For about the first 20 minutes of the film's 100-minute runtime, one might think they have an understanding of how The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is going to go. Old home movies show Steen as a baby and young boy in Norway, crawling, walking, and playing as young boys do. Soon, however, it's discovered Steen has Duchenne's disease, a rare form of muscular dystrophy that gets progressively worse over time. He is eventually restricted to using a wheelchair as his muscles grow weaker, and his ability to explore and interact with the outside world soon becomes more limited. He seeks solace in video games, as his parents grow concerned about the amount of time he is spending online.

Steen's parents and family talk in interviews about his worsening condition, and their sorrow over how he is unable to live a normal life filled with love and friendship. They talk about how, before passing away at the age of 25 in 2014, Steen gave his parents the password to his computer. There they discover he had been writing and publishing a blog online about his life. After his parents publish one final entry to let Steen's followers know he has passed away, they are flooded with emails from his online friends from all across Europe, people who largely knew him in Blizzard's MMORPG by the name of Ibelin. Each email talks about how much of an impact Ibelin had on their lives and how much he will be missed, shocking Steen's parents. They knew he played online with others but didn't know the extent of their son's digital life. One of Steen's friends, the leader of a roleplaying guild called Starlight, reveals that much of Ibelin's in-game encounters and conversations had been saved and transcribed on the guild's online forums, where Steen was an active member and contributor.

Adult Swim's anime adaptation of Uzumaki focuses on that unsettling feeling in its premiere episode, which was provided for review by Adult Swim. This introduction, for the most part, succeeds in bringing what makes Uzumaki so powerful in print to the screen. More than anything, it works to be painstakingly faithful to the manga in its art and style. It uses a black-and-white format to more closely match the book, a choice that serves it well, and some of the best images from the manga are transported exactly, or close to exactly, into the adaptation.

Agatha All Along begins with Agatha still trapped in some sort of residual illusion in Westview--she's a police detective who's been suspended without pay and has been wallowing until she's brought back in to investigate a murder. The case is full of sign posts intended to lead Agatha back to reality, like her centuries-old witch locket. After intervention by another witch named Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a mysterious unnamed teen boy (Joe Locke), Agatha escapes the illusion.

But she's got no power, and Rio wants to kill her thanks to some old personal grudge. To avoid the wrath of both Rio and a group of witches called the Salem 7, Agatha will need to gather a new coven of witches and walk the fabled Witches' Road, which she believes will help "get my purple back," as she says in the premiere episode.

With The Penguin, showrunner Lauren LeFranc and executive producer Matt Reeves have crafted a genuine extension of the world built in The Batman. The series also truly brings Gotham City to life in ways the movie wouldn't be able to. With eight episodes in Penguin's limited run, viewers not only learn more about Cobblepott--now named simply Oswald "Oz" Cobb for some unexplained reason--and what motivates him, but about Gotham, as a whole, in the aftermath of The Riddler's bombing of the seawall gates at the climax of the film.

This Gotham is suffering, as seemingly everyone but the wealthy elite has seen their lives destroyed by explosions and devastating flooding at the hands of Paul Dano's Riddler--who, like Batman, doesn't appear in the series. And it's in that space that the characters we meet (or already know, in the case of Oz) thrive.

Despite being set in '90s Japan, as opposed to the US, Terminator Zero still begins in the typical fashion. A Terminator is sent back in time to assassinate the scientist Malcolm Lee (voiced by Yuuya Uchida in Japanese and Andre Holland in English) before he can deploy Kokoro (Atsumi Tanezaki/Rosario Dawson). This rival to Skynet--the rogue AI system that's all but wiped-out humanity in the year 2022--is scheduled to beat its global launch in 1997. Following suit is a tough-as-nails soldier named Eiko (Toa Yukinari/Sonoya Mizuno), who's sent to the past in hopes of protecting Lee long enough to convince him that his plans will do more harm than good. It's essentially what fans would expect from anything Terminator related; for better or worse, series creator Mattson Tomlin made sure Terminator Zero followed in its predecessors' metallic footprints.

Terminator Zero's first few episodes are somewhat formulaic. Thankfully, it doesn't take long for the show to venture into new territory. This is the first time, for instance, that the notion of multiple timelines has been officially addressed--Terminator Genisys makes mention of a single, altered timeline but not about it splintering into different threads. What's interesting about this is that it doesn't negate prior events. Rather, Zero alludes to the events that caused the franchise's time paradoxes in a way that respects whatever impact they may have had on Terminator lore. It's a clever bit of writing that helps to elevate the show's canonical relevance while adding weight to Eiko's initial plight. Her choice to venture back to the past, after learning that she'll never return to the present, is as heartbreaking as it is commendable.

