He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
With the recently released movie Pressure delivering a solid performance at the box office and the History Channel documentary series World War II with Tom Hanks gaining steam with each passing week, it's a wonderful time for audiences interested in that period of history. Starring Brendan Fraser and Andrew Scott, Pressure unfolds in the tense hours leading up to D-Day, and is told partially from the perspective of American President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The film's British counterpart, which follows Prime Minister Winston Churchill's dogged pushback against the enemy in the early days of the war, is currently streaming on Peacock in the United States. Viewers looking for a companion piece to Pressure might want to check it out before it is removed from the platform.
The film was released in 2017, the same year as Christopher Nolan's World War II blockbuster Dunkirk, which, coincidentally, featured Churchill as a significant off-screen presence in its final moments. Directed by Joe Wright, it featured Gary Oldman as the British Prime Minister, with Lily James playing his secretary, who serves as the audience surrogate. The film received mostly positive reviews, but it'll remain etched in history for being the movie that finally won Oldman an acting Oscar. It was also praised for the stylized cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel and for its old-fashioned charms.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it's about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
We're talking, of course, about Darkest Hour. Produced on a reported budget of $30 million, the film grossed $150 million worldwide. It now holds a "Certified Fresh" 84% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, "Darkest Hour is held together by Gary Oldman's electrifying performance, which brings Winston Churchill to life even when the movie's narrative falters." The movie is available to stream on Peacock in the United States until July 1. Meanwhile, Pressure has grossed more than $10 million at the domestic box office on the strength of terrific reviews and audience reception, and the eighth and ninth episodes of World War II with Tom Hanks will be released on the History Channel on June 15. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
In May 1940, the fate of World War II hangs on Winston Churchill, who must decide whether to negotiate with Adolf Hitler, or fight on knowing that it could mean the end of the British Empire.
