TheRetroCritic

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After finally letting go of his (and our) beloved Dark Knight trilogy, Christopher Nolan finally ventured into the unknown, to more ambitious cinema where no man has gone before. Well, maybe Kubrick... Still, with Gravity greedily and, some would say, undeservedly claiming the space opera genre last year, only Mr Nolan could swoop in and reclaim it with a movie crazy enough to make you completely forget that Sandra Bullock was once spinning around somewhere. The film, of course, is Interstellar : a grand sci-fi blockbuster in which an ex-engineer/space pilot-turned farmer leads an expedition through wormholes and strange planets in what is essentially Earth's very last hope for survival as our world literally turns to dust. We spend some time with Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his family which includes his young daughter Murph (later played by Jessica Chastain) who seems to believe in ghosts and his father-in-law, played by a sadly once again restrained John Lithgow. C

Bit of a late review this one... After all, this gritty movie version of Les Mis is now a full-blown Oscar-winning blockbuster! Which is pretty cool considering it isn't a tongue-in-cheek crowd-pleaser like Chicago and actually tried something different with the musical genre rather than settle for a generic template. Something which Nine soon learned just is not always the way to go. Not that Les Miserables isn't an Oscar-friendly flick, it totally is, it's simply that it manages to be that and more. Having never physically been to see the musical prior to seeing the film and having never read Victor Hugo's novel (I know, being French it's especially shameful of me), I wasn't 100% sure about what to expect. I'd heard most of the songs from the show, though, so I wasn't completely oblivious as to what Les Miserables was about. Recorded singing directly on camera, sometimes in long one-shot scenes, the cast sure had their work cut out. Hugh J