Anything's Possible Review

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Anything’s Possible is exclusively available on Prime Video as of July 22.

Billy Porter makes his directorial debut with Anything’s Possible, a coming-of-age story for Kelsa (Eva Reign), a Pittsburgh senior navigating her last year of high school while embracing her trans life. Shot with vivacious energy and featuring a charming cast of mostly unknowns, Porter and screenwriter Ximena García Lecuona succeed in telling the unique story of a trans teen which is entirely relatable for everyone who has felt — or remembers what it felt like — to be on the outside and unsure of what the future holds.

The movie tracks a year in the life of Kelsa, from the first day of senior year to the start of her college career. Confident in her goals of being a professional photographer, everything else for Kelsa is still a work in progress. Bolstered by her supportive best friends, Em (Courtnee Carter) and Chris (Kelly Lamor Wilson), she’s still struggling with the by-products of her transitioning, like how people treat her, how to reconcile who she is inside with how the world sees her, and if she should start college telling people about her trans status. She works through her issues in a series of little-seen YouTube blogs and plans to just get through the school year with minimal drama.

That works until Khal (Abubakr Ali), the class nice guy, starts engaging her more in conversation with a healthy dose of light flirting. He’s from an affluent Muslim family who want him to pursue a degree in something safe and practical. But there’s a romantic and an artist simmering inside of him, who is intrigued and smitten by Kelsa’s style and fellow artistic spirit. Encouraged by his little brother to pursue Kelsa, Khal drops flowers on her publicly, which incenses Em, who's been harboring a crush on him. It causes a huge rift in the girls’ friendship, but it doesn’t stop Khal from pursuing Kelsa in what will be her first romantic relationship.

What ensues is a genuinely earnest and charming story about young love. While being trans is absolutely an issue, and addressed well throughout, the story remains grounded in the relatable dramas that every teen has faced: self-esteem issues, parents with unyielding expectations, first love, anxieties spun out of the fish bowl of social media, and on and on. Porter captures all of the uncertainty of being a high school senior with his engaging ensemble of characters, each teetering on the recognizable precipice of the rest of their lives, partially clinging to the known yet excited for the unknown to come. Perhaps the only major crack in reality in expressing that authentic high school experience is how well put together every single student is. It’s Pittsburgh cosplaying as the Parsons School of Design, which is certainly aspiration but hardly reality.

The film has a sprightliness to its storytelling, featuring a soundtrack stuffed with bouncy, anthemic dance tracks.

Porter also has a lot of empathy in telling Kelsa’s story, who wrestles with issues of self authenticity and preparing herself for inevitable rejection that will come with her transition. The school provides a microcosm of what’s waiting in the outside world, from the homophobic reaction of Khal’s best friend Otis (Grant Reynolds) to Em weaponizing Kelsa’s trans status because of jealousy and pettiness. It’s another reason why her relationship with Khal works so well in the movie, because Reign and Ali really make it clear what an oasis their characters are for one another. There’s a general kindness towards one another that is joyful to watch and makes us root for them to cling to one another when the difficulties threaten to pry them apart.

While the storytelling of Anything’s Possible isn’t genre shattering, per se, how Porter makes this teen story one of inclusion and empathy is potentially transformative in normalizing trans kids as having the same wants, needs, insecurities, and dreams as everyone. And by weaving into the film the mediums of Gen Z communication, from video blogs to texting and TikTok, Porter ensures the experience of today’s teens is grounded in actual reality instead of adults thrusting their “take” of the teen experience onto them. The film also has a sprightliness to its storytelling, featuring a soundtrack stuffed with bouncy, anthemic dance tracks that never let the more serious moments get too dire. Paired with Hanna Park’s kinetic edit, Anything’s Possible has an energetic pace that keeps the story lean and focused.

Porter proves his on-camera energy is entirely translatable in his first role behind the camera. With a great casting instinct, he gets some terrific performances out of his ensemble, especially from Reign and Ali, who are the beating heart of the story. There’s a tremendous amount of joy permeating every frame, which in turn frames the weightier issue of being trans with compassion and even celebration.

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Vengeance Review

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You can feel the gears trying desperately to turn, despite being firmly locked in place, in B.J. Novak’s exceptionally plain directorial debut. Vengeance follows pretentious New Yorker columnist Ben Manalowitz (Novak) on a reluctant journey to the deep south to solve (and podcast about) a young girl’s murder, but it fails to grasp at meaning despite having its characters verbalize dozens of different themes about the modern American divide. Granted, the result of this meandering is a stunningly — and in some ways, commendably — nihilistic conclusion, rendered with an intimacy the rest of the movie lacks. However, it’s too last-minute a turn, for a story that says nothing en route to suddenly deciding it had a profound mission statement all along.

When Vengeance opens, it feels like a movie with a lot on its mind. A montage, set to Toby Keith’s upbeat, casual “Red Solo Cups,” depicts a rural Texan oil field as the site of a young girl’s disappearance while the opening credits play. The stark tonal disconnect sets up both a wry comedic tone, and a sense of broad allegory — the red solo cup is, after all, a quintessential symbol of American culture across all lines of experience, something recognized the world over thanks to its prevalence in Hollywood — but the buck stops there.

When the casually womanizing Manalowitz gets a phone call about the death of a girl he used to sleep with — amateur musician Abilene (Lio Tipton), whose family believes they were still together, and deeply in love — he flies out to West Texas to attend her funeral, albeit with ulterior motives. Her brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) doesn’t buy the official story that she overdosed. He believes she was murdered and he has a culprit in mind, so he seeks out retribution and drafts Manalowitz into his service. Manalowitz, in the guise of catching a phantom killer, seizes the opportunity to craft an audio narrative about the woes of heartland America, including the opioid crisis that seemingly killed Abilene, and the conspiratorial thinking that makes Ty believe otherwise.

It’s a filmic introspection of a clueless, obnoxious liberal, but it often feels like Manalowitz is its author rather than its target, despite the numerous times he underestimates Abilene’s family and their intelligence. It has exactly one joke up its sleeve — city man think country person dumb, but country person really smart! — but it never uses this repetition to bring Manalowitz (or the narrative) closer to a genuine understanding of his podcast subjects. Sometimes, it’s a fish out of water story, à la Borat. Other times, it skirts close to making Manalowitz reflect on his unkindness. But as a whole, it has little to no narrative drive, whether in the unfurling of its plot (i.e. Manalowitz pulling on various threads and uncovering details the police might have overlooked) or in its character saga, of a man who intrudes on a grieving family and finds unexpected acceptance.

The key problem here is that, despite the film’s insistence that Manalowitz and his upper-crust Manhattanite ilk fail to recognize the humanity of people across America’s political spectrum, Vengeance offers them little of the same. Ty, his mother (J. Smith Cameron), his grandmother (Louanne Stephens), his younger brother (Elli Abrams Bickel), and his sisters (Dove Cameron and Isabella Amara), are all afforded snappy comebacks to the snooty journalist and his presumptions, but what they aren’t afforded is a sense of perspective and experience. Apart from Granny Shaw — a role Stephens inhabits with a mischievous grace, as if someone had breathed real life into Meemaw from Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy — the family rarely behaves as if they’ve lived life, or experienced loss. So, there’s never a lasting sense that Manalowitz is the interloping emotional vampire the film frames him to be, as he forwards their recorded conversations to his podcast producer, Eloise (Issa Rae).

This lack of discernible outlook also extends to the film’s core premise: despite its political allusions, Vengeance has no actual politics of which to speak, or any characters beyond Manalowitz with even a hint of political coding in the narrative (even the basic cultural aesthetics generally associated with American politics are too complex for the film to grasp). It’s a story that, apart from certain specificities — like the prevalence of delectable Texan fast food chain Whataburger — could take place practically anywhere else, so even the sheltered white-rich-liberal obliviousness on display has nothing off which to really bounce.

