The small, lightweight, inexpensive camcorder was a great liberator for filmmaking. Not only did it mark a significant leap in accessibility, it also made it easier for filmmakers to achieve the kind of raw, immediate visual language that had been established by directors like Spike Jonze in Video Days (1991).
Publicly traded companies are by legal definition and requirement completely amoral. They want only one thing, to raise their stock price, and the public good and common decency are just obstacles to be overcome or spun in that quest.
Kick off with Ridley Scott's 1982 OG Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which stars Harrison Ford as a special agent on a mission to exterminate escaped androids. Ford is joined by Ryan Gosling in the Denis Villeneuve-directed Blade Runner 2049, which is sure to whet your appetite for Dune: Part Three - hitting cinemas this December.
He was the actor I wanted to play this role. It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the Southwest. But Kilmer was unable to make it to set due to his battle with throat cancer. The film-maker is working in conjunction with the late actor's estate and his daughter, Mercedes, to bring Kilmer back to life with state-of-the-art, generative AI.
George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."
It's a simple but effective premise: Your hero dies. He awakens, only to relive his last day. He dies again. Over and over, this cycle happens until our hero has conquered the time-loop he's stuck in, having become stronger, faster, and wiser in the thousands of times that he's been resurrected. It's the video game conceit, as a thrilling alien invasion story.
In all the dystopian visions of the future that the movies have trotted out over the last few decades, the one that sticks the most, surprisingly, is WALL-E. That's not just because of the chastening sight of an over-polluted Earth or those sedentary humans glued to their screens. It's because those quite plausible possibilities mean something different in a kids movie. It's their future, after all.