Entertainment
Netflix Original Apocalyptic Thriller Takes Down Our Technological Dependence
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Navigating the early stages of a potentially world-ending event is no easy feat, especially if you’re the characters living within the fiction that Leave the World Behind establishes. After all, when airplanes start falling from the sky and self-driving cars start piling up on the interstate, you may find yourself wondering how you’re going to be able to watch the series finale of Friends on streaming while society crumbles around you, which is something that needs to be addressed immediately.
Taking a local approach instead of a global one, Leave the World Behind offers a startling glimpse of how a family vacationing in a remote area copes with getting suddenly cut off from the rest of the outside world. They scramble to find resources to make sure they can survive whatever faceless horrors are coming their way.
We’ve Become Too Reliant On Technology
Leave the World Behind wastes no time establishing how critical technology is to the Sanford family’s sense of well-being, as Amanda (Julia Roberts) decides to go on a spontaneous weekend getaway with her husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their two children, Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans). On the ride from New York City to the vacation rental, everyone is distracted and disconnected from each other because the only connections they care about are those accessed through the devices in their hands.
Settling in for the weekend, Amanda shows just how unlikeable she is when the owner of the house G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la), show up unexpectedly in the middle of the night, claiming that they’re seeking shelter due to a blackout. Though G.H. seems to have some inside knowledge about what’s happening back in the city, he doesn’t reveal any more information than he has to, so as not to cause any unnecessary panic.
Instead of trusting G.H. and Ruth and letting them be comfortable in their own home (something that Ruth makes clear several times), Amanda lets them stay the night after conversing with Clay, but only if they stay in the basement in-law apartment and leave after everybody gets a good night’s sleep.
Waking up the next day, Amanda sees a number of emergency alerts on her cell phone, but they quickly vanish before she can show anybody else.
A Vacation Gone Wrong
Having reason to believe that a global catastrophe is about to occur, both families begin to panic when they realize they have no way to communicate without their cell phones. Clay sets out to find locals who have more information than he does, while G.H. reveals to Amanda that the United States may be the victim of a massive cyberattack of unknown origin. Archie, your typical apathetic teenager, feels indifferent about the whole thing, while Rose takes note of the surrounding wildlife acting in increasingly strange ways, like a whole bunch of deer surrounding the vacation home that disappear as quickly as they make their presence known to her.
However, Rose’s primary concern is streaming Friends because she’s working through the series for the first time (poor girl), and it provides a great amount of comfort to her as the family dynamic begins to break down.
Preppers Be Preppin’
Thankfully, Amanda recalls encountering a doomsday prepper named Danny (Kevin Bacon) stocking up on supplies when she went into town for groceries, resulting in Clay and G.H. seeking him out for answers. With no access to radio, internet, or television, there’s no way for anybody to know how far-reaching the problems they’re facing are in Leave the World Behind, which demonstrates just how hopeless human beings are without being constantly dialed into their devices.
Stuck in the middle of nowhere, both families in Leave the World Behind have to use what limited resources they have to find answers, all while emergency sirens blare in the distance, which can only be heard when the entire sky isn’t shrieking at an unthinkable frequency that may be the result of the alleged cyber attack that they’re in no way prepared for.
Streaming Leave The World Behind On Netflix
While you may think that Leave the World Behind suffers from not showing how the rest of the world is coping with the blackouts, it’s quite effective in generating suspense because there’s no strength in numbers at the vacation house, and the entire situation could quickly devolve into an “every man for himself” scenario at the drop of a hat. Not fully understanding just how deep the alleged cyber attack goes, there’s no reasonable way for anybody to know how to find safety, or if everything will blow over and return back to normal.
However, Leave the World Behind gets in its own way on more than one occasion by trying to create conflict that doesn’t necessarily need to be there to move the story along. From the weird, semi-romantic encounters that Amanda has with G.H. when they bond over their distrust of humanity to Clay’s disproportionate amount of hopefulness and strange conversations with Ruth while they’re sitting poolside, hitting a vape pen, this movie felt bloated in a way that makes me wish a 90-minute cut existed instead of the 140-minute version we get on Netflix.
At the very least, Leave the World Behind is a solid watch on Netflix because it shows just how hopeless most of us would be if we couldn’t simply log onto social media to see what’s going on. Proving just how quickly the world can become such an incredibly small place if the technology we rely on for our day-to-day interactions disappears overnight, this film will most certainly make you consider hoarding water bottles and canned goods for your survival, and DVDs for your bunker so you don’t lose your mind while you wait for everything to blow over.
Entertainment
One dashboard, 20+ AI models — get ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more for $79
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Credit: ChatPlayground AI
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Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
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