Furthermore, Manalowitz’s chosen medium — the true crime and/or political podcast — is similarly an afterthought, despite the presence of a key supporting character as a parallel to him: Quinten Sellers (Ashton Kutcher), a music producer who helped Abilene record a couple of tracks. Sellers is the closest thing the movie has to a real conception of depth, as someone with a purposeful, existential outlook on sound and voices, but with a subdued bitterness towards everything else. Kutcher finds intriguing balance in this conundrum, but Vengeance never seems to recognize the dots it could potentially connect, as a story of people who capture lives and impressions through acoustics, and as a tryst between someone who knew Abilene well, and cared for her soulful music, and someone using her death to his advantage.

To expect Vengeance to use sound to tell its story in a meaningful way (beyond a few fleeting glimpses at Manalowitz’s podcast) is a tall order, given that even its use of images rarely seems to extend beyond “merely functional.” While a single scene of Manalowitz and the Shaws hanging out at Whataburger has an almost documentarian approach — an intrusive verité lens peeking in on unexpected joy — little else in the film’s visual construction helps tell its story, whether through individual brush strokes focused on character, or by crafting an overarching fabric. It has no sense of time or place, despite geography and the contemporary breakdown of truth and trust in America being central to its premise. Even in its less serious moments, it has little care for rhythm, beyond holding far too long on Novak’s reaction shots, in which he expresses little beyond a two-dimensional indignation. Novak may hold his character’s feet to the fire, but he can’t resist warping the story around his own presence.

Vengeance often resembles Jon Stewart’s pompous, deeply misguided political comedy Irresistible in its sheer nothing-ness, despite superficial gestures towards insight and answers. The story does eventually gesture towards Manalowitz’s hollowness, when it finally reveals the dark heart lingering beneath its surface — a nihilism that might have genuinely rocked an audience to its core in a better movie — but it ends up being a mere flourish in the grand scheme of things, a last-minute attempt to embody some sense of drama or intensity stemming from the world around the characters. Sadly, it ends up being too little, too late.

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Samsung QN90B Review

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If a manufacturer can’t offer perfect blacks in a television, then they better put a ton of horsepower behind pure panel brightness and color quality. That appears to be what Samsung aimed for here with the QN90B.

While it can’t hit the “inky” blacks of an OLED, the Mini LED array and Quantum Dots make up for it with enough brightness and glare resistance to offer a great viewing experience even in a brightly lit room. But as good as the panel is, Samsung’s frustrating software along with its high asking price holds the QN90B back.

Samsung QN90B – Design and Build

The QN90B is an attractive television when viewed from the front or the side. If you’re not going to wall mount it, the included stand is both heavy and sturdy while also managing to look nice below what is basically an uninterrupted giant screen.

Most televisions these days look basically the same now as they aim to put as much emphasis on what is displayed than on anything else. Samsung’s stand design lets it do that but also raises the panel up above your console just enough to fit most slim form-factor soundbars comfortably underneath, something that the Sony A95K doesn’t allow you to do, even if that stand is a real show stopper.

So while the QN90B isn’t going to drop your jaw quite like that, it’s far more practical for more people.

If the trend of big, thin, and heavy that comes with some televisions (especially OLEDs) scares you, not to worry: the QN90B is very light by comparison and a lot tougher. While it is still quite thin for a non-OLED, it feels a lot less like you’re going to break it while you’re setting it up.

The rear of the TV is just as simple as the front, which is nice to look at but it does result in some downsides. For one, it’s hard to tell what any of the ports are because the labels are either very subtle or missing altogether. Luckily, the eARC port can be located pretty quickly and since all four HDMI ports support full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 (which is required to get 4K at 120Hz on current-generation consoles), you probably won’t need to poke around that much back there. The QN90B supports FreeSync Premium Pro, G-Sync, and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and Samsung also has a low-frame rate compensation system (LFC) that kicks in when there are low refresh rates to help reduce screen tearing.

In addition to those four HDMI ports, the QN90B has two USB ports, digital optical audio out, a cable coaxial port, and ethernet, but there is no 3.5mm headphone jack. The TV also supports Bluetooth 5.2 and WiFi 5 (not WiFi 6, unfortunately).

The second issue with this super-simple backside is that the cable management is pretty poor. While yes, technically you can run cables through the gutters on the back of the TV and down the rear of the stand, it’s a tedious and often frustrating and fruitless endeavor. It doesn’t fit all cable sizes, such as the extra thick HDMI cables, and I’ve never had any luck with thinner cables (such as the TV’s power cable) staying in place.

Samsung QN90B – The Remote

I have generally been a fan of Samsung’s recent remote controls and that remains the case here. The QN90B’s remote is slim, simple, and features solar charging via a panel on the back. This completely eliminates the need for AA or AAA batteries which does contribute to how slim the remote is.

While I appreciate removing unnecessary buttons like the number pad, Samsung may have gone a bit too simple here. The company combined settings, a digital number pad, and the shortcut tools into one button, which makes accessing any of those three items much slower than if they had their own dedicated button. That is especially ironic for the shortcut menu.

It’s also not that intuitive to get to the Game Bar, which requires that you hold down the Play/Pause button while a compatible gaming console is plugged in. If you miss that prompt on screen, you’ll be mashing buttons until you’re blue in the face to try and get it to pop up.

The remote has four pre-set shortcuts for different services – my review unit featured Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and Samsung TV Plus.

Samsung QN90B – Software and UI

Speaking of Samsung’s free streaming service – it is where some of my least favorite aspects of the Samsung Tizen operating system coalesce.

I don’t know anyone who will say they love Tizen, and other reviewers I’ve spoken to are at best lukewarm on it. For me, it has become my least favorite smart TV operating system for a number of reasons.

First and most notably, Samsung shoves Samsung TV Plus down your throat at every opportunity. When you first set up the television and are looking through the settings, it will auto-start the Samsung TV Plus constantly and unrelentingly. I get that it is smart to have some actual content on screen before you decide how you want to view it, but the QN90B has so few picture options that anyone who has some familiarity with televisions is likely just going to set it one mode and leave it there, especially since there are so few options on this television (more on that shortly). You also cannot delete the TV Plus app, at least not through any means I could find.

Tizen also finds multiple clever ways to advertise to you, and by clever I mean extremely intrusive. The main app screen will always have some kind of ad on it, as will the gaming standby screen. The way it is set up, the operating system makes it hard to not hover over the advertisement which will immediately begin to auto-play. This TV loves auto-play and will always be trying to get something to start no matter what your actual desire is at the time. In short, it’s just a lot to be forced to look at for the price that Samsung asks for this TV.

As I touched on above, another issue I have with Tizen is the lack of picture options. The QN90B only offers a choice between Dynamic, Standard, Movie, and Filmmaker modes, and the settings beyond that are extremely limited. Coming from LG and Sony which give you a lot of customization options to choose from, the Samsung QN90B feels sparse by comparison.

For the casual user, this is probably a pro and not a con, since it’s easier to just start watching content and there isn’t a lot you can mess up. I can appreciate that, but I do wish there was a bit more here to support both sides of that equation.

It should also be noted that Samsung still doesn’t support Dolby Vision, but it does support HDR10+.

In addition to the new main gaming menu which I’ll delve into below, Samsung kept the excellent Game Bar which becomes available when the TV senses a connected PC or console. From here, you can adjust input lag settings and display how many frames per second are currently being shown with on-screen content. You can also adjust HDR, variable refresh rate, screen ratio, and a few other game-specific settings. This is pretty much the only menu in this Tizen operating system I really like, and I’m glad to see it here.

One menu shift over from the gaming section is Samsung’s promised support for NFT art, which can be browsed and purchased directly from the QN90B. That art can be set as the ambient screensaver when the TV is not in use if that’s something that interests you.

Samsung QN90B – Cloud Gaming

Samsung has amped up the gaming capability of this television in a way you probably wouldn’t expect: built-in cloud-based game streaming support via a dedicated gaming menu. You are given the choice among a few streaming options like Xbox Game Pass (via the beta of Cloud Gaming), Stadia, and Nvidia GeForce Now. I tested it with Game Pass and an Xbox controller and I have to admit, it’s pretty awesome to be able to fire up Halo Infinite natively on my television without owning an Xbox.

There are obviously some limitations that come with streaming a video game, and resolution is one of them: it’s capped at 720p at the time of publication. Additionally, during cutscenes, some artifacting was visible due to compression.

