Natalie Russo (Katharine McPhee) and Nick Smith (Mike Vogel) are two singles who are both unlucky in love. Natalie manages her family’s Italian restaurant, where opera is constantly playing. Nick is an architecht whose mother (JoBeth Williams) keeps setting him up on dates. They both toss a penny in the magical Hayward Fountain and wish for a chance to find their one true love. Despite having never met, they start dreaming about each other. Even though Natalie is being pursued by a volatile chef (Antonio Cupo) and Nick’s mom has set him up with another woman (Chiara Zanni), Natalie and Nick fall for each other.
That’s romantic, right? The problem is that the fountain has some dumb rules. Once you toss your penny and start dreaming, you only have seven days to find your perfect mate or you’ll lose them. That seems pretty mean-spirited to me. To quote Sigourney Weaver:
This is a Hallmark film so you never doubt that Nick and Natalie will find each other. I did get frustrated because it seemed like they should have spent more time in their dreams disccussing where to meet up and maybe exchanging numbers, But I guess that’s not the way the magic works. Still, it’s a sweet movie. Katharine McPhee is really pretty and Mike Vogel is really handsome. They probably would have fallen in love eventually even without the fountain.
I asked Tubi for a soccer movie and this is what I got.
Steve Guttenberg plays Henry Butler, an American soccer player whose love of gambling gets him arrested. He’s given a year’s probation and ordered to work as a handyman at a “boys’ home” that is managed by Karen (Sophie Lorain). Karen wants the boys to start playing soccer so that they can feel good about themselves and Henry just happens to know something about that. The team might not be any good but Henry teaches them to believe in themselves and Henry finally stop loathing himself. Then the boys’ home burns down but luckily, Henry and the cook (Michel Perron) make enough money at the horse races to build a new one. Sometimes, gambling is good!
This sucked. All of the boys were obnoxious and Steve Guttenberg spent the whole movie talking extremely fast and jumping up and down. A typical recurring joke was that the flatulent goalie’s shorts kept falling down. One of the boys was played by Christian Slater’s younger brother but he didn’t sound like Jack Nicholson so who cares? There’s a whole other subplot about Karen blackmailing the local funeral home into sponsoring the kids so that they can goet uniforms. Karen and Henry fell in love but I didn’t. Even the soccer games were boring.
This movie had a kick, straight to the head. It didn’t have the fighting spirit of the best baseball movies.
There’s a specific, almost mystical, pleasure in watching a movie that is, by almost every conventional standard, a complete mess. It’s a guilty pleasure, that sweet spot where a film is so unapologetically over-the-top, so earnestly ridiculous, that it circles back around to being utterly entertaining. And for my money, few films embody this “so bad it’s good” vibe quite like Steven Seagal’s 1990 action opus, Marked for Death. This is prime, uncut, vintage Seagal, a film that feels like it was beamed in from an alternate dimension where ponytails are a symbol of power, whispering threats is a sign of deep menace, and the streets of Chicago are apparently overrun with voodoo-practicing Jamaican drug lords. It’s silly, sure, but it’s a very specific kind of silly—grounded enough in its grim, urban revenge fantasy to feel almost earnest, which is precisely what makes it work. To put it in perspective, Marked for Death is downright restrained compared to the coked-out, reality-defying lunacy Seagal would unleash just a year later in Out for Justice. That film, with its infamous “anybody seen Richie?” barroom brawl and its general air of sweaty, unhinged mania, operates on a completely different, far more unhinged wavelength. Marked for Death still has one foot in the real world, however wobbly that stance may be, whereas Out for Justice seems to have been fueled by a warehouse full of stimulants and a complete disregard for narrative coherence.
