Warfare

Warfare, co-directed by Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, offers very little context as to why a special forces unit felt it necessary to barricade themselves inside an Iraqi household a few days removed from 2006's Battle of Ramadi. Why knocking through walls, taking hostages, and drawing a high-powered crosshair over milling civilians shouldn't draw ire from a neighbourhood that does not wish to be occupied or an audience that does not wish to be repulsed. Similarly though, there's zero interest in presenting the kind of hair-raising conjecture that might assist this film in eliciting the sympathies other filmmakers have felt is required when considering the heavily armed forces of American imperialism. Obviously, there are implied affinities that a home grown audience will pick up on - these are young, mostly white men under attack on the other side of the planet - but Warfare never knuckles down on jingoism like, say, Clint Eastwood's American Sniper did. 

Although the behind-the-scenes clips that are threaded throughout the end credits do offer us a glimpse of the human wreckage caused by this film's fruitless undertaking, this piece is, in the main, far more interested in mapping the moment-to-moment occurrence of a thousand natural and unnatural shocks: dehydration and some pleasantly observed boredom give way to shattered limbs, arterial spurts and the alarming cognitive numbness associated with a concussive head injury. Perhaps Warfare intends to be corrective? The Englishman Garland thanking his American military advisors by following up the more medicinal qualities of his Civil War (in which A24's domestic audience were forced to consider the idea that perhaps the rest of the world might actually delight in their country's destruction) with a piece that does not solely present that country's armed forces as empty collaborators fit only to be torn apart by insurgent gunfire. Here, we are assured, these service men will shriek just like anybody else, if you step on the pulverised remains of their bleeding leg.

Hannah Frances - Surviving You

City on Fire by Michael DeForge

Erika de Casier - You Can't Always Get What You Want

Massive Attack - Protection

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the presumed conclusion to Tom Cruise's stunt-packed series, trades the lighter touch evident in earlier episodes for a portentous self-seriousness that crushes the connective tissue arranged around the film's spectacular set-pieces. As with the previous Reckoning, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is attempting to drag and drop an all-powerful digital application into an almighty recycle bin before it can worm its way into the world's steaming nuclear arsenal. Indeed, the level of threat in director Christopher McQuarrie's sequel is so great, so all-encompassing, that it becomes ephemeral and abstract - a dark pall that hangs over a succession of anonymous, military-adjacent interiors. McQuarrie's film, already packed with winking excerpts from previous instalments, feels especially weak in its early passages where characters, very slowly, talk us through the sort of religious revelation now associated with Cruise's secret agent. This clip show (the sort of storytelling seen in 1990s television when overworked staff needed a mid-season breather) isn't just disappointing because it regurgitates extant material, it also fails to re-contextualise these inherited moments from the all-knowing perspective of Hunt himself. 

The character's overworked headspace - in which key moments are turned over and dissected - has been part of the series' visual language since the first episode, with that rookie agent embellishing the fragments of recall that remain in his head to make sense of the conspiracy unfolding around him. McQuarrie's second pass, Mission Impossible - Fallout, even played around with this character's vivid interior landscape: Hunt now able to imagine entire action sequences before they even play out. A zen-like advantage seemingly inherited for the sword masters of chanbara cinema. Unfortunately, Final Reckoning proposes nothing quite so potent when combing through previous victories. What this film does offer though is an exceptional, perhaps even series best, action sequence set in and around a sunken submarine. Cruise begins this claustrophobic, dialogue free delight by hand-cranking away the film's widescreen borders to make way for a towering, IMAX frame. Like Virgil Brigman before him, Hunt plunges down an icy trench then climbs into a rotted, rolling mausoleum. During the swim up, the throat-sung soundtrack suggests an undead leviathan being disturbed from its eternal slumber. Once inside this cramped, flooded beast the film's music is a cacophony of screeching and buckling metal as a stomach packed with unfastened ballistic missiles bump up against wincing, freezing bodies and rusted bulkheads. Every second of this expertly crafted sequence works to transform Hunt's already ludicrous objective from a scheme that really does seem impossible into one that feels genuinely insane. 

Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey - The Sevastopol

Fela Kuti - Gentleman

Patch and Joe Fixit by Alexye

Nas Feat. AZ - Life's A Bitch (Moose Dawa Remix)

Young Fathers - Pals

28 Years Later

If 28 Days Later represents a catastrophic moment in time, one sealed forever in interlaced amber, then director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland's belated sequel, 28 Years Later, speaks for the kind of societies that have sprung up in the decades following that captured collapse. Our principles are the headrung descendants who might well end up discovering that original, degraded document then. Like the back-end of Threads, from producer-director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Barry Hines (the author of A Kestrel for a Knave), Years is concerned with the offspring who are born in the ruins of the twentieth century; the innocents whose daily reality is a brutal and ever present reminder that the generations who came before them were not just unreliable but actively destructive when pursuing their own ends. Told almost entirely from the perspective of a child, Alfie Williams' Spike, Years allows itself to unfold around crucial absences - largely those associated with the basic transmission of information - that are themselves willfully elided by people playing the role of parent. 

Although Spike finds himself nocking arrows while the mutated children of Toshio Masuda's Prophecies of Nostradamus wriggle towards him, his biggest and most vivid opponent is his own father. Jamie, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is an insistent and eventually disappointing presence in his son's life. A young father struggling to come to terms with the wheezing death that is creeping into his wife Isla, played by Jodie Comer. Perhaps Jamie is as much a victim here? Jamie will have been a child himself when the rage infection swept the British isles and there are no doctors on the fortified island that this family call home. Reassurance is absent then and must be sought. Years stresses that there is no-one in this tight-knit enclave impartial enough to take loved ones aside and prepare them for the worst. Crucially for this film, none of the older adults have been brave enough to level with Spike, to trust this child with the knowledge that his mother will very likely not ever get any better. Years may be packed with bloated human worms and spine-ripping violence but the film's central dilemma is, essentially, based in domestic strife: a sick mother, a community steeped in mute conformity and a checked-out, unfaithful father. Boyle and Garland have taken the BBC's ancient Play for Today format then twisted it into apocalyptic knots. 

Lucy in Disguise - Gradient Midnight

Doc Simmo - Lost in Thought

Fortress Staff Officer Galvatron by あるれ (Alette)

JAKOB - SWAN

Michael Giacchino - Fantastic Four to Be Reckoned With