Those of us missing the John Wick universe can take heart, because Chad Stahelski—who created that franchise—is coming back early next year with a new dystopian action film. It's called Karōshi (a Japanese term that means "death overwork"), and Lionsgate released a killer trailer that puts this film at the top of my list of "must see" movies of 2027.

Dying from working too hard is a very real phenomenon, not just in Japan and much of Asia, but also in Sweden. The physical cause is usually stress-related heart attacks or strokes, as well as suicide (karōjisatsu in Japan). Writer/director Takashi Doscher has transported that concept to a grim, futuristic corporate Manhattan, specifically a company called Ikigai Technologies. Per the official premise:

Karōshi is an action-thriller set in a near-future Manhattan, where corporate loyalty and cultural tradition have reshaped everyday life. When a mysterious outsider infiltrates a powerful company after a worker’s death, he exposes the violent system hidden beneath its polished surface.

Teo Yoo (Past Lives) stars as the aptly named Hiro, who is clearly out for vengeance against the offending corporation. The cast also includes Takehiro Hira, so memorable in the 2024 miniseries Shōgun, as well as Giancarlo Esposito, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, Richard Harmon, Isabel May, and Show Kasamatsu.

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When Irene moved to San Francisco last year, she started using dating apps as a way to meet new people, get to know her new city, and connect with others who care about the things she does. After the 25-year-old analyst downloaded Hinge and started swiping, she noticed a trend.

"Hinge has a prompt where you can say, 'We'll get along if''," she recalls. "Sometimes people will be like, 'Fuck AI.'"

Usually, the people who include this kind of value statement on their profile work in the arts, nursing, maybe graphic design. Within the span of a few minutes of sitting down and swiping, Irene shows me a second profile where this happened once mo …

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Along with the rest of the world, we at Ars are mourning Sir Patrick Stewart—the beloved award-winning actor best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men franchise—who died Wednesday at the age of 86.

A statement released by Stewart's representatives said:

We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all. We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.

Through the actor's X account, the family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions be made to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources.

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In 2015, biomedical entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes was Silicon Valley's golden girl, lauded as the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire thanks to the company she founded, Theranos, which was valued at $9 billion at the height of its success. Then it all came crashing down when accusations of fraud surfaced about the company's signature blood-testing device, culminating in a sensational trial. Holmes was convicted on four counts and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Holmes is back in the headlines thanks to a new film, You Can See Everything, which depicts the final days before Holmes, having exhausted her appeals, went to prison. Co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it's a surreal, absurdist piece that has largely been received with gushing enthusiasm and no small amount of hype, with some declaring it the best film of the year. A few contrarian voices have emerged over the past week with much-needed reality checks, but there's no denying the film is destined to be an awards-season darling.

Pardon me for joining the buzzkills, but I cannot in good conscience jump on the You Can See Everything bandwagon. Sure, it has its moments, and the second half is highly entertaining, but there's nothing here to warrant all the breathless hyperbole. For all their much-touted access, Oppenheim and Fielder have produced a surprisingly shallow film that runs in circles, yielding very little fresh or novel insight—into Holmes, personally, or much else.

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Museums are pitching themselves as date-night destinations — and finding a generation of takers.

Let's face it, the mid-December box office will be dominated by Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three, but for those seeking fun holiday family fare, Jumanji: Open World opens the very next week on Christmas Day. Sony Pictures just released a new trailer for director Jake Kasdan’s sequel to his 2019 hit, Jumanji: The Next Level, teasing the usual wacky hijinks with a twist that calls back to the original 1995 film.

As previously reported, Kasdan gave the franchise a welcome major overhaul with the release of 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, updating the original board game into a vintage video game and giving us a hugely entertaining action-adventure. Welcome to the Jungle racked up over $960 million at the global box office and spawned the equally successful 2019 sequel Jumanji: The Next Level.

A third film was always in the cards: The Next Level featured a tantalizing mid-credits scene in which a heater repairman (Lamorne Morris) visits Spencer Gilpin’s (Alex Wolff's) house, sees the broken video game console, and inadvertently triggers the game. The COVID-19 pandemic paused the third film’s development, but things picked up again in 2024, and here we are. Per the official synopsis:

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The end of the year is fast approaching and with it, the pre-Christmas release of Dune: Part Three, the final installment in Denis Villeneuve's acclaimed adaptation of sci-fi author Frank Herbert's novel(s). Warner Bros. gave us a broody and haunting extended teaser in March and a July trailer jam-packed with tantalizing hints of what to expect, along with plenty of Easter eggs to delight avid book fans. Now we've got one last action-packed trailer setting up the final act for iconic anti-hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet).

(Spoilers for first two films in the franchise below.)

