Before listening to The Storage Papers, I never thought a podcast could scare me as much as The Magnus Archives. That the mind-melting, the dark-is-dangerous thrill it gave me was the peak of horror storytelling.
Luca serves as another reminder of why Pixar has the reputation it does. Yes, stuff like The Good Dinosaur and the Cars franchise unsettled that a little, making it guesswork if the newest Pixar movie will be worth the time, but Luca is worth the time.
Nimona hit the media landscape with such explosive power that avoiding spoilers was difficult. A stylized, bombastic, irreverent sci-fi fantasy mashup with an animation style reminiscent of Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has become a winning combination, practically guaranteed to get the attention of the critic community, and I’m no different. The question of Nimona was when I would review it, not if I would.
Even after watching the first three episodes, The Bureau of Magical Things feels like a show that doesn’t exist. A hypothetical series a nerdy character might watch in the background of a scene. I’ve heard no one discuss The Bureau of Magical Things, reference it, or allude to it anywhere online in critic circles, yet it has all the trappings of a show that people make video essays about.
The Cellar Letters is the first podcast I’m reviewing that I didn’t like. Its first few episodes have many problems that ejected me from the narrative. Because of limited review time and well over forty episodes, I’ll concede the podcast may leverage its ideas later to great effect, but the initial impressions were medium to bad.
To call Circle an intense film is to undersell it. Utilizing almost only a single location, this death game story touches upon politics, human nature, mercy, and bigotry. It uses a very simple premise and plays it straight and is one of the best-paced films I’ve seen in a long time.
Just when I thought I had found the most obscure Star Wars show in Rebellion, I stumbled upon Star Wars Forces of Destiny. A series of short episodes, ala Groot (though this is from 2017), covering random points in the timeline. Some are so minuscule that it’s technically a bonus scene from a movie.
I hope it’s clear how good I think Nope is by me actively not wanting to spoil anything. Usually, I keep these reviews as vague as possible about plot points, but I must be even more careful with this one.
I don’t blame you if you’ve never heard of Star Wars Resistance. It’s more obscure; I only discovered it by searching through the vast swath of Star Wars content on Disney+. It’s the only series I know of that deals with anything related to the events of the newest trilogy (at time of writing) and seems the closest to a traditional children’s show.
So, here we are: The end of The Owl House. Perhaps my all-time favorite animated series. I wish the third season had been more, had been an actual season, but this is the next best thing.
The Book of Boba Fett seemed like an outlier when I considered it for review. A strange tangent for the Star Wars universe to explore. In the grand scheme of the current version of the universe (I’m sure the no-longer-canon books had him a ton), Boba Fett is a blip.
Star Wars Rebels mostly escaped my radar during its 2014-2018 run, but it was a positive surprise to explore now. Despite feeling like this franchise is now racing towards oversaturation (if it has not already reached it), Star Wars television shows have—for apparently a long time—been mostly solid little pieces of media.
