced, I was thrilled. I figured there'd be at least some carry-over from the first season, even knowing the series' second outing would focus on a brand-new set of characters and stories. Considering her main competition for my favorite character, Armand, wasn't an option (RIP), Tanya was definitely the character I most wanted to see back. Now, Tanya and Greg are back at a White Lotus resort, this time visiting Italy with a new assistant and many new relationship problems in tow.

But according to a recent Collider interview, Coolidge and Gries didn't know they'd be returning for the show's second season until they were directly asked by creator and "Survivor" runner-up, Mike White.

A Fateful Text

After one episode, Jennifer Coolidge and Jon Gries have already made quite an impact on the second season of the show, including one very amusing sex scene. However, according to the Collider story, the two had no idea they'd ever return to the show. "There was no mention of [returning for Season 2] when we were doing Season 1," said Gries. "I think maybe Mike White might have said it in passing like, 'If there's a Season 2, if we get that lucky...'"

In the end, they were that lucky, and they both got the opportunity to reprise their roles, even if it arrived without warning. For Gries, all it took was a text message:

"He texted me. I was eating in a café and I looked down at my phone, and there was a text from him saying, 'Are you available in May? I'm writing your character back in, and if you're not available, I don't wanna write it.' That's how simple it was. I said, 'I'm there. Doesn't matter, I'll be there no matter what.'"

It's a testament to Gries' trust in White's writing that he agreed so quickly. His character, Greg, wasn't even that fully fleshed out in the first season, so it'll be very interesting to continue to leer into the depths of the man who fell for Tanya McQuoid.

More Tanya

For Jennifer Coolidge, who seems to have enjoyed the character of Tanya as much as any of us, returning was also an easy choice, as she explained in the interview:

"Someone asked me once, if I would rather have been a new character and come in as a whole new person, and I have to say that Tanya, as a character, was really cool. She was so burdened with her incredible despair and depression with the loss of her mother, and she was grieving so much of the time, that I felt like you barely even got to know who she is. But who is she, beyond that? So, when Mike offered Tanya again, I would have been an idiot to say no. I loved the storyline of this season, once I found out what it was."

While Tanya is clearly an extremely emotional person, the first season did catch her at a particularly emotional point in her life. Now that things have seemingly settled down a bit for her and Greg, I'm thrilled to see what the two get up to now that they're in Sicily. Hopefully, it yields the same great results as the show's fantastic first season, and with yet another dynamite cast of actors, it seems certain.

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The post The White Lotus Stars Jennifer Coolidge and Jon Gries Didn't Know They'd Be Coming Back Until They Got a Call From Mike White appeared first on /Film.

"Nocebo" is an equally psychological and physical horror movie. It's mind and body horror, both surreal and all too realistic. Director Lorcan Finnegan's film takes a horrific part of the world, which is best not to spoil, and turns it into a suitably nightmarish setting featuring stars Eva Green and Chai Fonacier. 

The home is another cage in Finnegan's new film. "Lorcan explored that a bit in "Vivarium,'" Green told us in a recent interview, referencing Finnegan's 2019 sci-fi mystery. "It was something like being the perfect house, but it's too perfect and you choke. There's something when everything is too perfect, it's not right."

Green is an actor who works with true independent spirits. The "Penny Dreadful" star has made some box office hits, like "Casino Royale," but she's also made several out-of-the-box films, such as "Franklyn," "Perfect Sense," and "The Salvation." With "Nocebo," Green stars in another film that plays by its own rules. During our interview, the actress told us why she won't watch the film or her other past works until, maybe, she's 100 years old.

'Oh, God, Am I Going Too Far?'

Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" is one of your favorite performances. Here, you're playing someone stuck in a house battling their inner demons. Were you inspired by Nicholson at all here? There's a delivery or two that made me wonder.

No, no, but it's a compliment. Yeah, madness. That's for sure, that's in common. I'm such a big fan. I watched [that] movie so many times because I was horrified when I first watched it. Then I was so fascinated that I watched again and again for his acting, I guess. I thought he was so magnetic and very funny and his kookiness. Yeah, it's quite weird.

Didn't you say that performance wanted to make you an actor?

Oh, God, it was probably subconscious. I was in awe of him. I don't know if there was a specific moment with, "Oh, I want to be an actor." But for me, he enjoys himself so much. There's something -- he's having fun and his jubilation is contagious, I find. But yeah, maybe, probably it gave me the desire to do this crazy job, maybe.

It seems like you enjoy yourself even when it's darker material. Like, you're not an actor who can't shake a role.

You mean some actors are into it and they can't get rid of the role because it's so dark?

Yeah. For you, it's fun.

It's fun. Yeah, exactly. Of course, the director does it all, but Lorcan is very, very funny, and has a very dry Irish sense of humor. At the end of the day, it's terrible when actors take themselves seriously. Like, "Oh, come on." It's fun to be able to do extreme things and because it was so -- to control everything in life, it's a good platform to vomit and go [roars]. It's fun.

Did you have a lot of conversations with Lorcan about the more surreal imagery? Do you need to know exactly what he wants to say with it to play it?

First of all, he's a very visual director, so he sent me lots of images that were very inspiring and several documentaries on Lyme disease that were actually quite concrete. Because that's the thing about the movie, is that we always wonder, "Oh, is it psychosomatic or is it real? Is it due to a tick bite?"

When I watch these documentaries on Lyme disease, all these people are struggling so much. Lots of them are misunderstood and they're not taken seriously. It's quite painful. It's very hard. It really depends on how you react to this illness. But some of the people were shaking and having serious fits, and that was concrete for me.

I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." It almost sometimes looked possessed. It was weird, like shaky, shaky. But then he also sent me some books on sleep paralysis. That was quite scary and interesting. Of course, when you do extreme things like this, you always worry about being ridiculous. You're like, "Oh, God, am I going too far?" But he's there. Lorcan will go, "Oh, God, no. A bit less." It's really nice to feel that he trusts you as well. You feel loved or whatever. "Loved" is a big word.

Supported?

Yeah, exactly. He trusts you and it's important.

'It Is So Absurd, Effing Mad'

Are you a very referential actor? As you said, Lorcan suggested those images, but do you also look at films to prepare?

It was interesting, because Lorcan asked me to watch the movie "Safe" with Julianne Moore again. I think it's Todd Haynes. It was interesting because she's living in this very fancy L.A. home and it's the perfect housewife and all this and there's that pain. She feels trapped. I felt it could be something similar for Christine. But also, it was the atmosphere as well, as I said. I like "Single White Female," the Polanski movies like "Repulsion," or in the same vein as this oppressive thing, "The Servant," the Dirk Bogarde movie I love. That really was echoing the Dinah/Christine relationship.

