Emily Yoshida | The Verge

Our favorite films of TIFF 2016

2016-09-19T12:04:21-04:00

From the moment our boots hit Canadian soil for the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, we were rushing out dispatches, writing reviews, talking to filmmakers, and — most importantly — seeing lots and lots of movies. Some of the TIFF screenings were world premieres, others were making their domestic debuts, and others may already be in your local multiplex (or on Netflix). With this year’s festival now behind us, we take a look at our favorites. These are the films we haven’t been able to stop thinking about — and that you’ll want to see as soon as you possibly can.

Nocturnal Animals

First of all, can we agree that this is one of the most user-friendly film fests currently in operation? The relative ease of getting to the movies I wanted to see helped my appreciation of the films themselves; I wasn’t viewing them through the lens of “I waited two hours in a freezing tent for this!?“

My peak TIFF experience probably hit between Tom Ford’s sophomore directorial effort Nocturnal Animals and Denis Villenueve’s Arrival — aka The Amy Adams Double Feature. Both were hot tickets that I was pleasantly surprised to get into, and both were devastating in their own way. Nocturnal Animals stars Adams as a depressed LA gallerist who begins reading a manuscript of a novel that her ex-husband wrote after she cheated on him and left him, and it’s by turns suspenseful, upsetting, funny, and glamorous. Jake Gyllenhaal plays both her ex in flashback, and the protagonist of the novel, who goes searching for justice after some Texas yahoos abduct and murder his wife and daughter. About midway through Nocturnal Animals I had one of those pleasant movie-watching moments of self-awareness where I realized I was watching Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon (a grade-A Texas cop in a year full of them at the movies) essentially play out what should have been the second season of True Detective, and was so ineffably satisfied by watching their interaction. (There is also a killer Jena Malone cameo. I want next year to be Jena Malone’s year.) –Emily Yoshida

Arrival

I left the theater reeling from Nocturnal Animals’ gut-punch ending, then turned right back around and reentered the Princess of Wales theater to see Arrival. I was nervous about this one — I had built it up impossibly in my imagination, though I had kept myself from the finer plot points of the Ted Chiang short story on which it is based. As the film unspooled, all slow and stately pans and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s almost biological score, it dawned on me that this was my perfect film. Villeneuve, more optimistic here than he’s ever been before, deals with abstract ideas of language and sociology with astounding visual economy, and memorably conveys the completely disorienting paradigm shift of its titular first contact scenario. By the time Arrival starts closing in on its central reveal — and the implication it has for geopolitics, the human race, and time itself — I started all-out bawling. It’s rare for a sci-fi film to capture the very real human implications of typical genre fodder like ETs and paranormal phenomena, even rarer for an actor to be able to keep such far-flung material grounded. Amy Adams, this is your year. Enjoy it before Jena Malone’s 2017. –Emily Yoshida

La La Land

Expectations are a dirty game in general. So with all the buzz coming out of Venice for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, I admit I went in with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I loved his last film, Whiplash, but that movie was a far cry from a full-fledged musical love story about a would-be actress and jazz pianist. But from the very first frames that hit my eyeballs — the faux-retro logo for distributor Summit Entertainment, and a “Shot in Cinemascope” reveal — it was clear that I was watching something extraordinarily special. And that feeling just built, scene by scene, song by song, beat by beat.

La La Land made me shiver with the romanticized ideals of love and art that years of watching movies have instilled in me, and when I wasn’t doing that I was either a) smiling, or b) crying. (Even as I write these words, days after seeing the film, the lyrics to “Audition” are running through my head, causing the hairs on my arms to stand on end. Maybe that’s why the film took home the Audience Award at TIFF.) I was lucky enough to see a lot of films I really loved in Toronto, but the wonder, joy, and heartbreak in La La Land is unique unto itself. I didn’t see anything else like it, and my only regret is that I have to wait until December to see it again. (Paging all publicists: Bryan does not want to wait until December to see it again.) –Bryan Bishop

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

Emily already discussed another of my favorites, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, but I had one of my most surprising experiences of the festival away from the hubbub of downtown, at the Hot Docs Cinema on Bloor Street. (Side note: this also happened to be the third or fourth time I saw something while sitting in a balcony. Toronto, you love your balconies, and I love you for it.) Written and directed by Osgood Perkins, I Am the Pretty Thing is an atmospheric ghost story about a young nurse (The Affair’s Ruth Wilson) that lands a job as caretaker of an eccentric old horror author, loosely modeled on Shirley Jackson.

The film is heavy on mood and restraint, sketching out the outlines of a traditional horror narrative while resisting the urge to go for obvious scares or genre conventions. That opens up room for Wilson’s delightfully weird performance, while forcing the audience into the same place of skewed perceptions and self-doubt that her character soon finds herself contending with. More than anything else, the film is terrifying because it is so patient — something spelled out in the opening shot, which lingers on the vaporous apparition of a young woman, just out of focus, as the audience squirms to make sense of it. –Bryan Bishop

The Girl With All The Gifts

I saw more ambitious and significant and groundbreaking films at TIFF than this zombie movie, but the experience of seeing it was the most fun I had at the festival. It was my only visit to TIFF’s Midnight Madness section, where the viewers tossed around LED-filled balloons before the screening, let out a hearty collective “Arrrrr!” at the anti-piracy warning, and treated all the opening PSAs and festival bumpers like Rocky Horror Picture Show, with perfectly timed shouted one-liners. And then the second the film started, they were the perfect audience — silent and respectful, except when certain events on-screen merited a collective moan of anguish or a cry of shock. Before the screening, international programmer Colin Geddes got up and talked about how great and well-mannered TIFF audiences were, and I thought he was just stroking our egos, but he was right — this was a fun group to watch a movie with. I could feel the electricity in the room, that feeling of rapt totally-into-it attention, but no one was disruptive about it.

And the movie itself was everything I wanted out of an adaptation of Mike Carey’s bestselling novel. I don’t want to give away too much for those who haven’t read or watched it, because so much of the story is about discovery. But Sennia Nanua is just preternaturally great as the protagonist, a young girl who starts the movie in heavy restraints, listening to a teacher read Greek myths in an underground military bunker full of angry, paranoid soldiers. Paddy Considine, Gemma Arterton, and Glenn Close round out the cast, but so much of this movie is about what Nanua plays and how she plays it. It’s a weird, painful, daring story with some interesting twists on the zombie-horror genre, and it makes zombies scary again — though more so if you’re watching with a crowd that’s really feeling it. –Tasha Robinson

The Unknown Girl

Belgium’s Dardenne brothers — Jean-Pierre and Luc — are some of the most reliable names in the arthouse industry. Every three years, like clockwork, they put out another sensitive, thoughtful, exquisitely performed, personal story, almost exclusively about younger adults dealing with knotty social issues involving family, class, work, money, and friendship. The latest one stars Adèle Haenel as a young doctor just starting a new practice. One night someone bangs on her clinic doors after hours, and she refuses to answer. The next day, she finds out the woman who knocked is dead. Racked with guilt, she starts investigating.

The film is somewhat of a procedural, as Haenel’s character asks questions and follows a trail of information. But more than that, it’s what the Dardennes always do well: it’s an intense emotional character study that’s aware of class issues without heavily underlining them, and aware of moral messages without spelling them out. This is a terrific film. I’ve never seen a Dardennes movie that didn’t stick with me, and this one has as well. –Tasha Robinson

Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee

I walked into the theater to watch Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee feeling sufficiently familiar with the ins and outs of the McAfee saga. Ninety minutes later I came out stupefied by what I’d seen. With no pretense, no self-aggrandizement — and seemingly little concern for her own well-being — director Nanette Burstein managed to pull off something remarkable, gathering damning, on-the-record interviews that speak to McAfee’s guilt in two murders and a rape case. And she did it all in less than a year of filming. It is everything a true crime doc should be: timely, thoughtful, and with enough revelations to poke holes through at least some of your previously held assumptions. Burstein begins the film with a voice-over in which she discusses her interest in how the privileged manage to evade the harsh realities of life and justice. As you watch McAfee reestablish his name and reputation in public media, Gringo feels all the more urgent. There’s no smoking gun or confession, but this is The Jinx-level stuff here. –Michael Zelenko

Karl Marx City

In the years following 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall, residents of East Germany learned the details of the massive surveillance state they’d inhabited for half a century: the government employed almost 100,000 agents and nearly 500,000 informants to document even the most trivial movements of their lives. In their documentary Karl Marx City, Petra Epperlein — who grew up in East Germany — and Michael Tucker dissect that oppressive infrastructure, and overlay it with a hauntingly personal tragedy: the suicide of Epperlein’s father. Was Epperlein’s father one of the half a million informants the country employed to police his neighbors, and did that have something to do with his death? It’s not the first time we’ve gotten a look inside East Germany’s Stasi, but as Epperlein and Tucker attempt to reconstruct the contours of a lost nation and a deceased family member, Karl Marx City is beautiful, raw, and haunting in a way that a fictionalized account like The Lives of Others could never be. –Michael Zelenko

There is a Peter Gabriel song on the end credits of Snowden that explains the plot of Snowden

2016-09-11T17:00:03-04:00

I haven’t yet seen Oliver Stone’s Snowden at TIFF this year — though you can read Bryan Bishop’s rather unfavorable review here. Luckily, I don’t really have to, thanks to “The Veil,” the new original song written by Peter Gabriel for the film’s soundtrack, which by all reports, plays over the end credits. Thanks to BuzzFeed‘s Alison Willmore for the hot tip:

“There’s no safe place to go / Now you’ve let that whistle blow”
— Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore) September 10, 2016

They truly don’t make ’em like this anymore, folks. Gabriel deftly describes the actions of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee turned NSA whistleblower, using a seamless combination of metaphor, simile, and statement of fact. Over a pulsing, prodding beat, Gabriel sings in hushed tones, gently reminding viewers that “information flows.” A sampling of some of the lyrical highlights:

Gabriel sets the scene by painting a picture:

Underneath the sky

Where the cold winds cross

There is an ocean where data flows

Then builds upon the “data = water” metaphor by introducing the idea of… yes, that’s right, a leak.

