Beyond telling an engaging story, animated children’s features have two goals: captivate the target audience and be clever enough so the parents don’t want to murder themselves on the 58th viewing. By all marks, Warner Brothers Animations’s Scoob! succeeds in… Read More ›
As I left the theater in early February, I knew instantly that director Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) was not for me. The post-fight margaritas, the bullet-proof bustier, the severity of Black… Read More ›
There’s an elegance and simplicity to writer/director Hoon-jung Park’s The Witch: Subversion that all begins with the opening. Via photo montage with intense tonal scoring, The Witch sets up a mysterious cabal performing medical experiments on children: iron lungs, tubes… Read More ›
There are a handful of video games who proved so resilient, they seemed to transcend their release date and extend into generations of play. We’re talking Nintendo’s Super Mario franchise, Sega’s Sonic, Capcom’s Street Fighter, and, the series that just… Read More ›
In June of 1987, Walter “Johnny D” McMillian was arrested by Sherriff Tom Tate of Monroeville, Alabama, for the murder of eighteen-year-old Ronda Morrison. The case had been unsolved for a year and Tate was keen to close it. Placed… Read More ›
In 1996, during the Summer Olympic games, a bomb went off in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, killing one and hurting many others. Though it was security guard Richard Jewell who found and alerted police to a suspicious package at the… Read More ›
The last time audiences saw Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, she was being freed from Black Gate prison by The Joker (Jared Leto) in David Ayers’s Suicide Squad. That was in 2016 when hopes were high that a group of DC… Read More ›
There’s something about Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining that’s gripped audiences for nearly four decades despite factors which one might presume would detract from its popularity. Kubrick quite famously tortured Shelley Duvall on set to a… Read More ›
According to actor/writer/director Edward Norton, his relationship with Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn began before the book hit shelves. As he explains in the featurette “Making-Of: Edward Norton’s Methodical Process,” he was tipped off by a friend about the… Read More ›
At the time of this writing, director Todd Phillips’s Joker is the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, has earned two Golden Globe wins for Best Actor in A Drama Motion Picture and Original Score with two individual nominations… Read More ›
“You’ll Float, too.” Three innocuous words infused with horrible terror thanks to Stephen King’s 1986 novel It. Then, in 1990, a television mini-series adapted from the book shifted the way the average person looks at clowns, thanks in large part… Read More ›
Published in 2013, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch went on to earn best-selling status, along with the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. It’s a book that — it seems — entranced readers, including future cast member Sarah Paulson (Ocean’s… Read More ›
When people talk about something being “timeless,” what do they mean? Are they referring to the aesthetic? To the sound? What about the structure? It’s all of these things and none of these things as timelessness refers to the innate… Read More ›
If you’re unfamiliar with the “Legend of the White Snake,” it’s an ancient Chinese folktale dating back centuries. Rooted in oral history, the tale has been translated into song, print, television, and film many times over. In it, a human… Read More ›
In November 2014, the first issue of DC Vertigo’s The Kitchen ran. Created by Ollie Masters and drawn by Ming Doyle, the story followed three women trying to survive in 1970’s mobland New York. With the desire for stories from… Read More ›
Doctor Sleep marks the fifth major adaption of a Stephen King work in 2019 alone, joining the theatrically released Pet Sematary and It: Chapter Two, Netflix’s In the Tall Grass, and Hulu’s original series Castle Rock. Adapting King novels and… Read More ›
The cinematic adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s book Motherless Brooklyn by Edward Norton (Keeping the Faith) possesses all the hallmarks of a great noir: mystery, a dame in trouble, and a gumshoe in over his head. When you add in a… Read More ›
Being from Durham, North Carolina, I have seen a lot of changes happen in my city over the last few years. Durham kept a large, mostly black, working-class population due to the employment of so many citizens at the tobacco… Read More ›
Considered one of the greatest films in American cinema history, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz has delighted audiences since it first premiered August 15th, 1939. Not many films, let alone adaptations, can say they carry that kind of esteem,… Read More ›
When you hit the seventh installment of a series, you’re either scraping the bottom of the barrel or hitting your stride. What began with co-writers Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes and director James Wan in 2013’s The Conjuring is… Read More ›