While I really need to emphasize that one of the best ways to play Elden Ring is to experiment with the various character build options made available to you until you eventually find the style that not only works “best” but works best for you, it’s certainly possible to follow a general “roadmap” for building your character that will help you get the most out of them and ensure that you’re maximizing every stat point you get to spend and every item you acquire along the way....

Emerald City Season 1, Episode 10 So ends the first (and possible only?) season of Emerald City, that weird, wonderful NBC show that both is like nothing else on TV and is thoroughly mediocre. As I mentioned in last week’s review, whatever you may think of Emerald City, you have to respect it for the way it boldly told one full, serialized story over the course of its first season. The story itself wasn’t particularly bold, but the ambition inherent in the structure kept me going when I cared less about particular storylines....

No one needs another adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma–we already had a perfectly acceptable one headed up by Gwyneth Paltrow in 1996, a BBC miniseries in 2009 starring Romola Garai, and the absolutely joyful Valley Girl spin on the story in 1995’s Clueless. Emma. 2020 is actually the fourth theatrical version of the story while there are eight TV adaptations in total. But where’s the harm? It’s a good book....

While the daily indignities of existence are at the heart of Everything Everywhere, they’re also a springboard—a thematic DeLorean to cling to as the movie slowly, but confidently, unfurls the vastness of its science fiction vision. The result is one of the most wildly creative and ambitious genre movies to hit cinemas in some years, revealing that even within the drudgery of a laundromat or an IRS office, the secrets of the multiverse are hidden in plain sight....

Fargo season 4’s finale, “Storia Americana,” wraps up an uneven season of FX’s crime series about as effectively as one could have hoped. The hour is thematically consistent, if a little short (which may have had something to do with the final two episodes’ abbreviated COVID-19 production schedule). In true Fargo fashion, the season ends with plenty of our main characters dead. Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) is killed for not properly realizing the power of his own family (and for a simple misunderstanding with killer nurse Oraetta Mayflower), while Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) is killed for underestimating the power of another family....

Fear the Walking Dead Season 7 Episode 4 I like Lennie James. He’s a serious dramatic actor who truly commits to his roles. I like Mo Collins, too. She has good comedic timing but she also knows how to tap into her darker side. Demetrius Grosse is an imposing, formidable presence, commanding the screen in almost every scene he’s in. And then there’s Rufus, a lovable, loyal bloodhound. Toss in a bunch of zombies, and you have yourselves an entertaining, must-watch episode of Fear the Walking Dead....

If you’ve finished Future State: Green Lantern #2, you know two things: we all weep for the passing of Hot G’Nortt, and that the ending was pretty dark. With Future State scribe Geoffrey Thorne keeping control over the Corps for DC’s upcoming Infinite Frontier era, we’re wondering exactly how his Future State work fits in with the upcoming ongoing series. It’s complicated, Thorne tells us in an interview. “The manner in which it will occur in the comics may deviate at points from the exact scene you’re seeing there,” he says....

The “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” bit defines Carlin in ways which go beyond comedy routines. The documentary shows how language, subterfuge, and identity are chosen, carefully selected to create a body of work which defies classification. Carlin had an elastic face and a knack for funny noises, but words are at the bottom of it all. When Carlin was a young comedian, he couldn’t embrace the counterculture commentator lurking beneath the surface on television....

Alberta Haynes (Danielle Pinnock) is one of CBS’s Ghosts most fascinating creations. A Black jazz singer from the 1920’s, she had a beautiful voice but life at the intersections of race, gender, and body image was not easy. Unfortunately, Alberta died in Woodstone Manor under mysterious circumstances. Her spirit was trapped in a ghostly form, unable to ascend to heaven or down to hell because her death became a mystery....

“That’s some heavy-duty conjecture,” the Knives Out sleuths might say, but “Glass Onion” was all about double meanings. The third song off the band’s 1968 double-album, The Beatles (more famously known as “the White Album”) is the most over-interpreted of all the Beatles songs, which makes it an ironic classic, because it was making fun of exactly that kind of compositional scrutiny. (Did you just Google that?) The idea has its roots in 1967, when John Lennon heard about a teacher at his alma mater, Quarry Bank School in Liverpool, who assigned his class Beatles songs to analyze....

