Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall when history was made? CITIZENFOUR gives you that opportunity. Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras has created a truly unique documentary in her film about Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee who felt morally obligated to expose surveillance being done on Americans. The film is special in several ways: how it came about, its structure, and its subject.
White Bird in a Blizzard, written and directed by Gregg Araki, adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke, is like an ultra-realistic painting of a bloody car crash. You can almost smell the smoke and the blood. This is a film you can praise for its technical and storytelling virtuosity, without saying that watching it was an enjoyable experience.
Forty years into the future, an Earth scared by massive solar flares sets the stage for a film-noir sci-fi adventure, which is at once both new and familiar. Automata, written and directed by Gabe Ibáñez, evokes both Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner, but goes much deeper in its exploration of what it means to be human. In this future world, a much diminished human race is served by a multitude of robots provided by the ROC Corporation.