The new Netflix spy thriller Black Doves can feel awfully familiar in a lot of ways. The series is reminiscent of a number of other popular shows, and indulges in some genre tropes that have frankly been overplayed for a while by this point. Somehow, it’s a lot of fun regardless. A good cast, smart… Read More Arouse No Suspicion | Black Doves Season 1 (2024) on Netflix
Universes and movie franchises collide in Deadpool & Wolverine, the blockbuster crossover that functions simultaneously as: 1) a trilogy-capping sequel to the popular Deadpool series, 2) the official merger of the X-Men (and some other less-loved stragglers) into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and 3) the point where Disney gives up pretending that any of this… Read More Wolverineing Is Hard | Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) 4K Ultra HD
Poor timing was just the first of many failures that befell the official Nintendo Entertainment System video game adaptation of James Cameron’s The Terminator. By late 1992, the original Terminator movie was already eight-years-old, and even the blockbuster sequel (that presumably inspired the release of this game) had left theaters almost a year and a… Read More 8-Bit Replay | The Terminator (1992) for NES
Five sequels, a couple TV spinoffs, and innumerable viewings later, The Terminator is no longer the same movie it was forty years ago. What started as a scrappy, low-budget thriller made by a relatively unknown young director desperate to prove himself, has transformed into the first cog in a popular and long-running franchise, as well… Read More You’re Dead, Honey | The Terminator (1984) 4K Ultra HD
Even if it has next to nothing to do with the original novel or movie from which it takes the title, the new streaming reboot of The Day of the Jackal is a very stylish and suspenseful modern thriller. The need to adapt it into TV series format, however, may have resulted in the story… Read More Everyone Lies, About Everything | The Day of the Jackal (2024) Peacock Series Premiere
As a tie-in with its wildly successful Energon Universe line of comic books, Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment has also licensed the right to reprint the original Marvel Comics run of The Transformers, first published in 1984. Re-reading it today unleashes a flood of nostalgic memories from my own ten-year-old youth. The Skybound reprint of The… Read More Commencing Revival Procedures | The Transformers Issue #1 (1984) Marvel Comic Book Reprint by Skybound
Looking back on it from the perspective of another particularly fraught moment in American history, the 1976 film adaptation of All the President’s Men feels both as timely and relevant as it ever has and, simultaneously, like an almost quaint artifact from an era in which truth and facts still had some currency in the… Read More Be Careful How You Write It | All the President’s Men (1976) Blu-ray
If not the first horror movie ever made, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an early feature film to explore the macabre side of cinema. While exact records of its critical and financial reception back in 1920 are somewhat unreliable and often contradictory, the film proved highly influential on the development of the horror genre,… Read More Deathly Silence | The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) 4K Ultra HD
While the cultural phenomenon of Batman ushered in a wave of comic book adaptations throughout the 1990s, the Caped Crusader’s own movie series burned out quickly and none of his imitators caught fire in quite the same way. As the new millennium approached, the genre waned once again, almost to the point of fading from… Read More What Would You Prefer, Yellow Spandex? | X-Men (2000) Blu-ray
In the fall of 1992, I was deep into a phase of Clive Barker fandom. I’d read all of the author’s books available to that point and watched both Hellraiser and Nightbreed often enough to put serious wear on my VHS copies. When a new movie based on a short story from one of Barker’s… Read More What’s Blood for If Not for Shedding? | Candyman (1992) Unrated Cut Blu-ray
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