Looking for something that isn’t there, the horror of the sea, staring at the beautiful crashing waves, maybe something is wrong, maybe there’s something terrible underneath, but what’s worse is what your mind conjures. Interesting how this was the movie that kicked off the J-Horror craze when it’s so obsessive about not directly showing anything horrifying, but that’s also exactly what makes it tick. The rules of the videotape lead to a constant countdown for the police procedural, a perpetual dreary mood overlaying the main duo’s race against time, the suffocation of inevitability envelops the film. The ending reveal is haunting — you would pass the curse on too, if you knew how. The cycle will always continue.

Sufficiency Top 100 Update

New List (BOLD = New Addition)

1. First Robotics Competition
2. Emotion
3. In Rainbows
4. Fahrenheit 451
5. House
6. Mario Kart Wii
7. I Saw the TV Glow
8. Slay the Spire
9. Tetris DX
10. Berserk
11. Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion
12. Pokemon Trading Card Game
13. One Piece
14. Jackbox 7
15. Us Against You
16. Secret Hitler
17. Balatro
18. Ocarina
19. Everything Everywhere All At Once
20. Wallflower
21. Hundreds of Beavers
22. Kung-Fu Hustle
23. Catch-22
24. The Great Gatsby
25. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
26. Golf With Your Friends
27. Speed Racer
28. Perfect Blue
29. Between the World And Me
30. Vagabond
31. The Lord of the Rings
32. Tango in the Night
33. American Football
34. Before Sunset
35. Synecdoche, New York
36. The Poisonwood Bible
37. The Secret History
38. Today Tonight Tomorrow
39. Revue Starlight
40. Invisible Women
41. The Goldfinch
42. The Fifth Season
43. Kaguya-Sama Love is War
44. Lawrence of Arabia
45. Seven Samurai
46. Social Network
47. Harakiri
48. OK Computer
49. Action Button Reviews Boku no Natsuyasumi
50. Jacob Geller
51. Silent Hill 2
52. It’s Such A Beautiful Day
53. Mulholland Drive
54. Brat
55. You Will Never Know Why
56. Hanagatami
57. Celeste
58. 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare
59. Hamlet
60. Hunger
61. Normal People
62. Totoro
63. Hamilton
64. Persona 3 Portable
65. Nathan For You
66. Enter the Gungeon
67. Dog Day Afternoon
68. Glass Beach
69. Haikyuu
70. Chrono Trigger
71. The Matrix
72. Come and See
73. Station Eleven
74. Titanic
75. Moulin Rouge
76. Avatar
77. Princess Mononoke
78. For Emma, Forever Ago
79. The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place
80. Funeral
81. Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse
82. La La Land
83. Connections
84. Danganronpa V3
85. Bloom into You
86. Symphony of the Night
87. The Double Life of Veronique
88. Paddington 2
89. Clone Hero
90. My Brilliant Friend
91. Demon Copperhead
92. 10 Things I Hate About You
93. JFK
94. Welcome to the Black Parade
95. Brat Internet Culture
96. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild
97. Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance
98. Folklore
99. Gilmore Girls
100. Succession

*To be clear, I am only writing about what I want to write about. Not all new entries get a writeup here.

100. Succession

Succession will probably make it a lot further in next year’s list, but alas, I am still working my way through it (currently halfway through season 2). Regardless, what I’ve seen so far is enthralling, beautifully crafted episodes of bad people in a constant power struggle.

99. Gilmore Girls

Probably far better than the placement on this list suggests (or maybe it really shits the bed in the latter half), but I couldn’t really put it higher considering I’ve only seen the first three seasons. Just good ol middle class white woman television comfort food, the conflict in the show is small but it all feels so real, I’ll write a big piece on this one once I finish.

98. Folklore

Modern day T-Swizzle is high key a fraud (one good song in the past two albums is a crazy terrible ratio, though Guilty as Sin is pretty great), but the Folklore/Evermore run is phenomenal, pop folk amplified by early day Swift’s astounding ability of universal resonance.

97. Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance

A turn based RPG that hates you, from its hostile architecture to its brutal boss encounters, but still enticingly accessible enough to keep you marching through its post apocalyptic hellscapes, all grounded by a philosophically rooted narrative. This is my first mainline SMT game, and if the other games maintain the power of this core gameplay while having an actually competent story, next year could have one of these games much higher on the list.

95. Brat and the Culture of Addiction

Alexander Avila is the best political video essayist around, consistently entertaining and witty but also has a way of distilling the ideas of ancient philosophers and modern sociologists into a form far more digestible to our modern day rotted brains. Brat and the Culture of Addiction is ostensibly about Charli XCX’s excellent era defining album, but is really about our chronic need to fill the void in our lives with something, anything. There’s a moment in this video that’s probably my favorite video essay moment ever.

94. Welcome to the Black Parade

I maybe like Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge as an album more, but the title song here is undeniable. The world will never take my heart.

