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In 1999, I crawled out of Counter-Strike 's wretched vagina to become the man I am today. And, now, I'm tasked with rating the game. How does one even rate his mother?

In sixth grade, I would wake up for school at 5:30 AM, but then I started getting up at 4:30 just to get a couple rounds in before class. Call it dedication or a sickening obsession, but I was hooked on CS (nevermind my neighbor who broke into my house to play while I slept!) It was more than a game. It was my social hub, my iTunes visualizer, and my brief entryway into game design (which didn't go very far.) It is and remains a standout multiplayer shooter that paved the way for things to come with Call of Duty and Battlefield.

Being eight years since the excellent Source remake, Valve has decided it's time to give the game another facelift. What started as a Source port for consoles became a more ambitious project that included PC. While there are no radical departures in Global Offensive, it is without a doubt a reboot. Valve has just hit the reset button on the series, once again. As drastic and premature of a maneuver it may be, there is no denying that Counter-Strike remains an addictive and rewarding competitive shooter like no other.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (PC [reviewed], PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment, Valve
Publisher: Valve
Released: August 21, 2012
MSRP: $14.99

Rig: Intel i5-2500k @3.30 GHz, 8GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 580 GPU (SLI)

Counter-Strike was born on PC and it is there that its largest community of players will stay. Nevertheless, Valve wished to branch out and get their hands on some of that Call of Duty money. Even so, the game still plays like classic CS: this is white-knuckled gaming not for the easily impatient and frustrated. It's true that the game has been rebuilt almost completely, but the majority of changes are superficial and surface level: A chime plays when you kill, you are rewarded with progress points and achievements that do nothing, and the game's player models have become greatly improved.

If you are new to the series, here's what you can expect. CS is a slow-paced game -- funny thing is that it was pretty fast in the days of Rainbow Six -- where two teams try to eliminate each other while attempting a secondary objective (rescue hostages or plant a bomb). The two defining features of the game are the permanent death that forces players to spectate until the next round begins, and the ability to purchase weapons and equipment at the start of each round with money earned from kills and victories. You can find these features in Call of Duty's Search and Destroy mode as well as Shadowrun (2007), but outside a couple mods for Quake and Unreal Tournament no one has attempted to replicate the full package.

What I love most of all about CS are the maps and Valve seems to know as much. Nine classic maps are included in this download, in addition to eight new maps for the two new game modes (more on this below). You'll find some minor changes made to Italy and Dust, but it's not exactly going to put a stop to your nostalgia or established strategies. Since death comes quickly, you'll need to learn the maps inside-and-out so you can cover all your corners. You'll also need to keep quiet, as this is a game where hearing nearby footsteps can change the course of a round. Above all, you'll need to be incredibly accurate and control your weapon. This is where things get a bit rough for console players. Without accuracy and player awareness, you don't stand a chance in the brutal servers of CS:GO.

Valve has tasked Hidden Path with fitting a square peg in a round hole, but the young developer has done an admirable job of making the game approachable to new console players. There is a well made tutorial to guns, an informative "How to Play" option in the menu, dumb-as-dirt bots to play against offline, and a new player ranking system (ELO rank) that will pair players of the same skill level together over time. Here's where the things fall apart: CS was never meant for consoles and this latest iteration serves as a reminder.

In addition to having far inferior aim controls, console players won't have access to a browser and are limited to 10 player matches instead of 32 on PC. It's ironic but Hidden Path have managed to gimp console gamers by abandoning its original plan to port Source. At least on consoles, you'll have a level playing field with a controller unlike PC where using a controller is the equivalent of gnawing your legs off before a kickboxing match. The PlayStation 3 release supports Move and keyboard/mouse. I'm not sure if this is a good thing though, since these players will have a great advantage on the majority of players.

The most noteworthy addition of GO are its two new modes: Arms Race and Demolition. Both of which are variations of the popular Gun Game mod played on CS servers for years -- though, you may be more familiar with Call of Duty: Black Op's mode that borrows the name and concept. These two modes serve as an excellent entry point for new players, since you are forced to learn the current weapon in your inventory until you get a new one by killing an opponent. This will give you some time to get used to the vicious recoil on some of these guns -- a jarring difference between GO and recent military shooters.

Arms Race has respawns so it's very fast paced but doesn't feel like CS. Even worse, there are only two maps that come with the mode and neither is very good. Demolition, on the other hand, is almost worth purchasing GO on its own merits. Demolition is the meeting point between Gun Game and classic Disarm CS maps. Once again, players are limited to one weapon they must upgrade through kills but now death is permanent and they need to plant/disarm a bomb.

Due to the smaller map size (there is only one plant site), these maps are intense and fast-paced but still capture that CS feel. It helps that all six maps are excellent. Most maps revolve around a central building that houses the bomb site, so if you love old CS maps like Estate and Militia you'll get a real kick of these new ones. One of the maps is even a shortened version of the classic Train, so you'll feel right at home on that one. Six maps is a good amount, but it'd be nice if more shortened versions of classic maps were included.

After a shaky divorce in 2004, Valve are breaking up the family again with GO. Counter-Strike has always been a game by community, for community. The game started as a mod made by fans and fans of the mod have made the game into something else over the years. If you are a 1.6 or Source player, you'll find GO to be a bit hollow in terms of features. Gone are the detailed damage reports, server rankings, gambling, and quirky server-side tweaks. I managed to find a couple quality community maps (including faithful recreations of old classics like Backalley), but the pickings are still pretty slim. You'll find some surf, Goldeneye, and zombie maps, but the mapping and modding community hasn't arrived just yet.

The biggest offender in GO is the removal of free look. This may seem like a trivial thing for new players or those that played in servers that disabled it in past iterations, but it means a lot to me as a long time fan. Before I bought a camera and made short films, CS was my portal into filmmaking. Whenever I died, I'd use free look to spectate the match and craft cinematic films for myself with the remaining players. Please, please, please put this feature back in Valve! Some players also may mourn the removal of sprays -- I've been told it can be turned on by server hosts, but I've yet to see one in a match.

Along with a wide set of achievements and two new modes, the biggest change to CS is a visual one. GO looks like what you remember Source looking like. No better, no worse. There are now multiple sets of player models specific to maps (no more arctic terrorists in the desert). These models look fantastic, but you won't mistake them for Max Payne 3 characters. I can't say the graphical upgrade to the levels is as impressive. You'll barely notice the visual upgrade, but at least the game runs at a very smooth frame rate with settings maxed out.

Along with re-balancing established guns' firepower, spread, and recoil, some new items have been added to the game. The most noticeable additions are the Zeus taser and grenades (molotovs, incendiary, and decoy). The taser is useless and expensive. It will replace the knife as the new troll kill. It's a one hit kill but you need to be so close to an enemy that you'll rarely see it pulled off with success. Molotovs and incendiary grenades are perhaps the best weapon added to CS in a decade. These weapons cause a wide spread of flames that will help you do some crowd control in those bottleneck corridors. There are also some new shotguns, submachine guns, and other items, including replacements for the USP pistol and MP5. Don't worry: There are no riot shields!

Though I was surprised to find many of GO's visual tweaks in Source when I loaded that dinosaur back up, I still prefer GO's presentation. The HUD, killcam, and achievement notifications give the series a new level of polish and feedback. However, loading old CS games made it apparent just how faulty GO's netcode is in its current state. Lag wasn't crippling in the matches I played but it always had a way of rearing its ugly head. GO also makes joining matches and friends a breeze. It's very much a game of its era, even if its roots are still firmly in the late-'90s.

Like Source before it, Global Offensive is at the mercy of its community. Even with all the work Hidden Path and Valve have put into the game, it remains a hollow shell of what CS: Source has grown into. Though the new modes and features they added are nice, the ones community added to Source that are currently missing here are much nicer -- not to mention the things that Hidden Path has oddly removed (free look, sprays).

If you want an excuse to play Counter-Strike again or an approachable entry point into this esoteric series, GO is a faithful reminder of what made this the little mod that could. However, in its current state, I have my doubts that this will be the version installed on fans' desktops for years to come. As for console players, let's not kid ourselves -- they'll be gone by the end of the year.

It may lack some of the community niceties, beloved maps (Assault, anyone?), and little features of past games, but Global Offensive delivers on the promise of a faithful, polished, and better looking Counter-Strike for whoever wants it. Even if the community doesn't meet the golden standard of 1.6 and Source, CS:GO will remain a multiplayer classic for those willing to put in the time to learn the maps and weapons.

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive reviewed by Allistair Pinsof

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In 1999, I crawled out of Counter-Strike's wretched vagina to become the man I am today. And, now, I'm tasked with rating the game. How does one even rate his mother? In sixth grade, I would wake up for school at 5:30 AM, but ...

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In Jumanji: The Next Level, the gang is back but the game has changed. As they return to Jumanji to rescue one of their own, they discover that nothing is as they expect. The players will have to brave parts unknown and unexplored, from the arid deserts to the snowy mountains, in order to escape the world's most dangerous game.

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the best new album

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Nothing about Post Malone suggests "career pop musician" but that is exactly what he has become. Speaking purely in numbers, he's just about the most ubiquitous pop musician alive: His songs multiply in the culture right now like kudzu or prairie dogs. He takes Jimmy Fallon to the Olive Garden and Medieval Times; he sells his own limited-edition Crocs. He emerges from Rolls Royce crashes unscathed and touches cursed objects on episodes of Ghost Adventures. Pop music is a little bit like Post Malone's very own Hanna-Barbera cartoon right now, and he is somehow both Shaggy and Scooby.

There are plenty of valid reasons to bemoan his dominance. He is kind of a sentient keg stand; he has a pretty lazy and unexamined relationship with hip-hop; there is strong evidence that he might not exactly be the sort of person who thinks through his actions. But if you can wriggle free from all that for just a moment, there is a lot to appreciate in his music. There could be, and have been, far worse pop hegemonies, and in a few years, when his cherubic-face-tatted mug has receded somewhat, the virtues of his music will become more apparent.

