Verity is in theaters now.

In a Guardian piece on how Colleen Hoover became a global best-selling author, one YA fan that was interviewed by the paper suggested it was because she’s “writing for people who don’t like reading.” If that's the case, then one could argue that the film adaptations of her work are for people who don't like cinema.

Now that I've watched all four films inspired by her literary prose — 2024's It Ends with Us, 2025's Regretting You, this year's Reminders of Him, and now Verity — I'm making that case. For these are not adaptations that make any attempt to elevate the middling narratives fumbling around Hoover's novels; I realised this when reading It Ends with Us after suffering through the movie, and I vowed never to read another.

With Verity, I had more hope that it would buck the trend. Divorced from the sentimentality of previous adaptations, this story opens with a meet-cute that’ll give you whiplash. After introducing Anne Hathaway's best-selling author Verity Crawford through interviews with the likes of Gayle King, where she discusses the darkness in her writing, struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) enters the chat. Lowen's agent has landed her a meeting with Crawford's publishing house for a mysterious job opportunity, but on the way, she not only witnesses a road accident but is drenched in the blood of the cyclist involved. It's an opener as out there as the one in Meet Joe Black (IYKYK), but it does provide an opportunity for Josh Hartnett's handsome stranger to step in and help clean her up.

In typical Hoover fashion, the pair trauma bond: He tells her he dragged his dead daughter out of a lake, and she says her mother died of cancer the week before. There’s no build up, just some awkward exposition-dumping in a men's toilet. They're soon reunited at the publishing house, where it’s revealed that he's Verity's husband, Jeremy. He and the editors want to commission Lowen to finish his wife's novel series; Verity is in a comatose state after a car accident and cannot speak or move. So, with little deliberation and due to the shoehorned fact that Lowen is also being evicted from her New York apartment, she packs up and moves into the Crawfords' sprawling Vermont home for six months.

There she meets Verity, a shell of her glamorous self wearing a glazed stare. This is one of the few scenes the women share; most of Hathaway's performance is marginalised to interviews on the likes of Hot Ones and the Call Her Daddy podcast, as well as flashbacks layered with sultry voiceovers as Lowen reads Verity's secret autobiography. Every time she picks it up, sentences run across the screen, and often Lowen is superimposed over scenes from the past to try to enliven the act of reading. It doesn't.

What's most infuriating is how long it takes Lowen to finish the text. It’s unbelievable that an author would constantly run away from the autobiography to masturbate and go on a date with Jeremy, given how unflinching Verity's candour is. She reveals juicy details about her marriage and hints that their daughter's death might not have been an accident — how did she not finish it in one sitting? Nothing screams “padding for time” more than this tedious set-up, accomplishing little in the way of ingratiating the viewer with Johnson's "pick me" girl protagonist.

Nor does it scratch the surface of who Jeremy actually is beyond the one-dimensional trope of a swoon-worthy husband. Screenwriter Nick Antosca, who recently impressed with his adaptation of Cape Fear, hints at some resentment on Jeremy’s part for his wife's success, but the script never probes deeper than in a final act reveal that flings the missing pieces at you in one blink. The best Antosca offers is an examination of the reliability of the narrator, but even that effort is phoned in. Michael Showalter's direction is similarly dull, conveying little of the vision seen in his Oscar-nominated films, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Big Sick. Instead, it plods an uneven, uninspiring route into cliché and lazy convention.

That Anne Hathaway has been on an exquisite run of big screen releases from The Odyssey and Mother Mary to The End of Oak Street and The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes this, her last 2026 performance, even more disappointing. What a lead balloon for everyone involved — one that proves a moratorium on Colleen Hoover adaptations is long overdue. To misquote Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice: "Are the shades of cinema to be thus polluted?"

For a series as storied as Star Wars – one brimming with more spacecraft and speeders than George Lucas has beard bristles – it borders on baffling that developer Fuse Games’ Star Wars: Galactic Racer can arrive in 2026 as the first new game of its kind in over two decades. I blame Super Bombad Racing, if only because Gungan isn’t a real language and using a portmanteau of bomb and bad in the title was probably never the perfect pathway to sales success. Galactic Racer, on the other hand, has a range of impressively customisable vehicle classes that expands the hangar well beyond classic podracers, gorgeous course design, and an impressively credible and explorable world outside the on-track action. It’s an eye-catching and rich resurrection of Star Wars racing that’s as fast as it can be surprisingly unforgiving.

Galactic Racer’s main hook is its run-based, roguelite-inspired campaign, which comes with a strict philosophy of no mid-race restarts. It is an interesting and genuinely fresh approach that bakes a very real and logical feeling of risk and danger into the action – a feeling that is admittedly absent in racing games with any sort of rewind functionality or unlimited restarts. Yes, you can still pause and, yes, you can still save and come back later – but you otherwise need to live with the consequences of what happens out on the track. It’s a structure that makes the racing tense and meaningful, even if racing over the same landscapes over and over does grow repetitive.

Now This Isn’t Pod Racing

Whether by intent or not, the huge time gap between Galactic Racer and classic Star Wars games like Episode I: Racer and Racer Revenge feels almost mirrored in Fuse Games’ original story. That is, where those games were set in the prequel period, Galactic Racer is set in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, where the art of podracing is a distant relic of a bygone era. Unsurprisingly, podracing does still feature here, and it’s represented incredibly; lightning quick, and with impeccably authentic sound design. However, I’m hesitant to describe specifically how or when it pops up outside of the quickplay modes. Just know that I feel like the Fuse Games crew were paying close attention when Maverick found an F-14 in the heart of enemy territory during the Top Gun sequel, or when Bond retrieved his DB5 in Skyfall. I may be a pretty casual Star Wars fan by most metrics, but I do love stuff that imbues vehicles with a sense of old soul – even fantasy ones. That’s my jam.

For clarity, the bulk of the Galactic Racing League garage consists of landspeeders, speeder bikes, and a new vehicle type called skim speeders. Bikes are fast but fragile, and skim speeders have a podracer-esque ability to bank completely vertically to slice through gaps and turn harder, but landspeeders have proven to be my favourite class. They’re essentially floating cars, and I enjoy their more predictable handling and added durability.

As the mysterious and faceless human racer called Shade, our ultimate goal is to beat the Galactic Racing League’s moaning, arrogant, and entitled heel Kestar Bool in the final head-to-head race. However, for that to happen, we need a suitably fast vehicle. In simple terms, building and piloting a quick one requires a combination of general stat upgrades, performance parts, and various additional perks – from gadgets that can be activated during races to specific bonuses granted to you by allies you accumulate over the course of the story. These are rationed out randomly, or earned, as we progress (and re-progress) through the championship “tours.” I’ve grown to be a particular fan of the autopilot gadget, which is regularly a lifesaver to tackle particularly treacherous stretches of track. The fact that these gadgets are primed just prior to race starts with a series of specific button presses, like pre-flight checks, is a very clever touch that gives waiting on the grid a tangible sense of occasion. The sequence always ends with the final go-ahead to fire your engines, which cough to life and glow harder as you squirt the throttle. It was important to somebody at Fuse Games that we should be able to rev our speeders like hotrodders at a red light, because it looks cool. I love little flourishes like that.

Now, speeders are scrapped between tours, so you’ll need to choose and set-up a new one each time. It’s not a solution I find I’m loving, considering I was never able to establish any real sense of ownership or attachment to a vehicle. Theoretically, you can build a replica of the same-looking vehicle every time – with the same add-on cosmetic parts and the same livery – but you will need to wave goodbye to specific upgrades you might’ve really enjoyed. The more heavily upgraded your previous speeder, the more points you’ll have to spend on pumping up its general stats before you start – but it won’t behave the same as your last one. Not unless you can pick up the same upgrades in your next run, whether by chance reward or spotting them in your mechanic Hibi’s randomised selection. As a roguelite rookie and a traditional racing game meathead, I have to admit I didn’t much like losing powerful upgrades that really suited my racing style to what’s essentially a dice roll, but I do appreciate the novelty of needing to come to grips with something not typical of the usual racers I play.

Tours unfold over three (and later five) planets before culminating in a final knockout event. Failing at any point means you’ll have to start a whole new one over again. This is quite elegantly and thoughtfully implemented, thanks to the racing paddock at each event you can fully explore in third-person. Not only does this build an authentic world around the Galactic Racing League – which in turn crafts a world I feel like I’m inhabiting, rather than just shuffling through menu screens – it lets Fuse Games fill it with characters that can acknowledge your previous failures as you return for another crack at the title. That is, you’re not actually restarting, or simply being scrubbed back in time until you get it right – time keeps moving forward and you just need to keep racing until you emerge victorious. The story is split into three distinct acts, so note that messing up in the third act means you’ll just need to take another run at the third act. That is, it doesn’t send us all the way back to the initial League qualification phase, and for that I’m grateful.

However, Galactic Racer’s core weakness is that it unfortunately doesn’t feature enough planets to avoid feeling overly repetitive. While I’m conscious a roguelite structure brings with it an expectation of a certain level of repetition, it does become fairly tedious slogging through its small list of repeating planets over successive attempts. The specific circuits used, the order of event types, and how they branch over the span of a championship are shuffled from tour to tour. There are reverse layouts for the tracks, too. However, the backdrops are nonetheless always the same. Having a couple more planets that could’ve been swapped in and out would’ve gone a long way in reducing the fatigue that quickly sets in after several runs through the same locations.

Intergalactic Planetary

It is a fantastically realised array of planets, though, and the details of the track environments are as excellent as they are varied. Jakku, for instance, has routes traced through its immense graveyard of war wreckage – swinging from wide open blasts across debris-covered dunes one moment, to cramped sections of makeshift tunnels formed by half-destroyed spacecraft the next. Crait is characterised by sprawling caves and its flat, salt-covered surface – which speeders whip up to expose the red mineral beneath. Lantaana is covered in dense forest linked by lava tubes, and Sentinel I is a toxic wasteland where racers must negotiate narrow causeways over acidic pools.

Each planet and track has its own set of properties that can help you or harm you, depending on how you race and the upgrades you’ve applied. Perhaps my favourite example of this dynamic is Ando Prime, an entirely frozen planet, where heating tubes have been dropped sporadically around the circuits. Passing through these will thaw out the frozen control surfaces that numb your steering inputs, but staying out of these hot boxes allows you to run your delicate ramjet for much longer before it catastrophically burns out. It’s a racer that essentially never stops asking you questions.

On the topic of burning out, it’d be massively remiss of me not to mention how much I adore the Burnout-inspired takedowns that Galactic Racer actively encourages, with speeders on the wrong side of a hefty slam being speared into trackside obstacles and splintering into thousands of shards. Not only are they incentivised with a slow-motion takedown camera, which swings back to soak in the spectacle, but they can be factored into the upgrade system. Any time I spot it on a run, I always opt to grab the upgrade that replenishes my speeder’s battery for each successful takedown – since doing so gives me more bursts of my autopilot ability.

But while the Burnout connection is strong (and hardly surprising considering the roots of Fuse Games’ founders reach back to Burnout creator Criterion Games), perhaps what I love most of all is how much Galactic Racer surprisingly reminded me of a sci-fi MotorStorm. That is, the often wide tracks full of natural obstacles and multiple routes, the multi-class nature of the grid, and the fact that holding onto that ramjet boost a fraction too long results in a fiery and rapid unscheduled disassembly. Funnily enough, just like the original MotorStorm, Galactic Racer also has no splitscreen multiplayer. 12-player online racing (or eight, for podracers) has a six-event championship structure that works a little like a shortened version of the singleplayer tours (where your upgraded vehicle is discarded after the finale) – but that’s for a different sort of player than me.

Full spoilers follow for the season premiere of War.

HBO’s slick new legal drama War will almost certainly be its next big watercooler show, and deservedly so, as it’s a sharply written, deftly paced, and well-acted trashy delight.

The Season 1 premiere quickly establishes rival London law firms Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne and their respective clients: social media mogul Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his movie star wife Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). Their long, now loveless marriage is basically over. So that means a very expensive and very public divorce will inevitably follow.

Carla not only wants out of the marriage, but she also wants to take Morgan’s fortune with her. But their pre-nuptial agreement is designed to keep Morgan bulletproof — provided he has lived up to his end of their bargain. He hasn’t. He’s been unfaithful to her before but this time Carla is armed with photographic evidence thanks to a honey trap.

Carla assures her lawyers she didn’t enlist her younger actress friend to sleep with Morgan but that doesn’t ring true. Her lawyers Serena Byrne (Phoebe Fox) and Nicholas Taylor (James McArdle), partners in both the firm and romantically, don’t like Carla’s underhandedness as it could be bad optics. Carla wants to file for divorce first but she and Taylor & Byrne are unaware that Morgan and his lawyers at Cathcarts have already deduced that she’s poised to file.

