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.
Back in December, when SFWA announced that it was updating its rules for the Nebula Awards. Works written entirely by large language models would not be eligible, while authors who used LLMs "at any point during the writing process" had to disclose that use, allowing award voters to make their own decisions about whether that usage would affect their support.
The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.
Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Dan Simmons, it chronicles a doomed Royal Navy expedition dispatched to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Under the leadership of Captains Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, manned with 129 crew, set sail from England in 1845. They became locked in pack ice off King William Island in the winter of 1846.
BBC Threads, directed by Mick Jackson, follows two families in Sheffield as they try to survive a direct hit from a nuclear bomb. It pulls no punches as its characters fall one by one, before ultimately only focusing on pregnant Ruth (Karen Meagher) as she tries to survive and carve out a life for her and her child. Meticulously researched, it presents a bleak picture of what civilization would look like after nuclear winter, including the ozone layer weakening, resulting in blindness and skin cancer, and the degradation of the English language itself.
This isn't your average pandemic thriller; here, the infected meld with inorganic material in their surroundings, until their outward contours and their personhood are gone. Thibault Emin's film starts with a little whiff of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen. After their one-night stand, hypochondriac Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and impertinent Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves bunkered up in one corner of a madcap apartment block.
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.
For the sheer quantity of its gibbering, jabbering nonsense, this movie deserves some points. That, and the amusing cameo at the end from Keith David as the Simulator, AKA God, who explains to the awestruck mortals that God is an entirely free creator, rather like a self-published novelist, then grows irritated when the mortals think that being self-published is lame: It's not my fault if you don't understand the industry! This is an exhausting indie romp on the subject of time travel,