Notes from the sketch book

Bong Joon-ho, ever the master of the sleight-of-hand genre, takes on deep-space survival in Mickey 17, a film that wants to be a high-concept meditation on identity, a satire of corporate-megachurch futurism, and a doomed romance all at once. It's the kind of ambition you almost want to applaud, until the pieces start bumping into each other like lost satellites. Robert Pattinson plays Mickey, so down on his luck he's signed up to be a human guinea pig – or rather, a human printer cartridge . Die, get reprinted, repeat. It's a premise ripe with the kind of dark irony...

I am sitting outside having just finished a sketch in pastel, on a sunny day, thankful and reflective. The last surviving Battle of Britain pilot, has passed away at the age of 105. His story, a testament to resilience and unwavering courage. The sky, once a canvas of roaring engines and desperate maneuvers, now holds a different sort of silence. John "Paddy" Hemingway, the last of that fabled 'Few', has taken his final flight, not into the smoky chaos of wartime skies, but into the quietude of a well-lived century. He was, in a way, a living film reel, a...

History whispers its secrets in unexpected places. Sometimes, it's not the leaders or the politicians who hold the fate of the world in their hands, but the quiet individuals, the ones who stand firm when shadows loom large. Vasili Arkhipov was such a man, a Soviet submariner who faced down not one, but two potential nuclear catastrophes.   His story, often overlooked, is a precarious dance of survival on the edge of annihilation. Born in 1926, he witnessed the Soviet Union rise from the ashes of revolution, a nation forged in hardship and fueled by the promise of a brighter future....

Director David Lynch has sadly passed away at the age of 78.  David Lynch, the cinematic visionary who captivated and confounded audiences for decades, has left us. But the films he created, those mesmerizing journeys into the darkest corners of the American psyche, remain as potent and unsettling as ever. He wasn't a filmmaker for the faint of heart; he dared you to look away, even as he held you captive with his strange, singular beauty. His journey began with Eraserhead, a film that seemed to crawl out of the industrial grime of Philadelphia like a creature from a nightmare....

After For a Few Dollars More proved a hit, United Artists wasted no time. They approached Luciano Vincenzoni, the film’s screenwriter, eager to lock down the rights not just to that film, but the next one in the series. The problem was, there was no next film—not yet. Vincenzoni, along with producer Alberto Grimaldi and director Sergio Leone, didn’t have a plan. But on the spot, Vincenzoni pitched what would become the backbone of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: three rogues on the hunt for treasure, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. United Artists liked...