We’re now seven installments into the Alien franchise. Of those seven, I think they break up into two extremely loose categories. The first category primarily has a focus on sci-fi horror, which I like to call “WE’RE GONNA DIE!” movies. For example: Alien is “We’re space truckers and WE’RE GONNA DIE!” Aliens is “We’re space […]

I like it when good people succeed. By all accounts, Josh Hartnett is a good guy. As far as I know, he’s never beaten up anyone. He’s never driven drunk. He’s never freebased cocaine naked in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, and if he has, then I tip my hat to his crisis […]

A little poking around on the website Statista revealed some interesting information to me. In 2022, law enforcement across the United States did kind of a good job clearing certain kinds of crimes. 52.3 percent of homicides were solved, which is not bad!* Should those rates be higher? Sure, but consider that the United States […]

I don’t know how to feel about Marvel Studios these days. It’s not due to superhero fatigue, a concept that’s been proven wrong for years. I’m more than okay with the snide nihilism of The Boys, the gleeful anarchy of Harley Quinn, the meatheaded sincerity of Peacemaker, and more. When online commenters bash “capeshit,” I […]

I don’t often do dual reviews. The main reason for that is, well, focus. If I’m going to write about a movie, I want to drill down into it a little. It’s tough to do that if you have two films that have nothing to do with each other by subject or theme. Somewhere out […]

Is nuance dead in America? I don’t think so, but it is apparently very, very sleepy. Everything is binary these days. The enchiladas you ate were either a gastronomical miracle straight from Saint Martha* or a meal of such blistering incompetence that it will summon Gordon Ramsay to wreak culinary vengeance. Same goes for movies, […]

If you watch enough movies, a few things start to happen. One of those is that you begin to recognize a filmmaker’s voice. You’ll notice the cheery pessimism of David Fincher, the slick wistfulness of Steven Spielberg, the aggressive goth-osity of Tim Burton, and the puckish rage of Spike Lee. It’s true that some directors […]

There’s a moment late in the new indie drama Mickey Hardaway where we hear repeated audio from newscasts. Each anchor uses nearly the same phrasing when they say, “a Black male, mid-twenties, with a gun.” That phrasing conjures a mental picture. That mental picture is the first link in a chain, one that ends in […]

A little research tells me a chunk of biker gangs remain involved with the drug trade, weapons dealing, and other criminal activity. Hasn’t it always been that way? Haven’t bikers always been the modern day equivalent of the Mongol hordes, sweeping across the American landscapes like leather-clad locusts? They’re nothing but a bunch of criminals, […]

Like the MCU, Pixar has been in a bit of a tough spot as of late. Initially, they were arguably the gold standard in family entertainment, perhaps even more so than Disney Animation itself. Whether you saw Toy Story, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Up, or Inside Out, you were virtually guaranteed a film that was clever, […]