Kelty Crawford (Abigail Breslin) is thirty years old and troubled. She’s the epitome of almost every Generation Z cliche imaginable. Haunted by a terrible accident and various guilt and mental issues, she currently has few career prospects, little money, and an upcoming wedding that is going to cost her a fortune.
She’s also having trouble sleeping. She sleepwalks and, when she does wake up, she’s doing strange things like eating the toothpaste straight out of the tube. Both to make some extra cash and to try to find out what is at the root of her sleepwalking, Kelty agrees to take part in a sleep study that is being conducted by the rather shady Dr. Baylour (Michael Eklund). Baylour gives her a shot of a powerful drug. Kelty falls into a deep sleep and she immediately has dreams about killing a man that she doesn’t know.
During her waking hours, Kelty is shocked to sees a news story about how the body of the man she dreamed of killing has recently been discovered. Kelty fears that she killed the man in her sleep. Kelty is also shocked when Dr. Baylour vanishes without paying her for taking part in his sleep study. Hey, Dr. Baylour — she’s got a wedding to pay for!
I had high hopes for I Killed Him In My Sleep. Abigail Breslin, who was just ten years old when she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Little Miss Sunshine, has developed into a good actress and she especially seems to be well-cast as people who are dealing with dark secrets. The film’s premise sounded intriguing. It sounded like I Killed Him In My Sleep would embrace the melodrama, much in the same way that Doug Campbell and Eric Roberts did with the Stalked By My Doctor series. (Remember Stalked By My Doctor: A Sleepwalker’s Nightmare? That was a classic!) And, to give credit where credit is due, this film did feature one twist that actually did take me by surprise.
And yet, with all that in mind, I Killed Him In My Sleep fell flat for me. A lot of it is because, instead of fully embracing the melodrama and cheerfully celebrating the excess that goes along with it, the film moves very slowly and seems to take itself very seriously. With its muted cinematography and its overly talky characters, this is a film that tries so hard to be naturalistic that it instead ends up feeling even more fake than usual. Abigail Breslin is a good actress and she probably does about as well as anyone could have with this role. Unfortunately, her dialogue sounds more like a series of social media posts than an actual human being. Kelty may not be a typical Lifetime heroine but that she’s also just not that interesting.
That said, the plot had potential and the nightmare scenes were well-directed. The film captured the feeling of waking up disorientated and not being quite sure what you’ve just spent the last few hours doing. A few nights ago, I dreamt that I had a job at a retirement community and that I did so well that everyone living there was happier than they had ever been. That was a nice dream and far better than killing people.
The year is 1991 and humans are using robots for everyday tasks. Because the budget is low and Michael Crichton had already done Westworld, none of the robots are humanoid or capable of original thought. The majority of them are boxy and they look harmless until they malfunction. All police departments now have a division of cops trained to deal with robots. Being a part of the “runaway squad” is not prestigious but it’s perfect for Sgt. Jack Ramsey (Tom Selleck), a good cop who suffers from a crippling fear of heights.
Ramsey and his new partner, Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes), investigate a murder that was apparently committed by a robot. Their investigation leads them to Jackie Rogers (Kirstie Alley) and her boyfriend, renegade scientist Charles Luther (Gene Simmons). Luther has not only programmed robots to kill but he’s also designed smart bullets that can lock onto a target’s unique body heat.
It’s hard to resist Runaway. Stalwart Tom Selleck vs an overacting Gene Simmons? Kirstie Alley as a neurotic femme fatale? Robots spiders that inject acid into their victims? Remote control smart bombs that chase cars down the highway? Countless point-of-view shots of the smart bullets tracking their victims? It’s an entertaining B-movie, no matter what you may think of the plot or some of the acting. I don’t know what logic led to Michael Crichton casting Gene Simmons as a crazed computer scientist but I’m glad that he did. Watching a movie like this, you can see why Tom Selleck remains a television star. He doesn’t have the bigger-than-life persona of a movie star. But Selleck’s mild persona works perfectly when matched up with Gene Simmons acting like the phantom of the park. And then there’s Kirstie Alley, playing a dangerous secretary with the right mix of sexiness and humor. Cynthia Rhodes may have been the female lead but Kristie Alley is the one who stole the movie.
When Runaway was first released in 1984, it was expected to be a hit but it was instead overshadowed by another film about killer future robots, The Terminator. Needless to say, the simple heroics of Runaway can’t compete with intense action of The Terminator and even Gene Simmons at his most unhinged can’t beat Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, “I’ll be back,” but Michael Crichton’s vision of a future full of killer roombas still feels prescient today.
