'These allegations do appear substantial'

The sole 'hero' lightsaber from the original 'Star Wars' trilogy to ever be auctioned

'More than any nation on earth, ever'

'A populist economic approach better solves for Democrats' challenges'

She's being remembered for 'her passion for music and her empathy for young people'

'stronger than the topline numbers suggest'

Given all the expenses and anxieties that come with battling cancer, one might think that parking fees really shouldn’t be among them. Yet as wild as that may sound, some hospitals and cancer centers in Canada either charge for parking—as much as CAD$12 a day—or don’t have large enough on-site parking, forcing patients to park […] The post Beating Cancer Required a Mountain of Money for Parking: She Now Raises Funds for Other Cars appeared first on Good News Network.

Movies & TV The Conjuring: Last Rites The Conjuring: Last Rites Hits Both the Highs and Lows of the Series Ed and Lorraine Warren are back to defeat evil with LOVE and terrible outfits. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on September 5, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures The Conjuring: Last Rites might be my favorite in the series. Notice I did not say BEST—I think the best of the series is The Conjuring 2. But the parts of this one that worked really worked for me, and if this is the last time we see the Warrens, they get a send-off that’s a fun and breezy time at the movies. (The horror genre’s version of “fun and breezy”, at least.) If you like this series, you’ll almost certainly like this film, but I’ll get into a few of the things that didn’t work at the end of this review. Last Rites was written by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, and directed by Michael Chaves. All of the usual suspects are back, with the Warrens’ daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) taking a more prominent role, along with her new boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy).    We open with a highly-significant setpiece featuring a haunted mirror in 1964. Then the film jumps ahead to the mid-1980s, where the mirror is still causing problems, and the Warrens’ paranormal lectures aren’t as packed as they used to be. (The kids tend to lose interest when they find out no ghosts will be busted on stage.) The story cuts between the latest haunting and the Warrens’ home life circa 1986. The haunting in this one starts off great. A large, loud (so loud) rambunctious Catholic family, the Smurls, all live together in a crowded house. Dad Jack, Mom Janet, Jack’s parents Mary and John, teens Dawn and Heather, and younger twins Carin and Shannon. We join them on the morning of  Heather’s confirmation. Jack is proud and enthusiastically uses a clunky video camera to film the service and the dinner afterwards. The dinner, notably, is just the family at home, not a big feast at a restaurant or anything. The family has a new-ish TV, a VCR, and the aforementioned camera, but we only see one small car, and the furniture is all older and well-used. The house has enough space for all eight of them, but none of the daughters has their own room. Jack’s the only one we see going to work each day, but we never learn what he does. So, by Pennsylvanian 1980s standards, they’re in the middle of the middle class—which means they can’t afford to leave when the haunting starts. There are Poltergeists everywhere for those with eyes to see. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures At the dinner, Mary and John unveil their confirmation gift, which is the GIANT CARVED WOODEN MIRROR from the opening section, because of course it. They got it at an estate sale! They got a great deal! WHEN will people in horror movies learn to walk away from these estate sale deals? Heather immediately gets a bad vibe, pretends to be excited about this weird, weird gift, and the haunting chugs along. The basement? Not good. The twins’ talking doll? Really not good. Every single mirror in the house? Probably shouldn’t look into ‘em. If you’ve ever seen a haunted house movie you can predict all the beats, but it’s still fun because the family feels real, and the film absolutely nails 1980s Pennsylvania. Unlike the weird timelessness of the first two films, the characters here reference Ghostbusters and The Goonies. The girls’ shirts tells us that they like Culture Club, Care Bears, and the Steelers, and ‘80s hits play on the radio. It all helps to make this story feel like it’s grounded in time. As for the Warren family, this film is largely about the passage of time. Ed’s heart problems have only gotten worse since the last movie (he has to quit hunting ghosts, and worse than that, start eating fish and vegetables) and he seems to be exhausted even by a fun game of ping pong. It’s a good thing dark forces won’t conspire to drag him back into his old life or anything. Daughter Judy has grown up. She’s dating a young man named Tony, and he’s not just okay with all the supernatural stuff, he’s actively interested in it. This seems like a good thing, except Judy did in fact inherit her mom’s abilities, and her visions proved so overwhelming that  Lorraine urged her to block them out with a meditative rhyme rather than confront them. As you can probably guess, this drives the plot. