Explosive New Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Story Highlights Netflix’s Anime Release Calendar

“What kind of edgerunner are you?” That’s a question asked…nay, screamed midway through a brand new first look at the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 2 (styled Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2), the next standalone installment set in Netflix’s anime adaptation of the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. It’s a good question too, as fans of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (which includes notable names such as Cyberpunk tabletop RPG creator Mike Pondsmith and acclaimed video game industry visionary Hideo Kojima) have also wondered what kind of edgerunner they’re going to get to see next. The first season of the Netflix series provided an open-and-shut case, which means the…
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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Celebrates the Problematic Pleasures of Trash Cinema

This article contains full spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Trailers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma made clear that the film would celebrate ’80s slashers. What’s more surprising is the fact that Jane Schoenbrun‘s latest is also about junk food. Not only do up-and-coming director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) and reclusive actor Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) eat a lot of candy throughout the movie, but a stand-out scene involves the latter seductively placing pieces of KFC on a silver platter to serve to the former. While preparing the meal, Billy half-apologizes for serving take-out,…
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’s Puppet Episode Is the Height of Silly Trek

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 5. The title of the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Level Five Transporter Accident,” brings to mind one of the most upsetting moments in franchise history. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a transporter accident results in two people merging into one, screaming in agony as they die a painful death. Yet, what actually happens in “Level Five Transporter Accident” doesn’t come anywhere near horror, despite the fact that Pelia gets sliced in half by Orion pirates. Instead, “Level Five Transporter Accident” pushes Star…
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Marvel’s Third Wolverine Origin Comic Tries to Repair the Mystery it Ruined

Wolverine is the best at what he does, and what he does is talk about his past, apparently. Marvel has announced Wolverine: Origin III – The Dark Age, an upcoming miniseries written by Paul Jenkins and illustrated by CAFU, which will explore Logan’s actions in the 1950s, leading to his recruitment into the Weapon X program that gave him his famous adamantium skeleton. Marvel’s pitching the series as a look into an unexamined part of Wolverine’s history, which is true enough. But when they also present Origin III as a 25th anniversary celebration of the original miniseries Origin, by Jenkins…
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12 ‘Common’ Facts Many People Still Don’t Know

We all have those moments when somebody mentions an ordinary fact, and suddenly the world feels slightly different. Something you have seen, heard, eaten, used, or said countless times can hide a surprisingly obvious explanation. The funny part is that these discoveries rarely feel like obscure trivia. They are the kinds of things that make you wonder how you managed to miss them for so long. A recent Reddit discussion brought together plenty of those moments, with people admitting they had completely missed facts that seemed obvious once explained. These are twelve everyday facts that might make you stop and…
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Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1. The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only…
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Ed McBain: The Writer Who Invented the Police Procedural

Turn on a television, stroll the bookstore, walk through a movie theater, and you’re bound to see a cop. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching Spider-Man touch base with Jean DeWolff in Brand New Day, enjoying Jake Peralta goof around on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or reading the latest John Sandford thriller to pass the time at the airport, the police are everywhere. Moreover, they’re almost always the heroes—certainly flawed, often beleaguered, but at the end of the day, effective and morally good. But that wasn’t always the case, at least in film and literature. While several different events sent cops to…
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Noomi Rapace Talks Surreal New Sci-Fi Film and Prometheus’ Reappraisal As a ‘Masterpiece’

Hot Spot isn’t an easy movie. Directed by Polish auteur Agnieszka Smoczyńska—best known for The Lure, a horror/musical take on The Little Mermaid—Hot Spot explores pressing issues like AI, state surveillance, police violence, and immigration. But it does so through a surreal, sci-fi lens, one that takes time out for ecstatic dance sequences and animal transformations. Hot Spot may baffle as many viewers as it thrills, but that’s nothing new for star Noomi Rapace. After all, she was in Prometheus, the highly-anticipated Alien prequel that turned out to be a mediation on humanity’s relationship to God. “I love Prometheus. I…
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15 Bad Movies That Actually Aren’t a Waste of Time

Not every movie needs to be good to be worth watching. Some are messy, over the top, painfully cheesy, or simply fail to deliver what they promised, yet they still manage to offer something interesting. A bad movie can teach you about filmmaking mistakes, capture a fascinating moment in pop culture, showcase an actor before a career breakthrough, or become so entertainingly ridiculous that its flaws are part of the experience. Some are even useful precisely because they get things wrong, giving viewers a chance to question the history, science, or ideas they put on screen. These movies may not…
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15 Sweet ’70s Muscle Rides Representing a Different Time

There was something wonderfully excessive about American cars in the 1970s. Big engines, long hoods, aggressive grilles, wild paint jobs, enormous tires, and interiors that could feel more like living rooms than places to sit behind the wheel. Street machines were built to be seen, heard, and enjoyed, often with modifications that made each car feel like a reflection of its owner. The photographs from the era capture a particular kind of car culture that is difficult to recreate today, when these machines were still relatively new and their owners were turning parking lots, streets, and driveways into personal showcases.…
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15 Improvised Movie Scenes That Went On to Steal the Show

