The premise here is certainly promising: a dangerous synthetic drug that takes lives in an unusual way, altering users’ biological makeup so much that they literally fall back in time and die at the hands […]
Tag: Sci-fi
Ready Player One (Spielberg, 2018)
Sorry Spielbergers. I’m not sure I’m the audience for this kind of stuff. I do admire the thoroughness of the VFX work and how wonderfully the different avatars are rendered, and the whole sequence inside The […]
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Persichetti, Ramsey & Rothman, 2018)
It’s hard for some films to live up to hype. They’re talked up so much and made to seem like the greatest thing, and then when you get around to watching them, they can’t live […]
Border (Abbasi, 2018)
This is quite the mish-mash. A heaping of Scandinavian folklore here, a sprinkle of gritty police procedural there. It ping-pongs between the two genres with intriguing results. Its feet are firmly planted in reality, but […]
Sorry to Bother You (Riley, 2018)
The angry and confrontational nature of Sorry to Bother You is its best feature, there’s no question about it. The anti-capitalist, pro-labour mindset being espoused is not filtered or watered down, and Riley’s absurdist touches help make […]
Upgrade (Whannell, 2018)
It’s not exactly sophisticated aesthetically or thematically, being another skeptical morality play on the dangers of biotechnological advancements that seek to erase our humanity, but Upgrade is quite a likable bit of pulp. There’s a Frankenstein quality […]
World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (Hertzfeldt, 2017)
Maybe we didn’t need a sequel to the perfect World of Tomorrow, and I would’ve been happy without one. Nevertheless, Don Hertzfeldt gave us a sequel after recording his niece Winona Mae a year after her […]
The Cloverfield Paradox (Onah, 2018)
I’m not averse to schlock if it’s entertaining. And there are definitely moments in The Cloverfield Paradox that are fun in a schlocky sense, like Chris O’Dowd’s arm being… ripped? sliced? bitten? from his body, and then […]
War for the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2017)
I am a little bummed that War for the Planet of the Apes was not a step up from Dawn, as Dawn was a step up from Rise. If memory serves, Dawn interweaved themes of loyalty, betrayal, and compassion into a genuinely crackling […]
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
I do think that The Force Awakens leans a little too heavily on the mythos of the first trilogy, almost repackaging the journeyman hero elements of A New Hope and sending it out to us as though it were […]
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Big, bold and beautiful. It’s hard to describe Rian Johnson’s achievements here any other way. This is the kind of Star Wars film that lives up to the grandeur of the title: high stakes galore, with whopping […]
Logan (Mangold, 2017)
If I had a special connection to the X-Men franchise, and if Wolverine had been one of my all-time favourite characters, I would’ve appreciated this far more. This whole setup feels like the culmination of a grand […]
Annihilation (Garland, 2018)
Will 2018 give us another film as strange, mesmerizing and uncompromisingly cerebral as Annihilation? As I sit here writing this, I am inclined to say no. I’m sure there will be films I’ll like better, and […]
A Wrinkle in Time (DuVernay, 2018)
I’m afraid I have to agree with the consensus here: A Wrinkle in Time isn’t very good. Mostly because it’s a mature film trapped in a Disneyfied body, needing to take flight but barely getting off the […]
A Quiet Place (Krasinski, 2018)
A Quiet Place is among the best experiences I had watching a film this year, as it utilized its technical facets with a great amount of intelligence. From the sound design to the cinematography, John Krasinski ensures you […]
The Lonely Film Critic 