Raritania

Watching 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra , I was, of course, struck by the ways in which the film was derivative of the Bond film The...

A while back I happened on a blog post (regrettably, I haven't been able to track it down again) which raised the matter of authors'...

I read little Henry James until recently, and most of that in a hurry for a long-ago graduate course. (Indeed, "Daisy Miller" is a...

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD By the time I saw Josh Trank's Fantastic Four I had long since had an earful of the bad press--and as is so o...

Looking at today's games--I have in mind here the action RPG genre--I am struck by their breathtaking graphics, their rendering of vast,...

Looking at popular fiction today it certainly seems that the first person point-of-view is more popular than it used to be, and one might wo...

As The Double Four opens country squire Peter Ruff is summoned to Paris to meet with the mysterious old woman heading the titular organizat...

I remember often thinking that the 2005 Fantastic Four movie was overcriticized. It was by no means ground-breaking--but it was entertaining...

Just as we have been deluged by Marvel and DC superheroes at theaters, so have we been on network TV. This past season the CW, an obvious ca...

Again and again I have been struck by the staying power of the boom in superhero movies--up to eight movies a year, with this looking like t...

I would not account myself a particular fan of Zak Snyder's work, but his film version of Watchmen has always struck me as grossly over...

The career of E. Phillips Oppenheim can seem an object lesson is how hugely popular writers can fade into utter obscurity, while relatively ...

Looking at Hollywood's run of product recently I find myself wondering if the action film genre has not seen its best years already--and...

Those who offer a straight answer about just "What is a Novel?"--beyond its being a "book-length" work of prose fiction-...

Is science fiction flourishing, or is it dying? Some vehemently insist on the former, many insist with equal vehemence on the latter--and bo...