For those who don’t remember the heyday of Seagal-mania, Marked for Death is a perfect time capsule. This was before the bloated, straight-to-DVD era; this was Seagal in his physical prime, slim, athletic, and seemingly capable of snapping every bone in a human body without breaking a sweat. He plays John Hatcher, a burnt-out DEA agent who, after a botched operation in Mexico, decides to retire and seek some peace and quiet by visiting his sister and niece in his old Chicago neighborhood. This is the first of the film’s many logical leaps, because apparently, a retired DEA agent’s idea of a stress-free vacation is moving back to the neighborhood where he grew up and where a violent turf war is raging. It’s a classic action movie setup that requires you to immediately check your brain at the door, but compared to the sheer narrative anarchy of Out for Justice, it practically feels like Shakespeare.
You see, the peace and quiet Hatcher seeks doesn’t exist. The town is being terrorized by a Jamaican drug posse led by the wonderfully named and gloriously performed villain, Screwface. Played with scenery-chewing, eye-rolling relish by Basil Wallace, Screwface is more than just a drug dealer; he’s a voodoo priest with a penchant for giving people a “t’ousand dets wurse dan yoo doo.” He’s a cartoon character in the best possible way, a man so over-the-top that his presence alone elevates the film from a standard revenge flick into something far more memorable. When he declares Hatcher and his family “marked for death,” you can’t help but lean in, not because you’re scared for the hero, but because you want to see what bizarre, hammy line he’s going to come up with next. It’s absurd, but it’s a controlled absurdity, a deliberate performance that knows exactly what movie it’s in. That’s the key difference between this and the later Seagal outings; Marked for Death plays its absurdity with a straight face, whereas Out for Justice feels like it’s sweating and twitching through every frame, as if the filmmakers themselves had just snorted a mountain of the very product their hero was supposedly fighting against.
The plot, such as it is, kicks into gear when a gang shootout at a local bar forces Hatcher into action, and the posse retaliates by shooting up his sister’s house and wounding his young niece. This is the moment where the film’s narrative pivots from “watch the hero mope” to “watch the hero mope and then absolutely obliterate everyone in his path.” The central premise, like many critics have noted, is as formulaic as they come: a former lawman with a troubled past is forced out of retirement to avenge his family using excessive force. One reviewer put it perfectly, noting the film follows the “familiar one-note, bone-crunching action vehicle for Steven Seagal.” And while that might sound like a criticism, in this context, it’s a promise of the guilty pleasures to come. But even within that formula, there’s a certain grim logic that holds it together—something you absolutely cannot say about the gloriously unhinged Out for Justice, where the plot seems to be held together with duct tape and pure, unfiltered rage.
What makes Marked for Death such a classic guilty pleasure is the sheer, unrelenting brutality of the action sequences. This is not the sanitized, quick-cut action of today. This is a film where every punch sounds like a gunshot and every bone snapped echoes with a sickening, satisfying crunch. Director Dwight D. Little, who later went on to direct TV episodes for shows like Prison Break and Bones, stages the action with a “tight handling,” making sure the camera is right there to capture Seagal’s trademark Aikido. The violence is so extreme that it becomes comical. We’re talking broken arms, broken necks, gouged eyes, a decapitation, and a finale so over-the-top that it involves Seagal using a samurai sword to fight his way through a compound. Yet even with all that mayhem, it never quite reaches the hallucinatory, sweaty-palmed frenzy of Out for Justice, where the violence feels less choreographed and more like a bar brawl that somehow escaped onto film stock.
There are moments in Marked for Death that are so ridiculous they deserve their own standing ovation. There’s the infamous department store fight, where Hatcher dismantles a small army of henchmen while surrounded by mannequins and glass displays. It’s a perfect showcase for Seagal’s skills as a fighter and a complete lack of interest in things like, say, civilian casualties or property damage. Then there’s the entire third act, where Hatcher and his buddy Max (played with stoic reliability by the great Keith David), somehow manage to smuggle an entire arsenal of weapons into Jamaica for a final assault on Screwface’s compound. The logic of this is never explained, but it doesn’t matter. We’re given a montage of them prepping their weapons, and the next thing you know, they’re on a plane. It’s this kind of brazen disregard for realism that makes the film such a hoot, but again, it’s a calculated hoot. The cocaine-fueled silliness of Out for Justice would never bother with such a montage—it would just have Seagal appear in Jamaica with a shotgun, no explanation given, because who needs logic when you have that much manic energy coursing through the projector?
