Today, fans would demand to know why Bill Murray was trapped. 30 years ago, no one cared. Few movies achieve the level of instant recognition offered by Groundhog Day. Since its premiere 30 years ago, it’s been regarded as the gold standard of the…

Forget the Joker and the Riddler. The detective has a bigger monster to fight. You’ve probably never given much thought to what Batman would be like in the Victorian era, but DC comic book writers Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola certainly did. In…

Hollywood would never be the same again. Dinosaurs have long been a source of curiosity for kids and adults alike — who wouldn’t be entranced by the fact that giant lizard monsters once roamed the Earth? But the cultural interest in paleontology was…

No one expected a passion project to take such a disturbing turn. In 1982, master puppeteer Jim Henson released his first non-Muppet film, The Dark Crystal, with a cast comprised entirely of puppets. Henson was already renowned for his work on The…

Sometimes it takes a children’s show to point out how silly adults can be. Seven years after the 2006 cancelation of Teen Titans, the characters returned to television with Teen Titans Go! But the new show wasn’t quite what fans expected. Along with…

In the 2010s, there was a surge in the popularity of women-led psychological thrillers: The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, A Simple Favor. But the grandmother of them all is Gone Girl. The book, and its subsequent film adaptation, is…

When you crunch the numbers, there’s no way to consider it anything but a failure. At first glance, it’s hard to understand why Treasure Planet was a box office failure. Released on November 27, 2002, the concept for this Disney animated adventure…

Only Spielberg could make a movie like this — though he didn’t do it alone. Horror is a big genre, but many of the most successful scary movies rely on gory and grotesque to win over audiences. From recent hits like Hereditary and Barbarian to…

And it’s streaming now on Amazon Prime. Some movies are pure, iconic Nicolas Cage. For a movie to qualify as a truly unadulterated Nic Cage film, there should be a resounding “Yes” to at least three of the following questions: Are there any bizarre…

Equilibrium is a surprisingly emotional movie about an emotion-free dystopia. And it’s streaming now. Dystopian stories appeal to a certain curiosity in many of us who wonder what the future holds — and the recognition that it might not be an…

Before Keanu Reeves could become Neo, he had to be Johnny. It’s the second decade of the 21st century. Everything is run by corporations, and there’s a mass plague infecting people worldwide. No, this is not a recent documentary, it’s actually the…

“Think your teachers are aliens? You could be right.” “The students of Herrington High always suspected their teachers were from another planet.” A bit puzzling, I thought, as I had never heard any high school student (as an adult or as a student)…

From here on out, at least in North America, it was all tedious flops. You know you’re in trouble from the film’s first scene. The sun is shining, flowers are blooming, a beautiful deer is sipping from a waterfall... and then we get a close-up of the…

Cage gets top billing for this film, but this isn't really his story. When a movie character suggests taking a shortcut, you know nothing good is about to happen – especially when that shortcut is through dark woods at night. So it’s no surprise…

You’re better off watching the 2009 movie that this one is clearly trying to imitate. A little over a decade ago, Hollywood launched an iconic franchise about a middle-aged white man with a particular set of skills who sets out to rescue his…

Unlike South Park, this movie failed to make a lasting impression. 1997 was a landmark year for Trey Parker and Matt Stone. On August 13, the project that would define their careers premiered. South Park was crass, crudely animated, and utterly…

Advertised as a wacky adventure for children, this clever horror story features surprising emotional depth. Despite the incredible amount of time and effort that goes into its creation, stop-motion animation is often dismissed as being for children.…

Athletes have always made bad movies, but this flop was practically set up to fail. The athlete-to-actor pipeline is a risky one. While a few big names, like Dwayne Johnson, have successfully made the jump, many more have wilted. A good athlete may…

Reviled as one of the worst movies ever made, it took almost two decades to undo the damage. Look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores for Christopher Reeve’s four Superman movies, and you’ll notice a pattern. There’s a clear decline, starting with the…

Captain America was one of the first (and worst) Marvel movies of the ’90s. Thirty years ago today, we got the first major superhero motion picture in American theaters to kick off the ’90s: Captain America. Technically, this film was released in the…