Of course, there’s much more going on in the MCU’s second film revolving about Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas)—the continued development of the Quantum Realm, some welcome rebalancing of screen time to give Lilly’s Wasp her dues, etc.—but in terms of action that keeps the viewer delighted and excited, Ant-Man and the Wasp provides some of the year’s best. Plenty of action films with much less complicated plots and fewer characters to juggle have failed, but this one spins order from the potential chaos using some comic-inspired narrative devices that seamlessly embed the needed exposition into the story. 1. And in today’s sequel-saturated environment, that is practically a superheroic achievement in itself. Created by Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery, previously known for their work on The Legend of Korra, the new Voltron is a genuine delight that everyone from nostalgic â80s fans to young kids can enjoy. There, of course, against all rules he has a meet-cute with another outsider (Rachel Weisz) involving elaborately designed sign language (a metaphor maybe, like much in Lanthimos’s world, for the odd ritual of dating), and they fall in love. With the arrival of Pacific Rim: Uprising on March 27, the giant robot/tokusatsu genre returns in full force to the big screen. The new film captures the gloriously dark absurdity of the original with moments like GIR inspiring the children of the world with his song about peace…and chicken and rice…and alternate-realities colliding that include a variety of illustration styles and even claymation. Set ten years after 2013âs Pacific Rim from Guillermo del Toro, a new corps of Jaeger pilots have to prevent another major kaiju onslaught. In that sense, The Lobster is an oddly feminist film, obsessed with time and how much pressure that puts on people, especially women, to root down and find someone, no matter the cost.
Amazing. Now, the last of humanity resides on “Snowpiercer,” a vast train powered via a perpetual-motion engine. —Chad Betz, Year: 2014 Director: Bong Joon-ho Stars: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94% Rating: R Runtime: 126 minutes, There is a sequence midway through Snowpiercer that perfectly articulates what makes Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho among the most dynamic filmmakers currently working. And even a little romance. As â90s kids remember, pretty much every fight the Power Rangers get into ends in a colossal kaiju-versus-robot showdown in downtown Angel Grove.
—Dom Sinacola, Year: 2018 Director: Peyton Reed Stars: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Judy Greer Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88% Rating: PG-13 Runtime: 118 minutes, Admittedly, in the past decade superpowers have been as reliable a source of the “action” in action movies as a certain thickly accented, Austria-born bodybuilder named Arnold was in the 1980s. Under the Skin is a soul-crushing work and yet, somehow, the film reiterates that we must continue working towards finding our souls.
And for what itâs worth, there is a whole sequence where Jude Law (as the âSky Captainâ) evades War of the Worlds-looking robots the size of skyscrapers. Unlike many of it’s sci-fi action peers, Total Recall never runs out of steam or ideas; it starts with the memory implant stuff, but on the back end gives us a vividly imagined Mars society with an oppressed mutant population (which is, like, the best special make-up effects portfolio ever) and a secret alien reactor that’s a MacGuffin but also a deus ex machina.
Who doesnât love giant robots and monsters? Here, the intimacy is fraternal, which perhaps speaks to how Moorhead and Benson feel about each other. The world of The Lobster isn’t a dystopian future, more like a sort of mundane, suburban Everywhere in an allegorical alternate universe. An artful cascade of multiple exposures of random people, about midway through the film, would seem to symbolize the birth of empathy in Johansson’s femme fatale, and while this is the beginning of the end for her, it can’t help but resonate in Under the Skin with all the radiance of beatitude. Take notes. “Normal” fight scenes become a yo-yo-ing spectacle of kinetic uncertainty. (The family interactions, one strength among many with the first film, remain a delight in the sequel.) When she looks in a mirror, lost in a gaze at her own body, it’s a reminder to us to find some remove from our weary familiarity with ourselves, to think, “Golly, what strange things we are.” The film’s tragic conclusion is an assertion that we achieve some positive ideal of what it is to be human when we accept a state of vulnerability, when we forsake the power position in our sexual communication.
