Empire of the Sun (the book) is Ballard at his most Spielbergian, but unfortunately Empire the Sun (the film) is not Spielberg at his most Ballardian. Bizarrely, this came eight years after a film in which Spielberg did show a woman getting sexually aroused by military aviation technology (1941), but here he makes no attempt to evoke how Jim's obsession with hardware is about erasing the line between animate and inanimate matter, so as to erase the line between death…
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Angel Face 1952
A lot of the tension and atmosphere drains out of this in the second half, but then it completely redeems itself with one of the greatest endings I've ever seen in my life.
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Arrival 2016
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Can any explain to me why Amy Adams' character doesn't prevent her daughter from getting cancer? We know that she can use her knowledge of the future to intervene in the present, as she does with General Shang. The random cell mutation that causes cancer in her daughter will have required a specific set of circumstances at the molecular level – it's exceptionally bad luck (see the amazing account in Francis Spufford's Red Plenty of how many different things have…
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RRR 2022
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
The first two times I saw this were at Zone 3 Cineworlds with little to no audience, and I was getting so envious watching all those videos on Twitter of packed houses hooting and hollering at encoRRRe screenings in the US, so when I saw it was playing again at the Prince Charles I jumped at the chance. But even though the whole point was to see it with a crowd, I then became very apprehensive about seeing it with…
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