12 March 2015
Something is wrong. Something is broken. Something is missing. This is what pain tells us, and when pain goes on and on through time, unabated and unchanged, we can be confident that something has
6 February 2015
‘You smell like a patchouli fart’, says homicide cop ‘Bigfoot’ (Josh Brolin). His crewcut and skinny black tie signal him to be part of the straight-laced, conservative contingent of his 1970s Los Angeles, antitype
30 January 2015
The Turing test is one of the fundamental ideas in the philosophy of AI (artificial intelligence), and usually involves a computer hidden away from a person who is dialoguing with it. The test is passed when
9 January 2015
As the title suggests, this film purports to retell the story of the deliverance of the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, sometime in the second millennium before Christ. It centres upon
19 December 2014
He does not like people and people do not like him, reports Daka (Naomi Watts) in a thick Russian accent, seated in a diner in Brooklyn. ‘Why you like him?’, she asks the boy who is
12 December 2014
Nobody wants to be told what to do. Especially when it comes to sex. This is why the Catholic Church can be so [insert expletive] annoying. Why can’t priests just mind their own business
24 November 2014
Some things in this world we are never going to understand. Take, for instance, a man standing in a public fountain, naked, arms raised and shouting incomprehensibly to the heavens. Cases like this, the
13 November 2014
‘Maybe good isn’t your thing.’ These are the words, something of a lukewarm absolution, that Milo (Bill Hader) offers to his sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), after she confesses to having slept with three other
29 August 2014
With fast enough acceleration, an object will disappear. First you will see a car, then a blur and finally, at the end of the philosophical spectrum, nothing. The car is detectable nowhere because it
6 August 2014
Too often, the cataclysmic end of civilization in fiction functions as merely a fantasy about a certain kind of freedom. But not in this film, whose dramatic vision is not one of shaking off, as it were, the oppressive yoke of parenthood, but of growing up and taking it on.