Fargo Season 4 Episode 1 It’s been a long wait for Fargo’s fourth season. Noah Hawley’s improbably good Coen Brothers adaptation arrived on the scene as an idiosyncratic, darkly funny crime story, but in its third season, its Midwest charm and stylish execution couldn’t quite hide the fact that the story was lacking and the schtick was wearing thin. Hawley decided to go back to the drawing board for Season 4, then was forced to delay his return to the anthology series a bit longer due to coronavirus shutting down production....

To be clear, Final Fantasy 14 has always excelled at the often tricky art of class balancing, and that trend continues in Endwalker. When we talk about one FF 14 class being better than another, we’re often talking about degrees of differences. More often than not, the best FF 14 class is still the one that you feel most comfortable with and have the most interest in playing. Having said all of that, here’s a rough overview of where the game’s various jobs currently stand....

From Marvel to Lucasfilm, from House of the Dragon to The Lord of the Rings, from one horror classic to another, Hollywood is fully investing in and doubling down on movies and TV series that show us what happened before the iconic or classic films and series that we already love, whether we really need to know what happened or not. The empire of dreams known as Tinseltown, alleged source of unbridled, endless creativity and imagination, is resorting to massive dumps of fan service, easter eggs, and the apparently bottomless pit of emotional nostalgia in the hopes that the combination of all these will keep hitting that dopamine button for fans, and keep the box office and streaming subscriptions humming....

The news was announced by HBO Monday evening, with the premium cable network revealing the English-born Considine is stepping into the crown of Viserys I after playing Mr. Martin on HBO’s The Third Day. The actor has previously appeared in The Outsider, The Death of Stalin, and Hot Fuzz. Aye, if you know your Westerosi history—and even if you don’t—Viserys I is crucial to what will likely be the series-long conflict of House of the Dragon....

While Gangs of London series 2 hasn’t been confirmed, there seems to be an appetite for it from show co-creator (along with Matt Flannery) Gareth Evans. Evans told The Metro: ‘There’s room for it. Without giving too much away, we definitely end the season on a note where people will be wanting more and asking what is happening next. ‘I’m treading carefully! It’s sort of a cliff-hanger but as most things it’s a story that takes on a lot of different aspects, there’s a lot of different characters in there, a lot of vested interests, there’s a lot of stray threats trailing in the wind ready to be picked up again....

Little surprise then, that the show has been renewed for a second series. Sky has announced that the show will be returning, with filming planned for next year with an air date scheduled for 2022. The announcement from Sky didn’t state in what capacity creators Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery would be returning. Similarly no announcement was made as to whether series directors Corin Hardy and Xavier Gens would be back, though all have said they’d have an appetite to come back to the show....

Girls Season 6 Episode 8 This is an odd episode of Girls that throws characters together unexpectedly and ends up being half upbeat and half super, super sad. The upbeat half involves Ray and, completely out of nowhere, Shoshanna’s former boss, Abigail (Aidy Bryant). This is a character I can’t say I ever thought about much or expected to ever see again, so that she showed up and then had an instant connection with Ray is quite the weird surprise....

Who is Guy Gardner? While that might sound like an easy question to longtime DC Comics readers, initiate fans only familiar with Green Lantern’s film and television iterations are likely unaware of the powder keg of un-PC repartee that the classic character’s live-action arrival prospectively wields for the eventually assembled onscreen ensemble. In fact, Gardner is so prominent that Warner Bros. Television’s notorious 1997 Justice League of America live-action television pilot used him as the titular team’s version of Green Lantern....

While we’ve previously discussed rumors regarding possible Grand Theft Auto 6 locations, those rumors focused on major fictional/real cities such as Vice City and London. This is the first time we’ve heard that Virginia could be a location candidate. To be honest, it’s the kind of rumor that we would usually treat as nothing more than wild internet speculation fuelled by people’s desires to play a new GTA game. Here’s the crazy thing, though....

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see these remasters fall quite so hard on their face given some of the botched remasters and new releases we’ve seen in recent years, but it is truly astonishing to witness just how bad these games really are on a purely technical level. There is no excuse for how these remasters turned out, but I’m darkly eager to hear an explanation for one of the year’s most disappointing releases....

