Rough Men Stand Ready to do Violence

Fury

Directed by David Ayer

Three and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

The centerpiece of David Ayer's bleak and gritty "Fury" is a quiet and mysterious scene in a small German apartment that endures much longer than we initially think it might. In 1945, as the Allied forces had turned the tide in WWII and begun to advance deep in to Hitler's Germany, Don Collier (Brad Pitt) the grizzled commander of a beleaguered tank battalion, and Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), the terrified rookie in his outfit, find two German women holed up in their home after the Americans seize a small German outpost. Like these women, we have no idea what sinister designs these rough men might have on them. 

Beyond the Infinite

Interstellar

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Two and One Half Stars

Christopher Nolan is among the most ambitious of our generation's filmmakers. He is also one of the most materialistic. I mean this not as a judgement. Merely a point of reference. If we are going to make sense of Mr. Nolan's sprawling science-fiction spectacle "Interstellar", I think it might behoove us to consider that it has come from the director who revealed the inner workings of a grand magician's illusion to be a convenient machine ("The Prestige"), who manufactured a dream world with all the opacity and peculiarity of a Russian Nesting Doll ("Inception"), and who chose for his superhero saga that most notorious of superheroes who does not possess any superpowers. Indeed, Mr. Nolan has persistently, occasionally even beligerently, made an effort to govern his films by the laws and limitations of the physical world.