Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver

Rather than a full-blooded sequel, Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver is the previously unseen, feature-length third act for its predecessor, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire. The films are two pieces of the same Games Workshop-does-Star Wars whole and, unfortunately, the hard split separating the twins invites strange, structural imbalances in the individual fragments rather than allow for the wriggle room required to stage two successive, complimentary conclusions. Experienced apart on release day(s) - rather than streamed later, when both parts can be viewed back-to-back - the disinclination to twist and reassess the pieces on the board between instalments is disappointing but understandable. Scargiver is not a sequel, in the traditional sense. Instead it is the other half of a science fiction saga focused on crawling movement and noisy portraiture. Ed Skrein's fascistic Admiral Noble is a case in point: bloodily vanquished in the previous chapter, he returns here in the exact same human body he died in, despite the glowing, biomechanical juices that had to be pumped into his chopped-up corpse to revive it. 

Writer-director-cinematographer Zack Snyder (co-writing with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten) then deliberately foregoes his own grimdark approximation of Darth Vader to anchor this finale, preferring instead to shoot and frame the emaciated, Buccal drained Admiral as sacrilegious iconography: the diseased Christ that adorns the Isenheim Altarpiece returned, unnaturally, to life. As before, the subsistence stakes that powered Seven Samurai make very little sense when the aggressive party is an advancing, galaxy-spanning empire rather than a gang of starving noblemen who have turned to banditry. Although the assailed farmers pack their crop around key buildings, daring their invaders to incinerate their prize, Noble and his bovver boys are, as it happens, more than happy to detonate the grain. Once this idea of a battle between two armies running on empty stomachs is voided, all that remains is palace intrigue (both Noble and Sofia Boutella's Kora have been lieutenants in the orbit of Fra Fee's higher power) being played out, inconclusively, at the expense of Space Scandinavians. Wheat does remain important to Snyder though, specifically as an adored, photographic subject. The director's eye - which could, in short, be described as that of a muscle obsessed Malick - luxuriates in the slow motion wave of this grass and the straining, human hardship required to harvest it. 

Hannah Frances - Husk

Adieu Aru - Harmonium

Beavis and Butt-Head by Kensausage

Hannah Frances - Keeper of the Shepherd

Civil War

In one sense writer-director Alex Garland's Civil War does to the landscape and visual shorthand of the United States of America that which Hollywood has, gleefully, done to umpteen second and third-world countries over the last half century: it turns a fractured nation into a backdrop for fantastically choreographed terror. Civil Wars runs counter to any stirring notion of American exceptionalism or other birthright specialness that might demand that great pains be taken when massaging this future shocked scenario for the screen, grounding the unfolding implosion in the political or ideological turmoil of today. Although, in fairness to anyone expecting just that, Nick Offerman's cowering, fascistic Commander in Chief is deliberately and obviously reminiscent of President Donald Trump, that should-be jailbird gearing up for a second-term push with threats that he intends to make the position into a lifelong one. 

Regardless, Washington DC and its faux Grecian pillars are cast as Berlin circa 1945, the bullet-riddled prize soon to be claimed by the advancing armies of either Texas or California, a pair of secessionist states enjoying a marriage of convenience under a two star flag. This decision to cast states with diametrically opposed political identities as unified belligerents (or saviours, come to think of it) speaks to the overall flatness Englishman Garland ascribes to his scenario. This American Civil War isn't beholden to anything other than the prolonged description of detonation. The conflict harrowing ranch land with limed pits isn't presented as an opportunity to chide or congratulate the audience based on their own, personal leanings. It is, instead, free licence for military-aged men to do the most appalling things to each other. To wield the instant power associated with the firearms and 5.56 ammunition they have stockpiled over the preceding years. 

Aggressors, we see, are often motivated by little more than the idea that somebody else is manning an opposing, situational location. Kirsten Dunst's grizzled war photographer Lee and Cailee Spaeny's analog understudy stumble onto a number of these pop-up stand-offs as they close in on the capital. Although every act in Garland's film is framed by the strange, nihilistic amorality of people who translate human horror into beatific, black and white snaps for sunken newspapers, it is clear that, over and over again, these shoot-outs betray zero strategic value. It is simply the case that sightlines exist and both parties have the bullets to burn. Civil War then functioning as a response to the zombie genre that Garland helped resurrect with 28 Days Later: it removes the abstraction of living death to sit with the notion that a great many people genuinely aspire to shoot their neighbours. To hang their bleeding, pulverised bodies off the nearest awning for all to see. And, if none of that sounds particularly appealing, there's an embedded, IMAX assault on hallowed, Pennsylvania Avenue turf that is just as exiting as the one featured in the first video game to call itself Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. 

