Why Watch? Jay Cheel (Beauty Day, How to Build a Time Machine) has an incredibly fresh eye for documentaries. Not content to keep things dry, he hunts down compelling subjects and attacks them with nimble creativity, cool camera work and strong storytelling flair. In The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends (which, yes, sounds like a Community episode title), he almost-satirically points out the ridiculousness of high intensity, low stakes game-playing by taking it seriously. Specifically, he breaks down the dynamic between four friends bellying up to the table to play Settlers of Catan. This is a board game movie we can get behind. What will it cost? Only 10 minutes. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films

AMC’s The Walking Dead and I have a strange relationship in that I watch it but don’t particularly care for it. I can’t really tell you why I tune in every week, but it has something to do with my great love for the comic books and a desire to see horror on television, mostly regardless of quality. The books by Robert Kirkman have always had a bit of melodrama about them, but the show has often taken that to obvious, soap opera levels. “The Walking Dead” comics feature a great cast of characters with complex motivations and relationships. Many of those characters made it to the television show – well, at least characters with the same names made it in. Things have changed so drastically from comic to screen that one has to ask – when does an adaptation stop being an adaptation?

January is a notoriously terrible month for movies because the holiday rush is over, and because there has to be an island of misfit movies somewhere on the calendar. Even though there are a couple of decent-to-good films coming out this month, the dearth of interesting releases is a saddening one. Unless you see it as an opportunity. The movie world is giving you a breather, a chance to step away from the box office for a while and whittle down your dependency on the butter product they’re putting on popcorn now. What are you going to do with all that luxurious free time? Here are a few ideas.

Ridley Scott has been talking about directing Monopoly for some time now. Peter Berg is still waiting to board a Battleship movie. Kevin Lima is going to take us to Candyland. And now, Sony Pictures is planning a big screen adaptation of RISK.

Universal Pictures has announced a planned big screen adaptation of the board game Candyland. Seriously.