Perhaps the most surprising element is that despite the malevolent tone, the film has become a beloved “cult classic” for many. As one reviewer from the time stated, “it’s easy to see how someone could end up not liking Marked for Death. Its plot is ridiculous, it was overly violent for its time period… On the other hand, this is a film that doesn’t seem to care what you think and instead gleefully exist as a throwback to old-school Grindhouse films.” There’s a sense that Seagal and the filmmakers were in on the joke, even if they were playing it completely straight. The film is excessive, ruthless, and mindlessly numbing in all the right ways, a sentiment that perfectly encapsulates its enduring appeal. It’s the cinematic equivalent of comfort food—you know it’s bad for you, but it tastes so good. And it tastes a whole lot more grounded than the chaotic, unfiltered blast of pure id that is Out for Justice, a film that feels like it was edited by a hyperactive squirrel on a sugar rush.
Marked for Death isn’t a great film by any objective measure. The acting is wooden, the dialogue is laughable, and the cultural stereotypes are, to put it mildly, a product of their time. The Miami Herald even noted that Seagal dispatches his foes with “such an obnoxious sense of higher purpose that we get the feeling he’s not in on the fun.” The film’s portrayal of Jamaican culture as a hotbed of violent, voodoo-worshipping drug dealers is certainly problematic and not something that would fly today, which adds to the movie’s bizarre, anachronistic charm. It’s a film that, while considered one of his better works from that era, is far from what you’d call high art. But it knows its lane and stays in it, which is more than you can say for the gloriously unhinged Out for Justice, a movie that seems to have forgotten what lane it was in, swerved into oncoming traffic, and somehow kept driving anyway.
In the end, Marked for Death is the ultimate “bad movie night” experience. It’s a window into a time when action heroes were larger than life, plots were just excuses for mayhem, and a villain named Screwface could be a legitimate threat. It’s a film where you can quote terrible dialogue and cheer for the excessive violence without feeling guilty, because it’s all part of the deal. As one IMDb user succinctly put it, “Marked for Death is a thoroughly entertaining overblown unnecessarily violent & foul mouthed action film, the sort of film which Seagal was perfectly suited to star in. Sure it’s predictable & unoriginal but when a films this much fun who cares?” And honestly, isn’t that the highest praise you can give a movie like this? It’s a big, dumb, brutal, and brilliant piece of schlock that proudly wears its awfulness as a badge of honor. It’s silly, absolutely, but it’s a grounded, almost respectable kind of silly—the kind that makes you appreciate just how far off the deep end Seagal would go with Out for Justice, a film so wildly, unapologetically unhinged that it makes Marked for Death look like a quiet, contemplative drama by comparison.
FELON is a movie that caught my attention when I was scrolling through Val Kilmer’s filmography on IMDB. I was looking for a movie and performance that seemed worthy of his talents, and this one stood out to me based on its high rating. It was directed by Ric Roman Waugh, who has helmed several solid Gerard Butler films over the last decade, including ANGEL HAS FALLEN (2019), GREENLAND (2020), and KANDAHAR (2023). I decided to go ahead and check it out on a lazy, and hot, Sunday afternoon in Arkansas.
Stephen Dorff stars as Wade Porter, a man whose life takes a serious turn when he kills a burglar who has broken into his home. He’s sentenced to 3 years in prison for manslaughter and soon learns just how difficult it is to survive in prison. In what may be the best performance of his career, Dorff’s transformation from business-minded family man to brutal, prison survivor is incredible. As hard as he becomes, you never stop seeing the decent man trapped beneath the hardened exterior that prison forces on him. Val Kilmer plays John Smith, a mysterious lifer whose emotional scars and wisdom prove invaluable to Porter’s survival. While Smith may never go down as one of Kilmer’s most well-known characters, he gives an excellent, understated performance that proved he could still command the screen.
