Even though the 2024 Oscars ceremony does not have the same cultural impact the awards show had during its peak viewership decades ago, actors, filmmakers, and anyone involved with the moviemaking business still yearn to win one of those golden statues handed out Sunday night. Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, the …
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Be warned, all ye who watch House of the Dragon thanks to your parents’ Max account: A password-sharing crackdown is coming. Warner Bros. Discovery, Max’s parent company, plans to launch the restrictions in late 2024, WBD’s head of global streaming and games, JB Parrette, said at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media …
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Throughout the 1970s, the author Frank Herbert saw many producers and directors take stabs at bringing his Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel Dune to the screen: Roger Corman (Battle Beyond the Stars), Arthur P. Jacobs (Planet of the Apes), Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), Ridley Scott (Alien). Director David Lynch …
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The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation, efficiently titled Dune: Part Two, contains a single line that is as much about fans of Frank Herbert’s book as it is about its protagonist, Paul Atreides. It’s delivered by Chani, Paul’s concubine in Herbert’s novel and equal/skeptic in Villeneuve’s meticulously crafted …
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Lanny Smoot builds lightsabers for a living. No, not like the ones kids used to create with flashlights and plastic tubes—realistic extendable ones, with penumbral edges and laser-blocking abilities. Like an actual Jedi. He’s whipped up giant electromagnetic eyes, too, as well as an omnidirectional HoloTile floor, which adapts to …
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There’s a passage in Elif Batuman’s “Summer in Samarkand Part II,” published in N+1 in 2010, that I’ve never forgotten. Batuman noted that the language of Old Uzbek had 100 different words for crying. Old Uzbek had words for “wanting to cry and not being able to; for being caused …
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In her delightfully cheeky Verizon Super Bowl commercial, Beyoncé swore to do one thing: Break the internet. As the commercial demonstrated, she could not—at least not in the literal sense. Instead, after the commercial ended, she did something else: She hacked the internet, dropping two new songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” …
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Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime …
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As with most movie commercials that dropped during Super Bowl 2024, the new trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine was only advertised with a teaser. Makes sense considering trailers are usually a couple minutes and Big Game ads are decidedly 30-second spots. But there was a different reason it was only …
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Even on Zoom, Martin Scorsese knows how to frame the shot. Ostensibly he’s dialed in to talk about his new Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, but as he’s settling in, he adjusts the iPad he’s calling from to make sure his face is framed perfectly by the bookshelves behind him. …
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