Dreamy, hazy images juxtaposed with a dreary, melancholy tale, Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut isn’t self-contradictory but rather entirely built on discrepancies. This is most acutely felt in how the story is told – 25 years after the main event happens (spoiler: there’s suicides) from the memories of male classmates. This creates an aura of intangibility around the main Lisbon sisters – never do we learn their thoughts or feelings, we can only guess at why they committed suicide so many years ago. But this, too, is a lie. It’s obvious what led the girls to end them all. We’re shown time and time again that their parents are oppressive and hyper-controlling, never letting them go out, punishing them severely for any broken rules. And when there are physical prisons containing you, all you’re left with is your mind. But this is no respite for their living conditions –  because while the Lisbon sisters are loved for their beauty in their high school, they have never, ever been loved in all their complexities; the closest that one of them has ever gotten to a genuine connection has only led her to laying alone in the misty grass of the football field in the twilight hours of the day. Not only are they trapped in the prison of religious Midwestern suburbia, the Lisbon sisters believe they are only lovable in their sexuality. And when you’re trapped in inescapable mental and physical prisons, when the only people who talk to you have ulterior, sexual motivations, and your real, complex emotions are all treated as mere teenage angst, it becomes clear how the eponymous event came to be. But this is only part of what makes The Virgin Suicides so great – not just about the mental duress of living in a “perfect” middle class Christian family, it also explores the concept of the male and female gaze, media sensationalism, and the insensitivity of adults to the teenage condition (and probably so, so much more that I missed on my first viewing). All in all, The Virgin Suicides is a excellent film, but as a directorial debut? It’s absolutely astounding. 

Hayao Miyazaki, beloved animator and director, has recently retired at age 82 (for the fourth time) after releasing The Boy and the Heron. The last time he retired, his final film was The Wind Rises back in 2013. While these two films are both masterful in their own right, together, they paint a revealing portrait of who Miyazaki is as a director and a human being. 

The Wind Rises opens up on a quote from Paul Valéry – “The wind is rising!…We must try to live!” This is emblematic of what The Wind Rises tries to achieve as a whole, creating a more contemplative, literary work than Ghibli works past – while their previous films open with grand new beginnings, fantastical dogfights, The Wind Rises starts with a French poem from which any number of meanings can be extracted. Genre-wise, The Wind Rises is a classic biopic, following engineer Jiro Hirokoshi as he creates airplanes, including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the plane used to bomb Pearl Harbor. Hirokoshi desperately tries to preserve his childlike love of airplanes while ignoring the bloodshed his creations cause – he even says at one point “We’re not arms merchants; we just want to build good aircraft” to try and convince himself – but his nightmares are still filled with images of bombs, bullets, and devastated lands. Engineer Giovanni Caproni thinks similarly, proclaiming “Humanity dreams of flight, but the dream is cursed.” Miyazaki is similarly cursed by his dream as an animator – saying anime is “produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans”. He despises the current state of anime, with more and more garbage coming out every year, the medium he mastered desecrated by countless power fantasies and oversexualized women, art isn’t being created anymore, only content to be consumed and forgotten. Yet, even so, we must try to live. Reality is cruel, but our dreams of a better future make it beautiful.

