Auteurs in Space
Despite its reputation as a popcorn genre, science fiction has been an exciting frontier for some of cinema’s most innovative and ambitious masters. For Auteurs in Space, a Criterion Channel series we just premiered today, we’ve gathered a lineup of sci-fi odysseys from six directors, whose approaches run the gamut from the sidesplittingly funny (Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits) to the hauntingly existential (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris). Visual astonishments abound—just check out our series trailer above for glimpses of William Cameron Menzies’s sleek, grand-scale sets in Things to Come, or the eye-popping special effects in Kon Ichikawa’s Princess from the Moon. But in the hands of these visionaries, such imaginative feats become vehicles for far-reaching explorations of time, human nature, and the unfathomable mysteries of the cosmos.
