David Matthews - Main Theme from Star Wars

They Will Kill You

If Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is the Dante's Peak of action comedies based around rich elites kidnapping women for Satanic sacrifice, then this piece - director Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You - is the slightly later, much goopier Volcano. All of which is to say that neither film is particularly good but at least one of them (this one) is extremely interested in depicting hot, red liquids blasting out of ruptured structures. At the outset, Sokolov's film uses ornate buildings and inky, rain-lashed voids to prickle memories of Italian horror films directed by Dario Argento. When battle is joined though, Sokolov's reference points are instead the engorged violence and fitful flashbacks seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. 

Although Zazie Beetz maintains an impressive physical presence throughout, these stray notes of reproduction invite a level of comparison that does this film absolutely no favours. Sokolov's genre cross-fading plays photostat and Beetz is never given the opportunity to play anything like the plucky, Falconettian vulnerability that underlined Uma Thurman's signature performance. They Will Kill You is to The Whole Bloody Affair as 2 Days in the Valley is to Pulp Fiction then. As well, the crunchy invulnerability bestowed upon the hooded devil worshippers that hunt Beetz's vengeful housekeeper not only rob the audience of any satisfaction associated with a well-earned dispatch but this impermanence even undermines some cracking body detonations too. Still, Heather Graham's enucleated eyeball creeping around, while her headless trunk clatters about in an air vent is, at least, pretty funny.

Hi-Posi - あと何日

The Punisher by Frank Miller

Ayako Udagawa - Just Fallin' Love

3mitsu x Suyo - Pt.2

Ballad of a Soldier

At the height of The Great Patriotic War, a boyish Soviet soldat is given limited leave from the frontline to journey across a war-torn nation and help his mother fix her leaking roof. This unexpected and unlikely boon issued in recognition of the soldier's bravery in facing down, and wounding, a column of advancing German tanks. Writer-director Grigory Chukhray (co-writing with Valentin Yezhov)'s Ballad of a Soldier initially wrongfoots thanks to the sheer earnestness of Vladimir Ivashov's Private Alyosha Skvortsov. He's a guileless, likeable youth who cannot resist mucking in and helping all those who cross his path. From injured veterans to elderly truck-drivers, Alyosha is such easygoing sunshine that he either nudges these people away from self-destructive actions or he literally plants his feet and physically lifts them out of the mire that traps them. 

All too quickly, Chukhray's film expands its tonal scope from Children's Film Foundation pleasantries to consider warfare in starker, far less celebratory terms: how uniformed men present as inherently threatening to unaccompanied women or the ways in which solemn vows, made during peacetime, might then crumble in the face of the brutal, day-to-day realities of industrialised conflict. Beautifully composed by cinematographers Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva - the blocky, black and white Academy screen is equally at home examining Zhanna Prokhorenko's luminous face as it is peering at the twisting, urban wreckage that has been wrought by aerial bombardment - 1959's Ballad of a Soldier proposes that, in lads like Private Skvorstov, something deeply precious to the Soviet Union has been lost forever. An entire generation of gallant young men have been claimed forever by the foreign lands in which they fought and died. 

Vince Staples - Blackberry Marmalade

GF13-049NM Tequila Gundam by Ikka Niiro

Beck - Everlasting Nothing

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