Like his 2011 film Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special was born out of fear, specifically the fear of losing his son.

“I think, really, we’re terrified of losing them, so we’re going to try to figure out who they are to try to help them. Help them become the ones who manifest their own destiny,” the director told me during an interview I conducted a couple of weeks back. That fatherly fear is at the core of the film, though the story blossoms into something much bigger, touching on themes of friendship, homeland security, science, and religion, all in the mode of a sci-fi thriller.

Michael Shannon stars as a man escorting his supernaturally gifted son to a secret location, all while evading an armed religious sect and U.S. military forces. Aiding them on their journey is an old friend (Joel Edgerton) and the boy’s mother (Kirsten Dunst); a government scientist (Adam Driver), meanwhile, tries to understand the family’s plight as he tracks their location.

Terrifically thrilling and deeply affecting, Midnight Special is yet another showcase by one of this generation’s very best visual storytellers and opens in theaters this weekend.

Some people consider your movies to be vague or overly ambiguous. That’s maybe the biggest criticism levied against you.
It’s funny how everybody wants to be polite. Obviously, I made the film with an open ending on purpose. It’s like, let’s talk about it! If you don’t like it…maybe, rather than just being entrenched in your position, if we talk about it, you might be illuminated on something. It was funny, I had a good conversation with a lady in Berlin about [the movie]. She had a very specific place where she thought I should end the movie. She was very specific about not liking the end of the movie, and I said, “That’s cool. Where would you end the movie?” She told me, and I thought, that would be a terrible ending! She was like, “Well, it’s right. That’s where you should have ended it.” I was like, I really don’t think you’re right! I didn’t convince her, but it was at least fun to have a conversation.

So you do enjoy those conversations.
I do, yeah.

I do, too. If I meet a filmmaker and I didn’t like their movie, maybe, and I get illuminated by their insight…I love that.
The reality is, making movies is really complex. It’s a strange algebra. There are so many variables that go into them. I would be shocked if you met a filmmaker who said, “My film’s perfect,” you know? I don’t know if I want to be friends with that person.

Tommy Wiseau.
[laughs] It goes beyond ego. I want these films to be conversation starters, so of course it makes sense that I would want to have conversations about them. As long as people don’t ask me too many specifics about things. It’s cool to see how people’s minds work on them and work on the problems I created. It’s cool to hear how people interpret things, sometimes random, sometimes spot-on, sometimes differently. It’s fun.

In some ways, this movie is like the Superman movie I always wanted in terms of tone and taste, do you know what I mean?
I do.

The existential crisis of Superman is something that’s seldom handled well.
That’s very interesting. I think Zack Snyder scratched the surface of it. I think someone—maybe it was JJ Abrams—was talking about [doing] a Superman film and he was like, “I just wonder how he didn’t kill anybody as a baby.” I know that there are other people who have takes on it. I never saw this character as a superhero—I just saw him as a boy. His illnesses I just thought of as being organic, even though they’re supernatural. The same thing happened with

The same thing happened with Take Shelter. To your comment, specifically—wanting to see a certain version of a kind of movie…This is going to sound ridiculous, but Take Shelter was kind of my zombie movie. Take Shelter was my take on all those cool feelings in a zombie film where people are preparing for a disaster or preparing for the zombie stuff. I just wanted to make a movie that lived in that part. Then you start to make it deeper and more meaningful and relate it to your life, but that was very much the case with Take Shelter and here [with Midnight Special] too. I really liked those movies of the ’80s and sci-fi movies from that period. I kind of wanted to live in that world for a little bit, which doesn’t negate, though, my approach to the story or how I broaden its veins into my own life. It doesn’t discount that feeling, that sense you get after having seen stuff like that. I felt that way with Mud, too. I had this notion of what a classic American film was. I couldn’t tell you one specifically, but I can tell you a combination of several. Cool Hand Luke, The Getaway…I kind of wanted it to feel like some of the things I felt during those movies.

Midnight Special applies to that. So many people try to make these one-to-one analogies with these films, especially with the endings and other things. Those are kind of lost on me. That’s not how I thought about them. I just thought about the essence of those films.

Hitchcock’s movies were driven by his personal fears. Would you say you’re the same?
Absolutely. One hundred percent. The interesting thing about Hitchcock is that he chose fear as a predominant format to work in, which makes sense because that’s best for directors.

How so?
The feeling of fear is most directly linked to the toolbox that a director has to work with. This shot plus this shot equals this feeling. This music here, this framing here. I’m not going to give you much lead space in front of your eyes, and that’s going to freak people out. It’s different in comedy or drama…they’re not really genres. They’re these feelings. Fear most directly relates most to what a director does. I approach it a little differently. Definitely in Take Shelter, there are some scary moments, and they’re intended to be scary. I was getting to use that toolbox. I approach fear more from the standpoint of a writer. I use fear as a catalyst. Fear makes for a scary scene—“This is going to be a scary moment”—that’s what I’m talking about with Hitchcock. What I’m talking about as a writer…fear is a catalyst for a bigger idea. It’s a catalyst for the thought that you’re trying to convey to the audience, which for me is always an emotion—it’s not a story. It’s not plot. It’s not, “I’m going to tell you a story about what happened to a guy.” It’s, “I’m going to tell you a story about how a guy feels.”

Fear is a great place to start from. Fear is what motivates us as humans to get out and gather the food and build the shelter. It’s like a foundational element of humanity. But fear is only a catalyst. For instance, this film is about the fear of losing my son. That brings up a lot of emotions and other things, but that’s not a thought in and of itself. I can’t just make a movie about a guy afraid of losing his son. What does he do with that? What’s he trying to do with that fear? I think that forced me to think about the actual nature of parenthood. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to, I think, define for ourselves who our children are, in the purest way we possibly can. Sometimes, our own point of view gets in the way and we project that onto our kids. But I think, really, we’re terrified of losing them, so we’re going to try to figure out who they are to try to help them. Help them become the ones who manifest their own destiny. We have no control over that destiny. We have no control over who they become. At best, we can try to help them realize who they are and help them become that.

That became a thought. Fear produced that thought, which became the backbone for this movie. In Take Shelter, I was afraid of the world falling apart. I was afraid of not being a good provider for my family, or an adult, or a good husband. I was afraid of all those things, and there was a bunch of anxiety that came from that. But that’s not what that movie’s about—that movie’s about communicating in marriage. That movie’s about the foundational principles of marriage, which I think is communication. That’s why I made the daughter deaf. I think, in order to get that, I needed to have fear. Shotgun Stories is about the fear of losing one of my brothers. But ultimately that’s not what the movie’s about. It’s about the fruitlessness of revenge, a revenge that was born out of that fear.

I think there’s a huge misunderstanding among moviegoers in this country. People are obsessed with plot. That’s how they critique movies—solely on the plot! From the stunning opening of this movie, it’s clear you’re not interested in exposition. This is cinema, that’s it. We’re dealing with emotions, images, and sound. I wish more people appreciated that. I think maybe they do, subconsciously.
Maybe they do, you know? It depends on what people want out of a film. At different times you want different things. A lot of people—and I’m this audience sometimes—want escapism. Look at the way people use score. Score, even more than expositional dialogue, is the way to telegraph a pass, like in basketball. You never telegraph a pass—you never want the defense to know where you’re looking, because they’ll know where you’re going to throw the ball and then they’ll steal it. You can telegraph so much by having two characters speak, and then you put this music underneath it. Everybody knows they’re supposed to be scared, or they’re supposed to be happy, or they’re supposed to be sad. When you remove score, which I mostly did in Shotgun Stories, it’s very offputting to people. All of a sudden, they’re having to judge a scene on its own merits, not on this feeling that you’re giving them. They actually have to start listening. That’s just an example of my broader approach: If you remove certain things, people have to listen.

Some people don’t want that experience when they go to the theater, and that’s okay. I’ll catch you the next time, or maybe I’ll catch you on a Sunday night, when you’ve got a little more free time. It’s my job, though, to try and understand the nature of how people receive stories. It’s natural to search for plot. That’s how our brains work. I don’t hold it against anybody, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to challenge them through a new type of organization of information. Because that’s all it is—you’re just organizing information in a certain way so that it lands at certain times. My movies have plot. I just don’t think it’s the going concern. I think writers are so concerned sometimes with just making things clear.

I know that studios are. They test these things to make sure that no stone is unturned and that people are getting what they want. But what people want isn’t always what they need. I’m fascinated by story dynamics. I’m fascinated by what works for an audience and what doesn’t, what keeps them engaged and what doesn’t. If you’re not working on the edge of all that, you’re never going to have a situation where someone says, “My nails were dug into the edge of my chair,” and one person writes, “This movie is boring as hell.” I have to be okay with both of those responses. I don’t think I could get either if I was just trying to walk down the middle of the road.

About the opening, again, which I love so much…
I think it’s the best opening I’ll ever do.

Some people might consider it disorienting, but I think, for this story, you get exactly the amount of information you need.
What’s funny for me is, I think it’s so obvious. I’m wondering, like, will people just know that, once he picks the boy up into his arms in the hotel room, that obviously he’s not a kidnapper? Yes, they do, but since it hasn’t been so specifically told to them, they feel it, but they don’t know it yet. That’s a really great place to be. To me, it’s just so obvious. “That mystery’s solved.” But it’s not yet. It’s not totally solved. I have this line of Sam Shepard revealing, “The birth father, Roy Tomlin.” I wrote that scene specifically to be a surprise to the FBI, because they haven’t had the ranch under surveillance long enough to know that he was the birth father. The thing I’m wondering is, is it a surprise to the audience? That’s what I [mean] when I talk about narrative mechanics. I’m just so fascinated. When did you know? Here’s when I tell you, or here’s where I specifically don’t tell you.

Obviously, Joel Edgerton’s profession in the film—that was really specific. I remember giving [the script] to this young girl who was going to be a PA on our film. I gave her the script, and maybe she wasn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer, but she read it and just so clearly was like, “You have to tell us sooner that he’s a state trooper. We need to know that because I was really turned off when he did what he did at the end of the film. If I had known that, I’d have felt a lot better about his character a lot sooner.” She was so earnest in her argument. But it’s like, don’t you understand that you having all these emotions is part of the process? It’s part of the story. It just made me smile, and she probably thought I was a dickhead.

Joel gives you so much.
He’s a great actor.

In that scene in particular, he tells you what you need to know in how he behaves.
There you go! I thought it was pretty obvious. He walks over to the fallen state trooper and speaks in a way that no normal person would speak on the police radio. I was like, well, I’m just letting people know there. That’s what his character would do. A bad version of that writing would be [for him] to go over and say, “Hey, hey, there’s a police officer shot.” That wouldn’t be honest to him either. He wants that guy to get help. That’s why he goes and does it. He did not want to go shoot that guy. You could have Jeff Nichols the writer brain go, “If I have him speak that way, I’ll show my cards too soon.” But that’s as dishonest as having him explain that he’s a state trooper. Both of those things are dishonest. My fear for this movie…any shortcoming is when I might have been to purposefully ambiguous in a scene. I’ve read that critique, and I’ve gone back in and I’ve looked at it, and I don’t know. I’ve been able to reason out why they would behave that way. Point being, character behavior trumps all narrative desire.

I paint myself into corners all the time. It’s like, okay, I have this very strict rule about character behavior and dialogue, but I need this piece of information in the movie. It’s my job to craft a scene that allows that piece of information to come through, or we don’t get it. Then I deal with that consequence. It’s like an austerity to the writing you have to apply. You really have to stick to it. You really do.

Kirsten Dunst’s character is one of my favorite motherly characters in a while. You don’t see this stuff often. Without spoiling anything, the things she does, the way she reacts to things—it feels authentic, it feels real.
I think she’s the strongest character in the film. I think she’s able to do something the male characters can’t, specifically Michael Shannon’s. I’m not just saying this to gain the pro-women’s lib lobby. Watching my son be born and what my wife did and then what she did the year that followed…there’s no doubt in my mind that women are the stronger sex in terms of fortitude and emotions. I was very struck in high school when I read A Doll’s House by Ibsen. It’s about a mother that leaves her children. I came from a home where that would not be possible. But it is possible. That’s why the mother in Shotgun Stories hates her children. She blames them for her place in life. Their existence lowered her, in her mind. I was fascinated by the idea that there could be a mother character that would come to the conclusion first of what the inevitability of parenthood is. It made sense to me that a mother would be the one to understand the cycle of parenthood before the father, who has undeniably committed his entire life to the safety of his boy. It takes the mother to realize the cycle that they’re a part of.

I don’t think Michael’s character understands it fully or is willing to accept it fully until the boy gets out of the car. I think it’s important, but it’s also a big narrative risk. You’ve built this father-son story, the mother doesn’t come in for the first thirty minutes, and she’s tangential. Then you do this physical handoff where she’s the one who physically represents their position to their child at the end of the film. I had no idea if it would work, and for some people, I’m sure it doesn’t. I reason out, character-wise, why it would work out that way. Like I said, she’s the stronger of the two. I’m glad to hear you say you like her…because I like her.

That moment you mention where the boy gets out of the car broke my heart.
Good! That’s the one. David Fincher talks about how every movie should have an emotional punch in the gut. That was mine. I have one in each of my films. I’m glad you liked it.

Sevier (Adam Driver) is great, too.
Adam Driver is, in my opinion, going to be one of the most important actors of our generation, irrelevant of Star Wars. I think he’s that good. He’s that interesting. I want to make a detective movie with him really badly.

Why a detective movie?
Because I want to make a detective movie.

[laughs]
Because I’m a huge fan of Fletch. I just want to make a private eye movie.

What would happen to humanity if everyone lost their ability to retain memories? That’s one of the questions Claire Carré explores with her debut feature Embers, which drops viewers into a world 10 years after a disease infects everyone with short-term and long-term memory loss. Carré splits her film up into five narrative strands, each one examining how an aspect intrinsic to our existence changes within her own dystopian vision; a couple (Jason Ritter & Iva Gocheva) wake up every day trying to remember how they know each other; a former intellectual (Tucker Smallwood) tries different ways to learn again so he can find a cure; a boy (Silvan Friedman) with no parents wanders around trying to survive on his own; a young man (Karl Glusman, credited as Chaos) filled with rage attacks everyone he encounters; and the young girl Miranda (Greta Fernandez) lives in an underground bunker with her father (Roberto Cots), safe from the disease but cut off from the world.

On the surface, Carré’s film looks like standard post-apocalyptic fare, but its tone is anything but. Shooting in Indiana, New York and Poland, Embers casts its urban decay in a bland, grey hue that should bring to mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, except Carré doesn’t provide her film with the same bleakness and nihilism. With no one connected to their past, the strong emotions connected to memories don’t exist anymore, leaving characters to constantly live in the moment in a somewhat peaceful state. The only exception to this is Chaos, whose violent acts take on a new meaning given they’re instinctual and without consequence. The somewhat tranquil mood amidst a dying world makes for a fascinating juxtaposition, allowing Carré the ability to weave in emotional and philosophical questions about identity and the human condition.

With a short runtime and several disconnected storylines, Embers only disappoints with its inability to coalesce on a thematic level (most segments just end abruptly). The only exception is Miranda’s storyline, as her near-decade of isolation makes her consider leaving the bunker to go live in the real world. Her father begs her not to go, telling her that once she’s infected she’ll lose everything that makes her who she is. For Miranda, it’s a complicated situation that directly addresses Carré’s question at the heart of the film, over whether or not memory is the source of our own individuality.

Going into Magnetic, I had no idea that the husband and wife duo Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola had experience directing music videos, but within the first 10 minutes of this indie sci-fi it’s easy to recognize their background. That’s because Magnetic is essentially a series of music videos that are interrupted by brief scenes of robotic-like dialogue in an attempt to establish its futuristic atmosphere. For instance, our heroine Alice (Allix Mortis) gets into a car, inserts a cassette tape (yes, this is supposed to be the future, but it’s…magnetic) and pulsating ’80s inspired synth music plays as she drives. And drives. And drives. In an effort to fill time while the entire song plays, we see every side of Alice from every angle as she drives to a remote pay phone (yeap, still supposedly in the future). The music is temporarily suspended when the phone rings and a monotoned voice on the other end gives a cryptic message only the character understands. This lasts for less than a minute before she drives off and the music starts back up again.

It’s difficult to make sense of what the film is actually about, but that’s mostly by design. Obscure lines like “initiating electromagnetic brain link” and “solar flare activity within normal parameters” mean very little without explanation. But unfortunately, the directors’ hold useful exposition until the very last scene. This doesn’t result in a rewarding final reveal, it just makes watching everything before it frustrating and incohesive. There’s no question the filmmakers recognize catchy beats, or that they can create a stylish, moody atmosphere. But constructing complex sci-fi ideas into an engaging low-budget thriller may have been a little too ambitious.

The beautiful thing about old-school arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede is that they take passion, endurance and dedication to master. Few people on this earth are equipped with the skills to be the best at these electronic mental marathons, and these special few are basically freaks of nature (watch Seth Gordon’s modern classic The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters to fully understand their freakiness). Retro arcade gaming is an amazing, fascinating, largely undiscovered American subculture that’s deserved to be the subject of a  big-budget, big-screen vehicle for a long time. (No, Wreck-It Ralph doesn’t count; that movie’s about the games, not the gamers.)

Pixels, a movie by Chris Columbus and a product of Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions empire, is meant to be about retro gamers, but isn’t about anything at all. This movie makes no sense, has no message, isn’t funny and harbors what is easily the worst performance of Peter Dinklage‘s career. It’s a crying shame, especially for a lifelong gamer like myself, though the movie is extraordinarily impressive in one, very unexpected facet of its presentation, which I’ll save for later.

The plot is Independence Day, except woefully over-simplified and with classic video game characters playing the aliens. In a flashback to 1982 (when video arcades still existed), we meet our heroes. Sam Brenner is an good-natured arcade wizard, but he loses a NASA-sponsored gaming tournament to Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant, a cocky, mullet-rocking little person who smokes him at Donkey Kong. Sam’s best buddy, Will, is loyal to the end, though, and assures Sam that he’s destined for bigger things. As a consolation prize, they make a new friend at the arcade, a Napoleon Dynamite-like creature named Ludlow. This opening sequence has a great, vintage look and starts the movie on the right foot, though it’s all downhill from there.

Jump ahead to present day, and aliens that inexplicably look and behave exactly like the characters in the games Sam mastered as a kid have declared war on earth and threaten to blow our blue planet to smithereens. (Well, not exactly “smithereens”; everything the aliens touch gets “pixelated,” falling apart into neon-bright cubes of light.) Naturally (predictably), adult Sam (Sandler), Will (Kevin James), Eddie (Dinklage) and Ludlow (Josh Gad) are the only ones with enough gamer skill to save the day. (Oddly enough, Will grew up to be the President of the United States, which fast-tracked his friends to the front of the military earth-defense line.)

Nonsense incoming: When a giant, alien Pac-Man starts tearing apart New York City, he and his friends jump into color-coded cars, chasing Pac-Man through the streets and alleys as if they were the evil ghosts from the game. Sam was good at arcade games. How in the world, then, is he suddenly also a professional driver? Earlier in the movie, he’s holding a laser gun, shooting “centipedes” out of the night sky in London. I could have sworn he was a master of buttons and joysticks, not a badass gunman with perfect aim. It’s moronic. This movie isn’t about video games or gamers; it’s generic, trashy, sci-fi action shlock that prostitutes retro gaming and uses it as arbitrary window dressing. Blech.

Across the board, the cast is on their D-game. Sandler’s been playing the same, sleepy-Seth-Rogen character for the past several years, and he doesn’t break that streak here (same goes for Kevin James and his meathead routine). Michelle Monaghan plays Sandler’s love interest, and her role as a sexy government official is as demeaning and stereotypical as you’d imagine. Gad alternates between shrieking and sulking as the mentally unstable Ludlow, but his performance is more off-putting than funny.

Like I said, Dinklage is a mess: He puts on a mind-numbing accent that sounds like Barry White trying to talk like a “totally tubular” ’80s kid, and his comedic timing is near nonexistent. He says nasty things, like demanding a three-way with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Columbus lingers on him forever, as if he’s positive the audience is erupting in laughter at the absurdity of it all. Instead: crickets. Not one laugh-worthy line. Not one. It’s painful to see such a great actor fail so miserably.

Family-friendly action adventures like this typically leave you with some kind of moral or encouraging message. For the life of me, I don’t know what Pixels is trying to say. All of its heroes have dreams, and at the end of the story, all those dreams come true. But they learn nothing about themselves along the way. It’s a head-scratcher trying to figure out the point of it all. You’d think, maybe, that the message would be about retro games and how, even amongst today’s more complex, technologically advanced games, they still hold up as essential gaming experiences. Nope. Spoiler alert: Sam saves the world by ditching his old-school gaming philosophies and adopting a modern gaming approach. I honestly don’t understand most of this movie.

I saved the good news for last, though it’ll only apply to those willing to shell out extra dough for a movie ticket. Pixels has some of the best 3-D glasses implementation I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Aside from a few exceptions (Pixar movies, Coraline, Avatar), I detest putting on those damn 3-D glasses, but this movie blew me away: the colors were vibrant; people’s noses looked closer to us than their ears; shots of large crowds had cavernous depth. The more obvious visual effects—like the aliens exploding into a zillion “pixels”—looked great too, but it was the subtle stuff that dropped my jaw. I really, really didn’t like this movie, but at least it’s a fun tech demonstration.

How does one even begin to describe the enigma that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster? Since reading a brief description of its bizarre narrative months ago, it has been one of my most anticipated films of the year (and made our list for most anticipated films of 2015), and those familiar with Lanthimos’ previous work (most notably his 2009 Academy Award nominated film Dogtooth) are probably aware of how strange his work can be—but never without justification. The Lobster tells the story of David (Colin Farrell), a man who has recently been left by his partner and decides to check into The Hotel, where he has a month and a half to meet a new, suitable partner, otherwise he will be transformed into an animal of his choice.

The Lobster functions as part absurdist comedy, part dark romance and part social satire. The comedy is sharp and the romantic elements provide it with a sense of lightness which would have otherwise been absent; the execution of its societal commentary, however, is what sends it into uncharted territory, and the main reason why it comes across as such a deeply original work. Lanthimos pokes fun at certain commonalities of the modern romantic relationship, such as the notion that “birds of a feather flock together,” by utilizing the element of exaggeration. For instance, each character in the film has their singular unique characteristic. David is nearsighted, and thus is only interested in finding a woman who is nearsighted as well. The Limping Man (Ben Whishaw) pursues a woman who suffers from frequent nosebleeds, so in order to capture her attention and fool her into thinking that they are a match, he begins inflicting trauma on his nose, causing it to bleed when in her presence.

When I first saw Dogtooth, I praised it for its technical mastery: its carefully framed static shots, sharp editing and claustrophobic production design. Still, something held me back from fully embracing it, and looking back on the viewing experience now, I’m certain it was that I had a difficult time trying to figure out what it was saying about civilization. Its surreal and otherworldly, for sure, but what sort of comment is it trying to make about the human condition? It is indeed a tough egg to crack. The Lobster, on the other hand, is much more coherent (and dare I say accessible) in its satire. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, as I never thought I would be describing a Lanthimos film as accessible, but I definitely think people will have an easier time figuring out the meaning behind all of the madness here.

The technical elements of The Lobster are just as sound as those of Dogtooth, and aesthetically similar. The camera is almost perpetually static, and much attention is paid to the framing of certain shots, which is interesting because it allows the director to isolate aural elements such as off-screen noises that, though they cannot be seen, having a significant bearing on specific scenes. The musical score is jarring, but not in a negative way; I imagine it will be one of the first technical aspects that viewers take notice of, as its a loud and powerful score which makes itself known within the first few minutes. There isn’t much that I would change about The Lobster; if I was to suggest anything to the editors, it would be to pick out and remove certain scenes which might not seem as pertinent as others, for the film does exhaust a bit in its third act. Aside from that, it is a hilarious and biting critique of interpersonal relationships that is sure to appeal to a wider audience than Lanthimos’ previous works, and may bring him back into the limelight when award season rolls around.

