With its story set "in the near future", meaning at least 60-70 years from now, Ad Astra's protagonist is an astronaut named Roy McBride (Brad Pitt). After a mysterious space anomaly causes a global power surge that kills thousands of people across Earth, Roy is called into a top secret meeting at Space Command – think of it as NASA… read more!

Armageddon Time gets my vote for most disingenuous movie title of 2022. For those of you expecting a disaster picture, this is actually an intimately-scaled memory piece specifically set in Queens, NY in the autumn of 1980; its title is a riff on the Clash song "Armagideon Time", released a year earlier and played on the soundtrack but not especially… read more!

In 2009, I read David Grann's The Lost City of Z on a friend's recommendation. An account of early 20th century British explorer Percy Fawcett and his attempts to find proof of an advanced prehistoric civilization in the Amazon rainforest, it's a real page-turner. With its depictions of personal obsession and colonialist folly, the story seemed a perfect fit for Werner Herzog, who had already covered similar territory,… read more!