Emmanuelle

Despite the halting, even lifeless rhythms of the finished film, co-writer (with Rebecca Zlotowski) and director Audrey Diwan's contribution to the Emmanuelle saga does feel significant, at least in terms of adding one or two layers of complication to a character typically premised on a youthful enthusiasm. Noémie Merlant's Emmanuelle is no longer a trophy wife eager to please an indifferent husband by exploring her sexuality. She is a little older, maritally unentangled and enjoying a successful career swanning around high-end getaways with a tape measure. This particular job also offering the ever-present opportunity to jet around and mechanically seduce the men that Emmanuelle shares first-class seating with. Similarly, the anonymity and access provided by her role as a quality controller for a pernickety hotel chain allows her to slip in and out of a series of luxurious settings. 

Emmanuelle can taste affluence then but is unable to truly linger. Unmoored from any specific interpersonal relationship, other than a corporate voice that demands she engineer faults where none exist, Emmanuelle slips into a routine that is unfulfilled or even alienated. Caged within Hong Kong's lavish St. Regis hotel, ran by Naomi Watts in little more than a cameo, Emmanuelle rattles around, picking at the other residents and finding little real satisfaction. Unfortunately, since this listlessness accounts for the lion's share of Emmanuelle's runtime, Diwan's film is similarly numb. Developments inside these walls are diverting rather than intriguing; the sex that Emmanuelle kills time with perfunctory rather than exciting. Luckily, Emmanuelle is eventually given reason to leave her temporary base and venture out onto the streets of the city-state. Diwan's film is suddenly frantic: Laurent Tangy's camera darting around the statuesque and striking Merlant, appraising this underdressed woman as she suddenly explodes into life in cramped quarters. 

Blur - Y'All Doomed

Madonna by Matías Bergara

MF Eistee - Zander

Casshern

Director-cinematographer-editor (not to mention co-writer) Kazuaki Kiriya's Casshern is an odd and not entirely enjoyable duck. The film's pacing is glacial, with the overwhelming majority of Casshern given over to solemn but not particularly insightful sermons about the horrors of empire. The front-end of the piece is therefore filled with scenes in which the emotionless instruments of a Soviet-presenting war machine gather to declare their slogans at each other. The acting that takes place on this film's bluescreen backlot is often unduly theatrical in how it communicates its ideas: figures wrap themselves in flags then blast their rhetoric directly at their imaginary audience. The effect is chilly and austere rather than involving. Yusuke Iseya's augmented title character, at least in this theatrical cut, is absent for nearly the entire first hour of the film as well. We do see a few, brief inserts regarding his human life though: Tetsuya as a young man, hell bent on frustrating his father's scholastic ambitions for him, as well as black and white nightmares that depict the young conscript shooting civilians before he is himself killed by a booby trap. 

Resurrected, thanks to his father's pioneering research into inhuman cruelty, the artificial person that eventually takes the name Casshern finds himself, intermittently, fending off the waves of advancing, automated armies that encircle this expanding fiefdom. Technologically speaking, Kiriya's Casshern - adapted from Tatsuo Yoshida's mid-70s, child friendly animated television series - seems a reaction to the digital set-work and computer-generated set-pieces seen in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, specifically the moments in which George Lucas completely abandoned staid set-ups featuring human actors, giving the film over to two toy factions blasting away at each other during a sandstorm. Two decades removed from this deliberate unreal approximation of Middle Eastern conflict, and given that similar sequences in modern blockbusters have somehow evolved into perfunctory noise, the blaring falseness of ILM's black blizzard becomes entertaining in of itself. Lucas, unburdened from the human performers he had no interest in directing, was able to lose himself inside his very own polygonal pandemonium. Kiriya is similarly unleashed, applying the eye-catching collage of his Hikaru Utada music videos to this (much more modestly budgeted) visual effects drenched polemic. 

Casshern keys into a similar sense of superimposed overabundance as the Star Wars prequels then, jamming every inch of the screen with incongruous, obviously synthetic accentuation and charmingly primitive mechanical figures. Kiriya arguably even goes a step further than his spotless inspiration by cross-pollinating his special effects plates with the filthy figures seen in Polish science fiction films, specifically the blood and shit-smeared cosmonauts from Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe. Regardless of advances in grimy spacesuits, it does seem notable that Kiriya and storyboarder Shinji Higuchi, in their thrilling (and, in fairness, fleeting) depiction of man on robot destruction, are communicating the same reaction to Lucas' simulated armies as Cartoon Network wunderkind Genndy Tartakovsky. The second season of the Star Wars: Clone Wars shorts dedicated an entire three-minute episode to a fondly remembered interlude in which Mace Windu's Jedi Master pulverised battalions of action figures with his bare fists. Almost simultaneously, and on the other side of the planet, Japanese theatres were projecting the edge of Yusuke Iseya's human hand cleaving its way through another army of bulbous robots.