Countless films have been made about aliens coming down to Earth, but now director Michael Madsen brings that concept into the realm of documentary with The Visit. Madsen asks what we as a species would do if an alien came down to our planet, and answers his own question in a rather unique way. He makes the viewer take the perspective of the visiting lifeform, and has his talking heads—various professionals across Europe who deal with the type of hypothetical situation Madsen proposes—talk to the camera directly as if they’re conversing with the alien itself. Think of The Visit as less of a straightforward documentary about a science fiction scenario, and more of a realistic simulation of how to logistically handle the presence of an unknown entity.

At least, that’s what Madsen wants The Visit to be. It’s definitely a fascinating concept, but what sounds good on paper doesn’t always translate well to the screen. Madsen’s choice to take the alien’s perspective falls flat on its face from frame one, a mistake the film never fully recovers from. The interview subjects provide a wide, interesting range of perspectives, but making these people treat the camera as an extraterrestrial only provides one clunky, awkward scene after another. Even worse is when Madsen gets two people together at the same time, like two PR experts from the UK, to discuss handling more operational aspects of the visit with each other. It’s exactly what you’d expect; non-actors awkwardly play acting.

It’s also inconsistent with what Madsen wants to achieve by taking the visitor’s POV. Sometimes the subjects talk directly to the camera. Other times they clearly respond to a question asked of them, and when multiple people talk with each other on camera it’s designed to be conversation between just those people. Madsen just doesn’t commit to the gimmick he lays out, and The Visit becomes largely frustrating since it has no idea of what the hell it wants to do. Also unnecessarily complicating matters is a fictitious storyline where one of the interviewees “enters” the being’s spacecraft, a strange part to add considering the rest of the documentary’s emphasis on realism.

There are some flashes of interesting elements peppered throughout The Visit. Specific facts, like the United Nations having an “Office for Outer Space Affairs,” or the French Space Agency having a theologian as an advisor, are compelling pieces of information. And the film’s use of extreme slow motion when filming large crowds in public turns out to be a simple, effective way to turn the normal into the abnormal, with the smooth, slow-moving images giving off a surreal vibe. In a film filled with sleek visuals and re-enactments, it’s the only time where Madsen comes close to evoking a feeling of observing humans from an outsider’s perspective.

But those moments come few and far between. As The Visit plods along, Madsen begins unveiling the themes he really wants to look at, and they’re the kind of half-baked ideas that easily elicit groans. Madsen realizes that, by having to explain things to an alien, humans would have to confront deep, philosophical questions about themselves. Madsen could use this to explore some interesting existential themes, but instead the film’s narrator blurts out lines like “Man would rather destroy himself than give up the illusion that he controls everything.” It’s an observation that, like the entirety of The Visit, is more insufferable than insightful.

Like Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and Greta Garbo before her, Blake Lively has got the kind of glamorous, rarified Hollywood beauty that makes time stand still. In The Age of Adaline she plays Adaline Bowman, a young woman for whom time stands still quite literally, a freak accident in the early 20th century endowing her with the gift (curse?) of eternal youth. Set in present-day San Francisco, Adaline is a romance fantasy with a preposterous-but-amusing supernatural premise, a great cast, and a promising young director in Lee Toland Krieger (The Vicious Kind, Celeste and Jesse Forever), who’s made a conventional story feel new again not by reinventing the wheel, but by giving his all to make the best damn wheel he can.

While we’ve collectively, understandably developed a cringe reflex in the midst of the current Nicholas Sparks wave of cheesy rom-coms (a wave that shows no signs of receding, god help us), Adaline is a modern romance worthy of an honest look. Lively (and her stunning wardrobe) will catch your eye immediately, but it’s her moving turn as a girl time forgot that’ll keep you in your seat. Better still, the film gives you something to take home with you, a powerful message about the quality of time as opposed to the quantity of it.

When we first meet Adaline it’s the present day, and she’s actually not Adaline: she’s Jennifer Larson, a 29-year-old archivist living in San Francisco. In a series of flashbacks sparked by vintage newsreels she digs up at work, we learn her superhero-like origin story. Adaline Bowman was born in 1908 and grew to be a beautiful young woman, finding herself in a happy marriage and blessed with a cute-as-a-button daughter, Flemming. Then, the accident: Reeling from the sudden death of her husband, Adaline crashes her car in the middle of a rare California snowstorm, plunging into a freezing cold river. A lightning bolt saves her from certain death, and in addition to jumpstarting her heart, the jolt of electricity stops her body’s aging process. The science of the phenomenon is explained in storybook-style narration by Hugh Ross, who cites a thermonuclear law that won’t be discovered until 2035. It’s a funny little wink of a joke that helps the absurdity of it all go down the hatch much easier.

As time passes her by and her loved ones out-age her (present-day Flemming easily passes as her grandmother), Adaline is forced into a life on the run, mostly to stay out of the hands of the government, who’d most likely like to cut her open and exploit her unique immunity to aging. This brings us up to speed and back to Jennifer Larson, her cover for the time being until she moves to a new city and assumes a new identity.

While some may view the prospect of preserved youth as a dream come true (I’m turning 30 in about a month, so to me the idea sure doesn’t suck), Adaline’s found her life to be lonely and cold. She can’t start any long-term friendships. Adaline is constantly forced to deceive almost everyone around her, whipping up lies out of thin air so as to not give away her extraordinary condition. You can see the veiled torment on her face as she shoos people away, throwing to the wind what might have been beautiful human connections.

The worst part of the deal for Adaline is that she must avoid or stamp out any potential romances. Aside from one “moment of weakness”, Adaline’s managed to keep the boys at bay; that is, until she meets charming philanthropist Ellis (Game of Thrones‘ Michiel Huisman), whose dogged flirting (and dashing good looks) at a New Year’s Eve party earns him a spot in the back of Adaline’s mind. Though reluctant at first, she eventually can’t resist Ellis’ charms, and for the second time in her post-lightning bolt life, she has a “moment of weakness.”

The first half of the movie is mostly carried by Lively, as the proceedings are pretty conventional, running through a litany of rom-com clichés. When things start to get more serious between Adaline and Ellis, however, an unexpected twist shakes up the entire movie, changing the mood and upping the stakes way higher than one would expect. The sudden change in tone revolves around a contrivance that’s arguably more implausible than Adaline’s condition, but if you bought the car crash, you’ll probably be fine with it. The main cast doubles in size, adding Kathy Baker and Harrison Ford into the fold as Ellis’ parents. The movie gets really, really good from this point on, and the addition of the older cast members seems to light a fire under Lively and Huisman, who noticeably step up their game.

The film’s greatest gift might be that it harbors one of Ford’s best performances in years. You can never tell these days how invested he’ll be in any given project, but Krieger must have the magic touch. I can’t remember the last time Ford looked so invigorated. He’s not playing a grumpy man (himself) here, but rather a man who’s missing something deep in his soul and carries around a world of regret. Almost every scene he’s in threw me for a loop.

Even Ford can’t outshine the luminous Lively, though. Adaline is a complex role that poses several challenges: Lively is a 27-year-old actor playing a centenarian who’s playing a 29-year-old; she has to speak with a faint pre-war accent (she nails it); and she has to be the authority figure in scenes with Ellen Burstyn, an actor 55 years her elder, who plays her daughter. The blossoming actress pulls it all off effortlessly, and she looks like a zillion bucks doing it.

Screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz’s dialogue is hit and miss (their talent is more evident in their broad narrative strokes), but Lively makes the words sing with her controlled, gentle delivery. She also looks jaw-dropping in the period outfits draped on her by costume designer Angus Strathie, but that’s just the (ridiculously expensive) icing on the cake. The best compliment I can give the Gossip Girl actress is that I’m genuinely excited to see what she does next.

The story takes place in modern-day San Francisco, but Krieger’s version of the city is one that mercifully ignores the tech boom that currently threatens to sand down the city’s odd, beloved idiosyncrasies. He and cinematographer David Lanzenberg instead accentuate the city’s eerie side, setting Adaline and Ellis’ courting encounters in forgotten underground tunnels, shadowy abandoned warehouses and old hotels. The foggy City by the Bay is a fitting setting for a story so hauntingly romantic.

Michiel Huisman is best known for his work on TV, his turns on Treme, Nashville, and Game of Thrones making him the object of desire for female (and male) binge-watchers everywhere. And rightfully so! He’s crazy handsome, and despite hailing from Amsterdam, he can pull off any accent asked of him, making him a shoe-in for every hunky TV role that pops up.

The Dutch actor has greater aspirations than being relegated to playing the muscly eye candy on every project he takes, though. Despite the success of Game of Thrones, in which he plays Daenerys Targaryen’s oft-disrobed lover and quasi-advisor Daario Naharis, between shooting seasons of the show, he’s made it a mission to take on more dimensional roles and jump from the world of TV and into the movie theater.

Enter The Age of Adaline, Lee Toland Krieger’s San Francisco-set romance with a sci-fi twist. In it Blake Lively plays Adaline, a twentysomething who at the turn of the 20th century is struck by lighting following a fatal car accident, reviving her and, most amazingly, stopping her body’s aging process. As the people she loves begin to out-age her (including her daughter), she’s forced to live a life on the run to avoid being caught by people who may want to exploit her anti-aging properties.

Huisman plays Ellis, a modest philanthropist whose connection with Adaline might be strong enough to compel her to stop running. Ellis seems like standard rom-com fare at first, but when his father (played by Harrison Ford) comes into the picture, the story takes an unexpected turn that changes everything. Huisman’s first major role in a feature film is a memorable one that gets his movie career of on the right foot.

I spoke with Mr. Huisman in a roundtable interview during his visit to San Francisco to promote The Age of Adaline, though Game of Thrones talk inevitably popped up as the conversation went on.

The Age of Adaline hits theaters nationwide this Friday, April 24th.

How much filming did you guys do in San Francisco?
That’s the kind of question I try to avoid, and you start with it! [laughs] The thing is, shooting in San Francisco is a pain. We shot most of the movie in what we refer to as “San Francouver.” It was very strange for me, playing a character that is very much rooted here in San Francisco. It wasn’t until later, after we chopped the movie, that I made my first visit to the city. It seems to be the story of my life, shooting somewhere that’s supposed to take place somewhere else. I was here two weeks ago for the Game of Thrones premiere. Apart from one afternoon walking around and seeing as much as I could, the next day I had somebody take me around town, and I saw a lot. I managed to see the Bliss Dance statue on Treasure Island. You guys see that one?

No!
You should go see it! It’s awesome!

How did you get involved with the film?
By the time the script reached me I was already aware of Blake [Lively] being attached to it, as well as Harrison Ford. The thought of being able to play the male lead opposite Blake and being the son of Harrison Ford in one movie is too much for me, really. That was before I had even read the script. When I read the script, I was swept away by this journey of a woman through time. I thought it could become a very, very romantic movie that kind of feels like a small, independent, well-crafted movie, but at the same time, hopefully it appeals to a large audience. For me there is not a doubt in my mind; I was dying to be a part of it. Also, I come from doing a lot of great TV stuff, which I’m very proud of, but I was really eager to make that step and break into film. The Age of Adaline is special for me from that perspective because it marks the first time I’m playing a leading role in a proper Hollywood production.

Are you getting more offers now to play the “hunk” in movies and TV?
Yes, but I think it’s very important as an actor to spread your wings constantly and to not fall for the same thing. One of the things I thought was important during my hiatus between two seasons of Game of Thrones was to shoot a cool movie in which I’m not holding a sword. The Age of Adaline really hit that button.

One through line in your work is that you play a lot of characters that support strong, incredible female characters. Are you drawn to that?
I’m very thankful for the opportunity to work with [those actresses]. I love stories about strong women. I think that there aren’t enough stories about strong women in film and TV. I worked with Reese Witherspoon on Wild and I admired that entire project so much, and the way she played that character, too. If you look at it from that perspective, yeah, I get to support strong women, and that’s cool. I love that. But I also love stories about strong men. [laughs] Maybe in the future I get to play the strong man.

One of the most beautiful messages in the movie is about the quality of time as opposed to the quantity of time.
This woman’s found the so-called fountain of youth, and it turns out to be such a burden. I thought it was a very nice concept. I thought [the sci-fi element of the story], at least on the page, was not so far of a stretch. For a second I thought, “Maybe I should Google whether this is scientifically possible.” Maybe not with a human, but with a mouse. Can you actually kill it and then bring it back to life? I like that idea. You have to kind of go along with the movie’s concept, and I hope the audience will.

What kind of roles do you seek out?
I shot this movie basically a year ago. I went back to Game of Thrones, and it’s a show that’s so much about moments. There’s such a big cast, and as an actor I feel like I want to try to nail the moment. I was hoping to do projects during my next hiatus that don’t force me to nail a moment, that really allow me to be a character and carry a story not for a couple of scenes, but the whole way through. That’s how I pick, together with my team, the project I’m working on during this hiatus. I’m about to finish a movie we shot in Australia. We have a week left of stuff in New York…there you go! [laughs] San Francouver, shot in Sydney, takes place in New York. It’s very much a story in which I get to carry it the whole way through. I really enjoyed the freedom it gave me. In a certain sense, it adds a little pressure because I’m carrying the story. If the movie doesn’t work, it’s kind of on me. But when I’m shooting, I don’t really think about that. That comes a year later when I’m talking to people and they’re actually going to see this movie. When was shooting, I didn’t have four scenes to tell a story and sell a character, but one hundred and four.

Did you feel like you got to have that kind of arc on Treme? Even though it’s an ensemble, it was developed very thoroughly.
That arc was very gratifying to play, but it was that same thing. You get a couple scenes every episode. I love being part of a show, like Game of Thrones for example, that is so well made and so well written. The moments I’m trying to nail as an actor…they’re handing them to me on a little golden plate. “Here you go! You can say to the mother of dragons, ‘The queen of dragons without dragons is not a queen.'” You’re going to do everything you can to try and nail that line! I’m so grateful for that. But when I’m off of [the show], I try to do different stuff. Not only different genres and different characters, but [projects] I can carry.

I’ve met Harrison Ford once, and it was the most terrifying experience. I said, “Hello Mr. Ford!” and he just grunted and walked away. Was it intimidating working with him?
It was a different experience, really. [laughs] It’s a little intimidating for the first ten minutes because of who he is and because I admire him. But when we started working I was kind of surprised by how invested he was in this project and in this story. I think part of me though that, for him, this is just a little movie on his roster. But I felt like it wasn’t, and he gave it his all. Once he enters the movie, it not only puts it into another gear, but he also put me into another gear. He forced me to step it up. God, I loved it.

Harrison’s kind of known to not play well with fans. He hates hearing about Indiana Jones and Star Wars.
Everybody’s constantly asking me, “Did you ask him about Star Wars?!” Obviously not! [laughs]

Now you’re getting a little taste of that with Game of Thrones. You’re playing Daario!
The strange thing is, people are probing, but not really. They don’t really want to know. At least that’s my experience. “What’s happening? Don’t tell me!” I think it’s funny. You don’t want to know, really. You’d go crazy if I told you.

Daenerys’ storyline is going differently on the show than in the book.
We’re letting go of the books this year. I shouldn’t say more. [laughs] Everything I say is some kind of spoiler-y thing.

To bring it back to The Age of Adaline, your character, Ellis, uses his wealth philanthropically. What would you do if you suddenly came into tens of millions of dollars?
I would definitely set up some philanthropic foundations. A line in the movie I really liked was when he says, “It’s actually really hard to do good.” You try to do good and make the most of the money, but it’s actually really hard. Maybe it would be [a foundation] for the arts, something helping kids find a way into expressing themselves through music or acting, things that have given me so much fun and eventually a career.

Ex Machina is as much a nerd’s cautionary tale as it is a nerd’s wet dream. It’s about two tech experts (nerds) who conduct an experiment on the world’s first true sentient AI, a mesmerizing, beautiful thing made up of plastic and metal and sinewy wires in the shape of an attractive young woman. Her name is Ava. She walks and talks and flirts and makes small talk just like us, only her skin is synthetic and we can see her insides. (See? Nerd’s wet dream. I kid. Sorta.) But how smart is she? Her human captors try to test her limits as a sentient being, but what they discover is something not even men as ingenious as them could have prepared for.

Sounds pretty intense, right? Well, it is, but that’s not to say novelist-turned screenwriter Alex Garland‘s directorial debut is a piece of tech-panic horror. Rather, it’s a crafty piece of thinking-man’s sci-fi, a ponderous, level-headed exploration of the implications we’d face as a species should we birth true AI. There are more than a few fascinating ideas and themes floating around in the film, enough to make it one of the most thoughtful and idiosyncratic films about robots, well, ever. Still, the movie’s first priority is entertainment, and on that front it doesn’t disappoint.

The story’s mastermind is Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the muscly, intellectually imposing CEO of a Google-like search engine tech company. He’s Ava’s creator, and he’s found her a playmate in Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a lanky, timid programmer who’s won a company-wide lottery that’s gifted him the extraordinary opportunity to spend a week at Nathan’s secluded, ridiculously expensive home, nestled into a mountainside at some undisclosed location not meant for common folk. Upon arrival, Nathan springs the surprise of a lifetime on Caleb, informing him that what he’s really there to do is interact with Ava, performing a kind of post-Turing Test in which he’s to determine whether she can pass as authentically sentient, despite Caleb knowing with complete certainty she’s man-made. If the Turing’s imitation game is blind, Nathan’s removed Caleb’s blindfold.

There’s another, reverse Turing Test of sorts going on as well, outside the confines of what we see on-screen. Ava’s played by a person, Swedish-born ballerina Alicia Vikander, but she, with the help of Garland and his visual effects team, must convince us, the audience, through various forms of movie magic, that what we’re seeing on-screen is not flesh and bone, but a humanoid mass of electronics. The illusion is key, as it’s the foundation the rest of the movie builds upon. Thankfully, it’s as impenetrable a visual trick as I’ve seen in years; I was in a constant state of amazement at how believable Vikander looks as a robot with a see-through midriff and limbs. I was stumped, and it was awesome.

While Ava is partly a grand feat in digital effects and conceptualization, what truly makes her convincing is Vikander, whose body vocabulary represents a sterilization and streamlining of the human body in motion, the aches and pains, tics and stutters sanded away. It’s a bizarre thing to watch Vikander glide around the room, her mechanical joints purring softly, as you find yourself forgetting she’s, in reality, draped in digital confections. For her controlled, inspired performance, Vikander deserves all the praise we can muster.

Let’s not forget the boys, though; they get work done, too. A large chunk of the film is driven by the layered, between-the-lines game of wits and intimidation played by Nathan and Caleb. Ostensibly, Nathan seems to just want to be Caleb’s “bro dude man” rather than his boss’ boss’ boss. But there’s a bit of predatory menace lurking underneath Nathan’s “tech-bro” image that’s represented in his burly physique and un-blinking glare. (When Caleb first meets him, he’s walloping the shit out of a punching bag. Coincidence? I think not.) As Caleb clocks in more and more sessions with Ava (who’s kept behind a wall of thick glass, but is irresistibly charming nonetheless), he begins to see Nathan and Ava not as an inventor and his invention, but as a monster and his imprisoned damsel. The point is, Caleb begins to feel for this machine, to the point where he wouldn’t be above doing her some favors. Is he a pawn in Ava’s scheme…or Nathan’s?

Nathan is the best cinematic intellectual oppressor since Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa. Isaac is as good as he’s been in anything, and his physical transformation is arguably on-par with Vikander’s. Gleeson’s great too as the shy, slouched Caleb; while Isaac and Vikander’s characters are fully-formed and stay on a steady path throughout the story, Gleeson’s given what’s easily the film’s most dramatic character arc. He’s the audience’s proxy, primarily, but he lends a complexity and pathos to Caleb that pays off in spades by film’s end. Though Ex Machina is a cerebral movie for sure, Vikander, Isaac, and Gleeson’s performances anchor the film and make it feel wonderfully chaotic and raw as opposed to clinical and sober.

Garland’s got balls to tackle so many controversial topics at once, and that he pulls it off so smoothly proves he’s got skill on top of his nerve. There are tons of ideas swimming around in the film, some of which could fuel a movie on their own. Ava, for example, isn’t only the embodiment of AI and its ramifications regarding humanity, but a walking question of gender identity (she’s made of synthetic parts; and yet, she’s a she). Nathan and Caleb’s intellectual sparring matches are an examination of male ego, there’s more than a whiff of Blue Beard and Pygmalion in the narrative, and on top of that Garland brings up the freaky reality that our search engines know more about us than our loved ones do. Needless to say, I’m still chewing on this stuff weeks later.

What’s really cool about Ex Machina is that, despite its high-brow inner-workings, it’s still an easily accessible, small-scale thriller that offers as many genre pleasures as it does philosophical head-scratchers. It’s stylish, sleek and intellectually stimulating, but most importantly, it’s a lot of goddamn fun.

Alex Garland, a novelist-turned-cinematographer, has written some of the most geeked-about movies of the past 15 years: Sunshine, The Beach, 28 Days Later, and even a terrific video game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (if you haven’t played it…play it). Now, with Ex Machina, Garland is making his directorial debut, and it’s an indie sci-fi doozy. The film follows Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a young coder at the world’s largest tech company who’s invited by his boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), to participate in the grandest experiment in human history, involving a robotic girl named Ava (Alicia Vikander), the world’s first sentient AI. Mysterious, smart, and full of surprises, Ex Machina is about as awesome a feature debut a director could have, and we had the privilege of speaking with Mr. Garland in a roundtable interview during his visit to San Francisco to promote the film.

Ex Machina is playing now in New York and Los Angeles, opens tomorrow in San Francisco, and expands wide next Friday, April 24th.

What’s sexy about the uncanny valley to you?
You inadvertently flatter me with that question. The uncanny valley in this movie is, for me, something that is exhibited within Ava specifically in her movements. The way Ava moves is not robotic; it’s like a too-perfect version of how humans move. And in the perfection of those movements it feels a bit “other”. It’s quite hard to say why. I just feels a bit off, a bit “other.” The reason I’m saying you’re inadvertently flattering me is that, that had nothing to do with me at all. It was something Alicia Vikander arrived with. She was a ballerina since age 11 and she’s got incredible control of her physicality. The uncanny valley was brought here by Alicia as a way to approach playing this robot, and as soon as she said it I thought, “This is absolutely brilliant.

I’m trying to have a conversation, partly, about where gender resides. Is it in a mind, or is it in a physical form? Is there such a thing as a male or female consciousness, or is that a meaningless distinction? Maybe the gender resides in the external, physical form, or maybe in neither. There’s a broader question about what you call this creature: Do you say “he”, “she”, or “it”? It would be quite easy to present an argument saying Ava has no gender. That said, calling her “he” just feels wrong, with the way she looks. To use the word “it” feels disrespectful. You end up with “she”, and you end up with the strange thing of, is she a ‘she’? And just to be clear, of the questions that are posed in the film, some of them don’t have answers. But that doesn’t mean posing the question is wrong.

When it comes to sexuality, there’s a different thing going on there. Essentially, it’s about the fetishization of girls in their early twenties. Now, that’s not about gender; it’s a completely separate issue. I know there appears to be a Blue Beard narrative and a savior narrative in the film, but basically what you have is both a seeming protagonist and an audience being tasked with something, which is, “Tell us what is going on inside the mind of this being. Is it thinking?” Then, obstacles are presented to both the protagonist and the audience, which effectively get in the way of the question, “What is Ava thinking?” In the end, the thing the characters fail to do is establish what she’s actually thinking, and that allows her to trick them.

I think people are a little anxious and fearful of artificial intelligence, but you actually think it’s a good thing, perhaps even an improvement on human beings.
I do, and I also think that a lot of the stuff that’s perceived to be anxiety about artificial intelligence has actually got fuck-all to do with AI. There are two separate things going on: You’ve got Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk saying artificial intelligence is potentially really dangerous, being possibly anti-AI. And I’m talking about strong AI, not video games and mobile phones. That’s potentially true and potentially reasonable, but you could say the same thing about nuclear power. It’s potentially dangerous, and that doesn’t necessarily stop us from using it. The question is [about] how it’s used. With humans, it tends to be the case that, when something’s possible, we then do it.

The question to ask is not, “Should we do it or shouldn’t we do it?”, because we’re going to do it no matter what if it’s possible. The question is, “How are we going to deal with it when it happens?” That aside, I think a lot of the anxiety doesn’t actually come from AI. There have been a lot of stories about AI in film lately, from Transcendence, to my film, to Age of Ultron. There are tons of them that suggest this zeitgeist in the air. Why is that? Has there been any real breakthrough in AI? Not really. I think it’s probably got nothing to do with AI. I think it’s to do with tech companies. It’s because of our laptops and our phones. We don’t really understand these things, but they know a lot about us. So what you get is a sense of anxiety, either consciously or unconsciously. I think these AI stories are a consequence of that anxiety rather than anything specifically to do with AI.

