Confinement. Quarantine. Shut in. Whatever you wish to call it, we are all doing our part to stay safe during this tough time. For many of us, the arts are the key to keeping our minds stable through any issue, let alone being stuck in our homes for months. We have novels, music, films and television to see us through.

The world now lives in the age of bingeing

The most frightening film of 2020 is not a horror flick. It’s a film about our electoral process. Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman’s stunning and eye-opening documentary examines how gerrymandering (the act of manipulating boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor one political party) is a very real and very present danger to our American democracy. This could be the most important film of 2020.

Politics in the horror genre is a tricky thing. If done incorrectly, a film’s political slant can hurt its narrative. When done right, a political take can enhance a film’s potency. The late George A. Romero and horror film legend John Carpenter are the two filmmakers who expertly infused their political messages within their works.

Romero, with his series of “...of the Dead” films, made each one a reflection and commentary

The one and only Phillip Marlowe. Created by Raymond Chandler, he is perhaps the best-known of all private eyes. Almost everyone knows his name. A good private detective thriller can be cinematic gold and if Phillip Marlowe is your guide through the mystery, all the better.

Marlowe is a tough-talking, hard-living, private eye who dives headfirst into the underbelly of his cases and always gets in

Beginning your crime film with “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop is a marvelous idea and one that excitingly sets the tone for the very clever and labyrinthine noir “La Gomera” (“The Whistlers” in the English version). With his latest film director Corneliu Porumboiu has created a fantastic and riveting pop-culture cops-and-mobsters film that occasionally gives way to philosophical leanings.

In this age of YouTube and Twitter, there is simply too much information coming at us twenty-four hours a day. Everyone with a computer is an armchair newscaster. And above all else, when it comes to films everyone is a critic.

What people don’t seem to understand, or rather, what has become lost, is the truth that film criticism is, or can be, an art. No writer before nor since

The television cult hit “Mystery Science Theater 3000” ran from November 24, 1988 (where it began on KTMA-TV Minneapolis, Minnesota) until its cancelation in 1999 after three seasons at the then-new Sci-Fi Channel and seven seasons at The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central. 

MST3K was and is a unique television show. The simple plot being a man (Joel