Stories start to leak

They color your name

While up above

Cloud turns to rain

Gabriel offers an incisive encapsulation of Snowden’s still-controversial legacy…

Some say you’re a patriot

Some call you a spy

An american hero

Or a traitor that deserves to die

…While still being quite clear about what Peter Gabriel believes Snowden ought to do with the data he has access to.

Show exactly what is going on

Show exactly who is looking on

Let it all go

Set it free

“The Veil” has everything you want in a modern movie theme song: primarily information, delivered clearly and completely in a series of leaked dumps. Not too different from what Snowden did himself in 2013 when he exposed the NSA’s surveillance programs, come to think of it. I personally can’t wait to see “The Veil” put to interpretive dance at the 2017 Academy Awards when it’s inevitably nominated for a Best Song Oscar. But even if it doesn’t get the nod, it will still be out there, for you to listen to when you want to think about the plot of the movie Snowden. Information flows.

The Handmaiden review: Park Chan-Wook’s twisty exploration of class, ethnicity, and tentacle porn

2016-09-09T21:00:03-04:00

There is something inescapably Western about Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, even though its adaptation of British novelist Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith moves the setting to Japanese-colonized Korea in the 1930s. Its intertwining schemes and bungled cons recall Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder; its first half, with a brooding lower class heroine shipping off to a country manor has shades of Jane Eyre. The estate that serves as the primary setting of the action is a lumbering hybrid; half English manor (due to its proprietor’s respect for the British Empire) half traditional Japanese home (for similar reasons.)

But by replacing the class system of Victorian England with the dynamic of the occupier and occupied, Park has tapped into something uniquely complex about a chapter of history that is rarely explored. There is a deep, festering malady at the heart of The Handmaiden, exacerbated by idle fantasy, cultural projection and denial. The men who torment the female heroines do so because they hate some part of themselves — a part of themselves they’ve been made to hate by circumstances larger than themselves.

The film is divided in three parts, each from a different perspective. A Korean criminal posing as a wealthy Japanese man who goes by the name Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-Woo, bringing maximum Cary Grant charm) wishes to exact a sort of vengeance-by-proxy on Kouzuki, a Korean nobleman also posing as Japanese. His plan is to court and marry Kouzuki’s Japanese niece and ward Hideko (Kim Min-Hee) and obtain his fortune, then commit her to a mental asylum. In the film’s first act, he enlists the help of Sook-hee (Kim Tae-Ri), a lowborn pickpocket, to take a job as Hideko’s handmaiden, and convince her to wed Fujiwara. This becomes complicated when Sook-Hee falls in love with Hideko.

Less a star-crossed romance, and more of a revenge tale

Up until this point, things are chugging along fairly predictably — and prettily, thanks to the ravenous camera work of Park’s longtime cinematographer Chung Chung-Hoon. But the first third ends with Hideko and Fujiwara eloping, and a double-crossing that throws everything we’ve seen thus far into doubt. But in the second section we see the story through Hideko’s perspective — including a startling revelation about what exactly she and her Japanophile uncle work on all day together (it’s not what you think, not exactly) — and the film becomes less a story of star-crossed lovers and more a revenge tale (a Park specialty) for the objectified and belittled women at its center.

The women, by the way, are spectacular. Kim Tae-Ri is deeply lovable as Sook-hee; a wannabe hard-edged smart-aleck whose unmaskable emotions become the film’s only trustworthy moral center. And as the brittle object of everyone’s desire, Kim Min-Hee is, to use Fujiwara’s words, mesmerizing — Sook-Hee refers to her as both a rotten bitch and a helpless innocent at different points in the film, and she wears both labels with fascinating instability. Both of them carry the film’s frequent melodrama nimbly, as Park’s often exhilarating dips into Looney Tunes-style slapstick pop up in everything from an attempted suicide to the numerous sex scenes.

Ha Jung-Woo and Kim Tae-ri in The Handmaiden (Courtesy of TIFF)

The sex scenes are the most questionable aspect of the film — they are graphic, yes, but also clinical in a way that takes one out of the film. Like Blue is the Warmest Color, The Handmaiden lets you get swept up in the romance between two women as they grow closer, until it’s time for consummation, at which point it becomes painfully obvious that we are watching a film directed by a straight male. The sequences are frequently shot in full-body so that the entire sex position can be observed at once (aside from one frame that appears to be shot from the perspective of one character’s vagina). It’s a clear callback to the erotic woodblocks Hideko’s uncle obsessively collects, but jarring nonetheless.

Park makes the puzzle-like plotting look easy

And it’s a strange visual to echo, especially by the end when we learn that her uncle’s love of all things Japanese — their language, their interior design, their porn — is because he feels that it is inherently more beautiful and desirable than the art and language of his own culture. But it seems the unattainability is what turns him on more than anything — he’ll never be Japanese, just as he will never touch Hideko, despite psychosexually abusing her for years. His collection is eventually destroyed in a cathartic sequence that is difficult to parse — the books clearly represent a façade in need of tearing down, but the image is impossible to divorce from a book burning.

Not that anyone could ever accuse Park of being anti-obscenity, especially after watching The Handmaiden, in which characters stick everything from bells to knives in their orifices, and at one point simulate sex on a suspended wooden mannequin. The consensual scenes are executed with joy and creativity, if voyeuristically. But the hottest scene in the whole film is probably its tamest, involving little more than a thimble and a tooth. It’s a reminder that Park doesn’t need to bring the X-rated fireworks to still be capable of producing edge-of-your-seat tension out of shared glances, and the deceptive simplicity of a good edit. The Handmaiden‘s puzzle-like plot makes such fine-tuning look easy. But many of its more difficult thematic questions are left provocatively unanswered.

The Handmaiden opens in limited U.S. release on October 21.

Verge ESP: Final girls

2016-09-09T14:45:13-04:00

Today on Verge ESP, Liz and Emily are talking endings. How do endings influence how we think about events, stories, and TV shows? What does a good ending do? How does a bad ending torpedo a good movie?

Who gets to survive to the end? If it’s a horror movie, you already know: the final girl. She’s young, virginal, and pure — unlike the sexually active girl who is usually the first to get murdered. Her purity and self-sufficiency are what qualify her for survival. A series of movies in the last several years have played with the trope — and just this year, The Witch, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Don’t Breathe have taken it to new places.

The final girl often makes for a satisfying ending — but what else makes a good finale? Liz talks about how we recall experiences, relying heavily on the work of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman. (Thinking, Fast and Slow is an excellent introduction to his research.) Take a vacation: the parts that shape how you recall it are the emotional peaks, and the way it ended — but both count more than the rest of the experience. Emily considers how this applies to great shows with terrible endings (Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica.) Can we call a show with a terrible ending good? Why does a bad ending feel like it tanks the entire enterprise?
Speaking of endings: this is the final episode of Verge ESP. Spoiler alert: both Emily and Liz survive.

Here are 8 things we want to see happen in Stranger Things season 2

2016-09-02T16:24:37-04:00

Netflix has officially granted Stranger Things a second season. We really dug the show and enjoyed the supernatural mystery that played out over the short eight-episode run, even as it raised a number of questions that will certainly play to a second season.

While we wait for the second season to arrive on Netflix, let’s go over what we’d like to see in the show’s sophomore season.

More geeky book references and different influences

Stranger Things contained a metric ton of references to a whole host of classic movies and novels from the 1980s, ranging from Stephen King to E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. There’s every reason to expect that the show’s creators will do the same with the next season.

While we love a good reference-fest, one of the things that we really want to see the show do is pull in from a different set of source material. Reportedly, James Cameron will be a major influence on what’s to come (which makes sense, given that his followups to Alien and Terminator were both excellent). But we’d love to see the show’s creators pull out some zany references, such as David Lynch, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.

More of an anthology feel

One thing that we’re really hoping for is more of an anthology-style Season 2. The Duffer Brothers have already noted that they’re hoping for more of a “sequel” feel for next season: “We want to retain the tone. But I think all our favorite sequels feel a little different. It’s not about just another monster comes and it’s a bigger, badder monster. We want it to feel a little bit different, maybe a little bit darker, but still have the sense of fun.”

