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…
Prometheus wastes one of the most visually gifted directors in contemporary cinema on a script that requires its characters to be catastrophically stupid. These are supposedly the best scientists humanity could assemble for a trillion-dollar mission to find humanity's creators.
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…
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the most expensive screensaver in cinema history. Paramount gave Robert Wise a budget that dwarfed the entire television.
Contact is a film about a scientist so committed to empirical evidence that she rejects faith, who then has a transcendent personal experience, returns with no physical evidence it occurred, and is expected by the film to continue believing in…
Avatar is a white savior film wearing the costume of environmental progressivism, and the combination is more offensive than either element alone. The Na'vi, despite everything that makes them extraordinary, apparently needed Jake Sully.
Interstellar is a bad film that has convinced a large number of people it's a profound one. The misdirection is accomplished through scale: everything is so large, so loud, so visually ambitious, so heavily scored that the emptiness at the…
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.
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…
The Running Man is a better idea than film. The concept, a death sport television show operating as the primary mechanism of social control in a dystopia.
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…
Stanley Kubrick developed the project for years before his death; Steven Spielberg completed it as a tribute. The first act honors the premise.
The craft notes in these reviews come from the same eye Richard Lowe brings to books. He has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you want a book that respects the reader the way the best films do, start with a conversation.
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