A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On March 29, 2018, Warner Bros. released Ready Player One, director Steven Spielberg’s ambitious and visually stunning adaptation of Ernest Cline’s eponymous science fiction novel set in a dystopian near-future in which virtual reality and pop culture from the past are the only means of escape in a crumbling post-Information Age world. Co-written by Cline and Zak Penn ( The Last Action Hero ), Ready Player One combines live action sequences with immersive video game-inspired computer graphics – making this one of Spielberg’s most complex movies in his storied career. The film is set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. ...

Dunkirk (2017) Written and directed by: Christopher Nolan Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy Dunkirk is one of the great untold stories in modern cinema. Having made a trip on a small boat across the Channel about 25 years ago, the roughness of the water, the sheer physical challenge of making that crossing - but without anybody dropping bombs, without traveling into a war zone - cemented in my mind an extraordinarily high level of admiration for the people who in 1940 just got into those little boats and came over to help the soldiers. - Christopher Nolan , in a Time interview, explaining why he chose to make a movie about the Dunkirk evacuation.    Christopher Nolan's latest film, Dunkirk, is a World War II-set drama that looks a lot like an epic but feels like a thriller. It has many of the elements of a post- Saving Private...

(C) 2015 Dreamworks LLC Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Cold War film “Bridge of Spies” is an intriguing (if somewhat flawed) take on how a Brooklyn insurance attorney named James Donovan (Tom Hanks) helped negotiate the 1961 exchange of convicted Soviet intelligence agent Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and an American college student (Will Rogers) accused of espionage by Communist-ruled East Germany. Spielberg’s latest historical drama earned five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. “Bridge of Spies” only won one: Mark Rylance walked away with the 2015 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor – a well-deserved recognition for his nuanced performance as accused spy Abel. “Bridge of Spies” begins with Rudolf Abel’s arrest by FBI counterintelligence in 1957. It is an age of atomic anxiety: The U.S. and the Soviet Union are building nuclear ar...