Cillian Murphy

Nolan’s new film is a biography of the famous atomic scientist.

(Hopefully not a biopic that’s a bomb.)

Get ready for a long trip through history.

(The atomic bomb, that is.)

The countdown is on.

Nothing says summer blockbuster like a drama about an atomic physicist.

Free Fire, Ben Wheatley’s gangster movie that’s essentially a big group of characters played by a bunch of fantastic actors shooting and shouting at each other for 90 minutes, is about to hit theaters, and if you need more incentive than that description to go see it, a short, hilarious clip has just hit the internet.

I’ve already heard one colleague refer to Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, in which an arms deal goes wrong and escalates into an almost 90-minute-long shootout, as a kind of cinematic high-wire act. But high-wire acts don’t last 90 minutes; watching somebody balance on a wire for 90 minutes would get pretty boring if that’s all they were doing. There’s an audaciousness to Free Fire that’s self-defeating. Yes, Wheatley pulled off a feature-length gun battle. But the result is so monotonous that I ran out of patience long before the participants ran out of bullets.

If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, you probably remember the great scene where Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Ducard (Liam Neeson) fight on a frozen lake. But did you know that all throughout the day Bale and Neeson shot this scene, they could hear cracks in the ice beneath their feet? When the crew returned to the lake the next day, the entire thing had thawed. Yikes. That’s just one of the facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

28 Days Later is famous for those incredible shots of an abandoned London, as one of the last surviving uninfected men in the city, played by Cillian Murphy, wanders around in a daze. To achieve these scenes, director Danny Boyle worked with the police to close off small stretches of streets and roads for about an hour at a time. The shot of Murphy wandering past a demolished double-decker bus was accomplished in just 20 minutes. That’s just one of the amazing facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!