With the huge push for anthology shows going on right now (think True Detective, American Horror Story, American Crime, or Fargo), Stranger Things seems like it’s one of those stories that’s perfect for similar treatment, with the Upside Down world and the Department of Energy’s experiments as a focal point.

The cast and characters of Season 1 were fantastic and the show left us pretty satisfied with the results. Introducing a bunch of new characters in the same world could be a solid move going forward, with each season drawing on its own set of influences and nostalgia.

Less reliance on nostalgia

Speaking of nostalgia, Stranger Things’ first season relied heavily on it, almost to a fault. We’ve all seen the side-by-side comparisons, but nostalgia can be tricky to navigate. Too much, and it just becomes pandering, which was one of the main (few) complains of this show in the first place.

For the next season, the show’s creators should pull back on relying on the audience’s nostalgia for 1980s films and books, and make the story stand on its own. References are almost certainly going to be part of the story moving forward, but there are only so many times that an audience is going to sit through a show that cribs from E.T./Close Encounters/Aliens type story, even if we get a whole new set of references to borrow from.

More depth to the characters

Another season gives the show more of an opportunity to play with its characters, and we’re hoping it gives them a bit more depth. Case in point: Winona Ryder delivered a great performance as Joyce Byers, but when you get right down to it, all that we see of her is a grieving mother, essentially just one layer to what appears to be a fairly complex character.

There’s a whole range of characters surrounding the central cast, such as Matthew Modine’s Dr. Brenner and Randall P. Havens’ Mr. Clark, who played fairly important roles. But we know very little about them.

This is a pretty easy thing to work on, because the Duffer Brothers can build on what they’ve already established for Season 1. Hopefully, we’ll get to learn more about the returning characters and some of the new ones that are going to be introduced.

Building on the kid’s arc

The story arc of Dustin, Lucas, and Mike isn’t all that different from some characters like Elliot from E.T. and Roy Neary from Close Encounters. A strange occurrence impacts their lives, and they go off to save their friend. It’s a solid and durable narrative that’s been used many, many times.

We’re hoping that this new season will allow the show’s writers to go beyond the typical stories that we see. Stranger Things certainly has a level of self-awareness that surpasses the stories that it’s influenced by, and subverting these tropes will make for some really interesting narratives.

More grossness

Stranger Things certainly has its creepy and horrifying elements. Upside Down and the Demogorgon are definitely creeptastic, but there were points where the horror didn’t go far enough to really scare some of us. We’ve seen some of the concept art that showed that it could have been much scarier.

We’d like to have some more grossness — some more weird creatures and stuff that will really scare us. We’re not necessarily looking for Game of Thrones-level body counts, but we do want to make sure that the show doesn’t feel safe. One of the things that really made films like E.T., Close Encounters, and The Thing so memorable is that the stakes felt incredibly high and that the characters were anything but safe.

Answers to some of our questions (but not all of them)

Any good serialized show will leave us wanting more, and we’ve already talked about some of the questions that the first season raised for us. What happened to Will? What is the Department of Energy trying to do? What happened to Eleven? Where had Hop gone after the hospital? What was Dr. Brenner up to in the Department of Energy? We’re fully expecting the show to address some of these questions. We’re also fully expecting the show to raise more questions as it continues.

We’re hoping that we’ll get to see more about the external factors that are part of the story, such as the nature of the Upside Down world and its monsters, and how the Department of Energy came to explore it. At the same time, we don’t want the show to spoon-feed all of this to us: make these questions integral parts of the story, and they’ll come out in a more satisfying way.

Closure for Barb

Finally, we’d like to see some better closure for Barb, who was summarily killed off midway through Season 1 and became the show’s unexpected star. We’ve definitively heard that Barb is dead, but that the Duffer Brothers are planning on making sure that there’s some sort of justice for the character.

This is great to see, because it sort of ties in with our desire for high stakes. Barb’s death was a big issue, and hopefully, it will spell out some of the greater consequences of the first season in lasting and meaningful ways.

What do you want to see in Season 2 of Stranger Things?

The Verge fall movie preview: from Snowden to Star Wars

2016-08-30T11:35:04-04:00

If summer movie season is when thought and reason are jettisoned in favor of explosions and bombast, then fall is when Hollywood decides to get serious. Or should we say, it’s when Hollywood decides audiences are ready to get serious — because over the next few months a slew of Oscar hopefuls and more thoughtful films are coming to your local theater.

Things will be kicking off in earnest in September with Clint Eastwood’s next run at the Oscars, the Tom Hanks-starrer Sully, with movies like The Birth of a Nation and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk arriving at nearly weekly intervals. But fall is also the season of the smart(er) blockbuster, and this year we also have movies like Arrival and Passengers fighting it out over who’s going to be the new Gravity. (It also wouldn’t be a season on the planet Earth without Disney extending its dominance with films from Marvel, Lucasfilm, and its own animation studio.)

It can all be a lot to take in, but we’ve broken down the films that we can’t wait to see — and that you’ll be talking about the most — below.

September

September 2nd

Morgan (20th Century Fox)

It’s Stranger Things meets Ex Machina in this claustrophobic-looking bit of sci-fi horror from director Luke Scott (son of Ridley.) Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a Very Special Girl who has been confined to a bunker in the forest to keep her genetically modified superpowers from the public. Things inevitably go south when some corporate meddlers come to push her buttons, and get their swift comeuppance. Whether Morgan is able to distinguish itself from the recent pop culture properties it unmistakably echoes remains to be seen, but the pieces are certainly in place for an unsettling, tightly wound thriller. And it’s certainly got a fancy cast working in its favor, including Kate Mara, Paul Giamatti, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. [Emily Yoshida]

The Light Between Oceans (DreamWorks)

Director Derek Cianfrance’s latest is a period drama set in post-World War I Australia, in which war veteran Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander) are struggling to have a child. When a baby girl washes up on the shore near their home, they take her in, but it isn’t long before they run into the girl’s real mother, Hannah (Rachel Weisz). Based on M.L. Stedman’s 2012 novel of the same name, it’s a small story with top talent, and somewhat of a tone change for Cianfrance, whose previous romantic downers have been nearly universal critical hits. [Kwame Opam]

Septemer 9th

Sully (Warner Bros.)

Clint Eastwood may be 86, but that hasn’t slowed down his directing career (or his propensity for airing his personal politics). With Sully, he’s taking on the story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the airline pilot who heroically pulled off an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009. Tom Hanks (with a really impressive mustache) stars as the title character, and judging from the trailers Eastwood is dealing in a little bit of modern mythmaking — focusing on the aftermath of the incident, as the virtuous Sullenberger has his motives questioned by a bunch of dummy government bureaucrats. Did we mention Eastwood’s politics shine through in his movies sometimes? [Bryan Bishop]

Other People (Vertical Entertainment)

If everyone plays their cards right, Molly Shannon might have a shot at an Academy Award in 2017. In SNL writer Chris Kelly’s directorial debut, young writer David (Jesse Plemons) returns home to take care of his mother Joanne (Molly Shannon), who’s suffering through the late stages of cancer. The film earned critical acclaim and plenty of tears at Sundance this year, especially for Shannon’s devastating performance. [KO]

Author: The JT Leroy Story (Amazon Studios)

Just over a decade ago, JT LeRoy was a literary sensation, a teen outsider turned hit novelist and indie screenwriter. Until suddenly, LeRoy wasn’t anything at all: it turned out, he was one elaborate creation. The documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story talks to Laura Albert, the writer behind LeRoy, about the persona’s creation and the fallout after its discovery. It’s sort of like Weekend at Bernie’s, where the corpse is a pseudonymous literary career. [Jake Kastrenakes]

September 16th

Blair Witch (Lionsgate)

One of the most interesting things about the upcoming sequel to The Blair Witch Project is that it was originally advertised as a totally original movie called The Woods, complete with its own poster and secret Comic-Con screening. It was only in that San Diego theater that the film’s true nature (and title) was revealed, and while revisiting the godfather of modern found footage movies may seem like a bore, there’s reason to be optimistic: the film was written by Simon Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard, the duo behind the unnerving You’re Next and The Guest. You can rest assured that Blair Witch will feature the most terrifying bundles of tied-up sticks you’ll see this fall. [BB]

Bridget Jones’s Baby (Universal)

Remember back in 1996, when Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary helped usher in a wearying trend of popular women’s lit where all the protagonists were ditzy, clumsy, and incredibly socially awkward, but still capable of finding love with a perfect fantasy man? Twenty years after the novel and 15 years after the film adaptation, obnoxious trend-starter Bridget Jones is back, still played by Renée Zellweger, still directed by Sharon Maguire, and still co-scripted by Fielding. (Emma Thompson co-scripted and co-stars.) But now Bridget is accidentally pregnant at 40, and doesn’t know whether the father is handsome stranger Patrick Dempsey or handsome ex Colin Firth. In a world with (apparently) no rush paternity tests and plenty of sheepish dream men ready to fight for the right to date a 40-year-old pregnant woman, Bridget is still struggling to get her shit together, and trying to make flailing indecision look cute and relatable. [Tasha Robinson]

Snowden (Open Road Films)

