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New year, new country, new persona – and yet Joe can’t seem to shake off his past in the brand-new trailer for YOU Season 4 Part 1 from Netflix, which you can check out below.

After his previous life went up in flames, Joe Goldberg has fled to Europe to escape his “messy” past, adopt a new identity, and, of course, to pursue true love. But Joe soon finds himself in the strange new role of reluctant detective as he discovers he may not be the only killer in London. Now, his future depends on identifying and stopping whoever’s targeting his new friend group of uber-wealthy socialites…

The latest season stars Penn Badgley, Tati Gabrielle, Charlotte Ritchie, Lukas Gage, Ed Speleers, Tilly Keeper, Amy-Leigh Hickman, Niccy Lin, Aidan Cheng, Brad Alexander, Ozioma Whenu, and Eve Austin.

YOU S4 is inspired by the creeptastic novels by Caroline Kepnes. Showrunner Sera Gamble leads the way, developing the series alongside Greg Berlanti. The series is executive produced by Greg Berlanti, Sera Gamble, Gina Girolamo, Leslie Morgenstein, Sarah Schechter, and Michael Foley.

Writers on the season are 401: Sera Gamble & Leo Richardson, 402: Neil Reynolds & Kara Lee Corthron, 403: Mairin Reed & Justin W. Lo, 404: Amanda Johnson-Zetterström & Michael Foley, 405: Dylan Cohen & Hillary Benefiel, 406: Justin Lo & Leo Richardson, 407: Neil Reynolds & AB Chao, 408: Kara Lee Corthron & Mairin Reed, 409: Amanda Johnson-Zetterström & Hillary Benefiel, 410: Sera Gamble & Michael Foley.

Directors for the season are John Scott (401, 402, 406), Shamim Sarif (403), Harry Jierjian (404, 405, 410), Rachel Leiterman (407, 408), and Penn Badgley (409).

YOU S4 Part 1 launches only on Netflix February 9th.

The post [News] YOU S4 Trailer Takes Us to Europe for New Sights, New Kills appeared first on Nightmarish Conjurings.

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The characters of "Stranger Things" have been through a lot. For starters, there's that whole "one of my best friends disappeared into the woods one night and now no one knows where he is" thing that kicked everything off in season 1. From there, though, things have just kind of snowballed. It turns out that living in Hawkins, Indiana is as eventful as building your home in a guaranteed flood zone, only with decidedly more demogorgons and you know, cracks in the fabric of time and space that lead to another, more hellish version of your world. 

And even though Will, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and their friends definitely do not get paid enough to deal with all the near-death experiences that they consistently seem to find themselves in, the actors who play them absolutely do. In fact, the most recent salaries for the cast of the show are enough to make anyone's mind flay for real.

Cost Of Living In Hawkins, Indiana

Unless you've been living in the upside down for the last six years, you know that "Stranger Things" is kind of a big deal. It's one of Netflix's most-watched shows, and its popularity no doubt helped the stars of the series in cashing out much bigger paydays for the upcoming final season. In a recent article on Puck News, the results of salary negotiations were revealed (a process that sounded fairly complex due in large part to a specific California Law that allowed lawyers to re-negotiate their clients' contracts), and the numbers are mind-boggling. 

According to Puck News, the salaries were arranged in tiers with the most prominent actors (I.E. Winona Ryder and David Harbour) placed in the highest category. Tier 1 sees Ryder and Harbour bringing in a whopping $9.5 million for the whole season, while tier 2 is set to pay the show's arguably most important actors — Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, and Sadie Sink — a staggering $7 million. Sink, who plays fan-favorite Max Mayfield, reportedly made a strong argument for why she should be included amongst the tier 2 actors despite her character first being introduced in season 2. Tier 3 of the pay scale consists of the show's other heavy hitters — Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, and Maya Hawke — and they are set to make only slightly less than their tier 2 comrades at $6 million for the season. Tier 4 is the tier for everyone else involved, who Puck News reports will make "much less."

The Missing Number

Glaringly absent from any of the tiers is Millie Bobby Brown who was not part of the salary negotiations for season 5. This is because Brown has her own deal with Netflix that keeps her comfortable. She reportedly made $10 million alone to star in the "Enola Holmes" sequel, and she will also be in the Netflix-released 2024 sci-fi flick, "The Electric State." 

Puck News is quick to point out that while the individual salaries of each cast member are not that ludicrous for a show as insanely popular as "Stranger Things," because there are so many series regulars in the Upside Down, those numbers start to add up pretty quickly making season 5 a "pretty pricey season of TV." It should also be noted that the salaries for each actor are for 10 episodes even though the show's last season will only consist of eight, a move that seeks to bring down the on-paper cost that each actor is making per episode so that the company has an easier time negotiating payments for other shows (sneaky). The extra money is also meant to make up for the longer episodes in season 4 and possibly season 5.

Indie Wire states that other major TV shows like "Game of Thrones" and "Friends" saw the main actors making similar, if not bigger, salaries for their work on these major shows. Still, it's pretty impressive to see just how much it costs to populate Hawkins, Indiana. Though, I personally feel that Noah Schnapp can't be paid enough to sport one of the most frightening haircuts to ever grace our TV screens. 

Read this next: The 15 Best Anthology TV Series Ranked

The post The Stranger Things Cast Will Make Enough Money to Buy the Upside Down in Season 5 appeared first on /Film.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and machinery manufacturer Deere signed a memorandum of understanding on Sunday that ensures farmers have the right to repair their own farm equipment or go to an independent technician. From a report: As the agriculture sector accelerates its adoption of technology, the reliance on high-tech machinery such as GPS-guided combines and tractors has become more common-place. But equipment makers such as Deere have generally required customers to use their parts and service divisions for repairs and until recently, only allowed authorized dealers the means and tools to access the complex computerized systems of their tractors and other machinery. The Farm Bureau's memorandum of understanding with Deere "will ensure farmers everywhere are able to repair our own equipment," Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall said, speaking at the federation's convention in Puerto Rico.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureausBrian Krebs reported Monday. From the report: Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian's website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer's report. All that was needed was the person's name, address, birthday and Social Security number. In December, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to the cashing out of compromised identities. "I want to try and help to put a stop to it and make it more difficult for [ID thieves] to access, since [Experian is] not doing shit and regular people struggle," Kushnir wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity explaining his motivations for reaching out. "If somehow I can make small change and help to improve this, inside myself I can feel that I did something that actually matters and helped others." Kushnir said the crooks learned they could trick Experian into giving them access to anyone's credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian's identity verification process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a move that could change how more than a billion people write documents, presentations and emails, Microsoft has discussed incorporating OpenAI's artificial intelligence in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps so customers can automatically generate text using simple prompts, The Information reported, citing a person with direct knowledge of the effort. From a report: These goals won't be easy to accomplish. For more than a year, Microsoft's engineers and researchers have worked to create personalized AI tools for composing emails and documents by applying OpenAI's machine-learning models to customers' private data, said another person with direct knowledge of the plan, which hasn't previously been reported. Engineers are developing methods to train these models on the customer data without it leaking to other customers or falling into the hands of bad actors, this person said. The AI-powered writing and editing tools also run the risk of turning off customers if those features introduce mistakes. Since 2019, the year Microsoft struck a pact to work with OpenAI on new technologies, both companies have been largely mum about how Microsoft would implement and commercialize them. Microsoft last year released Copilot, a highly touted tool that uses OpenAI technology to help programmers write computer code automatically. Then on Tuesday, The Information reported that Microsoft's Bing search plans to use OpenAI's ChatGPT technology, which can understand and generate polished text, to answer some search queries with full sentences rather than just showing a list of links. The machine-learning models behind ChatGPT are similar to the ones that power Copilot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In yet another campaign targeting the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, six malicious packages have been found deploying information stealers on developer systems. The now-removed packages, which were discovered by Phylum between December 22 and December 31, 2022, include pyrologin, easytimestamp, discorder, discord-dev, style.py, and pythonstyles. The malicious code, as is increasingly

In the current landscape of anime adaptations, there aren't many animation studios doing it like MAPPA. Currently known for taking the helm from another animation studio to work on the final season of "Attack on Titan," they've also kept busy with the successful first season of "Jujutsu Kaisen" and have even more projects on the way. Along with the upcoming second season of "Vinland Saga" on Netflix, MAPPA is currently being praised for its work on the first season of "Chainsaw Man." The 12-episode series is filled with gory visuals and a story that can be tragic in one moment and darkly hilarious in the next.

The overwhelming work the studio has had to deal with in recent years hasn't stopped MAPPA from giving each project the attention it deserves. Aside from the stunning detail and staying faithful to the source material, MAPPA also clearly has faith in the success of its projects. While manga sales are one easy indicator to tell if an anime will be successful, how international audiences will receive the adaptation can still be a gamble. Nevertheless, the team behind the adaptation of "Chainsaw Man" were confident that the manic energy of the Shonen would become popular with audiences.

'Chainsaw Man Really Hits The Subculture'

In an interview with Crunchyroll, the staff behind "Chainsaw Man" talked about what made the project stand out from equally popular anime at the time. To MAPPA Ceo Manabu Otsuka, it all had to do with the tone of the series:

"Within Japanese entertainment, I believe 'Chainsaw Man' really hits the subculture, specifically the topics and themes in the story. There are other very popular titles like 'Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba' and 'Attack on Titan,' but within the popularity scene, you see that Chainsaw Man is a little different. It's much crazier, simply put."

"Much crazier" is an understatement because "Chainsaw Man" has non-stop moments of insanity. Denji is a Shonen protagonist whose drive differs from all the other protagonists in the same genre, creating a stark contrast that is a breath of fresh air. Moreover, the themes of control, willful ignorance, and desires of the heart are what Otsuka believes resonate with fans of "Chainsaw Man."

"That sort of theme is something a lot of readers right now are wanting. It's maybe the times that people are more interested in that sort of topic. I think that's why it matched the time the story came out and why it's really popular right now."

A Beautiful And Chaotic Puzzle

It isn't just the superficial aspects of "Chainsaw Man" that make it so popular. Sure, all the bloody chainsaw chaos and creatively designed devils make the series more entertaining. Still, Otsuka thinks if fans look further beyond the kinetic action, there's a touching story there about found family:

"On the surface of the story, you see things like violence and action, which is definitely a charm of the series. But if you go deeper into what's going on, it really is about family and bonds between those people and the relationships those people hold with each other."

Overall, not just one specific aspect of "Chainsaw Man" has made it so successful outside of Japan. Every subversion of Shonen expectations, emotional beat, and intricate world-building all fit together like chaotic pieces in a puzzle to create a beautiful picture. Makoto Kimura, Executive Director at MAPPA, put it best when he said in the same interview that it's the sum of all the different parts of the series: "You have the violence, the action, the comical parts, and then you'll have these peaceful, heartfelt moments throughout."

Season 2 of  "Chainsaw Man" is yet to be confirmed, but it's hard to believe that the successful anime/manga will not finish the story they started telling. As it stands, there are still a couple of major arcs left in the story so more likely than not, this unconventional Shonen will continue to find success in the near future.

Read this next: 18 Underrated Anime Movies You Really Need To See

The post Why MAPPA Was Confident The Chainsaw Man Anime Would Succeed Outside Of Japan appeared first on /Film.

Zack Snyder's blueprint for the DC Universe may not have come to fruition in the way that the filmmaker and his fans expected, but it's still an intriguing series of films to look back on. The beginning of Snyder's plan, which was 2013's "Man of Steel," is a good origin story for the last son of Krypton, filled with interesting lore that redefined Superman for a new generation. While some questionable decisions were made involving the film's third act, one thing that stood out was the action.

One of the biggest challenges with putting Superman into a live-action film is how you display his powers. Richard Donner's original film gave the Kryptonian a sense of wonder and awe, using the character's powers in clever ways that more often than not ended with Superman time-traveling with his incredible speed. "Superman Returns" would repeat that formula many years later, with Brandon Routh's iteration of the character putting out fires and preventing disasters rather than ever really throwing fists. With Snyder's Superman, fans of the character were treated to a much more violent and physical Superman. The challenge of creating engaging fights for the man of steel would turn into a puzzle to the director, with one of the early fights in the film proving to be the most essential to solving.

Battle Of Kryptonians

For all the blunders associated with the film (mainly the ridiculous amount of destruction), how Snyder approached the relationship between the Kryptonian characters was engaging. Clark's need for belonging throughout the movie eventually takes a dark turn with the arrival of General Zod and his soldiers, who are taken aback by the effects of the Earth's sun on their physiology. The disagreement between Superman and Zod regarding the Earth eventually leads to the first battle between them, which takes place in Smallville. As Zack Snyder said during the VERO watch party for "Man of Steel," he was most excited to figure out how a battle between several super-powered beings would turn out:

"The Smallville battle, which was a really incredible, fun thing to shoot, and it had a lot of cool sequences in it, and a lot of cool kind of... For me, it was fun to do this notion of a physical fight between Kryptonians on Earth, sort of equally matched, and how that would look. You know, the challenges of trying to create that physical fight."

The small town setting of the fight would starkly contrast with the super-powered beings duking it out as Superman and other Kryptonians tear through all sorts of product placements. The fast-paced battle required constant changing of scenery, which Snyder recalled being hard to shoot from a technical standpoint:

"...it was a difficult sequence to photograph. But we knew what we were doing. It was only difficult because it was technically complicated, in that we just had to know what would happen all the time."

'It's A Difficult Puzzle To Keep In Your Head All The Time'

Visual effects are standard for any superhero blockbuster fare, and the Smallville fight of "Man of Steel" required a fundamental understanding of every beat so that anything shot on location would be sure to flow with the VFX work that was yet to be done. The need to have a grasp on the continuity of the fight would be something Snyder compared to a puzzle, as he would say during the watch party:

"When you're just shooting elements, constantly shooting pieces, you get this – what I would say is, it's a difficult puzzle to keep in your head all the time. Because you have to pre-visualize how it's all going to go together and make sense."

No matter your feelings on "Man of Steel," Snyder and his team care about entertaining viewers with its heavy action. Snyder's DC films are filled with inventive and stylistic action, such as the titular fight in "Batman v Superman" and the epic and the mythical large-scale action of "Zack Snyder's Justice League." "Man of Steel" set the tone for those future fights, and for Snyder, it was all about extensive planning and understanding the story the fight would be trying to tell:

"It was fun, but it was also, like I say, complicated, and you weren't ever sure, 'Oh, we gotta hold him upside down here because the camera's going to be like that, and we just need this element of his head there, but then he's gonna be CG and fly out, and...' So it was a lot of that, and a lot of pre-planning, which I think the guys did an amazing job."

Read this next: Every DC Movie Made Prior To The DCEU Ranked From Worst To Best

The post Zack Snyder Had A Hard Time Solving The 'Puzzle' Of Man Of Steel's Smallville Battle appeared first on /Film.

