Tag Archives: Film

Summer 2026 – Week 10 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the summer anime season nearly finished and my journey through Galaxy Express 999 at last complete, I’m eager to catch up on what appears to have been the strongest anime season in years. At a glance, I absolutely need to check out A Witch in Mongolia, Goodbye Lara, The Ghost in the Shell, and Sparks of Tomorrow, as well as find time for outstanding films like Cosmic Princess Kaguya, The Ribbon Hero, and The Last Blossom. Between all those, Witch Hat Atelier, and Journal With Witch, this is proving to be a pretty ludicrous year in prestige productions, and a generally heartening sign for the medium’s strength and diversity. I’ll be sure to check back in as I munch through the season’s highlights, but for now, let’s run down the week in films!

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Summer 2026 – Week 9 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We have sadly reached the end of the summer months, which in New England terms means I’m now in for two months of damp leaves followed by six months of merciless winter chill. Still, I’m determined to keep my heroic, eminently praise-worthy jogging routine going, so I’m currently in the process of mustering up the energy to A: find a local gym, B: acquire membership to said gym, and C: actually make use of aforementioned membership. I generally stall out somewhere between steps A and B, but I’m feeling good about this year, and will at the very least keep jogging outside so long as the frosts permit.

In other news, I’m now three quarters of the way through Galaxy Express 999, and have also munched through the majority of the recent Critical Role-associated superhero game Dispatch. Aside from sometimes falling into that unfortunate “Mom’s not home, we can say swears” tone common to too-online narratives, the game’s proven a charming found family story, stapled to a mechanical system that calls to mind Yakuza’s cabaret minigames. I frankly would have picked up the game much earlier if it was pitched with the cabaret stuff; hearing some familiar voices is nice, but man, that minigame is a top-notch time waster. And of course, there were also film screenings aplenty, so let’s get on with the Week in Review!

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Summer 2026 – Week 8 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the site still boasting drafts of every single currently outstanding reader project, I’ve been hacking away at the novel for much of this past week, burning through a major back-half sequence and successfully extracting myself from the narrative hole I’d created. I’ve also been munching through Galaxy Express 999 episodes at a feverish pace, and thoroughly enjoying Matsumoto’s diverse, fantastical planetary concepts. There’s obviously some repetition of themes and structures (Tetsuro’s had his pass stolen at least twenty times by now), but it’s nonetheless hard to imagine coming up with such distinct worlds and stories on a weekly basis. I also conquered Baby Steps’ imposing Manbreaker, a preposterous mountain-climbing challenge that absolutely solidified the game as a personal favorite, possessing one of the most mechanically rewarding control schemes I’ve ever interacted with. I’ll have to figure out what to do with myself now that The Mountain is behind me, but for now, let’s break down the week in films!

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Summer 2026 – Week 7 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been keeping busy with all my various obsessions, munching through a pile of Galaxy Express episodes while also plugging away at that dang novel. I think I’m nearly out of the hole I dug myself some thirty-odd pages ago, but also feeling increasing trepidation at just how heavily I’ll have to rewrite this beast now that I know more about its final destination. “Just write whatever comes to mind, you can edit later” was undeniably good advice eighteen months ago, back when I was just trying to shake off the rust and write anything unrelated to art criticism, but at this point I can only gaze with envy and resentment back towards those first pages, which will now surely have to be tossed in order to ensure a dramatically and tonally cohesive whole. That inevitability of editing is also making me feel all the more impressed by mangaka who publish their work on a weekly basis, and thus must live forever with whatever choices they made however many years ago. Anyway, the movie screenings have continued as per usual, so let’s run down the Week in Review!

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Summer 2026 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve been keeping myself busy this week, screening plenty of movies while also marching through legacy anime (Galaxy Express 999), OVA artifacts (Cyber City Oedo 808), and videogames (Mina the Hollower plus Elden Ring). All that has been balanced alongside some determined hacking at my increasingly sizable novel, which I’m beginning to realize cannot possibly resolve itself in a tidy three hundred pages. For all my efforts to impose a strict outline on the narrative, the unfortunate fact is that sometimes shit just happens while you’re writing, and suddenly what you imagined as a “brief digression” is now an entire leg of the journey. Thus I find myself feverishly writing my characters out of self-inflicted narrative pitfalls, with the finish line seemingly retreating further into the distance every time I glance towards it. I couldn’t be happier, really, and I’m looking forward to sharing some more concrete reflections once I have something more concrete to reflect upon. In the meantime, let’s run down the week in films!

