Books

While retrospectives on the year 2021 will likely reflect an array of unpleasantness, the brighter pop culture sections should be lifted by a certain jingle’s three fateful words: Agatha All Along. Indeed, the year saw Disney+ finally bring the Marvel Cinematic Universe to television (officially, anyway,) starting in January with WandaVision, which wrought weirdness, forced

In addition to being one of the most underserved first-party Nintendo franchises, Metroid is also one of the few Nintendo franchises to have a strong, consistent, and cohesive narrative canon. The adventures of intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran are actually connected and impact one another in ways that you just don’t see in even Nintendo’s

Joker first disturbed widespread audiences on October 4, 2019—over two years ago already! Not only was it a dramatically groundbreaking outlier of a comic book movie, but it was the last major genre offering to hit the big screen before the pandemic upended the theater industry. Moreover, despite its homicidal barrage of bleakness, the film

One of the things Star Trek became somewhat infamous for in the late 1990s and early 2000s was recycling old plots in new episodes. Voyager and Enterprise both featured several episodes throughout their runs that seemed to be re-runs of earlier stories from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or even the Original Series, with

The 1960s TV sitcom The Addams Family was brilliant, but could only go so far because of the sensitivities of the times. Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 creature feature comedy classic The Addams Family, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, is marvelous, but Raul Julia is far too handsome to capture the repugnance of Chas Addams

Current Jeopardy! champion Matt Amodio reached a very important milestone last week. By winning his 33rd consecutive game on Friday, the Yale Ph.D. student moved into second place all-time in consecutive wins, just ahead of James Holzhauer and 41 games behind the Jeopardy! GOAT Ken Jennings.  Amodio’s streak has been both incredibly impressive and a

Daniel Craig takes his final bow as James Bond in the U.S. this week with No Time to Die, which marks the end of a 15-year run as MI6’s foremost secret agent. While that time has seen Craig reach many highs as the character, there have also definitely been some lows. The talented and outspoken

The Many Saints of Newark has once again brought the crime family at the center of The Sopranos into the spotlight. But Giovanni Rocco had eyes on them for years. Under the alias of “Giovanni Gatto,” the New Jersey police officer was at the center of Operation Charlie Horse, a federal undercover task force that

This Evil review contains spoilers. Evil Season 2 Episode 12 Pinocchio, your strings are showing. Creepy dolls don’t have to walk, talk, or wet themselves to capture paranoid attention. Chuckie, Annabelle, Talking Tina, and the Killer Krusty Doll from The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror III” all bring solace to some, and torture to others. Eddie

As anyone who has spent a minute or two on Tik Tok can tell you, songs from the Venom movie franchise have a prosperity to go viral…not entirely unlike the alien symbiote himself. A track from legendary rapper Eminem, fittingly titled “Venom,” that was featured in the 2018 Tom Hardy film has popped up all

In the last decade, Japanese publisher Konami has largely moved away from AAA video game publishing in order to focus its development arm on its much more profitable pachinko machines. It’s been an unfortunate pivot for fans of Konami’s games, to say the least, since the publisher happens to be sitting on some of the

Today’s young adult books bring romance, adventure and social commentary. Take a look at our best bets for what to read this September. Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson Type: Novel Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry BooksRelease date: Oct. 5 Den of Geek says: The author’s Venom comp hooked me on this one. Set in an alternate world

This article contains light spoilers for The Many Saints of Newark. The Sopranos prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark is David Chase’s return to the New Jersey city where his families lived, worked, and occasionally breathed their last. The film focuses on Christopher Moltisanti’s (Michael Imperioli) father Dickie Molitisanti (Alessandro Nivola), and his struggle

In a perfect world, Charles Addams would rise from the dead, appalled at the goings on in The Addams Family 2, leaving his estate the comforting task of reburying him. But we live in an imperfect world, divided by class, taste, and family values which are out of step with those of the original Addams

The return of infamous bounty hunter Boba Fett in The Mandalorian was the first big surprise in a second season full of them. First as a hermit living in the deserts of Tatooine, and then as a Mandalorian warrior on a quest to get his father’s armor back, Boba’s story five years after Return of

