Phantoms is awful, in that special way movies like Lawrence Kasdan and William Goldman’s Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher are awful. Author and screenwriter Dean Koontz is often considered the poor man’s King (perhaps unfairly, as his novel Intensity is one of the best thrillers of the 1990s), so it is fitting that Phantoms should have […]

George A. Romero’s Monkey Shines is the story of Allan Mann (Jason Beghe), an athlete who is struck down by a semi-truck at the start of the movie, rendering him quadriplegic. He is forced to use one of those wheelchairs operated by blowing into a straw in order to get around, and after he hits […]

Deep Blue Sea, like the slasher movies it emulates by way of movies like Alien and Predator, is less a compelling narrative than it is a sort of delivery system for gruesome death scenes. And that’s fine. When a movie realizes its ambition, however high or low that ambition may be, it succeeds. It is […]

Francois Truffaut famously stated: “There is no such thing as an anti-war film.”  In essence, what he was getting at is that any subject, when filmed and put on screen for viewers, inherently becomes glamorized and entertaining, and the filmmaker is therefore unavoidably subverted into creating entertainment out of the very thing which they set […]

The Help is a lot like Crash, The Blind Side, and other presumably well-meaning but largely tone-deaf movies about race that don’t happen to star Sandra Bullock (as a longtime devotee of both Demolition Man and The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down, I have to believe sweet Sandy’s heart is in the right place). However […]

“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of loving, or do we love our masters behind a facade of loathing?”  Balram  It is fitting that the first words heard in The White Tiger are spoken by Jay-Z. On the soundtrack as the movie begins is “Beware of the Boys,” Jay’s collaboration with British Indian […]

The longer you watch I, Frankenstein, the harder it is to believe that it is an actual theatrical feature and not just a bad TV movie made for the Syfy channel. Despite big-name, reliably good actors like Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, and Miranda Otto, and special effects that, at their best, at least look like […]

For over 30 years now, ever since his debut feature She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, Spike Lee has been one of the most innovative and provocative filmmakers of our time. As expressed numerous times throughout his many films, Lee’s highest goal is to “wake up” and uplift all oppressed and deluded people, but he […]