Robert W. Butler

About the author: Robert W. Butler is a film critic for the Kansas City Star.

Popular movies are more violent now then ever before in the history of cinema. In Hollywood's first decades, bloodshed was hardly ever shown, but in the 1960s, filmmakers began showing more graphic depictions of violence with films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. The 1980s saw the rise of the actionadventure film, with its high body counts, and in the 1990s films like Pulp Fiction played brutal violence for laughs. Violence has been so glamorized on the big screen that some viewers have been inspired to commit murder in the real world.

In the 1999 box office hit "The Matrix," Keanu Reeves dons a long black trench coat, picks up several rapid-fire weapons...