Entertainment
Perfect R-Rated Thriller On Netflix Is Tom Hardy's Best Performance
By Robert Scucci
| Published
I hate talking on the phone. When my parents call, my first question is, “Why didn’t you text me first to see if I’m even taking calls today?” Not because I don’t like my parents. Quite the opposite. I just don’t like filling awkward silences with small talk, and I’ve never been good at idle chit-chat, even with people I care about. Tom Hardy’s Ivan Locke in 2013’s Locke, on the other hand, can dial and talk with such urgency and fluency that if he hosted a seminar about proper phone etiquette, I’d probably pay $50 to attend.
Considered by many to be one of Hardy’s best performances, Locke is a tense thriller set entirely in his car as he takes a 90-minute drive to the hospital to witness the birth of the child he conceived during an extramarital affair. There are no cutaways showing what the people on the other end are doing. It’s just Tom Hardy in a car, shifting gears, barreling down the highway, dialing, and either confessing his sins or giving critical instructions, depending on who’s on the line.
A Tense, 90-Minute Drive
When we’re introduced to Ivan Locke, he’s tense but fully in control of his faculties. Though Locke is billed as a psychological thriller, there’s no unreliable narrator here. You have every reason to take him at his word. Is he stressed? Absolutely, and for good reason. A production foreman about to oversee one of the largest concrete pours in European history, his life is falling apart in every measurable way, and he’s trying to reckon with past mistakes as all of his stress points converge on this single evening.
The primary source of stress Ivan Locke faces is the premature birth of the child he conceived with former colleague Bethan (Olivia Colman). An otherwise faithful man, Ivan had a moment of weakness during a three-month job, and that lapse resulted in Bethan’s pregnancy. Though he hasn’t seen her since, he’s haunted by the fact that his own father abandoned him. Even without romantic feelings for Bethan, he refuses to let his child be born fatherless.
Because Bethan’s water breaks on the eve of the biggest job of his life, Ivan has to pass the torch to his trainee Donal (Andrew Scott), which understandably irritates his boss, Gareth (Ben Daniels), who promptly fires him for jumping ship at the last minute. Between phone calls to Donal, who is known to drink heavily after 5 p.m. and needs to ensure critical elements are in place for the pour, Ivan calls home, confesses his infidelity to his wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson), and attempts pleasantries with his sons Eddie (Tom Holland) and Sean (Bill Milner), who he hasn’t yet told the full story.
As the phone in his BMW lights up with voicemails, missed calls, and calls waiting on the other line while he navigates toward the hospital, Ivan Locke also lectures his absent father as if he were sitting in the passenger seat. It’s his way of confronting his demons and reassuring himself that although his life as he knows it is effectively over, he’s doing the right thing.
Top-Tier Voice Acting
While it may sound boring to watch a man talk on the phone in his car for 90 minutes, Locke is anything but. Whether he’s delivering life-shattering news to his wife, reassuring the mother of his new child, getting chewed out by his boss, chewing out his trainee, or comforting his sons, he remains calm and controlled while having conversations that would give any reasonable person a heart attack.
Tom Hardy doesn’t do all the heavy lifting alone. Everybody he speaks to carries their emotional weight through dialogue without ever appearing on screen, which is no small feat.
While critics often call Locke Tom Hardy’s best performance, the only thing that complicates that assessment for me is Mad Max: Fury Road. Sorry. I know it’s a completely different kind of movie and comparing them is apples to oranges, but if we’re talking about the singular best thing he’s ever done, I’m siding with the greatest action movie of all time. Coming in as a very close second, Locke, which technically doubles as a road thriller, is absolutely worth your time if you want to see how to handle the hardest conversations of your life without completely losing your cool in the process.
Locke is streaming on Netflix.
Entertainment
The Most Banned Series In America Is About To Blow Up On Netflix
By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
When someone says they’re an anime fan, it can mean anything. That’s the equivalent of saying “I like watching TV.” Anime is a huge swath of genres, stories, franchises, movies, and shows about anything you can possibly imagine. Who knew a show about giant, naked people would turn out to be one of the best anime of all time? And who would have thought that an anime about an ultrapowerful octopus who destroys the Moon and finds meaning in life working as a teacher for underprivileged children tasked by the Japanese government to kill him before he destroys the planet would be such a touching, thought-provoking, and humorous series?
That’s Assassination Classroom, and with its arrival on Netflix, it’s going to become even more popular. Then again, that also means even more people will judge it for its name, which, coincidentally, plays into one of the themes of your next favorite series.
Assassination Classroom Is Not What It Sounds Like
Assassination Classroom starts off with the mystery of how this strange, yellow creature managed to destroy the Moon. For what purpose? Why is the Earth going to be next? And why does the creature agree to become a teacher for a year, with the instruction that one of his students will be the one to kill him? Finally, why is the creature, named Koro-sensei by his students, so good at the job?
The Junior High students in Class 3-E are the real stars of the series, which quickly reveals itself to be more classroom than assassination. Sure, there’s other assassins that show up periodically, but the real joy of Assassination Classroom is to be found in the comedy of Koro-sensei’s hijinks while imparting real life lessons.
Season 1 follows the basic plot of the students bonding with Koro-sensei and grappling with the idea that, eventually, they will have to kill him. It can be a little slow, and the humor isn’t for everyone, but then Season 2 hits, and the entire series takes off with the speed of a bullet train. By the end, you’ll not only have your own favorite among the students of Class 3-E, but you’ll wish you had Koro-sensei as a teacher.
