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Ki-woo and his family, the Kims, live in a basement and barely scrape a living folding pizza boxes. They get what seems to be a lucky break when Ki-woo is offered the chance to become an English tutor for the daughter of the rich Park family, his sister Ki-jeong forging a college student identity to get him started. He then plans to bring the rest of his family into the Parks’ employment, finding ways to get their household staff dismissed and replaced. However this proves to be a risky strategy and it turns out the Kim family are not the only ones with secrets. Bong Joon-Ho’s thriller won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year and went on to win the Best Picture Oscar – the first non-English-language film to do so. It was also panned by Donald Trump (so far the only Home Alone 2 cast member to be impeached). It’s an extraordinary movie worthy of all these accolades, hitting many different notes – comedy, intrigue, heist, psychodrama, thriller and tragedy – while still telling a well-writt...

The space cruise ship Aniara begins its three-month mission to bring thousands of moderately rich Earthlings to Mars, leaving behind an environmental catastrophe. Amongst the passengers is MR (Emelie Jonsson), a technician responsible for tending to MIMA, an AI that can give the colonists soothing visions of Earth before the disaster. But shortly after departure a collision leaves the Aniara drifting off course with no engine, challenging Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) and his crew to try to find a solution and keep the passengers happy. Aniara is a Swedish-Danish movie – and you can tell this as it takes place on the decks of a rectangular cruise ship clearly designed and built by the Ikea-Lego Corporation (Assemble Your Own Better Worlds). There’s some clever low-budget sci-fi filmmaking – the interior of the Aniara has been filmed in airports, shopping malls and hotels, or perhaps airport shopping malls and hotels. CGI is sparsely used, basic but effective, mainly limited to exte...

Score: 3 out of 5 stars All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars SPOILER WARNING This review may contain spoiler warnings 2018's Avengers: Infinity War ended with the destruction of half of all life in the Universe, including half of the Avengers cast. I wasn't hugely surprised to find, and this isn't really much of a spoiler, that Avengers: Endgame turns out to be about an attempt by the remaining Avengers to bring the band back together and do something about it. I was more surprised by the downbeat, bluesy tone of much of the movie. I would expect to see more personal depth and character building in the individual superhero stories, and there's plenty of this in Ant Man and The Wasp, and Captain Marvel - it's hard to get the same depth in an ensemble movie, but Endgame does better than most. The movie opens a few years after Infinity War, in a world reacting to the shock of that Thanos moment through memorials and support...

As regular visitors to the Sci-Fi Gene blog will know, as a rule I have tended to post movie reviews without a score. This has always been a deliberate decision. I have always felt that giving a movie a score diminishes the review, and indeed the movie, the cinema industry, the general public, Life, The Universe and Everything and by logical extension the reviewer. Can we even assign a meaningful number to a movie? Or a restaurant, a car, a hotel stay, the amount of goals scored by each team in a football game, or the attractiveness of a random stranger? Is this not just the human fashion of attempting to impose order where there is none? Is it meaningful to compare two numbers, for example (and this is plucked purely at random from the many, many possible examples I could have chosen) the speed of a car and the applicable speed limit for that particular stretch of the A127? Do numbers such as the number 5 even mean anything? How do I know that the number I know as 7 doesn't appear...

Fifty people awake to find they are standing on glowing red spots in a circle in a dark room. They quickly learn that they are playing a deadly game – every few minutes one person is killed instantly by a shock from the hemisphere in the centre, their body then dragged out into the darkness by unseen forces. If they step off their circles they also die. It takes them a few rounds, and a few deaths, to understand that while they cannot prevent the scheduled rounds, they can choose who dies in each round. Circle is a literal, minimalist version of the balloon debate – if the balloon is losing altitude and you can’t all survive, who gets chucked out of the balloon and how do you persuade others to do the chucking. The starting fifty are diverse enough to (loosely) represent all of humanity. As the players learn how to vote for each other, alliances and dividing lines appear around age, race, gender, sexuality, politics and profession. Players try to use this to their advantage, but if the...

Four friends sign up for an escape room challenge - an hour to find the clues and unlock the door. The scenario of this particular escape room is creepy - dim lighting, cracked walls covered in mysterious documents and clues, and a mysterious hooded figure at one end of the room, attached to a very short chain. However, as if all of the existing décor wasn't creepy enough, the curator has recently added a skull-shaped chest, ignoring warnings that it might contain something deeply evil, and failing to warn the players of this. What if one of them turned out to be allergic to evil forces? There'd be grounds for a refund at least. And maybe, just maybe, if you have locked four strangers into a room with an evil entity in a box, this might be a bad time to leave your escape room building altogether and go for a sulk. Hard-core escapologists may enjoy films such as Cube, Exam or the Saw series - you may find this film a little lightweight, it's definitely on the easy setting. O...

