132 Best Releases From the Genre Science Fiction (Page 3)

When you insert the Blu-Ray of Schlock, John Landis’s 1973 directorial debut, the first thing that comes up—even before the menus—is a brief clip of Landis himself informing you of the film you are about to watch. He concludes by sheepishly adding, “I’m sorry.”  Continue Reading →

If nothing else, 65 proves that Adam Driver plays a marvelous survival hero. After his ship crash-lands on an uncharted world, his Mills is dazed and wounded—but not to the point that he does not remember what to do in an emergency. He's got a checklist memorized, and he can follow it until he's back together. As Mills treats his wound, catalogs the damage to his ship, and ultimately dons an environment suit to survey his crash site, Driver's body language shifts. Wooziness gives way to groundedness, and halting movements become smooth. Driver makes it clear that even when despairing and terrified, Mills knows what he's doing. Continue Reading →

The say goes: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But they forgot a couplet: fool me three times, I’ve just watched The Happening.  Continue Reading →

I am sitting in the waiting room at an Urgent Care in Maine, waiting to see someone about a mild allergic reaction to a bee sting. It is August 2003, and I am thirteen years old. While my mother and I wait, I look up at the muted television, and suddenly I can't breathe. The news broadcast is carrying a live feed of what I recognize as the Brooklyn Bridge, and to my horror, thousands of people are streaming across it, trying to get out of New York City. My first thought, before I stammer to my mother that she needs to ask for the remote, that she needs to turn up the volume, that she needs to call our family and see if they're safe, is: It's happening again. We manage to unmute the waiting room television and watch, frightened, as the news breaks of the massive blackout that has paralyzed the Northeast. No one knows the cause, and I convince myself: It is happening again. Continue Reading →

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe got bigger and bigger and bigger, it was downright refreshing to see something as fittingly small and low-stakes as the Ant-Man films break up all the universe-ending tension. It was nice; after watching the Avengers punch through an exhausting sea of robotic baddies and set up a bunch of Infinity Stone dross, along came Paul Rudd as a smirking, kinda-dumb thief who lucked his way into a shrinking suit he used on a tech heist. After Thanos snapped half the universe away, we flashed back to good ol' Scott Lang on a caper to bring his mentor Hank Pym's (Michael Douglas) wife Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) back from the Quantum Realm. They were lighter, more carefree, a much-needed sitcom wing of the MCU. Continue Reading →

Brandon Cronenberg & Chloe Domont direct stylish films about sex & violence among the bourgeoise wealthy. A growing trend in Hollywood film & TV of late has been to put a mirror in front of the idle rich and mock the privileged and avaricious lifestyles they live. Some may say this is happening now because of honest self-reflection in the face of growing and untenable wealth-inequality in this country, but that just sounds gullible to me. It’s probably more so that hedonistic and openly, publicly vapid displays of self-promotion and consumerist propaganda through social media has made it easier to become famous and sponsored by doing less than ever before. Brandon Cronenberg probably has imposter syndrome. In Infinity Pool, his central character James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is a writer plagued by a lack of inspiration and haunted by a review that boils his career down to only having a rich father-in-law, which affords him the luxury of not needing a real job. His hang-up over this connection through his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), explodes in the open when they have a fight and he tells her to “run back to Daddy.” In formally and thematically finding a voice unto himself apart from his lineage, the younger Cronenberg has cultivated a filmography where the corporeal form is at odds with the sense of identity. His characters constantly feel like empty vessels and thus, the trauma their bodies endure are more a dissociative terror than a deeply internally felt one. Continue Reading →

What would you do to know your parents? Not just as parents, but as people—even long after their deaths? How would you make the most of a horrendous moral quagmire you had no choice in getting dragged into—and what would you do when that quagmire, for all its familiarity, finally became too much to bear? On a broader level, what makes us human—and what remains when we're gone? Director/writer Yeon Sang-ho asks and answers these questions in his out-now-on-Netflix science fiction film JUNG_E. It's a solid, thoughtful film that shines thanks to its leading trio and Sang-ho's skill at depicting and delving into the uncanny. Continue Reading →

Vesper (Raffiella Chapman, His Dark Materials), a lone teenager clad head to toe in weatherbeaten cold-weather gear, expertly ferrets her way through a blighted field. She's looking for the remains of dead crops—critical samples for her ongoing bio-engineering research. A floating drone—humanized by an awkward, endearingly childish face that's been carved on it—accompanies her. Her father, Darius (Richard Brake), pilots the drone. Left paralyzed and fragile by war and a relentless artificial biosphere, Darius does what he can for his daughter. In the distance stand colossal machines long left to rust, their purpose obscure. Continue Reading →

In many ways, M3GAN is as much about its marketing as it is about the movie being marketed. That's hardly a revelatory statement, especially when it comes to horror films: Studios and producers have breathlessly promised thrills and chills with ever more outrageous gimmicks ever since the days of William Castle offering life insurance policies for audiences who "die of fright." With Blumhouse's M3GAN, the secret lies in its titular robo-tot, a cutesy android with snatched wig, Union Jack dickie bow, and murderous dance moves primed for TikTok virality, all of which have been over the film's marketing for months now. So it's a relief to learn that M3GAN has bite to go with its meme-ready bark, a horror-comedy as much about the ways we use technology to fulfill every human need as it is a sassy robot tween popping and locking with a paper cutter in its hand. Continue Reading →

