Supergirl

Aside from a pair of brief flashbacks featuring David Corenswet's Superman, that ground the picture in the ongoing present of this newly minted DC cinematic universe, director Craig Gillespie's Supergirl often appears like it could all be happening hundreds of years into the future. In fact, given that every other humanoid very specifically resembles the exact kind of people found on Earth, it seems like it'd be less distracting if Kara Zor-El's adventures where disentangled from the now and took place when mankind has journeyed into the stars. Much like Starlord and pals in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies though, this Supergirl is both contemporaneous with DC's unfolding superhero phase and proceeds from a place of airtight, space-faring slobbery. The interiors of this film's physics-defying spacecraft are caked with everything from shredded papers and stale cereal to fluorescent green dog piss. The leaky, lived-in aesthetic that George Lucas was so keen to evoke in Star Wars is taken here to a depressive, bed-rotting conclusion. 

Away from her adopted home planet, Milly Alcock's Kara celebrates her impending birthday by travelling to solar systems without yellow stars. By avoiding this specific spectrum of light radiation, Supergirl is able to both drink herself into a stupor and become vulnerable enough for Gillespie's film to entertain ideas of jeopardy. Bereft after being sent away from a surviving shard of the dead planet Krypton, Kara - quite reasonably - seeks distraction from her decaying memories of the family she left behind. Unlike the strident colonisers who sent Kal-El to Kansas to be its conqueror, Kara's parents (her father, played by David Krumholtz, is dressed very much like a retrofuturist scientist from a Fleischer cartoon) are far less megalomaniacal. Their decision to fashion a similar craft and have Kara follow her cousin to Earth done so simply to preserve the life of their beloved daughter. Of course, given that the audience is supposed to sympathise with Supergirl, it makes sense that she isn't seen to be mourning the passing of monsters. Indeed, there are asides from her parents here that are directly critical of Jor-El and Lara; positioned within the text as if to reassure us that not all Kryptonians are intergalactic imperialists but Kal-El's parents definitely were. 

Brief, compared to its comic book movie contemporaries (the film doesn't even hit the two hour mark), Supergirl plays like an overly tidied telling of a much messier journey. As is often the case with Warner Bros. tent-poles, trade magazines have rushed to detail the ways in which the various filmmakers fell out behind the scenes but even on the night, Supergirl is very obviously lacking in finer, lyrical detail. Characters may expound on their backstories or act decisively but there's little sense that they are growing closer and coming to rely on each other. At its conclusion Gillespie's film may outright declare that Eve Ridley's Ruthye (essentially Mattie Ross' vengeful teen from Charles Portis' True Grit) has, in fact, grown on Kara but there isn't a great deal within the piece that underlines this assertion. Although his screentime is comparatively brief, there's more of a sense that Jason Momoa's snarling Lobo has become a fan of this unusually principled child. That said, and although this film concludes in ways that are at odds with its source material - Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes' Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow - it's difficult not to draw real satisfaction from the sight of Kara, in full blue and red super-costume, placing the edge of an ornate sabre on the neck of a quivering, unrepentant sex trafficker then drawing it across his throat. 

Antônio Carlos Jobim - The Girl from Ipanema

Supergirl by Tom Scioli

Tricky - I'm Yours (feat. Mitch Sanders)

Assault Girls

Writer-director Mamoru Oshii's Avalon follow-up is a breathtakingly dull trudge beneath static skies that, somewhat, simulates the dawdling rhythms faced by video game players when they're putting off attempting a particularly difficult encounter and don't want to suffer their way through a team-up. Meisa Kuroki, Rinko Kikuchi, and Hinako Saeki are the Assault Girls, a disparate group of solo adventurers stuck on the same enormous, cybernetic worm combat event. Unlike this film's predecessor though, there's almost zero sense of a real world life that exists for any of these women outside of the all-consuming app. An extended opening passage - that perfectly replicates the feeling of being trapped, mid-level, by an unskippable interruption - details the jump from the derelict, post-Soviet aesthetic of the previous instalment to the much more obviously fantastical, Monster Hunter-esque design that props up the current iteration, Avalon(f). This transformation which, for all appearances, is a tremendous downgrade is, apparently, symptomatic of the stagnant Neoliberalism that has the twenty first century firmly in its grip. Oshii is still effortlessly prescient then, even if Assault Girls is not particularly entertaining to actually sit through. Edited with the all the stuttering imprecision of a post-round replay running on a shorting System 11 board, Assault Girls is less a full-fledged feature and more a dangling, discursive DVD freebie. The kind of compressed, live action distraction you might expect to find taped to a Japanese gaming magazine in the early 2000s, destined for the landfill. 

