The One and Only Ivan is streaming on Disney+. Once upon a time, there was a mall, located in a faraway land known as Tacoma. This mall wasn’t the sort of mall you might have hung out at as an incorrigible youth. It didn’t have a food court. It didn’t have an Apple store. It […]

Project Power is streaming on Netflix Next to westerns, there’s no other genre that has the flexibility that superheroes have in terms of storytelling. You might think that your options are limited to an MCU snarkfest or the Snyder cut of Justice League, truly an edgelord’s delight. But there’s more to superheroes than that. A […]

7500 is streaming on Amazon Prime Americans are not good at empathy. We like to think we are, but the hard truth is, we suck at it. Why? Because empathy is a skill. It takes a great deal of time, effort, and imagination to try to put yourself into the place of someone different than […]

The Pool is streaming on Shudder. There aren’t too many animals that genuinely scare me. Sure, I know that my place on the food chain isn’t anywhere near as high as I’d like to think. During a visit to the Denver Zoo a year or so back, I was spending time at the lion exhibit. […]

Sometimes, the best-case scenario is to be wrong. We all have our blind spots, right? I was wrong about Andy Samberg. Wrong as hell. For a while there, I had him pegged as a second-tier Saturday Night Live alum. I figured his comic persona was just like Jimmy Fallon, where he was all about being […]

The Old Guard is streaming on Netflix   So there I was, in the midst of a bout of pandemic depression. The old ways of coping were gone for the moment. I couldn’t schlep to my local movie theater. I couldn’t take my kid to a ball game. Up until recently, the zoo and local […]

The Beach House is streaming on Shudder. We’re in a period of change. Six months ago, most of us didn’t think we’d be where we are now. Six months from now, the smart money says that life will be just as unpredictable. Is it because of the pandemic? Partially, yet there’s more to it than […]

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is streaming on Netflix I like to think I’m a relatively knowledgeable guy. I read a number of reputable news outlets daily, including The Washington Post and The Atlantic. I’m able to speak quasi-intelligently on a fairly wide range of topics. While I might not be a […]

I’m writing this on the morning of July 2. By now, we should have been a couple of months deep into the summer movie season. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t miss it. Facts are facts, though. We’ve got one heck of a nasty virus wreaking havoc on the country, and one […]

Da 5 Bloods is streaming on Netflix I’ve never served in the military. At the tail end of high school, recruiters from the Army bombarded my phone, trying to convince me to sign up for officer training school. What they didn’t realize, and what I only dimly knew at the time, was that I would […]