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

Yoko Katori - Savanna Sunset

Sudden Death

Famously favouring a self-centered method of film assembly that prioritises successive shots of his own tanned, pumped-up muscles, it's clear then that Jean-Claude Van Damme was barred from Sudden Death's editing suite. Never mind that the action star barely gets to strip down to his vest, there are even long stretches of director Peter Hyams' take on the Die Hard hostage-taking formula in which Van Damme's Darren McCord is nowhere to be seen at all. The film instead preferring to painstakingly describe the mugging cruelty of Powers Boothe's evil Secret Service agent, as he offs a series of wailing hostages while a Stanley Cup final plays out, or the specific seating arrangements of Jean-Claude's onscreen children - Whittni Wright as daughter Emily and Sleepless in Seattle's Ross Malinger as the thoroughly unlikable Tyler. It's as if entire workplace interludes showing McCord in his natural environment have been excised. An unguarded, human touch in his character's depiction having been deemed extraneous. 

This presumed disinterest in the Muscles from Brussels is compounded by a screenplay - credited to Gene Quintano but based on a story by Karen Baldwin, the wife of Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin - that offers almost none of the verbal back-biting you might expect from a stressed Everyman. Similarly, a style of visual arrangement and shot ordering that isn't particularly excited about highlighting cracking, blunt trauma impact doesn't help the action star much either. Director Hyams, also the film's cinematographer, is great at constructing stunning chiaroscuro tableau out of relatively drab sports stadium backrooms but, simultaneously, reveals a complete disinterest in the human stresses that might exist between two terrified combatants. That the closest Sudden Death gets to your standard martial arts throw-down features Van Damme uselessly kicking away at a heavily padded sports mascot seems to underline the deliberate physical ineffectiveness of his character. Generously, this tracks pleasantly with an absurdly contrived (but thoroughly entertaining) interlude in which McCord must step out on to the rink and pose as the Penguins' goalie. Massively out of his depth, despite arm-chair critiques that are repeated to the players by his son, Van Damme's stressed pleading contrasts nicely with the high-speed puck play barreling towards him. 

LTJ Bukem - Demon's Theme // Music

Mike D - True Colors

Orko by Mizmaru Kawahara

Daniel Pemberton - Eternia // Enter Snake Mountain // A Job for He-Man

Masters of the Universe

Barbie for boys, right? That had to be the pitch echoing around Amazon headquarters a few years back. Director Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe - screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham - attempts a similar sort of trick as Greta Gerwig's film by ascribing three-dimensional torments and traumas to plastic, two-dimensional characters. Although not directly dissected within the piece, this Masters of the Universe (like Barbie) posits an unchanging layer of reality, distinct from our own lived experience, that operates with the strange, impenetrable logic of children at play. Soldiers, who cannot understand that they are toys, stand glowering at their mutated opponents; the front line of a war trapped in perpetual stalemate. This impasse holding until the imagination that is arranging these battles returns and completes their game. They don't even have names without him. So, after escaping through a swirling portal in the midst of a coup, Prince Adam of Eternia is stranded on Earth for fifteen years, desperately searching for the power sword he lost in psychedelic transit. 

Like the title character in John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, any interim between the sacking of his kingdom and the mindless toil that greets him in manhood - the Cimmerian endlessly turning an enormous grain mill, singlehandedly; Prince Adam working for HR in a strict, backbiting American office - is deemed extraneous and elided here. Unlike Margot Robbie's doll though, Nicholas Galitzine's pretender to the throne isn't yet the finished article. He hasn't completely assumed the role of beloved action figure. The rotoscoped, cornball antics of Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe television series may exist as a yet-to-be-achieved state of success within Knight's film but, this blaring simulacrum aside, there is something very different about Prince Adam the person. Surrounded by stock characters and bullied incessantly as a child for his perceived weakness, Adam is, as his mother hints, unstuck and atypical in this setting. He doesn't instantly fulfil a role within the wider play setting. He is, in fact, a chimera: a hybrid that combines the imaginative energies that course through this fictional realm with the deeper, much more complicated emotional range of an actual human being. 

Adam's assumption of Grayskull's cosmic power then a condition of an uncanny birthright - his mother a lost astronaut originating from Earth; his father an unsparing, PVC warrior - that allows him to channel and iterate on hackneyed skirmish. This boon isn't then something that can passed freely between the rest of Mattel's product range. Impressively loud, thanks to Daniel Pemberton's thundering score and Brian May's superheroic licks, Masters of the Universe may betray a similar sort of studied irreverence as a Taika Waititi Thor (or last year's A Minecraft Movie for that matter) but Knight's vision is presented with a kind of 5½ inch fluency that registers as celebratory rather than mocking. So, Karg and even Pigboy (as well as Dolph Lundgren in a cameo that plays like a DVD extra) from 1987's Masters of the Universe cohabit with characters plucked out of syndicated cartoons, Little Golden Books, and a Trap Jaw, played by Sam C. Wilson, that could be kin to Chris Cunningham's Mean Angel from 1995's Judge Dredd. This lovingly curated brand maintenance (as that is exactly what this is) exists within a piece that, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakthrough hit, quotes liberally from the stadium rock wing of the action-fantasy canon: Queen tracks are lifted straight out of Highlander to serve space opera theatrics on loan from Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon. All of which is to say that, in presenting itself as a mutant patchwork of clashing, barely compatible sources, Masters of the Universe 2026 is an appropriately cacophonous adaptation of a 1980s toyline.