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Carrie Fisher's last Harrison Ford story isn't romantic, it's tragic

by Tasha Robinson

In the wake of Carrie Fisher’s unexpected death at age 60, her new memoir, The Princess Diarist, is an unexpectedly emotional read. But the emotions aren’t grief and nostalgia so much as alarm and sympathy. Early in the book, she tells a...

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The golden age of reality TV is already here

by Chris Plante

There’s plenty to hate about Nick Viall. The latest star of The Bachelor — ABC’s 21-seasons-and-counting (not including spinoffs) competitive dating show — has the smile of a smug startup founder, the unsettlingly intimate murmur of a...

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2017 will be an important year for personal electric vehicles of all sizes

by Sean O'Kane

Longer range. Smaller batteries. Sleeker, more integrated designs. These are things you can expect to hear touted in 2017 by the companies that make what we at The Verge call electric rideables — an imperfect catch-all term that covers everything...

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How Adam Driver turned naked vulnerability into unconventional stardom

by Charles Bramesco

He’s made a career out of challenging the usual ideas of both heroes and villains

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This year, Shia LaBeouf became a new kind of interactive celebrity

by Lizzie Plaugic

For the actor and artist currently known as Shia LaBeouf, 2016 was a mellow year, comparatively speaking. In the previous three years, LaBeouf plagiarized graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, got arrested during the intermission of a Broadway musical,...

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How One Direction stayed the world’s biggest band even after it stopped existing

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

One Direction has been on an indefinite “hiatus” since December 13th, 2015 — one year ago today. In the meantime most of the members have moved on to new projects: a solo recording contract here, a label imprint there… a Christopher Nolan film, a g...

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Energy Department staff should refuse to answer Trump’s intimidating climate questions

by Alessandra Potenza

Last week, Bloomberg reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team issued a questionnaire to the Energy Department, asking for a list of employees who have attended climate meetings and have worked on efforts to reduce the US’s...

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After months without sleep, binge watching became my remedy

by Megan Farokhmanesh

In 2016, 4AM became a close friend. I’d awake with no provocation, roll over to check my phone, and mutter a string of my favorite swears. My insomnia was as reliable as it was frustrating, but it was unusual for me, too. All my life, I’d bragged...

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What if the internet could make Casey Affleck the last Casey Affleck?

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

If you buy into the current hype around this year’s Academy Awards, Casey Affleck is the current front-runner for Best Actor. He’s already won preliminary accolades from critics’ associations and major film festivals, and his publicity firm, ID...

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Hairspray Live! is event television at its sloppy finest

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

The nonsensical but utterly magical trend of major broadcast networks producing expensive and messy live musicals continued last night with NBC’s production of Hairspray. Thank goodness! This production was based on the 2002 Broadway musical,...

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Amazon’s Echo taught me I have no idea what music I like

by James Vincent

How many of your favorite songs can you name off the top of your head? Not if you had a pad of paper and an hour to think about it, but if you had to name, like, 20 songs right this second. It’s not something I’ve ever had to think about before. I...

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The new Gilmore Girls is weirdly hostile toward fans, women, and storytelling in general

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

After years of anticipation, Netflix has produced and released six new hours of Gilmore Girls. These new episodes should be enjoyable to watch, if only because they let us all revisit beloved characters and familiar settings. But they’re also six...

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Women still aren’t good enough to direct Star Wars, apparently

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

In an interview with Variety, current head of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy said the studio is looking for a female filmmaker to direct a Star Wars movie. Great! She then implied that the process is a slow one because "they’re gigantic films, and you...

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Why stories about aliens are always stories about humanity

by VoxMediaUser4017423

When it comes to depicting aliens on-screen, we’ve come a long way from little green men with bulbous heads and jet-black tea-saucer eyeballs. Cinematic aliens have assumed every shape and size, from the gorilla-suit-and-diving-bell monster...

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Arrival’s director also made Enemy, a movie that argues history will repeat itself

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve premiered his first two English-language films in 2013. One was the blockbuster psychological thriller Prisoners. The lesser-known, Enemy, is a moody, enthralling nightmare of a movie that seems to be...

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Apple’s $299 coffee table book is a holy tome for nostalgic fans

by James Bareham

On Tuesday, Apple released something unique: not a phone or a laptop or wireless earbuds, but a coffee table book. Designed by Apple in California features exquisite photographs of iconic Apple products, beginning with the iMac in 1998 and...