Yes, the lyrics can be infuriatingly lazy, particularly when he's tracing over hip-hop tropes about the Mille on his wrist or the 50 carats on his fist. But Post Malone's choruses are just stupefyingly good. Each one sounds like it could furnish a down payment on a personal helipad. Hollywood's Bleeding has about 10 titanium-grade hooks on it, choruses so immediate they erect stadiums in your head while they play-"I'm Gonna Be," "Staring At the Sun," "Allergic," Enemies," "Myself," "Wow." He seems to almost belch these out: "Got so many hits, can't remember 'em all/While I'm taking a shit, look at the plaques on the wall," he yawns charmingly on "On the Road." "Sunflower," his Swae Lee duet that hit No. 1 at the beginning of this year, shows up again outside of last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack, and its presence here among all these other soon-to-be Top 10 hits feels almost like arm-twisting. We get it.

He is also a sneakily agile singer, switching from red-faced howling to smoky crooning to something warbly and strange in between these two poles. He uses all three of those voices plus a surprisingly lithe falsetto on "Allergic," which features a chorus that feels like a down-the-middle split between 2003 Fall Out Boy, 2002 Weezer, and 1983 Billy Joel. It is an immaculate pop construction, and the words-"You're friends with all my demons/The only one that sees them/Too bad for you"-are just delivery systems for the thrill.

Post's music comes from that zone of confusion where hip-hop and alternative rock overlap. Artists keep wandering out of this spot, which widens every year, but it's hard to imagine the vortex producing someone as ready for algorithmic dominion than Post. Depending on how hard you squint, his music sounds alternately and suspiciously like Stone Temple Pilots or Sugar Ray or Everlast or Rae Sremmurd or Def Leppard or Tame Impala. The team behind this sound-a chewed-up ball of the last 25 years of rap and rock radio-consists of Louis Bell, Frank Dukes, and Post. Together, they made most of the brightest and most memorable tracks on last year's Beerbongs & Bentleys, and having established their winning formula, they work it relentlessly on Hollywood. There is no streaming playlist he could not plausibly land on.

There are two kinds of Post Malone songs: Useful and Not Useful. Post Malone's best and dumbest songs (usually one and the same) are intriguing for the appealing note of panic in them: He might have been singing " She got beautiful boobies" but the way he sang it, it sounded like secret code for Please, the combination to the safe, they have my family. This is Useful Posty, and there is a lot of UP ROI on Hollywood's Bleeding. "I'm Gonna Be" is a standard inspirational "be yourself" anthem on paper, but Post bellows the hook with a conviction that suggests a trap production of the musical Cats. He sings the hook to "Internet" with the same lunatic gusto-the message is "the internet sucks lol" but he and co-writer Kanye make it sound like a luxury ocean liner going down.

Moody Posty, by contrast, is not Useful Posty. On the title track, he moans about his demons and wonders who will be at his funeral; nobody needs melancholy despair from the guy who headlined a Bud Light Dive Bar tour. There are too many brooding fashion-plate numbers in general ("Die For Me," "On The Road") and they bog the album down. The aforementioned "Circles" is kind of pretty, kind of smooth, kind of sad. It is not a vehicle for Useful Posty: It sounds like a demo that someone meant to hand directly to Sheryl Crow and accidentally sent to Bobcat Goldthwait. His hair sounds combed. Washed, even.

When he's not wasting time trying to glower, he proves himself surprisingly versatile. "Myself" is a co-write with Father John Misty, of all goddamn people, a wry song about not being about to slow down to appreciate the spoils of success-or, to hear Post tell it, "We slammed butts and Bud Lights to write a cool, top-down, summer cruising song about doing all this shit, being everywhere, but not having the time to fully enjoy it." Post's silly-putty voice twists once more until, voila, somehow he's dirtbag Randy Newman, cruising through the perverse California night. His voice is both malleable and unruly-just as Led Zeppelin attempting reggae somehow managed to sound just like Led Zeppelin, Posty sounds Post-y no matter where you put him.

There are a lot of guests on Hollywood's Bleeding, and all of them sound engaged; when you are this famous, artists tend to give you their first verse, not their fifth or tenth. Rising star DaBaby crushes his turn on "Enemies"; Halsey, on the otherwise drab "Die For Me," breaks into her boyfriend's phone, finds all the girls in his DMs, and takes them all home. And then there is the power ballad "Take What You Want," featuring Travis Scott and Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne sounds pristine and ageless as always; his towering vocals seem teleported directly from the same studio session as " Mama, I'm Coming Home." Post takes over the hook from Osbourne the second time around, and he holds his own against the cyclone of his vocal take-remarkable, considering that by the time the song is over, you have forgotten Travis Scott existed at all. And then: a guitar solo. Not any guitar solo, but one so ludicrous it needs a rider stating it can only be played while straddling twin burning Camaros. It is screamingly wretched and undeniably mind-blowing and the most fascinating musical decision I have heard on a pop song all year.

It makes me think about Rick Ross circa 2010, happy and audacious, enlisting full symphony orchestras for him to rap over, but not before demanding a cigar. There is no one else on earth who would attempt to put such a thing on a pop album destined to break streaming records. These moments-when he dares to suck, gloriously and bravely-is when Post Malone ascends.

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Nothing about Post Malone suggests "career pop musician" but that is exactly what he has become. Speaking purely in numbers, he's just about the most ubiquitous pop musician alive: His songs multiply in the culture right now like kudzu or prairie dogs.

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I have a feeling that "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" is going to be an enormous box office success, but include me out. I didn't much like the first film, and I don't much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks. Nor did I enjoy the shameless attempt to leaven the mayhem by including a preachy subplot about the Pigeon Lady of Central Park. Call me hardhearted, call me cynical, but please don't call me if they make " Home Alone 3." I know, I know - the violence is all a joke. Some of the gags are lifted directly from old color cartoons, and in spirit what we're looking at here are Road Runner adventures, with the crooks playing the role of Wile E. Coyote. As the two hapless mopes fall down ladders and get slammed by bricks and 500-pound bags of cement, and covered with glue and paint and birdseed, you can hear the cackling of the old Looney Tunes heroes in the background. And just like in the cartoons, the crooks are never really hurt; they bounce back, dust themselves off, bend their bones back into shape and are ready for the next adventure. When little Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) taunts them ("Hey! Up here!"), he sounds like Bugs Bunny, and when they chase him (always unwisely), they're in the tradition of Elmer Fudd.

The problem is, cartoon violence is only funny in cartoons.

Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn't funny. Take, for example, the scene in "Home Alone 2" where Kevin lures the crooks into trying to crawl down a rope from the top of a four-story townhouse. He has soaked the rope in kerosene, and when they're halfway down, he sets it on fire. Ho, ho.

The movie repeats the formula of the best-selling original film.

Once again, Kevin's forgetful family leaves home without him (he gets on the plane to New York instead of Miami), and once again they fret while he deals effortlessly with the world. He checks into the Plaza Hotel on his dad's credit card and has time for heartwarming conversations with a kindly old toy shop owner (Eddie Bracken) and a homeless bird lover ( Brenda Fricker), not to mention Donald Trump, before running into his old enemies, the crooks ( Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). When he discovers they plan to rob the toy store, whose receipts are destined for a children's hospital, he knows he has his work cut out for him. ("Messing with kids on Christmas Eve - that's going too far!") The kid outsmarts the usual assortment of supercilious adults, including hotel clerk Tim Curry, before setting a series of ingenious traps for the crooks. As before, he seems to have a complete command of all handyman skills, including rigging ladders and wiring appliances for electrical shocks - and, of course, he finds all the props he needs, even for rigging the exploding toilet and setting that staple gun to fire through the keyhole.

In between the painful practical jokes, there's his treacly relationship with Fricker, as the Pigeon Lady, who shows him her hideaway inside the ceiling of Carnegie Hall. Christmas carols swell from the concert below as the sanctimonious little twerp lectures the old lady on the meaning of life. If he believes half of what he says, he'd give the crooks a break.

Is this a children's movie? I confess I do not know. Millions of kids will go to see it. There used to be movies where it was bad for little kids to hurt grown-ups. Now Kevin bounces bricks off their skulls from the rooftops, and everybody laughs. The question isn't whether the movie will scare the children in the audience. It's whether the adults will be able to peek between their fingers.

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Home Alone 2: Lost In New York movie review (1992) | Roger Ebert

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I have a feeling that "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" is going to be an enormous box office success, but include me out. I didn't much like the first film, and I don't much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks.

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HP3 has a new director on board: Alfonso Cuarón, widely understood to be introducing a darker, more grown-up feel to the Harry Potter adventures. Cuarón famously crowned his last movie, Y Tu Mamá También, with his male leads indulging in a three-way love romp with an older woman who withdraws leaving the men to get it on. Happily, Cuarón's treatment of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley has nothing more daring than allowing them to say "bloody" without getting a clip round the ear.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is, however, literally darker than the first two bright, clean movies that Chris Columbus delivered: a touch muddier, a hint grainier in its look. And to add to the general air of disquiet, there seems to be - unless I am imagining this - a silent, fleeting cameo at the very beginning by Ian Brown, late of the Stone Roses, glimpsed morosely on his own in a pub called the Leaky Cauldron.

Otherwise things are not so very different for Harry and his wizardly chums. As ever, we start with Harry's enforced confinement during the holidays in the suburban home of his hateful muggle relatives, Uncle Vernon (Richard Griffiths) and Aunt Petunia (Fiona Shaw) and these days hormones are kicking in to fuel the resentment. Taller, ganglier Harry has got a bit of fierce teen attitude - a little bit anyway - and breaks the no-magic-outside-Hogwarts rule, hexing his unspeakable Aunt Marge (Pam Ferris) by making her blow up like Mrs Creosote and letting her float away.

