The Little Mermaid

While neither as desperate nor as tragic as Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale source, Rob Marshall's live action The Little Mermaid does manage to capture a similar sense of longing - one that echoes beyond the confines of the frustrated, courtly love story that sits at the centre of the film. Marshall's remake, written by David Magee, tips its hand with its photorealistic menageries and gargantuan length (135 minutes to the 1989 animated film's 83): this is a feature designed to appeal to the parents who sat through John Musker and Ron Clements' original Disney princess pitch, and want to impart it to their own children. The House of Mouse used to accomplish this self-perpetuating hold on preadolescent imagination by periodically releasing their vaulted classics to cinemas, allowing a new audience to be swept up in the heavily merchandised stories of America's deathless mass media conglomerate. So while streaming (and home video before it) has effectively rendered this strategy obsolete, it has also allowed the Walt Disney Company to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the blockbuster re-imaginings that might tempt an audience back into theatres for an unburnished, first-run haul.

Whatever riches The Little Mermaid ends up claiming for its own subaqueous grotto, the film itself is a significant step-up from recent regurgitations of the Disney Renaissance. Unlike Guy Ritchie's pantomime Aladdin or Bill Condon's karaoke Beauty and the Beast, Mermaid has, in Halle Bailey, an actress and performer skilled enough to transition from playing a moment to singing about it. A feat accomplished - if behind the scenes clips are to be believed - whilst perched on top of human beings clad in blue screen suits acting as stones. It helps Bailey that her mermaid, Ariel, is unusually forthright for a Disney princess. She chases after her wants, making ill-advised and potentially ruinous sacrifices rather than just letting everything happen around her. Ariel doesn't just participate in her story then, she continuously generates it. The character consistently making risky decisions based on desire and, thanks to tweaks made to the previous telling, physically striking back at her slinking tormentor. So where does longing play a part in this obviously triumphant film? Rather than have our thwarted heroine melt away into sea spume, it is her father, Javier Bardem's King Triton, who must contend with heart break. His youngest child grows up and moves away, leaving his world behind. The solace for this weeping monarch, and the blubbering parents in the audience, is that they have seen Ariel, the daughter, tested and transformed from a scheming teenager into a young woman radiant enough to win the adulation of strangers. 

ADMO - Dream Link

Doctor Doom by Mike Becker

Altered Sigh - Wandering

Darkman

Reduce Darkman to its broadest strokes and you have a film that sounds very much like Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop: a hideously disfigured man attempts to reconnect with his humanity whilst battling corporate executives (drunk on dreams of skyscrapers as far as the eye can see) and the criminals in their employ. In terms of execution though, director Sam Raimi trades the Motor City madness for a much more deliberately screwy tone that combines the chilly portent of radio crime dramas and Universal monster movies of the 1930s with the rubbery physicality of a Tex Avery cartoon. Roughed up and left for dead after his fiancée leaves the wrong coffee-stained document in his possession, Liam Neeson's Dr Peyton Westlake finds himself raging in the shadows. His face has been burnt down to a chattering skull; his hands zapped until they are unfeeling bone. 

This deranged doctor, now wrapped up in gauze like James Whale's The Invisible Man, uses what remains of the artificial skin experiments he had been trialling to trick and deceive the heavies who detonated his life. Although lumbered with adult certificates on its original release, Darkman seems tame even when compared to Tim Burton's much more leniently sanctioned Batman from the previous year. Despite a disparity in exhibition notice that does not favour Darkman, there's nothing in Raimi's film as purely distressing as Jerry Hall's tranquilised turn as a melted moll in Burton's blockbuster. Presumably, the reticence to go lower with the film's age rating has more to do with Bill Pope's deliberately manic visual language or Bud S Smith and David Stiven's harried editing style? A trip to a funfair, once Westlake has perfected a facsimile of his own pre-scourging face and reconnected with his grieving girlfriend, lurches with the anxieties and irritations of forced festivity long before Neeson's Doc finds himself wailing in torment because his fabricated face has begun to bubble. 

Danny Elfman - The Plot Unfolds (Dancing Freak)

Moose Dawa - Feather Flip

Wolverine by Frank Miller (with Matt Battaglia)

Happy Diving - Mikey's Rules

Blur - The Narcissist

The Long Riders

Repeated throughout Walter Hill's The Long Riders is the notion that, at their core, the James-Younger gang are belligerents, still doing their bit to fight for an already vanquished Confederacy. It's a phoney sort of romanticism that, quite apart from the aims of their parent herrenvolk, registers as an excuse; a way for these criminals to, all too easily, achieve a kind of folk hero status in territories still reeling from their abject and no doubt humiliating defeat. Written by Bill Bryden and Steven Phillip Smith, as well as the actors playing Jesse and Frank James, James and Stacy Keach, The Long Riders is a fragmented and episodic experience. It's an elliptical piece that simultaneously feels like a dog-eared bank robber rambling through their most beloved escapades and a much longer television series that has been chopped down to squib-riddled action and the connective tissue between these eruptions. Long Riders is a beautiful-looking film too; Ric Waite's cinematography often of a piece with Barry Lyndon or The Duellists in how verdant and untouched greens are used to state, definitively, that we are in the past. 