The Game Bar also doesn’t seem to work in this mode, which I found strange. Instead, a different and far less useful menu appears that shows games I’m not interested in and a very limited set of streaming-specific controls. I wasn’t able to get the television to display the current resolution or framerate as a result, but I don’t think I was getting 60FPS, even though that is what I told Halo to target.

The QN90B doesn’t handle menu selection requests particularly smoothly while playing a game and it can take a few seconds for it to recognize commands, but the actual game plays quite well and was pretty responsive. I was honestly impressed with how well the overall gaming experience felt, especially considering it was being streamed directly to my television with no other hardware needed besides a controller.

I think children specifically are a great audience for this feature since they will be a lot less discerning when it comes to high-end gaming features and the lower overall resolution and framerates aren’t going to be an issue.

Samsung QN90B – Picture Quality

The QN90B panel uses both Quantum Dots and a panel of Mini LEDs, which means it has a lot more control over what is displayed on screen versus a typical LED television, but not quite as much as OLED. I think of Mini LED as a tech that strikes a solid balance between good black levels and excellent brightness, since OLED panels may provide better black levels but they can’t get quite as bright as LED.

Samsung’s Mini LEDs in the QN90B provide very fine control over dimming zones, and while halo-ing around bright objects on screen is minimized, it’s not fully eliminated and I can still see it in testing. That said, it’s not really noticeable at all when watching regular content or while gaming, so most people will be quite happy with the results.

The television is capable of nailing pretty dark blacks as well, though not nearly the “inky” level that you would see in an OLED. But because the QN90B can get so bright – over 1,000 nits of peak brightness in SDR – the contrast ratio is still significant, and as such content looks fantastic on screen.

Straight out of the box, color accuracy is pretty good. I measured 97.4% coverage of sRGB, 76.7% of Adobe RGB, and 91% of DCI P3 with an average Delta-E of 2.55. Samsung touts its QLED televisions as able to achieve 100% of the DCI P3 color space, but obviously, the television did not reach those lofty heights in lab testing though it is possible that could be achieved with professional calibration.

Still, over 90% is very good and while it would have been nice to see a Delta E of less than 2, these results are great for a display that is meant to sit in your living room. I don’t, however, think it would make for a very good computer monitor.

Screen uniformity was also very good: the entire screen either hit nominal or recommended tolerance.

Almost everything looked great on the Samsung QN90B with one exception: there was a bit of stutter when viewing slow panning content. This is a relatively minor complaint as it is not something everyone will notice and it’s really only going to show up in very specific scenes.

I mentioned earlier that I use the Filmmaker Mode picture setting and that is what I recommend for those who pick up the QN90B. Outside of gaming, where you’ll need to stick with the Game Mode, the other three picture modes on this television result in weird colors, especially Dynamic and Standard, where saturation is pushed way beyond where it should be.

Samsung QN90B – Gaming Performance

Gaming on the Samsung QN90B is generally pretty great thanks to the panel’s outstanding brightness, low input lag, and excellent response time. Because the TV has so much dynamic range to work with, HDR gaming in particular can look incredible.

I played mainly Returnal and Destiny 2 on the QN90B and both games looked and played outstandingly. The particle and lighting effects that are at the core of what makes Returnal such a gorgeous game are amped up here to a level that makes them just a joy to look at on screen – even the bits of light that are actively trying to kill you look so fabulous you might not even mind being hit by them.

Gaming at 120Hz in 4K HDR in Destiny 2’s Crucible is also quite nice, and while the combat of those maps often takes attention away from the environments, it’s hard to not marvel at the colors of explosions as much as the subtle details found in hallways or the outstanding skyboxes when seen on the QN90B.

The one issue I ran into is that when in HDR, the television’s panel can be a bit slow to transition between bright and dark, such as a menu and the game world, and from light areas to dark areas.

For example, in Destiny 2, hitting the character menu from anywhere in the game world will cause the screen to briefly flash brightly white and then back to the proper exposure of the menu. Leaving the menu causes it to do that again. The best way I can describe it is akin to how slow autofocus works on older cameras. Sometimes the camera has to overshoot the focus area in order to understand where it is and then come back to proper focus. You do eventually get the photo in focus, but you also have to wait for the camera to calibrate itself every time.

The way the HDR racks in and out of brightness is a bit distracting and every time it does it, it takes me out of the game world just a little bit. It’s even noticeable when changing between games from the Playstation 5 main menu, where icons will flash bright and then dim as I move between games.

Almost every television I’ve tested does this to some degree (and I’ve complained about it before, such as on the Vizio MQ6 Quantum and Samsung’s QN90A), but Samsung’s QN90B is doing it slower and more obviously than many other televisions on the 2022 market, so it stands out.

Samsung QN90B – Audio Quality

Just about every television manufacturer will say something in their marketing about how they’re doing something fancy with audio and it is my experience that they almost always greatly exaggerate reality.

Samsung touts its “object tracking sound” technology that leverages Dolby Atmos to provide surround sound from the television directly, and it certainly does not do that. That said, it’s not terrible and while audio does unsurprisingly lack low-end and even mids, I’ve certainly heard worse from other thin televisions. The QN90B does get pretty loud as well, which is nice.

I think Samsung knows that a slim, flat television isn’t going to be capable of delivering great audio on its own (and that comes down to just the limits of physics) and so – similar to what Sony is doing – the company has a technology that links with Samsung soundbars to combine the audio coming from the TV and the soundbar together. It’s called “Q-Symphony” and while I wasn’t able to test it since I don’t own a Samsung soundbar, it qualifies as a “nice to have” feature.

Samsung QN90B – The Competition

There is a lot to like about the Samsung QN90B, but its $2,600 asking price for a 65-inch set ($1,600 for a 55-inch) feels like a lot, even if it is a Mini LED panel. That’s more than LG’s excellent C2 OLED, and even Samsung’s own new S95B QD OLED isn’t much more expensive for a 65-inch model at $3,000. Sure, these prices are before you might find any sales, but it does go to show what Samsung thinks its Mini LED panel is worth compared to QD OLED, which we know is fantastic since the current TV to beat, the Sony A95K, uses the same panel.

When I look at the QN90B, I think it compares favorably against similar Mini LED-style televisions from the likes of TCL, but it is also a lot more expensive. While yes, I think the picture quality of the QN90B is superior, it’s not so much that it deserves over double the price, especially considering the number of irritations involved with the Tizen operating system.

Since it’s so closely priced to QD OLED and OLED options, the only time the QN90B makes sense is if it is going to live in a room that has a ton of window light. There, its brightness will certainly make it desirable. Otherwise, OLED and QD OLED have better blacks, color, and pixel response time.

Purchasing Guide

The Samsung QN90B is available from Best Buy and Samsung with an MSRP of $2,599 for the 65" model, though it's currently on sale for $2,299.

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Paper Girls: Season 1 Review

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Paper Girls premieres July 29 on Prime Video.

Paper Girls is the streaming series adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s recent Image Comics hit of the same name. The Prime Video series faithfully carries over the core story about four paper delivery girls from the suburbs of Cleveland who stumble into a time-traveling opus that hurdles them through several years, starting in 1988 with detours to 1999 and 2019. While it’s been compared to Stranger Things, the tone of the series actually aligns more with Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic Stand By Me, just with a primarily female cast of characters. And it’s those girls in the title who are the standouts of this adaptation, embodied by four young actresses who are all exceptional in selling the realness of their characters and the growing relationships between them. Unfortunately, they often have to overcome some very slow pacing and a time-travel arc that feels vague and less than propulsive.

Season 1 consists of eight episodes, with the first one, “Growing Pains,” doing a lot of the heavy lifting to establish tone, relationships, and basic mythology. Set in Stony Stream, a suburb outside of Cleveland, Ohio, Erin Tieng (Riley Lai Nelet) wakes at 4:30 am for her first day as a carrier for the The Cleveland Preserver newspaper. Determined but nervous, she assures her Chinese mother that she’ll be fine as she sets out by bike. It’s when she’s threatened by a male neighbor for stealing his paper that fellow carrier Tiffany Quilken (Camryn Jones) appears to defend her and then dispense with some tips and tricks of their trade. The two end up connecting with other paper girls – tough girl Mac Coyle (Sofia Rosinsky) and rich girl KJ Brandman (Fina Strazza) – forming a loose alliance against the older teen boys harassing them in the wake of Hell Night. When Tiff’s new walkie talkie is stolen, the girls go to a construction site to get it back and the weirdness begins.

