Films 2024

Loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, director Bertrand Bonello's The Beast disdains a dithering, male perspective on commitment to detail how terrible it is to be the subject in somebody else's problem. To be both incredibly vital and yet somehow still extraneous. In all of their meetings Léa Seydoux's Gabrielle is quite capable of recognising the connection between herself and George MacKay's Louis. She pursues him, using the apparatus of her age to appear open and amenable. It is Louis who resists, unwilling or unable to be truly brave and take a chance.

Original review

Viewers with a more comprehensive knowledge of Frank Herbert's cosmology might, in Paul's visions of endless elderly faces, find trace of the path this new emperor will walk over the years (and films) to come; the terrible foresight that demands he make some attempt to take control of the inevitable carnage. Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two though accounts for another, more human perspective to creep in: revulsion. Cursed with a total understanding of his own appalling genealogy, Paul connects with a barbaric, animalistic aspect as a way to reframe his own nature and satisfy his personal need for revenge. When Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet's all-powerful mother and son meet again, their first order of business is this rotten lineage and what it means for a shared future. The Atreides name, the human greatness of a Duke Leto that inspired loyalty and devotion in all of his subjects, has been polluted forever and will, in the fullness of time, sink beneath a flag of boiling, merciless violence. Amen.

Original review

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, director George Miller's latest instalment of Antipodean apocalypse, does tell a much more conventionally structured story than its predecessor. There are chapter stops and our heroine's progress is measured in decades rather than a few, fraught hours. These breaks allow tension to wane, to draw attention to a fractured approach to storytelling that underlines the suspicion that these are fragments culled from Fury Road's fruitful pre-production period. That fourth Max may be the livelier piece then, one that never stops to explain (really) anything, but Furiosa is still light years ahead of its nearest action contemporaries. Even with the odd stuttering, computer generated stunt double that doesn't quite match the physical capture, the conceptual focus on determined figures surmounting hair-raising hazards, all without ever losing either a sense of geography or genuine physical danger, is the work of a master.

Original review

Writer-director Chris Nash's In a Violent Nature is consumed with its killer, the camera dutifully trailing in his wake as Johnny crashes through undergrowth in search of a totemic locket. Outside viewpoints and performances are, for a majority of the film, pointedly irrelevant then. The anonymous victims who invade Johnny's space are contextualised using his point of view: they are therefore flat and one-note, nothing more than badly essayed irritants who demand to be silenced in increasingly ingenious ways. The time and energy usually apportioned to a more human frame of reference has been drained away here, leaving only the strange tranquillity of an untiring monster methodically battering through the woods, that used to be his prison, in search of something to silence the buzzing inside his skull. 

Original review

As an actor, Takeshi Kitano has a magnetic pull based largely around his casualness or indifference to the harrowing strife that surrounds him. This aspect of his performance has only deepened with age, as Kitano has grown larger (at least in this role) and even less mobile. His character, Hideyoshi, who frequently makes reference to his beginnings as part of the peasant class, isn't constrained by the same circuitous logics of pride and propriety that cage his suffocating peers. The studied ceremonies of the people he has infiltrated are actually physically excruciating for him, largely because a great deal of it is premised upon extended displays of suicidal etiquette. Hideyoshi finds it all just plain boring. Kitano, a comedic actor through and through, approaches each new, outrageous development as a hassle rather than a calamity then. Despite the (comfortably) hundreds of lives violently extinguished over the course of Kubi's runtime, Hideyoshi views all of the film's churning developments as the latest wrinkle in some ongoing cosmic joke aimed squarely at him.

Original review

Based on a web manga written and illustrated by Chainsaw Man's Tatsuki Fujimoto, Look Back, at least in its beginnings, revolves around a one-sided rivalry between two young teens who both contribute their art to the school newspaper. Fujino, the more confident and outgoing of the pair, submits wonderfully coarse and genuinely amusing three-panel gags, whereas the pieces sent in by the reclusive Kyomoto are more contemplative, demonstrating a much more obvious technical ability. Of course, each of these artists covets the skills of the other and express their devotion in wildly different ways: Kyomoto imagines her rival as a great master of the form who she worships from afar; Fujino kills herself trying to improve her draftsmanship then, judging herself to still be lacking, temporarily gives up altogether. Writer-director Kiyotaka Oshiyama's film, rather fittingly for an animated feature, revolves around an incredible amount of hard work, the vast majority of which is self-compelled and largely about achieving a kind of personal betterment. Rather than enjoy the picturesque landscapes that the film consistently offers up to the viewer, the pair (eventually) meet then promptly seal themselves away in Fujino's bedroom, working in concert to produce something they both can be truly happy with. Fanciful and devastating in almost equal measure, Look Back is a beautiful illustration of the strange, deeply internalised compulsions that drive people to produce and produce, often to no clear material advantage. 

