Sci-Fi
Enemy: Villeneuve's Spider, the Double, and the Dread
Before Arrival and Dune, Denis Villeneuve made his strangest, most private film
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Sci-Fi
27 articles
Sci-Fi
The Man From Earth: A Whole Sci-Fi Film in One Room
Jerome Bixby's deathbed screenplay proves the genre's biggest idea needs no budget at all
Sci-Fi
Denis Villeneuve: The Widescreen Unease
How a Québécois miniaturist became the last director trusted with the biggest cameras in the world
Sci-Fi
Upstream Color: Shane Carruth's Puzzle Made of Feeling
The Primer director returns with a film you decode through the body, not the notebook
Sci-Fi
Sunshine: Boyle's Beautiful Film That Loses Its Nerve in Act Three
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland build one of the great modern space films, then flinch
Sci-Fi
Timecrimes: Spanish Time Travel on a Shoestring
Nacho Vigalondo builds a perfect causal engine out of one house, one forest, and one man
Sci-Fi
Predestination: The Heinlein Loop, Filmed Faithfully
A review of the Spierig Brothers' time-travel film, and the impossible short story it dared to adapt straight
Sci-Fi
Ghost in the Shell (1995): The Frames Everyone Quoted
A revisit of Mamoru Oshii's cyberpunk landmark, and the images the rest of science fiction spent thirty years borrowing
Sci-Fi
Akira: The Anime That Sold the West on the Form
A revisit of Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 landmark, and how one film rewired what the West thought animation could do
Sci-Fi
eXistenZ: Cronenberg's Game That Predicted the Console War
A revisit of the wettest virtual-reality film ever made, and the one that saw the industry coming
Sci-Fi
The Matrix at 25: What the Sequels Misread
A revisit of the film that swallowed a decade of cinema, and the three that tried to explain it
Sci-Fi
Dark City: The Older Cousin The Matrix Never Credited
Alex Proyas built the reality-is-a-lie thriller a year early, on sets the Wachowskis would borrow
Sci-Fi
Nine Sci-Fi Films That Saw the Surveillance Age Coming
The cameras, the files and the watchers — nine films that got here first
Sci-Fi
Gattaca: The Quiet Dystopia That Aged Forward
Andrew Niccol's genetic-caste thriller was science fiction in 1997 and reads like a policy briefing now
Sci-Fi
Alphaville: Godard's Noir at the End of the Future
A secret agent, a talking computer, and a dystopia built entirely out of 1965 Paris with no effects at all
Sci-Fi
La Jetee: The Time-Travel Masterpiece Told in Stills
Chris Marker's 28-minute photo-roman is the most influential science-fiction film almost nobody sees first
Sci-Fi
Annihilation: The Studio's Nerve Failed, the Film Didn't
How Paramount blinked, sold the world to Netflix, and freed one of the decade's strangest studio pictures
Sci-Fi
Ex Machina: The Turing Test as a Chamber Thriller
Alex Garland's debut turns three people, a house and a machine into a slow, elegant trap
Sci-Fi
Moon: Sam Rockwell, Alone, and Duncan Jones's Debut
A one-man lunar mining station, a talking computer, and the best practical-effects sci-fi of its year
Sci-Fi
Coherence: A Dinner Party and a Fracturing Universe
James Ward Byrkit shot a quantum nightmare in his own living room, and it works
Sci-Fi
Primer: The Time-Travel Film That Refuses to Explain Itself
Shane Carruth built a paradox machine for seven thousand dollars and dared you to keep up
Sci-Fi
Children of Men: The Long Take as Despair and Hope
Alfonso Cuarón's 2027 is the most convincing end of the world ever filmed
Sci-Fi
Arrival: The Sci-Fi Film That Rewires Its Own Grammar
Villeneuve, Ted Chiang and a first contact story built out of language itself
Sci-Fi
Stalker: The Zone as a Test of Faith
Tarkovsky's ruined pilgrimage and the room that grants your deepest wish
Sci-Fi
Solaris (1972): Tarkovsky's Answer to Kubrick
The Soviet space film that turned inward while everyone else looked up
Sci-Fi
Blade Runner 2049: The Sequel That Earned Its Silence
Villeneuve, Deakins and the rare follow-up that deepens the original
Sci-Fi
Blade Runner: Which Cut Is the Film, and Why It Matters
Seven versions, one masterpiece, and the small change that decides everything