After looking through the IMDB profile for FELON, I expected a gritty prison drama with plenty of violence. You do get that, but I was surprised by how much the film affected me emotionally. This movie sets up a scenario that proves how quickly an ordinary guy’s life can be destroyed by one difficult situation, and then how hard it is to hold on to your humanity when your new world is completely built on violence.
Director Waugh is able to keep the stakes high from the very beginning of the film to its end. Porter not only has to fight with all he has to survive behind the walls of the prison, but he also has to do whatever he can to to hold his family together, especially when it looks like his wife Laura (Marisol Nichols) is going to divorce him. There is a lot of violence behind the prison walls, but it feels ugly rather than entertaining, which adds meaning and a layer of depth to the film. I want to shout out Harold Perrineau, who I know from the TV series LOST. He is absolutely chilling as the evil prison lieutenant Jackson, who lost his own humanity years earlier and who now treats inmates as nothing more than pawns in his own ugly game. His performance is especially affecting when coupled with Dorff’s decent character.
Val Kilmer put his name on a lot of movies later in his career that aren’t that great. FELON isn’t a classic, but it’s a very strong film. After enjoying their work together in THUNDERHEART, I really enjoyed seeing Kilmer work again with Sam Shepard, who plays his last remaining friend here. It’s a wonderful bonus for a low budget film from 2008. What stayed with me most, though, is the film’s reminder that justice and fairness aren’t always the same thing. Wade goes to prison wanting to quietly serve his time so he can move on with his life, but he quickly learns that survival often depends on abandoning the ideals that allow him to be a man of integrity in the real world. It’s a somewhat unsettling thought that has stuck with me after the movie ended.
FELON is a film that’s probably never received the attention it deserved, but it’s a good prison drama. Anchored by excellent performances from Stephen Dorff and Val Kilmer, it provides an emotionally compelling story that’s well worth a watch. If you’re a fan of Val Kilmer like I am, this one’s a forgotten gem!
THUNDERHEART came out back in 1992, when I was a mere 18-year-old and trying to go to the movies any time I possibly could. I already liked Val Kilmer based on his performances in such diverse films as TOP SECRET (1984), REAL GENIUS (1985), TOP GUN (1986), and WILLOW (1988). I also liked the director Michael Apted, who had directed the underrated Gene Hackman courtroom drama CLASS ACTION the year before. I figured THUNDERHEART would have to at least be pretty good…
Val Kilmer stars as the young FBI agent Ray Levoi, who’s sent to a Sioux reservation in South Dakota to assist veteran agent Frank “Cooch” Coutelle (Sam Shepard) in a murder investigation. You see, Levoi is “part” Indian, so the thought is that his family heritage will at least give him some credibility when dealing with the Indians on the res. At first overly confident and cocky, he begins to change as the investigation uncovers a history of corruption, violence and broken political promises that have had a tragic impact on the people of the reservation. By the film’s thrilling conclusion, Levoi has been forced to question his own identity and decide who his loyalties truly belong to!
I’m a big fan of THUNDERHEART. I really enjoy the arc that Kilmer’s character undergoes in the film. At first, he’s extremely cynical and doesn’t want to have anything to do with being the special “Washington redskin” in the FBI’s murder investigation. When he gets stuck with the job, though, he just wants to get it over with as soon as possible. But as the story moves along and he meets various characters like Walter Crow Horse (Graham Greene), Maggie Eagle Bear (Sheila Tousey) and Grandpa (Ted Think Elk), he begins to see the truth behind their situation. By the end, he’s willing to give up everything to solve the crime and bring those responsible to justice. Kilmer allows this 180-degree turnaround to happen naturally, and I personally believe that this is one of the more underrated performances of his career.
The primary supporting cast deserves a lot of credit as well. Graham Greene brings wisdom and an engaging sense of humor to his character of Walter Crow Horse, the tribal police officer who starts out as a pain in the butt to Levoi prior to becoming a trusted ally. And I’ve always loved Sam Shepard, who plays the grizzled veteran agent Frank Coutelle. He’s completely believable as a man who’s seen it all, maybe a little too much, over the course of his career. The dusty South Dakota landscapes become a character all its own and provide the perfect backdrop to the story. This is a movie that feels authentic instead of like some staged Hollywood production.