Suicide - Dream Baby Dream

De La Soul - Say No Go

Godzilla Minus One by Kaitlyn McCulley

Speak No Evil

Speak No Evil is an excruciating experience, a film that comes on like an increasingly sour comedy of manners before, in its dying minutes, lurching into a state of pulverising nightmare. A Danish family meets their Dutch counterpart on a Tuscan holiday. Their connection is brief but vivid, the mousier Danes flattered by the attention heaped upon them by a garrulous doctor, his glamorous wife and their sullen, non-verbal child. So when an invite appears weeks later, beckoning the Danes to Holland for a short break, they happily accept. In constructing this relentless horror show, writer-director Christian Tafrdrup has built a film without any pressure release valves. There is no levity in Speak No Evil. No opportunity to reassess or dismiss the path we appear to be on. The viewer is never given any information or allowed to glimpse any situation that would assuage their most paranoid suspicions about these overfamiliar hosts. Quite the opposite in fact. Although Morten Burian's Bjørn is ill-equipped to do anything but smile passively through a sequence of events that are slipping further and further out of his control, we are acutely aware that the people escalating these trespasses cannot be sated. They, in actual fact, delight in their guest's twisting discomfort. Tension and anxiety are allowed free reign then, growing and swelling far beyond a point where you believe any real person would be wiling to suffer for the sake of appearances. Weakest in its backend, where a contrivance or two in terms of interfamily communication (or lack thereof) stretches credulity beyond breaking point, Speak No Evil still feels indelible simply in terms of how much venom it is able to summon up for characters who are themselves the victims of the most appalling outrages. It's not that Bjørn and Sidsel Siem Koch's Louise are bad people deserving of some transgressive comeuppance, it's that they are so weak-willed, so completely unable to do their job as parents, that inspires genuine loathing. 

Conan le Cimmerien by Florent Desanthèmes

Weyes Blood - Andromeda

Olivia Newton-John - Take Me Home, Country Roads

Whisper of the Heart

Rather than the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-style whimsy promised by a theatrical release poster that depicts our teenage heroine ascending into the sky, a dandified feline on her arm, Whisper of the Heart is instead locked, with its feet firmly on the ground. Although dreamy landscapes untroubled by gravity do (briefly) appear in Yoshifumi Kondo's film, for the most part Whisper exists in packed and cluttered urban spaces. These environments do slowly take on a picturesque quality though, partially thanks to the beautifully painted medium presenting them but also the ups and downs experienced by the lovebird protagonists. Nostalgic in terms of depicting a bygone emotional bandwidth for an older viewer rather than any specific kind of toy. Whisper then deals in contrasts: the physical restraint of living in a box room, trapped under piles of books, or the freedom felt when traversing the vaulting greenery of a nearby hill, tamed by winding, concrete embellishments. 

Whisper does tell its story with the odd fairy tale flourish - bookworm Shizuku Tsukishima follows a haughty cat through the back alleys surrounding an educational campus, pressing deeper into dark, unclaimed scrubland - but these journeys only ever take her from her own, cramped working class neighbourhood to a staggered, upper middle class conclave. The jewel of this gated community is an antique shop that hardly ever seems to be open. Peering though the window, Tsukishima spies all sorts of treasures and claimed curios that immediately fire her idling imagination. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and based on a manga written and illustrated by Aoi Hiiragi, Whisper is a patient, empathetic look at the listlessness experienced by children fast approaching adulthood and not really having any idea what they want to do with themselves. It's not that Tsukishima is a dull person either, she's fit to bursting with ideas inherited from a childhood spent checking out books from her local library. 

Tsukishima feels a responsibility to do something with the incredible creative faculty that she has cultivated, one that isn't always compatible with more immediate concerns, such as the high school entrance exams that are creeping ever closer. As well as exploring and legitimising her own aspirations through sustained hard work, there's also a hint of penance in the punishing schedule that Tsukishima sets for herself when writing her own fantasy story. This contrition apparently some sort of atonement for thinking so little of a boy, Seiji Amasawa, who was (at first) a confounding presence in her life before he, very casually, revealed some deeply romantic hidden depths. Tsukishima seems to note some deficit in herself when considering her prospective boyfriend; some way in which he has raced ahead of her with his own dreams. Come the finale, when Amasawa attempts to gallantly bike the pair up a steep incline, Tsukishima dismounts and begins pushing, stating that she will not be a burden to any man. 

