Posts

Phone calls are back. I noticed this a few months ago, when I received five phone calls in the span of a single afternoon from people who said they didn't feel like sending a text. Weirder yet, not one of them was a parent, sibling, or telemarketer—the usual suspects on my recent calls list. They […]

When Star Wars: Battlefront II launches this November, it's going to have steep competition—not from its fellow holiday releases, but its decade-old namesake. The original Star Wars: Battlefront II, which came out in 2005 (and was the sequel to a game that in turn set up a 2015 franchise reboot), was pure fan service, welded […]

If there’s one truism in comic-book moviemaking, it’s that giant superhero team-ups are almost always sure-fire hits. (And then there's *Fantastic Four; *there are some things reshoots and wigs just can’t cover up.) What’s less true is that superhero team-up sequels will have the same good fortune. All the right ingredients can be there—good cast, […]

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." This is Stephen King's best opening line. It's one of the best opening lines in literature. However, it is *not *the opening line in the trailer for *The Dark Tower *that dropped this morning. That trailer instead opens with Idris Elba slinging guns, […]

A few years ago, Peter Shapiro needed a not-so-small favor from Robert Plant. Shapiro, 44, has been putting on concerts for more than 20 years—everything from intimate late-night Roots gigs to 2015's Deadhead extravaganza Fare Thee Well—and few situations drive him into a state of room-pacing, hair-futzing excitement like a last-minute booking. So when Shapiro […]

It’s the classic space-flick premise: Life as we know it is threatened by an alien force, and there’s only one unrealistically attractive crew that can save us. This month brings two sequels from masters of the genre: James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. We binged on the directors’ […]

Truly understanding artificial intelligence is rare. AI doesn't think in concepts and images the way humans do. It has individual goals, like to preserve humankind as technology's caretakers, or to dismantle complex systems. And in the sci-fi thriller Void Star, things are further complicated by the fact that AI's "thoughts" are actually glyphs, or waves […]

Samurai Jack, which ran for four seasons in the early 2000s under the tutelage of animator Genndy Tartakovsky, was always dark. After a duel with the demonic entity Aku in the premiere, Jack was sent through a time portal into the future where Aku had taken complete control of the planet, turning Earth into a […]

Craig Palmer hasn't left his Manhattan apartment in four years, but on a recent afternoon, the 78-year-old made a transatlantic voyage—while seated upright in his bed. He visited Stonehenge, a favorite vacation site of his; the streets of London's Russell Square, near his old apartment; the stretch of Broadway where he lived and worked for […]

There's slightly more than a month to go before Star Wars: The Last Jedi makes it to the multiplex, and Disney is reportedly already leaning on theater owners to toe the line in order to be able to show the movie. Does the studio's strict set of guidelines mean they know they've got a masterpiece […]