A movie about an individual struggling against oppressive government forces to reveal an elaborate web of conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels? Why yes, I have seen JFK — but what has Oliver Stone been up to lately? Turns out he’s been working with Joseph Gordon-Levitt to tell some new sides to the Edward Snowden story. Made in concert with the whistleblower, Snowden tries to put the man in context, portraying his evolution from a pro-government intelligence man to a fugitive that would almost single-handedly change the way we see US government surveillance forever. [BB]

Operation Avalanche (Lionsgate)

Operation Avalanche had one of the most intriguing descriptions of any film at Sundance this year: it’s a found-footage movie about a group of CIA wannabes that end up faking the Apollo Moon landing. Starring (co-writer and director) Matt Johnson, the film is alternatively fun, flippant, and an ode to visual effects and the fun of filmmaking itself — and in all of those aspects, it is tremendously entertaining. When it shifts into paranoid thriller mode, it doesn’t quite hold together — but seriously, how cool is that setup? [BB]

September 23rd

The Magnificent Seven (MGM)

Fresh off Southpaw, director Antoine Fuqua and True Detective‘s Nic Pizolatto return with a modern take on the classic 1960 Western — itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, and Vincent D’Onofrio are just a few of the titular seven, who are hired by a small town to protect them from the villainous Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard). Composer James Horner had already begun work on the movie’s score before dying in a plane crash last year at the age of 61, making The Magnificent Seven his final soundtrack. [BB]

Queen of Katwe (Disney)

If the teaming up of Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo aren’t enough to catch your interest, the inspiring true story behind Queen of Katwe might. The film tells the story of chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi who, as a young girl living in an impoverished area of Uganda, picked up chess and quickly became a world-famous player. [JK]

Goat (The Film Arcade)

James Franco produced this deep dive into frat culture’s underbelly, based on the book by Brad Land and co-scripted by Eastbound and Down director David Gordon Green. It follows Land (Ben Schnetzer,) a college freshman who decides to pledge the same frat as his brother Brett (Nick Jonas), only to discover pledging is harder and more insane than he ever imagined. The movie promises to give a raw, searing look at hazing, and could very well be used in an argument over why the practice ought to be abolished. [KO]

September 30th

American Honey (A24)

Usually, the trailer boast “Distributed by the same company that brought you [film you like]!” sounds desperate, along the same lines as “We used the same apprentice assistant set designer as Hamilton!” There’s one exception, though: “Distributed by A24” is starting to have real cachet. The NYC-based company has been curating some fascinating, striking releases lately — Green Room, The Lobster, Ex Machina, Morris From America, The Witch, The Rover — and the A24 stamp of approval carries some weight. Which is just one reason the latest from Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Red Road) looks so intriguing. American Honey follows a rootless teenager (newcomer Sasha Lane) on a road trip with a questionable sales force masterminded by a scruffy stranger (Shia LaBeouf), on an adventure that looks to have some tonal comparisons with Spring Breakers. Early word from Cannes has been rapturous. [TR]

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (A24)

The Blackcoat’s Daughter originally debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year under the title February, and its release date has been pushed several times, from a summer VOD date to its current fall release. Normally this wouldn’t bode well for a horror film, but there’s too much going for the elliptical-looking Daughter to not keep an eye out for it. It stars Mad Men‘s Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton (a standout in Sing Street) as two girls made to stay at their boarding school over the winter holiday when their parents fail to pick them up — deep childhood nightmare territory from the start. Reviews since its festival debut have been so cagey and spoiler-free as to border on nonsensical, but almost uniformly positive. And as Tasha noted above, indie distributor A24 has become a trusted arbiter of left-of-center and genre fare in 2016 — it’s a good bet that Oz Perkins’ directorial debut will offer more genuine surprises than the next month of horror schlock. [EY]

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (20th Century Fox)

Oh, Tim Burton, you and your weirdness. Audiences were already treated to his whimsically dark aesthetic in this year’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, but Burton hasn’t directed a film since 2014’s Big Eyes. He’s finally back with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, based on author Ransom Rigg’s novel of the same name. Here, Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield) finds himself at the titular Home for Peculiar Children after the death of his grandfather, and soon discovers he can see children with abilities. Before long, it’s up to him to protect them from the dark forces in the world. Given that this is a Burton movie, expect lots of tender drama and dark, strange humor. And lots of fangs. [KO]

Deepwater Horizon (Summit Entertainment)

Every year needs its based-on-a-true-story disaster movie, and in light of The 33‘s underwhelming performance, this is 2016’s last hope. Set around the titular 2010 oil spill disaster, director Pete Berg brings his patriotic brand of spectacle to the story of drilling rig crewman Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), who would become the human face of the disaster. With supporting performances from the likes of Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, and Gina Rodriguez, Deepwater Horizon is a fall movie with summer box office ambitions. [KO]

October

October 7th

Under the Shadow (Netflix / Vertical)

Director Babak Anvari made his feature debut at Sundance this year with what Indiewire called the “the festival’s most terrifying feature.” Under the Shadow takes the horror tropes of the standard haunted houses and transplants them to Tehran in the 1980s, in a home that’s under daily threat of bombings. The film’s trailer is tense and unsettling, adding the specter of a haunting to the horror of war and women’s oppression in Iran. [JK]

The 13th (Netflix)

Ava DuVernay has become one of the industry’s most-watched filmmakers, since her breakout with 2014’s Selma. She’s currently gearing up to shoot a big-budget adaptation of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, but first we get The 13th, a documentary tracking how America’s mass incarceration evolved out of slavery after the passing of the 13th Amendment. The film will debut at the New York Film Festival and then head to Netflix. [JK]

The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight)

This time a month ago, Nate Parker’s Nat Turner biopic The Birth of a Nation was still on track to be the great hope for a perennially white Oscars season; Parker himself a one-man cure-all for systemic racism in Hollywood. Of course, the actor-turned-director’s profile grew after the film’s record-breaking Sundance deal, and soon social media users unearthed the 1999 rape case against him while he was a student and star wrestler at Penn State, of which he was acquitted. Parker’s conduct and handling of the situation left a lot to be desired, and a lot of would-be ticket buyers questioning whether this was the man whose vision of the Nat Turner story the world needed right now. The film was critically lauded during its debut; it will be interesting to see how it’s received when it makes its theatrical premiere in Toronto this month. [EY]

The Girl on the Train (Universal)

The Girl on the Train isn’t ashamed to pitch itself as the next Gone Girl. Directed by The Help director Tate Taylor, the film follows Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) as she slowly finds herself caught in the middle of a mystery involving her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) and a vanished young woman (Megan Hipwell). Based on the 2015 New York Times best seller of the same name, Taylor & co. are clearly hoping to ride the popular adaptation wave to awards season. [KO]

October 21st

The Handmaiden (Amazon Studios)

South Korean director Park Chan-Wook gained his notoriety through his revenge stories (Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) and kept building it with stories of repressed lust and perverse scheming (Thirst, Stoker). His latest, The Handmaiden, combines all these obsessions. Park’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ terrific 2002 novel Fingersmith preserves some of the story — a poor young pickpocket is enlisted as a maid to help a con man seduce a rich young heiress — but Park transplants it from Victorian England to 1930s Korea. Cannes reviews say Park twists the story to reflect his usual fascination with fetishism, eroticized pain, and complicated power games. Add in the lush trailers and crystalline cinematography, and this looks unmissable. [TR]

Moonlight (A24)

From its trailer alone, Moonlight looks like a quietly gorgeous coming-of-age story. But director Barry Jenkins takes a slightly different formal approach, telling his protagonist’s story through three separate chapters of his life. The story follows Florida youth Chiron (played by Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, and Alex Hibbert throughout the film) as he grows up struggling with his broken home life, while coming to terms with his masculinity and sexuality. Moonlight also stars The Knick‘s Andre Holland, and Janelle Monáe in her feature film debut, before she appears in next year’s decidedly more mainstream Hidden Figures. [JK]

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (Paramount)

2012’s Jack Reacher barely recouped its production budget at the US box office, but international ticket sales (and the lingering star power of Tom Cruise) ensured that the property would live to see another day. This time, writer-director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai) is behind the camera, with Cruise continuing to talk really tough, hit really hard, and stare at people without even the slightest hint of blinking. Cobie Smulders joins as a military officer that Reacher thinks has been framed for espionage… and the only way to save her is to talk, hit, and not-blink as only Reacher can. [BB]

In a Valley of Violence (Focus Features)

The prolific horror movie producers at Blumhouse turn their attentions to something a bit different with In a Valley of Violence. Indie horror auteur Ti West (The Sacrament, The Innkeepers) takes on the classic Western this time, adding some splashes of Tarantino-esque humor and gore. The film premiered at SXSW this year to strong reviews. [JK]

October 28th

Inferno (Columbia)