I also like that this movie isn’t afraid to take its time with the story, a story that’s based on real events and that feels very relevant to this day. Stop me if you’ve heard any of these themes lately: governmental distrust, cultural identity, justice… THUNDERHEART’s entire storyline is wrapped up in these ideas. If anything, the film seems even more meaningful today than it did in 1992. There are times that Apted may operate with a bit of a heavy hand, but this movie isn’t interested in serving up cardboard villains or easy answers. Rather, we’re treated to an engaging mystery-thriller that never overshadows its characters and eventually rewards us for our patience.
At the end of the day, THUNDERHEART is a film that I highly recommend. It’s not going to blow you away with its action, although there are several exciting sequences. But I do encourage you to give this film your attention and settle in with the plot and the characters. Inside this crime thriller, there’s a strong human story about a man who comes to terms with his identity while gathering the courage to fight for the truth, no matter where that may lead. Although there were a lot of good options, when I read that Val Kilmer had passed away, THUNDERHEART is the film I watched to come to terms with the moment.
Rick Kagan (Rick Hearst) is a rich kid who has a rebellious attitude and lives to race dirt bikes. The other dirt bikers don’t like him and, when he tries to join the team sponsored by Steve Sinclair (Vernon Wells), the the other members of the team refuses to race with him. Rick competes without a team, while falling in love with the pretty Megan (Colleen Poland) and trying to avoid his disapproving father (John Saxon).
It’s hard to know what to make of this sports film. Rick Kagan is our hero but he’s petulant and spoiled and it’s hard to root for him. You can understand why other people wouldn’t want to race with him. I wouldn’t want him on my team. He takes too many stupid risks and he has absolutely no clue how to be a teammate. We’re supposed to like him because the members of the opposing team are also jerks but Rick doesn’t come across as being any better.
The only interesting thing about this film is that there are a few familiar faces in the cast. Saxon is Rick’s father and gives a better performance than the material deserves. Vernon Wells’s is the sponsor of Rick’s rivals. Cameron Mitchell is the chief of police who tells Saxon that he needs to be a better father. This must have been one of Mitchell’s final movies. He only appears in one scene and he doesn’t look well. Rick Hearst had the screen presence to be a star but, in this film, he’s stuck with a character who is impossible to root for.
Crossing the Line is set in America but it was filmed in South Africa at a time when many productions were boycotting the country to protest Apartheid. Director Gary Graver was a protégé of Orson Welles and was one of the many crew members involved in the lengthy shooting of The Other Side of the Wind. Graver shows a good eye for directing dirt bike races. It’s just too bad the film is far less interesting once it gets off the track.
That’s something that I heard a lot back when I was cheerleading in high school. A football player grabbed your ass while he was running out on the field? Someone told you that the team lost because you didn’t smile more? At the after-game party, you were called a tease if you didn’t drink enough to excuse whatever happened later that night? It was all just a case of boys being boys.
“They’ll grow out of it.” “They’re under a lot of pressure right now.” “Your job is help them celebrate when they win and to make them feel better when they lose.” I heard all of that back when I was cheerleading and, because I usually heard it from older women who were supposed to be looking out for me, I usually accepted it. If someone said something that made me cry, I told myself it was my fault for not understanding how difficult it was to be a good player on a bad team. If someone accused me of sending out mixed signals or giving someone the wrong idea, I didn’t say, “That’s your problem for not paying attention.” Instead, I felt guilty about it, as if I had done something wrong. My job was to support the team. I was there to cheer for the boys. Half of the time, I loved being a cheerleader. I loved the sisterhood. I love the thrill of pumping up the people in the bleachers. I enjoyed feeling as if I had played a role whenever one of our teams won a game. The other half of the time, I was a nervous wreck because I worried I had done something wrong.
I guess that’s why I related to the main character in Stand Against Fear when I watched it earlier today. (It’s on YouTube.) Sarah Chalke plays a cheerleader who is inappropriately touched by a football player (Lochlyn Munro). He thinks that he can get away with anything because he’s the star of the football team and his father’s rich. When the police and the school refuse to do anything, the cheerleader sues the football player for sexual harassment.
