Why do we love trash and hate slop? I worship at the altar of trash, by which I mean that I am one of those cinephiles with a fondness for bad movies. Perhaps I am underselling the corpus I have in mind by calling it merely "bad," and understating my sect's feeling by calling it merely "fondness." The movies my fellow-cultists and I most esteem are not just bad but incredibly, impressively terrible--scrambled, technically maladroit, incomprehensible at the level of basic plotting--and we are not just fond but obsessed, digging through piles of bric-a-brac at thrift stores in hope of uncovering forgotten VHS tapes from the eighties, scrolling to neglected corners of YouTube with the goal of alighting on some near-unwatchable monstrosity with thirty-two views and a handful of affronted comments. But we, too, are discerning; we do not approve of just any bad movie. The train wrecks we love feature amateur actors and dialogue so garbled that it may well have been translated from a foreign language by a non-native speaker (as it probably was in the case of "Troll 2," about which more later). The sound quality is scratchy; the camerawork is nauseating, and not in a chicly experimental way. The movies in the good-because-bad canon are not forgettably bad, like cheesy Hallmark fare or the thousandth predictable sequel in a superhero franchise; they are not skillfully and expensively bad, like botched Oscar bait. Nor are they quite like the gripping yet ultimately shallow entertainments that Pauline Kael defended in her classic 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," published in . No, our bad movies are monumental feats of incompetence, inspired in their badness, bad in ways I could never have dreamed a film could be bad, so feverishly and outlandishly bad that they have bodied forth a new aesthetic category. These trash movies, as I have taken to calling them, to distinguish them from prestige failures, do not quite constitute a genre, the way the thriller or the rom-com does. They do not treat any subjects in particular, or hew to any specific conventions, or share any consistent visual signature.

The study examined 97,364 breast scans from 29,921 women who had an average age of 54. The study examined 97,364 breast scans from 29,921 women who had an average age of 54. Doctors have discovered a way to use routine mammograms that screen for breast cancer to spot heart disease, the world's leading - and frequently underdiagnosed - cause of death in women. Researchers analysed the scans using artificial intelligence and were able to successfully identify women with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or who had suffered a stroke. Experts said it meant breast screening for cancer could become dual-purpose, helping to flag women with heart disease, and other cardiovascular issues, as well as spotting breast cancer early.

Women who have missed a cervical screening appointment in England are to be offered HPV self-testing kits by the NHS. Over the next year, nearly 4 million will receive invites on the NHS App or via text message, email or letter to order a free kit to use at home. Figures show around a third of women who are eligible cervical cancer screening have not taken up the offer recently. The self-testing kits are designed to get more women checked for high-risk HPV virus, which causes nearly all cases of cervical cancer. Gem Sofianos-Boorman, 39, said her experience shows how important the screening is.

Say More Look Up Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series China's'worst' animated movie has become an anti-AI box-office hit'Niu Lai' has reportedly dethroned'Obsession' as the most profitable film of all time. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter. The bizarre-looking Chinese animated film appeared destined to vanish from theaters and take its place among the countless bad movies no one remembers.

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series It's easier to ride a sandworm than to buy'Dune: Part Three' IMAX 70mm tickets The race to buy premium Dune: Part Three tickets led to crashed sites, scalpers, and angry fans. Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

For all the hysteria over "woke" casting and ahistorical choices, Christopher Nolan's epic is on track to make $200 million globally during its opening weekend. On the day of its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan's, at one of the few remaining cinemas in the northeast equipped to screen large-format, super-high-resolution 70mm IMAX movies . I arrived to find clusters of idlers in "NOLAN" sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, grousing outside the theater. The power had gone out. And the 8 am screening of would have to be cancelled.

With the rapid development of the big data era, Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has been widely applied to enable data collaboration while ensuring privacy protection. However, the ultrahigh dimensionality of features and the sparse data structures inherent in large-scale datasets introduce significant computational complexity. In this paper, we propose the Vertical Federated Feature Screening (VFS) algorithm, which effectively reduces computational, communication, and encryption costs. VFS is a two-stage feature screening procedure that proceeds from coarse to fine: the first stage quickly filters out irrelevant feature groups, followed by a more refined screening of individual features. It significantly reduces the resource demands of downstream tasks such as secure joint modeling or federated feature selection. This efficiency is particularly beneficial in scenarios with ultrahigh feature dimensionality or severe class imbalance in the response variable. The statistical and computational properties of VFS are rigorously established. Numerical simulations and real-world applications demonstrate its superior performance.

Trump's Border Crackdown Is Wreaking Havoc on the World Cup Travel bans and other visa issues are creating problems for World Cup participants even before the whistle blows. Even before the first whistle blows, the 2026 World Cup --taking place from June 11 to July 19 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico--already has winners and losers away from the field. Here, amidst denied visas, prolonged checks, and contested entries, a parallel competition is emerging where human rights are at stake. This World Cup was meant to be a global celebration of soccer in North America. For the first time in history, the tournament is being held in three different countries, a move meant to unite the entire continent and turn the World Cup into an even more inclusive event.

Loud eaters and phones nearly spoiled my cinema trip - and it's not just me The cinema lights are low and you're cocooned in your seat, ready for the film to transport you to another world. But just as you settle in, you're jolted back to reality. Audience members around you are scrolling on their phones, talking and munching loudly. Cinemas do clearly ask everyone not to disturb those around them - through the use of adverts, announcements and signs - but is behaviour in getting worse? I experienced disruption a few weeks ago while watching Ryan Gosling's sci-fi movie, Project Hail Mary, at a cinema in London.

We develop methods for rapidly identifying important components of a convex optimization problem for the purpose of achieving fast convergence times. By considering a novel problem formulation--the minimization of a sum of piecewise functions--we describe a principled and general mechanism for exploiting piecewise linear structure in convex optimization. This result leads to a theoretically justified working set algorithm and a novel screening test, which generalize and improve upon many prior results on exploiting structure in convex optimization. In empirical comparisons, we study the scalability of our methods. We find that screening scales surprisingly poorly with the size of the problem, while our working set algorithm convincingly outperforms alternative approaches.