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Only seven months after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth in 1961, transforming the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union from the Space Age into the Space Race (Destination: Moon), Marvel Comics's editor-in-chief/writer Stan Lee and artist Jack “King” Kirby introduced a radically new superhero team, the Fantastic Four -- Reed Richards, a genius-level scientist and serial inventor, Sue Storm, Richard’s soon-to-be spouse and equal in practically every respect, Johnny Storm, Sue’s physically gifted, quick-tempered brother, and Ben Grimm, Reed’s rock-steady best friend, and ace-level airplane/space jet pilot -- to comic-book readers. Soon dubbed Marvel’s "First Family" by the super-team's fervid fanbase, the Fantastic Four reflected the hope, optimism, and positivity of early 60s...

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The Twilight Zone remains one of the most influential TV series of all time. The anthology format provided a wealth of storytelling opportunities that series creator Rod Serling and his team transformed into dark, witty parables about the human condition. The sci-fi horror trappings made a perfect hook, and resulted in timeless episodes like "It's a Good Life," "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." However, even the best series have a few misfires here and there, particularly in anthology shows where the quality can vary greatly from episode to episode. Furthermore, the ironic twist endings that became the show's signature require a good deal of narrative weaving to work the way they should.

Not all of them reached that goal, and some of them generated a great deal of bafflement in their efforts to work out the various narrative kinks. While the best episodes...

Get the latest scoop on everything you need to know about today’s repeat Jeopardy! episode airing on Monday, 19 August 2024 including the Final Jeopardy, contestants and today’s winner!

Today’s Final Jeopardy – Monday, 19 August 2024 Today's Final Jeopardy Trailblazers - The foremost member of the “Sochi Six,” which was similar to a previous U.S. group, he died in a plane crash in 1968

Today’s Final Jeopardy Answer – Monday, 19 August 2024 Final Jeopardy Answer Who is Yuri Gagarin? Today’s Results & Who Won Jeopardy! Tonight – Monday, 19 August 2024 Returning ChampionContestantContestant Dan Pawson

Arlington, Virginia

Global Health Consultant

Final Score: $0

Round 2 Score: $6,400

Round 1 Score: $3,200Pam Mueller

Originally Chicago, Illinois

Justice Researcher

Final Score: $0

Round 2 Score: $16,800

Round 1 Score: $6,800Andrew He

Concord, California

Stay-at-home Dad

Winning Score: $33,601

Round 2 Score: $33,600

Round 1 Score: $600 Final Jeopardy Video & Today’s Highlights Jeopardy! Recaps

Final Jeopardy 8/19/24 & Who Won Monday, 19 August 2024Final Jeopardy 8/16/24 & Who Won Friday, 16 August 2024Final Jeopardy 8/15/24 & Who Won Thursday,...

Chemistry has always been Hollywood’s secret sauce, and, for rom-coms at least, the high-water mark remains the pairing of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Most cineastes can name their first collaboration (Pillow Talk in 1959), but the others — Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964) — don’t come to mind so quickly. As a brand, though, these two have more than endured in pop culture, and writers and directors have had to work harder and harder to find a way to recapture that magic, since we now know very well that it requires a great deal more than just putting a couple of good-looking famous people together.

Peyton Reed came close in 2003’s with his stylish, early-’60s period pastiche Down with Love, casting Renee Zellweger alongside Ewan McGregor, and Olivia Wilde certainly did not with 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, lumbering Florence Pugh with Harry Styles in a risible ’50s-themed sci-fi.

Ben Grimm is mad. The ace pilot would do almost anything for his college pal Dr. Reed Richards, the super-genius who has designed an experimental rocket. But Ben worries about cosmic rays surrounding the planet and threatens to drop out of the project.

“Ben, we’ve got to take that chance,” interjects friend Sue Storm. “Unless we want the Commies to beat us to it.”

With that Ben takes up the mission. Because if there’s one thing that Benjamin J. Grimm hates, its Commies. Well, at least that’s what Ben hated in the 1960s. And so he joins Reed, Sue, and Sue’s brother Johnny on a trip into space, a trip that will expose them to cosmic rays, transforming Ben into the Thing, Reed into Mr. Fantastic, Sue into Invisible Girl, and Johnny into the Human Torch. Together, they will form the Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four #1 by...

Bethesda's latest video game release, Starfield, is an expansive science fiction RPG set in the year 2330. Although it features interesting storytelling, an outstanding soundtrack, as well as many other impressive gameplay mechanics, undoubtedly the most impressive (and occasionally most boring) feature of the game is the universe-sized map featuring over 1,000 unique planets spread across 100 star systems. Each planet has distinctive resources, weather, climates, flora, and fauna, making for a truly enormous experience.

