Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Usagi Yojimbo by Alexye

Faye Webster - Kingston (Live)

Hannah Frances - Falling From and Further

Jurassic World Rebirth

Find in Jurassic World Rebirth two competing plot lines. The first is premised on the kind of pitch-think that sees a real movie star, like Scarlett Johansson, hired to take up an enormous amount of one sheet real estate and play a mercenary hunting for blood samples on an island packed with tooth and claw. The second, and less obviously showy strand, concerns itself with an injured and extremely divorced father attempting to keep his tween and teen daughters, as well as a layabout boyfriend (and eventually a tag-along pet who's the spitting image of Cera from Don Bluth's The Land Before Time), alive after they are shipwrecked in the exact same neighbourhood. So while the more experienced players can set up rope harnesses to descend into Pterosaur lairs or blast hand-held shock guns at thrashing sea creatures, the civilians that are along for the ride, the Delgado family, are able to have separate (and far more entertaining) sequences built around a terrifying jungle expedition. 

Set an enough amount of time following Jurassic World Dominion that the new normal proposed by that fossilized stinker - that mankind must learn to co-exist alongside prehistoric beasts of every stripe - has been jettisoned in favour of an equatorial containment that has dinosaurs only able to thrive on the tropical islands where they were genetically engineered in the first place. Rebirth then, despite the more expansive language used in its title, is far more interested in following up concepts and ideas present in the Park-era, Michael Crichton-adapting instalments. Directed by Gareth Edwards with a returning David Koepp on screenwriting duties, Rebirth underlines this conceptual shift with an ailing Apatosaur being scraped up off the tarmac in New York while tardy commuters grumble. Unlike the more striking, camouflaged examples that appear later in Rebirth, this dinosaur has the flat, grey texture of a lower resolution ancestor and the drooping clumsiness of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. It is, as it dies, marked as both technologically primitive and archaeologically outmoded. 

Although not the totality of a piece that still clings to the misguided notion that audiences demand fresh, mutated creatures and expert contrivance to get themselves engaged (see also: Alien: Romulus) Rebirth is best when the audience are allowed to luxuriate in the company of dinosaurs who are behaving more like curious animals in search of their next meal. A first act sortie involving a massive and highly prized Mosasaurus apportions space to a pack of streaked Spinosaurs who swim in her wake, gobbling up leftovers. Despite Jurassic Park III's big bad being relegated to a scavenger picking up after the real apex predator, this more crocodilian take on Joe Johnston's featured theropod allows Edwards' film to not only correct now discredited takes on antiquated beasts but also to indulge himself in Spielbergian conceits that reach beyond that director's Jurassic predecessors. Briefly, we're in Jaws territory with hurried chatter about astronomical taxonomy and wincing inserts of human blood lapping at uncharted shorelines. Even better still is a creeping interlude in which the sodden Delgado family attempt to retrieve a raft from underneath a slumbering (but not sated) Tyrannosaur, a sequence dreamt up by Crichton for his 1990 hardback but left out of the original Jurassic Park feature. 

Alexandre Desplat - Mosasaur Attacks Yacht

PinkPantheress - Illegal (Live)

Libra, Equilibrious Beast by Satria Putra

Olivia Rodrigo - Just Like Heaven feat. Robert Smith (Live)

Pulp - Common People (Live)

TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me (Live)

Elio

The function of an animated film like Elio, co-directed by Madeline Sharafian, Turning Red's Domee Shi, and Coco co-director Adrian Molina, very much seems to be one of affirmation; specifically a message to its young audience (and perhaps a chiding to the less attentive adults within earshot) that all children deserve to feel not just safe but absolutely adored in their home. Pixar's latest then treads similar ground to Disney stablemate Lilo & Stitch - recently promoted to live action status with much of its indigenous identity chipped away - in that a child can become so lonely that the only person who is capable of understanding them lies not just outside the family but might, in fact, be an extraterrestrial silk worm. Elio, voiced by Yonas Kibreab, is an orphan living with his childless, Air Force Major aunt who, after having wandered into a museum exhibit about the Voyager probes, becomes obsessed with the idea of contacting somebody else out there in the void of space. 

Any dangling insinuation that the endless night above us might roughly equate to the afterlife in the mind of a naïve youngster isn't explored here but the kinds of self-aggrandizing fabrication that provide shallow comfort for that same child are everywhere. Contacted by a peaceful federation of lounging aliens, Elio plays along with their assumption that he is Earth's galactic ambassador, eventually agreeing to broker a deal with Brad Garrett's warlike Lord Grigon, while a suspiciously well-behaved clone stands in for Elio on Earth. The latter entertains because its gooey military base antics prickle (presumably) inadvertent memories of Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers while Grigon, the sourpuss father to Elio's unearthly friend, gets to physically demonstrate the idea that absolutely everything - even bespoke power armour bristling with pistols - pales to nothing when judged against the health and well-being of your child. As with co-director Shi's Turning Red, Elio also looks to be taking further cues from Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball era Akira Toriyama, which is to say Pixar's film is packed with bemused but elasticated figures tinkering around with their obsessively detailed gadgetry. 

