The first game I sat down to play on my new PS5 was Spider-Man 2, which came out in October. This is wildly current compared to what I normally do gaming-wise; my PS4 and I were still picking our way through Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (from the olden days, 2017). So far, so good. It's entertaining, it's got a solid story, it looks great, and I can function pretty well in the early going when it comes to fights. Look, if you're not somebody who's done it for most of your life, keeping track of eight buttons long enough to reach the point where muscle memory can guide you is quite difficult. But this game has enough hand-holding for me, and it lets me fail (and fail and fail) and just keep learning. And that's what you want. If you follow film festivals and the like, you don't need me to recommend the film Anatomy of a Fall, now available for rent or purchase on demand. Sandra Hüller stars as a woman whose husband has come to a bad end, and who finds suspicion falling on herself. It does invite you to guess at her guilt or innocence, but more than that, it examines the decline of her marriage (including in flashbacks) and considers the effects on her son. All episodes of FX's A Murder at the End of the World are now streaming on Hulu. It's a tricky, twisty mystery about a death that takes place at a secretive tech billionaire's remote, wintry hideaway during an exclusive, invite-only conference. I had mixed feelings about the way the story wrapped up -- I've seen both positive and negative reviews of that element of it from critics -- but if you like moody, icy, Nordic-feeling mysteries that are slow and deliberative, it's well worth your time. |