Art director Hiroshi Takiguchi deftly replicates Nihei’s distinctive aesthetic, achieving in color what was before only monochromatic, while Yuki Moriyama capably improves on the uniform character designs of the original, imparting its casts with distinct, easily identifiable traits and silhouettes that greatly improve the story’s parsability. Nostalgic millennials will of course want to watch the original Mighty Morphin, but take it from a hardcore fan: Zeo, Lost Galaxy, Time Force, and RPM are where itâs at. Do you have an outlandish, fantastical concept that you need to communicate to the viewers (and characters) without bogging down the rest of the story? Total Recall’s $60 million production budget was absolutely huge for its time, but unlike similar Hollywood ventures that put money towards glitz (like the 2012 remake, so slick it slips right out of one’s head), Verhoeven uses the loot to give us more dust, more grit, more decrepit sets, more twisted prosthetics and maximum Arnold. It’s an exciting time for speculative fiction, whether you’re looking for alien arrivals, superheroes, space travel, technological dangers or imaginative glimpses at the future.
It’s pretty graceless—and borderline nonsensical—if you think about it too hard, as if screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and son Jonathan were bloodlessly ticking off boxes on their contracts, remembering every once in a while to have Han refer to an accomplice as “buddy.” Han calls everyone buddy. As in the first film, watching Helen Parr do the hero thing is also quite the delight—she’s resourceful, tough and, above all, a professional. You can also check out all of our What to Watch on Netflix guides, updated each month. Their characters are locked in a cosmic struggle with a nameless adversary, but the narrative’s gaze is focused inward: On the Smiths, on brothers, on how far a relationship must stretch before it can be repaired. Start here. Look (and listen). For as many times as Dick has been adapted, this is perhaps the one time the go-for-broke energy and imagination of his work has made it into the cinema (Blade Runner is something else entirely). Robert Zemeckis and Michael J.
They got it tenfold with Jhonen Vasquez, a comic-book writer and cartoonist whose previous projects included the hyper-violent comic series Johnny: The Homicidal Maniac, Squee and I Feel Sick. Which may be Solo’s saving grace: It’s a pretty great blockbuster if you don’t think about it much. This list contains the best animated movies and films streaming on Netflix at the moment.
Differing itself from other Godzilla movies with a heavy sci-fi setting, Godzilla is worth checking out even if itâs not the best in the G-Manâs oeuvre. From stories about brand-new baby brothers and anthropomorphic animals working together, to adult storytelling, painting a world destroyed by a giant monster or the tale of a teenage girl trying to find her parents in a dystopian, steampunk Paris, there’s something for everyone on this list. Though, in The Endless, the end is uncertain, but maybe the title makes that a smidge obvious. Verhoeven, in fact, uses Arnold as much as he uses anything else in the budget to tell this darkly exuberant story, from the contorted confusion of the set-up right on through to the eye-popping finale. And it blew away all expectations.
Ava is a heavenly mechanical body of sinewy circuitry topped with a lovely face, reminiscent of a Chris Cunningham creation. Not all is well here: Bizarre bonelike poles litter Arcadia’s outskirts, flocks of birds teleport from one spot to another in the time it takes to blink, Aaron and Justin keep having weird déjà vu moments, and worse: There’s something in the lake, a massive, inky, inexplicable presence just below the surface. He’s never been much of an action director, but his limitations are painful here, every fight and shootout as coherent as a car chase conceived by Olivier Megaton. —Michael Burgin, Year: 2015 Director: Christian Desmares, Franck Ekinci Stars: Marion Cotillard, Philippe Katerine, Jean Rochefort, Olivier Gourmet Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96% Rating: PG Runtime: 105 minutes, Keeping real life global history straight in narratives that leapfrog across decades and centuries is tough enough—making sense of alternate history when it’s articulated at breakneck speed throughout multiple eras of European cultural advancement is just downright strenuous. And PKD vibes are the best kind. They wanted something edgy and a little bizarre.
She learns everything from engineering to medicine to ethics (that latter subject key to the questions the film will eventually raise).Grant Sputore’s Australian/American production is constructed around plot twists as much as characters, and although some of them are exactly what any sci-fi fan was probably expecting, there’s enough original thought to keep the tension level high. Though the show is bold enough to explore ideas that so few other action anime dare to do â PTSD, mass murder, mental illness â the results are kind of mixed. They don’t actually want to hurt anybody.
Science fiction is the favorite genre of many of us here at Paste. This sets up a second act that’s firmly by the numbers in terms of story development—watch the husband try to succeed as a stay-at-home dad!—yet no less enjoyable. Meanwhile, we get to watch Elastigirl in action, as she encounters, foils and matches wits with the film’s mysterious villain, Screenslaver. Nearly two decades prior, in an ill-advised attempt to halt global warning, the government inundated the atmosphere with an experimental chemical that left our planet a barren, ice-covered wasteland.