When Raging Bull came out in 1980, I remember it was one of the first films I had ever seen that was purposely made in black and white other than Woody Allen’s Manhattan which came out in 1979.

You realize very early on while watching this classic movie that due to the gritty depressing nature of the film, making it in black and white was definitely the right choice. After seeing this movie we all learned what Robert De Niro went through to make it, which included gaining and losing 60 pounds and getting into the shape of a world class middle weight boxer. There was no way De Niro was not going to win for best actor in 1980 and one could argue that his performance in this movie might be considered the greatest of all time, given his acting and the physical and athletic achievement in making this movie. This is a must see for anyone who appreciates a great movie and an outstanding acting performance.

Raging Bull IMDB

I was reminded recently of how great a movie “The Imitation Game” was when it came out in January 2015. This is the story about Alan Turing who is considered to be the inventor of the modern day computer. Turing’s incredible genius saved 2 years of the World War 2 and 14 million lives when he invented a machine that broke what was called ENIGMA, which was the machine that encrypted the German communication codes. The number of combinations this machine created was 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 and decoding it was considered at the time almost impossible. Why this movie was great how well the process of building this decoding machine was explained as well as the breakthroughs that eventually lead to the best way to figure out every single German code and the combination changes that happened every day. Its incredible to realize that Germany and all their evil and murdering of so many innocent people during World War 2 would possess scientists so brilliant to invent a machine like this and so many of the best weapons of war including almost the Atom Bomb. More amazing to realize is that in order to save lives during a horrible war the most important invention in human history, the computer was invented. The insanity of war most unbelievably has created many of the greatest inventions in human history, including the science of medicine. This could be the greatest irony of all.

Another great story within this great movie is that once you have broken the code using this decoding machine, how often can you use it as to not alert the Germans that you have figured out their ENIGMA machine? This one idea creates the best scene in this movie where they all the scientists working on the decoding machine realize that the machine cannot be used that often and only by using mathematical formulas and statistics can they win the war while at the same time not alerting the Germans that the British had broken the code.

The downside of this story is how Alan Turing was treated after the war by England because he was gay and for many years because of this he never received the credit for his invaluable accomplishments during World War 2. I will not spoil the movie by elaborating more on this issue. Only until the year 2013 did the Queen of England finally give Alan Turing the credit he deserved for his incredible accomplishments during World War 2. For me for something like this to take so long is the biggest tragedy of this movie.

Both Keira Knightly and Bennedict Cumberbatch were outstanding in their roles in this movie.

If you have not seen the Imitation Game you owe it to yourself to learn about one of the most important stories of World War 2.

I highly recommend The Imitation Game.

This movie is very loosely based on the movie Cloverfield which came out in 2008. Unlike the original Cloverfield which was a science fiction movie involving aliens, 90% of this movie takes place in a bomb shelter where the owner of the shelter played by John Goodman has taken in a young woman played by Mary Winstead whom he was in a car accident with at the start of the movie. After this, almost the entire movie was scene after scene of her trying to escape from the shelter, talking with another young man who is in the shelter with them, playing board games and finding out that the character played by Goodman may have killed another young woman in the shelter some time earlier. Why this other woman was killed or the circumstances of this possible murder was never explained in the movie which I considered to be another flaw amount several during the 2 hours.

The payoff of this movie is to finally find out if they are in fact in a shelter for a real reason, trying to avoid the aliens who have attacked the earth or protect themselves from the poison air which supposedly the aliens have used to kill humanity or if the Goodman character is just insane and kidnapping two young people for his own insane enjoyment. Unfortunately these are not compelling enough reasons including the special effects in the last 10% of the movie to recommend it. For these reasons I cannot recommend this movie.

10 Cloverfield Lane – IMDB