Everyone thinks they know the story of Dante’s Inferno, but only one brave man dares to ask: why Dante? Why hell? Dang, you guys. Listen: Tom Hanks is holding one damp hand out to you, the other one wiping away dust from the latest secrets of Catholicism, and asking: do you dare to go on my hell-themed scavenger hunt? “Sounds fun,” says Felicity Jones, after Googling “Felicity Jones Oscar chances vs. overexposure risk” and donning her finest wig. The secrets they uncover will never be covered again. It’s a death cult, but you’ll never believe how far it goes. You were right to be nervous about ancient Rome. Dante? Scramble up the letters a little, mix them up, and they spell NET AD. Coincidence? See this movie while stoned. [EY]

November

November 4th

Doctor Strange (Disney)

How do you fit a cosmic magician in a silly cape into the Marvel Cinematic Universe without looking ridiculous? Hopefully we’re about to find out, via The Exorcism Of Emily Rose director Scott Derrickson and stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Mads Mikkelsen. [TR]

Loving (Focus Features)

Writer-director Jeff Nichols occasionally brings big dramatic beats into his films (Mud, Take Shelter, Midnight Special), but more often, they simmer with buried tension and what-comes-next wonder. Judging by the Cannes reviews, his historical drama Loving goes even further than usual into quiet, sun-baked Southern drama, minus the fireworks. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga star as Richard and Mildred Loving, the real-life couple whose 1967 Supreme Court case ultimately ended state laws against interracial marriage. Loving focuses more on their relationship than on courtroom drama, and it’s been praised and criticized in equal part for its abstract, personal take on history. But Nichols is tremendous with both images and actors, and as awards-bait prestige pictures go, this one looks unusually distinctive. [TR]

Trolls (DreamWorks)

If satirists set out to compile absolutely every lame, obnoxious cliché from the latest 20 years of kids’ animated films into one trailer, they’d get something awfully close to the ads for Trolls. In just two minutes, we get multiple character dance parties, a pop hit, a cutesy pee-in-terror joke and a cutesy poop-in-terror joke, a jerky side character, a bunch of highly touted celebrity voices, and a whole lotta maniacal running around. And it’s all in service to a Tangled-like team-up between a joyous, ditzy girl and a worldly, wise boy who can’t stand her, but is guaranteed to change his mind by the end of act two. All that magic troll-doll hair certainly isn’t going to help with the Tangled comparisons, but really, this looks more like another Smurfs movie, minus Neil Patrick Harris, and plus a lot of garish wigs. [TR]

Hacksaw Ridge (Summit Entertainment)

Mel Gibson hasn’t stepped behind the camera since 2006’s Apocalypto, and the next step in his effort to rebuild his life and career appears to be the most violent anti-violence movie in the history of film. Former new Spider-Man Andrew Garfield plays Desmond T. Doss, who enrolled in the US military in 1942 but refused to carry a gun due to his religious beliefs. That didn’t stop Doss from heading into battle, however, where he served on the field as a medic — and if Gibson would have us believe, performed slow-motion gymnastics to deflect grenades like he was in The Matrix. But despite being the story of a man who rejected violence, the film itself appears to be awash in it, with explosions, gunfire, bloodshed, and brutal beatings all lovingly rendered with Gibson’s usual zeal. [BB]

November 11th

Arrival (Paramount)

The annual thinking woman’s space epic is starting to become a reliable high point on the cinematic release calendar; from 2013’s Gravity to 2014’s Interstellar to last year’s Golden Globe-winning comedy The Martian. This year we get Arrival, Denis Villenueve’s (Prisoners, Sicario) adaptation of Ted Chiang’s linguistic-theory-heavy sci-fi novella Story of Your Life. Rather than take a military defense-based approach to how our society would handle the arrival of extraterrestrials, Arrival focuses on communication: Amy Adams stars as a linguist who is enlisted by the government to figure out the aliens’ language and try to engage in a dialogue without accidentally starting a war. Jeremy Renner and Forrest Whitaker co-star, but perhaps most importantly: those alien ships look totally sick. [EY]

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (TriStar)

Director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) adapts Billy Fountain’s best-selling novel about a 19-year-old soldier who comes home to Texas as part of a “victory tour” after a firefight in Iraq. There’s a mystery behind the story — Billy Lynn (newcomer Joe Alwyn) is haunted by what actually happened in Iraq, which unfolds in flashbacks over the course of the film. But there’s also a terse family drama, as he tries to reintegrate with the people who care about him. Lee takes pride in the wide variety of stories he’s crafted over the years, but he always seems to return to the theme of repressed emotions bubbling up to the surface, and Billy Lynn looks like it has emotion to spare. Co-stars include Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Steve Martin, and Vin Diesel. [TR]

November 18th

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (Warner Bros.)

When this film was first announced, it seemed a bit ridiculous: not just one film, but an entire series based on a joke textbook that Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling wrote for a charity fundraiser? But as the trailers have come out, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them has begun to look a lot more promising. Finally, there’s a Harry Potter movie about the actual adult society of the Wizarding World, and Rowling’s worldbuilding can take center stage, in the absence of a Chosen One kid sucking up all the oxygen. Fantastic Beasts is set in 1920s New York, where a young magician (Eddie Redmayne) loses control of a briefcase full of magic creatures, and has to track them down and catch ’em all. Perhaps it can help breathe new life into Pokémon Go craze. [TR]

Manchester By The Sea (Amazon Studios)

Manchester by the Sea, which debuted during Sundance this year, is already being billed as a the performance of Casey Affleck’s career. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan paints a portrait of Lee (Affleck), a Boston janitor who’s thrown back into his ugly past and hometown after his brother’s untimely death, and is forced to take care of his teenage nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges). The story lets Lee’s story and trauma unfold at a natural pace, and the result is, according to our own Chris Plante, one of the most unexpectedly inspiring films of the year. [KO]

November 23rd

Moana (Disney)

Market realities dictate that Walt Disney Animation Studios’ latest film is coming to theaters behind a giant banner announcing a New Disney Princess, Giant Exclamation Point, Start Preordering Your Toys Now Or Get Left Out Come Holiday Season. But in spite of all the princess-y hoopla, Moana looks pretty intriguing. Like so many Disney hits, it’s based in folklore — this time, the legends of various South Pacific cultures, which share common stories about a shape-changing trickster demigod named Maui. Chieftain’s daughter Moana Waialiki sets out on an epic quest for a legendary island, with Maui as a reluctant partner. Disney vets Ron Clements and John Musker, directors of Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Hercules, return to direct. [TR]

Allied (Paramount)

Allied looks like a spy thriller plucked right out of Old Hollywood; it’s being poised a safe, middle-of-the-road pick for awards season. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film follows Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) and Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), two World War II spies who fall in love while on a mission to kill a Nazi official. (Yes, Brad Pitt is still making WWII movies.) The film will live and die on the pair’s chemistry, and considering their pedigree, this one could be a fun Thanksgiving watch. [KO]

Bad Santa 2 (Broad Green)

As a one-off, exceptionally dark comedy, 2003’s Bad Santa had its cachet as a unique experience. Directed by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, Crumb) and starring Billy Bob Thornton and Tony Cox as low-life criminals who used a “mall Santa and his elf” routine to case joints for robbery, the film earned its rep as a profane, uncompromising holiday comedy like no other. That makes the idea of a sequel pretty problematic, especially given the bigger-and-louder-is-always-better nature of sequels. Thornton and Cox are back, but Zwigoff has been replaced by director Mark Waters, whose films (Vampire Academy, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Freaky Friday) suggest a bent toward oversized slapstick. And the NSFW red-band trailer, filled with naked boobs and butts, accidental simulated sex, colorful profanity, ha-ha racism, and more juvenilia, isn’t particularly promising either. [TR]

December

December 2nd

La La Land (Lionsgate)

Writer-director Damien Chazelle made such a big splash with his Oscar-nominated, Sundance-award-winning 2014 film Whiplash that it was easy to forget it wasn’t his first film. He actually launched his career much more quietly in 2010 with the feature-length black-and-white musical, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, about a jazz trumpeter and a waitress who fall for each other, then separate. Chazelle’s third film, the much-anticipated La La Land, sounds something like a reworking of that story, this time in color, and with bigger names. The new film is a “throwback musical” starring two young LA up-and-comers — Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist, Emma Stone as a would-be actress — who meet and fall for each other, but find success is getting in the way of their relationship. La La Land premieres at the Venice Film Festival on August 31st, and until then, we’ve mostly just got the dreamy, mildly abstract, but mighty pretty trailer to go by. [TR]

December 16th

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Disney)

The first of the Star Wars standalone films covers some familiar territory: it’s about the team that steals the Death Star plans that Princess Leia hides in R2-D2 back in the first 10 minutes of the original A New Hope. It has TIE Fighters. It has Darth Vader. It has Felicity Jones as a rebellious scoundrel named Jyn Erso. But most importantly, it has director Gareth Edwards, who has shown an ability to balance character with thrills (the excellent Monsters) while also seeming equally at ease with blockbuster theatrics (2014’s Godzilla). Oh, one other thing: it’s Star Wars. [BB]

The Founder (The Weinstein Company)

Michael Keaton’s resurgence is nowhere near done yet. After earning acclaim for his performances in Birdman and Spotlight, Keaton is set to play McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc in John Lee Hancock’s The Founder. The film tells the story of how Kroc finagled his way into Mac and Dick McDonald’s hamburger business and managed to turn it into the biggest fast food brand in the world. In the tradition of character studies like There Will Be Blood, this movie seems made to showcase Keaton’s talents. We have high hopes for it. [KO]

December 21st

Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox)

2016 was supposed to be the year that video game movies proved they could actually work. It hasn’t gone so well thus far — and now it’s all up to Assassin’s Creed. First off, the premise of this thing is such high-concept movie fantasy trash that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t already made with Nicolas Cage or John Travolta. Michael Fassbender plays a criminal scheduled for execution, who is instead kidnapped by a shadowy organization that wants to Quantum Leap him back into the body of his ancestor, who was really good at killing people (and running on roofs) during the Spanish Inquisition. It’s like Lawnmower Man meets Face Off meets The Da Vinci Code, people. And on top of that, it’s directed by Justin Kurzel, a truly talented filmmaker that most recently worked with Fassbender on Macbeth. Seriously! Macbeth! As in Shakespeare! With a situation like that, it’s no wonder that 20th Century Fox went all out at Comic-Con this year, spending every single dollar the studio could promoting this thing.