There are a lot of little things Oscar does with his face that convey a lot to the viewer without giving anything away. Was that a conscious decision on your part?
People say a director got a performance out of an actor. I didn’t get any performances out of any actors. This is something Oscar brought because he’s an incredibly gifted actor. What I think you seek from an actor is that they will elevate everything to do with their character and find things that you never even thought of, improvements and stuff like that. That’s true of the DP, the production designer, the brilliant composers…and true of Oscar.

Does that suggest that you give your actors free rein on-set, or do you like to have some sort of collaboration?
The way I see it, I perceive myself as being a writer, primarily. I write the script and present it as a blueprint to people. Then, I’m not looking to control anybody. It’s almost like what you’d ideally want anarchy to be: a group of people, quite autonomous but also collaborative, working together with a shared goal. That’s my approach to filmmaking, broadly. I don’t like auteur theory. I find it boring and misleading and inaccurate a lot of the time. It’s definitely not what I am. I’m part of a team, and I like that. Years ago I used to work on books. You sit in a room, and you write a book. That’s “auteur.” There is no real comparison to working on a film with a lot of other people. Actually, the thing I dig about film is that it’s collaborative. That’s the pleasure in it.

Can you tell me more about the relationship between Oscar and Domhnall’s characters?
There are two things going on there. One is, [Nathan] is deliberately winding this guy up, presenting himself as something from which this machine needs to be rescued. He’s presenting himself as a bullying, misogynistic, predatory, violent man so this kid can rescue the machine from him. Now, there’s a question: Is that a complete confection? Is that just an act he’s doing? Or is he amplifying something that’s within his own character? That’s one of the hovering questions going on in the story. There’s another thing he’s doing, the “dude, bro” stuff. For me, it’s slightly trying to represent the way some tech companies try to represent themselves. It’s kind of like going, “Hey dude, hey bro, we’re pals! We’re a bunch of hipsters listening to music! By the way, can you give me all of your money and all your information? Thanks, dude!” That kind of speak cracked me up a bit.

So Domhnall’s character is administering a Turing Test…
Sort of. It’s pedantic, but it’s sort of a post-Turing Test. It’s a blind test. A Turing Test is really a test to see if you can pass the Turing Test. You can pass the Turing Test and not be sentient. What he’s saying is, this machine would pass the traditional form of the Turing Test; I want to know if I can show you it’s a machine, and you still think it’s sentient. It’s a step up.

There’s a kind of Turing Test going on between your team and the audience. You’re trying to convince the audience, through Alicia’s movements and visual effects, that she’s a synthetic thing walking around on-screen.
Initially. And hopefully, people are forgetting that.

Most of the legwork for the illusion is done by Alicia, but the visual effects are pretty incredibly. They had me stumped.
The effects are really brilliant, and they were run by this guy called Andrew Whitehurst, with a big team under him. I’ve met some really smart people in my life, [but with Andrew,] I did sometimes think, “You are literally the smartest guy I’ve ever met.” He has enormous creative instincts. I remember him saying early on, “I want to hang these plastic strips inside her torso that will diffuse light and make these structures inside her look slightly more mysterious.” It was a really subtle, nuanced idea that was very typical of him. Very late in post-production, there was a problem to do with the way the camera rendered pixels. It was going to cause us a huge problem, and he said, “I’ll fix this.” He wrote a bit of code that basically reworked the pixels and fixed it, and it fucking blows my mind that he’s able to do these things.

Can you comment on any movement for a Dredd sequel?
Not really. Not because it’s one of those coy things, like I’m demurely going to say “no.” It’s because there isn’t, as far as I can tell, going to be a Dredd sequel. The basic mechanics of film financing say, “If you make a film that loses a ton of money, you’re not going to get a sequel,” and that’s basically what happened. I understand and appreciate the support the film has had, the campaigns that have existed for it, and it’s extremely, genuinely gratifying. I love it in all respects except one, which is when I hear about people buying copies of the DVD in order to boost sales and change the figures. What I want to say to them is this: Don’t do that. Keep your money. The people who are making the decision are much colder and harder than that. The graphs they’re looking at aren’t going to be sufficiently dented by it. The support for the film is truly appreciated, but if there is going to be a sequel, it’s not going to be from me and the team who worked on the previous film. It’s going to be another bunch of people, and good luck to them. I hope it happens, and I hope they do a better job than we did.

Julian Richings is one of those actors everyone recognizes, though when asked to name one of his many credits, it’s easy to draw a blank. This isn’t because he isn’t known for his excellent acting abilities, no one without talent could have made their way through so many film and TV projects without it, but when looking at Richings it’s clear he can also attribute some of his success to his unique semblance. With a long and chiseled face, and wiry frame, Richings fits the bill for almost any outsider a writer can dream up. Starring in the sci-fi horror film Ejecta, it would be easy to assume Richings was primarily cast for perhaps his literal alien-like look. And while those staring eyes and smothered nose are well-suited to the film, the majority of the film’s oomph lies in Richings’ delivery, and in fact the film’s most obvious flaw is that unfortunately, Richings isn’t the only one in this film. Otherwise Ejecta is a sharp-looking sci-fi with some jump-able moments, but with some especially embryonic characters.

The film’s director Chad Archibald (who has a host of other low-grade horror under his belt) and Matt Wiele are no strangers to Richings’ talents having worked with him before. Written by Tony Burgess (Pontypool, Septic Man), the film is split into two side by side timelines. The first is video footage of Bill Cassidy (Richings), astronomer and professed alien abductee, as interviewed by Joe Sullivan (Adam Seybold) at his secluded home. Brought to the country-side by Bill, Joe hopes for an inside scoop on the elusive Bill Cassidy and to hear more about his experiences with aliens as well as observe a coronal ejection set to occur that evening. Cassidy tells his abduction story, passionate with the insanity it has left in him, sleep-deprived and PTSD-stricken. Otherwise he says as little as possible, giving Joe long meaningful looks when asked outright questions. A clear ploy to delay until the real action begins. Cut to a dark dungeon-like room with dramatic lighting and large metal chair. Cassidy sits in this chair, locked to it. A couple of soliders taunt him and are quickly silenced by the resident boss-lady, Dr. Tobin (Lisa Houle). With no fanfare and a softly sweet voice that betrays just how sinister she must be, she asks Bill for his cooperation in answering questions about what happened earlier in the evening. Her demeanor giving away that she has no intentions of playing fair.

Thus begins a back and forth between seeing what has just occurred leading up to Cassidy’s capture and imprisonment, and his current state of torture by Dr. Tobin for information. If Richings fits the crazy-scientist style weirdo—or let’s be honest, it fits him—then it would be easy to consider him the most predictable and stock-like of Ejecta’s characters. But no, that top honor goes to Houle as Tobin, whose militant without a cause is the epitome of the unnecessarily angry villain. The film leads toward a slow convergence of its two story-lines—a well-forecasted inevitability—but anyone thinking that the film’s climax will bring with it some insight into the evil Dr. Tobin will be sorely disappointed. Dr. Tobin is the sort of villain who asks at the opening of her interrogation for her subject to cooperate but offers nothing in return. And of course the thing is, if she’d asked nicely, offered some explanation, she might just have gotten the info she wants. She might also have saved our rapidly waning interest.

Once it becomes clear Tobin won’t be cluing us into her own personal motivations for her erratic and crazy behavior (at one point she chooses to shoot one of her own soldiers), we cease to care that she’s doing any of this at all. Our curiosity for what actually happened that evening sustains us through a fair amount of the film, but once the obvious happens it’s hard not to think, “Ok, what else?” Tobin hardly questions Cassidy’s imperviousness to her torture, especially his response to an early device that literally drills holes in his head but doesn’t kill him. Her decision to ignore the obvious is baffling. But then again she has soldiers out exploring (displayed out on the screens in front of her) who report back to her with things like “this goo is inhuman” and “it’s gotta be extraterrestrial.”

Ok, Burgess. We get it. We’re watching an alien film. We sort of got that when you opened the film on Cassidy relaying his abduction story. Tobin seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize she’s very much in the middle of an alien film, however. Constantly she harrows on about “getting answers” but without any revealed motivation, or any revelations into who she works for—other than the usual vague reference to dealing with aliens back in the ’60s—it’s hard to know why she is doing any of this. Considering her quest for alien life, she is especially oblivious when she finally comes in contact with it. I’d say her character is one-dimensional except that would give her even a leg to stand on. She’s not even given especially good dialogue, monologuing at Cassidy for whole scenes and at one point saying, and I quote, “it’s just you, me, and the end of the world” and makes an especially bizarre comment about Cassidy “squealing like a dog, while they stuff you like a pig.” It’s supposed to be a threat, I guess, but I can’t get past the part where dogs don’t squeal, pigs do, in which case maybe a turkey would make for a better metaphor?

The visuals stand out, and were clearly meant to, as though the filmmakers always intended this one to be for snapshots not overall appeal. The music is beyond distracting, a constant techno thumping that starts at 11 and gives itself nowhere to build. The home video recording timeline is at many times very dark and hard to make out. Mostly it’s yet another found-footage style scenario where it’s really hard not to question why someone would be filming when their life is on the line.

There are elements of Ejecta that work, mostly that for at least a little under half the film it manages to pique curiosity and certainly has a florid visual aesthetic, but the distraction of enormous holes in the key characters keeps one from actual enjoyment of the film. If they’d angled to be more of a horror than a sci-fi, it would be easier to forgive. Chris Nolan and his ilk are proving audiences like smarter sci-fi and with something as outdone as alien films, the need is even greater to hold interest. Ejecta orbits close to amusing, but never lands.

In theaters and on VOD Friday Feb. 27th

War, what is it good for? Well, apparently for a generally reliable genre of film in which to insert characters and hope the lofty setting alone will garner some respect. Except if wars have happened since the dawn of man, then the devices of this genre have also worn some heavy grooves over time, and Alien Outpost slips into every one of them. Thoroughly confused how what you assumed to be a sci-fi film is actually a clichéd army film? My bewilderment mirrored yours, believe me.  Alien Outpost is an almost disrespectful war mockumentary with a smidgen of sci-fi.

Granted, taking this sort of film all that seriously is to put too much effort into the whole affair, but the level at which the film abuses war stereotypes is hard to ignore when not much else is happening on-screen. The film, directed by effects guru Jabbar Raisani, is shot documentary style (though with an inordinately unbelievable amount of good angles and coverage, if you get distracted by things like that, as I do) and provides insight into the lives of the soldiers placed at Outpost 37 in the year 2031. It’s been 10 years since aliens invaded earth, wreaking mass destruction and death. A brief montage of news clips and narration clue us in on the history of the initial attack and mankind’s fight back. We chased them away, but a few stayed on earth, hanging out in a demilitarized zone in the middle east. This is where Outpost 37 lies.

The men of the outpost are each given screen time (on a sound stage strangely enough, no explanation provided) to be interviewed and offer some back story. Each of them seems to represent some sort of soldier cliché. The one attached to his mother. The one who fights for his fallen brother. The ones representing their home countries proudly. The jokester. The two besties who went through boot camp together. Everyone has a nickname and everyone thinks—despite the almost constant state of attack they are under—that the whole thing is a fun excuse to shoot some ammo. Other than these brief interviews, and a few scenes making sure we understand how casual and buddy-buddy the soldiers are—except their leader, General Dane (Adrian Paul), who is of course always intimidatingly serious—the film is almost entirely a shaking camera of gun fire and men with bazookas, machine guns, and in other modes of military combat.

There are too many characters to really learn anyone’s name, but the losses come soon and often, without much incentive to mourn them. Within all this chaos one would think there’d be plenty of sci-fi action as well, however the armored aliens, or “Heavies” as they are called, appear on-screen midway through the film and then pop up sporadically and with hardly a straightforward look as the camera throughout the film is as shaky as they could possibly make it. I will say what we do see of the aliens is quite impressive. As visual effects supervisor for Game of Thrones, and plenty of other effects experience under his belt, Raisani stretches his budget and the glimpses we get are noteworthy. But he does the film (and his own skills) a huge disservice not giving us more. A rushed ending provides some spectacular visuals, but the plot is so confusing and goes so quickly it’s hard to focus long enough to appreciate it. Clearly Raisani did not understand who his main subject ought to have been.

There are a couple of so-called plot twists, but with so little investment they too seem to get lost in the jostle and action. The film seems determined not to be a big metaphor for Middle Eastern warfare, to the extent of overstating just how much the locals in the area are also at the mercy of the Heavies, and yet first-time writers Blake Clifton and Raisani chose just such a location. In all the world of places aliens could hole up, it feels distinctly contrived.

All in all those looking for an adrenaline fueled action sci-fi film will undoubtedly be bored by the constant interruption of the documentary film and the serious lack of aliens. Those looking for an innovative war film with an interesting new enemy will be nauseated by the constant sway of the well-manned, documentary crew’s cameras. Whatever target Alien Outpost was aiming for, it missed entirely. A surprising feat with such considerable ammo.

Alien Outpost releases in select theaters on Friday, January 30th.

Spanning the farthest reaches of time and space, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar will show you worlds so wondrous you’ll feel the floor fall out from under you and the breath leave your lungs. It’s an experiential, transportive sci-fi film that’s even more spectacular than advertised. The film is made a mess of, however, by a clunky and scatterbrained plot. Nolan burrows deeper than ever into his creativity to build an epic journey into the stars, but more of that energy could have been devoted to making his on-screen explorers, their relationships, and their internal struggles, as inventive and sharply-executed as the visuals. Still, you’ll be floored by Nolan’s outer-space opus, its imagery overwhelming in scope and wonder, its ambition boundless. This is a worthy moviegoing experience, despite its flaws.

Oh, the amazing things you’ll see: alien tidal waves thousands of feet high; planets where time itself gets bent and stretched beyond all recognition; clouds frozen into floating ice chunks; a black hole that looks unlike anything I’ve seen on film. But before shooting off to the edge of the galaxy, the story begins on the ground, in the dirt, on a farm owned by a country-bred former astronaut named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). He’s raised a brainy daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and a son, Tom (Timothee Chalamet), with his caring, wise father-in-law (John Lithgow). Earth is plagued by parasitic dust storms called “The Blight” that have ravaged the planet of her crops and diminished the global food supply to frightening lows.

One day, Murph discovers a gravitational anomaly in her bedroom she claims is the doing of “her ghost”, who’s allegedly also been pushing books off her bookshelf. Following clues extrapolated from the anomaly, Cooper and Murph end up at a secret NASA compound where they find Cooper’s old mentor, Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), who consequently needs him to lead a mission through a wormhole near Saturn to track down a team of previous explorers who were tasked with finding a new home planet for the human race. His crew mates are Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), snarky scientist Doyle (Wes Bentley), the jittery but brilliant Romilly (David Gyasi), and a walking homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a talking robot named TARS who looks like a mobile version of the monolith from Kubrick’s masterpiece. Cooper accepts the mission, and doesn’t know when he’ll be able to return to little Murph, who’s resentful and torn to pieces. Nolan cleverly pairs the image of Cooper speeding away from the farm in his truck, kicking up a trail of dust, with audio from a space shuttle countdown and liftoff, a shining example of his audacious filmmaking style.

The plot is rooted in complex physics, metaphysics, relativity, and other concepts richer than the average moviegoer is used to. Nolan and his co-writer and brother, Jonathan Nolan, must have been terrified audiences wouldn’t be able to keep up, because the dialogue is so over-explicated and reiterative (if they reference Murphy’s Law one more god damn time…) your ears will turn beet red. If clarification was the objective, the Nolans achieve the opposite; the incessant exposition and space-time mumbo-jumbo only make things more complicated, and the heady concepts swirling above it all only add to the confusion.

Cluttered as it is, the script poses some fascinating scenarios. A great example is the aforementioned time-bending planet, whose proximity to a black hole means that for every hour Cooper and his team spend on its surface, 7 years pass for everyone else on earth. An unforeseen accident that extends the team’s stay on the planet leads to the film’s most devastating scene, in which Cooper returns to the ship, opens his video mailbox, and discovers the severe consequences of his mistake. McConaughey, convulsing and drowned in tears, breaks your heart. This portion of the film is terrific, because it’s a case in which the big, bombastic on-screen action dovetails perfectly into a moment of raw human emotion. It clicks, and it’s divine.

An older Murph is played by Jessica Chastain, whose poise as an actor makes her the film’s second-biggest boon, next to McConaughey. Cooper and Murph’s inter-dimensional father-daughter relationship is the glue that binds the film, which otherwise would feel like a collection of unrelated sci-fi short stories. Matt Damon enters the fold at around the halfway mark as one of the original astronaut explorers, adding a welcome layer of mystery to the proceedings. Bill Irwin, who voices TARS without an inkling of robotic inflection, lends the film a surprisingly significant amount of warmth and humor. What’s frustrating, though, is that 50 percent or more of the actors’ dialogue seems to be fixated on tiresome exposition, Hathaway being the prime victim of this design choice. She tries valiantly to emote, but labyrinthine chatter about space-travel mechanics constantly gets in her way.

Where the film threatens to fall apart is in its final act, a prosaic series of events sorely lacking finesse. Nolan’s finales often come off as emotionally cold or overwrought because he’s so self-serious and obsessed with juggling pathos, plot twists, philosophy, and mind-bending visuals all at once. Interstellar is sadly no exception, with a climax so disorganized that you’re frantically trying to shuffle things around in your head to make sense of it all, too preoccupied with deciphering logistics to feel the full impact of Nolan’s message, which he means to be poignant, but ultimately thuds. The shame is, the message is a beautiful one, in which we’re asked to consider the preciousness of the time we have with our family, and confront the inevitability that one day, we will all drift apart into eternity. I was ultimately touched by the heart of the story; I just wish I didn’t have to shove so much space junk out of the way to get there.

Nolan shot Interstellar in 35mm, VistaVision, and IMAX 70mm, which gives the breathtaking imagery a sort of dirtiness and inelegance that fits the story well, while sufficiently supporting the grandiosity of his vision. The mind-boggling proposition of visually representing four or more dimensions on-screen has always been fascinating to me, and Nolan and his team (including Her cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema) have concocted the most awe-inspiring version I’ve seen. It’s encouraging to see a big budget supporting such an artful, sincere endeavor. Flying under the radar, surprisingly, is Hans Zimmer, whose tasteful, nuanced score is one of his best, floating in and out of scenes fluidly and emphasizing only when appropriate. His notorious blaring, thrummy horns are replaced by sensitive, heavenly organs, which is a saving grace, because the last thing Interstellar needs is more chaos to further obstruct its purpose.

Interstellar trailer

The styles of post-apocalyptic sci-fi and dustbowl Western collide in Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones, a tragic, imaginative story of a family struggling to survive in a dry world where water is as hard to find as virtue. Michael Shannon stars as Earnest Holm, a survivor and a farmer doing his best to raise his children Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning) the right way, though a handsome scoundrel named Flem (Nicholas Hoult) threatens to take everything Earnest has left.

In our chat with Jake we discuss the myriad inspirations he took for the film, bringing robot dogs to life, how the film isn’t technically post-apocalyptic, the great Michael Shannon, and much more.

How long has the idea for this film been in your head? It’s pretty unique.
Jake: Oh gosh, a long time. It’s been, like, five years from beginning to now. Initially, it really started with the father-son love story and wanting to explore that. There’s a lot of my dad in the Earnest character. He died young, and I hadn’t written anything about him. I wanted to see what that would feel like. It felt sort of sweet and nice, but also dark and tragic. It started there. I reread the S.E. Hinton books–The Outsiders, Rumble Fish–and I really wanted to do a story about kids in an environment like this, sort of imagining what a science fiction book written like her would be like. I approached it like an adaptation of an S.E. Hinton science fiction story. Those don’t exist, but I was imagining that. I wanted to keep those literary devices in the movie so that it wouldn’t feel realistic, in a funny way. I feel like I was trying to find the fine line between making it naturalistic but not realistic.

There’s a fun mixture of sci-fi post-apocalypse and Western in the film that works very well.
Jake: To me, the film isn’t post-apocalyptic at all. It’s an environmental disaster, a man-made thing. It’s an extrapolation of something we’re dealing with right now in California. When you bring the politics of how we got here into it, it’s not that implausible that we could end up in a situation like that. It’s not like the entire world is in drought, it’s just this area. In the urban cities in this movie, people are falling in love with their operating systems and have perfectly functioning lives. But the people who don’t have a lot of money and are suffering the worst of these environmental calamities are the people we’re focusing on in this movie.

I love independent sci-fi movies because it forces filmmakers to be disciplined about their special effects. I love the way you implemented yours.
Jake: Thank you. We really had to prepare to ensure we could get this finished with a very low budget. At the same time, I wanted to have ILM-level visual effects, which I think we achieved.

Talk about that robot. It’s an incredibly convincing creation.
Jake: It was inspired by the Boston Dynamics robot Big Dog. When I first got the idea for the movie, I saw that video, and it had such an emotional quality without being alive. There was something about it…I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was very emotional. I got really excited about putting it in the movie, and I spent time with people at Boston Dynamics. We really did try to make it work so that Big Dog was in the movie, but they had a lot going on, so it wasn’t really possible at the time. The way we did it was, it was part puppetry and part CGI. The thing that I really wanted to achieve most was the effect where the actors could really put their hands on it and it wouldn’t all feel like it was just an animated foreground effect. We were able to do that.

It was bugging me. I kept trying to figure out whether what I was seeing was practical or CG, and it was pretty much impossible.
Jake: Thank you.

Michael Shannon and Kodi Smit-McPhee are great together.
Jake: My favorite scene is when they’re taking apart the defunct water well and they start play fighting, which is sort of very rough. That’s something that comes from my dad, and I really liked that. It’s a personal thing, and they did it so perfectly. Kodi shows how scrappy that character is, and Mike is so good at playing this compassionate tough guy. That’s probably my favorite moment between them.

I was impressed with Nicholas Hoult because he’s such a likable guy when you see him, but he plays a great villain in your film.
Jake: The character is so complex, and I think that’s a great testament to Nick. I think he made Flem infinitely more complex than he was on the page. Flem was written as a more traditional bad guy, and as we tailored it to him, he brought a complexity to it that made it much better.

You said that this film is a very personal one, a lot of it inspired by your late father. Is that a comfortable thing to do?
Jake: There’s a difference between personal and autobiographical. There’s nothing in the movie that’s autobiographical at all. But there are moments and emotions that I feel close to. When you’re making a movie, there is an element that should be personal and should be confessional. I’ve always gravitated toward those kinds of films as a fan. I just do that intuitively as a filmmaker I guess.

Young Ones is for fans of…what? Who would you recommend it to?
Jake: I like lots of different things. I wouldn’t limit it to film fans. A big part of what I built this movie from is my love of anime and manga comics. Neon Genesis Evangelion was one that always meant a lot to me. A lot of inspiration for Jerome and Ears, the girl across the border is His and Her Circumstances, which is a great anime that I really like. There are a lot of people out there that like sci-fi movies, but also find themselves surprised by these character-based things. I think our film falls into this place where you can have the experience of a genre picture, but at its core, it deals with some larger, interpersonal family issues, and not in a pandering or sentimental way at all.

Speaking of not pandering, you leave a lot to the imagination and make us work a bit as an audience.
Jake: I feel like there are certain things we rely on in certain kinds of movies that move away from authenticity. For me, as an audience member, when I see those things, it loses me on the things I do love about it. An example in this movie would be that the end of the movie isn’t Jerome and Ears getting together. That romantic experience of going across the border and meeting the girl that his father mentioned…that’s enough. It always makes me think of Citizen Kane. At the beginning, he says, “I saw a woman through the window of a subway 50 years ago, and not a month in my life goes by that I don’t think about her.” Those moments in our lives are so monumental that it doesn’t need to culminate in marriage or sex. It can just be a meeting or flirtation that stays with you for the rest of your life. For me, that has an emotional relevance that means something to me. In most movies, the reward for this boy going through all this hardship would be for him to get the girl. That’s stuff that I don’t really gravitate toward.

