Advantageous

A picture emerges that at times suggests a strange if alluring mash-up of "Stella Dallas" and Michel Foucault, with a smidgen of Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" and a hint of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

Unfortunately, the stilted script and portentous direction make Advantageous, a film written and directed by Asian-American women, a missed opportunity.

As in a lot of good sci-fi, the movie is set in a particular world, but driven by the characters that inhabit it.

Achieves much on a relatively meager budget (it has an impressive futuristic visual design), and the last half hour is so irresistibly creepy that it's sure to invoke discussion after the screening.

You've seen enough movies to know it won't go as planned, but director Jennifer Phang's low-budget film is extraordinary in the sly way it dishes out the details.

It's not hard to imagine it becoming cult viewing in places like Berkeley, the director's city of birth, or any college town or urban area with the right critical density of literature, film and women's studies majors who sometimes read Wired.

A thought-provoking sci-fi drama about parenting, education, the commodification of women's bodies, and female unemployment.

...one of the best science-fiction films of this past year and further proof that female directors know how to deliver on genre films.

ADVANTAGEOUS is a science fiction film with a much higher budget for art direction than it has for special effects.

Advantageous makes a superb showcase for Kim, a hugely underrated and underutilized talent.

The dialogue is so disaffected it's as if humans were replicants even before going through the aforementioned twin-making procedure.

As with the best science fiction, the technology of the future is used to explore the human condition of the present.