vintageverb - Metallic

VIQ & Altered Sigh - Afraid

Star Wars by Dan Goozee

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies - He Walks By Night

Invention_ - Hood

King Kong Lives

Lethargic and prone to comedic, bug-eyed reaction shots whenever Lamborghinis or similar are being crushed underfoot, King Kong Lives does at least take some massive conceptual swings in its early passages. A decade has passed since Jessica Lange's hirsute suitor was blasted full of holes, by hovering Bell helicopters, before falling off a skyscraper onto the concrete pavement below. Rather than turn the giant ape's bones to powder, this plunge instead landed the Eighth Wonder of the World in a long-term but apparently stable coma. Tended by Linda Hamilton's Dr. Amy Franklin in a mid-80s present day, the sleeping Kong is suddenly found to be in desperate need of both a blood transfusion and a brand new, mechanical heart. Luckily for Kong, Brian Kerwin's earthy adventurer stumbles across another enlarged primate in Borneo. This gorilla, dubbed Lady Kong, is rather shy and retiring, especially when compared to her male namesake. The female of this species, apparently, preferring to brood and sulk rather than thrash about in an impassioned rage. Although farcical in terms of how John Guillermin's sequel accounts for its time skip, there's a certain kind of fun in how the film portrays the scaled-up, day-to-day processes of looking after a pair of enormous apes. Heavy trucks, driven by weekend warriors, bus around rotting fruit while fleets of bulldozers are employed to corral the more placid Ninth Wonder. The real highlight though is an open heart surgery sequence in which Hamilton's doc cracks Kong's ribs with a gleaming, sterilised circular saw before plunging a pacemaker the size of a small van into the titan's chest. It's a shame that the rest of the film has, comparatively, flatlined. 

Joy Division - Dead Souls

Soundwave (with Laserbeak & Ravage) by Geoff Senior

Madara 1000 - Davibez

Hans Zimmer - Gurney Battle

Dune: Part Two

When considering a sequel, or simply how this adaptation of Frank Herbert's intergalactic tragedy might continue, the key moments in the first part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune seemed to be those immediately following Jessica and Paul's escape from the invading Harkonnen armada. Made fugitives and buried under waves of sand, the mother and son wept and argued about their predicament. His previous standing in the feudal solar system smashed, Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides, now strung out on grief as well as an allergic reaction to twinkling narcotics, dreamt of golden violence. An army, under his command, crashing into then over his ivory enemies. Paul saw himself in a trance; dispassionately exterminating the greatest warriors in the galaxy with, seemingly, little effort. The visions travelled deeper into the future, focusing on pyres of burning bodies - either those of his recently ambushed clan or some enemy yet to falter - and himself, beatific and buoyed by the zealotry of berserkers. 

Paul screamed at his mother for making him into the kind of freak who inspires such deranged dedication. For failing to consider the personal toll of the Godhood she had stolen from future generations to give to her son. Jessica consoled her child, reassuring him that he was also the product of his father: a good and decent man, beloved despite his position in a choking, intergalactic royalty. The fallout from this huddle reverberated throughout the remainder of Part One. Rebecca Ferguson's concubine viewing her son with an increasing sense of disassociation and horror as his prophesised reign (slowly) began to take shape. Upon meeting the indigenous Fremen, it's crucial that Jessica's immediate plan is one of escape, using them to contact the smugglers and pirates that she assumes they know, to take them away from the desert planet of Arrakis. Placed in a position of danger and weakness, Jessica refutes the Bene Gesserit whispers that should herald her son's coming, preferring to play it safe and use her considerable martial and political power to go off into hiding. 

It's Paul who hesitates, embracing his visions of victory and, therefore, the slaughter to come. Following a delightful sequence in which Harkonnen scouts, dressed in black blast furnace suits, weightlessly traverse a rock face before meeting their doom, Dune: Part Two quickly settles in with the Fremen; describing the ways in which Paul and Jessica attempt to appeal to their new bedfellows.  Given the choice between euthanasia and drinking a third-eye opening poison, Lady Jessica chooses the latter, transforming herself and her unborn child into a bicephalic creature, one constantly in conversation with itself. In Villeneuve's film, drinking this sanctified Water of Life is very much a real kind of death and, during the ceremony in which her character sips this liquid, Ferguson's surging, shaking Jessica treats it as such. Although the physical body and a trace of its wider, familial connections remain, the original identity is either obscured or outright overwritten by the composite desires of countless, conspiring ancestors and a descendent yet to come. 

In the seconds before the water touches Jessica's lips, the dying Reverend Mother, that the concubine has been recruited to replace, is practically levitating with excitement. Some tiny fragment of herself will outlive this wrinkled physical form, trapped forever in the gorgeous monarch that now crouches captive beneath her. Post-sup, Jessica twists in terror-struck supplication until the cautious woman we met in the previous film is extinguished. The person (or persona) who remains is quick to assume the appropriated robes of her new office, to travel South and stir up war. Her body is adorned with runic spells written in Fremen script; her mouth dripping with manipulation and the threat of impending jihad. In David Lynch's Dune the inner monologues present in Herbert's text became hushed murmurs, whispered over the unfolding action. Villeneuve uses Jessica's pregnancy to relitigate some aspect of this device: questions and their answers carry over uteri landscapes in which an unborn, female messiah stirs. 

