Rick McGinnis

3 weeks ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

They're almost all gone now, but there was a time when every city had its art house cinema – some shabby but proud former "nabe" or second run movie theatre whose management had given itself over to screening foreign films and Hollywood classics, often between regular screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead and The Song Remains the Same.

4 weeks ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

There are actors and there are movie stars and then there are those rare legends whose image projected on a screen inspires tributes and treatises, polemics and diatribes, encomiums, tracts and paeans. Every movie star who ascends, even briefly, to some rare level of fame becomes the subject of this sort of beetle-browed inquiry by the sorts of writers tasked with finding something in pop culture that explains everything about a moment in social and political time.

1 month ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

As a place on a map, Bohemia is roughly half of what we call the Czech Republic today. As a neighbourhood or a state of mind it can be found all over the world, in big cities, where it suddenly coalesces in insalubrious districts, flourishes briefly, raises the value of the real estate and then dies off in a flurry of media coverage regretting how these things never last.

1 month ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

A really influential film, seen decades after its influence has percolated into dozens (if not hundreds) of films and redefined a whole genre, can elicit a feeling of déjà vu. Who knew that an ultra low budget horror b-movie would spawn a subgenre that persists to this day (Night of the Living Dead) or a gang picture originally imagined as a western, marketed to dopey teens (The Warriors) would be copied over and over with immensely larger budgets for decades.

1 month ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

The news of this week was summed up in a phrase: Habemus papam. The election of a new Pope was major news for the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, of course, but the internal workings of the Vatican hold a strange, almost universal appeal, and even after two millennia the papacy is appreciated as a political institution as much as a religious one.