Tekken 3 by Vitaliy Shushko

Yello - Of Course I'm Lying

Lalo Schifrin - The Wave // Insensatez

MadS

With the Days and Weeks series failing to progress to 28 Mois Plus Tard, despite an epilogue from the latter that saw Britain's infected traversing the Champ de Mars in Paris, it falls to David Moreau's MadS (or was it Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher's The Horde?) to describe how France might deal with catching ferocity. Told as if filming was accomplished in one continuous take, MadS tracks the worsening fortunes of a group of teenagers attempting to celebrate a birthday. First up is Milton Riche's Romain, a rich kid who dabbles in blood-red cocaine and drives around in his absent father's sports car. Idling back from a hurriedly concluded connect, Romain comes across a bandaged, bleeding woman who offers up a brutal-looking recording device by way of explanation before emptying the car's glove compartment for something to stab her unfeeling body with. 

An increasingly distressed Romain makes it to the house party thrown in his honour, inadvertently transmitting his full-body freak-out to his friends and lovers. Romain may be difficult to care too much about but MadS has a secret weapon in the form of Laurie Pavy's Ana, his jilted girlfriend. Initially dressed in a billowing shirt, presumably Romain's, and positioned as something of a nag in her boyfriend's self-indulgent life, Ana's fortunes change when she takes a crimson bump and discovers that Romain has gotten her friend, Lucille Guillaume's Julia, pregnant. Chased from her taxi by the trigger-happy liquidators policing the spread of this contagion, Ana begins to change both physically and psychologically. She sheds her voluminous outer layer, tearing it from her person, to examine her chewed-up torso. Ana runs her fingers over seeping bullet holes that, quite obviously, have not proven to be lethal. Suddenly armed with an invincible body, Ana does what anyone experiencing the twitching malevolence of a cellar ghoul from The Evil Dead would do: she steals a pedal bike then races after her love rival so she can, as she puts it, eat her face. 

Lalo Schifrin - Jaws

Revenant by 炒菜 (oochan_25)

billy woods - Corinthians (feat. Despot & El-P)

Phases - Estate

28 Weeks Later

Although hardly the central thrust of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, in teddy bear cab driver Frank, Brendan Gleeson was given room to essay an atypical sort of father figure, at least in terms of the genre he found himself inhabiting. Unusually, Frank was on the level. A good man who only ever wanted the best for the people he had taken under his charge. Despite Naomie Harris' Selena and Cillian Murphy's Jim being adults themselves it's Frank who assumes a higher level of responsibility for the group, be that driving the taxi in which they escape London or deferring the contents of Selena's medicine bag so he can stand guard all night, soothing restless sleepers. Despite his size and the strength inherent to that, Frank behaved with gentleness in basically every moment but the one where he foolheartedly barked at a pecking crow, sealing his doom. 

Physically and emotionally, Robert Carlyle's Don, a discarded viewpoint character in director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, is the opposite. Slighter and happy to lord his all-access pass to the American shock-and-awe occupation of this partially reclaimed London, the brief time we spend with the conscious aspect of this man imparts a sense of someone flawed who is desperate to transmit importance. By the time he's contracted the long-dormant rage virus through a stolen kiss, Don might as well be a continuation of Francis Begbie, the wiry pub-fighter that Carlyle played in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Although the kind of agency required to lead a film is lost when this disappointing father is transformed, Carlyle's magnetism demands that we linger on his actions, ascribing intent or recall to his agitated fog. 

Previous passes at these adrenaline soaked plague carriers prioritised shaky close-ups of their gnashing teeth or the torrents of blood that issue from every orifice. Carlyle though, and in fairness he's given more time onscreen to make a more lasting impression, takes his cues from the depressed chimpanzees seen in 28 Days Later's prologue. Don lingers, apparently plotting, and perhaps even directing his more mindless underlings. When it arrives his violence is overwhelmingly and absolutely destructive; be that balled fists clattering down on his wife's ruined face or sinking his crooked teeth into his youngest child's throat. The self-centredness (or good sense, depending on your perspective) that saw him flee when his wife found herself cornered in a seething cottage becomes the motivating factor for this character, one which curdles into a rolling familicide in which Don attacks, not to bring his loved ones closer into his contagious bosom, but to annihilate the less interesting characters who are gobbling up all of his screentime.