Divorcee Renee (Tammin Sursok) is so upset when her teenage daughter Cherie (Monroe Cline) moves in with her father that, despite being nearly 40, Renee enrolls in high school and becomes a cheerleader.
PARENTS! DO NOT DO THIS!
This was based on a true story. A 30 year-old mother imitated her 13 year-old daughter, enrolled in a middle school and spent a day there, posting to social media. She was eventually arrested for trespassing and tampering with government records. She said she was doing it to make a point about school’s not being secure enough and she certainly did that. But, even if the real mother did make her point, I repeat:
PARENTS! DO NOT DO THIS!
DO NOT EVER EVER DO THIS!
Your children will never forgive you if you do. High school is not your place. Your place is drinking wine and talking to your girlfriends about how much you love Andy Cohen.
In this film, Renee looks a lot older than 30 and she also manages to stay enrolled in the school for nearly an entire semester. She becomes a cheerleader! She dates a student! A teacher get uncomfortable when she flirts with him because she’s too young. She kills people to hide her secret because she’s having so much fun in school. But she looks like she’s closer to 50 than 40. It takes more than getting bangs to erase those age lines. Is everyone at the school blind?
It’s not a very plausible movie but, when I was a cheerleader in high school, there were a lot of cheer moms who would have loved to have enrolled in the school and taken their daughter’s place on the squad. None of them were crazy enough to try it, though. Instead, they would just sit in on practice and make everyone uncomfortable.
Luckily, this movie is a comedy and it made me laugh enough for me recommend it. Renee just went to such extremes to try to reclaim her high school years. Cheer moms are crazy. You have to laugh.
When my mom was dying in 2008 and then when my Dad was in hospice care in 2024, I learned just how important nurses were.
While the doctors that I dealt with were often brusque and overworked, the nurses were the ones who always took the time to answer my questions. While the doctors took an attitude of, “Death happens,” the nurses were the ones who were willing to show compassion. They were the ones who seemed to understand the pain that both myself and my sisters were going through. The nurses were the ones who seemed to care. Even when it comes to something simple like getting my ADHD prescription renewed, I always feel more relaxed when I’m dealing with a nurse than dealing with a doctor.
(Don’t get me wrong. I understand why doctors so often avoid a personal connection with their patients. As Doctor Warshaw (Richard Stahl) puts it in 1970’s The Young Doctors, “mourning is reserved for loved ones.” It may sound cold but it’s the truth.)
When my Dad was in home hospice, we had a nurse the came by the house every day. She was cool and professional but still always seemed to care. She was also a chain-smoker and there were more than a few days that I stepped outside with her. She always had an extra cigarette for me. Usually, I don’t smoke because I have asthma but, at that time, I was so stressed that the calming effect of smoking made the risk worth it. Knowing that the nurse would always arrive early in the morning helped me deal with a very difficult time. At a time when everything felt like it was spinning out of control, the nurse was someone upon whom I could depend. After my father died, I struggled to adjust to a lot of things, including the absence of the nurse. I discovered I missed the nurse’s professional presence. I missed talking about my feelings while burning a cigarette down to its filter.
In short, I have a lot of respect for nurses. They have a difficult job, one that I certainly could not do. But I’m thankful for all that they’ve done for me, my family, and other people’s families.
With all that in mind, I watched 1970’s The Student Nurses earlier today.
The Student Nurses tells the story of four women who are studying to be nurses while working at the local hospital. Phred (Karen Carlson) is introduced when she’s attacked by a crazed patient. Later, she falls for a doctor named Jim (Lawrence P. Casey). Sharon (Elaine Giftos) grows close to a terminally ill patient (Darrell Larson) and discovers the wisdom of Dr. Warshaw’s admonition about mourning. Priscilla (Barbara Leigh), who is regularly admonished for the length of her skirt and for never wearing a bra, meets a charismatic drug dealer named Les (Richard Rust). Les is all about dropping the acid on the beach but he’s not about sticking around when his girlfriend gets pregnant. And finally, Lynn (Brioni Farrell) meets a Latino political activist named Victor Charlie (Reni Santoni) and discovers that some people just aren’t rich enough to go to the hospital. When Victor shoots a cop during a raid on his headquarters, Lynn is forced to make a difficult decision.
