Pictureland

World War II has proven to be a great, perhaps THE great source for all manner of literature and film since 1945.  Death and destruction on a previously unimaginable scale, sure.  But a gold mine for writers and filmmakers.  Almost seven decades on, despite existing mountains of scholarship and art, new narratives or wrinkles seem to emerge yearly, while those stories long-established provide their ongoing variations.  So it is with one of history's great thrillers, the breaking of the Nazi's seemingly unbreakable Enigma code. In the last dozen or so years alone, there have been several productions based on the long-secret effort.   Enigma (2001), written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Michael Winterbottom, is a highly-fictionalized story set in the actual English code-breaking center at Bletchley Park.  More recently, the English series Bletchley Park  (2012-14) followed a group of women who worked at the Milton Keynes complex during the war, re...

They're kooky, not so creepy - the Stoker Family.   Oh, adolescence.  It can be such a dark, difficult time.  Particularly if you’re the unfortunate India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska).  Not only does she bear a surname which provides rhyming fodder for the menacing jocks who lurk outside her high school.  But not long into Stoker , the young woman finds out that her beloved father has died in his SUV in a mysterious accident.  Fast upon that shock, the father’s heretofore unseen brother, the mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up after the funeral and quickly ingratiates himself with India’s not-terribly-mournful mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), very much to the chagrin of the melancholy child. Lest this begin to sound like a contemporary, female Hamlet - dad barely dead and mom getting cozy with the creepy uncle almost before the body's cold -  first-time screenwriter Wentworth Miller has cited Hitchcock and not Shakespeare ...