Review - Fury

It is April, 1945. The second world war draws to an agonizingly bloody close on German soil. Materializing out of a haze of sunlight and gun smoke, a German officer atop a weathered white horse trudges through a scorched battlefield, floating in silence like a ghost amongst the dead bodies and burning debris. There's a sad beauty to this image that greets us at the onset of Fury, steeped in an eerie serenity that the film's title does not suggest.

Naturally, this moment ends in an abrupt and brutal fashion more typical to the rest of this rockem' sockem' war story. Written and directed by David Ayer, many of whose previous films and screenplays (End of Watch, Harsh Times, Training Day) have been gritty studies in rock-hard masculinity, Fury follows the perilous travails of a tank unit as it pushes the Allied advance deeper into enemy territory in the dying days of WWII.

Brad Pitt headlines as Sgt. Don 'Wardaddy' Collier, commander of a 30-ton M4 Sherman tank (the eponymous Fury, whose moniker is scrawled across the cannon barrel as if the bow of a ship) and its testosterone-oozing crew. This includes Shia LaBeouf as its devout trigger man, Michael Peña as its empathetic driver, and Jon Bernthal as its certifiable mechanic. No, not “certified”, “certifiable”.

Review - The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The unbearably long gap between the November Oscar releases and the Christmas Oscar releases has driven me all the back to last September in the hunt for something decent to watch. My quarry: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Based on his own novel of the same name, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower may appear to be nothing more than a fairly typical high school movie, and the reason for that appearance is because... well, it is. But just because something isn't remarkable or revelatory, that doesn't mean it can't still move and captivate. This particular youth-oriented drama is a graceful montage of a year-in-the-life, steeped in all the agony and ecstasy that one year can bring, but told with the utmost tenderness.