This infringement is, however, overlooked by the school authorities and soon Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is back at Hogwarts with Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). This time around the big scare is that the evil wizard Sirius Black, played by Gary Oldman, rumoured to be responsible for the death of Harry's parents, has escaped from the prison at Azkaban and is headed their way. But there are secrets and secrets-within-secrets to be uncovered about Sirius and his relationship with Harry.

As ever with the Harry Potter series, the actors playing the new teacher-intake supply much of the fun. Professor Dumbledore is portrayed by Michael Gambon who, perhaps in honour of the late Richard Harris, does it with a faint Irish accent. Emma Thompson is on great form as Sybil Trelawney, a scatty, pop-eyed Professor of Divination who reads tea leaves. (The parent or guardian accompanying each group of Harry Potter fans will have to explain afterwards what tea leaves are.) David Thewlis brings saturnine charisma to the role of Professor Lupin, the new Defence Against Dark Arts teacher. Among the existing staff, Alan Rickman gets some laughs with his acid, rolling consonants, and Robbie Coltrane has charm and real pathos as Hagrid, the bulky old retainer who gets into trouble for letting the Hippogriff, a bizarre horse-eagle creature, attack one of the pupils.

Hermione mischievously disrupts the time-space continuum with a time machine which allows her to spy on herself from afar. "Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?" she says crossly - the best line in the film.

It's all rattling good fun, but oddly, considering that this is around 20 minutes shorter than the previous film, I found my attention wandering more often. Cuarón stages the big set-pieces well but may not have Columbus's gift for driving the storyline onwards at all times, round the obstacles and over the speed bumps. Perhaps it's possible to get blase about this most reliable of entertainment franchises, which has translated the bestselling books to the screen with such energy and good humour.

But I'm not sure how often we can watch, for film after film, that opening scene in Uncle Vernon's suburban house, then the scenes outside in the street, then the railway station and then the dangerous but essentially cosy Hogwarts, where Harry gets to fly around on broomsticks or fantasy animals. After three movies, I find myself now longing for Harry to test his powers outside the closed world of school, to confront a human adversary in a situation where magic skills may or may not be of any use, or else to use them to quell a wizard-opponent viciously seeking dominion in the muggle world.

Instead, the impetus of the Harry Potter films seems at this stage to be in the opposite direction: to retreat further from the concerns of non-magic civilians into an autistic wizard-ish universe, which will be increasingly baroque and complex and pregnant with its own self-important Tolkien-esque seriousness and "darkness". This new Harry Potter picture will cast a spell on its fanbase. But the broomstick's losing altitude.
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harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

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HP3 has a new director on board: Alfonso Cuarón, widely understood to be introducing a darker, more grown-up feel to the Harry Potter adventures. Cuarón famously crowned his last movie, Y Tu Mamá También, with his male leads indulging in a three-way love romp with an older woman who withdraws leaving the men to get it on.

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Stretching a horror story into a TV series is a long shot, even for a show as well-crafted and well-performed as FX's new "American Horror Story."

Most of our best horror productions, from "Dracula" and " Psycho" to " Friday the 13th," have immediately sent our adrenalin level soaring and then kept it there for an hour or two before releasing the pressure.

A weekly series needs a different rhythm.

"American Horror Story," which premieres Wednesday night at 10, takes the same attitude about dramatic boundaries as "Glee," which is to say, it pays no attention.

While it's faithful to the horror-film tradition, right down to lights that flicker off at precisely the wrong moment, "American Horror" cheerfully integrates Hitchcock-style psychological horror with old-school ax murders.

Like many horror films, "American Horror" starts with a creepy house, this one in Los Angeles. L.A. may not have as many troubled old houses as, say, New England, but in case anyone doubts the town's credibility for bad-house karma, an early episode references the Manson murders.

This particular house's backstory will unfold gradually, as will the backstories of its past and present inhabitants.

This may leave some viewers puzzled at first, since the premiere episode raises more concerns than it explains. The good news for viewers is that a considerable number are addressed in the next episode or two.

The story itself revolves around the Harmon family: psychologist Ben ( Dylan McDermott), his wife, Vivien ( Connie Britton) and their daughter, Violet (Taissa Farmiga).

They have moved to this house from Boston, hoping to start fresh after a couple of events that changed their relationships.

They didn't count on the house, however, or on a new circle of acquaintances that includes their creepy next-door neighbor Constance ( Jessica Lange) and a disturbed young patient named Tate ( Evan Peters), who seems interested in Violet.

We won't explain plot details, because they're part of the fun of watching. The viewer might want to know only that things get complicated fast and that several of the performances, while well handled, have a stylized feel.

"American Horror" doesn't fit a lot of patterns, but it does fit the style of many recent successful cable dramas, from "The Killing" to " Sons of Anarchy."

Viewers who like the horror genre and the offbeat Murphy/Falchuk approach, and who are willing to put in enough serious time to absorb all the nuances, will fall in love.

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'American Horror Story' review: Dylan McDermott and Taissa Farmiga star in boundary-pushing series

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Stretching a horror story into a TV series is a long shot, even for a show as well-crafted and well-performed as FX's new "American Horror Story." Most of our best horror productions, from "Dracula" and "Psycho" to "Friday the 13th," have immediately sent our adrenalin level soaring and then kept it there for an hour or two before releasing the pressure.

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he filming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games,
Each actor involved here looks mad as a hatter,
When the trailer came out, we were CALLING THEM NAMES.
It began with Cat poems from old TS Eliot,
In the 80s, Lloyd Webber just put them on stage
That was frankly a bit of a gamble for Andrew, but
Coach-loads of punters made Cats all the rage.

Now Cats is on film, with many a lonely puss
Played by performers of A-lister class.
But the number of mammaries looks frankly erroneous
And tails that appear to emerge from each arse.
There are lots of big names here, names we see daily,
Names that supposedly give us a lift.
Nothing like Jonathan Pie or Bill Bailey,
But names like James Corden, and - yes - Taylor Swift.
The setting is London, it does look post-nuclear
There aren't any people, so maybe there were
Bomb blasts - or maybe a bio disaster
Causing cat-human mutants with digital fur.
The twitching of ears on their heads is distracting

Bemused ... Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy. Photograph: Universal Pictures

As they gaze at the greenscreen and sashay and crawl,
It's weird to behold them all gurning and acting,
And why do so many resemble Darth Maul?
Did director Tom Hooper intend this appearance?
Did it make him feel happy - or cause him some stress?
We have to assume that he gave it his clearance
But THE MAN HIMSELF KNOWS and will never confess.
These are the Jellicle felines of legend,
All elbows and shoulders and undulant arms.
Each male in the cast looks a bit of a bellend,
And those bizarre whiskers don't add to their charms.
The Jellicles welcome Victoria: a new cat,
Francesca Hayward's the thesp with this role,
She's sleek, unlike Corden - well known for TV chat
But it's his size that reveals that he's meant to be droll.
And then Idris Elba comes on as McCavity,
(A boomy-voiced villain in anyone's book)
There's a prominent gap in his penis locality.
I honestly didn't ... well ... know where to look.
As Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson will sniffle
Singing Memory, this movie's moment of truth.

Gurning and sashaying ... Cats. Photograph: Universal Pictures

But it's warbling warbling warbling piffle
From a bag lady drama-queen obsessed with lost youth.
The Jellicles' leader is Old Deuteronomy
Judi Dench has this part, looking very bemused.
What's with that extra big fur coat? You've got me.
She looks bewildered and (like us) confused.
Obviously, Ian McKellen is in it,
And he's got a tatty old topcoat as well.
The other cats' nude state is clearly permitted.
But why? That is something that no cat will tell.
There's another cat in it, by name Mungojerrie,
Not the 70s pop group who once raised a cheer,
With their Summertime chart hit that really was very
Much better, more catchy, than anything here.

Ray Winstone's the creepiest cat in this feature
His Growltiger sends a sharp chill down your spine
With his hissing he looks like he's having a seizure,
It's scary - like adverts for betting online.
When you notice these cats in profound meditation
With a digitally created frown on their brow
Their minds are engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of what on earth to do now.
"Pretend to be cats!" says a director. They reply ...
"Me? How?"

* Cats is released in the UK and the US on 20 December and in Australia on 26 December.

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Cats review - a purr-fectly dreadful hairball of woe | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

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he filming of Cats is a difficult matter,It isn't just one of your holiday games,Each actor involved here looks mad as a hatter,When the trailer came out, we were CALLING THEM NAMES.It began with Cat poems from old TS Eliot,In the 80s, Lloyd Webber just put them on stageThat was frankly a bit of a gamble for Andrew, butCoach-loads of punters made Cats all the rage.

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Jumanji is back, activating the time-honoured sequel device of bringing in character actors from the older grandparent generation. It is showing every sign of becoming a very solid family-movie franchise, cheerfully drawing once more on the traditions of Indiana Jones and the body-swap movies of yesteryear. And there is once again a really nice quadrophonic chemistry between its four stars: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black (joined by more big names this time around), and the odd-couple comedy bonding of Hart and Johnson. (A noticeable flaw is that Black does not get much of a chance to demonstrate his comedy chops.)

In the previous instalment of the franchise, four high-school kids, Bethany (Madison Iseman), Spence (Alex Wolff), Martha (Morgan Turner) and Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain), were catapulted into the VR world of the Jumanji video game, occupying avatars on a mission to rescue someone trapped inside its colossal invented landscape. And Spence got to exist inside the body of alpha-male explorer Dr Smoulder Bravestone, amusingly played by Johnson - an experience that allowed him to escape his wimpy-nerdishness, value himself for who he is, and learn that it's what inside that counts.

Now, a couple of years have gone by, the quartet are at college and things aren't quite as happy as we might have hoped. Spence is at NYU, lonely, stressed and pining for his bygone triumph in the imaginary world of Jumanji. Without his three friends realising it, he has retrieved the Jumanji game console and has once again made a desperate leap into the digital rabbit-hole. It looks as if the remaining three will have to leap in after him - but now we make the acquaintance of Spence's crotchety but good-natured grandpa Eddie, played by Danny DeVito, and Eddie's old codger pal Milo, played by Danny Glover. Through a weird quirk of fate, it is Fridge and Martha who re-enter Jumanji, bizarrely accompanied by wacky old Eddie and Milo, with Bethany left behind, to search out the object of their original quest: Alex, played in the real world by Colin Hanks and in the game by Nick Jonas. They too will wind up in this fantasy universe.