Crime shows can take on many forms. There are procedurals, shows like "Homicide: Life on the Streets" and "Law and Order" (and its endless spin-offs), and then, there are the gritty masterclass dramas, shows like "The Wire" and "The Sopranos." Some favor the process, some the outcome, though all abound with the kind of detached criminal activity audiences fervently eat up. Just look at "Breaking Bad's" 16 Emmy wins.

"NYPD: Blue," "Hill Street Blues," "Criminal Minds," "CSI," and the like endure because they're accessible. They're fun. They're mainstream. Crime dramas like "Better Call Saul" are critically acclaimed and instantly recognizable. However, some crime dramas slip through the cracks. The John and Jane Does of crime shows, the ones that, for one reason or another, never quite found their audience. Whether they were canceled too soon, premiered during "Game of Thrones'" triumphant reign, or featured a misstep or two that alienated huge swaths of their audiences, these shows never got the justice they deserved. To make amends, here are 13 underrated crime dramas viewers can binge now.

Impeachment: American Crime Story

"American Crime Story's" first season remains a high mark in executive producer (and director and sometimes writer) Ryan Murphy's career. Audiences had reached O.J. Simpson saturation, yet years after the trial to end all trials, Murphy somehow found an angle to make it all seem new. Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark has never been better, and Sterling K. Brown delivers one of the finest performances ever as co-prosecutor Christopher Darden. The second season, detailing the death of Gianni Versace, was just as good.

Then, the third season was long-delayed, and when it finally arrived, airing simultaneously on both Hulu (where it can presently be binged) and FX, it was met with the worst reception, both critically and in terms of viewership, of the bunch. While the third season didn't accomplish the same miraculous feat of reframing history in quite the same way the preceding two did, it was still considerably more delicate than most ripped-from-the-headlines miniseries. Paulson achieves the impossible, rendering the late Linda Tripp a genuinely tragic figure, and Beanie Feldstein is transcendent as Monica Lewinsky. It has intrigue, romance, and disheartening political foresight. For younger viewers, too, it's about as good a glimpse as any into the latter years of the Clinton presidency.

The Killing

"The Killing" has a complicated history, almost all of which can be traced to its controversial (though laudable) decision to span the investigation into the murder of Rosie Larsen (Katie Findlay) across two seasons. Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman star as Sarah Linden and Stephen Holden, two detectives responsible for tracking down Rosie's killer. Audiences believed the case had been solved when the first season concluded, though a last-minute twist revealed the true killer remained at large. As detailed by The Week, "The Killing" hemorrhaged viewers, resulting in cancellation after the second season. After Netflix agreed to co-fund a third season, it was renewed, only to once again get canceled. And then, miraculously, Netflix renewed it for a fourth and final season.

Despite its troubled history, "The Killing" remains one of the finest police procedurals in years. It's about as close as any show to capturing the charm of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks." It's moody, gothic, aggressively patient, and eminently watchable. It allows audiences to simmer in the tragedy and death, rendering it more affecting — more heartrending — than most. With the entire show available to stream on Hulu, now is as good a time as any to see the show that wouldn't die.

Gaslit

Watergate seemed a story about which there was nothing new to say. Audiences knew of the intrigue and scandal, the key players, and their subsequent incarcerations (or exonerations). They knew about "Deep Throat" and Woodward and Bernstein. They knew everything. So when Starz announced an eight-episode Watergate miniseries starring Julia Roberts, it would have been fair for audiences to assume it was an Emmy bid and nothing more.

Color them surprised when "Gaslit" turned out to be anything but. Sure, Roberts might have been there in part for the television accolades (she's been nominated for a Golden Globe), but in detailing the lesser-known story of one Martha Mitchell, "Gaslit" made the Watergate scandal as timely and fresh as ever. "Gaslit" tracks the truncated timeline of Mitchell's role in the Nixon administration (because of her marriage to Attorney General John Mitchell, played by an unrecognizable Sean Penn) and her subsequent kidnapping to keep her silent. Roberts excels in a searing portrait of a troubled woman with a lot to say but no one to listen. "Gaslit" is tragic, fiercely funny at times, and a worthwhile time capsule of American politics.

The Outsider

"The Outsider" is one of the scariest shows ever made. Full stop. At first, HBO's adaptation of Stephen King's novel of the same name appears to be a murder mystery. Jason Bateman's Terry Maitland is accused of a murder he couldn't have committed. He was miles away at the time of the crime. Curiously, Terry was seen both on-camera and by witnesses at the crime scene. From there, "The Outsider" only gets weirder. It's a slow, methodical descent into full-bore horror that takes its sweet time churning out simmering nightmare after simmering nightmare.

The genre shift goes into full effect with the arrival of King mainstay Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), an exceptionally, perhaps supernaturally, perceptive detective. I won't spoil the full thrust of "The Outsider's" many twists and turns, though this unassuming murder procedural soon becomes anything but. It's a shame HBO never picked the show up for a second season, likely because of its genre status and deliberate pacing. For audiences with moxie, however, the entire show can be streamed on HBO Max. Just be sure to keep the lights on.

Sharp Objects

"Sharp Objects" arrived after the release of HBO's other big debut, the one and only "Big Little Lies." The late Jean-Marc Vallée returned to the director's chair for "Sharp Objects," an adaptation of "Gone Girl" author Gillian Flynn's novel of the same name. Audiences might have been expecting more of the sunny, fiercely feminist, diabolical intrigue of "Big Little Lies," though from the premiere onward, "Sharp Objects" proved to be anything but. Arguably one of the darkest television shows ever, "Sharp Objects" started in the thematic muck and only dug itself deeper as it progressed, ending with one of the most shocking final lines in history (even for fans of the book who knew what to expect).

Amy Adams' Camille Preaker is a reporter assigned to cover a string of child murders and disappearances in her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. Grappling with severe alcoholism, body dysmorphic disorder, and a host of other ailments, returning home might well spell her doom. And it nearly does, as she reunites with her treacly, sinister mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), a local socialite who all but runs Wind Gap. While the central mystery often takes a backseat to character development (likely accounting for its small viewership), it remains one of the most gripping, traumatizing tales of female violence ever conceived.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

The Undoing

HBO's other attempt at capitalizing on "Big Little Lies" (for a while, the network seemed desperate to capture that same zeitgeisty lightning in a bottle) wasn't met with quite the same acclaim as either "The Outsider" or "Sharp Objects." While neither commanded a huge audience, they had the critical reception to back them up. Not so with "The Undoing," a show whose critical consensus laments a story that falls short of its star power. Like so much of the female-centered crime subgenre, "The Undoing" starts with a murder. One that psychologist Grace Fraser's (Nicole Kidman) husband, Dr. Jonathan Fraser (Hugh Grant), is accused of.

Throughout its six-episode run, viewers unravel more of the mystery, desperate to deduce whether Jonathan has been framed and whether Grace can really trust her husband (and given that it's Nicole Kidman in the lead, viewers probably already know the answer). Sure, "The Undoing" never does much to break free from the shackles of its conspicuous progenitors. Episodes always end with a morsel of new information, no one communicates, and everyone lives in lavish houses. Though as a capstone to the short-lived "rich women and crime" HBO trend, it could have been a lot worse. Kidman is expectedly great, and Hugh Grant is sinisterly mischievous as the accused. And while much of it remains aspirational — Kidman's lifestyle is envy-inducing, murder and all — it's merciful enough to be a zippy, twisty foray into wealthy urban murder.

On Becoming A God In Central Florida

In 2019, the criminally underrated "On Becoming a God in Central Florida" was renewed for a second season on Showtime. Largely responsible for the resurgence of Kirsten Dunst (premiering after her Cannes win, but before her Oscar nomination, "On Becoming a God in Central Florida" took a while to grow into itself, though once it did, it emerged as one of the most vicious, deliciously twisted crime comedy series on the air. Dunst stars as Krystal Stubbs, a poor Orlando water park employee whose husband, Travis (Alexander Skarsgård), is deeply embedded in the Founders American Merchandise pyramid scheme. Insistent that the MLM is his shot at the American Dream, he's hemorrhaging what little money they have —  at least until he's killed by an alligator in the premiere.

From there, Krystal takes over, balancing her plan for revenge with being a single mother (a fascinating plot device that Dunst insisted be handled realistically), all the while proving to be remarkably good at exploiting the goodwill of those around her. While the early episodes lean a bit too far into "I, Tonya" surrealism, the show soon — inexplicably and wonderfully — becomes something akin to a horror movie. It's genuinely frightening, hallucinatory, and perhaps second only to "The Florida Project" in capturing the distinct geography and poverty of the theme park capital of the world. It's a shame that after renewal, Showtime reversed course, canceling the show just as it hit its stride.

The Cry

Joanna Lindsay (Jenna Coleman) and Alistair Robertson (Ewen Leslie) travel from Scotland to Australia to visit Alistair's family and, hopefully, fight for custody of his daughter. In tow is their young son, Noah. En route, they stop at a convenience store for some late-night supplies, reasoning it's okay to leave Noah alone in the car. After all, they'd only be away for a moment. When they return, Noah is gone. CCTV has captured nothing, there are no leads, and Joanna and Alistair slowly unravel as the case attracts national attention.

"The Cry," currently available to binge on several networks, including Acorn TV and Sundance Now, is a deliciously short (just four episodes) crime series in which nothing is as it seems. Coleman is transcendent as the young mother in over her head, and Leslie is an adroit actor, fluidly and easily unraveling the layers of Alistair, a man whose public persona is wildly different from his private one. With plenty of twists, intrigue, and a gut-wrenching core, "The Cry" is what more crime-themed limited series should aspire to be. It's intoxicating, thrilling, and mercifully never overstays its welcome.

American Vandal

"American Vandal" is one of the funniest shows ever made. Ostensibly a parody of true crime documentaries, it draws inspiration from the likes of "Serial," "The Staircase," and "Making a Murderer." The show boasts two genuinely compelling mysteries at its core. Sure, it's uproariously funny in its mockumentary style, but it also packs more pathos than most as it unravels its outrageous mysteries.

The first season concerns the accusations lobbed against class clown Dylan (Jimmy Tatro) after several faculty cars in the school parking lot are vandalized with phallic graffiti. Everyone assumes it's Dylan's work, though aspiring filmmakers Peter (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam (Griffin Gluck) aren't so sure. As they interview classmates, "American Vandal" becomes about a lot more than some phallic symbols on cars. Season 2 expands on the stellar premiere, taking Peter and Sam to a Catholic high school where someone dubbed the "Turd Burglar" has been menacing students. That Netflix would cancel the series remains the biggest crime of all.

Happy Valley

As Sgt. Catherine Cawood in "Happy Valley," Sarah Lancashire delivers what may be one of the most exceptional and nuanced performances of all time. With a third series premiering in 2023, this long-gestating BBC crime drama (its second series ended in 2016) might finally be getting its due. While considerably more graphic and dour than most, it's anchored by Lancashire's performance, which is so simultaneously fierce and tender that it's impossible to turn away from.

Like several of its contemporaries, "Happy Valley" is less concerned with the specifics of a single crime than it is with developing its characters and the fractured relationships they're desperate to either sever or save. Cawood's daughter is deceased as the series begins, and it's a tragedy that informs her every decision — for better or worse. While it's not an easy show to watch, it explores territory most crime dramas save for fades to black. Eminently watchable and accomplished, the first two series are currently available to stream on Crackle.

Mindhunter

Netflix and David Fincher's "Mindhunter," still sidelined for a third season, might seem the kind of springboard project that predicted a deluge of exploitative true crime outings, the kinds of shows like "Dahmer" that trade in the base fascination of monstrous humans with callous disregard for the real world implications of those depictions. While "Mindhunter" is at times keen to wink at the audience as it introduces the likes of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) and Edmund Kemper (a sensational Cameron Britton) to its roster of serial killers, it's as much about the pitfalls of violent obsession as the fascination therein as the fascination therein.

Jonathan Groff stars as Holden Ford, an FBI man who, along with fellow agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), develop the FBI's first behavioral profiling program for serial killers. Rooted in the real history of the FBI's interest in predicting serial murders, "Mindhunter" is as much a time capsule as it is a compelling foray into the darkest recesses of human behavior. It's grim stuff, though an undercurrent of surreal levity keeps it from feeling too overwhelmingly nihilistic. It's arguably Netflix's premier crime drama, and while a third season seems off the table, the first two are remarkably binge-worthy.

Top Of The Lake

Currently streaming on Hulu, "Top of the Lake" is likely the toughest sell among the shows listed here. Despite a Golden Globe win for star Elisabeth Moss, "Top of the Lake" never quite took off the way the BBC's other crime dramas (such as "Broadchurch") did. It's likely because of a pace that redefines glacial. "Top of the Lake" is a patient, patient show. It's dense with rich cultural history, detached protagonists, and a matter-of-fact approach to its many violent dealings that conspicuously subverts crime story expectations. While it can be binged, it's the kind of show that really shouldn't be. Despite its short length, "Top of the Lake" needs to sit with an audience.

Moss stars as Detective Robin Griffin, and in the first season, she's tracking down a missing 12-year-old girl in New Zealand. Along the way, she meets a spiritual leader for women (Holly Hunter) and several other noteworthy characters, all of whom know more than they let on. The series moves forward five years for its second season, this time with Robin tracking down the identity of a young immigrant found dead in Sydney. With a preeminent interest in sexual assault and the ramifications and consequences therein, It's heavy stuff. For audiences who can manage it, "Top of the Lake" is one of the most richly detailed crime dramas around.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

The Missing

Fans of James Wan's "The Conjuring 2" might well have walked away wondering if Frances O'Connor could act. Sure, her cockney accent in that movie might have been a bad call, but fans of "The Missing" know well that she can deliver what is arguably one of the strongest portraits of bereavement ever seen. "The Missing," like "Top of the Lake," is split into two seasons, the connective tissue of which is Tchéky Karyo's Julien Baptiste, a retired detective whose innate perceptive abilities draw him into several disappearances. In the first season, it's a young boy named Oliver who's missing. Baptiste teams with O'Connor's Emily Hughes and the boy's father to track him down.

The first two series were so remarkably successful that Julien Baptiste got a spin-off of his own. Airing on BBC One, the aptly titled "Baptiste" had its second series premiere in July 2021. Across the board, the acting is sensational, and Baptiste is one of television's finest detectives. While "Baptiste" is certainly worth an audience's time, "The Missing" is where it all started. The curious can check out the first two series on Starz and Hulu now.

Read this next: The 18 Best Crime Dramas In TV History

The post Underrated Crime Shows That You Can Binge Right Now appeared first on /Film.

In May 2020, a former NASA engineer named Ronald Edwin Hunkeler passed away at the age of 85. During his time with the space agency, he had patented heat shields that helped put people on the moon in 1969, but he lived in constant fear that his other claim to fame would be unearthed. For during his teenage years, he was the boy who inspired "The Exorcist."

