Science Fiction - vo.rs

Under the Skin: Alien Cinema at Its Coldest

Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Most alien films are anxious to explain the alien. They give you a homeworld, a motive, a plan, a face you can read. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin gives you almost none of that, and it is the coldest, most genuinely unearthly film in the modern science-fiction canon because of the withholding. A woman drives a white van through Glasgow. She stops men, asks directions, offers lifts. Some of them she takes home, into a black room where the floor is a liquid that swallows them. That is nearly the whole plot, and describing it does nothing to prepare you for the experience, which is one of the great feats of pure cinema this century.

Videodrome: The Prophecy About the Screen

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Some films age into their meaning. Videodrome was a commercial disappointment in 1983 — a strange, sticky, unclassifiable thing that confused audiences who wanted either a clean horror picture or a clean idea and got neither. Then the world caught up with it. Watch it now, in a house full of screens that watch back, and David Cronenberg’s fever about television reads like a document that was simply filed forty years early. It is a horror film, an addiction study, and a piece of media theory that happens to have a pulsing, breathing videocassette in it, and the reason it endures is that its central worry has only grown truer.

Denis Villeneuve: The Widescreen Unease

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Denis Villeneuve makes enormous films that feel like someone holding their breath. This is the paradox at the centre of his work, and it is why he ended up with the keys to Blade Runner and Dune while flashier directors were left arguing on Twitter. He takes the largest canvas the industry can print — 65mm, IMAX, budgets with a lot of zeroes — and uses it to render a very small, very human sensation: the moment before the bad thing, stretched until the room goes quiet. Nobody working at his scale is as comfortable with silence, and nobody makes silence feel as much like a threat.

David Cronenberg: The Flesh and the Machine

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Most horror directors are afraid of the body. David Cronenberg is fascinated by it — the way it leaks, mutates, betrays, and occasionally improves. For half a century he has made films about flesh doing things flesh should not do, and the reason they unsettle so precisely is that he never treats the transformation as evil. To Cronenberg, disease is a form of change, and change is neither good nor bad; it is simply what happens next. That clinical calm, laid over the most visceral images in mainstream cinema, is the signature. He films the end of the human as we know it with the composure of a man reading a lab report.

Dark City: The Older Cousin The Matrix Never Credited

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Fourteen months before The Matrix taught a generation to ask whether the world was real, Alex Proyas had already answered the question and shown the machinery behind the curtain. Dark City opened in February 1998 to modest business and a shrug, and then spent two decades being rediscovered as the film that got there first — the reality-is-a-lie neo-noir the later blockbuster stands on. The overlap is not coincidence and not quite theft. Both films were shot at Fox Studios Australia, and some of the standing sets Proyas built for his eternal night were reused, redressed, for the machine world the Wachowskis unveiled the following year. The older cousin never got the credit, and the family resemblance is impossible to miss once you have seen both.

Nine Sci-Fi Films That Saw the Surveillance Age Coming

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Science fiction gets graded on its gadgets, which is unfair, because the genre’s real predictive gift has always been social rather than technical. The films below mostly missed the specific hardware — nobody drew the smartphone — and they nailed the thing that mattered far more: the feeling of being watched, filed, scored and sorted by systems too large to see the edges of. They understood that surveillance is a relationship before it is a technology, and that the watched change their own behaviour long before anyone acts on the data. Some are cold dystopias and some are intimate character studies, and every one of them was written when the surveillance we now take for granted was still a warning rather than a subscription. Here are nine that arrived early, in the order they were made, so you can watch the anxiety sharpen decade by decade. Spoiler-free throughout.

Hard to Be a God: German's Medieval Mud and the End of the World

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013) is the most physically overwhelming film I have ever sat through, and I do not say that lightly. For nearly three hours you are dragged through the streets of a planet called Arkanar, a world stuck forever in a Middle Ages that never produced a Renaissance, and the film’s project is to make you feel that filth in your teeth. Mud, pus, spit, snot, blood, offal, rain and rot fill every frame. Faces loom into the lens and back away. Hands reach out and smear the camera. By the twenty-minute mark you have stopped watching a film and started enduring a place. German spent something like fifteen years making it and died in November 2013 before the final mix was complete; his wife and co-writer Svetlana Karmalita and his son Aleksei German Jr. finished it. It is a deathbed film, and it feels like one.

Gattaca: The Quiet Dystopia That Aged Forward

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Most dystopias date badly because they overreach — the future arrives, checks the film against reality, and finds the flying cars missing. Gattaca did the opposite. Andrew Niccol’s 1997 debut imagined a near-future society that sorts human beings by their genome, and in the years since it has crept closer to the news rather than further from it. Polygenic embryo screening is a product you can buy. Prospective parents can select among their own fertilised embryos for lower disease risk. The word “designer baby” has moved from science fiction to the bioethics syllabus. Gattaca aged forward, and that alone would make it worth revisiting. That it is also a beautifully controlled, quietly devastating film is what makes it a small classic.

Alphaville: Godard's Noir at the End of the Future

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Jean-Luc Godard made a science-fiction film in 1965 without building a single set, hiring a single effect, or admitting for a moment that the future needs to look futuristic. Alphaville is set in a distant technocratic city on another world, ruled by a sentient computer, and Godard filmed all of it in Paris — the real Paris, at night, using the coldest, most modern architecture the city had to offer. Glass towers, fluorescent corridors, motorway underpasses, the brutalist hotels going up around the edges of the capital: shoot them in high-contrast black and white, keep the camera moving, and 1965 becomes the year 3000 without a franc spent on illusion. The trick is so confident it comes round to profound. The dystopia is already here. Godard just had to point at it.

La Jetee: The Time-Travel Masterpiece Told in Stills

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

There is a single moving shot in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, and it lasts a few seconds. A woman lies asleep in soft morning light, and her eyes open. Everything else in the film’s twenty-eight minutes is a photograph — hundreds of black-and-white stills, cut together over a narrator’s voice and Trevor Duncan’s music, held long enough that you begin to read them the way you read a comic panel or a memory. When that one image finally stirs, when the sleeping face blinks, the effect is genuinely startling, and Marker has spent the whole film loading the gun. He turns the most ordinary thing in cinema — motion — into the rarest, and by rationing it he makes you feel the difference between a photograph and a life.