The Young Nurses is almost legendary because of its status as a politically-themed exploitation film. It’s a Roger Corman production so there’s a lot of nudity. But director Stephanie Rothman used the genre to explore themes of class conflict and feminism. All four of the nurses are portrayed as being strong and independent women who have sex because they want to and who feel no shame about their decisions. For a 1970 film, that was a big deal. Interestingly, considering the film’s reputation, it’s actually fairly even-handed when it comes to the differing worldviews of the nurses. One of the nurses decides that she wants to serve in the Army Nurse Corps, even if that means going to Vietnam. Another ends up bragging about the gun that she’s carrying in her glove compartment, just in case anyone tries to stand in the way of the revolution. The film treats both of their decisions with respect. The important thing, the film seems to be saying, is that all of them are in control of their own future.
It’s an exploitation film, make no doubt about it. Today, we might talk about the film’s politics and its feminist subtext but I kind of doubt that’s what made the film a box office success in 1970. That said, Stephen Rothman brings some imagination to even the film’s most exploitive scenes. When Priscilla drops acid on the beach, Rothman slowly introduces more and more people to the scene, leaving us to wonder, just as Priscilla does, whether they’re real or their just a part of her trip. All four of the lead actresses are well-cast and fans of great character actors will probably enjoy seeing Reni Santoni playing someone other than a cop or a doctor.
Finally, like so many exploitation films, The Student Nurses is a true time capsule. The music, the clothes, the groovy slang, this is a film that proudly announces that it was made in 1970. We may not have time machines but at least we have the movies.
I have no idea if The Student Nurses is a realistic portrayal of what it was like to be a student nurse in 1970. That said, it’s an entertaining film and, in its grindhouse way, a tribute to the nurses who do so much.
At first glance, Darnell (Taye Diggs) appears to be a nice and charming guy.
He appears to have a good job. He’s confident. He’s seems to be all about family. He’s the guy who tells his stepdaughter’s boyfriend to look him in the eyes because “that’s showing respect,” but he somehow manages to do it without coming across as being a complete jerk. Darnell spends a lot of time talking about the correct way to show respect and how to act like a man and his wife, Asia (Tamar Braxton), appreciates it. Her ex-husband, Tim (TJ Shaw), was irresponsible and hurtful. Her teen daughter, Melanie (Jessica Jarrell), is going through that rebellious phase and Asia is happy to have someone who can back her up when it comes to being a parent. And Darnell …. well, Darnell is all about family. In fact, one might even say that he’s a bit obsessed with finding the perfect family….
Of course, Darnell’s name isn’t really Darnell. He’s used many different names over the years and he’s been a part of many different families. Though Darnell might seem nice and polite on the surface, he regularly has fantasies where he loses control. When he’s alone, he talks to his other personalities. He also remembers how he murdered his last family and went on the run.,..
Stepfather, as you already guessed, is an uncredited remake of the classic 1987 thriller, The Stepfather. Taye Diggs steps into the role that was previously played by Terry O’Quinn, Robert Wightman, and Dylan Walsh. (Wightman played the role in Stepfather III while Walsh took over for the 2009 remake that literally no one remembers.) Is this latest version of Stepfather any good?
Define good.
I say that because this is a Tubi original and I think you can very much argue that, when compared to other Tubi originals, Stepfather isn’t bad. The film is in focus. You can hear the dialogue. The pacing sometimes feels a bit off and the scenes of two detectives searching for Darnell often feel like filler but, for what it is, Stepfather is an entertaining film. I watched it on Friday while it was raining outside and I enjoyed it. It can’t really compare to the original film because the original film was as much a satire as it was a thriller. The remake does have a few moments where Darnell’s attempts to be a “perfect father” seem to comment on all the psychobabble about “respect” that was sold by the television shows that Darnell probably watched as a youth. But, for the most part, Stepfather is a straight-forward thriller. There aren’t a lot of surprises, especially if you’re someone who has watched a lot of Lifetime films. But the film still holds your attention.
Not surprisingly, the strongest thing about the film was the memorably unhinged performance of Taye Diggs. If the original film was made all the more effective by Terry O’Quinn’s initial blandness as the title character, this version wastes no time in establishing that Darnell is a bit unstable. After murdering his previous family, he dances. When he meets Asia in a grocery store, he delivers every line like a charming wolf on the hunt. When he argues with his other personalities, Diggs does a good job of establishing each personality as an individual character. Diggs shows what a good actor can do with familiar material.
