Longform

Webster’s Dictionary defines a reboot as “the act or an instance of starting (something) anew or making a fresh start.” Which is actually not all that helpful for the purposes of figuring out how a reboot is different from a remake. What the hell, Webster’s? You’re supposed to define these things for us!It feels like the terms remake

If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call? Chester Cheetah!(We’ll workshop that.)In the annals of popular culture, there has never been a crossover quite like this: The meeting of American’s favorite ghost incarceration service and America’s favorite jungle cat who enjoys the taste of corn meal enriched with ferrous sulfate, niacin, thiamin mononitrate

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Sets Franchise Record With Rotten Tomatoes Score,” the headlines screamed this week, as the latest Ghostbusters sequel debuted squarely in the rotten area of the Rotten Tomatoes ratings system.To be sure, I don’t take issue with Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire going down in history as the worst-reviewed Ghostbusters (even if I personally would rank it slightly above the even

The following post contains spoilers for the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale. What’s the deal with the word spoilers? Nothing here is spoiled! It’s not like the piece is going to give you food poisoning if you read it without watching the episode!The Curb Your Enthusiasm finale may not have been perfect, but it had the perfect title: “No Lessons

With the possible exception of James Dean, no actor left a bigger impact on the world of film in fewer onscreen appearances than Bruce Lee. While Lee headlined only four martial arts movies during his lifetime, those films — especially the fourth, Enter the Dragon, which Lee finished only a few months before his death — became so

Week after week, X-Men ’97 keeps exceeding all of my expectations. What could have been a hollow exercise in ’90s nostalgia has turned out to be a terrific show in its own right: Not just a fitting successor to X-Men: The Animated Series, not just a good cartoon but, at least through its first five episodes, one of the

“I don’t want to end up being a nothin’.”American Movie premiered 25 years ago. I saw it for the first time when it played my college campus. Back then it almost felt a mockumentary, except its subjects were real people. I still remember the sound of the laughter erupting in the theater when American Movie’s subject, independent filmmaker Mark Borchardt

I don’t remember where I first saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s odd;  I can usually rattle off exactly where and how I saw my favorite movies. I watched Citizen Kane in the family room of my parents’ old house on a pan-and-scanned VHS tape I rented from Blockbuster Video. I fell in love with Jacques

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier would have been a great title for the final Star Trek movie.As it turned out, the film was so disliked it almost was the final Star Trek movie, and perhaps would have been the franchise’s farewell if not for two key factors. For one, while The Final Frontier was the lowest-grossing Star Trek film to that point, it was

Did you know that one of the best movies of the year just premiered on Netflix? I hope so, but it wouldn’t surprise if you didn’t. Sometimes it looks like Netflix’s distribution strategy is designed to finally answer the age-old question about whether a tree falling in the woods makes a sound if no one is