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. 

PJ Harvey - Voyager

Del The Funky Homosapien - Mistadobalina

The Amazing Spider-Man #1000 by John Romita Jr. and Devmalya Pramanik

Yasushi Miyagawa - Teresa's Sigh

Backrooms

Even before Chiwetel Ejiofor's divorced store manager noclips his way into the Backrooms, director Kane Parsons' feature debut is packed with the chromed, overstuffed interiors indicative of a period aspiration that now reads as alienating and deeply impersonal. These living spaces appear (and, even in some cases, actually are) staged for show, rather than settled into or lived-in. Set in the 1990s, Backrooms treats that decade as a lingering, radioactive presence that transmits itself beyond standard confines into an enormous other. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox - as well as production designer Danny Vermette, art director Alan Derksen, and set decorator Trevor Johnston - set their focus on the dying moments of the twentieth century, when a post-Cold War upswing, as well as the dotcom bubble, ensured that cavernous retail units were packed with cheap, gimcrack garbage.

These towering monuments to consumerism have mutated, rendered here as a never-ending labyrinth of harsh big lights and damp wallpaper. By the time Parsons, born in 2005, had picked up a camera and shot his original YouTube shorts these spaces had long since passed into mouldering abandonment, fit only for urban exploration. The once mighty shopping centre now reduced to the paint-peeled ruin of a bygone, and crucially not experienced by Parsons, era. The horror in Backrooms then the very potent realisation that younger generations will spend the rest of their lives shovelling through a detritus, both socially and economically, that was blinked into being decades before they were even born. Presumably this is the horror of Backrooms? It's a shame then this feature follows dozens of short, online episodes about this very subject matter and therefore feels no obligation to treat its audience as if they are discovering this maze at the same time as Ejiofor's Clark or Renate Reinsve's Dr. Kline. An exposition dump placed at the film's conclusion, that is delivered with all the wit and verve of an unskippable video game cutscene, doesn't help matters either. 

Boards of Canada - The Word Becomes Flesh

Yoshiko Sai - Yukionna

Doom Patrol by Ian Bertram

2ADDICT - Da Phat Kat

Disclosure Day

Perhaps because the film is set in a present parked up and ready to plunge into the kind of nuclear conflict we were warned against in The Abyss, director Steven Spielberg's latest, Disclosure Day, is best enjoyed as throwback: a pre-war on terror thriller that has convinced itself there could possibly be a development - an all-consuming societal shift - that would bring everybody together, instantly putting all of humanity on the same page. Josh O'Connor plays Dr. Daniel Kellner, a shadow government whistleblower with a backpack full of portable hard drives that, it is implied, will be instantly discredited and deleted should he attempt to file share them. Emily Blunt deploys her governess charm as Margaret Fairchild, a weather girl whose ambitions to sit in the anchor's chair are complicated by a sudden onset of uncanny insight into the interior landscapes of everybody she comes into contact with. To lock eyes with this woman is to lay your secrets bare; revealing the treacherous interpersonal structures that prop up the persona you present to the world. 

Colin Firth's Scanlon, Kellner's former boss, is hot on their trail. This high-ranking agent in an off-the-books intelligence service is a remote viewer, able to transmit thoughts and murderous action into oblivious accomplices half a country away. In the fullness of Disclosure Day we learn that Scanlon's Possessor-like hold over others is the brute force aspect of an attempted summit between humanity and another, extraterrestrial race. Scanlon's efforts - most of which are focused around transforming Eve Hewson's blameless ex-nun into an unwitting assassin - may be indicative of a military-industrial mindset that sees any technological scrap from beyond the stars as an opportunity to crush its enemies but, plainly, all communion in Spielberg's film is expressed in traumatic, involuntary episodes. The abilities developed by Kellner and Fairchild, as well as the blocked memories that bleed into their subconscious minds, were all placed there in horrifying childhood events premised on an invasive and unwelcome change being visited upon these shivering youngsters. Although both adults are treated like the twin prophets of a new faith, this status isn't one they've made any conscious decision to pursue. 

Unlike, say, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, there's no sense in this film that these space men are inherently good then, only uncannily powerful and perhaps even indentured to some secretive department within the American government. That their grand plan to establish a shared understanding with us is indistinguishable from the false memories that can be constructed around childhood sexual abuse seems pretty notable too. Are Kellner and Fairchild supposed to be grateful? Or is the wreckage of their lives just a means to an end? Naturally, this terrifying narrative about the malleability of mankind in the face of a wheezing master race resides in an expertly arranged chase film that even begins in medias res. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński consistently link together beautiful, successive perspectives on human and mechanical action. There are performance car interludes - in which farmhouses are driven through and the camera snakes around the straining drivers - that firmly underline why Spielberg was eager to take Michael Bay under his wing twenty years ago. Similarly, televisual techniques picked up while young Spielberg was making his bones with the parlour mysteries of Columbo - specifically an ability to find multiple, illustrative shots within an unbroken sequence - sing here. The restlessness of Spielberg's frame feels atypical now; even spritely compared to the increasing theatricality of the computer-generated epics that clog up the cinema screens. Not showy per se, simply indicative of an expert craftsman. 

John Williams - Memory...

Chaos Squats Death Guard by John Blanche