We Will Fight Them: Darkest Hour

By Pamela Zoslov

Darkest Hour chronicles the period following Winston Churchill's unlikely accession to UK Prime Minister in 1940 and his famous “We shall fight” radio address, a mere 48 hours later, stating that England would never compromise with or surrender to Hitler. The film was scripted by Anthony McCarten (who also wrote The Theory of Everything), for whom this episode in British history is a personal passion. The screenplay is adapted from a book McCarten wrote on the subject.

Gary Oldman, who is nearly as protean as Lon Chaney, is the umpteenth actor to portray “The British Bulldog.” Encased in masses of jowly makeup, Oldman persuasively affects Churchill's personality and mannerisms, or at least the way those are remembered through the unreliable prism of history. All that is recognizably Oldman are his eyes, which seem younger, and probably less bleary, than those of the prodigious drinker Churchill. (His daily alcohol intake was reportedly white wine with breakfast, champagne and brandy with lunch, two or three glasses of whiskey and soda in the afternoon, champagne and brandy with dinner, followed by more whiskey and soda.)

Pan

Review by Bob Ignizio

Plucky young orphan Peter (Levi Miller) is whisked away from his drab and dreary life in a WWII era British Orphanage and into a much bigger world filled with magic and adventure in PAN. Peter doesn’t know it yet, but he’s the “chosen one” meant to fulfil a heroic destiny. But first he has to escape from the fairy dust mines of the immortal Blackbeard the Pirate (Hugh Jackman). Our hero is aided by Hook (Garrett Hedlund), a charming antihero who says he’s only out for himself, but shows flashes of altruism, and Tiger Lilly (Rooney Mara), a native princess who can more than hold her own with the men when it comes time to battle Blackbeard’s pirates. If this rag-tag band of rebels is to succeed in forging the prophesized alliance between the native tribe and the fairy folk, though, Peter will first have to learn to have faith in himself.

Anna Karenina (now in theaters)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Hope you don't mind a brief discussion of the book-publishing industry. I know this a cinema blog, but in my opinion books tend to be slightly less of a disgraceful waste of time and mammoth human resources than movies. Anyway, a recent pop-fiction phenom has been an imprint called Quirk, who hit big with the Jane Austen horror "mashups" Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Oh, and their Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter was popular enough to be turned into a 2012 movie that nobody, apparently, likes. Too bad, I actually found the book diverting, even if the undead gimmick didn't carry sufficiently to the end. Anyway, it's clear that Quirk's money-making endeavors are, at this point, aimed for what the corporate types like to call cross-media exploitation, conceived with a view to movie adaptations and action figures and probably theme parks by now, built on the launch-platform of formula mashup books. It was impossible not to notice Quirk star author Seth Grahame-Smith as one of the screenwriters of the 2012 bigscreen reboot of DARK SHADOWS (which was also widely disliked).

Hanna

Review by Bob Ignizio

Parents watch their children grow into adulthood with a mixture of hope and fear. That's certainly the case for Erik Heller (Eric Bana), who knows that when his daughter Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) leaves the nest, she'll have far more difficulties to face while making that transition than the average teenage girl. That's because Hanna is the product of a CIA experiment designed to create a perfect warrior. Erik has done all he can to train his daughter to protect herself against those who will inevitably come looking for her, but the isolated cabin the two have been living in hasn't provided much opportunity for teaching Hanna how to function in the real world. She's incredibly bright and capable, but to call her socially awkward would be a major understatement.