Science fiction, at its best, uses the impossible to say something true about the present: who we are, where we're headed, what we stand to lose. From the operatic scope of The Empire Strikes Back to the knotted time-logic of Inception, the genre rewards directors bold enough to think as well as spectacle. See what Macca made of it all below.
Rating: 1.5★
There is a particular category of Hollywood blockbuster that exists not so much to tell a story as to fulfil a transaction: you hand over your ticket money, the studio hands back explosions, a recognisable face, and the vague shape of a plot. Rampage (2018) sits squarely in that tradition.
Rating: 2.5★
Before there was Flash Gordon, before there was Star Wars, before science fiction had even settled on its own name, there was Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Barsoom. The series of novels Burroughs began in 1912 with A Princess of Mars essentially invented the template for planetary romance: a soldier
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that demand you arrive prepared, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion is one of the less apologetic examples of the type. Released in 1997 by the Tokyo animation studio GAINAX, in partnership with Production I.G and Star Child Recording, the film was produced as
Rating: 2.0★
The Resident Evil franchise has had a complicated relationship with cinema since Paul W.S. Anderson launched the Milla Jovovich series back in 2002. That run stretched to six films, earning a certain loyal following while frustrating fans of Capcom's survival horror games in roughly equal measure. A
Rating: 3.5★
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and the story has never quite left us alone since. Orson Welles sent radio listeners into a panic with his 1938 broadcast adaptation, Byron Haskin put it on screen in 1953, and Jeff Wayne turned it into a prog-
Rating: 1.5★
I went into Pontypool primed to love it. The cult reputation had been ringing in my ears for a while, that whispered promise of a clever, low-budget sleeper that does something genuinely different with the horror genre. And the premise, I'll admit, is still one I cannot
Rating: 1.0★
Every so often a film comes along so brazen in its theft that you almost admire the nerve. Mac and Me is one of them: an E.T. knockoff so shameless it makes you wonder how it was ever allowed to reach a cinema. Stewart Raffill's 1988 "
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you admire and films you enjoy, and sometimes those two categories barely overlap. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within sits squarely in the first group. I can watch it and feel genuine awe at what they pulled off technically, and then sit back at the end feeling oddly
Rating: 3.5★
The most surprising thing about Bride of Frankenstein is how much heart it has. I turned up expecting a lurching-monster picture, a 1935 horror sequel picking up exactly where the original left off, more of the same gothic atmosphere and pitchfork-wielding villagers. What James Whale actually delivers is
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There's a quiet melancholy beneath the surface of Lilo & Stitch that I wasn't quite expecting when I first sat down with it, and it's that melancholy that lingers long after the credits roll. Not the big, showy emotional beats that Disney tends to
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There's a moment watching The Crazies when you think: right, this is actually pretty decent. It moves well, it's got genuine menace, and it taps into something properly unsettling about ordinary people turning feral and the institutions meant to protect you becoming the threat. And then
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There's a moment in RoboCop where a corporate suit smugly presents a walking tank of a robot to a boardroom full of executives, it malfunctions spectacularly, and a man gets shot dead in front of everyone. The suits are horrified. Not because someone died. Because of the PR
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