I remember some film critic ages ago talking about how rare it was to find an adventure film without a woman in it. I suspect, in our current politically motivated age, that might seem an appalling sentiment, but it actually reflected the awful reality of Hollywood at the time. We kept seeing the love interest […]
Read more "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997)"This is an absolutely amazing film. We’re talking about a film which takes us to an incredible place, a luxury spaceship enroute to a distant star, with its crew and passengers in suspended animation. And “place” is the right word, as we are talking about a film that created this world not in some digitally […]
Read more "Passengers (2016)"This interesting and creative film came out of Amazon’s direct-to-Amazon Amazon Studios, although it does seem to have had at least a minimal box-office release. Somehow, I suspect they had the French Nouvelle Vague movies of the 60s in mind when they made this, with its rich, smoky black and white cinematography. It has a very definite […]
Read more "Creative Control (2015)"Back in 2004, BBC 4 was so impressed by the success of the new Doctor Who that they commissioned a live remake of The Quatermass Experiment. Its modest success led them to remake the classic BBC serial, A for Andromeda, the next year and this film in 2006. I’m not sure what the first two films […]
Read more "Random Quest (2006)"It was only hours after I saw this one that I realized that it resembled Martin Gooch’s 2013 comedy, The Search for Simon . After all, both deal with a young man obsessed with events from his childhood that connect him to aliens from outer space. And yet there is surprisingly little in common between these two very funny […]
Read more "Earthbound (2012)"The general complaint about this one has been that it resembles a “Hallmark Channel” movie. This is both unfair and at the same time, mostly true. Mind you, I’m sure you would’t find a film with such a clear, carefully thought-out, science fictional premise on The Hallmark Channel. A disgraced professor of Quantum Mechanics from a major university, […]
Read more "Love & Teleportation (2013)"Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something truly strange turns up. Soviet SF has a tendency to be a little dry, more intelligent than similar US efforts, with a fondness for hardware-heavy portrayals of space travel, vague socialist futures where everyone is happy together (and therefore politics don’t matter) and sometimes, a turgid […]
Read more "Amphibian Man [Chelovek-Amfibiya] (1962)"