The Death of Robin Hood

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood is a film of two halves and, as it happens, two aspect ratios. The first, weaker section is a muddy, 'scope reorganisation of Sherwood Forest mythology with Hugh Jackman's gruff outlaw living in a fog-shrouded wilderness, pursued by the youthful descendants of his many victims. In this pointedly revisionist telling Robin Hood does not redistribute wealth from corrupt nobles and is instead a pitiless bandit who has killed more people than he cares to count. As well as clawing the life out of the middle-aged men attempting to settle some forgotten score, Robin is pressed (only very lightly) in this section to kill a woman and blast an arrow through the head of a child. This latter detail placing Jackman's Hood in the same cinematic company as Henry Fonda's Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West or Clint Eastwood's William Munny from Unforgiven. They are all men who have indulged too greatly in their evil and cannot, therefore, hope for redemption. 

The muck-caked misery of this opening act is somewhat marred then by an approach to violence that teeters on the absurd, with Jackman's ferocious highwayman able to force torches through the blubbering, blancmange-like bodies of his enemies. Presumably a front-end packed with such gruesome incident is a sop to back-end that is almost completely still and meditative. Sarnoski twists fragmented ballads of courteous outlaws - that date back to the earliest days of the printed press - to arrive at a piece that presents like a half-remembered slither of Arthurian legend. The height and width of the film changes to a more European standard while cinematographer Pat Scola fills his frame with landscapes that are crafted out of faces. So, although Jackman's snarling, horizontal Santa struggles to come to terms with his truly awful past, Jodie Comer's prioress and Faith Delaney's Little Margaret are seen to bask in the strange stability that this chained animal offers. Unable to lift a weapon or otherwise retreat from this Avalonian isle, Jackman's Hood detaches from his mainland persona and begins talking through thoughts and feelings that are unencumbered by levity or cod psychoanalytical insight. Instead, we have the final address of a monster teetering on the edge of an oblivion proposed, centuries earlier, by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius. 

Mitch Murder - Hurricane

Tarn by IBI

Sakanaction - Wasurerarenaino

Black Magic M-66

Very loosely based on the "Booby Trap" chapter from Masamune Shirow's Black Magic series, the mangaka's debut work in the comics field, Black Magic M-66 dispenses with the self-published story's interest in Venusian political intrigue, preferring instead to transplant an interlude regarding doll-faced robots into a more familiar, near future setting. As well, and unlike other concurrently produced adaptations of Shirow's work, Black Magic has the writer-illustrator's fingerprints all over it. He wrote, storyboarded (these delightful scribbles later released in their own right by Shirow's Japanese publisher, Seishinsha), and co-directed the OVA with Hiroyuki Kitabuko, ensuring that this video cassette release captures a career at a specific moment - when his interests where attractively drafted women in tense cyberpunk environments; long before pornographic art books with overly expressive names like Greaseberries became the totality of his output. 

Although Shirow's original work prefigures the release of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator by a year, the malfunctioning and much more easily defeated androids of his amateur work didn't have any specific targets programmed into their circuit brains, instead driven by a petty vindictiveness planted via psychic suggestion. For this breathless, rental tape feature the M-66 cyborgs are redesigned as armoured marionettes, capable of moving their human-like bodies in impossibly fluid ways, and tasked with eliminating a helpless damsel who is introduced in her underwear. Essentially one long chase sequence, with an investigative reporter named Sybel as the protector character, Black Magic represents something of an ideal in OVA releases: it lifts liberally from big screen sources - Aliens, Blade Runner and First Blood are all in the mix - but this material is explored in ways that would be almost impossible for live action filmmaking of that period to portray. So not only do implacable cyborgs toss around soldiers (and their armoured transport) with wild abandon but futuristic buildings contort and collapse around our hapless heroines, leaving them dangling on scaffolding above a neon-lit abyss while a glitching Machinenmensch closes in. 

Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer - Mad Technology feat. Method Man

Optimus Prime by Birdie

Luci Gang - Headlock

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Well acquainted with life-altering misfortune himself, director Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth makes a point of rubbing its audience's nose in all of the upsetting bloodshed that would otherwise, in a more traditional telling, be occurring off-stage. We are compelled to gaze at bodies - women and children - bloody and bent at uncanny angles, the film offering up a blunt human horror that is evocative of crime scene photography. Jon Finch - a former reservist for British special forces and a Hammer Films veteran - plays Shakespeare's title character, at least initially, with a mod insouciance. His is a much younger Macbeth, a newly elevated lord who has quickly ascertained that he can beat a path to Scotland's throne with increasingly daring acts of violence. Egged on by his equally grasping wife, played by Francesca Annis, Macbeth finds himself in his monarch's bed chamber, his fingers clasped around a dirk. 

