The Raid and The Raid 2 are, without a doubt, the most nailbiting action movies I've ever watched. I consistently overhype this movie to friends as the best action movie ever made, which is replied to with an eyeroll or something - until the first fight scene, where they look at me with a "what the fuck is THIS?!" face. By the end of the movie they are completely convinced...

And then I tell them the second movie is just as good and their heads explode.

Galavant. Two seasons on ABC in the mid 2010s.

A bawdy, over the top musical medieval themed fantasy series about a knight trying to get his wife back after she's kidnaped and forced to marry an evil king.

Fantastic main cast and Weird Al in a recurring role as as the abott of an order of singing monks.

I don't generally like musicals, but it's so damned catchy and fun.

So far I've loved every tv show Taika Waititi has been involved with, and many of them I've only found out when checking "ok, what else has he done" on wikipedia. Most recently, Reservation Dogs and Our Flag Means Death.

Also, I think there are many canadian tv shows that are really good and deserve a wider global audience: like Heated Rivalry, 19-2 (the original one in French) and Happily Married (C'est comme ça que je t'aime).

Hm. There is a pair of Star Trek adventure games, called 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites. They are essentially an extra season of TOS, and are quite good.

You're gonna think I'm weird, but star vs the forces of evil. It's a trip. It's so creative and different. Watched it with my youngest and my grandson.

I actually really love the average to panned 2001 romcom Kate and Leopold. It's about a average woman working in advertising and a hunky duke(?) from centuries before who fell forward in time. Hugh Jackman and Meg Ryan, I think they have reasonable chemistry and there's a lot of good lines that are delivered well. It's a fun movie, and even if it's not good per se it's a good experience with fun vibes.

Hyper Light Drifter for gaming.

Extol (Norway) for music, specifically the album "Burial".

Bone comic book series by Jeff smith.

It is the perfect balance between Tolkien and Disney, had a influence in making comic books more popular in the 90s-00s.

Its mainly aimed at kids but its very enjoyable to adults as well, it has the topic of metaphysics front and center.

https://kids.scholastic.com/content/kids64/en/books/bone/books.html

The TV adaptation of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. The voice acting is incredible and it has the best soundtrack from any media in the last 10 years. It's a solid show that had virtually no money so they made the most with abstract backgrounds and amazing writing. The show was always under threat of being cancelled and wrapped up so fucking well at the end of season 2 that it was clear the people behind the show knew Disney was stringing them along.

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of TMNT that removes the bioscience and introduces Yokai/Yaogwai and magic. It's the best writing TMNT has ever had across any iteration and is on-par with Futurama with delivering a poignant moment in a cartoon full of solid jokes. The turtles learn about their dads and what family means - it's got family moments as strong as Stephen Universe. I cannot say enough good stuff about Rise.

1. Big Fan, a movie about an obsessive football fan, starring Patton Oswalt. I only saw it once, when it first came out (2009), but remember thinking that it was really good. A very prescient, dark comedy about a certain type of guy that is very relevant today. It made $230,000 in theaters according to Wikipedia.
2. Unreal 2, and specifically just the multiplayer. Unreal 2 was a pretty disappointing sequel, and it didn't even have multiplayer when it came out. A year after its launch, they released a multiplayer addon and it was amazing. Completely overshadowed by Unreal Tournament 2004, never really had a chance of becoming popular, but it had a dedicated fan base for a while. You can get it for free now; I want to get a group together at some point.

There's this indie game called The Gap. It's about a man who is trying to find the cure to Huntington's disease to save his family. He discovers that déjà vu is one's own memories from a parallel universe. He uses this knowledge to search other realities to find the cure. It's a slow burn but it's so good.

This is actually one of my favorite games and it has the third place spot after Silent Hill 2 and SOMA. This isn't a horror game just to be clear. I haven't seen anyone talk about this game which is a real shame. I highly recommend it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458300/The_Gap/

Tom Goes to the Mayor is a delightful series that really captures the feeling of living in forgotten small-town America and being crushingly poor.

I don't know if that's what the creators were going for but it resonated with me on that level.

Chinese Lore Podcast, not a singular piece but worth a mention.

https://chineselore.com/

The translations aren't bad, it's incredible value for free audiobook/translations.

Not a single piece of media, but I want to make an apologia on behalf of amateur sci fi writing. No the prose isn't going to wow you, but I love seeing other people's unfiltered imagination at work.