What compelled director Fede Álvarez to include this moment in Romulus is anyone's guess. It's a line that makes no real sense in context, it's out of character for the person who says it, and there's no particular reason to use that particular word on this particular alien monster. In Aliens, when Sigourney Weaver's Ripley first originated the line, it was shouted in rage, full of emotion, as Ripley stepped out in a power loader to challenge the massive alien queen and save Carrie Henn's Newt. It was an invective thrown by one would-be mother at another.

In Romulus, the line is a reference to another movie you really liked from 40 years ago. It's forced into the mouth of this character in this movie, it seems, to get you thinking about that other film. After all, in the modern age, reminding you of something you previously liked is what sequels are all about.

Borderlands, from Hostel director Eli Roth, is an adaptation of the sprawling game franchise set on Pandora, a hostile, desert planet full of corporations and fortune hunters trying to break into a mythical ancient vault that's allegedly full of all sorts of amazing technology. Enter Lilith (Cate Blanchett, delivering her worst American accent), who's been hired by a man called Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to find his kidnapped daughter on Pandora. There's a catch, of course--the daughter is Tiny Tina (Arianna Greenblatt), and she's more his creation than his actual daughter, since she was engineered from the blood of ancient aliens for the purpose of opening the vault. And she wasn't kidnapped--the Atlas soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) rescued her from her captivity.

It's not long before Lilith catches up to them and shortly after, they're all attacked by Atlas soldiers. Lilith then has to team up with Roland, Tina, their sympathetic psycho bandit pal, the quirky scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and the comic relief robot Claptrap to survive and find the vault themselves.

Not that Deadpool & Wolverine is awful. It's got several great bloody action sequences, including an opening bloodbath set to NSync's "Bye Bye Bye," and when it's funny, it's really funny. But, just like with Deadpool 2, Deadpool & Wolverine is strangely full of earnestly emotional scenes that don't track at all next to all the silly, fourth-wall-breaking wisecracks, and now we get the added bonus of an overly complicated MCU story that requires far too much explanation despite actually being razor-thin.

The setup for Deadpool & Wolverine is basically Deadpool's version of the Loki series. He's pulled out of his reality by the Time Variance Authority--folks from outside of time who keep the timelines straight--and brought to Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen). Paradox tells Deadpool that his home universe is dying because it lost its "anchor being," Wolverine--this is meta humor about Logan being by far the most popular of the X-Men, how the franchise didn't work without Hugh Jackman, and the MCU subsuming Fox's Marvel franchises after the merger with Disney. Paradox offers to let Deadpool join the Avengers if he'll help accelerate the destruction of his home universe. There's never any discussion about what Paradox actually wanted him to do, though, as Deadpool rejects the offer and takes his own path by hopping across the timelines to find a new Wolverine, and then the two of them end up stuck at the end of time for most of the movie.

Fortunately, it's a fun and well-made movie, and it's got a great cast. It will entertain you from beginning to end. But since it also plays things so safely, it's not that memorable. It's a cotton candy movie--it tastes great, but you're not really getting anything out of it. But that's hardly the worst thing a movie could be.

Since Twisters follows its predecessor's template, it opens with a tragedy. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a woman with a plan for destroying active tornadoes by using diaper polymers to absorb the moisture in the storm. But the small EF1 tornado that she wants to try it out on very quickly turns into an EF5, and things go badly. Very badly.

Season 3 delivered an explosive end (literally) with Homelander (Antony Starr) exploding the head of a Starlighter after the protester threw a plastic bottle at Homelander's son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). The new season picks up months afterward as Homelander prepares for trial over the incident and struggles to find someone he believes is on his intellectual level within the Vought Tower who isn't absolutely terrified of him. Homelander's trial doesn't take up as much of the season as expected, considering how The Boys loves holding a fun-house mirror up to our real-world headlines. Instead, both supes and the Boys are focused on election night and the Jan. 6 certification of the election, with both sides going to extremes to ensure their respective desired outcomes.

