At this point, Shia LaBeouf’s as famous for playing Shia LaBeouf as he is for any of his other roles. He’s constantly performing as himself in public, whether that means wearing a paper bag to the red carpet or inviting the public to watch him watch his own movies.

Honey Boy, in a lot of ways, feels like the logical extension of that art. It’s written by LaBeouf, based on his own experiences as a child star, with LaBeouf playing the fictionalized version of his own father. It’s so meta, there’s a scene LaBeouf has in this very screenplay explained to him by an actor (Lucas Hedges) playing an analogue of his own mid-’00s self. 

SEE ALSO: Zac Efron’s Ted Bundy movie ‘Extremely Wicked’ is shockingly pointless

But Honey Boy is no smirky stunt. It comes across like a deeply sincere effort on LaBeouf’s part to exorcise some of his demons. And if it sometimes feels like a very elaborate therapy session, and not much more? Well, you can’t accuse LaBeouf of not trying. We should all be so willing to reckon with our issues.

Most of the film takes place around 1995, when Otis is 12. His work seems to consist largely of cheesy Disney Channel-style movies, but he’s well-liked by the cast and crew, and starting to get famous enough that strangers are recognizing him. After work, he goes home to a run-down one-bedroom motel room he shares with his father, James, an ex-felon who’s affably neglectful at best and outright abusive at worst. 

Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) plays the younger Otis, and he is the single best reason to seek out Honey Boy. Otis is a character at odds with himself – trying simultaneously to project a grown-up cool and cling to the last vestiges of his childhood innocence – and Jupe conveys those contradictions through a widening of his eyes or a slump of his shoulders. Not a moment of his performance rings false, though I hope for his sake that his real experiences as a child star are more pleasant than the ones he’s playing here.

Noah Jupe is the single best reason to seek out Honey Boy.

LaBeouf has the flashier role as James, a former rodeo clown who’s just charismatic enough to win over people who should know better. The actor (and the script he wrote) takes pains to show James’s capacity for both empathy and cruelty, and he commits fully to James’s colorful personality. But he can’t seem to lose himself in the role, and I couldn’t either. To the end, James feels less like a person than a projection of a person. 

Or maybe that’s just right. Director Alma Har’el frequently uses blurred boundaries (between past and present, sets and reality, dreams and waking life) to tell this story about other blurred boundaries (between father and son, money and affection, trauma and recovery). In the adult Otis’ case, this often takes the form of nightmares or montages that only reveal themselves to be real or not real a few minutes in.

For child Otis, though, Honey Boy tends to muddy those distinctions in less showy but more disturbing ways. One scene has Otis acting out an argument between his parents, because they refuse to talk on the phone with one another; another has him sharing a moment with his TV dad that he yearns to have with his real one.

It becomes no wonder that this kid grew up to be an adult buckling under a weight he can barely bring himself to admit he’s carrying. (“My dad isn’t the reason I drink,” he scoffs during a court-mandated therapy session. “He’s the reason I work.”) Or that that adult, in turn, eventually decided to work through those issues by turning them into a screenplay for himself to perform.

James probably wouldn’t be a fan of reliving ancient history. “Stop bringing up the past,” he grouses to his son, late in the movie. “I can’t get out from under it.” What James does not have the self-awareness to realize – but LaBeouf does – is that no one else can, either. And that refusing to bring it up won’t save him, or anyone else, from what’s already happened.

Huawei’s foldable phone is coming in about three weeks. 

This is according to a new teaser for a company event on Feb 24, ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. 

SEE ALSO: Huawei MateBook 13 is a tiny, powerful laptop that starts at $999

The image and the tweet don’t reveal much, but the image clearly shows a foldable device of some sort. Given previous indications that Huawei plans to launch a foldable phone (though the plan to launch before Samsung likely won’t materialize), the hint is clear enough. 

Huawei previously said its foldable phone will be a 5G device as well, making it one of the most interesting such phones to launch in February (and there are a lot).

It’s also likely that Huawei will launch more than one device at the event, as the invite it sent us used phrases like “latest innovations” and “cutting-edge products”.

As for foldable phones, seemingly everyone is making one these days. Xiaomi has a very interesting prototype, Samsung is planning to launch the mysterious (and expensive) Galaxy F, and LG is working on many interesting form factors, including a phone with a detachable screen. 

Hardcore gamers, rejoice! The new Razer Phone 2 might just be the smartphone for you.

Two years ago, Razer changed the game by carving out a specific niche in the mobile phone industry: an Android smartphone specifically made for gaming. After spending a number of weeks with Razer’s latest gaming phone, it’s clear why Razer is still the king of its domain.