Surprisingly, Lynch's film, and the director's wider work, is referenced several times in Villeneuve's sequel. As well as Javier Bardem's Fremen warlord Stilgar inheriting lines specifically drawn from the 1984 movie, we also see a vanquished foe's body crawling with the Arrakian equivalent of hungry, Lumberton ants. The two adaptations even share a similar sort of storytelling apparatus when signposting the disconnect between the Paul who exists happily within the society that has adopted him and the Paul who is willing to use seeded superstition to his advantage, positioning himself as a leader of leaders. Following an attack on a Fremen holy site by Austin Butler's monstrous, albinoid Feyd-Rautha, Duke Leto's son steels himself and follows his mother by drinking the poisonous waters that promise a feminine, extrasensory insight. As Paul lies alone, decoding the toxins he has inflicted on his own body, the strange, structural frequencies of Lynch's film re-emerge: that feeling that a sequence of events has broken down and fresh information with only vague, visual purchase has survived the disruption. 

And so Zendaya's Chani appears from nowhere in a weathered, Arrakian helicopter (of no clear origin) to kneel beside her comatose partner and fulfil a previously unmentioned prophecy that she otherwise wants no part in. Following his reawakening, Paul portrays a kind of religious revelation when dealing with the Fremen. Like his mother before him, caution is abandoned to such a degree that it is clear that the Paul that remains is either, to some extent, reliving an experience he has already dissected then consigned to memory or the young Atreides has transformed into someone so convinced of their impending ascendancy that their every action reads as dangerously impatient. Paul then is a child inhabited by things that are already dead and, therefore, cannot know fear. Regardless, the remaining Atreides are no longer alone and shivering beneath a shifting landscape, they tower above it. Eyes fixed and boring through an atomic fire that they themselves have unleashed. 

Mother and son are now glowering, all-knowing fulcrums; pressing every socio-political and metaphysical advantage available to them to trample an indigenous faith beneath their bloodthirsty decrees. Viewers with a more comprehensive knowledge of Frank Herbert's cosmology might, in Paul's visions of endless, elderly faces, find trace of the path this new emperor will walk over the years (and films) to come; the terrible foresight that demands he make some attempt to take control of the inevitable carnage. Villeneuve though accounts for another, more human perspective to creep in: revulsion. Cursed with a total understanding of his own appalling genealogy, Paul connects with a barbaric, animalistic aspect as a way to reframe his own nature and satisfy his personal need for revenge. When the all-powerful mother and son meet again, their first order of business is this rotten lineage and what it means for their shared future. The Atreides name, the human greatness of a Duke Leto that inspired loyalty and devotion in all of his subjects, has been polluted forever and will, in the fullness of time, sink beneath a flag of boiling, merciless violence. Amen. 

Hans Zimmer - Beginnings Are Such Delicate Times

Endless Withdrawal & .diedlonely - What's Left of Us

Lady Margot Fenrig by zhami

Jon & Vangelis - Horizon

Red Rooms

A young woman sleeps rough in an inner-city alleyway (despite clearly possessing the means to not have to do so) with the intent to stir early then secure herself a gallery seat for the trial of a serial murderer not only accused of killing children but of then broadcasting these crimes to some subterranean, invite-only layer of the internet. She returns day after day, sits in the same seat, boring holes through both the impassive, emotionally deactivated defendant and the grieving families actually affected by these crimes. In terms of divining any sort of meaning or rationale for the behaviour of Juliette Gariépy's Kelly-Anne, the only real clue that writer-director Pascal Plante seems to offer are the online poker games this semi-employed model returns to throughout Red Rooms. It's not just the hard currency these simulated hands facilitate, it's the basic structure of the game, and how it then informs Kelly-Anne's frequently alarming decision making: you're dealt your cards, you then propose a stake based on how likely you believe you are to win, then hold or fold depending on how the game develops. In conversation with a much more forthcoming woman, Laurie Babin's fellow court squatter Clémentine, Kelly-Anne's describes her detached approach to these should-be exciting games of chance. How she will often discontinue matches early to protect her own investment or the ways in which her deliberately cold playstyle contrasts with those who find themselves emotionally entangled and therefore more likely to make mistakes. She lets something crucial slip during these conversations though, perhaps emboldened by her proximity to another person who seems to share her own strange fascinations. This statement the only real insight into a physically fine-tuned person who sips smoothies in her wind-whistled glass house while casually committing identity fraud or cataloguing paedophilic snuff clips. Kelly-Anne doesn't just like to win you see. What she really enjoys is witnessing somebody else lose. 