Ten years later, Miyazaki released his (as of now) final film, The Boy and the Heron. At its core, The Boy and the Heron follows Mahito, an 11 year boy exploring a fantasy world while processing his grief over his mother’s death. Yes, the film’s plot is a lot messier than that, with so many plot points and thematic threads to keep track of, but putting all that aside, the most interesting for our current purposes is the Grand Uncle. He’s a character who rules over the fantasy world, trying to create a world of perfection for nearly his entire life, but his rule is soon coming to an end. At the end of the movie, he offers Mahito the throne, but Mahito chooses to decline and live in reality instead. Studio Ghibli has also struggled with finding a successor and they too ultimately failed and were acquired by Nippon TV, a broadcast television network. The Boy and the Heron, then, is Miyazaki coming to terms with this. He has made perfect fantasy worlds for his entire life, and now, when his time has come, he can finally let Ghibli go. The magic the studio created might never be cast again, but the legacy he has left on will live on forever, the millions of people he affected with his art will live on, and Miyazaki and the Grand Uncle are both ready to let their worlds go. The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron are both perfect final films, reflecting on legacy and dreams in a way that only a master of their craft in their final years can do. Sure, they might not be the studio’s best films – after all, Studio Ghibli has created some of the best films of all time, from My Neighbor Totoro to Princess Mononoke to Spirited Away and both The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron function much better with the context of those earlier films. But what these two films do is reveal parts of an artist that he never outwardly shows. Miyazaki is a cantankerous old man in public, to the point that he walked out on his son’s first movie. The Wind Rises, then, is Miyazaki revealing some regrets – Caproni also proclaims that “Planes are dreams. Cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up.” So, too, is animation. Sure, the end result is undeniably beautiful, but at what cost? Goro Miyazaki, his son, has proclaimed “Hayao Miyazaki, to me, is ‘Zero Marks as a Father, Full Marks as a director’” and details how his father was never around, always busy animating, Goro Miyazaki never knowing anything about his father and turned to his films “because I wanted to learn about him through them”. Hayao Miyazaki was swallowed up by the sky, cursed by his dream. The Boy and the Heron is a response to that, acting both as a final chapter to the story of Studio Ghibli, and a message to his son that he couldn’t possibly convey in real life – “I’ve come to terms with my own legacy. Go forge your own.” The best final films act as a culmination of an artist’s entire life work, and both The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron play the role perfectly, intertwining together to act as a rumination on legacy, an apology to those hurt along the way, and a masterful distillation of what makes Studio Ghibli the greatest to ever make animated films.

What does evil look like? Popular culture will lead us to believe that evil is obvious – it resides in tall, dark towers,  it emanates a dark aura, it brainwashes the masses, it generally does cruel things out in the open. We tell ourselves that if we were in certain scenarios, say, in Nazi Germany, we wouldn’t be like that. We wouldn’t be complicit, we wouldn’t be Nazis, we wouldn’t be evil. But reality is a lot more complicated than that – evil isn’t abnormal, it’s utterly, truly banal. 

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that Adolf Eichmann, a major contributor to the Holocaust, was a prime example of “the banality of evil”. He did not seem to display any guilt and claimed no responsibility – he argued he was just “doing his job”. This banality of evil is at the center of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest. It follows a family in Auschwitz, the father being the commander in the camp. Yes, he is evil, leading to the deaths of millions, but what makes The Zone of Interest so compelling is that it never explicitly shows the inside of the concentration camps. We only see glimpses, hear faint echoes of the horrors that lie inside, the family ignores the screams and smoke to continue living their peaceful existence. 

In 1965 to 1966, hundreds of thousands of members of the Communist Party in Indonesia were massacred in a clear act of politicide. This event is not covered in Indonesian history classes and has received minimal international attention. The documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of this forgotten historical event from the point of view of the killers. They were never tried in court and never punished. Adi Zulkadry, one of the killers featured in this documentary, proclaims “I’ve never felt guilty, never been depressed, never had nightmares”. These people do not feel remorse for their actions, they talk about how they took the job to get better clothes, they roam free to this day. 

In a 1968 CIA report, the Indonesia massacres are called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with … the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War…”. What both these events illustrate is the banality of evil, with people in the center of both of them thinking they’re just doing their job. These films are some of the most important of all time because they show that evil isn’t found in tall, dark towers or in complex, sinister plots, but rather an aspect of everyday existence that we choose to ignore. These films force you to confront yourself and ask “Is what I’m doing right?”

Prince of Persia The Lost Crown is great on the same virtues that makes other modern classics like Sekiro Shadows Die Twice great- on the purest level, it feels good to play. The combat is simple 2D sword fighting – think the Mega Man Zero games or the swords in Dead Cells, but everything reacts with this simple mechanic exactly how you think it will – hit enemies always go in the trajectory you expect them to, the upwards and downwards attacks are refined to perfection, and the swings all have a tangible heft to them without slowing the pace of the combat down in the slightest. All this combined makes combos a joy to learn and execute – it feels like learning combos in Super Smash Bros, though far more streamlined and easily learnt.  In addition to these attacks, Sargon (the player character) has a dodge and parry and learning to use both of these is crucial in order to beat the game – it’s not that hard (at least on normal difficulty), but it does require learning how to fully utilize your moveset. The final combat mechanic is a meter that fills while attacking enemies that can be spent to execute an ultimate attack. The ultimate attack can be chosen by the player and can range from a strong projectile to creating a massive tornado that destroys any enemy in its path, but the stronger the attack, the more meter it costs to use. All good action games are really just rhythm games, and The Lost Crown is no exception – all these elements coalesce to create flow state inducing boss fights that demand you to get better at the game and are always satisfying to conquer. 

