The heart Stone, 2023

Rachel Stone is an intelligence operative, the only woman who stands between her powerful global peacekeeping organization and the loss of its most valuable -- and dangerous -- asset.

The film stars Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt (in her Hollywood debut), Sophie Okonedo, and Matthias Schweighöfer.

Rating: 10 Stars

Paradise, Sci-fi, Mystery & thriller 2023

 

Premise

Trade years of your life for money!  We’re in Berlin, in the not-too-distant future, where a method of transferring years of your life from one person to another has changed aging completely.  For those who can afford the procedure and have a match willing to donate years. If they donate years of their life, they are compensated rather generously. However, these DNA matches also tend to be found within communities where people are already in dire need of money.  The biotech start-up AEON is a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company at the forefront of this technology, but the CEO has yet to find her own DNA match. As a rule, you can no longer look at someone and know how old they are.  Someone can be 18 years old (the age when one can start donating years), but look 20 years older because they’ve donated two decades to afford the life of their dreams. Another may look 25, but really be 60 years old and have simply received (or bought) extra years from their match.  Age is now “chronological age” or your practical age based on whether you’ve given or received years.   It truly is a brilliant setting and right off the bat, there’s a focus on both the good and the bad. Or rather, the possibilities for humans and the danger in how humans can misuse this new technology.

Rating: 10 Stars

The Portable Door, 2023

 The Portable Door is a 2023 Australian fantasy adventure comedy film directed by Jeffrey Walker and starring Patrick Gibson, Sophie Wilde, Sam Neill, and Christoph Waltz. The screenplay by Leon Ford is based on the 2003 novel of the same name, the first in Tom Holt's J.W. Wells & Co. series. A co-production between The Jim Henson Company and Story Bridge Films, the film was released theatrically in Australia on 23 March 2023 by Madman Entertainment, before streaming on Stan from 7 April 2023.

Paul Carpenter and Sophie Pettingel are lowly, put-upon interns who begin working at the mysterious London firm J.W. Wells & Co., and become increasingly aware that their employers are anything but conventional. Charismatic villains Humphrey Wells, the CEO of the company, and middle manager Dennis Tanner are disrupting the world of magic by bringing modern corporate strategy to ancient magical practices, and Paul and Sophie discover the vast corporation's true agenda.

War of the Worlds, 2005

War of the Worlds is a 2005 American science fiction action thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. Tom Cruise stars in the main role alongside Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, and Tim Robbins, with narration by Morgan Freeman. It follows an American dock worker who must look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he struggles to protect them and reunite them with their mother.

Rating: 10 Stars