If you’re looking for a comfortable, easily digestible thriller with clear-cut heroes and villains, Munich is going to be a tough sit. This 2005 film, now two decades old, finds Steven Spielberg operating at a peak level of craft, but it’s a cold and angry kind of mastery. It’s a dense, paranoid, and deeply unsettling historical drama that feels less like a movie and more like a wound that’s been picked at for years. Based on the book Vengeance, the film dramatizes the secret Israeli mission, “Operation Wrath of God,” to hunt down and assassinate the Palestinian militants responsible for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But here’s the kicker: this isn’t an action movie about a bunch of spies getting revenge and feeling good about it. Spielberg isn’t making a war film about who is right and who is wrong. Munich is a film about the ugly, corrosive nature of state-sponsored violence and the way it eats away at the soul of everyone involved. It’s a thriller, sure, but the tension isn’t built around whether the team will succeed, but around the psychological and moral cost of their success. There’s no triumph here, no victory lap—just the sinking realization that for every target they eliminate, the wound in the world only seems to get deeper.
The movie is anchored by a phenomenal performance from Eric Bana as Avner, the team’s leader. He’s a man of deep patriotism, handpicked for this mission by Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) herself, but he’s completely unprepared for the psychological toll the job will take. He’s joined by a fantastic ensemble that includes Daniel Craig as a brutal and cold-blooded South African operative, and Mathieu Kassovitz as a toymaker turned reluctant bomb expert. They’re a tight, desperate group, and as they move from one European capital to the next, meticulously planning and executing assassinations, the initial sense of righteous duty slowly curdles into paranoia, guilt, and nihilism. The film doesn’t shy away from the violent acts, but it presents them not as a cause for celebration, but as messy, brutal affairs that often have unintended, horrific consequences—like a scene where a bombing intended for a target gets dangerously close to an innocent child. You can feel the weight of every decision pressing down on these men, and Spielberg makes sure you sit with that discomfort rather than brushing past it for the sake of pacing.
One of the most crucial—and still controversial—aspects of Munich is its willingness to humanize the Palestinian perspective. This isn’t a film that paints the Black September terrorists as caricatures of evil. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Avner and a PLO member named Ali (Omar Metwally) engage in a tense, philosophical debate about their respective claims to the land. Avner warns that the world will see the Palestinians as “animals” for their actions, to which Ali chillingly replies, “Yes, but then the world will see how they’ve made us into animals. They’ll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.” The film doesn’t excuse the terrorism, but it forces the audience to understand the desperation and statelessness that fuels it, presenting a horrifying symmetry where both sides see themselves as victims fighting for survival. It’s a gutsy move for a mainstream Hollywood director, especially in the mid-2000s, and it’s precisely that moral even-handedness that made the film so divisive upon release—and still makes it so damn compelling today.
And that’s where this film connects to a larger, darker moment in Spielberg’s career. Munich was released at the tail end of what some critics have rightly called his “Post-9/11 triptych,” alongside Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005). These aren’t just three random films. They are all steeped in a profound sense of paranoia and fear of the outsider that was so prevalent in America after 9/11. Minority Report imagines a society where you’re arrested for a crime before you commit it; War of the Worlds literalizes the fear of a sudden, devastating attack on American soil; and Munich transposes those anxieties onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Spielberg used this triptych to explore the American psyche’s newfound sense of vulnerability and its willingness to embrace extreme, morally ambiguous measures—like torture and preemptive strikes—in the name of security. It was a director grappling with a changed world, and Munich, with its focus on a secret, government-approved assassination squad, feels like his most potent and cynical entry in the series. You can almost hear the echo of post-9/11 rhetoric in every scene, as if Spielberg was holding up a dark mirror to his own country’s creeping acceptance of extrajudicial killing.
But the bleakest part of Munich is how it transcends even that specific historical and political moment. The film relentlessly returns to the theme of the “violence loop.” The team assassinates one target, and he is immediately replaced by someone even more radical. They get a hit, and there’s a retaliatory bombing. It’s a terrifyingly accurate depiction of what has continued to happen for decades after the film’s events. Avner realizes that their entire operation, the endless cycle of state-sponsored revenge, is ultimately pointless for achieving peace. It’s a desperate, bloody game of whack-a-mole that only ensures the conflict continues in perpetuity, a cycle of vengeance that simply feeds on itself. As the film shows, and as is still plain to see today, the violence doesn’t end when the “list” is completed; it just regenerates. The final scenes, where Avner finds himself unable to even sleep in his own bed, watching his young daughter with a haunted look, drive home that the real casualty of state-approved assassination isn’t just the targets—it’s the humanity of the people pulling the trigger. He’s won the tactical war, but he’s lost every single battle that actually mattered.
