Paul Schrader grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a hard film to watch, not because of what it shows, which is less explicit than its reputation suggests, but because of what it understands about…
Futureworld (1976) earns its 7 as a lean 1970s paranoid thriller. Cheesy, dated, and genuinely unsettling.
Westworld Season 1 is near-perfect science fiction television. The other three seasons are a masterclass in how prestige TV destroys itself.
The Adjustment Bureau earns its 9 by doing something most high-concept films fail at completely: it makes the concept personal without letting the concept. The idea, that a bureaucracy of angelic agents manages human fate, adjusting events whenever people deviate…
RoboCop is a better film than its premise suggests and a more subversive one than its marketing implied. Paul Verhoeven made a corporate satire inside a violent action film, and the two registers enhance each other instead of competing.
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.
The film that executes the concept earns a 6, primarily because of an ending that retreats from the horror it spent ninety minutes building. The domed city is a closed system, finite resources, finite population, managed by a computer that…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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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