I don’t know if this movie was based on a true story but watching it brought back a lot of memories of high school. The dread of knowing that you’re going to be treated like an object, the fear of not fitting in, and the helplessness of knowing that no one is going to be on your side, Stand Against Fear captured all of that. When Sarah Chalke and her family finally stood up for themselves, I wanted to cheer. It was inspiring to see.
As for me, it wasn’t until a few years after I graduated from high school that I looked back and realized just how messed up all of that was. Whenever I run into any of my old cheerleading friends today, we inevitably start talking about the past and we always agree that we spent way too much time worrying about the boys when we should have been worrying about ourselves. As this movie shows, it takes strength to stand up for yourself but it’s always the right thing to do.
It’s been a while since I’ve written about any of my favorite romantic films. Today, I thought I would discuss the film that just might be my favorite love story of them all, and that’s the 1995 version of PERSUASION. Based on Jane Austen’s final completed novel, PERSUASION tells the story of Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) who was persuaded eight years earlier, at the age of 19, to reject the hand of the man she loved, Captain Frederick Wentworth (Ciarán Hinds). At the time, Wentworth had no fortune or social standing, but the ensuing years seemed to bring both to the seafaring captain. When fate unexpectedly brings them back together, Anne’s past feelings of love re-emerge, and so does her regret for her earlier decision. After all these years, does the still-single Captain Wentworth love her, or is he ready to move on?
PERSUASION features incredible turns from Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds as Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth. Their performances aren’t built around grand gestures or sweeping declarations of love. They’re built on quick glances, emotional restraint, and an ability to convey lingering pain, regret, and feelings of love that began many years earlier but have never gone away. Their chemistry isn’t flashy, but it is authentic, built over many years rather than some instant attraction. These character traits may seem old-fashioned and unnecessary in this day and time, but the action in the film takes place in early 1800’s where this behavior would have been perfectly natural.
Speaking of “perfectly natural,” director Roger Michell’s realistic presentation of the material is one of the film’s key strengths as far as I’m concerned. Avoiding the polish of most period dramas, PERSUASION embraces the weathered houses, imperfect landscapes, simple costumes, and yes, even the less than glamourous looks of the cast. It seems like we’re watching real people living in the real world instead of impossibly attractive men and women playing dress up. As the lead characters seem to be falling deeper into love over the course of the film, their blossoming happiness makes them more attractive.
If I haven’t made it clear enough, if you’re looking for a movie that throws a lot of overly dramatic plot twists and simple solutions your way, PERSUASION is probably not the movie for you. But if you enjoy a deliberately paced, mature story that deals with messy themes of missed opportunities, personal growth, and forgiveness, then you just may love it. There are moments when Anne simply watches Wentworth across a room, or clutches a chair as he enters a room, where I felt such a strong connection to the characters. Sometimes the most powerful emotions truly are those that are left unspoken. This film will reward your patience if you stick with it, and its final scenes are very satisfying to me because of what the characters have gone through to reach that point.
PERSUASION is a film that I return to again and again when I’m stressed or need a pick-me-up. It just makes me feel good. In my opinion, it isn’t just one of the best Jane Austen movies, it’s one of the best romantic dramas out there, and I highly recommend it!
There are films that entertain, films that impress, and then there are films that simply break you. Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata and released by Studio Ghibli in 1988, belongs firmly to that final category. It is one of the most devastating pieces of cinema ever committed to screen — animated or otherwise — and its power has not dimmed a single watt in the decades since its release. If anything, it has only grown heavier with time, which says something quietly terrible about the state of the world we keep building and destroying.
The film is an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical short story of the same name written by Akiyuki Nosaka, first published in 1967. Nosaka drew directly from his own traumatic experience as a child survivor of the American firebombing of Kobe and Nishinomiya during the final months of World War II. He lost his adopted younger sister, Keiko, to malnutrition during that period, and spent much of the rest of his life consumed by guilt over her death — guilt that he transformed into literature as a form of personal penance. The story, and by extension Takahata’s film, is not simply a war narrative. It is a confession. That emotional honesty is what gives Grave of the Fireflies its extraordinary moral weight and separates it from more conventional wartime dramas.