Ultimately, Munich is a masterclass in filmmaking that offers no easy answers, and watching it today, with the current geopolitical landscape looking more fractured than ever, its relevance hasn’t faded one bit—if anything, it’s sharper and more painful now than it was in 2005. The same arguments, the same grievances, the same bloody score-settling between Israel, the Palestinians, and their Arab allies are still playing out in real time, with no end in sight. And yet, for all its brutal honesty, the film also exposes a tragic truth: this movie, like so much of the discourse surrounding the conflict, will probably only deepen the divide between the two groups watching it, as each side can point to it and say, “See? That’s what they do to us. That’s our pain validated.” It becomes another piece of ammunition in an endless argument rather than a bridge toward understanding. The brilliant cinematography from Janusz Kaminski and the chilling, minimalist score from John Williams only add to that oppressive, paranoid atmosphere, making it not a film that will make you feel good about anything, but one that will make you think—and perhaps that’s exactly why it remains so damn relevant decades later.
So what’s the way out? The film doesn’t give you a manual, but it does whisper a desperate question between its frames: can either side actually step back from the brink long enough to see the loop they’re both trapped in? Because the violence loop isn’t a natural disaster—it’s a human creation, and what humans build, humans can theoretically unbuild. But that would require something infinitely harder than pulling a trigger or planting a bomb—it would require acknowledging that your own righteous suffering doesn’t cancel out the other side’s legitimate pain, it would require looking at the face of your enemy and seeing not a monster but a person who also loves their children and believes they’re fighting for survival. The film dares to suggest that the only real break in the cycle might come from exhaustion, from the sheer soul-crushing fatigue of burying one more generation, or from a moment of radical, almost insane empathy that makes someone say “enough” before the next retaliation.
Spielberg doesn’t offer that moment in the movie, because he knows it hasn’t happened yet in real life—Munich isn’t a prescription; it’s an autopsy. Every few years, when the news cycle inevitably rolls around to another flare-up in that tortured corner of the world, this movie comes back to mind not as a prophecy, but as a painfully accurate diagnosis. It’s a powerful, haunting reminder that the echo of old violence is never truly silent, and that in the long run, vengeance is often a debt that can never be repaid. If you go in expecting a straightforward revenge fantasy, you’ll walk out exhausted and conflicted. But if you go in ready to wrestle with some of the ugliest questions about justice, morality, and state power, then Munich will stick with you like a splinter you just can’t dig out—and maybe, just maybe, that splinter is the first tiny crack in the loop that someone, someday, will have the courage to break.
“Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.” — Dr. Iris Hineman
There’s a particular pleasure in revisiting Minority Report now, decades removed from its 2002 release, because it’s aged in the strangest possible way: it hasn’t dated so much as it’s caught up to us. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story plays like a glossy, big-budget action thriller on the surface, all sleek gestural interfaces and Tom Cruise sprinting across rooftops, but underneath that polish is a film that’s quietly become one of the most unnervingly accurate predictions of how surveillance, data, and policing would actually evolve in the real world.
The premise is simple enough to fit on a poster. In a near-future Washington D.C., a special police unit called PreCrime uses three psychic “precogs” to see murders before they happen, allowing cops to arrest people for crimes they haven’t committed yet. John Anderton, played by Cruise with a kind of haunted, grief-soaked intensity, is the unit’s star detective, a true believer in the system who lost his son years earlier and has thrown himself into the work as a substitute for healing. Then the precogs name him as a future murderer, and the rest of the film is Anderton on the run, trying to prove his innocence inside a system explicitly designed to make innocence irrelevant. It’s a clever structural trick because it forces the audience to watch the hero discover, in real time, all the holes in a system he’s spent his career defending.
What makes the film work as more than just a stylish chase movie is how seriously Spielberg and his screenwriters, Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, take the philosophical rot at the center of the premise. PreCrime isn’t framed as a dystopian villain organization; it’s framed as something genuinely good and genuinely popular, a program that’s driven murder rates to near zero and that ordinary citizens are grateful for. That’s the unsettling part. The film isn’t asking you to be afraid of an obviously evil system. It’s asking you to be afraid of aSteve Harris system that works, that delivers real safety, and that nonetheless requires you to accept punishment without due process, fate without appeal, guilt assigned before the act. Cruise’s Anderton spends the film discovering that the machinery he trusted contains exactly the kind of ambiguity and abuse it was built to eliminate, and the film never lets you forget that the most dangerous systems are the ones that feel necessary.