Assassination Classroom Faces Constant Bans And Boycotts
If Assassination Classroom is an emotional, comedic version of Dead Poet’s Society, then why has it joined a very different type of school anime and been banned in over 50 libraries and school districts across the United States? The name, for one, as Assassination Classroom puts an image in your head that’s technically correct, but there’s so much more to the story than that. Secondly, students having to kill their teacher sounds horrible in a vacuum, but in context, it’s an uplifting journey. Those who pushed for the bans never read the manga, never saw the anime, and, honestly, they likely haven’t read a book since eighth grade.
Now that Assassination Classroom is coming to Netflix in May, you can experience the journey of Koro-sensei and Class 3-E for yourself. Lerche, the animation studio behind the series, isn’t a huge name in anime, but they went on to animate Dangonronpa 3 and Classroom of the Elite, making them the go-to for a very specific anime niche. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be impressed at Lerche’s animation style, and in the end, you’ll wonder how one of the best series of the last decade could be hidden away from those who would enjoy it the most.
Entertainment
Ask.com shuts down after 30 years
Ask.com, originally founded as the Y2K stalwart Ask Jeeves, is officially dead.
“As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,” the homepage now reads.
Ask Jeeves was launched in 1997 by the Berkeley-based duo Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, a year before Google’s now-dominant search engine debuted to the masses. At the time, Ask Jeeves’ natural language processing, combined with its personality-filled voice and branding, made it the go-to web search and answer engine for early internet adopters. The website’s butler mascot, Jeeves, modeled after the P.G. Wodehouse character, made appearances at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, holding its own against other iconic corporate logos of the early 2000s.
Mashable Trend Report
“Can one man have all the answers?” If he has access to the entire internet, absolutely.
But while many still refer to the site by its 1990s name, Ask.com hasn’t been “Ask Jeeves” for nearly 20 years, with the brand dropping the latter word and its valet logo in 2006. The shift came after a change in ownership, when the brand was transferred to American holding company IAC. In 2009, Ask.com was dubbed the official search engine of NASCAR.
“We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you — the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world — thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust,” Ask.com reads. “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”
Amid an overwhelming shift toward generative AI-powered search engines and a repositioning of AI agents as the future of web browsing, the loss of Ask.com feels like a true end of the early dot-com era. So long Jeeves, hello AI.
Entertainment
How Charisma Carpenter's Horrific Childhood Accident Led Buffy The Vampire Slayer To Nearly Kill Her
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the earliest events in The Empire Strikes Back is Luke Skywalker being attacked by a Wampa on Hoth. It’s a sobering moment signaling a more serious sequel. Even though Luke saved the entire galaxy in the first Star Wars movie, he got nearly taken out by some local wildlife in the second.
However, that sudden Wampa attack also had an important purpose: it helped provide an in-universe explanation for why our hero’s face looked different. You see, Mark Hamill had gotten into a car accident, and the onscreen attack helped cover up the fact that the Luke Skywalker actor had facial reconstruction surgery.
Using an onscreen incident to explain an actor’s real-life scars is a pretty clever trick. It’s also one that was used in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though most fans never noticed.
In the episode “Lovers Walk,” Cordelia falls onto a piece of rebar, leaving the character with a nasty scar. A few years back, Cordelia actor Charisma Carpenter revealed that this was a case of art imitating life, as she was impaled by rebar (and subsequently gained her own gnarly scar) at the tender age of five years old!
A Girl Walks Into A Rebar
“Lovers Walk” was a Season 3 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that focused on wacky romantic drama. Spike is trying to use a love spell on Drusilla to make his old girlfriend love him again. Resident witch Willow, meanwhile, is having an emotional affair with Xander, despite the fact that she’s dating Oz and he’s dating Cordelia. After they are kidnapped and believe they will die, Willow and Xander share their first kiss; a horrified Cordelia sees this and runs up some stairs in disgust. Unfortunately, the stairs collapse, and she is impaled on some rebar. She survives, but Sunnydale’s ultimate mean girl is left with a major scar.
When “Lovers Walk” first aired, this seemed like nothing more than a classic case of misdirection. The audience is worried about Willow and Xander dying, and the last thing they expect is for would-be rescuer Cordelia to nearly get killed. But in 2019, Charisma Carpenter revealed that she had suffered a very similar injury when she was a small child. In retrospect, it seems that this very specific event may have happened to Cordelia to explain away Carpenter’s real-life scar in case it ever appears onscreen again.
Giving The Fans What They Want
On X, Carpenter responded to a fan who felt bad about scars on their body. “Hey Kiddo, late 2 this tweet but I want U 2 know I get scar shame. I have a thick, wide scar about 4″ on my belly. I was 5 when I was impaled by a rebar,” she wrote. “My scar is a part of my story, but it’s not who I am. It doesn’t define me. It makes me unique. Just like urs makes U unique.”
It’s a fairly touching response, one that shows just how much this Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor cares about her fans. But it also provided us with an answer to a decades-old fan question: in a show filled with vampires, werewolves, and other nasty demons, why the heck was Cordelia injured by something as simple as some rebar? Now we know that, for whatever reason, the Buffy producers wanted to give the character a scar that corresponded to Carpenter’s own injury.
Even though Charisma Carpenter’s scar didn’t make many more prominent appearances onscreen, the producers were likely thinking ahead. Soon, the actor would be one of the leads in the popular Buffy spinoff Angel, and they had no way of knowing if future episodes would require her to show where she is scarred.
Thanks to the rebar incident in “Lovers Walk,” they didn’t have to worry about covering that old injury up. But they might never have thought to do this if nearly two decades earlier, George Lucas hadn’t thought to explain Mark Hamill’s own scars by having his Luke Skywalker character get injured onscreen!
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