Street Fighter

Much too long and convoluted to deliver sustained entertainment, director Kitao Sakurai's Street Fighter is, at least, an honest attempt to organise decades of contradictory video game tournaments into the kind of franchise-launcher not seen since Marvel Studios was in its ascendancy. Capcom's incomparable arcade hit, Street Fighter II, offered up a basic competition framing with blips of a background story rationed out based on a player's ability to clear the game with their favourite character. As far as adaptations have gone then - and there have been many - much has had to be invented to cater to the various and differing mediums that cashed-in, with more notable themes and ideas even being rolled into latter interactive instalments. 

Despite a large cast of characters then, one that largely favours the second game in the series, the key texts for this Street Fighter have turned out to be Masahiko Nakahira's Street Fighter Zero manga, a two volume black-and-white series that first introduced the concept of a murderous power lurking within Ryu, the Japanese all-rounder who is as close as the series gets to a default character, and Street Fighter Zero 2, the 1996 arcade cabinet that allowed a corrupted palette-swap of this what-if character to be selectable. Pushed aside for the all-American Guile in Steven E. de Souza's 1994 Street Fighter and AWOL from 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Ryu is an unusual dramatic proposition largely because he avoids human connection within the various texts, partly to better serve as pure utility for a player's pre-adulthood imagination but also because this wandering warrior fits a particular (and popular) Japanese cultural archetype: the rōnin. 

So, although Gisaburo Sugii's animated Street Fighter II Movie successfully centred around a deliberately blank character with little personal desire, there's a sense that an American blockbuster audience might want a little more meat on their bones. Screenwriters TJ Fixman and Sakurai again (with Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman sharing a story credit) invert the relationship of Ryu and Ken from Sugii's pass, trading an easygoing Ken transformed into a violent pawn of a psychotic dictator with a Ryu that, underwritten by coin-pumped lore, looks set to be similarly claimed. Noah Centineo's Ken is diminished by the trade though, losing his marionette fiancée Eliza (and subjected to ugly AI reproduction for prop photographs) to be crowbarred into the role of a comedic understudy for Andrew Koji's surprisingly conceited Ryu. This is perhaps the most glaring issue with Sakurai's Street Fighter then. By altering characters to fit roles that differ from their more simplistic, video game functions the film must apportion space or dramatic axis to justify these changes. This strained scaffolding is then compounded by inheriting such a massive ensemble, all of whom demand at least a certain amount of attention. As a result Guile, as portrayed by pro-wrestler Cody Rhodes, vanishes into a series of amusing YouTube skit-style asides and Callina Liang's Chun-Li - the character with the clearest filmic motivation - forestalls her revenge for no clear reason, allows her body to be mutilated, and is fobbed off with a moment of triumph in which she beats the shit out of her Interpol colleagues. 

Evil Dead Burn

Although director Sébastien Vaniček's sequel makes further appeals to an overarching organisation of these belated, Sony Pictures instalments - specifically, credit stinging developments that no-one could possibly care about - in the main Evil Dead Burn is a fine addition to the long-running spook house series originated by Sam Raimi and his elastic pals. This latest episode, set in a crumbling holiday getaway, revolves around an acute, interpersonal cruelty; a not-so-passive aggression that is premised on the poor fortune of having married into an extremely dysfunctional, middle-class clan. Like Evil Dead Rise before it then, Vaniček's film proposes the decay and destruction of a family unit as the framework for a seething, locked-up horror film. Trapped with her in-laws inside what is, essentially, a decaying mansion following the funeral of her overbearing and abusive husband, Souheila Yacoub's Alice braves dangling accusations about her suitability as a wife (and failure to become a mother), while supernatural menace takes hold in her ageing tormentors. 

Despite being the third part of this new phase, Burn is bleakly humorous as opposed to slapstick funny. The film preferring to extrapolate its chills from the moment when a pencil is plunged into a bare ankle then waggled around from Raimi's original The Evil Dead rather than the massing hordes of prop skeletons seen in Army of Darkness. Vaniček and editor Maxime Caro channel the visually inventive, not to mention boundlessly energetic, mania of their dentist-hustling predecessor, depicting a human body that can become unencumbered by gravity or able to power through grievous, life-snuffing injury based on little other than pure spite. As the bodies pile up, francophone Alice slowly sloughs off the withering expectation that has been heaped upon her. She ceases her whispered English and reverts to her mother tongue, delivering scornful assessment in machine-gun bursts around dithering affines while decrepit demons saw at their trapped limbs. Burn then, through bloody violence and an equally oppressive intrafamilial brutality, comes to suggest something of the bigger budget films that followed in the wake of the New French Extremity. Vaniček's film sitting alongside works such as Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes remake, both pieces being audience-alienating updates on distinctly American properties. 