It's also very William S. Burroughs for a bit with a giant tick on the bed. Was that a surreal day?

Oh, I was laughing so much. It was difficult not to keep a straight face with this thing. There were people in green suits and with an enormous tick. Then landing on Mark Strong's face, it was really difficult like, "What the f*** is this?" It's funny. It is so absurd, effing mad.

By this point, what's your relationship acting with more effects-driven scenes? You've done some big green-screen work in the past.

There were two men and they were holding a stick, and at the end, there was this enormous tick. So it was good because you didn't have to imagine. That's the most difficult thing, when they completely do a clean green screen and they go, "This is what's happening." Sometimes you feel a bit insecure because you're like, "I'm not sure. I can't see." So there, at least there was a real wonderful, beautiful tick. But yeah, green screen, I find sometimes you have to trust the director. "Here you go." God knows. It's not in your hands.

You and Chai have some intense scenes, but what's it actually like on the day shooting those scenes?

Oh, she's absolutely lovely. We were not like, "Oh, we have to be dark." We were joking between takes and also, it was my first movie since Covid. It was during a heavy lockdown in Ireland. We all were wearing masks and all this. I felt the privilege as an actor to be able to take off the mask and talk to another human like Chai and, "Oh, we're not wearing masks." It sounds quite weird, but we take everything for granted. I was like, "Oh, wonderful." She is just such a professional actor. Very, very instinctive. Super bright. She's a very old soul, very mature. She possesses a strength that I've never seen before, actually.

'How Come You Never Watch Your Movies? Are You Crazy?'

So making your first movie after quarantine, how else did you feel about acting?

I enjoyed it. I felt very blessed. I felt so lucky. Sometimes, because of quarantine or doing a movie, you were stressed. But here, it made me realize how lucky I was. Of course, I love Lorcan and his crew were amazing, so it helped tremendously. I just felt blessed.

You've worked with a lot of fiercely independent filmmakers like Lorcan. Typically, what draws you to working with a director?

On a big studio movie, I sometimes feel sorry for lots of directors because it's very hard for them to express themselves. The studio is very strong and it's very hard to express their own vision on a [big] movie. Lorcan, who has a very strong vision, is very inventive, very cool, he knows exactly what he wants. This is so wonderful, because he's the only one who decides. It's not 100 people and politics and all this. He is there and it's all him, like in the old days. But yeah, indie movies, they're getting more and more difficult to make, but when there's a subject that is appealing to you and I'm like, "Oh!" I jump at the opportunity.

You don't watch the movies when they come out, though, right?

Actually, I was talking to my mum just before the interview and she was like, "How come you never watch your movies? Are you crazy?" It's not like I disrespect the work. It's just that I'm having a really hard time looking at myself. I become very narcissistic, not in a good way. I'm like, "Oh, my God, this is terrible. I'm terrible." Or maybe it's good. I'm only seeing myself, rather than the movie. I prefer to have the experience and I talk about it and then ... I don't know. Maybe I'll watch all my movies when I'm 100 years old.

"Nocebo" is now playing in theaters and available on VOD. 

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The post Nocebo Star Eva Green Will Watch Her Movies When She's 100 [Exclusive Interview] appeared first on /Film.

If you’re anything like me, your overriding goal in life is to not have a hilarious obituary. This is why I’ve decided to never ride a rollercoaster, board a hot air balloon, or go skydiving—I don’t want my last thoughts to be along the lines of why I thought jumping out of a plane was a good idea.

But just avoiding…

Read more...

The post Next Exit 2022 1080p WEB-DL DD5 1 H 264-EVO appeared first on SceneSource.

Fanatical celebrates its 10th anniversary with a giveaway, handing out free copies of Internet Cafe Simulator (thanks RedEye9). This requires signing up for the Fanatical newsletter. The free game...

As far as American cinema was concerned, the 1980s were a heavily bifurcated time. On the one hand, there were numerous films about the glory days, the music, and the nostalgia of the 1950s reflected in films like "Diner," "Stand By Me," or "The Big Chill." At the same time, many films just as aggressively satirized the rising tide of conservatism in the U.S., using punk and paranoia to undo the decade's tendency to look backward. Films like "Parents," "Christine," and "A Christmas Story" painted the 1950s as a darker time, and films about the modern yuppie milieu depicted the decade's callow rich as Earth's newest supervillains (see: "Fatal Attraction," "Trading Places," "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," the TV series "Thirtysomething").

Oliver Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street" was the crown jewel of the anti-yuppie movie movement, depicting cutthroat stockbrokers as amoral jerks who would stab anyone in the back if it meant they could close a deal, manipulate stocks, and make a few more million dollars. At the film's conclusion the beleaguered and betrayed Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) confronts his Wall Street mentor Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) after Gekko sold out Bud's father. He asks Gekko in outrage how much is enough? How much money will it take before Gekko can feel like he can stop clawing at more? "It's never enough," Gekko cries.

Not only is this a declaration of yuppie greed run amok, but it also proved to be dismayingly true. A study published in 2021 showed that earning more money, even if you're already rich, increases one's happiness. The rich are not like us -- something Stone recognized while directing Douglas in what would become one of the most famous performances of his career.

'You Look Like You've Never Acted Before In Your Life.'

In a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair, in celebration of the film's 30th anniversary, Michael Douglas looked back on "Wall Street" and the role that won him both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. Douglas recalled with clarity the bizarre way that Oliver Stone -- an intense human being -- tried to get a better, angrier performance out of him. Gordon Gekko is the ultimate yuppie, and using his buttery voice, slicked-back hair, and dazzling confidence, convinces Bud Fox and the rest of the world that greed is good. Stone clearly wanted Gekko to give off a supervillain vibe, and Douglas wasn't quite providing what he wanted. 

To get it, Stone practiced a bit of reverse psychology on Douglas, attempting to bring out the actor's natural rage by insulting his talents. Stone knew that Douglas didn't like to re-watch dailies on a set, preferring to feel his performances rather than look back and analyze. One day, as Douglas told it, Stone pulled him aside and had a serious talk. "He said, 'Michael are you doing drugs? Because you look like you've never acted before in your life,'" Douglas recalled. The actor immediately sensed that his director was saying more than mere insults, and violated his personal rule to look at some dailies. It "looked pretty good," he said, and he immediately knew what Stone was up to. He explained:

"Oliver wanted just a little bit more anger. He was willing to forgo our relationship to get that performance, and I went to town and worked my ass off after that conversation."

The Vietnam Mentality

It should be noted that Oliver Stone had, just the year prior, completed work on his Best Picture Oscar-winning film "Platoon," a cynical tragedy about the Vietnam War. Stone established himself as a forthright, open-throated political artist, a view that was reinforced by the anti-capitalist themes of "Wall Street." For many years, Stone was a filmmaking mercenary, using the medium to confront and provoke. Michael Douglas understood that about Stone in 1987, and felt that it was the director's real-life war experience that colored his directing. He called it Stone's "Vietnam mentality ... He wants you in the trench with him."

