Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) stands as one of the great American directors. Through his films, he took us from the distant past in Spartacus (1960) to the enigmatic future in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In Dr. Strangelove (1964), he warned us about nuclear holocaust, and in A Clockwork Orange (1971), he gave us a...
M. Night Shyamalan is back in form! Like many people, I fell enthralled with Shyamalan with such films as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000). Though I liked Signs (2002), the movie was too spiritual for my taste, and I felt the climax resorted to a dues ex machina. After seeing The Village (2004),...
If I were grading Les Misérables (2012) like a term paper, I would be tempted to give it a C+ or a B-. If we assume C means average and B means good, this grade implies it’s better than average but less than good. It is an entertaining movie, worth seeing—especially if you’re in...
Passengers, directed by Mortem Tyldum, is a science fiction adventure that doubles also as cerebral science fiction. It is not as cerebral as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Sunshine (2007), or Interstellar (2014), but it is forces you to stop and think and to ponder about what you have seen. From that perspective, I...
I bemoan the current state of the vampire genre. More than any other classic horror theme, vampires interest me. Ghosts can be scary, but most ghost stories resort to the same clichés of creepy noises, unexplained doors opening and closing, and shadowy figures. Frankenstein, a cautionary tale of science gone too far, also scares...
Let’s see if this premise sounds familiar. There’s a secret school where magic is taught. A boy, long feeling an outsider in the real world, learns he has magical powers. He learns of this school and finds himself drafted as one of its students. There he meets a know-it-all witch, who’s shunned by the...
To show a man has nothing, give him everything men want. That formula, it seems, had been in my thoughts for as long as I’ve been writer, but I’m uncertain where it came from. It doesn’t feel like something I created myself. Perhaps one of my writing professors said it, or I read it...
