Sci-fi

Charlie Brooker’s cautionary technological tales have now been running for well over a decade, and they are almost in danger of seeming old-fashioned. When Black Mirror began in 2011, Instagram was only a few months old, the iPhone was a new novelty just coming into the mainstream, and Elon Musk was best known for being CEO of Tesla. Now, virtually everything in the world has changed, and Big Tech plays roles in our lives that the ever-cynical Brooker could barely have imagined. There is, naturally, a residual irony that in order to afford the budgets – and starry casts – that the show continues to demand, it long since left its original home on Britain’s Channel 4 for the deeper-pocketed Netflix, which still funds it into its seventh series.

On its surface, “corporate art” is comforting and accessible. It’s bright, friendly and visually simple, featuring flat cartoon vector people — with their bendy arms and odd proportions — who are jumping, dancing, reading or running. They’re always happy. Always. This art is used in every HR manual, charity about-us page, Facebook help section and LinkedIn jobs application. It’s uniform, indistinct, impersonal and insincere. The more you see it, the more you start feeling unsettled. Severance, the Apple TV+ sci-fi office thriller show from Ben Stiller, leans into that discomfort. The managers at Lumon Industries have perfectly clipped hair and overly broad smiles with flashy grins. Their white-wall offices are clean and organized, accented with single-color carpets.

A decade ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity soared into theaters, to ecstatic reviews and a vast box office. Its success was all the more surprising — and welcome — because it had been dogged by reports of disastrous test screenings and production chaos, with its innovative, visual effects-heavy story apparently beset by the envelope-pushing demands of the technology that it required to depict its world. The movie could easily have been a colossal flop, but instead it seemed to herald a brave new dawn for ambitious, intelligent science fiction filmmaking that soared into the stratosphere, in both senses. Ten years on, the success of Gravity, or even Ridley Scott’s The Martian, are very distant memories.

There’s a bit of moviegoing conventional wisdom that says January is the dumping ground for Z-list schlock films, all the genre fare not good enough for the holiday or summer seasons. And that’s why M3GAN — directed by Gerard Johnstone, and boasting story and production credits from legendary horror/thriller director James Wan — is such a pleasant surprise. It’s a nasty little cinematic bonbon packed with memorable images, and one that manages to say a few interesting things about modern life. After eight-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) witnesses her parents’ deaths in a horrific auto accident, she’s sent off to live with her single aunt Gemma (Allison Williams).