Age transitions feel like starting a new game The most significant change compared to prior titles is the game’s completely new approach to ages. In most of the earlier games, ages were called “eras” (like Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, or Modern) and were just signposts to show how far…

We do see a hint of extra improvement in Forza Horizon 5, a game where the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 8GB Intel Arc A750 do struggle compared to similar cards with a bit more RAM (Nvidia’s 8GB cards seem to handle it fine, though). An extra 2GB of…

Here at Ars, we’re suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows’ notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static…

Nintendo may be getting ready to make its Switch 2 console official. According to “industry whispers” collected by Eurogamer, as well as reporting from The Verge’s Tom Warren, the Switch 2 could be formally announced sometime this week. Eurogamer suggests the reveal is scheduled for this Thursday, January 16. The…

Neverwinter Nights came out in 2002 and received an enhanced edition in 2018. In 2025, that should really be it, but there’s something special about Bioware’s second dip into the Dungeons & Dragons universe. The energy from the game’s community is strong enough that, based largely on the work of…

Last month, we asked readers to donate to a couple of good causes in our 2024 Charity Drive sweepstakes. And boy, did you deliver. With the drive now complete and the donations all tallied, we can report that Ars Technica readers gave an incredible $39,047.66 to Child’s Play and the Electronic…

Here at Ars, we’re judicious about which of the many, many Switch 2 rumors we decide to highlight on this page. For every report on hardware power or magnetic Joy-Cons that we share, there are probably five others we see and decide are too lightly sourced, too unlikely, or just…

Of course Atari’s new handheld includes a trackball, spinner, and numpad – Ars Technica Tempest, Missile Command, etc.”,”image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Atari-Gamestation-Go-500×500.jpeg”,”listing_image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Atari-Gamestation-Go-768×432.jpeg”}”> Skip to content My Arcade’s “GameStation” partnership means authentic portable Tempest, Missile Command, etc. Finally, the authentic, portable Crystal Castles experience we’ve all been waiting for. Credit: My Arcade / Atari Finally,…

Nintendo still isn’t ready to officially reveal any details about the Switch 2 (beyond a brief mention of backward compatibility in November). But that hasn’t stopped gaming accessory maker Genki from giving us one of the best looks yet at the size and shape of Nintendo’s upcoming hardware, as well…

Just when you thought you had seen every possible Doom mod, two game developers released a free browser game that reimagines the first level of 1993’s Doom as an art gallery, replacing demons with paintings and shotguns with wine glasses. Doom: The Gallery Experience, created by Filippo Meozzi and Liam…

Nvidia has good news and bad news for people building or buying gaming PCs. The good news is that three of its four new RTX 50-series GPUs are the same price or slightly cheaper than the RTX 40-series GPUs they’re replacing. The RTX 5080 is $999, the same price as…

Almost exactly a year ago, we were publicly yearning for the day when more portable gaming PC makers could ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS (without having to resort to touchy unofficial workarounds). Now, that day has finally come, with Lenovo announcing the upcoming Legion Go S as the first…

Nearly two years ago, AMD announced its first Ryzen Z1 processors. These were essentially the same silicon that AMD was putting in high-end thin-and-light laptops but tuned specifically for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally X. As part of its CES announcements today, AMD is…

AMD’s batch of CES announcements this year includes just two new products for desktop PC users: the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D. Both will be available at some point in the first quarter of 2025. Both processors include additional CPU cores compared to the 9800X3D that launched in November.…

It was about this time that something else began: The Pinball Resource. Becoming The Resource Young’s obsession with pinball dates back to the early ’70s, when he was a college student at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that would eventually lead to a career at IBM. He and…

With Valve’s impressive work on the Proton tool for Linux and the Mac’s Game Porting Toolkit and CrossOver options, few games are truly “Windows only” these days. The exceptions are those with aggressive, Windows-based anti-cheating tools baked in, something that hit back hard against players eager to dive into a…

Nvidia is reportedly gearing up to launch the first few cards in its RTX 50-series at CES next week, including an RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070. The 5090 will be of particular interest to performance-obsessed, money-is-no-object PC gaming fanatics since it’s the first new GPU…

It’s a WebAssembly application, but it was made via a human language, prompt-driven web development tool called v0 that’s part of a suite of features offered as part of Vercel, a cloud-based developer tool service, of which Rauch is the CEO. You can see the LLM bot chat history with…