Visually, this is one of Spielberg’s most distinct collaborations with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, who bleached the color out of nearly every frame to give the film a cold, overexposed, almost silvery look. It’s a future that feels lived-in and grubby rather than chrome and gleaming, which was a deliberate choice; Spielberg and his production designers consulted with actual futurists and technologists to imagine a 2054 that felt plausible rather than fantastical. That’s part of why the gestural data interfaces Anderton uses, swiping and conducting evidence in midair like an orchestra conductor, became such a cultural touchstone; they didn’t feel like science fiction gadgetry so much as a believable next step from where computing was already heading.
And that brings us to the part of the film’s legacy that’s only grown more pointed with time. Minority Report arrived in June 2002, less than a year after September 11th, and it’s impossible to separate the film’s anxieties from that specific American moment. This was the period when the Patriot Act had just been signed, when warrantless surveillance and preventive detention were being normalized in the name of safety, when the entire architecture of American security policy pivoted toward stopping threats before they materialized rather than responding after the fact. Minority Report dramatizes that exact logic and then methodically exposes its flaws, showing a security state so committed to preventing harm that it’s willing to imprison the innocent, manipulate evidence, and treat dissent as a structural malfunction.
It’s worth situating the film alongside the other two movies Spielberg made in the years immediately following 9/11, because together they form a loose, unofficial triptych about post-9/11 American fear. War of the Worlds, his 2005 alien invasion film, restaged the trauma of a sudden, incomprehensible attack on home soil, with Tom Cruise again playing an ordinary man trying to shepherd his children through a landscape of falling ash, mass panic, and faceless threats descending from above, imagery that’s hard not to read as a direct echo of lower Manhattan that morning. Munich, released the same year, dug into the moral wreckage of a state’s decision to respond to terrorism with a covert campaign of targeted assassination, asking hard questions about whether vengeance dressed up as justice actually makes anyone safer or just perpetuates the cycle. Minority Report is the third leg of that stool, the one concerned not with the attack itself or the retaliation but with the surveillance and preemption apparatus built in the name of preventing the next one. Together, the three films trace a kind of emotional arc through American anxiety in that period: the shock of the unknown threat, the morally compromised vengeance that follows, and the paranoid, technologically enabled security state erected to make sure it never happens again. None of the three films name 9/11 directly, but all three are unmistakably shaped by it, by a culture suddenly suspicious of the outsider, willing to trade liberty for the promise of safety, and uncertain whether the institutions built to protect them could be trusted.
What’s remarkable is how much more relevant the surveillance angle feels today than it did in 2002. Predictive policing software is real now, with departments across the country having actually used algorithms to flag individuals or neighborhoods as high risk for future crime, often with the same built-in biases and feedback loops the film gestures at. Data brokers and advertising networks track movement and behavior with a granularity that makes the film’s retina-scanning ad billboards look almost quaint by comparison. The conversation about predictive algorithms making consequential decisions about people’s freedom, hiring, credit, and policing based on probabilistic models of future behavior is now a mainstream policy debate rather than science fiction. Watching the film now, the gap between its imagined 2054 and our actual 2026 feels uncomfortably narrow, less a futuristic warning than a documentary about tendencies we’re already deep inside of.
That’s what makes Minority Report so achingly prophetic, not just in its prediction of our tech, but in its prediction of our mindset. We live in a world now where predictive policing algorithms are actually being used, where social credit scores are a reality in some places, and where the debate over privacy versus security is a constant, exhausting hum in the background. We’re not at the level of precogs, but we don’t need to be. We have big data, machine learning, and a populace that’s been slowly conditioned to accept that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The film is a warning shot across the bow of that complacency. It asks us to consider the cost of a crime-free society, and it suggests that the price might be our very souls. Spielberg, ever the optimist even in his darkest films, ultimately comes down on the side of human fallibility. He prefers a world with crime and free will to a world of perfect, totalitarian peace. And watching it today, in an age of deepfakes, biometric tracking, and algorithm-driven justice, that preference feels less like a luxury and more like an urgent, desperate necessity. It’s a hell of a ride, with more twists than a pretzel factory and a car chase that still holds up, but the real thrill of Minority Report isn’t the action—it’s the haunting feeling that we’re not watching a dystopian future anymore. We’re watching the news.
