Author: Polygon

The Last of Us has been widely celebrated not only as the “best video game adaptation of all time,” but also as the ostensibly simplest to jump from pixel to picture. And in many ways, HBO’s The Last of Us earned that reputation. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have a keen sense of what to expand, and each version wields impressive technical control over locale and light that makes the post-apocalyptic vision feel real. There’s the strong cast, led by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, giving two career-best performances that have the emotional stopping power of a sawed-off shotgun.…

Pokémon Go is having a Slowpoke and Galarian Slowpoke Community Day event on March 18 from 2-5 p.m. in your local time. As expected with a Community Day event, Slowpoke and Galarian Slowpoke will spawn in huge numbers with a high chance to appear shiny. There are also several other bonuses and perks, which we’ve listed out below. How do I catch a shiny Slowpoke? According to research conducted by Pokémon community site The Silph Road, Shiny rates on Community Days are about 1 in 24, which means that if you keep playing throughout the three-hour window, you should find…

A Black Lotus card from Magic: The Gathering — considered to be the most sought-after card from Magic, and perhaps from any trading card game — has sold at auction for a record $540,000, the highest ever bid for a Magic card. It’s an impressive figure, albeit one that suggests the market for collectible trading card game cards has stabilized after years of explosive growth. An almost identical example of a Black Lotus sold two years ago for $510,000. Like the card in the present auction, it was given a perfect Gem Mint 10 rating for its condition by the…

In December 1983, the great movie director Jonathan Demme, who went on to make Silence of the Lambs, spent three nights filming the art-rock band Talking Heads at a theater in Los Angeles. He cut the footage together, being careful to preserve the shape of the band’s very theatrical show, and released it as the concert movie Stop Making Sense. Most critics agree it’s the greatest concert film of all time. Now movie studio A24 has acquired the rights to the 1984 film, and has announced that it will release a 4K restoration of it in theaters later this year.…

The Mandalorian season 3, episode 3 resurrects two recognizable faces from seasons past: Dr. Pershing, the Empire-affiliated clone scientist played by Omid Abtahi, and Elia Kane, a Moff Gideon crony. Their reappearances come fully loaded; “Chapter 19: The Convert” is The Mandalorian’s most political hour, and one of its messiest. Star Wars has never been more “I’m just asking questions!” than in Pershing’s peculiar redemption arc and Elia’s return, which seems poised to connect the Disney Plus show to the Star Wars sequel trilogy. [Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for all of The Mandalorian through “The Convert.”] Last year’s…

Ghostface has returned for yet another killing spree in Scream 6 and this time he’s in the Big Apple. In the latest installment, the multi-identity masked killer returns to stalk the four survivors of Scream 5. Scream 6 opened to the best weekend box office of the series so far, cresting $44 million in its first few days. With success like that it seems like a given that another Scream movie is on the way, but a new entry in the series hasn’t been announced, officially. With that in mind, here’s everything we know about what Scream 7 might look…

Myst is one of the most revered point-and-click adventure games of all time, known for it’s meditative nature and thoughtful narrative. But what if you threw all of that Zen-like exploration of a strange, beautiful island right out the window? The team at Woe Industries was brave enough to ask this question, and the answer they delivered is Myst FPS, a “point-and-kill” adventure game that tasks the player with something truly novel — killing demons with a gun. You can play Myst FPS on the itch.io page for Woe Industries. The game, created by Peter Henningsen and Steven Nass, tasks…

Though the Scream movies are happy to name-check famous slasher villains like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees, they will always stand apart from the slasher-franchise pantheon because of their murder-mystery structure. Ghostface isn’t a character or a near-supernatural entity: It’s a costume, ready to be doffed at the climax of each movie. Every Scream film ends by unveiling which character has been hunting and stabbing (or in the latest series installment, Scream VI, occasionally shotgun-blasting) the other characters, and presenting a media-savvy monologue about their motivations. And since these horror movies are also meta breakdowns of horror movies,…

None of the six donkeys that star in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Oscar contender EO will receive a statue at the 2023 Oscars ceremony, even if the film does pull off an unlikely upset in the Best International Feature Film category against its stiffest competition, Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Animals aren’t eligible for Academy Awards, though plenty of movies embraced by the Academy have featured animal actors, like Terry (Toto in The Wizard of Oz) and Popcorn Deelites (Seabiscuit in Seabiscuit). But centering EO on a donkey as the subject rather than as an object, as the star…

This initial spoiler-free take on Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves comes from the movie’s debut at the 2023 SXSW Conference. We’ll have more in-depth coverage as the movie’s release date approaches. We’re living in a new golden age for fantasy movies and shows. Gone is the time when epic fantasy adventures were given low budgets that crippled production, or scripts that showed open disdain for the genre. Now, elves, dragons, and magic are as big a part of the pop culture zeitgeist as sitcoms were in the ’90s. And yet, thanks to the huge success of Game of Thrones,…