Scarlett Johansson in Lucy (2014)

Unpacking 2014’s Blockbusters

If you want to talk about the experience of the average moviegoer in 2014, you need to talk about blockbusters. Boyhood might be the recipient of cascades of praise from critics and award bodies alike at the moment, and stands a solid chance of picking up the Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And yet,…

Interstellar

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…