Like all film fans, I was ecstatic when the lineups for the Toronto, Venice, and Telluride film festivals were announced. There were so many movies to sink my teeth into that I knew I had to go. So, I set up a GoFundMe to pay for my trip, and agreed to write a report for Crooked Marquee. As it...

This weekend, the female guerrilla rises again with the release of Peppermint, the story of a woman who wakes from a coma to get jacked and find the people who killed her family. Peppermint, aka Riley North (aka Jennifer Garner), hunts down and kills a lot of bad guys with knives, guns, and her...

Here at Crooked Marquee, we are open to pitches from all writers, regardless of experience. Why, the number of pitches we get per week must be somewhere around ! Many of these ideas are excellent, but a few bad ones slip through, too. Here's a sampling of some of the pitches we rejected this...

If you faced The Meg (opening this weekend), a 75-foot prehistoric shark properly called “Megalodon,” odds are you wouldn’t survive. In that spirit, let’s remember some of the aquatic killers that have scared us since the 1950s and calculate the odds of surviving an encounter with...

Now that Black Panther has dispelled the long-held belief that African-American movies don't do well overseas, Hollywood is scrambling to green-light more black-led projects. But they don't always get these attempts to cash in on diversity quite right, as evidenced by these titles and log lines now...

The sixth Mission: Impossible movie was released 22 years and two months after the first one — say what you will about this franchise, they're not crankin' 'em out like sausages. There's always a gap of at least three years between entries, as that's how long it takes a new Tom Cruise clone to...

Jukebox musicals have been popular on Broadway for years, and some — like Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys — have successfully been turned into movies. With the upcoming release of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, I thought I’d see if I could come up with some jukeboxes of my own. Since the songs...

Solo: A Star Wars Story opens in a few days, and everyone is supremely excited because making a prequel to Star Wars is a slam-dunk idea that can’t fail. Most fans are content to sit back and wait for the film to open, but true fans know that waiting is for “nerf herders.” Secrecy is at an...

Eighteen feature films, more than 40 major characters, 10 years of stories, six Infinity Stones: There’s a lot going on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It may seem daunting to try and recall all that’s happened  before the premiere of Avengers: Infinity War (the last chapter in this phase of...

As a wise woman once said, “All movies are lies and anyone who watches them is a sinner.” OK, she wasn’t so much “wise” as she was “living in an old boat in the woods behind my house,” but it was said by someone and you can’t prove otherwise. Her spittle-firing maxim is certainly...

A Quiet Place was released this weekend to big acclaim and even bigger box office. The movie is not only impressive for the fact that it’s an original non-franchise horror film that’s largely dialogue free, but that the co-writer and director is none other than John Krasinski of The Office...

We got an exclusive look into the day(-lewis) planner of three-time Academy Award winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis now that he’s retired from acting. 5:45 a.m. Wake up. Notify doctor if I’ve had the dream where I get shot by John Wilkes Booth again. 6:00 a.m. See if Paul Thomas Anderson called...

Editor's note: After we'd published two of these columns, we discovered that Noel Mellor already has a well-established podcast and book called "Adventures in VHS." We chose the name at the last minute and neglected to check whether anyone was already using it -- totally our mistake. We apologize...

The arena. The Pongitron. “How’s that for a bad hit, Team Leader?” The Ball Chase. The music of Guns N’ Roses. The liberation of Pong City One. Any of these phrases instantly brings to mind one of the most notorious cult films of all time: Pong: The Motion Picture. Released in December...

I’m a simple man. I’ve been married for 26 years, I have two wonderful daughters, and I like to sit back at the end of the week and lose myself in a great film. And while that’s gotten even easier with MoviePass, some people on the internet are saying that the subscription service can’t...