******SKIN-ILLUSTRATED SPOILERS!****** With Oscar-winning lead actor Rod Steiger starring as the title character in movie based on a book from legendary writer Ray Bradbury, 1969’s adaptation of “The Illustrated Man” had a lot going for it. However, the devil is in the details, and “The Illustrated Man” is a devilishly difficult book to will into…
(Finally) seeing “The Odyssey” in 70mm IMAX…
Does Size Matter? This is not going to be a review of “The Odyssey” (2026), which I saw at an AMC Dolby Digital theater on opening weekend, and have already reviewed in a previous column (SPOILERS). This is about the experience of seeing “The Odyssey” in IMAX 70mm. Director-screenwriter Christopher Nolan went to great pains…
The original “Star Wars” (sans “A New Hope”) returns to the cinema next year for its 50th anniversary…
At the recent D23 Disney convention in Anaheim, the seemingly inevitable news finally dropped; Disney/Lucasfilm is finally releasing the original, unaltered “Star Wars” (1977) to theaters next year (without the “A New Hope” subtitle added to the film in 1981 for rerelease) for the movie’s 50th anniversary in a limited release beginning February 19th. Lucasfilm…
Star Trek TOS’ “Tomorrow is Yesterday”; looking back at Star Trek’s first time travel adventure…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Way back in the dark days before streaming or even affordable home video, I used to place my old audio tape recorder up to the TV speaker and record Star Trek episodes during their syndicated broadcasts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’d taped roughly half of them before the shifting sands…
The San Diego Maritime Museum; “All I ask is a tall ship…”
San Diego Comic Con Sidequest… During our recent annual trek to San Diego Comic Con, our hotel was located in the Little Italy area of downtown San Diego, a few blocks from the San Diego Maritime Museum. On the day of our arrival, I walked down to the shipboard museum, which is centered aboard the…
Apple TV’s first season of “Star City” is much more than a spinoff…
*****SOYUZ-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” presents a more cosmically expansive, inclusive alternate-present for America than the one we’re currently enduring in our own timeline, and it’s all based on a simple premise; what if the Soviet Union beat the United States to the first manned lunar landing in 1969? In this series’ reality,…
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” (2026) is pure, undiluted cinema…
******3,000 YEAR-OLD TROJAN HORSE-SIZED SPOILERS!****** On the surface, writer/producer/director Christopher Nolan (“Interstellar,” “Oppenheimer”) is a cross between Ridley Scott (“ALIEN,” “Blade Runner”) and David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago”); sharing their love of grand spectacle and pioneering visual effects, with a knack for attracting all-star casts who earn their paychecks. With his career marked…
San Diego Comic Con 2026 had a lot of news to share, and some disappointments…
Like that line from The Godfather Part III, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” My wife and I have been attending San Diego Comic Con together for roughly 22 years, only missing it in 2007, and, of course, the year it was shut down in 2020 for COVID. As…
The real horror of “Obsession” (2026) comes from the loss of self-agency…
******UNSETTLING SPOILERS!****** Made on a sub-shoestring budget between $750,000 (yes, thousand) and $1 million, the Universal-Blumhouse distributed “Obsession” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year, and was a huge hit. When it was released in the United States this past March, it did incredible business, making over 400 times its production budget, and becoming…
Remembering Sam Neill (1947-2026), an actor who effortlessly traversed between darkness and light…
After a wonderful weekend celebrating pop culture at a horror convention this past weekend, I woke up this morning to the terrible news that actor Sam Neill, whose work I’ve long admired over at least five decades, has passed away at age 78–an age that seems terribly young to me these days as I tentatively…
CreepIE Aftermath 2026 brings a Halloween chill to a warm summer…
Trick or Heat In 2022 a new horror convention called CreepIEcon came to the Inland Empire of SoCal (hence the capitalized “I.E”), and it was small but attracted a decent enough crowd to warrant a second show, called CreepIE Aftermath, in September of 2023. Now both shows have evolved to attract a larger talent pool,…
An X-ray look into “Superman Returns,” 20 years later …
******SUPER-SPOILERS!****** Growing up in the 1970s reading random Marvel comics books (“SpiderMan,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The Hulk”), I wasn’t much of a DC kid. Despite being old enough to have seen TV’s “Adventures of Superman” (1952-1958) in reruns (as did friends of mine), I never really got into it, and the only reasons younger-me ever…