Sonatine by Alexye

Dry Cleaning - I Have the Key

Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys

The Snow Woman

The striking Shiho Fujimura stars as The Snow Woman, a gliding wraith that stalks the frigid depths of a feudal forest, freezing elderly snoopers when they dare to bed down in abandoned cabins for the night. Rather than hold this supernatural character at arm's length, director Tokuzō Tanaka's film (clocking in at a concise 79 minutes), welcomes her into the household; describing her pained attempts to maintain a consistent emotional presence in the human realm. Beautifully shot by Chikashi Makiura, The Snow Woman largely elides location work, and any verisimilitude such a practice can confer, preferring to stage its spontaneous blizzards on a succession of cramped, delicately lit sound stages. This beatific falseness reflective of a central character who works extremely hard to maintain their own staged, and temporary, reality. 

Besotted with the apprentice sculptor who wandered into her chilly domain, Fujimura's Snow Woman disguises herself as a beautiful, ageless woman and quickly ingratiates herself with the widow of the man she flash-froze, all to win her beloved's heart. Based on a folk tale included in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaiden: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the spell of The Snow Woman is that this paranormal presence is, essentially, both sympathetic and, unless threatened, benign; a lonely creature that really only represents an aspect of nature that just so happens to be associated with death. Yuki, as she is known to her husband, simply wants to be in love and raise a family. The outside forces determined to degrade or undermine this partnership then seethe with jealousy: the brutish local lord who wants The Snow Woman for himself or the ancient medicine woman who blisters Yuki's pearlescent skin with boiling, ceremonial waters. 

LTJ Bukem - Demon's Theme Part II

The Major by Vallez Gax

Robert Glasper - Everything in its Right Place

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