TheRetroCritic

L.Q. Jones' cult sci-fi film A Boy And His Dog gets its own video review.

Review available on the new website .

Released on Netflix in 2017, What Happened To Monday is a science fiction thriller starring Noomi Rapace as seven sisters named after each day of the week who try to survive in a dystopian one-child-only society. In order to tackle an overpopulation problem and attempt to fix the environment, the Child Allocation Bureau, run by Glenn Close's intimidating politician, enforces this one-child policy which takes the oldest siblings, if there are any, and cryogenically freezes them until society can accommodate them. When a woman dies while giving birth to identical septuplets, her father (played by Willem Dafoe) decides to raise the kids in a way that allows all of them to live their lives. Each of them is allowed to leave the house on a specific day of the week, hence their names, if they pretend to all be the same individual. At home, they can look and act like who they are but outside, they become the same person. Of course, when one of them doesn't come home as planned, t

Following  Ratatouille , Pixar tackled the science-fiction genre with WALL-E , the story of a big-eyed little robot stuck all by himself in the middle of a post-apocalyptic Earth until he meets an unexpected visitor. This was Pixar's boldest concept since Toy Story as a good portion of the film is basically silent save for music and sound effects. The human characters don't show up until much later and when they do, they never steal the focus from WALL-E or his modern robot love interest EVE who is sent to Earth, we soon find out, to look for any source of vegetation. The world the film depicts is one overcome by garbage due to the environment having crumbled under the weight of industry and commercialism. Incidentally, the weakest aspect of WALL-E is probably its environmental message, which isn't exactly subtle, but it is admittedly done quite well in that it gives the characters something to fight for and presents a uniquely comfortable yet lazy and ultimately grim

Back in 1985, Terry Gilliam directed Brazil , a science-fiction comedy like no other about a dystopian future in which the world is run by totalitarian bureaucracy. It wasn't a big hit in the US but it did well everywhere else and over time it has become something of a cult classic. The film follows Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry, a meek government employee whose dreary life is turned upside down when he literally meets the woman of his dreams. The world depicted in Brazil is a gloomy, depressing one with its backwards technology, its inhuman laws, its crushingly industrial metropolis and yet Gilliam manages to find the humour in that setting by emphasising just how ridiculous this society has become with countless larger-than-life characters and awkward tech. The result is kind of a cross between 1984 , Blade Runner and Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life . The dreams Lowry has, in which he's flying, saving a damsel in distress from monsters, look beautiful and work a