So the question of who plays who has been reshuffled and suffice it to say DeVito's grumpy, pernickety, wisecracking old dude now occupies the mighty body of Johnson - giving Johnson a chance to show his comedy stylings, and pretty impressive they are. It is rare in the literal-minded world of Hollywood (in any genre) to let an actor show off in this theatrical way. As for Glover's laidback Milo, he occupies the body of zoologist Moose Finbar, played by Hart - and Hart is funny in more or less the way he would have been anyway. Martha is once again biologist Ruby Roundhouse and Fridge is annoyed to find himself inside Jack Black's body. And where is Spence? Whose body does he inhabit? Well, this is a casting reveal, and it would be unsporting to say more, but more performance comedy ensues.

What gives Jumanji its likability is that it has the emphases and comedy beats of an animation, but also the performance technique of live action - and the occasional reshuffling of avatars and players lets the actors show off a little bit further. Jumanji's next level is rather satisfying. Perhaps the next Jumanji film will experiment with an "acoustic unplugged" version which takes place solely in the real world, or a dark version in which Martha becomes a hip games designer who introduces a Battle Royale element. But my prediction is that fans would be perfectly happy with another episode on the same lines as before.

*Released in the UK on 11 December, in the US 13 December, and in Australia on 26 December.
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Jumanji: The Next Level review - Dwayne Johnson ups his comedy game

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Jumanji is back, activating the time-honoured sequel device of bringing in character actors from the older grandparent generation. It is showing every sign of becoming a very solid family-movie franchise, cheerfully drawing once more on the traditions of Indiana Jones and the body-swap movies of yesteryear.

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nding a trilogy can be as tricky as destroying a Death Star, requiring a rare mix of battlefield experience and blind faith in The Force. Those, presumably, are the qualities that put JJ Abrams back in the pilot's seat for this safe but solid series finale, after Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow (who was originally signed to direct) failed to take control of this blockbuster ship.

Turning his back on the controversies of The Last Jedi, Abrams conjures a mix of crowd-pleasing spectacle and unadventurous storytelling, steering a whizz-bang course between a series of oddly familiar set pieces as he ties up some long-running narrative threads while leaving others hanging. The result is a handsome if creaky and oddly inconsequential final film that lurches around the galaxy at light speed without actually getting anywhere, as it steers a course between the inventive and the inevitable.

Back in 1983, the first Star Wars trilogy ended less with a bang than a whimsy, as Return of the Jedifailed to live up to its series-best predecessor The Empire Strikes Back (it was memorably dismissed as only having "a bunch of muppets" in Kevin Smith's Clerks). Fast-forward to 2005 and for all it manifest flaws, proved to be a low highlight of George Lucas's terrible prequel trilogy - ploddingly executed, yet still somehow preferable to the inanities of The Phantom Menaceand Attack of the Clones.

With The Rise of Skywalker, the stakes are raised not only because it attempts to wrap up a story arc spanning three trilogies, but also because it follows what proved to be the most divisive episode in the entire series. After the reinvigorating thrills of The Force Awakens(the best Star Wars film since Empire), some fans howled with frenzied derision at Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, feeling "betrayed" by its somewhat iconoclastic take on the series' ever-expanding mythology, a complaint Abrams appears to have taken to heart.

Stylistically, The Rise of Skywalker returns to the aesthetics of The Force Awakens, juggling rocket-fuelled action sequences - dogfights, desert chases and saber-battles abound - with straight-faced "dark v light" standoffs, retaining the thread of humour that dates back to A New Hopewhile still taking the unfolding events deadly seriously. While Rian Johnson delighted in wrong-footing viewer expectations (Luke comically ditching a sacred talismanic object in Episode VIII raised laughs, gasps and shrieks of dismay in equal measure), Abrams keeps things closer to home, reviving that strange sense of quasi-mystical cod-reverence that was the hallmark of Lucas's original productions.

John Boyega and Naomi Ackie ride into the fray. Photograph: Allstar/ Lucasfilm/ Disney

We pick up with our heroes still pluckily fighting back against the First Order, unaware of a greater phantom menace lurking in the background. In a world in which a cast list can be a plot-spoiler, and death (both real and fictional) is no impediment to resurrection, suffice to say that all the key characters return, including Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia, thanks to repurposed cut-scene footage from The Force Awakens.

As for the narrative, Abrams (who shares screenplay credits with Chris Terrio) returns to the core themes to which he and Lawrence Kasdan had "projected forward" when writing The Force Awakens, largely sidestepping (or just flat-out ignoring) the more intriguing googlies of The Last Jedi. Rey's identity is once again at the heart of the story (the question "who is she?" reverberates throughout), wrestling with her own potentially destructive powers as she continues her long-distance, combative relationship with Kylo Ren.

Both Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver rise to the challenge of their roles, with the former increasingly commanding the screen while the latter exhibits vulnerabilities beneath the cracked face mask. Between them, they carry the burden of the film's emotional core as Abrams invokes the fractured-family revelations of yore that have always been a Star Wars staple.

Other cast members are less well-served as they ping-pong around the galaxy, chasing clues and objects that open doors leading to other clues and objects like players in some vast, multi-level video game. For such an essentially simple story, there's a superfluity of plotty exposition, bogged down by an underlying risk-aversion that promptly undoes any genuinely daring developments.

What we're left with is an entertaining but rather empty greatest hits compilation of familiar riffs, characters and iconic space hardware - a feeling amplified by John Williams's score, which revisits key themes from the entire series in appropriately heart-swelling, tear-jerking fashion.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker review - may the ninth be with you...

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nding a trilogy can be as tricky as destroying a Death Star, requiring a rare mix of battlefield experience and blind faith in The Force. Those, presumably, are the qualities that put JJ Abrams back in the pilot's seat for this safe but solid series finale, after Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow (who was originally signed to direct) failed to take control of this blockbuster ship.

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Pedro Pascal plays the title character in Disney Plus's new show, "The Mandalorian." (Francois Duhamel/Lucasfilm Ltd.)

Queuing up the first episode of "The Mandalorian," the big-ticket offering in Tuesday's launch of the category-killer streaming TV service called Disney Plus, it's impossible not to recall that great run-along-now line from "Arrested Development's" Lucille Bluth: "Here's some money. Go see a Star War."

As Lucasfilm's first live-action Star Wars television series, "The Mandalorian" will cost you $6.99 a month - which is surely just an introductory fare for the first of us clones who get in line. I opted for the yearly plan ($69.99, thanks), not because I'm dying to have more Disney content crammed into my eyeholes, earholes and air holes (especially after that nauseating "Little Mermaid Live!" production on Disney-owned ABC the other night), but because surrender just seemed to be the only option left to click. The FOMO is strong in this one.

The mouse empire is coming for us with all of its firepower - princesses, mermaids, Marvel heroes, Muppets, droids, Bart Simpson, you name it. It doesn't just feel like we're drowning in content; we've already drowned. This is Disney's master plan: take up all the air that's left.

As for "The Mandalorian," there's not a lot to say yet except to report the good news that it is very much in keeping with a Star War - visually intriguing, amusingly adventurous and light on its feet, a space-western comfortable with the tropes of cinema culture and common reference points. This is clear the moment the Mandalorian himself (Pedro Pascal of "Narcos" and "Game of Thrones"), in his Boba Fett get-up, enters a grimy backwater saloon filled with creature criminals and demonstrates that he's the fastest draw around - it's cowboys and aliens.

The episode acquaints us generally, though certainly not deeply, with the Mandalorian's busy and often violent work as a bounty hunter - so busy, alas, that it's not clear if or when we'll ever see him take off his helmet.

It's set during a reconstruction era in an even farther away part of that galaxy far, far away, after the collapse of the Empire but before the rise of the fascist First Order (in other words, in that void between "Return of the Jedi" and "The Force Awakens"). With civil war as Star Wars' continual backdrop, the series tantalizingly suggests that it might make time to explore the notion that an entire galaxy can ever really be ruled. What about all the planets the war never gets to?

While the people behind "The Mandalorian" have their thinkin' caps on, it might also help to know why bounty hunting - the capture of humanoids and other species who are in financial hock to gangsters, crime lords and random shady lenders - is such a recurring theme in Lucas lore. We see the Mandalorian deliver his deep-frozen cargo and collect the bounty, where he informs his client that he doesn't take Imperial credits anymore. "I don't know if you've heard, but the Empire is gone," he says.

The same client offers the Mandalorian a lead on a newer, riskier job, which sends him to the lair of another heavy - sorry, with Star Wars, one never really knows who anyone is until there's an action figure on the toy shelves. But I can tell you this guy is played by none other than the dutifully doleful German filmmaker Werner Herzog. (You go, Werner. Get that cash.)

That's one nice thing about "The Mandalorian": As conceived and written by Jon Favreau (the actor-director, not the political podcaster), the series immediately shows signs of a sharp sense of humor about itself, which has always been a key ingredient to any successful Star Wars outing. Favreau and company also have great fun sprinkling their scenes with all the little gizmos and weirdos that let fans know we're in good hands, that the child within is still being served. In addition to the oddly satisfying sight of one of Jabba the Hutt's preferred species of lap monkey being roasted on a spit, there are landspeeders, R2 units and, at long last, a Star Wars toilet.

The Mandalorian's new gig leads him to another planet, where he meets a pig-snouted rancher played by Nick Nolte. (You go, Nick. Get paid.) After a bit of bronco-bustin' involving alligator-cows (again emphasizing the series's desire to play as a western), the Mandalorian ends up in a shootout, where he encounters a naive IG bounty hunter droid (voiced by actor-director Taika Waititi) pursuing the same target. Hoots and hollers from fans will surely greet the episode's big reveal of who (or what) the target is.