I guess Michael stands out less because he was never part of anything excessively dumb. Oh yeah, he had a bunch of lesser sequels that culminated in being beat up by Busta Rhymes and there’s that Halloween III fiasco, but he never fell into the pop culture trap of other ’80s and ’90s boogeymen. He didn’t show up on Arsenio Hall’s show or appear in a Fat Boys music video, for starters....

This day and date “hybrid” strategy, which mixes online with theatrical distribution, has been described by WarnerMedia as a “unique one-year plan,” although many are dubious, likely including theater owners. AMC Theatres fired off a public statement that said, “Clearly Warner Media intends to sacrifice a considerable portion of the profitability of its movie studio division, and that of its production partners and filmmakers, to subsidize its HBO Max start up....

You might suspect that a “Whodunnit?” case built into a Hitman game would be somewhat watered down, but the truth of the matter is that Death in the Family’s murder mystery is one of the better examples of this format in video game history (and my personal favorite since the best quest in The Elder Scrolls franchise). In fact, it’s quite easy to miss vital clues and walk away with the wrong impression of who the murder actually is....

Homeland Season 6 Episode 11 Homeland season 6 is in its final movements. The season finale is only a week away, and the penultimate hour didn’t want you to forget that as it ended its 50-minute drama on a thundering cliffhanger filled with explosives, vital missed phone conversations, and every implication that a full-throated military coup is in motion with CIA badmen headed to “protect” the president-elect at gunpoint. And ironically, the most exciting thing about the episode is not in the pyrotechnics of a somewhat arbitrary cliffhanger; it’s in the tension of a president (or president-elect) sitting down with rightwing talk radio/fake news, legitimizing that type of crazy and challenging it in a conversation that would suggest the fate of the republic rests in the hands of the seedy underside of the internet....

In 1970 House of Dark Shadows flipped the vampire subgenre on its head. While certainly a B-horror in the Hammer mold, this chiller wasn’t satisfied with one bloodsucker, or even two. Instead Dark Shadows would turn nearly its whole cast into the ravenous undead, indiscriminately slaughtering beloved heroes and heroines, not caring for a second that they were also the stars of a daytime soap opera—one that was appointment TV for millions of kids across America....

We love a good anti-hero, and from Breaking Bad’s Walter White to The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, rooting for the wrong character feels right sometimes. George R.R. Martin is no stranger to delivering TV anti-heroes, with the likes of Lena Headey’s Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones being a masterclass on how it’s done. When it comes to House of the Dragon, some call Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) the “new” Cersei, but let’s be honest, there’s only one villain we’re really rooting for here… Matt Smith’s Daemon Targaryen....

House of the Dragon Episode 2 It’s long been observed (including by me in last week’s House of the Dragon episode 1 review) that the best scenes in the Game of Thrones universe frequently feature little more than a handful of well-dressed characters talking to one another in opulent rooms. Before HBO realized that there was gold in them there Westerosi hills and upped the show’s budget to massive CGI battle levels, Game of Thrones was often content to let its characters talk things out, with George R....

Three dragons is nice. But what about 17? That’s the kind of visceral reframing of this fantasy that Ryan Condal offered to the Hall H faithful at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday. We’ve of course heard before that House of the Dragon—the new prequel series co-created by Condal and Martin—is about a different, grander time in Westeros, with the show picking up about 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones....

Now that F9 is streaming on HBO Max, cars n’ splosions fans who weren’t able to check out the penultimate entry into the Fast & Furious franchise last year are finally getting a chance to catch up with the film’s ludicrous plot and its set up for the upcoming tenth installment. But if F9 turned out to be a rather frustrating affair for a keen audience still very dedicated to the saga, it was perhaps even more so for those who tinkered away on its pricey product placement behind the scenes and who agreed to stuff RED’s Hydrogen One smartphone into proceedings....

Guiseppe Acromboldo painted human figures made out of fruits and veggies. One of Ang Lee’s best films, Eat Drink Man Woman, features lovingly shot scenes of elaborate meals. And who’s mouth hasn’t watered at the sumptuous depictions of food in a Ghibli film? Food remains a prominent part of nearly every art form. Gaming is no exception. From delicious digital delicacies like Pac-Man’s fruit to Arthur Morgan’s hearty bear stew in Red Dead Redemption 2, food has not only been lovingly portrayed in games for decades but has long served as one of the medium’s most iconic and important powerups....