Columns

Seeing Double is the new Scene-Stealers series that celebrates the only thing better than watching one movie—watching two movies. Each week we look for a more perfect cinematic union as we view and discuss a pair of movies chosen either for things they have in common or things they don’t. The films may be old […]

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Week three of our new series spotlights a song that never, ever gets old. Some how, every time I hear it, it makes me want to sing to the rafters. I suppose it’s as close to a gospel song as I’ll ever have in my life. It’s the lead track off of 1995’s “Tomorrow the […]

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“I used to think God was angry, too, but not anymore! He used to jump on me like a wild bird and dig his claws into my head. But then one morning, he came to me. He blew over me like a cool breeze and said, ‘Stand up!’ And here I am.” When “The Last […]

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Welcome the the second installment of our new weekly series The Great Songs. This week, I want to spotlight Ray Davies and The Kinks. I saw Davies earlier this month (here’s my review for the Kansas City Star) and was struck by how humble, laid back, and amiable he was for a guy that has […]

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Why “Pontypool” didn’t become a huge cult hit during its initial theatrical release is beyond me. It got good reviews from critics who know what they’re talking about (Noel Murray, Kim Newman, Mark Kermode and David Edelstein, to name a few). It made a good run on the festival circuit, playing at both SXSW and […]

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I think this is as good a time as any to start a new weekly series here at Scene-Stealers. As you may or may not know, in addition to starting this website and being a full-time movie critic, I also play the rock n’ roll drums. (See The Dead Girls, Ultimate Fakebook, and Truck Stop […]

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William Peter Blatty is famous for having written The Exorcist. Regretfully, his popular notoriety tends to end there.  At the risk of coming across as hyperbolic and nerdy, I’ll say that it is altogether distressing to me that a work of his called The Ninth Configuration (a.k.a. Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane) doesn’t often come up […]

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“How could guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?” The bracing melancholy of childhood is an underrepresented phenomenon in popular entertainment. By and large, children’s films prefer to coast by, parading antiquated, uninteresting archetypes and reducing all conflict to clinical action sequences devoid of substance or originality (see: Tim Burton’s […]

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Coming off of the disastrous critical and box office reception to Showgirls in 1995, director Paul Verhoeven decided to return to the science fiction genre he was best known for, adapting Robert Heinlein’s much-revered, juvenile-oriented novel “Starship Troopers.” Verhoeven was known for the hyper-violent “RoboCop” and “Total Recall,” so filmgoers were ready for giant bugs […]

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“Take the greatest Jewish minds ever: Marx, Freud, Einstein. What have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality, and the atom bomb.” “The Believer” contains one of the most compelling portraits of a psychologically unstable young man ever captured on film. Where “American History X” explicated racism and inter-cultural hostilities as products of social circumstances and […]

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