Rejecting Netflix's binge model, Disney Plus will parse out the remaining seven episodes between now and Christmastime, at which point you're supposed to report to your local multiplex for an actual Star Wars movie ("The Rise of Skywalker," the ninth and allegedly last - ha! - of the Skywalker trilogies that began in 1977).

Looking past that, Disney Plus is impressive mainly for its archive, which by now includes a heaping helping of everything. The service's other original TV offerings are a bit weak so far, including "Encore!," a reality series nominally hosted by Kristen Bell ("The Good Place"), wherein a different group of adults each week are offered the chance to restage the musical they starred in during high school 12 or 20 (or more) years ago.

It's a sweet idea in theory, until it's actually happening, and then it just seems creepy. Everyday Americans already have problems facing the future, often seeking solace in nostalgia. ("Here's some money. Go see a Star War.")

"Encore!" drags its participants back into a presumably rosier past, where they once more try to belt out tunes from "Annie" or "Beauty and the Beast." More Disney properties grafted onto Disney notions of life. The corporate hope here is that you'll subscribe and sing along.

The Mandalorian (40 minutes) is available on Disney Plus, a new subscription streaming service. The remaining seven episodes will premiere each week, beginning Friday.

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Review | With a swagger in his step, 'The Mandalorian' is here to collect his fee. Better pay up.

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Queuing up the first episode of "The Mandalorian," the big-ticket offering in Tuesday's launch of the category-killer streaming TV service called Disney Plus, it's impossible not to recall that great run-along-now line from "Arrested Development's" Lucille Bluth: "Here's some money. Go see a Star War."

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On the court, NBA 2K20 is a dazzling experience that matches the energy and presentation of its real-life counterpart. Enhanced footwork, dribbling, and player spacing help improve an already sturdy foundation. However, outside of the surprisingly well-written story mode, NBA 2K20 loses its focus off of the court. NBA 2K20 excels at recreating the pro game, but opportunities to purchase microtransactions exist at nearly every corner, and complex modes like MyLeague are given far too little attention.

The first thing I noticed about NBA 2K20 is that everything feels more intuitive. The learning curve is still immense, but learning the basics is now a lot smoother than it used to be. A redesigned "2KU", NBA 2K20's optional tutorial mode, is particularly helpful and doesn't require more than an hour to get through. Thoughtfully, an on-screen controller mimics the movement of the desired skill, making it plenty easy to imitate. Once I successfully learned a skill, like eurostepping toward the basket, I could move on at whatever pace I felt comfortable. This allowed for the remastering of skills I forgot about since last year, and trying out some moves I hadn't been able to pull off previously at all.

Every IGN NBA 2K Review Ever

NBA 2K20 upholds the recent franchise tradition of having top-notch presentation. Players are expertly crafted to mirror their real-life selves and a bevvy of apparel options have been added to help match the NBA's sense of style. Both players and announcers will flash a lifeless gaze every now and again, but it wouldn't be so noticeable if everything from the player's shoes to the court floors weren't so meticulously crafted. I also noticed some awkward pauses between David Aldridge and players during interviews, which is a stark contrast to the effortless flow of commentary from the likes of Kevin Harlan, Greg Anthony, Chris Webber, Doris Burke and more. NBA 2K20's stellar A/V package is rapidly approaching what can be seen on television, and that really is a remarkable accomplishment.

While the NBA 2K franchise has always done an excellent job making each player feel unique, having a renewed sense of mastery over the controls brings out the best in each player. Pulling off step-back jumpers with James Harden or blow-bys with Eric Bledsoe is really satisfying, and with improved defensive A.I., more important than it has been in the past. Defenders are better equipped to deal with speedy players, especially in transition, where tactics like "walling up" (a defense strategy used to forced contested shots near the rim) are employed against drive-heavy players like LeBron James. Learning when to pull up for a jumper and when to drive it right to the basket provides a welcomed new layer of frantic strategy.

Learning when to pull up for a jumper and when to drive it right to the basket provides a welcomed new layer of frantic strategy.

A lot of this is amplified by the badge system, which attaches unique abilities to players that are less tangible than something like the speed or strength attribute. Take the "Pogo Stick" badge, for instance. This allows for players like Anthony Davis to quickly regroup after a blocked shot, making it easier to block several shots in a row. Another interesting badge is "Worm", which is attached to players who are better at slipping through box-outs when rebounding. The total badge count is about 80, and it really can't be overstated how much they can be felt while playing. NBA 2K20 goes above and beyond to make every player feel and play unique.

The best gameplay addition to NBA 2K20, however, is the upgraded ball-handling system. Instead of canned animations taking over mid-dribble, every success and failure I had with the ball in my hands felt earned. Even flipping the basketball from one hand to another feels satisfying, especially when you follow it up with a ankle-breaking crossover from someone like Kyrie Irving. Given how much time is spent looking at players with the ball, the newly added dribbling animations help things look different, too. Watching Giannis barrel down the court with long strides is just as majestic as you would expect. The pursuit of mastery is NBA 2K20's best hook, and the ball-handling mechanics are the best example of that.

You can watch the "Momentous" trailer for 2K20 below:

Still, a lot of the franchise's legacy issues persist and a few new ones crop up. The CPU rarely plays with the urgency it should, ignoring easy 2-for-1 scenarios and milking the clock even when they are losing in the final moments of a game. Infrequently, the CPU will also dribble out of bounds for seemingly no reason at all. Perhaps worst of all is a far-too-frequent double team that happens on any player who scores a handful of points in succession. The idea is right - adjustments need to be made on players who are hot - but it's often far too premature and easy to break down.

A lot of the gameplay improvements are magnified in the new WNBA mode. Spacing feels particularly good, which is key in simulating the differences between the men's and women's game. It ultimately leads to better off-ball movement and smoother play in general. The animations are almost unique to the league, helping differentiate itself from NBA play. It could be the novelty of getting to play with a whole new set of stars, like Candace Parker or Liz Cambage, but it feels entirely fresh.

A lot of the gameplay improvements are magnified in the new WNBA mode.

The WNBA mode is not without its problems, however, including a noticeably worse commentary team of Blake Suniga, Tim Swartz, and Brian Banifatemi. While it's nice that the trio is entirely separate from the NBA's broadcast crew, it seems like this would have been a perfect spot to bring in Doris Burke (who is already in it) or someone like Pam Ward. As a whole, the crew isn't bad, it's just hard to switch from the rock-solid presentation package that the NBA has. On top of that, the WNBA is unavailable for online play. This is a shame, because the league would be perfect for some competitive matches against other players. Luckily, NBA 2K20 comes with a WNBA season mode for some extended depth, even if it doesn't reach the heights of the much deeper MyLeague installed for NBA play.

Beyond the Court

Speaking of MyLeague, it's received disgracefully few enhancements in 2K20. It's also one of the few modes left untouched by microtransactions. MyLeague is so close to being feature complete that it would be easier to ignore the lack of improvement if some of the major problems, like the inability to sign-and-trade players, were seen to. Some quality of life changes were made, like the option to force wins and losses (in the case that you want a particular result while simulating), but it's clear that MyLeague wasn't given the attention it deserves. Unfortunately, it's mostly ignored in favor of the casino-like MyTeam, which provides a host of complicated problems for NBA 2K20.

Check out the "House of Next" trailer for 2K20 below:

The best thing about MyTeam is also the worst thing about MyTeam: it provides an endless set of things to do. It became immediately clear to me that the mode's centralized goal is to extract as much money as I am willing to give up in place of not having to grind out various mundane challenges. Not only did I find myself disinterested in grinding tasks with a roster of bottom-of-the-barrel players, unlocking a "premiere" pack costs anywhere in between $5-10, and even then there is no guarantee of who or what I would be receiving. To make matters worse, the entire mode and its UI is designed like a casino, all the way up to a lifeless roulette wheel that randomly stops upon a prize. The only redeeming quality to the entire mode is a card-pack ripping sound effect - which only served to remind me of how preferable real-life card collecting is to the joylessness of MyTeam.

The available game modes aren't universally a disappointment, however. The MyCareer story mode "When The Lights Are Brightest" is the best entry for NBA 2K yet. It kicks off with an entirely new create-a-player feature that allows for a host of possibilities. I went with a lengthy, defensive-minded power forward, but a wealth of options gave reason for future creations. MyCareer also boasts a new-and-improved badge system that allowed me to avoid needless grinding for specific badges in favor of choosing them myself.

It's clear MyTeam's central goal is to extract as much money as I am willing to give up in place of not having to grind out mundane challenges.

While this obviously isn't a high bar to cross, the writing in this year's iteration is witty and pretty well executed by a star-studded cast that includes Idris Elba, Rosario Dawson, and Thomas Middleditch. The story follows Che (performed by Deric Augstine), a college senior on his way to the NBA Draft. Right before graduating, Che sits out of his final collegient game in protest after his friend is stripped of his scholarship due to a season-ending injury. This sets off a series of interesting ripple effects, like souring Che's relationship with his coach (Elba).

"Lights" thankfully skips on most of the boring and ultimately meaningless gameplay to deliver a more cinematic experience. The story is only four or five hours long, but it navigates some interesting issues inside of the sport, like the manipulation of student athletes and the temporary nature of an NBAer's career. It never overstays its welcome, and every time the story slows down for a second, it picks back up moments later. A few fun gameplay variants, like participating in a series of mini-games for the NBA Draft Combine, help set When The Lights Are Brightest as the new standard for story modes in sports video games.
Watch the trailer below for a glimpse at MyCareer's story:
Unfortunately, microtransactions are just as prevalent in MyCareer as they are elsewhere. Even while playing the Legend Edition, which comes with a whopping 100,000 virtual currency (the equivalent of about $25), I was only able to level up my created player to an overall grade of 82. Playing in the MyCareer scrimmages and summer league games would be an absolute slog with a significantly worse player to control. Still, the ease with which I was able to upgrade my player's attributes seemed like a significant improvement from last year - even if that isn't saying much. One welcome change is that you are able to test out various builds before diving in, making it less of a gamble that I would grind my way to the top only to figure out I didn't like my player archetype.

