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.
Country United States Of America
There's a moment in The Thing where you realise you've been holding your breath. Not because something jumped out at you, not because of a sudden crash on the soundtrack, but because John Carpenter has spent the last hour quietly, patiently winding the tension so tight
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
Rating: 3.5★
I came to The Maze Runner with my expectations set firmly to low. It sits on Letterboxd's "Top 250 Most Fans" list, which in my experience is often code for popular rather than good, and I had it filed away under interchangeable young-adult blockbuster, the
Rating: 3.0★
There is a lovely irony sitting at the heart of Born in Flames, and it is this: made in 1983 and set in a near-future America, it now works best as a time capsule of the very moment it was made. Lizzie Borden's guerrilla-shot feminist drama
Rating: 3.5★
They Cloned Tyrone announces itself as one of those films that refuses to sit still in a single genre, and for a good while that is exactly what makes it such fun. Juel Taylor's debut opens as an atmospheric, darkly comic crime picture set in a rundown neighbourhood,
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in Total Recall where you genuinely stop and ask yourself: is any of this actually happening? Paul Verhoeven plants that question early and never lets it go. Doug Quaid, a humble construction worker played with that trademark jaw-clenching physicality by Arnold Schwarzenegger, visits a
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of Idiocracy that works brilliantly. A savage, formally rigorous takedown of anti-intellectualism, commercialisation and the slow rot of public life. The bones of that film are here. Mike Judge clearly has something to say, and in the years since its release, a lot of
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment about halfway through Sonic the Hedgehog 3 when my son got up, wandered out of the room, and didn't come back for a while. He's the target audience. He loves these films. And when a Sonic movie loses the child in
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular kind of frustration that only a technically brilliant film can produce. If something is rubbish from top to bottom, you just shrug and move on. But when a film has every conceivable ingredient at its disposal and still manages to leave you completely cold, that&
Rating: 3.0★
There's a version of watching Under the Skin where the whole thing just washes over you, strange and cold and beautiful, and you walk out feeling vaguely disturbed in a way you can't quite put into words. There's another version where you spend half
Rating: 3.0★
Let's get one thing straight before anything else: the suit in this film is the best Spider-Man suit ever put to screen, full stop. That textured, crimson-and-blue design, worn by Andrew Garfield's lanky, skater-esque frame, gave the character a kinetic, grounded agility
Rating: 2.5★
I'll hold my hands up straight away: I'm not the biggest fan of the modern superhero industrial complex. There's a formula, and almost everybody sticks rigidly to it. You get your quippy hero, your globe-trotting set pieces, and then, inevitably, a third act
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free