sci-fi
Nick Hasted
Beavis and Butthead’s vicious grunge-era gormlessness remains interred, Wayne and Garth (and their stars’ careers) are too superannuated to revive. But here are the slightest of Gen X’s idiot double-acts, back again to save the universe in a time-travelling phone-box.Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) were only ever cult hits, giving no studio impetus for this third film, whose script was being hawked around nine years ago. Keanu Reeves (Ted), Alex Winter (Bill) and original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon instead made it as fans of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Could you cope with spending three years away from your family and loved ones while you went on the first crewed mission to Mars? This is the question that underpins Away, Netflix’s new space exploration drama.Certainly it’s a daunting ask, but if you were a career astronaut surely it’s something you’d have faced up to long before, even if it was only at some point during the long and arduous training programme that would precede a mission like this. However, for mission commander Emma Green (Hilary Swank) and her four companions, life on board their ship Atlas is full of awkward surprises, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Josh Boone’s New Mutants. Delayed production, reshoots, the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, Covid-19, and accusations of whitewashing, have all contributed to it being dubbed a ‘cursed’ film. Now, with little fanfare, this YA horror has finally limped onto cinema screens three years after production wrapped.Updated from the original 1980s setting, the film opens in the mid-90s in the spooky surroundings of Essex House, an asylum for unruly teenage mutants (far removed from the hallowed halls of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters). This Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Go back over Christopher Nolan’s films and count the clocks. He has an obsession that would give a horologist a run for his money. Time is a continual motif of his body of work and it finds its zenith in his latest work Tenet. Beneath the highly polished spy-thriller aesthetic lies a head-spinning, temporally warped plot, laced with concepts and conceits that will delight and baffle in equal measures. At the heart of the story is The Protagonist (John David Washington, pictured below with Robert Pattinson), a highly trained agent who stumbles upon a time-bending technology Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Queen, performances and production design drive this campest, funniest and sexiest of the post-Star Wars space boom. Flash Gordon is a film about a classic American comic-strip hero made by a cynical English director, Mike Hodges, and dreamy Italian producer, Dino De Laurentiis. As this 4K fortieth-anniversary edition makes clear, American leads Sam Jones and Melody Anderson were innocents abroad among arch British character actors and extravagantly erotic Italians, almost as much as their characters Flash and Dale Arden are on Mongo’s moons.The plot is straight from Alex Raymond’s 1934 comic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.For the purposes of this entertaining, if slight, new US drama series (on ITV2), the object was a flying saucer, and unknown to the locals, unearthly survivors from the crash have been living among them ever since. The secrets of the past begin to unravel when Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) returns to this “sleepy cowboy town” and starts re-establishing contact with her old Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, which have plagued thinkers for around 2500 years, tell us that super-speedy Achilles can never outrun the tortoise and that an arrow in flight must always occupy a fixed position at intervals of time – and so can never hit its target. My introduction to these favourite brain-tanglers came when, as an easily overawed teenager, I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers and learned that, thanks to that arrested arrow, “Saint Sebastian died of fright”. Stoppard doesn’t take a bow in Joseph Mazur’s far-reaching and idea-crammed tour of the meanings we Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Vast of Night’s premise scarcely guarantees originality. Non-science-fiction buffs scoping Amazon’s film listings will probably move on quickly when they learn it’s about two late-'50s teenagers discovering that an alien space craft is hovering over their rural New Mexico burg. But Andrew Patterson’s sparkling directorial debut is an object lesson in how to revitalize an over-familiar narrative with fresh-seeming characters, visual daring, ladles of wit, and atmosphere to burn.Patterson uses the tropes of the extra-terrestrial visitation scenario to investigate Eisenhower-era Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS, saw her vocals merging into the rich flows of bubbling tones, melodies channelling folk traditions from various corners of the world, creating an unmistakably utopian sound. It felt neither futurist nor retro – rather, of a part with Craig Leon's Interplanetary Folk Music or Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After a season that sought to redefine what Westworld could become, the finale exposed the confused arc, before limping towards an emotionally weak ending. This season began by recoding itself into something schlockier, more high-octane, and arguably more mainstream than before – somewhere between a Jason Bourne film and The Matrix. Whether a glossy, high budget HBO show (on Sky Atlantic) could ever be classed as anything other than mainstream is a fair question, and the feature-length finale was no different. If Game of Thrones taught us anything, it was Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
In the time since the show’s inception four years ago, arguments have raged as to whether Westworld is a dud or a cult classic. For every dedicated fan, there’s someone out there crying, "The Matrix did it first!" and complaining that the plot didn’t make sense (it did). Whichever side of the argument you fall, the question loomed as to where the show’s creators, Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, could possibly take it next. Two years on from when we last entered Westworld (Sky Atlantic), we can finally find out. The violent delights at the end of Season 2 saw the "hosts" rising up against Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When Sea Fever premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, no one could have guessed its story about an Irish fishing trawler attacked by a giant jellyfish would in one respect prove prophetic. Toward the end of writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s low-key horror movie, self-quarantining becomes a bone of contention for what’s left of the crew. The creature latches on to the boat with its ghostly white limbs, turning patches of the hull into mush with its slime and spreading a lethal parasitic infection that plays havoc with victims’ eyes.However, no blame Read more ...