Although Bethesda has developed a reputation for creating enormous and immersive environments in its video games, nothing the studio has produced before comes close to the enormity of Starfield's map. Although a point of criticism has been Starfield's occasionally barren atmosphere, Bethesda's executive producer Todd Howard and managing director Ashley Cheng indicated in an interview that it was largely an intentional choice, as to simulate the sensation of the player's smallness. Irrespective of intention, while not all 1,000 planets are full of interesting activities,...

Players can recruit historic aviator Amelia Earhart as a companion in Starfield, adding a fun and adventurous element to their journeys through the galaxy. To recruit Amelia Earhart, players must complete the "Operation Starseed" quest, which involves interacting with various historical clones and repairing a defunct cloning facility. While players can form romantic relationships with certain companions in Starfield, unfortunately, Amelia Earhart is not one of them. However, her exploratory nature and combat skills make her a likable and valuable companion in the game.

There are a wide variety of companions to recruit in Starfield, but one of them seems to have walked right out of a history book. Each companion in Starfield is different: some of them are friends and allies who devote their lives to the player character, some of them are mere mercenaries who can be hired for a fee, and some of them land somewhere in between.

Starfield's robotic companion, Vasco, can address the player character by name, but only from a set list of over 1,000 names. The list of names that Vasco can recognize in Starfield includes nods to iconic science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert, as well as characters from popular sci-fi movies like Blade Runner, Alien, and Akira. The inclusion of Yuri Gagarin, Neal Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin on the list pays tribute to the pioneers of the space race and their significant contributions to space exploration. Vasco's own name is a reference to Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama.

Starfield has a feature which lets the player character's name be spoken by Vasco, the game's robotic companion, but there's a set list of names that are viable. It's a feature lifted straight out of Fallout 4, where Codworth recgonized certain names and would address the player as such. It's a nice personal touch,...

In October 2021, a few days after he became the oldest person in history to travel to space, William Shatner blocked me on Twitter. To be fair, it may have been an inauspicious moment to publicly ask the 90-year-old, who had spent around three minutes floating around Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket before returning to Earth, whether he had actually traveled high enough to reach the official definition of space. Needless to say, Shatner had a lot on his mind at the moment, as the ensuing year and a half made clear.

While the “Star Trek” O.G. had spent many years contemplating his sci-fi legacy from that show, the cosmic experience of witnessing the planet from above made him far more concerned about the fragility of the Earth. In tandem with various other multimedia projects, the now 91-year-old Shatner has become a bonafide climate change activist, and that cause has...

Hollywood star William Shatner felt a sense of “grief” when he went up to space.

The actor, who is known for his starring role as Captain Kirk in the ‘Star Trek’ franchise, became the oldest person ever to reach space when he blasted off on Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard Ns-18 rocket in October 2021 but has revealed that the experience wasn’t as “beautiful” as he thought it was going to be, reports aceshowbiz.com.

He said: “I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things–that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.

“I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was...

Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s remarkable drama Gagarine is one of the best films of 2022. Centered on Youri, a 17-year-old engineer who is likely on the spectrum, and his hyper-fixation on space, we witness his struggles to cope with the abandonment from his mother and the imminent destruction of his apartment complex. As the building empties out entirely, he sets out to transform his home into a spaceship, crafting an escape from the hardships of the world and finding a way to keep his building intact forever. While on this journey of keeping his home alive, he begins a relationship with Diana, a young Romani woman who figures out the way to communicate with him properly. Youri is forced to reckon between the hardships of the real world, and the fragile beauty of his dreams.

Gagarine is an incredibly intimate and compassionate film, one that never makes fun of...

Forget the romanticized versions of Paris and its surrounding areas that often dominate both film and TV — “Gagarine” gets brutally real about the City of Lights.

Although the film’s narrative is a work of fiction, there is a real grounding to it that confronts the issues of displacement working-class and poor people increasingly face. Setting the story at the now-demolished Cité Gagarin housing project on the outskirts of Paris helps accomplish that.

Named for the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space, the Gagarine building is a character unto itself. The film’s protagonist Youri (played by Alséni Bathily) even derives his name from the iconic figure. But even though young Youri has dreams of also traveling to space, being poor makes realizing them tough. Co-directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh have professional experience with public policies of displacement and have incorporated that into...

