Featured Review
The Rocketeer (1991)
1938, Los Angeles. Stunt pilot Cliff Secord stumbles onto a prototype jetpack hidden in his hangar by gangsters — and straps it on. As word of a flying man spreads, Cliff finds himself hunted by Neville Sinclair, a matinee-idol movie star secretly working for Nazi agents desperate to recover the rocket before it reaches Germany, with only his mechanic Peevy and his girlfriend Jenny standing between the jetpack and the Third Reich.
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Hidden Gem of the Week
They Live (1988)
A drifter looking for work in Los Angeles finds a box of sunglasses that reveal the truth: the billboards say OBEY, the money says THIS IS YOUR GOD, and the ruling class are skull-faced aliens running Earth as a third-world franchise. He responds the only way an American hero can — with a shotgun and a one-liner.
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From the Journal
The Day the Earth Stood Still: 1951 vs. 2008 — A Complete Comparison
Two films, fifty-seven years apart, tell almost the same story: a flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C.; a humanoid alien named Klaatu steps out, accompanied by a silent, apparently indestructible robot called Gort; and humanity is given an ultimatum it has no real way to argue with. What changes between 1951 and 2008 isn't the shape of the warning — it's what, specifically, we're being warned about, and how much a…
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View all →The Day the Earth Stood Still: 1951 vs. 2008 — A Complete Comparison
Same saucer, same ultimatum, fifty-seven years apart: how Robert Wise's Cold War classic and Scott Derrickson's eco-anxious remake handle the same warning — and why one delivers it so much better than the other.
Waking Up From the Dream: Science Fiction in the 1990s
CGI crosses the uncanny threshold, cyberpunk gets a second wave, and an entire decade of science fiction starts asking the same unsettling question: how do you know any of this is real?
Chrome, Sweat and Neon: Science Fiction in the 1980s
Practical effects at their absolute peak, synth scores humming under every frame, and a decade that gave the genre its franchises, its cyberpunk future and its most quotable one-liners.
Paranoia and Wonder: Science Fiction in the 1970s
From dystopian overpopulation dread to a galaxy far, far away — how the decade of Watergate and Vietnam produced science fiction's most cynical decade, then reinvented itself in a single year.
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