In Perfect Days, Koji Yakusho's Hirayama has achieved an everyday routine that allows him to live frozen inside a contented peace. Repetition and the fulfilment of basic but attainable tasks seems key to attaining this baseline. So, rather than think beyond the moment and stock up on something like the Boss brand Caffè Latte cans that this man unfailing begins his days with, Hirayama prefers the ritual of depositing a coin in the (admittedly well-stocked) vending machine that sits in the courtyard of his apartment complex. Similarly, the work that keeps him in his canned coffee is janitorial in nature, based around a series of avant-garde toilets dotted around an upmarket Tokyo district. In the time allotted to him, Hirayama can clean these commodes to a standard that is, in itself, pleasing to him. Evenings are spent pruning tiny trees that sit beneath UV lighting, listening to catalogued cassette tapes or reading through the second-hand books Hirayama has purchased for a pittance. Director Wim Wenders (co-writing with Takuma Takasaki) allows us a glimpse into the life of someone who has fine-tuned themselves to appreciate tiny, almost microscopic feedback loops, all of which allow him to experience or consume something in their entirety and then be satisfied enough to disengage. Unfortunately for Hirayama his regimen can be upset by the human scaffolding that supports his asceticism: the incompetent co-worker who torpedoes this carefully curated balance or the simple fact that Hirayama's cheery, guileless presence cannot help but engender deeper expectations in those he spends his time around. 

In conversation with someone she believes to be her subordinate, Juliette Gariépy's Kelly-Anne describes her detached approach to the should-be exciting games of chance that account for her financial independence. How she will often discontinue these online poker matches early to protect her own investment or the ways in which her deliberately cold playstyle contrasts with those who find themselves emotionally entangled in the game and therefore more likely to make mistakes. She lets something crucial slip during these briefings though, perhaps emboldened by her proximity to another person who seems to share her own strange fascination with serial killers and their Red Rooms. This statement the only real insight we get into a finely-tuned person who sips smoothies in her wind-whistled glass house while casually committing identity fraud or cataloguing paedophilic snuff clips. Kelly-Anne doesn't just like to win you see. What she really enjoys is witnessing somebody else lose. 

Original review

A French-language remake of an earlier, Japanese-language Kiyoshi Kurosawa film that threads this project's cross-continental drift back into the text of the piece itself. In this new, 2024 version of Serpent's Path we are no longer dealing with just an obvious class divide, that is to say the chaffing and cross-purposes experienced by a middle-class maths teaching mastermind as he directs the violence of an incompetent, low-level dogsbody. Damien Bonnard's Albert, a journalist investigating the abduction and murder of his daughter, at least initially, seems to be on an equal sort of footing with Ko Shibasaki's Sayoko, an emotionally cool hospital psychiatrist. The men they abduct, and the crimes they charge them with, aren't as clear cut as they were back in 1998 either. 

There, Sho Aikawa's Nijima and Teruyuki Kagawa's Miyashita were attacking something structured, local and physically attainable: a criminal gang that was distributing video cassettes containing unimaginable darkness. Albert and Sayoko's quarry is much more corporate and therefore illusory; dark money and illegal organ trades intermingle, while the video capture of premeditated murder somehow functions as a particularly loathsome side-hustle. The men they capture are intermediaries who either express an ignorance (or all-consuming fear) of the next link in the chain. Kurosawa then consistently withholds a clear sense that any of the people at either end of the film's many tortures really know much of anything. The more emotive Albert rages and dithers, a man seeking a particular version of the truth. One that lionises rather than condemns him. Comparatively, Sayoko is steely and unflappable. Equally at home flirting with traffic wardens, while they hover next to vehicles packed with bodies, as she is with sipping coffee in an adjacent room while two of her prisoners claw each other to death. 

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is a powerful illustration of sociopathy and the avaricious ability for one particular group of human beings to suddenly imprison or exterminate another for whatever arbitrary reason has just crossed their mind. Locked inside static shots that detail the lush, upper middle-class trappings of a villa sat on the same grounds as wailing, industrialised murder we see various expressions of the thought processes underpinning this deplorable crime. Imogen Kogge, playing Linna, the mother of Sandra Hüller's Hedwig Höss, seems to think of The Holocaust through a kind of class dimension, with the extinction of the Jewish women who used to employ her a necessary sacrifice so that people like herself and her oafish daughter can move up a station in life. Indeed many in the Höss family are enraptured by these trappings, the luxuries afforded to them by their enthusiastic participation in the truly appalling, often to the exclusion of everything else. 

Above all (and certainly eclipsing any affection she feels for her husband) Hedwig delights in the power she is now able to wield in her household, the silence and fear she can instil in the Polish teenagers who race around, adjusting ugly bric-a-brac while trying, desperately, to remain unremarked upon. This bullying and crushing lack of empathy is presented as instructional for the Höss children. Left alone in the garden to play, one older boy assumes the role of jailor, locking his younger brother in a greenhouse. While his sibling screeches to be set free, the big brother basks in the authority he has momentarily seized for himself. Hedwig, in accordance with the demented screed of Nazi era pedagogues like Johanna Haarer, keeps her children at arm's length. Tolerated but never consoled or loved. A brief interlude, while a sleepless Linna considers the smoke rising from the nearby camp, features Hedwig's screaming baby in some adjoining room, billeted away from its mother. It stands up in its crib; red-faced, crying and desperate to be held. Hedwig refuses to answer this call and the Polish woman assigned to nurse this child simply stares at this scene, drinking herself into numbness. Whether this servant is also acting in accordance with Haarer's blueprint for raising obedient and emotionally bowdlerised citizens (Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind, if you're interested) or enacting some tiny, sanctioned revenge on her captors isn't clear. 