There’s a great visual arc to the film. At first, we’re in a dry, sun-drenched desert, but later in the movie we see an urban environment that feels like a new world.
Jake: Yes, that urban environment is to show that there’s this commercial prosperity in the state next door, that they’re not suffering the way the Holm family is. We talked about the stages of hydration within the environment. Obviously everybody is really suffering at the beginning of the film and sort of dehydrated, and that adds to this heightened emotional state. The idea is, the first stage of the water pumping is this artificial stage where one of these aqueducts has been run toward the farm, so there’s water to irrigate a small portion of the land. There’s water to bathe and water to drink, so we start to see a vibrancy in the skin and in the land they live on. But when the rain starts falling, we can start brining reed clothes into it. We follow an organic way to bring a lushness into the film.

I look forward to your next feature, but I hope we don’t have to wait so long in between!
Jake: Me too. This one took much too long. I definitely won’t be letting that happen again. I’m working on my next project now, and it’s in this same vein, but in a more urban environment. It’s around a similar time frame and has a science fiction element to it. It’s maybe in some ways even more ambitious. I hope to have it finished as soon as possible.

A tragic tale of a farmer, his children, a swindler, and a robot donkey…thing, Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones is a unique film that’ll make you smile with its inventive mixture of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, and western milieus, though its characters and their melodramatic lives aren’t quite as compelling. You get the sense that Paltrow really opened his creative floodgates and poured all of the things he geeks out about onto the screen, from anime to Bergman to John Ford, a beautiful approach more filmmakers would be smart to adopt, quite frankly. Had there just been a little more discipline in the writing, the film would have been a more noteworthy work, though cult status could very well be in Young Ones‘ future.

The film is set sometime in the near future where the earth has balanced our leaps forward in technology with a crippling drought that’s rendered much of the world a veritable wasteland where starving nomads kill for jugs of water. Though the setting isn’t technically post-apocalyptic (there are thriving, lit-up cities dotting the arid landscape) our story (mostly) operates within the post-apocalyptic rubric. Top-billed star Michael Shannon plays Earnest Holm, who raises his children Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning) on a farm that’s barely fit to keep them alive and fed, let alone turn a profit. Their mouths and wallets are parched, and the’ve just lost the family donkey, which they used to transport bottles of booze Earnest brews and sells to keep the family afloat.

It’s dark days for the Holm family, not just because they’re scraping by, but because they’re a house divided. Earnest has a strong bond with Jerome, who soaks up his dad’s life lessons like a sponge, but Mary is staunchly defiant, her disdain for her father stemming from his sordid past. Years ago, Earnest got drunk and crashed his car, paralyzing Mary and Jerome’s mother (Aimee Mullins), who can now only walk with the assistance of a bionic spine and lives at a rehabilitation center. Though Earnest has a reputation as a good man, all Mary sees is the drunk who tore their family apart. To Earnest’s chagrin, Mary dates a handsome, motorcycle-riding scoundrel named Flem (Nicholas Hoult), who through small deceptions weasels his way into the Holm family and threatens to take everything Earnest has worked so hard to protect.

Had the film been made to stand solely on its narrative legs it would topple over in a quick minute. Though the backstabbing, secrets, and underhanded maneuvering harkens back to old-school Western melodramas, the story feels more rudimentary than classic. What gives Young Ones its real value is its style, which has cinematographer Giles Nuttgens capturing the cruel beauty of the outstretched, dry landscapes. Special effects are used sparingly and tastefully, with the Holms’ replacement for their donkey, a load-carrying robot with four long metal legs, being the most pervading visual flourish. It’s genuinely difficult to discern shot to shot whether the robot is physically there or rendered by computers (when you think it’s CGI, someone will place their hand on it), which is makes it the best kind of visual trick.

The four-legged hunk of metal is also surprisingly one of the film’s key characters. It plays an important role in the film’s most pivotal scene, but there’s more to it than that. Much like the titular donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, the robot has no inner thoughts to speak of, and is there only as an innocent, silent witness to the evils of human nature. There’s an inherent sympathy that comes with its dog-like appearance and mannerisms, especially as we see its legs buckle as it’s kicked and beaten by its owners. But unlike Balthazar, the robot gets a measure of revenge on its prime abuser (its built-in, always-on camera comes into play), though to say a thoughtless work-bot is capable of vengeance is a bit of a stretch. We may project the revenge storyline ourselves, but it’s no less satisfying.

The performances are generally very good, with Shannon anchoring the film with his stripped-down, nuanced turn as the Holms’ patriarch. He plays the gun-toting former drunk like a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment, and while he isn’t afraid to take a life for his family (a toughness we see on full display in the film’s grisly opening moments), he also has a tender rapport with the scrappy Jerome. Smit-Mcphee, who’s subtle yet deceptively emotive, has great chemistry with Hoult, who’s a great villain despite being known to play more likable characters very well. Fanning is a fine young actress, but she isn’t done justice with the role of Mary, who feels one-dimensional and slightly objectified.

What’s most enjoyable and impressive about Paltrow’s sophomore effort is how well he blends his homages to other films into a cohesive vision. From on-screen titles dividing the film into three chapters; to the actors posing in front of a curtain and looking straight into the camera for the closing credits; to the brief glimpse of a futuristic city that recalls the kookier side of mainstream sci-fi, we see countless influences, old-fashioned and contemporary, and they’re all a treat for the eyes and ears. If the characters’ journeys were as innovative as the aesthetics, Paltrow would have had a career-defining masterpiece on his hands.

Young Ones trailer

Sci-fi thriller Automata’s obvious parallel – so obvious that it has dominated press publicity — is with I, Robot, both the film and the Isaac Asimov novel it was adapted from. But it is instructive to consider where the two works deviate. Automata is a flawed film, but it succeeds – or, at least, tries to succeed – in a number of places where the I, Robot film fails significantly.

Automata starts in a similar setting to its film twin, establishing a dystopian future where automatons have become an essential, natural part of human life. Additionally, the film also has these robots start to slowly gain consciousness – to the simultaneous fear and puzzlement of the humans. The robots are governed by a set of protocols that are highly reminiscent of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Robots can’t intentionally cause harm to humans and they can’t alter themselves or other robots. Automata’s central dramatic tension arises out of the robots somehow finding a way to avoid following the latter of these two rules.

I, Robot used a similar premise to create an action film, featuring Will Smith as the hero who wards off a robot uprising. Automata has its moments of action, but it’s more fundamentally philosophical. As directed by Gabe Ibáñez, and written by Ibáñez, Igor Legarreta, and Javier Sánchez Donate, Automata has Big Questions to pose about identity, technology, and humanity.

Granted, the film poses these questions in blunt, on-the-nose ways. There are too many elements that exist purely as reductive symbolism. Protagonist Jacq Vaucan’s (Antonio Banderas) wife (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) is pregnant with a child who represents hope for humanity’s future and fear of our inescapable decline. Dialogue like “Life finds a way” or “Self-repairing implies some kind of conscience,” painfully underline the themes of the film – themes that are fairly easy to discern even without the extra nudge. But, that said, these themes remain interesting even if they feel a little overdrawn. The multiplex is lacking in not only good science fiction, but is sci-fi without any original ideas or relative ambition. It is to the film’s credit that its ambitions fall short of its grasp, rather than never being there in the first place.

This begins with the narrative tact the film takes to contextualize these themes. Solar storms have destroyed the majority of humanity and turned the Earth’s surface into an inhospitable, radioactive desert. The robots have been created in order to build and maintain barriers and defenses for one of Earth’s last remaining cities. The company that has constructed the robots, ROC Robotics, has come to dominate society, and outside of its workers and shareholders, humanity lives just above the poverty line. This has been exacerbated by humanity’s exponential reliance on the company’s robots. The robots have insinuated themselves into all elements of human life, making it difficult to survive without owning one.

Jacq Vaucan works as an insurance agent for the company. He investigates possible criminal activity related to the robots. Some of this turns out to be people lying to get a desperately needed cash payout, but increasingly Jacq finds himself dealing with inexplicable cases where manipulated robots attack humans. Jacq plays a Rick Deckard-like role — a cynical and skeptical man thrown into a complicated investigation of rogue robots, revealing dark truths about human limitations.

Automata borrows heavily from Blade Runner for much of its visual design. Its cityscape is a dark, crowded tangle: equal parts grime, smoke, and neon glow. The way Ibáñez, specifically, films the city at night heavily evokes Ridley Scott’s vision, sleek and luminous yet sinister – especially in regards to the famous shots of Deckard in a ship flying past the skyscrapers and digital billboards. The films of Neill Blomkamp appear to be another source of visual inspiration. Beside the class divides that connects their works, the other noticeable parallel is the gritty, burnt-out way Ibáñez shoots the film.

Ibáñez’s visual sensibility is easily the film’s best feature. Ibáñez began his career as an animator, primarily for a few gruesome films —The Day of the Beast deals with cannibalism and the anti-Christ, among other things – and it shows. The film looks really good, especially for its estimated budget of $15 million. It has polish and even manages some grandeur. But Ibáñez is also able to imbue wonderful, idiosyncratic touches – like an indistinguishable Dylan McDermott as a corrupt cop straight out of some pulp novel.

These notable flourishes often come from the film existing in a post-apocalyptic world with a regression in technology. That requires the robots to be advanced but also slightly retrograde. Their design is wonderful. They are slow and clunky, and they don’t have proper faces, just two lights to suggest eyes. Ibáñez allows us to see their full movement – in a manner not quite seen since Pacific Rim. Their voices come out like the speech generating device that Stephen Hawking is known for. Even Javier Bardem, who plays an important robot credited as Blue Robot, has his voice made somewhat unrecognizable.

In the early proceedings, the film does some nice world building, filling it with all sorts of these weird, specific touches. It’s here where the film uses a subtler, gentler hand in depicting just how similar the robots and humans are. Robots exist in all corners of this place and in all various manners of ways. There are homeless robots, robot beggars, disabled robots. There are even robot prostitutes in brothels created to satiate humanity’s odd fetishes.

This last robot, Cleo (voiced by Melanie Griffith), is eventually retrofitted by Dra. Dupre (also played by Griffith) with technology Jacq discovers from altered, self-aware robots. Late in the film, Cleo saves Jacq’s life and brings him into the desert surrounding the city. The second half of the film finds Jacq crossing the desert with reconfigured robots. This is where the film decidedly slags. Ibáñez plays up how long and miserable the journey is for Jacq, who is in such bad physical condition that he needs to be dragged by the robots in a former car-seat. This probably goes on longer than it needs to.

It’s here where being the thoughtful man’s I, Robot does a disservice to Automata. The film wants to be both philosophical and thrilling, and doesn’t always quite know how to effectively split the difference. It’s never exciting enough to make up for how simplistic it feels and it isn’t insightful or contemplative enough to smooth over how lacking in action it is. There are some interesting ideas being considered here, but they are no more compelling or complexly engaged than their uncited, but not-so-secret, source material.

Automata trailer

Terry Gilliam is no stranger to absurd dystopian science-fiction films. His best work came early in his career with films like Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, and his latest film The Zero Theorem feels like an extension to those titles. Written by a creative writing teacher from the University of Central Florida (Pat Rushin), The Zero Theorem takes a satirical stab at a dystopian future — mocking big government, commercialization, our fascination with always being connected, and even the meaning of life itself. Unfortunately, the outcome is neither as funny nor fascinating as it should be, though after a decade of disappointment from the filmmaker it’s at least a step in the right direction.

Set in an Orwellian future, an introvert computer hacker Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) attempts to convince Management (played by a white-haired Matt Damon) for the opportunity to work from home, claiming he would double his work output. Though efficiency isn’t the real reason Qohen is so adamant about working from home. It’s actually so that he won’t miss an important phone call from a mysterious party (for reasons not explained until later). Management compromises by letting him work from home as long as he spends his time solving the equation for the meaning of life, aka Zero Theorem. Only in a Gilliam film is finding the meaning of life a difficult task and not an impossible one. But Qohen is willing to accept this challenge.

Frequent interruptions prevent the recluse from making any breakthroughs on Zero Theorem. Perhaps none more distracting than the beautiful bombshell Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), who shows up at his door after meeting him at a party. She is easily attracted to him, for no reason other than to move the plot forward, and her character has as much depth as a blank canvas. Bainsley distracts him from his work so much that Management sends his cocky whiz-kid son Bob (Lucas Hedges) to help keep Qohen focused on the task at hand.

For a film with such high concepts and philosophies, The Zero Theorem has some serious logic flaws. It’s unfitting that Management doesn’t enforce any rules despite showing authority. Especially considering Qohen is constantly under surveillance by cameras in his home and follows orders from Management. But for some reason the computer genius gets the luxury of deciding to keep working on a never-ending math problem or calling it quits for a beautiful woman. Which seems like a no-brainer, even for a dim-witted person like myself. Putting logic aside, the major themes of the film involving how life is both meaningful and meaningless are successfully carried out. Just don’t expect it to make a lot of sense.

Although the writing is uneven, the acting on the other hand is an area in which The Zero Theorem excels. Most of the weight is put on the shoulders of Christoph Waltz and as usual he handles the load with ease. His portrayal of an isolated computer genius on the verge of a mental breakdown is divine. The young Hedges serves as a solid companion to Waltz, bringing a lot of the same eccentric energy to his character that Brad Pitt did in Twelve Monkeys. Both Matt Damon and Tilda Sinwton are barely on-screen enough to call for much discussion, but do well with their limited screen time. Mélanie Thierry was doomed from the start as her character is so poorly written as a glorified “booth babe”, simply eye-candy with little substance.

It’s unfortunate most of The Zero Theorem takes place indoors because when the film ventures outside, a beautiful fantasy world is brought to life. In Gilliam’s vision of the future, smart cars zip down streets lined with people wearing bright neon colors, with large electronic billboards far and wide. All of the energy and flashing colors from the city is completely unlike the dark and claustrophobic dungeon where Qohen spends most of his time. On top of the gorgeous production design, Gilliam employs his signature off-kilter camera angles to emphasis the satire bend and circus-like theatrics.

Unfortunately, The Zero Theorem lands in the middle of the road in terms of Gilliam’s work. The film doesn’t reach the levels that Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Twelve Monkeys did, though it easily surpasses his most recent efforts in Tideland and The Brothers Grimm. The Zero Theorem stumbles not for a lack of ambition, but a misfiring of good ideas ultimately stretched too thin. Ironically, The Zero Theorem preaches everything while trying to convince the audience that the film actually amounts to something.

In anticipation of Jodorowsky’s Dune being released on Blu-ray and digital on July 8th, we spoke with director Frank Pavich about his gripping documentary, which explores the eponymous French-Cilean director’s doomed attempt to bring his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi novel to the big screen.

In our chat, Pavich speaks about Jodorowsky’s natural magnetism, the bonus material we can expect to find on the Blu-ray, the incredible animated storyboard sequences in the film, an alternate universe in which Jodorowsky’s Dune made it to theaters, and much more.

Own Jodorowsky’s Dune on Blu-ray and digital on July 8th.

Although Dune never got made, I’m glad it led to this film being made, because Jodorowsky is such a fantastic documentary subject! I could listen to him talk for days.

Frank: He’s one of a kind, for sure. We’re so lucky to have him as the main subject of our film because he’s a natural performer. He’s a trained mime! He studied under Marcel Marceau. Jodorowsky apparently wrote the very famous mime routine of a mime trapped in a clear box trapped in another clear box. He’s this natural storyteller, has great hand movements, and he’s like a cartoon character come to life.

When you hear Jodorowsky say things like, “Dune will be the coming of a God,” what was your reaction? Were you fascinated? A little spooked?

Frank: It was more than we ever could have wished for. The whole, “Dune will be the coming of a God,” was actually the very first thing we recorded him saying. When we first sat him down to record, he said, “I want to give you a prologue!” He went into this five minute spiel. “First I made El Topo, then I made Holy Mountain, and then I wanted to make Dune, and I wanted it to be an LSD trip without dropping acid!” We couldn’t believe we were actually getting it on tape! Me and my crew packed up our gear, walked to the sidewalk, looked at each other and said, “Oh my god! Can you believe how amazing this film is going to be!” We had no idea how magnetic he was going to be, so we were overjoyed.

I shudder to think of the process of cutting out of the movie a lot of the things he had to say, because I’m sure it was all mind-blowing.

Frank: Thanks to the modern invention of DVD and Blu-ray, you get to include those gems that couldn’t fit into the narrative structure of the film. Thank god we have all this fun bonus material we actually get to share with people. Once you watch the movie, how could you not be in love with him? You want to watch another hour and a half of him. Another three hours. Another ten hours! Who wouldn’t want to see that? We wanted to give a little more footage of this incredible person and the amazing, sometimes controversial things that come out of his mouth.

Talk a bit more about what’s on the disc for people who are going to pick it up.

Frank: Some of it is essentially deleted scenes, like an animated sequence or two that we trimmed out. Most of it is stuff we cut together from the raw footage specifically for the DVD and Blu-ray release. There’s Jodorowsky espousing his thoughts on religion or his thoughts on the Hollywood machine or filmmaking in general. We just sort of let him talk. Our interviews were conversations between me and him. Sometimes you hear my voice in there, but it’s really just him giving his philosophical ideas on so many different aspects on life and art.

I love the animated sequences in the film.

Frank: I knew right when I had the idea to make this movie that the artwork was the key piece of the film. That’s what makes it an interesting story. He and his team of “spiritual warriors” spent two years in Paris making all these designs, storyboarding the film, doing costume designs…all this stuff. We knew once we saw the storyboards that they had to be brought to life in animation. The audience needs to see his vision moving, giving them an idea of what the film might look like. I asked an artist friend of mine for a recommendation for an animator. He said, “There’s one person: Syd Garon. He’s the only one you need to speak to.” Once I saw Syd’s work, it was like he was one of my spiritual warriors! I knew he was the right guy for the job.

I really like Syd’s technique, because he can do so many things. He understood that we needed to have a light touch to the animation. What we tried to do was bring Alejandro’s vision to life. We didn’t want to re-do the artwork and make it all CGI. Only Jodorowsky really knows what it would have looked like. The movie exists in his imagination. The power of it is it exists in my imagination, in your imagination, and in all the viewers’ imaginations. We took the very simple, pencil-on-paper drawings and breathed just enough life into them to animate them and kind of lift them off the page. We keep the simplicity in there so you get an idea of what the sequences would look like, and hopefully your imagination is sort of filling in those blanks.

We found this amazing audio interview with Dan O’Bannon, but we had no footage to go with it! We didn’t want to pan over black and white photos, so we thought, let’s just animate it. We gave Syd an idea of what the sequence should be, and he just went to town. One of the crowd-pleasing moments in the film is Dan talking about meeting Jodorowsky for the first time and getting some magical, spiritual marijuana from him and going on this otherworldly trip. It’s hilarious.

Can you imagine an alternate universe in which Dune was completed? What do you think cinema would be like?

Frank: Let’s say that he got to make his film. He completed it, and it was however many hours it was going to be. People wen to go see it in 1976. There are two ways it could have gone: It could have been a huge success, thereby changing the timeline of movies forever, or it could have been a huge disaster, thereby also transforming the timeline of movies forever. If the first true space opera had been Jodorowsky’s Dune and not Star Wars and it had been a success, what would have happened? Would the major studios have looked at themselves and said, “We need to give more money to the next drugged out, trippy, spiritual movie made by a completely unique artist”? I think we’d be having more avant-garde, larger budgeted films. If his film had been a disaster, the biggest one ever, how would that have changed the world? Fox was already iffy on Star Wars, and science fiction was unproven as producing money-making films. Had Dune come out and been a failure, Fox might have pulled the plug on Star Wars. Where would we be without Star Wars? Would we have these big tentpole superhero movies? The different realities that could have existed are incredible.

James Ward Byrkit’s resume doesn’t do much to explain his first feature. With a smattering of shorts, video game writing, and storyboard artistry as his only experience, it’s understandable why he might choose what would seem the easy route for a first film — hand-held cameras and mostly improvised dialogue — but why he went with an incredibly convoluted, confusing, and theoretically complex story is as mysterious as his film.

In the first of many blurred lines, the characters of Coherence, for the most part, have names that are quite close to those of the actors playing them. Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and Lee (Lorene Scafaria) host their friends for a dinner party one evening. Em (Emily Foxler) is the first to show up. She’s in the midst of making a huge decision regarding her future with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling), who arrives shortly after she does. Causing some unease is Amir (Alex Manugian, who co-wrote the story) who is bringing with him Laurie (Lauren Maher), who once dated Kevin. Rounding out the group is Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), an enlightened sort of soul, sharing her thoughts on feng shui and bringing with her a homemade tranquilizer of sorts which she offers to her friends, and her partner Hugh (Hugo Armstrong).

Once all assembled the group makes their way through dinner, often talking loudly over one another, having secondary conversations and generally acting like a bunch of actors who are all vying for the spotlight. It’s supposed to seem natural, but ends up feeling a bit chaotic. Luckily, at times Byrkit allows one or two to lead the conversation and the beginnings of a plot emerge. After several of them experience strange cell phone behavior, Em chimes in about a comet passing over the earth. When the power goes out suddenly and the only house in the neighborhood with lights is two blocks up, the real twists begin to emerge. Amir and Hugh offer to check out the lit-up house, taking with them blue glow sticks. The others, tensions rising among their already fragile group, are frightened by a knock on the door by an unknown person. When the two men return with a box and a cut on Hugh’s head, the film starts to expertly set up a complicated story. Inside the box are pictures of each of them, with numbers written on the back, and one of the pictures could only have been taken that evening. More horrifying is that Hugh claims with certainty that what he saw in the house was themselves, in the same place, having the same dinner party.

Questions of time and space begin to emerge, and when Hugh conveniently mentions a theory that might explain their situation (a little quantum mechanics knowledge that his eccentric brother just happened to think may come in handy) he propounds that they may be in a Schrödinger’s cat situation. This theory supporting the idea that within a scenario (the dinner party) there exists several possibilities, and in this case that the comet may be allowing these other possibilities or realities to exist simultaneously, with only one of them emerging once the comet passes. It’s a stretch, but an interesting one. Where the film starts to fall apart is the individual reactions the characters have to this potential explanation. First, that they all seem to accept that this is indeed what’s happening. Second, that they are now somehow in competition with the alternate reality playing out down the street. A plan to sabotage the other group comes into play, though they soon discover there are more complicated details to consider, and when trying to best a group of people who think exactly as you do, it’s a well-matched feat.

The film relies heavily on the paranoia of its characters, which goes a fair distance to keep up tension. Eventually the bad decisions of its characters, and perhaps the fact that there are so many of them to keep track of, makes it hard to care too deeply for them. Em is the clear main character and the only one allowed some real follow-through in her storyline. This situational paradox a heavy lesson just to prove she hesitates too much in making major life decisions.

Even those with a perfunctory understanding of Schrödinger’s cat theory (which includes myself) will wonder at the ending. Likely, any quantum mechanic in the crowd would find it scientifically lacking. Luckily, it is just a theory, but even when loosely applied Byrkit hasn’t filled in the gaps of the show’s science-fiction elements enough to make it ultimately convincing. The film starts off scattered, narrows its focus when the plot picks up enough to piqué real interest, but ultimately loses that interest just as quickly as it loses its viewers’ last threads of comprehension.

Mike (played by Brendon, whom audiences will mostly recognize from the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer) discusses his acting career at one point with Laurie, mentioning that he once starred in the series Roswell. A hint at the character’s alternate reality existence from the onset? Perhaps. The film can get as meta as it wants, and hold out hope that in some parallel reality it balances its indie sci-fi twists to better effect.

Dangled before us since early last year, Terry Gilliam’s highly anticipated next film The Zero Theorem has a new international trailer that continues to tantalize us. With a vague “Summer 2014” expected US release, the film follows Qohen Leth, played by a very pale and bald Cristoph Waltz, an existentially angst riddled man in an Orwellian future. Qohen is a reclusive computer genius obsessed with his task of uncovering the meaning of life. Unwanted visitors continue to interrupt his progress, including a seductress played by Mélanie Thierry.

David Thewlis, Matt Damon and Tilda Swinton also star. Swinton, playing a character named Dr. Shrink-Rom and sporting a crazy set of fake teeth, proves she can act right through any ridiculous costume. Though it’s hard to remember the  last role she had where she wasn’t playing an on-screen caricature.