Although the case has been subject to great scrutiny and skepticism since it was reported in 1949, the "Roland Doe" exorcism remains one of the most famous possession cases, largely thanks to its relation to William Friedkin's blockbuster movie. Hunkeler, who was given pseudonyms to protect his identity, was 13 years old when the disturbances began. First, there were strange noises and moving objects. Then he started displaying increasingly unusual behavior, talking in a guttural voice unlike his own, speaking Latin phrases, and showing extreme discomfort when presented with sacred objects. He also became violent, attacking a priest with a piece of bedspring during one attempted exorcism, and words appeared scratched on his skin. In a later ritual, his bed was seen to shake and he broke another priest's nose before he was finally freed of his ailment.

Author William Peter Blatty heard the story while at university and later used it as inspiration for a novel. He switched the sex of the victim and the rest was history: First published in June 1971, "The Exorcist" was a hit, topping the New York Times bestseller list for 17 consecutive weeks (via The Guardian). Friedkin's film version came two years later and was also a controversial success, a box office smash with urban legends of audiences puking in theaters, and becoming the first horror movie to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Let's take a look at how it all plays out.

So What Happens In The Exorcist Again?

"The Exorcist" opens with an eerie prelude set in Northern Iraq where aging priest Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) is heading up an archaeological dig. Among the finds is a silver St. Joseph medal from a completely different time period than the other relics and a statuette head of the demon Pazuzu. The latter object shakes him and he decides he must leave, as if to attend to urgent business. He visits the site again before he departs and finds himself facing off against a life-size statue of the demon.

Next we're in Georgetown, Washington D.C., where actor Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is starring in a film directed by her friend Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran). While in town for the shoot, she lives in a large townhouse with her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair), where things are going bump in the night. Also from the neighborhood is Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller), a troubled young priest who is suffering a crisis of faith due to his guilt about his elderly mother dying alone.

Regan talks about an imaginary friend called "Captain Howdy" and starts displaying unusual behavior, and her symptoms grow worse after she urinates on the floor at one of her mother's parties. Medical tests also prove fruitless as Regan becomes abusive and violent, apparently possessed by a demon. When Dennings is found dead at the bottom of a flight of steps outside her bedroom window, detective William Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb) investigates the case, asking Karras about potential suspects in the priesthood.

Confounded doctors mention exorcism as a last resort, and Chris turns to Karras to help save her daughter. Karras puts in a request to perform the rites, but his superiors decide he could use a little experienced help. They send for Father Merrin to conduct the rare ritual.

What Is The Demon Pazuzu?

One of the most striking shots in "The Exorcist" is Father Merrin face-to-face with an imposing statue of Pazuzu, a terrible winged demon with a dog's head and a snake-headed penis. The imagery couldn't be more clear; this is a showdown between good and evil.

Pazuzu is a Mesopotamian demon who was considered a powerful evil force, but the roles of demons were more complex in pre-Christian cultures (via World History Encyclopedia). In Mesopotamian culture, even the most destructive demons were also capable of good. We now associate the word "demon" with pure evil, but it is derived from the Greek "daimon," or spirit, which better explains their more ambivalent role. Demons only became associated with the Devil after the birth and spread of Christianity, which cast out older religions or repurposed parts for its own.

Therefore, while Pazuzu controlled destructive winds that brought famine and locusts, he could also be invoked for protection. He was thought to be especially effective in protecting pregnant women and young children from Lamashtu, a demon-goddess who preyed on babies, and was also handy for warding off disease and impotence. This is what Merrin's colleague means when he says "evil against evil."

The statue Father Merrin faces is an accurate depiction of Pazuzu, although likenesses of that size have never been found; Mesopotamians believed that creating something so large could attract the attention of the demon it represented. Smaller statuettes, like the one he finds in the hole, could harness their protective powers and were placed in the home to ward off evil spirits.

Notably, a clay model of a bird that Regan makes echoes the design of the statue. Has Captain Howdy somehow fed her that image, or has she even seen Pazuzu in his true form? Or could she just be picking up on it subconsciously?

How Does Pazuzu End Up Possessing Regan?

"The Exorcist" doesn't make it completely clear about what is possessing Regan, which has caused a little confusion among fans. It doesn't help that the possessed Regan shouts "And I am the Devil!" by way of introduction to Father Karras, but the lore established in both the novel and subsequent films confirm that it is indeed Pazuzu. The big question is why does Pazuzu, once at large in Assyrian and Babylonian superstition, end up possessing a young girl thousands of miles away from his home turf in Washington D.C.? 

With the demons cast, from a Christian perspective, as Satan's henchmen, any one of them could have possessed her. Perhaps Pazuzu, with his reputation for scaring away evil, was simply the most dominant when the right channel of communication was opened up. This is where the ouija board comes in, offering a cautionary tale against the dangers of using occult items for a bit of a lark. As Christianity.com warns:

"Christians and all people need to know that Ouija boards are not a gateway to communicating with dead loved ones. Ouija boards are direct communication with Satan and his demons only. When a person passes away, they can no longer communicate with the living (Luke 16:19-31)."

Ouija boards have been sold commercially as a game or toy since the late 19th century; Walmart online even offers a large selection. Regan says she found hers in the closet and has been using it to chat with Captain Howdy; unknown to her, the imaginary friend is Pazuzu's benign mask as he gains her trust before possessing her.

Father Merrin

Max von Sydow was only 43 when he played 80-year-old Father Merrin, undergoing three hours of makeup work each day to look the part (via The Hollywood Reporter). As always, he brings such gravitas to the role; Merrin maybe be weary and ailing, but he is just the kind of authoritative figure you'd want conducting your exorcism. 

Author William Peter Blatty based the character loosely on Gerald Lankester Harding, the British archaeologist most well-known for excavating the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in modern-day Palestine, as well as overseeing their preservation and study. With this source of inspiration, it's fitting that we first meet Merrin on a dig, and his encounter with the Pazuzu statue takes on greater significance when we later learn that he previously conducted an exorcism in Africa that almost cost his life.

This explains the apprehension on his face when he first unearths the statuette head of the demon. While the film doesn't specify that Pazuzu was his opponent in the earlier ritual, it makes sense. Mesopotamian influence reached into Egypt and North Africa before the time of Christ, so it follows that their demons also went with them.

Merrin's death during Regan's exorcism is left a little to the viewer's imagination. We see that he is old and infirm and he pops pills whenever the stress gets too much (in the novel, he takes nitroglycerine for a heart condition), pointing to him suffering a heart attack when left alone in the room with the girl. But what triggered it? When Karras enters the room to find him dead, Regan is free of her restraints and giggling in the corner of the bed, suggesting Pazuzu said or did something that pushed the elderly priest over the edge.

Father Karras

Father Karras, brilliantly portrayed by playwright Jason Miller, is the true heart and soul of "The Exorcist." It is as much his story as Regan's, with his crisis of faith and grief at his mother's loss running parallel to the girl's deterioration under the malign influence of Pazuzu. The demon really goes hard at Karras; it's almost as if Regan is just a temporary residence until he can lure someone like the doubting priest. Pazuzu constantly tests the nerve of Karras, first mimicking an old homeless man he ignored earlier in the film before sadistically taunting him about his dead mother. "What an excellent day for an exorcism," said by Pazuzu, is one of the film's most memorable quotes, followed by a key exchange:

"You'd like that?"

"Intensely."

"But wouldn't that drive you out of Regan?"

"It would bring us together."

"You and Regan?"

"You and us."

This suggests Pazuzu has his sights set on Karras and foreshadows the end of the film, where the demon gets what he wants but not quite in the way he perhaps hoped. After the demon imitates his mother and does away with Merrin, Karras snaps and starts beating Regan, demanding that the evil spirit takes him instead. The chance to corrupt a man of the church proves too tempting for the demon to pass up; snatching away the protective medallion of St. Joseph, he makes the leap into Karras's body. Pazuzu forces him to attack Regan, but Karras summons the willpower to fight the demon back long enough to throw himself out of the window, sacrificing himself to save the girl. As his life ebbs away at the foot of the steps where Burt Dennings also died, his friend Father Dyer (Father William O'Malley) holds his hand and delivers the last rites.

Real-Life Exorcisms

According to some sources, exorcisms are on the rise today, with Christian outlets blaming the rise of ghost-hunting TV shows like "Most Haunted" and supernatural-themed shows on Netflix potentially having a psychological effect on susceptible viewers, especially during lockdown. If you live in the catchment area of the Archdiocese of Washington, their website even matter-of-factly outlines the process you need to go through to request an exorcism.

Premier Christianity details what happens during an exorcism, or "deliverance" in the Anglican Church, playing down the hokier elements that we are familiar with from movies like "The Exorcist" and its sequels. Apparently, the church takes great pains to discourage inexperienced exorcists from trying out the ritual, citing the unfortunate case of Annelise Michel as an example of what can go seriously awry in the wrong hands.

Michel was a young German woman suffering from mental illness who became convinced, along with her family, that she was demonically possessed. Two priests acquired permission to perform an exorcism and, 67 sessions later, she died of malnutrition and dehydration. A court trial followed where the priests and her family were found guilty of negligent manslaughter, and the case prompted calls from bishops and theologians to update the Roman Ritual of 1614, the liturgy Merrin quotes in "The Exorcist." They felt that passages addressing the Devil directly could reinforce the sufferer's belief that they were indeed possessed by a demonic force (via Washington Post). Michel's story has inspired three movies, the most high-profile being "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

In the hints and tips that come with the ritual, it recommends identifying a phrase that has a particularly strong effect on the demon and repeat it. This is perhaps why Merrin and Karras lock onto the phrase "the power of Christ compels you" during their exorcism.

The St. Joseph Medallion

While on the dig in Iraq, Father Merrin inspects some items that have been unearthed, including a small round St. Joseph medallion -- an interesting find considering it was buried on a pre-Christian site. The mystery of its provenance is never explained, but its discovery along with the Pazuzu head sets up the theme of an age-old battle between good and evil.

As a symbol of good, the medal appears as a an important motif throughout the film. When Karras has a dream sequence, we see it falling through the air, symbolizing his loss of faith and his foreshadowing fatal fall at the end of the film. Later, it appears in the exorcism scene as he struggles with Regan, who rips it from his neck and removes the protection it affords before Pazuzu enters his body. It isn't clear whether it is the same medallion from Iraq, perhaps given to him at some point by Merrin, or one like it. However, like the Pazuzu statue that briefly appears in the exorcism scene, its incongruous presence establishes the notion that good and evil know no borders.

The medallion makes its final appearance at the end of the movie, with a different slant depending which cut you watch. As they leave, Chris gives it to Father Dyer as a reminder of his deceased friend. In the theatrical cut, he accepts it and watches them drive away. In the later Extended Director's Cut, he hands it back to her saying, "I think you should keep it." Chris doesn't protest; while she is agnostic for most of the film, this indicates that she has at least become acceptant to the possibility of God by the end. It also has another connotation. Regan might be in the clear for now, but does Dyer think she'll need its protection in the future?

The Beginning Of A Beautiful Friendship

William Peter Blatty always considered "The Exorcist" a story about the triumph of good over evil, but the film's alternate endings differ in how much this comes across. His novel concluded with Detective Kinderman befriending Father Dyer as they walk away from the house, a scene that William Friedkin shot but decided to cut from the original theatrical version. Instead, he left us with Dyer looking down the steps where Karras died before walking away, closing on a far more somber note. Blatty felt that ending the film in such a way caused some viewers to believe that the Devil had won, even though Regan was saved by the sacrifice of the two priests (via Den of Geek).

In the Extended Director's Cut, Friedkin restored the scene with Kinderman and Dyer. I thought it was a bit odd when I first saw it, played in a lightly comic register that is largely absent throughout the rest of the movie. Calling back to his earlier conversation with Karras, Kinderman attempts to befriend Dyer by offering to take him to the cinema, and they walk away arm-in-arm. In a version of the scene where the audio was too poor for use, Kinderman quotes Humphrey Bogart at the end of "Casablanca," indicating that he intends for them to become good friends. As Blatty says, "And Karras lives on; he lives, the relationship continues."

I've always held the belief that "The Exorcist" is a good movie in the purest sense of the word. All the characters in the film, apart from Pazuzu, are good people, and together they have beaten the Devil and his cohorts. In this respect, the optimistic ending with a new friendship born out of tragedy is a more fitting way to wrap things up, and I like it better each time I see it.

Read this next: How These Child Stars Feel About The Horror Movies That Put Them On The Map

The post The Exorcist Ending Explained: Beating the Devil appeared first on /Film.

And here comes another leak. Following the leaks of of Duke Nukem Forever 2001, PREY 1995, Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded, Halo 3 “Pimps at Sea” build, Mortal Kombat 2 Arcade, Horizon Forbidden West Alpha Build, Blood 1996 and Dungeon Siege, the first prototype for Valve’s Left 4 Dead has been also leaked online. This Left 4 Dead … Continue reading The first prototype for Valve’s Left 4 Dead has been leaked online →

The post The first prototype for Valve’s Left 4 Dead has been leaked online appeared first on DSOGaming.

(Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they've been watching, why it's worth checking out, and where you can stream it)

The Movie: "Possession"

Where You Can Stream It: Shudder

The Pitch: "Possession" is a wild, piercing shriek of a film. Andrzej Żuławski's long-unavailable 1981 film follows a spy named Mark (Sam Neill) who grows increasingly desperate and disturbed when his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), asks for a divorce. Anna herself isn't exactly acting normal; she's evasive and erratic and alludes to a relationship with someone else, plus there's a teacher at their child's school who looks just like her. All of this, though, is an extreme understatement compared to what we see on screen, because "Possession" is a frantic, shocking, logic-defying, funny, and fantastic film that defies nearly any explanation.

The movie is composed in large part of explosive scenes between Adjani and Neill, who pull apart and crash together all across West Berlin with a sense of epic melodrama and tragedy. But "Possession" only gets stranger and more complex as it goes, evolving into a tense psychological thriller about divorce, a gruesome and seductive slice of body horror, and even a savvy political allegory. Żuławski crafts the film at a pace -- and with a demented fervor -- that makes nearly every scene feel as gutsy and unhinged as the climax of a particularly adventurous horror movie, and the result is a visually stunning, primally satisfying film that will leave you dizzy and in awe by the time it's finally done.

Why It's Essential Viewing

Historically, "Possession" has been extremely hard to come by. In the U.K., it was labeled a "video nasty" upon release, banned as a part of the country's push towards censoring films deemed exploitative. American moviegoers didn't get to experience "Possession" in all its glory for years, either, as its eventual U.S. release was, as Roger Ebert noted in his review, "dumped just before Halloween with a third of its running time removed." The movie never even got a semi-proper U.S. home video release until the year 2000, and it wasn't until this past year that Metrograph Pictures made a 4K restoration of the uncut film available at repertory screenings nationwide.

The film's inaccessibility may have solidified its status as a must-watch for hardcore horror fans, but it also fully deserves its massive cult following. There's a weirdness in every word of "Possession" that makes it special. It's the kind of movie that, once seen, you can't wait to show someone else as soon as possible. Nearly every line reading in the film feels like an off-the-wall choice from its actors, especially when Heinz Bennent's Heinrich waltzes onscreen to trade words with Mark. The film sometimes dips into camp territory, but it's clearly purposeful, with Żuławski reveling in disorientation, disconnect, and emotions so vast and deep that they feel dangerous.

