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 […]

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 […]

It’s been ten years since Marcus, Dom, and the other members of Delta Squad first shot and chainsawed their way across the planet Sera in a desperate attempt to defeat the Locust, and in some ways, both those characters and the gameplay we so strongly associate with them now feel like relics from another era. Gears […]

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 when so many games are burdened with a grim, superficial self-importance that their actual narratives can’t support, dashing and double-jumping across […]

Adam Jensen, the cybernetically augmented security expert and trench coat enthusiast from 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, is back. Set two years after the events of Human Revolution, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes place in a world where augmented people find themselves increasingly marginalized and dehumanized, and the game couldn’t be more explicit about drawing connections […]

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 of the pioneering tech company Mutiny, questions her husband’s choice of words. “Her?!” “Yeah, her. Temperamental, high maintenance, only responds to […]

The first thing you notice about the new PlayStation 4 game Bound is just how mesmerizing and intriguing the animation is. Most of the game takes place in a constantly shifting psychological landscape which you navigate as a young dancer. It’s clear that the developers captured and studied the motions of a real dancer, and at […]

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 yet another ghostly apocalypse. If mood slime were a real thing, the male-entitlement-fueled rage directed at the new Ghostbusters reboot surely […]