Assassin's Creed

But will it be any good?

Boy, that Adi Shankar sure doesn’t waste time. Just weeks after we saw an official voice cast and trailer for an animated Netflix Castlevania, the director announces work on another video game project, that of an anime Assassin’s Creed TV series.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving is all about.

It has long been a fine American tradition to escape the awkward enclosure of your parents’ house over your holiday vacation and spend a few hours in the local movie theater, where everyone can shut up about politics and stop swapping passive aggressive comments on each other’s lifestyle for a few hours. 2016 was no different, with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Sing drawing in the big crowds while La La Land and Fences impressed in limited release. Not so impressive: Passengers, Why Him?, and Assassin’s Creed, each of which underperformed.

A great many things happen in the new trailer for Justin Kurzel’s upcoming adaptation of the popular video game Assassin’s Creed. Great thespians Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling have a staring contest while saying the words “the Apple of Eden” with a straight face. A giant robotic arm grabs Michael Fassbender and throws him into the past. There’s a burning at the stake and smoke bombs and a double-neck-stabbing and so much more, and yet this all pales in comparison to the magnificent sight of Michael Kenneth Williams saying “What now, pioneer?” to our hero. It’s like seeing the aurora borealis, or Niagara Falls, or the miracle of a new life beginning. It’s majestic, elemental even. Clearly, other things will happen in this movie, but in a way, is Assassin’s Creed not a documentary about the former Omar Little saying “What now, pioneer?”

There's always been a seamless crossover between video games and comic books, and odds are if you're a fan of one, you're a fan of the other. Comics have been adapted into video games and vice-versa for almost as long as video games have been "a thing," and as both mediums have evolved, so too has the quality of those crossovers. With the holidays around the corner, we've put together a selection of some of the best video game related comics and art books for the gamer in your life.

Our ongoing celebration of the best from the world of film in 2016 continues with our ranking of the finest movie posters of the year. In the gallery above you’ll see our picks for the 25 best. They range from massive hits to to tiny indie releases; we decided not to limit our list just to huge commercial successes. We don’t determine a movie’s quality by its box office totals. Why should we determine a poster’s quality that way?

As far as assassins go, Michael Fassbender is certainly dressed for success in the latest batch of photos from Assassin’s Creed. Fassbender re-teams with Macbeth director Justin Kurzel and co-star Marion Cotillard for the long-developing adaptation of Ubisoft’s hit video game series — which could very well end up being the first genuinely good video game movie ever released.

In an interview not long ago, Michael Fassbender promised that the Assassin’s Creed movie would feature some practical stunts, which seemed a bit hard to believe given the increasingly CGI-driven nature of film — not to mention how crazy dangerous it would be to pull off some of the physical tricks depicted in the video game series. But it looks like director Justin Kurzel is delivering on that promise, as evidenced by this awesome behind-the-scenes video, in which a stuntman takes a 125-foot “leap of faith.” 125 feet. That’s beyond impressive.

It feels like Michael Fassbender has been attached to an Assassin’s Creed movie for years, to the point where we began to wonder whether this movie would ever actually exist (it at one point was scheduled to open in theaters three months ago). But,...