ADMB - White

Beyoncé - Texas Hold 'Em

Lily-CAT

An unapologetically derivative anime from Studio Pierrot that cross-contaminates the winding, industrial corridors of the Nostromo with the precocious critters that stalked Outpost 31. The OVA's most original aspect then is the dress sense of the doomed passengers: instead of overalls spotted with personal effects, the crew of this deep-space cruiser are bright and preppy; voluminous sweaters are tied over the shoulders of corporate princesses and a pump-action Pinkerton noses about dressed in a Varsity jacket. Hisayuki Toriumi's Lily-CAT (viewed here lumbered with an English language dub courtesy of Carl Macek and Streamline Pictures) often seems to be presenting scenes either out of order or without the kind of connective tissue that, usually, knits a narrative together. So, cats die horribly then reappear as snooping cyborgs or bodies bulge, fit to bursting, clearly intended to be located inside an explosive decompression event before we're reassured that these figures are simply rattling around while an untethered escape vessel tumbles away from its mooring. Confrontations between the expendable, unlikable crew and the pulsing alien infection are blocked strangely too, often without any real sense that the static, gawping figures and the writhing tentacles that menace them are occupying the same space. It's as if Lily-CAT has been constructed by two different teams - one flicking through issues of Olive magazine; the other trying to top the slimy special effects of Rob Bottin - then rudely spliced together. 

Madara 1000 - Clack Bat

The Detective by Hello Berlin

Endless Withdrawal - Losing Sleep

Double Echo - Spectre

Poor Things

Emma Stone and her enormous, bulging eyes play Bella Baxter, the guileless product of a deranged scientific experiment that intertwines the wreckage of a suicidal adult with an infant brain completely untouched by any previous experience. Naturally, the same childlike affect that sees Bella relentlessly hoovering up any and all information also attracts slathering, Victorian bachelors in their droves; each man petitioning to ensnare this innocent but unusually liberated woman. Bella sees and interprets all: a concept reflected in Robbie Ryan's cinematography, whose perspectives range from monochromatic and partially obscured to technicolour and glaring when Bella is at the height of her powers. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written for the screen by Tony McNamara (based on the book of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray), Poor Things very obviously riffs on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with Willem Dafoe's scarred vivisectionist standing in for the Swiss body snatcher. Instead of a sagging but sapient failure scorned by all though, Bella is raven-haired and luminous; courted again and again by a succession of weeping cads who all long to nail her down to their own living quarters. In this sense there's more than a little of Charles Dickens' Estella, the emotionally cool heartbreaker from Great Expectations, to Bella. Like Miss Havisham's icy ward, Bella expresses an avowedly independent form of femininity. Similarly, the emotional terror of being human is decoded with an exacting logic that does not waste a great deal of time consoling with the heartbroken men she leaves in her wake. Mark Ruffalo's Duncan Wedderburn soaks up the lion's share of the damage, slowly transforming from a Terry-Thomas-style scoundrel into a figure of shrieking farce. His boastful cocksmanship coming up short when faced with the insatiable appetite of a person locked into a relentless, data-gathering phase. 

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies - My Name is Death

Gurney Halleck by Artyom Trakhanov

A Tribe Called Quest - Jazz (We've Got) // Buggin' Out

Al Dali - Hittin' Switches

The Butterfly Murders

The Butterfly Murders, director Tsui Hark's dreamy feature debut, takes place in the aftermath of a martial arts apocalypse that has, quite apparently, wiped out scores of the tight-knit, chivalrous adventurers who usually find themselves battling across similar, Shawscope frames. Hark and cinematographer Fan Gam-yuk's picturesque depiction of rural China is, therefore, one littered with the remains of these doomed warriors and the carrion insects that feast upon their rotting bodies. This viewing, done so under the less than ideal conditions of an ancient Laserdisc rip with perfunctory, burned-in English subtitles, had the unintended effect of adding a layer of analogue obliqueness to a film already plotted around incomprehensible deceptions and strange, ulterior motives. What is clear though, despite the smudgy delivery system, is that Hark came out of the gate with an obvious gift for staging and shot design: the deserted fort, where a great deal of the non-underground action takes place, is wrapped in butterfly nets to keep the poisonous lepidopterans out; the billowing, diffused photography of high-end advertisement is gifted not just an organic but an axial purchase within the piece. Dotted with nature doc close-ups of massing moths, it does eventually become apparent that Hark views his disturbed, distrusting heroes with a similar sort of detached fascination. Motivation is rarely parsed and accords are fleeting; instead these costumed heroes strike and claw at each other, to no clear advantage, until their fragile arenas collapse in on them. 

