The magic of Monkey Man, doesn’t come from its incredible fight scenes, or it’s brilliant choreography or it’s smart and intelligent cinematography. Instead, it comes from an obvious struggle. You can see, throughout this movie, that Dev Patel’s blood is everywhere. There’s no part of this film that doesn’t scream like something trying to rip its way up through an artist's chest, and out of their mouth.

At the end of the day, Indiana Jones is Harrison Ford. You know what I mean? It's one of those characters that dies with the actor. It's not like James Bond. I don't think we'll get another Indiana Jones. We'll get similar movies. Nathan Drake is Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider is Indiana Jones, but with different lead characters. They're not walking around with fedoras and whips. Indiana Jones is a very specific, very alive personality that is tied to this miserly, curmudgeonly Harrison Ford. There are points where you can really tell the man's almost 80. But who cares? Let old guys do action movies. It rules.

It’s understandable to look at that laundry list of MCU goings-on and raise your shoulders, cock your head, and ask…what the hell is going on? The answer to that specific question is, well, nonspecific: a lot. A lot is going on. How do you take this roiling molecular spaghetti of a universe and push it forward in almost every direction at once? I will answer that question…with a question of my own. Did you know ants can carry 10-50 times their body weight?

Sitting down to watch a Christmas movie called Violent Night, produced by the same folks that made John Wick, Nobody, and Atomic Blonde, you can only really expect one thing: Hand to hand combat, guns, and excellent fight choreography. Violent Night is exactly what I wanted, delivered with a few extra goodies that I had no expectation to get. The fight scenes are creative and brutal and the family storyline is actually passable and at times touching. Santa brought his slay!

The Clade family is a family built on legacy. Jaeger Clade, the explorer, Searcher Clade, the farmer. But what will Ethan Clade become? When his father is recruited to root out the plague impacting the nation of Avalonia’s pando crops, his attempt to keep his son from becoming like his absent grandfather will be put to the test. Strange world is a Disney gem that confronts us with questions about who we want our kids to become as parents and who they really are. 

It’s not every year that you come across a game that has the innate ability to command your thoughts for weeks, even after completion. Perhaps it is the high bar that I am using as a filter. What I seek to elucidate here is perhaps obvious, still, there are only a few games that elicit a deep emotional response from me. I can list those games on one hand. I have been playing games for twenty-three years. I have been writing about games for twelve years. It is even rarer when a game vaults itself all the way to the top of said list. This is it. This is my favorite game of all time.

Amsterdam isn’t perfect but it has a lot of heart where it counts. The cast is astronomically loaded, the performances are all genuine and convincing, and its message will land a lot closer to home than it should. Largely because Americans are confronted with issues no one from this era (the 30s) would have expected us to still be dealing with. It’s fascinating, confounding, and moving. Things I imagine anyone forging a mystery would hope people took away from their work.

I still find it immeasurably silly that adults write reviews for children’s movies. Why aren’t more people taking their kids, asking them what they thought, and publishing that? They are the target demographic, after all. Do I understand that there are instances where parents want to see if something is “ok” before they let their kids watch it? Sure. Does that take away any ridiculousness from the fact that I am sitting here to write a review about an unlucky orphan who receives and subsequently loses a lucky coin given to her by a black cat with a Scottish accent? Ah dinnae ken.

Bullet Train is what happens when you blend Ocean’s Eleven and Murder on the Orient Express. If you were to then look to me for another sentence or two more I would follow that by simply saying, If you let the guy who directed John Wick and Deadpool 2 direct it. Boom. Sold. That is this movie. Its wild, irreverent, harebrained, and a great time.

Knowing how something is going to end is generally a source of comfort going into a movie based on events that took place in the real world. If Ron Howard has made anything clear in his approach to these types of films, nothing could be further from the truth. The veteran of Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Everest, and Rush knows full-well how to make a movie gripping, regardless of the audience’s understanding of how events would play out.

It’s nearly equal parts a coming of age tale, a romance, a murder mystery, and a courtroom drama, and while I enjoy all of those things, balancing them all at once is a precarious task. Knowing that this movie is based on a novel contextualizes some of the rapid transitioning. Where the Crawdads Sing is an admirable attempt at an adaptation. Even if it occasionally catches you off guard by accelerating the plot.

WandaVision introduced us to altered reality, Loki introduced us to the Time Variance Authority and alternate timelines, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness introduced us to alternate universes. For a saga of films that has existed for nearly 15 years, in the last year and a half alone our perception of what the MCU could entail has been expanded tenfold. With this comes risk. How could you scale something so quickly without risk? But more than just risk, as a viewer, you are being asked to keep track of more. It should come as no small comfort then, to know that Thor: Love and Thunder is one of the most digestible, fun, and easy to approach since Black Panther.

As an adult, more importantly as a parent, what I find silly is that while writing this review I found myself debating the principles of film. I find it pretty significantly comical that I almost wrote about this movies adherence to the three act structure, or the fact that I wanted to measure its necessity in the larger universe of Minions films. The reality is that this movie was made for children, and as someone who got to watch it in a room full of children, they loved it.

For a movie that ostensibly didn’t need to exist, Lightyear does a tremendous job campaigning for that existence, thrilling viewers with a space spectacle that feels right at home in its universe, and furthermore, lives up brilliantly to its initial pitch. If I had seen this as a five year old, I would have absolutely begged my mom for a Buzz toy. After this movie who wouldn’t?

Following the cataclysmic events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom the Jurassic World park has failed yet again, only this time the dinosaurs got out, migrating across the world. Those events have the possibility to set up a world in which dinosaurs have truly taken over the ecosystem. I will admit, the potential of a Jurassic movie that edges on the post apocalyptic, with dinosaurs taking over cities and people fleeing new and dangerous predators is a delicious idea.

FAR: Changing Tides, the follow-up/sister title from the small team at Okomotive, is another one of those titles that I found deep resonance with. It seems, somehow, that the Zurich-based indie studio managed to bottle lightning twice. Games are art. Art is inherently political. The FAR games stare right into environmental disaster, and then through that lens tell tales of survival, endurance, and the relationships we have with our machines.

PlayStation exclusives refined themselves this generation. They are heightened storytelling experiences with a tremendous amount of good writing, jaw dropping visuals, and reimagined mechanics. Have they been a consistent wellspring of innovation? No. But then neither has prestige television. It’s a familiar system, twisted and turned, made to look fresh. And it’s perfect, and learning.

From the trailer you’ll immediately notice the game’s charm: lovable art style, characters, great music and that mid-90s design aesthetic with beautiful hard edged pixel graphics. There are an impressive 30 tracks composed by Frédéric "ElMobo" Motte while also featuring guest tracks from bands like Carpenter Brut, Gojira, and a whole lot more.

Reverse engineered with an actual Genesis dev kit #Ultracore is truly like jumping into a time machine. There are some really advanced ideas in this game. It really seems like too much for a Genesis to handle. However, games at the end of a consoles life-cycle always seem to do the impossible.

XCOM Chimera Squad is my definition of a pleasant surprise. Just soldiering through quarantine on a lazy April Tuesday afternoon, across my news feed comes the improbable: a new XCOM game getting shadow dropped. Chimera squad is a $20 exploration into the ways that XCOM can, and I believe will, evolve.