Let’s get this upfront: the Razer Phone 2 is not for everybody. First and a foremost, it’s a device made for gamers. The look, the feel, and the specs behind the phone are all optimized for gaming. With that said, a number of these features also greatly enhance your all-around entertainment experience.

The latest version of Razer’s flagship gaming phone looks a lot like its predecessor. We previously described the first Razer Phone as “more Hummer than Porsche, and you’ll either like it or not.” That remains true. 

Personally, I like how the Razer Phone looks. I don’t have a problem with the phone’s bezels. The grille design houses speakers on the face of the phone and actually nicely fits Razer’s aesthetic. I much prefer that to the dreaded notch. Plus, it gives your hands enough room without covering the phone’s display while you’re gaming.

Flip the Razer Phone 2 over and you’ll find a feature straight from Razer’s popular line of Blade 15 laptops: the Razer Chroma RGB light up logo. On the back of the phone, Razer’s three-headed snake logo can shine in over 16.8 million colors. It’s not a game-changing feature, but it certainly sets the Razer Phone 2 apart from the rest. Plus, the logo you can change the settings so the phone can light up based on a specific app’s notification. For example, a new Gmail message notification can make the Razer logo glow bright red.

The Razer Phone 2’s display is one of its defining features. It has a big 5.72-inch IGZO LCD 1440 x 2560 screen. The company boasts that the Razer Phone 2 is the only phone with a true 120Hz display rate. This is crucial when setting apart a gaming phone from the rest of the smartphone pack. There’s not stuttering or lagging on the screen when you’re playing Fortnite. That refresh rate is a critical factor when it comes to in-game accuracy. Razer says the phone’s display is 50 percent brighter than the previous model. I can’t quite tell if its 50 percent brighter, but the screen is bright!

Holding the big, blocky phone took some getting use to. As someone who wears fairly tight-fitting jeans, the phone looked humongous sticking out of my pocket. Thanks to the size, I never really felt too comfortable holding the phone upright in portrait mode. 

On the flip side, however, handling the Razer Phone 2 in landscape mode when you’re using two hands was much more pleasing. It felt very much like gripping a well-made game console controller, maybe even a shrunken Nintendo Switch. As a smartphone made for gaming, you’re likely to find yourself holding the Razer Phone 2 in landscape mode more often than not so it  works out.

Being primarily an iPhone user, the Razer Phone 2 was heavier than I’m accustomed to. However, the phone’s aluminum unibody does make the device feel nice and sturdy. It feels like the premium you paid for the phone.

Razer says the phone is water resistant, which would be new when compared to the first Razer Phone. Much like its predecessor, though, there’s still not a headphone jack. Maybe this was a knock on the phone back in 2017, but it’s expected nowadays. The phone comes with a dongle so you really can’t complain. The company also sells its own Hammerhead USB-C ANC headphones.

Of course, what would a smartphone made for gaming be without blazing fast performance. WIth a Qualcomm 845 Snapdragon processor and Adreno 630 GPU, Razer says the phone performs 30 percent better than its predecessor. Go live on Twitch with this phone and you’ll notice no difference between console streaming, at least performance wise.

The Razer Phone is equipped with 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. It’s a little disappointing that they didn’t increase the internal storage from the previous generation, but the phone does have a micro SD slot which can expand space up to 1TB.

Powering the Razer Phone 2 is a 4000 mAh lithium-ion battery, which is the same as the previous model. I found that the battery was roughly halfway depleted after a few hours of gameplay. Razer says the battery can last up to 10 hours. Perhaps that’s the case for the first Razer Phone. But, to be fair the battery has to power a phone with much high specs this time around. Also, mobile gamers know by now to always have an external battery pack handy.

If you’re that worried about battery life, however, the Razer Phone 2 has you covered. The Razer Cortex Mobile app is sort of the company’s own little app store. It curates a list of games that take full advantage of the Razer Phone 2’s specs. But, found alongside the games in the app is the Cortex: Game Booster. This feature enables Razer Phone users to optimize their device’s performance by creating customized settings that attach to each game on their phone. Users can change these settings and alter CPU performance and frame rate output for a simpler games that don’t require the phone to run on its maximum settings. That was your battery doesn’t get drained. The Game Booster also remembers every time you launch that particular game.

