Isaac's Film Reviews

Welcome back to Rapture. Game review by Isaac Handelman The first part of BioShock Infinite ’s episodic DLC expansion, Burial at Sea , is immediately familiar, wasting no time in plopping players back into the shoes of Booker DeWitt. This version of the private-investigator protagonist is living in a thriving, pre-fall Rapture, the setting of BioShock and Bioshock 2 . He’s approached by a noir version of Elizabeth, who claims to want to help Booker to find a lost girl named Sally whom Booker has paternal feelings for. Booker sets out alongside Elizabeth to track down the missing child. The initial chunk of Burial at Sea - Episode 1 is comprised almost entirely of looking and listening. Players are granted their first opportunity in the series to explore a living version of Rapture rather than the destroyed remnants of the once-great city that welcomed players in the first two games. In this earlier version of the city, citizens stroll about admiring the view, Big Daddies ten...

Money talks dirty. Film review by Isaac Handelman Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is, purely from a filmmaking perspective, downright masterful. Clocking in at three hours, one would expect this colossal chronicle of Wall Street megalomaniac Jordan Belfort's atrocious escapades to grow tiresome and stale over the course of its duration, but Scorsese's flawless pacing ensures that the film is almost always quite engaging and is never boring. And yet, after Belfort's story has come to a close, I found myself feeling exhausted and sickened, and not entirely satisfied by what I saw. It's difficult to fault Scorsese for his brilliant work here, but Wolf is so absorbed in wretchedness that the experience as a whole suffers. I take no issue with morally repugnant films, so long as a purpose exists for all the awfulness depicted onscreen. But Jordan Belfort's tale is not a downfall nor a story of comeuppance. Belfort starts bad and quickly falls to bord...