Artificial Review: Who Authorized These Men to Decide the Future?
Sam Altman offers Ilya Sutskever a seductive arrangement: scientists will direct the future, free from interference by governments and financiers....
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The graphic-novel and picture-book sensibility of The Merlies survives its move into a game because the illustrations become usable space. Conceived by Cosmografik and produced by ARTE France, Darjeeling, and Blue Ramen, the project brings its illustrated world into contact with the familiar grammar of exploration and environmental puzzles. Its tiny birds climb electrical cables, cross fallen signs, and encounter abandoned household objects as substantial structures. Scale gives the artwork a practical function: recognizing an object is only the beginning of understanding what it might let the flock do. www.arte.tv Wishfully’s Swedish-made Planet of Lana offers a useful comparison. Both...

Flying cars remain distant in the city views of April X. Down where Baxter conducts his business, the vehicles look familiar, and technological progress arrives chiefly as second-hand artificial organs. Michel K. Parandi’s science-fiction thriller gives its future a suggestive vertical arrangement: freedom of movement overhead, bodily necessity for sale below. The distance within these establishing shots matters. Baxter can see the future without enjoying its apparent privileges, a useful visual position for a man whose livelihood depends on keeping other people’s machinery running. The Bucharest locations, brutalist buildings, and nighttime photography give that separation a persuasive physical setting. Later,...

When a boy is failing several classes, his father’s immediate concern is that he may become ineligible for baseball practice. The educational problem enters the conversation as an obstacle to training. Watching that response, I wondered what a good report card would mean here: evidence of learning, or permission to keep hitting? At Legendary Prep Academy in Scottsdale, Arizona, parents describe an academic day of roughly two hours, with much of the remaining schedule devoted to baseball. The arrangement gives that father’s reaction a certain internal logic. If most of a child’s day has been organized around athletic development, school...

Catherine Corless reads the names of dead children in the back of a van, surrounded by graves. Beside her, the graveyard manager, John, helps her search for a burial record that might attach one of those names to a place. The list continues; the places cannot be found. Frank Berry allows the scene to retain the modest proportions of a practical inquiry, two people consulting information, until that ordinary task becomes almost unbearable. Each name has been preserved well enough to be spoken. The community has preserved no discoverable record of where the child was laid. Elsewhere, the children return...

Repeating your strongest attack is an inefficient way to fight in False Hero. Switching from a sword strike to a stolen ability, then to another ability, produces faster sequences than pressing the same input again. The sword spends stamina and restores focus; combat arts consume that focus. Every return to the basic attack therefore funds another part of your moveset, giving the player a reason to stay engaged even when the sword’s damage is unimpressive. Choosing the next move involves its cost, reach, and place in the sequence. Those sequences can change who controls an encounter. The right combination of...

The sound-deprivation chamber in “Heartbeat” offers a particularly nasty kind of confinement: you want relief from the film’s sensations, and the characters cannot escape the place producing them. David Moreau sends vloggers into an abandoned Bulgarian military facility, then uses distressing sound and a distorted camera perspective to make their predicament physically uncomfortable. The room’s purpose becomes a cruel promise. Silence ought to offer respite, yet this enclosed space makes listening feel dangerous. The unstable visual presentation denies us the reassuring distance from which to watch someone else panic. That discomfort arrives faster than the story can develop it. Adjusting...
Sam Altman offers Ilya Sutskever a seductive arrangement: scientists will direct the future, free from interference by governments and financiers....
Read moreDetailsColter Shaw is hanging beneath a tractor-trailer at the Port of Los Angeles, putting Tracker’s new production base to immediate...
Read moreDetailsLeaving cover in Gears of War: E-Day can be a planned attack with several moving parts. Activate an adrenaline Injector...
Read moreDetailsKayce Dutton has a son to rescue, a heavily armed enemy to confront, and colleagues whose actual job involves handling...
Read moreDetailsToby Sawyer leaves a corpse unattended because he would rather visit his mistress. Until then, his assignment in The Deputy...
Read moreDetailsRoku has ordered Scarlett Holmes, a limited series that casts Lucy Hale as a descendant of Sherlock Holmes who applies the family's famed powers of observation to love instead of crime. Hale also executive produces the show, which debuts exclusively on The Roku Channel in 2027. Her character inherits the...
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Read moreThe graphic-novel and picture-book sensibility of The Merlies survives its move into a game because the illustrations become usable space. Conceived by Cosmografik and produced by ARTE France, Darjeeling, and...
Flying cars remain distant in the city views of April X. Down where Baxter conducts his business, the vehicles look familiar, and technological progress arrives chiefly as second-hand artificial organs....
When a boy is failing several classes, his father’s immediate concern is that he may become ineligible for baseball practice. The educational problem enters the conversation as an obstacle to...
Catherine Corless reads the names of dead children in the back of a van, surrounded by graves. Beside her, the graveyard manager, John, helps her search for a burial record...
Repeating your strongest attack is an inefficient way to fight in False Hero. Switching from a sword strike to a stolen ability, then to another ability, produces faster sequences than...
The sound-deprivation chamber in “Heartbeat” offers a particularly nasty kind of confinement: you want relief from the film’s sensations, and the characters cannot escape the place producing them. David Moreau...
Sam Altman offers Ilya Sutskever a seductive arrangement: scientists will direct the future, free from interference by governments and financiers. In Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, that promise helps recruit a brilliant...
Roku has ordered Scarlett Holmes, a limited series that casts Lucy Hale as a descendant of Sherlock Holmes who applies the family's famed powers of observation to love instead of...
The Emmy Awards are leaving broadcast television. Amazon's Prime Video will stream the ceremony worldwide under a six-year agreement with the Television Academy, ending a run on ABC, CBS, Fox...
The Busan International Film Festival opened its 31st edition Tuesday with a star-heavy ceremony, as Michelle Yeoh collected the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award at the Busan Cinema Center....
The graphic-novel and picture-book sensibility of The Merlies survives its move into a game because the illustrations become usable space....
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