A ghostbusting team consisting of a TV presenter (director Eileen Daly), a medium and a defrocked priest investigate a demon-infested castle - and their innermost desires. The mysteriously aged proprietor and his two succubus nieces give the ghostbusters the runaround while they search for a way to lift the curse. I say they... the duty falls mainly on Eileen as her two male co-ghosthunters are smitten with the nieces and unable to concentrate on the job. However when all seems lost the team benefit from the help of a passing demon-hunter and her remarkable iPhone app. Witches Brew, screened at Horror-on-Sea 2018, is a movie that will infect you with its joy even as it challenges you with its rough edges. Some directors and producers are so obsessed with perfection that they edit, re-edit and re-release their movies again and again in search of that ultimate, overproduced director's cut. Not Daly. Mistakes and mis-takes are seen throughout the movie - light and sound change from sc...

Struggling horror-movie obsessed filmmaker Catherine Sweeney has a dream - to bring to life her Warm Bodies-style zombie romcom. She has the idea, now all she needs is a script, a cast, a producer, funding, a crew and a camera. Her first taste of reality comes when she draws the attention of a big player willing to come on board as executive producer and provide seven-figure funding - as long as she can write a talking dog into the script. Egomaniac, screened at Horror-On-Sea 2018, is a bittersweet black comedy about the experience of compromising to get the movie made - with a particular emphasis on the treatment of women in the industry. It was made in 2016 but with the Hollywood scandals breaking in the past few months it's deeply relevant right now, and perhaps can serve as a reminder that far from being the clean, happy alternative to Hollywood, the indie world is the Wild West of moviemaking. Catherine Sweeney, played by the real-life director Kate Shenton, carries the film w...

In honour of the late George A. Romero, two modern-day zombie classics: Train To Busan ( 부산행,  Busanhaeng) is a Korean movie made in 2016. Workaholic fund manager, divorcee and useless dad Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) must reluctantly accompany his daughter Soo-an (Kim Su-an) by train from Seoul to Busan, returning her to live with her mother - on the day Korea succumbs to a zombie plague. I have enjoyed Korean horror movies in recent years, particularly Thirst (vampire horror) and The Host (newt horror). I can only comment on the few I've seen, but I've found them intelligent, well-written and produced, and willing to tell stories about families and relationships that are different to those in western cinema - as a result they're often very moving, while there's still plenty of action, drama, shock and gore, and also humour with just the right amount of darkness. I can report that Train To Busan is another enjoyable horror. The backstory is unoriginal, with a viral outbreak...

When a valuable stolen treasure is sighted in the multi-dimensional Big Market, Valerian and Laureline, two intergalactic special agents are dispatched to recover it - but this turns out to be just the first step in solving a greater mystery connecting the stolen item, the destroyed planet of Mul and the mysterious entity that has taken over part of the multicultural space city Alpha. Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is a Luc Besson film based on the Valerian and Laureline French graphic novels. The heroes are played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delavigne. As in the comics, Valerian is straight-laced and does it by the book while Laureline is more of an out-of-the-box thinker; traditional gender personality traits are exaggerated for effect. Somehow they appear younger in the film than in the comics - more or less hormonal, bickering teenagers despite their elite skills, military rank and galaxy-saving duties. Theirs is not the greatest on-screen partnership Hollywood has ever se...

When policeman Daniel Carter finds a wounded man in the road and drives him to a nearby hospital, he and the other inhabitants find themselves trapped, surrounded by monks with triangular hoods and at the mercy of whatever is already inside. The Void is a Canadian horror movie, made on an Indiegogo budget and released in 2016. It's an original story but heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, demonstrating everything that makes a good Lovecraft horror. It's not just about the tentacles, you know: Life from another dimension Science confounded by the supernatural Contact leads to insanity A cult of murderous human worshippers And yes, it's still mostly about the tentacles... Performances are great, particularly from Aaron Poole and Kathleen Munroe. The film relies heavily on special effects rather than visual effects for the creature scenes, these are impressively gruesome and a lot of fun, channeling John Carpenter's The Thing and other classics. I have nothin...

