Rebuild #2 is a more radical transformation of the original, but that's all I like about it. It had me thinking of the way Lana Wachowski attacked her own aesthetics in The Matrix Resurrections. (Perhaps she hated what they had become?) I look forward to finding out if the parallel holds.

Little Amelie or the Character of Rain, an animated film that I enjoyed seeing but not watching. Handsome it may be, but it relies on staid tropes, and I'm not sure the cover of a children's story is enough. Do kids want to watch this? I won't bring up its orientalist bent, this isn't an academy.

The first of the Evangelion Rebuild movies covers the opening episodes of Eva and diminishes them in every way. It looks worse, has impatient editing and constantly over-exposits. Contrasting the two, I felt how delicate art must truly be, that such slight alterations have such harsh impact.

I watched End of Evangelion for the first time! following a revisit of the original series which left me more in awe of the show than ever. I am perhaps equally sad that there seems to be no will to ever reach such heights again in the medium. One day.

I watched The Look of Silence, the companion piece to Joshua Oppenheimer's astounding The Act of Killing. Silence is a more conventional but still moving work about Adi, a middle aged optometrist, confronting those who killed his brother in the Indonesian Genocide.

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Briefly returned to Assassin's Creed 2, a game defined by such wonderful craft that it spawned a dynasty. But whose main achievement in stealth is that it's a generic action-adventure under the cloak of the stealth label. Also, the Italian accents are a uniquely painful unforced error.

Death Stranding 2's form swings between quite amateur self indulgence and outstanding kino. The bones of the plot make up a bog standard sad dad gig. You've seen those many times before. Honestly, there's a lot of bad held up by a lot of excellence. Feels a bit like Death Stranding by way of MGSIV.

Chainsaw Man is over! A supremely dark and gory comedy that takes the piss in ways subtle and loud out of the entire battle manga genre, Chainsaw Man plays with conventions and expectations in a way that has made fans feel as if author Tatsuki Fujimoto was personally trolling them. Respect.

Even today film reviewers disparagingly compare certain movies to games. DS2, which uses George Miller's likeness for a character, shoots its action scenes with a stylist's touch and textbook clarity. In contrast, it appears shameful how billion dollar film franchises could ever settle for less.

When I discovered videogames, they ignited something in my imagination. In that same instant, they made me a promise: that they would be a new channel for the human spirit which like air, like light, seeks to fill the universe with its song. Mundaun keeps that promise.

The first hours of Death Stranding 2 are certainly on brand. The game will drag you through some utterly graceless exposition and later do what today we like to call "absolute cinema."

Very good, @coledone.com, enviable in fact.

I played Esoteric Ebb and I enjoyed it very much.

I have not observed one critic to be consistent in their affections, and despite a deep familiarity to the medium, none can overcome the subjectivity of reality, only elucidate it in some slight manner. Like all of us, Ebert saw symbols to which only his soul could answer -- mainly to our benefit.

Some demos I played this weekend! Queen's Domain. One of several Field-likes to emerge in recent years, and certainly the most handsome of them. I didn't get to do much in the demo but it was persuasive enough. Now, I wait.

Watched Let the Sunshine In by Claire Denis, an understated comedy featuring Juliette Binoche in the typically masculine role of the oversexed yet noncommittal protagonist. Naturally, there is a small part for Alex Descas. Bless.

I cherish Disco Elysium so much that I doubt I will soon reach objectivity about Zero Parades. But I played the demo and it was okay, if inconsistent. It would have been great with the guts to be its true self, and not a follow up to something that will always be better.

I finished Righteous Victims by Benny Morris. Undoubtedly a well written and informative work. There were a couple blind spots, but that's why I read the Charles D. Smith book. It's a painful history, but there is nothing to resent like a missed opportunity.

I enjoyed 28 Years Later, and I can now say I enjoyed Bone Temple, but I am thoroughly over-gored. I can't watch it anymore. Its realism has put it beyond cartoonishness for me.

Claire Denis's Bastards, her rather effective take on neo-noir, has joined my roster of discomfort movies.

I didn't intend to watch any Robert Duvall vehicles after his passing, but I nevertheless found him driving a cab in Bullitt. The movie, by the way, not bad. Surprised how visually striking it is given its straightforward approach.

Finished Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Charles D. Smith. Next is Righteous Victims by Benny Morris.

TR-49 is brilliant, not least of which because @inkle.co wisely assigns JA a more honorable place in the credits than even GA's. At one point, I fat fingered the wrong code and landed on a passage that -- pure serendipity -- provided the title to an orphan entry.

If Judero has a million fans, I am one of them. If Judero has one fan, I am that fan. If Judero has, etc., etc. Now the creators of Judero are running a Kickstarter for their new project, one that I am eagerly anticipating. Until its release, I have no choice but to ABIDE.

