Matt Goddard

For many gamers, it’s in the commercial before it’s in the game. Consoles and their headline franchises have competed on graphics and technology for years. But their advertising has been just as competitive. Rivalry and ad agency creativity has meant some of the biggest video games have made their marks on pop culture through TV campaigns as much as in-game campaigns.
Many commercials have stood the test of time, outliving the games and consoles they promoted. We’ve picked out the best...

Independent cinemas used to be a premier hang-out for students. But with multiplexes pushing smaller venues out of picture, Matt Goddard asks whether it's curtains for the art-house cinema.

Black Hawk Down: Two decades on from the battle whi...

Warning: This article contains some mild spoilers for all the movies of MCU Phase 4.
How do you follow the Infinity Saga? With more, with bigger, with better. That’s got to wind Thanos up. Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the franchise’s most ambitious chapter yet. It’s not just setting up a new multiverse-threatening arc but doing so on a vast canvas. We’re used to each new Marvel phase being larger than the one before, but Phase 4 has brought us an intertwined narrative of ...

What makes a good movie trilogy? As this list demonstrates, there are many ways to approach it, but no strict formula. Some of cinema’s best-loved trilogies have emerged by accident.
Some trilogies stick to Scream’s jokey formula, increasing threat and spectacle while adding callbacks and twists. Others have picked up unfilmable book sequences and made adapting them look simple.
But there are rules...

2021 was a year that needed superheroes, and boy did it get them. After the delays of 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year saw at least one Marvel character reach the screen every two months.
It was also the year of Jack ‘The King’ Kirby. The famed comic creator’s most spectacular universes appeared on film like never before. Zack Snyder’s Justice League appeared from nowhere to unleash its epic vision of Kirby’s Fourth World for the DC Extended Universe. Over in the Marvel Cinemat...

2021 has proven that cinematic horror is in ominously good health. The genre has earned an abundance of new fans during the pandemic, with more viewers ready for darker escapism that takes the sting out of real-world events than ever before. A mix of new concepts and classic returns collectively dominated the box office and received great critical acclaim as well. The divisive French horror Titane even won the Palm D’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The genre’s broad range was well rep...

If you’ve heard of NFTs, then chances are you’ve discovered them over the past couple of years. Non-Fungible Tokens have been around since the mid-2010s, but 2021 was the year that they started making mainstream media headlines. When they first popped up in 2015, they looked like an early indication of Web 3.0 — the blockchain-based iteration of the internet. But NFTs found a niche, quickly growing an active marketplace and making waves in culture and financial markets.
What is an NFT?
That s...

Comic books are big business and auction houses. For mass-produced pamphlets, the power these small masterpieces of sequential storytelling hold long after they’ve left newsstands is incredible.
The Golden Age of comics kicked off in the 1930s and quickly brought us several heavy-hitting pop-culture icons, who are still around today. Batman and Wonder Woman, Captain America and Namor the Sub-Mariner, and at the front, the archetypal superhero, Superman.
Remarkably, many of these icons’ comic ...

SDCC 2022 revealed that Michaela Coel was set to bring a familiar face from the Black Panthercomics to life in Wakanda Forever. As Aneka, a combat instructor for the Dora Milaje, she’ll no doubt be at the center of the action. It’s about time Disney and Marvel came calling for Coel, but what else has she been in?
Over the past decade, Coel demonstrated her incredible talent for drama and comedy in front of and behind the camera. She’s not only an actress knocking on the door of a major Marvel...

Doctor Who fans learned the identity of the latest actor to play the Doctor in the run-up to the BAFTA Television Awards. As one of the highest-profile roles in British TV, the news made instant headlines. While the stars were taking to the red carpet in London, one BAFTA nominee was about to get their first taste of the attention the legendary role attracts.
Ncuti Gatwa stepped on the red carpet as a nominee for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme, and everyone wanted to talk to him ...

*This article contains some spoilers for the build-up to Dark Crisis and Dark Crisis #0*
For the remainder of 2022, DC Comics will be dominated by the publisher’s most significant crossover for two years. That’s a big deal in anyone’s book, except the titans of the Justice League, whose books are conspicuously empty. The death of Earth’s mightiest superteam in Justice League #75 is the starting point for Dark Crisis.
DC has become famous for its crises — gigantic, reality-shattering events th...

The Wii console was a breath of fresh air when Nintendo launched it in 2006. The video game giant’s commitment to bucking the trend had been clear for years, but its previous console, the GameCube, hadn’t paid off. Despite its cute design and emphasis on fun, its unique game discs and lack of online multiplayer meant that it struggled against Microsoft and Sony. It was tough going head-to-head with the phenomenally successful PlayStation 2, and GameCube was also hit by a recurrent Nintendo pr...

Morpheus has escaped, and he is coming. This summer, the Lord of Dreams will materialize on Netflix, finally making real the influential comic book series’ nightmare journey to the screen.
The Sandman was a revelation when its first issue was released in 1989. Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg joined forces to update and transform a Golden Age hero while opening up a vast new part of the DC/Vertigo multiverse. Along with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The ...

Among some memorable lines, the expression ‘time is a flat circle’ stuck out in the first season of True Detective.
It was mentioned by Matthew McConaughey’s Rustin ‘Rust’ Cohle, the troubled Louisiana State homicide detective known to his colleagues as ‘The Tax Man’ thanks to his scrupulous note-taking in a giant ledger.
True Detective’s first season followed Cohle and his partner (and former partner) Martin ‘Marty’ Hart (played by Woody Harrelson) through two time periods. One saw the partn...