Progression in MyCareer feels like a significant improvement from last year, even if that isn't saying much.

In the matches I've played online, I found NBA 2K20 to be pretty good in a player-versus-player setting, as it punishes arcade-style play and rewards playing strategically and to a team's strengths. Even the matches where my opponent clearly didn't have a great connection resulted in minimal amounts of latency, but it is noticeable - especially given the precision of the controls. All the time I spent in 2KU really paid off, as it was easy to notice which players hadn't taken the time to learn the ins and outs. It is more fun than ever to beat down online opponents.

It's also worth mentioning that while I only experienced small inconveniences with online myself, other players are currently reporting widespread issues with random disconnections, crashes, and other online bugs. 2K says it's already working to address these issues, but they seem to be persisting as of the time of this review.

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On the court, NBA 2K20 is a dazzling experience that matches the energy and presentation of its real-life counterpart. Enhanced footwork, dribbling, and player spacing help improve an already sturdy foundation. However, outside of the surprisingly well-written story mode, NBA 2K20 loses its focus off of the court.

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Only the best Christmas movie ever.

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Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot. It's the film that wrested the catchphrase "Yippee-ki-ay" away from Roy Rogers, with a certain vulgar addition. Every pub quizzer knows it's a Christmas movie, but not many know of its unexpected cinematic use of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth - the terrorists whistle it as they get closer to the target.

Bruce Willis plays New York police detective John McClane, in Los Angeles for an uneasy reunion with his semi-estranged wife, having failed to support her career move out there. While at her office building, owned by a Japanese corporation, the whole place is taken over by fanatically armed German extremists, an unfortunate juxtaposition of Axis powers. The intruders are led by Hans Gruber, a renegade German terrorist with links to Northern Ireland's "New Provo Front". It's a glorious scene-stealer for Alan Rickman, though it's a credit to Willis's cheeky charisma that his scene is not in fact stolen.

Singlehandedly, covered in sweat and muscles, wearing nothing on his top half but a manly vest and finally not even that, McClane hides in the elevator shaft and takes down Gruber and his whole hideous crew, one by one. The only help he has from the outside is a tough, capable LAPD cop, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson). The stuffed shirts of the FBI are certainly no help and the TV news media are needless to say the terrorists' contemptible useful idiots. Finally, his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) introduces herself to Al using her married name, and the natural order of things is restored.

It's an incredible 80s time capsule, with Hans fondling a Filofax as he silkily addresses the hostages and a coke-snorting office worker describing the situation in terms of a hostile takeover: with talk of "Greenmail", "Poison pill" and "white knight". An innocent pleasure.
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Die Hard review - Bruce Willis Christmas classic is still a blast

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Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot. It's the film that wrested the catchphrase "Yippee-ki-ay" away from Roy Rogers, with a certain vulgar addition.

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nding a trilogy can be as tricky as destroying a Death Star, requiring a rare mix of battlefield experience and blind faith in The Force. Those, presumably, are the qualities that put JJ Abrams back in the pilot's seat for this safe but solid series finale, after Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow (who was originally signed to direct) failed to take control of this blockbuster ship.

Turning his back on the controversies of The Last Jedi, Abrams conjures a mix of crowd-pleasing spectacle and unadventurous storytelling, steering a whizz-bang course between a series of oddly familiar set pieces as he ties up some long-running narrative threads while leaving others hanging. The result is a handsome if creaky and oddly inconsequential final film that lurches around the galaxy at light speed without actually getting anywhere, as it steers a course between the inventive and the inevitable.

Back in 1983, the first Star Wars trilogy ended less with a bang than a whimsy, as Return of the Jedifailed to live up to its series-best predecessor The Empire Strikes Back (it was memorably dismissed as only having "a bunch of muppets" in Kevin Smith's Clerks). Fast-forward to 2005 and for all it manifest flaws, proved to be a low highlight of George Lucas's terrible prequel trilogy - ploddingly executed, yet still somehow preferable to the inanities of The Phantom Menaceand Attack of the Clones.

With The Rise of Skywalker, the stakes are raised not only because it attempts to wrap up a story arc spanning three trilogies, but also because it follows what proved to be the most divisive episode in the entire series. After the reinvigorating thrills of The Force Awakens(the best Star Wars film since Empire), some fans howled with frenzied derision at Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, feeling "betrayed" by its somewhat iconoclastic take on the series' ever-expanding mythology, a complaint Abrams appears to have taken to heart.

Stylistically, The Rise of Skywalker returns to the aesthetics of The Force Awakens, juggling rocket-fuelled action sequences - dogfights, desert chases and saber-battles abound - with straight-faced "dark v light" standoffs, retaining the thread of humour that dates back to A New Hopewhile still taking the unfolding events deadly seriously. While Rian Johnson delighted in wrong-footing viewer expectations (Luke comically ditching a sacred talismanic object in Episode VIII raised laughs, gasps and shrieks of dismay in equal measure), Abrams keeps things closer to home, reviving that strange sense of quasi-mystical cod-reverence that was the hallmark of Lucas's original productions.

John Boyega and Naomi Ackie ride into the fray. Photograph: Allstar/ Lucasfilm/ Disney

We pick up with our heroes still pluckily fighting back against the First Order, unaware of a greater phantom menace lurking in the background. In a world in which a cast list can be a plot-spoiler, and death (both real and fictional) is no impediment to resurrection, suffice to say that all the key characters return, including Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia, thanks to repurposed cut-scene footage from The Force Awakens.

As for the narrative, Abrams (who shares screenplay credits with Chris Terrio) returns to the core themes to which he and Lawrence Kasdan had "projected forward" when writing The Force Awakens, largely sidestepping (or just flat-out ignoring) the more intriguing googlies of The Last Jedi. Rey's identity is once again at the heart of the story (the question "who is she?" reverberates throughout), wrestling with her own potentially destructive powers as she continues her long-distance, combative relationship with Kylo Ren.

Both Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver rise to the challenge of their roles, with the former increasingly commanding the screen while the latter exhibits vulnerabilities beneath the cracked face mask. Between them, they carry the burden of the film's emotional core as Abrams invokes the fractured-family revelations of yore that have always been a Star Wars staple.

Other cast members are less well-served as they ping-pong around the galaxy, chasing clues and objects that open doors leading to other clues and objects like players in some vast, multi-level video game. For such an essentially simple story, there's a superfluity of plotty exposition, bogged down by an underlying risk-aversion that promptly undoes any genuinely daring developments.

What we're left with is an entertaining but rather empty greatest hits compilation of familiar riffs, characters and iconic space hardware - a feeling amplified by John Williams's score, which revisits key themes from the entire series in appropriately heart-swelling, tear-jerking fashion.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker review - may the ninth be with you...

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nding a trilogy can be as tricky as destroying a Death Star, requiring a rare mix of battlefield experience and blind faith in The Force. Those, presumably, are the qualities that put JJ Abrams back in the pilot's seat for this safe but solid series finale, after Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow (who was originally signed to direct) failed to take control of this blockbuster ship.

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It's family fun but with a muddied message.

The Grinch is up there with Ebenezer Scrooge. An all-timer of a Christmas heel. He stole the holiday simply because he hated the noise. That's it. His heart was two sizes too small. End of story. There's a simple lesson to be learned from Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas when that's all there is to it, but as Illumination's The Grinch proves it's a lesson that gets muddier the more you try to explain it.Entire generations have grown up with the story so the film doesn't have too many surprises. The Grinch lives alone and angry in a Whoville-adjacent cave while the Whos that live in the town below are loving and merry each and every Christmas. For 53 years The Grinch sat in his cave hating it until finally deciding to literally steal Christmas from The Whos. In the end, moved by the Whos' persistent Christmas spirit even after his holiday heist, the Grinch has a change of heart and returns the gifts.

When the Grinch is as one-dimensionally grumpy as the Whos are one-dimensionally loving, it's easy to catch the moral of Dr. Seuss' original book. But the wrinkle added to this Benedict Cumberbatch-voiced Grinch makes buying it a little tougher.It needs to be said though, the movie is a lot of fun. The cast, Kenan Thompson in particular, make all the jokes land, while Illumination's signature blend of physical comedy and and Rube Goldberg-style gadgets and gizmos gives the world around the Grinch an update that's mostly in keeping with Dr. Seuss' visual flare. My 4-year-old had a blast and it was hard not to have one too just sitting next to her.

Of course, to flesh out a 30-page children's book to a feature-length movie, Illumination's film adds layers to the characters to both add screen time and update the 1957 original. Cindy Lou Who, for example, is the oldest daughter of a hard-working single mom; all she wants for Christmas is for her to be happy, which is VERY 2018. In years past, Cindy Lou Who would've been wishing for a dad as if that's the only thing a single mom could really want.

The attempt to make the film's main character more understandable is way less charming and in fact, a little problematic. In addition to a Despicable Me-style upgrade in the tech department, The Grinch gets a surprisingly tragic backstory. Young Cumber-Grinch was abandoned, a forgotten child whose exile as an adult is no longer self-imposed. Yes, like the book, his heart is too small, and his shoes may be too tight, but there's a reason for it in this version that's not his fault. As a result the simple, elegant lesson about kindness and warmth in the holiday season gets trickier.Instead of The Grinch being angry at other people's joy during a holiday he sees as hollow and annoying, he's bitter about being left out of it in the first place. There's still a lesson being taught to the Grinch here, but the onus is completely on Cumber-Grinch to just kind of get over it. There are a handful of moments in the film where the Grinch isn't a mean one at all, showing the kind of empathy he's meant to learn by the end of the movie. His dog, Max, is by the Grinch's side throughout the entire movie. In spite of Grinch's gruff demeanour, it's obvious Max cares about him and vice versa. As we all know, there's not much better endorsement of character than a cartoon dog.

