PHASE IV: The Ants Are Coming

Directed by SAUL BASS Screenplay by MAYO SIMON

The best thing about science-fiction films is their opportunity for wonder, their ability to draw out and contain the most extravagant imagery. In Stanley Kubrick's great 2001: A Space Odyssey, themes and images reinforced one another. In most other futuristic films —and Phase IV is one of these—the force of the ideas cannot compete with the power of individual images.

Phase IV is good, eerie entertainment, with interludes of such haunted visual intensity that it becomes, at its best, a nightmare incarnate. It can also sometimes go quite wobbly, with ripely absurd dialogue...