The Quiet Horror Of ‘Dunkirk’: Christopher Nolan’s War Epic Will Wreck You
Dunkirk is the final act of a horror film… but as a full-length movie.
If You Choose to Accept It: Tom Cruise and the Mission: Impossible Franchise
Tom Cruise is one of this generation’s most enduring movie stars. In 1986, he piloted Top Gun to the top of the box office; three decades later, well into his fifties, he launches the fifth instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise while his Top Gun contemporaries have faded into irrelevance (or television). So what is…
Interstellar (2014)
Where T.S. Eliot found fear in a handful of dust, Christopher Nolan finds it in huge clouds of the stuff. Dust storms are consuming America’s failing agrarian communities decades from now. Blight ravages the planet’s few remaining crops as that dust brings illness and despair. This is a pre-apocalyptic world, a wasteland upon which mankind…
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes rejects the modern blockbuster’s inclination towards weightlessness; for a film about super-intelligent monkeys, this is a surprisingly heavy picture. While its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), half-heartedly feinted at social resonance before shrugging and descending into frivolity, Dawn unapologetically bears the burden…
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
There’s been a wealth of conversation recently about the increasing homogenisation of superhero films: Matt Zoller Seitz kicked off the discussion with his piece on “Things Crashing Into Other Things” and I can’t dispute his points. Even if you enjoy most of the new wave of big budget superhero pictures, it’s hard not to notice…
Transcendence (2014)
As we were dutifully informed before the preview screening of Transcendence, Wally Pfister not only shot this movie on film, but he also developed the film photochemically rather than digitally. This isn’t surprising for Pfister, acolyte of fervent film fetishist Christopher Nolan, but it is reflective of this cinematographer-turned-director’s old-fashioned approach to the material. Old-fashioned…
(2001) Memento: Cut Extended
It’s August, 2013 and I’m watching Memento for the seventh time. Next to me is my partner’s sister. We’re about fifteen minutes into the film, and she comments, “Oh, so it’s like it’s running backwards?” It’s funny how the context surrounding a film can change. Back when Memento was first released, it was “the backwards…
Double Feature: Paprika (2006) and Inception (2010)
(Double Feature is a series of “double length” (400-word) posts where I’ll discuss two related pop culture artifacts) Inception was a critical and commercial success, a cerebral blockbuster nonetheless filled with action. It’s unique in that it’s successful, high budget film from the last decade that’s based on an original idea. The film has even…