The other half of the game is standard Metroidvania exploration – go around the world, find areas you can’t get to, find powerups, use those powerups to access those previously inaccessible regions, rinse and repeat. Of course, The Lost Crown does do some things to make this more interesting – defeating enemies along the way is always entertaining, the platforming can get Celeste levels of intense, and the map is far more open than other, more linear Metroidvanias. The standard quality of life features are present – a detailed map, quick travel, healing at save points, etc., but the game also offers something that all Metroidvanias should – a camera that captures pictures of the environment that can be viewed later. This is supremely useful, as it helps the player figure out where the hell they’re supposed to go after getting a powerup, which is a large pain point in lots of games in the genre, to the point that some just resort to outright telling the player where to go. This adds up to create exploration that’s always interesting and fresh throughout the 15 hour runtime of the game, something that lots of its contemporaries can’t say. 

But yet, for every brilliant stride the game makes in evolving the Metroidvania genre, it gets held back by a Ubisoft-ism. Yes, the camera system is brilliant, but why is the number of photos you can take limited? This doesn’t make the eventual camera upgrades feel useful, it hampers a potentially great feature into one that the game actively disincentivizes using. And while the combat system is great, not doing the “optional” tutorials puts you at a massive monetary disadvantage early on, which dulls the nature of its inherent intuitiveness as the game feels a need to explain everything to you anyways. And while exploration is enjoyable, it becomes less so with the RPG-ification that plagues so many modern games – no, I don’t want to do sidequests, I want to explore the world on my own accord without some NPC telling me what to do and where to go. With all this considered, I don’t think the game is a masterpiece in the Metroidvania genre as so many have claimed, but it is ultimately a very good one that manages to stand out in an extremely crowded field and the team at Ubisoft Montpellier should be very proud of what they’ve made, regardless of any events that may have transpired after the game’s release. 

My first impression walking out of Nosferatu was that it was a story about how your past trauma and mental instability will destroy your relationships with everyone around you, but after some time and reading some interviews, that’s not an entirely fair reading of the film. While it is about past trauma sabotaging your relationships, it’s primarily about how puritanical society transforms any abnormal desires into a problem to be solved, the resulting shame leading to the trauma in the first place. In other words, this is a story about sexual liberation, about how we must allow everyone full bodily autonomy to save ourselves from a society that continually forces its citizens to repress all their emotions until they inevitably blow up, with all the shrapnel piercing everyone around them.  As many reviewers have already pointed out, this makes the film a clear Jungian one that explores the danger of not confronting the shadow self, parts of a psyche that are repressed and hidden. In one scene in the film, scientist Von Franz, arguably the moral center of Nosferatu, tells the doctor to “untie this poor child” after seeing Ellen (Nosferatu’s vessel/victim) tied to a bed to try and treat sleepwalking and seizures. This scene acts as a microcosm for the whole film – men in Ellen’s life try to control her and she never gets “better”, only by giving her her autonomy can the trauma society has bashed into her disappear. What Nosferatu ultimately conveys then, is that to take away control may be an easy option, but it is never the correct one. The film asks the trite nature vs nurture question (“Does evil come within us, or from beyond?”), and the answer, as always, is that the real evil is society. 

There’s a scene near the start of Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) where Ethan Hunt and Ilsa Faust are in a desert, embracing each other after a fight. The entire world is against them, but in that short moment, it doesn’t matter. They have each other, for a few seconds they can feel like everything is going to be alright. This is the crux of Ethan Hunt’s character, someone who will risk his life time and time again to have precious little flashes of normalcy. His greatest villain, then, isn’t the governments or secret societies that hunt him down. It’s himself, his ability to sacrifice anything and everything to keep his friends safe, his absolute need to avenge his allies that have fallen. 

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is as unwieldy as its title, from its ridiculous runtime to its vast, complex themes (AI and world domination, how the truth is distorted, how relationships change in a digital age). Yet, despite this, Dead Reckoning Part One never forgets to be entertaining. The extraordinary stunt work (the motorcycle cliff jump is just as breathtaking as the advertising would lead you to believe), arresting, powerful soundtrack, and incredibly elaborate setpieces combined with the exploration of the emotional underpinnings of the entire IMF squad pushes Dead Reckoning Part One to the impossible status of being the best film in a series filled with modern action classics. 