Largely focused around a series of cack-handed attempts by the Pinkerton detective agency to put an end to the James-Younger gang, Long Riders uses these strike-breaking mercenaries to generate a genuine (rather than just an assumed) sympathy for the central stick-up artists. The James-Younger gang are bold in their crimes while still adhering to a strangled sort of code of honour. By comparison the Pinkertons are bushwhackers who hide in long grass, shooting through anything or anyone who just so happens to be between them and their quarry. Children burn in their homes after malfunctioning smoke bombs are tossed, unannounced, through their homestead windows; pig farmers are blasted to pieces on their own land, judged instantly guilty by agents who haven't even established the presence of their prey. As in Hill's previous film, The Warriors, the establishment is presented as a lurking system of dehumanisation and cruelty, one so incredibly resourced and protected that it needn't worry about the particulars of anyone they are inadvertently exterminating. Long Riders goes one further too. Unlike The Warriors, which failed to draw a line between the actions of David Patrick Kelly's Rogues gang and an agitating NYPD, Long Riders explicitly links Jesse James' assassins with the Pinkertons. Nicholas Guest's Robert Ford is a spurned fanboy acting on shadowy orders and hoping to claim a substantial prize by betraying the man he formerly looked up to. 

Ry Cooder - The Long Riders

Zangief by Quasimodox

Keith Mansfield - Grandstand

VIQ - Red Night

Ready or Not

It's difficult to not immediately compare Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not to Adam Wingard's 2011 stunner You're Next. Both films feature an Australian actress (both veterans of the never-ending seaside soap opera Home and Away) racing around a massive mansion pursued by murderous in-laws armed with crossbows. In her Wingard directed showcase, Sharni Vinson had to cope with shrieking subordinates and an ever-changing landscape of intergenerational loyalties. Samara Weaving's Grace is less encumbered, obliged to slink around an unfamiliar household while still wearing the remains of her wedding dress. Where Vinson got to tap into an expertise for mangling (one that no film since has expected of the actress), Weaving instead runs an emotional gamut, scrunching up her makeup model good looks as she forces her shredded gown though a succession of shocks and snares. Of the two, Ready or Not proves to be the lighter proposition. Its characters are caricatured and confused rather than sexually deviant trust fund children who climb all over each other while their mother rots inches from their rut. As well, and despite a large cast of bumbling oafs, Ready or Not does not adopt the tick 'em off structure that so electrified You're Next either. Grace's initiations into the pacts that underline the fortunes of her husband's parlour game obsessed family are instead centered around a harried avoidance. Ready or Not then greedily holds onto its ingrates and cack-handed buffoons, denying Grace a piecemeal vengeance just so her tormentors can suddenly ripen during the thwarted ritual that closes the film.

Daði Freyr - Whole Again

ＪＰＪジェイ・ピー - Wave Sequence

The Transformers #1 (UK) by Geoff Senior

Emil Rottmayer - Burn

Evil Dead Rise

Cursed with a wraparound that sets up precisely nothing of interest and a toothy volume of the Necronomicon that looks like it's escaped from Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter sequel (presumably the many rubbery DVD special editions issued by Anchor Bay have rendered the original design quaint in the eyes of these filmmakers), Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise is, otherwise, an excellent modern update of tape era horror. Rather than have a gang of semi-strangers abandon themselves to a rundown cabin in the deepest darkest woods, Rise builds itself around a single-parent family's attempts to escape a dilapidated apartment complex. These victims are not brought together by strange social obligation or misbegotten romantic overtures, they are all, instead, bonded in blood. These deeper connections trap them in cracked rooms, demanding that they fight and fight until their dying breath. So, after a sacred burial site is disturbed by a crate-digging teenager (the mausoleum in question explicitly cross-pollinating Sam Raimi's more animistic mayhem with the strained Judeo-Christian efforts to constrain it), a particularly cruel demon is unleashed into this mouldering would-be demolition site. 