Wait, what? Fox didn’t show up at all? Even though Assassin’s Creed seems to be genetically engineered to appeal to Hall H Comic-Con crowds? Hrm. [BB]

Passengers (Columbia)

Passengers is a movie starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Passengers is a movie whose script floated around Hollywood for years as one of the best unproduced screenplays out there. Passengers is a science fiction film about two people who wake up from hibernation ahead of schedule. Passengers is also a love story. Passengers is a total mystery, because other than a brief clip shown at CinemaCon earlier this year, there hasn’t been any footage shown from Passengers. Passengers is supposed to come out in less than four months, but a still photo release was a recent newsworthy event. What does this tell us about Passengers? Only Passengers knows for sure. [BB]

December 23rd

A Monster Calls (Focus Features)

Director J.A. Bayona made a tremendous debut with the 2007 horror movie The Orphanage. But his prestige-picture follow-up, the real-life disaster drama The Impossible, dulled his edges with a sentimental core and some questionable choices. Bayona is thankfully back to his horror roots with A Monster Calls, based on a young-readers novel by Patrick Ness, author of the blisteringly grim Chaos Walking trilogy. Liam Neeson stars as the primal, Groot-like tree-monster summoned to help a young boy whose mother (Felicity Jones) is gravely ill. Sigourney Weaver co-stars as the kid’s brisk, patrician grandmother. If this is anything like Ness’ dark, uncompromising book, and if Bayona can resummon his terrifying Orphanage voice, this will be a can’t-miss film. [TR]

How filmmakers manipulate our emotions using color

Verge ESP: Let’s talk money

2016-08-26T17:47:18-04:00

So! Money doesn’t really make the world go round, but it sure greases the skids in late capitalism. Take Mylan’s EpiPen, which has parents and lawmakers up in arms. The injection is meant to halt anaphylactic shock in patients who may have encountered an allergen — so it’s a crucial buy for a lot of people in back-to-school season. But its price has been steadily rising since 2007, when it was a little more than $100. Now a package of two pens retails for $609, and most of that price hike came in the last few years. Liz talks about pharmaceutical pricing, and why what Mylan’s doing is standard-issue for the industry — right down to that expanded assistance program. Maybe it’s time we stopped talking about individual expensive drugs and started talking about the industry as a whole.

Meanwhile, Frank Ocean finally dropped not one but two albums. The first, Endless, is a so-called visual album that fulfilled his contractual obligations to Def Jam (a part of Universal Music Group). The second, Blonde, came two days later — as an independent release. Endless is a streaming exclusive with Apple music; Blonde is an apple exclusive on Ocean’s own Boys Don’t Cry label. It looks like Blonde will trump Endless, in terms of revenue — and the debacle has been used as an excuse by UMG to halt all one-platform streaming exclusives. What’s at stake here is revenue; streaming services often pay far less to labels than digital sales do. And, more, Ocean only got 14 percent of the share on Endless; Billboard reports he’ll get 70 percent of Blonde. Emily considers whether that makes Apple Ocean’s de facto record label, and what the future holds for online streaming services.

5 summers that were worse for movies than 2016

2016-08-23T18:07:45-04:00

Every year, as Labor Day draws near, you start to hear it. That plaintive refrain, echoing over the hills and plains of movie blogland. Worst. Summer. Ever.

Whether for reasons of critical acclaim, box-office performance, or a combination of both, there’s always a reason to feel underwhelmed after the last big release of the summer months. And 2016, admittedly, does feel worse than usual. After a perfectly serviceable season opener of Captain America: Civil War, things went downhill. Fast. Though the season will probably end up being about as profitable as 2014, there was something extra disillusioning about this year’s tentpole movies, so much so that by the time Suicide Squad screened, critics could regularly be heard questioning their professions entirely.

Every summer is the worst summer!

But let’s be real — every summer is the worst summer! Part of that is just the nature of summer — we’re always in a bad mood by the end of it; it’s always over before we’ve taken advantage of it in the way we had hoped to. But hyped-up blockbuster properties, sequels, and threequels have an particular ability to leave us disappointed. Search hard enough on the Wayback Machine, and I’m sure you can find an argument for why any given year’s crop led to the “worst summer ever” since the dawn of the World Wide Web.

Wait, hold that thought — we’ll do it for you. Selectively. At least until the 1980s.

2010: The Sands of Time

Kwame Opam: Summer 2010 was the worst. Yes, this was the year that Inception and Winter’s Bone came out, but it’s also the year that M. Night Shyamalan and Avatar: The Last Airbender decided to shit on everything. An adaptation of one of the most inventive and beloved animated series of the era that turned out to be a muddy, mindless, and frequently offensive mess. It’s a strong contender for one of the worst movies ever made. It’s so bad Avatar‘s creators like to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Of course, that was only the nadir of an all-around terrible summer. You had Iron Man 2, easily one of the weakest entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You had Sex in the City 2, which stretched the premise of “Hey, what are these women up to since their show ended?” to its logical extreme by sending them to Abu Dhabi. You had Prince of Persia, which apparently soured Jake Gyllenhaal on blockbusters for years. And you had Jonah Hex, which was an early sign that Warner Bros. had no idea how to make a decent comic book movie that didn’t involve Batman.

Speaking personally, though? This was one of the worst summers of my life, period, and the movies only made it worse. Imagine the absurdity of getting into a fight after watching Shrek Forever After, which ends up leading to the worst breakup of your life. Then imagine trying to get back together after watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That movie is great, but the absolute last one you watch when your relationship is in shambles. 2010 was a nightmare. 2016 is just fine.

2009: Revenge of the Fallen

Russell Brandom: Do you remember summer ‘09? Think back to the charmless trudge of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe, the wasted potential of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Terminator: Salvation. Those alone should qualify it as one of the worst movie summers on record. Friends tell me there was also a great Pixar movie and a good Harry Potter movie, although I still haven’t seen them.

But for me, the sourest lemon will always be Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, [Ed: technically a spring movie, but whatever] which I saw after a friend convinced me it was worth a shot. I love the book for all the usual reasons — but after 40 minutes of lovingly shot blue-green violence, I realized Snyder was probably more of a Spawn fan. Of course, there were still another two hours to go at that point, including an excruciatingly bad sex scene set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It was so uncomfortable that my friend and I couldn’t look each other in the eye walking out of the theater, too ashamed of what we had experienced together. Seven years later, it still holds the title as the worst time I’ve had in a movie theater. And somehow, despite all odds, someone let Snyder’s reign of terror continue.

2007: At World’s End

Emily Yoshida: In the summer of 2007, I picked up a job ripping tickets and shoveling caramel corn at the original recipe Arclight Cinemas on Sunset and Vine. It paid minimum wage, and I only stayed for four weeks, but of course, the real perk was the ability to see free movies when I was off-duty. I took full advantage of this and the theater’s perfectly adjusted A/C during the dog days of August, but it turns out I was one summer too early. 2008 would prove to be one of the best summer movie years in recent history, but this was still 2007. 2007. After a pair of threequels nobody asked for (Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third, yes, a Shrek movie came out in 2007, yes, 2007 is ancient history), Transformers introduced dubstep cinema to the world, shattering our earbuds in a whirlwind of digital metal, and then… everything was a blur. There was a Harry Potter? And a Pirates movie, I guess? A third Ocean’s? Sure, sounds right. I didn’t see them. I used my free pass to see loftier fare, like The Bourne Ultimatum (which was fine) and, uh, inexplicably, the Jet Li / Jason Statham vehicle War. I saw Sunshine and Starlight in 30-minute increments over the course of a month on my lunch breaks. I Know Who Killed Me sadly never made it to the Arclight, or really, anywhere at all.

The dawn of the modern manchild comedy

Instead, 2007 will probably go down as the inaugural year of the modern manchild comedy, which is now waning in favor of the modern Girls Can Be Gross Too comedy. Knocked Up and Superbad made movie stars out of Seth Rogen and Michael Cera, respectively; whether this is a good thing or bad thing depends on who you ask. For big-budget genre franchise filmmaking, 2007 came at an awkward phase, when many of the big properties launched at the turn of the millennium were getting a little droopy, and the next wave had yet to crest. Foolishly, I quit my job before the fall, when No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood managed to make for a satisfying Oscar season. But my time on the inside was good for something: thanks to the time I spent casing it, I knew how to sneak into movies for the next three years.

