Futureworld (1976) – Review
Futureworld (1976) earns its 7 as a lean 1970s paranoid thriller. Cheesy, dated, and genuinely unsettling.
Tag: Memory and Identity (Page 8)
AmbiguityWestworld Series – Review
Westworld Season 1 is near-perfect science fiction television. The other three seasons are a lesson in how prestige TV destroys itself.
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.
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…
1990sGattaca (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.
Artificial IntelligenceMurderbot Review
The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells' series adapted for Apple TV+, follows a SecUnit: a part-human, part-machine construct that has quietly hacked its own governor module and would prefer to watch serialized television than interact with the humans it's contracted to…
DystopiaBlade Runner 2049 (2017) Review
Blade Runner 2049 is visually extraordinary and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema, the orange desolation of post-collapse Las Vegas, the grey protein farms extending to the…
1990sThe Matrix (1999) Review
The Wachowskis accomplished something that almost never happens in blockbuster cinema: they made a philosophy lecture into one of the most viscerally entertaining action films ever made, and the philosophy and the action are the same thing. This review is…
2000sThe 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…
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…