The best I can figure, the first movie about Dracula was the Hungarian production The Death of Dracula released in 1921. From there, the bloody floodgates opened. As of this writing, there are over eighty movies about Dracula. Some are good. Others, not so much!* All of them, to one degree or another, were spawned […]

In The Heights is streaming on HBO Max I wasn’t a fan of musicals until I was. It took a while. The problem began with old black and white movies. Fred Astaire. A vibe right at home in the 30s and 40s. The kind of thing that was a fairly reliable moneymaker in theaters up […]

Sometimes a giant ape is just a giant ape. Sometimes not. If you’re a filmmaker, the trick to making a memorable creature feature is to make sure your message doesn’t overwhelm your entertainment value. Yes, you can read 1933’s King Kong as a screed about the racist fear of black sexuality. Yes, you can also read 1954’s Godzilla as […]

Straight Outta Compton is really two movies stitched together. The first movie is intense, angry, joyful, and it’s about a group of friends trying to escape the madness of a racist society through art. There’s a couple of scenes in the beginning that encapsulates that perfectly. First, young Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) sits on a […]