The crowning jewel of "Possession" is Adjani's performance. She plays Anna like a piece of shattered glass, fragmented into dozens of glistening pieces that each reflect the world a little differently than the next. She's hungry and pained and ferocious and glorious. The camera also loves her, confidently framing Anna in some of the most indelible horror shots of all time. 

"Possession" is an unrelenting trip, and Adjani our beautifully monstrous tour guide.

Read this next: Horror Movies With Unconventional Monsters

The post The Daily Stream: Possession is Unlike Anything You've Ever Seen appeared first on /Film.

NVIDIA is rumored to incorporate AI optimizations within its future graphics drivers which will release this year for enhanced GPU utilization amongst a list of things.

NVIDIA Incorporating AI-Optimizations Within Its Graphics Drivers For Tensor Core 'RTX' GPUs

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become the popular buzzword for technological advancements, especially in discovering new scientific discoveries and medicines to software and PC components. It is very little surprising that PC  components could lay the groundwork for more involvement in graphics, namely with NVIDIA's Game Ready Drivers. Please remember that this article is strictly a rumor and that no claims have been confirmed through NVIDIA.

The NVIDIA Game Ready Drivers library has helped enhance performance and quality in hundreds of next-gen games and even some older titles (Quake RTX and Portal RTX), which has shown that NVIDIA is backing its claims made last year about their direction with artificial intelligence. In this aspect, AI could help with performance and other related instructions and tasks, allowing games to run more smoothly with less graphical interference, take some if not all of the load off the CPU, and process that information better or more.

Work it harder, make it better. Do it faster, makes us stronger. More than ever, hour after hour, Work is never over.

— Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk

CapFrameX tweeted this morning about upcoming drivers that would launch this year, possibly sooner than expected, that would optimize the NVIDIA Game Ready Drivers with AI enhancements. Note that the Twitter leaker has posted this as a rumor and should be handled as a future possibility. Whether these enhancements will come through a separate suite or be added within the current RTX technologies such as DLSS which rely heavily on AI Tensor cores remains to be seen. NVIDIA did promise that they will be adding a range of improvements and deliver a major update to DLSS by the end of this quarter.

[Rumor] Nvidia is working on AI optimized drivers. Release maybe this year (Q1).

Up to 30% more performance
Average improvement ~10%
No info about specific gen

Take this with a grain of salt. If true Nvidia drivers will be real "fine wine". pic.twitter.com/QGTUL9iK7N

— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) January 8, 2023

AMD is also working to begin taking assistance from AI in its upcoming FSR 3 technology while their recent Ryzen 7040 'Phoenix' APUs leverage Xilinx-based AI technology for faster ML and DNN capabilities. This new driver advancement would utilize the AMD Radeon Super Resolution, which enhances specific latency enhancements and upscaling through the entire system, not just having the overhead specified to one section of the computer.

NVIDIA has been at the forefront of AI innovation with the advent of its tensor core design and these cores are likely to play a crucial role if this news is indeed true. Again, since this is highly speculative, it is unknown how any of this would work and what hardware is needed.

The post NVIDIA Might Incorporate More AI-Optimizations In Its Graphics Drivers For RTX GPUs by Jason R. Wilson appeared first on Wccftech.

At first glance, Cherita Chen might seem like the kind of character you put into a movie just for laughs. Played by Jolene Purdy, Cherita is the less-than-popular outcast that goes to the same high school as Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the 2001 film, "Donnie Darko." Fans will most likely remember her for constantly telling anyone who bothers or makes fun of her to "Chut up!" (In the film, Cherita is Chinese, though Purdy herself is actually part Japanese-American). However, her role in "Donnie Darko" extends far beyond comedic relief.

Search the internet for fan theories on Cherita's purpose and you will find everything from speculation that she was sent here by aliens to spy on Donnie to more meta ideas that she is actually the one writing the very movie we are watching. Her presence in the film is so minimal that it's easy to come up with seemingly limitless possibilities for her significance, though probably the most logical is that her character is meant to represent innocence as well as provide Donnie with an opportunity to show care and compassion for another person. 

In fact, in one of the more touching scenes in the film, Donnie and Cherita share an exchange in a school hallway where Donnie holds her head in his hands and tells Cherita that "one day everything is going to be better for [her]." Though the scene is brief, it still packs a punch, as we are left to intuit (after glimpsing Cherita's dropped books, one of which sports Donnie's name doodled lovingly on its cover) that Cherita has a crush on Donnie. But Cherita isn't the only one to be flustered by Donnie's presence. Purdy herself was also actually nervous to film this emotional scene in real life.

Fulfilling A Contractual Obligation

Cherita Chen is the outcast amongst the students in "Donnie Darko," often bullied relentlessly by her peers who pick on her for her weight and her accent. Donnie is the only character that shows her empathy. In an interview for Stumped Magazine, director Richard Kelly said, "She's the whole point of this horrific environment that high school creates where kids are so maliciously cruel to each other." In the scene between her and Donnie, because Cherita is constantly picked on, part of the reason she runs away from him is that she's unable to decide whether he is being kind or cruel to her. Donnie's hands on her face also make it seem like there's a very real possibility that he's going to kiss her, which, even though she seemingly has a crush on Donnie, seems terrifying to Cherita in the moment.

Though no actual kiss transpires between the two characters, the scene is still very intimate, and Jolene Purdy remembered being extremely nervous to film it. In an oral history for The Ringer, she said, "I remember looking at the script and being like 'I don't think I can do this.'" She went on to explain, "Up until that point, I had never been kissed. And so I just remember telling my mom, 'I can't do this. I give up. I'm done.'" Thankfully, Purdy's mom helped give her the push she needed, gently reminding her that while she may want to quit, she was contractually obligated to do the scene. Talk about motivation! In the end, though Cherita's part in "Donnie Darko" may feel minimal, she really is at the heart of the movie's message about empathy, and that's really not something to "chut up" about. 

Read this next: The 14 Best Film Acting Debuts Of All Time

The post Jolene Purdy Almost Quit Acting Over Donnie Darko's Near-Kissing Scene appeared first on /Film.

While Jackie Chan has always been an affable and comedic performer, even going back to his early martial arts films from the 1970s, something curious happened when he broke into the Hollywood mainstream in the late 1990s. Producers looked at Chan's playful, heroic, somewhat goofy charm and shifted it into overdrive. Chan's American films, as a result, tended to be incredibly broad, full of silly mugging, "culture clash" humor, and a general lack of stakes. Chan's first major American hit was Brett Ratner's "Rush Hour" in 1998, a serviceable but largely unremarkable police comedy wherein Chan played opposite Chris Tucker. That film was such a runaway success (it made over $244 million worldwide) that a pattern was immediately set for Chan. Pair him with an unlikely co-star, put him in generic action scenarios, and watch the money roll in. 

The next few years saw such pieces of mainstream fluff as Kevin Donovan's "The Tuxedo" (opposite Jennifer Love Hewitt), "The Medallion" (opposite Claire Forlani), "Around the World in 80 Days" (opposite Steve Coogan), two additional "Rush Hour" sequels, and, most notably for the purposes of this article, Tom Dey's 2000 film "Shanghai Noon" and David Dobkin's 2003 sequel "Shanghai Knights," both opposite Owen Wilson. 

The premise of "Shanghai Noon" is novel enough: Chan plays Chon Wang (it sounds like "John Wayne"), a royal guard of the Chinese Imperial city in 1881. When the Chinese imperial princess (Lucy Liu) flees the country and hides out in the Old West, Wang follows her to the American frontier. During his search for the missing princess, he forms a partnership with a laconic and friendly gunfighter named Roy O'Bannon (Wilson), and they will spend a great deal of "Noon" comedically bantering. 

Martial arts master meets the gunslinger. So far, so good.

Jackie Chan, Dumbed Down

While "Shanghai Noon" ended up a modest hit -- $99 million on a $55 million budget -- it opened small. According to a 2000 article in EW, the film's only earned a trim $19 million on its opening weekend, clearly not breaking any box office records, nor matching the financial glories of "Rush Hour." Dey, in the same EW article, lamented the low numbers, having been utterly convinced that his film would at least cross the $30 million mark. He blamed Disney's marketing department for the tepid response, pointing out that the previews for "Shanghai Noon" leaned into the film's broader, more comedic moments and scenes of fish-out-of-water humor. 

"Shanghai Noon" is a light, breezy film to be sure, but Dey did not think he was making a comedy. "I feel like it was misrepresented," the director said. "The trailers really dumbed it down." The usage of ZZ Top's "La Grange" and Kid Rock's "Cowboy" in the preview certainly didn't help sell "Noon" as a straightforward Western adventure

Dey would go on to make bright, antiseptic Hollywood comedies like "Showtime," "Failure to Launch," and "Marmaduke," but with "Noon," his first feature, Dey was determined to make something richer and more nuanced than the average piece of commercial Tinseltown detritus. "I really tried hard to give it extra layers," he said. "To make it about something: friendship, exploitation. These are real things that mean something."

First Time?

Dey, 31 at the time, had come to directing "Shanghai Noon" after several years in the world of TV commercials. He acknowledged what a big step this was in his career, only to be met with the horrors of a studio marketing department. Although he clearly knew from advertising, it was a step in the process he was not allowed to participate in. Dey lamented: "It was hard because here was the most important product of my life, and I was pretty much frozen out of any involvement in terms of how to sell it." Eventually, "Shanghai Noon" found enough of an audience to warrant the above-mentioned "Shanghai Knights," a sequel that saw the same characters travel to 1880s London, although Dey did not direct it. 

Generally speaking, "Noon" is affable, if generic. It also received far more positive reviews than 2000's other major blockbuster, John Woo's chaotic and terrible "Mission: Impossible 2," released the same day. The disappointing financials of "Noon" could merely be attributed to competition. "Mission: Impossible" was a higher-profile release, starred Tom Cruise -- a bigger star than Chan in America -- and came with a larger marketing push. 

Dey's most recent film was the 2022 Netflix film "Wedding Season," so he still seems to be working, and is still living in the realm of "affable comedy." It's fun to imagine a parallel universe, however, wherein a filmmaker like Dey was recognized as being more nuanced, and that he was permitted to pursue his own creative projects. Perhaps Dey, along with any number of Hollywood commercial directors, has a dark heart of strange art waiting to burst out. While we speculate, we can rent "Shanghai Noon" online and stroll past it while we make dinner.

Read this next: The 15 Best Jackie Chan Movies Ranked

The post Director Tom Dey Thinks He Knows Why Jackie Chan And Owen Wilson's Shanghai Noon Flopped appeared first on /Film.

[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 ]

So, it feels like I played a bunch of games last calendar year. But that’s probably because I sampled a bunch while not necessarily going deep in any particular game. Steam actually highlights this with a year-end wrap-up called Steam Replay. According to my SteamDB profile, I managed to finish the year at exactly 2300 hours – 2262 hours in 2021 = only 38 hours? Looking back on it, I guess that tracks. There were 2 games into which I invested quite a bit of time on 2 different weekends. Otherwise, I seemed to get heavily into racing games this year.

Ah, racing games. I was surprised to realize that, prior to this year, I didn’t even have cause to create a “Racing” category in my Steam library because I had no racing games. This year, I managed to sink a lot of time into various racing games. Actually, it seems like a lot of time, but I didn’t technically log a lot of hours, because each short play session was usually packed with enough action, and then I moved on to some other non-gaming activity.

However, the above stats don’t tell the whole story. I was motivated to branch out from the Steam platform this year, mostly enticed by various freebies. For example, I got a new phone carrier plan that gave me a free 6-month trial of a bunch of different services. New services I tried include:

• Apple Arcade: 6 months included with my carrier
• Google Play Pass: 6 months included with my carrier
• Amazon Luna: Amazon’s game streaming service which rotates in a new selection of 4-6 free games every month
• Epic Games Launcher: Epic’s effort to achieve dominance in the game launcher wars by giving away as many free games as it takes

Not much happened for me on the MobyGames front, with only 33 contribution points, all cover art. However, that wasn’t my only archival work this year– I finally got serious about filling in any holes I can find in the Internet Archive. See my archival log blog posts for more details on that.

