There are a very small number of movies that have had a profound impact upon our culture, jumping immediately to the status of cult classic or, in some instances, genre classic. The Matrix, released in 1999, was just such a hit, a film that turned actor Keanu Reeves into a star, catapulted director siblings The Wachowski’s onto the A-list and had us all marveling at the “bullet-time” super-slow-motion action sequences. The story was engaging, a stunning…Read More

I watch a lot of international action films. Hollywood might have a visual effects company around every corner, but it turns out that a lot of overseas production groups have their own amazing vf/x companies ready to work on films outside of the USA. Foreign films also have a different sensibility and different approach to the storyline, often along with an interestingly biased cultural skew. No question, seeing how other countries portray Americans holds up…Read More

Widely considered one of the very best science fiction books, Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel “Dune” was also my favorite book as a teen. It’s set thousands of years in the future and humanity has spread across the galaxy. Great family clans called Houses run various planets in a feudal society and the Padishah Emperor rules over it all, seeking to balance the power of each great house to ensure none become so powerful they can…Read More

When a woman receives unwanted attention from a man, is she playing coy or legitimately saying “no”, to which the man is morally obligated to listen? The consequence of him going further is that it become rape; intimacy without consent. The woman then might opt to tell others, too often just to be told that she’s lying, that she invited it, that she didn’t protest or fight the advances with sufficient vigor, that women ‘secretly’…Read More

Horror films often revolve around fears and desires, generally with dire consequences for anti-social or blasphemous beliefs. As a genre, they reinforce community standards and behavioral norms, which is one reason that audiences perpetually ask “what did they do to deserve this?” when someone is possessed, haunted, or otherwise experiences evil. With a sort of evil spirit realm paralleling our own, sometimes all it takes is opening the wrong door, unsealing that basement cupboard, even…Read More

New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams created The Addams Family, a delightfully weird and wacky family of macabre cartoon characters, back in the late 1930s. He continued offering up strange and darkly humorous cartoons of his popular clan until his death in the 1980s. The Addams family was a surprise hit, inspiring a live-action TV series in the 1960s, another live-action series in the 70s, two live-action movies in the 90s, an animated series in the…Read More

Based on a series of thrillers written by former spy Ian Fleming, there’s no more successful film franchise than that of James Bond. The master spy of the British MI6 service with the license to kill denoted by his double-oh identifier – 007 – he’s long been the epitome of Western masculine cultural values. The franchise has also had its ups and downs with Sean Connery, Roger More, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and, for one…Read More

It’s millions of years in the future and the Galactic Empire spans hundreds of planets and trillions of people. It’s been surprisingly calm and stable for thousands of years, but psychohistorian Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) is convinced that something terrible is about to happen. Seldon, a mathematician, has invented the science of psychohistory, an amalgamation of psychology and statistics that allows him to analyze humankind across eons to predict future events, both large and small….Read More