If there’s one thing we learned from HBO’s Westworld, it’s that it’s phenomenally hard to pull one over on modern audiences, no matter how artfully made your material is. That’s not to say it can’t be done (see Shutter Island or The Prestige for example of recent successes), but with more than a century of cinema history, meta post-modernism, and social media hive mind on their side, audiences are sharper and more perceptive than ever; hip to all the narrative tricks that filmmakers use to obfuscate truth. Which is what makes a film …

If there’s one thing we learned from HBO’s Westworld, it’s that it’s phenomenally hard to pull one over on modern audiences, no matter how artfully made your material is. That’s not to say it can’t be done (see Shutter Island or The Prestige for example of recent successes), but with more than a century of cinema history, meta post-modernism, and social media hive mind on their side, audiences are sharper and more perceptive than ever; hip to all the narrative tricks that filmmakers use to obfuscate truth. Which is what makes a film …