Onslaught

Not sure why you'd want your film, in this case director Adam Wingard's Onslaught, to arrive plastered with the Albertus font, that white text on a black background so beloved of John Carpenter (the typeface also enjoyed a previous life as the basis for all signage in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner television series). Presumably the decision is partly affectionate and partly to anticipate, even acknowledge an obvious stylistic debt to the work of that director. A shame then that, despite aping something of the high-contrast photography of Dean Cundey and Carpenter's trademark electronic score, all of this scraping replication is in service of a piece that treads water until the fifty minute mark then skips an entire second act to instantly arrive at an unsatisfying finale. Premised on an idea of invincible, fascist super-soldiers, Onslaught curtails any hope of excitement by denying its monsters either a voice, by which they might puzzle through their undeath or, really, any truly impressive kills to hang their hat on. Instead, they simply glower outside Adria Arjona's trailer. A shoot-out in a bright, uniformly lit supermarket instantly recalls a similar situation in Universal Soldier where Dolph Lundgren's ear collecting zombie screamed at baffled shoppers while his underlings rotted on the floor beneath him. There's nothing in Onslaught even remotely as entertaining. Similarly, if viewers truly value muteness in their muscled murderers then, while neither are perfect, both Project Wolf Hunting and In a Violent Nature are light years ahead of this would-be watchable The Guest spin-off. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Strip away the synthetic, screensaver backgrounds and an, at times, overbearing affection for an anachronistic slasher series that has never actually existed and you're left with a gentle inquiry into sexual intimacy. Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, at least initially, details the attempts made by a festival darling filmmaker, Kris played by a blushing Hannah Einbinder, to get a handle on a destitute horror franchise that has collapsed into diminishing, straight-to-video claptrap. Hired by a Blumhouse-style production company, in the hope that her queerness will somehow dispel the franchise's transphobic undertones, Kris arranges to meet with the star of the first entry, Gillian Anderson's actress Billy Presley. Kris finds Billy squatting on the ramshackle sets used when filming the original features; the actress perhaps even more obsessed with the ghostly child murderer, who stalked this scenery, than the dialogue-reciting Kris is. 

The promise of a film reel viewing of Billy's starring role prompts discussion of the piece with Billy dismissing Kris' description of Camp Miasma's cultural relevance as being overly cerebral, as if the young filmmaker is applying academic language to thoughts and feelings that are rooted in something less reputable: that the faltering, rape-tinged sex and bloody murder present in the film turns Kris on, basically. Although mixed in with the supernatural and a truly triumphant massacre, the meat of Camp Miasma is a gentle goading between two women who have each dismissed themselves as being sexually dysfunctional, only to find another person that they can be truly, truthfully intimate with. The awkward, shy Kris can, at last, realise her fantasy of flowering into a blood-drenched victim, running in her underwear while a deranged killer pursues and a camera lingers on her nakedness. Billy's arc is similarly therapeutic, the actress finally able to die in the arms of someone who adores her rather than a score-notching creep who is leveraging a delicate situation in order to take liberties. Beyond all of that though, the real victory for these women happens later, when the playact is complete, and the pair are covered in dried viscera. They saunter to a well-stocked gas station to merrily chat and shop for snacks, by now deeply embedded in a loving relationship. 

Coyote vs. Acme

Exhausted after decades of running afoul of malfunctioning gimcrack, Wile E. Coyote decides to, at long last, sue the Acme corporation. It's a concept so purely wonderful and imaginative that, obviously, the soulless, dead-eyed hatchet men who recently ran Warner Bros into the hands of a monopoly merger were determined to burn the negative in return for a modest tax rebate. Rescued from oblivion by Ketchup Entertainment, who also distributed The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie in the United States, director Dave Green and screenwriter Samy Burch's Coyote vs. Acme (based on a beautifully written The New Yorker article by Ian Frazier) doesn't even have to be especially good to feel like a tiny victory against the rampant corporatism that has consumed a once hallowed film studio. Thankfully then, the film is not only great but actively engaged with the outright corruption on display in America's corridors of power. 

The rot is so pronounced that beloved cartoon characters find themselves warped in its presence: Elmer Fudd appears as a winking, big business-friendly Senator; Tweety is recast as a bagman, forced into mercenary servitude to protect his beloved Granny. Worst of all is Foghorn Leghorn as Acme's good ol' boy CEO who, in a congressional address, speaks on behalf of his cel-animated kind, making the truly repulsive point that his people are a malleable, physically invincible underclass who deserve nothing more than to be experimented upon. The speech is so close to the knuckle that it seems reasonable to presume that David Zaslav and his cabal of wax-faced media executives felt that issues of medical apartheid were a little too strong for their Merrie Melodies movie and that this was a deciding factor in the film's engineered non-existence. If Coyote vs. Acme has a flaw it's that (nearly) every animated character is rendered and moves with a jittery, computer-generated outline that prevents them from registering as purely beautiful. The exception to this minor disappointment is Bugs Bunny - presumably a late addition to the piece - who, in a move befitting his inexhaustible super stardom, is illustrated with a character and fluency that is outrageously in advance of his peers.

Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert

Happy to report that, based on the evidence presented here, eighty one year old director Yuen Woo-ping hasn't lost a step when it comes to orchestrating fluent and exciting action sequences. Adapted from a successful Chinese comic series, Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert sadly inherits an indistinct, two-dimensional approach to storytelling from its source material, one that perfectly simulates the act of physically flicking through sketched situations or pouring over columns of clashing horse riders. At one point in the film a great map of the titular wilderness is revealed, said to be the life's work of a departed Khan, but Blades of the Guardians never quite manages to make us believe that its subjects are travelling these huge distances or traversing a three-dimensional landscape. For all the rushing in every direction, the locations of these warriors are dictated, primarily, by whichever battle they need to be taking part in next. Thankfully, Yuen is still very much an expert when it comes to describing these characters through their approach to combat. Wu Jing's Dao Ma, a disgraced cavalryman turned bounty hunter, adapts to the level of danger in front of him: playfully batting away nonthreatening underlings one minute then, when responding to a violent affront, equally adapt at kicking an evil nomad's head clean off their shoulders the next. Highlights include a duel between Dao Ma and Yu Shi's ghostly swordsman in a burning oil field and a not-long-enough interlude that combines Yuen's superheroic wuxia with the horse-hopping action of John Ford's Stagecoach and the swirling, computer-generated peril of Mad Max: Fury Road. 