Momma - I Want You (Fever)

Anakin by Matías Bergara

Massive Attack v Mad Professor - Radiation Ruling the Nation (Protection)

Baby Assassins: Nice Days

Freed from the black hole pull of their two-seater couch, Saori Izawa's Mahiro and Akari Takaishi's Chisato have taken a trip to the beach, specifically the subtropical city of Miyazaki. In Baby Assassins: Nice Days the murderous duo take in the sights, daydream about sampling local delicacies and find themselves double-booked for a hit. Rival button man Fuyumura, played by Shin Kamen Rider's sweaty, filthy Sosuke Ikematsu, isn't affiliated with the same mob union as Mahiro and Chisato, he's a freelancer with vague ties to arms dealing co-operatives ran by mean old men. The danger that this scab represents is political as well as physical then, his continued existence an insult to this setting's highly structured departments of youthful contract killers. As with the previous film, Baby Assassins 2 Babies, Nice Days is confident enough to let the girls take a back seat, with Fuyumura's perspective rationed out to us as Mahiro flicks through his diary-cum-serial killer scrapbook. Like the Baby Assassins, Fuyumura feels basically nothing about the people he eliminates. He catalogues them, talking about each experience as a repetitive step in creating a complete, working sense of self. The flashback crimes we see are often amateur and cumbersome in execution, with Fuyumura straining against the limitations of his body to snuff out his targets. A fluency obviously emerged though and, at least when this film begins, he's a more than credible threat to both of our leads. The damage this character represents goes a little deeper than beautifully fluent counter-striking though. Mahiro, simultaneously the more physically accomplished and socially awkward of the Baby Assassin pair, senses something of herself in this tome; a path she hasn't had to walk, thanks to her anxiety dispelling partnership with Chisato. 

Fugazi - Waiting Room

manny. - snr.

Capcom Cup 11 by 哀ScReaM

A.L. West - Rabbitbrush 2

Presence

Unusually, for this genre of thriller, there's very little attempt to invoke supernatural malevolence in Steven Soderbergh's Presence. David Koepp' screenplay, not to mention Soderbergh's camera, defy the rhythms and reveals typically associated with big screen phantasms to concentrate on a spectre that is, largely, passive but still ever-present. This ghost is observational, our free-floating perspective on these lives, able to drift around the cavernous household and nose into pertinent conversations. Presence's spook, lingering on the edge of human perception, seems to be most comfortable crouching in the wardrobe of Callina Liang's Chloe, the youngest and least appreciated child in the Payne family. Quickly, Chloe picks up on their unseen companion, believing it to be some fragment of a recently departed friend: another depressive teenage girl who was also rumoured to be experimenting with drugs. Since we are privy to all of this phantom's coming and goings - and not just those picked up upon by paranormally attuned cast members - we are able to note the less consequential ways in which this viewpoint expresses itself, be that tidying up notebooks in the bedroom it seems anchored to or literally looking down upon Lucy Liu's Rebecca as she ignores her floundering children to hurriedly empty her inbox of incriminating emails. Although this strange consciousness is thoroughly described by the film's conclusion, there are enough clues scattered throughout the piece to suggest something trapped but penitent; an emotional sensation that his persisted in these walls, hoping to connect itself to a vessel that can then enact real physical change. 

Horsegirl - Switch Over

Long-Haul by Kiron Fan

MIKE - Artist of the Century

Flight RIsk

Sandwiched between two heavily computer-orchestrated sequences, that impart nothing other than a revolting sense of unreality, sits the meat of Flight Risk, a lightly twisted tale of frustrated extradition. Mel Gibson's latest makes an excretable first impression, even with the disgraced director's name deliberately elided from any ad campaign that preceded the film. Instantly we're hammered with a succession of collapsed digital imagery, from a motel exterior so stylistically overwrought and disconnected from the tone of the piece that it prompts laughter, to a badly composited telephoto appraisal of a landing strip. Worse still, Topher Grace's mob accountant is written to be funny but, sadly, with the objective of pleasing an audience who find the prospect of a grown man being unable to attend to his own toiletry duties the height of comedy. 

Eventually we're trapped in a creaking Cessna, pointed directly at a snowy mountain range, with Michelle Dockery's US Marshal and Mark Wahlberg's snarling pilot bickering over the controls. Dockery, when given centre stage in the latter half of Flight Risk, brings a beleaguered likability with her that accentuates the nightmarish task of having to keep a light aircraft from nosediving. Wahlberg's drooling belligerent is the highlight though, although largely for his increasingly pained and contorted face as well as the ways in which his florid description of sexual violence seem so completely at odds with a film that otherwise feels like a bottle episode in a long-running TV serial. Completely unrecognisable as the work of a director that previously delivered Apocalypto, fans of Gibson's fixation on self-flagellation may like to note that far more attention is paid to the ruinous damage that Wahlberg's balding maniac gleefully inflicts upon himself than any of the bodily trauma otherwise deployed to vanquish this pest. 

New Order - Blue Monday 88

The Dinobots by Geoff Senior and Josh Burcham