Nope may not be a good title for a movie, but that don’t let that keep you away from this excellently made, entertaining, and sharp-eyed entry in the great parade of Alien Invasion pictures, a genre whose roots reach back to 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. With few…

[With The Sopranos star Tony Sirico’s recent passing, I thought I’d re-edit and reissue this piece I posted way back on my old site in 2007, after the series ended. One thing for sure, character actors like him make everything better.] “We all dream of being a child again. Even…

I never fully took to Elvis Presley, but his big-sky voice singing songs like arias written for a backwoods operas, streamed under my childhood during the 1950s and 1960s. …

For over forty years, writer-director David Cronenberg has been among cinema’s most daring and intelligent auteurs. As the founder of what is now called “body horror,” he’s also among the most controversial. Audiences walked out on his first film way back in the late 1960s. They’re still walking out, as…

I haven’t paid particular attention to Tom Cruise throughout his thirty-plus year career. Thanks to a blinding grin visible from the moon, his stardom is undeniable. Still, I’ve never been able to embrace him as I have other stars, some of whom are lesser actors. Like many great movie stars…

Though it thrives most everywhere else around the globe, Thoroughbred horse racing is the sick man of American sports. The “Sport of Kings” was once as popular as baseball, more popular than football. …

The Duke is both caper comedy and underdog story. On its surface, it resembles one of those inspirational tracts about a plucky outsider’s battle against great odds and greater enemies where he emerges at the end, arms raised, doing his triumph pirouette. (You know I’m thinking Rocky.) These movies are…

“The past is a foreign country,” an English novelist named L. P. Hartley wrote. Indeed, short of a working time machine, even the best historians and artists can never fully immerse us in the past or make us feel what it was really like to be alive way back when. …

It may not be a great movie, but it’s easy to admire and enjoy Everything Everywhere All at Once (now streaming on Amazon) as a funhouse genre-bender through our addle-headed, anxious and dangerously confused era. The film is a head-trip, a Hong Kong-style, action comedy of intruding and conflicting realities…