Persona

Beginning with a spluttering series of projected clips that include a lamb being softly cradled while thick, black blood drains from its throat; a hand, jolting, as iron nails are struck into its palm; and the body of a young boy stirring from rest in a morgue, Persona, from writer-director Ingmar Bergman, soon settles into a story about an actress who has decided that she no longer wishes to speak. Played by Liv Ullmann, this mute performer, named Elisabet, is assigned a nurse of similar age to look after her and perhaps help coax back her voice. Bibi Andersson's Alma shrinks ever so slightly when given the assignment, conscious perhaps of a disparity in social standing between the two women. What could they have in common? Packed off to a cottage by the sea, as a way of disconnecting with a modern world teeming with upsetting imagery, the pair settle into a pleasant, paperback-reading domesticity. 

Alma happily chats away, filling the silence between the pair and remarking that, for the first time she can recall, she feels like she's actually being listened to. This isn't a back-and-forth though. Elisabet's only contribution is a silent smile. This lack of conversational impediment is enough to encourage Alma to really plumb the depths of her psyche, summoning up memories that are, for her, deeply rooted in shame. A drunken Alma details a casual sexual experience between herself, a sunbathing woman she found herself in awe of, and a pair of young boys who had been spying on them. This confession appears, thanks to Elisabet's stillness, to have fallen on sympathetic or even understanding ears. A gentle grin and no words of judgement regarding this escapade or the calculated cover-up revealed by Alma - she seduced her fiancé that evening to ensure that no objections would be raised when she later required an abortion - leaves the nurse feeling understood in a way that she isn't used to. This is an intimacy she hasn't otherwise experienced. 

This happiness doesn't last though. The following day, while out driving to the nearest post office, Alma lets her curiosity get the better of her: opening an unsealed envelope and reading a letter written by Elisabet that makes her feel small and used. The mocking tone of the correspondence leaves Alma with the impression that Elisabet sees her as a silly little subject to be studied rather than, say, the beloved companion of a worldly actress. The typed text is candid and dismissive, Alma's very personal scandal transmuted into flat, mocking gossip to be transmitted to a sneering outsider. Naturally, Alma and Elisabet's relationships disintegrates into recrimination and even threats of beauty-altering violence. Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist photograph their subjects in sculpted close-ups, where creeping light accentuates every tiny hair covering the human body. The two women's faces are seen to overlap in packed compositions and, eventually, they converge into one, asymmetrical portrait. As the film progresses, and third-parties interact with them interchangeably, it actually becomes less and less clear that these women even are two, distinct people. 

Alma's revenge on her mute charge is a repeated dressing down that details Elisabet's failures as a mother. The decision for Elisabet to even be a parent is contextualised by Alma as a kind of stubborn response to a boorish dinner guest who questioned if the actress could truly see herself as successful if she hadn't bore a child. The nurse intuits or perhaps even recalls the failed terminations that preceded the birth of Elisabet's estranged son. This is a child who, very obviously, was not wanted yet still persists in adoring a mother that denies him even the most basic of connection. With this in mind, it's difficult then not to recall the sickly, gangly-looking child who seemed to rise from a cold mortuary table then press himself against a blurred image of a woman at the beginning of Persona. Surely no accident as well that the boys that Alma spontaneously slept with were described as not just shy but physically uncomfortable and then how similarly Bergman's film portrays this discarded, undead child. If these women are two halves of the same whole, is Elisabet's maternal disgust rooted in the ignoble conception proposed by Alma? Has their biggest shame taken on physical life? Or do the similarities in experience simply speak to some underlining horror related to motherhood? Persona is threaded with dead ends and deliberate contradiction but all routes to understanding do at least seem to be premised on the acknowledgement that this a symbiotic relationship between an unsophisticated chatterbox and the ravenous mute who feeds upon her. 

Resident Evil

Despite a perfect opportunity to rest on his laurels - thanks to the rich, circuitous history of Capcom's video game property - Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil instead represents a change in storytelling technique that better serves the filmmaker's abundant horror comedy skill-set. Weapons, with its varying perspectives on a town bereft of children, was piecemeal by design but Barbarian, the writer-director's breakthrough hit, undercut several finely composed horror situations by journeying elsewhere at crucial moments. In fairness, Cregger used these breaks to consolidate unease and layer in alternative threats but there was a nagging sense that, perhaps, these distractions were being employed to avoid having to commit to a specific resolution. Not so with Resident Evil, which stays locked-in with Austin Abrams' medical courier Bryan as he struggles, impressively, to transport a much-needed organ across a landscape crawling with incomprehensible, cartwheeling threat. 

Rather than suit-up with the specially trained police officers that the video game series usually revolves around, Cregger's hero is a pleasant tweaker braving iced, pitch black roads and incoming calls from a (justifiably) pissed-off girlfriend to deliver his precious cargo. As a pitch, this Resident Evil is very much After Hours meets The Thing (and, latterly, An American Werewolf in London) but it's worth noting that Bryan doesn't invite his misfortune through antisocial behaviour or duplicity. If anything - and certainly for a movie character - he's honest and respectful, particularly when dealing with situations that demand he take responsibility. A would-be hit-and-run becomes an extended comedy of errors with Bryan attempting to transport a defrosting zombie; while a run-in with a conscious, vulnerable infected sees Bryan willing to maintain the social contract, despite an obvious (even blaring) red flag. This latter detail - that bodies threaded with the film's curling, castellan contagion remain painfully aware of their degrading faculties - allows a certain poignancy to creep into proceedings while still playing with an audience's willingness to side with a narrative subject over the squealing meat puppets thrown in their way. 

