Over the years, many of you have written to me to tell me about your favorite theater - often an oasis of sorts away from the impersonal, generic insides of a multiplex. For eleven years, I have had such a place. Called the Ritz 16, it was run by ...
May brings good news to those who have had trouble getting excited about 2007's theatrical fare. In fact, thus far the only movie to really excite movie-goers in general has been 300. Sure, there have been other success stories, but the adaptation ...
The "where" is actually a "when," and the answer to that question is sometime on Friday. The question that naturally follows is "why?" Why Friday, when half the movie-review websites already have the review posted and the rest will have it up ...
I'm not the only one expressing this sentiment this weekend: Welcome back, Roger. Oh, I know he hasn't really been away. He has written occasional reviews and other columns for the Chicago Sun-Times and has been hard at work rehabbing, but there's ...
For those involved in the motion picture industry, the process of editing commercial DVDs for content then offering them for sale in that edited format is anathema. There are a number of companies that offer this "service": CleanFilms, CleanFlicks, ...
In the film festival pantheon, there are three levels of prestige. Tier One is inhabited by The Giants. Cannes and Toronto are the only undisputed members of this select group. Some would argue that Venice belongs there, or Telluride, or Berlin. ...
There's a curious trend in recent movies that I have noticed: strippers keep their clothes on while addicts take them off. This is by no means a hard-and-fast rule, but it has struck me as a curious development. I have a few thoughts about what it ...
The average life cycle of a television program is a known quantity: birth, first-run, repeats, death, syndication, DVD release. For some shows, the steps get jumbled a bit (with repeats and first-run episodes interspersed and DVD releases preceding ...
The question hanging over the DVD industry is simple: Has Toshiba's HD-DVD become the new Betamax?The facts are indisputable on the high definition DVD front. Not only have more of Sony's Blu-Ray discs been bought in total, but Blu-Ray is ...
This was ready yesterday, but I decided it was probably not a good idea to post any substantive content on April 1...Looking ahead to April's theatrical releases, I have to admit it doesn't look more promising than March, which appeared much like ...
SPOILERS for: the third season of Battlestar Galactica, the second season of Rome, and the sixth season of 24.Now that Battlestar Galactica has shown its hand for the season finale, it's as good a time as any to look back at the past season and ...
It fascinates me how interested some readers are in ReelViews traffic statistics. Not a week goes by when I don't get at least one friendly inquiry asking about the site's number of hits. Hopefully, this column with satisfy all with such curiosity...
I don't hate turtles. When I was a kid, I can remember wandering around my backyard or in the adjacent woods looking for them. I'd catch them, put them in a topless shoebox overnight (usually with a dish of water and a few lettuce leaves), then let...
This past Tuesday came and went with barely a whimper. But do you know what day it was? Not the Ides of March - that was last week. Not St. Patrick's Day - that was Saturday. And not the First Full Day of Spring - that was yesterday (although, to...
The DVD release of Shortbus got me thinking about the growing body of films often referred to as "art-porn." These are "legitimate" titles featuring explicit sexual activity. For the most part, art-porn films do not star recognizable actors but ...
Let's go back in time about 20 years... back to when the idea of renting movies on videotape was relatively new and the concept of a "home theater" was the province of wealthy videophiles. In the mid-1980s, the typical length of time between when a ...
Addressing this subject is nothing new. I have done it many times in e-mails and written a prior ReelThought or two devoted to the subject, but it keeps coming up. What exactly do the star ratings mean?Every film critic who uses a rating system has ...