Although savvy to Stone's tricks, Douglas did tap into his rage, and created a gloriously evil character that emerged as one of the scarier movie villains of the 1980s. Scary, because he was all too real. In a way, Gordon Gekko was almost too cool. Ben Younger's 2000 film "Boiler Room" was about then-modern wannabe hotshots who had seen "Wall Street" and would repeat Gekko's dialogue like it was holy writ. Gekko's philosophy was clear: Having wealth and power is preferable to being decent or helpful or developing any kind of personality or skill.

Stone reunited with Douglas in 2010 to make the sequel "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," but by then, the magic was gone. Stone had matured as a filmmaker -- and as a person -- and had less interest in being as confrontational or as caustic as he had been 23 years earlier. Although the United States was recovering from the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 at the time, Stone didn't stick it to 21st-century Wall Street the way he would have as a younger man. It's too bad; the message would have been appreciated.

Read this next: The 20 Greatest Human Villains In Movie History

The post Oliver Stone Brought A 'Vietnam Mentality' To Directing Michael Douglas During Wall Street appeared first on /Film.

It's a true challenge for any actor to portray a real person who is still alive. Sure, you can play a deceased historical figure, too, but there's no chance Abraham Lincoln will ever see Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in "Lincoln" and grow angry about the voice he used. When you are tasked with playing a character based on a real human being who's probably going to see the movie, there's an immense amount of pressure to get everything right.

Daniel Radcliffe's role in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" is both an example and a subversion of this idea. When Radcliffe was announced to play Weird Al, many people were surprised. He really doesn't look anything like the esteemed parody artist, and Radcliffe would admit that. But according to an interview with Weird Al himself at Uproxx, he and director Eric Appel both believed that, despite his lack of physical resemblance, Radcliffe was the right man for the part.

"Eric Appel and I came up with a list of about a half a dozen or so people that we thought, oh, these people would probably be good in the role. And we both just kept gravitating toward Daniel's name. We just thought that he would get it. We knew that he was great at comedy, and he was also great at drama. And we need both for this movie, because it's a comedy obviously, but we need it to play like it's some extremely serious Oscar-bait Hollywood biopic. And we knew that Daniel would really focus into that tone and really get what we were going for."

As strange as the casting may have seemed, it paid off, as Radcliffe would blow away both Appel and Yankovic with his performance.

We Didn't Expect This

While Radcliffe is definitely most well known for his time as Harry Potter, he's also done some quality work in comedies and is a student of the game, with his performance in 2022's "The Lost City" being inspired in part by legendary comedic actor Tim Curry. Radcliffe has proven his humor chops in the past, so it makes sense why Appel and Yankovic gravitated toward him.

And according to an interview with /Film's own Ethan Anderton, Appel was extremely impressed with Radcliffe's performance during the movie's extremely quick filming schedule.

"What the hope was going to be when we went out to him, it was like, we need someone that's a great dramatic actor, but knows comedy really well and isn't going to push comedy," said Appel. "We didn't want anything to feel comedically pushed in his performance. It should all feel super grounded, and that's what makes it funny."

Radcliffe brought that balance of drama and comedy to the film, where he excelled at playing ridiculous plot points completely straight. His dedication to the part impressed both Appel and Yankovic.

"To the extent of how good his performance was, that kind of blew me away. I'd hoped that it would be great. And I was confident that it would be great. But until you see it on its feet, my God. I remember sitting behind a monitor and there's this take, and Dan has tears in his eyes in this scene, and Al and I are turning to each other and we're just like, 'What do we... I mean, I don't know. We didn't expect this.'"

To see the performance that knocked Weird Al's socks off, you can catch "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" on the Roku Channel starting November 4, 2022.

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The post Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Director and Weird Al Himself Were Blown Away by Daniel Radcliffe [Exclusive] appeared first on /Film.

Eric Appel's "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story," coming to the Roku Channel on November 4, 2022, tells the 20% true story of Alfred Matthew Yankovic, better known to the world as "Weird" Al Yankovic, as he rose to fame "inventing new lyrics for songs that already exist," as characters repeat often. The film covers the events of Yankovic's life from his beleaguered childhood and his first comedic recordings that he mailed into the Dr. Demento Show in the late '70s, to his record contracts and immediate quintuple platinum records in 1983 and 1984. 

The film also posits that Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) was hated by his parents for his passion for comedy, and was busted for attending a very illegal polka party where accordions are treated like contraband reefer. In the world of "Weird," Yankovic improvised his song "Another One Rides the Bus" as a challenge at a well-moneyed industry party attended by Wolfman Jack (Jack Black), Elvira, Divine, Mark Mothersbaugh, Paul Reubens, Tiny Tim, Alice Cooper, and Gallagher. "Weird" also declares that Yankovic had a Jim Morrison-like alcoholic "crash and burn" phase and that he had a torrid affair with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood). 

Little of this is true, which we already knew but was reinforced at a press conference for the film attended by /Film's Ethan Anderton. Indeed, most of the film is completely false. Some of the players are the same, but Yankovic (who co-wrote the screenplay) and Appel seem to have taken great delight in bending the truth far past its breaking point. In a recent interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Yankovic and Appel both got to comment on how Al's story was never going to make for a traditional Hollywood biopic, and that "remixing" tiny elements of his life into a spoof of the biopic genre was the immediate aim.

The True Story

In truth, Al Yankovic had a pretty quiet, conservative upbringing in the small California town of Lynwood. He was drawn to comedy records as a child, but his parents (played by Julianne Nicholson and Toby Huss in the film) didn't really resent it. He did indeed receive his first accordion from a traveling door-to-door salesman, and he did indeed record his own accordion-based comedy songs in his bedroom as a teenager, which he mailed to Dr. Demento, granting him a modicum of fame in the local comedy world. There were no contraband polka parties, however. 

Yankovic has been telling a version of his story since as early as 1985 with the release of the straight-to-VHS movie "The Compleat Al" directed by Jay Levey and Robert K. Weiss. Even back then, Al was riffing on his own myth as a rock hero, and deliberately fudged certain details -- the footage of him working in a nasal decongestant factory as a teen was staged. Yankovic clearly had no interest in telling a straightforward story, saying:

"I can't think of any other way I would have done this movie. 'Cause there's some interesting things that have happened in my actual life, but not anything interesting enough that would merit a Hollywood biopic. We figured that we needed to spice it up a little bit. Take a few artistic liberties, and make it a little bit more interesting. So that's what we did. We tweaked the facts just hair here and there to make it more palatable for audiences."