Optimus Prime: Awakening

Screened alongside the 40th anniversary re-release of The Transformers: The Movie, with this short playing directly after the main feature, director Joshua Wassung and The Third Floor's Optimus Prime: Awakening plays with metatextual concepts that would seem to go hand-in-hand with a toy franchise that is constantly reinventing itself. Disappointingly though, this funereal self-reflection is undermined somewhat by gauche pleas for further adventure. It's difficult though not to commiserate with Awakening's filmmakers. The short now carries the final performance of the late Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and is therefore expected, quite unreasonably, to function as something of an epitaph for the actor as well as the role he became synonymous with. Beginning with Prime's death, as seen in The Movie, Awakening follows the flicker of the Autobot Commander's life force as it journeys into a machine afterlife to commune with a swirling intelligence that describes itself as a repository of all Cybertronian consciousness. 

Instead of Primus, the creator of The Transformers in the Marvel comics continuity, this is, seemingly, a God that they themselves have created, through millennia of warfare and struggle. While it does feel appropriate that a race of robots who are locked into a never-ending civil war - that has raged for millions of years and completely drained the resources of their home planet - would be ruled, from a remove, by an entity reminiscent of The Idea of Evil from Kentaro Miura's Berserk, but it's outright weird to see the rhetoric of cosmic indifference being wielded as the precise summation of a character famously described by his voice actor as strong enough to be gentle. Really, the tension in the modern Transformers property is that adults (myself included) cannot disengage from a Saturday morning sales pitch that is nearly half a century old. Elements of Awakening speak to this fact directly, literally demanding that Optimus Prime lay down his vestments of office and stride, confidently into oblivion, but this effect is dulled by comparison to the work that precedes Wassung's film. 

Rather than cling weakly to life, like his tyrannical rival Megatron, the Prime of The Movie is almost ecstatic in his passing; commanding his subordinates not to grieve and quickly anointing a successor, assured that his knowledge and vitality will pass from this life into The Autobot Matrix of Leadership. This gleaming, crystal device a holy Cybertronian relic that promises relief in times of insurmountable hardship, inspiring a kind of religious reverence that crosses faction divides. That Prime was content to die then. It is we, the audience, who demand that he return in increasingly implausible and less impressive ways. Similarly, the vision quest that Prime is poked down by his haranguing celestial overseer is not a tapestry of phantoms drawn from this dying robot's memories. Although we are suddenly transmitted into speculative moments of the Cybertronian civil war, the characters within them enjoy an agency that is both distinct from the events of the preceding feature and the voyage of enlightenment that Prime has been bullied into. These are not archetypes, within a fading consciousness, pulling this trembling mind in different directions. 

A battered and bloodied Bumblebee begs Prime not to depart while a beautifully rendered Megatron - who looks almost exactly like a John Stokes illustration from the 1986 UK Annual - is seen, in an aside that follows Prime's decision to depart, to take possession of a discarded Matrix. So, rather than unite the disparate sects of the Cybertronian race through mercy and understanding - perhaps even reestablishing some common ground with the D-16 aspect of Megatron, introduced in Transformers One - or physically pass the Matrix to another young subordinate, this Prime tosses the Godly relic into a boiling pit and removes himself from the equation. Presumably, the filmmakers believe this divine vestige is a weapon? Wassung's film then preaches self-sabotaging pacifism in the face of genocidal violence - doing so with pat allusions to a cyclical violence that our lead character does very little to perpetuate - and is, in this particular moment, genuinely disturbing. An affection for Peter Cullen's crackling performance (and Frank Welker's come to mention it), as well as the weight of real-life events, smooth over this bizarre axial shift but it's difficult to shake the impression that, somewhere along the way, this piece was designed to function as a jumping off point rather than a sainted conclusion; a misbegotten pilot for an ongoing Transformers series without Cullen or his Prime. Such harsh economic considerations are nothing new for a property that has made it its business to sweep old toys off the animated tie-in board the second they're no longer for sale (no matter how beloved they are) but it registers as completely baffling that we are all supposed to solemnly nod that a fitting denouement for this character and that performance is to imagine that, in some tangential continuity, they never existed at all. 

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway is an animated Mobile Suit Gundam feature film that is completely disinterested in depicting its namesake powered armour in heroic or, really, even particularly exciting terms. Director Shukou Murase's film - adapted from a series of light novels co-written by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - relinquishes any sense that these towering machines are simply substitute, metal bodies for warring humans, preferring to depict them as the magnified horror of an international police state or a particular tempestuous form of aerial technology. When dealing with top-of-the-line suits, Murase's film obscures a relatable, human outline with layered designs that resemble an unholy mix of mythical predator and fighter jet. So, rather than build itself around futuristic armoured warfare, this flash of Hathaway leans much more heavily on the sociopolitical intrigue implied by the futuristic premise. 

We have an almost abandoned home planet slowly being bought up then fenced off by the ultra-wealthy while a cell of eco-terrorists busy themselves by attempting to assassinate members of this hoarder class ahead of an important cabinet meeting in Australia. Hathaway then is closer to a spy thriller or a police procedural than any familiarity with endless Bandai model kits might have you expect. Indeed, a pre-credit sequence set abroad a luxury passenger flight, that is shipping dignitaries between the Moon and Earth, is an opening gambit not just worthy of high-level James Bond filmmaking but exactly the sort of unassuming-then-explosive set-piece that should be utilised when introducing a new actor into the 007 fold. Hathaway Noa, our anchor in these events, foils this hijacking then (after introducing himself surname first to the audience) finds himself in the company of a young woman, named Gigi, who seems able to psychically intuit that which Noa would prefer not to share: rather than a post-graduate student of botany, Hathaway is actually a high-ranking member of the Mafty terror group. 