The story follows two siblings—fourteen-year-old Seita and his four-year-old sister Setsuko—who are left to fend for themselves in the ruins of wartime Japan after their mother is killed in an air raid. Their father is away serving in the Imperial Navy, and the children initially take refuge with a distant aunt whose cold pragmatism and growing resentment become as suffocating as the war itself. Eventually, Seita takes Setsuko, and the two retreat to a small abandoned shelter near a lake, where they attempt to survive on dwindling resources. What follows is a story of extraordinary love between two children set against the backdrop of a society collapsing under the weight of its own catastrophic choices. Takahata makes no political speeches; he does not need to. The tragedy unfolds with quiet, terrible inevitability, and the film’s opening scene—in which we learn from the outset that Seita does not survive—ensures that every fleeting moment of joy between the siblings is shadowed by grief already lodged in our chests.
It is worth pausing on the animation itself, because Grave of the Fireflies is a masterwork of the form. Takahata consistently pushed back against the notion that animation was a lesser medium suited only to fantasy or comedy, and here he uses it to render the physical reality of war with extraordinary specificity: the blistering heat of an air raid reflected in Setsuko’s wide eyes, the sickly pallor of a malnourished child’s skin, the gentle glow of fireflies against the blue-black darkness of a summer night. Studio Ghibli’s artists create a version of wartime Japan that feels tactile and achingly real, and the deliberate contrast between the natural beauty of the countryside and the devastation wrought by human violence is one of the film’s most quietly devastating achievements. The fireflies themselves—insects that glow brilliantly for a short time and then die—function as one of cinema’s most elegantly constructed symbols, one the film earns rather than imposes.
Grave of the Fireflies occupies a unique and important place in the history of how anime has been received in the West. For decades, Western audiences and critics tended to treat animation as a genre rather than a medium—something inherently juvenile, made for children, and incapable of the emotional or artistic range associated with live-action film. Anime, with its distinct visual language, was often doubly dismissed as too foreign, too strange, or too cartoonish. The arrival of Studio Ghibli films in Western markets—and Grave of the Fireflies in particular—fundamentally challenged that assumption. Here was an animated film that dealt with death, starvation, grief, and moral ambiguity with more unflinching honesty than most of Hollywood’s prestigious war dramas. Roger Ebert, who gave the film four stars, famously described it as one of the greatest war films ever made—a statement that helped elevate not just the film but animation’s broader cultural status. Grave of the Fireflies helped pave the way for deeper Western critical engagement with anime as a serious art form, a conversation that continued through works like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Spirited Away, and persists into the present era of global anime fandom. Without Takahata’s film insisting on animation’s capacity for genuine tragedy, that shift might have taken far longer.
The film also complicates some of the West’s more self-flattering narratives about World War II. Grave of the Fireflies does not engage with questions of who started the war or who was morally right; it simply shows two Japanese children dying slowly in the wreckage of American bombing campaigns and asks the viewer to sit with that reality. This is not a film that endorses Japanese imperialism or absolves the government whose war Seita and Setsuko ultimately suffer from. Instead, it refuses to let civilian suffering disappear behind the abstractions of historical victory. That refusal has made it an uncomfortable but essential work in discussions about the human cost of war.
One cannot watch Grave of the Fireflies today and remain complacent about the news cycles documenting conflicts around the world. The images of starving children in Gaza, orphaned families in Ukraine, and displaced populations in Sudan are a visceral, real-world echo of Seita and Setsuko’s plight. The film acts as a powerful antidote to the desensitization that can occur in a world numb to constant tragedy. When we scroll past headlines or see statistics of casualties, we are abstracting suffering. The film refuses to let us do that. The reality of malnutrition and starvation is put on screen in a way that feels almost too intimate to watch, from Setsuko’s distended belly to the sores that form on her skin. The film forces a confrontation with the fact that war’s “collateral damage” is not a number, but millions of individual, human stories—stories of children robbed of their childhood, their innocence, and ultimately, their lives, just like Setsuko and Seita. The cyclical nature of conflict means that for every generation, there is a new set of children living out this same tragedy, and the film’s refusal to offer easy catharsis or redemption makes it an enduring, uncomfortable mirror.
