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Jupiter Ascending (2015): What If the Gods Came to Harvest Us?
What if the beings we mistook for gods were not morally superior to us at all, but simply older, richer, and vastly more powerful? That question lurks beneath the extravagant costumes, genetic…
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Ex Machina (2015): If a Machine Wants to Be Free, Does It Have a Soul?
What would convince us that an artificial intelligence is truly alive? Intelligence alone would probably not be enough. A machine can calculate, answer questions, recognize patterns, and imitate speech without necessarily possessing…
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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014): A Revolution Needs a Face, but the Face Has to Be Real
A revolution may need soldiers, weapons, plans, and numbers. It may also need an image. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 understands that Katniss Everdeen’s greatest value to the rebellion is…
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As the Gods Will (2014): Why Death Games Keep Choosing the Young
Takashi Miike’s As the Gods Will throws high school student Shun Takahata and his classmates into a succession of deadly games modeled on familiar children’s play. The games keep coming while their…
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Interstellar (2014): Science Can Cross the Universe, but Can Humanity Cross Itself?
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a film of enormous distances. It crosses planets, gravitational fields, dimensions, and decades, yet one of its most interesting suggestions may be that technological progress does not necessarily…
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Before I Go to Sleep (2014): Rebuilding a Life from What Remains
Before I Go to Sleep is unsettling not simply because its protagonist has lost her memory, but because that loss has taken away something even more fundamental: her ability to know whether…
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The Giver (2014): What If We Could Remove Only the Feelings We Hate?
Phillip Noyce’s The Giver presents a society that appears peaceful because much of what makes ordinary human life difficult has been stripped away. Jonas lives in a world of conformity and contentment…
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Break Up 100 (2014): More Relationship Drama Than Comedy
Break Up 100 looks like it might be a comedy, but it plays much more like a straightforward relationship drama. There are a few comic touches, of course, though very few movies…
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Lucy (2014): Knowledge, Memory, and What Comes After Us
Lucy (2014): Knowledge, Memory, and What Comes After Us Lucy begins with a deliberately outrageous premise: a human being gradually gains access to more and more of the brain’s capacity. The movie…
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Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) — Robots, Romance, and One Very Unimpressed Father
Transformers: Age of Extinction offers plenty of reasons to simply watch things transform. Lockdown turning into a gray Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 is an obvious example. The vehicle looks sleek and cold,…