The Artifice Girl (2022)

The Artifice Girl starts out pretty dumb, then it gets very intriguing, then mildly intriguing, and then it reverts to really fucking stupid. And that’s all in the first act. Unfortunately, the stupidity persists for the rest of the film.  The film opens with ICWL “special agent” Deena Helms (Sinda Nichols) alone in a room...

The Silent Star (1960)

Released just two years before Mariner 2 recorded the temperature on Venus for the first time, The Silent Star (Polish: Milcząca Gwiazda, German: Der schweigende Stern, also known in English as First Spaceship on Venus) is one of the last few works of speculative fiction (based on the 1951 science fiction novel The Astronauts by...

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

Day of Reckoning is the Apocalypse Now of Universal Soldier movies. It’s also a throwback to old-school science fiction/action flicks (Total Recall and Blade Runner, for example, come to mind) in general and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s oeuvre in particular (complete with a doppelgänger for the hero).   The film also features plenty of graphic violence...

The Primevals (2023)

The Primevals, equal parts a throwback to a golden age of special effects and an artifact from that self-same bygone era, is worthy to be called a Full Moon Feature. Originally conceived in the 1960s and finished a couple of decades after the death of its credited director (David Allen), The Primevals carries on as...

Bionic (2024)

Bionic (original title: Biônicos) posits the question, what would happen to athletics as we know it if robotics could make the ‘para’ in Paralympics go from ‘beside’ to ‘beyond’? Unfortunately, the answer is irrelevant.   In this movie, individuals known as “bionics” are the evolution of parathletes. Their state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs allow them to take...

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Crimes of the Future is a near-perfect recipe for vintage David Cronenberg. Not a remake of his 1970 movie of the same name, but a revisiting — complete with nods to Dead Ringers, eXistenZ, and The Fly — of recurrent obsessions: body horror (which the protagonists regard as "body art," but then isn’t real-life body...

Life Like (2019)

Dickens is often discussed in Life Like, but the movie takes its literary cues (and quite openly, I think) from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was, of course, turned into Blade Runner) and Pinocchio (by way of A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It would have benefited the script to be more of the former and less...

The Shift (2023)

Strangely for a Christian drama, The Shift is almost blasphemous. I don’t mind the faith-based thing on those rare occasions when it’s done well, and I would welcome the heresy if it were deliberate. What I do have a problem with, not as a believer (which I’m not) but as a (re)viewer, is the disparity...

The Creator (2023)

The Creator is a high concept wherein an ersatz Pinocchio meets artificial intelligence, and whoever thought of it must have been literally high — so much so that they completely forgot that Spielberg had already done it in his overrated A.I. Now, Godard did say that the best way to criticize a film is to...