Perhaps more than anything else, Tacoma is proof that a decent story, brilliantly told (which Tacoma is) is far better than a brilliant story, decently told. The follow-up to their debut masterpiece, Gone Home, Tacoma […]
Category Archives: Reviews
Pyre Review: The Fires of Freedom
Games almost always want us to feel like a great deal is at stake. Our hero’s life, or the outcome of a war, or maybe the fate of the universe. But few games succeed at […]
Wonder Woman: The Hero We Need in a Film That Falls Short
After seeing Wonder Woman last Friday and having a chat on Facebook Live to share our immediate impressions, Anita and I exchanged emails this weekend to discuss the film in more detail once we’d had […]
Jungletown and Reality TV: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being and ‘Surviving’
The onslaught of headlines indicating some dark times – regarding immigration, education, and healthcare, to name just a few areas of concern and crisis – have left a lot of us looking for escapist entertainment in our […]
Blue Belle: Femininity, Fashion and a ‘Tale as Old as Time’
Let’s state the obvious right up front: Beauty and the Beast is a Disney film. What this means is that it follows a long history of formulaic narratives involving young women in a bit of […]
Logan: A Film Fighting With Itself
It’s telling that Logan, Hugh Jackman’s final outing as Wolverine after playing the character for 17 years, heavily references a moment in Shane, the legendary 1953 Western. Specifically, it references the moment when gunfighter Shane […]
Well, Too Bad We Can’t Stay
I saw Get Out among a predominantly white audience this weekend. The decision was spontaneous and swift — there was a showing near me (in the white-ass suburb in which I live) at the perfect […]
The Final Girl
There’s a line of dialogue about halfway through Split, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest blockbuster, that masterfully illustrates precisely how this film careens smugly off the rails. Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), sympathetic psychiatrist to the movie’s […]
ReCore Review
Man, I wanted to like ReCore. In its first few hours, both the game and its protagonist, Joule, exude such a scrappy, can-do attitude that I found myself really rooting for it. At a time […]
Halt and Catch Fire – Season 3 Review
Struggling to get a mainframe computer working in the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire’s third season, Gordon (Scoot McNairy) refers to the uncooperative machine as “her.” Donna (Kerry Bishé), one of the heads […]
Ghostbusters (2016) Review
In the 1989 film Ghostbusters II, Peter, Ray, Winston and Egon discover that “mood slime” is being powered by all the hatred and aggression in New York to bring the city to the brink of […]
Adventure Bros: Nathan Drake and the Awkward Adolescence of the Action Adventure Genre
NOTE: This post contains major spoilers for Uncharted 4. That’s Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV, discussing why that game’s core party is made up entirely of men. I thought of Tabata’s words when […]