The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology
Terrence Malick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe the best work yet about the great Lost American Childhood yet – a film that doesn’t seem to be about anything but has far more to say than almost all other multiplex films
The first film from French animator Rene Laloux, a trippily surreal vision and one of the few portraits of a genuinely alien world on film
An Italian-made homage to/parody of Fantasia offering an anthology of animated tales. This is witty and more adult in tone, yet perfectly charming and delightful in its own way
Brian De Palma makes a surprisingly good hard science film about a rescue mission send to save the first manned Mars expedition and their encountering alien artifacts on the planet
The Wachowskis set out to make a space opera adventure in the Star Wars vein. As always, the elevate every genre they take on and the film is packed with astonishing action sequences and wild, mind-expanding ideas
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
An impressively large-scale SF film about a military sortie into an area of western Russian that is all that is left unaffected after aliens create a worldwide power cut
Yorgos Lanthimos has become a director of acclaim in recent years. Here he remakes the Korean film Save the Green Planet where crazy conspiracy theorist Jesse Plemons abducts CEO Emma Stone insisting she is an alien
A compilation of shorts from anime directors set in the Halo videogame universe. The first two episodes have a breathtaking scale but the others are bitsy stories but nothing standout
A bizarre South Korean comedy about a businessman who is imprisoned by a possibly crazed man who insists that he is an alien. Things sit in an absurdly funny ambiguity. Later remade by Yorgos Lanthimos as Bugonia
A Marvel Comics offering that is an adaptation of a team created by the greatest comic-book writer/artist of all time. On screen however, this emerges with strangely flat and moribund results
Documentary based on the book by Erich von Daniken and his much ridiculed theories that aliens visited Earth in the past and evidence of this can be found in ancient texts, inscriptions and monuments
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong
Roland Emmerich returns to mass destruction with a film about The Moon on a collision course with Earth, which heads in some conceptually challenging directions
A Russian SF film about an expedition through a wormhole that then gets lost, this bites off an ambitious conceptual reach only for it to fall apart in a shaggy dog ending
Beginning as fan mill speculation, 20th Century Fox finally brought their Alien and Predator franchises together on the screen here. The result is an okay effort in the hands of Paul W.S. Anderson, even if it never has the grueling intensity of the early entries in either series
A bizarre Italian film that recounts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and then follows on from their banishment from Eden and into the wilderness where they encounter dinosaurs, cavemen and wild beasts
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Prometheus where they have settled for giving us Predator as a Found Footage film (with a good few doses of Ancient Astronauts nuttinesss)
The big-budget film version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide phenomenon is a disaster that fumbles Douglas Adams’s absurdist wit and blows everything up with big-budget effects and a pitch to American audiences