The murder of Nicholas Selby's King Duncan then is portrayed as the outcome of an acute kind of mania: an intense and hypnotic greed has bewitched Macbeth, urging him to act as fulcrum for the predestined bloodshed that has been sung to him by hags. He stabs his naked king as if in a trance, his body acting on auto-pilot. The guilt that Macbeth then struggles to come to terms with, for this murder and the many that follow, manifests in Polanski's film not so much as explicitly supernatural occurrences, rather as figments of an imagination fired by brain lacerating trauma. The ghost of a former friend, Martin Shaw's Banquo, who appears only to Macbeth in a room crowded with feasters, is readily organised within this filthy, miserable telling as the hallucinatory experience of a man suffering through a psychotic break - this subconscious strata explicitly accessed within the piece by the decision to transform Shakespeare's soliloquies into a whispered internal monologue. 

While Lady Macbeth slips away into a stupor - Annis, naked with her eyes locked on the audience that compelled her to commit these acts - the new king does eventually come to terms with himself as a kind of mythic entity that cannot easily be vanquished. Another visit to the Weyward Sisters convinces Macbeth he is living inside a riddle that indicates an apparent invincibility. Armoured battles with the opposing underlings who arrive to end his reign are therefore short and brutal; Macbeth believing himself to be unbeatable and Finch doing an excellent job of portraying exactly that. With respect to the real-life tragedies experienced by Polanski immediately prior to the filming of The Tragedy of Macbeth, Terence Bayler's Macduff would seem to take on a more personal dimension, since Macduff's wife and children have been slaughtered on the orders of a madman. This information is relayed to him as he stands before a massing army; his would-be monarch pleading with the sobbing father to get a hold of himself. 

The moment is both public and tinged with shame then, as if the devastated Macduff should, for the benefit of all assembled, take the news on the chin and just instantly accept that everybody he loves is now no more. There's a sense then, come a finale in which Macbeth's bleeding body claws at its neck for a head that no longer resides atop it, that the onscreen Macduff is delivering a coup de grâce that Polanski himself never could: striking Charles Manson's head from his shoulders before a crowd of solemn well-wishers. This reading though elides the fact that, in his relentless pursuit of success, this strangely charismatic Macbeth has, like Macduff, come up short in his obligations to his family. Macbeth, by this point, has abandoned an uncooperative wife to a gaggle of doctors and failed to be present when her life has then hung in the balance. Macbeth and Macduff are therefore united in a shared damnation for their absence. So, rather than transpose our feelings for this pre-sexual assault case Polanski (who, it's worth noting, co-wrote this adaptation with theatre critic Kenneth Tynan) onto any one specific side of these onscreen combatants, perhaps these battling, equally matched husbands could be assessed as warring aspects within a grieving widower. Shakespeare's four hundred year old play then having been reinterpreted as autobiographical psychodrama. 

CoryaYo - Dollar Bin

Vince DiCola - Death of Optimus Prime

Optimus Prime by Daniel Warren Johnson

Earth Tongue - Dimly Lit Cadaver

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Seemingly just because he can, Gian Maria Volonté's police inspector pays a visit to his wealthy mistress, played by Florinda Bolkan, slitting her throat during a sex game. Before the act of murder we get a brief sense of a strange, sadomasochistic relationship between the two; a dynamic based around the power and access that this high-flying police officer presumes to wield. While his leisure class lover bleeds out, the Inspector makes only cursory, even contradictory attempts to conceal his presence at this location: he paws at drawer knobs with his fingers wrapped in a handkerchief but makes no such effort when cleaning arterial blood from his body in his victim's shower or when he handles her telephone. Not that it matters. When called upon, in a professional capacity, to examine his own crime scene the Inspector, conspicuously, places his fingers on nearly everything. 

Anything he doesn't touch while on the clock, that still bears his mark from the initial offence, is hand-waved by snivelling subordinates who swear blind they have witnessed events that never actually took place. Writer-director Elio Petri (co-writing with Ugo Pirro)'s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is very upfront then about the willing ignorance and abject inconsistency that powers authoritarian systems that dovetail with the repressive governance of fascism. Entrenched in his new position as the chief of a political intelligence division, the Inspector rants and raves about the imagined lawbreaking of the working classes; his need for complete and total control over the thoughts and feelings of his fellow citizens. Rest assured though that crimes committed by himself, and men like him, can be safely ascribed elsewhere. Pinned on student anarchists or homosexuals, if need be. After all, there's an entire machine in place that is designed to do exactly that. 

