What I've Watched, Played, and Listened to Lately

I've been wanting to try a new format for a while — a loose round-up of everything I've been consuming recently, rather than a curated "best of" list. Credit where it's due: this was inspired by Amber Cassette, who does something similar around books. I don't read nearly enough to fill a segment like that, so I'm swapping books for music instead. Here's what's been on my radar the past few weeks.

At the Cinema

My mum and I caught the newest Insidious film last weekend — another entry in a franchise I honestly know very little about, but you don't need the backstory to follow this one. It's the familiar formula: spirits, demons, a mother and daughter dragged through hell and back, generations of women fighting an inherited curse. The opening is genuinely fun, though the middle sags. My real complaint has nothing to do with the film itself: opening-night horror screenings at the big UK chains are simply not worth it anymore. Cinema etiquette has collapsed — people were having full conversations through the movie and screaming louder than the actors. It knocked the experience down for me, but on its own merits, I'd still give it three out of five, and it's a solid pick for a horror night with friends or family.

The film that actually surprised me was Spider-Man: Brand New Day, watched with my dad. I don't cover Hollywood much — this channel is mostly Asian cinema territory — but this is the first Tom Holland Spider-Man film that actually feels like Spider-Man at its core: Peter Parker, alone in a random New York apartment, just trying to get by. What's always made the character work is the tension between Peter and Spider-Man — one life bleeding into the other, money problems affecting web shooters, patrol nights costing him exams or dates. The MCU has mostly skipped that duality, and Brand New Day finally leans into it. The swinging is the best it's looked in the franchise (admittedly a low bar for me), and visually it's the strongest of the Tom Holland run. No such kind words for Far From Home, still one of the weakest Spider-Man films I've sat through.

That renewed interest sent me back into the wider Spider-Man debate — Tobey, Andrew, or Tom — so I revisited the Andrew Garfield films. I know the Maguire trilogy line for line at this point, but it had been years since I'd watched Garfield's two outings. He's a genuinely great Spider-Man, arguably the first to give the character organically built web shooters as part of his own story. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has real problems and some of the performances haven't aged well, but I still enjoyed both, watched in pieces, and I think rebooting the franchise afterward was the right call.

Completely out of left field: The Wild Robot. I went in wanting something animated and came out properly moved. A servant robot crash-lands on a wild, animal-filled planet with no one to serve, ends up adopting a gosling, and partners with a fox voiced by Pedro Pascal to build an unlikely makeshift family. The parenting themes reminded me a lot of Hirokazu Kore-eda's family dramas. DreamWorks hasn't had a genuine hit in a while — this is one, and I'd recommend it without hesitation.

Japanese TV

Boys Love fans aside — I mean Badly in Love here, which I mentioned in an earlier video. Season 2's second batch of episodes, with a new cast, just dropped, and it's a real step up. What I love about the concept is how thoroughly it upends the polished image people expect from Japanese reality TV — it puts genuinely messy, complicated people on screen, people with rough pasts in nightlife who are willing to lay all of that out for an audience. It leans closer to American-style reality TV than the more traditional Terrace House format, which has started to feel a little stale by comparison, and that shift feels overdue. There's been some pushback from parts of the Japanese media about who gets to "represent" Japan on a show like this, but that criticism misses what makes it worthwhile — these are people taking a real risk to be honest about where they've been and how they've changed.

Anime & K-Drama

I've fallen behind on anime generally, but I'm still following the One Piece Elbaf arc. I took a break through June and July, came back in August, and binged a stretch of episodes — currently at the point where Loki gets freed (spoiler, consider yourself warned). Pacing still feels uneven despite claims of improvement, so my approach is to let a few weeks of episodes stack up and binge them together. Not as strong as the Egghead Island arc, but still enjoyable.

On the drama side, I've started The East Palace, a Korean drama set in a period with a supernatural/spirit thread running through it — new territory for me in K-drama. Two episodes in, and it already looks fantastic; I heard about it through a recommendation on Instagram, and it's living up to the hype so far.

Games

Still riding the Spider-Man wave: I finally picked up Marvel's Spider-Man 2, three years after release. I'd played the first game back in 2018 but never got around to the sequel until Brand New Day put me back in the mood. There's been some pushback online about it not innovating enough on the first game, but I've really enjoyed it — playing as both Peter and Miles, the symbiote storyline, and Harry's arc. It's the kind of game you actually want to see through to the end, and there's enough new here to keep it from feeling stale, though I'd agree the traversal and swinging could have been pushed further. Still one of the best-selling games on PS5 for good reason, and I'm already looking forward to Spider-Man 3.

Wolverine is out in a month, and I'll be buying it day one, though I'm a little less excited than I expected to be — the gameplay footage looked exactly like what the first trailer promised years ago, no surprises. There's a broader pattern across the PlayStation Studios lineup — Spider-Man, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Ghost of Yōtei, The Last of Us — where the underlying story beats and gameplay start to blur together under different skins. That's part of what's tempering my excitement here, but I'll still be there on release day.

On Repeat

The Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack has been on constant rotation — genuinely one of the best film albums of the last few years. Brand New Day has pulled me deep into Spider-Man media generally; I might even revisit the '90s animated series next (don't worry, this isn't turning into a Spider-Man channel).

Demon Slayer finally returned to Crunchyroll after nearly a year away, so its soundtrack has been in the mix too. And I've been listening to a live album from Super Beaver, the J-pop band known for Haikyuu's theme songs — a recording of a 2025 concert in Yokohama that I'd recommend without reservation.

That's everything I've watched, played, and listened to lately. I'm experimenting with formats like this one — moving away from purely "best Japanese films on Netflix" style lists toward something that shows a bit more of who's actually behind this channel. Let me know what you think.