Hellish

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThe Zone of Interest – which has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture – issues a warning from just outside the walls of Auschwitz, spreading its soul-sickness across each frame. It studies the domestic life of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the real-life commandant at the Polish concentration camp where an estimated 1.1 million people – 960,000 of them Jewish – were…

Hubble has helped astronomers measure changes in the weather on an exoplanet – and it won’t be topping anyone’s travel lists. Forecasts for the planet Tylos predict a gigantic hurricane today with a top of over 3,000 °F (1,650 °C), followed by a strong chance of showers of molten iron tonight.Astronomers spend a lot of their time hunting for exoplanets that could be potentially habitable. We’re looking for rocky worlds with a stable climate, comfy temperatures, plenty of water, shelter from radiation, and preferably a…

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has completed its first ultra-close flyby of the hellish moon Io. The spacecraft has been orbiting our solar system’s gas giant, Jupiter, for several years now, completing multiple flybys of the moons and objects found within the Jovian system. This is the first time Juno has flown so close to Io, though it has captured images of Io in the past.This particular flyby brought the iconic spacecraft within 920 miles of Io’s surface. The dense moon is the fourth largest satellite within the…

Cinema has a troubled relationship with the Holocaust. It is repeatedly drawn to the subject, which seems to offer a shortcut to moral gravity, emotional depth and the highest possible stakes – elements every storyteller yearns for – and yet there is so much that can go wrong.For one thing, the very act of depicting the horror of the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews risks minimising it. To pick one crude example, no matter how extreme a diet an actor might undertake, they can never resemble the Muselmänner, the walking…

Quordle 689 answer for December 14: The Thursday puzzle is all set to annoy and frustrate you today with words that are quite challenging to guess correctly. Usually, Quordle keeps its difficult puzzles for the end of the month, but even as we have entered a new month, it shows no signs of mercy. On top of that, the game picked a weekend for a tough puzzle when people are already in holiday mode and are not focusing too well. And this combination can lead to a disaster today, given the nature of the puzzle. So, don't…

When I was a kid growing up in the Berkeley flatlands I used to play with a couple of neighbor kids, Tony and his little brother, Mikey. One day in 1979, two men got out of a car, approached Tony and Mikey’s house, and beat another man with a club. The neighborhood buzz was that the assailants were from a group called Synanon, and they were unhappy that their victim had left the group. I was nine at the time, and none of this made sense. But it all came rushing back as I watched Born in Synanon, a new Paramount +…

In a surprising twist, German astronomers have uncovered the presence of oxygen in Venus's atmosphere, challenging the conventional understanding of the planet's composition. The revelation, which spans both the day and night sides of Venus, could hold key insights into the stark differences between Earth and its so-called "Second self." Despite Venus being Earth's closest neighbour and sharing a strikingly similar size, with a radius of 6,052 km compared to Earth's 6,371 km, the two planets have notably distinct…

Quordle 506 answer for June 14: Some days, the puzzle does not throw any trick words with one weird element in it. Instead, it just picks some difficult words and asks us to show our cognitive abilities to solve them. Today is one of those days. You are getting four words where none of them are easy to figure out but neither are exceptionally hard either. If your basics of the game are good and you feel confident, you can go on and try to solve it on your own. But if you value your winning streak, then we would recommend…

The hunt for alien life has been long and arduous, with disappointing revelations. While we have yet to discover proof of aliens out there, our means of finding alien life in the universe are steadily advancing, and the latest development comes thanks to a hellish planet found 12 light-years from Earth. The planet in question is a small rocky world known as YZ Ceti b. This planet orbits a small star, completing each rotation in two days. That quickness means the planet is much too close to its star, making its…

Solar activity has been on the rise ever since the turn of 2023, but the month of March in particular witnessed some record-breaking solar storms. In the second week of the month, the Earth suffered the blow of a G3-class geomagnetic storm that delayed a SpaceX rocket launch and disrupted the operations of oil rigs in Canada. Worse was to come. In the third week of March, the worst solar storm in six years, a G4-class geomagnetic storm struck the Earth. And now, the planet must brace for another ordeal as solar winds,…