film criticism by maryann johanson | celebrating 25 years: 1997–2022
A wonderfully unexpected sort of horror movie, beautiful and delicate, but unsettling, too, with an authentic plausibility to the dichotomy between the invented uncanny and the human response to it.
This Apollo-era would-be suspense-thriller mockumentary is more an exercise in “look how film-school cool and clever we are” than anything else.
The highlight is the absolutely astonishing “World of Tomorrow,” which crams in more SF ideas than you’ll find in a decade’s worth of summer blockbusters.
Star Wars is stuck “a long time ago”: in a 1950s mindset that was already outmoded when the first film was released in 1977.
Neill Blomkamp cements his science-fiction credentials as a filmmaker with a genre vision the likes of which we haven’t seen since the socially conscious SF of the 1970s.
Love of Blomkamp flips around a movie image that’s almost religiously iconic…
Reel Steel (which I keep typing when I mean Real Steel) could be a gritty film noir about a private dectective who investigates Hollywood crimes…
I think it’s very urgent that children be taught media literacy, but I have to confess that it never occurred to me that we might teach children how to watch and interpret great movies in the same way that we teach them how to read and interpret great fiction.
Tree of life? Tree of sanctimonious mopey male egotism disguised as a search for meaning, more like. Or a search for God. Or for nostalgia. Or for innocence. Or for Mom. Or for something.
Having now seen the film, I can say that this trailer is more moving and more coherent than the film itself.
