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.
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.
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.
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.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is a show hard to review as its own thing. While lately a good chunk of Star Wars is an act of accounting for missing parts in the timeline and universe, Kenobi has especially little space to experiment—its plot is so heavily stuck by continuity that there are practically no surprises to be had. We know who can and cannot die in any scene; even people who don’t know Star Wars well will have a general idea of what will happen in this plot.
To review Foundation, I must reveal my lack of foreknowledge. I’ve not read the books; I’ve heard amazing things and that they’re a seminal work of science fiction, but never ventured there myself. I probably should now: if they’re better than this show, they’re probably incredible.
Perhaps the most notable thing about Andor is how immediately it establishes itself as different from the usual Star Wars fare. What little I’ve seen of more recent Mandalorian projects suggests this isn’t an isolated affair, but it is to me.