Speaking of the phone’s battery, the Razer Phone 2 supports wireless charging, a feature missing from its predecessor. Taking advantage of this, Razer has released a pretty cool wireless charger for $99.99. Just like on the back of the phone, this wireless charger has customizable Razer Chroma RGB lighting. It also charges the phone pretty quickly thanks to its Qi Wireless Fast Charging feature.

An extended gaming session would make most mobile devices feel pretty hot. During my time playing with the Razer Phone 2, I did not experience much of a temperature change. That’s thanks to the Razer Phone 2 stealing another feature from the company’s line of laptops. Razer installed its “vapor chamber cooling system” inside its latest line of phones which helps keep the phone’s body cool.

My biggest issue with the Razer Phone 2 before launched last year was its camera. Since then there has been a Razer update that dealt with the camera’s functionability. Even with the update, however, the camera remains the Razer Phone 2’s biggest weakness. We had issue with the first Razer Phone’s camera too. Razer has improved on it with a rear dual 12-megapixel camera and a front-facing 8MP selfie cam with HD video. It’s just still lacking though. The cameras not bad per say, but when compared to photos taken with other high-end smartphones, the Razer just couldn’t compete. The camera app also lacks so many features like slow-mo/time lapse options and the filter pickings are pretty slim. It’s especially disappointing in a phone that’s far and away more advanced in so many of its other aspects. Smartphone cameras are a big deal!

With that said, let’s talk about the Razer Phone 2’s most impressive feature: its sound. The Razer Phone 2 has built-in Dolby Atmos surround sound. It’s the only phone to receive official certification from Netflix for HDR video and Dolby Surround 5.1 audio content. It makes sense when you find out that Razer owns THX. But, even so, the sound is incredible. Over the past month I showed this phone to gamers, cinephiles, and your average smartphone user. Some noticed the phone’s display and performance, some didn’t. One constant with this phone was that everyone was wow’d by the sound on this phone. The phone can get loud and does so without distortion. Watching movies on this phone is a one-of-a-kind experience thanks to the surround sound. If adding a surround sound system to your television set at home gives you a home entertainment system, the Razer is the home entertainment system of smartphones. I’m truly impressed and I think Razer doesn’t talk this feature up enough!

The Razer Phone 2 usually retails for $799. Amazon, Best Buy, and the Microsoft Store are currently offering $100 off the phone for a limited time. Furthermore, Verizon is currently offering a $250 Prepaid Mastercard to any Razer Phone 2 user who switches from their current wireless provider. The offer is valid until February 7. Customers can combine the two offers and knock off a total of $350 off the Razer 2.

My extended time with the phone really didn’t change my opinion much from when Razer provided me a hands-on sneak peek before launch. 

Razer is a gaming peripheral company. (Hell, the company even sells its own Android gaming controller.) Razer created the gaming smartphone niche with its flagship mobile device, the Razer Phone. If you’re not playing a lot of mobile games, you could definitely find a more affordable smartphone option that will serve your needs better. If you watch a lot of movies, maybe take a look at the Razer Phone 2 for its display and amazing sound. If you’re a hardcore gamer, the updated Razer Phone 2 is for you. Hopefully, the next Razer Phone addresses its camera though!

It doesn’t matter how successful you get, your old friends will always be there to bring you right back down to earth.

Rami Malek, who was recently nominated for his first Oscar for his role in Bohemian Rhapsody, just learned that the hard way.

SEE ALSO: The 2019 Oscar nominations are finally here

Actor Rachel Bilson just shared what’s pretty much the ultimate throwback photo of Malek on Instagram to congratulate him on his Oscar nom. The two went to Notre Dame High School in California together, and they don’t look much older than high school kids in this photo. 

“Hey @ramimalek where’d you get that gold chain?” Bilson jokingly wrote in the caption for the photo showing a young Rami Malek, who’s sporting spikes and a thick gold chain while embracing The O.C. star.

Bilson added the hashtags #dontforgetthelittlepeople and #oscarworthy.

Is that really Rami Malek? We’ll have to take Bilson’s word for it…

One thing’s for sure, though. Those spikes are definitely #oscarworthy.

The following is a spoiler-free review for Velvet Buzzsaw.

Horror movies. They’ll make you laugh. They’ll make you scream. And then, if you’re really lucky, they’ll make you do both. At the same time.

Dan Gilroy, the visionary creator behind the 2014 thriller Nightcrawler, has once again teamed up with stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo — this time for a terrifying take on the world of modern art in Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw. Aptly marketed as a satirical thriller, Gilroy’s deliriously and devilishly fun romp isn’t breaking much new ground for the genre, but it does manage to uncover the rarely enjoyed holy grail of scary movie experiences: the laugh scream.

