Derek Malcolm has been covering the worlds of tech and entertainment for more than two decades.
Before coming to How-To Geek in 2025, Derek was a contributing editor and writer for the A/V and Home Theater section at Digital Trends, where he wrangled and wrote everything from what to watch on Netflix to reviews, explainers, and guides on the latest Bluetooth speakers, turntables, projectors, and other A/V gear.
Based in Toronto, Derek graduated from Humber College's Journalism program in 1999, after which he started covering the worlds of music, movies, TV, and celebrity for publications such as TV Guide, Hello! magazine, and Inside Entertainment. He then got the bug for covering tech and gadgets in 2006, when he served as editor-in-chief of Canadian tech magazine Connected for more than a decade.
An avid skier, when all the snow's gone Derek can be found at home spinning vinyl with his daughter or cheering on his favorite F1 team, McLaren.
The Top 10 is where I've been digging lately, and the last several days have yielded some excellent movies, including the stunning animated superhero movie that reshaped a franchise; a remarkable true story about a stray dog and a grueling adventure race; and my top pick this week, another true story: an intense Mexican crime thriller built around a pair of patrol officers and the traffic stop of a lifetime.
Peter Parker's spider-bite origin story has been done so many times that it's ingrained in our collective psyches at this point. But one of its best and most creative tellings of the last decade is, without a doubt, Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won Best Animated Feature at the 2019 Oscars and, at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, is the highest-rated of all Spider-Man films, period.
Five web-slingers, one quiz — can you tell your Peter Parkers from your
Miles Morales?
Which Spider-Man famously said 'With great power comes great responsibility' in a
voice-over at the start of his first solo film?
Which Spider-Man is a teenager from Brooklyn who discovers he has spider-powers
after being bitten, and whose story is told through a groundbreaking animated style?
Which Spider-Man appeared in a black-and-white noir universe and was voiced by a
major Hollywood actor known for his eccentric roles?
Which Spider-Man actor was the first to portray the character as an active student
at the Midtown School of Science and Technology within the MCU?
Which Spider-Man famously used web-shooters that he built himself rather than
organic web-spinnerets that were a biological result of his spider bite?
Which Spider-Man lifted a massive amount of debris off himself in a deeply emotional
scene that became one of the most celebrated moments in superhero movie history?
Which Spider-Man's love interest was Gwen Stacy, played by Emma Stone, whose fate in
the sequel became one of the most talked-about moments of that era's comic book movies?
Which Spider-Man tearfully told a dying Tony Stark 'I don't want to go' after being
un-snapped in Avengers: Endgame and reuniting on the battlefield?
Into the Spider-Verse also has the distinction of bringing us a gaggle of Spider characters making their big-screen debuts; chief among them—and at the center of the franchise—is Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn teenager bitten by a radioactive spider and, well, you know what happens. There's already a Spider-Man in Miles' world (Chris Pine), but after watching him die at the hands of Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), he feels it's his duty to take up the wall-crawler's mantle. And then things get incredibly interesting.
Kingpin's been building a particle collider to reach into other universes (I won't spoil why), and in the process, the rip pulls in five other Spiders—Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), a talking pig named Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), who pilots a mech-suit Spider character, and the brooding black-and-white Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage). They all work together to mentor young Miles while also taking on Kingpin to get themselves home.
If you like good doggos as much as I do, and even better, true stories about them and some of the incredible things they can do, then this extreme-sport adventure movie that's been floating around the Netflix U.S. Top 10 charts recently is for you. Arthur the King brings Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord's memoir, Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home, to life.