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Feel like you’re in hell? Let this forgotten Anna Kendrick comedy guide you

by Charles Bramesco

In 2013, the Anna Kendrick comedy Rapture-Palooza had the misfortune of opening exactly one week ahead of Seth Rogen’s This Is The End, another absurdist envisioning of Judgment Day. (They even shared a primary cast member: Craig Robinson, in both...

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How the short story that inspired Arrival helps us interpret the film’s major twist

by Nick Statt

This post contains major plot spoilers about Arrival. In one of the final scenes of Arrival, the new first-contact science fiction film with a focus on linguistics, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) explains why she got divorced. “He said I made the...

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A Tribe Called Quest’s new album is tear-jerking, essential protest music

by Kwame Opam

When A Tribe Called Quest reunited to perform on The Tonight Show last fall, the group — Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White, and Phife Dawg — couldn’t know what 2016 would bring. They were pioneers returned from hip-hop’s golden age, but...

Social media keeps reminding us of the election timeline that could have been

by Sean O'Kane

We are living in the universe in which Donald Trump won the presidency. But that’s a lot harder to accept any time I open Facebook. Or Instagram. Or Twitter. Because all three social media apps employ algorithms that surface older posts over new...

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Forever an immigrant

by Dami Lee

In 1996, my dad was assigned to go work overseas at Samsung’s new semiconductor chip manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas. Initially, he was hesitant to go. It would mean uprooting his entire life, and plus he didn’t want his children growing up...

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Brexit 2.0

by Vlad Savov

In the early hours of June 24th this year, I was sat upright in a hotel room bed, observing UK Brexit votes with disbelief. Tonight I got to experience a re-run of that disconcerting event as the United States followed the same trajectory with its...

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Doctor Strange’s murky morality brings it close to being a supervillain origin story

by Kwame Opam

Doctor Strange hit theaters just a few days ago, catapulting fans deep into the weird far reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s brand-new territory for the long-running series; where superheroes like Iron Man and Thor already have...

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Battlefield 1 is an anti-war message trapped in a best-selling shooter

by Nick Statt

One of the most iconic moments in the WWII film Saving Private Ryan occurs near the end, when sniper Private Daniel Jackson strikes down soldier after soldier from a clocktower post. His scope settles on the turret of a German Tiger tank, which...

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Eulogy for the perfect headphones

by Chris Plante

I wish the doctor had mentioned hysteria before he broke my jaw. After seven weeks of watching The Simpsons DVDs, eating cheddar soup through a syringe, and communicating through a dry erase board, I snapped. It was a cool summer evening, and the...

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Westworld is a cautionary tale about photorealism and video game murder

by Nick Statt

In the debut episode of HBO’s Westworld, narrative director Lee Sizemore makes a case that the futuristic theme park’s team should stop working toward increasingly lifelike androids. “Does anyone truly want that?” he asks. “Do you really want to...

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Go ahead, put up your Christmas tree

by Chris Plante

Tradition dictates that Christmas festivities begin the day after Thanksgiving, not the day after Halloween, but traditions are more malleable than you’d think. Generations ago, kids would celebrate Saint Nicholas on his actual feast day —...

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Why Fox is ditching Marvel's superhero strategy

by Kwame Opam

A Deadpool sequel is in the works, but it’s in need of a director. The Wrap reported last week that director Tim Miller walked away from the project due to creative differences with star Ryan Reynolds over how to approach the follow-up. Miller...

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White Girl, Goat, and the little words that shape power

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

When people go to see movies about race or privilege, they expect to be hit over the head with a message. These are big, complicated issues, but we’ve been trained to expect villains, moral clarity, and right and wrong — laid out at a fifth-grade...

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Vine was an underrated source of joy on the internet

by Lizzie Plaugic

It’s October 27th, 2016, and Vine is being given its last rites. Twitter made the announcement today that it would be shutting down the video platform’s mobile app in the coming months, although its website will remain online. The news triggered...

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Like Microsoft and the 1990s, 3D graphics are cool again

by Ben Popper

I grew up on Microsoft Paint as a PC kid in the 1990s. So when Microsoft showed off a new version of its storied software today, updated to make it easy for anyone to create objects and scenes in 3D, I felt a stab of excitement imagining how my...

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Westworld is a good TV show about a terrible video game

by Adi Robertson

HBO's Westworld is a show about technological anxiety, explored through the lens of a futuristic theme park where you can live out your wildest fantasies with hundreds of almost perfectly lifelike (and increasingly self-aware) animatronic "hosts."...

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