Previously, 2021’s Dune culminated in the brutal defeat of House Atreides by rival House Harkonnen, with Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), fleeing to the desert and taking refuge among the Fremen. Among them is Chani (Zendaya), whom Paul has been seeing in visions all along.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Sherlock Holmes, spawning countless novels, films, TV series, and so forth featuring the sleuth. Far fewer people know about the real-life inspiration for Holmes: a renowned surgeon at Scotland's University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s  The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.

In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. And last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, collaborated on an illustrated children's book, Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels.

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Peacock series Crystal Lake doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie when you first press play, even though it’s set up to be a prequel to the original film. (This review includes spoilers of the original Friday the 13th movie but avoids major Crystal Lake spoilers.)

Instead, Crystal Lake strives to build a drama that’s half homage, half uncharted territory, while giving a long-awaited backstory to Pamela Voorhees. The original villain in the first film, Pam Voorhees, shocked audiences in 1980 by popping up out of nowhere in the midst of a brutal camp counselor killing spree, then confronting the final girl with a Norman Bates-like delivery of the movie’s chilling tagline, “Kill her, mommy,” using the voice of her drowned son, Jason.

Although the hockey-masked killer, Jason Voorhees, became the horror icon at the center of the franchise, his mom, Pam, continued to fascinate fans, who knew very little about her. Beheaded in the first film after just 13 minutes onscreen, her spirit would occasionally appear in later films, but the original actor, Betsy Palmer, who portrayed Pam refused to return, largely because the character has no depth.

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A 25-year-old German experimental photographer has won the 2026 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition with a striking image of droplets of ink being deposited on paper by an inkjet printer. Ole Bielfeldt beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries.

Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents' attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father's camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand.

It was Bielfeldt's curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera's shutter speed. Bielfeldt's solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques.

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Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns next month for its third season. Prime Video unveiled a teaser earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con, but we haven't heard much about the new season otherwise. We now have the official full trailer, and it's jam-packed with a rising Sauron, who is intent on conquering Middle-Earth with his army of Orcs—with the fractured opposition of elves, dwarves, and men scrambling to figure out how best to stop him. We also meet the human men who will become the Ringwraiths; the showrunners have dubbed them the Nazgnagol ("Rings-servant").

(Some spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

Prime Video made a major investment in The Rings of Power when it acquired the rights to the source material from the Tolkien estate, even committing to multiple seasons upfront. S3 is set seven years after the events of S2 and opens when the war between the elves and Sauron is at its height. Per the official synopsis:

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Apple just revealed a new brand identity for Apple Music, with the expected turn to Liquid Glass. I’m not much of a fan of their new design language in general; this is where I admit that I’m still running MacOS Sequoia and have grumpy things to say about rounded corner radii and text legibility.

It’s just a trend, it will pass, and at some point I’ll probably cave and upgrade when it starts actually affecting my ability to get work done, or more importantly get security updates. Once I adjust, I’ll stop noticing it, and life will go on.

As such, I wouldn’t normally find an obvious rebrand like this notable, much less feel like I had much to say about it. But then I happened to catch Apple’s behind-the-scenes video in my YouTube recommendations, and I realized I did have thoughts.

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Carrie White, the telekinetic prom queen from hell, is one of the most beloved horror icons in popular culture. First introduced in Stephen King's 1974 novel, Carrie, the character was immortalized in director Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation, widely regarded as one of the best horror films of all time. It's certainly one of the best King adaptations. So Mike Flanagan faced a massive challenge when he signed on to create an eight-episode miniseries for Prime Video based on the book, released just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of de Palma's film.

I was among the skeptics who questioned why a Carrie miniseries was even necessary, although as a diehard Flanagan fan ("Flana-fan"?), I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If anyone has an affinity for smartly adapting horror in general, and King's work in particular, it's Flanagan. And you know what? With one (very big) exception, Flanagan pulls it off, giving us a richly textured version of the story that is as much about kindness and lost innocence as bloody, vengeful rage—although we get plenty of the latter, too.

(Many spoilers below for the novel and the 1976 film, but there are no major reveals for the new series until after the second gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

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About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest.

The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.

The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.

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The trailers for HBO's DC Universe series Lanterns teased a show that eschewed the usual superhero hijinks in favor of a gritty realism more in the vein of True Detective or Slow Horses. Personally, I liked the change. My verdict: Ignore the review bombing; it's wonderful. The season wrapped with an emotionally charged, almost elegiac finale that fully delivered on that initial promise. I've found the rebooted DC Universe films released thus far to be enjoyable but rather forgettable, even when the positives outweigh the negatives. But Lanterns is a shining beacon of what is possible when someone is allowed to get really creative within the genre.

(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are two primary storylines. The first takes place in 2016 with a mass shooting at a local football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Current Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his new trainee, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), get involved in the investigation, to the annoyance of Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who initially doesn't think the case has any extraterrestrial connection. She is soon proved wrong when the suspect (an alien) self-detonates. Hal's power ring controls the damage, but the mystery remains.

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