You can’t understand how massive Will Smith was, not unless you were there. These days, he’s still ubiquitous. My son, Liam, knows who he is, as do his friends. Will Smith is, to his generation, the same way that Frank Sinatra was to mine. He’s a celebrity, only one that isn’t a cultural driver the […]

When is a hit not a hit? When it’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. We’ll get into the review specifics in a moment, but before we do, please allow me to paint you a picture. I didn’t see this film at a critic’s screening, surrounded by a bunch of egghead movie nerds like me. Like […]

If you ever want to really check your humility level, try writing about a subject you’re ignorant on. I like to think of myself as a relatively intelligent person. Want to talk about politics or current events? I can handle myself okay. Literature more your thing? Cool, we can talk about books and/or writing.*  Movies […]

When you boil it down, there are two kinds of movies. The first are studio movies. These range from the (formerly) unstoppable juggernaut of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to dramas directed by Clint Eastwood. They come from a major studio* such as Disney, Universal, and others. Whether or not these films are actually good, they’re […]

Things change. Sometimes it’s slow, other times it’s terrifyingly fast. Movies are no different. As a member of Generation X, the forgotten generation, my experience growing up was that seeing movies theatrically was a central part of the cultural conversation. At school, we’d chatter excitedly about Ghostbusters. The standard-issue date involved dinner and a movie. […]

It feels like I’ve spent an upsettingly large portion of my life trying to convince people to take movies seriously. Hearing movies referred to as “content” will never not be annoying. Just as irritating is when I’m talking film with a normie and they use some variation of the phrase, “Why do you care about […]

If you’re a reader of a certain age, you likely remember the television series Moonlighting.* The show concerned a private detective agency, as so, so many shows did back in the good old 1980s. For the most part, the episodes were a mystery-of-the-week type of thing, and if it were only that kind of a […]

I’m not sure I can fully explain to you how I feel about violence in movies, but I’ll try, beginning with an anecdote. Years ago, a very good film called Mad Max: Fury Road was released. Like all right-thinking people, I loved it. Brilliantly shot and edited, intelligently written, skillfully acted, all in service of […]

There’s a photo I remember seeing not too long ago. It was taken in Irpin, one of the suburbs of the Ukrainian city of Kyiv. The first thing I noticed was a Ukrainian soldier staring downwards, a look of numb shock on his face. What he’s looking at is a dead family. A mother and […]

For decades in movies, we had people punching, kicking, shooting, stabbing, exploding, and otherwise dismembering legions of bad guys. The 1970s gave us Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, and Charles Bronson. The 1980s gave us Arnold Schzwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis. The 1990s gave us Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. The 2000s […]