Action Bronson - Triceratops (feat. Lil Yachty & Paul Wall)

Youth of the Beast

It could be a quirk of the English subtitles stamped on the viewed video but, at one point in director Seijun Suzuki's Youth of the Beast (and following a lengthy cab ride in which Joe Shishido's ex-cop Mizuno lays out his suspicions about a blackmail ring to a former colleague), our hero leaps from the still moving vehicle with an instruction to the driver to take 'him' home. We presume Mizuno means the policeman that he has just spent the last couple of minutes outlining a conspiracy to. However, as Suzuki and cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka's jittery camera bounces around, facing into the back seat of the taxi, we notice - through the rear window - that the policeman has already darted out of the car. He silently keeps pace with Mizuno, leaving us behind with the camera, rocking uselessly and forlornly as we recede from this renewed meeting. We have, ever so briefly, been dismissed from the unfolding proceedings. The pervasiveness that we, the audience, enjoy has been thwarted. This sort of textual playfulness is all over Youth of the Beast, a film in which malevolent pimps are transformed into receding optical effects in the mind of despairing junkies or a scene in which an interlude of sadomasochistic foreplay is presented as the swirling eye of a tumultuous dust devil. At the film's outset, Joe Shishido's Mizuno reads as expert and conniving, a front he largely manages to maintain when dealing with two opposing gangs of uneducated, low-level street toughs. However, when his investigation expands to include women from a variety of backgrounds - from weeping widows to scheming madams - Mizuno's control over the unfolding counter-crosses quickly slips away. 

Takuya Nakamura - Liquid Nice

Zabolo - Cálida Tarde

Ken by Kandoken

Beck - Ride Lonesome

Send Help

It does the soul good to see an arch, remorseless face-prodder like director Sam Raimi back at the helm of a film, like Send Help, that isn't premised on an enormous, swaying franchise. Rachel McAdams (who, in fairness to the thundering Disney machine crossed paths with Raimi as an inherited love interest on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) stars as Linda Liddle, a cubicle-bound company backbone who is continuously passed over for corner office advancement because she doesn't wash her hair often enough or instinctively swipe away the tuna mayonnaise that clings to her cheek. Shipwrecked on a Thai island with her nepotism hire superior, played by Dylan O'Brien, who was keen to fill out his boardroom with the frat buddies that have just provided entertainment as uncontrolled decompression events, Linda is in her element. Finally, she is able to leverage all the wilderness, self-sufficiency trivia she's soaked up while striving to be a contestant on the never-ending American reality series Survivor. Her ability to tune out the squelching goops now constantly about her person has become an obvious benefit. Conceptually, Send Help has trace structure inherited from morality plays, with the indefatigable Linda now in an unexpected position to make literal claims on her indispensability to a cowed boss but Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's screenplay does quickly press into entertainingly amoral waters. As Linda becomes increasingly comfortable exercising control over O'Brien's quivering injured ingrate, revealing a genuine desire to keep him trapped in her web, Send Help threatens to coarsen but, in truth, Linda has fought so hard (and so bloodily) to amuse us that it's difficult to really hold a couple of murders against her. 

Elliott Smith - Son of Sam

Nine Inch Noize - Closer

Godzilla by Manabu Yashiro

Daniel Deluxe - Realms Long Forgotten

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Given the film's premise - a blushing bride is pursued by evil billionaires participating in a satanic ceremony, this time joined by her younger sister - you might be forgiven for thinking that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is acquainted with prolonged instances of jeopardy. This isn't really the case, the film's tonal dimension is much absurd and comedic. Scenes track towards clipped punchlines here rather than take the time to construct excruciating tensions that terminate on a retributive release valve. Samara Weaving's Grace, the winner of Ready or Not's previous attempt to curry favour with the literal devil, takes the majority of her persecution in her stride; soaking up an incredible amount of punishment that, a frenzied finale aside, isn't really turned back against her tormentors. It's not that a protagonist wallowing in sadism is definitively the preferred destination when considering this kind of highly personalised danger but, if you want an audience to consider something like a dimensionality in your characters, it's perhaps best if they respond, proportionally, to such slights. With that in mind, Kathryn Newton as Faith, Grace's sister (the actress looking distractingly similar to Virgina Madsen when wearing her hair up), is largely used as a substitute body for these absurd elites to work out their ongoing frustrations with an uncooperative and unkillable Grace. The slow-motion used to describe the pummeling that Newton's character is subjected to by Shawn Hatosy's Epstein class weirdo is particularly off-putting, suggesting that some level of decision maker on this film really enjoys seeing beautiful blonde women hissing blood through their pearlescent teeth. 

Takuya Nakamura - Liquid Kid

Bizarro by Ramon Villalobos

Fleaureque - Herbarium (EP)

Primate

After years of pixel perfect reproductions of aggro chimpanzees, specifically in the recent Planet of the Apes phases, it's a pleasant surprise to be treated to a suit-acted Primate. Miguel Torres Umba plays Ben, a chimp living in glass house captivity with a family comprised of a deaf father named Adam, played by Troy Kotsur, and his daughters, Johnny Sequoyah's Lucy and Gia Hunter's Erin. Bitten by a rabid mongoose offscreen, Ben glowers and froths, eventually transforming into a bone-breaking monster. Obviously prompted by a similar simian attack in Jordan Peele's excellent Nope, director Johannes Roberts' Primate is a feature-length extrapolation shot digitally on London sound stages and cast in blazing reds and powdery cobalt that suggests a, presumably absent, temperature. Neither as tense or oppressive as the POV Nope interlude, where Primate does impress is how it suggests some level of thwarted agency or even interpersonal jealousy behind Ben's destructive acts. 

Rabies here is used as a way of unlocking a kind of interspecies bitterness that has simmered in a creature that lives amongst, but cannot truly connect with, people. Ben takes bites out of the thigh of his nearest contemporary, youngest daughter Erin, apparently a demonstration of possessive, consumptive intent. A frat boy love interest played by Charlie Mann, who appears much later in the film, is trapped than examined by Ben. His simpering white boy features pored over and collated, before Ben begins tugging aggressively on his jaw, obliterating his agreeable, human face. Primate is thinly written, with shallowly realised characters (the absolute limit of communal jeopardy is the forwardness with which Jessica Alexander's Hannah behaves around a friend's crush) but there is something unexpectedly sad about the performance generated by a man playing a simian who lashes out at his human owners because a viral infection has turbo-charged his grievances. His diminished, childlike stature, within a family that has already begun to grow apart, has become intolerable for this superhumanly powerful simulacrum. 

Adrian Johnston - First Bite

Thee Sacred Souls - Any Old Fool

Ultraman & Ultraseven by Rariatoo

Flying Lotus - 1983