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Summer 2026 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been keeping active in spite of this summer’s absolutely brutal humidity, heroically jogging through the pain before collapsing into an air-conditioned puddle. I’ve also been keeping busy on the anime screening front by finishing off the first season of Witch Hat Atelier, which proved, well, likely as good as it could be. The unfortunate issue with Witch Hat Atelier is that it is so well-suited to its original medium that any adaptation will almost necessarily be a lesser version, and though this production team is obviously excellent, there’s basically no way to effectively translate the original manga’s deftness of paneling, or to perfectly balance its drama versus its humor. Still, it’s certainly a strong show in its own right, and will undoubtedly find a place within my annual wrap-up. I’ll likely be tackling one of this ongoing season’s many apparent delicacies next, but in the meantime, let’s burn down the week in review!

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Summer 2026 – Week 4 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Summer’s passing us by with alarming speed, but I’m doing my best to make the most of it, having recently discovered some excellent new jogging routes around my neighborhood. It’s been a bitter pill to swallow that diet and exercise are indeed the truest routes to physical and mental health, but I’m at least working to complement such disappointingly mature revelations with plenty of cartoons and videogames. As far as that goes, I recently screened the excellent Gunsmith Cats OVA series, and have also been bashing my head against Mina the Hollower for a couple of weeks now. The game is clearly made with love, but it often feels like the developers take their love of “old-school design sensibilities” to a self-defeating extreme; I like many hard games, but I have no patience for obtuse design as a shortcut to difficulty, and I feel like Mina too often strays over that line. And of course, there have been plenty of our regular movie screenings, so let’s get started on the week in review!

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Summer 2026 – Week 3 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I hit a nice personal milestone this week, as I finally reached the end of my annual “get off your ass and out jogging” progression chart, meaning I am apparently qualified to run a 5k. This feels nice in an intellectual sense, even if it conflicts with my own physical impression of my body as a rancid, decaying husk, and I’m gonna do my absolute best to keep that energy going through the months to come. Meanwhile, my house just finished up Magical Knight Rayearth, leaving us once again in search of a worthy legacy production. Given my last two summers were shared with Sailor Moon and Slayers, whatever comes next has some big shoes to fill, so I’d appreciate any recommendations regarding classic (or recent, I’m not picky) anime to munch through. In the meantime, let’s burn down the week in review!

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Summer 2026 – Week 1 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The summer anime season appears to be an absolute deluge of quality cartoons, but in characteristic fashion, I have so far not sampled any of them. Look, I spent most of a decade writing for ANN’s preview guide, I feel like I can be forgiven for my temporal obstinance when it comes to new shows. Nonetheless, even I feel tempted to check out such enticing propositions as a new Naoko Yamada show or fresh Kyoto Animation adaptation, so I’ll likely be diving in myself in short order, presumably when enough episodes have been released to make a proper meal of any of them. In the meantime, my house has been knocking off film viewings and supplementary series with uninhibited abandon, so let’s see what treasures await in the Week in Review!

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Spring 2026 – Week 13 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the summer anime season already commencing, we’ve got an absurd bounty of promising new productions to look into, from Naoko Yamada’s A Witch in Mongolia to the new Ghost in the Shell, dazzling aesthetic throwback Goodbye Lara, and even a brand new adaptation from Kyoto Animation. Sometimes I have to scramble to fill out my year in review posts, but between this season’s contenders, Witch Hat Atelier, and Journal With Witch (it’s clearly a particularly witchy year), 2026 is looking to be one of the strongest years in anime for quite some time. Meanwhile, my own house just finished up the original Bubblegum Crisis, leaving me wavering between Magic Knight Rayearth and Galaxy Express 999 as our next legacy viewing. I’ll let you all know how that shakes out soon enough, but in the meantime, let’s run down the week in films!

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