Chappie: more bats**t conceptual sci-fi from Neil Blomkamp
Forget about Paul Verhoeven. Step aside, the Wachowskis. There’s a new master in town when it comes to bats**t conceptual sci-fi.
South African director Neil Blomkamp is well known for his allegorical social commentary – apartheid in District 9, health care and the 1% in Elysium – but the underpinnings of Chappie are mainly philosophical.…
It Follows is a brilliant, terrifying paean to the Carpenter tradition
Is there any genre that has defined a decade as much as horror defined the ‘80s – and visa versa, of course
From The Thing to Day of the Dead, they brought psychological insight to a form otherwise defined by B-movie schlock.…
Focus is on the ball but only knows one trick
How invested can you get in a film where you can’t trust anything that’s on screen, let alone any of the characters’ motivations?
From The Sting through to American Hustle, the con-artist thriller is a genre known for its slickness, its unpredictability and slight-of-hand.…
Predestination is a slick, hermetically-sealed sci-fi treat
Is there any genre with more potential for ideas than sci-fi?
Not restricted to the realms of the realistic or the possible, yet generally ruled by the same forces that make our world tick, science fiction is a way of deconstructing the human experience, of really getting to the heart of our identity, who we are, where we’re going. …
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is on a quest for oblivion
As cinematic provenances go, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter has a fairly tortured one.
A “true story” based on an urban legend based on events that took place in Minnesota in 2001, the film follows the misguided adventurers of the eponymous Kumiko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), an office drone in Tokyo who becomes obsessed with finding the treasure buried at the end of Fargo.…
Jupiter Ascending aims for the stars and ends up burying itself
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
By the same token, any sufficiently misconceived work of science fiction is apparently indistinguishable from utter bollocks. Case in point: the Wachowski’s latest bloated epic, Jupiter Ascending; a film that substitutes the interconnectedness of the flawed but ambitious Cloud Atlas for a story with just as much scope and infinitely less point.…
Son Of A Gun is a movie under the influences
Julius Avery’s Son Of A Gun may fall into the broad category of “crime thriller” but it’s not a neat fit: Julius Avery’s first feature evokes genre pieces as diverse as Starred Up, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Drive.
…Kingsman: The Secret Service goes to top of the (working) class
Remember when spy movies were silly and fun?
Long before Daniel Craig’s brooding, psychologically complex 007, Sean Connery “yellowed up” to take on a scar-faced megalomaniacal villain in his hidden volcano base, George Lazenby went undercover at an alpine base filled with a bevy of (non-allergenic) beauties, Roger Moore headed into space to battle a metal-mouthed giant (alongside the unlikely named Holly Goodhead), and Timothy Dalton, well, he mostly brooded too.…
Selma passionately documents the coming of a change
Why was Selma largely overlooked by The Academy?
Given its pedigree, it should, by most standards, have been a lock. What then? Could it be backlash from last year’s choice of Best Picture – have voters grown tired of slavery and segregation?…