Beatrice “Queen Bea” Ubosi (Nina Sosanya) and St John Smallwood (Pip Torrens), Serena and Nicholas’ counterparts at Cathcarts, fire the first shot in this war by serving Carla divorce papers on the red carpet at the premiere of her new movie, a savage move reminiscent of Olivia Wilde being served onstage at CinemaCon. And Carla then has to smile for the cameras with Morgan at her side?! Ouch.

The episode’s biggest surprise, however, is saved for when we learn that the ambitious, overconfident young lawyer Johnny Warren (Archie Renaux) – newly hired by Taylor & Byrne specifically to work on Carla’s divorce – is, in fact, a mole working for Cathcarts. For the entire episode, we follow Johnny’s desperate search for a job at a law firm, so the reveal that he’s going to be the show’s equivalent of Matt Damon in The Departed is a fun twist.

Still, as a scrappy, lower class guy trying to make his way up the social ladder, Johnny is sympathetic — for now. Like Charlie Sheen’s character in Wall Street, the question remains just how much of his soul he’s willing to sell to succeed and how many personal relationships Johnny may destroy in the process. It’s a testament to the writing and to Renaux’s nuanced performance that the viewer remains invested in Johnny even when his arrogance gets the better of him.

War is impeccably acted across the board by an ensemble cast filled with familiar UK character actors playing the respective firms’ legal teams. As for the leads, West finds some sad-sack sympathy in his tech bro mogul, while Miller imbues Carla with a steely resolve that suggests she’d have been a natural fit in the boardroom had she not pursued acting. They’re only in one sequence together this episode but it’s rife with tension.

Showrunner George Kay’s finely tuned script is as darkly funny as it is sad in its portrait of the wounded (if not outright lost) humanity of its many characters, people who may not want to be this nasty but, well, that’s what you’re paid for, luv. I can’t wait to see what these posh bastards do next.

As a millenial, I grew up during what I consider the golden era of cartoons – the 1990's. Some of my favorites included Rugrats, The Angry Beavers, Hey Arnold!, and Rocko's Modern Life. But, just as the 90's came to a close, Nickelodeon dropped another certified classic on my young, impressionable mind. I knew there was something special about SpongeBob SquarePants from the very first episode, and now, more than 25 years later (wow, I feel old), it's one of the most popular children's cartoons of all time, and is still going strong with over 300 episodes.

LEGO SpongeBob SquarePants: Bikini Bottom (available now exclusively from the LEGO Store) is the first new SpongeBob-themed set since 2012, and the first designed for adults with an 18+ age rating. It includes plenty of references and gags from the series, making it an excellent set for longtime fans to put together.

The original set featuring the iconic homes and denizens of Bikini Bottom released in 2006, composed of just 579 pieces, and included a rather horrifying Squidward minifigure. Now, 20 years later, the set is much larger and has been completely reimagined for an older audience. At 1,794 pieces, more than three times the number of the original, this is also the largest LEGO SpongeBob SquarePants set released by far.

The contents of the massive box are split across 14 bags. This is the second set I've built that uses LEGO's new eco-friendly packaging, which replaces the transparent polyethylene bags with paper bags, an initiative that began back in 2021. While I appreciate the positive environmental impact these new bags promise, I've found that they are prone to having small pieces get stuck in the seams. If you're building a set that includes these new bags, be sure to double-check each one if you're potentially missing a piece.

One aspect I really like about this set is just how good the minifigs look. Each one has been redesigned from the previous iterations, with more accurate colors and improved moldings. SpongeBob, in particular, looks great. The color is spot-on, and he finally has a proper pair of printed pants instead of looking like he's standing on a pair of brown stilts. SpongeBob also comes with his trusty jellyfish net.

Patrick's minifig received a substantial redesign compared to his originals as his head and stomach are now one large piece that fit over the torso like a sort-of reverse cape that more accurately depicts his food-loving physique. He even comes with one of his favorite junk foods – a Neopolitan ice cream cone.

Squidward got the biggest glow-up compared to his original minifig. Although later iterations fixed this by giving him a proper head mold, the version included in this set features a more accurate face, improved coloring, and little tentacles printed on the feet.

While not minifigs per se, the set also comes with a buildable DoodleBob (complete with the Magic Pencil) and a buildable Gary the Snail, although it hasn't changed much from early LEGO iterations aside from having better coloring. He still doesn't have eyes, though.

This set is divided into two instruction books, with the first book covering Patrick and Squidward's houses, and the second book dedicated entirely to SpongeBob's famous "Pineapple Under the Sea," which employs some unique tactics to get its shape – more on that later. There are also a number of smaller builds to round out the scenery, including the crooked Bikini Bottom sign, a Boatmobile, SpongeBob's Bubblestand, and small diorama of the Jellyfish Fields, with a small rotating platter to make the jellyfish swim around.

Patrick's house doesn't take long to put together, as all of its contents fit in a single bag. After all, it is just a large rock covering a hole in the ground. Thankfully, LEGO didn't just stop there. The lid of Patrick's house can be opened to reveal all of his sand furniture, including his chair, lamp, rug, and CRT TV. It even includes a space for him to "sleep" under the lid.

Squidward's house, split across six bags, is a little more involved to assemble as it's comprised of four floors: the bottom floor which features his clarinet and music sheet; the second floor with his canopy bed; and the third floor bathroom, complete with his toilet, shower, and bubble bath. There's also a shower curtain with what appears to be a silhouette of SpongeBob hiding behind it - a reference to the episode "Squid's Day Off," where Squidward becomes paranoid after leaving SpongeBob in charge of the Krusty Krab. Finally, the top floor of the house features Squidward's tanning bed that he frequently sets up in front of his house, along with a mirror and a flower-topped cocktail drink.

The interior of the house repurposes some LEGO pieces in interesting ways, such as a pink-colored crown as a sea anemone plant and an upside down cupcake piece as the lampshades for Squidward's nightstands.

LEGO absolutely nailed the exterior of Squidward's house. The dark blue pieces look fantastic, and the chunky geometry of the large nose, ears, and thick brow come through great. The window "eyes" are also a unique printed piece, of which this set has a surprising amount. I was pleased to find only two small sticker sheets overall.

The highlight of this set is undoubtedly SpongeBob's pineapple house, though, which comes together across the remaining seven bags. The bottom floor features plenty of references to the show, including a hidden Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy Easter egg inside the TV set, the shellphone, the photo of Gary on the wall, and even SpongeBob's "friends" Penny, Chip, and Used Napkin.

Upstairs, SpongeBob's bedroom includes his bed, complete with ladder and diving board, of course, as well as his alarm clock and Gary's dessert in the corner. Don't worry, he's gonna finish it, and he's gonna like it!

The designers at LEGO took a very interesting approach to recreate the rounded nature of the pineapple's exterior and its criss-crossed diamond pattern. Each one of the pinapple panels is attached to a rigid internal frame built out of Technics pieces, allowing them to sit on an angle and pivot a bit to create the rounded look. Individual panels are attached to the exterior, leaving a small gap around the edges to make the diamond pattern. While they don't fit together perfectly, the overall shape and finished house looks fantastic.

Finally bringing all three houses together to recreate the Bikini Bottom landscape is a blast. Each of the bases can be connected to save space, or you can display them all freely. There's so much character to this set with endless scenes that can be recreated that it's a must-have for SpongeBob SquarePants fans.

LEGO SpongeBob SquarePants: Bikini Bottom, Set #11386, retails for $219.99 and is composed of 1,794 pieces. It is available to purchase exclusively from the LEGO Store.

Matthew Adler has written for IGN since 2019 covering all things gaming, tech, tabletop games, and more. You can follow him on the site formerly known as Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.

Looking to the past to expand on a current game is a pretty common avenue for post-launch content, and developer Sucker Punch does this in more ways than one for Ghost of Yotei. Echoes of Sekigahara weaves in flashbacks from lead character Atsu's life for a brief yet effective questline woven into the middle of the base game. Alongside that is the new Most Wanted mode, which introduces grueling run-based combat challenges – a major highlight of which is that Ghost of Tsushima's Jin Sakai is a playable character, with all of his original mechanics intact. Together, these additions deliver more of what the series is so good at: lethal, precise ronin combat and beautiful landscapes for its violent drama. They're not breaking any new ground, but they distill what made Ghost of Yotei great to begin with.

First thing you need to know is that both Echoes of Sekigahara and Most Wanted are packaged together in the newly minted Ghost of Yotei: Complete Edition, and if you already own the base game, it's a $15 upgrade through the PlayStation store. You'll need to have progressed roughly 10 hours into the original story (where you've taken down a handful of the Yotei Six) in order to initiate a bounty called "Nagato, the Handsome" and access Echoes of Sekigahara, while Most Wanted is available from the main menu right off the bat. They're two very distinct things, so I'll be looking at them separately, but just know that both are worthwhile in their own right.

Burning Old Flames

One of my favorite aspects of Yotei in comparison to Tsushima was the way Atsu contrasted with Jin – she's brash and fueled by vengeance, giving her revenge tale a more personal edge. Echoes of Sekigahara further emphasizes this by exploring her more intimate side, introducing an old flame named Nagato – he's known across the land of Ezo as "The Handsome" because, well, he is a good looking dude, not gonna lie. After accepting a bounty with his name on it, you're ushered into an all-new region on the map known as Ashoro Foothills with its own questline and set of open-world activities in the same vein as the base game, but condensed for a tight seven-to-eight hours of new content.

The impetus for the quest is to cut off resources to Lord Saito's army (the villain of the main story) and to take down a ravenous faction called The Vipers and multiple big-bads vying to replace The Snake – the member of the Yotei Six who Atsu kills at the very start. Atsu gradually unravels Nagato's motives for pursuing these objectives alongside her while confronting him about what happened between them three years ago. They'd been high-ranking comrades on the frontlines of the tide-turning Battle of Sekigahara, and short playable flashbacks throughout this new questline give insight into their past; a budding romance and the interpersonal struggles of mixing business and pleasure. Like Ghost of Yotei itself, the story is a bit predictable, but even when you can see what's coming, it's still captivating for how it's told. With Nagato being a sly trooper and Atsu constantly balancing her emotions and pragmatism, the way their personalities clash and harmonize is really well done.

Nagato accompanies Atsu on most of the main missions, and that comes with the perk of having him target a separate enemy whenever you aim your bow. It makes for sweet double kills from a distance and a nice tool to have in your belt during this DLC’s frequent stealth scenarios. Otherwise, he'll support you in fights without much of an effect, if only to occupy enemies and take some of the heat off you. The main addition to Atsu's arsenal are the disposable Massive Weapons – some heavier enemies drop these and you can find them on weapon racks in combat arenas. They don't really change up the already fantastic dynamic of Yotei's rock-paper-scissors weapon mechanics, but I can't deny that it's satisfying to just swing a big-ass club or axe that not even fully armored samurai twice my size can block.

There are quite a few walk-and-talk sequences combined with platforming/cliff-scaling, which I liked quite a bit because I was fairly invested in their banter. Yotei's brand of Uncharted-style climbing has a certain weight I really enjoy as well, and whether Atsu had to do this alone or with Nagato, I was treated to some of the most gorgeous vistas in all of video games. It reminded me of how impressive Ghost of Yotei looks; the Kurosawa imitation in cutscenes is still prominent, of course, but the way colors pop across landscapes, leaves get swept in the wind, and backdrops give a sense of scale are integral to this series. Your first impression of Ashoro Foothills may be that it's a desolate plains ravaged by warlords and bandits, but it's still home to beautiful views you wouldn't get from other technical powerhouses.

Sidequests fill out the new region and may seem like just your standard fare of checklist-y objectives where you fight a mob of bandits or opportunistic samurai to save villagers. But I appreciate how they at least roll into a bigger idea of rebuilding and defending a region that's mostly been forgotten about and left to fend for itself. There's one particular questline that delves into The Snake's family business – it's a small, but satisfying way to frame Atsu's version of revenge to circumvent the "you're just as bad as the bad guy" trope.

Echoes of Sekigahara as a whole is well-rounded in that it's an extension of Yotei's better parts while doing enough to make it feel like I learned something important about Atsu as a character. And it's a damn fine excuse for more of the already excellent combat, whether it be chaining assassinations or hitting a perfect parry before striking down a foe as I'm on the brink of death. It's definitely a case where more of a good thing isn't bad at all.

Ronin Gone Rogue

I had high praise for the deadly, incisive combat in my original review for Ghost of Yotei, and the new Most Wanted mode offers up more of that hand over fist. Here, you have six different bounties centered around the Yotei Six villains, and you must survive several rounds against waves of enemies and minibosses in order to make it to them. You have to take down each bounty target in one attempt and they get progressively harder. No stealth or exploration, just straight combat, and that rules.

The four hunters you can choose to play as – Atsu, Oyuki, Nagato, or Jin Sakai – act as combat classes who have different weapon loadouts. Everyone gets a katana, but by default Atsu comes with dual katanas, a bow, and a quickfire pistol while Oyuki comes with the kusarigama, a musket, and kunai, as examples. The same rock-paper-scissors weapon dynamic still exists so overcoming certain enemies you may not have a direct answer for pushes you to get a little creative and make use of projectiles, weapon drops, and throwables.

