Jarring, visceral and all too plausible, Alex Garland’s Civil War is a must see

In his filmmaking career, Alex Garland has terrified us with zombies, infectious alien hybrids, murderous men and A.I. run amuck. Civil War, the writer and director’s latest film, is not only his most ambitious entry but also his most plausible. The press notes for Civil War describe the setting as “near-future America,” but it feels like … Read more

“Dune” and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

A trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” features the boy prophet Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, yelling something foreign and uninterpretable to a horde of desert people. We see Chalamet as the embodiment of charismatic fury: every facial muscle clenched in tension, his voice strained and throaty and commanding. A line at the … Read more

Cop drama Allegiance aims to show flaws, possibilities in justice system

Mark Ellis was nervous coming aboard another show about police officers. Not least because police procedurals have become an even more crowded media sub-genre since he co-created Flashpoint in 2008. But Ellis was more worried about making such a show when concerns around community and police relationships have reached a fever pitch. “So what do you do … Read more

Lunar lander issue complicates privately-led U.S. moon mission

A robotic lander built by a private company suffered a technical problem on its way to the moon on Monday, threatening to upend the first U.S. soft lunar landing in over 50 years. The issue with the lander’s propulsion system followed a successful launch of a new Vulcan rocket debuted by a joint venture of … Read more

This UBC grad has discovered thousands of likely planets across our cosmos

At 30 years old, Michelle Kunimoto already has more than 3,000 planet candidates under her belt. Inspired by science fiction and curiosity, the University of British Columbia astronomy graduate is passionate about searching for exoplanets — bodies orbiting stars outside our own solar system. She’s currently leading a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hunting for them. … Read more

Colonialism contributed to extinction of woolly dogs valued by Indigenous people, study suggests

For thousands of years, a breed of white, woolly dog played an important and cultural role for Coast Salish people in Western Canada but when colonists moved in the animal quickly became extinct, a new study says. It started with a dog named Mutton that died in 1859. Its pelt had been in a collection at the … Read more

Review: Joanne McNeil’s “Wrong Way” Takes the Shine Off the Self-Driving Car

Car companies have been experimenting with driverless cars for decades, but their presence on roads has exploded in recent years. It became increasingly common, beginning in the twenty-tens, to see robo-taxi prototypes driving around on public streets, albeit with human “safety drivers” sitting inside, ready to take over and compensate for machine error. Then the … Read more