Search for Science Fiction

For her feature-film debut, Lisa Joy (Jonathan Nolan’s partner-in-crime on the HBO Westworld series) has attempted to graft futuristic elements onto an old-fashioned noir detective story. The result is disappointingly drab with contrived act...

Renaissance is the latest in a growing range of screen titles with a graphic novel sensibility. Coming in the wake of Sin City, Renaissance treads through similar territory, but with a striking difference: director Christian Volckman uses rotoscop...

Over the years since its March 1984 release, Alex Cox’s debut feature, Repo Man, has developed a reputation as a “cult classic.” Unlike many other films to claim that badge, this one deserves it. Largely dismissed by mainstream audiences dur...

Repo Men feels like it was cobbled together using pieces of other, often better motion pictures. I could provide a list of titles but it would be more comprehensive simply to state that if a movie is set on a less-than-optimistic future Earth, some...

Even after nine years, you can't keep a good man down. The indomitable protagonist of 2000's surprisingly engaging Pitch Black and 2004's disappointing The Chronicles of Riddick is back for his third go-around and, if the open-endedness of the narr...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes represents Fox's attempt to reinvigorate a dormant franchise. The new movie is technically a prequel to the 1968 Planet of the Apes; however, it ignores the various sequels and spin-offs (including a TV series) that d...

Robocop was among the biggest surprises of 1987 - a sci-fi action film with a silly title that turned out to be a biting satire of big business practices. A tribute to the perspicacity and skill of director Paul Verhoeven, Robocop is capable of sa...

2014's iteration of Robocop is a kinder, gentler version of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 sci-fi orgy of violence. The storyline has been trimmed and reworked to allow it to slide under the PG-13 bar. That means a brutal torture/murder sequence is no more ...

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” Perhaps those words don’t mean as much as they did a couple of decades ago but they still have the capacity to raise goose bumps. And, although Rogue One, the first so-called &ldqu...

The memory is not to be trusted, at least insofar as movie evaluation is concerned. When I first saw The Running Man in theaters more than 30 years ago, I believed it to be firmly rooted in the “dumb entertainment” category where many of t...