Waves can get overwhelming quickly as well since they'll send mobs at you in a way story-based encounters never did. This was frustrating at first, but instead of brute forcing it, I began to think more tactically and make use of every tool I had. Smoke bombs and fire bombs were clutch for crowd control, archers in the distance needed to be taken out immediately, and the kusarigama's charge combo kept groups at bay. I knew this from the base game, but the stakes felt higher here, so assessing situations and adapting became just as (if not more) important as nailing perfect dodges and parries.

After a few rounds, you can choose one perk from a random assortment of three for just that run. These can be additional weapons that your selected hunter doesn't come with, or boons that range from “nice to have” to a major advantage if you form a build around them. Things like inflicting poison, setting a foe on fire after a number of hits from a certain weapon, or causing a bomb to go off from killed enemies. Two of my favorites were one that automatically activated a free smoke bomb after landing a headshot on marked targets, and another that inflicted fear on surrounding enemies after a perfect parry. These helped tremendously when handling tough bosses or mobs that seemed insurmountable, and little eureka moments where the right decision and good execution came together made me see Yotei's combat in a new light.

Playing as Jin again was refreshing, too, because he controls like he did in Tsushima with his different stances being suited for going up against certain enemy weapon types. Of course, that was still the overarching basis for Yotei, but he feels distinct thanks to his nimble movement between forms, using one katana and the strong attack combos that are his alone (the sticky bombs he packs are also the best quickfire weapon). That’s a nice nod to Tsushima, preserving its specific mechanics and fitting them into Most Wanted's combat gauntlets.

Each of the bounties take place in existing points of interest from the story's open world, drawing from a random assortment of villages and encampments. The bosses are recycled from the campaign as well, so you're not going to see anything entirely new in Most Wanted. That said, the way they're remixed and formatted as run-based challenges for do-or-die situations is enough to create a new kind of tension and let the combat system itself sing again.

However, throwing a higher volume of combatants at you shows some limitations – specifically, targeting. Since the series doesn't use a deliberate lock-on system (which is largely for the better), it relies on magnetizing you to the closest enemy or the one your character is facing. Sometimes it confuses one for the other and may pull you toward enemies you didn't intend to attack. For example, I'd perfect parry an enemy I'm facing which would push them back slightly, and of course I'd want to follow up with a combo, right? Well, if another enemy behind me or to the side is just close enough, it'd make me start whaling on them instead, wasting an opportunity to get a kill from a parry. Sometimes it's not that big of a deal and I would just reset and lock back in, but the moments in which it's consequential are undeniably frustrating, especially in final boss fights where they summon mobs to join them. Every move counts, and if that leaves me open to surrounding enemies or spoils a chance to bounce back, long effortful runs can end in disappointment.

Thankfully, blips like this are infrequent so as to not overshadow everything else Yotei's combat system does so well. I was surprised by how much time and effort I put into Most Wanted and how invested I was in finishing bounties, with that familiar voice in my head saying, "just one more run." It's rewarding enough to stick with and highlights what Sucker Punch had built when the series started.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for South Park Season 29, Episode 2!

Following a season premiere that felt like a throwback to a more classic incarnation of South Park, the series pivots in Episode 2 with a more topical approach. As the title suggests, "Billionaire Weenietown" is all about skewering the billionaire class, specifically the fact that we can't seem to escape their attention-seeking, data center-building ways. It's a fine episode, but one that's mostly carried by the ever-dependable Butters and his family.

The conflict this week comes as Butters finds he can no longer enjoy his precious Dr. Pimple Popper videos. South Park America has become infested with billionaires who have built a power-hungry new data center literally in Butters' backyard. And he's not going to stand for it one minute longer.

Again, I think the Stotch family storyline in this episode works a bit better than the Weenietown half of things. There's certainly a fun novelty in seeing just how literally this episode takes the whole "Billionaire Weenietown" concept. There's never not some fun to be had in watching a bunch of talking penises bicker with each other and go on The Joe Rogan Experience. It's a way for the series to make fun of the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world without directly including them.

But as is sometimes the case on this show, the shelf life of that particular gag is limited. This episode leans a bit too hard on the "billionaires are dorks who think everyone wants to hear their opinions" joke when, frankly, there are a lot more reasons to make fun of them besides. The resolution to the Weenietown conflict is also a bit too simple and abrupt for my liking. That said, I'm curious to see if the writers find ways of integrating the remaining Billionaire Weenies into the remainder of Season 29. Hopefully they don't become the new Member Berries...

But it's hard to muster too much criticism for an episode that gives us such a concentrated dose of Butters. If anything, this normally plucky, innocent character is even more entertaining when he's pushed over the edge. Angry Butters is a good Butters, and that anger really carries the day here. Whether it's his tantrum in the classroom or his interactions with the pest control guy, Butters is a real hoot here. Who can't empathize with his righteous anger at this point?

Well, his parents sure can't. Butters' crusade tees up a hilarious subplot where Steve and Linda Stotch fear their precious baby boy has contracted "libtardedness." That subplot serves as a terrific sendup of the anti-vax movement and a certain brand of self-educated, Joe Rogan-loving know-it-all. With the two parents having a complete meltdown while Butters is off doing his own thing, this episode feels like a direct callback to 2001's "Butters' Very Own Episode." That formula still works very well. Though this subplot does sort of drop off before the episode's end. I was expecting some sort of payoff to the FBI call that never comes. Maybe that's a seed for another day?

Finally, I can't not mention the ending. After going nearly two full episodes without roasting Donald Trump directly, the series turns all of its wrath back his way with another goofy deepfake sequence. It's an amusing way to cap off this episode. Coming off of such a Trump-heavy Season 27 and 28, I wouldn't necessarily mind if the show limited itself to these occasional roasts rather than making him a central character again. We'll just have to see what direction Season 29 takes as we get closer to November and the all-important release of GTA.

Carrie debuts on Prime Video on October 7. This is a spoiler-free review.

It’s easy to forget that for all the haunted hotels, dark towers, cursed cemeteries, society-ending viruses, killer clowns, and various and sundry things that go bump in the night that Stephen King has subjected us to, the author’s half-century grip on the horror genre started with a telekinetic teenage girl named Carrie White. Carrie’s cautionary tale of bullying has been adapted and sequelized numerous times, and Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 film even beat Mike Flanagan to the punch by first pulling Carrie into the 21st century. But, as is often the case when Flanagan brings King to the screen, Carrie successfully celebrates what makes the novel so relevant 52 years after its first publication by evolving with the times and palpably deepening King’s characters.

The opening moments of the premiere treat Carrie’s story with a Shakespearean level of reverence, with a Greek chorus of doc-style talking heads giving an overview of the story’s well-known beats that led to that fateful prom night. Inviting a closer look at all angles of that story is the dramatic thrust of Carrie, and the series sets itself up well for that effort by structuring itself as a teen drama in the vein of Pretty Little Liars or Riverdale. Carrie is an epistolary novel which heavily relies on interviews with the survivors of the prom night massacre and documentary evidence to tell Carrie’s story, and the series replicates that fractured perspective of the events by quickly setting up different groups of characters tied to Carrie as focal points for the narrative to jump around to.

Flanagan and his team are broadly successful in adapting the story and themes already present in King’s novel to the teen drama format. Carrie’s not a plot-heavy book, and the series compensates for that by spending more time on exploring how everyone is processing the events as they play out, and how the evolving interpersonal and public relations crises are picking at scabs at the back of the minds of characters like Carrie’s teacher Rita Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) and Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard). The extra time and scope afforded to the story is a rising tide that lifts all boats, even if that format does occasionally leave room for some overwrought stylistic or dramatic choices. There are a few too many on-the-nose dream pop needle drops with lyrics that explain what the action of a given scene has already communicated just fine.

Carrie is not one of Stephen King’s strongest characters on the page - that epistolary style of the novel leaves Carrie often feeling a little decentralized from her own story - but that problem doesn’t persist into the TV series. The Carrie series is unquestionably successful in its most important effort: putting the plight of its two central characters, Carrie and Margaret White, into a modern context. As Carrie, Summer H. Howell is totally magnetic from her first moments onscreen. Carrie’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for integrating with the outside world is contagious, even as her first day with classmates like good-natured Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) and mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) proves to be overwhelming. Howell’s accommodating and empathetic energy, even in the face of how poorly Carrie’s treated by the world, is a well of positivity and light that Flanagan and his team of directors - Kate Siegel, Axelle Carolyn, Kyra Sedgwick and Hiromi Kamata - continually put to the test across not just the classic challenges from her story, but the new ones afforded by the present-day setting. As Carrie becomes more self-assertive and is then tempted towards darkness, Howell’s work is even more impressive, and the writing does a good job giving her the space to take Carrie down more intense lanes without losing sight of the precocious girl she is at heart.

Carrie getting pelted with tampons in the shower by a gang of girls led by Regina George Chris Hargensen while she gets her first period is bad enough, but the show follows that event to its next logical permutation in 2026: what happens when video of that kind of horrific bullying makes its way onto social media in the form of a meme account run by Chris, “CarrieRed.” The viral spread of the “CarrieRed” account, and the resulting fallout, is a reliable kettle the show keeps on the boil throughout the season. With that in mind, despite its supernatural trappings, much of the show’s horror is internal and existential. There are surely scares, but by and large, Carrie is content to let the experience of being a teenage girl be its own engine of horror.

Of course, Carrie’s reaction to being so callously treated by people she just wanted to be friends with is paramount, but the show takes pains to keep Sue and Chris’s experiences of these in focus as the two social poles between which Carrie is being pulled. Both Siena Agudong and Alison Thornton are good in their roles, but with Sue being a naturally decent person who usually makes the right decision, it’s Thornton’s volatile Chris that winds up with more exciting material, especially given how Flanagan and company use her own complicated circumstances at home to serve as a foil to Carrie’s. Chris’ life is falling apart, with an estranged mom and a jerk father whose poor planning leaves her freshman year of college in jeopardy, and despite the fathomless cruelty that Chris inflicts on Carrie, the writing finds grace for Chris by making clear that there are plenty of ways that poor parenting can leave a girl ill-equipped to navigate the trials of growing up in 2026.

Carrie’s relationship to the events of the plot are largely unchanged from the novel, so it’s Samantha Sloyan’s Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, who winds up as the character with the most worthwhile overhaul here. Margaret White is one of the most famous religious zealots of horror fiction, but this series explores the roots of that fundamentalism in a much more nuanced way, a mission statement the series makes right off the bat with a canny alteration to the book’s inciting incident.

The death of Ralph White, Margaret’s husband, still leads to the authorities discovering Carrie’s shut-in conditions back at home but, this time, the cops discover both Carrie and Margaret holed up in the family prayer closet, where sinners in this house are sent to repent. The way Ralph looms as a specter over their home even after his death makes it clear as the season continues that Margaret’s fervent attempts at protecting her daughter from the outside world are rooted in the ways her relationship to her ultra-right wing husband warped her own worldview. Margaret sees herself as a holy warrior, and is there no more ungodly battlefield in that war than the town square of social media, especially with her daughter being savaged there on a daily basis?

Samantha Sloyan, a frequent Flanagan collaborator, is perfectly cast as Margaret, with the actress’s intensity and openness each a perfect fit for the character’s megalomania and genuine love for Carrie. Sloyan is at her best taking that holy warrior energy toe-to-toe with those she sees as adversaries at the school, like Principal Grayle, who are mostly doing their best to balance doing right by Carrie with the institutional loopholes that leave them hamstrung in those efforts. How willing others in the town of Chamberlain seem to be to cosign Margaret’s style of guardianship call attention to her pridefulness in ways that don’t let her off the hook from being responsible for her choices, but do wonders for pointing out how prevalent the tendency to be “holier than thou” really is these days.

What shakiness is present in how Carrie is expanded out to eight episodes of TV comes from a side plot and characters that Flanagan and the writers have created to underline Carrie’s significance to the wider Kingverse. Their presence does at least make sense, given how freely the Carrie novel acknowledges the presence of other characters with the “TK gene” out in the world. Flanagan uses one character in particular to give structure to each episode, most beginning with her narration about the story of another gifted girl or woman out in the world. It’s during these vignettes that the series’ writing is at its least subtle, lacking enough variety in how they speak to the way Carrie represents all disenfranchised women to keep them from feeling a little repetitious by the season’s end.

The varying mileage these additional plot elements get is perhaps best represented in the presence of another brand-new character, Emaline (Thalia Dudek). Emaline is another new student at Ewen High who befriends Carrie and encourages her to take a more active stance against her antagonists but, as written, Emaline’s function in the story winds up being a little too one-note for a little too long to feel like a necessary invention. The Carrie series folds in this supporting roster of characters sparingly, but their presence does call for the show’s focus to occasionally drift, especially as things start heating up going into the finale.

