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 demonstrates that Fullbright are still in a class by themselves when it comes to creating environments that feel believably lived-in, and […]

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 making us feel the weight of those stakes, because we know that if we fail, we just get a Game Over […]

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 a little time to process their thoughts. Be aware that we talk about the ending in some detail, so… Anita: There’s […]

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 downtime. Even just an hour offline and away from the news can provide a much-needed respite. Ironically enough, though, for many […]

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 a pickle (as the result of, say, selling their voice to get out of that darn sea, see the world, and […]

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 tells Joey, the young son of some local ranchers, “Joey, there’s no living with, with a killing. There’s no going back […]

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 time, so I went. If I had had more than 10 seconds to think about it and plan, I would have […]

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 hero (more on this later), sits across from her patient and asks him which of the personae inhabiting his body currently “has […]

Shortly before Rogue One was released, a clip of the late, great Carl Sagan discussing the original Star Wars made the rounds on social media. In it, Sagan noted the fact that the people who populated the fictional sci-fi setting of the film were almost entirely white. It is wonderful that, 39 years after the release […]

For all of its immensely enjoyable stealth and combat mechanics and its terrific assortment of powers and abilities, the original Dishonored failed its female characters in a big way. With Dishonored 2, it’s clear that the developers heard these criticisms, crafting a game in which women populate all walks of life, while also improving on the […]