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#OccupyGattaca! Clever lad Andrew Niccol’s latest high-conceit parallel-universe science-fiction allegory, “In Time,” is also a bold, goofy, political parable that pits plutocrats who “come from time” (time = money) against the ninety-nine percent of the population that pay out their days in seconds against minutes. The unexplained gene-splicing that allows everyone to stay twenty-five sets an internal clock ticking on that birthday, which gives you a year: a year of currency to spend in order to live. You can stay twenty-five forever if you earn enough time and also evade the police, now known as “Timekeepers.” Read the rest of this entry »

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“World On A Wire,” (Welt am Draht) the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 science-fiction epic about virtual reality, made for German television, has been restored from its 16mm Ektachrome origins and into 35mm visual splendor. Among other things, it’s a gorgeous, strange time capsule of futurism past, with dollops of Philip K. Dick, intriguingly prescient musings on alternate realities, and many other recognizable Fassbinder themes and players brought at long last to light. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Fireworks come screaming across the sky. Near the hulking fortress of a London housing estate, five teenagers are mid-mugging. It’s Guy Fawkes Day; a larger flare falls to earth. Monsters. Alien monsters. Who can save the “block”? Five unlikely heroes and their once-victim, now reluctant co-human, are on the run, through the streets, through the vast estate’s corridors as more monsters land and hunt. There’s only one enemy now. (“Inner city vs. outer space” is one of the filmmakers’ coinages for the elemental conflict.) Running under ninety minutes, even with end credits, Joe Cornish’s debut feature is triumphantly rude and violent and headlong thrilling and even funny, honoring worlds of influence that came before. The richest gift of Cornish’s work is how it’s permeated with influence, but he listens to film history the way he listened to the kids near his home and the actors in his film to create its fast, funny lingo: transformatively. Read the rest of this entry »

(Ha Evangerion shin gekijôban, 2009) Hideaki Anno’s sequel to 2007′s “Evangelion 1:0,” and the second installment of four planned anime re-imaginings of the 1990s Japanese TV series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” places huge, destructive angels battling humanoid robots called Evangelions at the center of a saga about an apocalypse striking Japan. Yikes, the timing of the release. (Japanese exhibitors pulled Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” which opens with the destruction and deaths after a tsunami, from release.) On one level, the furious pace of the story of teen-geek heroes and heroines battling to save their nation and the world is dazzling and visually kaleidoscopic, if confounding for a non-aficionado of the source material. In the context of the tragic events of the past week, it gains painful resonance. Then again, any Japanese viewer who knows the history of earthquakes, atom bombs and other forms of destruction loosed upon the islands of their country would have felt the same pull, even before tsunamis and nuclear plant meltdowns. If memory serves, “Evangelion: 2.0″ is more pungent and ever so slightly less daffy than its predecessor. 109m. (Ray Pride)

“Evangelion: 2.0 – You Can (Not) Advance” opens Friday at the Music Box.The trailer below offers a brisk slice of “Evangelion: 2.0″‘s style and pace.

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In “Battle: Los Angeles,” a small unit is trapped behind enemy lines in an urban war zone, as in “Black Hawk Down” (2001). As in “Cloverfield” (2008), massively armed aliens block their way out. This classic war film is set in Santa Monica on August 12, 2011. Meteors cloaking war vessels land off the coasts of twenty cities around the world. Invaders move inland, shocking and awing. A military pundit on television calls the attack “textbook.” Columbia Pictures inaccurately overstates its kinetic product as a “platoon” making “the last stand for mankind.” The leaner plot clicks on a smaller scale. A squad of U.S. Marines from Camp Pendleton is ordered to rescue a handful of civilians hiding in a police station, but then it undertakes a second mission of laser-targeting an alien command-and-control center for a missile strike. The day before, Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) signed his papers to exit the military after a twenty-year career. Hardly out the door, he’s brought back. Under his command are rookies who heard he made a bad call that got some of his men killed in Iraq. Repairing his reputation is the quiet kernel of the story. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mexico City, sprawling, overpopulated, polluted, is already a dystopian apparition, and in Francisco Laresgoiti’s “2033,” things have only gotten worse. Renamed “Villaparaiso” (Paradise City) after a military regime topples civilian government and thwarts revolutionaries, the metropolis teems with exploited poor and the enforcers of the rich. Religious cults are banned; pharmaceuticals are used to keep the populace content. While this 2009 production isn’t the equal of “Monsters” in its use of contemporary technology to make effective science fiction on a modest budget, it’s an engaging bit of malarkey. Plus dirigibles. Airships! Distinctly average, it’s a “Blade Runner” wannabe made for very little, a “Children of Men” with few cogent notions, yet still likeable in a B-minus movie kind of way. U.S. premiere. (Ray Pride)

“2033″ opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

What is so wrong with a message in a bottle? “Experiment supervisor” Vladan Nikolic’s “Zenith” is a feature film surrounded by messages in bottles, approaching its desired status as “a retro-futuristic stem-punk thriller” in the vein of Philip K. Dick and Terry Gilliam in a “transmedia” approach with additional online content and suggestive promotional materials. But the film itself is sufficiently inventive and imaginative to cut through that thicket of messages and bottles: on hardly a budget at all, this jam-packed conceptual agglomeration works on the knife-edge of what Ridley Scott and company were onto with “Blade Runner.” What decay will encrust the edifices of tomorrow’s unseen histories? What becomes of the mind when knowledge is compacted instead of explicated? When happiness comes from medication but not meditation? Shot in disused and rundown reaches of New York City boroughs, “Zenith” is an impressive and certainly downbeat dystopia built from found locations, insistent hypotheses and studded with superlative acting, termite performances from gifted actors playing paranoids and conspiracists with unbridled glee. With Jason Robards III, Peter Scanavino. Some transmedia material is at zeniththefilm.com. 93m. (Ray Pride)

“Zenith” opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

Everyone’s young and precisely pretty, no one’s old in Gregg Araki’s B-movie-plus, “Kaboom,” luminously shot in Jell-O-shot-colored colors, elevating polymorphous ambisexuality at its most playful and, even, comfortingly innocent, as well as being kidnapping-, murder- and UFO-obsessed. It’s both compact self-satire and fizzy simulacrum, a “petite little snack,” to recall a phallic appellation from an earlier film. A compact greatest hits of the timeless, well, 1990s-inflected Araki-verse, “Kaboom” follows in the tradition of his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,”  “Totally Fucked Up,” “Nowhere” and especially “The Doom Generation.” Encouraged by John Waters to explore the snap of his earlier pop without too much regression, Araki grafts a “Twin Peaks”-ish paranoid mystery atop a tale of prototypical freshman year terror, with a wall-to-wall score that includes songs by Cut Copy, Explosions in the Sky, Ladytron, Tears Run Rings, Interpol, Airiel, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Read the rest of this entry »