1. Dungeon Warfare II: First game I played this year, several weeks in. There’s still a ton of content I haven’t gotten to on this one, but it’s very difficult.
2. Bayonetta: God of War (the newer one with Old Kratos) was released on Steam early in the year. It made me yearn for the earlier entries in the series to also be released for PC, but alas. Then I remembered that I have a number of games of a similar spirit and that I still have yet to play Bayonetta. Interesting for a bit, but I just don’t understand the world that it tries to build.
3. Into The Breach: I finally got around to figuring this game out. From the creator of FTL, which also took me awhile to warm up to. It’s frustrating but these roguelikes have a way of sucking me in anyway, once I figure out the core gameplay.
4. Opus Magnum: Getting back into this machine-building puzzler, which runs great on a lower end Chromebook that I recently reformatted as a general purpose Linux laptop.
5. Dungeon of the ENDLESS: This game has always looked interesting to me, even though I wasn’t quite sure what it was. It came up for cheap enough in January that I pulled the trigger. It’s some kind of rogue-like, but set in a sci-fi universe of Endless Space. It’s really confusing to me. But just like all such Rogue-likes, it’s able to suck me in just enough that I spend at least an hour on it. It makes me wonder about its relationship with Team Fortress II, as it seems to have numerous characters influenced by that game. Later on, I realized that this was because the game came bundled with a bunch of DLC, including characters from TF2.
6. Pix the Cat: I picked this up sometime last year, likely because it looks minimally interesting and was on sale for very little. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going in. I suppose that by now, I should expect games to mess up my windows on first startup. I know it’s a petty complaint, but it roils me every time. Anyway, it’s a well-done and reasonably fun game. It’s like a Snake/Nibbles-type game in which you have to grow your tail, but also shrink your tail in order to finish the level. It’s fun in small spurts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to retain the resolution settings across games. Also, the music seems to be synthesized in real time (like a MIDI or tracker format) and sometimes gets jumbled, as if they processing load is too high.
7. F-Zero (SNES Classic Mini): This sort of serves the role of “comfort game”. I’m good at the first 3 courses and I don’t think I have ever cleared the fourth.
8. Contra III: The Alien Wars (SNES Classic Mini): I actually started to try getting good at this game.
9. Super Castlevania IV (SNES Classic Mini): Another oldie but goodie on the classic console.
10. “Manos”: The Hands of Fate, Director’s Cut: A curious title I found on Steam while searching for the upcoming Rifftrax video game. It was cheap enough and it looked novel enough that it was an instant pickup. I was curious to see how much NES side-scrolling action they could squeeze out of the legendary Manos movie. It looks like they pulled other stuff out of famous MST3K episodes and didn’t just stick to Manos lore. A fun little romp before the gameplay got too challenging for me.
11. Refactor: I found this tower defense-with-a-twist at a publisher sale. It wasn’t even on sale. Sadly, never got into it.
12. Titan Souls: I watched a Let’s Play of this game a long time ago and I picked it up recently because it was cheap enough. It’s a fascinating challenge that’s simple enough to grasp. I’m trying to figure out how to classify it; I’ve decided to file it under “puzzle”. I felt quite a sense of accomplishment when I figured out how to beat one of the titans. Then I beat the second one and the game crashed, so I didn’t get credit for it. Fortunately, I was able to beat the titan again, more easily the second time.
13. Exodus Borealis: At the start of May, I realized I had only managed to sink a whole 10 hours into Steam gaming since the start of the year. I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the grand scheme of things– perhaps I’m just doing more productive things with my free time. Or maybe there’s a “They Are Billions“-shaped hole in my gaming life. So I went searching for games that might be similar to Billions and this title showed up in some recommendation lists. With the anthropomorphized fox protagonists, I wondered if I discovered the furry version of Billions. There was a demo available so I gave it a try. I emerged 3 hours later, having played as much as the demo would allow me. It’s a very beautiful game with some quite chill music and I found it overall quite pleasant. I was a bit despondent, realizing that I would likely never have the opportunity to play it again. Serendipitously, however, I came down with a minor illness and had to stay home for a day, plus, a long audiobook came up for check out from my local library. Thus, I spent an entire Saturday playing this game while enjoying the audiobook, perhaps the gaming highlight of the whole year (at least, according to my Steam Replay report, ahem: “You picked up this game for the first time and were immediately hooked”).
14. Klocki (Android): Dipping back into a bunch of Android games I have on my phone, I started with this old puzzle game. It’s really ingenious how it starts relatively simple, leaving you to think “is this all there is to it?” before slowly ramps up by adding another mechanic.
15. Capcom Arcade Stadium: Street Fighter II: The World Warrior: This came up as a Steam freebie in June. Actually, I guess it’s always a freebie, as it’s just a virtual arcade framework and delivery platform for classic arcade ROMs and emulators as DLC. When I got it, the freebie was the original Street Fighter II (not Champion Edition, not New Challengers or anything else). So I took it for a quick whirl with Guile. Always a challenge to play with a gamepad vs. the original arcade scheme.
16. Capcom Arcade Stadium: 1943: I think this is the freebie arcade game that comes with Arcade Stadium. I don’t think I’ve ever played it before. Quite fun.
17. Hotshot Racing: I first learned of this racing game from a Penny Arcade comic, which noted how it’s a throwback to very early Sega Saturn-era 3D racing games like Virtua Racing. I snatched it when it came up for sale and I really enjoy it. Great music, racing gameplay that isn’t especially deep or complicated, and wonderful race tracks which are pastiches of real places, and a treat to decipher. The game almost makes me want to invest in some kind of racing wheel setup. But this game doesn’t have official support so I would have to spend time configuring x360ce.
18. Redout: Enhanced Edition: I picked this up for cheap, probably as a promotion because the sequel was about to drop. It’s described as the spiritual successor of F-Zero and Wipeout and I can definitely see that. I also appreciated that it allowed me to jump straight into the action right away with a quick race, just to sight-see. At the end of my little race against myself, the game awarded me a 1st place gold medal, which felt a tad patronizing. Still, this game also made me wonder about a racing wheel setup. However, this game also doesn’t support such a setup directly and relevant forum discussions note that it’s not really an appropriate form of control since this is more akin to flying than driving. This makes me want to dust off the HOTAS I bought last year.
19. Slayaway Camp: Tried out another Android game. I knew it was some sort of horror theme. Turns out to be a puzzle game with an 80s horror bent. It’s fun.
20. Shadowgate: Every time I have previously sat down to play this game, I always tried to recall the NES game that I completed once upon a time. This time, I decided to just let it roll and treat it as a new experience and I had a better time playing.
21. Stealth Bastard Deluxe: Strange little puzzle game, a genre I always enjoy sinking some time into.
22. Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition: Free weekend, and my first exposure to the venerable franchise. It didn’t click for me.
23. Chessformer: Curious puzzler game in which you use chess pieces to knock out other chess pieces. So it requires knowledge of the game of chess beforehand (actually, no, because engaging with a piece will indicate all the possible valid moves). It also requires buying into the bizarre logic and physics of the world, like when your pieces can phase through solid objects, and when the Wile E. Coyote rules of gravity kick in (i.e., move in a straight line off a cliff, and then drop at a 90 degrees angle).

And now I come to the part of the year when I received 6 months free of several different subscription services, as part of an upgraded cell phone plan. 2 of the 5 freebies were Google Play Pass and Apple Arcade, which grant the bearer access to a curated library of known-good games with all their IAP and ads stripped away. So I can go nuts with these libraries. Still, is there likely to be anything worthwhile? As in, are there any games that are really mobile-exclusive, or which work best on mobile platforms? I guess that would apply to games like Pokemon GO, which I’m really not interested in. Many games which receive their start on mobile platforms eventually seem to find their way to other platforms, and I would much rather play games on a bigger monitor through Steam on my PC. Still, I wanted to delve in to search for some gems.

24. Marvel Pinball (Android): I got a free subscription to Google Play Pass and the first thing I gravitated toward was a game I’m already very familiar with. This is a version of the venerable Zen Pinball with all the Marvel-branded boards packaged in, and all accessible for free under Play Pass. I remember purchasing the Avengers (corresponding to the 2012 movie) and Blade boards a decade ago (and they’re still accessible through my account!). This app currently leads with “Marvel’s Women of Power” a.k.a. A-Force. I’ve never seen so much cinematic footage in advance of a pinball game. Anyway, when I tried Zen Pinball on my new Samsung Z Flip phone last year, it didn’t feel right with the tall, narrow screen, as my thumbs tended to cover the screen when I actuated the flippers. This time, I learned to touch the area below the board in order to control it, so it’s a bit more usable. It’s a little frustrating and limiting to play on such a small screen, but it’s still really graphically amazing. It also occurred to me to attempt to attach an external USB-C monitor, but those don’t work with my phone. Finally, I tried a pairing a new PS4-style Bluetooth controller and the trigger buttons are a much better method for actuating the virtual on-screen flippers.
25. Guns’n’Glory Zombies (Android): This is supposed to be some manner of tower defense game. It has a great art style and theme going for it. And it’s the first game I have gotten to experience that fills the entire 21:9 screen on my Galaxy Z Flip.
26. Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood (Collector’s Edition) (Android): I think this is a hidden object game, the first time I have experienced one. I didn’t care enough to go very deep.
27. MechCom (Android): Created by the impossibly generic “Game Dev Team”. Some kind of mobile RTS. It’s not especially involved, but I guess I can’t really expect much from a simple mobile game.
28. Steel Assault (Amazon Luna): I saw that this game streaming from Amazon called Luna offers Prime members a selection of free games reach month. I know that companies have been trying to make a go of this game streaming service for well over a decade, and I remained skeptical. However, I was able to score a cheap third party PS4 clone controller and connect it to this Luna service to try it out (though I would later learn that it also works just fine through a web browser). I have to admit– it works great, at least for me. Steel Assault is the first game I experienced. It’s really amazing. It’s one of those games that did a great job of copying retro aesthetics while vastly improving on gameplay.
29. Garfield Kart: Furious Racing (Amazon Luna): I know that the go-karting genre is popular, or maybe that’s just Mario Kart, which I’m not sure I’ve ever actually played. This is a go-karting game with all your favorite Garfield characters. I learned from this game that the Garfield universe has 2 more characters that I’ve never heard of, making me realize that I haven’t read the comic strip in maybe 35 years.
30. Control (Amazon Luna): Another of the first batch of Luna streaming games that I got to try. Some kind of mysterious FPS action game. It didn’t impress me, but it was a good showcase of the streaming technology.
31. Myst (Amazon Luna): This was the last of the 4 free-for-Prime-members games during the month that I first tried Amazon Luna. At first, I didn’t care to try it because I felt like I experienced enough Myst a long time ago when it was still the hottest experience in fledgling multimedia titles. I decided to give it a whirl after Steel Assault started to become too frustrating. This is the neo-Myst experience, clearly. Rather than clicking through a pre-rendered slideshow peppered with small, grainy FMV, this is the version with a full real-time 3D rendering of the environment. I remember playing the original Myst and thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if this were all real time 3D-animated?” So it was quite fun to wander around for a few minutes. It’s a little frustrating to play with a controller, though. It really cries out for keyboard+mouse controls since you have to place your reticle fairly precisely on objects in order to interact with them (I would later learn that this streaming works fine through one’s web browser, not just on Amazon’s own Fire TV sticks). Also, this time around, I found myself drawing on a mental model I’ve built up over the past 2.5 decades of gaming. Specifically, when I know I’m playing a puzzle-type game like this, my mind starts to anticipate the psychology of the original game designers, and how they probably established a finite set of things to work with and that’s what I need to focus on, rather than try to make sense of anything.
32. My Bowling 3D (Apple Arcade): Bowling sim, and the first thing I tried when I ventured into Apple Arcade. Sort of reminds me of the time I played a ski jumping game. Exquisitely accurate, but at the end of the day, it’s still a sim of a single activity.
33. Air Twister (Apple Arcade): Reminds me of Panzer Dragoon (on-rails shooter). Pretty, but there doesn’t seem to be much to it. I have a feeling that this will be a common theme on these mobile apps.
34. Outlanders (Apple Arcade): This looked like a simple town builder that could be fun and would work well on an iPad. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out the basic game features from the tutorial.
35. Overland (Apple Arcade): Post-apocalyptic turn-based strategy game, which reminded me fondly of X-Com. This showed promise. Ultimately, I moved on.
36. Earthworm Jim (Amazon Luna): This is the first time I have gotten to play anything in the Earthworm Jim franchise. It reminds me fondly of the very challenging mid-90s epoch of action gaming and quirky, zany humor. I finally understand the “Launch the Cow” reference that I’ve heard surrounding this game. Extremely challenging, though, and it wore me down pretty quick. That may have something to do with streaming latency too.
37. Everspace (Amazon Luna): Beautiful, but not terribly interesting space flight game. I used to be really enamored with the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games in the latter DOS years. But these games do nothing for me now, as graphically impressive as they are. Now they’re frustratingly difficult and make me dizzy. I’m probably just old.
38. Party Hard GO (Android): I saw this was available with my Google Play Pass and got excited since I was a big fan of the original game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support physical controller input, so I bailed right away. I’m not dealing with onscreen controls for an action game.
39. 80’s OVERDRIVE: Very fun racing game. Unlike Hot Shot Racing that I got into earlier this year, this one employs the aesthetic of racers from pre-3D sprite-based console systems. It can be jarring at times, with the way that parallax backgrounds slide around on the horizon. But in the grand scheme of improving over vintage games, this is much deeper than most vintage racing games with a lot more content. I rather enjoy the 18-song soundtrack.
40. Hot Wheels Unleashed (Amazon Luna): So many racing games this year! This game exercises a lot of creativity as you get to race Hot Wheels cars around tracks designed at a small scale. The most interesting bit is when you have to work up enough speed to survive loops. Fail, and your car just falls helplessly.
41. Riptide GP Renegade (Amazon Luna, then Steam): This is my first exposure to the Riptide franchise which seems to take place in the future. I was unable to clear the tutorial. Fortunately, that’s not a requirement to actually play the main game. The gameplay is quite exhilarating. I actually found myself wanting to know more about the futuristic world in which this takes place, but it has been a highlight in the games I’m sampled through Luna. I got to pick it up for cheap on Steam during the Autumn/Thanksgiving sale (I had better luck clearing the tutorial while playing locally; perhaps my troubles were down to streaming). So I have learned to use Amazon Luna as a method for trialing games that I might eventually want to purchase on Steam. Probably not what Amazon had in mind for this service.
42. Star Wars Pinball (Amazon Luna): From Zen Pinball, I don’t think I’ve seen pinball with quite this much story and progression. Also, this is the first time that I feel that game streaming has fallen over. The input response just wasn’t tight enough, between the Bluetooth controller input and the round trip to the gaming server. You eventually figure out how to account for it, but you certainly shouldn’t have to.
43. Per Aspera: Free for a weekend so I tried out this Martian colony builder. I actually got into it, for once. I’m always infatuated with the idea of playing such games, but I can never seem to power through the complete tutorial. It took me about 2 hours of play to get to the first achievement, which indicates that it might be absorbing enough for a purchase when it goes on sale for cheap enough.
44. Earthworm Jim 2 (Amazon Luna): This was free in October on Amazon Luna, the month after the original game was free on the same service. It was more of the same frustrating gameplay combined with the “lol so random” brand of 1990s humor.
45. Blair Witch (Amazon Luna): Ostensibly a scary game for October, free on the Amazon Luna service. I didn’t get too far into what appeared to be a first person walking simulator before I realized I had more important things I should be doing. It is, however, the first game I have played with sidekick dog feature customization.
46. HELLFRONT: HONEYMOON: Thanksgiving weekend rolled around and I remembered I have this informal tradition of playing some tower defense game a bunch over this holiday. I have been stockpiling lots of games over this year and had to dig for some TD games I might have picked up. I settled on this one first. Not great. Very simplistic, to the point that it reminds me of some of the incredibly simple TD games on mobile.
47. Freshly Frosted (Amazon Luna): Excellent puzzle game that was free on Amazon Luna in November. Construct little machine pipelines to prepare and deliver donuts. I keep wondering how it could possibly get more complicated, and the game doesn’t disappoint, always throwing new challenges my way.
48. Thymesia (Amazon Luna): Very amazing graphics delivered by the Unreal Engine. And once again, the game streaming technology shines. When I started playing this game, I assumed it was a spectacle fighter in the vein of God of War. Instead, I ascertained that this must be what the kids these days are calling a “Souls-like” game, owing to its brutal, unforgiving challenge. Indeed, I noticed that Steam has this game tagged as such. Sure is pretty, even if I can’t abide the control scheme, or make it past the first major enemy character.
49. Ninja Stealth: I was scrolling through my list of Steam games, scouting for unplayed items, and I caught that this one somehow boasts 5000 achievements. How is that possible? Turns out that this simplistic puzzle game just tosses you a +1 “Another One” achievement every few seconds (this also explains why my Steam Replay report proclaims that I managed to earn 247 achievements for the entire year, despite relatively little play time). The game starts with a warning that this might actually stress your system’s RAM. Good thing I recently doubled from 16 -> 32 GB. I got a few minutes of play and learned the gameplay, and it was sufficiently novel, fine for the likely “less than a dollar” price I paid for it.
50. Offworld Jupiter’s Legacy: I played this during game during a free weekend in 2018. I indicated that it didn’t grab me at the time, having played through some of the tutorial. But in the intervening years, I picked this up in a Humble Bundle of games. Playing Per Aspera got me interested in trying this again. I was a bit confused because booting up “Offworld Trading Company” launched “Offworld Jupiter’s Legacy”. However, that appears to be an expansion on top of the base game. I was able to pick up where I left off on the tutorial during the free weekend 4 years ago. It’s a game that I really want to get into, but it still hasn’t clicked for me.
51. Star Wars Squadrons (Epic Launcher): As a huge fan of the 1990s X-Wing and TIE Fighter Star Wars space combat games, I’ve coveted this title ever since I heard about it 2 years ago. It came up for free around Thanksgiving on the Epic Games Store. This finally motivated me to sign up for that service and install their launcher. And I am finally getting to use my HOTAS that I purchased last year. So far, it has drawn me in more than any of the other HOTAS games I have tried. It’s utterly mind-boggling how many different controls are packed into a HOTAS setup.
52. Pinball FX3: I’ve played — and enjoyed — Zen Pinball on so many other platforms that it occurred to me to look it up on Steam. This uses the same model as the other platforms– base game with a couple of boards is free, pay for extra boards. It’s slightly more annoying than other platforms because it messes up my monitor config on first startup, and then has extensive tutorializing, on the assumption that the player has never heard of pinball before.
53. Strike Suit Infinity: Space mech combat game. Something that seems really cool, but I can never get the hang of it. At least I picked it up cheap.
54. Quake (Epic Launcher): Now that I finally acceded to creating an Epic Games Launcher account, I can finally claim all those free titles that Epic subsidizes with their Fortnite money printer. This is the original Quake with original assets, though apparently using a newer engine that runs more reliably on modern Windows. I have never gotten to experience this game before. I actually got into it for a little while. I think maybe it helped that it was still “skating” movement, i.e., it didn’t simulate the up-and-down motion of normal walking.
55. Orcs Must Die 3: This started life as an exclusive for Google’s Stadia game streaming service. As a big fan of the first game (and the second game was pretty good too, but I guess I was a bit burned out after the first), I was eager to pick this up after it was released from its exclusivity. I really got into it towards the end of the year.
56. Horizon Chase Turbo (Epic Launcher): Another racing game, another freebie from Epic. Just like the other racing games this year, I got heavy into this for a little while. The aesthetic here is like an 8-bit racing game, but with fully 3D (flat-polygon) cars.
57. Tomb Raider: Legend: I finally got around to watching Romancing The Stone (1984 movie) and it put me in the mood to play some kind of treasure-hunting adventure game set in exotic locales. At first, I thought about certain Nathan Drake/Uncharted games which have made their way to Steam. Then I remembered that I already own most of the Tomb Raider franchise on Steam (as they frequently go on sale for extremely cheap). I didn’t want to start at the very beginning of the 3D era, when such games were just finding their footing, so I looked up an article describing the chronology and decided that this 2006 entry would be a good starting point. Runs great on current OS and hardware (Windows 10 and RTX 2070), even at 4K/widescreen. Still, the 2000s-era tech makes me wistfully nostalgic, between the PDAs and the CRT monitors featured in-game. It was a novel experience for about an hour, but then I could already feel the experience begin to feel repetitive. It doesn’t help that every bad guy goon is an exact clone of all the others; really jarring when they are talking to each other.
58. ISLANDERS: I was leaning towards picking up Oxygen Not Included during the Steam Christmas Sale, which I would categorize under simulation games in my collection. Instead, I decided to delve into some of the unplayed simulation games I already have in my collection, starting with the game that bills itself as a chill city builder. It certainly is. Starting the game feels like stepping into a spa. However, it’s not especially deep either. So after I got my bearings, I was pretty much finished.
59. Death Coming: This reminds me fondly of Party Hard— pixelated graphic style, great soundtrack, and gameplay centered around surreptitiously ensuring lack of survival among a large crowd of unsuspecting folks, who all have memories like goldfish, as they immediately forget traumatic deaths they just witnessed. A real highlight as the last new game I got to experience before the year’s end.