Video Games 2024

How can a game built out of gleaming, blacklight pixilation feel so verdant and alive? Look at it: neon vines drape across scurrying slimes; lambent waters trickle down sunken walls. Like a dying CRT cab pumped full of ooze. As an exploration focused platformer, Animal Well's approach to progress is both dense and layered. Screens that resemble a glimmering terrarium are knotted with hide-holes and secret shortcuts that run concurrent with more casual traversal. Controlling a ghostly little blob, players work their way around these dripping screens in loops, pressing up on walls and scurrying through any passages that reveal themselves in search of mysterious eggs and save checkpoints that take the form of a rotary telephone. Developed by Billy Basso and published by Bigmode, Animal Well is an instant, high quality calling card for Dunkey's newest video game venture. 

Hot on the heels of sinkhole disaster Concord, PlayStation quickly corrected the narrative pertaining to their 30th year in business with Team Asobi's Astro Bot, a love letter to those three decades worth of ups and downs. Whereas Firewalk Studios' game rabidly (or, maybe more accurately, foolheartedly) chased a place in a service gaming landscape already dominated by several long ensconced titans, Asobi's game was content to be a luxuriously worked summation of its home platform. Nintendo-like not only in its ability to constantly introduce new ways to navigate a lush 3D landscape but also in how the game's mood manages to be celebratory without slipping into arrogant self-satisfaction. Perhaps it's that Sony's iconography has been so thoroughly subsumed into Astro Bot's cute droid aesthetic? The cynicism associated with brand maintenance vanquished by the sight of Bloodborne's Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower reimagined as a capsule vending machine toy. 

After a couple of minutes with Balatro it becomes clear that the decision made by PEGI (the content rating board for video games released in Europe) to quickly revise their age label classification from a PEGI 3 to a PEGI 18 is, at least partially, a qualitative assessment of this game. LocalThunk's deck-building take on poker is compulsive and hypnotic rather than the cheery, mindless pair-matching seen in dozens of Nintendo party games. Players are presented with deals that can then be held or discarded, before a final submission subjects them to the powers of the juiced-up, leering joker cards that are purchased between rounds. As more and more of these cackling multipliers are gathered, the players chip haul starts to seriously outpace the (early game) completion demands placed upon them. The result is intoxicating, activating a part of the brain that thrives on pure greed and twinkling feedback. 

Already sinking beneath sludgy AI imagery and aggressive micro-transactions, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 had a great couple of weeks in which online action coalesced around playlists dedicated to the smallest maps the game has to offer. Blessed (or cursed) with a new, multi-directional movement model that seems much more logical when considering the wide open spaces of the Warzone spin-off, rather than the spawn-flipping back-and-forth of the dedicated multiplayer maps, Black Ops 6 does actually shine on the tiniest possible arena. Stakeout takes place inside a series of claustrophobic apartments; staggered rooms with clear paths in and out that cater wonderfully to the instant correction of the shotgun weapon type. Players can hug walls, hovering out of view, waiting to blast unsuspecting visitors or dawdle around, firing from the hip. The close-quarters and point-blank damage scaling mean opponents cannot slide away from your boom stick and the funnelled movement channels ensure that you're unlikely to be sniped from some unconsidered angle of vulnerability yourself. 

Never thought I'd feel pangs of nostalgia for the rickety polygonal meshes of the PlayStation 1 era but here we are. Crow Country is a cutesy, Haunted PS1-style spin on survival horror that allows players to do something almost unthinkable: they can rotate the camera around these environments, to really examine the nooks and crannies of these lovingly crafted 3D spaces. Indeed, such was the novelty of this unlocked perspective feature, I didn't even realise you could do it until I'd put a good twenty minutes into the game. 

Additional content so completely fantastic that FromSoft could very easily have held it all back for a quick, cash-in sequel. Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree is, at least before you gather some very specific items, almost impenetrably difficult. Arriving in a pocket universe filled with horrors so terrible that the ruling powers of the main world have sealed them away, players are very likely to either be instantly pummelled by one of the wandering, skyscraping bonfires or ambushed by an assassin who stalks the player like a big cat on the way to visit some crypts. Make it inside one of these extra tiny dungeons and you'll be met with a mini-boss who owns a fully automatic crossbow. 

These first few hours are uniquely dispiriting then. Your endgame equipment only able to nick and chip these fresh enemies. Dedicate yourself to finding fragments of another of the game's mythical trees though and the difficulty curve begins to level out until rolling progress is, again, within the player's grasp. Although decried for introducing this strained kind of longevity, Erdtree's sap collecting forces players to re-examine both their build and equipment. Sticking to what has worked previously is, very clearly, a form of self-sabotage. FromSoft have filled their adjunct realm with new weapons and armours; fresh spirits and allies to call on; recipes for improvised chemical weapons that can, thankfully, make some dent in the enormous health pools that bar your ascent to a new throne. It'd be rude not to make use of them. 

