Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) Review
A New Hope is the film that created modern blockbuster cinema, and it did so by being something very specific: a myth engine. Lucas wasn't writing charact.
Filming Location: California (Page 16)
CaliforniaMinority Report (2002) Review
Minority Report is a Spielberg film arguing against surveillance and predictive control while being too Spielberg to commit fully to the darkness its premise requires. Dick's source material was about the arbitrary nature of certainty, and Spielberg captures that element…
ArizonaStar Trek: First Contact (1996) Review
First Contact is the best Star Trek film after Wrath of Khan, and that's a significant statement given how many entries the franchise has produced. What separates it from the rest is a structural decision that most franchise filmmaking refuses…
CaliforniaThe Abyss (1989) Review
The production achievement of The Abyss is extraordinary even by Cameron's standards. The Deepcore rig is a superbly designed setting, confined, functional, full of the specific texture of working machinery that Cameron consistently brings to his industrial environments.
CaliforniaGattaca (1997) Review
Andrew Niccol designed Gattaca's world with genuine intelligence. The discrimination is depicted without melodrama, which is the film's most mature choice.
CaliforniaTerminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) Review
James Cameron's most audacious decision in Terminator 2 isn't the liquid metal effects or the freeway chase or the nuclear dream sequence. It's taking his own iconic villain and making him the film's emotional center.
CaliforniaBlade Runner 2049 (2017) Review
Blade Runner 2049 is visually extraordinary and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema, the orange desolation of post-collapse Las Vegas, the grey protein farms extending to the…
AustraliaThe Matrix (1999) Review
The Wachowskis accomplished something that almost never happens in blockbuster cinema: they made a philosophy lecture into one of the most viscerally entertaining action films ever made, and the philosophy and the action are the same thing. This review is…
CaliforniaThe Terminator (1984) Review
The original Terminator is a good film that time has treated unevenly. The effects that were groundbreaking in 1984 show their age in ways that occasional.
CaliforniaBattlefield Earth (2000) Review
Battlefield Earth is the most comprehensively failed film in science fiction history. This isn't hyperbole or enthusiasm for the negative, it's an honest.
CaliforniaBlade Runner (1982) Review
The theatrical cut of Blade Runner, with Deckard's voiceover narration intact, is the correct version of this film. That position is unfashionable.
ArizonaPlanet of the Apes (1968) Review
Planet of the Apes has one of the great endings in science fiction cinema and earns its place in the conversation entirely on the basis of that ending. The Statue of Liberty rising from the sand is the genre's most…