existential

via A24 It’s been almost a decade since music video director turned feature filmmaker Jonathan Glazer delivered his third and most recent effort from behind the camera, and yet Under the Skin continues to live up to its moniker by burrowing into the hearts, minds, and psyches of sci-fi and horror fans everywhere. In fact, the idiosyncratic, offbeat, existential, and altogether creepy as hell trip into inter-dimensional terror and bloody murder has embarked on a major streaming renaissance. As per FlixPatrol,…

The greatest artistic tool ever built, or a harbinger of doom for entire creative industries? OpenAI's second-generation DALL-E 2 system is slowly opening up to the public, and its text-based image generation and editing abilities are awe-inspiring.The pace of progress in the field of AI-powered text-to-image generation is positively frightening. The generative adversarial network, or GAN, first emerged in 2014, putting forth the idea of two AIs in competition with one another, both "trained" by being shown a huge number…

Deep into Soul — the new Pixar movie out on Disney+ and Disney+ Hotstar — protagonist Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) achieves what he has been waiting his whole life for. Those are literally his words, not mine, but Joe is not anywhere near as happy as he expected to be. It's unexpected for Soul too. Most films, once they set a goal, send heroes on a journey on which they encounter obstacles, before arriving at their destination with new values. But Soul goes a step further and questions all of it. What is the journey worth?…

On a dead still November morning in the Sierra Nevada, two researchers walk through a graveyard of giants. Below their feet: a layer of ash and coal. Above their heads: a charnel house of endangered trees. This is Alder Creek Grove, a once idyllic environment for a majestic and massive specimen: the giant sequoia. It is now a blackened monument to a massive wildfire—and humankind’s far-reaching impact on the environment. But these two researchers have come to do more than pay their respects. Linnea Hardlund and Alexis…

Signage is seen at the 2019 Deadline Contenders Hulu Reception at Paramount Theater on the Paramount Studios lot on April 07, 2019 in Hollywood, California.Rachel Murray | Getty ImagesDisney has a Hulu problem.In 2019, the entertainment giant struck an unusual agreement with Comcast. Two months earlier, Disney had acquired Fox's 33% stake in Hulu as part of a $71 billion acquisition, giving it a majority stake in the streaming service.That put Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts in an odd position. Comcast owned the…

I didn’t expect to laugh while playing Time Flies, but I did, out loud on the Summer Game Fest show floor. It’s a deceptively simple game with monochromatic, MS Paint-style visuals and a clear premise: You’re a fly and you have a short time to live a full life in a random house. There are layers to the game’s main goal, as the fly has a bucket list filled with items like “learn an instrument”, “read a book”, “make a friend” and “get drunk.” Each of these tasks is completed in a delightfully surprising way — for instance,…

Existential Sci-Fi-sis 11-Bit Studios (of This War is Mine fame) has revealed its brand new title, The Alters, during the PC Gaming Show. The intriguing-looking adventure sees a space builder, stranded far off on a distant planet, who is forced to, essentially, clone himself again and again in order to find a way back home. The protagonist must create versions of himself sporting new and unique skills, but might find himself losing a little of himself each and every time. The developer promises drama, mystery,…

via Saban Films The best sci-fi movies tend to be the ones that make you think, while still providing plenty of entertainment value. Project Ithaca may have been a lot more existential, introspective, and thought-provoking than genre diehards would have been expecting given the broad premise, but the unsung Canadian effort has slowly been gaining a reputation as an underrated gem. Too many great films have been flying under the radar in the age of streaming, but Nicholas Humphries’ mind-melting cosmic adventure…

Robert Bresson’s hypnotically intense and lucid movie-novella from 1959 is now revived as part of a director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and whatever creakiness I thought I saw in this masterly film for its last UK re-release has vanished. The andante pace of Pickpocket is part of its brilliance, part of its seriousness and its status as a cinema of ideas: a movie with something of Dostoevsky or Camus, or even Victor Hugo.The then non-professional actor Martin LaSalle was cast by Bresson as Michel, a gloomy…