The post Games I Played In 2022 first appeared on Gaming Pathology.

Whether you're a long-time fan of "Doctor Who" or a relatively new Whovian that started following the seminal British sci-fi series after the 2005 reboot, you know that The Doctor's history is basically a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. And after nearly sixty years of stories, you start to revisit some of your old favorites. For starters, Russell T. Davies is returning to helm the BBC series (which makes its debut on Disney+ internationally starting this year), along with former stars David Tennant and Catherine Tate, to reconnect with some of the most beloved characters of the modern era of the show before the universe meets Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor.

Not only will we see the "Good Omens" and "Staged" star back on the TARDIS (this time as the Fourteenth Doctor) alongside "The Runaway Bride" Donna Noble in some capacity, but Jacqueline King, Karl Collins, and the late Bernard Cribbins will join in for the 60th-anniversary celebration as they reprise their roles as Sylvia Noble, Shaun Temple, and Wilfred Mott. However, based on the showrunner's recent activity on social media, they may not be the only returning characters that Davies has in his grand plans.

An Unearthly Child

As many social media accounts tend to do towards the end of the week, the official "Doctor Who" Instagram shared a #ThrowbackThursday video featuring William Hartnell's First Doctor saying goodbye to Susan, who was the Doctor's Gallifreyan granddaughter and his first companion on his adventures across space and time. In the classic clip, the time traveler realized that his young grandchild had grown into a woman with her own life. Before leaving Susan with freedom fighter (and future husband) David Campbell, the Doctor promised that he would come back one day. While her grandfather would keep his promise by reuniting with her in his second, third, fifth, eighth, and thirteenth regenerations across prose, audio dramas, and a TV special titled "The Five Doctors," the NuWho Doctors have said that Susan was "lost" and their family was presumed dead.

But according to his comment on the video, it would seem that Davies has been thinking about the Doctor's first companion lately. In response to the throwback, he asked, "Whatever happened to her?" He even included a thinking face emoji for good measure. While we don't know for sure, this may indicate that we may get to catch up with Susan very soon.

All Hands On Deck

While that cannot be confirmed at the moment, here's what we do know. The Fourteenth Doctor's adventures will last for three special episodes airing in November 2023. They will be followed by a new series during the holiday season starring Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor and his new companion Ruby Sunday, who is played by "Coronation Street" star Millie Gibson.

Carole Ann Ford, who originated the role of Susan, is still alive and has returned to the world of "Doctor Who" on numerous occasions over the years. If there's an opportunity for Ford to return onscreen alongside the latest incarnation of her grandfather, then I don't see why Davies and company wouldn't welcome her back with open arms. Or, if for some reason that doesn't pan out, Susan is also from Gallifrey. As a Time Lord herself, it would make sense if she has also regenerated over the years. If that's the case, then the Doctor's granddaughter could play a much larger role on Team TARDIS moving forward. Since RTD has a penchant for spinoffs like "The Sarah Jane Adventures" and "Torchwood," maybe there's even a new show in the cards for a regenerated Susan.

Of course, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves at this point. With all this talk of classic "Doctor Who" amidst Davies' upcoming return, there's a whole universe of possibilities out there. For all we know, we might even catch up with the Doctor's daughter too. But that's a conversation for another day.

Read this next: 12 Underrated Sci-Fi Shows That You Need To See

The post Will We Finally See What Happened To The Doctor's Granddaughter On Doctor Who? appeared first on /Film.

Comedy king Mel Brooks has always pushed the envelope. He's been no stranger to controversy over the years, and a lot of his films have raised even more eyebrows in today's political climate than they did upon their release. But still, to this day, there isn't a single joke that Brooks would take back. In fact, he regrets not going even further.

Brooks' 1974 film "Blazing Saddles" examines race through a parody of classic Hollywood Westerns. Despite being a critique of racism, Brooks has argued that fear of political correctness would have censored the film if he had tried to make it today. 

"We have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy," he explained to BBC Radio 4 (via Variety) back in 2017. "It's okay not to hurt feelings of various tribes and groups. However, it's not good for comedy. Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks. Comedy is the lecherous little elf whispering into the king's ear, always telling the truth about human behavior." 

When asked what lines he wouldn't cross, Brooks gave the same response my own Jewish grandfather would probably give. "I personally would never touch gas chambers or the death of children or Jews at the hands of the Nazis," he said to BBC. "Everything else is okay."

Some people argue that Brooks takes things too far, but the comedian doesn't regret a single joke he's ever told. "[There's] not one I would take back," he told Fresh Air last year. "As a matter of fact, I'm pretty upset about some jokes that I took back [...] that I thought, well, that's a little too risque. But there were plenty of jokes I should have just exploded with, and I said, 'Maybe that's a bit too much for the kids' or whatever."

Madeline Kahn Bites Cleavon Little's Arm

There was one gag in particular that Mel Brooks ended up cutting that he wishes he had kept in "Blazing Saddles." "It had to do with Madeline Kahn going into Cleavon Little's dressing room after the show," he recalled to Fresh Air host Terry Gross. "And then she says something like, 'Relax,' you know? And then she says, 'Oh [...] how are you built? Oh, you're — oh, how beautiful [...] the way you're built, your people are built,' you know? And it was too much. And she's — and he says, 'I'm sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Von Shtupp. You're biting my arm, you know?'

The scene was a satirical take on the way that white women objectify and fetishize Black men. It's a gag that's designed to make the audience uncomfortable with the way that Ms. Von Shtupp is treating Little's character, Bart, but this discomfort mixed with humor might have felt too complicated and sexually charged for Brooks' intended audience. The film still earned an R rating for its strong language, comic violence, and sexual and racist references (per BBFC).

Probably the biggest controversy in "Blazing Saddles" is the use of the N-word, but Brooks doesn't lament this choice either. "I use the N-word in 'Blazing Saddles," the director told Men's Journal in 2013. "But it was to show how despised, hated, and loathed this Black sheriff was. Without the N-word, you couldn't have the story. You got to tell the truth."

Brooks Never Regrets Taking It Too Far

"Blazing Saddles" isn't the only film that has landed Mel Brooks in hot water over the years. "When I did Springtime for Hitler [in 'The Producers'], the war was not even cold," he also told Men's Journal. "People like rabbis and would write to me and say, 'This is execrable.' And I'd say, 'You can't bring folks like Hitler down by getting on a soapbox — they're better at it than we are. But if you can humiliate them, ridicule them, and have people laugh at them — you've won.'"

Brooks was never worried about offending people, even if they weren't ready for what he threw at them. "Oh, you have to risk it," the comedian insisted in the same Men's Journal interview. "To hell with them." He was confident that history would side with him eventually and added: "I knew 'Springtime for Hitler' was perfect, I knew it was right. I said to my friends, they may have to catch up with me. I may be a little ahead of the curve at this point and have to wait for some of the world to catch up with me."

What good is regret when every mistake was part of the journey? "Forget about correcting your past," Brooks proclaimed. "You learn from your past as you go along. You can't say, 'If I had ....' You say, 'Okay, all right. That was a mistake. I won't do that again.' That's how you learn."

Read this next: Every Mel Brooks Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

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The Russian cyberespionage group known as Turla has been observed piggybacking on attack infrastructure used by a decade-old malware to deliver its own reconnaissance and backdoor tools to targets in Ukraine. Google-owned Mandiant, which is tracking the operation under the uncategorized cluster moniker UNC4210, said the hijacked servers correspond to a variant of a commodity malware called 

NVIDIA has released a brand new driver for its graphics cards. According to the release notes, the NVIDIA GeForce 528.02 WHQL driver adds official support for the NVIDIA RTX 4070Ti GPU. Moreover, it is optimized for the DLSS 3 patches of Conqueror’s Blade and Dakar Desert Rally. This driver also packs a number of fixes. … Continue reading NVIDIA GeForce 528.02 WHQL driver is available for download →

The post NVIDIA GeForce 528.02 WHQL driver is available for download appeared first on DSOGaming.

After almost 2 decades Half-Life 2 has been given a free expansion, except it’s not developed by Valve for the FPS game, with it instead being made by a group of fans and released on Steam. Telling a short story of a rebel fighting off Combine in the woods, Half-Life 2 Evacuation isn’t exactly the explosive narrative of Half-Life 3 we’ve all been waiting for, but at least it’s something - and it’s free.

MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best old games, Best FPS games, Best VR games

The "Evil Dead" franchise has accrued a lot of famous objects over the years, and the upcoming "Evil Dead Rise" looks like it's bringing back all of the classics. We already knew that "Evil Dead Rise" was going to focus heavily on the Necronomicon Ex Mortis -- the Book of the Dead -- and the red-band trailer featured a great glimpse of new hero Beth (Lily Sullivan) wielding a bloody chainsaw, but we now have evidence of a boomstick, too! Empire Magazine revealed an image of Beth with a double-barrel shotgun alongside their interview with director Lee Cronin back in December, and it looks perfect. The movie looks like it's tonally right between the original "The Evil Dead" from 1981 and its 2013 reboot, and having all of the tools of the Deadite-trashing trade around is enough to make any fan start drooling. Seriously, can't it be April already?

"Evil Dead Rise" will blast its way into theaters on April 21, 2023, which means fans are going to have to sit tight just a little longer. It's been a decade since Fede Álvarez's gorgeously gory "Evil Dead" shocked and amazed franchise fans with a brutal update on the classic formula, so it's the perfect time for another "Evil Dead" to, well, rise!

Blowing Away Some Kandarian Demon Dorks

"Evil Dead Rise" will be set "firmly" in the "Evil Dead" universe, which means that the same insane rules that apply to the movies and Starz television series apply here. The formula tends to be pretty much the same across the franchise: someone finds a freaky book bound in human skin, reads from it, and the Kandarian demons possess everyone they can, creating an army of Deadites bent on destruction. The scariest thing about Deadites is that they still look like the people we once loved, and can even tap into their memories to try and convince you that they're still human, but they're all evil. 

In "Evil Dead Rise," Beth's estranged sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) ends up possessed, and Beth and Ellie's three children must fight against the reanimated corpse of their beloved family member. There's brief footage of the kids at a lake house, so it's entirely possible that they got the original Necronomicon from the original cabin, though I doubt that's the original chainsaw or boomstick. After all, Ash (Bruce Campbell) took those with him when he traveled into the Middle Ages in "Army of Darkness," and then used them again in "Ash vs. Evil Dead" years later, so those are probably in the back of the Delta. But why are we so excited about a shotgun, again?

The Man, The Myth, The Boomstick

Ashley Joanne Williams, better known as "Ash, Housewares," is one of the greatest horror heroes of all time. Portrayed by the grooviest guy alive, Bruce Campbell, he started the "Evil Dead" franchise as a nebbish, nervous nerd and ended it as a sweet-talking, butt-kicking antihero who saved the world multiple times. In each iteration he uses some kind of long-barreled gun to blow away some baddies, starting with a rifle in the first film before being changed to a double-barrel shotgun in "Evil Dead 2." In "Army of Darkness," Ash gives a speech to the assembled medieval peasants trying to capture him, and it's become the stuff of "Evil Dead" fandom legend: 

"Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This ... is my BOOMSTICK! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety-five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?"

Funnily enough, none of the guns in the original "Evil Dead" trilogy were ever Remingtons, but maybe Raimi picked that brand because it's fairly recognizable to Americans. The gun in "Army of Darkness" is actually a 12-gauge Stoeger Coach Gun, but I won't tell if you won't. 

It Just Isn't Evil Dead Without The Boomstick!