His Bologna Story

One interesting true story is that, when Yankovic was attending California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he majored in architecture, served as an occasional DJ for his college radio station. It was also at this time that he recorded his hit song "My Bologna," a parody of the Knack's "My Sharona," altered to be about cold cuts. The version one might have initially heard on "The Dr. Demento Show" was recorded in a men's room on his college campus. That part was partially recreated for "Weird." 

As Yankovic says:

"There are a couple moments of actual truth sprinkled in among the biopic. Things that people who aren't familiar with my story may not actually know are true. There was, is fact, a door-to-door accordion salesman who came along in my neighborhood offering music lessons. I did in fact record 'My Bologna' in a public bathroom. I did it by myself at the time, so I didn't have a whole band with me. But just to be there, on set, trying to recreate 'My Bolonga' in a bathroom ... that was kind of an odd thing for me."

Another gag of "Weird" is that Yankovic only wrote parody songs, and had a breakthrough when he thought to write his first original comedy song in 1984. In fact, Yankovic was recording originals since his college days. Indeed, he wrote a song at Cal Poly SLO called "Take Me Down," all about the slow, dullness of the town. 

For any southern Californians, the song is hilarious, making references to local attractions like Bubblegum Alley and the Madonna Inn. For others, it's a bit alien. Hence, it was never on a record.

Doing No Research

It should be noted that "Weird" was adapted from Appel's fake movie trailer released by Funny or Die in 2010. The fake trailer, starring Aaron Paul, used all the usual drug-fueled benders often seen in Hollywood biopics but juxtaposed with Yankovic's career, not only a whimsical comedy musician but by all accounts a very nice human being. In expanding his short into an actual feature, Appel wanted all the whoppers left intact, and, indeed, gave himself a good deal of creative license to make up whatever he wanted about Yankovic's life. The story he was about to tell was false. Only the names had been unchanged to protect the innocent.

"Starting working off that trailer, we were trying to reverse engineer a movie staring with a fake trailer that was made 10 years earlier. And then we veered away from that and ... Really, we were really open, and the story took us to different places. Obviously, we had the songs we wanted to highlight. The Dr. Demento relationship. But the way that we portray those things are not actually the way they happened. I think I'm the first director in the history of biopics who had to do absolutely no research of my subject."

It would be hard for even the most hardcore Yankovic purist to be angry at the changes to Al's actual life, given how silly they are. When the film posits that Al wrote his hit 1996 song "Amish Paradise" in 1984, it's easy to turn a blind eye. 

Be sure to book a room at the Madonna Inn today!

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The post Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Required Zero Research, But It Does Contain Some Nuggets of Truth appeared first on /Film.

Russian PC users are currently at a loss for new PCs and components as the lack of hardware and component support from manufacturers has been slim because of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia last year.

Russian consumers scramble to upgrade their systems, and the higher risks are raising prices on specific components

Users are purchasing components for their computer systems and laptops, increasing sales of those parts by as much as four times over the last nine months. The purchased components are CPUs, GPUs, memory kits, SSDs, HDDs, cases, and motherboards. Consumers use more localized online retailers, such as Wildberries, Ozon, and M.Video-Eldorado, to purchase their needed computer components.

NVIDIA, Dell, HP, and ASUS are four companies that have halted all shipments to the country. At the same time, partners continue to supply GPUs and motherboards to the area, benefiting consumers and businesses. One such company is Lenovo, which designs its systems with exclusive parts that have continued to supply Russian consumers and a few other OEMs during this time.

Sales on graphics cards and memory are rumored to be more affordable to purchase, while other components have increased pricing to profit off the demand of users. It is also noted that some shipments from specific suppliers have also expanded to the region to supply customers.

However, some users have chosen to purchase components illegally, placing themselves at risk so that they can receive the parts sooner so that they may upgrade their systems.

In this situation, we may see some companies or unknown third parties choose greed, raising components costs to five times the amount to prey on the lack of support to users in Russia. The GPU crisis was a time when users were left with having to purchase new GPUs from second-hand sellers for pirating costs. With the demand caused by the crypto boom simultaneously, it is no wonder that companies would see a financial gain by upselling the products at a higher percentage.

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Slashdot readers MojoKid and williamyf share the news of AMD's two new high-end graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. "Priced at $999 and $899 respectively and available in December this year, the new Radeon cards are expected to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090," writes MojoKid. HotHardware reports: AMD states that its goals for RDNA 3 are to accelerate performance-per-watt leadership and to raise the bar for high resolution and high framerate gaming. AMD has turned to a chiplet architecture to accomplish these goals, a first for gaming GPUs. The chiplet complexes consist of a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD), which is flanked top and bottom by up to six 6nm memory and cache dice (MCD). The RX 7900 XTX uses the full complement of 6 MCDs which aggregates as a 384-bit memory bus (64-bit per die) with GDDR6 memory offering 20Gbps of throughput. The RX 7900 XT uses 5 MCDs with a corresponding 320-bit bus. All of this increased bandwidth and resources translates to what AMD claims is up to a 1.7X uplift in performance for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX versus its previous gen Radeon RX 6950 XT card in high resolution gaming. This could put the card within striking distance of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 possibly, but it's hard to say until cards ship to independent reviewers for testing. Regardless, gamers will appreciate the RX 7900 XTX's price point versus NVIDIA's $1600 top-end beast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now that NVIDIA has kicked off the latest video card wave with the insanely powerful RTX 4090, all eyes are on AMD to see how it will respond. Today, the company announced the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, two confusingly named GPUs powered by its new RDNA 3 architecture. On stage during its Las Vegas launch event, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su claimed the new hardware offers a 54 percent increase in performance per watt over the previous GPUs. She also emphasized that AMD is focused on delivering complex performance with reasonable power usage, a clear knock against NVIDIA's power-hungry (and PSU cable-melting) RTX 4090.

And, as is typical for AMD, it's also trying to undercut its main competitor in pricing. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX will sell for $999, while the RX 7900 XT will go for $899. Both cards will launch on December 13th. That's far more reasonable than the $1,599 RTX 4090 and $1,199 RTX 4080. 

These cards aren't just a mere spec bump. Su says RDNA 3 is the world's first chiplet-based GPU, giving it a modular design that can be easily tweaked down the line. Currently, those chiplets include a 5nm GPU compute die and a 6nm memory cache die. It's capable of reaching up to 61 teraflops of computing power (up from a maximum of 23 TFLOPs in RDNA 2), can manage up to 24GB of GDDR6 RAM and consists of 58 billion transistors.

AMD

Naturally, the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX gets the full 24GB of RAM, while the 7900 XT will ship with 20GB. Both cards look similar to AMD's last-gen hardware, albeit with bigger fans and a sleeker heatsink design. AMD SVP Sam Naffziger also joked that you won't need any new power cables for these cards — you should be able to drop them into your existing system. 