Hathaway lingers in Gigi's company, ostensibly to see if she intends to blow his cover, ending up as a vertex in an emerging love triangle. His competition? A Federation Colonel named Kenneth Sleg who is, actually, quite taken with Hathaway himself. Sleg threatens young, hot-shot Lane Aim - the kind of upstart character these narratives usually revolve around - that he'll happily replace this subordinate, as the pilot of the flight-capable Penelope, with Hathaway if Aim doesn't buck his ideas up. Hathaway, no stranger to human dynamics in which a tragic heroine is being pulled between ideological opposites, fixates on his role in this drama, almost seeming to contextualise the whole situation as something beyond his ability to influence. Hathaway though, through this romantic drama, finally allows himself to assume the role of an adult protagonist, rather than remain a child bystander. His longing is so despairing then as to be grimly metatextual. The abstracted and functionally useless persona that he has created for himself is commented upon, directly to him, by the few working class voices in the film as well. While Hathaway Noa strives towards a future in which the heavily polluted Earth is relinquished by mankind and left alone to heal, the taxi cab drivers and stall merchants struggling to make ends meet - with the threat of a forced expulsion by Federation jackboots hanging over them - would prefer it if he just did something about the fascists twisting the screws. 

Destiny's Son

Destiny's Son (the film also known as Kiru) accomplishes so much with its scant, 70 minute runtime that, thinking back on it, you'd swear it was far longer. Director Kenji Misumi's film offers an unhurried and elliptical overview of a life lived within the strange, death-obsessed system of Bushido. Raizo Ichikawa plays Shingo, the child of an assassin who bumped off a black toothed concubine and the man who would be, in the fullness of time, her executioner. Misumi's film doesn't belabour this point but Shingo does, therefore, seem to have an uncanny aptitude for extinguishing lives. Forced to compete in a local Kendo tournament - and pressed to wield a real katana rather than a bamboo sword - Shingo proves so intimidating that he unseats a twirling champion just by adopting an unusual stance and staring straight at his opponent's throat. These abilities never take hold of Shingo though, he remains almost childlike in his desire to seek father figures who delight in his expertise. Perhaps the strength of Destiny's Son is that it immerses us in the thought patterns of someone who has been thoroughly deranged by his closeness to so much death? 

Cinematographer Shozo Honda captures images both alluring and alarming; while editor Kanji Suganuma ensures that these striking tableaux intrude just at the right moments, when Shingo is at his most troubled. Presumably a virgin, Shingo has little interest in taking a wife and drunkenly boasts that he cannot dishonour the memory of three women who are important to him. Cherished recollections of a bratty younger sister, who was murdered by jealous rivals, and second-hand reports of a mother he never knew make a juvenile sort sense when considering Shingo's reluctance to connect with another but it's the third woman who represents a more adult, and even alarming, perspective. Masayo Banri's Sayo was thrust suddenly into Shingo's life with an edict to protect her from a gang of rampaging samurai. When her brother came under attack, and looked to be losing, Sayo disrobed and placed herself between her brother and his assailants. Quickly struck down by her enemies, flickers of her boldness clearly lingered on with Shingo. It's only as the film begins to wind down that we fully understand the impression that she actually made. Shingo's recollections revolve around her nakedness: strings of her dark hair matted to a sweating neck or a dribble of blood that slowly snakes towards the cleft of her pale chest. As he sadly heaves a sword into his own body, we learn that death carries an erotic charge in the mind of this deeply depressed man. 

Appleseed

A lesser adaptation of a Masamune Shirow manga, director Kazuyoshi Katayama's Appleseed doesn't come close to scaling the same cyberpunk heights as either of Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell features or Science Saru's recent The Ghost in the Shell television series (and, if we're being completely honest, this OVA isn't in the same league as Black Magic M-66 or Manga Video fav Dominion Tank Police either). Although Katayama's film fails to adequately translate the core appeals of the Appleseed manga - a beautifully rendered work that is, as the volumes go on, increasingly a futuristic, special tactics slice-of-life seemingly informed by newsagent holds on every motorcycle engineering or firearm magazine the author can lay their hands on - it does develop dropped threads about human estrangement in a seemingly perfect city built by androids. 

In a way this dull, chummy film even anticipates Oshii's Patlabor: The Movie (released the following year) by beginning with a stylised suicide that, in the fullness of the story, spells doom for this forward-looking city. Cop-turned-terrorist Calon Mauthos, who conspires with cybernetic criminals to hand over an enormous gun platform to deliberately ill-defined foreign interests, actually acts upon the alienation that is threaded throughout the first two volumes of Shirow's manga. This bubbling sense of disaffection with utopia was promptly dropped as Shirow developed as a draftsman of speculative weaponry, knife combat and muscular female physiques. Pleasantly rather than expertly realised by a pre-Gunbuster Gainax, this Appleseed plays like a bigger budget pilot episode for an unrealised TV series. Sort of like The Real Ghostbusters for Combat Magazine and Monthly GUN subscribers. 

The Death of Robin Hood

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood is a film of two halves and, as it happens, two aspect ratios. The first, weaker section is a muddy, 'scope reorganisation of Sherwood Forest mythology with Hugh Jackman's gruff outlaw living in a fog-shrouded wilderness, pursued by the youthful descendants of his many victims. In this pointedly revisionist telling Robin Hood does not redistribute wealth from corrupt nobles and is instead a pitiless bandit who has killed more people than he cares to count. As well as clawing the life out of the middle-aged men attempting to settle some forgotten score, Robin is pressed (only very lightly) in this section to kill a woman and blast an arrow through the head of a child. This latter detail placing Jackman's Hood in the same cinematic company as Henry Fonda's Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West or Clint Eastwood's William Munny from Unforgiven. They are all men who have indulged too greatly in their evil and cannot, therefore, hope for redemption. 