The sky turns an ominous fuschia color, which is straight out of Chiang’s sequential art, and the gang holes up in Mac’s empty house to figure out what’s happening. As the girls wait, they try to navigate the differences in their disparate socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Mac, for instance, initially lets loose with the casual racism she’s gotten from her neglectful blue collar dad, while Erin is reticent in opening up about her Chinese-speaking mom because of the lack of acceptance from her bigoeted neighbors. Tiff is the assured intellect of the group while KJ is the peacemaker. When an exterior searchlight freaks them out, an accidental shooting happens, which forces them to head to the hospital. But they’re intercepted by two facially disfigured men in robes who force them into a capsule that dumps them all in 2019.

Observing the men get killed by soldiers in white, futuristic uniforms, the four girls realize the dire straits they’re suddenly in and they run to Erin’s house, where they meet Older Erin (Ali Wong) inside, who is just as confused about everything as they are. But after the initial shock, she allows them to stay as they try to piece together what is happening, and why.

As with all time-travel tales, the rules and minutiae of the premise change based on the individual needs of the story. Paper Girls spends the majority of the season allowing the girls, Older Erin, and others to piece together the specifics of how it happens and determining that it’s a by-product of a ongoing “time war” in the future between the Old Watch, who wants no unauthorized time travel to retain one pure timeline, and STF Underground, who are rebels trying to peel the corrupt power away from those in charge. It’s fairly typical sci-fi stuff, which makes it the least interesting element of the series. However, it drives the plot of the story, so how much you connect to the time mythology is going to be directly related to how patient you are with the show’s slow drip of discovery that comes over the course of eight hours, and how much you really love time-travel paradox stories.

What’s a lot easier to connect to are the four girls. Each year they get stuck in gives the storyline a bit of a reboot as they have to band together anew to get resourceful about keeping themselves alive and figuring out how to get home. And since they’re only 12 years old, there’s also the constant temptation for any of them to find their families, and older selves, to get a glimpse at their futures. All of them succumb and end up relatively disappointed in how their future selves have handled their lives. That translates into some great scenes of existential confrontation, as the optimism of youth butts heads against the realities of age and regret. It’s in those moments, which are peppered judiciously throughout the season, that the time-travel story is at its most interesting. Because the girls are pretty ruthless in their assessments of their destinies, the series remains clear-eyed in its grounded vibe, never delving into the potentially maudlin or cloying – and that’s refreshing.

All four young actresses give performances that are entirely authentic to their ages and their origin era.

The cast is also excellent. All four young actresses give performances that are entirely authentic to their ages and their origin era. Each straddles that ineffable line of teen girls who are still clinging to some of their innocence, like not knowing what to do when one of them gets their period, but also coming across like old souls. And that’s only augmented by their time-hopping adventures. When one of them wearily says, “I’m just tired” in the last episode of the season, that’s a line entirely earned and owned by each character. The actresses playing their older selves are also great, with Ali Wong palpably carrying Older Erin’s failures on her person and then shedding it more and more as she comes to protect the girls. Older Tiff (Sekai Abenì), too, is a delight to watch, especially in scenes where she’s pitted against Camryn Jones as the two brainiacs ably spar with one another. Theirs are some of the best scenes in the back half of the season.

As mentioned before, the time-travel antics, which include a Terminator-esque Old Watch soldier (Adina Porter) and Larry (Nate Corddry), a nebulous STF soldier the girls find in their orbit repeatedly, don’t really move the radar in terms of overarching interest. There’s also some out-of-nowhere tech elements that feel like they were lifted from Pacific Rim and disappear as quickly as they show up. Jason Mantzoukas is a welcome presence who adds some lightness to the piece but he’s essentially in a cameo role that needs a lot more fleshing out if more seasons are picked up.

Overall, the series mostly suffers from a lack of propulsion. There is certainly a lot of expansion from the comic book in regards to the lives of the four girls, which is welcome. But the episodes are almost too indulgent when it comes to digging into their lives, especially in 1999 and 2019. The fifth episode does have a welcome burst of CGI action and some major stakes playing out, but the series returns to a simmer until the finale. It’s always a tough call for showrunners to gauge how quickly a new series should burn through story, but in this case, Christopher C. Rogers and his writers could have been more ambitious in getting us deeper into the lore, while adding those emotional moments of character building. Less patient viewers might find Paper Girls too meandering, or derivative of other time-travel stories, and they wouldn’t be wrong. But there’s still plenty to latch onto that makes the ride worthwhile.

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Surface: Season 1 Review

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Surface debuts globally on July 29 exclusively on Apple TV+.  

A satisfying potboiler mystery is always a fun summer diversion and Apple TV+’s Surface ticks all the boxes for what makes the genre worthy: gorgeous, wealthy characters; a gray moral compass; love triangles; and a lead character with amnesia and no long-term memory. It’s a smorgasbord of tropes but series creator/executive producer Veronica West manages to arrange the pieces in suitably entertaining ways, shifting and playing on our assumptions with enough finesse that the outcome feels unexpected and worth the ride.

Set in the most affluent neighborhoods of San Francisco, Surface opens with Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) waking from a nightmare of her recent horrific near-drowning. Having fallen from a ferry five months earlier, she’s trying to navigate her “new normal” with no memory of her past, or her present as the wife of James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a wealthy VC portfolio manager. She’s spent months convalescing in their gorgeous Victorian home, being doted on by a concerned (and helicoptering) James, and figuring out how to cope with the help of her therapist, Hannah (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), with the aftermath of being told she jumped off the ferry. Everything from the fancy dresses in her closet to the pictures on their walls are mysteries that she trusts James and her best friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) to reveal to her. But Sophie clearly doesn’t believe in the narrative she’s being fed.

As she begins to venture out into the outside world, volunteering at the local hospital and socializing at James’ work soirees, Sophie's curiosity prompts her to look at her own medical records which have some startling notes. And then she’s approached by a stranger, Thomas Baden (Stephan James), who slips her matches to a bar in Chinatown. Intrigued by the possibility of some answers, Sophie ventures to the dive bar and Baden reveals this was her old haunt and that he was the officer assigned to her case after her incident. He spurs her to dig deeper into inconsistencies regarding James’ behavior, and her former selves’ actions.

Like peeling back the layers of an enigmatic onion, Sophie pieces together that her pre-accident self was making some very morally complicated life choices with Baden. And as she continues to pull more aggressively at the threads of her past life — despite her therapist’s warnings — a lot of mess comes bubbling up in her fractured memories. James becomes more fraught with her erratic behavior and they challenge one another about the secrets they’re both keeping. He looks more shifty in his obsession with knowing her whereabouts, while Sophie digs into their marriage with observations by Caroline and James’ best friend, Harrison (François Arnaud).

The “Pilot” episode lays the groundwork for Sophie’s predicament very well, with all of the players in her small circle both helping and hindering her from feeling like she’s getting the true story about her life before. But West and her writers don’t quite get a hold of the pacing of their mystery until Episode 5, “It Comes in Waves.” In it, director Sam Miller plays with Sophie’s increasing impulses to push the boundaries of who she is now, by trying experimental memory recovery, drinking, popping pills, and unrepentantly flip-flopping between James and Baden’s affections. Tripping out at Caroline’s art show flips a switch in opening up Sophie as a character in regards to how she will continue to pursue her history and the “truths” that will continue to make her, and us, swing wildly back and forth, reassessing each new piece of information that comes to light. It’s after this point that the series pushes forward with renewed momentum and cliffhangers that are more propulsive going straight through to the finale.

