Paul McCartney - Take It Away

About a Place in the Kinki Region

It probably sounds absurd to describe a film in which terrified journalists are visited by their bleeding, mutilated doppelgangers as cosy but writer-director Kōji Shiraishi's About a Place in the Kinki Region is so steeped in curated creepiness and abandoned, old-world rhythms that it cannot help but evoke these strange notes of comfort. When a writer for the Japanese equivalent of Fortean Times goes missing with an important deadline looming, freelancer and friend to the departed Chihiro, played by former pop idol Miho Kanno, is brought in to complete the ailing magazine's centrepiece feature. This salvage job demands Chihiro sink into a well-stocked basement and rummage through notes and dusty physical media, each containing fragments of apparently unconnected paranormal phenomena. Cinematographer Futa Takagi's camera then returning, again and again, to beatific images of CD-Rs adorned with post-it notes and VHS tapes that clatter into video cassette recorders connected to rolling, blue screens. In an era of algorithms and high-definition streaming, where all the world's horrors feel so close and instantly (or unwittingly) attainable, that these short, eerie episodes - the viewing of which accounts for a significant portion of this film's first half - are physically constrained and therefore denied that kind of free-flowing accessibility actually feels unusually comforting. This case unravels in such a way that our snooping leads have to deliberately access each individual breadcrumb if they are to advance to the next stage of this haunting, implicating and endangering themselves by the specific act of trying to understand any overarching objective. With that in mind, Kanno's Chihiro is the perfect character to centre this kind of story around - a fearless reporter who is not only unusually determined to see this story through but behaves as if she is, actually, completely immune. 

MidPoint - Time

The Olympians - Strawberry Kiwi

Red Sonja

Although executed as a feature film, director MJ Bassett and screenwriter Tasha Huo's take on Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's Red Sonja plays like a couple of episodes of mini-series television stapled together. A midpoint break, in which Matilda Lutz's horse-girl turned gladiator strikes a status quo altering blow against a slave master, played by a gleeful Robert Sheehan, feels oddly conclusive, as if the film had suddenly come to an end fifty minutes sooner than expected. This conceptual or structural oddness crops up elsewhere in the film too. Rhona Mitra's Petra, an old hand within the film's arena setting (a position that reflects the actress's familiarity with the action-fantasy genre) is very quickly organised away from the mentor role she seems primed to fulfil. A move that, if anything, underlines the human wastefulness that really should be associated with something as terrible, but reflexively deployed in sword and sandal films, as big screen bloodsport. Elsewhere, an injury suffered by Sonja - before she's had a chance to vanquish her foes - registers as grievous and alarming, rather than simply the kind of wound that forestalls climax. This note perhaps sharpened by Lutz's presence, an actress who, in Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, was subjected to all manner of grisly and sustained abrasion. In comparison to its Brigitte Nielsen starring predecessor, this Red Sonja suffers and thrives in opposite ways then. The production looks distinctly underfunded, especially when compared to the cut-rate opulence provided by Danilo Donati in the mid-1980s but, while Nielsen was eclipsed by her Austrian co-star, this red-headed barbarian is only ever upstaged by infrequent appearances from an extremely well-trained stallion named Vihur. 

Kim Gordon - Not Today

Madara 1000 - ıןןosıouǝ dǝɹɟɟǝʇɐ

Optimus Prime by Daniel Warren Johnson

Gorillaz - The Hardest Thing // Orange County (Feat. Tony Allen, Bizarrap, Kara Jackson, and Anoushka Shankar)