Editor’s note: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had tragic consequences for the Ukrainian people, and the wider ramifications of the conflict are only beginning to be understood. As the West imposes economic sanctions on Russia, the country is facing a period of isolation unseen since the Cold War. Here, acclaimed Russian novelist and journalist Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of the sci-fi novel series Metro 2033, writes about how Russian propaganda has taken hold of his fellow countrymen. He is based in Europe. The column is translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz.

***

Russia’s state-controlled media would have you believe that its army is conducting a special operation to de-Nazify Ukraine, liberating Kharkov, Mariupol, and Nikolaev from Nazi battalions. The operation is going according to plan, they say, and would already have been brought to a victorious conclusion had the Nazi fighters not taken civilians hostage. These Nazi fighters are blowing up apartment buildings and hospitals,...

The retaliatory ban on all things Russian by businesses, organizations, and individuals concerned with that country’s Ukraine invasion continued today. The Fiapf (Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films, translated as the International Federation of Film Producers Associations) has acted against two film festivals from that country. The organization announced earlier today that the Moscow International Film Festival and Message to Man International Film Festival have had their accreditation paused “until further notice.” The Fiapf, created in 1933, has 36 member associations and provides accreditations to 47 film festivals. It helps producers deal with copyright issues, intellectual property rights, anti-piracy, technology standardization and trade issues. Being accredited by the Fiapf means that a festival commits itself to implementing standards defined by Fiapf members, including clear procedures for submission and competition, and concern regarding the security of screeners, prints and piracy in theatres. Essentially, it means a loss of prestige and favor among international film festivals,...

Six decades after Yuri Gagarin was gently ushered off the surface of our planet and out into orbit—with his life as an Earth-man coming to an end while he was born anew as the galaxy’s first space-man… and then born anew again as an Earth-man when he landed back on the ground—Russia has dealt the United States another…...

This mesmerising debut about a teenager looking to fix up his Paris estate passes up the usual angry social-realism in favour of something more celestial

We are used to seeing Paris’s tough banlieues filmed with a kind of blistering verité. Think of La Haine and Ladj Ly’s recent Les Misérables – angry films about the pressure cooker caused by poverty, police racism, underfunding and official neglect. Now with their mesmerising debut, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh bring something different to the suburbs. The pair filmed this poetic movie, with its streak of magical realism, in Cité Gagarine, a redbrick housing estate on the outskirts of Paris, just before it was demolished in 2019. Built in 1961, it was named after Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Which might explain why this is a movie looking up at the stars.

It opens with actual footage of Gagarin visiting in the early 60s,...

A common trend amongst autistic people is the desire to escape, to exist outside of ourselves and transport into another realm. There is this consistent appeal and magnetism to the idea of going to space, of floating amongst the void where there is no weight or sound to overwhelm or trigger you. While the realities of space are terrifying and dangerous, there is something about its endless possibilities that inspires that desire for so many of us throughout our lives, a fixation that we can devote all our knowledge and passions towards. In our reality, autistic people experience discrimination and a lack of proper support throughout the world, especially if they’re poor or a person of color. There is little state assistance for autistic people, a societal lack of knowledge about what being autistic actually means, and explicit hatred from ableists. While being autistic is often beautiful and not...

On 12 April, 1961, Klushino-born pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into space. Despite all the rivalries of the cold war, he would become an inspiration for people all around the world. Set in a real life French housing project which bears his name, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's magical realist fable follows a teenage boy named Youri (played by newcomer Alseni Bathily) who is cared for by the wider community after his troubled mother abandons him. When the estate is scheduled to be demolished, Youri doesn't want to leave, but scavenges among the empty apartments, corridors and elevator shafts, building his own capsule in an attempt to escape from a world which seems to have no place for him.

A modern fairy tale set among the poor and outcast on the fringes of Parisian society, Gagarine balances its strange beauty with scenes showing the casual brutality.

Stargazing in Gagarine. Co-director Jérémie Trouilh: 'We found inspiration in such films as 2001 A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner and Solaris. We also felt kinship to such directors as Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho - directors who mix genres and who have a point of view on our society' Photo: Photo Haut et Court Picture the scene in the Sixties when Yuri Gagarin, Russia’s first man in space, returned from his mission and ended shortly thereafter on a housing scheme in Paris on a special visit to inaugurate a block of brutalist flats to be named after him.

Filmmakers Fanny Liotard and Jérémie Trouilh stumbled on archive black and white footage during researches for their feature film Gagarine and knew immediately that it would provide the perfect opening segment.

Gagarine directors Fanny Liotard and Jérémie Trouilh: 'They did not want us to portray them in a downbeat way but in an optimistic manner.