The muck-caked misery of this opening act is somewhat marred then by an approach to violence that teeters on the absurd, with Jackman's ferocious highwayman able to force torches through the blubbering, blancmange-like bodies of his enemies. Presumably a front-end packed with such gruesome incident is a sop to back-end that is almost completely still and meditative. Sarnoski twists fragmented ballads of courteous outlaws - that date back to the earliest days of the printed press - to arrive at a piece that presents like a half-remembered slither of Arthurian legend. The height and width of the film changes to a more European standard while cinematographer Pat Scola fills his frame with landscapes that are crafted out of faces. So, although Jackman's snarling, horizontal Santa struggles to come to terms with his truly awful past, Jodie Comer's prioress and Faith Delaney's Little Margaret are seen to bask in the strange stability that this chained animal offers. Unable to lift a weapon or otherwise retreat from this Avalonian isle, Jackman's Hood detaches from his mainland persona and begins talking through thoughts and feelings that are unencumbered by levity or cod psychoanalytical insight. Instead, we have the final address of a monster teetering on the edge of an oblivion proposed, centuries earlier, by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Well acquainted with life-altering misfortune himself, director Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth makes a point of rubbing its audience's nose in all of the upsetting bloodshed that would otherwise, in a more traditional telling, be occurring off-stage. We are compelled to gaze at bodies - women and children - bloody and bent at uncanny angles, the film offering up a blunt human horror that is evocative of crime scene photography. Jon Finch - a former reservist for British special forces and a Hammer Films veteran - plays Shakespeare's title character, at least initially, with a mod insouciance. His is a much younger Macbeth, a newly elevated lord who has quickly ascertained that he can beat a path to Scotland's throne with increasingly daring acts of violence. Egged on by his equally grasping wife, played by Francesca Annis, Macbeth finds himself in his monarch's bed chamber, his fingers clasped around a dirk. 

The murder of Nicholas Selby's King Duncan then is portrayed as the outcome of an acute kind of mania: an intense and hypnotic greed has bewitched Macbeth, urging him to act as fulcrum for the predestined bloodshed that has been sung to him by hags. He stabs his naked king as if in a trance, his body acting on auto-pilot. The guilt that Macbeth then struggles to come to terms with, for this murder and the many that follow, manifests in Polanski's film not so much as explicitly supernatural occurrences, rather as figments of an imagination fired by brain lacerating trauma. The ghost of a former friend, Martin Shaw's Banquo, who appears only to Macbeth in a room crowded with feasters, is readily organised within this filthy, miserable telling as the hallucinatory experience of a man suffering through a psychotic break - this subconscious strata explicitly accessed within the piece by the decision to transform Shakespeare's soliloquies into a whispered internal monologue. 

While Lady Macbeth slips away into a stupor - Annis, naked with her eyes locked on the audience that compelled her to commit these acts - the new king does eventually come to terms with himself as a kind of mythic entity that cannot easily be vanquished. Another visit to the Weyward Sisters convinces Macbeth he is living inside a riddle that indicates an apparent invincibility. Armoured battles with the opposing underlings who arrive to end his reign are therefore short and brutal; Macbeth believing himself to be unbeatable and Finch doing an excellent job of portraying exactly that. With respect to the real-life tragedies experienced by Polanski immediately prior to the filming of The Tragedy of Macbeth, Terence Bayler's Macduff would seem to take on a more personal dimension, since Macduff's wife and children have been slaughtered on the orders of a madman. This information is relayed to him as he stands before a massing army; his would-be monarch pleading with the sobbing father to get a hold of himself. 

The moment is both public and tinged with shame then, as if the devastated Macduff should, for the benefit of all assembled, take the news on the chin and just instantly accept that everybody he loves is now no more. There's a sense then, come a finale in which Macbeth's bleeding body claws at its neck for a head that no longer resides atop it, that the onscreen Macduff is delivering a coup de grâce that Polanski himself never could: striking Charles Manson's head from his shoulders before a crowd of solemn well-wishers. This reading though elides the fact that, in his relentless pursuit of success, this strangely charismatic Macbeth has, like Macduff, come up short in his obligations to his family. Macbeth, by this point, has abandoned an uncooperative wife to a gaggle of doctors and failed to be present when her life has then hung in the balance. Macbeth and Macduff are therefore united in a shared damnation for their absence. So, rather than transpose our feelings for this pre-sexual assault case Polanski (who, it's worth noting, co-wrote this adaptation with theatre critic Kenneth Tynan) onto any one specific side of these onscreen combatants, perhaps these battling, equally matched husbands could be assessed as warring aspects within a grieving widower. Shakespeare's four hundred year old play then having been reinterpreted as autobiographical psychodrama. 

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Seemingly just because he can, Gian Maria Volonté's police inspector pays a visit to his wealthy mistress, played by Florinda Bolkan, slitting her throat during a sex game. Before the act of murder we get a brief sense of a strange, sadomasochistic relationship between the two; a dynamic based around the power and access that this high-flying police officer presumes to wield. While his leisure class lover bleeds out, the Inspector makes only cursory, even contradictory attempts to conceal his presence at this location: he paws at drawer knobs with his fingers wrapped in a handkerchief but makes no such effort when cleaning arterial blood from his body in his victim's shower or when he handles her telephone. Not that it matters. When called upon, in a professional capacity, to examine his own crime scene the Inspector, conspicuously, places his fingers on nearly everything. 