Space Warrior Baldios

Space Warrior Baldios, directed by Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Hisayuki Toriumi, was the The End of Evangelion of its day, a feature-length, big screen release designed to tie up the loose ends for an early 80s television series that had attracted a small but dedicated following. Hacked together from 30-odd TV episodes and capped with material rearranged from unaired instalments, Baldios may trudge moment-to-moment but the plotting covers enormous ground, picking up on a seemingly alien planet choked with pollution and ending on an Earth facing a similarly destitute future. In this telling, Baldios seems notable for being a version of a super robot show that barely features its gleaming mechanoid. Although extraterrestrial sorties and transforming spacecraft are frequently deployed, the story's despondent destination means our heroes are always presented as being on the backfoot - assailed by a dimension-hopping civilisation, originating from the dead planet S-1, who will stop at nothing to claim Earth as their prize. As the conflict grows to include nuclear detonations and city swallowing tsunamis, leaders on both sides of the conflict tune into this apocalyptic death spiral, completely unwilling to take stock or exercise restraint. This mania is complimented by the film's two main characters: the S-1 refugee Marin Reigan, who fights on behalf of Earth and Aphrodia, the adopted daughter of the invading Fuhrer. Although clearly lovestruck from the second they meet, this strange pair bicker across a canvas of human extermination, constantly inventing reasons to prolong, but never consummate, their demented flirtation. 

Black Marble - Far

Khruangbin - White Gloves ii (Live)

Lensman

A fast and loose animated adaptation of EE 'Doc' Smith's science fiction novels that is, really, best understood, contextualised and appreciated through the enormous success of another work that drew significant inspiration from the series, George Lucas' Star Wars. Cyberpunk supremo Yoshiaki Kawajiri's feature-length debut, co-directing alongside Kazuyuki Hirokawa, seizes on this antecedent work - originally serialised in the magazine Astounding Stories beginning in 1937 then concluding in 1948 - and reimagines it using the Campbellian shorthand so beloved of Lucas. Lensman's Kimball Kinnison then is, accordingly, transformed from a plucky service cadet to, like Luke Skywalker, a farmhand with a knack for daredevil aviation. Although Kinnison is thinly sketched here, really only a blank surrogate for young audiences yearning for adventure, Lensman actually does do a better job of describing his hotshot pilot credentials than the earliest passages of A New Hope. 

If anything Kinnison's impressive ability to seize control of a decaying star cruiser and safely land its crumbling body anticipates a similarly entertaining setpiece from 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. As Lensman reaches further and further out into space, Kawajiri and Hirokowa's film applies a grungier, biomechanical aspect to its planets and alien lifeforms - the villainous Boskone Empire are, seemingly, formless energies trapped in shell-like carapace; heroic alien Worsel is the spitting image of Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill's Nemesis the Warlock, so much so that you wonder if odd issues of 2000 AD actually made their way to Japan. Together, Worsel and Kinnison find themselves key players in a galactic theatre of war that combines fleets of spacecraft locked in battle; the rescue of an endangered loved from the clutches of a formless monstrosity; and a worker's uprising on a planet choked with mining machinery. Obviously, again, this tiered action is a storytelling technique clearly patterned after Lucas' blockbuster episodes but Lensman does at least deliver on the suggestion of a slave uprising, a concept thwarted by reflexive drag racing in Lucas' prequel chapters and teased, then abandoned, in the more recent Disney sequels. 

