films

I watch a few documentaries a week, but it's rare for me to come across a series that I need to take notes on to keep up with. The first season of the BBC series "Connections" is one of those. It will blow your mind. James Burke walks us through the history of innovation from a touch stone (used to test the purity gold) right up to the atomic bomb, and explains how these two distant inventions are related. If you can see through the 1970s disco outfits and smoking on airplanes, you will be shocked that documentaries this good were being made 30 years ago.

As with every year, a tuxedoed crowd huddles in the dark to honor the luminaries of the film world with Academy Awards. However, this ceremony didn’t feature Hugh Jackman’s dancing or Queen Latifah’s singing. No, this time we’re talking about the Science and Technology Oscars. And even though the SciTech Oscars only got a brief mention during Sunday’s larger ceremony, Popsci.com dives deep into the achievement of the scientists who make the movies possible.

Adobe Flash has helped create many of the animations and games commonly found on websites. But Israeli director Ari Folman used the multimedia software to make Waltz With Bashir, an animated film which explores traumatic memories of his experience as a teenage soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.

With the holiday season fast approaching, multiplexes have begun filling up with the Nazi-themed award magnets that always seem to flood the market at the end of the year. However, amidst the plethora of films filled with series English actors in sharp Teutonic uniforms a single high budget, special effects crammed movie squeezed into theaters on December 12th. The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the canonical 1951 science-fiction film, switches out a widowed secretary for an astrobiologist played by Jennifer Connelly, and attempts to earn the science in science-fiction. So, does the science hold up?

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Help us come up with a list of the top 10 science films of all time. Make your suggestions in the comments on PopSci's blog.