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures There is so much Catholic kitsch in this movie, I’m fairly certain an Italian grandma exploded on set—and RIP to Marie Theresa or whatever, but it looks great. If there’s a flat surface available, you better believe there’s a statue of a saint or a rosary on it. No wall is complete without a crucifix. The home of the afflicted family even features a life-sized bust of Jesus—I’ve never even seen one of those in a home! This series has always fascinated me because I like religious horror. As with folk horror, it’s fun to watch modern people deal with older ritual. At its best, religious horror can work in a lot of social commentary as well—but the Conjuring series has always gone for a much more practical approach. Lorraine walks around using her rosary like it’s a fucking dowsing rod, Ed bellows incantations and waves crucifixes around, sometimes there’s an ineffectual priest cowering in the background, it’s great. And then Ed can make pancakes or fix the family car or whatever, and Lorraine can have extremely emotional heart-to-hearts with one of the afflicted family members in between bursts of supernatural shenanigans. There’s some of that here, but I fear the film is trying to do a little too much to let the quieter moments open up the way they have in previous films. The Smurls never become full characters the way the Perrons and Hodgsons did, or even Arnie and Debbie in The Devil Made Me Do It. And Chaves does a good job building atmosphere in the first half, but I missed James Wan’s verve. (Guess I’ll just have to watch Malignant again.)   Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures The performances are excellent as ever. Patrick Wilson has been one of my favorites since he played Joe in Angels in America in 2003, and he’s balances Ed’s gruff mid-century man’s man style with vulnerability, like he knows the toughness is just a performance. But now he adds a new dimension as his heart gets worse and he has to admit that he’s aging out of battling ghosts. Vera Farmiga provides her usual warm presence, but here it’s darkened a bit by her desire to protect Judy from the family business. Mia Tomlinson and Ben Hardy are both solid as Judy and her beau Tony. And all the Smurl family members are fantastic, realistically loving and prickly—we just needed more time with them and their daily life as the haunting intensifies. The actual demons are frightening enough for jump scares, but none of them are at the level of Crooked Man, Annabelle, or Possessed Janet Hodgson. Which gets at the problem with the film. Apart from the excellent setting, there’s a lack of specificity to the film. Yes there are ghosts, and a demonic presence, but I never got a sense of them as individual entities that were attacking the Smurls and the Warrens in particular. To get into why this was a problem for me, I’ll have to get into spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything about the film, skip down four paragraphs, after the next section break. There’s a point where the Warrens’ priest, Father Gordon, goes to visit the Smurls. Only Janet is home, and Father Gordon walks from room to room splashing holy water around. When the basement floor literally smokes he begins to suspect this problem is beyond him. He says he’ll “talk to the Church” and leaves, and the next thing we know he’s in an office waiting for a Father McKenzie. His slow realization that he’s walked into a supernatural trap is maybe the most affecting in the movie. He responds with faith and a crucifix, but in this case the demonic presence overpowers him, and he hangs himself. I had two issues with this. First: this demon is able to utterly cow a lifelong priest who’s worked with the Warrens for years, and Seen Some Shit, to the point that he commits suicide. This implies that this demon is somehow more formidable than anything else we’ve encountered in this series, since Father Gordon walked away unscathed from all those cases. But the rest of the film really doesn’t back this up. My other issue might just be me. I recently watched an ‘80s thriller called The Rosary Murders for a project. (A very young Jack White is in it as an altar server!) The movie is fine—I think Exorcist III covers most of its themes to greater effect. But there’s one scene that’s stuck with me, where the main character, a priest played by Donald Sutherland, thinks he’s about to be murdered. In that moment, even though it’s been made clear that his commitment to his vocation is shaky, he says the Act of Contrition—and Sutherland makes the scene terrifying. Despite Last Rites being cluttered with Catholic kitsch, there wasn’t a moment that felt so raw and desperate, not even this Father Gordon scene, and that’s what I think the movie was missing. OK I’m done spoiling stuff, you can come back! Let me talk more generally about one of my issues with Last Rites. You usually receive first communion when you’re about 7, because