93. JFK

Masterful – it’s not really about the (inaccurate) history of the events surrounding the JFK assassination as it is about learning to distrust a fundamentally broken system that is designed purely for profit at the cost of countless lives. What is past is prologue.

92. 10 Things I Hate About You

*Pick for all the girly classics – Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, Clueless, and so on

These are all great, sharply written while also deeply kind to their characters, watched these all with a phenomenal group of people.

91. My Brilliant Friend

This and its surrounding entries are dedicated to my bff <3 (the book is fine, I guess). In response to your writing about this novel, have a passage from this novel as a treat.

“Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.”

Thank you for always pushing me to be better and putting up with my bullshit.

89. Clone Hero

Rhythm games are obviously great in how they force you to pay the utmost attention to them in order to succeed on any level, making you leave behind any worries and stresses behind in the process. Everyone has their favorite, Clone Hero just makes sense to my brain, the near infinite amount of user generated content also helps.

75. Moulin Rouge

*Entry for the Broadway musical

Truth, beauty, freedom, love. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. The Bohemian ideals are the Sufficiency ideals. Watching with some of the best people cancels out the deeply problematic parts. Let the loud pop music bleed into your broken heart.

71. The Matrix

As much as I love The Matrix Resurrections, I’m replacing it with the OG because how could I not? A pitch perfect film, a smorgasbord of philosophy and anime and queerness coalesces into the best action flick probably ever.

63. Hamilton

I love Hamilton, to the point that I wrote a bad 20 page essay on it. Not all writing is meant to be seen, after all. But because I’m lazy, I’ll self plagiarize and copy the intro to that essay here.

While studying for a Calculus exam, I, for reasons beyond my comprehension, decided to listen to the Original Broadway Cast recording of the blockbuster musical Hamilton. Maybe this was just because Lin-Manuel Miranda (writer of the entire show, Hamilton in the original cast) is more interesting than L’Hopital, but looking back on it, this is an entirely reasonable decision – Hamilton is exciting, Hamilton is energetic, Hamilton is a sports film projected through the eyes of a theater kid who read a dry tome of a biography of a man relegated to a few sentences in U.S. history textbooks and instantly knew that he would spend the next seven years writing a pop rap R&B musical about him. It’s a two and a half hour hype song, an ode to hard work, if Hamilton could write his way out of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean to become one of the most powerful men during the creation of a global superpower, then you can figure out how to do related rates problems. And it worked at hyping Hamilton up – there were plans to remove him from the $10 bill until the musical came out, at which point he was so beloved that there would be riots in the streets if ol Hammy was replaced. But more than being a brilliant piece of pop art that both wine moms and gay teenagers adore, Hamilton is a brilliant piece of propaganda. It is the richest text of the 2010s, not because of its layers of wordplay and motifs but because of what it omits to tell its story of a young immigrant rising up to become a founding father in the greatest nation on Earth. Hamilton the man is America, all of its strongest attributes and deepest flaws personified, and in the act of glorifying him, Hamilton perpetuates the eternal lie, the lie that the systems in place here work for the people, the lie that through the structure of checks and balances, the moral arc of our nation bends towards justice.

59. Hamlet

The best Shakespeare, fairly obviously his magnum opus.

55. You Will Never Know Why

My soundtrack for the late ride back home, after nights of long partying with friends, the notes fill the strange void that was so overflowing with the joy of other people a few minutes ago. Don’t you make me smile if you don’t intend to. The traffic lights turn to flashing yellows. Change is inevitable. Maybe that’s okay.

51. Silent Hill 2

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill.”

Broken people stuck in a broken place, trying to find that which is already lost.

50. Jacob Geller

The best currently working video essayist, or at least 2^nd best depending on how loose your definition of “currently working” is, able to weave together some impossibly different strands into something beautiful. His book “How A Game Lives” is excellent.

49. Boku no Natsuyasumi

Tim Rogers is the best writer that writes about games. I would kill to write half as well as he does, his authorial voice bleeds into every word he’s ever penned. This is a 6 hour video essay ostensibly about Boku no Natsuyasumi, a Japanese PS1 game that was never localized and still hasn’t been translated to English in any capacity, official or otherwise, but it’s actually a beautiful reflection on nostalgia and memory and existentialism framed through the lens of this mostly forgotten Playstation game.

48. OK Computer

Would’ve gone on the original list, but I already had In Rainbows on the list and I didn’t want two Radiohead albums on the list. Now that I’m free of my own stupid rules, I can acknowledge that the album most people consider one of the best ever is good, actually. The stretch from the opening “Airbag” to “Karma Police” is absurdly strong, “Let Down” is a top 3 Radiohead song, “One day, I am gonna grow wings” is the best line they’ve ever written. Such a good depression core album, speaks to the existential angst of a generation going through monumental change in a way that resonates with us living through the AI revolution (obligatory fuck AI), undeniably great.