A bloodthirsty take on Konami's run-and-gun shooters, Iron Meat caught my attention by presenting itself like some lost, plugged-in update of a Mega Drive fav. The equivalent of the Mega CD version of The Terminator when judged against some speculative release that combined the exploding perps of RoboCop Versus The Terminator with the more athletic movement of a Contra: Hard Corps. Although not as arresting as either of those classics, Iron Meat is still a lot of fun, particularly a level that sees the player trying to escape a crashing airship infested with writhing, bio-mechanical worms. 

If nothing else, Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics clearly illustrates the stark contrast between the kind of HD remasters that are expelled from a parent company to prop up a weak quarter and the reception that can be expected when the porting and packaging of such a property at least attempts to equal the genuine longing that has galvanised multiple online petitions. This Fighting Collection not only allows players easy access to games that were previously subjected to lousy console translations (see X-Men: Children of the Atom and The Punisher) but also offers up a beautifully curated copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes that allows players to tweak and toggle to the degree that even specific, character-related bugs can be switched on or off. Right now, New Age of Heroes is living a second life, energised by fighting game master Justin Wong and his screen-clearing alter ego The Wazzler, as well as an expanding YouTube scene that specifically disregards the ingrained, meta to re-investigate lower tier characters that were instantly deemed useless back in the early 2000s. Finally getting to see Sunburnt Sakura or Iron Body Zangief pulverising Sentinel match-ups has been delightful. 

Expectations were underground for Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2. Publishers Konami had long since ran that particular cash cow into the ground, losing source code so re-releases of PS2-era classics are permanently hamstrung or handing off development duties to anybody but whatever remnants of Team Silent remained within their parent company. Even jumping immediately to the second game in the series for this modern re-jig sounded worrying, as if Konami were attempting to stir up the biggest possible pay day for themselves before their audience realised they'd been had. As it turns out though, Bloober have actually overdelivered, subtly rebuilding the second Silent Hill in such a way that this release can function as a companion piece to the original, rather than something designed to overwrite it. As James creeps deeper into this abandoned town, familiar progress, puzzles and encounters are missing. Marked only by an interactive prompt that then simulate some sense of fuzzy recall. Although never stated outright, it seems as if we are experiencing James' dilemma as something cyclical and purgatorial. Another round in an endless punishment that he has trapped himself in. And if that doesn't do it for you, there's some tighter combat controls that allow you to duck and weave around the emaciated horrors attempting to lay themselves on top of your widower. 

Developer Coal Supper's Thank Goodness You're Here! is sort of like if you got the Viz cartoonists to devise their own, interactive version of one of Richard Scarry's Busy Busy books. Players control a little gnome who zips about a lurid, postcard drawing of a post-industrial Yorkshire town that sprawls across several interconnected (and sometimes deliberately unconnected) screens. These strange little scenes teem with villagers going about their daily business, from running a dilapidated corner shop to attempting to fish a penny out of a sewer grate. Everything and everybody can be whacked, in fact that's all you can really do. Thankfully, striking your palm across their collective backsides will always result in some sort of reaction, from a shocked titter to a response that might actually cause the day's progress to inch that little bit forward. Comedy is a something of an untapped resource in video games, either reduced to incidental flavour or something excruciating that must then be endured. Thank Goodness is neither, managing to concoct a prevailing sense of daftness that is both genuinely amusing and actually sort of cosy.

Music 2024

Arooj Aftab - Aey Nehin // Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 1 // Beyoncé - Texas Hold 'Em // Burial - Dreamfear // Caribou - Honey // Cassandra Jenkins - Delphinium Blue // Chappell Roan - Good Luck, Babe! // Charli XCX - Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde // Clairo - Add Up My Love // The Cure - Endsong // Eagle Eyed Tiger - Borrowed Time // Faye Webster - Wanna Quit All the Time // Fontaines DC - Favourite // Geordie Greep - The New Sound // Hannah Frances - Husk and Keeper of the Shepherd // Hans Zimmer - Beginnings Are Such Delicate Times // Hello Meteor - Ballistic Terra // John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter & Daniel Davies - My Name is Death // Julia-Sophie - Lose My Mind // Junior Varsity - Cross the Street // Kendrick Lamar - Dodger Blue (feat. Wallie the Sensei, Siete7x, and Roddy Ricch // Khruangbin - May Ninth // Knifeplay - Tears // Kupla - Treasure // Magdalena Bay - That's My Floor // Okay Kaya - The Wannabe // Peel Dream Magazine - Central Park West // Sky Ferreira - Leash // System96 - Terminal // Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - I Know // TV Girl & George Clanton - Yesterday's World // VIQ & Altered Sigh - Afraid