When it comes to ray tracing, historically one of AMD's weakpoints, the company says the new cards have a next-generation accelerator with 50 percent more performance per compute unit. They'll offer 1.5 times more rays in flight, new dedicated instruction and upgraded ray box sorting. Hopefully, that means we'll see closer ray tracing parity with NVIDIA's cards. The Radeon 7000 GPUs also feature AMD's new Radiance Display Engine, with support for 480Hz 4K gaming and 165Hz 8K performance. (And yes, the latter sounds like a stretch to us, as well.)

So what do these cards look like on paper? In addition to its massive 24GB of GDDR6 RAM, the RX 7900 XTX features 96 compute units running at up to 2.3GHz, all with a 355-watt power draw. The 7900 XT, meanwhile, sports 84 CUs, a 2GHz clock speed and a 300 watt power draw, alongside its 20GB of GDDR6 memory. AMD has also partnered with companies like Samsung for DisplayPort 2.1 monitor, which should arrive early next year. Surprisingly, Samsung offered up a juicy tidbit: Its new Odyssey Neo G9 monitor will offer an 8K ultrawide resolution. (The better question is should anyone be aiming for 8K gaming at all.)

As for gaming performance, AMD says the RX 7900 XTX reached up to 295fps while playing Apex Legends in 4K, and up to 704fps in Valorant. Given that the refresh rate limit of DisplayPort 1.4 is 240Hz, that's a lot of performance today's monitors won't even register. AMD also claims its GPUs are seeing up to 96fps in Assassin's Creed Valhalla with Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR). 

Notably missing, of course, is any comparison to NVIDIA's RTX 4090. Perhaps AMD just didn't have time to benchmark that card, but it'll be interesting to see just how competitive the RDNA 3 GPUs will be.

As was expected, AMD's Lisa Su just announced the Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards. AMD continues to back their graphics processors by fully open-source Linux driver support and Linux benchmarks will come on Phoronix for launch. Here are the initial details on the announced Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the flagship RDNA 3 GPU based on the Navi 31 XTX chip, has been unveiled and comes packed with next-gen chiplet architecture.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB Graphics Card Unleashed: RDNA 3 "Navi 31 XTX" GPU With 2.3 GHz Clock, 96 MB Infinity Cache

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card is amongst the two flagship products that will be fused with the Navi 31 "RDNA 3" graphics core. Both of these GPUs will have a range of technologies that will result in higher gaming performance in rasterization and ray tracing while also delivering better power efficiency versus the RDNA 2 "Navi 21" GPUs.

Some of the highlighted AMD RDNA 3 "Radeon RX 7000" GPU features include:

• AMD RDNA 3 Architecture – Featuring an advanced chiplet design, new compute units, and second-generation AMD Infinity Cache technology, AMD RDNA 3 architecture delivers up to 54% more performance per watt than the previous-generation AMD RDNA 2 architecture. New compute units share resources between rendering, AI, and raytracing to make the most effective use of each transistor for faster, more efficient performance than the previous generation.
• Chiplet Design – The world’s first gaming GPU with a chiplet design delivers up to 15% higher frequencies at up to 54% better power efficiency. It includes the new 5nm 306mm² Graphics Compute Die (GCD) with up to 96 compute units that provide the core GPU functionality. It also includes six of the new 6nm Memory Cache Die (MCD) at 37.5mm², each with up to 16MB of second-generation AMD Infinity Cache technology.
• Ultra-Fast Chiplet Interconnect – Unleashing the benefits of second-generation AMD Infinity Cache technology, the new chiplets leverage AMD Infinity Links and high-performance fanout packaging to deliver up to 5.3TB/s of bandwidth.
• Expanded Memory and Wider Memory Bus – To meet the growing requirements of today’s demanding titles, the new graphics cards feature up to 24GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory running at 20Gbps over a 384-bit memory bus.
• Dedicated AI Acceleration and Second-Generation Raytracing – New AI instructions and increased AI throughput deliver up to 2.7X more performance than the previous AMD RDNA 2 architecture, while second-generation raytracing technology delivers up to 1.8X more performance than the previous generation.
• DisplayPort 2.1 Support – The industry’s only high-end gaming graphics cards to support DisplayPort 2.1 technology with UHBR 13.5, offering up to 54Gbps of display link bandwidth and enabling high-refresh 4K (up to 480Hz) or 8K (up to 165Hz) gaming on next-gen displays.
• New AMD Radiance Display Engine – Provides 12 bit-per-channel color for up to 68 billion colors and higher refresh rate displays compared to AMD RDNA 2 architecture and includes support for DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1a.
• High-Refresh Gaming – DisplayPort 2.1 provides increased display bandwidth compared to DisplayPort 1.4, with the ability to support up to 900Hz, 480Hz and 165Hz refresh rates for 1440p, 4K, and 8K displays, respectively.
• Dual Media Engine – Supports simultaneous encode or decode streams up to 8K60 for HEVC and supports AV1 encode, delivering up to 1.8X higher engine frequency than AMD RDNA 2 architecture.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB Graphics Card "Official" Specifications

The AMD Navi 31 GPU, the flagship RDNA 3 chip, would power the next-gen enthusiast cards such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX/XT graphics card. We have heard that AMD will drop CU (Compute Units) in favor of WGP (Work Group Processors) on its next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs. Each WGP will house dual CU (Compute Units) but with twice the SIMD32 clusters as opposed to just 2 on each CU within RDNA 2.

• AMD Navi 31 XTX: 12288 Cores, 384-bit Bus, 192 MB Infinity Cache, 308mm2 GPU Die @5nm
• AMD Navi 21 XTX: 5120 Cores, 384-bit Bus, 128 MB Infinity Cache, 520mm2 GPU Die @7nm

The AMD Navi 31 GPU with RDNA 3 architecture will offer a single GCD with 48 WGPs, 96 Compute Units, 12 SAs, and 6 SEs. This will give out a total of 12,288 SPs or stream processors. This is an increase of 2.4x in cores compared to the 5120 SPs featured on the Navi 21 GPU. The GPU or the Navi 31 GCD is said to measure 300mm² and will come packaged on TSMC's 5nm process node. AMD's latest RDNA 3 GPU packs a total of 58 Billion transistors and the top die can deliver up to 61 TFLOPs of Compute performance.

Starting with the RDNA 3 generation, AMD will be decoupling the clocks with the shader clock being a more conservative but power-efficiency-focused 2.3 GHz while the front-end clock speed will be at 2.5 GHz (a 15% frequency boost).

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The Navi 31 GPU will also carry 6 MCD's which will feature 16 MB Infinity Cache per die and are also likely to carry the 64-bit (32-bit x 2) memory controllers that will provide the chip with a 384-bit bus interface.