As a series, Surface is gorgeously shot, portraying an almost fairytale version of San Francisco that’s always glowing with wet streets of reflected neon and neighborhoods only possessing expensive cars and luxuriously appointed abodes. It’s visual wealth porn similarly captured in Big Little Lies or Little Fires Everywhere. It’s not surprising that all three are executive produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production shingle, so there’s a throughline here of watching the dappled lives of the uber rich deal with their niche problems. However, where Surface acquits itself differently is showing Sophie's distaste and unease with her affluent life. As she struggles with being in her own skin, she’s also not in accord with the life James has built for her and that puts another strain on their relationship, which is interesting and feels authentic in her journey of discovery. That’s expanded upon in the sixth episode, which is one of the better efforts of the season.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw flirts with all the iterations of who Sophie has been and could be.

The cast is also integral to selling this whole story, with Mbatha-Raw giving a sympathetic yet ambiguous performance as Sophie. She starts as a blank slate innocent, but as more and more of who she was comes into focus, Mbatha-Raw flirts with all the iterations of who Sophie has been and could be. At times, we’re watching her decide which Sophie she wants to be and it’s engaging to watch. Jackson-Cohen vacillates between loving and obsessive well, as his performance leaves us on our toes about whether he’s the cause of her problems or the sad recipient of Sophie’s choices. Graynor is also great at leaving us wondering if she’s a friend or foe. Unfortunately, Stephan James’ Baden isn’t given enough backstory to flesh out beyond the face value, which is really unfortunate because his character feels the most underserved in the story. He’s given scenes where you’re left wanting to know more about his work life or his personal life, but he’s only oriented around Sophie, which means we don’t get much of his internal life outside of his devotion to her.

Maybe the most disappointing element of the series is how it ends. There’s a strong argument that where it's left is just fine, like a great book that leaves you thinking about it for days or weeks. West and her creative team leave us with some answers, some questions but no need to keep going. Yet the very final minutes all but require that, which feels like it's been mandated to stretch the premise, regardless of its plausibility. And that’s always the cardinal sin of a great mystery: not knowing when to end the game.

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My Hero Academia Season 5 OVAs Review - "HLB" & "Laugh! As If You Are in Hell"

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Both My Hero Academia Season 5 OVAs, "HLB" and "Laugh! As If You Are in Hell," will be available to stream on Crunchyroll on Aug. 1, 2022.

My Hero Academia is back! Kind of. The two new OVAs (Original Video Animation) may not contribute much to the overall plot of the show or offer many clues as to what's coming next, but they are good reminders of what My Hero can do at its best. These standalone stories get you reacquainted with most of the main cast, expand the world of MHA, and also provide enough superpowered laughs and fun to make the wait for Season 6 easier.

OVAs, in general, are not what they used to be. Back in the '80s and '90s, when home video exploded in popularity, they were an avenue to produce edgier, more mature animation that couldn't get past TV sensors. From gory and violent shows like Bubblegum Crisis and Hellsing Ultimate, to experimental ones like FLCL and Gunbuster, or complex, epic sci-fi operas like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, there was an OVA for everything. Nowadays, most high-profile OVAs tend to be short episodes or bonus features released on home video as cool extras to reward fans. Shows like Attack on Titan released OVAs that expanded their world without distracting from the main plot.

My Hero Academia had already released several OVAs, but not to this level of anticipation. After a lackluster reception to Season 5, a smash hit film, and an adaptation of an acclaimed arc coming soon, it is the perfect time for the show to remind us why we've stuck with it for many years, and prepare us for what's to come.

The two new OVAs are as different as they come. HLB, or Hero League Baseball, is essentially an episode-long game of baseball between Gang Orca's hero agency and Lion Hero: Shishido and his agency. Meanwhile, Laugh! As If You Are in Hell feels more like a standard episode of the show, with Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki working with Endeavor to stop a criminal whose quirk makes people around him laugh uncontrollably.

Just like the last time a big shonen anime did a baseball episode (Jujutsu Kaisen), the HLB episode is a hilarious success. Rather than remotely attempt to connect this episode to the events of last season, it is mostly just an excuse to show how superpowers would affect sports in this world. The result is essentially Super Mario Strikers but with baseball — i.e. a no-holds-barred bloodbath. The animation may not reach the hights of the main series, but it still knows when deliver energetic moments of action to highlight the quirks.

And this is what makes this an essential episode for My Hero Academia, even if it doesn't move things forward. It explores a rather mundane part of the show's world and uses its runtime to answer the question of how it would work with superpowers, all while reminding us of which character has which power ahead of the new season. Seeing the over-the-top violent and creative ways the players use their quirks not just to score but to put the other team out of commission is thrilling and some of the most fun the show has been in a long while. Whether it’s Mineta using one of his adhesive spheres disguised as a baseball to knock out the batter using his own strength, or Gang Orca using his sonar to affect the ball's movement, or Shishido just throwing the ball so hard it destroys the home base and knocks out both the batter, the catcher, and even the umpire, it’s all delightful, superpowered madness.

If nothing else, they serve as good reintroductions to this world and these characters before the new season.

Sadly, the second episode feels more like retreading old ground, focusing on a criminal that must be stopped. That the villain is essentially a Joker-like character does result in some fun scenarios where every character starts laughing uncontrollably. Also, the episode does work well as a season premiere-like recap, bringing us up to speed on where the characters are in their journeys, with Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki still doing their Hero Work-Studies at Endeavor's Agency, and mentions of the Meta Liberation Army and other story beats from last season. Still, it feels rather inconsequential, and the episode ends a bit too abruptly.

Did we need these OVAs? No. Do you need to watch them to understand the previous or the next season? Probably not. That being said, you can still gain something from them. If nothing else, they serve as good reintroductions to this world and these characters before the new season, and the baseball episode is a delightful one-off story I wouldn't mind seeing more of. How does football, or wrestling work with quirks? Maybe we'll find out one day.

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Keep Breathing: Limited Series Review

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Keep Breathing streams on Netflix on July 28, 2022.

The survival drama is a paint-by-numbers formula. Take a terrified individual or group, drop them into the harsh wilderness, and follow them as they fall apart. Sprinkle in some interpersonal issues, and boom! You've got an easy show for just about any audience to follow…But that doesn’t always mean you’ve got something good, and unfortunately, Keep Breathing, Netflix’s latest take on the genre, is serviceable at best.

The limited series is an uninspired take on what shows like Lost did first – forcing “normal” people to survive in the wilderness – without any of the supernatural elements that made that series interesting. It’s a weird mishmash of action and melodrama that somehow manages to make surviving in the wild even less exciting than our heroine’s personal flashbacks. The result? An extremely rote series that's mercifully over in just six episodes.

Attorney Liv (Melissa Barrera) has made it her mission to meet someone near the Canadian wilderness before she returns to her normal life, but her flight has been canceled. Desperate, she turns to two men she finds in the airport headed to the same destination. They reluctantly agree to take her with them, but disaster strikes when the plane goes down. With both men eventually succumbing to their injuries and the plane submerged underwater, Liv must survive on her own as long as she possibly can…with little hope of being rescued.

It's all extremely standard survival fare: the work-first attorney struggles to adapt to the situation, all while reflecting on the failures that led up to this moment. Interspersed with colorful vignettes that give us a peek into Liv's life before the crash, Keep Breathing showcases the young lawyer's determination to survive the wilderness – even if that means burning piles of money she finds in luggage and burying the oxycodone she found with it.

Because as it turns out, living alone in the wilderness is hard. This show really wants to remind you of this fact every time you tune in, and about how hard its protagonist is working to make sure she stays alive. Liv dives underwater again and again to recover equipment from the plane, only to find herself face to face with a hungry bear tearing through her food stores. She doesn’t quite know where to take shelter at first. There’s nothing to distract her from her absent mother and doting father’s death…or the skeletons in her closet. But she finds a way, of course, because Keep Breathing wants us to root for Liv, even when she’s as milquetoast of a survivor as humanly possible.

As resourceful as Liv appears to be, figuring out which berries are okay to eat and crafting her own compass, she also shows little common sense. Why burn piles of money when there's plenty of wood around to set ablaze? And why dump out perfectly good medication (despite the potential for complications) when there are dangers lurking around every corner? It would come in handy if she happened to break her arm or get in a tussle with a bear. There’s no real explanation for these decisions, other than the fact that it’s just more dramatic that way, apparently. An attorney burning money? Seems a bit on the nose.

