The View From The Mountain

I’ve loved dinosaurs since I was a little spud, collecting dinosaur toys, model kits, books and movies. I’ve enjoyed the Jurassic Park/World series, as well as other big-budget dinosaur films like 65 , and various lower budget flicks. When I saw the first trailer for The End of Oak Street , and saw that it involved dinosaurs, I was already eager to see this. But when I found out that it was written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, I really wanted to see this movie. DRM wrote and directed the wonderfully bizarre thriller It Follows, a horror film that was extremely creative—and scary—in using its central threat as a metaphor for STD. While I wasn’t expecting anything too deep or subversive in The End Of Oak Street, figuring it was aimed at the four quadrant popcorn audience, I was still pleasantly surprised. Anne Hathaway ( Interstellar ) and Ewan McGregor ( Trainspotting ), star as Denise and Greg Platt, a couple who are living a somewhat ideal life in the suburbs i...

I was originally going to list my top five favorite episodes of the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, until I thought: to hell with it, let’s review ALL of the episodes. So come join me on the transporter pad and let’s get to it. Valles Marineris: This is a grand, epic science fiction adventure featuring dinosaurs (!!!), and it’s just as much fun as a summer popcorn movie. I loved it. The Griffin Incident: This is the “haunted starship” episode, and it’s GREAT. Kirk, Spock and La’an encounter a derelict Federation starship that was lost nine years ago. This is basically a horror movie that has some genuinely chilling moments. It’s fantastic, extremely scary, and a perfect watch for Halloween. Human Best Friend: Everybody goes on vacation, gets stoned, and then the wackiness ensues! People online have referred to this as the “Dude, Where’s My Shuttlecraft” episode. I agree. But I didn’t care for this one. I’m tired of these characters being reduc...

In The Runner (not to be confused with the 2015 film of the same name starring Nicolas Cage) Gal Godot ( Wonder Woman ) plays a London prosecuting attorney named Maia Martin who’s got a major case on the docks at the Old Bailey. She just has to drop her young son Noah (Rory Wilmot, who’s in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series) off at school before she heads out for her run. But while she’s later running in the park, Maia receives a call from an unknown man who states that he has kidnapped Noah, and unless Maia does exactly what he wants—which is to kill a star witness before he can testify—Noah will die. And we’re off! Well, not really. While it’s not as horrifyingly bad as some the more histrionic YouTube reviewers have made it out to be, The Runner is still frustrating because there’s a halfway decent movie in there, somewhere. It lacks the intensity of Nick Of Time (1995), a similarly styled thriller starring Johnny Depp, which pr...

Would you swim in a place called The Devil’s Mouth ? A bunch of dipshits young thrill seekers do exactly that. Led by Maxine (Lana Condor; To All The Boys ), the group’s unofficial pleasure coordinator, a group of flaming morons college students, not satisfied with already vacationing in Thailand, decide to go exploring a network of underground freshwater caves with a local guide named Wat (Tayme Thapthimthong; The White Lotus ). Despite the fact that sharks only like the salty ocean, they all encounter a bull shark in the deep waters of the caves, through which they must swim, because they couldn’t at least have made this trip on a boat—oh no, that would have made too much sense. The Devil’s Mouth isn’t a truly terrible film, but it’s far from being a good one, as well. It’s the type of annoying “thriller” where the characters act so stupidly that you’re reduced to just waiting (and hoping) for the shark to pick them off, one by one, which it does (and ...

Steven Spielberg introduced me to aliens. I had seen aliens in many movies and TV shows before I watched his Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the movie theater as a kid. But Close Encounters was the first film I saw back then to really treat the subject seriously for me, opening my mind up to the fact that aliens might be visiting our planet, and that—for once—they were benevolent. With Disclosure Day , Spielberg returns to the ‘benevolent aliens are here’ genre, but with a darker twist. Disclosure Day opens with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) rescuing his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) from the clutches of Wardex, a corporation run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). It’s the singular mission of Wardex to suppress all knowledge of aliens on Earth. Daniel and Jane go on the run with the Archive, a physical media library of documents and films about alien visitations to Earth, starting with Roswell. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist, abru...

