Sonic Cinema

**If you haven’t seen the “How to Train Your Dragon” films, beware of spoilers below about all three films.** I loved Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s “How to Train Your Dragon” immediately when I saw it in 2010. It was a wonderful piece of storytelling and animation that hooked me in immediately, and in the […]

**This is intended as a deep dive look at the themes and stories of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Eastrail 177” trilogy. Spoilers are revealed for all three films, so tread carefully if you have not seen “Unbreakable,” “Split” and “Glass.” The prospect of a trilogy of films starting with M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable” had been on […]

This space is usually reserved for my thoughts as I close the calendar movie year at Sonic Cinema, and that will still happen below, but this retrospective will also be about how Sonic Cinema has grown over the past year. I began the year with big aspirations for this website. I started a Patreon subscription, […]

**This article originally ran on the horror blog Death Ensemble as an induction into the site’s “Hell of Fame.” It is reposted here, along with links to the respective movies whose themes are listed here. I hope you enjoy!** The music is usually the final piece of any film to fall into place. It can […]

**This article originally ran on the horror blog Death Ensemble as an induction of The Predator into the site’s “Hell of Fame.” It is reposted here, along with some postscript to discuss Shane Black’s “The Predator” in the context of what it brings to the creature.** The name Kevin Peter Hall is not one that […]

With the coming of DragonCon this weekend, my movie summer ends. Here is a brief video summary where I, for the fifth or sixth time today, inexplicably forgot to single out Bo Burnham’s delightful “Eighth Grade”- with Elise Fisher in my favorite performance of the year- as well as Jeremiah Kipp’s terrific short film, “Slapface,” […]

It was in 1997 when I first watched Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and while it did not have the immediate intellectual impact other films have had, it was nonetheless a stimulating, and inspiring, experience when I watched it on VHS. It was unlike any other film I had seen, and it cast an […]

**The following contains spoilers for all five of the “Jurassic” movies. Caution when reading.** I’ve written in individual reviews- most recently, my review of his “Ready Player One”- of my affection for Steven Spielberg’s work in the sci-fi genre. The one outlier in that run of genre films has always felt like “Jurassic Park” and […]

Hello all! You’ll notice some changes to Sonic Cinema, and one of the things this is going to allow me to do is to really start writing some commentary again since these blogs won’t get swallowed up with the podcast posts anymore. That being said, the first new addition to this is actually a video […]

In a first for Sonic Cinema, I have decided to share a teaser trailer for a film. My primary focus here is for commentary and film criticism, as well as interviews, but I decided to make an exception for “E-Bowla” because, well, it hasn’t been often that I’ve gotten a look at the filmmaking process […]