If you’re of a certain age, 1993’s Jurassic Park is one of your favorite movies. It makes sense, considering it’s made by Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live. It’s got groundbreaking special effects that fuse CGI, puppetry, and mechanical creatures. Perhaps most importantly, it’s got dinosaurs. Just a metric ass ton of […]

One of the most common questions I get from people is, “Can you just turn off your brain and watch a movie?” I get it. For a lot of people, perhaps more these days, movies are nothing more than content.* Like a thirty second Tiktok or a five minute YouTube video,, they’re thought of as […]

It’s thrilling when there’s a quantum leap in genre filmmaking, when a director lights hoary old tropes on fire and charges forth with something new. Back in the day, zombie movies nearly all aped the work George Romero did with Night of the Living Dead. Romero laid out all the rules. The zombies were slow, […]

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Stephen King is one of the greatest writers in American history.* It’s not just that he’s incredibly prolific, with more that two hundred short stories, sixty-five novels, five nonfiction books, a few screenplays, a musical, and comics. While King built up his reputation as a horror […]

Not long ago, my good friend Mark announced to us that he was dipping a pinky toe into the barracuda-infested waters of dating. As you might imagine, it’s been a good news/bad news kind of scenario. The good news is that he’s chatted with a number of smart, interesting, and cool women. The bad news […]

A little research tells me that 59.3 million people, or roughly twenty-three percent of Americans, deal with mental health issues. Those figures come from the National Institute of Mental Health, and assuming that those figures haven’t been monkeyed with by DOGE, I’m inclined to treat them as accurate. I’m one of those 59.3 million people. […]

We can agree that the primary purpose of art is to elicit an emotional response, right? The way I understand it is, an artist creates their piece. That piece could be sculpture, painting, music, literature, film, or so much more. During the act of creation, they have an eye toward the hoped-for emotional response. A […]

We all know that the only constant in life is change. That’s an easy concept to wrap your head around in an abstract sense. But it’s far knottier to reckon with when you consider how much, in your own life, things have changed. The country has changed. How we relate to each other has changed. […]

The irony is not lost on me that Marvel Studios, a company that rose to prominence by making movies almost exclusively about superheroes, forgot what superheroes are. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve featured characters in flamboyant outfits with astounding powers punching each other in the head. By doing that, they’re halfway there. But really, at […]

I think there are two ways to approach movies that feature a mystery. The first is the puzzle box approach, where viewers sort the evidence alongside the characters, and try to “solve” the movie. Which…y’know, you can do that if you want to! It’s just that a) movies are generally meant to tell a story/elicit […]