While this equals 96 MB of Infinity Cache which is lower than the 128 MB featured on the current Navi 21 GPUs, there's also a 3D-Stacked solution in the works which was pointed out recently and that would double the Infinity Cache with 32 MB (16 MB 0-hi + 16 MB 1-hi) capacities for a total of 192 MB of cache. This is a 50% increase versus the current Navi 21 design and it also makes Navi 31 the first GPU with both, chiplet and 3D stacked designs. These chiplets or MCD's will be fabricated on TSMC's 6nm process node and measure 37mm² each. The latest 2nd Generation Infinity offers up to 5.3 TB/s of bandwidth, an increase of 2.7x versus the previous generation design.

In terms of multimedia, the AMD RDNA 3 Radiance Display Engine comes with support for Display Port 2.1, Display link bandwidth of up to 54 Gbps, and 12-bit per channel color for up to 68 Billion transistors. With the new multimedia engines, gamers will be able to take advantage of 8K 165Hz and 4K 480Hz panels (AMD FreeSync Premium Pro). The new dual media engine also enables the RDNA 3 chips to simultaneously encode/decode for AVC/HVEC, 8K60 AV1 Encode/Decode, and AI-enhanced Video Encode.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX "RDNA 3" Graphics Card Performance

In terms of performance, AMD is promising up to 70% better performance in rasterization and 60% in ray tracing versus the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card at 4K resolution in various popular AAA titles.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX "RDNA 3" Graphics Card Reference Design

The graphics card will come with a gorgeous new reference cooler that comes with a 2.5-slot cooler which is slightly thicker and incorporates triple dual-axial fans, each with 9 fan blades. These fans push air towards a massive aluminum heatsink that is featured underneath the shroud and over the vital components such as the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs. The shroud extends just a tad bit beyond the PCB and measures 287mm.

The card also packs a really futuristic shroud design which looks absolutely great. There are two RGB accent bars on the front around the middle fan and two metallic frames in the center too. The "Radeon" logo can be seen on the side and once again, this should illuminate with RGB LEDs. The sides of the card show that the card is much longer than the previous RDNA 2 flagship. The Radeon RX 7000 series have more heatsink real estate and also has a distinct 3-red stripe design. There is also more room on the sides for the air to pass through. The graphics card utilized an enhanced vapor chamber cooling design.

The most interesting aspect of this AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA 3" graphics card is that it comes with just two 8-pin connectors which is something that AMD itself confirmed a few days ago when Scott Herkelman stated that they won't be using the 16-Pin connector which is utilized by NVIDIA. The graphics card will feature a TBP of 355W which is an increase of 20W over the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card.

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AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA 3" Graphics Cards Availability

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB and Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB graphics cards will be available on 13th December for prices of $999 US and $899 US, respectively.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT "Official" Specifications:

Graphics Card	AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX	AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT	AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT	AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
GPU	Navi 31 XTX	Navi 31 XT	Navi 21 KXTX	Navi 21 XTX
Process Node	5nm+6nm	5nm+6nm	7nm	7nm
Die Size	308mm2 (Only GCD) 533mm2 (with MCDs)	308mm2 (Only GCD) 533mm2 (with MCDs)	520mm2	520mm2
Transistors	TBD	TBD	26.8 Billion	26.8 Billion
GPU WGPs	48	42	40	40
Stream Processors	12288	10752	5120	5120
TMUs/ROPs	384 / 192	384 / 192	320 / 128	320 / 128
Game Clock	2.3 GHz	2.0 GHz	2100 MHz	2015 MHz
Boost Clock	2.5 GHz	2.2 GHz	2310 MHz	2250 MHz
FP32 TFLOPs	61 TFLOPs	52 TFLOPs	23.65 TFLOPs	23.04 TFLOPs
Memory Size	24 GB GDDR6	20 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6
Infinity Cache	96 MB	80 MB	128 MB	128 MB
Memory Bus	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Clock	20 Gbps	20 Gbps	18 Gbps	16 Gbps
Bandwidth	960 GB/s	800 GB/s	576 GB/s	512 GB/s
Effective Bandwidth	5.2 TB/s	TBD	1728.2 GB/s	1664.2 GB/s
TBP	355W	300W	335W	300W
PCIe Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16
Price	$999 US	$899 US	$1099 US	$999 US

The post AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB Unleashed: Flagship Navi 31 XTX “RDNA 3” Chiplet GPU, 70% Faster Than 6950 XT For $999 US by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

After months of leaks and eager anticipation, it's finally here. AMD unleashed the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship GPUs earlier today at the RDNA 3 Tech Event in Las Vegas. RDNA 3 is extremely exciting for gamers everywhere -- not only due to the ongoing shortages and safety concerns with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, but also because of RDNA3's unique combination of hardware and software features leveraged by Radeon 7000-series.

In addition to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, AMD has also unveiled its RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7900 XT which offers faster performance than NVIDIA's RTX 3090 Ti for $899 US.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB Makes Enthusiast-Tier Gaming Affordable With Faster RDNA 3 GPU Performance Than An RTX 3090 Ti At $899 US

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card is amongst the two flagship products that will be fused with the Navi 31 "RDNA 3" graphics core. Both of these GPUs will have a range of technologies that will result in higher gaming performance in rasterization and ray tracing while also delivering better power efficiency versus the RDNA 2 "Navi 21" GPUs.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB Graphics Card "Official" Specifications

There will also be a cut-down variant that will feature the Navi 31 XT GPU core. This chip is going to pack 42 WGPs (84 Compute Units) or 10,752 cores. That's 12.5% fewer cores than the full-fat variant. The GPU will also run at slightly lower clock speeds with the game clock rated at just 2.0 GHz which is 300 MHz slower than the XTX variant.

• AMD Navi 31 XT: 10752 Cores, 320-bit Bus, 160 MB Infinity Cache, 308mm2 GPU Die @5nm
• AMD Navi 21 XT: 4608 Cores, 256-bit Bus, 128 MB Infinity Cache, 520mm2 GPU Die @7nm

The graphics card will also feature 20 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 320-bit wide bus interface. Since there are only 5 MCDs enabled, the card will end up with 80 MB of Infinity Cache which is 16MB lower than the top variant and a 16.6% decrease.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT "RDNA 3" Graphics Card Reference Design

The graphics card will come with a gorgeous new reference cooler that comes with a 2.5-slot cooler which is slightly thicker and incorporates triple dual-axial fans, each with 9 fan blades. These fans push air towards a massive aluminum heatsink that is featured underneath the shroud and over the vital components such as the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs. The shroud extends just a tad bit beyond the PCB and should measure around 30cm since the 6950 XT reference model itself features 27cm.

