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Yes, as you may have heard, planet Earth experienced a spot of viral bother last year, necessitating a move of the 2020 Summer Olympics to 2021. It’s only the fourth time the Olympic games have been cancelled or postponed since their modern debut in 1896 (the other three times were for that other kind of global catastrophe: war). Though the COVID-19 pandemic remains a grave global concern, Olympic athletes from around the world are now in Tokyo, residing in their Olympic Village suites atop bang-proof bedding....

Factions are formed and fractured in episode four of ITV’s true crime drama White House Farm from Hatton Garden director Paul Whittington. Jeremy Bamber’s (Freddie Fox) murdered family have been cremated as per Jeremy’s wishes, and in so doing, further key evidence is destroyed. Dogged detective DS Jones (Mark Addy) feels like Jeremy is slipping through his fingers. But Jeremy’s arrogance, hubris and erratic behaviour might just be his undoing....

Director Matt Thompson has been in the adult animated comedy game for a long time. Thompson was around for the dawn of Adult Swim in 2001 when the programming block hosted Sealab 2021, the series he created alongside frequent collaborator Adam Reed. Reed and Thompson would go on to produce several other animated classics including Frisky Dingo and Archer (which is set to premiere its 12th season later this year)....

The music rises to a crescendo. The booth begins to creak under the blob’s raw strength. We know it wants in; we know the waitress is doomed. But it’s what happens next that provides the biggest shock. We cut to an overhead shot, where we see the pink, translucent goo burst into the phone booth, engulfing the waitress from her feet to the top of her head until it appears to envelop the lens itself....

But something goes awry in The Forever Purge: a breakaway movement using terms like “Forever After Purge” intends to keep the violence going after the 12 hours are up, instituting a permanent Purge with which they intend to “cleanse” the United States of those they deem not fit to be Americans. Immigrants are, of course, at the top of their list, but so are the wealthy — and the NFFA themselves may be in the line of fire as well....

We know that Snyder, once the driving creative force behind Warner’s DCEU, was already the odd man out with the studio by the time a personal tragedy incited him to relinquish the director’s chair of 2017’s Justice League to Joss Whedon, but a recent comment from the director has stamped the idea with a powerful punctuation. While Snyder’s focus right now may be this month’s release of his new feature, Netflix-bound horror film Army of the Dead, a promotional interview with Jake Hamilton saw him field the inevitable SnyderVerse question with an answer that’s rather inauspicious for its advocates....

And that’s just two of the four electric flavors he’s offering this fall when one considers his recent supporting, and memorable, work in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter. Yet when we sit down to discuss things with the thespian, he reflects that his variety of roles is everything acting is about. “Part of it is about live invention and part of it is about not getting stuck in a certain methodology,” Dafoe tells us over Zoom....

Wynonna Earp Season 4, Episode 10 Like most good-but-not-great episodes of this beloved show, “Life Turned Her That Way” is an instance of Wynonna Earp biting off more narrative than it can effectively chew in one, hour-long installment. What starts as an episode that promises to delve further into Wynonna’s alcohol abuse and other mental health struggles and how they affect her loved ones quickly veers into a more action-forward story that sees Waverly kidnapped by her worst nightmare and BBD upper management initiating a plan that could end Purgatory (and some of our favorite recurring characters) forever....

The Game Awards creator and games journalist Geoff Keighley summed up Xbox pre-orders best: My personal favorite was GameStop, which set up a “virtual queue” page for pre-orders that didn’t actually guarantee you a spot on the pre-order line but was instead a clever way to hide longer than usual load times to the homepage. According to Kotaku, this “pre-order queue” page eventually crashed, too. And it doesn’t help that supplies are reportedly very limited, especially on the PS5 side, due to manufacturing and shipping delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic....

It’s understandable if you don’t immediately associate Nintendo with multiplayer games, but a deeper look at the company’s history reveals a collection of classics that have led to as many memorable multiplayer matches as the genre’s heaviest hitters. So what’s the best Nintendo multiplayer game of all-time? That’s a question we’ll try to answer as we look back at the best multiplayer games Nintendo has ever developed and published....