Some of the most memorable movie moments weren’t sitting neatly on the page waiting to be filmed. An actor tried something unexpected, reacted naturally to another performer, or kept going after a scene took a turn nobody had planned. Sometimes the director loved the result enough to leave it in. Other times, the accidental moment became more famous than anything anyone could have scripted. Of course, Hollywood stories have a habit of turning every good performance into an “it was completely improvised” legend, so not every famous example actually qualifies. These 15 do, at least in some meaningful way, and…
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15 Trusted Directors Who Still Helmed a Flop

A director can spend years building a reputation for making great movies, earning awards, attracting major stars, and delivering exactly what audiences expect. Then one project comes along and somehow everything falls apart. Sometimes the idea sounds perfect on paper, sometimes the cast is stacked with talent, and sometimes the director’s previous work makes the disappointment even harder to understand. Even highly respected filmmakers have movies that simply do not connect with audiences or critics. These are the films that stand out in otherwise impressive careers, proving that even the safest names in Hollywood can occasionally make a movie that…
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It Ends Review: NEON’s Brutally Clever Cosmic Horror

Introverts and extroverts view the world in different ways. For most extroverts, a road trip with friends where small talk transforms into the random minutiae of a wandering mind sounds like a blast in eight-hour chunks. To an introvert, the prospect of spending even a fraction of that time “shooting the shit” can be its own special type of torture. In writer-director Alex Ullom’s debut horror movie, It Ends, both sides of the mind find common ground in a cosmic hell that is as fresh as it is economically clever. It’s the story of four childhood friends who, now as…
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15 Movies That Leave You Wondering What You Just Watched

Some movies end and you immediately know how you feel about them. Others leave you sitting through the credits wondering whether you missed something, whether any of it actually made sense, or whether you just watched the strangest thing ever committed to film. A Reddit discussion about exactly that feeling produced an interesting mix: some people named movies they absolutely hated, while others picked films they loved precisely because they couldn’t stop thinking about them afterward. That’s the fun of the “What did I just watch?” category. A movie doesn’t necessarily have to be bad or impossibly confusing to qualify.…
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X-Men Has Already Got Its Mister Sinister Right With Nathaniel Milbury

When Adam Driver was announced as the villain of the upcoming X-Men movie, fans felt both relief and confusion. Driver is one of our best working actors, someone who shines in indie films like Marriage Story and Paterson, but who can also bring depth to genre pictures, as his Kylo Ren was one of the best parts of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Moreover, it was nice to see a villain who wasn’t Magneto announced for the first movie, with Driver stepping into the thigh-high boots of Mister Sinister. At the same time, fans were confused to hear the name…
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The MCU X-Men Needs to Do Right By Storm

What happens to a weather-controlling mutant when she gets put in an X-Men movie? Same thing that happens to every other-weather controlling mutant who gets put in an X-Men movie? She’s largely ignored, except for being saddled with the worst lines in the franchise. In the original X-Men from 2000, Halle Berry had to ask about a toad getting struck by lightning, the payoff of a running gag written by Joss Whedon by excised from the finished film. Alexandra Shipp’s Storm set up the funniest part of X-Men: Apocalypse, asking En Sabah Nur what he was doing with his face…
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Ranking Every Spinoff of The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead may have concluded its run back in 2022, but the universe lives on in a string of spinoffs like Dead City and Daryl Dixon. Not content with waiting for viewers to demand more franchise stories, AMC also explored a few spinoffs while the mothership show was still on the air. But how many of those spinoffs are worth a watch, and how many of them should you feel comfortable skipping? We’re ranking every The Walking Dead spinoff so you can figure out if you should spend your precious time on them. However, if you’re a true Walking…
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Lion: Exclusive First Look at Nat Geo Doc Is a Real Life Lion King Moment

The world of lions is full of shifting power dynamics, fragile monarchies, and feline strife. This applies not only to The Lion King; it extends into the savannas of Africa, where the roiling ecosystems showcase clashes between beasts of all shapes and sizes.  An upcoming docuseries is set to explore the exciting world of a lion pride in extreme detail. Lion will air Wednesday, August 19 on National Geographic and then hit Disney+ and Hulu on Thursday, August 20. The four-episode series follows a male lion cub named Kio and his four-year journey in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Preserve as…
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15 Ex-Employees Spill Their Dark or Unethical Company Secrets

The experiences we have at work are as varied as there are people on Earth, so not all claims of what happens in the workplace should be taken as fact. However, having insider knowledge of the ins and outs of certain companies can be more of a boon than a burden. A recent Reddit thread asked people to share the things they learned on the job that customers, patients, travelers, and the general public probably never see, letting us have a peek at that insight. We’ve rounded up some of the strangest and darkest claims, always keeping in mind that…
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Lanterns: Guardians of the Universe, Abin Sur, and the Green Lantern Corps Explained

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1. At the start of the pilot episode of Lanterns, a young John Stewart watches a television interview with Hal Jordan, the first human member of the Green Lantern Corps. Jordan talks a little about being a space cop, but for the most part, he focuses on the quality that makes him a suitable choice to join the Corps: his absolute lack of fear. The interview sets the model for the rest of the episode, in which Hal trains the adult John by mentioning a few details about the power ring…
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