Review - Dunkirk

'War is hell' is not fresh fodder for the movies. For a hundred years filmmakers have employed the bombastic, enveloping power of cinema to show audiences just how horrible it is to walk a mile in a soldier's boots, from early touchstones like All Quiet on the Western Front to modern incarnations like Hacksaw Ridge.
But seldom is the chaos of combat evoked with such precision and formal exactitude as it is in Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's visceral, artfully disorienting account of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from the eponymous beach in the spring of 1940.

The 'Miracle of Dunkirk' is considered a linchpin moment of the second World War – A sort of psychological victory salvaged from an untenable military fiasco in France. Some 400 000 British, French and Belgian men found themselves stranded at the tiny port town of Dunkerque while the German noose tightened around them, waiting to be ferried across the English Channel to safety. The fact that so many of them lived to fight another day became an early cornerstone of the war effort, preserving Britain's might and boosting her morale.

At least, that's how history (having been written by the victors) remembers it.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actor

In most instances, the foundation of support behind Best Picture nominated films is a considerable factor in predicting Oscar winners in other categories. And in some instances, a completely different narrative takes hold that makes such things irrelevant. We may be seeing that this year in Best Supporting Actor, which houses four performances from Best Picture nominees, yet the frontrunner represents his movie's sole nomination.

My Award Nominations: Actor

This field wasn't really as big a yawn this year as the Oscar lineup makes it seem... You just have to look for exceptional performances in the right places, and there were surely more than five that I consider worthy. Check out my Best Actor picks after the cut.

Review - Mad Max: Fury Road

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Max is just living in it. Well, existing in it.
By his own admission, survival is the one instinct that he – the last sane man in a world gone crazy – has been reduced to as he wanders through the post-
apocalyptic Wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth in a film series that hasn't revved its engines since 1985.

The real madman is producer-writer-director George Miller. Mad for deciding to pull his long dormant road warrior out of retirement 30 years beyond Thunderdome; Mad for conceiving the sort of world that heretofore could only have existed in a truck-driving anarchist's worst acid trips; And finally, mad for pulling it off with the sheer mind-shredding gusto that filmmakers half his age (he recently turned 70) consistently struggle to inject into modern action movies.

Best not to stand up after seeing this one. It'll melt your bones from the inside.

Early Oscar Predictions: The Actors

With a shooting script in hand and the stage set, principle photography begins. Directors work closely with their performers and cinematographers to bring the writer's words to life and capture it all on camera.

There's never a dearth of prospective performances that look like they could certainly turn some heads at this early stage of the game, especially in the perennially competitive Best Actor category.

Review - The Dark Knight Rises

Batman faces his greatest challenge yet in The Dark Knight Rises, in which Gotham city is threatened by potential nuclear Armageddon at the whim of a coldly calculatory and brawny terrorist, forcing the reclusive billionaire to dust off his batsuit after eight years out of the saddle. How to move on from the emotional and physical scars incurred from that fateful clash with The Joker and Two-Face, unaware of the even greater emotional and physical hurdles to come? As it proves the greatest challenge yet for Batman, so too does The Dark Knight Rises prove the greatest challenge yet for the trilogy's writer-director-producer Christopher Nolan. How to follow up the unprecedented commercial and critical success of his 2008 hit The Dark Knight with a third and final chapter that can satisfy geeks, general audiences, and critics alike? Well, he may have stumbled across that finish line somewhat, but cross it he has, giving his franchise the epic and stirring conclusion it deserves.

Compositing numerous character arcs and plot threads with which Batman aficionados will already be familiar, The Dark Knight Rises takes off with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) been shaken from vigilante retirement upon the appearance of a new villain in town; the mask-wearing international master criminal Bane (Tom Hardy) who enacts an ambiguous plot which Wayne's concerned butler Alfred (Michael Caine) suggests might be connected to foes from Batman's past. It doesn't help matters that the Caped Crusader's list of allies is as flimsy as his injured right leg. The city wrongfully holds him responsible for the death of Harvey Dent eight years earlier, but he still has friends in GCPD Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), a young cop named John Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt), and wealthy socialite Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) whose investment in Wayne's company have yielded a clean energy source which could be weaponized if allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Also along for the ride is anti-heroine Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a slick cat burglar whose allegiances are in question and flux as she tries to steal and slink her way out of an increasingly dangerous Gotham.