Isobel - Limn

Looking Glass Knight by Ryan F

Acen - Trip to the Moon (Part 2) The Darkside

Dry Cleaning - Evil Evil Idiot

Red Sonja

Based on a Marvel comics character created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, director Richard Fleischer's Red Sonja is an odd adjunct to Arnold Schwarzenegger's barbarian films in which the Austrian oak does not even play everyone's favourite Cimmerian. Sold in the Italian market as Yado (a choice that, bizarrely, implores immediate comparison with Yoda, the amphibian guru from The Empire Strikes Back), complete with a ghostly poster image of Schwarzenegger swirling in the mists of time, Red Sonja is instead a star vehicle for Brigitte Nielsen, a model-turned-actress who is striking and statuesque but otherwise lacking in any of the kind of experience required to carry such a project. Since this is a production of the Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, Red Sonja is pretty lavishly appointed though. The costume and production design, courtesy of the Academy Award winning Danilo Donati, far outstrips every other aspect of the picture. Outfits are suitably baroque, seemingly drawing inspiration from Windsor-Smith's beautiful detailed pin-ups of these mythological characters. Sets are likewise well appointed, with the cavernous, steaming throne room of Sandahl Bergman's evil queen a particular highlight. Despite all this wonderful dressing Red Sonja is a lifeless trudge that often seems to be poking fun at its own limitations. A prolonged battle between Schwarzenegger's Lord Kalidor and a mechanical fish is so repetitive that it becomes clear that every scrap of coverage containing this nascent (and increasingly bankable) superstar is being used. And, not long after, a slow treacherous creep along what looks like a sheer rock face for the principal adventurers is suddenly revealed to be a few feet from the floor when Paul Smith's bodyguard rushes into the frame to help his bratty princeling hop off the hazard. 

Ennio Morricone - Main Title from Red Sonja

Venom by Michael DeForge

Madara 1000 - pɐʇ ɯısʇɐƃǝʌ2

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - Extended Edition

The big draw here, with this Extended Edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, is that whatever clips have been added for this bells-and-whistles retail version has caused this concluding chapter to jump up an entire rating. So a 12 certificate cinema release is transformed, through these additions, into a 15 (or a PG-13 has now been elevated into an R, if you prefer). Obviously, given director Peter Jackson's priors with extremely entertaining splatter comedies like Braindead, there's the presumption (or, perhaps more accurately, desire) that these brand new moments will revolve around the violent detonation of computer-generated bodies. Following a viewing though, and whilst browsing a list of the Extended Edition's newly restored footage to be certain, it's actually quite shocking to discover how much of this film's more exciting dramatic material was chipped away for the cut that saw the wider, big screen release. 

A brief exchange between Martin Freeman's Bilbo and James Nesbitt's dwarf Bofur, as the former attempts to quietly sneak out of a crack in a besieged mountain filled with treasures, is an early highlight. The sequence standing out not just because it is an actual conversation in a film trilogy packed with declarative exposition but because Bofur is well aware that Bilbo is, effectively, deserting and the dwarf wishes to give his blessing without outright saying so. It's a back-and-forth in which both participants are lying in word but each actor's performance, and the carefully selected phrasing of the screenwriters (Jackson credited alongside Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro) indicates an unspoken agreement based on a genuine friendship. Although no great shakes in most filmic contexts, this discussion is positively revelatory for a prequel series so completely dedicated to surface-level chatter that imparts nothing but momentum. As with Bilbo's battle with the Mirkwood spider nest in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the scene is greedily received by anyone holding the belief that, had he been allowed to, Freeman could have comfortably carried these films on his shoulders. 

Further seemingly minor insertions serve the central conceit of greed clouding the minds of otherwise noble men, adding flavour and tonal variation to a film in desperate need of something other than monotonous action and fey love triangles. Notably, the dwarven and elven armies that gather to plunder the dragon's trove actually clash in this telling, ratcheting up the tension for a forthcoming confrontation with massing goblin hordes, by pointlessly spilling each other's blood and thereby depleting any eventual alliance. Described as dragon sickness within the piece, this version allows this all-consuming avarice to visibly take hold in many formerly sympathetic characters, confirming prejudices and setting the allied armies of antiquity against each other. All of which results in a particularly needless, but nevertheless entertaining pre-main event slaughter. Speaking of which, the prolonged battles that account for the majority of Five Armies' runtime also reveal the reason for this film's harsher home video certificate. As hoped for, we are treated to many fresh instances in which Wētā's textured marionettes are absolutely pulverised. Again, these additions introduce much needed variety into the bloodless back-and-forth between enormous, computer-generated legions seen in the theatrical cut. 

