Notes from the sketch book

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey stands as the most exhilarating, terrifyingly scaled, and emotionally devastating American blockbuster I've seen in a decade. Sitting in the theater, the kinetic shock is palpable, this time that's not just his usual ear bleeding volume control. It feels as though Western mythology has been dragged from academia and thrown directly into the confusing, bloody reality of modern psychological trauma.  I actually had to triple-check the runtime before buying my ticket, as it takes up a good portion of your day. But once it starts, you realise you don't just watch this nearly three-hour colossus, it...

How do you make a movie about the total collapse of the American character without the audience running out of the theatre in a panic? In the summer of 1982, John Carpenter released The Thing, and the audience did just that—they ran, they recoiled, and they rejected it. It was the summer of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a movie that offered a suburban fairy tale of intergalactic friendship, assuring us that the universe was benign and that our own government, though clumsy, could ultimately be outsmarted by a boy on a bicycle. Spielberg gave the Reagan era exactly what...

In the first subject of the Among Us collection we look at two films that tap into the nightmare of paranoia and fear over two decades.

Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction... but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.   I popped along to the cinema to check it out...   Gosling has spent the last ten years nailing...

How do you take someone who’s been drawn and redrawn until he’s basically just a corporate logo—and make him feel like he’s actually breathing? That’s the big trap with iconic heroes: they turn into statues. By the late ‘80s, Batman was headed straight for a pedestal. He was becoming this grim, stiff monument of "detective fiction" that had lost its spark. A Breyfogle comic is to remember why we fell in love with this stuff in the first place, before everyone started insisting that "graphic novels" had to be somber and "literary" to matter. Breyfogle didn’t give us a literary...