Grave of the Fireflies is not an easy film to recommend in the conventional sense. It is not something one watches for enjoyment, and it offers no catharsis in the traditional Hollywood mold—no heroic sacrifice redeemed, no peace restored, no comforting resolution. What it offers instead is something rarer and more valuable: witness. It is a film that confronts the true cost of war and refuses to look away, doing so through animation with a grace and rigor that should permanently dispel any lingering notion that the medium cannot carry the full weight of human experience. Nearly four decades after its release, Grave of the Fireflies remains one of the most important films ever made—a eulogy for two children, and by extension, for every child the world has failed to protect.
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If you’re having trouble getting to sleep tonight, you can always go over to Prime or Tubi and enjoy 1995’s Hackers.
Hackers is a film about …. well, it’s right there in the title. They’re hackers. They’re cool. They’re hot. They’re sexy. And they are way into computers! They know everything that there is to know about exploring the internet, breaking into protected accounts, and rewriting code. They know all about viruses, both how to spread them and how to cure them. And they’re all teenagers! The coolest kids at school are totally into computers and they’ve all got nicknames.
Hackers is very much a film of the 90s. When this film came out, the Internet was still exotic and it was assumed that anyone who could write code had to be an eccentric genius with a larger-than-life personality. Johnny Lee Miller is Dade Murphy, a.k.a. Zero Cool. When he was a kid, he almost crashed the global economy. Matthew Lillard is Emmanuel Goldstein, also known as Cereal Killer. Lillard is hyperactive and he yells a lot but one can be sure that he’ll be a Silicon Valley billionaire by the time he’s 22. Angelina Jolie is Kate Libby, also known as Acid Burn. Hackers was early in Jolie’s career, back when she had so much personality and charisma that she seemed like she might literally step off of the screen and ask you if you wanted to step outside to smoke a joint or maybe do something a bit wilder. All of the hackers go to high school together. They all hack computers together. And they all find themselves targeted by The Plague (Fisher Stevens), a super hacker who is so evil that he rides a skateboard to work.
It’s a perfectly ludicrous film but it’s so cheerfully and excessively stylish and Miller and Jolie have so much chemistry that it doesn’t really matter whether or not the film makes any sense. This is one of those films where The Plague hatches his evil scheme while standing in a neon room surrounded by screens, as if the film is suggesting that The Plague actually lives in the middle of the Internet. The music is early EDM. The action is fast. The cast has charisma to burn. This film is about as 90s as a film can get.
Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie (who was 20 when she shot this film) were married shortly after the film’s release and, though the marriage may not have lasted, their chemistry is explosive. For lack of a better term, they are totally into each other and it’s exiting to watch them interact. The end credits roll over a scene of them undressing and making love in a pool and it’s the perfect ending for this film, a jolt of energy that feels like the proper way to celebrate having saved the world from collapse. It’s also the type of thing that few studio films would be willing to do today. Somehow, 2026 has turned out to be more puritanical than 1995 and progressiveness has, for many, come to mean either chastity or performative asexuality. It’s as if both Hollywood and many modern critics have been captured by Orwell’s Anti-Sex League. (Just consider the bizarre reaction that many had to Christopher Nolan including a sex scene in Oppenheimer.) Hackers may not be a realistic portrayal of programmers or hackers but it is reminder of a time when movies were not only fun but they were also sexy. Watching the film, one regrets that Johnny Lee Miller never became a big star and that Angelina Jolie is no longer the unpredictable force a nature that she once was.
Hackers is a trip to a time that may have only existed in our imaginations but it’s still nice to go back and visit on occasion.
Through the Shattered Lens 