Silent Night (2021)

What a dreary exercise this is, about an annoying group of family and friends, like all those twerps from Four Weddings And A Funeral, gathered for Christmas Eve, and as if that alone were not a situation ripe for high tension and aired grievances and awkward revelations, it also happens to be the eve of the end of the world, so all these goofuses face a decision that is sufficiently ghoulish to keep you watching through the drudgery to the end: they can die painfully from a poisoned atmosphere, or take a pill and die peacefully before the agony starts, Merry Christmas.

★★☆☆☆

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Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

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Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17 is a messy overreaching film about an "expendable", a worker on a spaceship who is employed to die over and over (with a new self 3D-printed after each death); it's a childish pantomine of conflated woke themes presented plainly - a rehash of ideas from Okja and Snowpiercer - with Toni Collete stepping in for Tilda Swinton, and Mark Ruffalo arrived directly from the set of Poor Thing.

★★★☆☆

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The Substance (2024)

The gothic fairytale The Substance very efficiently sets up how the peculiar science at its core works - an unboxing scene reveals boldly labelled products, one after the other, that neatly, cleverly explain the workings of a substance that promises rejuvenation to Demi Moore's has-been tv star Elisabeth Sparkle - but then the movie uses voiceover and those bold labels repeatedly flashed on screen to hammer home again and again what has been firmly established, making the really very humorous body horror movie more and more of a camp pantomime for imbeciles as it goes along.

★★★☆☆

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Moonfall (2022)

Mercifully skipping the usual disaster-movie preamble of ignored scientists and warnings spilling from dot matrix printers, Moonfall gets to collapsing cities and lunar chaos within minutes, but its brisk, comic-book style only makes it slightly less exhausting than it would otherwise be.

★★☆☆☆

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Reminiscence (2022)

What was apparently intended was a noir detective story set in a water-inundated future world - Hugh Jackman's Nick provides the hardboiled voiceover, wondering out-loud things like why a dame like Rebecca Ferguson's sultry bar singer Mae walked into a "memory detective" agency like his - but the photography is glossy, the actors look like they are in a fashion magazine, the set design is 'Dick Tracy' cartoony and cheap like an escape room, and the lighting is 'BioShock' neon and bright, leaving you with the impression that the writer, the lighting person, the set designer, and the actors needed to sit down together at least once for a production meeting.

★★☆☆☆

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Mindscape (aka "Anna") (2013)

The high-concept sci-fi is really just a contrivance, the only thing separating this movie from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit with Mark Strong's "memory investigator", a man able to piggybank along in people's memories, really just a Hercule Poirot who might otherwise have to simply interview those involved in a mystery involving a housebound and hunger-striking teenager (another eye-roll-inducing contrivance), a family secret, a murder, schoolyard bullying and mistaken identity.

★★☆☆☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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Ghost In The Shell (2017)

Masamune Shirow's manga, previously brought to the big screen in 1997 as the celebrated (and confusing) anime feature, is adapted here as a cartoony live action scifi but despite whiz-bang visual effects, not much interest is generated in the story of Major Kusanagi (a wooden, stiff Scarlet Johansson), the cyborg with a human mind (or "ghost" as we are repeatedly told) tasked with investigating the assassinations of several Hank company executives.

★★☆☆☆

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What Happened To Monday (2017)

In an overpopulated world of food shortages and unrest, a one-child policy is strictly enforced meaning illegal septuplets, all played The Klumps-style by Noomi Rapace, grow up confined to an apartment with each able to venture outside only on their one allocated day per week and only provided they all pretend to be the same person, which is the starting point of this patently absurd scifi action that sees the septuplets' lives (blessed lives free from health emergencies, apartment fires, unwanted visitors and noise complaints from neighbours) suddenly thrown into disarray when "Monday" goes missing and the remaining six, despite their cloistered upbringings, find themselves suddenly able to take on evil agents repeatedly breaking down their apartment door.

