Any long-time ‘Built For Speed’ listeners will know I’m not a big fan of director George Miller’s Mad Max films. Of the entire franchise, I prefer Mad Max 2 as it had genuine otherworldliness and atmosphere. Many raved about 2015’s Fury Road but I was only mildly impressed by that return to Max’s post-apocalyptic world. The cinematography was undeniably terrific
Read moreIn 2021, Denis Villeneuve’s first instalment in his cinematic version of Frank Herbert’s iconic 1965 science fiction novel Dune saw young, floppy-haired Duke, Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) battle the invading armies of the nefarious Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) before becoming a desert dwelling, giant sand worm-loving freedom fighter. It was essentially a sci fi Lawrence of Arabia. While technically impressive
Read moreThe dystopian sci-fi film series, The Hunger Games was hugely successful and a cultural touchstone for many young cinema goers (but not so much this reviewer). Through those films, Jennifer Lawrence established herself as a major star playing heroine, Katniss Everdeen who, in a post-apocalyptic future, competed in the eponymous televised teen gladiator death matches and battled the fictional nation
Read moreFrench film, After Blue is one of the weirdest movies of the year and one that shows that weirdness alone does not necessarily equal fascinating art or entertainment. In what might be glibly dubbed eco-feminist science fiction, it’s set in a future where humanity has fled an environmentally devastated Earth to the planet, After Blue where only women have survived
Read moreJurassic Park was one of the event films of the 1990s and a movie many would recall as fondly as ET or Star Wars. Based on the excellent Michael Crichton novel, the film combined revelatory photorealistic dinosaur special effects with a mostly exciting, if at times, cheesy adventure story built around revolutionary science and technology concepts. Although not as rigorously
Read moreFor many, the Wachowski’s original 1999 Matrix movie – which depicted a freedom fighting cyber hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves) battling to free humanity from a computer simulated world – was a sensation. Many talked about being blown away by its hyper-kinetic action sequences and never-before-seen computer generated special effects which included a slow-motion style known as ‘bullet time’. A
Read more