How ‘Logan’ Fits in Trump’s America

Comics, like movies, are texts ripe for deconstruction. Animators and writers deliberately plot their stories for audience entertainment, while simultaneously commenting on the world around us. The power of the comic book is so strong that in 1954 a United States Senate Subcommittee convened to inquire as to whether (among other things) Batman and Robin’s

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Liked ‘Logan’? Watch These

Logan, directed by James Mangold, is the third film in the Wolverine trilogy (if you can call it that), the tenth film in Fox’s X-Men series, and a departure from the other films in the X-franchise. Not just because it’s rated R, either. This one is very much a classic genre film, with Wolverine playing

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Review: ‘Logan’ Is a Slash to the Skull, in a Good Way

Logan is the third standalone film for Hugh Jackman’s knife-fisted X-Men maverick Wolverine, completing the weary trilogy with something fans have long waited to see: Wolverine’s adamantium claws slashing through human skulls like they were piñatas. Yes, we’re in hard-R territory here, with Mr. Logan (and others) doing fatal, bloody damage to numerous people, swearing

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Zodiac Killer Movies: A Brief History

There’s a scene about two-thirds into David Fincher’s Zodiac in which David Toschi, the San Francisco homicide detective played by Mark Ruffalo, walks out of a screening of Dirty Harry in disgust, bemoaning the fact that he hasn’t solved the Zodiac case and “they’re already making movies about it.” (A colleague even jokes that “Harry

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Baseball and Sisyphus: Repetition Brings Focus and Purpose

Richard Linklater’s latest movie Everybody Wants Some!! follows the lives of college baseball players over a weekend in 1980, as they attempt to define themselves en route to adulthood. In one pivotal scene, Jake, a freshman pitcher, talks about his college admission essay, which compares baseball to Sisyphus from Greek mythology. What follows is that

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U.S. History in Film Part 1: 1492-1908

George Santayana isn’t a household name, but something he said is one of the best-known quotations in human history: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As a bit of a history buff, I’m a big fan of that quote, and I think it is, for the most part, very true. If

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