The more than two decades since Half-Life 2‘s release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the official-ish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we’re approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks…

How it works Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or by picking an item from the Amazon…

So here’s to you, Stardew Valley. You were one of the brightest parts of my 2024, and a game that I already know I’ll return to for years. — Lee Hutchinson Grounded Credit: Xbox Game Studios Obsidian; Windows, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation My favorite discovery this year has probably been Grounded, a…

At this point, any serious retro gamer knows that a bulky cathode ray tube (CRT) TV provides the most authentic, lag-free experience for game consoles that predate the era of flat-panel HDTVs (i.e,. before the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era). But modern gamers used to massive flat panel HD displays might…

How it works Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or picking an item from the Amazon wish…

-Kevin Purdy Sixty Four Oleg Danilov; Windows, Mac I try not to think about, or write about, games in the manner of “dollars to enjoyment ratio.” Games often get cheaper over time, everybody enjoys them differently, and they’re art, too, as well as commerce. But, folks, come on: $6 for…

So when Sony put out the recent “remaster” of Zero Dawn, I was cautiously optimistic. Any sort of non-half-assed PS5 reworking ought to reduce load times, right? Machines make it hard to enjoy the view. Machines make it hard to enjoy the view. So many more people in the towns.…

Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia’s partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards. According to recent…

When the impossibly punctuated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl released on November 20, after many delays (that included the Russian invasion of the developer’s native Ukraine), it seemed like it could have used even more delays. Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty…

When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro a few months ago, some wondered just how many people would be willing to spend $700 for a marginal upgrade to the already quite powerful graphical performance of the PS5. Now, initial sales reports suggest there’s still a substantial portion of the console…

In theory, it ought to be as good a time as ever to be a gamer on the iPhone. Classic console emulators have rolled out to the platform for the first time, and they work great. There are strong libraries of non-skeezy mobile games on Apple Arcade and Netflix Games,…

How it works Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or picking an item from the Amazon wish…

When Nvidia replaced the longstanding GeForce Experience App with a new, unified Nvidia App last month, most GPU owners probably noted the refresh and rebranding with nothing more than bemusement (though the new lack of an account login requirement was a nice improvement). Now, testing shows that running the new…

When Sony launched the PlayStation Portable almost exactly 20 years ago, the value proposition was right there in the name: a PlayStation, but portable. But now modders have flipped that, introducing a PSP that can be played on a TV, console-style, and they’ve dubbed it the PS Placeable. It’s a…

GPU power consumption numbers under load. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Power consumption is another place where the Battlemage GPU plays a lot of catch-up with Nvidia. With the caveat that software-measured power usage numbers like ours are less accurate than numbers captured with hardware tools, it looks like the B580’s power consumption,…

If you’ve been too busy punching virtual Nazis to take part in this year’s Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don’t worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win). In…

Are humans just squishy machines? Can an artificially intelligent robot create a true moral compass for itself? Is there a best time to play The Talos Principle again? The answer to at least one of these questions is now somewhat answered. The Talos Principle: Reawakened, due in “Early 2025,” will…

The itch.io domain was back up and running by 7 am Eastern, according to media reports, “after the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issue.” Users could access the site throughout if they typed the itch.io IP address into their web browser directly.…

It’s once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That’s right—it’s time for the 2024 edition of our annual Charity Drive! Every year since 2007, we’ve encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity, which provides toys…

As podcaster Ryan Zhao put it on Bluesky, “The design process has gone wrong when what you need to prototype is ‘what if there was a space.'” Gotta go fast When Google revealed the first version of Genie earlier this year, it also published a detailed research paper outlining the…

Steam Machines 2.0? While there hasn’t been any wider official rollout for the Powered by SteamOS program yet, any move by Valve to offer officially licensed SteamOS compatibility for third-party hardware wouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Valve’s Lawrence Yang has been saying since 2022 that “we’re excited to see…

Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is the trusted source in a sea of information. After all, you don’t need to know everything, only what’s…

The Steam Link was a little box ahead of its time. It streamed games from a PC to a TV, ran 1,500 0f them natively, offered a strange (if somewhat lovable) little controller, and essentially required a great network, Ethernet cables, and a good deal of fiddling. Valve quietly discontinued…

Turnover at the top of the company isn’t stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570. Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX…

When an updated, remastered, or otherwise spiffed-up version of a game is released, nobody—not long-time fans, not archivists, not anybody, really—ever asks for the original version of that game to be taken down. Does this seem to stop game studios from committing this unforced public relations error? Absolutely not. Blizzard,…