One of the neat things about the "Evil Dead" franchise is that it offers opportunities for new heroes to join the Deadite-fighting fam, so it's entirely possible to have great "Evil Dead" stories without Ash at their center. The 2013 film's lead, Mia (Jane Levy), proved to be just as badass as Ash, using both a shotgun and chainsaw to dispatch Deadites, and Ash's friends Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) and Pablo (Ray Santiago) from "Ash vs. Evil Dead" became compelling heroes in their own right, too. Will Beth and Ellie's kids be able to join the ranks of Deadite destroyers, or will they be doomed to fall before their demonic foes? 

The new blood in the "Evil Dead" universe have one serious battle ahead of them, but at least we know they'll have the right tools. "Evil Dead Rise" hits theaters on April 21, 2023. 

Read this next: Horror Remakes That Are Better Than The Originals

The post It Looks Like Evil Dead Rise Is Bringing Back The 'Boomstick' appeared first on /Film.

It's almost impossible to read a headline that promises to count down "the best movies of all time" without raising an eyebrow. What a bold premise! The art of filmmaking encompasses so many different components that it can be hard enough to rank even two movies against each other, much less to pit every movie in existence against the entirety of its cinematic brethren. What's more, so much of filmmaking is subjective. Even if a list of all-time best films is calculated by a large group of people rather than one person, who's to say what makes one movie "better" than another? Is there any way to escape an inherent bias shared among voters in any given list? If not, is setting out on such a venture futile, to begin with?

The answer? Maybe. But that hasn't stopped many people from taking their best shot at it. Time and time again, publications, organizations, and the like have gathered critics, moviegoers, and staff writers to compose a definitive ranking of what they consider the best movies ever. In the spirit of the boldness that inspired each of the following outlets to attempt their daring countdown of all-time films, here is a countdown of those rankings, ranked. In them, we find fascinating reasoning, a fair share of hot takes, and an abundance of passion for the movies we all love so much.

Honorable Mention: Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

The esteemed movie critic and UCLA professor is the perfect guide through Hollywood in his book "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide." Maltin originally wrote the book in 1969. However, it became so expansive that it was eventually separated into two volumes: "Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide" (last updated in 2015 and curating movies released through 1965) and "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide: The Modern Era" (most recently revised in 2017). It's an honorable mention in this article because it doesn't exactly conform to the parameters of the rest of our list — it's not a countdown of all-time best movies, but rather two tomes of synopses and reviews of over 26,000 films.

Maltin and his contributing editors leave readers feeling informed, enlightened, and inspired about movie history, regardless of their level of expertise. Maltin's work is thorough but not overly complex — accessible but not dumbed down. It's just the right balance that any film writer should aspire to have. Over the various editions of the two books, many include Maltin's list of "50 Movies You Really Ought to See," which is as good an excuse as any to recommend the book.

Metacritic's Best Movies Of All Time

Metacritic assigns a score out of 100 to every movie featured on its website. In describing its process, Metacritic says it "distills the opinions of the most respected critics writing online into a single number." In and of itself, that language implies bias, as who's to say which critics are more "respected" than others? In the database's list of top-rated titles, there are the expected (and deserving) classics like "Casablanca" at No. 4 and "Citizen Kane" at No. 2. There are also relatively new entries like "Pan's Labyrinth" at No. 19 and "Moonlight" at No. 11.

In Metacritic's ranking, the score out of 100 is supposed to speak for itself, with the only accompanying copy on the list being a summary of each film. (Clicking each movie takes users to a page with critics' reviews and links to stream, but it's an extra step that keeps the list from being all-encompassing.) The problem with the score being self-explanatory is that the numbers often still raise questions. The top spot goes to "The Godfather," with a perfect score of 100, but the citation for that particular movie is only based on 16 critics. Meanwhile, "Boyhood" is number five, also with a perfect score, but based on 50 critics. While few would likely argue that "Boyhood" deserves a higher ranking than "The Godfather," how does the math check out according to those numbers?

TIME's All-TIME 100 Movies

Compiled by TIME Magazine's Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel in 2005, "All-TIME 100 Movies" loves its punny title (and its accompanying slogan, "the greatest films made since 1923 — the beginning of TIME"), but sells itself short by presenting its findings in alphabetical order rather than as an actual ranking. In terms of user interface, readers can scroll the visually underwhelming bulleted entries or click their way through all 100 slides and their accompanying critique one by one, beginning with "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." 

The making of this list seems to have been quite the saga. Corliss and Schickel originally published it in 2005, though many of the blurbs have a 2010 date, and Corliss added 20 more movies in 2012. Perhaps most fascinating of all, in 2011, Corliss wrote an article reflecting on the buzz the initial 2005 list caused, including its 7.8 million online hits in its first week. In his introspective essay, Corliss elaborates on his choices, critiques his own partialities, and responds to feedback he and Schickel received from readers in 2005 ("The main complaint is that so few of the films we chose had heart"). His observations bring to mind Ego, the food critic in "Ratatouille," whose critical review of Gusteau's restaurant inadvertently becomes an assessment of the art of criticism in and of itself.

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies

In 1998, the American Film Institute revealed "100 Years... 100 Movies" in honor of the hundredth anniversary of cinema. AFI  updated the list in 2008. It includes basic, bulleted information about each film but offers little in the way of reasoning for its selections. AFI says 1,500 "leaders from across the American film community" voted on the movies by choosing their top 100 from a pre-nominated list of 400 movies. The result is a fairly standard compilation without any huge surprises — all acclaimed, to be certain, but not entirely unprecedented given the parameters of voting. Towering as the champion is "Citizen Kane." 

Perhaps most notable about this list is a self-acknowledgment of its major flaws. In an inscription displayed prominently at the top of the list, AFI writes, "Since its inception, American film has marginalized the diversity of voices that make our nation and its stories strong — and these lists reflect that intolerable truth. AFI acknowledges its responsibility in curating these lists that has reinforced this marginality and looks forward to releasing new lists that will embrace our modern day and drive culture forward." Here's hoping a new ranking can channel this sentiment soon.

Parade's 100 Best Movies Of All Time

Parade's 2022 list describes itself as "the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest films ever made." It goes on to specify that "these are movies everyone should see at least once." Credited to Samuel R. Murrian, it's unclear how many people from Parade's staff contributed to the rankings. The undertaking is intentional about including movies from a variety of genres and evoking many different styles of filmmaking. Murrian writes, "In ranking these movies, we're taking into account their artistic merits, how well they've aged, and rewatchability." It's nice to have this framework stated upfront, as it provides a lens through which to approach the ranking and explains the distinctive ways Parade's list sets itself apart from others.

The list immediately sends a message that it's mindful of a general audience, not just lovers of old Hollywood, with its No. 100 pick, "Bridesmaids." While certainly a hit, you wouldn't find the movie anywhere near some of the other rankings in this article. Other wildcards are "Shrek" at No. 81 and "Mad Max: Fury Road" at No. 54. Closer to the top, the list becomes more traditional, with No. 1 being "Vertigo."  Parade's 100 Best Movies of All Time is easy to scroll through and concise yet clear in its explanation for each movie. It sets out to help readers make an awesome movie checklist and succeeds.

TimeOut's The 100 Best Movies Of All Time

TimeOut's staff writers compiled this 2022 list, which is intriguingly upfront about its intent to disrupt readers' expectations and prompt friendly disagreement. Phil de Semlyen and Joshua Rothkopf write, "Passionate disagreement is what lists are made for, and few artforms [sic] make tempers flare quite like the movies. After all, more than just about any creative medium, cinema tends to shape who we are as people."

This gets at the heart of movie discourse itself, the reason why cinephiles can spend hours thoughtfully and passionately discussing the ways in which a story about a space alien who loves Reese's Pieces is better or worse than a picture about a talking clownfish who loses his son. Effective storytelling transcends its subject matter to engage its audience beyond a surface level, and that's what makes the cinema so great — and also what can make its most ardent fans defend their top picks with their lives.

TimeOut takes some big swings in its attempt to start "a knock-down, drag-out, full-throated, spittle-spraying argument." For example, No. 57 is "Airplane!," No. 36 is "The Truman Show," and No. 15 is "The Dark Knight." These selections will be met with applause by some, and scorn by others, but that's all part of the plan. No.1 here goes to "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Sight And Sound Critics' Poll: Greatest Films Of All Time

Sight and Sound began its list of top 100 films in 1952 and has updated it once every decade since. The 2022 version includes "1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists, and academics, each submitting their top 10 ballot." The results are primarily niche, with the most mainstream of its newer inclusions probably being "Get Out," tied for No. 95. More often, the Sight and Sounds Critics' Poll spotlights movies that the general American public has likely never heard of, but that isn't a bad thing.

The value here is that readers with a passion for cinema may find it fascinating to explore titles that are new to them but are considered the greatest of all time by those who assess films for a living. Short of an existential crisis, how can I call myself a film fan when I've not only not seen this list's top pick, 1975's "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," but I've not even heard it mentioned once in my life? Adding it to my queue! On the flip side, this list seems somewhat out of touch by not including several staples that define film for the last century. Readers will get the most out of the Sight and Sound Critics' Poll if they approach it with the intent to expand their horizons rather than shout out their familiar favorites.

WatchMojo's Top 100 Movies Of All Time

WatchMojo's hour-long 2021 YouTube extravaganza of its top 100 movies is great for visual learners or those who want to sit back, relax, and enjoy clips from favorite movies instead of reading text. The video's description specifies its contents as ranking "the most iconic, rewatchable, and influential films ever made." WatchMojo uses data from its voting pages "to tell us how much 'Mojo' a movie has." This ultimately delivers a unique ranking that's driven by modern audiences but still curated by the source presenting the information. As such, it reflects WatchMojo's viewership and the current tastes of the public at large.

Voters were quick to embrace a few recent movies as instant classics, among them "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" at No. 80 and "Parasite" at No. 53. WatchMojo's compilation features a far greater number of traditional blockbusters than you'll find in any critics' countdown elsewhere in this article, with the likes of "Back to the Future,"  "Ghostbusters," and "The Avengers" rubbing shoulders with the time-tested immortals like "Singin' in the Rain." Coming out on top is "The Godfather." 

IMDb's Top 250 Movies

User-generated. That's what gives IMDb's Top 250 movies an edge over a ton of other rankings out there. The list is presented "as rated by regular IMDb users," which indicates its perspectives are largely those of people who are quite passionate about movies. While it's not quite representative of the general public, a user-generated list of this magnitude is nonetheless eye-opening.

On IMDb, users rate movies on a scale of up to 10. The top-rated movie is "The Shawshank Redemption," with a score of 9.2 based on 2.7 million votes. This is fascinating, as it implies that by this scale, there's no such thing as a perfect movie. Users on IMDb have the opportunity to rate every movie ever made, and yet, the film that reigns supreme over all others is a 9.2, not a 10. By this scorecard, no film in existence is a perfect 10. That's wild.

One of the best features of perusing IMDb's list is all in the name. After all, this is the Internet Movie Database, and upon clicking any given title in the top 250 movies, users can instantly find a wealth of statistics. From box-office numbers to crew information to a complete filmography of the cinematographer, IMDb has it all.

Sight And Sound Directors' Poll: 100 Greatest Films Of All Time

As with the Critics' Poll, the Sight and Sound Directors' Poll is revised once every 10 years. It began in 1992 with 101 directors, and the 2022 roster boasts 480. "Though it has always been global and inclusive in scope, the poll has expanded significantly each decade," The British Film Institute says. "The electorate spans experimental, arthouse, mainstream, and genre filmmakers from around the world. In every case, the voter is a director of note." It's refreshing and illuminating to browse through a list curated by the people who bring the magic of the movies to life.

How their selections differ from critics' and audience picks is the insight into what filmmakers generally enjoy in each others' work. Among the movies that you won't find on many other lists are "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" at No. 93. Some other films are typical of many best-of lists, but aren't often ranked so far toward the middle, like "Singin' in the Rain" at No. 53 and "Psycho" (1960) at No. 46. (Both films are No. 1 in lists referenced elsewhere in this article.) A dominant trait of the Directors' Poll is lots and lots of black-and-white. The filmmakers collectively ranked "2001: A Space Odyssey," directed by Stanley Kubrick, as their top movie for the 2022 list.

Empire's The 100 Best Movies Of All Time

Empire's 2022 ranking of the 100 best movies of all time is unique in that it's a combined ranking from Empire readers and the publication's critics. Writer James White defines the selections as movies "that comfort, challenge, and pioneer. Films that blow your mind, help you see things from a new perspective, and continue to shape cinema as we know it today. Films that make you feel something."

The choices swing from the expected to the wildly unorthodox. Sure, "The Godfather" is here, but so is "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." The result is a delightful gauge of equilibrium between critics' and audiences' tastes. The entry that prompted an audible "What?!" from yours truly was "Thor: Ragnarok," a movie that I rather enjoy. Still, I was shocked to find it coming in at No. 83 on a list of the 100 greatest movies ever. Empire's top pick is "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." 

Empire includes an explanation of their reasoning, links to each movie's full Empire review from its original release, and links to rent or purchase each film digitally on Amazon. That last feature is well-intentioned but sometimes unhelpful because many of these movies stream elsewhere for no added cost to subscribers ("Thor: Ragnarok," for example, streams on Disney+.)

Roger Ebert's The Greatest Films Of All Time

Roger Ebert was arguably the most famous movie critic of all time. Over decades of film criticism, audiences trusted his perspective. Before an oversaturation of online discourse, Ebert's voice was not one opinion in a sea of noise but one of the few that were readily available to moviegoers. Ebert wasn't just a critic. To many, he was the definitive authority on movies.

When Ebert participated in the 2012 edition of the Sight and Sound Directors' Poll ranking of the top 100 films ever made, he blogged about his selections on his website. An icon elaborating on his thought process for what is a passion is a joy to read and particularly poignant when considering Ebert died just one year later. "Lists are ridiculous," Ebert wrote, "but if you're going to vote, you have to play the game." He ultimately chose to replace one of his 10 previous selections from 2002, deciding on "The Tree of Life" as his pick "because it is more affirmative and hopeful" than the other film Ebert considered ranking, 2008's "Synecdoche, New York." Ebert's inner dialogue reads like a master's thesis from one of the best.

Variety's The 100 Greatest Movies Of All Time

What a list! Variety's 100 greatest movies of all time was compiled by critics and written with care. In comparison to other ranked lists on our list of ranked lists (say that 10 times fast), Variety's presentation gives readers the most bang for their buck. Included are wonderful historical context about each selection (some written by actors or filmmakers!), links to Variety's reviews for each film, and (here's the kicker) links for where to stream each movie, which could be very helpful provided that the links are maintained over time. The interface is also user-friendly, with the ability to skip to different parts of the list without scrolling endlessly.

The list's introduction includes a challenge: "Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That's the nature of the beast — the nature of the kind of protective passion that people feel about their favorite movies." The No. 1 pick on our No. 1 list is "Psycho." 

Read this next: The Best Movies Of 2022

The post The Best Ranked Lists Of The All-Time Best Movies, Ranked appeared first on /Film.

