Screen — Sci-Fi, Future & Fantasy Criticism
The Screen desk publishes serious criticism of sci-fi, fantasy, and ambitious genre cinema and television — the films and shows actually worth your attention in 2026. Reviews, essays, double-bill recommendations, and arguments about what the best sci-fi is really saying about the world we already live in.
22 posts
Silo makes the apocalypse climb stairs
Apple TV+’s Silo turns architecture into authority, making its buried city the most persuasive character in modern post-apocalyptic TV.
Mr. Robot knew the password was always us
A 2026 rewatch proves Mr. Robot was never great because it typed fast. It understood hacking as labor, performance, paranoia, and power.
Black Mirror is no longer faster than the future
Black Mirror once felt prophetic. In 2026, its sharpest episodes stop predicting gadgets and start dissecting the platform economy already around us.
Soft sci-fi learned to whisper
Arrival and Annihilation did not save sci-fi by getting bigger. They made alien contact smaller, sadder, stranger, and far more durable for a genre drowning in scale.
Apple has the crown, Amazon has the better show
Foundation makes prestige sci-fi look expensive. The Expanse makes it feel politically alive. The winner depends on what you want from the future.
Severance turns the office into a crime scene
Apple TV+’s Severance remains the sharpest workplace nightmare on TV because its real villain is not technology. It is floor plan.
Dune made blockbuster sci-fi grow up again
Villeneuve’s Dune turned franchise sci-fi into an argument about power, belief, and scale. That is why the decade keeps borrowing its grammar.
Mid-budget sci-fi is making a bruised comeback
Original sci-fi is returning between franchise spectacle and microbudget dread, but theaters and streamers are teaching it very different habits.
Fantasy found its nerve on television
Theater screens still do dragons and witches. Television is where modern fantasy has learned patience, politics, ritual, and the courage to be strange.
Bong Joon-ho keeps finding bodies in the machine
From Snowpiercer to Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho turns sci-fi into a class x-ray: funny, brutal, and increasingly obsessed with disposable bodies.
Mickey 17 makes immortality look like factory work
Bong Joon Ho turns cloning into workplace comedy, colonial nightmare, and gross-out moral test. Mickey 17 is uneven, but its flesh has teeth.
The Matrix was always about prompt engineering
At 27, The Matrix trilogy looks less like a VR prophecy than a brutal comedy about language, belief, agents, and systems that generate reality on demand.
Nolan makes time behave like guilt
From Memento to Tenet, Christopher Nolan turns chronology into pressure: a cinema of memory, consequence, and elegant structural cruelty.
The best sci-fi still leaves fingerprints
The effects war is less rubber vs pixels than trust vs weightlessness. Modern sci-fi wins when CGI has something physical to answer to.
Hollywood still fears a livable future
Solarpunk cinema promises futures built on repair, not ruin. So why does Hollywood keep treating hope like bad drama?
Three-Body is too strange for one adaptation
Liu Cixin’s cosmic nightmare becomes three different beasts on the page, at Netflix, and in Tencent’s slower, stranger Chinese series.
Westworld was brilliant before it outsmarted itself
HBO’s android epic still has one perfect season, one underrated maze, and two cautionary tales about mistaking complexity for depth.
AI cinema keeps confusing wonder with thought
Ex Machina still understands what The Creator only decorates: AI stories work when they are about power, not just beautiful machines with feelings.
The multiverse works when it hurts
Everything Everywhere All at Once still beats the franchise multiverse because its cosmic chaos is anchored to taxes, regret, and a family dinner.
Blade Runner 2049 has outlived the future
Denis Villeneuve’s sequel looked like a monument in 2017. In 2026, it looks like a weather report for loneliness, AI intimacy, and dying cities.
Silo turns apocalypse into architecture
Apple TV+’s Silo works because its underground city is not a backdrop but a body: wounded, policed, class-stratified, and always listening.
Devs makes the universe look guilty
Alex Garland’s Devs remains the sharpest screen argument about simulation theory because it treats certainty as a horror show, not a puzzle box.