Additional Posts From This Author
The Disney animated classic Aladdin did, along with Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, cement the company Renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid. But whereas Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King both made celebrated translations to the stage, Aladdin, much like the stage version of The Little Mermaid, smells like...
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series covered here wouldn’t exist. The arrival of autumn brings with it renewed interest in all things macabre, including the return of two major horror-themed TV series, FX’s American Horror Story and...
The time has come. After a year of box office duds, strikes, CEO stupidity and the usual behind-the-scenes drama, Hollywood has kicked off Awards Season, culminating, as usual with the Academy Awards on March 10, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. But before the teary speeches and on-stage antics (hopefully devoid of slaps), those thirsting for the...
First things first. Anyone still sore over Masters of the Universe: Revelation’s plot twist of sidelining He-Man and Skeletor in favor of other, unexpected character development, please stop grousing now. For starters, that shocking choice elevated the show to new levels of depth. But more important for the sake of this conversation, Masters of the...
Dear beautiful readers, Another year is drawing to a close, and just when Hollywood began to recover from COVID-19-related chaos, a historic pair of strikes threatened to derail everything yet again. Dozens of shows and movies fell by the wayside or pushed into next year, and many of 2023’s most anticipated releases met with a...
God bless Zack Snyder. For almost two decades, the director has stood at the fore of Hollywood barricades, enduring the slings and arrows of critics, toxic fans, journalists, personal tragedies, corporate suits and more. Through it all, the man had continued to make movies his way without the pandering increasingly common to directors of cinematic...
Westwood, California, a borough of Los Angeles, has a bustle of life that never ends. Though it contains some of the few remaining vestiges of Golden Age Hollywood glamour—The Regency and Bruin cinemas among them—the past half-century has seen the neighborhood consumed by gentrification and the sprawl of the University of California, Los Angeles. A...
The onslaught of Disney Star Wars content continues with the release of Ahsoka on Disney+. Billed as a sequel to the animated Rebels, the series should delight Star Wars fans both familiar and virginal to the animated canon. Judging by the first two episodes, the show will also ignite debate over a buried, subversive purpose....
What does it say that in an era of superhero and sci-fi sequels, audiences will still rush out to cinemas to see an old-fashioned murder mystery? Granted, the Hercule Poirot series helmed by Kenneth Branagh does adhere to the “Hollywood only makes sequels” cliche and has its basis in existing intellectual property—a series of stories...
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series covered here wouldn’t exist. Hollywood commentators may long debate who deserves the glory for the success of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Though on-screen credit goes to director Gareth Edwards,...
For 50 years, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist has landed on every list of the best horror movies and, for that matter, turned up on countless compilations of the Greatest Movies of All Time. Since then, its numerous sequels, imitators, knock-offs, and wannabes have all proven one thing: the movie has a limited premise. The Exorcist:...
In the final moments of Killers of the Flower Moon, the new film by Martin Scorsese, viewers learn that the obituary of a major character fails to mention the Osage Murders. That episode in 20th-century history appears as little more than a footnote in most textbooks, if it appears at all. Given that Scorsese spends...
Movie geeks love to discuss the unmade movies of Stanley Kubrick, one of cinema’s great lion directors. Kubrick toiled for years to direct a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, and when he passed in 1999, the unmade film became one of the great “What ifs?” of Hollywood. Now Kubrick’s friend and longtime admirer, Ridley Scott, wades...
The opening moments of Wish, the new film from Walt Disney Feature Animation, play like a promise. They evoke the golden age of Disney animated features—Pinnochio, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty—by showing a storybook that magically opens and begins to spin a fairy tale. If the rest of the movie had played with this much grace,...