Anything he doesn't touch while on the clock, that still bears his mark from the initial offence, is hand-waved by snivelling subordinates who swear blind they have witnessed events that never actually took place. Writer-director Elio Petri (co-writing with Ugo Pirro)'s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is very upfront then about the willing ignorance and abject inconsistency that powers authoritarian systems that dovetail with the repressive governance of fascism. Entrenched in his new position as the chief of a political intelligence division, the Inspector rants and raves about the imagined lawbreaking of the working classes; his need for complete and total control over the thoughts and feelings of his fellow citizens. Rest assured though that crimes committed by himself, and men like him, can be safely ascribed elsewhere. Pinned on student anarchists or homosexuals, if need be. After all, there's an entire machine in place that is designed to do exactly that. 

The Inspector goes even further though, introducing alibis and excuses that exonerate these usual suspects, primarily as a way of asserting his own unassailable position within a police force that aspires to be totalitarian. Daring the system to make an example of him, he makes only lightly guarded confessions to other looters, including an immediate superior who quickly changes the subject. Despite his new posting, the Inspector returns to his old offices and relentlessly places himself in the path of this floundering criminal inquiry. Flashbacks push their way into the piece, building a more complete picture of his relationship with the victim too - specifically, the pathetic emotional turmoil he experienced when he felt that his authority was being challenged. None of this matters though. Fascism is a pyramid scheme after all. Everyone who takes part shares the blame and, therefore, those who teeter near the top cannot be seen to do wrong. The ruling party, in this case a braying police force staffed with dead-eyed, middle-aged slobs packed into bum-freezer suits, cannot suffer any shred of power to slip through their fingers. 

Repulsion

It's a curious thing to come across ad copy for a film that seems so completely at odds with the experience of actually watching it. The deliberately feminine cursive adorning Repulsion's one sheet poster describes Catherine Deneuve's Carol as virginal and inexperienced, as if her very obvious fear of men is based in some unconscious desire to remain untouched; her sexuality untapped. Watching director Roman Polanski's film, not only is Carol's reticence around every man she meets entirely understandable - all are aggressive and demanding, attempting to overwhelm Carol with either breathless declarations or physically with their actual bodies - but her heaving disgust is, seemingly, symptomatic of a terrible lived experience rather than maidenly neurosis. 

Left alone in a crumbling, Kensington flat by an older sister who has absconded with a married man, Carol almost instantly begins to unravel. Her living space is filled with flies and widening cracks; a lurking, phantom rapist appears at night, clawing at our helpless heroine. Quite unable to take care of herself, Carol's psychological state regresses a step or two back into a choking, sarcophagal childhood. One that Carol isn't, and hasn't ever been, equipped to escape. We are shown brief glimpses of a cracked, family photograph throughout Repulsion. All the frozen subjects stare into the camera, posing for the picture. All except for a child, dressed and arranged very much like Carol is in adulthood, whose eyes bore holes in the back of an older man's head. An older man who, if not exactly the same, is certainly a dead ringer for Carol's violent, spectral intruders. 

Walker

Ed Harris, dressed as an itinerant minister, stands rigid; his eyes bulging with mania as he preaches the good, indigenous-peoples-trampling word of white, American exceptionalism. Set in 19th century Central America, Walker, director Alex Cox's final fling with the Hollywood studio system, is an excoriating description of the wrong-headed madness that has gripped (and continues to ensnare) all manner of wealthy, upper class weirdos who see the world beyond their borders as a proving ground that can be twisted and tortured for their personal benefit. After a farcical coup attempt in Mexico, Walker wavers between settling down with his beloved, Marlee Matlin's Ellen, or journeying to Nicaragua to ensure that shipping lanes remain available to American business magnates during a civil war. 

Despite his obvious pomposity, there's a sweetness to the relationship between Ellen and Walker, perhaps because the sign language they use to communicate remains private and unknowable to the bores who blast Walker with their own, psychotic take on American foreign policy. The charmingly forthright Ellen is therefore able to castigate her blundering fiancé in secret and, when her death removes any other future for this hireling, Walker can sob and sign uselessly over her body while it lies in state. A tearful Walker is now finally able to completely embrace the dreadfulness of his bloodthirsty destiny. Harris plays Walker, a real-life mercenary obsessed with Manifest Destiny, as a man completely deranged by his own baffling sense of superiority. The United States and the democracy they claim to wield are, quite rightly, recognised as a religious fervour that empowers incredible deviancy. 

So, while early passages of Cox's film are positively Pythonesque in their arrangement - Michael Palin and Terry Jones' Ripping Yarns, specifically - later sequences, in which Walker talks up slavery while relics and pop-culture signifiers of the 20th century begin to bleed back into proceedings, are built on a similar sort of reckless, colonial misadventure as seen in films like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Cox's film begins with the Universal Pictures globe, wreathed in Van Allen belts and proudly trumpeting its association with the MCA Company, then ends with Harris, directly addressing the camera, declaring that the United States will never leave countries like Nicaragua alone. Flimflam speeches from Ronald Reagan, intercut with images of a Nicaraguan wedding party shot to pieces in the 1980s by Contras, follow over the film's end credits. A creative decision that feels not so much brave but, in a 2026 where superhero blockbusters are routinely shelved for tax breaks, unrepeatably daring. 