At any rate, The Zero Theorem is part of Gilliam’s “Orwellian triptych” which includes his 1985 film Brazil and 1995’s 12 Monkeys. Both of are some of his best work and decidedly better than recent endeavors such as The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Tideland, and I won’t even mention a certain disappointing 2005 fairy tale flick. Glad to see Gilliam back at what he does best.

Check out the new trailer.

International Trailer for The Zero Theorem

This slow, but intriguing film first made its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The increase in indie sci-fi films (read about a few of our favorites) has provoked a sub genre devoted to the subtlety and mystery utilized in sci-fi films, with understated (and under budget) visuals. The Signal uses this same formula, however stretched too thin.

Directed by William Eubanks, whose only other directing credit is for 2011’s Love, the film is about three MIT students road tripping to California. Nic (Brenton Thwaites), who uses forearm crutches to walk and whose consistent dreams of running tell us this wasn’t always the case, is taking his girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) to study in California for a semester. With them is his friend Jonah (Beau Knapp) and as they trek the two are constantly plugged in to their computers, trying to track the hacker, Nomad, who has been harassing them in the cyber world and who brought down servers at MIT, placing the blame on them. When they discover that Nomad’s GPS coordinates are along their route in Nevada, they can’t help but decide to take a detour and face him in person. The coordinates lead them to a seemingly abandoned house in the middle of the desert where things escalate and Nic ends up blacked out. When he wakens in a government institution in a wheelchair and surrounded by workers in space suits, he has to try to piece together what happened and why Haley lies comatose in a nearby room and Jonah is nowhere to be seen, but his voice seems to be coming through the air vent in Nic’s room.

Laurence Fishburne does his best, well, Laurence Fishburne as one of the scientists on Nic’s case, Dr. Wallace Damon. Few actors have perfected slow-speaking poker-faced delivery as well as he has and at many points it wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d pulled out a red pill and a blue pill and offered them to Nic. Dr. Damon asks tortuously enigmatic questions of Nic, answers almost none of his questions, and then just lays it on the table that it appears that Nic and his friends were abducted by aliens and that he and the others have to wear these outdated looking space suits because they fear contamination to whatever Nic and his friends were exposed to.

After getting no answers from the scientists, a few strange occurrences at the compound, and urgent whisperings from Jonah through the air vent that weird things are happening to him, Nic decides to break out with the sleeping Haley. From then on, as the film progresses into one big chase scene, it’s twist after twist revealing the magnitude of their situation as bigger than Nic thought and his sanity and his own body are in jeopardy.

The mysteries pile up throughout the film to the point that it seems there will either be a really surprising and satisfying payoff where all our minds are blown or… not. Unfortunately, The Signal decides that answering the biggest mystery should be enough to satisfy, but the film brings up so many other interesting questions that when it fails to acknowledge them at all the disappointment overshadows the general enjoyment the film had been building up.

It’s more than clear that The Signal‘s writer/director, William Eubank, is first and foremost a cinematographer. The film is visually saturated, relying on epic HFR slow-mo at key points to detract from the obvious plot holes. It’s a really good-looking film, with warm sunsets for romantic flashbacks between Nic and Haley, and blinding bright desert scenes depicting the hopelessness of their current situation. But no amount of pretty can make up for all those unanswered questions and strange editing choices. A scene with a cow featuring a strangely underused Sarah Clarke is never made mention of again. An amazing cameo by Lin Shaye as an enthusiastic gibberish spouting local who gives Nic and Haley a ride, gets hardly any further explanation.

Eubank couldn’t quite see the forest for the trees and has made a film with beautiful pieces that don’t form much of a picture. Some sci-fi enthusiasts will enjoy the open-ended nature of the film and its demand for personal interpretation, but this narrative-driven critic can’t help but see how a little more plot and a few less spectacles could have taken this fun film that much further.

Jonathan Glazer’s otherworldly Under the Skin feels somehow…forbidden. Hyper-artistic movies like this are a rare species, unwelcome in the tentpole Hollywood landscape. And yet, at the center of the film is one of the most recognizable young actresses in the industry, Scarlett Johansson, in one of her best, most sophisticated turns yet as an alien in a woman’s body preying on hapless human males. Entrancing, sensual, and tantalizingly oblique, Under the Skin is evidence of a visionary filmmaker breaking free of cinema conventions like Tarkovsky and Kubrick before him.

Following an expressionistic opening sequence that feels at once gargantuan and microscopic, we’re taken to the urban sprawl of Glasgow, where Johansson (nameless) scans the city streets for men out of a crappy van. Some of the men she attempts to seduce are real-life Glasgow citizens, unable to recognize Johansson under her dark wig and British accent and clueless to the fact that Glazer has fitted the van with small cameras ready to capture the unscripted interactions. Johansson is brilliant, vacant and still when alone and perusing, vivacious and perky when potential victims approach. She offers to give them a ride in her signature sexy rasp–an offer few men would refuse.

Whenever she does manage to successfully ensnare an unwitting chap, she takes him back to a ratty cottage on the edge of town where she disposes of them in a sickly inventive way only someone like Glazer could dream up. Spoilers would be unjust, but what’s certain is that these sequences–the mood, the sights, the sounds–will be burn onto your brain like an exotic tattoo. It’s gruesome and gorgeous. The futuristic, oddly tribal theme music that rings throughout is as terrifyingly catchy as Jaws.

Slowly, something begins to bubble to the surface of our icy huntress, something resembling empathy. A turning point comes in the form of a facially deformed young man, who elicits an unlikely act of kindness out of the once emotionless predator. As Johansson’s character begins to develop new layers of humanity, the film reveals that there are substantive ideas about gender roles, domination, and alienation running underneath all of Glazer’s moodiness and aesthetic texturing. The film, at first perplexing, takes a familiar shape by its third act, matching the evolution (or devolution) of its protagonist perfectly. It’s an out-of-this-world examination of human nature.

Johansson is mesmerizing as a soulless being in a woman’s body, the inverse of her role in Her, in which she played a bodiless, vivacious soul. The role requires her to switch from empty vessel to aggressive seductress on a dime, and she does so effortlessly. Despite there being a healthy amount of dialogue in the film, her performance feels in tune with the silent era, as she tastefully, delicately uses her face–her incredibly emotive eyes in particular–to communicate volumes in a split second. Watching her silently, calmly observe our terrestrial home is eerie and utterly riveting.

Though Glazer clearly revels in everything abstract and amorphous (his background as a music video director is telling), he’s also a director of discipline and control. Never does a scene feel slapped together or strange for strangeness sake; every sequence stimulates not just our senses but our fears and desires.

The amount of story here could easily fit into a short film, but Glazer is a filmmaker more concerned with the “how”. As much as people will likely be bothered with decoding the evasive narrative elements of the film, Under the Skin is all about the experience, about soaking up Glazer’s otherworldly nightmare like a sponge. His third film is a cinematic anomaly, alien in both its subject matter and form, and it’s to be treasured.

Under the Skin trailer

In Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed 1970’s adaptation of the acclaimed sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert, the Chilean-born director–essentially a talking head throughout the film–is more captivating in his musings than most actors are in sweeping, Oscar-bait dramas. It’s delightful to watch Jodorowsky, perpetually impassioned, chronicling the history of the impossibly ambitious production of his mind-altering magnum opus, which ultimately crumbled in his hands and never saw the light of day.

Jodorowsky’s dreams were as big as anybody’s. With Dune, he wanted sober audiences to feel the exact effects of LSD. He wanted to hurtle us through the cosmos in one long shot, blowing Orson Wells’ opening tracking shot in Touch of Evil out of the water. He wanted to open the minds of young people to new frontiers previously unreachable and spark an intellectual revolution. He wanted to fill the screen with gigantic sci-fi creatures that would be hard to film by today’s standards.

He equated his adaptation of Dune to “the coming of a god.”

Egotistical? Maybe. Crazy? Many thought as much. But his passion and self-belief is undeniably fascinating. Despite Herbert’s novel being considered unfilmable at the time, Jodorowsky (now 85 years of age) was never swayed in his desire to bring his vision to light. (In an endearing moment that speaks to Jodorowsky’s character, he admits with a giggle to not having read the book prior to embarking on his filmic quest.) But he needed a team of people just as kooky as him to get the project off the ground. “Spiritual warriors” he called them. French producer Michel Seydoux, a fan of Jodorowsky’s films, particularly the experimental The Holy Mountain, was his primary confidant and the man who got the ball rolling, financially.

Subsequently Jodorowsky wrote the script (in a castle in France, of course), employed the design talents of H.R. Giger comic book artist Jean Giraud (better known as “Mœbius”) to create the look of the film, got Pink Floyd to do the music (after scolding them for eating cheeseburgers at their meeting), and somehow managed to wrangle Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Wells himself for his cast. This was clearly destined to be the most delightfully nutty sci-fi movie of all time.

With the help of Mœbius, Jodorowsky created a beautiful book comprised of gaudy, elaborate costume designs, detailed storyboards, and gorgeous concept art, that essentially laid out his vision of the film in its entirety. These books, of which there are only a handful in existence, were shopped around to studios in lieu of a traditional movie pitch. Despite the impressive presentation of these coffee table film bibles, none of the studios bit, spelling Dune‘s doom.

Is the legend of “the greatest movie never made” a tragedy or triumph? Perhaps it’s both, but Jodorowsky’s Dune director Frank Pavich leans toward the latter. The documentary focuses on Jodorowsky’s brilliance and brio, with his interview segments stealing the show. He looks fondly on the time he spent developing his failed film with his spirit warrior partners. Only once does he shed his smile, letting out a bit of rage as he curses the stupidity of the studio execs who didn’t take a chance on Dune. The cheerful audacity of some of Jodorowsky’s philosophical statements are shocking, especially one in which he likens the creative process to rape.

Also interesting are the sections of Pavich’s film that concern the “what if?” factor. If Jodorowsky was able to pull Dune off, would Star Wars have failed to launch? Pavich animates some of Mœbius’ sketches to give us a taste of what the film would have looked like, a tease that will likely have geeks around the world salivating in their seats. Despite the weirdness and creative ambition of Jodorowsky’s project, Pavich’s storytelling is mostly conventional, laying everything out in a straight line, clean and clear as crystal, a style that doesn’t reflect the giant ambition of its subject matter, but makes sure that Jodorowsky’s strange ideologies and expansive ideas are digestible for wide audiences.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a hopeful documentary, pointing to the fact that Jodorowsky’s unfilmed masterpiece will never be dead in the water, so long as his “how-to” book exists. Jodorowsky himself states in the film that he would be happy for another director to pick up where he left off and bring his creation to life, even if it happens after his passing. In the doc, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn recalls an unforgettable night in which Jodorowsky (a close friend and mentor of his) personally walked him through his famous Dune book page by page, making him one of the only people in the world to have ever “seen”, in a way, Jodorowsky’s masterpiece. Refn seems like a worthy candidate to me…

Jodorowsky’s Dune trailer

This Friday, Divergent drops on the masses, looking to cultivate a the same kind of ravenous YA fan base that made Twilight and Hunger Games so goddamn bankable. (The second installment of Hunger Games I quite liked, proving these kinds of films don’t have to be reduced to cash-grabs.) The Divergent book series has already amassed a gigantic, devoted following, so now it’s just up to the creative minds behind the film to follow through.

We had an opportunity to sit down with two of the stars of the Veronica Roth novel adaptation, Maggie Q, who plays shadowy tattoo artist Tori, and Mekhi Phifer, who dons a badass black jacket as Max, the leader of Dauntless, one of five factions that make up the world of Divergent. Directed by Neil Burger, the film also stars Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Kate Winslet, and Miles Teller.

In the edited press roundtable interview below, the actors spoke to us about how it feels to be involved in such a huge franchise, what characters they’d like to play other than their own, navigating the movie industry as a minority actor, and the importance of saying no to stereotypical roles.

Divergent opens this Friday, March 21 nationwide.

What drew you to the project? Secondly, have you read the books, and do you know the fates of your characters?

Mekhi: First and foremost, in our profession, what draws you into any [project] is not only the people you’re going to potentially be working with, but the quality of the script. That’s first and foremost. Neither one of us knew about Divergent at all. What drew me to it was that it was just good. Then, you have Neil Burger, Kate Winslet, Ashley Judd–all of these other great people in it. It’s hard not to want to be a part of something so special. Then I spoke to my agents and people who knew the series, and they were extremely excited.

Maggie: You have to have faith in their assessment. They’re like, “You don’t understand!” and you’re like, “You’re right! I don’t!”

Mekhi: We sort of pseudo know [the fates of our characters]. We don’t have the script, but things could change. Who knows.

Maggie: Adaptations are funny. It depends.

Mekhi: There’s a certain artistic license we’re taking with the adaptation. It’s not necessarily literal to the book. I’m sort of twisting in the wind. I don’t know what’s happening. (laughs)

Maggie: [As for what drew me to the project,] the script is first and foremost, whether it’s a best-selling book or not. Let’s be honest: there are best-selling books that have been made into movies that are not good. Because adaptations are specific to what they think will work from the book, you kind of have to read the script first and not the book first, to see whether you like the way they’ve adapted it. If you want background, a rooting and education of it, you can turn to the book. We had Veronica Roth on set to help us, too, and it wasn’t a weird thing. It’s [typically] a weird thing to have writers on set: it’s a no-no.

Mekhi: Unless you’re doing TV.

Maggie: Yeah. It’s annoying. But on TV you need them because it’s constantly changing. But on a film that’s a touchy thing.

Mekhi: Usually in film, the [studios] acquire the rights [to the script], and then they say “get out of here” [to the writers].

Maggie: I don’t know how writers don’t jump off buildings. Their work kind of makes it on screen, but it takes a lot of passes. [As for the fates of our characters,] I know when she dies. I mean, the books are out, so that’s something the people knew before I did. We just hope that when we die the mourning is so great that people can barely make it! (laughs) This movie sets our characters up: who we are, where we’re going. The next film is going to be very exciting of us.

You guys are officially a part of this franchise now as these beloved characters, with this rabid fan base. If you could play another character in the series, who would you be?

Maggie: It’s hard, because they did such a good job with casting!

Mekhi: I like being Max! (laughs)

Maggie: Imagine if Mekhi was like, “I’d love to play Tris..” (laughs) I don’t know. I mean, I like our journeys.

Mekhi: I like our journeys as well. That’s a good question. Nobody’s ever asked us that. [I would pick] somebody in Dauntless.

Maggie: Yeah, we like Dauntless.

Mekhi: Jai [Courtney]’s character is interesting from a male perspective.

Maggie: But again, he does it well and he’s one of our friends, so I don’t know if I would want to take on what he did. There are so many characters in the franchise. A few die in this one, and then we’ll go on to the next one and see who we kill! (laughs)

Black actors are having a stronger and stronger presence in cinema, even though things aren’t where they should be, especially in television. Asian actors aren’t even close as far as visibility. They’re always type-cast, and it’s irritating. You two weren’t type-casted for these roles at all, which helps in terms of that conversation.

Maggie: It’s fun to be paired [on this press tour] with another minority. We know what it’s like. We know how that box exists. It’s very real. (To Mekhi) I’m sure you were offered every drug dealer role. Every pimp role.

Mekhi: Oh yeah, of course. You’ve got to say no. You’ve got to turn it down!

Maggie: You have to say no. The only power you have is to walk away. You can sit around all day long and whine about what [parts] you’re not getting, but it’s not about what you’re not getting; it’s about what you’re not taking. For me, as an Asian American, I’m looking for roles that are non ethnic-specific. If you come to me and you’re like, “Can you play this flower girl on this boat?”, the finger goes up really fast. The blood boils really quickly. Sure, I or any Asian girl could play that role. If you’re doing a story on history or whatever, that’s totally valid.

When you get roles that are stereotypical and do not push our cause or further our image in media and in entertainment, it’s your responsibility to turn those things down. I’m not saying that from the position of, “I’ve earned enough so that I can say no.” I’ve said no to things when I had no money.

Mekhi: Absolutely.

Maggie: It wasn’t about that. It was about the big picture. Where do I want to go with this? Do I want to make that amount of money for the next six months, and then what? It goes away, and I’d have no further career beyond that. Or, do I want to make smart decisions that are going to change the face of my freakin’ community?!

I was negotiating my deal on Nikita. A copy of the Hollywood Reporter came to my house one day. There was a photo of me, and it said that there was this landmark casting about to happen. I was like, “Ooh…what landmark casting?” I started reading this article, and it said that if I took the deal–I was still negotiating–that I would be the first Asian American lead on broadcast television. I wanted to throw up. There are so many quality Asian American actors out there, but they’re not giving us the lead roles!

What was important to me was not that it was an Asian lead. What was important to me was that it was a lead that was not written for an Asian. Nikita’s always been played by white girls. Always. Warner Bros. took a leap of faith and said, “We don’t want a French girl, or a white girl, or this or that. We want the right actress. And it doesn’t matter if she’s black, or white, or yellow or purple. We want the right person who has the heart of this character. You have it.”

These are not ethnic-specific roles (in Divergent). It’s not like Tori pushes the dim sum cart around the Dauntless vault, you know what I’m saying? But let me tell you…you get those scripts. They come all the time.

Mekhi: Max definitely wasn’t just written for a black man. You want to be good at what you do, and hopefully that helps break down stereotypes.

Mekhi, one of your early roles was in Clockers, and that was a very complex role and not stereotypical.

Mekhi: Right, right.

Later on you were on ER, and it’s that great progression where, you start seeing people in these roles and it no longer becomes specific to a particular ethnicity.

Maggie: You’ve got to walk into the [casting] room and change their minds. You do. I’m like, “Send me into that room where they want a white girl. Now. Send me into that room.” I don’t care. It shouldn’t be about that. They should be open to whatever, but if they’re not, you’ve got to be up for that fight. Half of the time it’s getting the job and performing at a level where you can continue to work. But the other half is that fight, getting into those rooms.

We’re seeing a bit of that now with the Fantastic Four casting. Michael B. Jordan’s a great actor. I think people will start turning, open up, and change. They’re fictional characters.

Maggie: We do live in the United States. What are we talking about? If we can’t be diverse here…I don’t understand how that’s even possible. It’s very, very strange. It’s also a global market now, too, which is why it’s changing. Some of it is that attitudes are changing. Some of it is that certain parts of the world–Latin America, Asia–we’re selling half the world, baby. You’ve got to put [actors] in positions where people in other parts of the world can relate to what you’re throwing on screen.

I’ve seen a lot of progress because of the global market, number one. Two, you have to get out there in a way where people actually know you as an individual. It’s about people knowing and liking you as a person first, seeing your work and appreciating it for what it is.

Mekhi: I’ve turned down money [before] because I was either going to be making lateral movement or going down as far as the way I was being perceived by the public and fans. There are jobs that I wouldn’t take, but then there’d be this job that would take you to another level.

Maggie: You’ve got to be patient, have faith in the process, and also know that you have something to offer that’s real. Then, it’s really all about what actually matters.

Mekhi: If integrity matters to you and you want to be an actor, when you get those jobs, save your money so that you’re not a slave to the system.

Maggie: I got the best letter ever. When we get scripts, there’s always a cover letter on it that says, “In anticipation of our conversation,” or “As per our conversation, here’s the script, here’s the director, here’s who’s in it.” There’s always this cover letter. To be fair to my agent–who I’ve been with for ten years and who I love–there was a bunch of scripts I was delivered. He was in Paris, hadn’t seen them, and had them sent over. I got this script–I’m not going to tell you what movie it is. “In anticipation of our conversation, please find the script written by ‘blah blah’, starring ‘blah blah’.” I shit you not, it said, “Please take a look at the role of ‘The Chink’.” You can’t make it up. That’s the name of the character.

It’s framed in my office, because I want to always be reminded of what’s out there. First of all, I’m going to punch this writer in the face! Just let me know where he or she lives. Then, they were like, “It’s kind of a cool character!” Super racist. A very talented Asian actress ended up taking the role. A very talented Asian actress. You’ve got to say no.

Writer/director Joe Begos has fashioned Almost Human, his debut feature, as a love letter to 80s horror/sci-fi schlock. The film opens with Seth (Graham Skipper) arriving at his friend Mark’s (Josh Ethier) house in a frenzy. Seth tells Mark and his girlfriend Jen (Vanessa Leigh) that aliens are after him, but before they can react blue lights and blaring sirens incapacitate all of them. Mark gets sucked into space, while Seth and Jen are left to figure out what happened.

Flash forward two years, and Seth is still having a hard time recovering from what happened. Jen, on the other hand, is engaged to a new man and wants to forget about what happened to Mark. Meanwhile, two hunters a hundred miles away discover Mark lying naked in a forest. It turns out Mark is actually some sort of body snatched version of him, whose express purpose seems to be murdering and reproducing. After brutally disposing of the two hunters, Mark proceeds to slaughter every single person he comes into contact with as he makes his way to see Jen.

Begos’ film is clearly a labour of love, but good intentions can only get people so far. Almost Human is supposed to be a genuine attempt at making an 80s-esque B-movie, but it’s too shoddily put together to work this way. Think Slither, but without any of the fun or craftsmanship. Running at a scant 76 minutes (technically just over 60 as the credits are about 8 minutes long), Almost Human barely leaves an impression before it’s over.

Problems lie mainly with the writing and acting. None of the characters feel distinct, and are largely forgotten once they aren’t on screen. Mark, looking like an insane lumberjack, is the only memorable character because of his Terminator-like killing spree. Begos’ visual style is bland, relying on grain filters to emulate the 80s time period the film takes place in, and the first two acts have a wash-rinse-repeat quality to them as a result (Mark kills people, Seth and Jen feel like something is wrong, repeat).

By the time Almost Human kicks into its Cronenberg-esque climax, the film has generated more yawns than thrills. There’s nothing wrong with doing a straight-up piece of genre filmmaking as long as one can pull off familiar genre elements well enough to make them exciting again (You’re Next and The Conjuring successfully did this last year). Almost Human can’t overcome its amateur qualities to become the fun genre pastiche it so desperately wants to be.

Almost Human trailer

Tonight, after the insanity of Black Friday shopping has passed and everyone’s Turkey-itis has subsided, the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival will be kicking off its three-week-long program, introducing San Franciscans to a whole new kind of madness, full of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy flicks that’ll delight fans of hardcore genre film (and likely make everyone else want to hurl. In a good way, of course.) The program, consisting of 54 feature films and 27 shorts, will be taking place at the Balboa Theater from today, November 29th, to December 5th. Then, the fest moves on to the New People Cinema in Japantown until December 19th.

For opening night, the festival is kicking off with Stalled, an interesting take on the zombie genre that places all the gory action in a tiny bathroom stall, The Battery, a zombie flick about two former baseball players navigating an undead-filled New England, and The Shower, about a twisted, homicidal baby shower.

Films we’re looking forward to at the festival:

All Cheerleaders Die–Lucy McKee and Chris Sivertson’s All Cheerleaders Die, the festival’s opening night film, is an ode to the slasher films of the ’80s in which the rebellious new girl at Blackfoot High convinces recruits her fellow classmates into the cheer-leading squad to combat a dark supernatural enemy. (Plays Dec. 5 at Balboa)

Face–Following a string of harrowing acts committed by college students that turned into the massacre of the Delta Chi Kappa sorority on Halloween 2012, Face looks to be a treat for fans of gross-out violence and…boobs? Sounds like there will be boobs. The film will be making its world premiere at the festival. (Plays Dec. 18 at New People)

Bath Salt Zombies–“Drugs, sex, & cannibalism!” Those are the three wonderful words the makers of Bath Salt Zombies use as a tagline for their zombie outbreak epic. I’ve seen the film, and I’ll just say it delivers on just two of the three promises. It’ll be interesting to see how an audience reacts to this frantic mess of a movie. (Plays Dec. 16 at New People)

Cheap Thrills–When a man (Pat Healy) loses his job and isn’t able to provide for his family, he teams up with an old high school buddy (Ethan Embry) to do dirty work for a wealthy couple to make extra dough. How far will he go to make ends meet? Here’s hoping he goes as far as the eye can see. (Plays Dec. 18 at New People)

Thanatomorphose–My pick for catchiest title of the festival (doen’t it just roll off the tongue?), Thanatomorphose is a Canadian film that follows a pretty girl as she wakes up to find her body rotting away (the title is a hellenic word that means “the visible signs of an organisms decomposition caused by death.” Sounds lovely! (Plays Dec. 16 at New People)

Senn–Making its world premiere as the closing night film of the festival, Senn follows the titular character, a worker on a forgotten world called Pyom, as he’s chosen by an alien being called the Polychronom for reasons that could spell doom for the humble factory worker. Sci-fi zaniness is sure to be abound. (Plays Dec. 19 at New People)

One of the biggest highlights of the festival for me will be the screening of two horror classics in gorgeous 35mm: Steven Spielberg’s textbook in suspense,  Jaws, and Stanley Kubrick’s legendarily enigmatic The Shining. In addition to these screenings, there will be a presentation of The Shining: Forwards and Backwards, which will probably drive me crazy, but will most importantly offer a fascinating new perspective on Kubrick’s classic.

