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.
Fans of WWII storytelling have been spoiled for choice this year, with the sleeper hit Pressure recently being released on the PVOD market, where it's competing against World War II with Tom Hanks. The epic, 20-episode documentary series is midway through its run, which is being billed as the most exhaustive series about the war ever made. World War II with Tom Hanks is currently the number one most-popular series on the domestic iTunes chart, according to FlixPatrol. Meanwhile, Pressure has emerged as a hit in its own right. Starring Brendan Fraser and Andrew Scott, the movie grossed approximately $15 million in its domestic box-office run, during which it outgrossed last year's Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe. Another WWII-era drama is currently available to stream in the United States on Paramount+, but you might want to rush, as it'll be removed from the platform soon.
The movie in question premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival a decade ago, and was headlined by Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson. They played a real-life couple who launched a protest against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in 1940, after their son died in the war. The movie was directed by Vincent Perez and also features Daniel Brühl in a prominent supporting role. It now holds a 58% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where it doesn't have an official consensus. However, critics were clearly mixed on it. While one critic called the movie "overlong" and "melodramatic," the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw described it as "well-carpentered."
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 about Alone in Berlin, which was released theatrically in 2016 in Germany, and in the following year in several other territories across the world. The movie is currently available to stream on Paramount+, but it'll be removed from the streamer on July 12. Gleeson was recently seen as the villain in Prime Video's critically acclaimed superhero series Spider-Noir, which remains hugely popular on the streamer even weeks after its release. Thompson, on the other hand, was seen in the sleeper hit film The Sheep Detectives, which has quietly grossed around $125 million worldwide and is now available on Prime Video. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