But in time, costs came down, the PS3 built up an impressive library and it’s now remembered just as fondly as its predecessors. In fact, there are so many great games for it that you might have missed some of these gems: 25. Magus 2014 | Black Tower and Aksys Games Not really enjoyable in any traditional sense, Magus is one of those “so bad it’s good” games in the vein of Deadly Premonition or Goat Simulator....

In most TV shows centered around athletes and sports, the stories told are rooted in inspiration, discovering your strengths, and most of all the power of teamwork. But, often, what’s forgotten in these portrayals is how sports culture can negatively impact the mental health of the teenagers who take part in them. We don’t see this potential toxicity covered as much on TV or film, which is why All American’s choice to make space for that type of conversation is so important....

As anyone who has watched Zombieland knows, different zombie dystopias have different zombie rules. The zombies in All of Us Are Dead, which is based on a webtoon translated under the same name, follow basic zombie rules (e.g. they are mindless, undead creatures hungry for brains), with a few quirks thrown in for good measure—most especially the inclusion of the “hambie” and the focus on students as undead. “We see many films about zombies, but only a few have students as main characters....

There are so many possible entry points to Starz’ American Gods. The TV series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s bestselling book about religion, immigration, and the fight for the soul of America is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to talent both in front of and behind the camera. Are you a Neil Gaiman fan? A Bryan Fuller fan? A fan of Ian McShane, Gillian Anderson, or Orlando Jones? All of those people have played a part in bringing this story to the screen....

Welcome to Vikings: Valhalla! It’s hard to believe it has been over three years since I received an email asking if I would be interested in exploring some sort of continuation of Michael Hirst’s epic series that had just wrapped after six seasons. As I sit here now it’s hard to believe my first reaction was: “No way I would do that.” Don’t get me wrong, I was a huge fan of the original series, but /Vikings/ had left the bar, in terms of character and action, so high you could hardly see it....

Thomas (Dan Stevens), a man presumed dead by the outside world, is sent to infiltrate the cult of Erisden to rescue his sister, Jennifer. Jennifer has been kidnapped by the isolated, island-dwelling group and a ransom letter was sent to their wealthy invalid father. Ignoring his disagreements with his father, a permanently brooding (and possibly addicted?) Thomas is told to keep his wits about him, and quickly sees evidence of the dark and violent nature of Erisden....

That includes a laundry list of Easter eggs. The Assassin’s Creed series has always benefited from some impressive and often elaborate Easter eggs, but we’d dare say that Valhalla features the franchise’s best collection of hidden references yet. While it’s going to be a long time before all of the game’s hidden references and in-jokes are uncovered, these are some of the cleverest Easter eggs in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla that have been discovered so far....

For 20 years Martin had taken on bit parts in the likes of The Asphalt Jungle, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Wild Bunch, his malleable and nasal Midwestern twang allowing him to play cowboys, two-bit criminals, and nuclear scientists. Then he broke through as the cruel camp boss in Cool Hand Luke, entering the American lexicon when he uttered the immortal line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate....

Now that excitement has somewhere to go. It has been announced that the newly formed Avatar Studios will “create original content spanning animated series and movies based on the beloved world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.” Not only that, but we may also be getting short-form content and spin-offs! The first project set to go into production this year is “an animated theatrical film” and it seems like the primary distribution for these projects will be Paramount+ (though they may also run on other Viacom channels) and even theaters....

There’s another, more underappreciated, reason for Avatar’s success however. The series quite simply knows exactly how much story it needs to tell and how to structure said story. Avatar: The Last Airbender lasted for three brilliant seasons, each one given an appropriate subtitle (Water, Earth, Fire) to complement the “Last Airbender” portion of its name, and each one featuring 20 half-hour episodes (though the final season was generously granted one extra installment)....