Total Recall (1990) Review
Total Recall is one of the great entertainments in science fiction cinema, and its pleasures are specific instead of generic. The women around him are sharply written and sharply performed.
Genre: Thriller (Page 15)
AdventureThe 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.
Artificial IntelligenceEx Machina (2014) Review
Garland built Ex Machina to be precise, controlled, and unsettling in a register that keeps the audience at analytical distance instead of pulling them into emotional investment. The performances are strong.
DramaGattaca (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.
ActionThe 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 occasionally pull you out of the story.
PsychologicalThe Butterfly Effect (2004) Review
The Butterfly Effect has a disturbing premise, childhood trauma so embedded in a group of people that any attempt to fix one person's damage creates worse damage elsewhere, and squanders it through arbitrarily defined mechanics, darkness deployed for shock instead…
Body HorroreXistenZ (1999) Review
eXistenZ is Cronenberg doing what Cronenberg does: making the body the site of horror and the technology that interfaces with it the vector of corruption. The bio-ports, the organic game consoles connecting directly to the spine, the game-meat assembled from…
Artificial IntelligenceWestworld (1973) Review
Westworld is great and deserves considerably better than its current reputation as merely the prototype for the HBO series. Michael Crichton's original concept is tighter, scarier, and structurally cleaner than anything the television adaptation produced in its first two seasons.
HorrorInvasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Review
The 1978 Body Snatchers remake improves on the 1956 original in one key respect: it doesn't flinch at its own ending.
DramaPredestination (2014) Review
Predestination is a clever puzzle in search of a reason to exist. The temporal loop at its center, a person who is their own parent, their own child, and their own nemesis, is logically consistent in a way that time…