Our Wives Under The Sea is not a love story. It is a story about love. It’s about how beautiful love is, how precious all of the little moments spent together are, how you come to learn your lover’s charming quirks and eccentricities. These romantic asides aren’t built into the story for the romance though: They’re built into the story to juxtapose against the harsh coldness between the lovers only a few months later, because in that time, one of them was supposed to be on an oceanic exploration for a few weeks but returned a few months later a completely changed person. It’s not so much the horror it’s advertised as, but rather the aftermath of horror. Both of the protagonists are pushed to their emotional extremes, but refuse to let go of each other. Our Wives Under The Sea is not a love story, it is a story about how fragile love seems and also about how strong it really is, a portrait of a marriage in the face of tragedy, an ode to the seemingly insignificant moments still remembered years later. In a tight 220 pages, Our Wives Under The Sea is a devastating, powerful novel that remains compulsively readable throughout with exceptionally poetic prose and some truly clever chapter breaks (you’ll know what I mean when you see them).

Mario Kart 7 controls like a breeze – it’s the easiest of the series to simply jump into and play and have a good time with. Without the more hidden mechanics from the others in the series (snaking, wheelies, inside/outside drifting) and with courses far easier than those from the past, especially with the addition of gliding and underwater driving, this is the Mario Kart with the least friction to get to high level play. It’s certainly still competitive – memorizing the courses and learning the item theory gives you an edge that will allow you to consistently place well – but through this increased accessibility, Mario Kart 7 became the highest selling game on the 3DS and helped save the system after its underwhelming launch.

While the courses may be easier, they’re no less fun – courses like Music Park and Piranha Plant Slide are phenomenal and the retro courses include tons of fan favorites, from Coconut Mall to Waluigi Pinball to Airship Fortress. Plus, its version of Rainbow Road is my favorite in the saga – it’s one long track with three segments instead of three laps and has you driving and gliding all around the vast expanses of space. 

Unfortunately, despite the extremely polished core gameplay, there’s a clear lack of care in other aspects – the character selection is absolutely abysmal unless you’re a massive Queen Bee fan, the lack of a versus mode to pick courses freely in single player is utterly baffling (it already exists in local multiplayer), and the new item, the Super Leaf, is comically unhelpful in most scenarios, as it can’t block any items without constant camera POV switching, needs to be extremely close to another player to hit them, and prevents grabbing another item while held.

The biggest problem with Mario Kart 7 is, of course, the fact that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s existence renders it mostly moot. It’s a game with mostly the same core gameplay and feel but with an absurd 96 courses, 44 characters, far more cart customization options, and more accessible local multiplayer due to being on a console versus on a handheld. There’s still reason to go back to other Mario Kart games – Double Dash’s core gimmick of 2 racers/cart still keeps the game fresh over twenty years later, DS’s single player mode is the best in the series, and Wii has the most passionate modding and competitive scene – but Mario Kart 7 can’t say the same. Like a breeze on a burning summer day, Mario Kart 7 is pleasantly experienced and easily forgotten.

Metroid Prime is often heralded as one of the best games of all time – for many people, the impressive environmental design, masterful soundtrack, and the successful translation of classic Metroid gameplay to 3D all coalesces into a perfect experience. I, too, felt this way for the first few hours of playing – at the start, the game truly makes you feel isolated on a remote planet and slowly becoming more and more powerful is viscerally satisfying. But after this honeymoon period, I started realizing the biggest flaw in the game – the combat is supremely uninteresting.

I can’t accurately comment on the difficulty – I played on keyboard + mouse via Primehack and on casual mode (not intentionally, casual mode was renamed as normal mode for some godforsaken reason for the Metroid Prime Trilogy rerelease on Wii) so nothing in the game felt threatening. But my problem with the combat is how boring every enemy is – it all becomes incredibly rote by the end: shoot the yellow enemies with the power beam, shoot the purple enemies with the wave beam, shoot the Metroids with an ice beam and then a missile. This problem is further exacerbated by how much health everything has – everything is easy to beat, but it takes a long time, especially compared to 2D Metroid games and other, more recent Metroidvanias. It becomes even worse with the bosses, who are easy in theory, but take so long to take down and have so many phases where they’re invincible that you’ll often make mistakes because you’re zoning out. They are not battles of skill, but rather battles of attrition.