Ultimately the Cumber-Grinch is not all that bad of a guy and thanks to his new backstory, even when you wouldn't want to touch him with a thirty-nine and a half-foot pole you can at least understand why he's acting that way. Humanizing him also robs the character of the simple, sneering, pink-eyed villainy that made him one of the greatest Christmas cads in history. But, when I asked my 4-year-old what she thought about the Grinch, she replied "he was funny when he stole presents because he was green." So, you know, Illumination did something right.

Verdict

Dr. Seuss' The Grinch is a fun and fast holiday movie, updating the classic story for the audience that made the Minions a billion-dollar industry. However, the straightforward moral of the 30-page children's book and one of Dr. Seuss' most memorable characters get a little handcuffed by this update.

While The Grinch is a fun family film, it muddies the message of the classic tale.

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It's family fun but with a muddied message. The Grinch is up there with Ebenezer Scrooge. An all-timer of a Christmas heel. He stole the holiday simply because he hated the noise. That's it. His heart was two sizes too small. End of story.

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Movie critic Bob Mondello tells us he worked like a droid to finish his review of "Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker" in time for Wednesday's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. But, as you may recall, that was when the House of Representatives debated the articles of impeachment against President Trump for hours. And all across the country, member stations switched to NPR's live coverage from Capitol Hill. We're betting many of you never got the chance to hear what Bob had to say, so here is an encore of his "Rise Of Skywalker" review.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Earlier this week, I overheard a guy in the NPR elevator saying, whenever a new "Star Wars" movie opens, I try to see it twice on the first day. It's a lot to process. As a theoretically jaded movie critic, my first response was to chuckle. But in mid eye-roll, I remembered leaving a first-day matinee of the original "Star Wars" in 1977 and getting right back in line to buy tickets for the midnight show. It was a lot to process, as is "The Rise Of Skywalker."

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We've spotted the fugitives.

MONDELLO: Director J.J. Abrams doesn't just have to end the third trilogy that he started with "The Force Awakens" a few years back. He also has to tie up a lot of loose ends, genuflect before the six movies in the first two trilogies, name check, voice check and face check a whole lot of characters and somehow still make us feel we're seeing things we haven't seen - A new stormtrooper tactic, for instance.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

ANTHONY DANIELS: (As C-3PO) They fly now.

JOHN BOYEGA: (As Finn) They fly now?

OSCAR ISAAC: (As Poe Dameron) They fly now.

MONDELLO: Now, as that exchange suggests, repetition and reinforcement are the director's stock in trade, where the most recent "Star Wars," Rian Johnson's "The Last Jedi" pleased critics and annoyed super-fans by suggesting some mildly new directions the series might head off in.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Which way?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) No idea. Follow me.

MONDELLO: Abrams pulls everything back in this one. He's here to pay homage to what's gone before and takes that task seriously.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

IAN MCDIARMID: (As Emperor Palpatine) I have been every voice you have ever heard...

JAMES EARL JONES: (As Darth Vader) ...Inside your head.

MCDIARMID: (As Emperor Palpatine, laughing)

MONDELLO: Not doing anything that's going to give fans palpitations, as it were, there is plenty of the usual action - space cruisers exploding or falling majestically, lots of lightsaber rattling. And to vary the pacing, there's also the sage advice from elders for which "Star Wars" is known.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

MARK HAMILL: (As Luke Skywalker) We've passed down all we know. A thousand generations live in you now. But this is your fight.

MONDELLO: Though the new kids - earnest Finn, smart alec Poe and forceful Rey have taken up the fight, guidance from their predecessors has consistently powered this trilogy. Just as Han was central to "The Force Awakens" and Luke to "The Last Jedi," "The Rise Of Skywalker" was intended as Princess Leia's swan song. And by employing previously unused footage of the late Carrie Fisher, Abrams has found a way to give her an emotional sendoff.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

HAMILL: (As Luke Skywalker) The force will be with you.

CARRIE FISHER: (As Leia Organa) Always.

MONDELLO: And with us all, presumably. The Skywalker saga may be ending, but "Star Wars" spin-offs won't be. And Abrams offers a sort of guidebook here for things that never get old - cute droids, for instance, of which there's a newbie, the fortitude of rebel fighters...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

DAISY RIDLEY: (As Rey) Use (unintelligible) data.

DANIELS: (As C-3PO) Happily.

MONDELLO: ...And the impressive housekeeping on the bad guys' warships. Say what you will about the Sith, they employ some serious clean freaks - floors that gleam no matter how many stormtroopers bite the - well, there's no dust for them to bite.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character, screaming)

MONDELLO: Meanwhile, "The Rise Of Skywalker" is a chance for fans to revel in what was, what has been, in fact, for 42 years. It doesn't do anything new or even terribly distinctive, but maybe it didn't have to. It just had to be good enough to stick the landing, and it does that. I'm Bob Mondello.

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Movie Review: 'Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker'

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: Movie critic Bob Mondello tells us he worked like a droid to finish his review of "Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker" in time for Wednesday's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. But, as you may recall, that was when the House of Representatives debated the articles of impeachment against President Trump for hours.

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By Anna Smith | Posted 1 Jan 2000

An uncanny gift for physical comedy helps Will Ferrell propel this festive family movie along, even though it's barely more than a string of sketches held together by a conventional plot.

His giant-among-elves character first amuses with his mere size, but in New York he's an outcast of a different kind: a wide-eyed, relentlessly cheerful child in a man's body whose elf-talk convinces everyone he's a nutjob.

The gags swing between mildly inventive and screamingly obvious, but even the latter are performed and timed well enough to draw a laugh. The plot, however, is so overshadowed by comic set-pieces that its ending fails to deliver the emotional impact it should. And it doesn't help that the supporting characters are either overexposed (we see far too much of Buddy's father at his work, for example) or underdeveloped (love interest Jovie is likeable but sidelined).

Ferrell's man-child invites sympathy and sniggers, making this amusing despite some flimsy plotting. Sight gags and a Santa-centred story should keep the kids happy, too.

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By Anna Smith | Posted 1 Jan 2000 An uncanny gift for physical comedy helps Will Ferrell propel this festive family movie along, even though it's barely more than a string of sketches held together by a conventional plot.

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https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/home-alone-2-lost-in-new-york-1992

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Maybe you haven't heard, but Camila Cabello is in love. If you're on the go, you might've missed the video for Cabello and her buddy-ternt-beau Shawn Mendes's couples collaboration " Señorita," where they frolic and sort of almost kiss in a dimly lit room for three and a half minutes, or their performance of the single at MTV's VMAs this fall, where they sort of almost kiss by candlelight for three and a half minutes, or the fan footage of Mendes's tour stop in Toronto from September, where Camila surprised the crowd with another three and a half minute prelude to a kiss, or the footage of the duo performing the single at the American Music Awards last month, which ended in a climactic nuzzle so close to a kiss you could see Cabello's former tour mate Taylor Swift try to resist clutching her neighbor in the audience, Billy Porter, in anticipation of the big moment. ( Faux-ment? NO-ment?)

Romance, Camila Cabello's matter-of-factly titled sophomore album, is sort of like the not-kiss in macro. In 14 songs, Romance offers a dozen musings on the journey of falling for someone, from the harmless fling stage to freaking out about sprouting feelings for a friend to wanting to be around that person even in quiet moments where they say nothing to explaining to your dad that this thing might be getting serious. The passion is there, the lived-in experience is there, and the vocals are there. But the narrowness of the concept demands a caliber of writing that intermittently exceeds the grasp of these songs. There's not a lot here that's as crushing as Camila Cabello's devastating 2018 combo of "Consequences" and "Real Friends," and the production can feel like a concerted shot at bottling and reselling the lightning that was " Havana."

Concision was the first album's secret weapon. Camila whizzed through 11 songs in just over 36 minutes. Romance lasts ten more minutes, and that turns out to be exactly enough time to fall into formulas. "Easy" and "Dream of You" are starry love ballads that speak to the experience of learning to trust a lover with your feelings, all of this after "Shameless" nails the same sensation in the chorus ("I need you more than I want to"), and "Living Proof" serves the same damsel in distress concept as "Easy," albeit more abstractly. Romance is a concept album almost too tuned into its concept; tellingly, the songs that stray from the path are the ones where things heat up. "My Oh My," a song about stepping out with a man you know is only hanging around for the physical fireworks, is a more effortless and fun crack at a steamy duet than "Señorita" by some distance, thanks to a beat from hip-hop producer Frank Dukes and a fleet verse by North Carolina rap whiz DaBaby, who serves the same purpose here that Young Thug did on "Havana," i.e. cutting Camila's wholesomeness with a bit of danger. (There's something itchy about this; it feels like concerted image control. But as long as Baby keeps upstaging people on their own albums, I'll allow it.)

The snarl in Cabello's voice in "Cry for Me," a song about shooting dagger eyes at an ex who's getting on with his life, is a mood Romance needed more of. The second verse is a headshot: "See that pretty life in pictures / See her lips erasing me / You're so good to her it's vicious / Yeah, she should be thanking me." The barely audible chuckle after the first line, and shriek before the final chorus crack the singer out of the girl group wrapping left behind from her Fifth Harmony days. Later, the unexpected "fuck" in "This Love" does the same. Album two is the one where the artist branches out from the ground covered on the first, and things get darker and weirder. Think of Britney Spears breaking out the red leather for "Oops ... I Did It Again" or Justin Timberlake making distorted sex jams and two-part ballads on FutureSex/LoveSounds. Romance is a longer album than Camila but it doesn't necessarily take more chances.

Like the performances of "Señorita" we've seen all fall, Romance generates heat and not enough fire, kicks up sparks and not enough electricity. It doesn't quite match the highs of the last album, but it's also not without haymakers. Closer "First Man" is a letter to a father from a daughter heading down the aisle that's good enough to soundtrack an actual wedding dance. Like the rest of Romance, it is a snapshot of a very specific moment in the timeline of a relationship, but there's clarity and directness to the story that other songs here miss in trying to find too many different ways to express the same feelings. The same unbridled directness shows face in the messy vengefulness of "Cry for Me," the giddy carelessness of "Liar," the horny abandon of "My Oh My," and the measured apprehension of "Used to This." A few more of these would've put the album over the top. As it is now ... There's bops.