Writer-director Cronin uses this atypical, for this series at least, set-up as a way to pick and prod at a household's worth of strained relationships. A pair of prickly teenagers aside, Alyssa Sutherland's Ellie, the mother in this group, feels abandoned by her sister. Lily Sullivan's Beth, the sibling in question, has sacrificed her own personal life (or perhaps more accurately, the familial aspect of it) in her efforts to climb the ladder in the concert touring industry. This ambition, clearly dear to Beth, is summed up in stark, reproachful language by Ellie. Remarks that, given how the building's other residents refer to Beth, Ellie does not keep to herself. In the original Raimi films, the possessed bodies of former friends and lovers were transformed into engines of pure torment. This violent mockery goes beyond just humorous torture in Cronin's instalment. The afflicted creatures attacking the ever-dwindling survivors are not simply spirits puppeteering the meat of a lost family member, they're an intelligence that has sunk into the memories and prejudices of their hosts, able to vomit up insults that genuinely sting. Beth clearly does believe she has failed in her obligations as both a sister and as an Aunt. Rise's Deadites never let her hear the end of it. 

Samia - Sea Lions

ADMO - Always

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Disney's Marvel films no longer need to introduce or describe their heroes. We're so deep into the never-ending machinations of the various phases that the idea of a central character has become outmoded or even useless. Rather than just focus on either of the title heroes, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania also has to find space and axis for Michelle Pfeiffer's quantum cast away Janet Van Dyne, Michael Douglas' ant enthusiast Hank Pym, and Kathryn Newton as Cassandra Lang, Ant-Man's ebullient daughter. This overabundance of gallantry can't help but affect the basic language of Peyton Reed's film: shots and assembly must account for several distinct and constantly evolving perspectives, often in the same scene. Take this group-based coverage and add to it a fantastical sub-atomic realm that must be created with purely digital tools and you have a film that often feels unduly synthetic and theatrical in its presentation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being directed at a mise-en-scène that feels innately disconnected from human view and touch. We're seeing a foreground space of abandoned actors having to imagine their immediate surroundings while a cauldron of background information swirls behind them. Quantumania is built to be fantastical but it's not a psychedelia any one of the onscreen people seem to be actively experiencing. 

Division Street - Reflections (feat. VIQ)

Ratboys - Black Earth, WI

Ryu by Quasimodox

Adieu Aru - Innocence

Cat Chaser

A film entirely lacking in a main character who behaves decisively. Instead larcenous events spin out of control with multiple unclarified players appearing, out-of-the-blue, then disappearing just as quickly. Occasionally, these roomy suits find the time to hassle Peter Weller's laid-back former marine before they permanently exit the proceedings. Adapted from Elmore Leonard's 1982 novel, Cat Chaser initially proposes an American soldier traumatised by his participation in the Dominican Civil War who has become fixated upon a young woman who he believes saved his life. The film begins with a glimpse of these deeply internalised events: the memories of Weller's George Moran are a fast cut black-and-white montage that adopts the frenzied visual language of an embedded war reporter. The camera of cinematographer Anthony B Richmond crowds at the feet of this soldier as he fires heedlessly at rooftops, our perspective that of a cowering journalist pinned down by unseen assailants. 

Fleeting and barely intelligible as anything other than vivid (but bullet point) trauma, this nightmare is one of the few moments where the manic hand of director Abel Ferrara feels truly detectable. Sweat-inducing night terrors barely established, the film then abandons itself to staid and leisurely noir, overseen by an elderly, omniscient voice-over that often works against the hacked-up highlights that are appearing on screen. Despite a striking opening gambit Cat Chaser almost instantly becomes a film preoccupied with voluminous hotel rooms and the rigid bodies that inhabit them. The smart aleck clip of Leonard's dialogue is broadcasting but it doesn't have any of the author's moment-to-moment intrigue to anchor it. Another sign of life does (eventually) make itself known though, just as the central swindle has begun to circle the drain. Charles Durning's overripe henchman Jiggs Scully discovers in himself a streak of real cruelty: a gloating murderous smugness exacerbated by whispering pistols and his proximity to suitcases filled with folded fortune. 

The Smashing Pumpkins - Starla

Forhill - Wither

Ben Kenobi by Artyom Trakhanov

Scream VI

It seems churlish to criticise a Scream sequel for being so relentlessly self-referential. After all, the entire series is built out of its characters' acute awareness that the slasher movies they have experienced as viewers can now be used as ammunition against the costumed assailants trying to stab them. The frazzled lectures of each film's terminally aware film freak then function as pitch meetings: the fiction itself speaking to its audience about how they can expect events to be framed from that point on. They either lay out all the twists and turns, with an ironic inflection, or firmly establish a daunting step-by-step that will then be subverted. By Scream VI though, co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, this sustained commitment to metatextual reproduction has transformed into navel-gazing. Despite a New York setting, this is a strangely routine sequel. An instalment happy to churn, adoringly, through the sights and sounds of its own immediate predecessors rather than, say, the 1970s and 1980s horror films that defined the (by now long forgotten) tape rental era. So while Wes Craven's Scream 2 might have featured a sequence based around screenwriter Kevin Williamson's memories of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Scream VI simply regurgitates the invincible supporting cast and university setting of its own ancient ancestor, Scream 2.

Moose Dawa - Fantasi