This crappy combat intrudes on the fun part of the game – exploring the world and living and breathing in its pretty environments. Metroid Prime looked stunning on its initial release and still looks incredible now, even with massive technological advancements over the past couple decades. These exploration sections are why the game is remembered so fondly today, and while they aren’t perfect – the map doesn’t show all the obstructions and leads to some wasted time and the camera is sometimes wonky – I still thoroughly enjoyed my first time through most of the areas of Tallon IV.

Notice I said first time – if you’re at all familiar with the genre, you’ll know Metroidvanias have lots of backtracking, and Metroid Prime is no exception. And going back through these areas feels like a colossal waste of time – there is no faster way to get around the map besides just slowly trudging through it all (the grappling hook doesn’t count, it saves maybe a few seconds per room). Additionally, the game will sometimes send you to an area and then make you walk a long, long way to another area to get a power-up to be able to traverse the area instead of just having the power-up be in the area – the Phazon Mines are notorious for this. Like it or not, you will be slowly walking back and forth a lot across this world.

Speaking of the Phazon Mines, I legitimately think the game is not worth playing after this point – as this is a late game area, the developers needed to find a way to make it challenging, but since no enemy poses a real threat or is interesting to fight, they had the brilliant idea of making you fight a lot of them in a row without save rooms nearby. A while after this, you have to hunt down 12 artifacts, presumably tying up any loose ends from past exploration along the way. This isn’t terrible in concept, but some of the locations are really stupid – x-ray a random wall in a tower you’ve been in once, go in this random lake, shoot a random stalactite off the ceiling. The biggest problem is that 12 just seems like too many – for every fun “eureka” moment you have after discovering what a mysterious object was for, there’s two moments of exasperation after giving up and looking up a guide and finding out what the solution was. Plus, this artifact hunt is really, really arduous because of how slow it is to get anywhere and kills any endgame momentum and motivation the player has. Though, if the artifact hunt didn’t do it, the last two bosses would’ve, as both take five times longer to defeat than they should and are dreadfully boring after you figure out their gimmicks. This last 4-5 hour stretch isn’t all awful though – Omega Pirate is the best boss fight in the game, since he’s fun to fight and doesn’t take a few business days to defeat, and endgame Metroidvania item hunting is always enjoyable enough, even if you have to do an excruciatingly dull, required easter egg hunt on the side.

Is it worth playing Metroid Prime today? Sure, it’s historically significant and really, really good at creating atmosphere through audiovisual design. But playing it in 2025 reveals flaws that are a direct result of its 2002 Gamecube origins that are core to its character and maybe part of its charm to some, but flaws that are nevertheless still unavoidably there and impossible to ignore in reviewing the game. It’s for this reason that I can’t give the game a “good” review score, but all review scores are arbitrary and you should always form your own opinion – both Metroid Prime Remastered on Switch and Primehack on PC are great ways to experience this gaming classic.

Memory Piece 

From September 1, 1996, to September 1, 1997, I will:

• Write down all my memories as they come, continuously, from Eight A.M. to Three P.M., seven days a week
• Only write down memories of things that occurred before the start of the piece
• Not put down my pen for more than one minute at a time

At the end of the performance the pages will be destroyed 

This is the titular “Memory Piece” that the title refers to. What, exactly, does the symbolic burning at the end of the year mean? What is it supposed to represent? Neither Memory Piece or the performance artist Giselle Chin provide an answer, but it’s an undeniably powerful moment when 278 notebooks filled to the brim with recollections of the past turn to ash and drift away with the wind. 

In the middle of the dot com boom, Jackie Ong finds herself mesmerized by the haze of anonymity the internet provides, where gender, race, and class become social constructs of the past,  leading her to become a legendary figure in the industry, but she must soon contend with big tech’s shift towards surveillance capitalism, a concept counter to the very reason she fell in love with the world of 1s and 0s in the first place. 

Ellen Ng is a social activist in a rapidly gentrifying New York City, fighting for and failing to achieve meaningful change through the decades the novel spans over. 

These three meet as teenagers in the 1980s and the novel tracks the growth of their relationships and careers through the dystopian future of the 2040s with delicate, piercing, evocative prose. The narrative structure of the novel makes the latter particularly powerful – after spending the majority of a lifetime with these three, seeing them in a torn NYC is very poignant. Is Memory Piece perfect? No – it’s a very messy novel, tackling a lot of big ideas without particularly delving deep into any of them. But ultimately, Memory Piece is really quite good, a work of great literary ambition that shot for the moon and landed in the stars.