that’s when, in the eyes of the Church, you’ve entered the age of reason and you’re expected to know right from wrong. Confirmation comes later and is more akin to a bar or bat mitzvah—I’ve always understood it to mark the point when you become a full member of the Church, and it’s a little more of a choice than baptism or first communion. (Although I guess that depends on the family.) I mention this because I think the film missed an opportunity to lean on the timing. Since the Conjuring series has always been steeped in folk Catholicism, it would make sense to have Heather’s confirmation ceremony be a crux point, and to relate the haunting to her worries about impending adulthood, or concerns about her faith. In the same way, despite the Warrens being super mega Catholic, when Judy is beset by visions Lorriane teaches her a nonsense rhyme to calm herself rather than any of the many, many spiritual recitations that are available to her. Which might be part of the point—if you’re trying to block an extra-natural force out of your life, maybe you don’t want to double down on ritual. But then that, too, could have been part of the point, given that Last Rites’ becomes Judy’s story as it goes along. Despite all of those quibbles, though, it was fun to watch, and even if it never hits the spooky heights of the first two films, I thought it was a big improvement on The Devil Made Me Do It, and a fitting end to this part of the Warrens Cinematic Universe if this ends up being their last outing.[end-mark] The post <em>The Conjuring: Last Rites</em> Hits Both the Highs and Lows of the Series appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: We Have Tomb Raider At Home Plus strange little things, superior adaptations, and cursed bunnies. By Molly Templeton | Published on September 5, 2025 Media: Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Media: Warner Bros. Pictures What day is it? The combination of late-summer vibes and the Labor Day weekend have had me thinking it’s the wrong day for at least the past week. Why do Fridays feel like Tuesdays sometimes? How do days have feels, anyway? I have it on good authority that it is, in fact, Friday—for real—so here, at the end of a weird-shaped week, are some suggestions for your weekend! I hope the days feel like weekend days and not like warped Wednesdays or something. Have you called your reps lately?  But I Wasn’t Done With the Last Version of Tomb Raider Yes, a new Tomb Raider is coming. But I still think we should’ve gotten more of the Alicia Vikander version. Tomb Raider (2018) starred Vikander as an oddly perfect Lara Croft—one who’s working as a bike messenger (alongside Hannah John-Kamen, my favorite Killjoy) and only reluctantly takes up her inheritance and then unwisely goes chasing off after her maybe-dead father’s work.  Yes, the elements in any Tomb Raider are similar, but this one—directed by Roar Uthaug (Troll) and co-written by Captain Marvel’s Geneva Robertson-Dworet—walked a perfect line between playing it straight and yet not taking itself too too seriously. Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands) is the very attractive ship captain who joins forces with Lara; Walton Goggins is the bad guy. I repeat: Walton! Goggins! Is the bad guy! Also Dominic West and Kristin Scott Thomas are in the film, because why not? I watched this movie on an airplane and it was perfect. I firmly believe it will still be very good in a non-airplane setting. Hollow Knight: Silksong and Games to Play If You Like Strange Little Things There is a very passionate Silksong contingent among the Reactor staff, but I am afraid of that game; everything I read about it and its predecessor, Hollow Knight, made me think I would find these games extremely frustrating extremely quickly. But I don’t have a game right now, and I’m sad about it. So I thought about replaying Strange Horticulture, a strange little game in which you identify strange little plants, again. And that’s how I found out that it’s getting a follow-up: Strange Antiquities. Another odd little store full of odd little things! Another whole pile of strange lore to accumulate and understand! Listen, mostly I play Zelda games on repeat, but sometimes a strange little game is just the thing. And to be honest, there’s quite a bit of reading in Strange Horticulture, relatively speaking.  Sometimes the Movie Is Better Than the Book There are so many adaptations coming out this fall. Most of them, alas, are not SFF. But sometimes we read other books and watch other things, right? LitHub has a roundup of forty-nine bookish movie and TV productions you might enjoy as the nights get longer and darker (I’m too jealous of you southern hemisphere people to acknowledge that your nights are doing the opposite). These are not all adaptations, but those that are run quite the gamut. There are a lot of very serious films, some historical, and one very appealing movie starring Ben Whishaw as photographer Peter Hujar. You already know about the big SFF adaptations this fall: the Stephen King(s) (three! of! them!), the second Wicked. Perhaps you’ll find something else in this