Ambulance Michael Bay, whose 1990s actioners are—for good and ill—iconic parts of the decade’s cinema, and whose 2000s and 2010s work is reliably fascinating (from the terrific Pain & Gain to the baleful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) delivers a bombastic chase movie that doubles as a damn good character study. Loving but criminal brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) take an ambulance hostage to escape a heist gone sideways. Along for the ride are a masterful EMT (Eiza González) resigned to personal apathy, and a critically injured cop (Jackson White). Amidst the carefully shaped chaos of burnt rubber and bullets, Bay makes space for Gyllenhaal (frenzied and in denial about how badly everything’s gone) Abdul-Mateen II (trying to keep cool even as that becomes impossible) and González (who must break out of her self-built walls if she is to survive) to bounce off each other in a pile of compelling ways. [JH] Continue Reading →

"Avatar has no cultural relevance." "It's just Dances With Wolves with blue cat people." We've all heard the digs ever since James Cameron's 2009 opus hit theaters more than a dozen years ago, made all the money, and gobsmacked the Academy into giving it a Best Picture nomination. But even though it didn't immediately launch a franchise and give people (apart from a select few who took Pandora way too seriously) Avatar Fever, its impact was more subtle and quiet. Sure, it launched a mini-3D boom that leaked out into the early 2010s, but its most noticeable ripples came in its normalizing of a new suite of CG technology, radical motion capture and worldbuilding, and fully-formed digital environments that could genuinely transport viewers to another place. Continue Reading →

One thing you can say about Christmas and the Guardians of the Galaxy is that both tend to go a bit over the top. One’s affection for either depends greatly on how you feel about a good thing taken to excess. For this critic, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special hits that delicious “too much, but I can’t help but like it” sweet spot like seconds on the pecan pie. Continue Reading →

How do we move on from a devastating loss? A close friend, a family member, a spouse -- or, in the case of Wakanda Forever, the twin losses of both Chadwick Boseman (who died unexpectedly in 2020 of colon cancer) and the character of T'Challa, King of Wakanda and the reigning Black Panther. But rather than recast T'Challa for the sequel (a movement that has itself garnered quite a lot of attention leading up to this), writer/director Ryan Coogler chose the harder, more innately interesting path: Follow a world, a people, a family without the nucleus around which they orbited. See what the world of Black Panther does without its central figure, and watch the mighty ensemble of Black women around him scramble to pick up the pieces of their lives and figure out what to do next. Continue Reading →

Remember when conspiracy theories used to be fun? Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word, but entertaining? Once, they were limited to harmless weirdos who would gladly give a presentation on chemtrails or how many different assassins were actually at Dealey Plaza when JFK passed by, but could also at least maintain some veneer of normalcy. Then the internet made it easier for people to spend most (instead of just some) of their time discussing their favorite conspiracies, without anyone telling them that they were getting obsessed, or that what they were saying sounded insane. And then, of course, QAnon turned conspiracy theories into a kind of religion, one in which its followers were willing to kill to prove their belief. It stopped being entertaining a long time ago, and now, like a lot of things about the world in its current state, it’s just bleak and terrifying. Continue Reading →

The modern age of sequels, spin-offs, and all other franchise extensions has amplified complaints about how derivative follow-ups can be. As a result, sequels have garnered a bad reputation, and it’s not unearned.  Continue Reading →

We’re officially in the third decade of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson being a movie star. The former WWE legend made his cinema debut in the forgettable sequel to The Mummy, where he’s introduced as the dreaded Scorpion King, one of the most infamous early CGI debacles. Special effects have since improved, along with Johnson’s abilities as an actor and charismatic leading man. However, it feels like now we’ve come full circle with DC’s Black Adam.  Continue Reading →

James Nguyen hammers down the end of his bad-movie trilogy with a true stinker of birdemic proportions... and not in a fun way. (This review is part of our coverage of Fantastic Fest 2022.) With its stilted acting, incompetent screenplay and direction, and special effects that looked like someone puttering around with After Effects for the very first time, James Nguyen’s "ecological horror" film Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) became a cult favorite among bad film fanatics, especially latecomers to the hoopla surrounding The Room looking for something they could claim as their own. Continue Reading →

Alright, there's only one way to start this off, so best to do it well. Continue Reading →

A look back at the use of chimpanzees as clowns & sidekicks for humans, & how it relates to a strange & haunting subplot of Jordan Peele's hit sci-fi horror. Note: this article contains spoilers for Nope. Please read Jon Negroni’s spoiler-free review here. If you haven’t seen Nope yet, you might be a little puzzled by references to a character named Gordy, especially once you learn that Gordy is a chimpanzee. It’s understandable: there’s not so much of a glimpse of a chimpanzee in any of the promotional material for Nope, and nothing that happens in its trailers seems to suggest that a chimpanzee will play any part in it. Continue Reading →

Being a pet owner can enrich your life and open your heart to certain movies you may otherwise ignore. If I had watched DC’s new animated children’s film, League of Super-Pets, before being a proud doggy dad, I would have rolled my eyes. I likely would’ve declared it a blatant cash grab that distracts kids with cute talking animals, loud explosions, mediocre animation, and plenty of needle drops that date the film quicker than Shrek.  Continue Reading →

We look at the return of a tokusatsu giant to the big screen, a feature-film extension of a legendary Taiwanese series, and a South Korean romp about a man and his dead dad's haunted car. (This dispatch is part of our 2022 Fantasia Film Festival coverage.) 2016's Shin Godzilla felt like such a breath of fresh air for a creature and a genre that'd long run around in circles. Hot off the back of America's take on the MonsterVerse, which traded allegory for AAA-budget Hollywood spectacle, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno reinvented the character in a huge, sprawling disaster flick that was just as much about the inefficacy of Japan's bureaucracy to handle existential threats as it was an eye-opening spectacle. Now, the pair are back (Higuchi directing, Anno writing) to adapt another classic '60s kaiju staple for the modern day with Shin Ultraman, and boy, it's a winner. Continue Reading →