Nina Simone - Tomorrow Is My Turn

Adam Hunter by grendelsagrav

Foewi - Rosebud

The Marvels

The Marvels has every opportunity to (literally) sing: not only is the film premised on the surprisingly high stakes-presenting idea that each of the three central heroes (Brie Larson's Captain Marvel, Teyonah Parris' Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani's Ms. Marvel) can switch places, instantly, if they happen to use their light-bending powers at the same time but a significant stop along the way takes place on a planet where it is customary to serenade rather than converse. Unfortunately for Nia DaCosta's salmagundi sequel, and really the vast majority of the Marvel cinematic universe at this point, the tease of these ideas is more important than following them through to any of the terrifying (or even just satisfying) conclusions they seem to guarantee. The situational vice versa that should see each of the Marvels constantly swapping in and out of perils explicitly tuned to a completely different power scale does make itself known in the film's early action sequences; the relatively underpowered, street-level Kamala Khan is thrown into much higher stakes scenarios than she is equipped to deal with but her presence there is quickly nixed before a genuine sense of life-threatening danger can be generated. 

The Marvels does even (briefly) toy with the idea that Larson's superhero can have her powers leeched away by Zawe Ashton's strangely hesitant Kree warlord but, as is expected, this neutering is so brief that it barely registers in the grand scheme of the overall piece. As for the singing planet, well, before any of these interlopers are forced to awkwardly trill and warble their way through the basics of communication they have already been placed in the company of a handsome alien prince who is happy to talk to these humans in their own, non-musical language. Post-Downey Jr., Disney's Marvel films seem to be premised on a pointed overindulgence that has recently tipped into complete wastefulness, one that denies characters any opportunity to really suffer or be put into positions where they are forced to transform themselves, either physically or emotionally. Although entire planets blink in and out of existence, the stakes have never seemed so low or so easily resolved. In one of the sequel stings, drip-fed as the credits roll, the displaced Rambeau finds herself in an entirely different superhero universe, one that allows her the instant opportunity to meet an alternative version of the mother she lost to cancer. These kind of interactional possibilities, which, at a minimum, should deal with hesitance if not outright horror, present as misshapen and repulsively unreal when the dead are not only returned to life but, in this instance, given exciting superpowers as well.

Spider-Man / Kraven by Corey Lewis

DJ BOG X DJ AKOZA - Inferno

YOUTH 83 - Lane

Madame Web

Although mortifying in terms of how the film splays itself, presenting the executive-level interference for all to see, Madame Web does offer a few stray notes of grim fascination. These blips amuse in ways beyond the reflexive chuckles associated with the distracted (presumably intended as neurodivergent) energy that Dakota Johnson brings to her Cassandra Webb, or an approach to dialogue that is so purely expositional as to be absurd. Director SJ Clarkson's film tips a different hand early, before it has even begun in fact, with a new Columbia Pictures logo that rushes through the various incarnations of the torch-bearing Goddess that have played ahead of the films distributed by the company over the last century. Embedded within this collage are several, gleaming black and white drafts, instantly evocative of the comic-strip serials synonymous with the studio's early years. Following this history lesson, Madame Web tumbles into a scenario straight out of those episodic, 1930s adventures: a middle-class white person snooping around in the darkest corners of South America then coming to a sticky end, but not before their offspring has inherited an animistic power-set from the secretive locals. This sequence - complete with a squad of Peruvian shaman, imitating Steve Ditko's web-head with bodies painted red and muscles wrapped with knotted vines - could set the stage for a knowingly trashy take on Spider-Man, one that dispense with teenage, masculine angst to concentrate on a quartet of plucky damsels and the skin-tight slasher pursuing them. To fully take advantage of that deliberately sacrilegious concept though you require the derring-do of an 1980s Italian movie producer high on The Terminator, not a sultan of straight-to-video like Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

Yussef Dayes - Tioga Pass (feat. Rocco Palladino) (Live from Malibu)

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Persona

Police Academy

A few decades removed from the churn of Police Academy's repeated television screenings, it's a shock to note that director Hugh Wilson's film was produced by The Ladd Company; they of that beautiful, pixelated green oak logo that played ahead of a certain science fiction film that found its greatest successes on home video formats. Despite a stark difference in quality between these two parties, Police Academy did make a killing at the box office, recouping some of the losses made by the comparatively austere Blade Runner. Released in 1984 and charting ahead of the much more fondly remembered Beverly Hills Cop in terms of pure domestic take, Police Academy is, despite this monster haul, a strangely listless, low energy picture. Although Wilson's film managed to land itself an R rating, it more or less refused to wield any of the power associated with that certificate. 

Bad language is kept to an absolute minimum, likewise nudity and violence. The profanity that does remain feels tacked on, as if only really present to nudge the film closer to a prospective audience's idea of the titillation (or revulsion) offered by a Stripes or a Porky's. This notion of the filmmaker's hearts not really being in it is borne out by the franchise's hurried slide into being, specifically, children's entertainment: by 1988 there was a syndicated animated series clogging up the airwaves. Police Academy then revolves around several oddball law enforcement trainees, now able to able to apply for a role in the department thanks to a recent ruling by an unseen mayor that her city's constabulary should reflect the diversity of the citizens who live there. This hook is both the best and the worst aspect of Police Academy. Best in that it acknowledges that the bullying, racist skinheads who hurl slurs directly at Marion Ramsey's Hooks (and indirectly at Bubba Smith's towering, gentlemanly Hightower) are the police establishment's preferred recruits; worst because the impending graduation means that the film's army of screenwriters need do nothing but kill time before every single character gets something approximating a satisfying conclusion. 

