The 2006 young adult historical novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation is a fascinating, ambitious,...

If you'd asked me when I was a teenager to name my favorite prehistoric protagonist from the anachronistic cartoon The Flintstones, I...

There are a lot of things to celebrate about the Harry Potter books, many of which I've touched on earlier in this list. One of the...

The time had to come eventually, I suppose. Next May I'll turn 42, the age at which Lester Burnham experiences his...

We all know a guy (and have, at times in our own lives, been a guy or even - gasp - a girl) like shallow Hal Larson. Superficial, caught...

The premise of the Casca series is a phenomenal and basic one. A Roman soldier, Casca stabs Jesus Christ with his spear while the Son of...

The origins of Dazzler are so wonderfully representative of late-70s corporate bumbling and creative bankruptcy that it's amazing such a...

The Toy Story films are perhaps Pixar's greatest, most enduring achievement. All of us as children imagined that our toys were more than...

When the 1994 movie Cabin Boy opens, Nathaniel Mayweather is wrapping up his stint at a posh finishing school for wealthy young men, a...

As I don suit and tie and head back to work after a year of domesticity, I'm forcibly reminded of another tireless New England icon of...

The Cheshire Cat of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is famous for his grin, and there's a reason he's smiling. In a...

From 1986 to 1992, Steve Martin enjoyed his greatest sustained cinematic success (The Jerk, in 1979, a bit of an outlier). Little Shop of...