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: 2.0★
You know the deal going in. Nobody sits down for a Michael Bay blockbuster expecting Ingmar Bergman. But even with every expectation already calibrated to "loud, chaotic, and relentless," Transformers: Dark of the Moon still manages to exhaust you in ways you didn't quite see coming.
Rating: 2.5★
There is a very specific moment early in Crumbs where a supposed alien artefact is dramatically revealed, and I'm fairly certain it's just a repainted plastic water pistol. I couldn't tell you whether Miguel Llansó intended that as a joke, a statement, or simply
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular kind of embarrassment that comes from rewatching a film you once championed and realising, quietly, that the years have not been kind to it. Casshern is that film for me. Back around its original 2004 release, I was absolutely floored by it. A comic book
Rating: 4.0★
Let me be honest with you: I walked into Project Hail Mary fully prepared to be disappointed. The early critic chatter was dominated by how "cute" and "funny" Ryan Gosling's companion was, and that framing had me bracing for some kind of cosmic Disney
Rating: 2.0★
The trailer sold me a lie. A tight, claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, bodies turning against their owners, paranoia spreading floor by floor through a sealed apartment block. Something in the vein of The Crazies, maybe, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I sat down fully braced for that film. What
Rating: 2.5★
There's a specific kind of feeling you get when a film pulls you back in time before the opening credits have even finished rolling. That's exactly what happened when I sat down to revisit this one. Within minutes, I was eight years old again, parked in
Rating: 3.0★
There are films you admire enormously and films you love, and sometimes those two things refuse to overlap. Phil Tippett's Mad God sits squarely in the first category for me, and I've been wrestling with that ever since the credits rolled. It is, without any doubt
Rating: 3.5★
Let's be honest: when those first official images of Sonic surfaced online, it was one of the most alarming things I'd seen in a cinema preview in years. Those teeth. Those unsettling human-ish eyes. The strange, elongated limbs. I remember thinking there was absolutely no
Rating: 2.0★
My seven-year-old lost interest before the climax. That, more than anything, tells you what you need to know about Jungle Beat: The Movie. If a child who will happily rewatch the same episode of a cartoon twelve times in a row starts drifting off during a kids'
Rating: 3.0★
There's a very specific flavour to early 2000s blockbusters, and The Day After Tomorrow is basically the purest distillation of it. Watching Roland Emmerich's climate disaster epic now, 22 years on, is a genuinely strange experience. Not bad strange, not good strange. Just strange. Like finding
Rating: 3.5★
There's a particular kind of chill that comes from watching a decades-old film and realising it was right. Not in a vague, hand-wavy way, but in sharp, specific, uncomfortable detail. That's exactly what watching THX 1138 today feels like. George Lucas's 1971
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment early in Memoria where Tilda Swinton's character jolts awake at a sound nobody else seems to hear, a deep, resonant thud that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and I genuinely wasn't sure what kind of film I was watching. Horror?
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