There are better versions of these games The VIP package Atari sent me, along with a selection of cartridges. Credit: Kyle Orland Since I’ve never owned an Atari 7800 cartridge, Atari sent me eight titles from its current line of retro cartridges to test alongside the updated hardware. This included…

Bloomberg reports that Sony is “in the early stages” of work on a fully portable console that can play PlayStation 5 software. The device is still “likely years away from launch,” according to “people familiar with its development” that spoke to Bloomberg anonymously. The report comes less than a year…

The bow is a bit too effective at taking out early enemies from afar Credit: Obsidian / Microsoft The tedium of the bow doesn’t really break until you stumble on your first spellbook, which you can hold in your off-hand while gripping the dagger in the other. Spouts of flame,…

You’re getting pretty close to the ground there, chief. But the good news is, you’re generating terrain for other players. Credit: Microsoft You’re getting pretty close to the ground there, chief. But the good news is, you’re generating terrain for other players. Credit: Microsoft AI learning was used for 2024‘s…

Despite the new weapons and mechanics that were already in the works for Episode 3, many developers quoted in the documentary cite a kind of fatigue that had set in after so much time and effort focused on a single franchise. “A lot of us had been doing Half-Life for…

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its…

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its…

In a field packed with quality roleplaying game developers, this is where BioWare has historically shined: making me have big feelings about my companions and the world they live in. This is what I crave. Who is (my) Rook, anyway? The Veilguard sets up your protagonist, Rook, with a lightly…

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day leading up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at…

The classic PC games market is “in a sorry state,” according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren’t currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk. Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG’s catalog,…

And Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, which dramatically built on past games’ physics mechanics, is in many ways a  concept that developers are still playing with and expanding on today. Ultrahand, the flagship player ability in 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, could be seen as a substantial…

Spotify has lost all enthusiasm for the little music devices it sold for just half a year. Firmware hackers, as usually happens, have a lot more interest and have stepped in to save, and upgrade, a potentially useful gadget. Spotify’s idea a couple years ago was a car-focused device for…

Confirming previous rumors, Variety reports that Amazon will be moving ahead with producing a TV series based on the popular Mass Effect video game franchise. The writing and production staff involved might not inspire confidence from fans, though. The series’ writer and executive producer is slated to be Daniel Casey,…

Sega has put dozens of its Master System, Genesis, Saturn, and other console titles onto modern game stores over the years. But, like that Dreamcast controller stashed in your childhood garage, they’re about to disappear—and getting them back will cost you a nostalgia tax. Those who have purchased any of…

In many ways, the timing of Sony’s 2016 launch of the PS4 Pro couldn’t have been better. The slightly upgraded version of 2013’s PlayStation 4 came at a time when a wave of 4K TVs was just beginning to crest in the form of tens of millions of annual sales…

As US states were busy counting votes to confirm who would be the next president Tuesday night, Nintendo’s Japanese Twitter account was busy confirming a key backward compatibility feature for the upcoming “Nintendo Switch successor,” which is still only pre-announced, officially. “At today’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing, we announced that…

Metal Slug Tactics pushes hard on the boundaries of the vaunted run-and-gun arcade series. You can run when it’s your character’s turn, but it’s a certain number of tiles. You can gun, but not rapidly, and only after considering the most optimal target and tools. Is this just Into the…

Even the bad clickwheel iPod games—like Sega’s nearly impossible-to-control Sonic the Hedgehog port—might find their own quirky audience among gaming subcommunities, Olsro argued. “One [person] beat Dark Souls using DK bongos, so I would not be surprised if the speedrun community could try speedrunning some of those odd games.” More…

Some of my favorite games deny me the thing I think I want most. Elden Ring refuses to provide manageable save files (and I paid for it). Balatro withholds the final math on each hand played (and its developer suggests avoiding calculators). And the modern X-COM games force me to realize just how…

You might think that since Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (which was released last Friday) is the 21st game in the franchise, it wouldn’t be that highly anticipated. You’d be wrong. Last week’s entry set multiple records when it launched. Specifically, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the game set…

Last night, Nintendo pulled off a surprise launch of a new Nintendo Music smartphone app, offering many of the company’s staple soundtrack songs as a perk to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. But the new subscription freebie could give Nintendo additional motivation to once again crack down on Internet users who…

Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most graphically demanding and visually impressive games in recent years, will soon get a Mac release, according to developer and publisher CD Projekt Red. The announcement was published on CD Projekt Red’s blog and also appeared briefly during Apple’s pre-recorded MacBook Pro announcement video. The…

Apple will adapt the classic educational game The Oregon Trail into a big-budget movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR). The film is in early development, having just been pitched to Apple and approved. Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Blades of Glory, Office Christmas Party) will direct and produce. Given that…

In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been “historically associated with piracy,” thus “rais[ing] a potential concern” for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF)…

The UK equivalent of a Pip-Boy 3000, which is nice to see after so many hours with the wrist-mounted one. Team FOLON The UK equivalent of a Pip-Boy 3000, which is nice to see after so many hours with the wrist-mounted one. Team FOLON It’s not the standard set of…

It’s been just over two years now since soon-to-depart CTO John Carmack told a Meta Connect audience about his vision for a super low-end VR headset that came in at $250 and 250 grams. “We’re not building that headset today, but I keep trying,” Carmack said at the time with…

Arena Commander was revealed to the public at PAX East in April 2014. From our perch in the press balcony, we could see the dev team on the stage (including Roberts) frantically re-compiling the game so that it would run properly. Credit: Lee Hutchinson Arena Commander was revealed to the…

The Last of Us season 2 trailer. Today marks the debut of the first full trailer for the second season of The Last of Us, the grim but compelling post-apocalyptic drama on HBO that’s based on the popular video game of the same name. The trailer revisits the first season’s…

Phil Spencer’s Tokyo Game Show update. Beloved real-time strategy classics StarCraft and StarCraft II will soon be available in Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription for PC, the company announced during the Tokyo Game Show. It’s already free to play both StarCraft and StarCraft II‘s multiplayer modes on PC. This move to…

Valve sued lawyers behind arbitration claims Valve used to prefer arbitration because few consumers brought claims and the process kept the company’s legal costs low. But in October 2023, Valve sued a law firm in an attempt to stop it from submitting loads of arbitration claims on behalf of gamers.…

The new suit makes heavy reference to arguments from the Epic v. Google case alleging that an informal agreement between Samsung and Google has prevented the Samsung Galaxy Store from becoming a true competitor to the Google Play store. The suit notes that, while the Samsung Store is available on…

Update, September 30, 2024, 6:34 p.m. ET: It seems that the new home screen experience that users reported today was the result of a bug that has been fixed. On September 30 at 6 p.m. ET today, the AskPlayStation X account wrote: “A tech error with the Official News feature…

There are multiple layers to a Clans battle. There is your actual movement, which can take getting used to, with your legs moving on their own trajectory while you swivel your torso. There is your squad and how they’re deployed, which takes up many of your background thought cycles. And there is…

In the wake of those legal efforts against other Switch emulator developers, the Ryujinx developers posted an automated message on their Discord server in response to any questions about Ryujinx’s ultimate fate. “Nothing is happening to Ryujinx,” the message read. “We know nothing more than you do. No dooming.” A…

I was on vacation last week, the kind of vacation in which entire days had no particular plan. I had brought the ROG Ally X with me, and, with the review done and Windows still annoying me, I looked around at the DIY scene, wondering if things had changed since…

Your first Halls of Torment run starts with a basic warrior, but new classes quickly unlock, each with their own distinct weapons and gameplay rhythms. My favorite ended up being the exterminator class, which uses a flamethrower to simply turn everything around him into a wall of flame. If that’s…

It’s been exactly one year since the initial announcement of the Analogue 3D, an HD-upscaled, FPGA-powered Nintendo 64 in the tradition of Analogue’s long-running line of high-end retro machines. Today, Analogue is revealing more details about the hardware, which will sell for $250 and plans to ship in the first…

Months ago, 13-year-old Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson became the first person to “beat” NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 157-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael “dogplayingtetris” Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling…

Crafting in Alien: Isolation has a lot more purpose than in most first-person games. Credit: Sega Unlike almost any other game, however, you do not build out a skill tree, pile up an inventory, and blast your way through xenomorphs. You hide, you rig, you discover the remarkably rich backstory…

When we reviewed Diablo IV, the latest installment in the long-running action roleplaying game series last year, we said it was off to a hell of a good start. But ARPGs live and die by their endgame loops, and it was far too early at the time to accurately assess…

