The Creator movie review: meat versus metal
Looks great, but the plot falls apart if you poke it and makes no attempt to grapple with AI’s potential. Instead it renders its robot people as a racialized Other in a clunky metaphor for bigotry.
21st sci fi
Don’t Look Up movie review: is the sky falling?
I laughed a lot while also feeling sick to my stomach. As subtle as a sledgehammer, almost obnoxious… and yet it might as well be a documentary. Is it elegant? Is it art? Who the fuck cares?
Silent Night movie review: house party at the end of the world
Apocalyptically sorta-satirical, bone-deep terrifying slap in the face that humanity has properly earned. Formidable, intense… and funny, in a very dry way that is nevertheless difficult to laugh at.
A Quiet Place: Part II movie review: this one goes to 11
A marvel of a sequel that smartly avoids any attempt to recapture the original, instead expanding its world in every way possible. Brisk, crisp, efficient, and full of masterful sequences of suspense.
She Dies Tomorrow movie review: when it feels like we all die tomorrow
Filmmaker Amy Seimetz evokes a taut, cursed mundanity, an allegorical contemplation of culture at its most basic level: when it fails and everyone is hopeless. Accidentally hits our pandemic mood.
A Quiet Place movie review: hushed horror
An apocalypse unlike any onscreen before. A film often almost unbearably tense, in part because it audaciously reconsiders the role sound plays in eliciting our emotional response.
Arrival movie review: how to talk to aliens and expand your consciousness
Intelligent, intense, grownup science fiction that will thrill genre lovers and satisfy fans of moving human drama. A beautiful, thought-provoking film.
The Girl with All the Gifts movie review: I believe the children are our future…
Stakes out its own fresh place in an SF subgenre that is well played out, and rehumanizes it ways that are both extraordinarily moving and deeply unnerving.
These Final Hours movie review: armageddon a hint of emotion
It’s the end of the world. Finally, a legitimate reason for a man to experience emotion. We’ve seen this all before… except not quite so ridiculous.
Mad Max: Fury Road movie review: warlords is hell
Astonishing. Achieves its grotesque, magnificent brutality in an old-fashioned way that serves as a smackdown to bloated, sterile CGI monstrosities.