Demi Moore plays the first woman ever to be accepted for Navy SEAL training. Anne Bancroft plays the senator who sponsored her but secretly wants her to fail. Viggo Mortensen is the hardass drill sergeant who I think is secretly in love with Demi Moore even though he doesn’t admit it during the movie. Ridley Scott directed, so the movie looks and sounds great. Demi shaves her head and tells Viggo to “Suck my dick.” All the other SEALS-in-training start shouting, “Suck my dick!” at each other. It becomes their rallying cry. That will put the fear in the hearts of America’s enemies.
When I first saw G.I. Jane, I really liked it. I got really caught up in whether or not Demi Moore would complete her training and prove all the chauvinists wrong. Rewatching the movie today, I realized that it was silly for me to worry about whether or not Demi Moore would become a SEAL. Of course she does! If she didn’t, the movie would be a real downer. This movie was made back when Demi Moore was always cast as serious women who never laughed and who were always intense. If they didn’t let Demi Moore become a SEAL, she would have burned down the entire Navy.
Rewatching, I still liked the movie. Demi Moore and Viggo Mortensen having a glare-off? Be still my beating heart! Demi Moore wants to become a SEAL but Sen. Anne Bancroft betrays her. So much for sisterhood! Is the movie saying that women belong in combat but not the Senate? It better not be! Maybe we need a sequel where Demi Moore takes down the new Ayatollah and then runs for the Senate.
I wanted to end this review by telling you about the real first woman to complete Navy SEAL training but I discovered that hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully, it will soon. Demi Moore didn’t shave her head for nothing.
All my life, my Dad has told me that Roger Corman’s BLOODY MAMA (1970), which was filmed completely in Arkansas, contained scenes filmed along the beautiful white bluffs of Calico Rock, Arkansas. Dad and I watched it today, and we didn’t see any such scenes. I did some quick internet research, and it turns out my dad has been spreading misinformation all these years. He had mistaken the film for a different movie called BOOTLEGGERS (1974). It was filmed in and around the Ozark town of Calico Rock, and it was directed by B-movie maestro Charles B. Pierce (THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN). I was very happy to see that it was streaming on Amazon Prime, so I decided to give it a watch.
Set in rural Arkansas during the Prohibition era, the movie follows Othar Pruitt (Paul Koslo) and his moonshine-running buddy Dewey Crenshaw (Dennis Fimple) as they manufacture high quality moonshine whiskey and battle their local business rivals, the Woodalls, led by their vicious patriarch Rufus (Seamon Glass). When he’s not battling the Woodall’s, Othar finds time to hang out with his grandpa (Slim Pickens) and romance the tough but beautiful Sally Fannie (Jaclyn Smith, who receives an “introducing” credit). If you’ve seen many southern redneck movies, you probably know where this is all heading, but the fun is watching how it gets there!
BOOTLEGGERS is not a traditionally great movie, but there is a lot of fun to be had if you’re in the right frame of mind for some crude regional filmmaking. Director Charles B. Pierce clearly understood rural Arkansas in a way most filmmakers don’t. The dusty roads, cave-based moonshine stills, and run down old homes feel more authentic since they are actually filmed on location. I’ve been through that area many times, and he gets it right. Heck, a lot of the extras look like they wandered into the scenes straight off the local streets and fields. The print I watched looks like a really bad VHS copy, but Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography still manages to capture the beautiful nature of the area with its beautiful mountains and limestone cliffs hanging over the White River. One gripe though… the characters keep referring to the river as the Buffalo River, which is another beautiful river in Arkansas, but it is not the river in this movie.
Another element of the film that I found interesting is the casting of Paul Koslo as the lead and good guy of the film, Othar Pruitt. Koslo almost always plays a slimy bad guy, at least he did in Charles Bronson’s 70’s films THE STONE KILLER, MR. MAJESTYK and LOVE AND BULLETS. The German born actor is actually pretty good as an Arkansas redneck, and he seems more comfortable handling the revenge sections of the film than he does the romance and comedy.
As far as the other cast members, Dennis Fimple steals most of his scenes as Othar’s friend Dewey. He’s the goofy but lovable hillbilly friend that these types of movies almost always have. He’s fun here. I always love seeing Slim Pickens and he’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect as an old moonshiner with plenty of homespun wisdom. Jaclyn Smith, a couple of years before her CHARLIE’S ANGELS fame, has a few fun scenes as a pistol-packing local hairdresser who takes a liking to Othar. Needless to say, when she did hit it big, the producers shamelessly repackaged the film to make it seem she was much more important to the plot than she actually is. All part of the 70’s fun of trying to make a buck at the drive-in!