When faced with a legal threat from Nintendo, most alleged modders, ROM pirates, and/or emulator makers will simply give in to a cease-and-desist demand, reach an out of court settlement, or plead guilty rather than hiring legal representation for what could be a lengthy, costly trial. Then there’s Ryan Daly,…

Dreamhaven Studios provided a round-trip train from Washington, D.C. to New York and accommodation for one night so that Ars could play Sunderfolk and interview its creators. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. Tabletop board games and video games typically offer ways to reduce their difficulty. But getting and…

The longer a game’s DRM lasts, the fewer new sales are left to be affected by piracy. The longer a game’s DRM lasts, the fewer new sales are left to be affected by piracy. Credit: Entertainment Computing / William Volckmann Just how much money a publisher can expect to lose…

After a US court ruled earlier this week that Google must open its Play Store to allow for third-party app stores and alternative payment options, Microsoft is moving quickly to slide into this slightly ajar door. Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, posted on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday evening that the…

There comes a point in most experienced Steam shoppers’ lives where they wonder what would happen if their account was canceled or stolen, or perhaps they just stopped breathing. It’s scary to think about how many games in your backlog will never get played; scarier, still, to think about how…

A few years ago, the idea of running PC games on a Mac, in Linux, or on Arm processors would have been laughable. But the developers behind Asahi Linux—the independent project that is getting Linux working on Apple Silicon Macs—have managed to do all three of these things at once.…

The motion detectors reportedly work with various bed sizes, from twin to king. As users shift position, the clock’s display responds by moving on-screen characters from left to right and playing sound effects from Nintendo video games based on different selectable themes. A photo of Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo. A…

New York is still reeling from the pandemic. Almost 35,000 people have died from covid in the city; temporary morgues, in the form of refrigerated vans, were set up to store victims’ bodies. Many residents have left dense urban areas for leafier suburbs elsewhere in the state or in New…

On October 7th the Swedish Academy awarded Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer based in Britain, the Nobel prize in Literature for 2021 for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. He became the first…

Entering the White Cube gallery in London, visitors can hear the whirr of busy machinery. It is not difficult to locate the source of the noise: 100 vintage sewing machines have been lovingly restored and mounted on wooden school desks. A mix of Singer and Butterfly models, they come to…

It would be wrong to say that Irish people do not commemorate the Great Famine. Since Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom a century ago, generations of schoolchildren have learned that, between 1845 and 1855, the island’s population fell by perhaps a third after a million people died of…

Funny business, the suspension of disbelief. Some disbeliefs are more suspendable than others. In six decades on screen, James Bond has been played by seven actors. He has barely aged. He has hopscotched on the backs of crocodiles, surfed a tsunami and enjoyed a run of enemies who, after capturing…

Hollywood loves making films about the movie industry. In this genre, the peculiarities of Tinseltown are sent up—from the enormous egos of the stars to the preciousness of the screenwriters—but the message is that there really is no business like show business. “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), for example, ridicules its protagonist,…

The scene is familiar. Ranked rows of seats face a small platform, with desks full of administrative clutter: laptops, files and water bottles. A projector screen in the corner shows a PowerPoint slide. After the drama of scandal or the anguish of tragedy, it is this sort of banal setting…

Be careful how many episodes you watch in a sitting. As the old joke says of Scotch whisky, one hour of “Succession” is fine. Two may be too many: without intending to, you are liable to start mimicking the foul-mouthed way the characters all talk, threatening to “beast” a housemate…

EVERYONE THINKS they know Vincent van Gogh until they see “The Potato Eaters” (pictured). Painted in the Netherlands in 1885, it is as far in tone as could be imagined from the blazing sunflowers of his later work in the south of France. Five members of a farming household huddle…

The opening caption is too emphatic for standard punctuation. “While the events of this story are fictionalised,” it declares, “These. People. Existed.” The statement is true in that some of the characters in “The Harder They Fall”, Jeymes Samuel’s stylish revenge western, share their names, if not much else, with…

Orwell’s Roses. By Rebecca Solnit. Viking; 320 pages; $28. Granta; £16.99 Literary critics have been studying George Orwell’s novels and essays for almost a century, and it is well-established by now what political ideologies and ideas the writer was against. But by paying attention to one of his passions—horticulture—readers can…

The return of ABBA may be the biggest event in pop music so far this century. On November 5th the Swedish group, which quietly disbanded four decades ago, released a new album, entitled “Voyage”. With a Beatles reunion or a Michael Jackson comeback impossible, it is hard to envision anything…

