1. REFLECTION Movies are not puzzles. I feel like I argue this all the time, but it sure doesn’t stop people from the pursuit. And it seemed like within mere hours people were arguing furious…
How Annihilation Nails the Complex Reality of Depression
No film in recent memory captures the truth of self-destruction and depression quite like it.
Spielberg’s ‘A.I.’ Divided Critics, but It’s the Ultimate Coming-of-Age Story 20 Years Later
Movies don't change, we do. And where you are in life may affect how you receive the heartbreaking vision of this film.
Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?
Annihilation and Ex Machina director Alex Garland on using sci-fi to explore self-destruction
From artificial intelligence to possible alien intervention.
Twilight of the Spielberg Image
Steven Spielberg's career wrestles with the power and meaning of image-making, and his sci-fi "Disclosure Day" makes this its very subject.
What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human
Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, joys and sorrows.
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Turns Autofiction Into Thrilling Sci-Fi
The Hollywood maestro’s latest is filled with excitement and sentimentality.
The Speculative Empathy & Radical Hope of Disclosure Day
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap
The 15 best Luddite horror films
From Godzilla to Pulse to the Terminator, these are the best films that register an aggressive critique of technology.
AI #182: Pause For Reflection
This was a week of quiet aftermath, an opportunity to process recent events and start to figure out the path forward.
The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing
Is “frame architecture” our escape route from the dogma trap of endless culture wars?
The Protagonist Problem - Uncanny Magazine
“Speculative Resistance”—a term coined by Malka Older—posits that one great power speculative fiction wields is that exploring other worlds and ways societies could work encourages people to question extant systems, to imagine alternatives, to hope, to act, and to reject the old hope-ending “because that’s the way it is.” The author Ursula K. Le Guin […]
The Anti-Populism of “Digger”
You don’t have to like Iñárritu’s new film to appreciate its refusal to confuse the punishment of villains with the repair of the world.
Refugees and Searchers Go to the Movies – First of the Month
Spielberg lets the screen go black for about five seconds. The communal experience of film-going then becomes a shared nightmare. With the screen unlit, the emergency lights in the theater are the only source of illumination. If you jump (as I did), you fear for a moment that the movie has stopped—the reel fallen off its plate, the fantasy interrupted by unfunny, drop-dead reality. “Are we still alive?” whispered by Farrier’s daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is an inquiry that invokes our own doubts about our safety, our capacity to dream, our possible awakening to dire reality. It recalls how many people felt after 9/11. Are we dreaming? Are we still alive? Bringing everyday experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss.
i am going to solve the cyberpunk discourse forever. part 1: the pigs.
A while back, I replayed Mass Effect; my politics have shifted more towards the left since I last played it about four years prior, and I…