With the Season 3 finale being a transparent metaphor for Donald Trump's 2016 "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and wouldn't lose any voters, ok?" boast, The Boys ditches any remaining subtlety in its political undertones in Season 4. Starlighters are the "woke left" mob, and Homelander supporters are stand-ins for the "MAGA" crowd. The season underscores the tensions between the two groups that we've all felt building up, especially in an election year. Vought News Network is essentially Fox News with broadcasts about the war on Christmas and covering Homelander's trial as a miscarriage of justice. At one point in the season, a member of the conservative elite paraphrases former Congressman Todd Akin's "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down," viral statement to Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit). It's so on the nose that it can be distracting from the fictional story we are watching.

If anyone thought that the Season 1 cliffhanger of Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) killing Luke (Elliot Grihault) with his dragon would mean Season 2 picks up with immediate dragon battles, you should brew a cup of tea and wait a minute, because this is Westeros and political dealings move at a glacial pace here. That's actually not a detriment to House of the Dragon Season 2. After two years off the air, the initial episodes carefully remind you of who the central players are, what they want, and who is willing to do the most to get it.

While the Targaryens and Hightowers still teeter on the edge of war in the early episodes, the more-ambitious members of both houses make underhanded deals and rash plans that lead to the gasp-worthy moments that the Game of Thrones universe is known for. You don't have to wait until the penultimate episode of the season to be reminded that no one is immune from death in this universe, even if they have a dragon.

The Acolyte centers on a pair of twins, Osha and Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg). The girls were raised by an unaffiliated coven of female Force-users, but despite living outside the Republic, the Jedi-- including Carrie-Ann Moss's Indara--poked their noses into these women's affairs, leading to disaster. As a result, the sisters are separated for decades, each thinking the other dead--Osha ends up training to be a Jedi before washing out after a few years, and Mae, while everyone thinks she's dead, trains under a secret Sith master. When Mae emerges to hunt and kill the Jedi who made the incursion to her coven, Osha takes the blame and gets pulled right back into Jedi business as they go after her sister.

One thing that sets The Acolyte apart is the way it doesn't dilly dally with the reveal that Osha and Mae are separate people--the show begins by inferring that Osha has a normal life and moonlights as an assassin, but we learn the truth about Mae before the end of the first episode. A lesser Star Wars story would have tried to milk that mystery for several episodes at least.

As the title indicates, Furiosa is a prequel that tells the life story of Charlize Theron's Fury Road character, starting with her first encounter with a new villain called Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Dementus is basically Toecutter from the original Mad Max: an unhinged maniac leading a massive motorcycle gang around the wasteland, terrorizing everyone they come across--starting with child Furiosa and her mother in the opening sequence of the film.

Furiosa's long-term fight against Dementus is the frame of this story. Over the course of the film, Dementus rampages all over the wasteland, attacking Immortan Joe's Citadel from Fury Road as well as the Bullet Farm and Gastown--places mentioned in Fury Road but not shown--and he becomes a general nuisance to everyone for decades as he tries to fight everyone he comes across.

Kingdom opens shortly after the events of War for the Planet of the Apes, at the darkly lit funeral for Caesar. It's an almost ominous scene, calling to mind Queen Cersei's spooky coronation on Game of Thrones, but it's not long before it cuts to the title card and a time jump to "many generations later."

Here, in this new ape-dominated future, we focus on a young ape named Noa (Owen Teague), who belongs to a group called the Eagle Clan--named so because each ape in the clan bonds with and raises an eagle that they form a lifelong partnership with. But Noa doesn't get the chance to do that, because a chance encounter with a human woman (Freya Allen) quickly leads to an incursion by a group of scary, masked apes who are after her.

Knuckles does feature heavily in the first episode, as we see his warrior traditions clashing with Sonic's family, including brief cameos from Sonic, Tails, and matriarch Maddie played by Tika Sumpter. (Marsden's character, Tom, is mentioned but never seen). But when Knuckles finds Wade in need of encouragement to win a bowling tournament, he takes this as an opportunity to train a protege in his warrior traditions. The two set off on a road trip for Reno, with shadowy figures on their tail aiming to steal Knuckles' power. Cue hijinks.

The focus on Wade means that your enjoyment of Knuckles will rely a lot on how much you like Adam Pally's comedy persona. He's not doing anything surprising here--he's playing the same likable, schlubby dork you may have seen in other roles, including the first two Sonic films. It's especially broad in Knuckles, and he spends some moments in the first episode winking a little too much at the camera, but it works. And since that firmly places this more on the "comedy" side of the action-comedy spectrum, the real proof is in the laughs. Knuckles passed that test for me, with at least one big laugh per episode and a handful of mild chuckles surrounding them.