Raphael by Jeremy Brooks

Mecha Maiko - Cold feat. Dana Jean Phoenix (ALEX Remix)

Yussef Dayes - Afro Cubanism

Badland Hunters

Dramatically, Badland Hunters never raises above the level of a streaming pilot. Director Heo Myeong-haeng's film presents itself as a sort of orphan project that introduces a few too many characters then doesn't really make a tremendous amount of effort to wring their post-apocalyptic wants dry. Anyway, there's an apartment complex, the only one still standing in a city otherwise reduced to rubble; a mad scientist who runs the building, attracting dilatory survivors with promises of clean water and cushy condominiums; and a standing garrison of reptilian grunts who cannot wait to charge at incoming gunfire. Of course, none of that dressing matters when you have the swaggering brawn of Ma Dong-seok to hand. Indeed the pained attempts at character investment that clog up the film's first hour melt away the instant that Nam, Ma's wasteland butcher, finds his way to this concrete experiment camp and starts hurling haymakers. Previously the best thing in Train to Busan and The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (not to mention, thoroughly wasted in Marvel's excretable Eternals), Ma is a sensational action proposition: the guy is enormous; a sardonic strong-man able to weave and strike like a heavyweight boxer. Director Heo (whose previous credits include martial arts co-ordinator on Kim Ji-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird) cues up several corridors filled with human garbage just begging to be mulched by Nam's fists, pump-action shotgun and the saw-toothed machete that hangs (just out of reach) across his enormous shoulders. Heo isn't a one-trick pony either, tailoring several sprier, but no less exhilarating, action encounters around Ahn Ji-hye's Lee Eun-ho, a knife-happy ex-special forces sergeant with a high rise-sized grudge. 

Hello Meteor - Gravity Yellow

Hibiki Takane by Nobita

MGMT - Nothing to Declare

Weyes Blood - A Given Thing

The Bricklayer

Quite something, in January 2024, to watch a meat and potatoes action film that is premised on the idea that a country, in this instance the United States, could see itself frozen out of the international community for the crime of murdering journalists. Right this second, Uncle Sam's biggest ally in the middle-east is exterminating not just news reporters but their families too; munitions happily handed over by a (notionally) centre-left incumbent soon to be seeking re-election against a bloviating fascist who is promising a dictatorship on day one. As well, rather than condemn Israel, it feels like the entire machinery of the real life western media is geared to finding ways in which they can excuse this abhorrent behaviour. In fairness to Renny Harlin's otherwise workmanlike The Bricklayer, Hanna Weg and Matt Johnson's screenplay dates back to 2011 (2010, if you count the Paul Lindsay book that the script is adapted from) when Harlin first signed on to the project, with the expectation that Gerard Butler would be his lead bruiser. Replacing Butler as the titular brickmason is Aaron Eckhart, an actor who brings a pleasantly paternal sort of energy to his interactions with Nina Dobrev's much younger CIA analyst. Given that in basically any other action thriller of this stripe you could expect some sort of fireworks between the two, it's nice that Eckhart's button man-turned-manual labourer keeps his comments and behaviour strictly instructional. That's it really. Although cinematographer Matti Eerikäinen breaks out the gels, there's nothing in this underwritten wheel-spinner that comes close to touching Harlin's heyday: Bruce Willis and Robert Patrick locking eyes, and trading pistol fire, across Die Hard 2's Annex Skywalk. 

Miles Davis - Blues No. 2

Leona by Hachii

Nirvana - Endless, Nameless (Live)

Silent Night

Really speaking Silent Night, actor Joel Kinnaman's straight-to-streaming action thriller, has two gimmicks. The first is that the film has almost no dialogue. This decision results in a story that is told in either the broadest possible strokes or ways that feel indirect and cumulative rather than momentary or incisive. We watch as a marriage dissolves slowly and with hardly a word spoken between the two parents, both trapped together and grieving a child that was killed in the crossfire of a gang war. Kinnaman's character, Brian - himself struck dumb by a more deliberately aimed bullet - sinks deeper and deeper into the isolated rhythms of vigilantism; one that combines the strongman prowling of Michael Winner's 70s pistol films with the urban estrangement evident in the films made about Los Angeles back in the 1990s. All of this meandering repulsion would likely fall completely flat where it not for Silent Night's second (and more powerful) gimmick: it's directed by John Woo. 