After multiple delays, No Time to Die is finally hitting theaters in the UK and U.S., marking Daniel Craig’s final appearance as super spy James Bond, the end of an era for one of the more beloved 007s. It’s still too early to say in which direction the storied franchise will go next, but now

New World features some of the most interesting character-building, skills, and weapons systems I’ve seen in an MMO in quite some time. While many MMO developers talk about balancing such systems to discourage meta min-maxing and encourage experimentation, New World‘s flexibility genuinely encourages you to explore a variety of builds to see what works best

Genre TV fans owe a lot to the spy drama Alias. Premiering twenty years ago this week (just..how??), Alias was a near-instant critical and commercial success thanks to its near-perfect pilot episode. It went on to run for five seasons full of ambitious, go-for-broke storytelling that featured rich character dynamics and wasn’t afraid to take

Amazon’s New World is the company’s best chance yet at a hit game, and if New World‘s day one player count numbers are any indication of the MMO’s long-term outlook, then they may very well indeed have a somewhat surprising success on their hands. People started sharing New World‘s initial player count figures earlier this

The latest Metroid Dread previews include quite a few (mostly positive) words about the highly-anticipated upcoming Switch game, but the one word that’s jumping out at everyone at the moment is “scary.” Granted, the Metroid franchise has always utilized horror elements (its revolutionary atmosphere can partially be attributed to the various ways it was influenced

The delayed release of No Time to Die, at long last, inches ever so closely. Yet, it’s understandable that fans of the James Bond franchise find themselves looking beyond the film, since it serves as Daniel Craig’s long-signaled cinematic swan song. Indeed, even before Craig sips his last onscreen shaken-not-stirred martini, speculation over his replacement

This The Simpsons review contains spoilers. The Simpsons Season 33 Episode 1 Why don’t we do the show right here, Mickey Rooney or Judy Garland might ask in a Hollywood Golden Age movie about barnstorming local theater. Sadly, The Simpsons’ “The Star of the Backstage” can’t go Rent-free. The techies, theater-geeks, and all the animators

This Evil review contains spoilers. Evil Season 2 Episode 11 Leland (Michael Emerson) does all the voices, from the venerated holy relics of The Exorcist to Laraine Newman’s Shirley Temple in Saturday Night Live’s takeoff on it. He tosses priests across rooms with one hand tied to a bedpost. He sweats, swears and pukes vile,

Almost every announcement in the September 2021 Nintendo Direct broadcast tried to one-up the other reveals. Audiences finally got the long-awaited Bayonetta 3 gameplay trailer (it was every bit as exciting as we hoped), minutes after the internet was left to decide whether to shout “Wahoo!” or “Mamma mia!” over the Super Mario movie voice

The Sandman author Neil Gaiman has famously fought off numerous attempts to adapt his most famous graphic novel series, but in Netflix’s TUDUM event, a sneak peek clip and some character art for a few of the most recognizable characters give fans a glimpse of the vision the author finally brought to life along with

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Often this axiom is used to apply rose tinted glasses over the past—a chance to get nostalgic about the “good ol’ days.” But sometimes when you take a critical look at the old days, they’re not always better. Which would be putting it mildly when acknowledging the gender

The Starling is a movie that can be held up as a good example of why Netflix should not get behind every single project that comes its way. The streaming giant probably thought that a tragicomic drama starring Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd, and Kevin Kline (making one of his rare onscreen appearances these days) would

This Foundation article contains spoilers. Don’t sleep on Foundation, Apple TV+’s excellent adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s once-thought-to-be-unfilmable hard science fiction novel series that chronicles the 1,000-year fall of a galactic empire. The story that was long considered too expansive for Hollywood (although many have tried) finds the perfect home on TV in the hands of

After a somewhat slow 2021, 2022 is set to give Star Wars fans the most stacked lineup ever from a galaxy far, far away. “The world of Star Wars is expanding in a new and exciting way on Disney+, but it seems as if the next few shows heading our way are things that I’ve

This Star Wars: Visions article contains spoilers. Seven animation studios have come together to create Star Wars: Visions, a collection of nine anime short films that reimagines the galaxy far, far away through the lens of Japanese culture and aesthetics. It’s one of the most ambitious projects Lucasfilm has ever embarked on with the saga,