Screamers first published by Little White Lies, as entry 104 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column In 2058, the mining corporation known as the New Economic Bloc (or N.E.B.) discovered a new energy source known as Berynium on the planet Sirius 6B – but when miners learnt that its extraction also released radiation and other pollutants,…
Archive first published by Sight & Sound, March 2021 Review: In Archive, the feature debut of writer/director Gavin Rothery, two very different types of futurist technology converge: the emergence of ‘deep-tiered machine learning artificial intelligence’ that can convincingly match a human mind; and the ‘Archive’ of the title, a commercially available device that preserves the…
Child’s Play first published (in a shorter version) by Sight & Sound, August 2019 Review: Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play opens with a diptych of scenes: first a to-camera announcement from Henry Kaslan (Tim Matheson), founder and CEO of Kaslan Corporation, about his company’s range of high-tech Buddi dolls, which learn from their environment and can,…
In a future Los Angeles, a pervasive complex of interconnected, semi-intelligent nanobots, both in the air and under our skin, keeps everyone permanently online (or ‘on-Tangle’) and under surveillance, modifying our perception of ourselves and the world around us and preventing any acts of violence. A small group of people – mostly geek designers –…
CTRL fist published by SciFiNow At the beginning of CTRL, Christian Lex (Saabeah Theos) and her boyfriend Dru (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett) are heading to the luxurious fifth-storey apartment of Lex’s brother Leo (Julian Mack), a reclusive computer geek with a strong streak of misanthropy, to celebrate his birthday. As the couple ascends, floor by floor, we…
First published by Daily Info Well, he did say he’d be back. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns to the rôle for which he was born – a soulless, emotion-free cyborg who spouts one-liners in a wooden monotone. Sarah Connor, the protagonist of the first two films, has died of leukaemia,…
First published by Grolsch FilmWorks College student Sam (Michelle Mylett) has important news for her boyfriend, but before she can even articulate it, she is dumped by him in a chatroom and made subject to online gossip from strangers. So as she seeks consolation from her old friend Mark (Cody Thompson) at a New Year’s…
Longer version of review first published by Sight & Sound, April 2014 Review: “Do you know your mother’s name? Or what she looked like?” Cybernetics genius Vincent (Toby Stephens) – his name evidently a play on the forename of Dr Frankenstein – is interviewing a soldier whose war-damaged brain has been replaced with a neural…
Computer Chess first appeared in Sight & Sound, Dec 2013 Review: “Just here to see the end of the world,” says John (Jim Lewis), cheerily explaining why he is attending a computer chess tournament in a nondescript American hotel even though he and his drug-dealing buddy Freddy (Freddy Matinez) have nothing to do with computers….
Computer Chess first published by Film4. Synopsis: Mumblecore moviemaker Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation, Beeswax) looks back to the pioneering days of computers (and video cameras). Review: It is the ominous-sounding year of 1984. A collection of geeky computer pioneers converge on a shabby hotel for an annual chess competition that pits one state-of-the-art…