Prevailing wisdom would suggest that The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has all of the trappings to be this year’s designated Halloween hit; it’s a gritty remake of a popular ‘90s sitcom, is tied to the zeitgeisty Riverdale universe, and has the involvement of Riverdale showrunner and source material creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Certainly, Sabrina will scare up some viewing numbers for Netflix, but my money is on The Haunting of Hill House to be the sleeper hit this Fall....

Nestled near the peak of the mountain it shares a name with, Snowpeak Ruins’ prominent placement in Twilight Princess‘ world and its somewhat haunting exterior make it one of those Zelda dungeons that just begs to be explored. Once you step inside, though, you’ll soon discover that nearly everything about this dungeon defines series’ standards. Nothing about Snowpeak quite makes sense, and that feeling of uncertainty it almost immediately inspires only grows stronger as you explore it further....

The Magicians Season 4 Episode 10 The best thing that can be said about this episode of The Magicians is that it showcased Summer Bishil’s MVP performance as Margo, which has been one of the most admirable aspects of season 4. Unfortunately, that’s about all that was great about “All That Hard, Glossy Armor,” the much-anticipated annual musical episode which, despite a few fun moments, mostly fell flat. The pursuit of Enyalius was surprisingly anti-climactic, and Zelda’s awakening to the Library’s betrayal was at best a set-up for future action....

The Man in the High Castle Season 3 Episode 5 Nicely done, The Man in the High Castle; this is how you do the midpoint of a season for maximum excitement! This episode shows what happens when impulsive decisions are made during what amounts to a three-dimensional chess game of political maneuvering. John Smith has always been several moves ahead while unknowingly staying within Himmler’s carefully constructed plan, and Juliana Crain just made a bold move with her queen that will either decimate the board or leave her completely vulnerable to attack....

But by the time the credits roll on this tale of witchcraft, Cristina has instead found purpose as the new bruja (Spanish for “witch”) of the Mexican village where she was born, ready to continue fighting the demons that lurk in La Boca as her unlikely mentor Luz once did. “We’re not good at this, but we’re going to get better,” Cristina tells Carson in the final scene of the movie....

Investigators found the corpses of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, two women in their 50s, and the remains of about fifteen bodies, when they searched Ed Gein’s Plainfield, Wisconsin, farmhouse after his arrest. Ed said he couldn’t even remember how many people he actually killed. That was irresistible to filmmakers in the post-post-war era that followed Eisenhower’s America when cinema was throwing off the prohibitive motion picture codes. Three classic films, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 chiller Psycho, Tobe Hooper’s 1973 killer The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Jonathan Demme’s 1991 thriller Silence of the Lambs, as well as the 1974 low budget cult flick Deranged, all delved into the memories Gein supposedly repressed....

It’s impossible to see The Right Stuff, Disney+’s new drama series about NASA’s Mercury 7 astronauts, and not think about the award-winning 1983 film of the same name, but those comparisons don’t do this streaming series version any favors. Where the film is widely and rightly lauded for its authentic and ultimately inspiring depiction of the real lives behind the men who pioneered the U.S. space program, the small-screen version of The Right Stuff never gets off the ground....

But A Christmas Carol has everything, all the trappings of Christmas, that sliver of darkness running through the whole thing, and above all a strong seasonal message to remind us what Christmas is about. The story has been reimagined and retold endless times since Charles Dickens’ book came out, from textually accurate recreations such as A Muppet Christmas Carol (seriously) to modern-day reimagining like the Bill Murray vehicle, Scrooged. And across all of these different retellings, the seasonal message is usually the first casualty....

All these elements are particularly present in the headquarters of the Time Variance Authority, the organization that keeps the Sacred Timeline from splintering off into pieces and sends agents out to retrieve Loki once he fractures the timeline with his escape from 2012 in Avengers: Endgame. It’s the kind of strange mix of science fiction, fantasy and enhanced reality that has been practiced in the past by filmmaking geniuses like Terry Gilliam and others....

