Joss Whedon’s Firefly is a science fiction series that lived and died on the Fox Network in the Fall of 2002. Fourteen episosdes were shot, but only eleven were aired before the series was canceled, to the consternation of the surprisingly large number of loyal fans that the show conjured up in the split second... Read More

I am sorry to report that I was disappointed by The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Jackson’s first mistake was trying to make a trilogy at all. The Hobbit is shorter than any of the three volumes of The Lord... Read More

Breaking Dawn, Part 2 is the fifth and final movie of Mormon novelist Stephenie Meyer’s phenomenally popular Twilight Saga. I think that the Twilight Saga is highly significant, because it offers a systematic argument for traditional — and biological — sexual roles and morality in the form of a Gothic teen romance story involving vampires... Read More

I finally got to a town with a movie theater and saw The Dark Knight Rises, the third and final film of Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight Rises does not equal The Dark Knight — which was scarcely possible anyway — but it is a superb piece of film-making. It is a... Read More

With its stunning H. R. Giger designs and first-rate cast, Ridley Scott’s classic Alien (1979) is imaginative, visually striking, immensely atmospheric, and sometimes just plain terrifying. Together with its worthy but very different sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it spawned a vast pop-culture “franchise” (which is Hollywood-speak for a mythos) including two unworthy sequels, Alien... Read More

Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1, is the fourth and penultimate movie of The Twilight Saga, based on Stephenie Meyer’s phenomenally popular series of novels. Worldwide, the Twilight novels have now sold more than 100 million copies; they have been translated into 37 languages; The Twilight Saga movies have grossed more than $2 billion. Meyer, I... Read More

I saw Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch a few days ago, but I wanted to wait until my ears stopped ringing before I wrote a review. Frankly, I needed the time to come up with something to say. Sucker Punch is often a great music video. It is frequently a great video game. But it never... Read More

In any poll of Counter-Currents readers, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) would surely rank high among fiction writers. Thus Lovecraft is a regular feature in these pages. For the uninitiated who want a quick introduction, I recommend you start with Frank H. Woodward’s Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2009), a 90-minute documentary on Lovecraft’s life and... Read More

In my review of Christoper Nolan’s Batman Begins, I argued that the movie generates a dramatic conflict around the highest of stakes: the destruction of the modern world (epitomized by Gotham City) by the Traditionalist “League of Shadows” versus its preservation and “progressive” improvement by Batman. I also argued that Batman’s transformation into a Nietzschean... Read More

Batman Begins In Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel The Dark Knight (2008), director Christopher Nolan breaks with the campy style of earlier Batman films, focusing instead on character development and motivations. This makes both films psychologically dark and intellectually and emotionally compelling. Nolan’s casts are superb. Although I was disappointed to learn that David... Read More

After being blown away by director Christopher Nolan’s Inception, I decided to give his Batman Begins (2005) another chance. The first time I saw this film, I did not like it. Not one bit. I must have been distracted, because this time I loved it. Nolan breaks with the campy style of earlier Batman films,... Read More

I finally went to see Inception. I wish I had gone on its opening night. It is one of the best movies I have ever seen. Inception is one of the most imaginative and brilliantly plotted movies ever, and it is also one of the most thrilling and emotionally powerful. Think Vertigomeets The Matrix—but that... Read More

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) looks like director Guillermo del Toro’s audition for The Hobbit. (He got the job, but backed out because of scheduling problems with the studio.) The root mythology is Tolkienesque: In remotest antiquity, elves, trolls, and other beings shared the earth with mankind. The visual style is pure Peter Jackson:... Read More

Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy (2004) is grounded in a highly entertaining fusion of occult history and lore—including elements of Traditionalism, Esoteric Hitlerism, and even H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos—although cut and pasted and juggled around without any regard for truth. Hellboy begins with the character’s origins. In 1944, the Nazis send a secret expedition, Project... Read More

Twilight: Eclipse is the third movie based on Stephenie Meyer’s phenomenally popular four volume Twilight Saga. I reviewed the first two movies, Twilight (here) and New Moon (here), and I was gratified to be contacted by several readers for my opinion of Eclipse. First, some background. In Twilight, Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart), the protagonist with... Read More

Recently, I went to see Predators, a sequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator, about a group of American Special Forces commandos in the Central American jungle who find themselves being hunted by an extraterrestrial, the Predator. Predator was not that good a movie, but the premise was interesting. It was ripped off and... Read More

Spoiler: Neo and Trinity die and the machines win. Bummer. Most of the rest makes no sense. I hated this movie. I didn’t hate it for its racial politics, which are the absolute worst I have ever seen. There are wise, powerful, competent, heroic Negroes everywhere. (The fact that they are all in Zion, a... Read More

About twenty minutes into The Matrix Reloaded I was feeling sick to my stomach — literally. The scene was in “Zion,” the last bastion of the human [sic] race. Picture the ugliest industrial junkyard on the planet and then drop it down a hole to the ninth circle of hell. Morpheus, played by the ugly,... Read More

It was one minute past midnight, one last time. I knew The Return of The King would be a great movie, and it is. The only question in my mind was, “How great?” Return is not as good as The Two Towers, my favorite Rings movie, but it is a magnificent, moving film, that will... Read More

Catherine Hardwicke’s movie Twilight is based on the first novel of a series by Stephenie Meyer. The books mostly appeal to young women, and the advertisements for the movie screamed “chick flick,” so I gave it a pass when it was released in theaters. But I admire Joss Whedon’s series Angel, about a vampire with... Read More

The news is: the movie of New Moon, the second installment of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, doesn’t suck—in the vulgar, colloquial, non-vampire sense of the word—although all the signs were certainly there. First, the book of New Moon is terrible: nearly 600 pages of pedestrian prose, glacially paced, padded to excruciating lengths not with fluff,... Read More

I liked the first Spy Kids movie a lot. It was a simple, enjoyable adventure story, told with humor and style and livened up with imaginative sets and great gadgets. I liked the premise: Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez are spies, a job they have to keep secret from their kids. The kids are smart, though,... Read More

I loved M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. And I love his new movie Signs. Signsdoes not have the amazing twist ending of The Sixth Sense, but it has a twist of its own. Ostensibly a suspenseful, scary sci-fi thriller with many wonderful comic scenes, Signs turns into something far more serious and... Read More

My cat and I saw Men in Black II this past weekend, along with a cheerful bunch of white college students. My cat found the movie complex, challenging, and fully engaging. I was less impressed, but I admit that I was much amused. The cartoonish nature of the film was underscored by the fact that... Read More

Definition: A minority report is a statement of a dissenting viewpoint defeated by majority vote. I saw Minority Report this weekend. Since I liked the last Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky, I thought I might like Minority Report too, even though the quality of a movie has far more to do with the director than... Read More