Nina Munteanu

Over twenty-five years after the first Star Wars motion picture blasted its way through our movie screens, the saga continues to live strongly in literature and cinema. To date, six films and three animated series for television were made, with a live-action series and a 3D CGI animated series in pre-production as well as a [...]

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Margaret Atwood’s Booker Award nominee, “Oryx and Crake” is a sharp-edged, dark contemplative essay on the premise of where the myopia of greed, power and obsession with “self-image” and its outstripping of ethics and morality may take us. Replete with sordid subject matter and unlikeable but complex characters, Atwood’s gloomy post-apocalyptic tale follows the slow [...]

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Robert J. Sawyer’s tenth novel, Hugo award-winning “Hominids” jump-starts a thoughtful and imaginative trilogy, “The Neanderthal Parallax”, which explores an alternate evolutionary stream where Neanderthals became the dominant intelligent species on the planet. Sawyer makes up for less than vivid prose with well-researched paleoanthropological information and theoretical physics played out by charming untraditional characters from [...]

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Steven Soderbergh’s stylish psychological thriller, released November 2002 in the United States by 20th Century Fox , eloquently captures the theme of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 book. Written almost fifty years ago, “Solaris” is an intelligent, introspective drama of great depth and imagination that meditates on man’s place in the universe and the mystery of God.
Soderbergh’s [...]

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In anticipation of the movie, “The Golden Compass” which will be showing in theatres this December ( can’t wait!), I dusted off my old critique of the three books that make up Philip Pullman’s incredible “His Dark Materials” Trilogy, of which “The Golden Compass” is just the first. The three books include: “The Golden Compass”; [...]

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