Keep Breathing is an average show, at least, if you just need something to watch. 

And of course, there also comes a particularly predictable reveal that often surrounds women in movies and TV who are facing already-difficult predicaments. For spoiler reasons, we won’t say exactly what that reveal entails, but it sets up exactly the kind of staid writing I'd expect from anything where a strong woman is meant to pull herself out of a seemingly insurmountable situation.

This twist adds little to the plot and only serves as a reminder that, if there's a chance for a woman to star in a series where she must use everything at her disposal to survive, she's still somehow got to be taking care of someone else. Because the last thing a woman should be taking care of is herself, apparently, and writing like this only serves to drive that harmful narrative home.

Otherwise, it seems the rest of Liv’s time willing herself to survive is dominated by men as well. If she’s not lost in thought about the death of her father, she’s daydreaming about her on- and off-again relationship with coworker Danny (Jeff Wilbusch), or tormented by Sam (Austin Stowell), one of the men she hitched a ride with.

Frustratingly, there's no real explanation for why Sam was so intent on no one coming out to save them after the plane crash. Assuming the men’s Cessna departed from the same airport Liv had visited, it had to have communicated with air traffic controllers. There's some sort of record, to be sure, of the flight and even its potential destination, despite what Sam says, requiring a bit too much suspension of disbelief from us.

As far as the story itself goes, there’s just no reason to watch this middling take on the survival genre.

There's also no reason for a device the series goes on to use: the deceased Sam acting as a negative voice that continues to tell Liv she's going to die. She has no personal connection to Sam prior to the accident, and he serves no real purpose other than to be a detractor so we can feel good about Liv's victories. And from what we knew about him during his brief time alive, there's little reason to assume he'd be this unfriendly to someone struggling to keep herself alive long enough to seek rescue.

On the bright side, Keep Breathing is visually pleasing, with fantastic camera work, an inspired score, and great acting from its core cast. It’s so unfortunate, then, that it fails to deliver any real staying power thanks to a boring setup and an even more boring cast of characters that fail to make any real impression. The best there is to say? Keep Breathing is an average show, at least, if you just need something to watch.

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Thirteen Lives Review

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Thirteen Lives opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago theaters on July 29 with a release on Prime Video Aug. 5.

In 2018, the whole world was transfixed by the Tham Luang Nang Non disaster which found 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach trapped inside an almost impenetrable underground cave network after a flash flood. With global news coverage, the details of the dive-based rescue operation had humanity on the edge of their seats. But the true drama was happening amongst the boys’ families, the Thai authorities trying to save them, and the international volunteers who amassed to work out many plans of action. Director Ron Howard recreates that moment in real time, bringing his camera into the depths of the caves to give us a tense and uncompromising diver’s-eye-view of the impossible plan to bring them out alive. Thrilling, hopeful, and revealing, Thirteen Lives is Howard once again putting audiences right in the thick of the peril, turning a global event into a personal story of will and then triumph.

Howard opens the film with a prologue that sets the context of the soccer team and their average, everyday lives in Northern Thailand. Excited about a birthday party that evening, they pregame with their coach (Teeradon Supapunpinyo) by visiting a local underground cave for some amateur spelunking. Open to the public and safe outside of monsoon months, they venture in with flashlights for what is usual playtime for the kids – but then an unexpectedly early monsoon storm douses the mountain and surroundings with incredible rains. When the kids don’t show up to the party that night, their parents drive to the caves and find all 13 bikes at the mouth of the cave, but no boys.

The Thai response is swift as the local Governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) — who is a political lame duck and potential scapegoat if needed — and the Thai Navy SEALS set up an operations post outside the cave. The locals also rally together to feed and support the parents who camp out on site, while other locals and even expats, like British cave diver Vern Unsworth (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), share their knowledge of the cave interiors. There’s even a former local engineer who takes personal time from his job in Bangkok to travel to the site to ask locals to help him dam the sinkholes on the mountain so the flowing water won’t stop the rescue efforts. All of this staging is integral to setting up the competency of the efforts and how, despite the thousands of global volunteers, making it clear the civilians were the core of the operation. And this setup is told entirely in the language of the region, which means they’re not afterthoughts in their own story.

Using each day of the recovery as a title touchstone, Howard uses his documentarian skills to set up a clear timeline, with visual markers on a map of the caves for progress context, while folding in new players as the efforts ramp up. By June 25, the Thai SEALS do an exploratory dive and find tight obstacles and low visibility in the caves is prohibitive. That’s when two expert British cave divers, Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), are summoned by Unsworth because of their singular experience. It creates some friction for the SEAL Commander Kiet (Thira Chutikul), but Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson rightly don’t lean into overblown posturing to augment the drama. It’s subtly drawn and allows the film to maintain focus on the bigger picture of everyone’s goal of getting the 13 out alive.

To the credit of Mortensen and Farrell, they modulate their performances extremely well as disparate friends who are pragmatic about the situation. Where Stanton is too blunt, Volanthen is the warmer messenger, who uses his empathy as the father of a boy the same age as the missing kids, to help keep the Thai operations team hopeful yet extremely cognizant of the unlikely odds facing them. They’re bolstered by Joel Edgerton’s empathetic turn as Dr. Harry Harris, a diver and anesthetist from Australia, who arrives to consult on the most provocative potential solution. His expertise is needed to create a reasonable plan in getting the team out of the caves for what will essentially be a five to seven-hour dive; in other words, a bleak test of will for even the most experienced diver.

Smartly, Howard does frequent check-ins with the anguished, waiting parents and community, so the film doesn’t pivot into a story about the western heroes. But the overall piece would have benefited if there was a Thai character that was afforded as central a place in the story as the English-speaking actors, with asides to their personal lives or connection to the region. Nicholson sort of goes there with the Commander and his returning SEAL graduate Saman (Sukollawat Kanarot), but it’s not explored in a satisfying way. However, Thai folklore regarding the cave, the region’s cultural practices, and religion are woven throughout, including the complexity of the Myanmar immigrant issues, three of whom are in the caves, and the concern by their parents that they won’t get saved with the Thai children. All of those choices fill in the details of the story likely unknown by broader audiences and make the telling more robust and thoughtful.

It’s often an overwhelming auditory and visual experience that necessarily puts the audience right in the peril.

Where Thirteen Lives really excels is in how Howard and Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom capture the bone-chilling claustrophobia of what the divers had to traverse to get to the survivors. From stalactite obstacle courses, to murky, treacherous sightlines and heavy currents, the cameras are often positioned right on the water-line and then submerge with the divers for their authentic aquatic perspective. Augmented with exceptional sound design that accentuates the alien nature of it all, they manage to make the normally mundane flow of water menacing. It’s often an overwhelming auditory and visual experience that necessarily puts the audience right in the peril of every foot gained within the caves.

The stressful final act tracks the nail-biting rescue effort itself, with the Thai government, the Governor, and the divers secretly agreeing to try the most extreme option, which is truly the only option. The tension of watching the mortal divers weigh the responsibility of safely returning the 13, but also the Thai divers who stayed with them to monitor their rapidly degenerating surroundings, will leave you squirming in your seat. As one of the divers says pre-dive, they would have been heroes saving one of the boys, but now it’s all or nothing, and you feel that in every frame. Howard uses every lesson he’s absorbed from Apollo 13 and his documentary efforts to imbue Thirteen Lives with all of the drama, tension, and realism of what happened to give us a needed reminder of human resilience, and the capacity we have to sacrifice and care when the situation calls us to rise to the occasion.

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Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Review

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There’s nothing special or noteworthy about the exterior of the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, and on paper, its specifications look like it’ll be a good gaming laptop, with the potential to be great. As it turns out, I should learn to stop judging a laptop by its housing. The Legion 5 Pro is a workhorse. Plain and simple.

