Nolan has managed to make a masterpiece in a genre crowded with masterpieces, one that will likely be held up as one of the best ever about World War II.

Under the Skin (Dir. Jonathan Glazer, A24) Jonathan Glazer makes movies that seamlessly combine emotional alienation with lustrous aesthetics. The director blends these potentially opposing approaches to narrative by putting them at odds with one another in films that constantly seem in danger of splitting in two. In Sexy Beast, he broke through the languor of a Florida retreat, replacing …

[xrr rating=4.25/5]Things are not looking good for planet Earth in Christopher Nolan’s latest science fiction film, Interstellar. Mother Nature has turned on us, making the planet hostile to almost every crop but corn. It’s a futuristic dustbowl, and those who have survived struggle to get by as farmers. No one needs engineers or pilots any longer. Dust covers everything. People …

Five years is an eternity in the life of a film. When coming up with this feature, the question the Spectrum Culture staff pondered was this: “How well do these movies play NOW!” Not five years ago, but how have they aged in our memories. While some acclaimed films of ’08 remain strong on our list, some critically-lauded ones didn’t …

The Cabin in the Woods (Dir: Drew Goddard, Lionsgate Films) Alternately hilarious and cruel, Cabin in the Woods is the kid-tested, nihilist-approved antidote to every rotten, boring, soulless, by-the-numbers horror flick to clog up the genre over the past few decades. Taking obligatory classic horror flick references to an illogical extreme, Cabin in the Woods skewers the modern audience as …

Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 thriller Insomnia did for film noir what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining did for horror: wrest the genre from the night into the harsh glare of daylight to prove that the same basic elements could be just as atmospheric and unsettling in plain view as they are hidden in shadow. Its protagonist’s guilt manifests itself in harsh, unending …

[xrr rating=3.5/5]For many, The Dark Knight Rises is the comic book crown jewel of this year’s blockbuster crop. Four years have elapsed since the superlative The Dark Knight, and since then Christopher Nolan has taken a break from Batman and teased us with the somewhat middling Inception. With each new entry in his filmography, Nolan has moved away from the …

Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. Christopher Nolan’s films entertain viewers with their well-dressed neo-noir style and narrative complexity, but below the surface they’re also about creation – often at the mercy of near self-destructive obsession. Just as a brief sampling, Memento’s Leonard Shelby writes a story to himself as part …

Ah, Inception. Every Dark Knight fanboy’s favorite head-trip action-fantasy, with a cast only someone with the bona fides of Christopher Nolan could muster: fugitive dream-invader-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), accused of murdering his wife (Marion Cotillard) and offered a path to freedom by corporate magnate Saito (Ken Watanabe), teams up with hard-nosed manager Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), snarky forger Eames (Tom Hardy), …

Summer at the box office is the season of promise, a time when loud trailers proudly herald the latest special effects bonanza. This year is no different than the others: cowboys battled aliens, a young wizard faced his destiny, shape-shifting robots once again did battle and that’s not even mentioning the slew of superhero movies the studios asked us to …