The Last Battle caused quite a bit of controversy in my super-evangelical circles growing up because there’s a passage where a character who’s coded as Muslim is welcomed into heaven simply for being a good person. You had people accusing Lewis of being a satan-worshipper and all sorts of rubbish. There’s also a scene…

The final Harry Potter film is wickedly entertaining, though I felt the creators misunderstood or glossed over the story’s deeper themes; it’s always annoyed me that Harry dueled Voldemort alone in the courtyard rather than being surrounded by his community of loved ones. Then again, I’ve always felt the final book…

Make a show about Dev Patel and Anya Taylor-Joy walking around Westeros. Make it a mockumentary, even.

One thing that I don’t think Pixar gets enough credit for is its ability to create characters who forge an instant bond with an audience. They’re getting viewers to empathize and identify with toys, cars, bugs, fish, a French rat, an old man, and they’re doing it so effectively that the end of the story (or hell, even…

as I think I said on the Dissolve, the only line from Avatar that I can remember is “you are not in Kansas anymore!” which is paraphrasing a line from The Wizard of Oz.

The Game of Thrones writers could’ve taken a cue from the final season of FRINGE.

He got the best episode of season 02 (the boarding school) and the best episode of season 03 (the moon landing).

The Dark Knight is a wonderful, awe-inspiring film, though I maintain that Memento and (especially) the overlooked Prestige are his best works. Both movies are built around mysteries where you don’t really know you’re watching a mystery until the final sequence, when everything clicks together and the horrible truth…

The dancing scene is actually great; it’s memorable and completely in character for this Spider-Man.

the last few seasons have been great, I’ll harp upon this theme until my eyelids can no longer wag

Probably my favorite joke on The Good Place comes late in season two when they enter the Bad Place for the first time and there’s a poster advertising “Pirates of the Caribbean 6: The Haunted Crows’ Nest or Whatever, Who Gives a Crap?” (in a similar vein, one of the best newswires Sean O’Neal ever did speculated that…

The Graveyard Book and Coraline!!

I’m reminded of that viral tweet a while back that said “stop shaming moms for being sexy, how do you think we became moms”

I can never watch the throne room scene where Kylo tells Rey “you’re nothing, you come from nowhere” without my hair standing on end. Partly it’s the execution and partly the sheer audacity of that revelation, that Johnson was brave enough to attempt this twist in a franchise known for its genealogical surprises.

I would argue that it’s the fourth or fifth best Star War, after New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi. I’m curious to see how everyone else would rank them.

Tom Stoppard was brought in to doctor the script for Revenge of the Sith and I maintain that George should have had him write the whole movie.

Spider-Man 2 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are near-perfect coming-of-age films.

Why does Katzenberg strike me as a Green Goblin figure, a creature of pure spite, gleefully lobbing grenades at the executives who pushed him out of the company while yelling “OUT, AM I?”

As a passionate Lord of the Rings fan my feelings about the third movie have always been sort of mixed. On the one hand it is a fantastic spectacle, perhaps the best ever filmed, and it holds up remarkably well. Maybe the problem is that it bore the burden of following and having to conclude two of the greatest films…

one of the AV Club writers once said Columbus has made a whole career out of making sort-of Harry Potters.