38. Today Tonight Tomorrow

To be clear, this entry is not for Today Tonight Tomorrow, it’s not quite that good. The book is simply a stand in for all the crappy romance novels I’ve been reading, which you’ll hear more about in December. All I’ll say for now is that I adore trashy tropey romance novels and T^3 is the best — academic rivals to lovers (the best trope), deeply kind to its characters, and even has a good sequel.

36. The Poisonwood Bible

A highlight of the monstrous AP Literature reading list (conjured up by a teacher who liked the postcolonial classics a little too much) that I had to work through — I assure you, my suggestion to read this in a Denny’s on a scorching hot summer day is not ironic, as it really puts you in the same mindset as the characters of the novel.

33. American Football

Midwest Emo living up to its conceptual highs, captures the feeling of being eternally trapped in an area that hates you, surrounded by the ghosts of should’ve and could’ve. Regrets are inescapable if everyone knows everyone.

32. Tango in the Night

Clears Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours by a hair for me, Tango in the Night’s tropical vibes ground the album’s yearning while Rumours is a rocket powered purely by spite and angst. But really, this is here because it was the background noise while I talked to the best person in my life seriously for the first time, whom I love dearly despite her chronic insistence that Pride and Prejudice is a good novel (though, it did lead to the excellent Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).

26. Golf With Your Friends

The ultimate Discord game, instantly understandable, infinite content, always fun but never requiring enough thought as to be more than a background process while conversation flows.

25. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

A campy, silly, beautifully queer horror musical as a canvas for connection – there’s nothing quite like yelling “asshole” and “slut” at a screen for a couple hours.

24. The Great Gatsby

An uncompromisingly raw depiction of the U.S. through the eyes of the emotionless elite, who still fall for the trap of sacrificing everything for the shadow of a dream. The great American novel.

17. Balatro

Just a perpetual dopamine machine, preys on the most primordial parts of your self but also requires some real thought unlike trash like Vampire Survivors.

16. Secret Hitler

Sure, it’s a special kind of torture, being trapped on a cramped bus for a long time, your life temporarily held in the hands of a sketchy, underpaid, probably drunk driver. But all the time I spent on those charter buses earlier this year was beautiful too, burning the time away with social deduction games, passing the ace, and sneaking glances at someone I cared far too much about. Drunk off our laughter and dubious gas station food, the hellish rides passed by in an instant. Blink and you miss it. This entry isn’t really for Secret Hitler, all social deduction is just an elaborate ruse to make you talk to people, consider who they truly are, stare deep into their eyes to see if they’re telling the truth, but something will always be off. The only truth to be found here is the connection made in the process. The real secret hitler was the friends we made along the way. Maybe the quality of life wasn’t the best on these rides, but the quality of life was, sparks form so much easier during a conclusion, and here, with films softly ignored in the background, the sun leaving to come back to a dimmer tomorrow, and the chatter dying down as the day grew long, I felt content.

13. One Piece (Pre Time Skip)

Now that I’m mostly caught up, I can confidently say I don’t really like post time skip outside of Whole Cake Island. But regardless of how it flops later, the best of pre time skip One Piece is the best of all of shounen, character driven to the point that everything matters because of how much you care for the straw hat crew. Again, Water 7/Enies Lobby is a perfect slice of storytelling, probably won’t be topped ever within its genre.

9. Tetris DX

Hates you just enough to not be modern Tetris with its modern niceties of drop lines and holding and different friction points but loves you enough to not be OG Tetris with its absurd speed scaling, the perfect middle ground between two eras. An immaculate piece of game design.

8. Slay the Spire

The best game (ignoring how badly balanced the watcher is), a constant battle of risk and reward, instantly perceived, never fully understood.

4. Fahrenheit 451 (UPDATE)

“Every man, I think, reads one book in his life” – E.B. White on Walden

Forever and ever my one book, the one that irrevocably changed the trajectory of my life. I’m half English major now because of one fateful day where I learned the truth of the world through one novella.

1. FRC

I guess this might not exactly synchronize with your idea of “art”, but labels constrict and sports are a large part of our cultural mythos so screw you. Anyways, this is probably a permanent #1, robotics demands everything from you and gives more in return. I’ve never been particularly good at the whole emotions thing, most of my feelings are a dull whisper, but FRC competitions made it feel natural for me, a tidal wave of ecstasy and euphoria that I can never translate to words no matter how hard I try.

It’s been a while since I published something here — I did write a 20 something page Hamilton essay during this break, though it kind of sucked, so I didn’t release it to the public. Anyways, some updates — Sufficiency will no longer be a “monthly release”, though the last time anything released monthly was like a year ago. I’ll publish things right after I write them. Some of it might suck and I might erase their existence from the internet after release, but things will be released more often. The Sufficiency ethos is still the same, all I want to do is write thoughtfully about whatever makes life sufficient.

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 Horikoshi as he creates airplanes, including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the plane used to bomb Pearl Harbor. Horikoshi 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).