★★☆☆☆

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Blade Runner (1982)

This classic film noir, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a gumshoe-turned-bounty hunter tasked with tracking down, in a future cyberpunk-neon Los Angeles of perpetual rain, six runaway replicants, androids built by the Tyrell Corporation replete with emotions and memories, making it hard for Deckard to distinguish them from humans.

★★★★☆ 

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Dune (1984)

This 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's dense and difficult 800-page read was at one point ten to fourteen hours of footage that over the course of director David Lynch's famously difficult production, was pared down to just two, and the result is laughable, with glib voiceovers bridging those lost hours on the cutting-room floor and mere sentences attempting to confer importance on too many details - too many feudal empires and ruling families warring over a precious resource on the planet Arrakis - but nonetheless the movie succeeds as a psychedelic rock opera full of fantastic SFX (a floating bloated villain, gleaming hyper-blue eyes, gigantic earthworms, yellow upside-down lightning) all set to a Toto-and-Brian Eno soundtrack, a heady, mind-numbing treat bringing to mind the camp excess and pulp spectacle of Flash Gordon - for better or worse.

★★★☆☆

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Memoria (2021)

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movie, an almost plotless stringing together of quiet, painterly and occasionally long and perfectly still moments, defies conventions and easy categorisation and is absolutely hypnotic, about a Canadian (Tilda Swinton) in Bogota, Colombia who wakes one morning to the sound of a strange earthy thud and then starts to experience oddities in her interactions with her sick sister, whom she is visiting, and in her blossoming friendship with a sound engineer named Hernan.

★★★★☆

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Capricorn One (1977)

Scripted in 1972 just three years after the moon landing, this slow burn, engrossing suspense takes a conspiracy theory levelled at that real-world event and applies it to a future faked Mars landing with the astronauts involved (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and, ahem, OJ Simpson) realising themselves in grave danger given they have become keepers of an awfully big government secret while hidden out-of-public-view, supposedly on the red planet.

★★★★☆

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2:22 (2017)

Most of the energy put into this Australian film, a sci-fi romantic thriller about a man experiencing odd things at 2:22pm each day, is spent trying to make Melbourne and Sydney look like New York City (or at least trying to make them look not unlike New York City, with the camera sticking close to the actors and street scenes cutting short just before a tram rumbles past), and there's not much energy to be found anywhere else because the tone is supposed to be ethereal, mystical, and mesmeric, and the two leads - playing the world's worst air traffic controller, and a victim of the near-aviation incident he causes - are brought together by Fate with their destinies written in the stars, so they are essentially automatons going through the motions whether they understand why they keep ending up at Grand Central Station or not.

★★☆☆☆

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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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Alien Vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

In the second of this daft series of movies that pits Predators from Predator movie against Aliens from Alien - though scene after dark, murky scene fails to distinguish which is which - the action shifts from the first movie's subterranean Antarctic pyramid to small-town USA, where way too many human characters blur together while a Predator, again sporting woeful Amstrad CPC-quality predator-vision, hunts Aliens whose number and purpose for marauding the town remain maddeningly unclear - they are just having a bad day, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A security guard at work assures me that the bringing together of the Predator from the Predator movies and the Alien from the Alien movies into an Alien Vs Predator (AVP) series of movies isn't silly, that the two series and two monsters complement each other nicely, but this first movie of the series has a research team investigating an underground pyramid in the Antartic, unleashing from a prison the beginnings of a long Predator/Alien mythology that is pretty bloody silly. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Door Into Summer (夏への扉 キミのいる未来へ) (2021)

Robert A Heinlein's 1956 science fiction novel is turned here into an unhurried Japanese 'heartful' drama mixed with madcapped and madly paced science fiction of a distinctly "Back To The Future" kind (replete with a mad professor in a white coat screaming about there being no time to lose to a bewildered kid in a orange/red puffer jacket) but the two elements - sloooow heartful drama and zany science fiction -  do not sit well together, plus the sight of the pretty-J-boy hero turning to booze, swigging from a flask, or the cat-hating J-femme fatale "letting go" and becoming a hideous Jabba the Hut draws unintended laughs, detracting from the scifi adventure.

★★☆☆☆

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