1992, I Blew Up the Kid

Tasha Robinson: Unlike some of you, I don’t peg particularly bad film years to major life losses. Summer movie seasons pretty much blur into one big, loud blob for me. Thankfully, there is this thing of beauty: Box Office Mojo’s season-by-season comparison tool. Ye gods, does it bring back some terrible memories, especially of 1992, the summer where Tim Burton’s Batman Returns topped the charts. That film was a huge letdown, but of course it came in at No. 1, because its primary competition consisted of Alien 3, Universal Soldier, Patriot Games, and Lethal Weapon 3, the one that tried to make a selling point out of the fact that Mel Gibson and Danny Glover’s perfectly good cranky bromance from the first film had permanently become an awkward Joe Pesci threesome. (Note: There is no other kind of Joe Pesci threesome.)

All y’all’s awful years at least have some high-profile bright spots, but Summer 1992 at its absolute best couldn’t offer up anything better than the weird turns in Prelude To A Kiss, Lars von Trier’s Zentropa, and Raising Cain, none of which feel remotely like summer movies. Summer 1992 should probably get some points for its surprising run of female-led hit comedies, including Sister Act, A League Of Their Own, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Death Becomes Her. But as a blockbuster season, it’s just dire, unless you hold 3 Ninjas close to your heart, or you treasure Single White Female, Honeymoon In Vegas, Unlawful Entry, or Honey, I Blew Up The Kid.

Everything after 1989 is terrible

Bryan Bishop: Yes, I know that we’re all trying to figure out which summer out-worsed the other, but thanks to Netflix we’re in a particularly resonant moment of nostalgia, and I’m just going to take it all the way: every summer at the movies since 1989 has been the worst. Because like it or not, the 1980s were the one true home of the summer blockbuster.

Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) may have been the first instances of the runaway hit, but the years of 1980 through ‘89 were when it became enshrined as a cultural institution. E.T., Back to the Future, Die Hard, The Goonies, Ghostbusters; check out the comparison tool Tasha linked to above, and poke around. You’ll weep. It’s not like every movie was good then — this is the same decade that gave us sequels like Cannonball Run II and Staying Alive — but what you will find is summer after summer of films that, good or bad, largely remain cultural touchstones. (And again, that’s not to be confused with films of actual quality — 1986’s Back to School, I’m looking at you.)

There are plenty of other films out there that are inventive, subversive, and clever

But take a formula and photocopy it enough times (they probably would have said “Xerox it” back then), and you get diminishing returns. And summers that once boasted three or four legitimately good films become summers with just a couple. Or a summer like 1995, where you had Batman Forever, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Waterworld, Mortal Kombat, and The Net all competing for what could be the worst possible thing to land at your local multiplex.

That was the ‘90s model — and it’s one we’re pretty much still using today, where we breathlessly hope that one or two hits will turn out to actually be worth watching, and raise the box-office tide accordingly. I mean, just look at some of these years we’re talking about up above. 2009, 2010, any year with a Transformers movie… is it any wonder people are wrapping themselves in nostalgia cocoons? But that’s the trick: summer blockbusters may largely be dreck, but there are plenty of other films out there that are satisfying. Inventive. Subversive. Clever. Just don’t expect many of them to show up between May and September.

Verge ESP: The crucial role of moms in the Ryan Lochte scandal AND in one’s microbial communities

2016-08-19T15:07:49-04:00

Okay friends, bear with us here: some things have happened since we recorded the podcast. For those of you who didn’t know, Ryan Lochte claims he was robbed at gunpoint. Brazilian police say otherwise.

In conclusion, don’t lie to your mom Here’s what we know: on Aug. 14th, initial reports surfaced that Lochte had been robbed in Rio, while he and three friends were out for a night on the town. His mother confirms these reports to USA Today; then Lochte himself gives an account of the alleged robbery. The International Olympic Committee initially denies the reports, then apologies to Lochte and the others. But on Aug 16th, the police tell press, they can’t find any evidence that the robbery happened (hmm). On Aug. 17th, Lochte leaves Brazil; two fellow swimmers are detained at the airport by authorities. Lochte sticks to his story of a robbery, but the details change. By Aug. 18th, (the day we recorded) the authorities say the group was definitely not victims of a robbery: apparently, they caused a ruckus at a gas station and got into a fight with staff, and a security guard pulled a weapon. Aug. 19th (today), Lochte apologizes for his behavior and promises to be “more careful and candid” in describing the incident.

Liz’s personal theory of how this all spiraled out of control? Lochte told his mother a sanitized version of events — omitting vandalism, for instance — and characterized the altercation as a robbery. His mother, furious at the thought anyone might have done harm to her special boy, tipped off the press. And that’s how a lie Lochte told his mom caused an international incident. In conclusion, don’t lie to your mom.

Your mom’s done a lot for you, of course — but not just for you. She’s also done rather a lot for your bacteria! Later in the podcast, science writer Ed Yong of The Atlantic comes on to tell Liz and Emily about his new book, I Contain Multitudes, a book about how animals (including humans) and bacteria interact. Not only will you find out how your mom helped shape your gut bacteria, you’ll hear about the Russian nesting dolls of bacteria that live on bugs, and why it’s so difficult to alter one’s microbiome for the purposes of medicine. You aren’t just a person, you’re an ecosystem — in fact, several ecosystems. Tune in to hear why probiotics might not live up to their hype, how one type of bacteria is eliminating males of certain species, and why cooperation in nature is less friendly than it sounds.

Werner Herzog on the future of film school, critical connectivity, and Pokémon Go

2016-07-28T15:25:01-04:00

Repetition is a powerful tool for both filmmakers and teachers, and Professor Werner Herzog wants you to know two things: he doesn’t have a cell phone (later he will tell you that he does, but only for emergencies) and he didn’t know movies existed until he was 11. He’s dropped these facts both as humorous anecdotes and boastful claims at screenings of his upcoming documentary Lo and Behold, in the video lectures for his recently released online filmmaking course with MasterClass, and in our conversation two weeks ago in Los Angeles. It’s a provocation of sorts — after all, who would trust a man without a cell phone to direct a documentary about our connected world? Who would trust someone who didn’t grow up dazzled by Star Wars or Spielberg to teach filmmaking?

These are questions nobody asks, of course, because this is Werner Herzog. As a documentarian who has traveled to the furthest reaches of the indifferent wilderness to ponder humanity’s place in it, there are very few filmmakers whose perspective on our digital lives I’d be more interested in. Lo and Behold, which was financed by a network management company, examines the myriad ways our nature as humans has adapted to, and sometimes violently resisted, the constraints and freedoms of online life. Told in short, episodic acts, the film’s subjects range from a family that was targeted by unimaginable harassment after the death of their daughter, to an internet addiction rehab facility, to the UCLA basement where the very first message was sent over a network.

It’s a delight to be taught by one of our least cynical filmmakers

Herzog has become almost a meme in recent years, his signature dour voiceovers sent up by Samantha Bee and in maudlin teen movies. But the reason he has a loyal following, and why thousands of eager filmmakers from all walks of life have signed up to access his MasterClass lectures, and applied to his more rigorous, in-person Rogue Film School, is his transcendent empathy as a filmmaker. This also makes him a great teacher. Come for the hyperbolic throwaway lines (“I do not use a storyboard, I think it is an instrument of the cowards”), stay for the uncompromising creative pep talk.

I had doubts about how this would be conveyed through a series of videos and a PDF course book, but when I did sit down to watch Herzog’s MasterClass, suddenly the interface didn’t matter — it’s a delight to be taught by someone who, despite the surface morbidity, is one of the least cynical filmmakers currently working. Of course, interviewing him was another matter, and I soon realized that when you’re talking to Werner Herzog, you have to throw your questions out the window. Maybe that’s how we ended up discussing the inherent violence of Pokémon Go.

You’re now the teacher of two different film courses. How would you quantify the difference between what someone gets for $1,500 at the Rogue Film School, and for $90 with your MasterClass?

The Rogue Film School is a very, very intense encounter, direct encounter with aspiring filmmakers. All of them are actually professionals already. I would not choose amateurs. It’s much more about the guerrilla style filmmaking including things that go outside of the limits of legality. Sometimes I would teach them how to forge a shooting permit in a military dictatorship, which I’ve done twice. It’s a different approach, and of course much more [focused] since it is in such direct contact with the students. They have their voice and I listen to them and they can talk about their problems and obstacles and doubts.

Whereas the MasterClass is something where I do not have anyone in front of me with the exception of a couple of cameras. I have to try to speak from my experience and get something across that would be helpful for those who are aspiring filmmakers. MasterClass is also meant for young people, people of any age who have not made films yet. You see, with the Rogue Film School, everybody has to send me a written application — which I read, every single one — and everyone has to send me a film. I’m the committee who checks out the film. I watch them all, hundreds and hundreds and I would make a very, very tight selection of a maximum of 50 people.