At a glance, the most surprising omission is the absence of Delroy Lindo’s name in the “Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama” category. Lindo, who’s done sterling character work his whole career, enjoyed the performance of a lifetime in the latest Spike Lee joint, Da 5 Bloods. There he played a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD, as well as a growing sense of greed. It was a tour de force, but the rest of the film, it was ignored by the HFPA when the five male acting nominees were announced in the drama category: Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Anthony Hopkins (The Father), Gary Oldman (Mank), and Tahar Rahim (The Mauritanian)....

Once again, I have to warn everyone to take these GTA 6 leaks with a slight grain of salt. We now know they are indeed legitimate, but they still represent an early build of a game that is nowhere close to being finished. As such, pretty much everything we think we know about GTA 6 today is subject to change at any point. That’s especially true of some of the smaller leaked details about the game that we’ll be focusing on today....

According to Rockstar, these remasters “feature across-the-board upgrades” that include “graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements for all three titles while still maintaining the classic look and feel of the originals.” Beyond that, we really don’t know much about what Rockstar is officially calling Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition at this time. What I do know, though, is that there is no way Rockstar can fairly call this the “definitive” edition of the GTA trilogy if these remasters don’t find a way to restore their original soundtracks....

Before we dive into the heart of this topic, there are a few things you should probably know about the context of this change. First off, Cassidy appears in a few GTA games, and Vice City is the only one in which he’s seen wearing a Confederate flag shirt. Given that Rockstar changed that element of the character’s appearance in subsequent releases, that would seem to suggest that they may have simply changed their mind regarding this design decision years ago....

Halo Episode 8 Halo is painting in broad strokes. The story focuses back in on Doctor Halsey, Master Chief, and TV show exclusive character Makee this week, trying to say something about the value of human life, the importance of our connection to each other, and how people should not be implanted with technology to make them better weapons. In doing so it further removes some of the pulpy specificity that made the world of the games work....

But all 343 needed to change the conversation was to put the game in players’ hands. A technical preview held from July 29 to Aug. 2 finally allowed fans (including this writer) to jump into Halo Infinite‘s multiplayer and get a feel for 343’s take on a faster Halo PvP experience that also hearkens back to the franchise’s roots as one of the foremost competitive console shooters. Despite offering only a snippet of the final product — three maps, a handful of weapons, and the first 20 tiers of a Battle Pass — the preview seems to have been a success, with many players immediately asking for more when the demo closed down on Monday....

After struggling through four very slow-paced episodes in which not much of note happened at all, The Book of Boba Fett has finally delivered a chapter that demands attention. “Return of the Mandalorian” is exciting, spectacularly shot, and takes us to new places we’ve never been to before, including a very cool ringworld called Glavis. Most importantly, it pushes the story of the post-Return of the Jedi era of Star Wars forward....

The Ridley Scott-directed sci-fi epic Raised by Wolves helped launch HBO Max back in 2020 and now it’s finally back for another season. Raised by Wolves season 2 premieres with three episodes on Feb. 3. This season will continue the conflict between future atheists and theists on a remote planet, while two androids raise some kids (Yes, there’s a lot going on here). February 2022 also sees the end of another, more recent HBO Max hit....

“The beautiful thing about the horror genre or just genre filmmaking in general is that you can take personal material and you can just sort of push it through the genre filter and out comes a work of relative invention, right?” says Aster when Den of Geek gets him on the phone. “So I can say that the feelings that fueled the writing of the film were very personal and coming from personal experiences....

Gaga commands the screen of Ridley Scott’s second film in as many months so thoroughly that it might as well be taking place on a stage in Madison Square Garden. But as good as she and other aspects of the movie are, you might also rather be at an arena concert than sitting through a movie with all the pieces to be a camp epic, but which nonetheless are inexplicably played straight and even demurely by the film’s maestro....