Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is, simply, one of the best movies I've ever seen. Repeat viewings never fail to overwhelm me with some of the strongest gut-level emotional reactions I've ever had to a movie. I can only talk about it in superlatives: it's a near-religious experience. One of the movies that makes me love movies.

Children of Men is set in a near-future dystopia, two decades after the last human birth. The sci-fi premise of mass infertility has…

If any excuse were necessary to rewatch Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a new print projected in a proper theater would certainly be it.

To mark the film's 50th anniversary, Warner Bros. commissioned filmmaker and Kubrick aficionado Christopher Nolan to create a set of new 70mm prints. Nolan's team located an intact 70mm preservation print, and strove to reproduce its inherent color and picture quality without digital effects. In theory, this new version of the film would be closer…

Thanks to the late, lamented Filmstruck for filling in another gap in my understanding of movie history. A helpful reminder to young & old film fans approaching cinema in non-chronological order: nothing comes out of nowhere.

Specifically, I'm thinking of Terry Gilliam. I've long viewed Jabberwocky and Monty Python and the Holy Grail as landmark satires of de-romanticized European history as crazed, filthy, ignorant, superstitious, and chaotic. Belatedly seeing Ken Russell's The Devils now, the straight line from here to Jabberwocky…