This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
We just watched "Passengers" (2016) and it was entertaining. There is a horrifying moral dilemma at the heart of the movie, and it is played out slowly to let the audience worry about it for a while. The leads (Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt) are winning as usual. The movie seems to become more conventional than it might have been, which I assume was an attempt to make it into a crowdpleaser rather than a morality play.
I'll save that…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
So here's a thing that happened.
An English philosopher, anti-apartheid activist, and acquaintance of Arthur C. Clarke named Olaf Stapledon wrote a science-fiction novel in 1930 called "Last And First Men." In the novel, a future human civilization communicates through complex means to our present, explaining how they have created an additional seventeen iterations of the human species (with numerous subspecies and variants), have become a telepathic hive mind, occasionally eat each other, and coincidentally have terraformed the planet Neptune.…
I think some might miss that Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is one of the best movies of the year so far, so hear me out. I was struck by how grand is our old friend’s vision, and how joyfully he has worked to share it with us.
The main title makes a special point to label the move as “a fable.” Although I might quibble and instead describe it more as a mythic poem, the important thing is for the…
I'm on a run of catching up on movies I should have watched a long time ago. Last night I saw Charlie Kaufman's "Syncecdoche, New York" from 2008.
It is one of the most miserable and depressing movies I have ever seen (and I do adore miserable and depressing movies) and I think it is a masterpiece. I promise you it will make you feel very bad.
The gist of the story is that a theater director finds himself making…
