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Billion Dollar Brain (1967, Ken Russell)
1960s movie about the threat of artificial intelligence, shot in high style for a British spy drama, which is medium-low style for a Ken Russell picture. Caine covering up Karl and Francoise: Villain...
View ArticleMission: Impossible 8: The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie)
This is what I imagine the Fast & Furious movies are like: filling the gaps between action scenes with sappy talk and meaningful glances between friends and family. When everyone shuts up about how...
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The Shrouds (2024, David Cronenberg)
Making up Vincent Cassel as Cronenberg and having him mourn his late wife could’ve gone so hard into self-indulgent territory but instead this soft dialogue drama (with Crimes lighting and lots of...
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Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)
Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different...
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The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)
Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by...
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024, Nick Park & Merlin Crossingham)
New adventures. Fan service for other people’s interests (the criminal penguin with the glove on his head, garden gnomes), none for my interests (cheese, cheese fingers).
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The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)
Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void...
View ArticleThe Last Ten Minutes vol. 29: SHOCKtober 2024 part two
Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups? I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out! Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros) This got decent...
View ArticleRumours (2024, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)
A different sort of thing for Maddin, his most restrained feature. More Bunuelian perhaps, tricking viewers with a political arthouse drama with Cate Blanchett then gradually accumulating unnatural...
View ArticleThe Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)
A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend,...
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Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders)
Nice thing about the five-hour movie being spread across two discs is it’s an easy way to break it up across two evenings. The down side is my brain played the title U2 song on a loop for the 22 hours...
View ArticleMission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning 1 (2023, Christopher McQuarrie)
We prepped by rewatching part one, where Kittridge was a standout, just the gov’t boss who has to say all the plotty dialogue, but he turns it into a twitchy physical performance, so we were psyched...
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M3gan (2022, Gerard Johnstone)
I was stressed to learn I’d been tricked, that this was only cowritten by Malignant‘s James Wan, actually directed by the NZ guy who made Housebound, but it didn’t turn out to matter – good movie about...
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The Matrix Revolutions (2003, Wachowskis)
Tying this up before part four comes out. Neo’s in limbo, aptly represented as a train station, having passed out using his matrix-powers in the real world. Morpheus and Trinity and the Oracle’s...
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The Matrix Reloaded (2003, Wachowskis)
In 2003 we watched this, wanting it to rule, but it kinda sucked. In 2021, I am a serious auteurist cinephile who understands the unique artistry of the Wachowskis, rewatching with a corrected mindset,...
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The Matrix (1999, Wachowskis)
Think I like this more now than I did when it came out. It was Phantom Menace Spring, and I wasn’t sure I enjoyed big-budget sci-fi spectacle anymore. Now I’m older and stupider, with fewer pretensions...
View ArticleUpgrade (2018, Leigh Whannell)
One of the only car-competent gearhead dudes in a computerized future is crippled in a suspicious attack after a self-driving car takes him into a bad neighborhood, right after meeting a reclusive tech...
View ArticleMarjorie Prime (2017, Michael Almereyda)
A great improvement on that Black Mirror with the inflatable husband-substitute… three acts of interactions with holograms programmed to behave like lost loved ones. First, Lois Smith (Minority Report,...
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Blade Runner 2049 (2017, Denis Villeneuve)
I’m not convinced there needed to be a Blade Runner sequel, but if commercial concerns demanded one, this was probably as good as it was gonna get. You’ve got action, Harrison Ford, lots of references...
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Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.” I remembered noir detective Harrison Ford tracking rogue artificial humans Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah through a future city, but did not remember the...
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