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Camila Cabello's in Love ... and Not Much Else

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Maybe you haven't heard, but Camila Cabello is in love.

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In love with the Hamilton soundtrack but growing antsy for new musical tunes?

No newcomer to the music scene, Grammy-nominated pop musician Sara Bareilles recently released "What's Inside: Songs From Waitress". The album is composed of songs from the new musical Waitress, which took Broadway by storm last March, for which Bareilles served as lyricist and composer.

Waitress tells the tale of Jenna, a pie-maker, who becomes pregnant with her less-than-dreamy husband Earl and begins to have an affair with her obstetrician. I saw the musical last year at the American Repertory Theater, and figured it would be interesting to see how the album stocks up. Let's see what's inside ...

This track has a big responsibility as the introduction to the entire musical, and it meets and exceeds expectations. The track builds gradually but impressively, starting with some amazing panning that creates a mental space that suits a musical perfectly. The musical is about a pie-maker, and the lyrics cleverly introduce this idea without appearing silly or campy. The transition into "Opening Up" is perfect, demonstrating the musical's fun spirit but also it's emotional depth.

This song is amazing, illustrating insecurity, indecision and regret beautifully. The repeated piano riff gives way to a deeper chorus, musically and emotionally as Jenna questions her decisions. The hopeful bridge has some of the best melodies on the album, and the snappy ending leaves us wondering what's going to happen next. While this song was later reworked into "What Baking Can Do," "Door Number Three" is still one of my favorites.

First things first, this song is the realest. It's quick and hilarious, debating the risks of first dates with potentially colorblind Oreo-eating masterminds, but it also packs a heavy punch about the realities of love: " What if when he sees me, what if he doesn't like? What if he runs the other way and I can't hide from it?" Bareilles sings. The music is beautiful, with punctuated rhythms leading into smooth harmonic choruses that echo the singer's fears and fantasies perfectly. While we worry about rejection, the final chorus shows the duality that we also aren't ready for things to actually work out: " What if when he sees me I like him and he knows it? What if he opens up a door and I can't close it? " "When He Sees Me" boldly encapsulates the dangers of love, comically and casually addressing universal truths.

Bareilles's versatility is again demonstrated as she completely changes characters and becomes bolder and brasher, taking a much more pragmatic view. The quiet snappy intro leads into an unapologetic ballad about how life tears apart our idealistic plans and we have to make the best of it: " Look around you - ain't no saints here, baby. We're all just looking for a little less crazy. Sometimes it's a hard left turn down a road you never thought you'd see. But don't you think dealing blame is a hazard? I'm not the only one who's dark side has her." The grungy instrumental bridge gives way to a final chorus that demonstrates Bareilles's amazing vocal prowess.

This reflective ballad was the first single released from the album and must have been confusing given all its pie references. However, in the context of the musical, the song is a brutally honest lament about how Jenna has lost herself. However, the very singing of the song shows how Jenna is self-aware and that she will find herself again. It's a sad and lonely number, but relevant to all of us and hopeful.

The hope continues in this track, and concludes the musical beautifully with Jenna's metamorphosis coming full circle. While in "Opening Up" Bareilles sang, " It's comforting how some things never change," the mantra has changed: " Starting here and starting now I can feel the heart of how everything changes when my heart's wheel now, and all my mistakes they make sense when I turn them around," the song concludes, leaving us with a happy ending and a newfound sense of wisdom and growth.

This quick closer introducing us to Jenna's daughter is the album's epilogue, giving us a glimpse into the future as well as finishing us off where we started with a fresh and hopeful perspective. This song is too quick to have quite as significant an impact as the others, but it's still a nice end to the album.

This album is stunning - Bareilles vocals are unsurprisingly amazing, the instrumentation is beautiful, and the lyrics are quick and clever, even when context is lacking. The addition of Jason Mraz just makes me love an already stellar album even more.

Listen to Bareilles' version on iTunes or Spotify, or learn more about the musical here.

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Album Review: Sara Bareilles - What's Inside: Songs From Waitress

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In love with the Hamilton soundtrack but growing antsy for new musical tunes? No newcomer to the music scene, Grammy-nominated pop musician Sara Bareilles recently released "What's Inside: Songs From Waitress". The album is composed of songs from the new musical Waitress, which took Broadway by storm last March, for which Bareilles served as lyricist and composer.

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Internships, exams, and a whole lot of tears. Note: This review covers all 25 episodes of My Hero Academia: Season 2; however, spoilers will be kept to a minimum. The first season of My Hero Academia wowed me last year with its memorable cast of relatable characters, gorgeous animation, and heartfelt story.

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In her famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema was structured by male gaze and male identification. The male spectator watches some male hero like, say, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Daniel Craig in a Bond film, as he shoots the bad guys, resists the Nazis, saves England, sweeps women off their feet, and looks cool while making things happen. The watcher gets to feel "the power of the male protagonist as he controls events." The fun of Hollywood film, in Mulvey's view, is that it gives (mostly) men the chance to pretend to be more powerful men.

Jumanji: The Next Level is aware of this dynamic, and caters to it to some extent. But writer-director Jake Kasdan also offers alternative pleasures. Rather than men identifying with the power of the male protagonist, the movie gives everyone of various genders, races, and ages the chance to identify with everyone else and their horse. The narrative isn't driven by one male hero, but by the gleeful spectacle of different protagonists picking up identification like a Super Soaker and then spraying it all over each other. Some 45 years after Mulvey's essay, many action movies do function as a dreary uptight slog of unitary male power. But Jumanji shows there's more pleasure in moving to a different, more polymorphous, and less predictable level.

The original 1995 Jumanji was an uninspired Robin Williams vehicle about a board game that summons marauding jungle creatures and proceeds to cause chaos in a small town. The 2017 reboot, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, shared little with its predecessor except the name. A group of kids discover a magic video game which transports them into a jungle setting where they take on the bodies of archetypal adventurers. The hero, nerdy high school loser Spencer Gilpin (Alex Woolf), ends up in the body of muscle-bound, smoldering archaeologist Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson); his love interest, shy nerdy intellectual Martha Kaply (Morgan Turner), transforms into uber-fit man-killer and dance-fighter Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan).

Welcome to the Jungle has a good deal of fun with shuffling identities and identification. Jack Black turns in a hilarious and surprisingly respectful portrayal of popular phone-obsessed teen girl Bethany Walker (Madison Iseman), for example. But ultimately the story is about how Spencer learns to be a man by being projected into the body of a standard sexy, strong, brave male protagonist. The film messes around in the Mulvey script a bit, but doesn't really challenge it.

That's why Spencer, at the beginning of The Next Level, finds the idea of returning to Jumanji appealing. His freshman year at college is not going so well; he's lonely, plagued by self doubt, and his long-distance relationship with Meg is on the rocks. He wants to be cool and strong and empowered again. So he decides to play the game that made him feel that way. He reassembles the circuitry of the video game he and his friends smashed at the end of the last film and returns to that trusty Mulvey narrative, designed to give men the pleasure of being men.

And then everything goes rather wonderfully wrong. Spencer doesn't end up in Smolder Braveman's body. Instead, his aging crotchety grandfather Eddie (Danny DeVito) is incredibly confused to find himself with Braveman's pecs. Spencer's other friends, determined to rescue him, also end up in different people; sports star Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain) becomes portly archaeologist Sheldon Oberon (Jack Black), and Gillan's Ruby Roundhouse-some characters even find themselves in the body of a horse.

The adventurers do solve puzzles and fight ostriches and mandrills, as you'd expect in an action film. But the inventively choreographed fight scenes and death-defying escapes are really just an excuse to watch the excellent ensemble cast swap mannerisms and pass DeVito's rasping New Jersey accent back and forth among each other like some hideous contagion of the larynx.

Part of the greatness of the film is the fact that the actors seem to be enjoying themselves so thoroughly. Dwayne Johnson, who is normally stuck as a standard boring heroic male lead, obviously relishes the chance to be the confused grouchy comic relief. Kevin Hart gets to shuffle out of his kinetic wisecracking persona to play Eddie's slow-talking frenemy and business partner Milo (Danny Glover). There's no one narrative perspective because no one is a single person. Stars get to be character actors, character actors get to be stars, and gender, race, age, and narrative focus get resolutely swapped and shuffled.

That shuffling is an empowering pleasure in itself. The standard action movie hard-bodied guy who fights and romances and wins is, as Mulvey says, a long-established formula for making screen viewers feel special and strong. But it's also incredibly limiting and tedious, like eating the same steak for every meal forever, or watching the new James Bond trailer even once. Spencer is somewhat disappointed that he doesn't get to be the awesome male protagonist. But viewers are encouraged to identify with Bethany, who hugs herself in joy when she's finally returned to her pudgy but familiar Jack Black body, or with Milo, who's delighted when he gets shifted into someone completely unexpected.

Yes, identifying with the tough guy can be awesome. But it's also a charge to identify with someone of various genders who is funny or old or familiar or different. Why would you be a boring dude saving the day when instead you can be Awkwafina channeling Danny DeVito sharing a tender moment with a horse? Mulvey pointed out how rote, predictable, and, of course, sexist Hollywood movies can be. Jumanji: The Next Level cosigns that criticism by providing an alternative. It's a giddily preposterous celebration of the power of art to put you in someone else's story-or several someone else's-all at once. v

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Jumanji: The Next Level playfully challenges compulsory identity

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In her famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema was structured by male gaze and male identification. The male spectator watches some male hero like, say, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Daniel Craig in a Bond film, as he shoots the bad guys, resists the Nazis, saves England, sweeps women off their feet, and looks cool while making things happen.