Editor's Note: This review currently only covers Gears of War: E-Day's story campaign, as that’s all reviewers were given access to ahead of release. It will be updated with a finalized score and multiplayer impressions once we spend some time with the Versus and Horde Siege modes.

To the casual observer, Gears of War has always been a heavy-metal third-person cover shooter about a bunch of meatheads with chainsaws attached to their guns fighting aliens. But what Gears fans know all too well is that the real secret to the series’s two decades of success isn’t the killer graphics, the smart cover mechanics, or the gloriously gratuitous gore – although those things are all certainly significant parts of the recipe. It’s the heart. Marcus and Dom’s brotherhood. JD or Del’s sacrifice (depending on what you chose to do in Gears 5). Dom’s relentless love for Maria. And so my biggest question heading into Gears of War: E-Day, a prequel to the first game set 14 years prior on the day the Locust emerged from underneath the planet Sera, was how it would hang onto that heart when we already knew our armor-clad bros would definitely be alive by the end. I’m thrilled to say that E-Day carries its own satisfying emotional weight, with additional welcomed backstory for Marcus and Dom leading the way – oh, and the action is pretty top-notch, too.

E-Day begins with our Coalition of Ordered Government (COG) heroes, Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, completing a ceremonial tour to honor their service in the finally-ended 79-year Pendulum Wars. We get glimpses of how each of them is reckoning with the end of the only thing they’ve ever known: Marcus is ready to re-enlist and hoping Dom will join him, while Dom is ready to go home to his wife Maria and their two young children, who are growing up without him. Of course, things quickly go to Hell – or rather, Hell comes up to them. Gears of War: E-Day does an excellent job of conveying both the uncertainty and the horror of what’s happening to these characters, even when we as players know exactly what’s going on.

By happenstance, Marcus and Dom get unofficially paired up with ex-Gear Mags Carter and rookie Gear Lucas Reyes, who happen to be at the same bar when the Locust tremors begin, before the quartet officially becomes Bravo Squad once the COG starts organizing its defenses. E-Day deserves a lot of credit here: In a prequel like this where you’re already attached to the leads, it would be easy for Carter and Reyes to be throwaway side characters who exist only to further the stories of our two well-known heroes. But E-Day makes time for your lesser-known Bravo squadmates, dedicating entire meaningful and enjoyable sections to establishing them in this world and getting you to care about them.

The unfolding nightmare of E-Day is reflected in both the types of Locust monsters you face as the campaign progresses as well as the sorts of weapons you’ll need to put them back in the ground. Easily-dispatched Wretches and run-of-the-mill, Hammerburst-wielding Drones are on the front lines as Bravo Squad wonders what the hell it’s up against in the invasion’s opening hours. You’ll take them down with Gears of War staples like the Gnasher shotgun and Lancer, both the bayonet-clad original version and the prototype of the chainsaw-equipped revision. Yes, you’ll get your hands on Gears’s most famous firearm pretty early, and you even get to witness its fun little origin story.

But as you move through the first hours of the Locust invasion, Bravo Squad is continually confused and terrified at the increasingly deadly horrors trying to kill them. The monster menagerie is, naturally, a mix of foes you have and haven’t seen before in other Gears of War games, and the battles get steadily more white-knuckle as you make your way through the five-act story. Giant, frog-like hopping freaks that arc multi-gallon acidic loogies at you. Heavies that come in multiple varieties, most menacingly the one that fires a medium-range Gorehook – a hook on a chain that will typically down you in one hit.

On that note, one of my few complaints about Gears of War: E-Day is related to the down-but-not-out situations you’ll find yourself in throughout the campaign. When, not if, you get downed, your allies will occasionally be standing right next to you and not revive you. In fairness, it wasn’t a constant occurrence, but there were numerous times throughout my 15-18 hour first playthrough when I got stomped to death by a Locust heavy because one of my buddies either stood next to me and didn’t get me up, ran off and left me for dead, or never even got over to me as I mashed the X button to cling to life for a while. The immediate solution for this is to play through E-Day in four-player online co-op (two-player split-screen is the limit on a single Xbox), but I sure hope a patch resolves this inconsistent AI behavior sooner rather than later as well.

Guns Aplenty

As with the Locust enemies, E-Day’s weapons are a mix of old and new, and my goodness do I love them. Every weapon has a unique purpose to suit a particular combat strategy. And man, it still feels awesome to blast a Locust Heavy to bits with the Gnasher shotgun, cut a Drone into pieces with the Lancer Prototype’s chainsaw attachment, or explode a Locust sniper’s head with a scoped-Longshot kill. But there’s so much more in there beyond those Gears classics. The Breechshot, first introduced in the often-forgotten Gears of War: Judgment, ended up being one of my go-tos the longer the campaign went on, as it offered solid range and stopping power without being as cumbersome as something like the Longshot sniper rifle.

But there are a lot of weapons I’d give shoutouts to as well, like the Incinerator, which shotgun-blasts a burst of flesh-melting Imulsion; the Ripper, which is basically the Gears-universe equivalent of a SAW; and the ol’ favorite Torque Bow, which has a hell of a windup but then unleashes an explosive arrow at your target. I loved the weapon complement here, as well as the options that deep roster of firearms afforded me in some of the campaign’s later battles.

And it’s not just that all of these weapons are fun to use in the right situation. They can also all be modified and upgraded through E-Day’s new Weapon Mod and Tactical Gear system. You’ll encounter dozens of yellow Hard Cases lightly hidden throughout the world for you to find. Each contains a mod for one weapon or another, such as accuracy enhancers, scopes, or clip extenders. Completing optional secondary objectives around the major industrial city of Kalona where E-Day takes place also grants these same rewards. Each weapon has four mod slots, which you’ll unlock as you go, and I found myself constantly tweaking each weapon to find the right mix of add-ons that suited my playstyle. As such, I was plenty motivated to find every Hard Case I could and complete every secondary objective possible.

In addition to this is the Tactical Gear that modifies your armor, giving you your choice of a few squad-affecting special abilities that recharge on a cooldown timer after you use them. Again, you’ll unlock more as you progress, but once I got my hands on the Stim that allowed me to heal myself and any teammates within its radius for a short time, I was never tempted by any of the other choices. All of these customization options evolve the classic Gears of War combat in a welcome but not radical way that I appreciate, while liberally placed Supply Caches let you cycle weapons and mods rather frequently if you so choose.

And you’ll be glad for the ability to rearrange your weapon loadout often in E-Day’s mini-boss fights and full-blown boss battles. Almost all of them are memorable in a good way. With, again, a mix of old and new “faces,” these were often barely-scrape-by bouts during my playthrough and ones I welcomed both when they arrived and when I emerged victorious.

E-Day is packed with beautiful locations. The destroyed downtown of Kalona; the pitch-black, Locust-dug caves underneath it; the almost sinister-looking Imulsion refinery; the peaceful mountaintops outside the city. Although the entire campaign doesn’t take place there, you’ll spend a healthy amount of time in Kalona, and the massive but dense battle spaces there are an excellent evolution of the mostly empty open-world areas from Gears 5. The freedom feels far more organic and meaningful here, as there are so many interesting things around almost every corner.

In addition to the aforementioned secondary objectives that grant meaningful Weapon Mod upgrades, there are hidden objects with optionally-viewed details that add a bit of color to a world in the process of recovering from a 79-year civil war, only to be invaded and destroyed by the Locust in a few days. The gorgeous visuals are brought down only by infrequent but noticeable framerate hitches, even while playing in Performance Mode on the Xbox Series X. As such, I can’t recommend playing on the 30fps Quality Mode – at least not before a patch or two.

On a side note, I appreciate that E-Day doesn’t do the all-too-common “make the player run the gauntlet of everything they’ve already fought, but multiply it” endgame sequence. Instead, your mettle is tested plenty of times along the way, with ample quiet moments to punctuate the loud action. And the ending is, I’ll say without spoiling anything, satisfying, which isn’t an easy thing to pull off when, as I mentioned, we already know that Marcus and Dom make it out of E-Day alive. And thank goodness, because I need more quippy Marcus Fenix one-liners in my life; I can’t get enough of them.

Campaign Verdict:

By going back to the beginning, Gears of War: E-Day returns to the heart of this series: Marcus Fenix, Dom Santiago, and a Locust horde that’s as terrifying as it is dangerous. E-Day pulls off the tightrope act of giving us a heartfelt prequel with strong characters even when we know how it ends. On a more mechanical level, it also evolves the enemies, weapons, and combat you’d expect to deliver a Gears of War campaign that stands toe-to-toe with any of the others. It wraps up with 10 years still left to go before Marcus gets tossed in prison ahead of the events of the first Gears of War, so here’s hoping the next one stays in the past for a while longer – and that we don’t have to wait another seven years for it to arrive.

East of Eden debuts on Netflix on October 1.

Good vs. evil, brotherly rivalries, parental rejection, the notion of free will as opposed to fate… East of Eden has a lot going on. And the new Netflix iteration of the John Steinbeck epic is pretty great at conveying these ideas with a well-acted, handsomely produced, seven-episode miniseries that’s the streaming equivalent of a page-turner.

I confess to having never seen Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation of East of Eden in its entirety, despite its status as one of only three starring vehicles for James Dean. But what I do remember about it is mish-mashed in my head with another of his films, Giant, so much so that I was a bit surprised by how the Netflix version ended. That may also be in part because, surprisingly, there haven’t been a ton of film or TV adaptations of East of Eden beyond the Kazan/Dean film; there was a TV miniseries in 1981 starring Jane Seymour, and a long-gestating movie version that had Jennifer Lawrence attached at one point but never materialized, but otherwise that’s it.

And that’s just fine, because now Kazan’s granddaughter, the actress Zoe Kazan, has adapted the 1952 novel for the small screen. Along with directors Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Kazan takes the story and imparts a modern sensibility to what is, after all, an age-old tale. For East of Eden makes no bones about its ultimate source, which is the biblical tale of Cain and Abel. Indeed, the very title comes from the Book of Genesis: “So Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

Only in this version of the story, the second Black Widow and the third Professor Xavier star! (Also, a former Ghost Rider villain shows up for a supporting turn.) I’m talking, of course, about Florence Pugh, who really is the centerpiece of this version of the story as Cathy Ames, and Christopher Abbott, who is the second lead as Adam Trask. Mike Faist (Challengers) plays Adam’s brother Charles, who winds up in the middle of things between Cathy and Adam even while the latter two are destined to marry and have children someday. East of Eden is a generational story, as we start Episode 1, “Brothers,” in the post-Civil War Connecticut of 1874 and eventually find our way to California’s Salinas Valley circa World War I in the finale, “Timshel.”

“I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents,” Pugh’s Cathy tells us in voiceover in the opening line of the series. And that is certainly an idea that lingers over the 46 years or so of the Trask family that we are to bear witness to, though whereas Cathy – a cruel woman who does unspeakable things to those who love her most – takes that notion to be incontrovertible, Kazan is less convinced. Cathy may be a monster, but was she born that way or did other monsters turn the once innocent child that she was into one of their own?

Episode 1 spends a good amount of time with the young versions of Adam (Costa D'Angelo) and his brother Charles (Tom Sweet), as they are forced to run military drills under their father Cyrus (a hateful Tracy Letts), whose heart is still in the war and who plays favorites with his sons. “Adam, don’t you see? I love you better,” Cyrus tells his elder son while Charles is barely within earshot. And yet he has a funny way of showing this affection, choosing to send Adam off to fight in the army while making Charles – the son who actually has an interest in enlisting – stay home to mind the farm.

By the time Cathy comes into the brothers’ lives years later, she’s on death’s doorstep as well as the Trasks’, having been beaten savagely by forces unknown. She will also soon drive a wedge between Adam and Charles, just as their father did, upending all their lives in the years to come, even while that central question will continue to come up: Are monsters born, or are they made?

East of Eden constantly raises this idea, and sometimes it’s a bit too on the nose about it. “I want to be good” and similar lines are uttered by characters who we already know are struggling with the choices they’ve made, or are about to make. But then it has moments of sublime exploration of such notions. In particular, the relationship that forms between Hoon Lee’s Lee and Ciarán Hinds’ Samuel Hamilton yields a philosophical discussion around the idea of “timshel” – a Hebrew word that, according to Steinbeck’s translation, means “thou mayest.” In other words, you may, or you may not. It’s your choice to do good… or bad.

Hoon Lee (Your Friends & Neighbors) is a standout in this series, eventually entering the picture as the Chinese manservant of Adam’s household who, despite being American born, is still treated as lesser by most of the whites who he lives among. His connection to Adam and Adam’s own sons, and how it leads him to reflect on his own life, is both heartwarming and at times sad. Hinds too plays an important and memorable part in the Trask family as Adam and Cathy move out West, while Joseph Zada and Joe Anders eventually join the series as the years progress, playing twin brothers Caleb and Aron, respectively, and effectively continuing the themes of fraternal friction as 20th century counterparts to their father and uncle.