CoryaYo - Dali

Sinéad O'Connor - All Apologies

Shockwave by AZOINAB

Tape Arcade & Voyage - Solaris

Sky Ferreira - Leash

Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain

A ghost story designed around extreme emotional denial and stifling tradition that expresses itself with pulsing backgrounds and unnatural colour. Nominally, Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain revolves around an impending celebration in a highly ordered harem that is being disrupted by supernatural events. The reason for this ceremony, the birth of a child, is of zero concern to director Kenji Nakamura's film. There is no wailing to be heard; and no danger directed at this infant. There are whispers that perhaps the baby will be an unsuitable heir, thanks to their gender, but that is simply muttered to massage the ascension of a different concubine to the lord's bedchamber. Glimpses of either the sitting power that conducts hundreds of women in total fealty or that of the uncanny underside that swallows up their dearest possessions are so brief as to be absent. Instead we are focused here on the human churn that caters to the uninterpretable. Adapted from a Toei Animation television series about a travelling spiritualist who is little more than an observer here, Phantom in the Rain is reminiscent of the work of Mahiro Maede, specifically his Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo TV series, in that every inch of every surface is alive with textured information. Patterns clash and combine, travelling over an environment that refuses to offer the viewer any space that could be considered safe or even normal. Everything here is blaring and aggressive, a setting of kaleidoscopic intranquility that crushes pleasant young women, transforming them into faceless automatons. 

The Cure - I Can Never Say Goodbye // Endsong

Knight by James Bousema

Junior Varsity - New York

Caligula - The Ultimate Cut

The latest in a long line of attempts to extract something artistically permissible from a Penthouse sponsored production that could, nevertheless, claim Gore Vidal as its screenwriter, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is a reforging of director Tinto Brass' film that aims to re-make the piece into something more befitting of a cast of luminaries that can count the likes of Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and Malcolm McDowell amongst their number. This newest assembly now sits alongside unrated theatrical versions, censored theatrical presentations, a variety of bowdlerised home video edits and even a 'clean' Director's Cut that was prepared for transmission (by Channel 4) on British terrestrial television. Compiled from nearly a hundred hours of dailies by editor Aaron Shaps, under the supervision of art historian Thomas Negovan, this Ultimate Cut proudly boasts almost zero commonality between itself and any previously sold release of Caligula. Although Negovan has spoken about his discovery that the takes selected by financier Bob Guccione were often not the most impressive, in terms of acting performance extracted, this particular edit does jettison some of the more memorable aspects of the original releases. 

As expected, the more volcanic sexual acts have been completely snipped away but also the odd aside that gave insight into the unusual thought processes of McDowell's bullied princeling. Gone is the moment where Caligula inquires of John Gielgud's Nerva, who sits in a tub of steaming water with his wrists open, what it is like to die. As well the end credits no longer march up the screen, laid over images of a murdered family, blood-stained marble and McDowell's lifeless, accusatory gaze. It's unclear if these moments have been deemed tonally counterintuitive or just extraneous by a project whose stated remit is to stick a little closer to Vidal's original screenplay. Perhaps they had no equivalent in the alternative footage that was made available? Presumably, this film has been changed so thoroughly for a very specific reason, be that a pressing copyright related issue or a personal challenge set by the new compilers. Regardless, this Caligula - which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival - is now packaged to denote discovery. As well as an expanded and reorganised scene order, we have a prologue and opening titles centred around rotoscoped animation of McDowell's pained march, created for this revision by artist Dave McKean; pristine digital attributions at either end of the film; a suite of unconvincing library sound effects; and a new musical score that forgoes the previously spliced-in music from Sergei Prokofiev's ballet, Romeo and Juliet. 

As ever though, Caligula is a tapestry of human cruelty. Cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti takes a theatrical perspective, often using audience-addressing master shots of production designer Danilo Donati's dizzyingly vertical sets; all of which teem with naked, vulnerable extras who behave as if they are being held at gunpoint. The removal of the hardcore pornography that Guccione previously insisted be threaded into the film not only goes some way to de-scandalising Caligula it also eliminates any sense of digression or levity in this emperor's unfolding madness. The sex we are shown in The Ultimate Cut is now either firmly based around imposed, hierarchical relationships or employed as an instrument of terror. With the likes of Lori Wagner and Anneka di Lorenzo clipped away, it is very clear now that absolutely no-one is enjoying themselves. Beyond these tonal corrections, Negovan's principle additions are a more detailed look at the relationship between McDowell's Caligula and Mirren's Caesonia. Previously a leashed accessory, Mirren's character is now, in the latter half of the film, clearly attempting to provide the same maternal comforts to her husband as Teresa Ann Savoy's ill-fated Drusilla did. The rote savagery of Caligula's rule is underlined in deed and conversation as well, harkening back to the words of Peter O'Toole's syphilitic Tiberius that his adopted grandson should be a punishment visited upon Rome. Most importantly, for anyone considering McDowell's career, there is now clearer connective tissue between this performance and A Clockwork Orange's Alex DeLarge. Both characters are plucky lunatics raging inside treacherous socio-political machinery who find themselves completely incapable of experiencing happiness and so turn to self-destruction. 