It’s been 25 years since “La Haine” made the banlieue a staple of French cinema. On the back of Mathieu Kassovitz’s cinematic Molotov cocktail, movies such as “Girlhood,” “Divines,” “Cuties” and “Les Miserables” have made the concrete jungles on the outskirts of Paris a haven for cineastes. But none of them are quite like Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s remarkable “Gagarine,” which mixes French social realism with Latin American magical realism before adding a dose of stardust from space movie classics, “Solaris,” “2001” and “Star Wars.”

“Gagarine” was a Cannes Official Selection label, unveiling at the Marché du Film Online, where it was a buzz title for Totem Films, selling out around the planet. The Haut et Court production is currently playing in competition at the Cairo Film Festival.

The film is a skillful blend of reality and fiction, making use of archive material and an exciting young French...

The Disney+ series, The Right Stuff, is about trailblazers, but as a TV show, it stands in a crowd.

Shows about astronauts and space agencies seem to be back in vogue because For All Mankind, Space Force, Away, and Moonbase 8 made their debuts, too.

Mega franchises, Star Trek and Star Wars continue to boldly go and explore a galaxy far, far away.

And since the 1983 film version is beloved and iconic, the comparisons between the two were inevitable.

Yet, as I was watching The Right Stuff, I wasn't comparing it to any of those other shows or the film. What I kept being reminded of, and wanted to watch instead, was HBO's From The Earth To The Moon.

Produced by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks (who also directed and acted in it), From The Earth To The Moon was HBO's 1998 mini-series chronicling the U.S. space program from NASA's reaction...

New series The Right Stuff, now streaming on Disney+, tells the incredible tale of

America's first astronauts

. Called the Mercury 7, the seven astronauts and their families became instant celebrities as they took part in the historic Project Mercury, each competing to become the first man in space. Launched into both fame and danger, the Mercury 7 would go down in history as fighters, go-getters, and risk-takers, all eventually flying into space. However, in the end, their destinies turned out to be very different.

Why Did NASA Start Project Mercury?

In 1958, during one of the most intense moments of the Cold War, the newly formed NASA was forced to go big or go home when it came to the space race. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, shocking the world with the idea of American technological inferiority. And although NASA was the first to launch a nonhuman...

Titles from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Lithuania, and Italy also selected.

Cannes 2020 official selection title Gagarine, and Halina Reijn’s Dutch thriller Instinct are two of the six titles nominated for the European Discovery 2020 Prix Fipresci.

The prize is presented annually as part of the European Film Awards (Efa) to a director for a first full-length feature film.

Written and directed by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, and co-written by Benjamin Charbit, Gagarine is about a teenager who fights to save his home town – named after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin – from demolition. France’s Totem Films sold US rights to Cohen Media Group...

This The Right Stuff review contains no spoilers.

It’s impossible to see The Right Stuff, Disney+’s new drama series about NASA’s Mercury 7 astronauts, and not think about the award-winning 1983 film of the same name, but those comparisons don’t do this streaming series version any favors. Where the film is widely and rightly lauded for its authentic and ultimately inspiring depiction of the real lives behind the men who pioneered the U.S. space program, the small-screen version of The Right Stuff never gets off the ground.

On paper, I almost always enjoy an uplifting tale of humanity’s infinite possibility to do and be better than we have been, and regularly weep over stories about our collective ability to work together to achieve great things. Space stories are a particularly potent example of both of those things, as humans look toward the stars and risk their...

Actors can feel the crushing gravity of expectations when playing real-life figures, even if they’re playing astronauts. For the cast and creatives behind The Right Stuff, shooting the TV adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s iconic novel about the Mercury 7 and birth of NASA took on added historical significance during the summer of 2019, with July 20th marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

The series from National Geographic, which begins streaming on Disney+ on Oct. 9, shot at Universal Studios in Orlando, in close proximity to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The day the crew filmed the first mission control scene, a NASA advisor sat in on a separate rehearsal with the director and the cast, pointing out which buttons to press and the correct terminology to use, going as far to help re-write lines in the script.

“It just made the whole thing feel so authentic,...

When humans first landed on the moon in July 1969, among the tens of millions of people watching was a rapt 10-year-old in England, future filmmaker Robert Stone.

“It was like four o’clock in the morning,” Stone recalls. “My mother woke me up, sat me down in front of the TV, and we watched…It was kind of in the sweet spot of life where it left really an indelible impression upon me.”

Five decades later Stone immersed himself anew in NASA’s historic lunar mission to write and direct the documentary Chasing the Moon for the PBS series American Experience. The six-hour film, told in three parts, is nominated in the prestigious Emmy category of Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.