Have you seen any changes or shifts in the work and in the submissions over the past seven years?

There are always surprises. All of a sudden there is a film that is not really accomplished, but in the film there is a minute of utterly new unseen stuff that just makes you sit down and take a deep breath. Those are the [filmmakers] I would invite [to Rogue Film School], those who are not following on the trodden path. The MasterClass speaks to you in the same way. Find your own voice, do not just stupidly and blindly follow the so-called rules of storytelling in terms of screenplays, the three-act theory, all these things. Find your voice, find your own identity, don’t be afraid just to step into it.

Because today it’s fairly easy; you can make a film with a very high caliber camera that’s not expensive anymore. You can record sound on your cell phone if you add a good microphone and you can edit your film on your laptop. In other words, you can make a feature film for $10,000 or under. And that’s what I keep telling the students or those who watch the MasterClass: don’t wait for the system to accept you. You create your own system, create your own [budget] and make your own first feature film or your first own documentary.

More and more that DIY spirit is the dominant attitude of young filmmakers, especially those putting their work directly online. Do you think traditional film school will ever go extinct?

No, unfortunately they are not going to go completely extinct; I wish they would. I wish everybody would come out of nowhere and be self-taught by life itself, by the world itself. No, [film school is] going to stay because there is a general demand for content, let’s say, on television. And the film industry has some sort of a permanent demand for content. Let it be like that. I do not want to challenge it. But when you look into my MasterClass you better be out for something else.

Have you seen the MasterClass?

Yes, but I haven’t seen all of it. I watched about three of the lessons and then it started getting to the assignments and I thought, “I kind of want to actually do these.” Rather than just watching the videos straight through.

No, you shouldn’t watch it all at once. That would be completely mad. And be careful with the assignments, because sometimes I would say you do not need to follow them. Create your own assignments, be intelligent. Giving assignments, it reeks of high school and getting homework…

Some people respond to that though, some people like that.

Yes, but I always was reluctant to give any assignments. But it’s fine. Let it be as it is. It’s part of the format and it’s part of the charm of it. When it comes to assignment I’m not the one who should be a high school principal.

Right.

I’d rather jump from Golden Gate Bridge if that happens.

I asked about film school because I graduated from a film program less than a decade ago, and already many of the technical skills I learned are outdated. And it seems the things that remain are very personal lessons that usually don’t come from the curriculum itself.

Yeah, certain things you can neither learn in film school nor let’s say the MasterClass nor in the Rogue Film School. It’s just life, raw life as it is has to give you insight and has to allow you to make the right decisions and ask the right questions and gathering enough courage to do something.

Do you think that’s harder to have those sorts of life experiences now that so much of our lives are mediated by devices?

If you are too much into the internet, yes, because it’s a parallel surrogate life. It has nothing to do with the real world or examination of the real world, if you delegate too much to your cell phone and applications.

It’s very interesting that you are releasing Lo and Behold at the same time as this completely online, digital class. What convinced you that you’d be able to get your ideas across in an online course given all the doubts you’ve expressed about the connected world?

I never knew that it was online. I always thought that you would subscribe and you would buy some Blu-rays or DVDs. Maybe it’s even better than depending on something physical. You see, I come from a world where you touch things, like a roll of celluloid. But I have to get better accustomed to the virtual world.

It’s not only the tactile experience that’s different, it’s also the act of going to a place to learn. Setting aside specific time over the course of weeks or months where you have this curriculum that you hold yourself to, instead of fitting it in in your spare time on the train or something.

Yeah, it’s better that way, I think. Because when you look at TV series there’s such a thing as binge watching. You watch a whole series in two days or three days. Here I would advise not to do binge watching of my MasterClass.

Lo and Behold is officially being released in August, but in the meantime you’ve had the chance to screen it several times. What kinds of reactions have you gotten, especially from people who are perhaps more embedded in the “connected world” than you are?

Well, everybody has been enthusiastic so far and the buzz is enormous. I never expected it, because in the beginning I was to do some YouTube tips on texting and driving. The financiers of the film, NETSCOUT, understood there was something much, much bigger and they supported me with that. The response has been totally unprecedented for me. What is also remarkable I get a lot of emails nowadays [from] 12, 14, 15-year-olds. And that’s something really surprising because they speak a different language, the language of their age group. And yet [they are] making some very intelligent remarks.

They’ve grown up never knowing life without this constant connectivity.

Yes, and they are excited that there’s something like conceptual thinking which will create a filter and an understanding how to use the internet and how to deal with it. In other words, taking a step away from it, looking at what it does and what the possibilities are your choices.

I really enjoyed the film when I saw it earlier this year. I also felt like there should be 16 sequels.

In a way, it’s unfinished business I’d like to continue. I’d like to continue, for example, with a segment about Bitcoin. That’s something I’m completely mystified by, a fantasy of currency, of cash, that you cannot touch and yet it exists. I’m interested how can I commit a bank robbery holding up the bank and getting away with loot of something that you cannot even touch. And countries like Estonia, which is going completely and systematically digital now — it’s very, very fascinating. There are many more aspects. And NETSCOUT by the way, is not completely done with it yet.

Really?

That’s my feeling. It depends a little bit on after the release of the film; what are the big reactions and if there is still demand. If there’s still a demand, I have a couple of things I’d like to continue with.

Do you know about Pokémon Go?

No.

It’s this…

I don’t know what Pokémon Go is and what all these things are…

It’s a…

You’re talking to somebody who made his first phone call at age 17. You’re talking to someone who doesn’t have a cell phone, for example, for cultural reasons.

Right.

Tell me about Pokémon Go. What is happening on Pokémon Go?

It’s basically the first mainstream augmented reality program. It’s a game where the entire world is mapped and you walk around with the GPS on your phone. You walk around in the real world and can catch these little monsters and collect them. And everybody is playing it.

Does it tell you you’re here at San Vicente, close to Sunset Boulevard?

Yeah, it’s basically like a Google map.

But what does pokémon do at this corner here?

You might be able to catch some. It’s all completely virtual. It’s very simple, but it’s also an overlay of physically based information that now exists on top of the real world.

When two persons in search of a pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?

They do fight, virtually.

Physically, do they fight?

No—

Do they bite each other’s hands? Do they punch each other?

The people or the…

Yes, there must be real people if it’s a real encounter with someone else.

Well, it’s been interesting because there are all these anecdotes of people who are playing the game, and they’ve never met their neighbors, for instance. And when they go outside to look for pokémon they realize they’re playing the same game, and start talking to each other.

You’d have to give me a cell phone, which I’m not going to use anyway, and I have no clue what’s going on there, but I don’t need to play the game.

No, I think it’s plenty to read about it… in the end, it does seem to be evidence of how easy it is for people to accept AR into their lives, as opposed to VR.

Yeah, but these things are very ephemeral, they come and go.

I read an interview you gave maybe a year or two ago about the potential of virtual reality for filmmaking and I wonder if you’ve seen anything else recently that’s changed your assessment.

No, nothing that has convinced me that there is clearly a type of content that we should focus on. Still, it makes me uncomfortable. You have this… how do you call it? This mask on, for more than five minutes. I feel uncomfortable, and no content whatsoever has taken this discomfort away from me.

There’s this persistent idea that virtual reality has this potential to be an “empathy machine.” That just by sitting someone virtually in another space you can convey the experience or give someone some sort of cultural epiphany.

You’d probably understand it better by reading a book about some of the phenomena out in the world. Or by traveling on foot.

I think a lot of people are “addicted” to their connectivity out of this need to understand the world, or find some kind of truth. It just speeds up the process. I’m thinking of the situation recently with the sniper in Dallas, and how in minutes, just because of social media and video, an innocent man was the target of a manhunt. But then, in another hour, he was exonerated — also through social media.

I think what is remarkable about it is that police immediately zeroed in on the real shooter, and they killed him.

With a robot.

Yes, also interesting. But they didn’t kill the wrong one. No matter what sort of false clues came via social media… it was solid, normal police work. If somebody opens fire you better shoot back when you have a clear target.

“Technology doesn’t have any qualities.”

What do you think about the use of technology in these sorts of cases? Video, and live video is becoming so integral to reporting of incidences of police violence and it’s a very powerful, perhaps unforeseen use of this technology.

Yes, in many cases it’s been very, very helpful, for example, for women under attack — all of a sudden you have a tool to verify what is happening. Even if, say, someone wants to assault you… if you turn on your cell phone and take photos or video of the guy he would probably be deterred.

At the same time the real atrocities are happening. There was a case of three teenage girls going out with a young man who was something like 10 years older. He rapes one of the girls and one of the girls not under attack films it and streams it live and does not help and cannot switch off because she told police she couldn’t take her eyes off the comments. That’s where your heart stops and you better do some hard thinking what we should do and what we should do not.

Like so many other tools, it only amplifies the highs and the lows of human nature.

Sure, and the question — is this technology good or bad? — is an incompetent question. It’s humans who are good or bad. Technology doesn’t have any qualities, it has technical qualities, yes. The internet is fast; the internet has many ramifications worldwide, and so you can quantify certain things, but you cannot endow it with qualities like good or bad.