The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshteyn

In splicing together this new, shorter Director's Cut of his 2008 feature, writer-director Chris Carter (co-writing with Frank Spotnitz) has removed perhaps the most uncanny element of that film: Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny's former FBI agents, after years of will-they-won't-they television serial teasing, are now seen to share a firmly established, middle-aged domesticity. Only in this film's theatrical cut do we see the couple, lying sleepless in bed, discuss a difficult medical case for Dr. Scully; a subplot that has been similarly snipped of a confrontation between a penny pinching Priest (who now register as a creeping presence, per his patient's unease with his looming) and Anderson's MD. Quite why Carter felt that this The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshteyn edit no longer required a disarming moment of intimacy or an interlude in which Scully is seen to almost physically grapple with her Catholicism isn't particularly clear. Given that much of I Want to Believe's front-end sees the production straining to re-establish a Monster of the Week framework, perhaps this pruning is simply a way to batter closer to the material that actually works? Speaking of which, by the time David Duchovny's Mulder - dressed in layers of jumpers and a cold-weather coat, something of a uniform for Millennium-era tension - is hiking down snow-covered roads, hunting vivisectionists armed only with a stolen wrench, I Want to Believe takes on certain qualities of contemporaneous (and similarly firearm free) Japanese or South Korean thrillers. Of course, the Mulder character is more of an endangered damsel in these kind of situations but, for a brief spell, it's pleasant to watch a dishevelled Duchovny trespassing around chain-link fences, backed by Mark Snow's eerie, electronic notes. 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Tom Holland's web-slinger, by now the surest bet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, returns with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, an atypically well-crafted superhero film that dispenses with the flat virtual backlots and insincere humour that has come to define these later, less-successful phases. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous Marvel feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings seems to have been condemned to the continuity black hole that swirls at the centre of the Disney series, takes the reigns from Jon Watts, who steered Sony's previous three instalments. Although Watts started strong with Spider-Man: Homecoming, his follow-up episodes stumbled largely thanks to intractable demands placed upon this property. Spider-Man's newcomer position within a wider, exploding brand tracked into an insistence that the queasy militarisation of Iron Man was mapped onto the otherwise working class Peter Parker. The chopped-up, off-putting simulacrum of Covid-era filmmaking hasn't helped either.  

Despite lingering Starkism, Cretton's take is refreshingly distinct from its immediate predecessors. The director's most obvious contribution then is that this Spider-Man sequel plays like an event unto itself rather than a prolonged reassessment of past glories or a carefully rationed prologue for the next team-up. Quite the feat considering the amount of guest players that appear in Sony's tentpole: Jon Bernthal's lunk-headed Punisher intrudes, making a lot more sense when paired with Holland's bright and assured Spider-Man (Castle, driving around in an armoured van and blasting bazookas is surely a nod to a similar appearance in the 90s Spider-Man: The Animated Series); Mark Ruffalo's increasingly savage Hulk represents a worst-case scenario for Peter's mutating superpowers; while Sadie Sink, as an emissary of The X-Men, is utilised first as a terrifying new enemy, later as an unlikely confidant. If anything then, this new Holland episode appears to have inherited the care, not to mention the billion dollar machinery, that the Japanese electronics firm marshalled during their tenure with Daniel Craig's shaken but not spared take on James Bond. 

Naturally, we're not skipping from continent to continent like 007, but there's a level-headed confidence in how the clashing tonal bandwidth of computer-assisted vehicular pile-ups and more personal, human drama are navigated that speaks to a piece designed for a slightly more discerning audience than the usual Marvel staging. Although credited to series regulars (and future Avengers: Doomsday scribes) Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, stars Holland and Zendaya have eagerly shared that this draft was treated to a transformative, and uncredited, rewrite by director Cretton as well as Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, as released, then not only gives Zendaya's workforce ready MJ more to play with than simple scowling, it also raises Marissa Tomei's sadly departed Aunt May to new heights of sainted, maternal radiance. Her flickering presence is presented throughout the film as the core, positive memory of a deeply depressed superhero. So powerful is this recollection though that it is able to be transmitted to others; to allow them to step into Peter's shoes and know what it is to be truly adored by a loving mother. 

Chinatown

Jack Nicholson stars as JJ Gites a private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles who, despite both his sleazy profession and the fact that he's the spitting image of Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel when captured in a similarly defeated repose, is completely above board. In fact, Chinatown - written by Robert Towne and directed by a despondent Roman Polanski, following the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate but before he fled to France with a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor hanging over him - cannot unfold quite the way it does if Gites isn't unusually committed to uncovering the truth. This gumshoe doggedly picks at LA's rapacious ruling class as a way of reconciling his own part in a cruel hatchet job. Hired by a middle-aged, moneyed woman to trail after her husband Hollis Mulwray, who she believes is having an affair with a much younger woman, Gites dutifully complies. The paparazzi-style photographs that the PI hands off quickly find their way into a local newspaper, much to Gites' consternation.  

The trailed husband, the Chief Engineer at the Department of Water and Power as it turns out, is found dead in a storm drain; meanwhile Faye Dunaway has arrived at Gites' office claiming to be the real Mrs. Mulwray. Better experienced than described, Chinatown is a guided tour around a powerful, emerging metropolis and the spectral forces who wield both appalling wealth and act with an unconscionable barbarity; power brokers who are, quite apparently, immune to the legal and moral laws that govern everybody else. Dunaway's Evelyn Cross-Mulwray, who would seem to be a manipulative femme fatale, an archetype inextricably linked with film noir, is instead a deeply tragic character. What we learn of her relationship with her much older husband and her father, John Huston's Noah Cross, conjures up despair rather than reassurance. Evelyn's life a commodity that has been traded back-and-forth between men who would presume to own, basically, everything. As Gites presses closer to understanding why Los Angeles is experiencing a manufactured drought, he demands of the creaking Cross what more he could possibly want in this life. The elderly millionaire's answer, delivered and repeated in haste, is that he wants to own the future. And, watching his enormous, arthritic fingers curl greedily around a screaming child's face, you believe him.