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.
Be Careful What You Wish Fur may have the worst pun of a title yet, but it proves that the Disney Chills books continue to improve as stories. The societal commentary from the first book combines with the physical threats of the second and even uses the focused structure of the third. The result is so close to YA fare, like Rules for Vanishing or Horrid, that where it doesn’t reach that height feels even more disappointing, but where it works is almost triumphant.
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.
In a running trend for Disney Chills, Second Star to the Fright mixes up the formula. This time, we get a complete curveball: it plays the “be careful what you wish for” trope entirely standardly.
One of my initial worries when planning these Disney Chills reviews was that they would be repetitive. And the plot summary for Fiends on the Other Side didn’t assuage that concern in the slightest.
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.
Did you know Disney released a book series like Goosebumps but with their villains? Well, neither did I, but it’s called Disney Chills; there are six out and a seventh releasing this year, and because it seems like fun, we’ll be reviewing all of them over the next few months. Starting with Part of Your Nightmare, a book that takes the horrifying implications of Ursula’s powers and then goes even further with them.
Horrid is a book about emotions more than anything else. Its plot, its ending, its momentum are all in service of getting across big emotional moments.