Specs

Here are the specifications of the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro I’ve been testing:

• Model: Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (16lAH7H)
• Display: 16-inch WQXGA 165Hz (2560x1600)
• Processor: Intel Core i7–12700H 3.5GHz (24M cache, 4.7GHz Max Turbo)
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU, 8GB GDDR6
• Memory: 16GB DDR5 4,800Mhz
• OS: Windows 11 Home
• Storage: 512GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD
• Webcam: 720p with e-Shutter
• Ports: 1 x Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C, DisplayPort 1.4), 2 x USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort 1.4), 3 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 1 x e-Shutter switch, 1 x 3.5mm headphone/mic combo, 1 x HDMI, 1 x RJ45
• Connectivity: WiFi 6E 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5.1
• Dimensions: 14.17 x 10.4 x 1.05-inches (WxDxH)
• Weight: 5.49-pounds

Lenovo Legion 5 Pro – Design

The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro looks like a cross between your Dad’s work laptop and a gaming laptop. The 5 Pro comes in a storm grey color that’s close to Apple’s space grey color offering. On the outside of the lid is the Legion logo, and that’s it. There isn’t any sort of fancy decal or design that’s become common on most gaming laptops.

Upon opening the lid, you’ll find a 16-inch display with thin bezels on the vertical sides of the screen and a slightly thicker bezel going across the top, housing a 720p webcam.

On the deck of the laptop, just above the keyboard is the power button with an indicator light in the middle of it. It turns white when the laptop is running on battery power, and red while charging.

There’s a full-size keyboard with a number pad on the right-hand side, with chiclet-style keys that have flat edges on three sides and a rounded bottom. There are four different RGB lighting zones behind the keyboard that you can customize to fit your mood, with a total of three different profiles available to switch between in the Lenovo Vantage app.

The trackpad is centered with the keyboard, or off-center on the left side of the 5 Pro’s housing. It’s smooth and easy to use, save for the imaginary line on the trackpad where it registers any interaction as a right-click instead of a standard click. I’ve had to consciously remind myself, several times during testing, to go higher and over to the left more on the touchpad in order to use it without errant right clicks.

The 5 Pro has a long list of ports, most of which are on the back of the laptop’s housing. There are a few sprinkled on either side and a unique switch on the right that puzzled me at first. Let’s start with that switch – it’s an e-Shutter switch that turns the webcam on or off. There’s a small icon that shows up on the 5 Pro’s display when you switch modes, letting you know the camera’s current status.

When the camera is turned off, the switch is red to let you easily see the camera’s status. Next to the switch is the 3.5mm combination microphone and headphone jack. Finally, there’s a standard USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port on the right side.

Flanking the left side of the housing is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort 1.4 support near the front, and a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port behind it. There’s a Thunderbolt icon next to the rear port letting you know that’s what you’ll want to use for faster transfer speeds, if your external hard drive supports it.

On the rear of the laptop’s housing is an Ethernet (RJ45) port, another USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 Port with DisplayPort 1.4 support and power delivery of up to 135W for charging the laptop. Next to the USB-C port is an HDMI port, followed by two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports. Finally, there’s the charging port that uses Lenovo’s power-in adapter. This is the charging port you’ll want to use during gaming or resource-intensive tasks as it provides 300W of power when paired with the included power supply.

My favorite aspect of the port arrangement on the 5 Pro is that you’ll find labels just above the ports on the rear of the laptop, making it possible to see which port is where when you’re looking down on the laptop’s housing.

As I said earlier, there’s nothing fancy or extraordinary about the Legion 5 Pro’s design. It’s a grey laptop with a logo on the lid and ports on three sides. It looks fine.

Lenovo Legion 5 Pro – Performance and gaming

Inside the Legion 5 Pro is an Intel Core i7–12700H with 14 cores and 20 threads, an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, a 512GB NVMe SSD for storage and 16GB of DDR5 4,800Mhz memory. That’s a respectable component list for any gaming PC, let alone for a laptop. Other than the 512GB of storage, that is. I filled up the 512GB of storage after installing a handful of games and benchmarking apps, which meant rejiggering which apps and games were installed during my testing. Ideally, 1TB of storage is where all gaming setups should start.

What surprised me, however, was just how much performance was packed into the 5 Pro, especially when I compared its benchmark scores to more expensive high-end systems with objectively better specs. When you compare the scores to systems like the MSI Raider GE76 with an i9–12900HK and an RTX 3080 Ti, or the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 with an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX and an RTX 3080 Ti, it’s clear that the Legion 5 Pro is keeping up with, and oftentimes outperforming, both systems.

For example, when you compare the 5 Pro’s Borderlands 3 score of 101, you see that it nearly kept up with the GE76’s score of 108 and outpaced the Duo 16’s score of 93. 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark test showed the 5 Pro’s real potential with a score of 11,916, outscoring both comparison laptops. The GE76 was close at 11,742 and the Duo 16 behind that at 10,768.

Gaming on the Legion 5 Pro has been fun. The speakers provide plenty of output to overpower the fans without making you feel like you’re making way too much noise. For my first few matches of Fortnite, I let the 5 Pro’s AI software decide if it should run in performance mode, based on what app or game is open. With all of the settings cranked to high – excuse me, epic – in Fortnite and the resolution set to 1920x1200, the 5 Pro averaged 123 frames per second.

When I manually switched the 5 Pro over to performance mode with the same settings, it averaged 113 FPS. Odd, right? I think the AI may be doing more than just turning performance mode on and off, seemingly also optimizing the system to get all of the performance it can out of it.

Finally, I tested with the full 2560x1600 resolution, which dropped the average frames per second down to 84.

Outside of gaming, the Legion 5 Pro handled whatever task I threw at it. Between using Edge with way too many tabs open, and alternating between a Twitch stream or one of my Spotify daily playlists, it never slowed down. I did some light photo editing with GIMP, as well, and have nothing bad to say about how the 5 Pro handled it.

One gripe I have is with the overall brightness of the display. Unless the brightness level is nearly maxed out, say 90% or above, it’s far too dark for my eyes. At the 50% threshold, which we use to run all benchmark and battery tests, I’ve had a horrible time seeing what’s on the screen. Don’t get me wrong, the concept is visible – just dark. Too dark. I had hoped the display’s HDR support would translate into a bright and vivid picture at all times, but that’s not the case.

What about when brightness is cranked up? Well, it looks good. Color saturation is on point and the clarity of images and video is clear and crisp.

I’m not the biggest fan of the keyboard’s keys, only because I found myself getting lost on them while gaming far more often than I usually do.

Lenovo Legion 5 Pro – Battery life

Lenovo’s spec sheet lists an estimated five hours of battery life for the 5 Pro. That’s a respectable and honest estimate.

In day-to-day use, the battery life of the Legion 5 Pro was good enough for casual work for several hours before needing to be plugged in.

Running the PCMark 10’s Modern Office battery benchmark, however, the battery ran from 100% to empty in 2 hours and 39 minutes. That’s a decent amount of time, but it falls short of Lenovo’s estimate as well as the performance we’ve seen from the GE76 and Duo 16.

Lenovo Legion 5 Pro – Software

There isn’t a whole lot of preinstalled software on the 5 Pro. There’s Lenovo Vantage, which I found useful to set lighting profiles, check for updates or adjust system settings like turning off the Hybrid GPU mode that switches between the integrated and dedicated GPU based on which app you’re using.

There’s also an option in Vantage to overclock your GPU with a couple of clicks. There is, of course, a warning when you first enable the feature, but once you skip past that you’re able to adjust the GPU Clock and VRAM Clock. Once you get it tuned to your liking, you can enable overclocking with the flip of a switch.

McAfee LiveSafe is preinstalled and after setting up the computer I was immediately met with a warning that my free trial of coverage had expired.

In addition to the unnecessary bloatware of McAfee, the Vantage app had a few ads at the bottom of the main page. There was an ad for “seamless gaming,” a 10% discount offer for Lenovo support, and a reminder to register the laptop.

Purchasing Guide

There are a couple of stock builds of the 5 Pro with Intel processors, with prices ranging from $1,399 to $2,599. The entry-level model comes with an RTX 3050 Ti, while the high-end model has an RTX 3070 Ti. However, neither build matches the test unit I’ve been using, which Lenovo tells me will be available at Walmart for $1,999, but the listing isn't live yet. The closest current listing is the $2,599 model, which matches the CPU and GPU but has double the RAM and four times the storage than the unit I tested.

