I’M WRITING THIS column towards the end of awards season, when my usual cult-cinema viewing list gets set aside so I can watch a stack of worthy pictures about serious subjects. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to suggest more outré complementary programming for this year’s crop of major motion pictures. In many cases, I’m more likely to go with the cultier version again than revisit the Oscar-BAFTA- GG-Critics’ Circle picks.
Oppenheimer —quite a lot of the plot of Oppenheimer follows The Beginning Or The End (1947), which was essentially a biopic of the Bomb, with egghead Oppie (Hume Cronyn) and gruff General Groves (Brian Donlevy) as head cheerleaders. If you thought Christopher Nolan’s film a mite self-important, note that 20th Century Fox buried a print of The Beginning Or The End in a time capsule to be opened in the 25th century as “an enduring record of our civilisation”.