Kendrick Lamar - Luther (with SZA) // Dodger Blue (feat. Wallie the Sensei, Siete7x, and Roddy Ricch)

Julia-Sophie - Lose My Mind

Megatron by AZOINAB

The Cure - Warsong

Gladiator II

Gladiator II ties itself in knots to place its hero, Paul Mescal's Hanno, on the same path to the colosseum as his predecessor Maximus, as played by Russell Crowe. The latest from 86-year-old Ridley Scott is a belated sequel that he (somehow) found the energy to film in the year following Napoleon, another of the director's enormously detailed historical epics. In terms of pure storytelling, David Scarpa's screenplay twists and turns around a shallow dynastic intrigue that seems rather obvious given this sequel's photostat plotting. Although charming in a five-a-side sort of way, Mescal isn't quite able to channel Crowe's strange, tractor beam turbulences; those arresting eyeline tremors that physical communicate a mind seesawing back-and-forth between temperance and explosive violence. Similarly, Connie Nielsen's performance as Lucilla, the daughter of former emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a shadow of her preceding act. The actress now flat and robotic where previously her Lucilla had registered as guarded but still extremely cunning. 

This lack of gravitational pull from two of the most important characters, as well as the aggressively blunt storytelling employed to get a gladius in Hanno's hands, means Gladiator II is a subordinate experience in comparison to the 2000 film. But that's not to say that Scott isn't having or transmitting fun. Like his twin Alien prequels, Gladiator II represents an opportunity to reappraise concepts and sequences that never made it into the parent piece, often because of budgetary rather than qualitative concerns. So while Prometheus allowed the director to reclaim Giger's pyramid designs, this second Gladiator inherits costly colosseum battles built around massive African beasts and duelling, burning battleships encircled by sharks. An arena battle involving a rhinoceros doesn't just deliver on the broad strokes of Sylvain Despretz's twenty five year old storyboards (images of which were tucked away in the special features of two-disc DVD sets for the first Gladiator), it also reproduces the unusual little details that Scott himself etched into his Ridleygrams. This fascination with macabre match-ups also allows for Hanno to be subjected to hand-to-hand combat with hairless baboons, rendered here as muscular teeth and claw that wouldn't shame Scott's pitiless Alien: Covenant. 

Gladiator II's vision of Rome is denser and dirtier as well, journeying beyond repeatedly re-dressed bedrooms and flat, computer-generated vistas to really stick its nose into the filthy stalls or subterranean tombs that are threaded into this ancient city. This vivid, lively approach to antiquity is best expressed by Denzel Washington as Macrinus, Hanno's ambitious, arms-dealing slavemaster. Washington's role could very easily default to a rehash of Oliver Reed's curtailed Proximo: an entertaining, storied actor for the less experienced leading man to bounce off or commiserate with. Macrinus' role in proceedings does overlap somewhat with Proximo's but, again, this sequel goes in directions that the previous film could not. Reed's untimely death meant that Maximus' master could not become an antagonistic presence in the Spaniard's life. Not so here. Macrinus is an actor, able to present whichever image his audience expects. So, with pompous senators, Macrinus pretends to be a rich gadabout. When in the company of real power, his servility may ratchet up slightly but it is always tempered with a ruthless focus. In all things Macrinus strains to appear useful; instantly solving problems that he himself has cultivated. The closer he creeps to the throne, the more venal and bloodthirsty he becomes. At his peak he's endangering maidens and galloping away from pursuing heroes like a serial villain. Washington's is a wonderful performance, one that combines the actor's Shakespearean bona fides with a more modern-presenting flamboyance reminiscent of an entitled, record label mogul. 

Harry Gregson-Williams - Gladiator II Overture

Astrotrain by Kiron Fan

Arooj Aftab - Aey Nehin

Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard - Now We Are Free

Gladiator

Following sepia studio logos and an introductory text that swirls inside the mists of time, Gladiator gives its opening seconds over to a hand touching the tips of long, wheat stalks during golden hour. While unseen children laugh, off in the distance, we watch as bronzed fingers lightly grasp at this waving grass, enjoying the prickly sensation. This interlude does not represent the present for Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, they are either his memories or a fantasy of home that has wriggled into him then refused to budge. Crowe's soldier blinks himself out of this trance to discover that he is still trapped on enemy territory in the midst of winter, preparing for an imminent, apocalyptic battle. It is, in a way, a dichotomy that is just as pronounced as the one experienced by Rick Deckard in the various Director's Cuts of Blade Runner: a dream that is pointedly disconnected from each character's current reality. Whereas Deckard's drunken, future-shocked reveries depict a muscular unicorn crashing through a forest, Maximus' interior perspective is softer, suggestive of a private moment that this man may have actually physically encountered. 

These personal desires instantly propose Maximus as romantic but beleaguered, an instrument honed by decades of bloodshed that would, quite happily, pack up then leave this place if he enjoyed that level of authority. Maximus returns to these visions again and again as the film presses forward. They expand in scope to explicitly include his wife and son, the situations curdling into precognitive glimpses of their death at the hands of bloodthirsty Praetorians. Later they are fleeting comfort for Maximus, following his failure to show fealty to Joaquin Phoenix's murderous heir. The visions are now drained of colour and life, taking on the same stark, funereal quality as that present in Arnold Böcklin's painting Die Toteninsel, specifically the monochromatic third version, painted in 1883. Scott's film portrays the afterlife as a place of family and comfort, an escape from obligation otherwise thwarted by the machinations of madmen. Happiness then is something always just out of Maximus' living reach. Even before his diseased body is sold into slavery, the General is very specifically a pawn in larger schemes. The dying emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, may trust and appreciate Maximus but the younger man is still just a tool, a way for this war-mongering monarch to realign a legacy that has emptied his kingdom's coffers and allowed for the rise of Phoenix's poisonous, self-obsessed Commodus. 

