“Death wasn’t being responded to as a public health problem,” David France says. “It was dealt with with sniggers. It was left to religious leaders to explain or respond to the epidemic. And they responded by calling it the wrath of God.” He adds: “That’s the hostility we all saw…

“I hate realism,” director Genndy Tartakovsky said last week over the phone. “In America especially, we’re very narrow-minded as far as animation goes. There is only one kind of movie, and that’s that big, family-oriented, four-quadrant, please-everyone kind of film. But if I wanted realism, I’d watch a live-action movie…

Typically, the creators of comic book adaptations assume that ingratiating themselves to anyone unfamiliar with their characters/properties demands boilerplate origin stories where protagonists exhaustively declare who they are in no uncertain terms. This is, thankfully, not true of Dredd, whose creators have the confidence to treat their narrative like just…