Author: Orson Scott Card

We went to see John Wick: Chapter 2 on Friday, the opening day, but because we went to a mid-afternoon showing, we were surprised to see how full the parking lot was. On a school day afternoon, it wasn’t likely to be The Lego...

Sometimes movie trailers inadvertently warn you that a movie’s going to be pretty lousy. The trailers for John Wick: Chapter 2 may be delivering that message. Remember how First Blood was such a powerful, memorable story of a...

The Founder is a powerful, sometimes moving film about the founding of the McDonald’s restaurant chain.  Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) plays Dick McDonald and John Carroll Lynch plays his brother Mac, the creators of the...

When I first moved to Greensboro back in 1983, there was an employee at the company where I worked who grew up in the mountain country of western North Carolina. To me, that was merely a mildly interesting datum – no more...

I grew up on movie musicals, but the ones I knew best were film adaptations of Broadway shows, which used to be a dominant genre. West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Oliver! These were not only nominated for the...

Best thing this past weekend: Watching a nearly 4-year-old and nearly 2-year-old, who normally live in southern California, frolic in an 8-inch layer of fresh snow on the ground. Dumbest thing this past weekend: Watching...

After several years of surfing the same Time-Warner Cable channels – from USA at 101 to Comedy Central at 113 – these past few months I began ranging higher, into channels that I used to think I wasn’t remotely interested in. I...

I keep hearing comedians and other commentators speak abusively of family Christmas letters. You know, the newssheet slipped into a Christmas card – or completely replacing it – in which your friends recap all the year’s high...

When I was a kid, my parents had an ironclad rule: No Christmas music until after Thanksgiving. They considered themselves to be quite open-minded when they allowed Christmas music on Thanksgiving day – after the feast. As soon...

The older you get as a married couple, the harder it is to find good Christmas gifts for each other. We have more money now than we did our first dozen Christmases, but money has never been the problem. My wife would still be...

For a lot of families – mine included – the holiday season always includes game-playing. It isn’t easy for a game to make it into our regular rotation. We buy and try a lot of new games, but even the ones we enjoy often don’t...

When I first saw Anna Kendrick in her Oscar-nominated role as Natalie Keener in Up in the Air (2009), I found her as memorable and remarkable as everybody else. She played a character who was completely out of her depth – but it...

While my lifelong anglophilia has led me to study the lives and reigns of all the monarchs of England, I must confess that I have had little interest in anybody after Edward VII abdicated in the 1920s. I did not care about...

How many movies have there been about first contact with aliens? There was Carl Sagan’s Contact, starring Jodie Foster, and both of the Independence Day movies, and the Superman film franchise. And a lot of TV series, and...

Inevitably, Facebook is littered with the whinings of people who are outraged that the moment Halloween was over (and in some cases long before), many people begin all kinds of chatter about Christmas. “Let Thanksgiving have its...

Nobody owns your vote. If you do not vote for Trump, you aren’t “voting for Hillary.” Trump hasn’t lost anything, because he didn’t own your vote in the first place. Ditto with a decision not to vote for Hillary. That’s not a...

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now. The Jack Reacher sequel – Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – is good. We enjoyed it immensely. But it is not as good as the previous movie (Jack Reacher), for one simple reason: Much of...

The leaves are beautiful as they change colors; there’s something romantic about breezes shifting the carpet of yellow, orange, red, purple and brown leaves across the streets. But for me, the sure sign that fall has arrived...

The curse of social media is that people are the same online as they are in person. When it comes to serious discussion or even argument, we all know the childish people whom we long since gave up on. They’re the ones who, when...

Fitbit, will you please notice when I’m asleep? Please? I rely on you to keep a record of my sleeping habits, but when you miss the first four hours, or the two-and-a-half hours in the second round, it’s very disconcerting. Was...

Yeah, I enjoy football. I don’t care about football, meaning that I haven’t adopted a team the way people adopt NASCAR drivers. The only time I ever cared about an NFL team was Ditka’s Bears; the only time I ever cared about a...

When we saw Sully the other night, there were a lot of grey hairs in the audience – apparently, when you make a film for grownups, they show up to watch it. It helps that Tom Hanks has been doing a lot of publicity. When he...

Most of America first met Harry Connick Jr. when he started mentoring American Idol contestants. He tried to get the young singers to rely on the melody and the words, rather than spending so much time fiddling with endless...

For years after the huge success of the movie Die Hard, half the action films pitched in Hollywood had a Die Hard tag line. Speed, for instance, was reputedly pitched as “Die Hard on a bus.” Well, the other night my insomnia...

The original movie Pete’s Dragon back in 1977 was based on an unpublished story by Seton I. Miller and S.S. Field, Hollywood writers in the 1930s. (Miller wrote dozens of screenplays, including classics like Here Comes Mr....

Jason Bourne. You’re either not going to see it (your loss) or you’ve already seen it or plan to see it. We’ve watched Matt Damon in this franchise role already, we know he’s unforgettably good in it because of that quiet...

Star Trek Beyond included touching tributes to two cast members who died: Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock, who was so vital to the success of this current reboot series; and Anton Yelchin, who died in a freak one-car accident...

Last Saturday night, my wife and I had a choice between going to see The Secret Life of Pets and Ghostbusters. By inclination, we probably would have chosen Pets, but Ghostbusters was playing at the Red Cinemas with their Luxury...

For years I relied on a firm, well-designed side-sleeper pillow that cradled my head and raised it up so my head remained in line with my neck when I slept on my side – which is the only way I can sleep. Temperature fluctuations...

To those critics who have panned Independence Day: Resurgence, I can only say, What did you expect? Did any critic imagine that between 1996 and 2016, everyone involved in the film would have gone to Artsy Film School and come...