Mortal Shell II feels like the feedback on the prequel from the players really helped to create a game that’s better than its predecessor. This sequel keeps the central identity of the first game while dramatically expanding almost everything that was used before. It is larger, faster, more flexible, and far more confident about what kind of action Soulslike RPG it
Read MoreAnomaly President is one of those games that you see and immediately think is going to stress you out. The idea is simple enough to explain in a sentence, yet strange enough to make it difficult to compare directly with almost anything else on the market. In the game, during the day, you are a presidential candidate trying to win over
Read MoreThe 2026 horror film Buddy acknowledges a point about Barney the Dinosaur that we’ve all been quietly thinking about for the past thirty years: The purple behemoth is a low-key narcissist. The film by Casper Kelly cleverly unwraps the pop culture craziness of the time period when every child became fixated on a character that ended on a song about “loving”
Read MoreWhat you need to know about Macon Blair’s Idiots is simple: this movie is very dumb. The film follows two idiots, Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), as they are tasked with a very simple assignment: transport a troubled teenager to a rehabilitation facility. The two individuals recently lost their respective jobs and have now found a gig that
Read MoreVirtually everyone knows of the tumultuous hurdles Coyote vs. Acme has jumped across to get to this point. A timeline of being a straight-to-HBO Max release, to a tax write-off to save money by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, to possibly being saved through purchase by another studio thanks to online outcry, to being in limbo again. Then the film
Read MoreA scholar of the Cannon Group, French genre auteur Jean-François Richet is no stranger to big, goofy actioners. His last movie, Plane, was mocked for its title but lauded as an effective and downright nasty vehicle that would’ve made a killing if it had been released in the 1980s and starred Chuck Norris instead of Gerard Butler. Richet has now reached
Read MoreColony sees the Train to Busan filmmaker Yeon Sang-Ho return to the zombie genre after the subpar follow-up Peninsula. With his new film, he pivots back to his familiar strengths, taking a group of survivors in a single-location setting and throwing as many flesh-eating zombies at them as humanly possible. But Colony adds new concepts to the zombie mayhem. Colony has
Read MoreIt Ends is another entry in the liminal horror craze, focusing on souls getting lost in never-ending familiar voids. Directed by Alex Ullom, the film takes those ideas but removes them from enclosed spaces. Instead, It Ends is on an endless road with no meaning or purpose. Others trapped in the same space either feel overly panicked and volatile or have
Read MoreAs unnecessary as spinoffs can get, Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi might present itself as a series devoid of interest. I mean, the spinoff of two short films presented in the first and third seasons of Star Wars’ anime compendium Visions seems like one hell of a stretch to do an entire eight-episode series over. That said, The Ninth
Read MoreTwenty One Pilots is the most important band in my life alongside Linkin Park. I’ve been listening to them for way more than a decade. As a band, they’ve spent a lot of time building a world and an entire lore around their music. Their concerts have become extensions of that world. They are complete with recurring symbols, visual storytelling, audience
Read MoreThe first forty-five minutes or so of Jacob Chase’s Insidious: Out of the Further are excellent. In that section, there are two incredible setpieces that genuinely had me on the edge of my seat. One is a Backrooms-inspired liminal horror that sees its protagonist, Gemma (Amelia Eve), trapped in a never-ending, claustrophobic hallway with creepy-looking creatures that do little more than
Read MoreThe Samurai and the Prisoner shares a unique commonality with Rian Johnson‘s recent work. Like Knives Out, it shares themes with the overall story. The film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) sees the prolific filmmaker lean into the charm of a detective mystery like an Agatha Christie novel, only here it’s through the lens of a period war drama set
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