Film Review: World War Z (2013)

It's a Golden Age of the Undead these days, and of the hundreds of different zombie stories that have emerged in recent years, Max Brooks' novel World War Z stands out as one of the more ambitious. Using an epistolary style that retells a zombie apocalypse that has already happens, Brooks wrote a book which owed as much to Studs Terkel's The Good War or Haruki Murakami's Underground as it did Romero's Night of the Living Dead. By presenting the end of the world in the past tense, the book managed to be both exciting, inventive and, at times, oddly moving. It was not just a terrific zombie story, but a terrific book regardless of genre.

Film Review: Killing Them Softly (2012)

Released on the cusp of the 2012 awards season, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly was strangely, some might say cruelly, ignored by most of the mainstream awards, a fate which mirrored its failure to connect with a broad audience. Granted, it's still the most commercially successful film of Dominik's career and it did not want for critical attention, but this seems much too modest a fate for a film which, whilst flawed, is still a fascinating, often brilliant attempt to make a down-and-dirty crime thriller which doubles as a (perhaps too) pointed political commentary.

Ed's Top 20 Films of 2012

"Now, is my movie going to be Number One, or am I going to have to make use of this?"

As 2012 recedes into our collective rear view mirror, now seems like as good a time as any to look back on what has been in anticipation of what is still to come. 2012 was a pretty good year for cinema, all told. Whilst there weren't too many unequivocal masterpieces - and what there were seemed to all get shoved into the last three months - there was a solid roster of second-tier films that ensured that nary a week went by without something good coming out. To use a tortured, ill-informed sports metaphor, it was a year with few superstars, but a deep bench of good all-rounders.

As such, this was one of the easiest Year End lists I've ever had to draw up since my Top 5 was very clear in my mind, and there was no shortage of good films to fill out the remaining spaces. (I could have easily drawn up a list of 20 more films that didn't make the cut, but which probably deserved to.) It was a year that offered up a varied mixture of extravagant experiments, some of which were more successful (Cloud Atlas) than others (Prometheus, John Carter), as well as one which offered plenty of opportunity to see good stories told well. Even the summer had a better caliber of blockbusters than usual, which is admittedly a very heavily qualified statement, but one that speaks to the generally decent quality of 2012 as a whole. Even its worst films weren't as numerous as in past years. Here's hoping 2013 can clear that (relatively low) bar.

On that somewhat muted note, let's get down to brass tacks and discuss the 20 best films of 2012.

"Film" Review: 8 (2012)

You've probably noticed my use of quotation marks in the title of this review, and they are not there because I have suddenly forgotten how grammar works - though chances are that I never fully knew in the first place - but to denote that this is not a review of a film since 8 is not a cinematic work, but a filmed play. In fact, it's so uncinematic that you don't need to see it in a cinema: the whole play is up on YouTube (and you will find it embedded at the bottom of this post). Yet it stars some of the biggest stars in the world, was written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) and directed by Rob Reiner. For those reasons alone it'd be worth discussing, but considering that it deals with one of the most important and controversial issues in American politics today, it almost demands to be written about.

Film Review: Moneyball (2011)

I feel I need to begin this review by admitting two things: that I don't understand baseball and I hate maths. So Moneyball, a film about highly complicated mathematical formulae and the impact they had on professional baseball that runs over two hours, should be my idea of Hell. If you break down the basic conmponents of the film, it should be the driest, dullest story in existence, and one that should have no audience, because there's nothing that hardcore math fans hate more than sports stepping all over their spreadsheets. Oh, and I guess the reverse is probably true for baseball fans.