Written & Directed by The Wachowskis. Starring Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglass Booth and Tuppence Middleton. PG-13, 127 minutes. Undocumented immigrant Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) begins the movie scrubbing toilets for the upper crust in Chicago. She wakes up every morning with a half-hearted “I hate my life” before she puts…
Directed by Paul Michael Glaser. Written by Steven E. de Souza. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Dawson, Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto, Mick Fleetwood and Jesse Ventura. R, 101 minutes. The basic premise behind The Running Man was nothing new to audiences even when it was released. Those at all familiar with the science fiction genre…
Directed by Irvin Kershner. Starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen and Tom Noonan. R, 116 minutes. SPOILERS AHEAD… RoboCop 2 uses similar clips of news coverage and satirically charged commercials to position us back in the corporate-run, crime-ridden Detroit of the near future, but from the very start something feels off. The original film masterfully towed…
Written and directed by The Spierig Brothers (Michael and Peter), Predestination is fast-paced, haunting and visually stunning. The duo previously collaborated with lead actor Ethan Hawke on their film Daybreakers (2009), another sci-fi thriller worth a watch. The Spierig Brothers based the film on the short story “—All You Zombies—” by Robert A. Heinlein. I have…
Written and Directed by The Spierig Brothers. Starring Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook and Noah Taylor. R, 98 minutes. Predestination opens by committing something of a cardinal sin, with its star giving us potentially hackneyed voiceover narration. This usually lazy move is later revealed to be something completely different and, admittedly, simply brilliant. It’s the best…
Directed by Jean Pierre-Jeunet. Written by Joss Whedon. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Michael Wincott, J.E. Freeman, Dan Hedaya and Brad Dourif. R, 109 minutes. Alien: Resurrection shouldn’t exist. While one can debate whether there’s an inherent need for any sequel, this fourth go-round at the Alien film series adds absolutely nothing of…
The Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival is returning to New York City January 15th to the 18th with a fresh new crop of sci-fi shorts and features. This is the third year for the festival and there a number of exciting films are part of the program. I had the opportunity to discuss…
Directed by David Fincher. Written by David Giler, Walter Hill & Larry Ferguson. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance and Lance Henriksen. R, 115 minutes (theatrical), 144 minutes (special edition). If you were to judge Alien 3 from its first thirty seconds, no one would begrudge you for getting excited. The 20th Century…
I am not going to say that Interstellar is the best movie ever made. I’m not even going to say that it’s the best movie of the winter season. I’m also not going to say that it’s the best movie by Christopher Nolan, because it’s not. It’s not any of these things. What it is,…
You can tell a lot about a book by its first chapter. That’s because writers often use it for expressly that purpose. They have to sum up the tone, the characters, and the world, usually with only about twenty pages to work with. It’s no small feat, and that’s why I am so excited about…
Directed by Francis Lawrence. Written by Danny Strong and Peter Craig. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci, Sam Claflin, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer, Mahershala Ali, Jena Malone and Donald Sutherland. PG-13, 123 minutes. Near the end of the penultimate chapter of The Hunger…
Let me begin this article by saying: I’m a thug. I read Stephen King all day. Nothing can scare me. This book, however, kind of freaked me out. In Litore’s Ansible 15715, readers are transported into a world so terrifying even your worst nightmare couldn’t hold a candle to it. Years into the future, we’ve…