As for Pugh, Abbott, and Faist, the trio are excellent in their roles, with Pugh in particular standing out as the complicated, headstrong, smart, and quite evil Cathy. Though indeed born of human parents as Cathy was, Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden can’t help but contemplate how even a character like this could be the result of more than just fate. “To a monster, the norm must seem monstrous,” Cathy says in that same voiceover. But what if that monster had no choice but to become monstrous in order to survive?

As the fantasy RPG GOAT, it really doesn’t take a whole lot for me to replay The Witcher 3. I’ve happily done so the numerous other times developer CD Projekt Red has revamped this masterpiece, but The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered seems to be the biggest overhaul to the beloved tale yet. A free update for anyone who owns the original, so many different parts of this already excellent game have been improved – from combat to movement to skill progression (not to mention the modernized graphics). After about 10 hours working my way through White Orchard and beyond, it’s already extremely clear that this is the best The Witcher 3 has ever been.

Combat is less floaty and enemies are (slightly) less stupid

It’s probably not controversial to say that one of the worst parts of this otherwise amazing adventure was the combat. Even after at least a few updates to it over the years, it still mostly felt floaty, a bit on the sloppy side, and enemies were a huge fan of just standing there and waiting for their turn to get decapitated. The modernizations made to combat in this remaster are its biggest step forward, as a whole bevy of tweaks have been made to address various sticking points. Geralt attacks faster and enemies are quicker to match your pace, which makes the process of chopping through your ninth pack of wolves much less irritating.

The camera and lock-on functionality have been the highlight so far, as you can now toggle between large groups of enemies with ease, and without the camera losing its mind. I didn’t even use the lock-on system in the original specifically because it was so unreliable, so being able to do so now has taken some serious getting used to. In general, the camera feels much better – less tightly locked to your back so you can handle groups of enemies more reliably (though those darn Neckers still like to sneak up on ya), and so far I’ve encountered far fewer situations where I felt like I was fighting my view as much as I was the monsters.

I’ve also noticed some new enemy behaviors that make swordplay more interesting, specifically how they’ll now retreat instead of letting you trounce them with steel, launch less telegraphed counterattacks, and disappear and reappear behind you (in the case of ghost monsters). All that did a much better job of making me feel like I was fighting intelligent creatures. Of course, compared to some of the stuff we see in action games today, I still do feel like the enemy behavior shows its age, and it was never all that great to begin with. Still, this is enough of an improvement to make combat feel much more engaging than it once did, significantly upgrading one of this adventure’s weakest points.

Geralt moves so much faster and Roach is less of a cretin

Movement is one of those small details that can grate the heck out of you in a massive RPG like The Witcher 3, slowly filling you with rage over the course of hundreds of hours. In the original, Geralt was often slow and had a lot of trouble getting over things. His rigid animations sometimes made me avoid ladders altogether because I just didn’t have the patience for it. In the remaster, Geralt absolutely flies over fences and navigates vertical obstacles with relative ease, to the point where it actually felt weird to see him be so nimble. I recall losing over an hour of progress in the 1.0 version when Geralt fell off a ledge no taller than a barstool and managed to break every bone in his body. This was reduced already in the next-gen update from 2022, but combined with the other speed and mobility improvements here, it almost feels like a completely different game – to the point where I’ve begun to wonder if it’ll make the map feel smaller than before as I get deeper in.

Similarly, Roach is no longer the annoying idiot she once was, now sporting much more intuitive controls that make her less likely to get caught on trees (which she now passes through if she’s just brushing against them while galloping), or end up on top of a barn. Most importantly, you can now loot herbs and whatnot without getting off your horse, which is maybe the single best improvement this remaster offers (dismounting every 10 seconds to pick a flower drove me to the brink of madness in 2015).

Skill trees are less restrictive

A pet peeve of mine in RPGs is when skill trees prevent you from playing around with different builds until you get deep into the progression. This is something The Witcher 3 suffered from quite a bit in the early hours, as so many of the impactful abilities were locked behind walls you couldn’t remove until late in the journey. The revised trees in the remaster take a page out of Cyberpunk 2077’s book by making perks more readily available earlier on, so you can customize how you’d like Geralt to get his Witchering done. I’m still early in my journey on this run, but I’m already happy to see that I won’t have to wait until I’ve invested a whole 12 points in a branch before I can unlock any good skills – so long as I’ve purchased a skill along the route I’m focusing on, I can now progress down a certain skill path with fewer obstructions.

Oh, yeah, this remaster looks pretty great too

Maybe this goes without saying for a remaster, but this is a pretty massive graphical upgrade, even over the one The Witcher 3 got for the current generation of consoles just four years ago. The lighting is much more dramatic, environmental textures are way more detailed, shadows and reflections are much more consistent across the board (especially on PC), and Geralt’s hair looks way less like a blurry mess than it once did. Again, this is all stuff that you’d hope would be the bare minimum when remastering a 12-year-old game, but it still warrants a shoutout. There’s even a new photo mode for those of you who want to take glamor shots of Geralt in all his new, high definition glory.

The one thing caveat here is that performance is still not perfect, and I still ran into a dropped frame or two on both console and PC. It’s a small price to pay for how much better things look, though, especially with the incredibly short load times I saw. And considering that the original had some framerate issues of its own, it’s not like anything has gotten worse here.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered’s greatest asset isn’t that it adds anything the original sorely lacked, but rather that it removes some of the biggest roadblocks to fun the 1.0 version was saddled with. Combat is more challenging but also easier to enjoy, movement is quicker and less irritating, and revised skill trees allow for more freedom. Even if it doesn’t manage to fix some of the technical issues (plus I’m sure there are some bugs waiting for me to encounter them that haven’t reared their ugly heads yet), it manages to make this classic RPG more enjoyable in 2026, and that’s worth yet another ride down its well-trodded roads.

Beware Boiúna is in theaters on October 2.

Movies about monstrous versions of recognizable animals are a fun subgenre. The likes of Anaconda, Lake Placid, The Meg, and the granddaddy of them all, King Kong, offer a certain innate allure regardless of their differing quality, as they take a creature we might already find menacing and mega-plus-size them. Some lean into camp, some into pure horror, and some into tragedy, but a surprising number of them work on some level.

The latest addition to this type of film is Beware Boiúna, which has its moments and a few clever twists on formulaic situations, but never quite fully takes off. On top of that, the film also suffers from just taking too damn long to get to the giant snake we’re there to see. I want to beware Boiúna, so give me Boiúna!

The film follows a trio of doctors who come to the Amazon on a humanitarian trip to administer medical assistance and, along with the crew of the boat they’re traveling on, run afoul of the legendary Boiúna — a massive fearsome snake from Brazilian mythology who is described almost like a force of nature, dispatching anyone that she sees as upsetting the balance within her home.

Though Beware Boiúna delivers a couple of early death scenes to tease the terrors to come, its set-up is far too prolonged for a film of this sort. Even at 1 hour and 44 minutes, it easily feels 15 minutes too long; Anaconda and Lake Placid knew what they were doing, running 90 minutes or less each. There are ultimately too many scenes establishing the characters and their dynamics, along with an attempt to go for a more serious-minded, grounded feeling than you might expect from a film of this sort. It’s admirable to infuse themes about the exploitation of the Amazon and its indigenous people into a giant snake movie, but it should be done far more efficiently or better blended within the mayhem people are paying to see.

The film also includes a storyline that feels like it’s part of the set-up to a totally different movie, involving a notably dark experience that med student Alli (Jessica Rothe) and ship mechanic Lena (Kiana Madeira) have that leads to “colonizer” Brennan (Logan Marshall-Green) and his men angrily tracking them from a different boat. Sure, it offers up more potential victims for Boiúna, but it’s another place where there was an easier, quicker way to get there.

When Boiúna finally unleashes, she’s pretty cool and very daunting, and the film makes good use of her unreal size as a weapon in its own right… when we can get a good look at her, that is, which isn’t enough. Director Mike P. Nelson and cinematographer Nick Junkersfeld keep Beware Boiúna often looking visually appealing, and the FX used to bring Boiúna are solid in the glimpses we get. But it quickly begins to feel like the film’s low budget is keeping her from being seen nearly as much as one would hope, including resorting to some distracting shaky-cam at points to try to disguise that fact… and this is not nearly a Jaws-level film in terms of making up for its often offscreen beast.

Veteran screenwriter Alan B. McElroy, the writer behind Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers — still the best Halloween sequel ever — manages to interject some deviations from the expected formula of this kind of movie. There are solid moments that play with the usual flow of who will die next, whose perspective we’re following, or what character we’re meant to like at any given moment. But at the same time, there’s not enough done in terms of delivering memorable deaths, with too many characters taken out quickly and without discernible details to make their demise stand out.

And yet there are also well-done scenes involving mosquito eggs left inside a human’s back, a snake smashing into a construction vehicle, or the particular highlight of a character needing to think fast to save themselves using the corpse of a fallen friend. But then that scene is undercut by some unnecessary flashbacks immediately afterward, providing hand-holding we simply don’t need to apparently remind the audience of a relationship we are already fully aware of. Ultimately, there’s just a lot of push-pull here.

Anchoring the film are the likable duo of Rothe and Madeira, projecting the feeling of believable resourcefulness that these characters need to have. It’s too bad Beware Boiúna doesn’t allow for Rothe to show off her impressively strong comedy chops like the Happy Death Day movies do, but better served on that front is Will Close. Close nails each of the funny lines given to his comic relief character of Callum, who’s very much out of his element even before the giant snake arrives.

Director Nelson — recently hired to direct the eleventh Saw movie — shows some flair, including the moments mentioned above or with a couple of well orchestrated jump scares, such as one that cleverly uses blurriness as a set-up. But these “that was cool” beats that are peppered throughout the film never gain enough momentum for the movie to feel like it’s truly locked in. And they can't make up for not having enough Boiúna!

The first two episodes of Scrubs Season 11 premiere on ABC on September 30 and on Hulu on October 1.

In an era where it's become customary to wait years between new seasons of many popular shows, it's certainly a treat to receive two seasons of Scrubs in the same calendar year. The previous revival season proved to be the ultimate sitcom comfort food. It effortlessly wiped away the stigma of Season 9 and won fans back over with its depiction of the eternal bromance between Drs. John Dorian (Zach Braff) and Christopher Turk (Donald Faison). Season 10 wasn't without its problems, but it was a fun little romp that recaptured the charming vibe of the original series. Season 11 is much the same, but with a slightly more ambitious storytelling approach added for good measure.

Naturally, Braff and Faison remain in the spotlight for Season 11, as does Sarah Chalke's Dr. Elliot Reid. Much of the new cast introduced in Season 10 also returns, with Ava Bunn's Sam Tosh now upped to series regular. Unfortunately, Season 11 eliminates two of the more memorable supporting cast members in Joel Kim Booster's Dr. Kevin Park and X Mayo's Nurse Pippa Raymond. It's not the worst thing in the world for the series to trim its ensemble cast a bit, but neither character deserved to be on the chopping block.

Season 10 did suffer at times from the lack of focus on classic Scrubs characters like Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) and Nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes). Thankfully, that changed late in the game as the now-retired Dr. Cox came roaring back into Sacred Heart and grappled with his own mortality. One of the perks of Season 11 is that it continues that storyline rather than simply moving on. In fact, there are hints of a more serialized narrative this season. The show really leans into Cox's ongoing health struggles and J.D.'s desperate attempts to care for his prickly mentor. Mind you, Scrubs is in no danger of turning into The Pitt anytime soon, but it is nice to get a bit more drama and see a little more connective tissue between these first two episodes. And if that approach keeps McGinley's hilarious character in the picture longer this season, so much the better.

If Scrubs is being a bit more ambitious with its storytelling this season, it certainly never loses sight of the fact that fans are here first and foremost for the dynamic between J.D., Turk, and Elliot. All three characters get ample room to shine in these first two episodes. J.D and Turk have several memorable bonding scenes together, and the series is ever on-point with J.D.'s fanciful dream sequences. There's one cutaway that rivals Season 10's detective noir scene for its sheer zaniness. And with Elliot, the series continues finding ways to explore and enrich the character outside the shackles of the "Will they, won't they?" format the original series was so fixated on.

But what of the newbies? As enjoyable as it was, Season 10 never fully cemented its new cast of interns. There were simply too many of these characters, and they never felt like a priority for the series amid the emphasis on the core doctor trinity. These two episodes show signs that the writers are looking to narrow their focus a bit this time. Obviously, Bunn's Tosh is a bigger priority now, and Episode 2 makes some inroads in terms of defining her as more than "the social media-obsessed one."