IT IS HARDLY hyperbole to call the cultural fascination with Diana, Princess of Wales, cultish. Nearly a quarter of a century after her death in 1997, the stream of intrigue, betrayal, exploitation, obsession and recrimination seems in no more danger of running dry than it was during her lifetime. The…

MUSIC AND art have an entwined history. Nat King Cole sang of his appreciation for Leonardo da Vinci’s painting in “Mona Lisa”; Don McLean wrote the song “Vincent” after reading a biography of Van Gogh. (For his part, the Dutch artist hoped to use his work “to say something comforting…

THERE IS A tide in the affairs of men, and in performances of Shakespeare’s plays. The pageant of demagoguery in “Julius Caesar” seemed urgent during the ascent of Donald Trump. The dilemma in “Hamlet” over how to act in a rotten state made it popular in eastern Europe at the…

FROM A HOTEL room in Brazil come the shrieks of children at play and the clangs of construction work. Sung Tieu tussles with her noise-cancelling headphones before a calm silence sets in over Zoom. The Vietnamese-born, Berlin-based artist touched down for the 2021 Bienal de São Paulo the previous night,…

VENUS AND SERENA WILLIAMS may be two of the greatest sportspeople ever. Yet it is their father who has been granted a biopic while they are still waiting for theirs. Twenty years on from playing a champion himself in “Ali”, Will Smith stars as the middle-aged Richard Williams. At the…

The Shadows of Men. By Abir Mukherjee. Pegasus Crime; 352 pages; $25.95. Harvill Secker; £12.99 Abir Mukherjee’s series of novels set in colonial India is crime fiction at its finest. The Scottish-born author’s debut in 2016, “A Rising Man”, followed two officers of the Imperial Police Force, Captain Sam Wyndham…

Few film books get a blurb from both an iconoclastic auteur and Variety magazine. “I have gone through the intense garden of your book with the inducement of a fruit longtime forbidden,” Luis Buñuel, a Spanish surrealist director, wrote of Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art”. Hollywood’s industry publication…

You might not have heard of Pierre-François Lacenaire, but thanks to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, his story may ring a bell. The two men had a lot in common: blighted youths, gambling problems, flirtation with radical politics, prison time and a fascination with the criminal underworld. Lacenaire’s key resemblance, though, is not…

Note: this list is based on British release dates “Another Round”The winner of the Academy Award for Best International Feature, Thomas Vinterberg’s bittersweet comedy-drama has a teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) and his three best friends addressing their midlife crises by staying drunk throughout the working day. At first they are more…

The American porn industry has been largely ignored by its more respectable film-making counterpart. Movies that have touched on the subject have mostly been derisive comedies, such as “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” (2008), or semi-nostalgic throwbacks to an earlier era, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” (1997).…

They crowded onto the stage at the Coventry Cathedral in a flurry of colour and sequins. On December 1st Array Collective, a group of 11 Belfast-based artists, were declared the winners of this year’s Turner prize, Britain’s most prestigious contemporary-art award, worth £25,000 ($33,000). The collective, who transformed a room…

“Afrique Victime”. By Mdou Moctar The most vital, thrilling rock music of the past decade has often come not from Britain or America, but from west Africa—specifically from Tuareg musicians playing what has become known as “desert blues”. In the wake of Tinariwen and Imarhan (and others), Mdou Moctar has…

The simple black-and-white animation shows a pair of legs running, soon joined by others. The perspective changes to reveal a mother pulling her child along as buildings collapse around them. A voice asks: “What does the word ‘home’ mean to you?” Softly, another responds: “Home…it’s someplace safe.” There is a…

The new film from Adam McKay is a lot more believable than you might want a blackly comic disaster movie about the end of the world to be. In “Don’t Look Up”, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence star as Dr Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, two astronomers based at Michigan…

“Little full,” says Clark Griswold (pictured) as the untethered branches of the family Christmas tree smash the windows of his living room; “lot of sap.” Soon the tree is ignited by a rogue cigar—though not before a cat has been electrocuted by its lights. A squirrel jumps out of the…

“Bo Burnham: Inside”The musical comedian wrote, filmed, directed and edited this 90-minute show in his home during the pandemic. Though it never named covid-19 directly, it was a brilliant depiction of life in lockdown, particularly its strains: amusing tracks such as “FaceTime With My Mom (Tonight)” and “Looks Who’s Inside…