The Inspector goes even further though, introducing alibis and excuses that exonerate these usual suspects, primarily as a way of asserting his own unassailable position within a police force that aspires to be totalitarian. Daring the system to make an example of him, he makes only lightly guarded confessions to other looters, including an immediate superior who quickly changes the subject. Despite his new posting, the Inspector returns to his old offices and relentlessly places himself in the path of this floundering criminal inquiry. Flashbacks push their way into the piece, building a more complete picture of his relationship with the victim too - specifically, the pathetic emotional turmoil he experienced when he felt that his authority was being challenged. None of this matters though. Fascism is a pyramid scheme after all. Everyone who takes part shares the blame and, therefore, those who teeter near the top cannot be seen to do wrong. The ruling party, in this case a braying police force staffed with dead-eyed, middle-aged slobs packed into bum-freezer suits, cannot suffer any shred of power to slip through their fingers. 

Ennio Morricone - Miraggio Secondo

Superman by Ashley Wood

Jalen Ngonda - Hang It On the Shelf

Bap Theory - One Day

Repulsion

It's a curious thing to come across ad copy for a film that seems so completely at odds with the experience of actually watching it. The deliberately feminine cursive adorning Repulsion's one sheet poster describes Catherine Deneuve's Carol as virginal and inexperienced, as if her very obvious fear of men is based in some unconscious desire to remain untouched; her sexuality untapped. Watching director Roman Polanski's film, not only is Carol's reticence around every man she meets entirely understandable - all are aggressive and demanding, attempting to overwhelm Carol with either breathless declarations or physically with their actual bodies - but her heaving disgust is, seemingly, symptomatic of a terrible lived experience rather than maidenly neurosis. 

Left alone in a crumbling, Kensington flat by an older sister who has absconded with a married man, Carol almost instantly begins to unravel. Her living space is filled with flies and widening cracks; a lurking, phantom rapist appears at night, clawing at our helpless heroine. Quite unable to take care of herself, Carol's psychological state regresses a step or two back into a choking, sarcophagal childhood. One that Carol isn't, and hasn't ever been, equipped to escape. We are shown brief glimpses of a cracked, family photograph throughout Repulsion. All the frozen subjects stare into the camera, posing for the picture. All except for a child, dressed and arranged very much like Carol is in adulthood, whose eyes bore holes in the back of an older man's head. An older man who, if not exactly the same, is certainly a dead ringer for Carol's violent, spectral intruders. 

Chico Hamilton - The Dealer

Benny The Butcher - Summer '26

Transformers Victory: Hero Set Battle by Guido Guidi

Alabama Shakes - Shoegaze

Denzel Curry & Kenneth Blume - DIFFERENCE ft. Yebba

Walker

Ed Harris, dressed as an itinerant minister, stands rigid; his eyes bulging with mania as he preaches the good, indigenous-peoples-trampling word of white, American exceptionalism. Set in 19th century Central America, Walker, director Alex Cox's final fling with the Hollywood studio system, is an excoriating description of the wrong-headed madness that has gripped (and continues to ensnare) all manner of wealthy, upper class weirdos who see the world beyond their borders as a proving ground that can be twisted and tortured for their personal benefit. After a farcical coup attempt in Mexico, Walker wavers between settling down with his beloved, Marlee Matlin's Ellen, or journeying to Nicaragua to ensure that shipping lanes remain available to American business magnates during a civil war. 

Despite his obvious pomposity, there's a sweetness to the relationship between Ellen and Walker, perhaps because the sign language they use to communicate remains private and unknowable to the bores who blast Walker with their own, psychotic take on American foreign policy. The charmingly forthright Ellen is therefore able to castigate her blundering fiancé in secret and, when her death removes any other future for this hireling, Walker can sob and sign uselessly over her body while it lies in state. A tearful Walker is now finally able to completely embrace the dreadfulness of his bloodthirsty destiny. Harris plays Walker, a real-life mercenary obsessed with Manifest Destiny, as a man completely deranged by his own baffling sense of superiority. The United States and the democracy they claim to wield are, quite rightly, recognised as a religious fervour that empowers incredible deviancy. 

So, while early passages of Cox's film are positively Pythonesque in their arrangement - Michael Palin and Terry Jones' Ripping Yarns, specifically - later sequences, in which Walker talks up slavery while relics and pop-culture signifiers of the 20th century begin to bleed back into proceedings, are built on a similar sort of reckless, colonial misadventure as seen in films like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Cox's film begins with the Universal Pictures globe, wreathed in Van Allen belts and proudly trumpeting its association with the MCA Company, then ends with Harris, directly addressing the camera, declaring that the United States will never leave countries like Nicaragua alone. Flimflam speeches from Ronald Reagan, intercut with images of a Nicaraguan wedding party shot to pieces in the 1980s by Contras, follow over the film's end credits. A creative decision that feels not so much brave but, in a 2026 where superhero blockbusters are routinely shelved for tax breaks, unrepeatably daring.