"Masters of the Air," recapped.

Callum Turner, Austin Butler, and a B-17. (Apple TV+)

With seven years as an editor for Air & Space / Smithsonian, may it rest in power, under my belt, I was the only man for the job of telling you which real American historical figures are played by real English and Irish actors. My Vulture recaps of Masters of the Air, showrunner John Orloff’s long-delayed Apple TV+ adaptation of Donald L. Miller’s nonfiction history book, are here.

Jaws 3-D: Roland Emmerich's "Midway," reviewed.

Aaron Eckhart wins the jaw-hypertrophy trophy as WWII flying ace Jimmy Doolittle in Midway. (Alan Markfield)

Just in time for Veterans Day, disaster artist Roland Emmerich has made a bid to improve upon 1976's Technicolor / Sensurround-sound sensation Midway with a more historically-focused (but also more heavily-animated) dramatization of the three-day battle that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. My NPR review of the movie is here.

Wartime in a Bottle: Dunkirk, reviewed.

400,000 stranded British soldiers await rescue on the frigid beach at Dunkirk. (Warner Bros.)

I've never understood the objection that Christopher Nolan's movies are sterile. Dunkirk, his new dramatization of the 1940 rescue of British soldiers from the beaches of Northern France carried out largely by civilians, knocked me flat. Here's my review.

We'll Always Have Casablanca: Allied, reviewed.

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as glamorous spies in Allied. (Paramount)

Here's my review of Robert Zemeckis' high-tech-but-old-fashioned WWII espionage thriller Allied. It's meant to evoke a genre that includes great films like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious or Carol Reed's The Third Man. Or lesser Graham Greene works, like this one.

What the Movies Taught Us About World War II Aviation

I wrote this fun piece for my day job. It appears in our May 2015 issue of Air & Space / Smithsonian, now on sale at Barnes & Noble and other fine booksellers and newsstands, as well as the National Air & Space Museum. It's our 70th anniversary of V-E Day issue, which – because it'll be out in time for the Arsenal of Democracy Flyover on Friday, May 8th (the actual anniversary) – includes pull-out Spotter Cards you can use to identify the silhouettes of the two dozen vintage warbirds that'll be buzzing over your head a few minutes past noon if you come down to the National Mall on that day.

For the record, I do think William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is the greatest of the films I surveyed – if not the greatest flying movie – save for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I had occasion to mention only fleetingly. (The photo at the top of this post is of Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in that film.)

Mark Harris's book Five Came Back was an invaluable resource for me while writing this story.

The Spoils of War: FURY, reviewed.

This is the scene that makes writer-director David Ayer's FURY something more than just a gritty combat picture.

Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal as the crew of FURY, an M4 Sherman tank.

Logan Lerman is a green member of Brad Pitt's tank crew in David Ayer's FURY.

I expected that David Ayer, the writer of Training Day and the writer-director of End of Watch and Sabotage, would make a gritty World War II combat picture. But I was surprised how much an interest his film takes in the plight of women, and its willingness to show American soldiers behaving badly during the "Good War." My NPR review is here.