SEE ALSO: Jake Gyllenhaal is absolutely done with you pronouncing ‘melancholy’ wrong

The laugh scream (or the scream laugh, if you go by Urban Dictionary’s syntax) is best described as two loud, audible reactions meeting somewhere deep inside one’s vocal box to then flourish into the world as a kind of mesmerizing mutant bark. It is an involuntary, cathartic, out-of-body experience I would personally liken to a desperately needed rest stop on a long road trip mixed with coughing while having the hiccups. 

Velvet Buzzsaw‘s structure — a series of shock value deaths addressed with imaginative goriness à la Final Destination, but broken up by scenes packed with hilarious, snappy dialogue — lends itself perfectly to the laugh scream. An even balance between comedic relief and outright horror, Velvet Buzzsaw‘s various vignettes leapfrog between genres like many projects before it, but truly shine when forcing the two opposing tones to collide. 

This cast is packed with excellent performances by John Malkovich, Toni Collette and more, but Gyllenhaal’s bizarre take on an art critic captures the duality of the film best. Similar to his chilling role in Nightcrawler (but with less antiheroic flair), Gyllenhaal portrays Morf Vandewalt with a kind of slipperiness that is both pleasantly likable and undeniably off-putting. As the characters of this cursed universe are picked off one by one, you can’t help but root for Morf to survive… if only so he can bite the big one with a more cackle-worthy splash later down the line.

Moreover, the visual interest of the movie holds the audience in daunting, perpetual suspense. Neon signs and elaborate statues pepper numerous backdrops of the film, as vicious but artful center pieces increasingly turn on the characters around them. This aesthetically intriguing environment begs you to lean in for a closer look even as the horrifying crescendoes of the narrative push you further and further into your seat. 

In spite of some imperfect pacing and thin monster creation, Velvet Buzzsaw‘s elaborate concepts and marked duality make it a more-than-worthy watch. Hitting an increasingly visual culture in the middle of a horror renaissance, Velvet Buzzsaw will have you laugh screaming “cult classic.” Or at the very least blurting out, “Oh shit!”

Velvet Buzzsaw is now streaming on Netflix.

When scientists study the effects of screen time on children, there’s really only one thing parents want to know: How much is too much? 

While the Academic Pediatric Association guidelines suggest daily limits for high-quality screen-based programming, those recommendations are based on studies with significant limitations. In general, studies on the subject quickly become outdated or can’t prove a causal connection between a certain amount of screen time and any number of outcomes, including mental health and brain development.

Studying the effects of screen time on children is much harder than you might imagine because scientists often can’t get the best data to understand the dynamics at play. That’s why new research often feels promising to parents who are looking for reassurance. If a study hints at negative effects, parents can justify giving their kids less time in front of a television or device. 

SEE ALSO: Wearable sensor may help screen for anxiety and depression in kids

Take, for example, a screen time study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, which found an association between excessive screen time and later developmental milestones in toddler and pre-school age children. 

You’d be forgiven for thinking the study explicitly focused on smartphones and tablets; plenty of the media coverage paired stories with images of children holding mobile devices. Yet, the researchers didn’t ask parents about iPhones, iPads, Kindles, and Androids because they’d either just debuted or didn’t exist when the study launched in 2008. (The study authors believe parents logged such use in an “other screen-based devices” category.)

This doesn’t disprove the study’s findings, but it does reveal how digital media technology often evolves faster than researchers expect. That means survey questions about devices and apps, for example, can quickly become outdated. Researchers, like in the JAMA Pediatrics study, also typically rely on reports about screen time use from children and their parents, the latter of which can be unreliable since adults aren’t great at remembering how much time they’ve spent on their own devices. 

Even if scientists can observe and accurately record screen time use, they often can’t classify a child’s engagement. Spending time on YouTube to learn about space is a much different experience than watching and commenting on Logan Paul videos. 

The good news is that dozens of scientists who want to better understand how screen time influences child development know these limitations well, and are trying to revolutionize the field by creating new research tools. 

The future of screen time research

One of those scientists is Dillon Browne, co-author of the JAMA Pediatrics study and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo. 

“You need a really forward-thinking group of researchers to anticipate those innovations [in technology use] before they even come,” he says.

Browne envisions future research on screen time that’s designed to adapt to the rapid changes in technology use. That would mean finding efficient ways to update a study as digital media evolves. 

