Mark Bowman Eric Andre News Today

Robots have fascinated cinema-goers ever since Fritz Lang’s 1927 expressionist silent film Metropolis. The German dystopia film portrays a near future where a female robot (a “gynoid”) is built as an evil twin of Maria, a woman trying to unionise the workforce. The robot Maria wreaks havoc, turning the workers against each other, inciting murder and the destruction of the machines powering the city. The portrayal of robots in popular culture has always captured the technological hopes an...

The Simpsons. In real life, artificial intelligence has so far proved itself pretty benign — Siri and Alexa haven’t tried to kill us, even if Netflix’s content-recommendation algorithm can at times be a little creepy. But the fear that our present-day technological wonders could one day bring about our downfall is never too far from our minds. And if it ever does get very far from our minds, Hollywood is always there to remind us that the robot apocalypse may be right around the corner. T...

Mitchells v Machines (7+, 114mins) Directed by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe ****½ Having been accepted into the California College of Film, Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) believes she’s finally going to meet “my people”. Sure her dinosaur-loving little brother Aaron (Mike Rianda) has always been supportive of her crazy Dog Cop series of movies (featuring their beloved cross-eyed pug Monchi) and mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) sympathetic to her passion, but there’s always been a reticence i...

TOM CLANCY’S WITHOUT REMORSE (Amazon Prime) Resurrecting a 1993 Tom Clancy book, the filmmakers decided to change just about everything except the title and Clancy heroine John Clark. Set in the present and starring Michael B. Jordan, “Without Remorse” is the origin story of Clark (who is known as John Kelly through most of the film), an elite Navy SEAL on a mission with his team in Aleppo, Syria. Instead of battling Syrians, the SEAL team discover that their opponents are Russia...

May 08, 2021 Rollercoaster ride: The Mitchells are the only ones who can save humanity from evil robots   -  NETFLIX Rollercoaster ride: The Mitchells are the only ones who can save humanity from evil robots   -  NETFLIX× What does the father of a soon-to-be film-maker do to patch up their fragile relationship? Head for a road trip with the family, of course, and battle evil robots on the way * The film is a splash of colours, combing traditional digital animation with hand-drawn 2D effec...

MAY is upon us and, with it, the reopening of cinemas inches ever closer. Hoorah! In the meantime, what have we to keep us sane? Well, a rather brilliant new animation on Netflix and one more, ultimately unsatisfying, adaptation of a popular video game series. From the producing team behind mega hits The Lego Movie and Into the Spider-Verse, The Mitchells vs the Machines is road trip and cautionary romp combined. Splendidly animated and written with wit, verve and bundles of energy, it’s ...

Print Ever since the slapstick “Vacation” franchise of the ‘80s, the dysfunctional family road trip has earned its place as a reliable Hollywood construct. At its best, it offers simple truths through easy laughs by pointing a mirror to our family’s familiar flaws. At its worst, in the case of flops like “RV” and “Johnson Family Vacation,” it relies on low-hanging humor — usually a hapless father thrown into ill-fated stunts — instead of locating real sincerity. The unwaveri...

Like a mash-up of an ‘80s family road comedy like “Vacation” and the visions of a tech apocalypse foretold in films like “The Terminator,” Netflix’s “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” is a lot of nostalgic fun but told in a modern style. It sometimes succumbs to that animated problem of choosing hyperactivity over all other storytelling options, but it’s also a whip-smart action film, a movie with nearly “Fury Road”-esque momentum in its asking of the question, “What if th...