Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth first published by Film4 If this is an age where technological advances are accelerating at unprecedented rates, it is also the age where the has-been hero can make his nostalgic return, trying to find his way around in a new new-fangled world that still, in the end, needs…
So Unreal had its European première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August Taking the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999) as its starting point and culmination, Amanda Kramer’s film essay might be described as a retrofuturist work. For it looks back to the future of our own present-day postmodern, cybernetic, terminally online divorce from reality as it was…
Flash Gordon first published by Little White Lies, as entry 109 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Alex Raymond’s adventure comic strip Flash Gordon was first commissioned in 1934 by King Features Syndicate to rival the similarly space-set Buck Rogers, and astonishingly, was still running almost seven decades later (the last new strip appeared in 2003)….
At the beginning of writer/director Miguel Llansó’s Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, the title is presented as the colourful title screen for an Eighties computer game, complete with garishly coloured 8-bit graphics displaying the film’s main characters, all to the accompaniment of old-school electronic squelches on the soundtrack. It is an apt…
Metropolis (Metroporisu) first published by Little White Lies, as part 25 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Every epoch dreams its successor,” states text at the beginning of Rintaro’s feature-length anime Metropolis (Metroporisu). This quotation from the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet captures something of the film’s retrofuturist vibe, as we see Rintaro’s towering world of tomorrow…