At the end of the day, BOOTLEGGERS isn’t as professionally made as a movie like the Arkansas set WHITE LIGHTNING with Burt Reynolds. What it is though, is a solid southern redneck film, set in a beautiful location, with good performances and a violent ending that should please its intended audience. It certainly did me!
1979’s The Quatermass Conclusion opens with a narrator telling us that civilization is collapsing and no one knows why.
Though the film takes place in London and the English countryside, we are told that societal collapse a worldwide phenomenon. What we see in London is a city that has been taken over by criminal gangs, where the police stand-by helplessly and watch as battles play out. The elderly, abandoned by their government, hide out in decrepit homes and try to avoid being noticed. The future is a world that is pretty much ruled by the young and the young appear to be insane.
Even if one escapes the gangs, there’s still the Planet People to deal with. The Planet People are a group of hippies, who walk across the countryside and who claim that they are going to be transported to another planet. At first glance, they make seem innocent and even a bit ludicrous. But they are actually aggressive and angry, convinced that the adults have destroyed the Earth and that the young are the chosen ones who will be transported to a better world. They are led by a man who calls himself Kick Along (Ralph Arliss), an anti-Semite who smiles when he manages to find a gun and who clearly relishes getting to decide who deserves to be saved and who doesn’t.
Into all of this comes a retired scientist named Bernard Quatermass (John Mills). Elderly and suffering from heart disease, Quatermass has come to London to search for his missing granddaughter. Because Quatermass has spent the last few years living in the Scottish highlands and because the British government has covered-up the extent of the unrest, he is shocked to discover just how bad things have become. Rescued from a gang by another scientist, an astronomer named Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale), Quatermass finds himself watching as humanity slowly sacrifices itself to an alien presence who is not interested in saving anyone but who instead just wants to feast.
The Quatermass Conclusion started life as a 4-episode British television simply called Quatermass, which was the last to feature the character of Prof. Bernard Quatermass. The four-hour miniseries was edited down to a 100-minute feature film that was subsequently released outside of the UK. As a result of the editing, The Quatermass Conclusion is a occasionally intriguing, frequently messy, and almost relentlessly downbeat. Having seen both the original miniseries and the subsequent film, I can tell you that tragedies that were evenly spaced out over the course of four hours come at you nonstop in the feature version. It seems like every other scene features someone either dying or giving up hope. Themes that were fully developed in the miniseries are only hinted at in the feature film. Events that were fully explained and built-up in the miniseries seem to spring out of nowhere in the movie, giving the whole thing a disjointed but nightmarish feel.
Taken on its own, the film has its flaws. I’m not really sure that the plot can truly be followed if you haven’t already watched the original miniseries. As the unfortunately-named Kick Along, Ralph Arliss gives a disturbingly plausible portrayal of a fascist who has adapted to the latest trend and John Mills is instantly sympathetic as the mentally strong but physically weak Prof. Quatermass but some of the other performances are definitely more appropriate for television than a film. And yet the film has moments that work incredibly well. A scene where the alien presence feasts on the thousands who have gathered at Wembley Stadium is undeniably well-done and brings to mind the real-life reports of political dissidents being held and executed in South American soccer stadiums. By the end of the film, the atmosphere has become so polluted with the particles of human remains that it takes on a sickly yellow hue. Even the film relentlessly bleak tone works. If you’re going to make a movie about the collapse of civilization, you should definitely go all out. There’s not much deliberate humor in The Quatermass Conclusion but, then again, there’s not much to smile about when the world’s collapsing.
Watching The Quatermass Conclusion, what struck me is just how much writer Nigel Kneale and Piers Haggard got right about the future. On the one hand, the film is anti-youth to the point of almost feeling like a parody. This is a movie that often seems to be shouting, “Get off my lawn!” Watching this, one can easily guess how Nigel Kneale felt about everyone from the hippies to the punks. However, the film’s portrayal of cities where people are scared to go out at night and of bureaucrats who would rather cover-up a problem than solve it feels rather prophetic today. (In the miniseries, there’s a youthful government official who is overjoyed at the idea of creating an entirely new civilization after destroying the current one and it’s hard to watch him without being reminded of some of the rhetoric of the COVID lockdowns.) It’s easy to laugh at the Planet People, with their face paint and their chanting, but they really don’t feel that far off from a lot of today’s wannabe activists. There’s really not that much difference between the smugly ignorant Kick Along and the people who used to throw paint on works of art.
The Quatermass Conclusion is a flawed, messy, intriguing, and prophetic. It may not be subtle but it’s a film that feel very relevant today.
Through the Shattered Lens 