Shelby Thomas

“Capricorn One” is a movie about the first manned mission to Mars. It’s difficult to classify as a sci-fi, though, because no one actually ends up going to Mars. It’s more of an action-packed conspiracy thriller—one in which director Peter Hyams channels both Alfred Hitchcock and Sydney Pollack. It presents the viewer with all the […]

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For a subject that was once (and still is, from time to time) so pervasive in the news media, it’s surprising to me that there aren’t more films exploring the “what if” scenarios of nuclear war. Here is my attempt to list the best of them. Disclaimer: “On The Beach,” “The Sacrifice” by Andrei Tarkovsky, […]

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William Peter Blatty is famous for having written The Exorcist. Regretfully, his popular notoriety tends to end there.  At the risk of coming across as hyperbolic and nerdy, I’ll say that it is altogether distressing to me that a work of his called The Ninth Configuration (a.k.a. Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane) doesn’t often come up […]

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