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: 4.5★
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrives at an interesting moment in the long, occasionally exhausting history of superhero cinema. By 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been a going concern for a decade, and audiences had grown well-acquainted with its particular rhythm: the quippy banter, the world-ending
Rating: 3.5★
By 1990, RoboCop had already earned its place as one of the more pointed pieces of science fiction cinema to come out of the previous decade. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original was a film that used the Detroit crime wave, the rise of corporate privatisation, and Reagan-era excess
Rating: 3.5★
Stephen King's relationship with cinema is a long and uneven one. For every faithful adaptation that captures the specific flavour of dread he does so well on the page, there are several that miss the point entirely, reducing his work to either slick gore or toothless television fare.
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero's name is so thoroughly bound up with the living dead that any film of his sitting outside that tradition tends to get overlooked. Monkey Shines, released in 1988 through Orion Pictures, is a case in point: a psychological horror thriller adapted from Michael Stewart'
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 1.5★
Horror films shot in genuinely unusual locations tend to carry a certain curiosity value before a single frame has even played, and Gehenna: Where Death Lives arrives with that novelty in abundance. Set and partially produced in Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth
Rating: 4.5★
There are films that arrive and are enjoyed, and there are films that arrive and rearrange the furniture permanently. Neo Tokyo gave a hint of what Japanese animation was quietly building towards, but it was Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira in 1988 that brought the whole argument to a head.
Rating: 3.0★
Universal's "Dark Universe" was, depending on your perspective, either a bold swing at creating a shared monster mythology or one of Hollywood's more spectacular misfires. After the 2017 The Mummy reboot collapsed under the weight of its own franchise ambitions, Universal quietly shelved the
Rating: 3.5★
Godzilla has been stomping through Japanese cinema since 1954, when Ishiro Honda's original Gojira gave the world its most enduring monster metaphor. Born from the anxieties of a nation that had survived atomic devastation, the character has since accumulated thirty-odd official entries across Japanese and American productions,
Rating: 1.5★
There is a particular strand of British genre filmmaking that tries to plant one foot in the kitchen-sink tradition and the other in pure pulp spectacle, and Attack the Block is one of the more talked-about attempts at that balancing act. Released in 2011 and set almost entirely
Rating: 2.5★
Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. When Avatar (2009) landed, it rewrote the rulebook on blockbuster spectacle, becoming the highest-grossing film in cinema history and turning stereoscopic 3D into something audiences actually sought out rather than tolerated. James Cameron had always promised more stories
Rating: 2.0★
By the mid-1980s, the toy aisle had become one of Hollywood's favourite hunting grounds. Mattel's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe line had been a commercial phenomenon since its launch in 1982, generating billions in sales and anchoring one of the decade'
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