The Screen Scribe

Recommendation: Bad Boys

July 16, 2025

There are action films that try to be gritty and profound, and then there’s Bad Boys, which simply wants to blow up half of Miami while Will Smith and Martin Lawrence trade insults like two stand-up comics armed with Glocks. This is Michael Bay before the military fetishism and robot mayhem, a hungry music video…
Review: Jurassic World – Rebirth

July 14, 2025

Dinosaurs are back on the big screen, again, and as the lights dimmed and that iconic John Williams theme swelled over the Universal logo, I felt it. That fleeting rush of childlike wonder that only giant prehistoric lizards can evoke. But by the time the credits rolled on Jurassic World: Rebirth, that wonder had once…
Side Notes: Vin Diesel’s Nerd Empire

July 11, 2025

It’s easy to look at Vin Diesel and see just another bald action star with a gravelly voice and a bank account large enough to fuel the entire NOS supply of the Fast & Furious franchise. But beneath the tank tops, behind the muscled glare and the perpetually furrowed brow, lies one of Hollywood’s greatest…
Recommendation: The Last Witch Hunter

July 9, 2025

Some films are guilty pleasures because they’re trashy. Others are guilty pleasures because they’re earnest beyond reason. The Last Witch Hunter is both. This is Vin Diesel at his most self-indulgent, a Dungeons & Dragons fanatic making his warlock paladin original character canon on the big screen, complete with flaming swords, Viking origins, and an…
Review: F1 – The Movie

July 7, 2025

There is something primal about the roar of an engine at 200 miles per hour. It awakens the part of your soul that still believes in gladiators and heroes, that wants to watch humans conquer physics through sheer will and precision. F1, the new racing drama from the Top Gun: Maverick creative team, understands this…
Side Notes: From Hellblazer to Hollywood – Constantine

July 4, 2025

There was a time when comic book movies weren’t box office certainties. Before Iron Man built an empire and before Batman brooded under Nolan’s prestige lens, there was Constantine, a 2005 supernatural noir that quietly did something remarkable: it brought DC’s darkest antihero to the big screen in an era when superheroes still wore their…
Recommendation: Constantine

July 2, 2025

If Catholic guilt and Matrix-era Keanu Reeves had a baby, it would look suspiciously like Constantine. Directed by Francis Lawrence in 2005, Constantine is a gothic supernatural noir loosely inspired by DC’s Hellblazer comics. Keanu Reeves plays John Constantine, a chain-smoking exorcist and occult detective with terminal lung cancer who’s spent his life banishing demons…
Review: Dragon Ball Daima Finale Arc

June 30, 2025

After an energetic start and a wildly inventive midseason, Dragon Ball Daima stumbles a little on the home stretch. The final arc, spanning episodes 13 through 20, attempts to blend old-school zaniness with high-stakes drama, but in trying to serve both gods, it occasionally satisfies neither. While there’s plenty here for franchise devotees, more transformations,…
Side Notes: Why Adaptations Often Fail

June 27, 2025

There’s a particularly modern type of Hollywood executive who says things like, “We’re updating the themes for a modern audience” and somewhere, at that exact moment, a bookshop owner quietly weeps into a dog-eared paperback. Adaptations are Hollywood’s bread and butter and have been since before Technicolour. Novels, comics, video games, stage plays, toy lines,…
Recommendation: Top Gun – Maverick

June 25, 2025

Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski and released in 2022, is a rare sequel that not only lives up to its predecessor but arguably surpasses it in emotional depth, storytelling, and technical achievement. Coming 36 years after Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986), the film reintroduces audiences to Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) while embracing…