“I was really looking to try to make a film that would capture my memory of what it was like growing up as a child in this time where...

A boy, a building and a looming big bang: Out of these elements French directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh create a wondrous debut feature that derives such a crackle of authenticity from the physical reality of its setting that its starry-eyed metaphysics seem uncannily plausible too. A fiction set and shot around a real event — the August 2019 demolition of the huge Cité Gagarine, a 370-apartment housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris — “Gagarine” is dream built from debris, a rocketship made from rubble, and a touching tribute to stratospheric aspirations thriving against the odds in even the most maligned and marginalized communities. We may be in the suburbs, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Youri (superb newcomer Alséni Bathily) is one such stargazer. A 16-year-old Black kid with a shy smile and gift for engineering, he has lived his whole life in Gagarine. On the one hand,...

Paris-based sales company Totem Films has unveiled a teaser for “Gagarine,” a feature debut by Fanny Liatard and Jeremy Trouilh which is part of Cannes’ Official Selection.

Totem Films will be hosting two virtual market screening at Cannes’ online Marché du Film that kicks off on Monday. Haut et Court, one of France’s top arthouse distributors, will release “Gagarine” locally on Feb. 10.

The movie is headlined by an attractive cast, including the newcomer Alséni Bathily, rising actors Lydia Khouri, Jamil McCraven (“Nocturama”), Finnegan Oldfield (“Bang Gang”), as well as well-known thesp Denis Lavant (“Holy Motors”).

The movie tells the story of Youri, a French teenager who has lived all his life in Gagarine Cité, a huge, red-brick housing project on the outskirts of Paris. When Youri finds out about plans to demolish his community’s home, he joins his friends Diana and Houssam on a mission to save Gagarine.

Brian Eno strongly believes he saw the flight path overhead of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to travel into space, when he was 12. “I was very excited by it,” he recalls now. But within a few years he lost his interest in space travel. By the time Neil Armstrong bested Gagarin by setting foot on the moon on July 20th, 1969, when Eno was 21, he didn’t expect to be impressed. “It just seemed to me like one of the many amazing things that was happening in the Sixties,” says the composer,...

French filmmakers Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh met at university while studying political science before diverging towards separate careers. Trouilh trained in documentary filmmaking; Liatard worked on urban artistic projects in Lebanon and France. They eventually joined back up to film three shorts: “Gagarine,” a Sundance Channel Shorts Competition Jury Prize winner in 2016; “The Republic of Enchanters”; and their latest, “Blue Dog,” which is in competition at UniFrance’s MyFrenchFilmFestival, available on VOD platforms around the world.

In “Blue Dog” the pair weaves a story of inclusion along with one rooted in a father-and-son relationship, all in a mixed tone of realism and fable. “The movie enlightens the strength of the community against isolation, especially in the kind of neighborhood we are filming,” they say.

Can you talk a bit about the story in “Blue Dog”?

It’s the story of Emile, a 60-year-old man, living in a social housing...

(Spoiler alert: Do not read on if you haven’t seen “First Man.”)

“First Man” is a retelling of one of the biggest moments in history, as well as a portrait of the reclusive man who became the first to walk on the moon.

Damien Chazelle’s drama starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong focuses more on the home life of the astronaut as he prepared for his dangerous missions into space.

That includes delving into the 1962 death of his daughter, Karen, of a malignant brain tumor at age 2. Throughout the movie, Armstrong is seen holding his daughter’s bracelet — and even takes it to the moon and throws it into a giant crater there before returning home.

But how factual is that part? Did Armstrong really throw his daughter’s bracelet into the crater?

Also Read: 'First Man' Lifts Off This Weekend to Steep Box Office Competition

Long story short,...

Updated, 2:40 Pm: 108 Media has pre-sold the Henry Rollins drama He Never Died to Take One for Scandinavia and Benelux. The AFM-bound title from writer-director Jason Krawczyck stars the legendary punk singer, author and radio host as a socially disturbed outcast. “He Never Died embodies the rare culmination of our fanboy sensibilities and mainstream marketability,” said producer Zach Hagen of Alternate Ending Studio. Adam J. Shully, who created and produced the Canadian TV drama The Bridge (not the FX series), also produces. He Never Died begins production November 13 at Pinewood Studios in Toronto.

The Outsider has a new financier. Previously with Silver Pictures, the post-ww II Japanese-based crime thriller will now be produced and financed by Worldview Entertainment, it was announced today. Qed International will be selling the film internationally as part of its slate at the AFM. Worldview’s reps CAA, who packaged and arranged financing, will represent domestic rights.