Westworld Series – Review
Westworld Season 1 is near-perfect science fiction television. The other three seasons are a lesson in how prestige TV destroys itself.
Tag: Ambiguity (Page 12)
2010sThe Adjustment Bureau (2011) Review
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 take over. The idea, that a bureaucracy of angelic agents manages human fate, adjusting events whenever…
2000sMinority 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…
1990sTotal 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.
2010sEx 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.
1990sDark City (1998) Review
Dark City is the most underrated film in the history of science fiction cinema. It arrived in 1998, one year before The Matrix, explored several of the same fundamental questions about manufactured reality and the nature of consciousness, and was…
1980sThe Thing (1982) Review
The Thing earns its 9.5 primarily through Rob Bottin's practical effects work, which remains the gold standard for creature design in horror cinema more than forty years later. Carpenter built something rare: a film where the monster is original, the…
1980sBlade 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.
1990seXistenZ (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…
1970sWestworld (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.
1990sContact (1997) Review
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…
1970sStar Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) Review
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the most expensive screensaver in cinema history. Paramount gave Robert Wise a budget that dwarfed the entire television series.