Grappling onto a monster’s back and spinning down it like a buzz saw with my dual blades, I couldn’t help but cackle with glee. There’s a real, pure, form of joy that only a Monster Hunter game can hit – a kind of David and Goliath feeling as your tiny hunter with a couple of knives brings down a Godzilla creature that can shoot lightning bolts.

Monster Hunter Wilds deliberately builds on the overhaul brought by 2018’s Monster Hunter World, doubling down on a lot of what that game did well, while also branching out in some wild new directions. It’s a seismic shift for the franchise that gives Monster Hunter something it’s never had before, a real narrative. Everything in Wilds is built around that narrative experience, while streamlining some of the rougher elements the series has been known for. This deliberate shift in focus may not be for everyone, but one thing is clear – this is the boldest Monster Hunter game yet, and the absolute best place for newcomers to start.

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We may be witnessing the last dying gasp of the “eat the rich” genre. Social satire that skewers the ruling class has been around as long as there has been civilization, but the genre has been running rampant in Hollywood for the past decade, enjoying an all-time peak with the Oscar-winning Parasite in 2019. But as we’re seeing more movies trying to mine every metaphor out of “eat the rich” satire as they can — from The Menu, to Blink Twice and the upcoming Opus — you start to see the slowly diminishing returns. And that’s a downturn that’s deeply felt in the latest movie in the genre: Death of a Unicorn.

Alex Scharfman’s so-edgy-it-hurts horror-comedy was met with a baffling amount of cheers and laughs during its buzzy premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, which I can only say was a result of the kind of groupthink that Death of a Unicorn was satirizing. But all the oohs at the very heavy-handed digs at the ultra-wealthy, and the gasps at the sudden shocks of gore, I only found perplexing — there’s nothing Death of a Unicorn was saying that hasn’t been said before. And what it did have to say, it repeated until its punchline was bled dry. Admittedly, there is a certain novelty to Death of a Unicorn’s premise but anything fresh about the film is undercut by the film’s dogged insistence that its comedy and satire is on the cutting edge.