When it comes to Mel Gibson, it's hard to separate the man from his work. When most people think of him now, they think of two things: his anti-Semitic ravings one night, and The Passion of the Christ (both of which South Park memorialized in the award-winning "The Passion...

This is the world we live in: any time you make a movie about morally conflicted cops battling charismatic drug dealers on violent city streets, you're going to draw comparisons to The Wire -- and almost inevitably, your movie will come up short. At times, Brooklyn's Finest is gleefully...

Ever since Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was announced, fierce debates have taken place about whether he should even have attempted such an oft-adapted story. Burton's gotten to the point in his career where he can pretty much do what he wants, and what he wants is the same thing...

It's hard to overstate the Disney effect on modern storytelling. Their princess retellings of classic fairy tales and children's literature, whether collected by oral folklorists like the Grimms or written by 19th century authors like Hans Christian Anderson or Robert Louis Stevenson, scrubbed most of the sex and violence and...

Once upon a time, the word "hacker" had a sort of outlaw cachet. At the beginning of the boom of the internet and World Wide Web -- say, the early '80s to the late '90s -- computers were ubiquitous but mysterious, seemingly limitless in capacity. And hackers were the wizards...

It's mighty strange
You're looking happily deranged
[lyrics incomprehensible]
Or have you picked your target yet?
Hey Sandy!
--"Hey Sandy," Polaris

If you were in school in the mid-1990s, you may remember those lyrics -- including the impossible-to-understand third line -- as the theme song to one of the strangest...

Henry Kuttner is one of the lost masters of science fiction, according to Ray Bradbury, who wrote the introduction to a posthumous collection of Kuttner's short fiction. Writing under numerous pseudonyms (and often with his wife, C.M. Moore as a collaborator) for numerous low-rent sci-fi publications in the '30s, '40s,...

Steve Purcell has done just about everything, and he's done it with Sam and Max -- a six-foot dog and a toothy rabbit with a taste for carnage. Purcell's not quite a legend, but he probably should be. In the late 1980s, he briefly freelanced for Marvel, and on...

The greatest crime committed by the 1998 film What Dreams May Come is its excessive, nearly humorless earnest, personified by its star, Robin Williams. That's certainly better than the alternative -- the sort of emotion-denying ubersnark with which we're all too familiar -- but it deadens the impact of what...

A movie's premise might be its most important piece. If you have a killer premise, it's hard to make a movie any worse than mediocre; by contrast, if you have a terrible premise, it's hard to make a movie any better than mediocre. Wristcutters: A Love Story, based on a...

The Monster Squad has a ridiculously easy premise for an '80s movie: bring together Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and then get a team of kids to try to stop them. It's sort of like The Goonies (rating: 65) with monsters...

Extract goes down smoothly, but there's not much there. Mike Judge's third live-action movie is a much more modest affair than the biting satire of the brilliant Office Space (rating: 88) or the uneven Idiocracy (rating: 78). It isn't quite clear who he's satirizing here, if anybody, which makes this...

I recently reviewed Almost Human, a book that followed the Carnegie Mellon robotics department's frequent frustration with building robots in the present day. Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre's Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs muses about the future, quoting futurists and science fiction and reasoning through thought...

American cartoonist Nina Paley has one of the hottest indie movies around, Sita Sings the Blues (rating: 86), her animated retelling of the classic Hindi story called the Ramayana, set to the jazz songs of 1920's torch singer Annette Hanshaw. Released for free on the internet in 2008,...

Whenever someone other than Disney wanted to make a Disney-like animated movie, they usually came to Don Bluth. After a long career at Disney, beginning with work on Sleeping Beauty (rating: 90) in 1959, in the late '70s, he made a series of movies with all the Disney design principles,...

Popular nonfiction is a tricky beast. It's one thing for someone to write a memoir, or a long-form investigation that the journalist-author has personally researched and reported. But it's hard to boil down complex science into readable prose for laypeople that omits the jargon, math, and much of the...

John Carpenter just might be the best filmmaker of the 1980s. With 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 (rating: 85), and 1978's Halloween, Carpenter began an astonishingly productive decade, establishing himself as perhaps the best thriller director and best horror director in Hollywood. The list of hits over the next 10...

Cartoonist Nina Paley has a distinctive style in her strips, whether she's drawing couples or cats: round, expressive faces with easy, honest smiles and occasionally painful comeuppances. Paley has a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of sarcasm or snark. She spent six years making Sita...

As movie premises go, it's hard to top a post-apocalyptic action movie. Every scene and setpiece is a perfect empty canvas for a lunatic art department to create a frightening, barely recognizable vision of our world, to tell a story with burnt-out rubble of how humanity destroyed itself, as we...

I criticized the Korean monster flick The Host as a movie that understood its genre but didn't add much of its own. The same can be said of Howard McCain's 2008 movie Outlander, which takes an unbeatable premise -- Beowulf with intersteller alien monsters playing the part of...