The Wind Rises review: Jiro dreams of flying
Visually ravishing, as you’d expect from Hayao Miyazaki, but there is, disappointingly, no drama and no conflict here.
WWII
Stalingrad review: life among the ruins
Russia’s first 3D IMAX spectacle is visually intense, but I never warmed to a story meant to be about human resilience.
The Monuments Men review: saving private collections (and public art)
As jaunty as Jean Dujardin’s beret, but in a sincere, old-fashioned kind of way. It could almost have been rediscovered from the 1940s…
Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts (86th Academy Awards) review
There is a single thread running through these shorts, and it is deeply existential and irreducibly personal: How do we save ourselves?
2014 preview: only movies left underived
Here are the few films coming in 2014 that are not sequels, remakes, reboots, or based on a stage show, the Bible, young-adult novels, comic books, cartoons, or — someone make it stop — toy lines.
The Monuments Men trailer: glorious bastards
Oh, this one is going to tick a lot of boxes for me: art and culture, men in uniform, World War II, the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, and George Clooney.
Pacific Rim review: the world goes to war
A war movie in the grandest tradition, set in a rich new fictional universe that we’re going to be talking about for a long time.
Doctor Who blogging: “Hide”
There’s a ton of stuff here that kinda doesn’t make sense, but I kinda liked “Hide” anyway. It reminded me of the Gothic era of Tom Baker’s tenure as the Doctor, which might be the single most consistently fun stretch of the show ever.
Lore (review)
Hints at a new mythology of darkness and light, of scary childhood and even scarier adolescence…
Hyde Park on Hudson (London Film Festival review)
Two separate tales of FDR that are certainly worthy of in-depth explorations on their own are mashed together in a way that is ridiculous and which gives both of them a short shift that neither deserves.
