Time Machine

There may come a time in the future when science or even advanced AI creates a way that humans can time travel to another year or century. It might seem improbable now but look at all the technological innovations that we never thought possible and are now a reality. At the same time, movie lovers already know they can vicariously visit people and places in the past thanks to the miracle of motion pictures. Just as recently as 2018, Peter Jackson produced and directed They Shall Not Grow Old, a stunning collection of archival footage from World War I which he had restored and colorized from black to white to give the documentary an immediacy and impact that brought the soldiers on screen to life (before they met their untimely deaths on the battlefield). If you want to go back even further to the turn of the century, you can experience life in the U.K. (mostly northern England with a few stops in Ireland) in Electric Edwardians: The Lost Cinema of Mitchell & Kenyon (2005), an amazing treasure trove of footage from 1901 and beyond that was considered lost for years until its discovery in 1994.

Continue reading

Operation Chastise: The Movie

The biggest box office hit of 1955 in England and honored with three BAFTA nominations for Best British Film, Best British Screenplay and Best Film from any Source, The Dam Busters (1955) is less well known in the U.S. but is nonetheless one of the most realistic and faithful accounts of an incident in WWII that is credited with hastening Germany’s defeat in the war. Continue reading