Another very cool event will take place tomorrow at the Balboa Theater at 1pm, where the festival will screen two hours of Saturday morning cartoons and serve cereal and milk, all for FREE! The opportunity to watch “Jem & the Holograms”, “Looney Toons”, “He-Man” and more is one no self-respecting 90’s kid can pass up.

Another Hole in the Head runs from November 29th-December 19th. For scheduling and ticket info, visit sfindie.com. Stay tuned to Way Too Indie for more news from the festival!

Much like its successful predecessor, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire–directed by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) and based on the book series by Suzanne Collins–features rock-solid performances, great writing, and inventive action set pieces set in a sci-fi dystopia. The Hunger Games was a largely enjoyable and entertaining blockbuster romp, but its sequel betters it in every respect, a tightly-woven, thrilling, adrenaline-pumped beast of a film with a 146-minute running time that feels like 60. Like a bulldozer, the film plows forward, never stopping, sweeping you up in its sci-fi action clutches and never letting go.

As the film begins, we find our teen heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, the backbone of the film) in a traumatized state after “winning” the last Hunger Games–a Battle Royale-style arena challenge used as a tool of oppression by a totalitarian government called “The Capitol”–for the people of District 12, the place she calls home. She and her friend Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who represented District 12 with her in the games, found a way for them to both survive the contest, outsmarting the Capitol and irritating President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in the process. The bow-wielding huntress’ cunning defiance has made her something of a symbol of hope for the destitute, violently oppressed districts of Panem. In retaliation, the malevolent Snow has finagled the next games so that Katniss and Peeta are thrown in again, along with other winning tributes from previous games.

As Katniss and Peeta are sent on a Capitol-mandated “victory tour”, paraded around in front of the districts whose tributes they’ve killed in the games, they wrestle with overwhelming PTSD and winners’ guilt (they’re plagued with constant night terrors and visions of death), though they’re forced to feign happiness (and love for each other) when in public. Katniss is reluctant in her new role as revolutionary, to say the least. Disgusted is a better word. Though she’s ignited a spark of revolution in Panem, all she really wants is to keep her loved ones safe and lead a normal life–a fool’s dream at this point, tragically.

The tension is thick and the stakes are sky-high from the opening moments of the film, and the intensity never ever lets up. This is mostly thanks to Lawrence, who sells the gravity and magnitude of the drama every second she’s on screen. With the Capitol bearing down on her and the rebellion holding her up her up, she’s being crushed in the middle, and the anguish is written all over her face.

In a terrific scene, Katniss stands in front of a district whose deceased tribute was one of her allies in the games. She sees the family of the tribute, and guilt, sorrow, fury, and regret slowly crush the pretty princess charade forced onto her by the Capitol. She gives an impassioned, mournful eulogy of her fallen friend, and inadvertently inspires the downtrodden citizens to show transgressive signs of revolt against the Capitol guards, who respond with lethality. Katniss is dragged away, heart shattered by the consequences of her accidental incitation, and we see her soul break in front of our eyes. The grand, sweeping themes of gender expectations, mental oppression, feminism, and violence as entertainment are siphoned through a relatable, layered, human character in Katniss, and Lawrence gets the message across superbly.

The supporting cast rises to the occasion, too. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a new, fantastic addition to the cast (no surprise there), plays the new “game designer” (a sadistic position, in the context of these “games”.) Stanley Tucci returns as the absurdly jubilant Hunger Games host, and matching his pizazz is the also returning Elizabeth Banks as the gaudily attired Effie Trinket, Katniss and Peeta’s den mother, of sorts. Jena Malone is a standout as Johanna, an axe-wielding, F-bomb-dropping punk queen who spits in the face of the Capitol.

The love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and hunky huntsman Gale (Liam Hemsworth) is downplayed here, as are the games themselves. It’s appropriate, since the real story here is one of people vs government. Fear not; nearly half of the film is spent with Katniss fighting for her life in the games, but the light of the rebellion and shadow of the Capitol pervades it all. Like the first film, the actions scenes are slick and imaginative, and Lawrence sells the games’ danger just as well as she does the dramatic beats. Francis Lawrence has a good eye for action, and infuses the action set pieces with so much suspense and terror it can feel like a horror movie at times. The set and costume design are also excellent, and Lawrence’s lush visual style magnifies their craftsmanship.

The one major weakness of the film is an unavoidable one: the ending is such a cliffhanger (it follows the book to a T) that it makes the film feel more like an episode than a complete, contained story. It’s noticeably manipulative, but for the life of me I can’t begin to think of an alternative narrative route. This is a series, after all.

Despite sharing a similar narrative structure with the first film, Catching Fire ups the ante and heightens every element of the storytelling, from the drama to the stakes to the performances to the action. All of the elements of the film work so well in concert that it’ll capture your attention entirely, and you’ll forget that it’s a tentpole studio film meant to sell merchandise. It transcends the category of “young adult cash-grab” many are so quick to shove it into, next the Twilights of the world. It’s so much better than that; this is a high-quality science fiction series for a new generation, and it’s one they can be proud of.

Ender’s Game is Gavin Hood’s (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s popular 1985 sci-fi novel about a gigantic, intergalactic war, the outcome of which relies on our eponymous hero, a pre-teen boy-genius. Hood’s film retains the thoughtfulness (however morally misguided) of the source material, homing in on the internal conflicts of the hero rather than relishing in the spectacle of war (though we’re given a satisfactory helping of that.) Hood’s is a heavy-handed thoughtfulness, though, as his symbolism lacks subtlety and finesse. Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is this year’s thinking-man’s sci-fi epic; Ender’s Game is best suited for the thinking-boy.

The people of Earth are gathering their forces in preparation for the imminent invasion of an insectoid race of aliens called “Formics”, who fifty years prior had attempted to overtake the planet, killing millions in the process. Humanity endured, barely, all due to the heroic actions of one man: Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley, trying on an awful New Zealand accent.) With the enemy’s return looming, earth is in need of a new hero to command its armies, and it must be a child (apparently, only young minds are capable of commanding the impossibly complex fleets of high-tech spaceships.)

Enter Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield, Hugo), a 12-year-old with a vast intellect and a prodigious gift for tactical dominance. He’s a “Third”, the youngest of three siblings, in a time when parents are only allowed two children, maximum (a clear reference to China’s “one-child policy”.) Kids at school bully him for this, but his intellectual superiority allows him to defend himself with ease. He’s recruited by grisly military commander Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford, who’s less growl-y than usual, surprisingly) to attend Battle School, a military academy meant to groom the next Rackham that rejected both his violently demented brother, Peter (Jimmy Pinchak), and his warm-hearted sister, Valentine (Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine herself), who he loves to no end.

We spend most of our time in the futuristic chambers and barracks of the Battle School, which are about as generic as it gets, aesthetically (lots of metal panels, neon lights, inexplicable buttons scattered about randomly). Ender begins, like a lot of us did, as a social outcast in the school halls, but strategically-timed exhibitions of talent (in a quidditch-like laser tag anti-gravity game) and fearlessness (he gives Graff lip, right in front of the others, of course) win his classmates over, inch by inch, making allies out of bullies and adorers out of acquaintances.

Ender’s social maneuverings and foresightful power plays make for the best scenes in the film, and it would have been nice to have seen this interplay receive more attention and time. His classmates Petra (Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit), a sharpshooter quasi love interest, and Bean (Aramis Knight), a pint-sized sidekick, are likable confidants, while his nemesis, Bonzo (Moises Arias), the Napoleonic leader of the bully-brigade, is a one-dimensional, but fun-to-hate villain.

Butterfield fits the role nicely–he’s a believable wunderkind, and while he’s a good looking kid, he’s also not hunky tween-bait. It’s great to see a normal-looking young man leading big-budget series, especially when you consider the film is being distributed by Summit Entertainment, the same folks behind the Twilight series. He acts with his eyes, casting stares that are at once icy and compassionate, and he shows restraint at all times–this is crucial to the role, as Ender is constantly suppressing a war-within.

Despite Ender’s uncanny ability to win his classmates’ respect, Bonzo’s pubescent ego makes his disdain impossible to budge, and he eventually challenges Ender to a fist fight. Ender dispatches of Bonzo physically, in self defense, and hates himself for it. Must he resort to destroying his enemies, like his sinister older brother, Peter? The internal war of humanity versus merciless dominance rages inside Ender throughout the film; Graff’s intent is to wipe all empathy from Ender’s nature, molding him into a cold-hearted commander that’ll do anything to save the human race, while Valentine and his friends keep the kindness in his heart from being hushed.

Card has been criticized for years for the way his novel covets the intentions of the protagonist while excusing his actions, essentially vindicating the violence. Hood makes no attempt to embellish upon Card’s philosophy (or any other part of his story, for that matter), and in fact magnifies his mixed-up morality, constantly bludgeoning us over the head with Ender’s conflict of heart and mind. There are a lot of high-concept ideas swimming around underneath the surface that should be thought-provoking and relevant to our time (training kids for war with video games is a more interesting notion now than it was in the ’80s, when Card’s novel was first published), but Hood’s too enamored with picking apart Ender’s psyche to flesh them out.

The large-scale, shimmering, spaceship battle scenes that bookend the film are spectacular, and will have kids across the country leaping in the air and pumping their fists with excitement at the sci-fi action gloriousness (I’ll admit, my inner video-game-kid was giddy as can be.) The half-baked high-concept ideas floating around Ender’s Game are a tease, but this won’t bother those who just came to see a light show.

Mr. Nobody is proof that just having all the right ingredients does not automatically make it a great dish. This film contains an intriguing plot, spectacular visuals, solid acting performances, more ambition than you can shake a stick at, and yet the results are not half as good as it sounds. Or at least not nearly as good as it sounds. In any case, one cannot help but wonder if not living up to the film’s potential is the very reason why it took so long (four years from its Venice Film Festival premiere) to get a proper U.S. distribution.

At the heart of the story is the unimaginable decision that a young boy must make between which parent to live with after they divorce. From there Mr. Nobody spirals off (out of control) into several parallel timelines that form based upon which decision he could have made. The film experiments with concepts of the butterfly effect by exploring the possible outcomes in a nonlinear fashion. In fact, it begins by showing the protagonist named Nemo (Jared Leto) dying in different ways before jumping all the way back to an elderly (117-years-old to be exact) version of him, who is considered to be the last man who will die of old age because everyone else on earth has benefited from stem cell treatments.

It is easy to get lost when the film jumps around between all of the different scenarios and timelines that the character is involved with. Nothing short of multiple viewings or detailed infographic of the film’s structure will help. But most of the major themes the film wanted to get across were made clear—most notably Nemo’s various love interests (Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Linh Dan Pham, and Juno Temple) in different stages of his life. The problem is aside from Polley, the emotional attachment to any of the characters is not actually felt.

Throughout the film I kept trying to figure out if I am supposed to take the film completely seriously or not at all. Perhaps the correct answer is somewhere in the middle. One just does not expect to see unicorns and other playful things intertwined with such a serious coming-of-age narrative and thought-provoking framework. This amalgamation of genres is admittedly fun and even adds some character to the film, but at times it makes the already confusing film even more baffling.

You will likely be reminded of several films while watching Mr. Nobody, the very first that comes to mind is Cloud Atlas—both were released around the same time and contain interlinking storylines spanning across several decades of time, including the distant future. Moments when the character thinks they are with one partner but then quickly revealed to be with another will remind you of Vanilla Sky. There are multiple Fight Club-esque moments aside from simply sharing Jared Leto and the Pixies song “Where is My Mind”. You could even draw some comparisons to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with its visually bizarre self-aware dream sequences. The list of influences could go on and on. While Mr. Nobody is reminiscent of all those films, it is unfortunately not as effective as any one of them.

Jaco Van Dormael’s film is stunning to look at and if nothing else makes the film a decent visual experience for the viewer. The CGI is handled well in film’s depiction of our futuristic world in 2092, mostly consisting of sterile white environments. By far the most impressive visual achievement was the makeup transformation that Leto had to undergo while playing the 117-year-old version of himself. It was scary just how realistic it looked.

Mr. Nobody ends up being one exhausting ride with constant leaps back and forth between multiple timelines, never slowing down enough to allow the audience to become attached to any of the characters on screen. Not helping matters is the fact that the film goes on for nearly two and a half hours. You certainly cannot fault Mr. Nobody‘s efforts to be an ambitious film, and it is easy to admire it just for that reason, but those efforts alone are not enough to save the impenetrable and messy final product.

Certainly no sci-fi film, and packed with more adrenaline than the average action film, it’s impossible not to have a physical reaction to the film Gravity. From the opening scene where astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) work high above the earth, the perspective is entirely disorienting. Voices from Houston check in on the astronauts, asking Dr. Stone if she’s feeling sick, and her queasy expression is easy to sympathize with. While the sensory impact of Gravity is what will make this film hard for any viewer to shake, it’s focus on every human’s instinct for survival and even human connectedness is what makes it a good film.

Gravity, while groundbreaking in its visuals, does rely upon them a bit heavily. The story is obvious by Hollywood conventions. Veteran astronaut Kowalski is finishing his final spacewalk, while Dr. Stone is on her first mission and not much of a space traveler. All seems to be going well in their mission to perform minor repairs on a space shuttle. A third astronaut, whose voice is all the character we’re really given of him, glides through space gleefully, as though to mock the tethers that keep him from spinning out into the cosmos. Then Houston gives them the command to abort. The Russians, (them again!), have destroyed one of their satellites and its remnants are hurtling in orbit directly toward them. A moment later they are bombarded with the high-speed pieces. Kowalski tries to hold on to Stone, but she is sent spiraling away from him. Thus begins her dizzying nightmare.

At times Alfonso Cuaron pulls the perspective into Stone’s helmet. Which, in that first harrowing moment, is the unending spinning of the universe as Dr. Stone demonstrates the laws of physics in sickening fashion. The universe has never seemed so big as in the drawn out minutes that Stone spends alone spinning into space unable to stop herself. Kowalski is able to reach her after a time, but their nerve-shattering journey to survive has only begun. With oxygen depleting, Kowalski’s jetpack running out of fuel, and the orbit of the earth set to bring the debris hurtling back at them in 90 minutes it’s a race against time and space, (sorry, I couldn’t resist), to survive.

Cuaron has been working on Gravity for almost four years, since the release of his last tale of human survival, Children of Men. Clearly drawn to stories of perseverance, Gravity isn’t as poignant as he is likely aiming for, but is most definitely a standout survival film. Cuaron’s decision to use Bullock in a space-based thriller may not seem the likely choice, but she was clearly a great decision. Her character is given the entirety of the sentimentality of the film to carry, including some hackneyed and hokey dialogue. But Sandy B. is America’s Sweetheart for good reason. She’s just so easy to root for. Each line delivered with just enough of an emotional waver in her soft voice to pull at the heart. Clooney is equally as typecast with his easy confidence and dulcet-tones that could talk anyone to safety. So while neither actor may be doing anything entirely new in their careers, they certainly do what they do best.

Choreographed and staged with intricate detail, the film’s visuals are like nothing ever experienced before in film. Forget ‘edge of your seat’, Gravity has its audience clinging to their seats and leaving with a newfound appreciation of terra firma. Never has 90 minutes felt so long. Alfonso Cuaron’s breathtaking film puts every viewer up into space in a way never before possible. Though admittedly in a way that may make any future space travelers think twice. Gravity is a healthy reminder of human smallness in a vast universe, but also successfully demonstrates the phenomenal strength of the human spirit.

Full disclosure: I personally do not like 3D movies, I feel that they are distracting to the true art of filmmaking. That being said, I saw the advanced screening of Gravity in 3D, however, my review would likely be no different for its 2D counterpart.

Gravity brings the long awaited return of Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón. Set almost entirely in space, this sci-fi thriller with a dash of humor has stunning special effects and dedicated 3D scenes. Actors George Clooney and Sandra Bullock play characters Commander Matt Kowalsky and Mission Specialist Dr. Ryan Stone. Within the first 15 minutes viewers are taken from a light-hearted and even slightly humorous conversation between three astronauts outside a shuttle to an adrenaline packed thrill ride. The focus then turns to Bullock’s character who must now overcome the cornucopia of challenges that comes with trying to get back on Earth when you’ve just been flung into empty space by a large cloud of increasingly speeding satellite debris (all caused by the Russians of course).

I wish I could tell you the rest, but I’m guessing you would not like the spoilers. Besides, I forgot it all within 2 minutes of leaving my seat. It’s just not that memorable. What I can tell you is that it’s filled with dazzling special effects and “3d-ness” that is sure to wow and perhaps even shock some audiences. However, I thought it was overkill. With such a small amount of dialogue, you have more time to focus on the scenes that often were tilted or flipped, but I was severely disappointed by the lack story development through the somewhat meager pace of the movie. Bullock’s character has an emotional back story but that emotion remains untapped for the most part. The storyline itself is decent, though Gravity certainly left me begging for more development in both the story and the characters.

The two redeeming qualities in my opinion are the fact that it’s set in space and that the sound score was decent. Something that seems to have become more popular, but does not entirely distract from the poor storyline development and what to me are overly done special effects. It is sure to win something for it’s massive technical feats. Warning – if you just happen to be an astrophysicist or a nerdy space geek, you will shudder at the sight some of the scenes, just keep in mind it’s purely science fiction.

Gravity premieres October 4th for its wide release. Despite what I mentioned above, I suggest you go see it in theaters…perhaps with an astronaut’s helmet on if your local theater permits such awesomeness (and if it does not, you may want to find another theater). If you do decide to see it, keep a lookout for Marvin the Martian’s cameo appearance.

Gravity trailer:

After seeing enough films on the subject, can we all agree that space travel outside the orbit of the earth seems to generally be a bad idea? This general consensus is why a film like Europa Report is able to bring in a few startles and a fair amount of suspense, but no true surprises. It certainly isn’t re-writing the deep space travel handbook, though it is trying to present it in a new and interesting way. Europa Report combines (highly improbable) found footage style filmmaking with (attempted) emotion-evoking documentary style filmmaking, but as it turns out the pairing of the two is scripted-reality overkill.

The film chronicles the voyage of a manned space mission to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, which appears to contain water. Believing “where there is water, there is life” and backed by a private sponsor, a team of six experienced professionals embark together on the several years journey. There’s the confident pilot, William (Daniel Wu), and his ace co-pilot Rosa (Anamaria Marinca, whose big dark eyes work well staring directly into camera lenses). They have a sensible doctor (Christian Camargo), a brooding handyman (Michael Nyqvist), a beautiful biologist (Karolina Wydra), and a chummy all-American astronaut, James (District 9’s Sharlto Copley, whose appearance just made me salivate for Elysium’s release later this summer).

From the beginning we know the trip to Europa did not appear to go as planned. The team’s on-Earth leader, Dr. Samantha Unger (Embeth Davidtz), gets emotional as she recalls the day they lost contact with the team and from there the footage is used as our primary means of recounting just what happened. Watching as the crew sleep and work in their rotating artificial gravity area (just one of many 2001: A Space Odyssey references), working at their various stations, and sending messages to their loved ones back home. Halfway to Europa tragedy befalls a crewmember and it seems as though this may be the main mystery of the film as they certainly delay revealing just what happened.

Eventually the team reaches Europa and the suspense holds up better as the team realizes they’ve found more than they could have hoped. But with such a slow journey the end is like a quick rollercoaster ride at the end of a long wait in line. And the thrills, while rapid in succession, don’t feel quite gratifying enough.

If Europa Report had presented itself solely as a found footage film, it may have worked wonderfully, as the “footage” is cleverly pieced together and the look of it all is quite well done. If anything it’s a tribute to how hard it is to pull off a good documentary because the attempt here is so contrived we’re keenly aware we’re being manipulated, and it backfires. Europa Report plays coy – focusing on the characters, the mid-way tragedy and the emotional high of the potential of alien life—but the film’s end offers too many questions and answers only one: Are we alone in the universe? At which point it’s an answer that seems less significant than we’d have thought.

Europa Report trailer:

It’s not often I encounter new film genres. There’s nothing new under the sun, right? But a comedic sci-fi folk music family film is definitely a first, and that’s precisely what The History of Future Folk is. Light in its approach, this film is low budget and walks a pretty straight path, so while it seems like it should be an absurd little indie comedy, it’s really just a fun fantasy with heart.

Providing the backstory for real-life musical duo, Future Folk, the film begins with Bill (Nils d’Aulaire) telling his daughter the seemingly fabricated tale of Hondo, a planet doomed by an incoming comet. The people of Hondo send their fearless leader, General Trius out into the universe to find them a new home. Armed with the means to wipe out humanity, Trius lands on Earth. He wanders into a bulk sales store where right before he is to annihilate the people of Earth to claim it for the Hondonians, he is overcome by a new sensation. Playing throughout the store is something he’s never experienced: music. Captivated by this discovery, Trius lets the people of Earth live and instead forms his own musical act, Future Folk.

Turns out, this is no story, and Bill is actuality General Trius. Many years later he has acclimated to being a human, even marrying a human, Holly (Julie Ann Emery), and having a daughter (Onata Aprile, seen more recently in What Maisie Knew). He hasn’t forsaken his native planet, but has lost contact with them.

Then one day another Hondonian, Kevin (Jay Klaitz), shows up to kill Bill and finish the job. Once Bill introduces Kevin to music (playing an AMAZING music-through-the-ages medley on his banjo), he too is overwhelmed by it to the point of abandoning his mission. The one-man folk act becomes a duo, playing frequently at a local bar run by Larry (Dee Snider, oddly enough). They garner a hipster following, but Bill’s lies start to catch up with him with the arrival of Kevin, especially when another bounty-hunter style alien shows up to kill them, and now Bill’s marriage is on shaky ground.

The entire concept sounds like it should be ridiculous to the point of hilarity, and it really isn’t. In fact this film wasn’t nearly as funny as I expected and oddly, didn’t really try to be. Granted, Jay Klaitz plays Kevin as though he’s seen one too many Jack Black films (or Tenacious D concerts) and Nils D’Aulaire has the innocent and pretty face that could easily be the Bret McKenzie type if they were trying to be Flight of the Conchords. But they just aren’t. The entire story is straight as an arrow. Just another bluegrass alien band from a planet in peril. Which somehow just makes it sweet and wholesome and easy to watch.

Admittedly, this film just made me somewhat nostalgic for Flight of the Conchords, as I would have liked a nice dose of ironic humor to go with the fantasy tale. And at times I thought to myself if only I were living in Brooklyn and knew of Future Folk, maybe I’d feel slightly more in on the joke. But at the same time it’s nice to see a film, especially a low budget one, feel comfortable in it’s own skin.

It does not take long to notice that even the smallest of details in Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes are not without purpose. As with most time-travel films, if you were to break everything down you are bound to find plot holes here and there. But over-thinking the logic ruins the entertainment the film provides and what would be the fun of that? The rapid pace of this independent science fiction film keeps one from dwelling very long on what transpires but the whole point of the film is not the outcome itself, but rather what caused the outcome to occur.

Timecrimes gets your pulse going right off the bat by starting out with a setup similar to that of a campy horror film. Héctor (Karra Elejalde) is minding his own business in his backyard as his wife (Candela Fernandez) moves some items into their new country home. Using a pair of binoculars, Héctor gazes around the woods that surround his home when much to his surprise he spots a woman undressing. When his wife heads to town for groceries he decides to get a closer look by heading into the woods. Just as he approaches the nude woman he is suddenly stabbed in the shoulder with a pair of scissors by a man with a pink bandaged head.