A sequence in which Bilbo's dwarven friends commandeer a war chariot, complete with whirring Ben-Hur teeth that shear legs from beneath armoured orcs and turn the heads of misshapen trolls into black, blubbery messes, is a significantly better version of the roller coaster-style action attempted in previous Hobbits. Here, there's a sense of danger and exhilaration rather than aggravation and outright boredom. As well, the decision for the camera to dwell on mutilated orc bodies as they attempt to stand on their bleeding stumps may be grimly humorous but it is also suggestive of the pitilessness associated with industrialised warfare, in which the flesh and blood individual is exposed to all manner of terrifying mechanical horrors. This idea of indiscriminate torment was also present in the theatrical cut's firebombing of Laketown by Benedict Cumberbatch's gloating Smaug - the film's opening passage in which a thriving and comparatively advanced (when judged against the medieval ruins elsewhere) settlement is gobbled up by a swirling orange flame that descends out of the sky - but, in this longer cut, Jackson is able to reiterate the point. Basically, all the extra notes of savagery reinserted for this release lift Battle of the Five Armies out of a routine rehash of Middle Earth's greatest hits. By applying more vivid, physical accounts of pain, combat shock and human bewilderment to this material, Jackson has rather more successfully appended this misfiring serial to his own, Great War conscious take on The Lord of the Rings.  

Howard Shore - Fire and Water

Megatron by Phil Knott (hinomars19)

ErgO1* - Vernalis

ADMO - For My Friends on Butter

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Extended Edition

Three hours and six minutes long, when viewed in this expanded edit, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is, given the length, very obviously not an honest-to-goodness attempt to simply adapt the middle section of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Instead the film is more of an expensive retrofit that presumes to batter this material into a shape that better connects with writer-director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In expanding Tolkien's text Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro have transformed a comparatively slight children's book into hours upon hours of impersonal incident. Packed with interchangeable dwarves and possessed of a digressive structure Desolation of Smaug meanders, a piece that consistently finds itself in desperate need of a unifying perspective on the constant, plastic noise. 

That isn't to say that there aren't stretches of the film that entertain though. Desolation of Smaug absolutely explodes into life about 40 minutes in when the camera settles on Martin Freeman's pleasantly understated Bilbo Baggins for some prolonged capering. Trapped in a murky forest and surrounded by pungent swamps and creeping spiders, the young halfling takes the initiative, briefly behaving as if this were actually his story. He climbs knotted branches to get a gasp of fresh air, as well as a sense of where exactly they need to go next, then battles with various layers of screeching arachnids. An albino creature that lives beneath a trap door and aims clawed appendage at a temporarily dropped One Ring even looks like something out of Jackson's previous epic, King Kong. A welcome sort of oozing nightmare then. Sir Ian McKellen's Gandalf the Grey, who is now on an entirely separate adventure, also gets to explore a variety of expertly ruined environments - from a disturbed tomb that was carved into a mountainside thousands of years ago to a castle packed with staircases that lead off in every conceivable direction. 

Perhaps it's because both sequences are built around singular characters with clear moment-to-moment objectives rather than an undulating mob on a mystic (and therefore disinteresting) quest? It helps as well that Jackson is well versed in the language of horror filmmaking. Pitch black shadows and canted angles on vulnerable human progress through oppressively baroque environments are much more in the director's wheelhouse, especially when compared to a grossly distended roller coaster sequence in which a dozen casked dwarves thrash along river rapids. It's an interlude that registers as elastic and artificial, no matter how much incongruent, pixelated GoPro footage Jackson squeezes in amongst the cartoon rollicking. Issued at the tail end of the post-Avatar craze for 3D filmmaking, Desolation of Smaug is similarly dependent on green screen sets and the hapless actors they ensnare but not so fluent in how it resolves the relationship between these individual elements. Frequently there's a sense that the film's weightless action would be better served by a total submission to animation. If, for instance, Desolation of Smaug was stylised and cel animated then the obvious artifice of bodies completely unencumbered by physics might then read as charming or, at least, gesturally pleasant. Here they are instead a persistent and hammering reminder that you're watching a confused retread of grander films.

Howard Shore - Beyond the Forest

Aqui Dela - Lost In

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Alexye