Yet to some, she will always be remembered as Catherine Martin, the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin who winds up being kidnapped by Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill, in The Silence of The Lambs. Not that fans always immediately realise it. “I don’t get recognized for it that much compared with something like Grey’s Anatomy,” she tells Den of Geek. “With The Silence of the Lambs, it’s more like ‘wait a minute, how do I know you?...

The Simpsons Season 33 Episode 7 The Simpsons season 33 episode 7 is Uff-da, even if the villain of the episode, Kostas Becker, voiced by Brian Cox, does say so himself. He is not one to get overwhelmed, and has faith in his good book, so we are inclined to believe him. But the biggest proof comes from Chief Wiggum, even if it will do nothing to clear up the case....

Even though the barrier for entry into the latest Sims game has been lowered to “nothing,” anyone who downloads the game is still downloading the same, flawed title that was released in 2014. While Maxis hasn’t spent its time developing The Sims 5 (as far as we know), modders have been busy improving The Sims 4 base experience in ways that even some of the game’s official expansions haven’t topped....

Robert Patrick is probably best known for playing the cyborg T-1000 in Terminator 2. It is an iconic role in science fiction cinema, as memorable as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character. Patrick had to fill the shoes, suits, and unimaginative ties worn by David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder when he stepped into the last two seasons of The X-Files, as Agent John Doggett. He stumbled into playing against himself on The Walking Dead....

Sometimes opening in media res has some real storytelling value. The goal of just about any story is to get people interested in continuing it. Given that the beginnings of stories are often expository and not particularly exciting, who could forgive a storyteller for wanting to jump right into the thick of the action and then fill in the blanks of what came before Well, in the case of CBS All Access’s The Stand, I can blame producer/director Josh Boone and showrunner Benjamin Cavell for wanting to jump right in and I will do just that....

New reality series The Traitors involves getting a group of strangers to form judgmental cliques, gossip behind each other’s backs and make accusations of wrongdoing, so yes, it’s a bit ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. Did the BBC even need to hire a castle? Set up cameras in the break room of any given workplace and you’ll get largely the same footage, give or take occasional scenes of giant wicker deer on fire as part of the tasks this lot also have to do to build their up-to-£120,000 prize fund....

So while The Wheel of Time is not exactly about the Aes Sedai, the hero’s journey would be impossible without them. “In our world, they function very much like the Catholic Church might have in medieval Europe,” showrunner Rafe Judkins says. “They are not the presidents of countries or the queens of countries, but they are the people who sit at the center of political power in the world and pull the strings of the world from the White Tower, the place where the Aes Sedai are based....

Yet the film starts not on chuckles or kisses; instead it opens with Christian Bale’s forlorn and forgotten Gorr, an alien of nondescript origin who’s been left to suffer by his gods. Taika Waititi, who returns as co-writer and director after Thor: Ragnarok (and winning an Oscar for Jojo Rabbit), still sprinkles in a few of his usual glib one-liners when Bale’s proverbial Job meets his maker, a deity of scathing indifference....

Titans Episode 2 This is more like it. My spoiler free review of Titans was based on my impressions from the first three episodes. A significant portion of the awkwardness I pointed out in there came from the first episode, which does an awful lot of telling and what it shows, often reinforces some of the unfavorable impressions fans got from the trailer (I still maintain that the “fuck Batman” moment, when taken in context, is terrific)....

All authors go through a process of drafting and redrafting, and this can involve making quite drastic changes to their stories. Usually all we get as readers are occasional tidbits in interviews (Arthur Weasley was to be killed off in The Order of the Phoenix!) but in the case of JRR Tolkien’s works, we have much, much more information. Tolkien’s son Christopher gathered and published enormous amounts of his father’s unpublished work, including a lot of drafts and notes Tolkien made in the course of his writing....

Breaking Dawn is the final book in the Twilight quadrilogy, closing out the “romantic” love story between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. After years of Bella thirsting for Edward’s marblesque manhood, they consummate their wedding, resulting in a pregnancy. Vampires in this universe have only one bodily fluid, venom, which is basically vampire blood, pheromones, and a toxin that will cause immense pain that immobilizes prey, who turn into vampires themselves if they aren’t killed....