You don’t need to be rich or Asian to enjoy this film, but it helps if you are crazy. Unless you sneaked aboard NASA’s InSight Lander, you may have heard that John M. Chu’s (“Now You See Me 2”) satirical Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood film since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club” to…
Alex Garland’s Annihilation is a complex puzzle, mixing the extraterrestrial with the most microbial elements of humanity. Its characterization is strong throughout — as its themes are mirrored in its leading lady — but its most promising components come in the form of visual metaphors. They’re scattered strategically throughout the 115-minute science fiction thinker. Where…
With a cut and a kick and an upbeat note, Damien Chazelle sure paints a pretty picture of classic Hollywood musical nostalgia, but La La Land is more plastic pastiche than poignant portrait. It’s a technical marvel that’s dramatically weightless, a boldly bravura effort from writer/director Damien Chazelle and his crew that’s also too cutesy…
Science fiction has long explored the question of what it is to be human. This philosophical topic has involved different non-human figures, such as extra-terrestrials in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Avatar,” clones in “Never Let Me Go” and “The Island” and perhaps most frequently, artificial intelligence. Films such as “Metropolis,” “2001: A Space…
Mind games are afoot in Alex Garland’s upcoming sci-fi thriller Ex Machina. And Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) finds himself in the middle of them as he gets much more than he bargained for when he is selected to evaluate how well a newly developed artificial intelligence represents human intellect and behavior. In the form of a…