It is hard to describe in detail the rest of the film as it runs the risk of spoiling the experience for those who have not seen it. But without giving too much away I will say that Héctor does travel back in time and makes some mistakes, hence the title of the film. And the series of events that follows makes Timecrimes a film that is fascinating, bone-chilling, and confusing, all at the same time.

Just like other well-made time travel films the element of time paradoxes becomes the true enemy. Here they are explored with a butterfly-effect style that may make your head spin. However, Vigalondo does a good job of feeding answers to the audience, while wisely holding a couple cards up his sleeve. Because many of the scenes are re-shown throughout the film, it becomes less about what is happening and more about why it is happening. The pacing of the film is important as it does not allow much time, pun intended, to ask why certain things are happening until after the fact.

Vigalondo handles the intricate time-traveling details rather well while at the same time carefully constructing a puzzle that he eventually reveals. Timecrimes makes it seem like you are one step ahead, but in reality that is exactly what the film wants you to think before pulling the rug beneath your feet. As equality impressive as the brilliant storyline is the range of mixed reactions the film conjures up. The opening scenes the film hooks you with intrigue, followed closely by heart-pounding terror and by the end of the film you will have laughed, been confused, but most importantly, engaged the whole way through. That kind of feat is rarely achieved by films with budgets tenfold that of this indie sci-fi thriller.

Antiviral is a high-concept sci-fi film debut from Brandon Cronenberg, son of legendary director David Cronenberg. It is not completely far-fetched to imagine a future celebrity obsessed society where fans receive a virus that their idol has in order to feel closer to them, which is why the film is so creepy. Unfortunately, the signs of a first-time director are present when several of the same shots are repetitively used and by the time the third act rolls around, most of the enthusiasm wears off. Antiviral has enough of style and dazzling imagery that it could possibly win over certain fans of the genre, despite its various setbacks.

From the very opening shot of a man sitting behind a giant billboard of a female model, Antiviral makes it abundantly clear what the film is about; society’s obsession with celebrities. The man in the opening shot is Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), a technician at the Lucas Clinic who specializes in injecting viruses from celebrities into clients who wish to come closer to their idol. Inside the clinic is a lobby full of clients who hide behind the latest gossip magazine while the latest celebrity chatter airs on the television. And if that was not enough, one can literally get a taste of their obsession at a meat market, where cuts of steak are made up from cultivated cells of celebrities.

With each passing day Syd’s physical condition seems to worsen and everyone around him starts to notice his apparent sickness. But what they do not know is that he is smuggling viruses from the clinic using his own body as the host. After stealing some lab equipment from work, he is able to then remove the copy-protection of the virus which allows him to sell the virus on the black market. Because the market is so fierce, he is in real danger when the wrong people find out his secrets.

Even though Antiviral takes place in a slightly futuristic time period, the truly terrifying part is that it could actually happen someday, especially considering the rise in social media which provides us with constant updates on the celebrities we follow. A rumor started on Twitter can quickly spread to a room full of gossip in the matter of seconds. Rumor spreading is touched on in the film when colleagues discuss rumors they hear from the media but then add their own wild spin on the topic they hear from unreliable sources.

Much of the weight of the film rests on the shoulders of Caleb Landry Jones as he is in almost every frame. The role was physically demanding as he portrays a man who is violently ill from the beginning and by the end is practically on his death bed. For the most part he does a great job with what is required of him. After all, it is not his fault that the film gets repetitive by having him appear in the same state the entire time.

Antiviral falls flat once the initial concept wears off, which is a shame because there were flashes of brilliance at certain moments. The first two acts fly by while the third drags on, mainly because we have to watch the lead stumble around with overwhelming sickness a few too many times. Still, Antiviral is a commendable first outing for the young Cronenberg, even if it is far from flawless. We currently live in a society where we figuratively feed off our celebrities, so Cronenberg’s portrayal of a society that literally feeds off them is frightening yet not unimaginable.

For all intents and purposes, Shane Carruth has completely disappeared off the filmmaking radar ever since his mind blowing indie sci-fi debut of Primer eight years ago. The only place his name has appeared since then was in the Thank You section of the credits in Looper. For Upstream Color the self-proclaimed “control freak” handles more than just the directorial duties as Carruth also; wrote, acted, co-edited, scored, and even self-distributed the film. At times Upstream Color will seem impenetrable and elusive, and at others it will make perfect sense; what remains constant is a mesmerizing and yet challenging film that explores the spirituality between humans and nature.

Near the beginning of the film, a creative professional named Kris (Amy Seimetz) is suddenly drugged by a mysterious thief (Thiago Martins) who uses a special maggot like creature that has a brainwashing effect. This leaves her in a hypnotic state where the thief has full control over her mind and what she does. Under his instructions, Kris empties out her entire savings account to him. A few days later she comes to her senses to find a long worm crawling under her skin. Another stranger takes her in, seemingly to help remove the worms, though ends up performing a surgery that exchanges fluids between her and a pig. It is nearly as bizarre as it sounds, although everything is done very technical and matter-of-factly that it looks believable in a sci-fi kind of way.

Soon after Kris realizes that she no longer has any money or her job, she runs into a man on a train who she has never met before yet is strangely drawn to. She learns that this man (Shane Carruth) suffered from a similar event that also left his past cloudy. Quickly, the two begin to bond as they share this intangible connection that they cannot quite figure out. This leads to the main plot of the film; their exploration into just how exactly their childhood experiences seem to blend as one.

The film itself plays out more like an abstract recollection of someone’s past than a straight dialog driven narrative. Beautifully lensed with outstanding stimulating visuals, Upstream Color perfectly illustrates the symbolizing connection between human and nature. Pairing wonderfully with the visuals is the masterful editing that keeps the pacing of the film in check. The editing here is extremely important as it cuts back and forth enough to simulate the kind of blurry state the characters themselves experience. The result is one of the better edited films of its kind in recent time.

Another part where the film excelled in was the score, which I mentioned before that Carruth himself wrote. The original music that he creates superbly compliments the eerie nature of the film. The score is ambient enough to not be overstated, but yet still noticeably enhances the tone the film aims for.

Upstream Color definitely calls for a second viewing to fully appreciate everything that is thrown at the viewer. But even then, I wonder if the film would still be fully realized. It is not that the film is impossible to decipher, but that it is shown in an abstract manner without a straightforward direction with somewhat dense storytelling. Perhaps a second viewing would also enhance the emotional relationship between Kris and Jeff, instead of the forced one that the viewer gets thrown suddenly into on the first watch.

By the time the credits roll, you will feel like you have just woken up for a multidimensional hypnotic state just like the characters in the film. There is definite method to its madness that purposely leaves the viewer a little puzzled with what exactly transpired. But the beauty of Upstream Color is that the film wants you to further explore all the themes, connections, and emotions on your own, and in order to do that, multiple viewings may be required.

It’s Toronto in 2040. Oscar is a digital janitor inside a virtual reality version of Google Maps in which he uses a paint roller to blur out advertisements. Gary and Karen are babymakers – they build realistic robot babies they sell and send them to China. Anton and Toph are brothers who gather and sell spider silk. Serina is a human spam ninja, who sneaks product placement into everyday conversations for money. These unlucky souls are the stars of a popular documentary show in China that follows them as they detail their strange occupations for the Chinese audience. The Chinese refer to these people who live in the slums and squalor of North America as “Ghosts” and find watching their pathetic lives unfold to be must-see television.

Directors Chris McCawley, Jim Morrison, Jim Munroe, and Tate Young’s take on the dehumanization and sterilization of North Americans is inventive, but Ghosts with Shit Jobs often falls flat in its attempts at any significant humor or drama. While the bleak future the filmmakers visualize is thought-provoking, troubling, funny, and playfully satirical, its Achilles’ heel is the underwhelming character interaction that mars the unique and intriguing concept.

The ideas presented here are comical and prophetic, echoing the great Jacques Tati’s satirical glimpses into the future, Playtime and Mon Oncle, though Ghosts doesn’t ever approach the quality of Tati’s work. To hear the “ka-ching!” sound of a register every time Serina (Rachel MacMillan) skillfully sneaks product placement into casual conversations is enjoyable, and there’s a great scene where she angrily drives off another, less clandestine spam ninja who encroaches on her territory. The film is a series of fun ideas like this, but the actors’ ho-hum performances fail to deliver the clever messages with any punch, resulting in some of the messages being lost. Jonah Hundert, who plays Anton, the more obnoxious half of the silk-gathering brothers, makes a solid attempt at providing the important central comedic role in the film, but again, doesn’t deliver the comedy with any significant impact.

The documentary-style aesthetic of the film is handled well, and there are some highly amusing sight gags that keep the film fresh. Oscar’s ventures into the virtual world contain some augmented-reality special effects that are visually striking, like when he gets chased by people with hand-drawn faces. When Karen rips a leg off of a 100% life-like baby doll she is working on and we hear the doll cry, it makes for effective cinema.

Ghosts with Shit Jobs begins to find some sort of momentum near the end, when the subjects of the television show finally meet each other, but by the time it starts to get good, it ends with a dud. There are some hollow attempts at drama in the film’s climax, and because of the shaky foundation laid out by the actors leading up to the film’s conclusion, it’s difficult to feel that the stakes have any real weight. There is a scene near the end of the film which desperately tries to generate a feeling of tension and danger but falls flat on its face. There is serious potential that lies beneath the surface of Ghosts with Shit Jobs, but sadly, it isn’t realized. The film has moments of brilliance, but these moments are fleeting and soon-forgotten.

Cloud Atlas is a big film by all definitions; it contains an inordinate amount of characters spread out across hundreds of years, making the shear scope of the production epic. Not to mention the estimated budget of 100 million dollars (though it was independently financed outside the studio). To pull off such an ambitious feat, the film split the directorial duties among a trio of film visionaries, Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and the Wachowskis siblings (Andy and Lana, The Matrix trilogy). However, Cloud Atlas’ biggest accomplishment may also be its biggest flaw; the overloaded plotlines are never boring, but at times they can be too much to follow.

When characters are first introduced in the opening sequence, one of them in particular seems to be speaking directly to the audience. That character is an older man (Jim Broadbent) on a typewriter who describes his time spent as an editor has made him dislike gimmicky storytelling involving flashbacks and flashforwards. But he goes on to say that if you have some patience you can then see that there is a method to its madness. That whole scene only lasts a few moments before going on to the next introduction, but it almost seemed to be begging the viewer to embrace what is about to unfold.

The plea to be patient between the back and forth storytelling proved to be necessary as Cloud Atlas contains six different time periods, each with their own plotline and characters. While everything happens in linear fashion in each time period, the film does jump between the six different time periods at will. Even though there are six different storylines, similar themes and characters are shared across them all, making everything connected to each other. The film brilliantly shifts from one period to another by using cleaver scene transitions. One example of this is when the thundering sound of horses galloping from one era leads into the next with a similar sound of a train racing on its tracks.

Cloud Atlas spans across several hundreds of years, ranging from the 1800s to the 2300s and several years in between as well. In the earliest setting of 1850, Adam (Jim Sturgess) is a wealthy pro-slavery American Lawyer who is poisoned by a corrupt doctor (Tom Hanks) for his fortune. He eventually switches his stance on slavery when a slave saves his life. In 1931, an upcoming composer (Ben Whisaw) works closely under one of the best known composers of the time (Jim Broadbent), but fears that his original masterpiece will be wrongfully claimed by his famous superior. Set in the 1970s, the daughter of a famous reporter, Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), is an investigative journalist who is looking to prove herself by uncovering a corrupt business leader (Hugh Grant). In the year 2012, a publisher named Timothy (Jim Broadbent) finally makes it big when an author’s (Tom Hanks) book flies off shelves after he murders a book critic. A few men go after Timothy for his money, which he does not have, forcing him to ask his deceitful brother for a loan who instead offers him a safe house. But Timothy’s finds himself captive in a nursing home instead. A hundred years in the future, a slave restaurant waitress manages to escape from her captivity to start a revolution. The last storyline is set far into the future, a member of an advanced civilization (Halle Berry) teams up with an island tribesman (Tom Hanks) to help solve each other’s dilemmas.

The common theme that stiches the six tales together is the desire of freedom. No matter what age the character lives in, there is someone there that wants to restrict the amount of power and freedom you possess. During each stretch of time, characters are morally challenged to stand up for what they believe in.

Because most cast in the film got to play both the hero and the villain, Cloud Atlas must have been an actor’s fantasy. Take the numerous roles that Tom Hanks had in the film for an example. He wonderfully portrayed the crooked doctor back in the 1800s but got a chance to redeem himself later as a good scientist in a different time period. Hanks, like other fellow cast members, is sometimes unrecognizable at first because of the amazing makeup job that serves as a disguise to their age, ethnicity and even gender.

Cloud Atlas is an entertaining yet dense film that contains many wonderfully told stories which link together seamlessly. All the stories brilliantly peak at the same time, making for one epic climax, once you first let all the stories develop independently. It is easy to get caught up in the web of trying to make all the connections between the characters – making a repeat viewing seemingly necessary. However, the major themes and messages are apparent enough in the film without the requirement of multiple viewings; but you must accept that some of the finer details will likely get lost in the shuffle.

The found footage subgenre of horror films, now appearing to be completely exhausted, has some new life injected into it thanks to Barry Levinson. The Bay is Levinson’s first real leap into horror (if you don’t consider Sphere to be a horror film) which makes his presence as an outsider work in the film’s favour. The Bay indulges in a few set-ups and cheap scares, but the movie generates most of its fear by showing a horrifying and seemingly plausible scenario.

The story behind The Bay’s footage is that the US government covered up an outbreak that wiped out the town of Claridge, MD in 2009. All cameras and footage related to what happened were confiscated by the government, but now someone has compiled everything together in order to reveal the truth about what happened in Claridge. Narrated by a local news reporter who survived the outbreak we come to learn how the town’s dumping of fertilizer into the local bay helped create a deadly parasite.

As the different sources of video (security footage, home movies, Skype chats, news broadcasts, etc.) are shown throughout, it becomes clear that Levinson is doing a leaner and meaner version of a disaster film. In a conventional disaster film more focus would be put on the characters, but here they’re only used as puzzle pieces that help explain the mystery behind what happened to Claridge.

Levinson, who also shares a story credit here, bases most of the background information in The Bay on real-life scenarios. The mutant isopods that terrorize the town are real (and thankfully not a threat for humans), while the issues of pollution and government incompetence have a basis in reality. While the storyline here is just playing on people’s worst fears, the presentation and background’s familiarity fill The Bay with a dread-inducing “this could happen” feeling. Other found footage films like Paranormal Activity are using the genre to put the extraordinary in a realistic context, but The Bay more effectively takes advantage of the format to heighten the terror behind a plausible-looking scenario.

Viewers expecting shocks and big scares in The Bay will come away disappointed, but its carnivorous parasites will leave some feeling seriously unsettled. Like Jaws did back in the 70s, The Bay will definitely have people feeling a little hesitant to go into the water any time soon.

I am always skeptic when it comes to most sci-fi action films but Looper is the rare exception that proves from time to time excellent ones are made. Rian Johnson’s Looper is a smart and unique science fiction film set in the future about time travel that is controlled by mobsters. Looper is not your average science fiction film; it understands the importance of character development and that explosions do not need to occur every five minutes in order to be entertaining.

The film is set in Kansas in the year 2044. Time travel is not possible yet but it is invented a few decades from then. Even though time travel is possible it is illegal to do. However, large crime organizations use it to get rid of people. See, if they send someone back in time and they are killed, that person vanishes from existence in both present and future.

This is where Loopers come in. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is informed when a person will appear from the future and it is his job as a Looper to be there to shoot that person immediately. Loopers blast their hooded targets with a powerful shotgun called a blunderbust from point-blank range. The range of the gun makes it impossible to hit anything beyond 15 feet but conversely impossible to miss anything closer than 15 feet, an important note that comes into play later in the film.

Eventually, when a Looper grows old enough, they will be sent back in time to be killed by his own younger self, which is called “closing the loop.” It is a clean process that only goes weary when the Looper fails to complete the loop. Letting your loop run when the person you are supposed to kill escapes is highly dangerous. Things start to go haywire when another fellow Looper named Seth (Paul Dano) sees himself as part of a closing loop and wisely decides not to shoot. Seth just so happen to recognize the song his future self was singing. By not closing his own loop, his future self was able to warn present Seth about what the future holds. Seth confronts Joe about this before their boss Abe has Seth killed for letting that happen.

Abe (Jeff Daniels) is from 2074 and is in charge of the Loopers for the crime syndicate. Abe criticizes Joe about his fashion style by preaching to be new and do something different. Which is precisely the advice that the film itself follows; to be something new and different. Joe has a plan to go to France after he is done as a Looper but Abe tells him, in a great scene, that he should go to China instead. Abe would know as he is from the future after all. Joe however is insistent about going to France and it starts to show just how ignorant his character is. He continues to study French between kills and saves up the silver bars he earns to travel there.

One day a man (Bruce Willis) appears late at the site without being tied up at all, two things that never happen. Joe freezes for a moment which gives this man enough time to escape. The man leaves a note for Joe that tells him he should leave town as soon as he can. After a short while you learn that the man who escaped is actually Joe from the future. Unlike all the others from the future, Joe willingly sends himself back in an attempt to save a loved one that wrongfully is murdered in the future. We are transported 30 years into the future to follow just how future Joe was able to show up not on time and not tied up.

Present Joe is very apprehensive about believing the man who claims to be him in the future. Or maybe it’s just his arrogance. We see a scar on future Joes arm of the waitress name that the present Joe often speaks to. Present Joe had just etched it into his arm, leaving a permanent scar that is seen on future Joe’s arm. This was likely done to try to prove that the older man is who he claims he is. Another detail that visually ties the two together is there is a bandage on present Joe’s ear and you can see that part of future Joe’s ear missing.

Jeff Daniels is only in a few scenes but he steals everyone one of them. The rest of the performances are not far behind with everyone pitching in making the film as a whole well performed. You could make a good argument that the young boy (Pierce Gagnon) is as equally superb and I probably would not argue. The filmmakers purposely made Joseph Gordon-Levitt to look physically different for his role to make him resemble Bruce Willis more closely. Which had me double-take a couple of times before I realized that it was actually Gordon-Levitt. The makeup team did an excellent job on altering his looks which apparently took 3 hours each day to do.

I kept seeing glimpses of Twelve Monkeys while watching this film. Bruce Willis being in both certainly had something to do with that but there are other reasons as well. Both are trippy sci-fi films that involve the main character coming from the future to warn people in the present about dangerous events soon to come. Both films do so by providing numbers or signs to watch out for.

Looper wisely tells the audience not to look too deeply behind the mechanics of the time travel because you are sure to find loop holes (pun intended). This high concept sci-fi keeps you guessing how it will end it until it does and suddenly it seems obvious. Backed with a unique premise, solid performances from the cast and a firm grasp on how to make a proper action film, Looper sets the bar on recent big-budget sci-fi action films.

Safety Not Guaranteed thankfully takes its science fiction framework and keeps it in the background, instead putting the focus on its characters and how they grow over the film’s short running time. For the most part the movie gets by on its low-key charm, with two good central performances but the sitcom-like structure drives a giant wedge into the film’s stronger qualities.

A recent college graduate working as an unpaid intern at Seattle Magazine, Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is anti-social and mostly miserable. When Jeff (Jake Johnson), one of the magazine’s writers, takes on a story about an ad looking for a partner to travel back in time with, Darius leaps at the opportunity to work on it. The writer takes Darius along with Arnau (Karan Soni), a nerdy intern who hasn’t been with a woman yet. Darius and Arnau soon find the man who wrote the ad, an awkward grocery store worker named Kenneth (Mark Duplass) who believes he’s being followed and recorded at all times. Darius convinces Kenneth to let her be his time travelling partner, while Jeff tries to get back with his high school sweetheart and Arnau begins to come out of his shell. As Darius gets more involved with Kenneth she starts to fall for him while thinking that he might actually be able to travel back in time.

Plaza and Duplass play slight variations on the kind of roles that they’ve been specializing in over the years. Duplass throws plenty of weirdness on his role as a paranoid outcast, while Plaza brings her character from Parks and Recreation down several hundred notches to something resembling reality. Duplass is terrific at balancing Kenneth’s quirks with the emotional pain his character hides, and Plaza’s greatest strength is the way she gets people to like her without coming across like she’s trying. Their first meeting at the grocery store Kenneth works at is truly enjoyable, showing off their terrific chemistry which is the film’s greatest asset.

Unfortunately Plaza/Duplass’ time is shared with the two subplots involving Jeff and Arnau. Both of the characters’ stories are predictable, and they feel so separate from the main action that at times it feels like they’re in a different film altogether. It also doesn’t help that Jeff’s vain, womanizing qualities make him unlikable while Karan Soni portrays Arnau so broadly that he doesn’t feel like a real person. Each time the film switches its focus to these two it grinds things to a halt.

Luckily the story between Darius and Kenneth is exciting enough to carry things through to the end. The ambiguity over whether or not Kenneth is a genius or a nut is responsible for most of the film’s momentum, and writer Derek Connelly manages to give a definitive answer with a surprisingly satisfying ending. The film’s two subplots feel more like padding which suggests that the time travel story might have been too weak to turn into a feature on its own, but Plaza and Duplass really make the material work. If you can get past the flaws, Safety Not Guaranteed will make for a short but pleasant time.

You Are Here opens with a professor (R.D. Reid) lecturing to an unseen audience while footage of waves rolling in play behind him. He tells the audience to stare at the waves and think for a minute before asking them how they’re looking at the waves. He pulls out a laser pointer and moves the red dot around the screen, asking if they’re focusing on one wave or looking at the whole image. Or are they looking at the red dot? He tells them not to because “this red dot is your enemy.” The professor explains that the red dot is a guide, and the only way for someone to get to their destination is to follow the guide without looking at it. The camera cuts to a shot of just the screen with the red dot bouncing around. Do you take the professor’s advice?

Daniel Cockburn’s film spends its time pondering about identity and how people find their place in the world. There aren’t any answers to the questions You Are Here brings up, but expecting some sort of solution would be missing the point entirely. The film feels like a series of indirectly connected shorts more than a feature with a new story popping up every ten minutes.

After the opening the focus shifts to “Alan,” a man who changes into a different person every several seconds. Other stories include office workers who spend their days telling field agents where to go, a man who spends decades trying to make people see the way he does, a doctor who finds a way to learn a language without understanding it and a woman trying to find a door leading to nowhere in an apartment building.

Cockburn’s decision to split his film into vignettes is a smart one as he can easily present his ideas in a way that separates them instead of throwing them together and overwhelming viewers. Each segment is compelling in its own right, with the most fascinating segment belonging to an archivist (the late Tracy Wright in one of her last roles) who spends her days cataloguing and storing abandoned items she finds in the street.

Eventually the archive appears to be sorting itself as items start moving around. The archivist isn’t sure if she’s doing this unknowingly or if the archive has become self-sufficient, and if the latter if true then she no longer has a purpose in the system she created. Wright’s performance is another sign of how underappreciated she was as an actress. In a film where every character has no real identity, Wright becomes the emotional core. In a later scene where the archivist talks with one of the field agents from a previous story (it’s also the first time we see the archivist having an interaction with another person) it’s surprising to realize how much emotional investment has gone into Wright’s character.

The ending stumbles a bit with the way it forcefully ties the segments together, but You Are Here is brimming with so many ideas that it makes up for its issues with the execution. It’s one of the more ambitious debuts to come out of Canada in a while, a film that’s hard to compare to anything else but covers themes that should hit close to home for everyone. A thought-provoking experience, and hopefully just the beginning of Daniel Cockburn’s career in filmmaking.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Science Fiction film Children of Men is devastatingly beautiful. The film is full of ugly greys and a tone that suggests nothing other than failure and yet, it’s the most hopeful film I have ever seen. There are so many things that make the film special but above all the film is a technical marvel. Cuaron should have easily won Best Director the year it was up for Academy Awards but alas, the film only pulled in nominations for Screenplay, Editing and Cinematography. All of which the film lost.

We are plunged into the middle of chaos at the beginning of the film. When the film begins we find out the youngest person on Earth, an Argentine named Diego, has died at the age of 18. 18? How is this possible? Soon we find out that humans have lost the ability to reproduce. We are dying out. As soon as this distinct possibility catches hold of the minds of the world, civilizations everywhere crumble. Governments collapse as there is no hope left in the world. The only bright spot on the globe is Great Britain. I use the term bright lightly as Britain itself is a cesspool.

