The Cremator (The Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray) by Oktay Ege Kozak The Movie: It's hard to think of a film that so viscerally and horrifyingly captures the banality of evil than surrealist Czech director Juraj Herz's alt-horror Holocaust masterpiece The Cremator. Herz slyly puts together a head-spinning mix of an exuberant and borderline experimental visual style with a realistic character study that chills the audience to the bone by becoming more matter-of-fact as its protagonist slips more and more into genocidal glee. It's bold, endlessly imaginative in its satirical grotesquery, and an extremely disturbing experience. It's also one of the most striking studies on how expectedly human abhorrent evil can be. The subject is Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusinsky), a blindly ambitious businessman with dreams of using his crematorium as a jump-off point for greater success. He's always bragging and scheming about his many different plans...Read the entire review »

Humans Complete Collection (Blu-ray) by Oktay Ege Kozak The Show: The question of artificial intelligence gaining enough sentience to replace humans, or co-exist with them, is a bread-and-butter type premise for hard sci-fi. Across its three seasons, the British series Humans explores as many of its aspects as possible, some derivative of other work, some refreshingly original. It's not on the level of wholly immersive as well as emotionally and cerebrally revolutionary works like Ex-Machina and A.I., but it's effective in the way it finds a universal human connection to the subject. The show takes place in an alternate present, where fully humanoid androids called Synths are part of everyday life. They act as maids, babysitters, factory workers, and even prostitutes, all depending on how they are programmed. They don't have sentience, and can't do anything that's not programmed by their masters. Th...Read the entire review »