In other reviews on this site of recent vintage, I’ve bitched about how a particularly brutal work schedule kept me from getting to the theater to see anything new for a few months, and one of the flicks I definitely wanted to check out that hit screens in this early-2016 time frame was director William Brent Bell’s The Boy. It must have been a really solid marketing campaign that sold me on the idea of seeing this one, because Bell’s previous film, The Devil Inside, was an uninspired, derivative mess, but what can I say? Stories about evil dolls, puppets, ventriloquist’s dummies, and the like have always been right up my alley. So I was pleased as punch when a free DVD “screener” copy of this (with no extras included, but I’m not complaining) showed up in my mailbox courtesy of Universal/STX Entertainment. I guess sometimes it pays…

So, here’s a tip : if you’re browsing through the titles available for streaming on Netflix and looking for something good — and I mean really fucking good — to watch, you aren’t gonna do much better than Jim Mickle’s 2014 indie crime thriller Cold In July, which was just added a couple weeks back. I know that it’s a cardinal sin in the “review game” to give away your final opinion on a film right out of the gate because people then have no reason to read any further, but seriously — you’re better off watching this flick than absorbing my words of “wisdom” about it anyway, so if you cut out right here and now in order to check it out, I promise I won’t take it personally in the least.

Okay, anybody still left? The let’s talk a little bit about why this movie is so…

When I was a little kid, Paul Williams was absolutely fucking everywhere. You couldn’t turn on Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, or Johnny Carson without seeing him. He was a guest star on everything from cop shows like Baretta to sitcoms like The Odd Couple. He was on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island seemingly all the time. In the movies, he took everything from bit parts in big-budget flicks like Smokey And The Bandit to lead roles in singularly unique fare like Brian De Palma’s The Phantom Of The Paradise. He wrote songs for the likes of Barbara Streisand and The Carpenters and had a successful recording career of his own. And who could forget “The Rainbow Connection?”

Yup, there’s no doubt about it — Paul Williams was a positively ubiquitous presence across the entertainment spectrum. Until he wasn’t anymore. And that’s where director Stephen Kessler’s 2011…

For some folks, the occasional vicarious look at people who “live on the margins” is enough. You know the type — they’re fascinated by reality-show train wrecks and Cops reruns and what have you, but really, they’re pretty happy to leave all that behind after 30 minutes or an hour and take the kids to soccer practice or go to the PTA meeting or do whatever it is that suburbanites generally do. Sounds kinda dull to me, but hey, if it’s working for them, more power to ’em.

Some of us, however, are wired a bit differently. “On the margins” won’t do for us when stories about people who live well beyond them are at our disposal. We dig flicks like Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Buddy Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock and Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy. We know that there are millions of people who are forced to eke out…

As Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence #9 opens up, the big moment has finally arrived — Robert Black has arrived in the series’ titular city, and surely that means it can only be a matter of time until all hell breaks loose and reality (shoot, any number of realities) comes crashing down around the ears (and eyes, and mind, and everything else) of our largely-hapless protagonist. Events have been building, both quietly and not-so-quietly, toward a crashing symphony of potentially-apocalyptic proportions for some time now in the pages of this book, it’s true, and it would be natural to assume that, with only three issues left to go after this one, the time to start “unleashing the beast” would be now.

Here’s the thing about Alan Moore, though — love him or hate him, the simple truth is that he’s just plain smarter than the rest of us (well, 

Expectations, dear friend, are a fickle mistress indeed. They have the capacity to elevate something unseen to undeserved heights of wonder and amazement or, just as easily, to drag it down into the murky depths of awfulness. Especially these days, when everyone not only has an opinion but is sharing it online, once-innocuous phrases like “I thought this was pretty good” or “that just wasn’t my cup of tea” have become positively loaded and can trigger “flame wars” that rage for weeks.

Of course, one advantage to “taking a pass” on a film in theaters and waiting for it to hit Blu-ray/DVD/streaming services is that you can get a general consensus as to what most folks think about it before deciding whether or not to invest and/or waste your time on it. True, there are times when everybody —or at least damn near everybody — is wrong (shit, look at…

Last month, a celebrated writer from outside the world of comics landed in our little four-color ghetto with a thud when Ta-Nehisi Coates debuted his much-ballyhooed new Black Panther series over at Marvel — first issue sales were strong, but the comic itself sucked (to put it mildly), and if the shelves at my LCS are any indication, there are going to be a lot of copies of issue 2 available in the bargain boxes sooner rather than later. It’s too bad, of course, because Coates is both an interesting and important literary figure — as well as one with an apparently long-standing love for this much-maligned medium — but when the history of comic books in the 21st century is written, Black Panther circa 2016 looks likely to go down as yet another missed opportunity to bring new readers into the fold.

Still, there’s gotta be hope, right? I…