Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't resound emotionally as much the first game but it improved in every other aspect, including the beautiful graphics, gameplay, and richness of the characters.

great!

John Wick 3's creativity in constructing action scene sets is exemplary in the genre. The film captivates the audience quickly with a frantic and brutal knife fight in a narrow corridor, and we are immediately loaded with anticipation of seeing where and how the next fights will unfold. This experience is not uncommon throughout John Wick 3. Action fans should watch this movie. The titular character, however, is monotonous as can be. John Wick speaks in slow, robotic monosyllabic grunts and makes you think if he's just trying really hard to remember his lines. The attempts at humanizing him by mentioning his wife and his love for dogs once in a while feel like they're there just for the memes. The rest of the characters are caricatures. The German Shepherds that were crucial in a few-vs-many fight probably had the most impressive performance. The lack of developed characters can be forgiven in action movies, but when a movie does infuse its characters with captivating personalities, it just makes the film that much better. Mad Max: Fury Road, another end-to-end action film without a loquacious protagonist, did it with Tom Hardy as Max so that we are wholly engaged in the sequences and their consequences (something John Wick should know a lot about). With John Wick 3, I watched the action scenes for the action, their outcomes and effects on its plot and characters were moot. The hand-to-hand combat scenes in John Wick 3 are boring compared to The Raid series. It might be unfair to compare John Wick 3 to the the titans of martial arts films but they do share a number of the same fighting experts/actors. What weighs down these scenes, and as much as I like him, is Keanu. He just doesn't have the agility to be a believable apex fighter. It's frequently obvious when it would be John Wick's turn to get hit because he would pull his arms back and just wait for the choreography to progress. He seemed slow and awkward compared to his opponents, and because of it, a few fight scenes at the end felt too long. Also, it disheartened me to see Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian's character in The Raid: Redemption) fall to someone who's significantly less talented. John Wick 3's gunplay is a different story. The series is renowned for doing its research on handling firearms to achieve realism. You can notice the attention to detail most saliently through the well-timed reloads, the perfect form with which John Wick uses guns, and the shotgun blasts that recoil and hit like shockwaves throughout the film's many brilliant shootouts.

A culmination of dozens of strong personalities and deep histories is difficult to contain coherently in a movie, even in a 3+ hour one, but Endgame manages to be a satisfying conclusion to the Avengers saga that feels flawless. Of course Endgame has the advantage of 923859 preceding films to shape its characters, but connecting them all is still a challenging endeavor. One critical way they succeeded in this is the pitch-perfect casting throughout the series. Can you see Tony Stark as anyone else other than RDJ? And who isn't happy that Mark Ruffalo replaced Edward Norton and made The Hulk so much more charming and likable? What surprised me the most was the first portion of the film, which is largely a rumination on loss. It depicts the somber struggles that superheros and common people alike are facing since the snap. Some attend therapy sessions, some drink the pain away, and some move to lakeside cottages to forget it all and focus on their families. This segment of the film felt more like an Oscar-contending drama than a blockbuster superhero film. Endgame manages to be a good comedy film too. Peppered with one-liners that make you exhale through your nose and gags that make you self-conscious because you're laughing a little too loudly, it's obvious the filmmakers took notes from the fiercely entertaining Thor: Ragnarok. The action sequences, the major crowd-drawing power of superhero films, are all delightfully unique. The setup, style, and scale of each fight is different from the last. You will see impeccably choreographed one vs. one hand-to-hand combat and also planet-scale war, all finely orchestrated as you'd expect if you paid attention to any of the discourse on this marvelous film.

It is pretty much a guarantee when I listen to a 99% Invisible episode that I'll have no prior knowledge of the topic and by the end I'll be intrigued by it and even feel like I somehow now have the authority to speak to the topic. Personally, 99% Invisible episodes are the perfect length. Majority of the podcasts out there are an hour or longer. I usually have to break each of those up into two or three listening sessions due to my commute and schedule. Most of 99% Invisible episodes are around 20 to 30 minutes. Usually I can finish them in one setting and it's just a much more gratifying experience.