But for important ethical reasons, researchers can’t make sudden changes to experiments involving human subjects without additional scrutiny. That also means adding a single new question or device category to a study can take weeks or months, and timing is always a concern for scientists who need to move on to a new phase of their research. Browne likens the process of amending a study to rolling out a change in human resources software in a large corporation. And once researchers significantly change their questions, it’s difficult or impossible to compare certain types of data over time without skewing the results. 

Studies could be nimbler, he argues, if they could use “passive data collection” to quantify kids’ screen time. Instead of relying on self-reports, scientists could have children and parents in their study agree to install a third-party app on an Android or iPhone device that would send all the information about use that Google and Apple already collect to the researchers. Passive data collection can be highly controversial; Apple recently eliminated Facebook’s ability to collect such information this way after it learned the social media company had paid people for the access. 

But for academic researchers, real-time data that includes detailed information about how a user engages with a device and its content would reveal emerging trends and habits sooner than later. If parents gave their consent for this type of data collection at the outset, it might also make it easier to get approval from an institutional review board to make changes to the study. 

“Living in an ongoing experiment”

Florence Breslin, manager of clinical assessment and testing at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and co-author of stud on screen time and brain development published last October, agrees that passive data collection is a key to answering complex questions about how digital media is used and how it affects children’s development. 

Breslin’s study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a massive longitudinal research effort to understand youth brain development and child health that should yield new insights about how screens can affect kids. (Breslin is a co-investigator on the ABCD study.) The paper published last year found an association between “screen media activity” and structural brain changes that could be positive or negative, but it’ll take additional research to know more about the effects. 

The study included questions about which categories of media children used and provided relevant examples like YouTube, Skype, and Instagram. Partway through the process, Breslin and her fellow researchers noticed something unexpected: Some brand names they’d discussed or included in the survey disappeared. They’d talked with each other about how kids used the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak, but then it shut down in 2017. At one point, research participants tried to report that they used the short-form mobile video app TikTok, an app referenced in the survey by its former name Musical.ly. In the study’s second year, they changed the questionnaire to include new app examples. They also changed a question about watching TV or movies to specify whether kids “stream” TV shows or movies. 

“It’s important to remember that we are living in an ongoing experiment.”

“It’s important to remember that we are living in an ongoing experiment,” says Breslin, referring to the rise of digital media. “This is all new and we can’t possibly keep up with the pace the technology is going at.”

Collecting information about study participants’ screen time directly from the devices isn’t a perfect solution. It requires permission from parents wary of how their personal data is already being monitored and sold. It’s also not guaranteed to measure use on things like school laptops, gaming consoles, and streaming TV services, so self-reporting would still be essential. Google currently permits developers to tap its application programming interface (API) to collect this data, but Apple does not. Breslin and other researchers are hoping to persuade Apple to change its policy.

Even with these caveats, both Browne and Breslin believe passive data collection is a critical component for studying screen time use in kids. 

“If we can get the passive data, we can look and see over time, are children using more of this, less of that?” says Breslin. “Is their behavior changing, and is it changing [as they move] from video gaming to social networking to news? Is there actually a causal relationship?”

Parents shouldn’t wait on researchers

Both Browne and Breslin belong to a group of interdisciplinary researchers who gather to talk about studying screen time. A nonprofit charity called Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development regularly convenes Browne, Breslin, and hundreds of scientists and clinical researchers to study the wide-ranging effects of digital media on toddlers, children and adolescents.

Within the next year, the group plans to develop and release a toolkit designed to help researchers use the best possible methods to assess children’s screen time, screen use, and media habits, and how they influence development. It will also provide pediatricians with ways to measure and assess their patients for digital media use. 

“Objective scientific research is the goal,” says Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, president, founder, and a major funder of Children and Screens. “I’m open to all the wonderful aspects of technology, both now and in the future, but I’m very open to trying to make sure that we do no harm.”  

“[D]on’t wait on us to tell you what the right amount of time is.” 

Parents shouldn’t expect a decisive answer about the effects of screen time in the near future, says Breslin. Studies underway now may take years to complete. While the results will help create more advanced guidelines for screen time, parents need to remember that every child is different. A kid with few friends at school may benefit greatly from making social connections on a mobile device, making extra screen time worth the risk. Another child might not see the same benefit while also losing sleep and physical activity as a result of excessive screen time. 

Breslin recommends that parents follow the current screen time guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics while also paying close attention to how their children respond to different aspects of digital media technology, particularly if it’s influencing their sleep, nutrition, and exercise. 

“You have to find what the right [limit] in your family is,” says Breslin, “and don’t wait on us to tell you what the right amount of time is.”