Death from Above 1979 - Private Lives

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. 

Justice - Flower in a Hurricane (feat. Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard)

Darth Vader by Daniel Warren Johnson

Mike D - Secrets Pt. I & II

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. 

Counting Crows - A Long December

The Mummy Walks by Tom Scioli

Father John Misty - The X-panded Universe

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.

Grimes - Accelerando

Twisted Teens - Stalks

Another Dracula by Mizmaru Kawahara

M83 - Siren / Behold... Beasts

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. 

Twisted Teens - When We First Met

A Nightmare on Elm Street by Alexye

Shinichi Tanabe - Kiri

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. 

CHVRCHES - Roses

Gigan by Manabu Yashiro

Beck - Run Away

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. 

Motoko Again by Matías Bergara

@ - Bird