The card also packs a really futuristic shroud design which looks absolutely great. There are two RGB accent bars on the front around the middle fan and two metallic frames in the center too. The "Radeon" logo can be seen on the side and once again, this should illuminate with RGB LEDs. The sides of the card show that the card is much longer than the previous RDNA 2 flagship. The Radeon RX 7000 series have more heatsink real estate and also has a distinct 3-red stripe design. There is also more room on the sides for the air to pass through.

The most interesting aspect of this AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA 3" graphics card is that it comes with just two 8-pin connectors which is something that AMD itself confirmed a few days ago when Scott Herkelman stated that they won't be using the 16-Pin connector which is utilized by NVIDIA. The graphics card will feature a TBP of 355W which is an increase of 20W over the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA 3" Graphics Cards Availability

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB and Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB graphics cards will be available on 13th December for prices of $999 US and $899 US, respectively.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT "Official" Specifications:

Graphics Card	AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX	AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT	AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT	AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
GPU	Navi 31 XTX	Navi 31 XT	Navi 21 KXTX	Navi 21 XTX
Process Node	5nm+6nm	5nm+6nm	7nm	7nm
Die Size	308mm2 (Only GCD) 533mm2 (with MCDs)	308mm2 (Only GCD) 533mm2 (with MCDs)	520mm2	520mm2
Transistors	TBD	TBD	26.8 Billion	26.8 Billion
GPU WGPs	48	42	40	40
Stream Processors	12288	10752	5120	5120
TMUs/ROPs	384 / 192	384 / 192	320 / 128	320 / 128
Game Clock	2.3 GHz	2.0 GHz	2100 MHz	2015 MHz
Boost Clock	2.5 GHz	2.2 GHz	2310 MHz	2250 MHz
FP32 TFLOPs	61 TFLOPs	52 TFLOPs	23.65 TFLOPs	23.04 TFLOPs
Memory Size	24 GB GDDR6	20 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6
Infinity Cache	96 MB	80 MB	128 MB	128 MB
Memory Bus	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Clock	20 Gbps	20 Gbps	18 Gbps	16 Gbps
Bandwidth	960 GB/s	800 GB/s	576 GB/s	512 GB/s
Effective Bandwidth	5.2 TB/s	TBD	1728.2 GB/s	1664.2 GB/s
TBP	355W	300W	335W	300W
PCIe Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16
Price	$999 US	$899 US	$1099 US	$999 US

The post AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Unveiled: Navi 31 XT GPU With 20 GB Memory, Faster Than NVIDIA 3090 Ti For $899 US by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

AMD has officially announced its next-generation FiedlityFX Super Resolution technology known as FSR 3 which comes with Fluid Motion Frame Tech.

AMD FSR 3 Official, Comes With Fluid Motion Frame Technology With Double The Gaming Performance, Launching In 2023

AMD FSR 3 is said to combine the best temporal super-resolution technology and the brand new Fluid Motion Frame technology that delivers more FPS in games by increasing performance when games are run with heavily demanding settings. The technology is set to launch in 2023 in various games and applications.

In terms of performance, AMD's FSR 3 will deliver up to twice the performance increase over FSR 2 at 4K resolution. AMD was shown running a demo of Unreal Engine 5 where the FPS jumped from 60 FPS (FSR 2) to 112 FPS (FSR 3). Currently, there's no word on the modes and how Fluid Motion Frame technology would work but the company is expected to reveal more details in the coming weeks.

Additionally, AMD also showcased a demo of Beckoning, a short film that Sava Zivkovic & his team were able to create with FSR 3 in just four months. The demo showcased was running smooth and showcased great visuals while running Unreal Engine 5.

• AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.2 – FSR is now available and upcoming in 216 games, and the next iteration of the popular FSR temporal upscaling technology, FSR 2.2, features enhancements that are designed to improve visual quality. It is expected to be available in the first title on November 8, 2022, Forza Horizon 5. It will also be available to game developers soon at GPUOpen.com.
• AMD FSR 3 – AMD plans to release a new version of AMD FSR featuring AMD Fluid Motion Frames technology in 2023, expected to deliver up to 2X more FPS compared to AMD FSR 2 in select games.

via AMD

AMD has also announced a new technology that will come to its software suite known as HYPR-RX. The tech will give gamers a one-click solution for faster frame rates and lower latency. A demo was shown with Dying Light 2 where an FPS improvement of 85% with 1/3rd of the latency was seen. It can also be seen in the comparison slide that with HYPR-RX off, you'd get around 90 FPS (30ms) but with the tech-enabled, you'd end up with 166 FPS (11ms). Like FSR 3, HYPR-RX is expected to come to gamers in the first half of 2023.

AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX & Radeon RX 7900 XT "RDNA 3" graphics cards will be amongst the first products to feature support for the FSR 3. The cards launch a bit earlier than FSR 3 in December.

The post AMD Unveils FSR 3 With Fluid Motion Frame Technology, Double The FPS In Games Versus FSR 2 & Launch in 2023 by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

It has been almost three years since Chromebook users got word that Steam support is coming to ChromeOS. We're still not totally there yet, but today Google announced that it's ready to enter beta testing. From a report: In a blog post, Zach Alcorn, Google product manager, announced that Steam on Chromebooks is available as a beta with ChromeOS 108.0.5359.24 and later. Steam on ChromeOS entered alpha in March, and Alcorn said the updates announced today are based on "thousands of gameplay reports." The Steam on ChromeOS alpha required not just an Intel CPU, but also an Intel 11th-gen Core i5 chip with Intel's Iris Xe graphics. The beta supports Intel's latest 12th-gen chips and extends support to Team Red. Alcorn said the beta supports AMD's Ryzen 5000 C-Series CPUs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The next-gen GPU war is in full swing, and it looks like AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards are taking the fight to Nvidia with a low price point. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX costs $999 USD, closely followed by the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT at $899. This puts both pixel pushers under the $1,000 mark, with the flagship undercutting the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 by a full $600.

RELATED LINKS: Ryzen 7000 CPUs - everything we know, RDNA 3 GPUs - everything we know, Best gaming CPU

AMD has announced its new RDNA3 graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the Radeon RX 7900 XT. According to the red team, these two GPUs will release on December 13th, and below you can find their specs, prices, and first benchmarks. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX will be the flagship graphics card. … Continue reading AMD has announced the Radeon RX 7900XTX & 7900XT; prices, dates & gaming benchmarks →

The post AMD has announced the Radeon RX 7900XTX & 7900XT; prices, dates & gaming benchmarks appeared first on DSOGaming.

