Movies

​Last week Samsung revealed it would cease production on Blu-ray players for the US market. Despite 2018 recording all-time high home entertainment spending, sales of physical media such have been dramatically declining over the past few years. Is this the beginning of the end for physical media?​

A few months ago, Canadian company SideFX quietly released an update to its bleeding-edge Houdini procedural animation software, which handles the physics behind CGI. This stunning video pulls back the curtain on the process behind so much of today's cinema and gaming.

Our sense of smell is now being used to help sell the illusion of virtual reality with the FeelReal VR Mask, which not only wafts certain scents your way but can also simulate rain, heat and wind on your face.

​Movies can receive Adults-Only or Adult-Accompaniment ratings for a number of reasons, although quite often it's due to scenes that are too upsetting for younger viewers. According to a new study, it may soon be possible to arrive at such ratings simply by testing the air in a theater.

In recent years, licensing deals with the likes of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and others have helped Lego stay relevant, and the block-making company's latest product taps into another world-famous franchise: James Bond. The spy's classic Aston Martin DB5 is now available to buy in Lego form.

Amazon has announced the latest in its line of Alexa-enabled streaming devices, the Fire TV Cube, which lets you bark voice commands at the TV and other devices from across the room, and access other Alexa mainstays like weather and sports updates.

Epic Games recently unveiled a remarkable demonstration of its latest real-time digital rendering system called Unreal Engine. The demonstration showed a completely digital copy of actor Andy Serkis reciting lines from Macbeth illustrating the rapid evolution of photorealistic digital effects.

As Netflix steps into the blockbuster movie territory and MoviePass brings new disruptions to an old model, we witness a transformative moment for the movie business. What can theaters do to rekindle their dwindling audiences? Is the answer in the same technology that is threatening its existence?​

​We've seen some incredible instruments from Fender Custom Shop's Yuriy Shishkov in the last couple of years. And now the Master Builder has teamed up with Jim Dolmage to create a guitar and amp which pay a not-so-subtle homage to The Who's iconic 1975 rock opera, Tommy.​

​Sci-fi is now the mainstream and we’re seeing millions spent bringing stories to the screen that are gloriously weird and fantastically futurist. Here are our picks looking forward to 2018 on both the big and small screens, from blockbuster sci-fi spectacle to compelling hard science speculations.

Hollywood has test screened films for years, but what if instead of subjectively asking people whether they liked a film you could objectively look inside their brain and find out? How has science begun infiltrating the test screening process in Hollywood?

​In the wake of Peter Cushing's digital resurrection in "Star Wars: Rogue One" debate is once again raging around the ethics of re-purposing the images of long dead actors. How do we deal with the murky legal and ethical waters surrounding this discomforting territory?