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.
7 posts
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.