In fact, Episode 2, which is titled "My Mentee," seems to cement a new status quo where each of the three leads is paired with a different underling, mirroring the Cox/J.D. dynamic of the original show. Elliott gets Tosh, Turk gets Dr. Dashana Trainor (Amanda Morrow), and J.D. struggles to connect with the new chief resident, Dr. Grant Summers (John Higgins). This narrowed focus is promising, though it does serve to make the rest of the interns like Asher (Jacob Dudman) and Blake (David Gridley) feel even more superfluous than before. We'll see if Season 11 can ultimately achieve a better balance than its predecessor, but things are looking promising so far.

The satisfaction of the metroidvania genre comes from a sensation of mastery – taking a place I'm unfamiliar with and slowly unraveling its complexities until I command dominance over its spaces and the threats that perpetually lurk within. For its debut game, End of Abyss, developer Section 9 Interactive tries to apply that format to an atmospheric horror adventure with twin-stick controls and instills a striking sense of dread inside a gargantuan labyrinthian facility. Its atmosphere only carries it so far, though; End of Abyss's exploration and combat slowly descend into a slog, and it never fully recovers from feeling like a routine procedure.

End of Abyss is centered around a young combat technician named Cel, who isn't given much in the way of personality. Cel is a silent observer who's trained to interact with the world through the scope of a gun. They skulk around this massive, desolate complex with only a few other soldiers four times their size, slowly attempting to discern what happened here. The place is abandoned, seemingly run by a series of AI boxes known as Security Control Units, which are trying to keep the facility from falling into total disarray. A mysterious voice calls out to Cel through these boxes, hoping they will help free this place from the zombified station workers who turned into enemy Husks.

Without much else explained, Cel is thrust into the cold concrete corridors and expected to survive. As I walked through dimly lit hallways and parasitic flea-infested tunnels, it was clear Section 9 was built of former Little Nightmares developers. The clay-doll aesthetic and isometric perspective is immediately recognizable. Atmosphere is the most captivating thing End of Abyss has to offer.

The grotesque detritus of vacant bedrooms litters the Habitation Sector, crafting a harrowing and bone-chilling opening section. I walked through every doorway with my thumb trembling on the right stick. Even with Cel's pistol drawn to keep my guard up, I was still terrified of what could be on the other side. The way a light flickers above an exit or how an enemy body encased in parasitic fungus is positioned all constantly feed into the uneasiness you want from a horror experience. These tricks work for the first few hours, but as End of Abyss dragged on, I began to see the seams of it all, and it eventually became too familiar.

What were once terrifying jump scares became predictable – corpses with important items conveniently placed in large open arenas consistently led to combat encounters I knew were coming. The supposedly dead enemies I used to fear waking up to chase me down always would, and thus it became routine to start shooting them before I even approached.

The mystery surrounding End of Abyss unsatisfyingly relied on the absence of information. Characters trade in vague uncertainties, often offering up little to no useful information about how or why we are in this facility. A few notes and documents are found scattered around its hallowed halls, but even slowly learning about what life was like here before our protagonist Cel touched down does little to actually paint a compelling picture. I pushed forward, turning on little AI boxes around this compound to activate an elevator, I searched for power cells to switch on a beacon, and I eventually descended into the dreaded lower levels to see what lurked below.

It wasn't until the back third of End of Abyss’ roughly 10-hour campaign that the plot started to gain momentum. The story suddenly took a front seat as characters began to explain the reason for our deadly trek through the compound. But because the buildup lacked tangible stakes, it was mystery for mystery's sake, and rarely did it feel of any consequence.

That's not to say that End of Abyss doesn't have its moments. Particularly in the last act when tiptoeing around the lower levels, I found note after note that brought me closer into the horrors of this world. Rooms filled with strange new oddities and remnants of experimentations piqued my curiosity and illustrated an underlying terror.

Atmospheric Pressure

A few new weapons to add to my parasite killing arsenal also kept me invested in the search-action. Your options range from the Pulse Gun, a trusty and reliable pistol with unlimited ammo, to a flamethrower that lights up entire rooms in a wall of fire. The twin-stick shooter part of End of Abyss is no joke, either. Combat encounters can swing drastically if you roll the wrong way or get caught in a corner. I always felt in control of the situation even as I dipped and dodged through large hordes of enemies. So when I would slip up and lose that control, it became a struggle to regain my footing. That's where the combat thrives: walking on the razor's edge between confidence and hubris with a little uncertainty.

Enemy variety pushed me to do some experimentation in the action. Grenades were a staple in large group encounters, learning to manipulate aggressive enemy behavior to my advantage became a small game on its own, and grouping up mobs to maximize a red barrel explosion was a key tactic. More challenging enemies, like the long-necked Husk Latcher, made keeping a safe distance difficult; it perpetually charged forward and swung its long-reaching, claw-like head in my direction.

While I found the moment-to-moment combat mostly strong, the boss fights feel rote by comparison. Circular arenas with large creatures played out largely the same – roll away from the boss, pop a few shots into them, rinse and repeat. Some bosses, like the Centipede Husk, mixed things up a bit by leaving the arena and popping out of different corners to try and catch me off guard. Other fights are more focused on dumping large amounts of ammunition into the boss, and that's disappointing for a game with flashes of brilliance.

With the exception of the pistol, you'll need to manage your ammo and craft more at workbenches found around the different save points throughout the facility. Early on, managing my Riot Breaker shotgun ammo and choosing to save my limited supply for the moments that mattered felt reminiscent of other survival horror games like Resident Evil. However, after only a couple of hours, I rarely thought about my ammo counts, since the materials required to craft more bullets at a workbench felt like drops in a bucket. This trend continued as I acquired the Security Rifle – an armor-piercing long-range gun – and that minimized a potentially interesting dynamic.

Fragments are found around every corner, and they're a plentiful currency throughout. I found them on dead enemies, stashed away in lockers and treasure chests, and just laying in optional rooms. It was so abundant that I eventually felt nothing every time I saw that blue glow in the distance.

Dazed & Confused

This resource problem began to seep into the cracks of the foundation and expose a larger problem: exploration is not truly rewarding. The interconnected hallways and twisting systems that make understanding how all of the locations fit together are part of the puzzle in a metroidvania. But here, the further I dove into the depths of it all, the more frustrating navigating this dilapidated station became. The lack of visual variety and identity across different areas made everything look the same, and it was difficult to pinpoint points of interest in an area to help anchor myself. End of Abyss became more about looking at the map every few seconds to ensure I wasn't going the wrong way than soaking in the foreboding atmosphere that surrounded me.

Unlocking shortcuts with keycards or opening a door from the opposite side didn't bring revelation or satisfaction. It often brought confusion about how or why these rooms were tied together and what use this shortcut would have. When every zone is the same gray-and-blue hue, it becomes a tired cycle to open up another cold steel door for the sake of it, or for a handful of Fragments I didn't really need. For every new weapon or piece of equipment I found, there were five rooms full of just Fragments.

And then there was the Containment Sector. This section of the map leaks radiation and would slowly tick away at my health if I stayed in the area. I quickly shifted gears and locked in, moving with surgical precision as I couldn't waste any time getting lost. Every few minutes my health would tick to zero, I would die, and I would respawn at a nearby checkpoint. It felt obvious that there was something I was missing, some sort of protection from the radiation, since the further into the sector I went, the stronger the radiation became.

Eventually I discovered a radiation suit mod that protected me from the constant damage. Instead of elation, all I felt was relief that I was done having to poke and prod random corners of this world for something that may or may not have existed. This entire scavenger hunt felt so detached from the Containment Sector and what I was trying to accomplish there, and it's a disconnect that even metroidvanias of yore didn't have.

Backtracking in End of Abyss is rough, even with a transit system that can take you to most zones. Cel does not move very quickly while sprinting, and the constant aimless roaming really pads out the overall runtime. These problems are exacerbated by multiple bugs that prevented me from progressing – random invisible walls that would stop me dead in my tracks on a ladder or prevent me from doubling back to a section I was just in. This caused me to have to restart at a previous checkpoint, losing 10-15 minutes of progress each time.

Despite the frustrations with exploration, the tone-setting audio design from Section 9 is some of the best I've heard recently. Pulsating reverberations of loud clangs and distorted gurgles rang through my headphones, sending shivers down my spine. The wet squelching of enemies as they scurried toward me made me want to crawl out of my skin. The audio gives End of Abyss a sense of scope that outsized its dark and tight corridors, making it feel like this facility goes far beyond the bounds of the screen.

This review contains full spoilers for Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 3, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

For as apt a title as “Resurrection” is for this particular Slow Horses episode, it also kind of undersells the amount of resurrecting — literal and otherwise — within. It’s a trifecta: Of course, there’s Sid (Olivia Cooke), who was revealed to be alive at the end of the last episode. But then there’s Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), living a new plush life in the corporate world whose past life as a Slow Horse is unmercifully revived when Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) drag her out of a meeting. Lastly, there’s Moira (Joanna Scanlan), who might have actually been dead for a minute or two after the hit attempt by the murder twins (Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring), springing back to life. “Resurrection” is a real doozy and an overall excellent Slow Horses episode that takes full advantage of all the plot-building groundwork this season has done thus far.

It kicks off with River’s (Jack Lowden) understandably bemused expression watching Sid prance around his grandfather’s kitchen as if almost nothing had happened. He asks all the same questions we as viewers have: How? Why? What the hell, man? But their conversation is cut short as the murderers — who apparently have names (rather, obvious aliases), Jim and Jane — pull up on the long driveway to cross off their next hit. It starts an episode-long cat-and-mouse game between the two pairs that makes space for fun banter (ie., how much a cow costs) and big developments to the grander season conspiracy (the murderers are Russian, some of Sid’s current story).

It’s a thrilling framework that also reminds us of both the bumbling and occasionally competent sides of a Slow Horse. When Jim and Jane first break into the house after a lame attempt at non-forced entry (“We’re lost” — try harder!), I braced myself: Will River and Sid do some cool spy shit and take them out? The thought was answered with a cut to them sprinting through the field to escape. Again and again, they find a moment to breathe and unpack the lost years until Jim and Jane have found the end of the scent trail that leads directly back to Sid and River. The very end of the episode is no different: Just when you think the Slow Horses have shaken their tail, Jim and Jane come ominously skulking through the parking lot. (Coe, do something!)

Of course, “Resurrection” isn’t just the River and Sid show. The women of Slough House have formed a ragtag little band with Louisa and Moira in tow to keep in line with Blake’s grave protocol. Louisa is a welcome familiar face and the lingering effects of Moira’s gas poisoning give her some funny moments of delirium, but this team-up keeps up the weakest part of the season thus far: Standish continuing to grieve her ex-boss Charles Partner while suppressing her urge to drink. It’s a real shame that she's been mostly sidelined to staring at wine racks so far given that she’s so often been an integral supporting role in the series.

Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), however, has been given plenty to do — such is the life of First Desk — and is Going Through It after her disastrous interview with Talkpoint. Pretty much everyone has a bone to pick with her right now, and she takes it out on Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), demoting her from her head Dog duties and banishing her to Slough House. I can’t help but wonder how much more of this pressure Diana can take before her deflective front starts to erode. Or maybe she really is an impenetrable force after all!

Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) have their own side quest, too, in picking up Reece Nesmith (Lenny Rush), the son of the ex-Dog that Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving) strangled last episode — and sole witness to his murder. Given that Lamb is actually good at his job, they find Reece, who proves to be quite the match for both of his captors (and can go fart-to-fart against Lamb). Unfortunately for Reece, decades of experience beats out the energy of youth.

Digger opens in theaters on October 2.

"Gentlemen, we find ourselves in a dildo of a pickle," says the President of the United States as he comes to grips with the fact that a US oil-drilling mishap has split off a city-sized ice shelf that's on a path of destruction toward Europe and will trigger tsunamis, causing untold death and destruction. That line, exquisitely delivered by John Goodman and imposingly photographed by director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Babel, Birdman, The Revenant) in his signature low, wide-angle style, also sums up my complex feelings toward a film whose reach far exceeds its grasp and whose satire—while funny—would have felt fresher a decade ago.

Starting with an ice fracture "10 times the size of his own dick," Digger follows Digger Rockwell, the oil tycoon responsible for the ice shelf debacle mentioned above, who finds himself on the defensive as he works with the president, advisors and generals to try to stop the impending doom brought on by our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels—and when that fails, at the very least, to "control the narrative."

There's a twist that the marketing seems to be deliberately trying to avoid, so I won't directly mention it in this review. However, it fundamentally affects my opinion of the film. I'll talk around it and also fence it in with "Possible Spoiler" warnings.

But let's get right to the best part of the show: Tom Cruise.

The Tom of It All

It's been a long time since Tom Cruise has taken on a role that required zero action. I was excited for him to enter his post-Mission: Impossible era and was delighted to see elements of Digger Rockwell echo Tropic Thunder's Les Grossman.