These strict states of being for Maximus have structural purchase as well. The General is always subordinated; always stuck answering for somebody else's life-or-death demands. After he is unceremoniously ejected from the Roman army he is bought by Oliver Reed's Proximo, an ex-gladiator turned slavemaster. Later, when he fights before crowds in the Colosseum, he acts on behalf of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, functioning as a male proxy who can lower himself to violence and vanquish her creeping brother. It is in these later passages that Gladiator reveals itself as a sports movie masquerading as a historical epic. Ridley Scott's film, written for the screen by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, may begin with massed, strictly regimented armies blasting flaming rocks at treelines but once the principal characters have returned to Rome, Gladiator gives itself over to a mode of storytelling that has more in common with a pro-wrestling television show than pious, Technicolor biblical blockbusters. Above all there is a complete submission to a very specific format. Secondary characters may plot and plan in shadow but nothing in Gladiator can truly be accomplished unless it involves armed combat staged for sadistic spectators. Scott's film then pointedly elides any of the contextualisation typical to this genre: Maximus isn't saved by the Christian faith. Similarly, he doesn't allow himself to be martyred or transformed into a messianic symbol. His final act is to relay the message, the albatross-like burden, that Marcus placed around his neck at the beginning of the film. He does this job admirably, after getting to enact a ferocious, truly triumphant beating on the new nepotism hire. 

System96 - Terminal

Optimus Prime by AZOINAB

Ultramagnetic MC's - Give the Drummer Some

Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 2

The Beast

From the outset writer-director Bertrand Bonello's The Beast seems to be building a very specific kind of scaffolding, one that uses a science fiction premise and the fantastical technology available therein, to detail a would-be affair that occurs again and again, across multiple centuries and lifetimes. In an emptied-out, Covid-compliant future, Léa Seydoux's Gabrielle argues with machines of varying sophistication about her career prospects. Gabrielle's reluctance to sink herself into oil and have her past lives audited for emotional irregularities means that she is only able to perform the most menial of tasks. The artificial intelligence that presides over the Paris of the 2040s simply refusing to collaborate with persons who haven't subjected themselves to strange, somnambulist experiments that resolve certain, unseemly emotional responses. Despite a very obviously shrunken human population, the machine masters of The Beast have little use for anyone who isn't attempting to match their serene, robotic neutrality. 

The horror here then is that not only has an impartial kind of intelligence mapped out human suffering to such an exacting degree, arriving as well at an inhuman sort of solution, but that mistakes made lifetimes ago can still impact upon the now, damaging a person who hasn't even had a chance to influence those experiences. The ability to dip in and out of these scenarios and participate in this latent trauma doesn't seem to be particularly therapeutic either. More of a blunt force correction that fails to make any concession for the wants or desires of the fixed, human identity trespassing outside of their own era. When Gabrielle does take the plunge, subjecting herself to lengthy, fragmented dreams in which she relives key instances of stress that have stained her karmic soul, the sticking points always revolve around George MacKay's Louis. He first appears as a chaste, Victorian suitor who refuses to act upon the signals being beamed directly at him by Gabrielle's married equivalent. This sumptuous interlude, premised around an expected sort of propriety wrongfoots the audience about the kind of person that Louis is. 

When we meet Louis again a hundred or so years later, this inability to act upon his desires has curdled into something violent and reproachful. The hesitance of a high-society (supreme) gentleman now fully realised as a ranting incel who creeps around at night, following women in his car while trying to build up enough courage to do something awful. Loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, Bonello's film disdains the dithering, male perspective on commitment to detail how terrible it is to be the subject in somebody else's problem. To be both incredibly vital and yet somehow still extraneous. In all of their meetings Gabrielle is quite capable of recognising the connection between herself and Louis. She pursues him, using the apparatus of her age to appear open and amenable. It is Louis who resists, unwilling or unable to be truly brave and take a chance. The Beast is a cumulative experience then, a forlorn piece that makes its point out of fragments that, very deliberately, fail to congeal into anything romantically satisfying. Léa Seydoux, as photographed by Josée Deshaies, is our only real constant. The actress very rarely anywhere but the centre of the frame. Often the camera will slowly close in on her face, eliminating all extraneous information to fill our screens with a pair of big blue eyes that permanently look like they are on the verge of weeping. 

Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 1

Okay Kaya - The Wannabe

A World's Finest by Paul Jon Milne

Junior Varsity - Cross the Street

Madara 1000 - Visions V1

Who Can Kill a Child?

