Since I posted my review of The Terminal, I have received numerous e-mails taking exception to the following comment: "The premise - that a man could live months of his life in an airport terminal - holds a certain fascination (especially for those ...
It's always this way for me during the closing days of March - I'm filled with an unfounded sense of optimism. You see, I'm a warm-weather person. My ideal weather is a cloudless, 85-degree day with high humidity. A summer with dozens of 90-plus ...
I hadn't planned to write anything about the Golden Globes (sounds like it should be the name of a porn awards ceremony), since I have such a low opinion of awards shows in general, and this one in particular. (It's a small step up from the People's ...
Not everyone loves scary moves, but most people do. This isn't a new phenomenon, although the genre commonly referred to as "horror" has changed radically since our great-grandparents hunkered down in theater seats. This brief essay is not in any ...
There's something daring - almost pompous - about calling a book The Great Movies, but that's precisely what Roger Ebert has done. Originally released in hardback during 2002, the volume (which is a compilation of retrospective reviews previously ...
Recently, after assembling eight or nine reviews with pictures (five of which have been posted to date), I came to a decision about how to proceed. The ultimate vote was roughly split, with a slight majority of 5% urging me to retain the pictures. ...
And now I will proceed to piss of a certain percentage of my readers... For those who don't think a film critic has any business writing about politics or expressing a political viewpoint, I can safely say that today's ReelThoughts isn't for you. (...
Initially, I had planned for this series to be three parts (plus the introduction). However, the volume of e-mails received about it, some of which raised interesting points, led me to append this final piece. Since this is essentially a response ...
"We're losing money!" That's the battle cry of the studios, recognizing (although perhaps not understanding) that movie piracy is somehow impacting the bottom line. So how do they react? A clumsy frontal assault that would be laughable if it wasn'...
There are typically six questions worth answering about any subject: the "five w's" (who, what, why, where, when) and "how." For Part One of my examination of movie piracy, I'm going to concentrate on "who" and "why." I'll cover the other four in ...
When it comes to Asian piracy, the biggest sellers are DVD titles. In a way, these can be the hardest to crack down on, because all the pirates are doing is taking a legitimate title and making illegal copies. And, because the DVD covers are done ...
When it comes to studio greed, Kill Bill isn't the only example, but it's the most egregious one. Not only did Miramax have the effortery to break the movie into two pieces in an obvious attempt to collect twice as much money, but one look at their ...
Sadly, I was too tired at the end of last night's Oscar ceremony to launch into a full-scale tirade, disappointing a few readers who found my comments to be too kind. "Berardinelli has poured too much sugar on his sour grapes." (A Best Actress win ...
Yesterday, the On-Line Film Critics Society (OFCS) named The Return of the King as Best Picture. Peter Jackson was selected Best Director, with his film sweeping through most of the non-acting categories. Bill Murray won Best Actor for Lost in ...
For four years, from 1998 through 2001, I was a regular attendee at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. My sojourns began in 1998 (less than six months after I first went to the Toronto Film Festival), when I was starting to explore the ...
Disney's Miracle doesn't arrive in theaters until next weekend, and I won't be posting my review until tomorrow or Monday, but, as often happens when there's a national sneak preview (as there is tonight), I get requests from curious movie-goers ...
In the past, I always wrote an end-of-the-year commentary called "Rewinding XXXX - The Year in Movies." This year, the more appropriate place for those thoughts is here. Rather than lumping everything together into one mega-long ReelThought on ...