Logan: Noir and Watching Movies in the Age of Instagram

Thanks to Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services, and with high-quality home-entertainment systems more affordable than ever, theaters have been upgrading their technology to coerce moviegoers to actually go to the movies. So the limited release of Logan in black-and-white (dubbed Logan: Noir) should come as no surprise to anyone. The central gimmick appeals to […]

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Ripley’s Shame: The Backsliding Feminism of the New Alien Movies

In 1979 director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon gave audiences the scare of a lifetime with Alien and a feminist action heroine with Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. The blue-collar woman with ‘80s curls transformed into a kick-ass action heroine, a small step for women in a landscape that’s still male-dominated. Weaver’s character hasn’t arrived […]

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The Lost Versus

Movie audiences love great action, and they love it more when they care about the characters. From Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman to Batman v Superman to Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, the overpriced-popcorn-loving set rush to the local cinema to watch what goes down when two classics come together to settle the most important question mankind […]

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REVIEW: Great Ideas Lost in the Rehash of Alien: Covenant

To watch the Alien prequels — Prometheus (2012) and now Alien: Covenant — is to marvel at the changes in astronaut-hiring practices that must have been implemented between the earlier chapters and the later ones. The characters in Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, set in 2124, are competent spacefarers who encounter difficult situations. But the people in Prometheus (set in […]

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