Ida (2014) – Pawel Pawlikowski

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is one of the most quietly powerful films of the year. It is a detective story, road movie, and a coming-of-age narrative wrapped concisely into 82 minutes. Set in 1961 Poland during the Stalinist dictatorship, Ida centers on Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young orphaned woman who was sheltered in a convent since she […]

Inherent Vice (2014) – Paul Thomas Anderson

If I ever needed a psychedelic trip without turning to drugs, then watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice would do the trick. Anderson’s latest film feels like a synthesis of Boogie Nights and The Master, borrowing the wit and slapstick comedy of the former while retaining the abstraction and intellectual masturbation of the latter. To […]

The Imitation Game (2014) – Morten Tyldum

The Imitation Game has been quite a crowd-pleaser because it is both a satisfying thriller and a poignant biopic. Taking the center stage of the film is Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), an idiosyncratic and socially awkward British mathematician and prodigy. Turing was hired to crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma, a code used by the Germans for […]

Interstellar (2014) – Christopher Nolan

(Editors Note: I was originally going to make some likely ignorant comments about the science of Interstellar but instead, we’ll be having our first guest contributor on the blog. Michael Tremmel, PhD Candidate in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Washington, will be giving us his assessment of the film’s science shortly.) I’m a […]

Birdman (2014) – Alejandro Gonzalez Innarritu

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is an audacious film. It was designed to make it seem like the entire movie was shot in one take, when in fact it is a series of long, uninterrupted scenes seamlessly spliced together. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in last […]

Gone Girl (2014) – David Fincher

Gone Girl is the type of film that is right up David Fincher’s alley, the man who authored Seven, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy Dunne, the film is a seeming whodunit when Nick returns home and discovers his wife is missing […]