For Digger Rockwell, Cruise dons heavy prosthetics to fully transform into the wily old oil tycoon. His look may be more Ross Perot, but it’s still clear an action star is under all that latex, climbing mantles and dancing with his shovel. Whether he's bickering with Riz Ahmed about his annoying scientific ethics or lecturing world leaders on why he's necessary—the latter of which is one of the best scenes in the film and might be worth the price of admission alone—Cruise's performance is both focused and kinetic.

Digger lecturing a United Nations-type body is Cruise's "you can't handle the truth!" monologue and might be one of the best of his career. His "You demand. I supply" rhetoric echoes Colonel Jessup's "[you] sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, and then you question the manner in which I provide it" speech. Instead of Nicholson's fierce but measured delivery (which Nerdwriter expertly broke down in his Jack Nicholson: The Art of Anger video essay), Digger delivers this whole speech while pacing the set and even physically fighting with some listeners in one unbroken take.

For every Tom Cruise action movie, there's some featurette of the filmmakers marveling at his ability to deliver a line while he's dangling from a building or strapped to the side of a plane. Digger's monologue, where he conjures up an almost 1,000-word lecture without cutting, all while hitting the constantly moving camera blocking, is as stunning an accomplishment and as mesmerizing as any of those action scenes.

This scene isn't just Tom at his best; it's also Iñárritu and longtime collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, upping their game too. This Digger oner combines the complex blocking of background and extras from Birdman's Times Square underwear jaunt with the more dialogue-heavy long shots Iñárritu and Lubezki experimented with in The Revenant to create a stunning one-shot that showcases Cruise's acting chops in a way we haven't seen in decades, if ever.

Thematically, this monologue is one of the few times the satire actually says something pointed. Most of the film relies on a Looney Tunes-esque, Yosemite Sam diplomacy: We need oil at any cost and American weapons and brute force can solve any problem nature presents.

Digger's speech provides a smart contrast to the President's mean-spirited, selfish, extremely aggressive, and idiotic decisions. His monologue deftly navigates a complex and evolving argument that starts with that "You demand, I supply" line before chastising the attendees for profiting royally from his companies, explaining that the masses are too poor to care, and finally lecturing them that they've inadvertently chosen his side in these matters, so they better pray he wins.

Digger represents the status quo, personified. Iñárritu uses this monologue as the film's sharpest argument for how Digger and company's poor decision-making got them into an environmental catastrophe that these fossil fools are too ill-equipped to solve.

The Politics of It All

This is a film about how methane leaks caused by the prolonged burning of fossil fuels, combined with an oil-drilling fiasco, created an environmental catastrophe that the film's clearly conservative leadership is ill-equipped to deal with. To avoid bringing politics into this review is a diplomatic exercise that only John Goodman's president would be stupid enough to pursue.

Political satire doesn't need to be subtle, but it does need to illuminate something beyond the obvious by pushing story elements like recognizable characters, plots, and events to their logical extremes. Unfortunately, the script by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman fails to provoke any profound truth or unique thinking. The end of this global-warming disaster satire lands exactly where you think it will. Regrettably for Digger, there are other films like Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up that have tackled the same topics, but in more interesting ways.

There’s been a lot of reporting on the mixed early impressions of Digger. Don't Look Up’s reaction was also mixed. It currently has a 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. But IGN gave it a 7/10, and I more or less agree with our review. McKay's different, and in my opinion, smarter approach to the topic—using an asteroid impact as a metaphor for global warming—created a more nuanced take on the subject. He used an objectively obvious catastrophe to contrast our society's inability to do anything to stop it because of our culture's unholy mix of greed, politics, and misinformation.

Digger does the exact opposite of Don't Look Up: Instead of indecision, things go worse because the film's leaders make profoundly stupid decisions. Digger still made me laugh at a decent amount of the jokes, but the film will probably alienate a large part of the audience due to the cartoonishly selfish and negligent conservative politicians and businessmen—characters like Goodman's President Compson and his cabinet, who embody the most negative stereotypes of the American right wing. Meanwhile, some on the other side might bristle at rampant machismo and misogyny that are done in the name of satire.

"Controlling the Narrative"

There's a twist in Digger. I'm going to talk around it here.

Possible spoilers below!

A big theme in Digger is "controlling the narrative," which Digger believes is crucial to maintaining power. To that end, we need to talk about Jesse Plemons' character.

I've lamented how unrefined the film's characters are. Only twice does its blunt satire say something interesting: the first is Digger's monologue, and the second is a speech from Plemons' character.

When I left the theater, it was Plemons' monologue that kept me thinking about the film. Without getting too deep into spoilers, his monologue touches on themes explored in the 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a film about how the Sackler family used its money to fund the arts to rehabilitate its image after its role in America's opioid crisis. Plemons' character smartly touches on these same ideas, putting an interesting spin on Digger's story in the final act.

End of possible spoilers.

There's A Lot of Great Work on Display

There's an old filmmaking adage: "You can make a bad movie from a good script, but you can't make a good movie from a bad script." Unfortunately, the script is Digger's Achilles heel. But that doesn't mean there isn't some exceptional work on display.

From frame one, it's completely obvious that this movie looks expensive. From evocative murals to stylized miniature work to window vistas that look like amazing natural history museum dioramas, production designer Dennis Gassner created a world that is overflowing with detail and style worthy of a Wes Anderson movie.

Riz Ahmed, who plays Ganesh, Digger's lead scientist and the voice of reason, spars frequently with Tom Cruise, making for some of the film's best exchanges. This probably won't be the movie that lands Cruise his acting statue, but Ahmed turns in the kind of generous supporting performance that Cruise was known for in the late '80s and early '90s which helped his co-stars land Academy Awards.

John Goodman also delivers a stellar performance as President Compson. He has some of the best lines, and you can tell he had a hell of a time delivering them on set.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Simpsons Season 38, Episode 1!

Nothing is certain in life but death, taxes, and new seasons of The Simpsons. It's pretty incredible to think that this iconic animated sitcom has crossed the 800-episode mark and is now entering its 38th season. That said, the series doesn't do anything particularly noteworthy to ring in the new season. "The Children's Book Job" settles for delivering a fairly standard late-era Simpsons adventure, one that's mostly carried on the back of its guest star.

The conflict this week comes as Marge (Julie Kavner) is no sooner sworn in as PTA president than the town learns Springfield Elementary is about to be shut down. That in itself seems like a decent premise for a new episode. How do you save this beloved Springfield institution? Should the town even want to, given how legendarily terrible Springfield Elementary is?

But that's not the direction writer Dan Vebber opts to go with this particular storyline. Instead, Marge and her fellow parents put all their eggs in the basket of beloved children's book author Constance Clavinger (Emma Thompson). Apparently, having Constance read her latest creation in public is the key to keeping Springfield Elementary's doors open? I wish I knew that when my local district was deciding to shut down my daughter's school...

It's a slightly weird and random pivot, but whatever. As mentioned before, it's really all about this week's celebrity guest voice. Thompson is a real hoot as Constance, an eccentric personality who's both charmingly British and enough of a drunken mess to give Homer (Dan Castellaneta) a run for his money. We also get a brief cameo from Colin Jost, but this is really Thompson's show to steal at the end of the day. She brings her A-game, making the most of her character's many wild mood swings and even belting out a tune with Castellaneta for good measure.

Plot-wise, "The Children's Book Job" is nothing special. This episode is yet another opportunity for Homer to prove he can be reliable and dependable and isn't fully checked out of the fatherhood game. I do appreciate that it doesn't take the cynical route, but instead focuses on Homer earnestly trying to manage Constance's nonstop brand of mischief. The ending is also sweet, as Homer manages to pierce through Constance's jaded heart and convince her not to sabotage her life's work. But still, this is nothing we haven't seen 1000 times before on the Homer/Marge front.

There are a few other noteworthy moments worth calling out in the premiere. It makes solid use of the wider Springfield supporting cast, whether it's Moe (Hank Azaria) calling for a Squid Game-style bloodbath or Snake (Azaria) briefly allying himself with Homer's cause. It would be pretty funny if the series actually followed up on that plot thread and the destruction of Homer's beloved car, but somehow, I doubt that'll happen. I also got a kick out of Marge's passive-agressive responses to Lisa's (Yeardley Smith) various helpful suggestions.

But if there's anything in this episode that stands out as much as Thompson's character, it's the brief chase sequence where Homer hallucinates a journey through various children's books. It's a well-animated bit with fun nods to everything from classics like Madeleine and Richard Scarry to modern fare like Captain Underpants. That's one way to spice up an otherwise textbook Homer storyline.

This is a spoiler-free review of the first episode of Get Jiro, which premieres on Adult Swim on October 3 and HBO Max on October 4.

It's been close to a decade since Anthony Bourdain's passing, and the sting hasn't faded. Bourdain was such an interesting personality who brought a unique perspective to the worlds of food and travel. It only stands to reason that perspective would also translate to fiction writing. The graphic novel Get Jiro has now been adapted into an animated series on Adult Swim, and the series is well worth a watch for anyone who considers themselves a Bourdain fan.

Based on the graphic novels co-written by Bourdain and Joel Rose and illustrated by Langdon Foss and Alé Garza, Get Jiro is set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles where society has all but collapsed and chefs are now the true power players. The idea being that, as humanity turns inward and becomes ever more obsessed with virtual reality and online entertainment, food is now the only pleasure that can't be digitized. Amid this new world order, a humble sushi chef named Jiro (Brian Tee) embarks on a quest for vengeance.

Basically, Get Jiro takes the tropes of a straightforward revenge thriller and embellishes the whole package by submerging it in the culinary arena. What might have been an overly formulaic story were it to star mobsters and assassins becomes something far more weird and compelling when knife-wielding chefs instead take center stage. This world is strange, surreal, and more than a little cut from the Blade Runner cloth, and it works. It's a satire that doesn't feel too out of line with our actual reality.

The titular character anchors the first episode well. Tee's Jiro is extremely soft-spoken and taciturn, but we learn everything we need to through his actions and his behavior around his fellow chefs and food suppliers. He's a character whose talent for creating mouth-watering delicacies is matched only by his skill with a blade. Again, he's a character who might come across as a little too generic in a more traditional crime thriller/martial arts setting, but the food angle helps keep things fresh and exciting.

In fact, Get Jiro's first episode is often at its best when it simply lingers on the act of making food. There's a Miyazaki-esque emphasis on the rote tasks and silent motions that go into cooking. The show's animation style is solid in general (if a bit stiff in motion), but those quieter scenes are where it shines the most, and where Bourdain's own influence is most evident.

The pilot is also adept at introducing the show's other key players, including rival mafioso chefs voiced by Titus Welliver and Alison Pill. These antagonist characters are perhaps a bit too broadly rendered for their own good, but once again, the food angle does help to offset that a bit. And with the graphic novel being given a full 10-episode adaptation, there's ample room to flesh out these characetrs as Jiro's bloody quest unfolds.

One of the reasons Minecraft is my favorite game of all time is how alluring its world of endless possibilities is, so it’s a little strange that the Minecraft Dungeons series seems to represent the exact opposite. Minecraft Dungeons 2 is a brief, forgettable ARPG that’s as thin as they come, from its barebones story to its shallow gameplay, and you can see almost all it has to offer in the span of an afternoon. Simple, easygoing action is kinda the whole point here, but while there’s nothing actively offensive about this humdrum adventure, there’s also very little worth getting excited about either. The good news is that the minor improvements this sequel makes over the original are quite welcome, including more customizable characters and the added ability to jump, plus the new realm of the Sift adds some fresh color and creatures to the Minecraft universe – so if you’re looking to spend a mindless night or two swinging swords with your friends, you could do a lot worse than this.

If you didn’t play the first one, Minecraft Dungeons 2 takes the pixelated items and goofy mobs from Minecraft and throws them into an extremely light (and noticeably less gory) version of Diablo. You’ll delve into dungeons, smack around swarms of monsters, and tackle big ol’ slobbery bosses while hoovering up as much loot as you can along the way. But where most ARPGs lean hard into dizzying skill trees and loot with so many different stats you need a degree in mathematics to comprehend them, Minecraft Dungeons strips away most of that in favor of a much simpler framework. That makes it both more approachable and, almost equally, less interesting. While this sequel expands on the ideas from the first in modest ways, like by increasing the armor slots you’ve got from one to four, it mostly maintains that stripped down buildcrafting philosophy.

The roughly seven-hour story has your unnamed hero squaring off against an evil cabal of Illagers who gain access to a new dimension, called the Sift, and… actually, look at that, I’ve just about covered it all. The cutscenes and conversations to be found here are basically just a vague outline of a story that sends you to and fro to kill things and save the world, and that’s about as deep as it ever gets. It’s not like I was expecting some kind of emotional drama from my “Minecraft meets Diablo” game, but like most things in this adventure, there’s still very little to it.

