Johnny Mnemonic: in Black and White

Trapped somewhere between Blade Runner and The Matrix, aesthetically as well as chronologically, director Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic immediately benefits from any proximity to the latter, the project on which actor Keanu Reeves firmly ascended to his position as one of cyberpunk's holiest messiahs. The thirty years of real-life socioeconomic downturn that has occurred since cameras rolled on this adaptation of a William Gibson short story hasn't harmed the film either, with amateur futurologists noting that more or less every single worst case scenario threatened in Wired's 1997 article The Long Boom has come to pass (in some form) in the decades since. That which registered as pointedly downcast back in 1995, when Mnemonic was originally released, now plays like eerie prescience, particularly the idea that the unceasing data firing at human beings can have a palpable and even detrimental physiological effect. Although this information overload may not trigger the bodily ruptures described in Mnemonic, it'd be laughable to argue that the weaponised blurbs now blasting out of every person's pocket haven't melted a lot of people's brains into a reactionary goo. Re-released on home video in 2022 with a new colour grading that has tweaked Mnemonic to be monochromatic, Longo's film is now better able to present itself as queasy, ideas-driven science fiction rather than a failing attempt at an exciting, post-Speed blockbuster. In black and white, Reeves' face now reads as luminous and glaring: a light source destined to be imprisoned inside the headsets and hardware that the filmmakers have lifted straight out of Shinya Tsukamoto's seminal works of technological alienation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. 

Orbital - Sad But True

Stabbing Westward - Nothing

Gunstar Heroes (Sega Game Gear) by Jack Teagle

OMICRON - Whirl

Jason X

Jason X, New Line Cinema's second pass at a Friday the 13th sequel, sees the Camp Crystal Lake killer stalking promiscuous teenagers on a spaceship-cum-battering ram, hundreds of years in the future. So, just as disinterested in languid voyeurism as Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday then. A semi-successful attempt at freezing Kane Hodder's muscle monster in our present is rediscovered centuries later during a class outing for undergrads who, quite apparently, scavenge cobwebbed military installations for extra credit. Jason and his jailor, a government scientist played by TV's Lexa Doig, are defrosted then blasted off into space for sale as carnival attractions. True to form, a catatonic Voorhees stirs back to life - during his own autopsy - when people begin pairing off elsewhere on the ship. His hand tenses when a medical student makes motion towards performing oral sex on his partner; Jason only fully activating when penetration has occurred. 

The murder that immediately follows this resurrection then has an uncomfortable sexual element to it. A struggling Jason very clearly grasps his victim by her chest when manoeuvring this unsuspecting intern, played by Kristi Angus, into a more vulnerable, bent over position. Rather than (conventionally) rape this woman though, Jason forces her head into a vat of liquid nitrogen before pulverising her face. This, clearly, is his release. Although uncomfortably staged, the killing is structured as if intended to pass as a joke as well, with the ludicrous, strawberry brain slush outcome positioned as the punchline. Detached and deliberately ironic throughout, Jason X is most entertaining when, as above, the title character's earthier approach to violence is given centre stage. Later, when trapped in a simulation of his lakeside hunting ground, a newly toyetic Jason salves the noises in his head by sealing holographic floozies in sleeping bags before battering them against a tree. Far less agreeable though are any passage in which we're expected to fret about a cast who appear to have escaped from a terrible, made-for-cable science fiction serial about some loser who has built himself a robot girlfriend. 

Storm by SheepShin

The The - Uncertain Smile

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Borrowed Time

Napoleon - Director's Cut

Appropriately enough, given that the feature itself is obsessed with describing folly and decay, Ridley Scott's Director's Cut of Napoleon finds itself dumped, with very little of the expected ceremony, to Apple's streaming service in the midst of a PR downturn for its star, Joaquin Phoenix. As well as torpedoing a Todd Haynes project by walking away at the last possible moment and leaving the rest of the cast and crew in the lurch, Phoenix's Joker follow-up, presumably the guaranteed hit he was expecting to re-write his 2024, attracted far more puzzled shrugs than expected at the Venice Film Festival. As if preternaturally conscious of this widespread cooling on its lead actor, and with nearly an hour more than the theatrical edit to play around with, Scott's second (released) pass at his bored, hateful Napoleon is, at least in its earliest passages, now happy to take the title character off the table for longer periods, apportioning more space to such things as the plight of women during the French Revolution. 

Obviously then that means particular attention is now paid to Vanessa Kirby's Joséphine. Although clearly a crucial aspect of the scaffolding underlining Napoleon's ascent from a canny officer to a crowned Emperor in the previous version of the film, Kirby's former viscountess is almost elevated to a co-lead here. Unlike the armies of soldiers, advisers, and hangers-on that sweep in and out of the piece, her Joséphine lingers, enjoying several successive scenes of her own, all of which are constructed around this woman's perspective and the dilemmas she encounters. Following the arrest and subsequent beheading of her aristocrat husband, Joséphine is herself imprisoned. During this detainment she is instructed, by another jailed lady, to get herself pregnant as quickly as possible, in the hopes that the child she carries will then delay her own execution. Of course the previous assembly held similar material but the telling there was perfunctory, as if in a rush to place Kirby by Phoenix's side. Here we're allowed a few scenes of Joséphine picking apart her place in post-revolutionary France.