The Womack Sisters - If I Let You

Punisher 2099 by Nuri Durr

Voyage - Ascend

Kenji Kawai - Log Off

Avalon

After a break of nearly a decade, director Mamoru Oshii returns to live action with Avalon, a dystopian science fiction film concerned with the extremely forward-thinking idea (for 2001) that digital lives can be so lucrative and personally rewarding that they demand priority when judged against tranquilised participation in a crumbling, post-Cold War present. Małgorzata Foremniak stars as Ash, a highly-skilled e-sport pariah (who is, therefore, forced to play a team game solo) who excels at an illegal, highly-addictive multiplayer game in which players, with small arms loadouts, take on everything from tanks and helicopter gunships to sauntering, computer-generated mechanoids. Unlike the American productions that seem to default to high-flying, stunt show agility when photographing helicopters, Oshii and cinematographer Grzegorz Kędzierski regard their subjects, on loan from the Polish armed forces, as hovering monsters: bulbous, even insectile in shape; radiating incredible noise and landscape blasting power. 

Their human victims, of which there are many, are instantly zapped into two-dimensional snapshots of death throes that then crumble into pixelated cinder. Complete a mission and the hovering hardware's final agonies are similarly frozen, pulsing with amber congratulation. Comparatively, Ash's sepia-stained waking life is drained of danger or, really, purpose. Her illicit earnings may be enough to procure fresh fruit and vegetables but her living space remains bare. She inhabits a pointedly impersonal lodging, not unlike Melville's Le Samouraï, anchored only by the come-and-go presence of Oshii's trademark basset hound. Stylistically similarly to the director's animated features, Avalon's early passages revolve around the kind of slow-motion, gestural movement that entrances when rendered in successive cels but registers as dawdling when considering real, unhurried people. The observational element, communicated in brush strokes, has been removed, you see. The simulacrum proving much more arresting than a captured, human equivalent. 

Later though when Ash, very much like Major Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, pursues an abstract reward as a way to make sense of her diminished, depressive sense of self, Avalon really comes into its own. Although largely found wanting when compared to Oshii's 1995 masterpiece, Avalon does excel when detailing the intense, perception-shifting enlightenment experienced by its main character. Whereas Kusanagi's electronic apotheosis is strange and unknowable by design, the ascension experienced by Ash is vividly described as a movement from a flat, haunted fiction to something much more brilliant and tactile. Having cornered the interlaced Angel that allows passage into the more mysterious corners of the game, Ash advances to a complete new, secret area entitled Class Real. The hustle and bustle of the Polish city of Wrocław is re-framed here as a technicolor wonderland; a confusing and beguiling Oz, with its own inscrutable tasks, for Ash to explore then conquer. This reframing of the contemporary, in which a modern Polish city is transformed, largely through comparison, seems indebted to similar interludes in Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe. There, brief glimpses of shoppers traversing escalators was used to paper over footage either missing or never shot and served to remind viewers that the mundane and everyday becomes equally unusual, even alien, when judged against landscapes and situations powered by pure imagination. 

