Sleeper (1973)

Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) goes into the hospital for a routine operation, which turns out to not be a success. However, instead of dying, he is cryogenically frozen and is woken up in the year 2173, two centuries later. Not only does he have to overcome the shock of being thrust into the future so…

Primer (2004)

Budget constraints and a lack of experience should not stop anyone from making an audacious or innovative film, no matter how hard Hollywood campaigns for the idea that a bigger budget is somewhat indicative of quality. No one knows this better than Shane Carruth, whose career may only consist of two films, but remains one…

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

A Boy and His Dog had all the qualities a film needs to make it a masterpiece – it has an audacious concept, a funny storyline and effective approach to the execution of its many ideas. Yet, somehow it just isn’t good as it should be, and while it is far from a disaster, it…

High Life (2019)

Claire Denis did something exceptionally special with High Life. She managed to overcome so many of the challenges facing the sub-genre of the space movie and effectively crafted nothing short of a masterpiece. Denis was clearly inspired by several other works, both within and outside of the genre – and this film seems to be…

Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

In all honesty, Pokémon Detective Pikachu is exactly what you’d expect from a modern live-action Pokémon film, and will certainly divide audiences – it isn’t going to win any new admirers to the franchise (except for maybe very young audiences, who may have this film serve as their introduction to the iconic Japanese creation) and…

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

A dystopian world, around six hundred years into the future. Dr Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) is a mechanical engineer and scavenger who finds the processing core of an unnamed cyborg, who he rebuilds and subsequently names Alita (Rosa Salazar). Beneath the innocent exterior lurks the heart of a fighter, with the capacity to do battle…

I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)

The last person on earth trope – one of the most adored subjects in the history of literature, television and film. Over the past few centuries, we have seen speculative fiction written on the subject of the apocalypse, where some situation results in the death of the entire human population, with the exception of one…

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

There have been very few franchises that have been formative in the lives of many people as Star Wars. Despite the franchise only entering slightly later in my life than it should have, I can understand fully why George Lucas’ masterpiece of a space opera has been the definitive moment in the childhoods of multitudes…

Ready Player One (2018)

We have reached quite a fascinating era, where the past is suddenly becoming far more fashionable than it was before, and people are more obsessed with recapturing previous eras than actually moving forward, particularly in terms of entertainment. This has resulted in many television shows from the 1990s and early 2000s being rebooted – Roseanne,…

Alien (1979)

Dear readers, what would my career as a cinephile and film writer be without occasional hesitant admissions towards terribly embarrassing cinematic blind-spots? It would be almost non-existent, and I really do have quite a confession to make today – up until tonight, I had never seen a single film in the Alien franchise, and while I…