Futures that went wrong on purpose. Dystopian fiction builds a system designed to control people, then follows the ones who bend under it or refuse to, and the best of it is always about the present in disguise.
Black ComedySouthland Tales (2006) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Richard Kelly took an unfinished cut to Cannes because nobody turns down a competition slot, was booed, recut it, and watched it earn under four hundred thousand dollars.…
AdventureThe Postman (1997) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner turned a satirical novel about a con man into a three hour sincere epic about American institutions, and ended it with a statue of himself. It took…
Dystopian12 Monkeys (1995) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A time travel film in which the loop cannot be broken and everybody involved eventually works that out. Gilliam made it for twenty-nine million dollars in Philadelphia and…
Cult ClassicA Clockwork Orange (1971) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kubrick makes you enjoy a monster's company, then cures him, then asks whether the cure was worse. Withdrawn from Britain by its own director for nearly thirty…
ActionMad Max: Fury Road (2015) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A two-hour chase that explains an entire world without a line of exposition. The fourth film in a series, the best one by a distance, and…
Black ComedyBrazil (1985) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A clerical error kills the wrong man and a whole film proceeds from a typo. The most internally consistent world in the genre, and Gilliam fought Universal for most…
ActionDredd is the rare comic book adaptation that fully understood its source material. Alex Garland wrote, between his collaborations.
ActionDemolition Man is one of the funniest action films of the early 1990s and one of the most accidentally prescient. Marco Brambilla directed in his feature.
DystopianBong directed and co-wrote with Kelly Masterson. The film made approximately eighty-six million dollars worldwide on a forty million dollar budget.
ActionEscape from New York is John Carpenter's dystopian action film and one of the foundational works of 1980s post-apocalyptic cinema. Carpenter directed and co-wrote with Nick Castle.
ActionGhost in the Shell is the live-action adaptation of Masamune Shirow's manga and the subsequent animated films and television series. Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger wrote.
ActionRoboCop is the satirical action franchise that established the cybernetic-cop subgenre and one of the most accomplished critiques of late-1980s corporate American culture. Paul Verhoeven directed the 1987 original.
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