My love of movies is well known, and you're reading this on a LEGO fan site so my love of the bricks is also pretty obvious. So when something comes along that combines the two you've got my attention.

Enter Brick Films, a book by Warren Elsemore. It promises 60 iconic movie scenes and posters to make from LEGO. Barron's was kind enough to send me a review copy, and I'm happy to share my thoughts about it.

I was lucky enough to meet the author during my time in the UK. We both attended STEAM and for a while there I was a member of The Brickish. Warren is a very talented builder (his St Pancras Station is phenomenal, truly breathtaking) and is also quite busy in the community, being a writer and an event organizer. And how many people can say they broke a world record? Warren did with the largest LEGO mosaic ever done, a massive undertaking which covered over 170 square yards. Needless to say I my hopes were high with this book.

First impressions of the book were favorable, the quality is good with a heavy paper cover, glossy pages and nice print quality. Upon opening the book however the first thing that struck me was how tiny the print was. I'm no spring chicken, and my eyes are starting to go (bought my first pair of reading glasses recently, *sigh*) but this print is like the warning label on a box of cold medicine. The text also has colored backgrounds, which is a nice stylistic touch, but the color is way too dark on some of the pages, making the already hard to read text near impossible except under bright light. The writing is also almost solely about the movies themselves, with nearly no mention of the models or LEGO. While I appreciate some of the fun facts about the films, I really expected more info about both, but this reads less like a LEGO book about movies and more like imdb.

The list of movies featured is long and varied, everything from Sci-fi to horror and from comedy to drama is represented. Some of the builds are quite good, but far too many are either too simple or just odd. Perhaps I set to bar too high, but a great many of the MOCs included seemed rushed and just not very good. Even the better ones, like 2001 A Space Odyssey could have benefited from just a little more work and care.

I'm happy there are building guides in this book, but the choices of what to feature are quite baffling to me. They are either so simple that a single image would pretty much suffice, or completely uninteresting. I know that instructions are a huge undertaking, and can take up many pages, I deal with them regularly for BrickJournal, but these just leave me scratching my head.

Overall I'm a bit disappointed. Perhaps I had my hopes up too high, but the quality of the builds combined with the lack of information about them left me wanting more. But it is always fun to see movies scenes and posters recreated in LEGO, and this book is jam-packed with those. I give it 3 out of 5 Nerdlys