Next year's Olympic Games in Beijing won't be quite as explosive as Neo-Tokyo's futuristic Games. From the title character's astonishing powers to Tetsuo's astonishing rage, Akira represents a truly revolutionary advance in anime, not to mention some prescient observations about the unchecked ruthlessness of government.
Neo-Tokyo is about to E.X.P.L.O.D.E.
AFS Essentials: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
As part of their summer Global Minds, Other Worlds: Global Sci-Fi Cinema series, the Austin Film Society presents Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). In this masterful remake of the '50s original, director Philip Kaufman confirms once and for all that soulless pod people are, truly, a mass-anxiety filmic allegory for the ages. The first Body Snatchers (1956) saw alien seeds drifting to a small California town, quietly killing off its inhabitants and hatching...
AFS Essential: Planet of the Vampires
If the Italian name of the vampires-in-space sci-fi movie playing tonight at the Alamo Downtown (that would be "TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO") doesn't give you a thrill of glee, how about this line of the description? "...the crew soon discovers the crashed Argos—and learns that her crew died fighting each other!" No? You have a hard and boring heart, my friend. This film, part of the AFS' summer foreign scifi series, "Other Minds, Other Worlds: Global...
Come along and ride on a Cosmic Voyage
Slide, slide, slippity-slide, hittin' switches on the block in a '65... oh, sorry, wrong kind of voyage. Anyway, this Cosmic Voyage promises to be pretty much as rad as anything Coolio's ever done. Based on early space travel theorist Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky's novel Beyond the Earth, Cosmic Voyage (Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella) portrays humans in space 25 years before Yuri Gagarin's historical journey. It's presented as part of the Austin Film Society's Other Minds, Other...

