Wooden Crosses

Wooden Crosses

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A man lies dead

1932’s Wooden Crosses (Les croix de bois) is more death, less glory than your average drama about the First World War. That might explain why it doesn’t always make it onto the “best of” lists, where The Big Parade, 1917, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory and Westfront usually jostle for a place on the podium. It’s more about the collective experience of warfare than individual heroics, which might also explain that absence, though there is a lead character, in the shape of Gilbert Demachy (Pierre Blanchar). Constructed in classic style, it starts with war being declared to scenes of national jubilation in France. Men eagerly signing up. Trains loaded … Read more

30 March 2015-03-30

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Matthew McConaughey as astronaut Cooper in Interstellar

Out in the UK This Week Interstellar (Warner, cert 12) I wasn’t a fan of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films – too long, too much yak, humourless, over-insistent and with a poor grip on action – so I wasn’t exactly warming up a welcome for this much hyped slide sideways into space fantasy. How wrong was I? This is the best “hard sci-fi film” for decades, so grand in scale that it dwarfs Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. McConaughey is the star, playing the retired Nasa astronaut heading back into space after years kicking his heels on a world heading towards annihilation. There he finds that, out on the edge of a … Read more