The View From The Mountain

Coming nineteen years after the first X-Men movie, X-Men: Dark Phoenix wraps up the superhero team saga without any mention of Hugh Jackman’s Logan/Wolverine (Jackman retired from playing the character after 2017’s Logan ) in a more toned down adventure that, at times, seemed derivative of past (and better) X-Men movies. It’s the far-flung future of 1992 and the X-Men are called to rescue the crew of the space shuttle, which has come under attack from a strange cloud of energy from outer space while in orbit above Earth. Jean Grey’s (Sophie Turner) already considerable physic powers receive a major boost when she’s exposed to the otherworldly energy. And not only is she more powerful, but she can also see through a lie that Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) had created within her mind as a child in order to “protect” her. This incites Jean to become very cranky, which is not a good fit for a person who’s now armed with the powers of a god. Vuk (Jessica Chastain), the leader of an ali...

The ironic thing about the classic silent vampire film Nosferatu is that it probably wouldn’t be the masterpiece that it is were it not for the Bram Stoker estate. F.W. Murnau, the German filmmaker genius, had wanted to make a movie of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , but Stoker’s estate denied him the rights to film the book. And so Murnau simply changed the names of the characters--Count Dracula became Count Orlok, and so on--and in doing so, by being forced to create his own take on the story, Murnau gave us a unique version of the vampire tale. His Nosferatu , released in 1922, remains genuinely creepy, with plenty of unsettling, nightmarish imagery that still sends chills down the spine of a viewer almost a hundred years after its original release. When Werner Herzog, another brilliant German filmmaker, remade Nosferatu in 1979, he kept the character names from Stoker’s novel (the Dracula copyright had long since fallen into the public domain) while still retaining Murnau’s original ...

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Sleepy Hollow , dealing with the legend of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, which was one of the few folk stories that actually managed to creep me out as a kid. The film takes place in 1799, and recasts Crane as a constable with the New York City Police Department. Crane is played to jittery perfection by Johnny Depp, who deftly plays the duality of a skittish, squeamish man who still bravely tries to get the job done by tirelessly seeking justice for the victims of senseless crimes. To this end, Crane constantly pushes a scientific approach to police investigation, about a century or so before scientific police investigations would finally take hold. Endlessly tired of Crane’s crusading, a local judge (played by Hammer horror legend Christopher Lee in an effective cameo) orders him to the Hudson Highlands town of Sleepy Hollow, which has suffered a series of murders. Perhaps Crane’s reliance on newfangled science might solve the...