Forty two years after the Helen Slater cinematic Supergirl , DC Comics tries it again. After first playing Supergirl in an amusing cameo at the end of 2025’s Superman , Milly Alcock ( House of the Dragon ) plays her again as the lead character in 2026’s Supergirl , which turned out to be one of the really big bombs of the year (so far). And, seeing how it took a big dive financially, that must mean Supergirl ‘26 must be pretty bad, right? No, not at all. Having just seen it, I have to say that, while far from being a cinematic masterpiece, Supergirl was still pretty enjoyable for me. After the unbridled optimism of 2025’s Superman , Supergirl aims for a darker, more intense interpretation of the superhero tale. And it’s very gritty: the film opens with an off screen Krypto the Super Dog pissing on a newspaper in Supergirl’s spaceship/RV, with a still-in-bed Supergirl congratulating Krypto on getting most of it on target. Maybe this down and dirty tone was what turned off...

If I had been ten years younger at the time, I might have been a huge fan of Masters of the Universe —aka He-Man —when it first premiered on TV back in the 1980s. But I never watched the original cartoon, nor did I buy any of the action figures (and these days, I wish I had bought some, seeing how several of the original MOTU figures are now worth big bucks). Despite the silliness of its overall concept, like characters with goofy names such as Lock Jaw, Ram Man, and Fisto (!!!), I still enjoyed the first live action MOTU movie, back when that was released in 1987. I thought Frank Langella ( Dracula ; Those Lips, Those Eyes ) gave a great performance as Skeletor, the evil villain of the MOTU fantasy world known as Eternia. I tried to watch the Netflix animated series of MOTU , produced by Kevin Smith ( Clerks ), but I just couldn’t get into that version at all and so I tapped out midway through. After the Netflix version, it looked like that was finally the end for MOTU —but Matt...

Willa Holland stars as Rebecca Owens, a young woman who’s trying to put her life back together by finishing her training as a mortician’s assistant, while also receiving her one year sober chip from Narcotics Anonymous. All in all, things are going swimmingly for Rebecca—until her boss, Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), unexpectedly calls her back in to work overnight after her first day, because the mortuary has just seen a large influx of fresh corpses. But Rebecca still easily manages the extra work, despite the raging thunderstorm outside that plays havoc with the electricity. The flickering lights keep making Rebecca see things in the darkened corners of the mortuary. She sees some really creepy, unnerving imagery—like the corpses moving ever so subtly on the tables, or one corpse that suddenly has a mouth filled with fangs—but everything weird she’s seeing is strictly a result of the spotty lighting. Right? Right?! I first saw Willa Holland on the Arrow CW sh...

Former microbiologist and present day science schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) awakens inside of a body bag while being tended to by an automated robot medic. Fighting off the automated medic, Grace stumbles around a strange structure that turns out to be the interior of an interstellar spaceship. At first, he has no idea why he’s aboard the ship, or where in space the ship is located. But as his memories slowly come back to him, in the form of flashbacks, we learn that Grace is part of a three-man crew aboard the Hail Mary, a spaceship traveling towards the Tau Ceti system, located just under twelve light years from Earth. It turns out that the very same sun that has lit Earth with its light and warmth for billions of years is slowly dimming, threatening all life on the planet as it freezes into an icy ball. What’s causing the sun to dim are particles that are dubbed astrophages, and our sun isn’t the only victim of these particles. Other stars out in space are also...

I was still flush with the recent pleasant news that Brendan Fraser and cinematic goddess Rachel Weisz (woof!) were returning in a new (and hopefully better than the third entry) Mummy movie when I first heard about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy , which premiered in theaters this past April. LC’s The Mummy tries to reanimate bandage boy for the twenty first century, but with a twist. TV correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is living with his family in Cairo, Egypt for his job when his eight year old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from her home by a stranger. The girl seemingly vanishes into thin air, and the heart-broken Cannon family move back to the US. Eight years later, the US embassy in Egypt calls them to report that Katie has been found alive...kinda...sort of. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) had been a bound prisoner in a sealed ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, and the experience has left her in a horrific zombie-like state. If you’...

Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse (2018) was a fantastic superhero film that just happened to be an animated feature. Starring Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as Spider-Man, the film dealt with the multi-verse—which is a scientific theory that states there are a multitude of universes out there, each existing on its own plane of reality. This idea isn’t new to comics; I’ve read countless stories about superheroes dealing with denizens from other universes—and it’s also an idea that’s been used often in science fiction, like the In A Mirror Darkly episode of the original Star Trek . Recently, the MCU has used this theory in the last ten or so of its films. Into the Spider-Verse has Morales dealing with several different Spider-Men, and Spider-Women, from alternate Earths—one of whom is Spider-Man Noir, voiced by Nicolas Cage. The Spider (as he’s known in the TV series) is the Spider-Man from a 1930s era New York City. He’s a private eye named Ben Reilly (played on screen by ...