The crew of the International Space Station retrieve a capsule from Mars, completing a sample return mission and bringing a small quantity of soil into their orbital laboratory. The sample contains what appears to be Martian microbes - but are they dead or can they be revived? And should they? Life is at heart a surprisingly traditional creature feature, perhaps even a tribute to classic films such as Alien, The Blob or even Roger Corman's Little Shop Of Horrors. There's a creature who grows in power and intelligence as it hunts down the humans who had the hubris to summon it into existence. The only truly original aspect of this movie is the setting, with the ISS re-imagined as the perfect modern-day haunted house - labyrinthine, claustrophobic, vulnerable and disorientating due to zero-gravity. The creature is also well-designed, developing from scene to scene like a Martian Audrey Two, and it definitely feels alien, although there's little attempt to explain its biology...

Received my invitation to the Evil Medical School reunion. Think I'll give it a miss this year - it would just be too embarrassing meeting up with classmates Dr. Evil, Dr. Heiter and  Dr. Ledgard , and having to admit I've still not achieved anything on a par with their nefariousness. Some of the comments below could be considered minor spoilers. Read on at your peril. Dr. Volmer, head of the Volmer Institute, would fare better in comparison, although he's still no Dr. Frank'n'Furter. His institute, an aquatherapy centre for rich guilt-stricken investment bankers and suchlike hidden in the Swiss mountains that hides a sinister history and even more sinister purpose, is the setting for A Cure For Wellness  directed by Gore Verbinski. Ambitious young banker Lockheart is sent there to bring back a senior partner currently "taking the waters" but discovers what first appears to be a strict and eccentric health regime but develops into a gothic myth. A Cure F...

Adam and Eden, the hero and heroine of French film “Upside Down”  are star-crossed lovers, the poor boy and the rich girl. Just like Romeo and Juliet, Laura and Alec or Megashark and Giant Octopus, they live in different worlds – no, they literally live in different worlds, one suspended above the other and each with its’ own gravity.  When Adam (Jim Sturgess) last saw Eden (Kirsten Dunst) she was falling upwards towards her own world and to her death.  Years later, when Adam discovers that Eden is still alive and working for Transcorp, a mysterious company whose offices link the two worlds, he comes up with a crazy plan to win her back. Adam and Eden strive to escape the limitations of their societies and geometries, so Upside Down is Science Fiction . “Upside Down” tells a simple and rather traditional story of love across the class divide, with a crude and obvious use of metaphor. Good performances from Sturgess and Dunst can’t cover over the lack of depth in the writ...

“Hidden Figures” tells the story of three mathematicians who became crucial to the US space programme, and who faced down sexists and racists in the segregated America of the 1960s along the way. The three lead characters, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, all strived to escape the limitations of what to all intents and purposes was a dystopian society, so “Hidden Figures” is Science Fiction – it just happens to be true as well. This film could have been as bleak or serious as its’ subject matter. However the obstacles faced by Katherine Johnson (Taraji Henson, superb in “Person of Interest”) and her fellow “computers” would not be out of place in a Kafka play or a Douglas Adams novel. Appropriately the film is light and humorous in places, although there’s plenty of black humour too. It works - it's easy to ridicule and show up the behaviour of the bigots, played by Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst, while the lighter moments show Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson as ...

Sometimes you need to turn your brain off and just watch something stupid and bloody... Evil Aliens is a comic horror film from 2005 starring Emily Booth as a cynical TV journalist and featuring Red Dwarf's Norman Lovett sadly only in a minor role. Booth and her crew are sent to investigate an alien abduction story on an isolated Welsh farm, accompanied by an eccentric UFO expert played by Jamie Honeybourne. It soon becomes clear that the aliens are somewhat hostile, and the film progresses into a series of close encounters of the messy kind. This film is an unashamed gorefest, and it's very clear the budget has been spent mainly on realistic blood-and-guts effect shots which are detailed, delightfully inventive and utterly gratuitous. Everything else is cheaper - the script is perhaps not as fine tuned as it could be, the aliens appear to have bought cheap Predator costumes on eBay and rendered their spaceship CGI on Microsoft Paint. The acting is all hammed-up melodrama but i...

According to modern science I use 100% of my brain, although not necessarily all at the same time. According to Hollywood - yet again - we all use only 10% of our brains, and unlocking the full 100% could give us godlike powers. I worked hard to deconstruct this myth in my award-winning* short film "We Can Get You Some Really Cheap Gear" so I am a little disappointed that the rest of you haven't moved on. What do you all have for brains? Pudding? In Luc Besson's new film Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a tourist who is kidnapped by drug traffickers and receives an unintended dose of an experimental product that has been surgically implanted in her abdomen. As the drug boosts Lucy's intelligence and strength she manages to escape her Triad captors, but as her telekinetic powers grow she realises she only has a limited lifespan, and she must find a way to stay alive - and stay human - long enough to do something meaningful. However, about a third of the way through ...