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Today, it came to pass. Five years after the breakout of House of Cards, a decade or so into the era of "prestige television," and a season or two into the decline of Game of Thrones, Netflix is finally the king of television. The streaming giant beat out HBO with 112 Emmy nominations, besting the […]

Sacrilegious as it may be to ’90s kids, I was never a big Sonic the Hedgehog fan. I watched some of the (terrible) cartoons as a kid, but never having owned any Sega consoles, the history of the franchise itself is lost on me. So when Sonic Mania Plus was touted as improving upon last […]

For the entire history of moviemaking, men have been the focal point. There have been exceptions, of course, but the epic hero journeys, the buddy comedies, the spy thrillers—most of them revolved around dudes. Until recently. From calls for equal pay for actresses to calls for more women-led films, Hollywood has slowly been making strides […]

Over the past six months, on a patch of desert ranchland outside Marfa, Texas, one man's mysterious vision has been taking shape. First, nine massive chunks of quarried black marble were trucked in from northern Mexico and craned into a circular formation, echoing Stone and Bronze Age erections in the British Isles. Next, one of […]

It’s been 22 years since Tom Cruise infiltrated a CIA vault suspended from a wire in the first Mission: Impossible flick. This summer, Cruise reprises his role as secret agent Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible–­Fallout, the sixth installment in the $2.8 billion–­grossing series. Aside from its earworm theme song and stomach-clenching (and reportedly bone-crushing) stunts, […]

If one thing's for certain, it's that Disney productions are tight-lipped affairs. Lucasfilm movies, Marvel flicks—these things are made under lock and key. So if you happen to ask people affiliated with those franchises, don’t be surprised if the answers they give are less than definitive. Take, for example, Ewan McGregor, the man who played […]

In Boots Riley’s trippy new film Sorry to Bother You, hunger is the main throughline. The hunger for truth. The hunger for justice. The hunger to succeed personally, and even more so in one’s professional life. At RegalView, a low-level telemarketing firm in Oakland, one path to success presents itself in the form of code-switching. […]

The last seven days have been difficult for all kids of reasons, most more important than the [closure of the final Toys "R" Us stores], even though folks did need to take a moment to shed a tear at the site of mascot Goeffrey the Giraffe leaving the store one last time. (We’ll leave it […]

Late in Nier: Automata's runtime, the game takes an unexpected break from sci-fi action to share the backstory of two minor characters. It does so by turning itself briefly into a text adventure, the sort of thing you'd find in Twine, that tells you how these two came to be where they are. The pain […]

Fortnite, a free-to-play shooter by Epic Games (Gears of War), has taken over the world. That may sound like exaggeration, but I couldn't overstate the popularity of Fortnite if I tried. It is massively played, and even more massively watched—on Twitch, 66 million hours of Fortnite have been watched in the past two weeks, with […]