Music has always been instrumental in Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime (pun intended). More than just merely background music, every soundtrack featured across Watanabe’s body of work is inextricable from the identity of each of his series, from the big band jazz and rock of Cowboy Bebop to the lo-fi boom bap beats of Samurai Champloo. Lazarus, the latest sci-fi action thriller anime from Watanabe that premiered earlier this month, is no...

Horror movies are constantly calling out for experimentation; it’s a whole genre based around rules that are just waiting to be bent, twisted, or broken into a brand-new shape. Which is exactly why it’s such a shame that so many new horror movies are just slight variations on the same old ideas. But just last year we got two truly original horror movies — Azrael and In a Violent Nature...

This week, the highly anticipated second season of Andor premiered on Disney Plus with its first three episode arc. Naturally, most of the attention among Star Wars fans has been concentrated around Tony Gilroy’s live action drama series, but that’s not the only major Star War-related release to come out this past week. Last Friday, the second season of Light & Magic, the documentary series on the history of the...

It’s that time of year: wedding season. For a lot of the continental U.S., spring and summer brings to fruit a flurry of wedding invites — and Andor’s first batch of episodes is no exception, with everyone getting to watch Mon Mothma’s teenage daughter get married in a traditional (and quite decadent) Chandrilan ceremony.  These first three episodes of Andor’s second and final season bring plenty of intrigue, sniping, and...

This Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of Kazuya Tsurumaki’s beloved cult-classic anime FLCL, which is a joyous occasion for fans — especially since it also marks the long-awaited premiere of FLCL Reanimated, a fan-organized shot-for-shot re-creation of FLCL’s fifth episode, constructed over four years by a team of more than 300 animators across the globe. “The project started back in 2021, like early 2021,” FLCL Reanimated creator Kobe Kendall, aka...

The relatively niche subgenre of Black vampire films was popularized by Blacula in 1972, and to date only has a handful of entries — all of which are much less well known among the general public. To celebrate the release of Ryan Coogler’s new box-office hit Sinners, as well as to see what it adds to this particular collection of monster movies, we’ll run through some lesser-known vampire films that feature...

There’s way too much going on in Until Dawn. Director David F. Sandberg tried to make a faithful-ish adaptation of the popular 2015 video game, a Groundhog Day-style repeating-day movie, a comedy, a drama with something to say about trauma, and a love letter to every horror subgenre ever, all at the same time. But the byproduct of all this ambition is a movie that never quite finds an identity,...

When I first heard about Anne Shirley, the new Anne of Green Gables anime series from The Answer Studio, I knew exactly which scene from L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel I was looking forward to the most: Anne smashing her slate across the head of cocky classmate Gilbert Blythe after he teases her about her bright red hair. Fans of the books know that this is just the start of Anne...

Some of history’s finest ideas seem obvious in hindsight: Add peanut butter to chocolate; create a global trade network to build a complex, lucrative system of mutual reliance that disincentivizes war; make a Predator movie in which the alien hunter is the hero instead of the villain.  Long relegated to “Predator extended universe,” the concept that fans have long pleaded for is finally becoming a reality: Predator: Badlands, as shown...

Dark Horse Comics and Critical Role Productions are teaming for a free Mighty Nein comic to be given away at Free Comic Book Day, featuring heroes Caleb and Beau on their most harrowing adventure yet: Surviving an evening of interactive, musical dinner theater. You can check out five pages of Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Acquired Taste below, written by Sam Maggs (Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy) and...