The movies used to thrive on Evil Geniuses and Criminal Masterminds, but today the only remaining vestiges are either rather drab fellows, or they’re holdovers from comic books and were created years ago. No one seems to be coming up with new ones. So let’s pause for a bit and take a look at some of the older panache-obsessed villains.

The rumors are back about London After Midnight, the cineaste’s holy grail of lost movies, and this time there seems to at least possibly be some substance to them.

I’m going to put forth some ideas for musical films that might enliven a non-Bele Chere weekend, suggestions that can also augment a weekend of Bele Chere-ing, should one choose to do so. Some of the choices are going to be pretty predictable—though I’ve deliberately left off a couple of the usual suspects.

I’m not saying that there’s no good comedy out there, but the bad — and the flat-out dreadful — far outweighs the good, especially when it comes to the folks who specialize in comedy.

My interest in movies started with an interest in horror movies.

Let’s pretend: You’re in hell, and ol’ Scratch will allow us our 10 favorite movie clips to watch for eternity.

In many ways, nostalgia’s the key to the annual horror fanfest known as Monster Bash — or at least to a lot of it. But if you stop and think about it, it’s a weird kind of nostalgia once removed. It’s nostalgia for an era of horror pictures that few of us (and fewer all the time) experienced first-hand.

“Sturgeon’s Law” states that 90 percent of everything is crap. The concept started me thinking about how true it actually is or isn’t, so I took a look at a year’s worth of movie reviews — those from 2007.

Here’s a little tour of classical music in the movies. The interesting thing about so much of this—and the reason it so captured the imagination of many of my generation and drove us to the record store—is that the music was actually used by these movies. The movies gave something back to the music they were appropriating—something exciting. The music drove the action, enhanced the images, and the images enhanced the music.

My absolutely biggest moviegoing disappointment—and one that ultimately has a happy ending—came with Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Here was a movie with a lot of legend attached.

I’m bowing to requests various and sundry that I augment my spiel on overrated movies with one on bad movies I can’t resist.

Each and every one of the films in question have indeed shaken a finger at the viewer — and they’ve done so without any distancing. It’s one thing to suggest that we as a people might have bungled something in the past, or that we were somehow not as attentive or aware as we might have been. It’s another thing to lecture the viewer that they’re doing the same right now.