Samuel R. Staley | Wednesday July 19, 2017 at 4:34 PM PDT
Critics panned The Book of Henry when it opened in June, but this may say more about their ability to step outside their pre-conceived ideas about what a movie “should be” than anything else. The film’s storyline conforms much more to what a reader would expect in a suspense novel than the conventional three-act...
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Samuel R. Staley | Thursday September 8, 2016 at 12:30 PM PDT
Fifty years ago today, on September 8, 1966, the first regular episode of the path-breaking series Star Trek premiered on NBC television. Sold as “Wagon Train to the stars,” producer Gene Roddenberry delivered much more. His agenda included using the series as a vehicle for social commentary and to project a liberal, progressive, and...
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Samuel R. Staley | Thursday September 1, 2016 at 8:54 PM PDT
In a pivotal scene in the film Free State of Jones, three white men are chasing the recently freed slave Moses down a dirt road in immediate post-Civil War Mississippi. What is notably missing from Moses’s hands is a gun, a symbolic feature embedded so thoroughly in the narrative of the film that it could...
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