When Minority Report was released, it was a massive success. Not only was it a huge critical and commercial smash at the time (Roger Ebert didn’t hesitate when naming it the best film of the year), but it is still fondly remembered as one of Steven Spielberg’s best sci-fi films. And yet, even after hearing […]

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: A Most Violent Year, despite the menacing (and irritatingly pretentious) title, actually isn’t all that violent. Violence surrounds its setting (New York, circa 1981), plot, and characters, but it’s never actually shown all that much. Instead of gory, Tarantino-esque action, the film firmly roots itself in slow, […]

My hopes were really high for The Vast of Night. Tired of overly frenetic fare like Star Trek Beyond, the thought of a slower, more old-fashioned science fiction film really caught my eye. After glimpsing the very positive buzz it received not long after being dropped on Amazon Prime, I was absolutely hooked, and convinced […]

The Back to the Future films are nothing if not entertaining. The first film was pretty lightweight Hollywood fare, but it was such joyously well-executed Hollywood fare that I couldn’t help but love it nevertheless. Even the unjustly maligned Back to the Future Part II, despite featuring some surprisingly gloomy moments, delivered more than enough […]

Watching Back to the Future Part II made me realize just how simple its predecessor was. Even with its major emphasis on time-travel (in itself a confusing concept), it was still a pretty straightforward tale of a boy who goes into the past, accidentally interferes with his future parents’ lives, and has to get them […]

Most of the time, when I disagree with the major critical consensus in certain areas (i.e. the newest Star Trek films), I can still see why others would like the particular thing(s) I disagree with them about. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot fathom why District 9 is “staggeringly original” (Jeanette […]

It’s truly a shame that the X rating (now NC-17, which is equally frowned upon by the general American public) has only become associated with pornography. Once upon a time, back when it first debuted in 1968 along G, M (later GP, then PG), and R, it was actually a classification for films that weren’t […]

No teen, preteen, or even adult who saw Back to the Future left the theater not wanting to get their hands on the time-traveling DeLorean automobile themselves, or shake the hand of the eccentric scientist who created it, Doctor Emmett “Doc” Brown. The film didn’t just infuse 1980s youth culture, it was 1980s youth culture. […]

Stephen King has finally had his day. The best-selling, yet long-suffering author has expressed his displeasure with Stanley Kubrick’s version of his popular horror novel The Shining for years on end, and even when he tried to remedy that with the badly received mini-series Stephen King’s The Shining, it still wasn’t enough to dissipate his […]

For some reason, I never watched Popeye the Sailor as a kid, though I always knew that it was outlandishly goofy and cartoonish. So going into Robert Altman’s live-action adaptation of it (simply named Popeye), I was expecting something right along those lines, and I wasn’t surprised one bit when it wound up being just […]