Sorry We're Closed: not a masterpiece, but a good game that holds up some real wisdom, not to mention style and panache. One of many decent showings that the attention economy can't, but should, reward.

Lunacid honors its inspiration so much that the homage overtakes the game. King's Field doesn't have that much in common, after all, with the series that inspired From Software, but I believe its creation does far more credit to Wizardry precisely because of its originality.

It's a joyful experience showcasing much design excellence, but: Like so many classics, the new Hitmans will always require the caveat that its storytelling is clumsy and ineffective, and it always makes us look like ignorant provincials when we disregard this weakness to announce masterpieces.

I've played through a growing cadre of games, most recently Metal Garden, (but also Falcon Age, Season) that, whatever their merits, are too large in spirit and too limited in scope. They need more stuff, more duration, to excel in the telling of what they aim to tell.

There's a certain kind of film product whose essence, along with its particulars, is spelled out in such large letters that, to me, it barely feels like watching a new movie. And that's Predator: Badlands.

At this moment I can only read One Battle After Another as PTA's attempt to shame America's left with a fantasy reality in which they actually do something to protect their polity.

Claire Denis returns to French Africa in White Material, a fevered drama about a coffee plantation owner desperate to get in one last harvest before the civil war overtakes her land. The formidable Isabelle Huppert goes well beyond ostrichism as the radios hail the end of "white material."

I have joined this throng of the talented with a thought on Team Bloober's Cronos: The New Dawn.

This is what I wrote this year: Diablo IV is a victim of its environment, and so are we. unwinnable.com/2025/02/25/t...

My top 10 games of 2025: 10: Hell Is Us. This AA joint lacks the superbly refined combat of, say, God of War, but it's one of the more interesting games this year. It's a modern Final Fantasy set during a civil war whose violence recalls the Yugoslav Wars. Like FF, held back by weak writing.

Flock is a delightful ride through the beastie-to-bestie pipeline atop a bird who knows how to sing. It's a Pokemon sans combat. The hooting, crooning, hopping and soaring of its animal cast manages to carry it despite its unexpectedly small scope.

Claire Denis channels Ozu in 35 Rhums' tale of a father-daughter relationship disrupted by the passage of time. I don't know when it was I finally realized this was essentially doing Late Autumn Afternoon, but the bright red rice cooker is such a wonderful first touch.

A rainbow opens our visit to the cosmically green, misty hilled Ireland of Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin. At first, Banshees seems an allegory. No. It is a post-modern detective story in which the central mystery is not the death of a friendship but the despair of one's own heart.

The Intruder (2004) features Michel Subor in a very Denisian role as a former mercenary who is heart-stricken in more than one way. The color blue regains its dominance, and Gregoire Colin features in a few critical scenes as the son, in what surely must be a reference to Beau Travail.

Glass Onion: a nice fantasy but I feel as if the liberal section of the internet had already written half the jokes before Rian Johnson. Daniel Craig is really funny. The resolution feels false, the camera is meant to deliver a revelatory coup but never quite succeeds. The Hateful Five.

Friday Night, 2002, marks the halfway point in Claire Denis' filmography. Something about the poetry in it has hit me with so much more clarity that it's brought into focus some of the choices in her 90s work. I look forward to discovering what she's been up to in the new millennium.

Gun Crazy is the last of the noirs for now. It follows a premise so well trod that I need not describe it. But I wonder: Did the Hayes Code influence the development of these darkly ironic endings? Is the femme fatale a product of biblical misogyny in a far more religious America?

I watched Detour, 1945. To quote David Lynch: wowee! Also amazing is this: male lead Tom Neal later copped an actual charge for involuntary manslaughter. Life, my dears, is strange. I also realize that I know very little about the history of independent cinema, to which this movie belongs.

The film community's never been shy about The Third Man's quality. But they've never been forward about its (literally) off-kilter vibe. My congratulations. Visually this film looks like the crowning glory of the hardboiled family. Tonally, it has more in common with The Big Lebowski. What a movie.

I started The Seance of Blake Manor tonight and while I don't know how the mystery will resolve... Diabolik, is that you?!

The Killers, 1946, a gorgeous noir flick adapted from Hemingway starring Burt Lancaster in his debut, and Ava Gardner in what Wikipedia informs me was her breakout role.

It's an unfortunate constant that videogames so often attach to a genre which they represent badly. Recently Bloodlines 2 did to noir what sunlight does to vampires, and had me flying towards relief. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett provided that and more. Great book.

I watched The Naked Gun and while I laughed, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the onscreen romance between Neeson and Anderson's characters.

Watched Del Toro's Frankenstein.