Love it or hate it, the 80's aesthetic has seen a lot of mileage over the last ten years or so. Resurrected by O.G. Michael Mann's Miami Vice reboot, taken to the extreme by Panos Cosmatos' feature debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, and hitting mainstream success with Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, the bi-lighting and synth heavy scores make a comforting ensemble for Millenials pining for a time they never really experienced or were too young to appreciate in any way…

If there's one essential quality of America that no one talks enough about, it's that we love to invoke our troops when it's politically convenient, but when it comes to them surviving combat long enough to return home they are swiftly referred to their own Marine-issued boot straps. Conveniently swept under the rug are they the skeletons of our world police headquarter's closet. PTSD, psychosis, drug addiction, and suicide serve as a mental MRE for the overwhelming majority of these…

In the ever increasingly difficult task of keeping science fiction fresh there are bound to be a few casualties. I did not expect director Alex Garland would disappoint with his follow up to 2014's Ex Machina, but Annihilation is the very definition of a sophomore slump. Much like another audacious but vacuous sci-fi outing, Inception, the film boasts dazzling visuals in service to a thin plot that's lacking any semblance of an emotional core. A cool concept is squandered in…

In an age where the highest grossing movies center on costumed vigilantes committing acts of violence and destruction outside and above the law for the sake of some utilitarian homeostasis (that, ironically, becomes more cosmically unstable each episode), it’s about time a filmmaker put the vigilante under the gun to reckon with the karma they’ve accrued. I know, I know, we’ve had some deconstructionist superhero movies in the last decade, but they’ve always maintained the premise that despite all of…