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MultiVersus Review

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Few companies have the wealth of recognizable and exciting characters required to create a platform fighter that could rival the likes of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series. With the help of developer Player First Games, Warner Bros. is trying to use the seemingly endless list of movie and TV studios it owns to do just that, bringing together an eclectic roster of fan-favorite characters that somehow includes Harley Quinn, Bugs Bunny, and Shaggy all at once. While the result makes for some gleeful multiplayer chaos, MultiVersus is ambitious in its laser focus on competitive multiplayer too. That’s left some of the more casual aspects undercooked, but its prioritization of 2v2 online matches still makes for a fresh take on an increasingly crowded genre.

Unlike last year’s competent yet underwhelming Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, MultiVersus clearly has significant support from the Warner Bros. family and, more importantly, the budget to follow through on Player First’s vision. Not only are iconic faces like the DC superhero trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman available to pilot, but so are characters from Steven Universe, The Iron Giant, and even Game of Thrones. The open beta’s initial roster of 17 is a tad small for my taste, but I’m not worried about it in the long term as the cast is already set to expand in the coming months – basketball and Space Jam superstar LeBron James was just added, and Rick and Morty are supposed to join him in August.

While compact, the roster is diverse and brimming with personality thanks to its impressively faithful voice cast. Having actors like John DiMaggio (Jake the Dog), Kevin Conroy (Batman), Matthew Lillard (Shaggy), and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) reprise their roles goes a long way toward making these characters feel authentic. It’s great to hear the voices I remember from cartoons and movies I grew up on bantering with characters they’ve never had the chance to meet before. Beyond the recognizable, I dig additions like Reindog, too, an original creation that opens up the possibility for more new faces to join the fray down the line.

Puncha Some Buns

Matches in MultiVersus play out as either 1v1, 2v2, or four-player free-for-all battles in places like a spooky Scooby Doo-inspired mansion or the gadget-ridden cavern of the Bat Cave. Unfortunately, the sparse selection of stages are bland and lack identity beyond those two standouts. The other three locations look like they could take place anywhere despite supposedly being based on memorable sites like the Adventure Time treehouse. Thankfully the music does help make up for this, and I look for any opportunity to brawl in the Sky Palace just to hear its wonderful instrumental cover of the Steven Universe theme.

Like in Smash Bros., your goal is to build up damage on your opponent in order to make it easier to send them flying off into the void at the edge of the screen for a kill. Characters have two attack buttons to work with, representing normal hits and flashier special attacks, with different moves performed by pointing the analog stick up, down, or to the side while unleashing an attack. It’s recognizable, but a well-executed system, and controlling your character is as quick and fluid as I’d hope the chaotic gameplay of a platform fighter would be.

Controlling your character is as quick and fluid as I'd hope. 

I almost always feel in complete control, which can be attributed to the tight mobility options available to most of the roster. You can use double jumps and dodges to navigate the airspace, escape danger, avoid projectiles, or line up a devastating assault of your own. A change from the norm is a lack of ledge grabbing, which is why Player First has opted to enable wall jumps that make for exciting, daring saves by sticking to the side of the main platform and leaping to safety instead of falling to your doom.

Another big departure is that the 2v2 mode is meant to be the main way to play, making MultiVersus refreshing and setting it apart from its peers. These team battles are a lot of fun, with each character assigned a class that promotes a specific playstyle to help compliment a partner. Whether that’s the frontline tanks, the hard-hitting bruisers, the agile and deadly assassins, or the trickier ranged mages and support classes; everyone has a role to play in a fight, and your team composition can be vital to succeeding against experienced challengers. It’s great fun discovering how Bugs Bunny and his toon gimmicks pair with the protection and crowd control provided by Wonder Woman’s moves. While I naturally gravitated towards tanks like Superman and The Iron Giant, I’ve also been having a blast learning the intricacies of playing support as Steven Universe and learning about each character to be a better teammate.

Rollback Netcode

With how important the online modes are to MultiVersus, the rollback netcode running remote multiplayer sessions has to be great, and it has been across most of the well over 100 matches I have under my belt. A large majority of fights have played out with smooth and responsive controls on PC and Xbox, both with wired and wireless connections. I have run into some issues online, although it’s fewer than I can count on one hand. However, in those rare times when a connection is bad, it’s chaotic and near unplayable, with characters warping around the stage or running aimlessly off a cliff only to appear a few seconds later just yards away. Thankfully, moments like that are the exception rather than the rule.

You can equip up to four different perks before every match, adding a level of customization to enhance your playstyle, support your partner, or even try to counter your opponents’ team. Three of those can be perks that affect attributes like movement speed or damage dealt, which is amplified in power if your teammate equips the same one. Signature perks fill the fourth slot, modifying specific character attacks and abilities, such as leaving flame walls in the wake of Iron Giant’s jet boosters or Taz hacking up an anvil if he eats an enemy projectile. Perks add a meaningful layer of strategy to each match that I appreciate in every mode, but especially when I’m playing alongside someone I can build a gameplan with.

The unfortunate side effect of that focus on competitive 2v2 is the absence of meaningful local multiplayer options. Currently, you can play with up to four people on one device in team battles and free-for-alls, just like online, but there isn’t enough here to keep my interest with friends if I want to have a chaotic anything-goes party experience. Items occasionally populate in the FFA game type, but none of the rocks, dynamite, and ice weapons are remotely entertaining to use or add surprising moments to the mayhem that’s already playing out. Local multiplayer also means the lack of stages is more glaring, making MultiVersus a disappointing game for casual fun overall.

A Caboodle of Collectables

Characters and perks have to be unlocked, but thankfully MultiVersus takes a big step in the right direction when it comes to free-to-play fighting game monetization. While the free-to-play model comes with a lot of negative connotations and possible pitfalls, it also has the potential to be a boon for fighting games by allowing more people to casually try a game without having to drop a dime on it if they don’t want to. And crucially, Player First has ensured everything that affects gameplay is accessible simply by playing, avoiding any pay-to-win concerns.

Perks are only unlocked either by leveling up characters or by spending the free gold currency that’s earned from playing matches and completing various daily missions and reward tracks. Characters, on the other hand, can be bought with gold, the real-money premium currency called Gleamium, or Character Tickets which are available to those who buy the optional founders packs. Only four characters are unlocked from the start, but I’ve found playing just a couple of hours will earn enough gold to unlock someone new. There’s a nice pace to learning a character or two and then moving on to a new one when you have enough gold.

Gleamium and Premium Item Pricing

Gleamium can be purchased in bundles of 450 ($4.99), 1000 ($9.99), 2200 ($19.99), and 6000 ($49.99). Variant costumes currently can cost 500, 800, 1500, or 2000 Gleamium depending on the rarity, and characters are each 700 Gleamium if you want to forgo paying the 1500-3000 free Gold. Character emotes can cost 200, 350, or 500 Gleamium depending on whether it's uncommon, rare, or epic rarity, respectively. Ringout animations are 800 Gleamium for rare and 1200 Gleamium for epic items. That means pretty much no matter what item you are looking to buy, the Gleamium bundles won't quite line up with the price.

Gleamium is also used to unlock multiple cosmetic items like character variant costumes, emotes, profile icons, ringout animations, and more. These cosmetics are fun, especially the skins that change the entire aesthetic of a character down to the voice lines, like the Cake the Cat costume for Jake. However, some of the pricing on these items don’t align well with the bundles of Gleamium that can be purchased, which forces you to buy more than needed – that’s not a new business practice, but it’s still a lame one. If you want to invest in Luau Velma or a Batman: The Animated Series skin, it’ll cost you. They’re by no means necessary to purchase, but if the right skin comes around, such as Black Lantern Superman, I’ll definitely be tempted to swag out my main fighter if the price is right. Not every cosmetic costs Gleamium, and there are other ways to snag some of these items in the free and premium season pass rewards and by leveling up each character. I love that these reasons to keep playing and engaging exist even if I’m not throwing down money.

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