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. 

Ennio Morricone - Miraggio Secondo

Superman by Ashley Wood

Jalen Ngonda - Hang It On the Shelf

Bap Theory - One Day

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. 

Chico Hamilton - The Dealer

Benny The Butcher - Summer '26

Transformers Victory: Hero Set Battle by Guido Guidi

Alabama Shakes - Shoegaze

Denzel Curry & Kenneth Blume - DIFFERENCE ft. Yebba

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. 

Joe Strummer - Filibustero

Hornets - Concrete Rhapsody II

The Ghost Who Walks by Lee Gatlin

Carpenter Brut - Cherub Rock

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. 

Mark Snow - Photo Evidence

Col. Kusanagi by Matías Bergara

Michael Giacchino - Suite New Day

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. 

Madonna - Drowned World/Substitute for Love // Blur - Tender // All Saints - Pure Shores

The Avalanches - Can't Get Over Losing You ft. Portraits Of Tracy

Havoc #4 by Barry Windsor-Smith

Open Mike Eagle x Kenny Segal - She Swear I'm Colorblind feat. billy woods