The terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001 are tough to make a movie about. That’s not to say that several films covering them haven’t been made anyway, but let’s be real here: how exactly do you take such a shocking attack on American soil and make a dramatized motion picture out of […]

Hollywood has not been shy in taking on Stephen King. From Carrie to Children of the Corn, from Gerald’s Game to The Green Mile, and from The Dark Tower to The Dead Zone, they’ve been turning his most famous (and even most obscure) works of fiction into big-budget blockbusters for decades now. The Shining, despite […]

Roxanne is one of those movies that my criticisms of are delivered with a certain degree of reluctance. It’s too goofy and slapdash for me, but on the other hand, there’s so much effortless charm and likability that, bar the unbearably grating “smooth jazz” score, the film’s impossible to have any real ill will towards. […]

A film about Mark Zuckerburg creating Facebook just didn’t seem destined for greatness. According to the script, it was supposed to be another generic Oscar-bait biopic (coughcoughcough americansniper coughcoughcough) that would get some praise and awards, but then fade from everybody’s memory not long after getting dumped onto Blu-ray. What the cleverly titled The Social […]

This may already be quoted often (particularly by Roger Ebert), but celebrated French filmmaker François Truffaut once stated that all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, make combat look like fun, so therefore, it is absolutely impossible to make an anti-war movie. Famed actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood should really have taken this into […]

First, the good news. Star Trek Beyond, despite the equally dumb title, is actually a bit better than the previous film in the Star Trek reboot series, Star Trek Into Darkness. For starters, it actually does feel like a proper Trek action film, whereas Into Darkness was a faceless, over-serious J.J. Abrams action film that, […]

In 1976, a little film named Rocky was released into theaters. Starring (and directed by) the then-unknown Sylvester Stallone, it told the inspiring, heartwarming story of an inner-city worker whose courage helps him achieve his dreams of boxing superstardom. About four years later, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull came out, and it was about Jake LeMotta […]

Besides The Godfather (honestly, the famous “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” line is now just an Italian gangster cliché), I can’t think of a single film that’s been more of an easy target for parody than Easy Rider. The image of the two rebellious hipsters on giant motorbikes, stars-and-stripes helmets glinting in […]

Roger Ebert is well-known for going against the critical grain (this is the man who gave 2/4 stars to Die Hard and 1/4 stars to Blue Velvet, remember), but I’m sure he really shocked a few upon proclaiming “No finer film has been made about organized crime [than Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas]—not even The Godfather, although […]

Roma, despite garnering much praise and awards, was something I had been meaning to see for a while now, but somehow never did. This is far from the only film I’ve inexplicably postponed watching, but it especially stuck out to me because of who was directing it. Having only seen Alfonso Cuarón’s more conventional work […]