Jackie Chan has been in the entertainment business his entire life. His 1978 film "Snake in the Eagle's Shadow" forever cemented his name as an action star — this was an actor who performed his own stunts no matter how many bones he broke. Jackie Chan is a household name, not just in East Asia but all over the world.

Chan's contribution to the slapstick kung-fu comedy style of films has made him so popular it's impossible to meet someone who doesn't know his name. He's one of the biggest action stars in the world — and even with all the critical acclaim and existing love for his work, the "Drunken Master" star still believed that he needed to do more to continue working and being memorable in the film industry.

In Chan's 2017 profile published by GQ Magazine, the Hong Kong-based star explained how he was always looking for a "different script, different character, different Jackie Chan" in every movie. He wanted to be seen as an actor, as a performer who could do everything — and not just an action star. Certainly, Chan is an expert in the genre, but he hopes his choice of movies tells us enough about him as an artist.

A Different Jackie Chan In Every Film

The "Rush Hour" actor discussed with GQ how in the East Asian film industry, several action stars had come and gone. To be memorable and relevant year after year was a challenging task, and Chan thinks in order to do that, every performer needs to change and dabble in different kinds of films. Like Sylvester Stallone, who Chan seems to look up to.

"If I'm [to] continue on in the film industry ... I have to change. Otherwise, you gone. You see—in Japan. Korea. America. China. Hong Kong. How many action star all gone? Only few can stay. Stallone's different. He's a legend. Other action stars already gone."

Chan also detailed how stars like Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro had taken over multiple roles in the film industry — they'd all gone from acting to directing to producing films. It's something that interests Chan too.

"So that's why I'm looking for different script, different character, different Jackie Chan. I want the audience look at Jackie Chan as an actor. Not the action star. Actor who can fight. Look at Clint Eastwood. If he continue to 'Make my day'? Gone. So he change to directing. He change some other things. Look at Al Pacino. Robert De Niro. I wanna be an Asian Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino."

The Actor Wants More For His Movies

The actor went over how films like "Titanic" and "Avatar" had made history — and are memorable and still talked about decades after their release. Those are the kind of films that Chan wants to make, films that continue to enthrall a new generation of fans every time, and don't disappear after being released. Chan concluded:

"I want the movie not just finished, released, gone ... I don't want to make a movie, boom, finish, release one month, gone."

Jackie Chan has appeared in over a hundred movies. He has been performing since the 1960s, he has directed multiple films over the course of his career, he has completed his own stunts, and he has been injured for it. Still, he has never stopped being ambitious. He has often played a good guy who finds himself in crazy circumstances with the bad guys. But every once in a while, there will be a film like "The Foreigner" or "The Karate Kid" where Chan will give an emotional, dramatic performance that outweighs the action of it all, and it'll tell you the one thing you've known all along: there's nothing the man cannot do.

Read this next: The 14 Greatest Action Movies Of The 21st Century

The post Jackie Chan Knew He Had To Be More Than An Action Star To Continue On In The Film Industry appeared first on /Film.

At winning football games, the team dumps Gatorade on the coach. At "Evil Dead" movie wraps, it only makes sense that the stars dump buckets of fake blood on the director. It sounds like that's pretty much what went down on the set of "Evil Dead Rise," the latest installment of the Sam Raimi-created horror franchise that's known for absolutely drenching its stars in the syrupy red stuff. Director Lee Cronin spoke to Empire about the upcoming film's impressive amount of fake blood, and revealed that even he ended up on the receiving end of some splatter.

"We used a hell of a lot of it," Cronin said about the prop blood that cakes the Los Angeles apartment where Beth (Lily Sullivan) and her nieces and nephews face off against Beth's demon-possessed sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). The red-band trailer for the film dropped this week and caused quite a splash in horror-loving circles, as news that Raimi and Campbell would produce the film without getting behind and in front of the camera, respectively, previously had fans on edge. We needn't have worried, as "Evil Dead Rise" looks incredible. Its trailer includes not just loads of blood, but also a flayed human scalp, a crunchy bite of glass, and a cheese grater brandished as a weapon. But when it comes to the legacy of "Evil Dead," there's no doubt that the blood's the stuff.

'The Old School, Sticky-Icky' Blood

"There's lots of ways of putting blood on screen," Cronin told Empire, including "red water with a bit of food coloring, digital blood, whatever it might be." The crew of "Evil Dead Rise" stuck to the classic, extra-goopy form of prop blood, which looks great on screen but is, on a basic comfort level, probably a lot more involved for actors than blood added in post-production. "We used the old-school, sticky-icky [blood]," Cronin shares, "which led to people just caked and coated."

One of the castmates who we see get caked in the stuff in trailers is Lily Sullivan. In one shot, she drips with dark red gore while brandishing a chainsaw a la Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) in the original "Evil Dead" trilogy. In another shot that appears to be an extra-intense homage to "The Shining," her feet get yanked out from under her by the massive force of an elevator full of blood that ultimately lands on the camera screen. All of this bloody mayhem culminated when shooting came to a close, and Sullivan decided to get Cronin back.

"I got covered in litres and litres of blood when we wrapped by Lily Sullivan, who plays Beth," Cronin told Empire. "She wanted her revenge for how bloody she'd been got." By that point, apparently, the set had pretty much been subject to a deluge of the stuff, since the filmmaker said the movie was shot largely chronologically. "We watched our world just disintegrate around us as we went," he shares, "the sets just getting bloodier and messier and pukier." Now that sounds like a sight that would be Raimi-approved.

"Evil Dead Rise" hits theaters on April 21, 2023.

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The post How Lily Sullivan Got 'Revenge' On Director Lee Cronin After The Blood-Soaked Shoot Of Evil Dead Rise appeared first on /Film.

"Evil Dead Rise," the latest film in the "Evil Dead" horror franchise, is setting itself up to be one ferociously fun flick. The trailers revealed glimpses of our new hero, Beth (Lily Sullivan) wielding a chainsaw, we've seen her with the boomstick, and there's a freaky new take on the Necronomicon Ex Mortis — the Book of the Dead. 

The red-band trailer promises that this "Evil Dead" entry will be as gory and gross as the rest of the franchise, and its version of the book seems to reflect the film's extra teeth (literally!). So what's up with this new Necronomicon? Is it the same one discovered by Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) in the woods back in the 1980s? Is it the one from Fede Álvarez's 2013 reboot, found by Mia (Jane Levy) and her friends? Or is it some new, third thing, bringing new lore to the world of Kandarian demons and Deadites? 

In an interview with Empire Magazine, writer and director Lee Cronin revealed the origins of the newest Necromicon, and it turns out that the inspiration comes directly from "Army of Darkness." This isn't a franchise known for having easily followable continuity, but that's definitely a pretty great way to cement this new entry within the "Evil Dead" universe.

Multiple Books - It's Canon!

The newest Necronomicon, which features teeth, veins, and human flesh bindings, is one nasty-looking piece of literature. The team behind "Evil Dead Rise" started work on the book as soon as pre-production started, because they knew the Necronomicon is vital for a good "Evil Dead" story. It's also important for the book to be appropriately scary, and franchise star Bruce Campbell hyped up "Evil Dead Rise" being "all about the Necronomicon." Cronin revealed the inspiration behind this particular iteration of the Book of the Dead:

"In one of the early meetings I had with Sam Raimi, I said, 'You know the way in "Army Of Darkness," there's three [Necronomicons]? You had one, Fede had one, I'm going to take the other one.' It gave me that platform to nudge things forward, and also to showcase that we live in a world where there is more than one copy of the Necronomicon. Those books may all have slightly different personalities -- it's not exactly the same book, necessarily, that Ash had in the cabin. But it's very, very firmly related. It could even be more dangerous..."

"Army of Darkness" is sometimes only hinted at in the "Evil Dead" franchise canon because of rights issues, but Cronin's reveal that the three books from that film are canon in the new film sets up the potential for all kinds of future hijinks. A sequel to "Evil Dead Rise" could even feature multiple books, maybe crossing over with the Starz series or the 2013 film, introducing Beth to Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) and Pablo (Ray Santiago) or even Mia, if they could convince Levy to come back. 

This Book's A 'Bastard Cousin'

The new Necronomicon is a little bit different from its predecessors, missing the full facial features of the original book and the grotesque stitching of the version from the 2013 remake, but it's got plenty of its own freaky flair. There are veins all over the fleshy cover, and a set of sharp teeth serve as the locking mechanism that holds the book closed. Cronin revealed that work on the book took somewhere close to three months, and that it was a unique work of art:

"It's all completely hand-made, hand-drawn. It's got a different visual style to what you've seen before internally. I even brought in little hints of Celtic influences and different things to give it a hell of a lot of personality. It's the bastard cousin of the other books, and they're the bastard cousin of this."

Both of the other Necronomicons are filled with terrifying drawings, weird glyphs, and strange languages, so drawing from ancient Celtic influence is a neat new touch. The original and reboot versions both have Latin and Sumerian, but it will be interesting to see if there's any Gaelic in the new film. Does this mean that the Leprechaun from "Leprechaun" could be a Deadite?! 

"Evil Dead Rise" will claw its way into theaters on April 21, 2023. 

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The post Director Lee Cronin Used Army Of Darkness' Necronomicons To Help Construct Evil Dead Rise appeared first on /Film.

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Richard Kelly, who was only 25 while directing his genre-hybrid, deliciously ominous "Donnie Darko," had been inspired to pen the screenplay after hearing a news report while growing up in Richmond, Virginia. Per this news report, a chunk of ice had fallen off a plane and crashed into a boy's bedroom (thankfully, the room was empty when the crash occurred). This image haunted Kelly for years, as the incident could symbolize myriad things for the boy who had evaded near death, including questions about the meaning of existence and the concept of deus ex machina. These speculations took shape in the story of Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a troubled boy who narrowly evades death, and goes on to unlock the powers of time travel to prevent the collapse of the primary universe. While being mired in teenage angst and existential dread, Donnie is plagued by visions of a man in a rabbit suit, who plays a seminal role in Donnie's heartbreaking journey.

Gyllenhaal, who had proven his merit in his breakout role in 1999's "October Sky," invested Donnie with the perfect amount of snark, balanced out with a curious, sensitive core hidden beneath layers of emotional armor. Donnie encapsulates the turmoil of adolescence taken to extremes, wherein feelings for a crush assume equal importance as heady, existential questions about the nature of death. Donnie's exchanges with Frank (James Duval), the dude in the rabbit mask, emerge as high points in this evenly baffling, emotionally-charged film, thanks to Gyllenhaal's unique approach to handling this aspect of Donnie's character.

Per The Ringer's oral history of "Donnie Darko," Gyllenhaal made the conscious choice to be creepy during his conversations with Frank, whose presence already evokes a surreal, nightmarish effect that accompanies the countdown to the end of the world. How did he do it?

Countdown To The End Of The World

After the opening dinner-table kerfuffle, Donnie is seen sleepwalking and speaking to Frank on his neighbor's golf course in the dead of the night. The setting of the scene is extremely eerie, as the tone shifts from a coming-of-age drama to an unsettling, apocalyptic sci-fi involving otherworldly beings who double as messengers of doom. Frank, ever-menacing, tells Donnie that the world is about to end in a precise amount of time. However, the underlying terror of the scene emerges from the way Donnie responds, his eye hooded and chin angled downwards, perpetually smirking at Frank's ominous prophecy.

Gyllenhaal told People how he had intuitively incorporated this creepy stance while talking to Frank, making every scene he shared with the monstrous man-rabbit his own:

"I remember as an actor making a choice in that scene as to how I talked to the rabbit. That wasn't really scripted. It was the beginning of where I said, 'I'm just gonna throw this and see where it sticks.' And all of a sudden I started looking at the rabbit, my chin down, looking at him in a particular way. And eventually, it became a choice that my character made every time he saw the rabbit."

Gyllenhaal's choice to speak to Frank in this specific manner was so effective, that even Duval, who was acting opposite him in the nightmarish rabbit mask, was creeped out by his " otherworldly intensity." This is especially fitting, given how Donnie is meant to fulfill the trope of the chosen one, the Living Receiver who is meant to be in tune with things that do not hail from his world. Even without this context, the scene is appropriately creepy and sets Donnie apart from the average angsty teen in coming-of-age arcs.

Donnie And Frank's Exchanges Are The Heart Of The Film

"Donnie Darko" tackles a plethora of themes, some of which are more philosophical than others, pondering possible theories about tangent universes and what it means to be young in a world accelerating towards extinction. Despite the dense implications of Donnie's ultimate sacrifice and the exact mechanics of the worldbuilding, the film is accessible to anyone who finds themself a little too lost in life. The transition from adolescence to adulthood is not a definite, defined process, but these growing pains can often leave lifelong marks. The conversations between Donnie and Frank highlight these fraught anxieties and doubts, which do not necessarily cease to exist with adulthood. On the contrary, they can mutate and fester.

Frank acts like a mirror to Donnie, a subconscious stand-in who pushes the teenager to see beyond social systems meant to restrict personal growth. Throughout the film, Frank urges Donnie to embrace his own demons, which is a necessary evil in the journey of self-exploration. Despite acting like a jerk on occasion, while also being empathetic when the need arises, Donnie comes to terms with his own mortality and understands his purpose as the Living Receiver. He is meant to die for the ones he loves — a devastating, heartbreaking burden — which he carries gracefully in the end. It is the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy, but in this case, the bearer no longer runs away from his inevitable fate: instead, he embraces it.

Although no one remembers Donnie's sacrifice, they feel it instinctively, like an unconscious need to mourn a brave soul in a mad, mad world. Among them, Frank feels the ache of a ghost wound while staring at his rabbit mask in stunned silence. Donnie Darko will always be remembered.

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The post How Jake Gyllenhaal Made Donnie Darko's Frank The Rabbit Scenes His Own appeared first on /Film.

Car & Driver reports on what they found in the menus of a 2023 BMW X1: BMW TeleService and Remote Software Upgrade showed a message that read Activated, while BMW Drive Recorder had options to subscribe for one month, one year, three years, or "Unlimited...." We reached out to BMW to ask about the menus we found and to learn more about its plan for future subscriptions. The company replied that it doesn't post a comprehensive list of prices online because of variability in what each car can receive. "Upgrade availability depends on factors such as model year, equipment level, and software version, so this keeps things more digestible for consumers," explained one BMW representative. Our X1 for example, has an optional $25-per-year charge for traffic camera alerts, but that option isn't available to cars without BMW Live Cockpit. Instead of listing all the available options online, owners can see which subscriptions are available for their car either in the menus of the vehicle itself or from a companion app. BMW USA may not want to confuse its customers by listing all its options in one place, but BMW Australia has no such reservations. In the land down under, heated front seats and a heated steering wheel are available in a month-to-month format, as is BMW's parking assistant technology. In contrast, BMW USA released a statement in July saying that if a U.S.-market vehicle is ordered with heated seats from the factory, that option will remain functional throughout the life of the vehicle. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for submitting the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.