The Poetry of Violence: Breaking Rick Grimes
By the end of The Walking Dead’s seventh season premiere, Rick Grimes is a broken man. And it’s his own damn fault. And as I watched the...
The ramblings of a wannabe cineaste. Join me as I dissect the art of storytelling in films, comics, TV shows, and video games.
By the end of The Walking Dead’s seventh season premiere, Rick Grimes is a broken man. And it’s his own damn fault. And as I watched the...
From the opening frame to the end credits, a cloud of impending doom hovers over Fruitvale Station—not only because the visual language...
The remake of Red Dawn truly is a war movie for the Call of Duty generation, too preoccupied with the spectacle of bloodshed to...
Man, woman; white, black, Filipino; farmer, college boy–under the leadership of Earth’s “Federation,” all are finally equal....
It ends with a tight close-up on the sweat-drenched face of fencing instructor Araki Mataemon (Toshiro Mifune, a far more versatile...
On the morning of April 20, 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with semi-automatic handguns and improvised...
In the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit, corpses litter the (rapidly declining) Old West. They swing from nooses, decay in coffins,...
Ever since Edwin S. Porter had his great train robber fire directly at the camera, the landscape of cinema has been drenched in blood....
You can feel them. Frigid as a bucket of ice water poured straight down your back. Eyes. The eyes of a stranger. Stalking you through the...
A pair of wounded samurai wade through a dense, endless sea of tall grass, leaning on one other for support. Every line on their...
A mother looks from the ticking clock on the mantel to the empty chair at the dinner table. She leans out the window and calls her...
Few cinematic serial killers ooze calculated creepiness quite like Sir Anthony Hopkins’ “Hannibal the Cannibal.” From the slurping to the...
The “villain” of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s tense police thriller seems to step into the story fully-formed–no past, no future, living entirely...
A few patches of wiry hair frame his otherwise bald head, sprouting just behind his pointed ears. Razor sharp talons flex at the end of...
[W]hat we are dealing with here is a perfect engine–an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim...
With Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry sold mankind a squeaky-clean vision of the future. A vast “new frontier” stretched out into the infinite...
“Watch Clark. And watch him good.” That single, simple line of dialogue epitomizes the primal horror at the heart of John Carpenter’s...
“Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others.” Thus, Pinhead himself perfectly describes what makes...
Gaze into the mirror. Chant his name five times. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman… Your voice catches in your throat. Your rational...
I was recently invited to participate in a “10 Days, 10 Movies” meme over on another social media platform. Unfortunately, my...