I'm very much into worldbuilding, and I'll devour fan wikis without even consuming the source material. My knowledge of Warhammer 40K and D&D is almost exclusively from various wikis. Seeing regular people build their own little paracosms, with or without accompanying art or fiction, I find very engrossing.

As for actual media, judging by how little representation the series gets in the US, I'd say Custom Robo. I thoroughly enjoyed the single entry on GameCube that Nintendo localized here.

I had tons of fun with Battleborn! It was a FPS hero shooter/MOBA hybrid with co-op modes and Borderlands style load-outs, skill tree and gear. Unfortunately never became very popular and they shut it down after desperately trying to revive it by changing its model. The only MOBA that ever clicked for me.

Very obscure 45-minute 1991 anime movie: Christmas in January. Rated extremely low (5.46 / 10) on MAL, it's absolutely one of my favorite movies. It's whimsical and melancholic and so so interesting. Reminds me a lot of the Ghibli movie Ocean Waves, which is also an underrated gem (and, while I'm at it, the Kimagure Orange Road masterpiece sequel movie from the same director as Ocean Waves).

I really love stories that are just miraculous/odd/interesting excerpts of people's lives that are otherwise inconsequential. There was nothing grand or life-changing about the events in the story, but I will never forget the delicate social interplay in the shoe store, or the only scene that actually takes place in January at the very end: just a moment of reflection.

Flower (video game): https://youtu.be/0IS9sGGuvYo

Man, people can't help but post stuff they like and is popular, not stuff that's almost never talked about. Anyway...

The Irresponsible Captain Tyler is an old school anime most people slept on. It's the sci-fi genera of "aliens are elves with big shoulder pads", and Tyler is a bum, he decides he wants to join the military because it's got free food and chicks dig guys in uniform, and then he accidentally starts an interstellar war with the aliens, accidentally becomes captain of a ship, and accidentally starts beating the crap out of the aliens without meaning to. The aliens think he's a strategic genius, his bosses think he's an idiot and are trying to get rid of him, and his crew can't tell if he's one or the other. The whole show has a lot of love put into it, each background character has it's own name and voice actor, and the show is hilarious right off the bat till the end.

I also feel that Thief the Dark Project doesn't get enough credit and attention. It was the first first person sneaker, has better stealth mechanics than even some modern games, and a great story and world building. I think maybe some sequels that weren't as popular as the second one kinda made people drop the series but it was fantastic.

The Jesse Owens Story (1984). Really good made for TV biopic. Won a primetime emmy. But has barely 300 total ratings on IMDB and so few on Letterboxd that it doesn't have an average score. Several cast members from the Roots miniseries.

Meet the Raisins (1988). The original 30 minute made for TV claymation special. Here on YouTube (lots of music missing) It was a spinoff of a highly successful marketing campaign (a 30 second commercial where raisins sing 'heard it through the grapevine').

Cable Guy . Jim Carey is very scary and the end monologué about thé internet future was spot on.

Games: Epistory and Nanotale. Both typing games from Fishing Cactus. Absolutely beautiful games that have interesting stories and you get to practice with your typing skills. I love both of these games so much.

Tv: Sliders. It was fairly popular when it was running and got kind of weird at the end, but I love that show. It was one that my family got together to watch every episode each week when they were on broadcast. I was also part of an early online petition to save the show and move it to the SciFi channel. I was also part of the early online petition to save MST3K, back when online petitions actually worked.

Movie: Ghostbusters Answer the Call. People will disagree with me but I unapologetically DGAF. That movie is hilarious and I love putting it on when I work out. It’s a far better Ghostbusters movie than the last two garbage ones that were put out. It has everything from the original: dark adult horror comedy about scientists who save the world. The last two were not true GB movies, they are family friend teen coming of age movies with a plot that depended so heavily on nostalgia that they felt like a crappy cash grab. ATC is my second favorite GB movie behind only the original. Holtzman is my hero!

Akira Kurosawa's lesser known works. He's most famous for films like Seven Samurai or Yojimbo, but his other films like The Bad Sleep Well are super amazing too. It's a film noir movie with a strong anti-corporation message I bet would resonate with a lot of people here.

Mr. Robot is one of my all-time favorites and my most recent favorite was Mr. Corman.

Triangle is an independent movie made in 2009 - so good. First found it on YouTube for free, I believe i recently saw it on peacock