After Yang (2022) - Movie Review

A film that gets described as a “metaphysical science fiction drama” in its Wikipedia page is like a siren call to me. And the story attached to it certainly doesn’t disappoint from that perspective, exploring what happens to a family when their adopted son passes away. Well, not so much ‘passes away’ as he shuts down and won’t turn back on, as this is set in a near-future where a company exists that basically sells artificial siblings wholesale, and said child (the titular Yang, played by Justin H. Min) is a ‘technosapien’ that couple Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) originally bought so that their other adopted child Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) had someone she could learn about Chinese culture from.

The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (2019) - Movie Review

I love movies like this. Well, to be more accurate, I love movie titles like this. The ones that are direct and to the point about what they’re about, or that are so outright bizarre that they stick in the mind regardless of the film’s actual content, or the rare instance of both at the same time. However, the title itself is accurate in terms of content, its tone is another story. Whatever you think this movie is going to be like, you’re probably on the wrong track.

Next Gen (2018) - Movie Review

 

Streaming services are going to completely replace the traditional cinema in a few years. That’s not even speculation on my part, I’m taking that as a given with how much services like Netflix have changed our media consumption. And today’s film, I feel, is the penultimate signifier of that. Ads for Netflix series have been popping up on cinema screens for a while now, but this marks the first time I can recall a Netflix movie getting that kind of screen time. To the point where I’ve likely seen more ads for this than a decent amount of films I actually saw in cinemas this year. While we can consider the bigger ramifications of this elsewhere, the specificity of this has me curious: Is this film worth that much marketing push, or is this just another lacklustre effort being put on an artificial pedestal?

OtherLife (2017) - Movie Review

The plot: Programmer Ren (Jessica De Gouw) and her business partner Sam (T. J. Power) are less than a week away from launching their product OtherLife, a breakthrough in biotechnology that allows them to create and administer virtual experiences; in the space of a minute, a person lives out an entire day’s worth of memories. However, as they are trying to iron out the bugs before the big launch, it seems that Ren has been some work of her own with the tech… and if she isn’t careful, she could be stuck in a virtual nightmare.

Criminal (2016) - Movie Review

Memories are rather curious things. For as terrible and brilliant as they can be, both in the moment and the lasting effect they can have, every one of them ends up shaping who we are as people. Even those that end up being repressed because they are too traumatising to recollect end up shaping crucial elements of our own personal makeup. As such, whenever sci-fi or otherwise fantastical storytellers end up discussing the concept of memory, it usually ends up highlighting just how important memories are when it comes to who we are as people. So, with today’s film taking a similar focus, maybe it will bring a certain poignancy along those same lines. Somehow, though, I highly doubt it.