Now, while Woo could hardly be said to be at the top of his game when conducting the film's action - rather than the beatific destruction you might expect, Silent Night is a little more interested in digital knitting solutions that allow carefully arranged shoot-outs to become supernaturally prolonged - the filmmaker is, as ever, unwavering in his earnestness. Silent Night's description of fatherhood isn't one that seeks to right a wrong committed by a parent before their child was taken from them. Brian was neither absent or distracted in his home life, he was present and demonstrative. He loved his son and repeatedly expressed that to the youngster. In some ways, the unabashed emotional sincerity of Silent Night recalls the strange, immigrant interlude in Woo's misbegotten A Better Tomorrow II. Both films are premised on the concept of a decent person who is morally and linguistically alienated and therefore only able to respond to their circumstances through the universal language of American action cinema: screeching cars and smoking firearms. 

Endless Withdrawal - Disintegrate

Reina by Quasimodox

Faye Webster - Lego Ring (feat. Lil Yachty)

Madara - ilikeuglysnares

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One concludes, after the credits have staggered their way up-screen, with a dedication to George Pérez, the penciller for the 1980s comic book series that this animated feature is based on. The solemnity of the gesture is rather undercut though by the decision to have this particular inscription break up into the same flaking ash that marks the destruction of this film's doomed, two-dimensional heroes. Quite apparently even the briefest of obituaries, for those whose work is being ruthlessly mined, pales in comparison to the sanctity of the cliff-hanger. The dignity usually extended to those who have passed a mere trifle when judged against the maintenance of a mood calculated to pack people back in for Part Two. Other than this worryingly ill-judged addendum, Crisis Part One is everything we've come to expect from these stale, direct-to-video adventures: a neat central concept that is obscured by circuitous writing and a staging so flat and lifeless that no-one can be left in any doubt that the talent that buoyed DC animation through its golden age has long since migrated elsewhere. As if to underline this point, Part One spends a significant amount of its time centred around The Flash's dealings with Amazo, the power-leeching adversary who previously dismantled television's Justice League in 2003's Tabula Rasa two-parter. The strange elegance of an android shaped like an awards statuette, who fought his opponents by physically reproducing their own powers, is replicated here as a busy-looking robot full of accessory chambers who simply holds out his hand, numbing his already static enemies into a state of sleepy repose. 

Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees (Acoustic Version)

Cammy by Daigo Ikeno

Super Tight Woody - 2K24

Tom Holkenborg - Prologue Antiphony // Scar Tissue

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Zack Snyder's latest, a holiday season blockbuster for Netflix, resuscitates an unsuccessful Star Wars pitch that the writer-director made back when Disney and Lucasfilm were looking for ways to expand their (surprisingly parochial) space saga. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire does then, at least in conceptual terms, betray a slightly deeper understanding of this disconnected predecessor. The film isn't satisfied to mindlessly wield the used-up aesthetic or revolutionary warfare of George Lucas' space opera, Snyder knows to poke around in the bones of that piece, recognising the debt to Ray Harryhausen's Dynamation monster films or Akira Kurosawa's rain-lashed chanbara. Snyder and his team are obviously fluent in the works that followed in Star Wars' wake too - the fantasy epics; the lead figure tabletop games; the science-fiction comics, like Heavy Metal or 2000 AD, that stripped the religious aspiration out of an American cultural phenomenon, replacing it with human avarice and body-shredding violence. Unfortunately this pop culture fluency is communicated by a film experiencing a severe, structural lurch. 

Although Rebel Moon's first act shows promise, teasing out the familiar tale of impoverished farmers forced to hire warriors to battle the invaders who would drive them to famine, once Sofia Boutella's ex-imperialist Kora starts putting the gang together Snyder's film begins to run aground. Seven Samurai (and to lesser degrees, The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars) built scenes around the emerging camaraderie experienced by a growing gang of misfits. The small connections that their similar backgrounds reveal or their collective responses to attempts at trickery. There was a class dimension too, one that doesn't quite scan here thanks to Kora's backstory. She may live as a farmer now but she wasn't born one; she wasn't raised as one. When interacting with the people she recruits, Kora does so as an equal rather than somebody who is scared and suspicious, who perhaps even considers themselves to be somehow socially inferior. Rebel Moon doesn't just skip over successful or misfiring fellowship though (drawing together a line-up that barely interacts), the film eventually abandons the basic, consumptive stakes outlined when a battleship landed on a wheat field. As the canvas swells to include a star system's worth of planets, seemingly instantaneous space travel (and therefore retaliation), and the genocidal glassing of a pacifist planet, the basic thread of hopelessly outgunned mercenaries repelling a technologically superior force slips away completely. 

It's the Year of the Dragon by Makoto Ono

FRM - Gaussian Goodbye