Backrooms, the recent horror movie mega-hit, is a film replete with ideas about repetition and degradation. Its central theme—the horror of a world that seems to be mindlessly, monstrously, ripping off our own—was regarded in some circles as a critique of generative AI. The idea has clearly struck a nerve. Recently passing $300 million at … Read more
Temperatures may be soaring, but there’s an unseasonable chill on screens right now—at least when it comes to some of the movie offerings hitting streaming services this month. Director Yorgos Lanthimos delivers a twisted take on Frankenstein in Poor Things on Netflix, while Shudder digs up painful family secrets and adds a side of demonic … Read more
Wilson’s Odysseus himself is, by turns, heroic, cunning, cruel, conniving, maudlin, and ever-blubbering—in a word, complicated. Such sympathies naturally offended the sensibilities of those who hold Homer (and Odysseus himself) as foundational to that amorphous notion of “Western civilization,” which can seem like little more than myth sustaining white, patriarchal, Eurocentric supremacy. Some other scholars … Read more
Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day imagines the moment 8 billion humans find out that we are not alone in the universe. The movie, which opens in US theaters on June 12, is a fictional account of the government cover-up and subsequent “disclosure” of evidence that aliens have contacted Earth. The UFO community has been … Read more
It’s strange to see your life playing out on the big screen, but that’s what it felt like when I got an advanced look at TikTok Never Dies, a new documentary chronicling the high-stakes legal drama around banning TikTok in the United States. I’m not actually in the film, but as a China tech reporter, … Read more