We are introduced to Theo (Clive Owen) within a minute of the film starting. We follow him for nearly every second of the film. He is our guide to this disgusting world we now inhabit. He works for the government and spends a lot of his time hanging out with his old friend Jasper, played by Michael Caine. Caine’s performance is sensational. Jasper spends pretty much all of his days watching over his wife who is now a mute.

A few days after the news of “Baby” Diego’s death, Theo runs into his ex-wife Julian. She’s played by Julianne Moore. She now runs with a small terrorist group known as The Fishes. Theo’s past with his ex is a troubled one. They seemed to have split after the grieving over the death of their young child got the best of both of them. I guess it’s hard to say he runs into her when in actuality The Fishes kidnap Theo in broad daylight. The Fishes then demand that Theo escorts a mysterious girl out of London.

The girl is an immigrant to Britain. Normally this isn’t a big issue, but with the world in a complete state of disarray, Britain has outlawed anyone from entering the country. Theo hitches a ride with Julian and her cohorts as they take this immigrant (her name is Kee) out of the city to refuge at a cottage in the English country side. What Theo discovers next is the biggest revelation anyone could have made in 20 years. Kee is pregnant.

The rest of Children of Men has Theo taking control of Kee’s destiny into his hands as he guides her to the The Human Project. This project (that may or may not exist) consists of a group of scientists dedicated to finding out why humans cannot conceive anymore and trying to possibly find a cure.

As I mentioned earlier, the filmmaking choices in Children of Men are some of the best any director has made in recent years. Everything on a technical level is brilliant. Most movies would’ve had a narration or an opening crawl explaining the film’s situation. Cuaron instead chooses to explore the plot of the film with information about the collapse of the world being provided in the background. Newspaper clippings, newscasts, protesting marches through the city and massive digital billboards show the audience what kind of world we live in. He trusts his audience to go along with this. All of this works with ease as we unknowingly go along with tons of information being thrown at us.

In terms of the film’s special effects, Cuaron makes the right choice not to distract from the film. Instead he uses them to enhance the world the film occupies. Some shots of London are given a dystopian uplift as tons of huge LCD screens adorn the buildings of the English metropolis. These screens show everything from ads about how to turn in an immigrant to world news. The visual effects also help out with Emmanuel Lubezki’s stunning Cinematography.

Lubezki’s camera work is some of the best this decade, if not the best. In fact, it’s a crime he lost the Oscar for it. Cuaron’s direction and Lubezki’s camera team to put you as close to the action as possible. Using hand held camera work we are thrown alongside Theo as if we were helping him.

Cuaron made a decision to film as much as the film as possible in long takes. This heightens the realism of the film. There are a lot of long takes in the film and if that isn’t enough to keep the actors on their toes, then a couple of exquisitely fine set pieces will. There are two scenes in the film that are downright insane in terms of their difficulty to film.

The first scene involves Theo, Julian, Kee and two members of The Fishes as they are driving through a road in the forest as they are viciously attacked by a marauding gang. The camera is situated in the middle of the car during the attack and basically turns in a 360 degree angle for over 4 minutes showing the carnage being inflicted on the group. The camera work combined with the visual effects creates a realistic nightmare for us as we are situated right in the middle of all the action.

The second shot of brilliance comes at the end of the film and has to be one of the greatest shots ever put forth on the silver screen. Lasting over 6 minutes the camera follows Theo through a hellish warzone as he seeks out to protect Kee from those who mean to do her harm. Following him through bullets, explosions, blown out cars and eventually a dilapidated building; the camera never loses him. Granted the shot is aided by visual effects it’s nonetheless audacious filmmaking.

The production design of the film is top notch. Every scene feels completely authentic to the film’s setting. I can’t imagine the planning of the film or even the shooting of it. The streets of London, even if it’s the last civilized city left, are a complete mess. Trash permeates the streets of the city and makes the city look like a decaying cavity that is Britain’s society.

What makes Children of Men so special is its endearing heart that pushes its characters hope through the most terrible odds. The film is the most violent Valentine ever filmed about the endurance of the human spirit. In a world of absolutely no hope, a man is given the most arduous task of his life. Everything is stacked against him. What do you even do with the only child born in 20 years? Do you trust a group who wants to use the baby as a symbol for a society to overthrow its government? Or do you take it to a one that may not even exist? Children of Men throws Theo head first into these tribulations.

What I love about the film is how it presents hope. Hope is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to describe. Hope is a thing not guaranteed. I first saw the film during a time in my life where I was pretty down and out. When I finished it, I wasn’t given the answers I needed, but instead I was filled with the confidence I needed to make changes.

That’s what makes the film so special. It doesn’t tell you everything but it does supply the idea that anything, no matter how difficult, can be accomplished. The film plays by these rules too. The film ends on a note that doesn’t show you what ends up happening as a result of this pregnant woman. It ends at a pretty abrupt moment. But the point I think most people miss is that this is Theo’s story. Not the pregnant woman’s. When he leaves the story, the film is done. But the idea that something good will come about from all of the hard work is what I think the film is about.

Alfonso Cuaron is a Mexican director of vast talent. He has shown great promise in the past with such films as Y tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (easily the best of the series), but Children of Men is Alfonso on another level. His previous films only hinted at what he accomplishes here. There is no stopping him either. The film he is involved with now (Gravity), looks to see him taking his filmmaking to the next step.

Despite its ugliness and crassness, Children of Men is a film of great beauty. Yes, it is very violent and full of brutality. The film, however, shows great moments of tenderness throughout; enough at least to keep our hearts cheering for a happy outcome to all the suffering endured by Theo and Kee. Never has the human spirit suffered a more perilous task in a film. Come for the brilliant filmmaking, stay for the sounds of children’s laughter as the credits run over your screen. Children of Men is one hell of a film.

To say Beyond the Black Rainbow is trippy is an understatement, I have a feeling some LSD trips are less intense as this. It is visually stunning with plenty of color filters, distortions, and off-the wall compositions that takes you to a futuristic alternate reality which makes you feel like you are the one on drugs. The only other film I can say had this same effect on me is Enter The Void. Beyond the Black Rainbow will take you on a trip, whether it is a good or bad one is up for you to decide. It is a midnight movie that has cult classic written all over it.

Opening with an infomercial style video set in 1983, Dr. Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands) states the purpose of the Arboria Institute. Their goal is to find the “perfect way for people to achieve happiness, contentment, inner peace.” The Institute claims to have found a way to make that dream a reality through their unique practices. I found the whole opening similar eerily similar to the Dharma Initiative training videos from the television series Lost (one of my all-time favorite shows).

Inside the state of the art facilities of Arboria Institute is the administrator Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers) who speaks into the microphone that sounds to the other side of the glass where our film’s mute protagonist Elena (Eva Allan) sits with her head hanging down. She does not look up but rather just sits and listens to what Barry has to say. Almost always he is trying to get a response out of her by saying something like how sorry he was that she never got to meet her mother and how beautiful she was.

Barry is a breathy speaker who seems to have special powers over his patients which he may or may not get from the pills that he takes himself. He is not the only one that contains special powers but no one but he is able to look through the eyes of God, as he puts it. He sees what others cannot, beautiful things like a black rainbows.

Then the film goes off for an hour on a highly stylized head-trip that makes you wonder if the experiment is really on you. Director Pano Cosmatos takes you on a hypnotic trip into an alternate reality on a level that few can achieve through cinema. It is only the beginning and the end that there is much of a plot and subsequently when reality sets back in, which is it’s biggest downfall.

Apparently at one of the Q&A’s, someone asked Cosmatos, “Can you help me understand better” and the first time filmmaker responded in a deadpan tone, “I don’t think I can.” This makes me believe that the director intended the film to not be one that someone understands but rather experiences.

The score is easily the best I have heard this year so far and will likely remain that way. Without it the film would not be the same, it sets the ominous feeling that lingers in the film. It was a score so perfectly fitting that even the synth masters themselves, Daft Punk, would have a hard time replicating the mood.

I think it would be fair to draw some comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey after watching Beyond the Black Rainbow. There is the obvious futuristic aspect where machines with flashing red buttons have tremendous power in a bright white minimalistic environment. Then you have the eerie repetitive soundtrack that accompanies the film nearly the entire time. Even the mood was unusual, creepy, and peculiar, like often found in Kubrick films.

Beyond the Black Rainbow more feels like a dream than anything else, scratch that, a nightmare. There is little to no plot as it ditches everything that is conventional for avant garde. Films like this, ones not driven by story but rather an experience, are the ones that you walk away from not knowing exactly how you feel about them because they are tough to analysis. One thing is for sure, it will likely be the most original film you see in a few years’ time.

Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb is a quiet, abstract, and eerie science fiction film about a woman who has a hard time of letting go. There is no doubt that it has drawn some controversy due to incest playing a big role in the film. With a taboo subject, slow moving and depressing feel, it is easy to see how Womb would be difficult for the average viewer to sit through, however, I found no such difficulties.

Womb begins with a voice over, “Just because you went away, it does not mean you are not here anymore. Perhaps I all ever needed was this gift. The one you gave to me at the end.” The last line is important as this opening scene is really the end. It is hard to call it foreshowing because if you pay attention it practically gives the ending away.

A friendship begins when two young children meet on a rainy beach underneath a dock. Soon Rebecca and Thomas share much of their time with one another which normally consists of going on beach adventures together. But that does not last for long as Rebecca informs Thomas that she will be moving away with her mother to Tokyo to live in an apartment on the 72nd floor.

The film then jumps ahead 12 years later when Rebecca (Eva Green) is now an adult. We see her take the same ferry back into the town she left on as a child. Rebecca now lives in the same house she grew up in. Eager to see Thomas she finds out that he does not live too far away from where he grew up at. When the two do finally meet again as adults Thomas (Matt Smith) remembers the exact floor number of the apartment she moved away to so long ago.

Not long after the two reunite Thomas tragically dies in a car accident. This is where Womb takes an interesting turn. While mourning his loss she comes up with the bizarre idea of giving birth to his clone so that she can effectively bring him back into the world again. Perhaps cloning him is Rebecca’s way of coping with the idea of Thomas’s death being her fault. At least that would be the most logical answer but that is when the film takes another turn, a controversial one at that.

Never moving faster than it needed to, sometimes even a bit too slow, the film showed us subtle hints of something deeply troubling Rebecca. There is intense passion she has for her son/lover that goes back and forth between being a mother and being attracted to her deceased lover.

The director of photography, Peter Szatmari, repeatedly shows long empty shots of an overcast beach, resulting in beautiful cinematography that was carefully done. It accurately portrays the loneliness and isolation that is found in Rebecca.

In a lot of ways Eva Green’s character in this film is similar to the one she played in the Jordan Scott’s marvelous film Cracks. Both of the characters had to deal with unconventional sexual desires. Green’s performance here is solid, on the outside there is not a lot going on but it is evident that on the inside she is torn.

Because Womb moves at a snail’s pace, some audiences may find it difficult to hold their interest in it. Others may find it hard to get over the underlying theme of incest. If you can get past those two big hurdles then you will see the film does have something to offer aside from the amazing cinematography. The film shows how powerful nostalgia can be and how difficult it can be to let go.

Prometheus is an ambitious, entertaining film from Ridley Scott that ultimately falls flat due to an overextended plot that becomes convoluted in the second half of the film. The film is set in the same universe as Alien (1979), which Scott also directed, and contains many similarities (female lead, untrustworthy androids) but is more of a stand-alone film than a direct prequel. With expectations sky-high due to an intense trailer and Ridley Scott’s track record with science-fiction, Prometheus aimed to reach those expectations with a philosophical story that has potential, but is marred by an incomplete story, and uneven pacing.

Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) are archeologists that have recently concluded that a variety of different cave drawing portraying humans worshipping God-like figures pointing to the stars is a map to the home planet of some sort of alien race. Enter the dubious corporation of Weyland Enterprises to fund the voyage to the mysterious planet under questionable premises.

Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) is the corporate stooge who questions the point of the mission. It’s hard to describe too much more of the plot without giving anything away, but there are several plot twists (some interesting, some not) and, believe it or not, there are in fact aliens on this planet.

The main problem with Prometheus is that it tried to do too much on too many levels. It tries to tow the line of an entertaining thriller while still being taken seriously as an exploration of the deeper questions of life. Many pivotal scenes feel rushed and several plot points are unresolved in order to bring the film running time in at a marketable two hours.

Characters drift in and out, and there is no real connection. Michael Fassbender gives an excellent, interesting portrayal of David the android, but most of the other actors didn’t really get a chance to flesh out their characters. The existential parts of the plot, while interesting, seem forced and unsatisfying, it just never reaches that point where the film really drives home an interesting, original concept.

Prometheus is a good film, and definitely worth a watch if you are any sort of a science fiction fan. It does not meet the lofty expectations but still brings enough of the table to leave the viewer thinking about the film afterwards. I am really hoping there is an extended Directors Cut that possibly develops out the plot and characters a little more completely, but until that happens, this film gets a mediocre review.

Disclaimer: I am a huge Ridley Scott fan, and my expectations were through the roof for this film.

First of all let’s get something straight, Extraterrestrial does not have any aliens in it. In fact, the only real science fiction in the film is used to keep the characters locked in an apartment from fear of alien invasion. From there the Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo turns the film into a dark romantic comedy that focuses on human relationships and human flaws.

Extraterrestrial begins with the lead character Julio (Julián Villagrán) waking up in an unfamiliar bed. He has no idea where he is but a bra on the floor lets him know that he got lucky after a night of heavy drinking. Soon he finds out that the apartment belongs to a beautiful woman named Julia (Michelle Jenner) as the two shared those awkward-next-morning moments that are typically accompanied by hangovers. With nearly identical names maybe Julio and Julia are meant to be?

As Julio is about to leave her place he notices that his cell phone has no coverage and asks her if he could use her cell phone. Sure enough, Julia’s cell phone lacks reception as well. Being without cell phone reception and internet access is pretty much a crisis in of itself in our modern world. Then he begins to notice how empty the streets are in the busy city, not even a single soul is walking about.

Using the oldest form of technology Julia owned, a radio, the two hear an emergency broadcast telling everyone to stay indoors. Julio glances out the window towards the sky to see a huge alien ship covering the city. Luckily, Julio is an industrial designer so he is able to estimate that the ship is probably around 4 miles wide. The two do what they are told and remain indoors. Being that Julio finds Julia attractive, he has no problem obeying the request.

As night falls Julia is getting tired so she goes to sleep in her room. It appears as if Julio is stuck on the couch in the living room which is an ironic turn of events from the previous night. It is funny how when they were both drunk and did not really know each other they were alright to sleep together but now it is completely opposite. Julio does not seem to mind much because he is not sleepy anyways.

Things begin to get real interesting the next morning and not because of any alien attacks. Julia’s boyfriend Carlos (Raul Cimas) returns home so the two make up a story that Julio blacked out and Julia brought him in to save him. Carlos is a fairly laid back kind of guy, accepts the story and insists that he stays for his own protection.

As if a love triangle was not enough drama for one apartment, the creepy stalker neighbor Angel (Carlos Areces) is invited over, turning it into a love square. I am not exactly sure what the reason is that Angel is invited over, since Carlos despises him because he knows he has a thing for Julia. Angel is an important player in this game though because he knows the secret Julio and Julia are keeping from Carols.

It sure sounds like a synopsis of a soap opera but Extraterrestrial is more of a dark romantic comedy than anything else. The science fiction elements disappeared as quickly as it entered and you start to see what the film is really about, the study of human relationships and how we react in critical and awkward situations. The film is also about how one lie has a snowball effect to more and more lies and lies within lies.

Vigalondo took what could have been a sci-fi heavy story and turned it into a rather simple yet entertaining film about human relationships. Not only that but Vigalondo got us to side with each of the characters in the film despite each one have their own flaws. I went into Extraterrestrial not knowing much about the film and it was completely not what I expected. I believe the film benefited a lot from that.

Fresh off the independent film festival circuit is Mike Cahill‘s first feature film entitled Another Earth. Reciting the synopsis of the film, a discovery of another planet that is incredibly similar to ours that it is labeled Earth 2, may sound like your standard science fiction film. But I am here to tell you that Another Earth contains more than just the standard fare.

Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling) is 17 and just got an acceptance letter from MIT. After a night of celebrating the good news, she makes the decision to drive home under the influence. Instead of paying attention to the road, she is gazing at the newly discovered Earth 2 when she slams head-on to a car instantly killing the people inside.

Because she was a minor, she spends the next four years in prison before being released. As you would probably expect, this tragedy has left here emotionally scarred. This is most evident when she is looking for work when she tells the job placement representative that she does not want to be around people or do much talking. She is depressed and it is not hard to understand why.

Another Earth does a good job of constantly filling you in, a little bit at a time, about Earth 2 through different media channels. The news on TV when Rhoda is signing her release papers from prison. The radio from time to time keeps us up to date such as when it is the anniversary of the discovery. The voice on the radio asks its listeners if they remember where they were at when it was first discovered, Rhoda cannot forget even if she tried. In the film, Earth 2 represents hope that in a parallel world the same mistakes you make could be erased, forgiven, or possibly not even ever happened in the first place.

After walking around near where the accident took place, she notices a man in a truck pull up and place a children’s toy near the intersection. It is then that she realizes the possibly that someone could have actually survived the accident. After performing a Google search she discovers that while two people died in the car accident, the driver eventually awoke from a coma. Naturally, she becomes more curious about what impact she had on this man’s life and tries to figure out if there is a way she could show her respects.

Cahill shows a wide range of skills as he not only directed the film but he was also the editor, producer, cinematographer and co-wrote the film. The film lays all of its cards on the table at the very beginning, however, Cahill keeps the audience engaged with trying to figure out what the end result will be. Brit Marling also took on more than just one responsibility; she played the lead role as well as co-wrote the screenplay. Marling was excellent in her role which mostly consisted of being depressed, but at times showed her character showed ambition and happiness. Marling has great potential for a promising acting career if she continues with performances like this.

Another Earth achieved more than the indie budget typically allows. Even though there may not have been very many special effects, it was impressive what Cahill was able to pull off. The cinematography was artfully done and the poetic storyline was thought-provoking. The final scene is both haunting and mesmerizing at the same time; goosebumps will likely to appear.

Lars von Trier, the Danish controversial out-spoken director, delivers his least controversial film of his career, Melancholia. The film centers around two sisters who are both psychologically ill and must deal with the tragedy that world will end when a rogue planet named Melancholia approaches Earth. It is one of the most captivating opening sequences of the year and will instantly get you hooked. But it is an art-house type of film that demands patience from the audience for most of it’s duration.

Melancholia is divided into two parts; the first part is called “Justine”. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and her newly wedded husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) show up two hours late for their own wedding reception. As they are about to enter the reception, they notice an unusually bright red star in the sky and take the time to admire it despite already being so late. You can tell that something is bothering Justine, as she disappears throughout the reception to be by herself. Justine acts as if she is going to fall asleep on more than a couple occasions and at one point takes a bath instead of cutting the cake.

At the halfway point of the film, there is not a whole lot we know about Justine yet. The plot also does not advance a whole lot in the first hour. Still, the film does not lose your attention as you get a sense that it is building up to something. It feels like the film was almost shot in reverse as we are shown the characters in action before knowing anything about them, as it turns out that is what the second part is about.

The second part of the film called “Claire” and is in the point of view of Justine’s sister named, you guessed it, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Suddenly, the film starts giving us more background on the characters and the story. The red star they mentioned at the beginning is in fact the planet Melancholia, which is supposed to pass by Earth in 5 days. At least that is what the scientists are saying; Claire is worried that they might be wrong.

Unless you were not paying attention, the opening sequence gave away the film. The planet does collide with Earth and the end of life as we know it is looming. But knowing that does not take away from the film, knowing that only adds to it. There are many transformations in the film but the most obvious one is the characters themselves.

It turns out that Justine is extremely depressed to the point of barely functional without Claire. Claire battles with her own illness with anxiety about Melancholia. Justine does not help with the anxiety when she tells Claire that “Life on Earth is evil” and there will not be much time left on it. As the planet approaches Justine seems to become more relaxed and normal than ever while Claire is basically switching roles with Justine. It is as if Justine is represented as Melancholia and Claire is represented as Earth, it may be stretch but the paths of destruction links them together.

Beginning shots of slow motion were captured fantastically and had a perfect score to go along with it (Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde). Showcasing people in their last moments before the plant Melancholia collided. We see lightning coming from Kristen Dunst’s finger tips and her laying in her wedding dress on water with her eyes closed. The beginning and ending scenes were phenomenally well shot and hard to forget.

Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her role of Justine. Dunst does an amazing job of playing an unhappy person who cannot deal with everyday normal activities but can deal with the world ending. Charlotte Gainsbourg (who worked with von Trier in Antichrist) does an equally impressive job with her supporting role as the supporting sister.

Melancholia is perhaps the best “end of the world” film as it does not try to sugarcoat anything or use a far-fetched sci-fi solution to magically resolve the impending doom. Instead, it shows us paths of destruction in multiple ways, psychologically through Justine’s character and physically with the planet Melancholia. While the beginning and ending scenes are brilliant, the middle section is so-so. At the very least, I think most people can agree it is an ambitious film that you can admire from a technical standpoint.

Super 8 is a summer blockbuster film by director J.J. Abrams that contains obvious hints of Spielberg throughout. The film is both entertaining and predictable when a group of adolescent filmmakers stumble upon a magical discovery. It is everything you would expect from a summer blockbuster; it’s exciting, entertaining, mindless and the plot could have used a little work.

Super 8 takes place in a small Ohio town set in 1979, with 12 year old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) helping his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) make an 8mm zombie movie for a local film festival. Those two have a few other friends to join them that are committed to filmmaking as well. Together they try keeping it mostly a secret from their parents as best as they can.

Somehow the group of boys gets the attractive girl, Alice (Elle Fanning), to star in their film but she is reluctant when she figures out Joe is a part of it. This is because she is driving her father’s vehicle without a license and Joe’s father is a deputy. Joe is at first shocked that she even knew who he was and tells her that he will never tell his father about it.

Once they arrive at the train station where they are going to shoot the next scene, they begin to setup lights, get makeup on and rehearse the lines. I must say it was truly impressive for a group of 12 year olds. As they are reading their lines everyone is taken aback at how wonderful Alice conveys emotion through her lines. She does so in a way that is brilliant because you can tell she is acting like she is acting.

The scene suddenly gets a huge break when they hear a train coming on the tracks next to them. Charles realizes that this opportunity will add a great amount of production value to the film if they can use it in the scene. So Charles rushes everyone into position and starts filming.

Everything goes as planned and the scene nears the end as the train is passing until Joe witnesses something odd. He spots a pickup truck getting on the tracks and heading towards the train at full speed. The train and pickup collide head-on that derails the train and setting off an enormous explosion. The camera gets knocked over on its side during all the commotion but continues to film the entire thing.

The group slowly wanders around the site looking at all the train parts on fire when they spot the truck that caused the accident. They approach the truck cautiously and find that the person behind the wheel of the truck had a schedule of the train. The man who is barely alive tells them not to tell anyone else about the accident.

You cannot read any reviews of this film without someone comparing this to a Steven Spielberg film but it is easy to see why. First of all, Spielberg is an executive producer of this film. Second of all, the film contains a ton of classic Spielberg elements such as; having a small courageous group of friends who all vary in different talents that are slightly beyond normal for their age. In my head I could not stop comparing this to a modern day version of The Goonies. It did lack one element that Spielberg seemed to always nail, an amazing original soundtrack.

Oddly enough, I was least impressed with the main character’s acting; Joel seemed to lack emotion that Elle and Riley expressed. Elle Fanning’s performance stood out the most for me but knowing that she is the younger sister of actress Dakota Fanning, it is not surprising she has so much talent. I would be shocked if she did not start getting some larger roles and later down the road pick up an Oscar for one of them.

I very much enjoyed the first two-thirds of Super 8 because it was focused much more on the group of kids trying to make a film together and less on the monster itself. However, the film seemed to abandon that in the last third of the film. This made it seem like the whole idea of them making a film for a festival seem like an afterthought by showing it in the ending credits only instead of referencing it again beforehand. The film is called Super 8 after all. I wonder if they won the local film festival?