In the spring of 1967 Joan Didion was gathering material for an essay on the hippie movement. In Haight-Ashbury, a neighbourhood in San Francisco, a man named Otto promised to show her something that would “blow your mind”. He took her inside a house and pointed to a young child…

Walt Disney landed in France just days after the first world war ended. The 16-year-old was working as a driver for the Red Cross and spent nine months touring the country, stationed in outposts including the outskirts of Versailles and the Hôtel Régina (opposite the Louvre). When he was not…

Storytellers have always been fascinated by nature, particularly when it is hostile or its usual order perverted. In “Beowulf”, an Old English poem, abhorrent beings spring forth from marshes and watery caves to feast on human flesh. Gothic novelists used dark skies, whistling winds and misty moors to create a…

“This changes nothing.” Colonel Tom Parker made the now-notorious remark when his client, Elvis Presley, died in 1977. Yet the cold-blooded former fairground huckster was right: Presley would be the first of many artists to have a posthumous career that rivalled their mortal one. Death was just one more marketing…

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. It is New Year’s Eve, and bawdy revellers are enjoying a fancy-dress party on an American train; in the baggage compartment is a caged gorilla in the care of two…

The 79th annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony was held in the Beverly Hilton on January 9th, which means that photos of the guests’ dresses and clips of their speeches should be all over the internet by now. That’s certainly how things usually go. Organised by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association…

On December 27th, in a series of tweets, the Ugandan novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija described the president’s son as “obese”, a “fool” and an “inebriated curmudgeon”. The following day he tweeted again—to say that “gunmen are breaking into my house by force”. He has been detained ever since, in defiance of…

It is 50 years this month since the first airing of John Berger’s documentary series “Ways of Seeing”, which scrutinised the political meanings of art. Fifty years, too, since Berger published his Booker-prizewinning novel “G.”—a portrait of Europe just before the first world war, following the exploits of a modern…

The fifth film in the “Scream” series has a counter-intuitive title: “Scream”. That may be unhelpful to cinema-goers who are discussing the film, and to journalists who are writing about it, but it’s not unprecedented. The sequel to “Halloween” (1978), released in 2018, was called “Halloween”. Last year’s sequel to…

 Art #oil painting #painting #plants #portraits #Rafael Silveira #surreal December 17, 2023 Jackie Andres “Extravaso.” All images © Rafael Silveira, shared with permission Brazilian artist Rafael Silveira supplants heads with bunches of flowers, flocks of birds, and plumes of smoke in fantastical portraits that delve into the inner workings…

 Photography #animals #Ashraful Arefin #portraits #street photography December 14, 2023 Grace Ebert All images © Ashraful Arefin, shared with permission In Animals from the streets, photographer Ashraful Arefin takes a moment to greet the furry creatures that join the hustle and bustle of the city. Taken during the last…

 Art History Photography #art history #black and white #books #Frida Kahlo December 16, 2023 Grace Ebert Adolfo Best Maugard, María Luisa Cabrera de Block, and Frida Kahlo, (1945). All images © 2010 Banco de México in its capacity as Trustee in the Trust relating to the Diego Rivera and…

 Art #art history #painting #portraits December 15, 2023 Grace Ebert Rembrandt portraits Jan and Jaapgen. All images courtesy of Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp Standing just under eight inches tall, two oval portraits rediscovered after 200 years are now considered Rembrandt’s smallest formal works. On view at the Rijksmuseum, which houses the…

 Art Craft #Cécile Davidovici #embroidery #portraits #still life December 15, 2023 Jackie Andres All images © Cécile Davidovici, shared with permission Through densely embroidered still lifes and portraits, Cécile Davidovici stitches together a dialogue between time, objects, and nostalgia. Focusing on gesture and color, the Paris-based artist uses short,…

 Art Photography #Jason Chen #portraits #weaving December 14, 2023 Grace Ebert “Coming to an End.” All images © Jason Chen, shared with permission Rather than capture a single moment, Jason Chen (previously) weaves together photographs taken just seconds apart, creating disjointed portraits that convey movement and the passage of…

“Sanguines.” All images © Jon Ching, shared with permission We’re thrilled to announce our next limited-edition print release with Jon Ching (previously). Longtime Colossal readers will recognize Ching’s fantastic hybrids, which seamlessly meld flora and fauna into otherworldly compositions. In “Sanguines,” blush-colored petals and feathers merge into a delicately layered…