Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Jurassic Park, in all its dark consumeristic negatives and heartless colonial instincts, exists in the real world as a film in the same way that the park exists in the[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
A Transformers film has to face incessant criticism about the amount of action, the blurry continuity of its symphonies of shrapnel, the overuse of MacGuffins, and the lack of good[…]
Drama · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Even as it has sunk like a stone commercially, Annihilation has drawn a flurry of passionate responses, mainly, it seems, from women writers. Many single out its admixture of beauty[…]
Directors · Horror · SF & Fantasy
“It’s better to be a human being than an imitation.”- John Carpenter, on The Thing * * * 1. Begin with sound. Begin with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). A[…]
Blade Runner 2049 resists our contemporary moment of political and cultural polarization that exploits difference as a cudgel to reinforce (inevitably racialized) hostilities. The film instead forwards a vision of[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · SF & Fantasy
As in romance novels, the excitement of sexual provocation is the heart of the story. It occupies two-thirds of the film: “His finger brushed mine” developed in fifteen stages. The[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
One might argue that Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi attempts at deconstruction yet again, depicting the original trilogy’s heroic Luke as an inexplicably jaded Jedi living in self-imposed exile on[…]
Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
So as you peel back the folds of the opening of Batman v Superman you get the sense that even in its immediately awkward, tone-deaf plotting, this is not a perfectly[…]
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the window pane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I Lived on, flew on,[…]
The beautiful grime in Blade Runner challenges you to find humanity in the mechanism of our future, humanity which Scott omits. So we search the frigid replicants for their ghosts,[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Is it rude to point out that male chimps don’t hug their sons? That’s because they don’t know they have sons! They aren’t “faithful” to their “wives,” which they don’t[…]
Comedy · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
The recent passing of Adam West – who made Batman his own despite the many higher-profile claimants to the cape – reminds us of the feature film based on the witty TV[…]
Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Unshackled by the Snyder malaise – and ignoring the slow motion he made a fad with 300, which Jenkins curiously revisits with consistency verging on the fetishistic – Gadot roars.[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy
Several questions suggest themselves. What ideological framework is revealed by the forwarding of a contemporary story in which the white man has lost his mojo and needs to struggle to[…]
Franchises & Series · Horror · SF & Fantasy
The people we care most about in Alien: Covenant are those we most delight in seeing eviscerated. David gives us his own flair for the ghoulish, cultivating with us his garden of monsters[…]
Animation · Comics · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has infinitely more in common with the psychic quest for one’s identity, the yearning for belonging and friendship, and the no-rules imagination – sometimes[…]
Essays · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
In honor of its 15th anniversary, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko plays throughout the U.S. this year starting March 30 at select theaters in a 4K restoration – in some cases in the[…]
Our failures of understanding may express themselves as prejudicial disregard of others of a different color, race, religion, or gender. From this vantage, the film invites the viewer to reflect[…]
Experimental & Underground · Romance · SF & Fantasy
Many have captured in equally luxurious fantasies the Beast that longs in men to be more than he is, and it is this Beast that Disney aims at literal children.[…]
This film is indeed all about catharsis, ours certainly but mostly Logan’s: liberating violence alongside liberal use of profanity, both underpinned by what we know to have been eighteen long[…]