Nirosta Steel - English Party

RoboCop by Alexye

Dev Lemons - Eat the Pavement

Kupla - Honeydew

Mortal Kombat II

Presumably indicative of the creaking audience the film expects to attract, director Simon McQuoid's second pass at adapting Midway's ancient arcade series proposes itself as The NeverEnding Story for the washed-up, straight-to-video action stars of the 1990s. Karl Urban is recruited to play Johnny Cage, a character originally designed as something of a stand-in for Jean-Claude Van Damme when game designers Ed Boon and John Tobias were working on their coin-op calling card. Here, Cage is middle-aged and unsuccessfully working the convention circuit before he is enlisted by an inter-dimensional God to fight on behalf of Earth. Although apparently poised to build itself entirely around Urban, whose star has ascended thanks to Amazon's The Boys television series, Mortal Kombat II never fully commits to this handover, preferring to - and this is to the film's credit - maintain an interest in Ludi Lin's Liu Kang, Hiroyuki Sanada's Scorpion and, introduced in this instalment, Adeline Rudolph's Princess Kitana (Tadanobu Asano's Raiden is sadly sidelined, with Pink Floyd's laser show leaking out of his freshly cleaved throat). Initially off-puttingly by-the-numbers, Mortal Kombat II successfully pivots away from the hand-holding character development of the previous Mortal Kombat to concentrate on bloody battles staged inside computer-generated infernos. Following a stand out confrontation between Liu Kang and Max Huang's zombie Kung Lao - which takes place on a churning portal stage quoted directly from Sega's 16-bit adaptation of the Mortal Kombat II cabinet - McQuoid's film weaves several interconnected, and task complimentary, climaxes together. These cross-cut incursions simultaneously allow for your standard universe saving amulets as well as a feature opportunity for a vengeful daughter to slowly mutilate and dissect the faceless monster that murdered her father. 

Carly Rae Jepsen - On Wires

Godzilla Against Mothra by Leiji Matsumoto

Paycheque - Heatwave

Orbital - Halcyon + On + On

The Hidden Fortress

Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara play Tahei and Matashichi, two ambitious feudal peasants who have sold all of their worldly possessions so they can march off to war, convinced that this will be the (financial) making of them. As is often the case with societies woven around intractable class distinctions, the pair are quickly driven into a kind of slavery; pressed to dig graves and search for a hidden treasure in the ruins of a castle with the rest of the interchangeable commoners who have followed defeated, as well as victorious, noblemen. After escaping this servitude during a violent uprising, the duo are recruited, somewhat against their will, by Toshiro Mifune's glowering stranger. Their task? To transport a fortune in gold across a war torn and strictly divided country. Mifune's Makabe enlists (rather than murders) these men after hearing Tahei and Matashichi's plan to travel back-and-forth between several neighbouring states as a way of avoiding the heavily guarded checkpoints dotted along the more direct routes. 

Despite Tahei and Matashichi's lowly, pitiful station in life, and everything that implies to this samurai, the mysterious Makabe is impressed with their plot. Such expert deception would never occur to a valiant but straightforward warrior such as Makabe. Their slinking procession diligently plays the part of dirt poor commoners transporting their wares - even subjecting themselves to the indignity of having to sell their horses, simply because a nobleman decided he wanted to buy them. When discovered, Makabe literally springs into action, drawing his opponent's swords and killing them before they can even formulate what exactly it is that is happening to them. The Hidden Fortress was director Akira Kurosawa's first widescreen, Tohoscope feature and, like Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood before it, the film absolutely soars whenever Mifune is in motion. The comparative dullness of having to slowly move great stacks of firewood, laced with gold, lulls the film's audience with stalled, rained-out progress and sleepy rhythms, all the better to showcase sudden explosions of incredible violence or gallantry, all courtesy of Mifune. 

Riding alongside Makabe, Tahei and Matashichi is Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki, the subject of a manhunt that has already claimed the lives of several other young women, including Makabe's younger sister. This handmaiden posed as a decoy for the Princess and gave herself up to a rival clan, whereupon she was promptly executed. Yuki, especially when compared to the comparatively crude Tahei and Matashichi, is a strange, alien presence in The Hidden Fortress. In her own way, equally magnetic as Mifune's fallen general. Having had haughtiness drilled into her from birth, the Princess is naturally theatrical and prowling, even when attempting to pose as a put-upon peasant. Makabe, recognising the very obvious otherness of her shrieking, insistent manner of address, forbids her from speaking on the journey, lest they be discovered. Posing as a mute, the peculiarity of Yuki's behaviour is somewhat mitigated, allowing her the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to genuinely mix and observe the sort of people she would otherwise only come into contact with as her grovelling servants. A willingness to participate then, as well as her headstrong nature and a genuine decency, allows Yuki to get a sense of what life actually means to people who do not reside in castles, worrying about their dynastic obligations. Her enthusiastic acceptance of fate, having sampled genuine turbulence and misery, proves so impressive (and atypical for people of her rank) that it even stirs something in the group's enemies, eventually drawing them to their cause.