Director Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? begins with seven minutes of punishing black and white documentary footage that details, again and again, the immense suffering that has befallen children throughout the twentieth century. These newsreels obscure nothing. We are asked to peer directly at the bloated bodies of innocents; the tiny, mutilated people who have either starved to death during a famine or been murdered by other genocidal apparatus. These episodes seep into the events of the film itself, recurring as a news report on a portable TV set that sits on a shop counter while an English tourist, Lewis Fiander's Tom, buys his wife, Prunella Ransome's heavily pregnant Evelyn, a few rolls of film so they can document their island-hopping adventure. Although the Spanish salesman who serves the couple is moved by the rolling misery on display, Tom and Evelyn are more interested in resuming their getaway. They are escaping reality, rather than embracing it. 

Filmed and released in the mid-1970s, Who Can Kill a Child? wasn't necessarily intended to be pored over with a mind to present-day paedological concerns but it is striking that this couple have, and it's stated a few times, deliberately left their children at home, denying them access to this sunny break. Similarly, the duo's nationality (within the context of a Spanish film) and Tom's self-appointed role of expert fails to arouse much sympathy for the duo either. They are very deliberately tourists, the kind of transplanted visitors who might deign to mumble a few words in the local language but are still comfortable enough to complain about regional customs and the crowds that they attract. Tom is fixated on a remote, nearby island that he holidayed on many years previously which has, in the meantime, become the flash point for a mass uprising of children. The specifics of this mutiny are left mysterious but the intent to kill any and all adults seems to be communicated psychically, child-to-child. It says something as well that the message is always so greedily received. Given the very real evidence offered upfront as explanation for this reprogramming, as well as the self-involved subjects navigating this turmoil, it's difficult to side against the revolting youth. 

The Flaming Lips - Evil Will Prevail

Quincy Jones - Killer Joe

Godzilla Got a Nintendo GameBoy for His 70th Birthday!! by Brett Marcus Cook

Quincy Jones - Ai No Corrida // Razzamatazz

Joker: Folie à Deux

A sequel that doesn't just refuse its place in the ever-expanding comic book movie pantheon, but actively works to sabotage and undermine such an enterprise altogether. In that sense Joker: Folie à Deux can sit proudly alongside other, hectoring second episodes like Exorcist II: The Heretic or Gremlins 2: The New Batch instead. All three films are, after all, the result of the entity formerly known as Warner Bros. demanding a second visit to well-trodden turf. Folie has (similarly) been received as disappointing, if not actually frustrating and outright upsetting, for its obstinate desire to not give the audience the Clown Prince of Crime they so desperately desire. The film very obviously having next-to-no interest in assuming the role of gritty predecessor for a series of period Gotham City spin-offs. Despite this incalcitrant outlook there are a few, brief allusions to DC's wider world of criminality, but they are all so abashed or plain out-of-focus that they might as well have been clipped away in the edit bay. It's as if the piece itself cannot bare the studio notes that have, presumably, been foisted upon it. 

A promise of the kind of gauche, multipurpose continuity that the various Marvel universes have staked their future on does intrude very late in these proceedings but it's all so blurred and indistinct, occurring way in the background while Lawrence Sher's camera stays locked in on Joaquin Phoenix's gasping, drowning performance as Arthur Fleck. That thing that audiences say they want is present then but the execution is deliberately aggravating and disappointing, framed as a wrinkle casually unfolding on the periphery. Wouldn't you rather focus in on the character that the filmmakers actually want to tell you about? Hasn't Phoenix's all-consuming act sated your need to see this heavily merchandised monster revert to trick flower type? With Folie, writer-director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver have delivered a follow-up that isn't just ambivalent about its billion dollar ancestor, it's angry about it. Put out that the incredible marketplace success that the previous film enjoyed demands another instalment; appalled that a substantial amount of the film's audience saw in Joker an insurrectionist façade that could be applied to social movements from the shallower end of the political waters. 

Phillips' solution then is to underline the foibles and flaws inherent to his interpretation of this character: Fleck is physically meek and easily dominated; his grasp on reality is slippery and prone to fantastical delusion; and perhaps most crucially, he lacks the healthy, psychological scaffolding required to make good on his dearest make-believe. All of which very deliberately works against the expected assumption of a cackling super-identity for this jailed psychiatric patient. The captive audience of an ongoing court trial, as well as the introduction of Lady Gaga as Lee, a shade of Harley Quinn, would seem to suggest an opportunity for mass, cathartic slaughter but the pieces, by design, never quite click into place. Lee isn't the elasticated sidekick we're otherwise used to, she's a troubled rich kid holidaying in her idea of somebody else's mania. She's a fan. In love with the branding rather than the person that is actually stood before her. When Lee's fantasies are not being served she eagerly pouts and recriminates, damning Arthur for his failure to measure up to the persona that she has herself concocted. For his part, the wrinkled and emaciated Fleck doesn't fantasise about orchestrating the kind of orgiastic violence his beloved would seem to prefer. Instead he dreams about himself and her as brightly coloured subjects in a gently mocking variety show. Happiness as a Saturday night television broadcast. Unlike his would-be partner, who at first seems to be a particularly vivid agent of Fleck's imagination, when left to his own devices Arthur is quite happy to sit there medicated, soaking in Technicolor musicals. 

Joaquin Phoenix - True Love Will Find You in the End

The Cure - Alone

Savage Street Vigilante by Simon Mallette St-Pierre