Back in the day, whodunits appeared with great regularity on both televisions and movie screens. With the cinema, audiences ate up mysteries such as Chinatown, Basic Instinct, Gosford Park, The Gift, and In the Heat of the Night. These films didn’t need massive explosions, death-defying stunts, or even high-wattage movie stars. All they needed were […]

These are interesting times for science fiction. You can be excused for thinking that science fiction is just shorthand for an action movie set in space, or with aliens, or time travel. Yeah, we’ve had a lot of that, particularly with Star Trek Beyond and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.* But we’re also living in a bit of a […]

There’s this theory I’ve had for a while now. I’ve shared it with friends, but now it’s time to share it with all of you. I believe that international superstar Tom Cruise is either a fiendishly clever performance artist, or a deeply depressed man. When he makes other films, he’s a talented and driven performer. But […]

  In 2008, the fledgling Marvel Studios released Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. Before the release, there were rumblings that the film would fail, and fail big. How could it succeed? It was a movie about a superhero that only hardcore nerds like me had heard of. Plus, Downey was best known not as a […]