Raritania

In the 1960s the Bond films virtually invented the action movie as we know it. In the decade that followed, however, they lost their earlier...

That the Wachowski siblings' Jupiter Ascending would get anything but a brutal reception was a long shot. After all, it has long been...

What I said about G.I. Joe recently applies to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well, even though I recall watching more of the series (...

Wally Pfister's Transcendence (2014) is a Frankenstein story--one that hews so closely to the plotline of Mary Shelley's book that ...

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...