Snowpiercer

In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer, a bullet train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine. The first Hollywood (or quasi-Hollywood) film from acclaimed South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host; Mother; Memories of Murder) comes to us untampered with, despite the well publicized inclinations of producer Harvey Weinstein.

Snowpiercer is a class allegory masquerading as an action movie, or possibly the other way around. Either way, it is delivered with slambang violence, visual panache, and delirious conviction. The international cast features stellar work from Captain America himself (Chris Evans), Tilda Swinton as a Thatcherite middle-manager charged with keeping the proles in their place (at the back of the train, drinking the higher ups recycled urine), and John Hurt as a wise old designer going by the name Gilliam…

Saturday’s screening comes with a short introduction by Ernest Mathijs, Professor, Cinema Studies, UBC

Ernest researches cult film, genre cinema, David Cronenberg, and European horror. He literally wrote the book on cult films — several of them in fact: 100 Cult Films, Cult Cinema, The Cult Film Reader, and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (co-edited with Jamie Sexton).

Politically provocative and visually spectacular Snowpiercer — the best action film of 2014, and probably the best film, period.

Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

Watching it, I was reminded of the first time I experienced The Matrix or District 9. Snowpiercer sucks you into its strange, brave new world so completely, it leaves you with the all too rare sensation that you’ve just witnessed something you’ve never seen before…and need to see again and again. A

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly

Gets at a kind of daring, giddy excitement that plays like something our movies have lost.

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York