The action is thankfully more developed than the story, adding some key features to the mix that make battling through the blocky world more enjoyable. I had completely forgotten, for example, that the original didn’t have a jump button, and having one here adds some needed platforming and light puzzles to solve – plus it gives you access to a new jump attack so you can drop a ‘bow on these filthy adds. You also have more options for enchanting your weapons and armor with special effects (which you unlock by conquering dungeons and completing quests throughout the world) as well as new artifacts that offer passive buffs, like increased damage with ranged weapons. All of these things are a decent step up from the original, but the vast majority of the moment-to-moment gameplay remains largely unchanged, and smacking samey zombies and Illagers tends to run thin quite quickly.

The fact that buildcrafting is mostly left up to whichever odd equipment you happen to stumble upon, rather than a class-based system, also means you and your co-op teammates all play exactly the same way, and you rarely have control over how your build feels (at least until you near the endgame), since you’re largely at the mercy of the RNG gods. For example, I wanted to play a rogue-type class, but kept finding big ass swords and tank-like items, so I ended up serving as our crew’s defacto melee fighter despite my best efforts. Not that there’s much of a difference anyway, since every player has access to the exact same dodge skill, base speed, weapon options, etc. and you won’t find a shield to add blocking to your arsenal or anything like that.

The handful of equipment slots you’re given offer a few perks each, like increased DPS or added benefits from using healing items, or the ability to shoot fireworks that explode and deal damage to everything in the vicinity (which are good for ringing in the new year, too). You’ll also find a small arsenal of melee and ranged weapons with which to thwack creepers and skeletons, each with just a single attack pattern for you to spam. As you progress, you’ll be able to add some neat enchantments to give weapons and armor a new perk, like one that makes you move faster after you score a kill, or another that lets your ranged attacks penetrate through a target, but none of them do much to shake up the hollow hacking and slashing.

The best part of Minecraft Dungeons 2 is the new area called the Sift, a magical, soul-powered realm filled with goat things, poisonous water, and more teal landscapes than was previously thought possible with the science of our day. This isn’t a game with a whole lot of personality, and it often feels like it merely wears a thin Minecraft skin – but this new dimension is one of the few ways in which it branches out to do its own thing, and it mostly succeeds at being an interesting place to explore. It’s got some new creatures and a super distinct vibe, with souls floating everywhere and dancing automatons roaming about. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best showcase of the new realm, since you’re mostly just plowing through areas killing things, so it really just made me wish I could wander around it in regular Minecraft. But in a game with not a whole lot of exciting stuff going on, getting to explore this new slice of the Minecraft universe was definitely a highlight.

Once you’ve completed the story, you’ll unlock the equally thin endgame, which adds a new activity called Soul Storms. These events summon more deadly enemies for a chance at better loot, but there aren’t really any other activities to pursue where you’ll really need this better gear – at least not yet. Mojang has said it has plans to roll out additional endgame content after launch, which could make this activity worth grinding some day, but for now it feels mostly like more of the same monotonous chopping and dodging I’d already had enough of by the end of the story. The new equipment, which adds an additional perk to all the weapons and armor you find within this elite tier, is a decent prize at least, so even though I immediately felt like there wasn’t much for me to do with my new kit, there’s something about obtaining cool stuff that’s a worthy end in itself.

Beyond the Soul Storms, you’ll mostly roam around, complete any side quests you hadn’t gotten to yet, replay boss fights from the story, and conquer the numerous optional dungeons that can unlock some new enchantment options for your gear. That’s all fine, but it’s all the same button mashing that will have worn out its welcome by that point. My friends and I tried to find reasons to stick around, curious if the story was just a primer for a more deep, compelling endgame (as is often the case with ARPGs), but it seems like that just hasn’t been built yet.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Lanterns Season 1, Episode 7!

The worst part about Lanterns finally diving into the 2026 storyline first teased back in the pilot is that it forces us into a post-Hal Jordan reality. So much of the appeal of the series rests on the sour dynamic between Kyle Chandler's Hal and Aaron Pierre's John Stewart, and there's just something missing without the former in play. Thankfully, there's a workaround in the form of the Halogram backup. Episode 7 exploits that loophole for all its worth, resulting in a new installment that digs far deeper into Hal's troubled psyche and dark family legacy.

Fittingly, this week kicks off with a flashback to Hal's childhood, where we finally meet Martin Jordan (Jake B. Miller) in the flesh. That opening sequence offers some valuable insight into Hal's character. We can see how Martin casually fostered the same sort of fearlessness in his son that the Stewarts mercilessly drilled into John. And we also get a taste of the deep-seated, suicidal depression that is clearly a generational legacy in Hal's family. Miller really shines in his brief time in the spotlight, expertly conveying Martin's bravado and pain in equal measure. And I have to assume the Sinestro-esque mustache is intentional, a subtle reminder of how much the orphaned Hal would come to look to his GL mentor as a father figure.

From there, things shift back to 2026, as the Halogram reacts to being dug up and reactivated after another 10-year hiatus. Again, the series makes the most of its ability to work around Hal's murder. We get that all-important Hal/John banter back, but with the twist that comes from having a slightly younger and less mean-spirited version of Hal in the mix. It's endlessly entertaining to watch the two interact and for the Halogram to convey some of the things his flesh-and-blood self could never admit.

We're also treated to a terrific scene involving Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) reuniting with "Hal," one that features arguably Macdonald's strongest performance in the series to date. I'm not prepared to discount the theory that she was Hal's killer just yet (particularly if it somehow involved her protecting her son), but her grief is clearly genuine regardless.

"The Jordan Boys Legacy" does share one flaw with Episode 6. The drama involving the other Rushville locals just isn't that compelling. Granted, this episode doesn't suffer nearly as much in that regard because it's so much more focused on Hal and John's investigation, but there are still a few scenes focused on these less compelling subplots. I really can't bring myself to care about the blackmail conflict between John and Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler). So he's out $315,000 and a fancy Richard Mille watch. Why does any of that matter in the grander scheme of John's Green Lantern origin story?

It's also tough to know what to make of the Noah (Shea Pritchard) of it all. On the surface, his little Hat Day runaround isn't that compelling, either. But there's obviously something deeper at work with the character. I fully suspect we'll learn in the finale that he's some sort of human/Manhunter hybrid and is at the heart of Hal's murder (assuming Hal is even dead, which we really can't). I'm just glad the series is running out of room to prolong that particular mystery.

Finally, Episode 7 ends with John stepping foot onto an alien world for the first time. We quickly discover that Hal bequeathed a portal to Antaan's (Paul Ben-Victor) home planet, offering a glimpse of the devastation Manhunters can wreak. It's a nice change of pace seeing a setting other than Earth, even if the flat, featureless desert doesn't make for the most memorable view. It's more Stephanie Economou's eerie, discordant score that makes this setting feel hostile and otherwordly.

After a tense fear gas sequence and some more heart-to-heart moments between Hal and John, we're treated to a proper payoff to the entire sequence with the long-overdue return of Ulrich Thomsen's Sinestro. Naturally, him being marooned on a dead world instead of locked away on Oa raises more questions than it answers, but it's enough simply to see the character again. I just hope Episode 8 has enough room to address these many lingering questions and still wrap up John's season-long arc in a satisfying way. There's still a lot of ground left to cover.

This review is based on a screening timed to the New York Film Festival. Godzilla Minus Zero opens in theaters in Japan on November 3 and in North America on November 6.

Godzilla movies have long had a problem: What do you do after the initial thrill of a quote/unquote serious Godzilla origin story? Can the filmmakers somehow continue the deep thematic underpinnings of that first adventure, even while upping the visual ante with more giant monster action? How do you offer a probing commentary about the world we live in – which is what the best of the genre is known for – when you’ve got skyscraper-sized lizards slugging it out MMA-style?

It is under these circumstances – or should I say restrictions? – that Godzilla Minus Zero enters the ring. As the sequel to the much-praised Godzilla Minus One from three years ago – a picture that dealt with, among other things, notions of survivor’s guilt, hope in the face of hopelessness, found family, and more – Minus Zero is on the ropes from the start. Can returning writer-director Takashi Yamazaki wring even more out of his characters, who have already been to hell and back, while also blowin’ up stuff real good? In a word, no.

The film takes place two years after the events of Minus One, with Ryunosuke Kamiki back as Kōichi Shikishima and Minami Hamabe returning as Noriko. Kōichi, as fans of the Oscar-winning previous movie (for Best Visual Effects) will remember, is the former would-be kamikaze pilot from World War II who was instrumental in defeating Godzilla the first time around. Now married to Noriko, the woman he took in after the American air raids on Tokyo, the pair have also adopted Akiko, the orphaned baby they had cared for after that same disaster. Living happily together as a family, there’s only one thing that can ruin this idyllic picture… well, two things, since not only is Godzilla of course back, but there’s a new monster on the scene as well.

Minus Zero opens with a sequence of devastation, as this new critter lays waste to countless helpless civilians as they flee in the streets, avoiding both falling rubble from the buildings crumbling around them and lightning breath from the creature’s mouth. Yes, as fans have already figured out and as the marketing for the film has teased, this is Ghidorah, also known as King Ghidorah in the larger Toho mythology, and generally the archnemesis of the big guy for whom we have all gathered once again. (Ghidorah has also been referred to as “Monster Zero,” which helps to explain this film’s title.)

These scenes of destruction and terror are breathtaking, with Yamazaki and his team of visual effects maestros once again managing to keep their creatures from feeling like CGI monstrosities. No, rather, Ghidorah, and Godzilla when he eventually shows up too, just appear to be real monstrosities – humongous, slow-moving, reptile-like, and all-the more terrifying for it. Ghidorah also distinguishes himself from his counterpart with his scary yet herky-jerky, almost cat-like mannerisms.

So as soon as that first-round bell rings, the movie has already proven its VFX bona fides – to no one’s surprise. But it has also confirmed that a Godzilla Part 2 inevitably means more monsters. And look, none of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with a movie where Godzilla has to rip his own arm off because his foe’s teeth are sunk so tightly into it. We all love monster-on-monster action, but there’s no denying that the more of a mash a monster movie becomes – be it of the Toho, Universal, Alien/Xenomorph, or whatever else variety – the more it loses its edge as the human characters and their emotional baggage run the risk of looking puny in the face of these god-like creatures.

Remember what Bogart said in Casablanca? “It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Yes, I’m quoting Humphrey Bogart in a Godzilla review, but if there’s an issue with Minus Zero, it’s that the travails of Kōichi, Noriko, and little Akiko just pale when considering the scope of destruction that Godzilla and company are capable of. Whereas the first film framed that destruction through the lens of the trio’s trauma, not just in regards to the giant monster but also specifically around what they went through in the war, that resonance is missing here.

In fact, the most interesting character in Minus Zero is perhaps the most under-served. Kanji Murakami, played by Min Tanaka, is a scientist whose work is key to battling the monsters this time around. He’s also kind of warped, with Tanaka getting one scene in particular that is a bit too spoilery to describe here, but is also a highlight of the film. As with Kōichi and Noriko, and indeed every character in the film, the war irrevocably changed his life, and the scientist is still struggling to cope with that reality while he works to prevent a pair of living A-bombs from doing even more damage to humankind.

Speaking of which, a much ballyhooed sequence first glimpsed in the trailer last spring involving Godzilla and the Statue of Liberty is certainly something to behold here. Toho has asked critics to not reveal the specifics of this particular scene in reviews, but suffice to say that it is both everything you’ve imagined and theorized about, and at the same time none of that at all. It does connect back to Tanaka’s character in one of his darkest moments, and as a result is one of the film’s most memorable incidents of Godzilla-on-human action.

But that brings me back once again to the feeling that kept bubbling up for me while watching Godzilla Minus Zero. Even as Godzilla sets upon what looks like Spider-Noir’s version of New York City, the whole emotional underpinning of the scene is tied to Tanaka’s Murakami. Unfortunately, the character’s true motivations and how they’re ultimately resolved in the film play as more of an after-thought than Minus Zero’s thematic or emotional core, and for that film suffers.

If there is a central theme at work here, it’s the idea that no matter how hard we as a species try, we can’t outrun our own mistakes – and we’re gonna keep making them over and over again, despite the efforts of the best among us. Minus One ended with a hint of what was next for Noriko; while she miraculously survived a Godzilla attack, she also now bore a mysterious scar on her neck from the experience. It’s no surprise to learn in Minus Zero that it was no mere scar, and that in fact Noriko is now also a very important player in the fight against the monsters. But she, like Kōichi, is also a pawn in a greater game that’s happening on the world stage involving the monsters. The regular folks on the ground are the ones bearing the trauma of the battles that have been fought, but the powers that be don’t seem to care…

By the final act, you know where this is all going, and that’s fine. Monsters must brawl, and as with Minus One, the period setting of this film really adds to the luster of the visual effects and action scenes. Seeing Kōichi back in the pilot seat, this time of 1949-era fighter planes, is thrilling, and the various schemes concocted by the returning Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), now the head of the “Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau,” are often ingenious and satisfyingly crunchy in their attempts to slow down and ultimately stop Godzilla and his enemy.