By Elias Savada. For Elsa, her E.T. essence in her head never offers up an origin story or a political agenda, and this ambiguousness pushes the question – is this a cosmic lifeline or an invasion?” Leave it to the French (and writer-director Jérémy Clapin) to fashion this moody, low-budget, […]
Take Me Far from Your Leader: Zach Clark’s The Becomers
By Thomas M. Puhr. Far from great satire, but further proof that Clark is willing to take big swings, budget and taste be damned.” While watching Zach Clark’s The Becomers (2023), I was reminded more than once of a web comic that was making the rounds on social media earlier […]
Dune: Part Two – The Myth Continues, Big and Loud
By Elias Savada. Dune: Part Two succeeds on its many storyline levels, big and small. Passion, power, corruption, oppression, romance, intimacy, and revenge all get their time in this sweeping spectacle.” Okay, it’s been awhile since Dune (well, only a few hours in elapsed cinematic time), but the wait is […]
Tom DeLonge Wants You to Believe: Monsters of California (2023)
By Jonathan Monovich. Despite its imperfections as an introductory feature film, fans of the sci-fi, horror, and adventure genres will walk away with a smile and will want to believe.” “We all know conspiracies are dumb.” Knowing his extraterrestrial obsessions, it’s a lyric sung ironically by Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge in […]
The Creator: Something Rotten in the State of AI
By Elias Savada. With all the talk of artificial intelligence taking over our lives, this technically proficient film may be timely, but its futuristic concept – mankind vs. an enemy of its own making – flails about as a misguided, muddled search for (non-)human salvation.” I can’t accept the overblown […]
A Commodified Future: Sophie Barthes on The Pod Generation
By Ali Moosavi. When I wrote this film I had no idea [that the advance of AI] would happen so fast…. We have to talk about it and raise the questions; is that the world that we want?” Writer-director Sophie Barthes was born in France but grew up in South […]
A Neglected Man as Machine – Soldier: From Script to Screen
A Book Review Essay by Andrew Kolarik. There is something admirable in the blind positivity the book has towards Soldier and makes it a quiet strength, for better or worse.” What is it about some films that makes us utterly embrace them, even the derided and forgotten ones? Why do […]
Notes from Uncanny Valley: Franklin Ritch’s The Artifice Girl (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Franklin Ritch’s feature debut hinges on its ability to make you think you’re watching one kind of movie before becoming another, and then another. If you like cerebral, speculative science-fiction, then you should seek this one out.” The first lines of dialogue in The Artifice Girl […]
The Other Side: An Interview with Sophie Linnenbaum on The Ordinaries
By Yun-hua Chen. We wanted to lean into this classic world of superheroes and create this contrast between the supposed superhero and the ordinaries, which is what this film is about – what is ordinary, what is special? And we try to bring these elements together in this title.” –Sophie […]
Triggered: The Post-Traumatic Woman and Narratology in HBO’s Westworld
By Keith Clavin and Christopher La Casse. As the show develops, we come to learn that some of the hosts are not ‘forgetting’ the traumas inflicted upon them…. Despite a wipe of their memory caches regarding prior ‘narratives’ (earlier roles they played in the park’s performances), they seem to be […]