For better or worse, Shane Black has revivified the Predator franchise with this slick but shallow thriller. Shying from typical reboot territory, The Predator is a straight sequel, explaining the murderous aliens' presence on Earth in largely forgettable form. Antihero Quinn McKenna is our protagonist, a military sniper who witnesses the gory crash landing of a Predator in the … Continue reading The Predator
Representationally radical, Crazy Rich Asians arrives with massive box office success stateside. This romantic comedy tells a straightforward story of love gambled and won, but does so with an impressive all-Asian cast that can't quite elevate a lacklustre script. The terrific, charming Constance Wu is Rachel, an NYU professor going out with the ambiguously minted Nick (Henry … Continue reading Crazy Rich Asians
Guest post by Tom Franklin In 2004, Spider-Man 2 was released for the Xbox, PS2 and Gamecube. Based on the Sam Raimi film of the same year, it has for over a decade been held up as the shining example of games based around everyone’s favourite wallcrawler. Finally, it has been surpassed by Insomniac Games’ … Continue reading Spider-Man
Scrabbling desperately through narrow tunnels gives way incrementally to empowered exploration and secret-sweeping in Team Cherry’s excellent Hollow Knight, re-released to fanfare on Switch. This is a medtroidvania dungeon-crawler that stands alongside greats of the genre. In a subterranean world of insects, players play a diminutive knight armed only with a rusted nail, who awakens … Continue reading Hollow Knight
If it’s tempting to praise the timeliness of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, it’s also worth remembering that America’s issues with institutional and accepted racism never really went away. This sometimes incendiary, but generally tame film could have been released any time in the last thirty years and still summoned the righteous rage with which it closes, … Continue reading BlacKkKlansman