list? (Personally I have written TALAMASCA in my calendar in all caps. Your mileage may vary.) (And no, I’m not saying any of these movies are better than the book. I haven’t seen them yet. But I will go to bat for Children of Men every time this topic arises.) There’s Bunny and There’s Also Cursed Bunny Sometimes one’s brain makes connections between things that are not all that connected, and that’s why I’m really delighted that the authors of both Bunny and Cursed Bunny, Mona Awad and Bora Chung, have new books out later this month: the Bunny sequel We Love You, Bunny from Awad, and the novel-in-stories Midnight Timetable from Chung. No, you can’t read either of those just yet, but you can go back and read their predecessors. Bunny is the story of a woman who gets wrapped up in the world of her creepily perfect MFA peers, who are all shiny-haired rich girls who call each other “Bunny.” The bunnies, it turns out, have some unusual hobbies. Cursed Bunny is a short story collection (translated by Anton Hur) that begins with “The Head,” a story about a woman and the creature that crawls out of her toilet. It’s made of everything that goes down the toilet. No one seems to find this odd except the woman it speaks to. It calls her “Mother.” Things continue to be unusual and fascinating from there. [end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: We Have <i>Tomb Raider</i> At Home appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UK government has revived an idea that has already had one funeral. Digital ID, once buried in a flurry of opposition and civil liberty concerns, is now back on the table. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly giving serious thought to a national digital identification system, presented as a way to make it look like he’s doing something about illegal immigration. This move comes in the context of ongoing pressure on the government to respond to rising Channel crossings and the broader debate around migration enforcement. Ministers are eager to be seen doing something effective. A digital ID system offers the image of precision and modernity. It also raises serious questions about privacy, personal freedom, and the limits of state power. Rebecca Vincent from Big Brother Watch issued a direct statement: “While Downing Street is scrambling to be seen as doing something about illegal immigration, we are sleepwalking into a dystopian nightmare where the entire population will be forced through myriad digital checkpoints to go about our everyday lives.” Her warning echoes long-standing fears. The proposed system would not just apply to newly arrived migrants or foreign nationals. It would apply to everyone. Routine activities like applying for a job, renting a flat, or registering with a doctor could involve compulsory checks. This vision is built into the logic of national ID systems that have been tried elsewhere and, in some cases, walked back after public resistance. Vincent made her point clear: “Mandatory digital ID…will not stop small boat crossings, but it will create a burden on the already law-abiding population to prove our right to be here. It will turn Britain into a ‘Papers, please’ society.” Tony Blair’s original ID card plan fell apart in 2010 after years of resistance. His government spent millions trying to convince the public that the cards would improve national security and reduce fraud. The scheme never gained traction. The fingerprints of that original plan remain on this new proposal. Through his think tank, Blair has continued to advocate for a digital identification regime. He is now in a position to influence Starmer. Conservative MP and Shadow Justice Minister Robert Jenrick questioned the practical use of digital ID cards. His assessment cuts through the surface appeal of new technology: “Most employers who are employing individuals illegally are doing so knowingly. Asking them to check ID cards rather than the current checks that they are already obliged to do is not going to make a blind bit of difference to illegal migration.” His point stands in opposition to the idea that more paperwork or digital checkpoints will bring employers into compliance. The infrastructure to verify employment status already exists. Those breaking the law are not struggling with confusion; they are simply choosing to ignore it. Digital identity systems are not isolated tools. Once built, they tend to expand in purpose. The scope of ID checks could grow to include housing, healthcare, education access, and financial services. The intention may begin with migration control. The end result often reshapes how citizens interact with nearly every public or private service. Previous debates over national ID cards included concerns over cost, data protection, mission creep, and the inevitable risk of abuse. These issues remain in place. The main difference is the technical landscape. The technology is more advanced, the data more valuable, and the consequences more far-reaching. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Starmer Weighs UK Digital ID System, Drawing Civil Liberty Backlash appeared first on Reclaim The Net.