Back when NVIDIA announced DLSS 3 with its Frame Generator, I said that this was a really smart move. I also said that AMD would be definitely following NVIDIA’s example, and it appears that I was right. During its RDNA3 presentation, the red team announced a direct rival to NVIDIA’s DLSS 3, the FSR 3.0. … Continue reading AMD has announced its DLSS 3 rival, the FSR 3.0 →

The post AMD has announced its DLSS 3 rival, the FSR 3.0 appeared first on DSOGaming.

The Register: A number of job postings -- including this now-closed ad from late September for a principal software engineering manager -- are looking for engineers and others to become part of the "newly formed Windows Incubation team" whose mission is to "build a new direction for Windows in a cloud first world." The lofty goal is to "move Windows to a place that combines the benefits of the cloud and Microsoft 365 to offer more compute resources on demand and creates a hybrid app model that spans from on-premises to the cloud." According to the ad, it also includes "building a Web-based shell with direct integration with Windows 365." Included in the possible models are low-cost PCs available via subscriptions, with advertising helping to offset some of the costs. (Also mentioned in the job are direct-to-cloud devices.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The original "Enola Holmes," directed by "Fleabag" helmer Harry Bradbeer and based on Nancy Springer's book series "The Enola Holmes Mysteries," burst onto the scene with surprising aplomb. Following Enola Holmes (an excellent Millie Bobbie Brown), the brilliant and rebelliously independent teen sister of Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin), the first film sees young Enola working to find Holmes matriarch Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) and discovering that a bigger mystery is afoot. The freshman mystery adaptation was smartly written and charming with a wonderful performance by star and producer Millie Bobbie Brown. With the groundwork laid for a strong second outing, "Enola Holmes 2" had a number of legs up on its forebear outing alongside relevantly higher stakes. 

It's an interesting emerging franchise for dominant streamer Netflix. With the first film originally set for a theatrical release before its acquisition by Netflix, "Enola Holmes 2" confirms that the success of the original is not a fluke: the streamer has something great under its belt. With this and a better-than-ever Benoit Blanc soon gracing our screens in "Glass Onion," there are lessons aplenty to be had from the fact that some of the streamer's best original movies happen to be charm-fest mysteries premiering in November 2022. Netflix, take note: we need a solo Sherlock outing and a Eudoria and Edith "Thelma & Louise" movie, and we need it yesterday.In this outing, a more seasoned Enola has to navigate building her own detective legacy out from under her brother's shadow, while still learning to balance independence against a need for allies, connection, and romance. Oh yeah, and there's intrigue and murder and social upheaval, too. "Enola Holmes 2" is not without some missed opportunities, but Brown remains excellent as the title character behind a script that's perhaps sharper and more tightly structured than its successful first entry. Adept mystery plotting, engaging twists and turns, charming dialogue, and strong character work together to land a successful and enjoyable sequel. "Enola Holmes 2" works well enough that we should start asking why there aren't more of these movies, and why we can't see them in theaters.

Holmes Alone 2: Lost In Old York

"Enola Holmes 2" begins with an entrepreneurial Enola having started her own detective agency since the events of the first film. Her skill notwithstanding, Enola still has to contend with the discriminatory oddities of her day and clients are hard to come by. When a young "matchstick girl" arrives in search of her missing friend Sarah Chapman, Enola is happy to take on the case despite the lack of financial compensation. As Enola begins to investigate the shady undercurrents that run beneath the area's rich and powerful, Sherlock pursues a surprisingly connected elusive case that unknowingly brings him to his greatest criminal rival.It's hard to say more without spoiling a number of the film's mysteries (there are twists, turns, and complications aplenty), but it's a well-scripted affair that runs along at a breezy pace. A movie like this typically only works with properly teased details, and "Enola Holmes 2" is joyfully layered with enough clues and cues to make the intricacies of the mystery land. The script (written by Jack Thorne) also takes the wise choice of centering the real-life Matchgirls' Strike of 1888, in which Sarah Chapman played a pivotal role. It's smart to center the narrative in the era's real-world struggles, and as the plot progresses Sarah Chapman's fictional counterpart even gets some of the finale's finer hero moments. The choice to allow Enola to share the spotlight with real-world heroes in her own mystery outing is an appropriately bold narrative move. It works.

There are also a number of action sequences that contribute to the film's overall fresh, modern mystery energies. Lensed by Giles Nuttgens ("Hell or High Water"), the foot chases and combat through elaborate set-pieces genuinely look good. At the same time, while the overall editing sets a strong and ably developed pace, some of the combat sequences (including a particularly important one in the finale) are slightly awkwardly cut and harder to visually follow than they should be. Nonetheless, it's an ably crafted narrative with strong technical elements and a genuinely solid script.

Rollin' With The Holm-Ies

Millie Bobbie Brown continues to shine in the role of Enola Holmes, here perhaps more impertinent than the original, with a slightly stronger propensity to break the fourth wall. The character stands out from Sherlock's shadow, as Enola's detective work isn't a heady exercise in over-abundant logic: Enola is more empathetic, more human, and less coldly rational than Sherlock. She wants relationships and connections more than Sherlock often shows. It all adds welcome complexity and cheekiness that makes the protagonist feel unique, but in a way that should still land for fans of her famed literary brother.

The supporting players all hold their own, with Cavill similarly excelling as a vexed and humanized Sherlock. The pair have a strong rapport, and their uniquely written personalities allow for some enjoyable exchanges when the narrative brings their investigative efforts together. Helena Bonham Carter is always enjoyable as Eudoria, nailing that tenuous balance between manic fugitive and dysfunctional, loving mother that the character needs. The biggest issue here, indeed one of the largest issues with an otherwise stellar film, is that these excellent performances are variably underutilized and sometimes haphazardly incorporated.

This is Enola's story, and Brown nails the character, and the story is overall better off for the focus. We do see a decent bit of Cavill's excellent Sherlock here and there, but it could be more substantially and thoughtfully interwoven into the narrative--and why not, when the pair have such good on-screen chemistry? And Eudoria's fingerprints are so represented in the skills and emotional baggage of her brilliant children that it's a shame we see so little of her on-screen. Yes, yes, she's on the lam, but every brief moment she's on the screen is a reminder of what's missing. 

The end result is that some excellent performers and performances get subtly shortchanged, and inserted into the script in ways that, at times, feel like an afterthought. With the ultimate lesson of much of the film being "it's nice to have family, friends, and allies," here's to hoping for a more integrated "Enola Holmes 3," and a spin-off movie or two. At the same time, between strong character work, adept mystery writing, amusingly tongue-in-cheek fourth-wall breaks which broadly work, and swift action sequences, "Enola Holmes 2" is by and large a welcome and engaging mystery experience.

/Film review: 8 out of 10

"Enola Holmes 2" premieres on Netflix on November 4, 2022.

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The post Enola Holmes 2 Review: A Charming Mystery Outing Better Than the First Movie appeared first on /Film.