We see the sacrifices Joséphine will have to make: the men she will have to sleep with and the alliances she will need to cultivate if she is to keep herself and, more importantly, her children safe from the guillotine. Her marriage to Napoleon offers the status and stability she craves but, in this broader telling at least, the relationship does (eventually) strike a note of equitability. Although Joséphine is dismissed just as quickly as Napoleon's other generals, her voice is pointedly heard following her husband's less careful decrees; her notes an informed or steadying influence that isn't heeded. Later, frostbitten and excreting blood in the midst of a Russian winter, it is clearer now that this Napoleon really is nothing without his Joséphine. Her absence, as the film winds its way towards another exile, is much more keenly felt too. The despondency lingers: Napoleon climbing into his former wife's death bed just to feel close to her. Prior to this viewing, the worry presented by a longer telling of Napoleon was that Scott's film would lose the harried but intoxicating energy that previously blasted us through a lifetime that has been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. Although that style of construction has been mitigated (but not completely eliminated) here, the mode of storytelling that replaces it is one that consistently reiterates then underlines its points. 

For the armchair generals, who chafed when viewing last November's highlights package, Napoleon's battles are, presently, both more frequent and more complex in how they are expressed. Their telling is a little less tidy and therefore better able to generate a feeling that, in the thousands of men gobbled up by cannon fire, we are seeing the pitiless result of machinery coming to bear on vulnerable, goose-pimpled flesh. This awfulness then not simply a spectacle of detonation but the design and application of competing mad men. If the appearance of Chris Morris collaborator Kevin Eldon, or The Death of Stalin's Simon Russell Beale for that matter, weren't enough of a hint then frequent, straining trips to the lavatory in this Director's Cut confirm that Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa's Napoleon was always intended to be both sardonic and relentlessly improper. No matter how high this Emperor climbs or what his achievements are, there will always be some rude intrusion from reality to bring him crashing back down to earth. While she yet lives, Joséphine is often this instant adjustment: laughing in the face of a husband who reflexively issues the kind of pounding, master of the universe rhetoric so beloved of history books. When she's no longer available to us, Scott ensures that gnats itch and bother conspiring royals or flocks of birds slather stale, Russian throne rooms with their chalky white shit. 

Martin Phipps - Joséphine

Ripley by Matías Bergara

Shuggie Otis - Strawberry Letter 23

Johnny Guitar Watson - If I Had the Power

Tiger Cage

Tiger Cage, director Yuen Woo-ping's take on a modern, urban crime thriller, distinguishes itself from the rest of the streak thanks to a healthy appetite for excess and endangerment. The film's opening shoot-out, when the central narcotics task force are at the height of their powers, is sprawling and relentless. Civilians are caught up in the crossfire as an undercover drug bust spills out onto the streets, before crashing over neon-piped promenades and concrete sprawl. As soon as the police have chased off their quarry, Tiger Cage switches gears to focus in, leadenly, on the forced camaraderie displayed by work acquaintances. The false note these sort of unfunny capers usually strike in similar films actually ends up working in Tiger Cage's favour when it is slowly revealed that several key players within this chuckling department are on the payroll for a heroin smuggling ring. 

As the group dynamic dissipates, the film narrows in on a trio of rookie cops played by Jacky Cheung, Carol Cheng and a young Donnie Yen. Obviously, given that this is film directed by Yuen Woo-ping, Yen is given ample opportunity to shine: his hot-headed plod, Terry, a more than convincing answer to a pair of heavies deployed to massage a dockside drug deal. This is Yen pre-megastardom though, so his high-kicking hold on Tiger Cage is only fleeting. Yen's twirling showcase quickly comes a cropper, suddenly depositing Terry in a situation that is reminiscent of the doomed heroics so beloved of Shaw Brothers great, Chang Cheh. As the stakes continue to ramp up, Tiger Cage only gets meaner and coarser, casually disposing of, apparently, crucial characters and trapping Cheng and Cheung's disgraced fuzz in situations that have more in common with a bloody, Italian horror film than your standard police procedural.

Linus Duewer - Some More Beats (Analog Hip Hop Instrumentals 2017)

Mazinger Z by Yoshiyuki Hane

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Enola Gay

Caribou - Come Find Me

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Long time fans of the Planet of the Apes series may be excited to note that, just as the 2010s Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves trilogy dissected and embellished 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, director Wes Ball and screenwriter Josh Friedman's Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes performs a similar trick with the much less impressive Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Ball's reimagining takes the warring settlements of J Lee Thompson's film - a hippie commune ran by apes and a sunken, irradiated city packed with mutated humans and their mouldering technology - and blows them up into two larger, computer generated fiefs. Whereas Battle signalled the terminal decline of the 70s Ape films, the series then demoted to television-level adventures, Kingdom comes hot on the heels of three successful blockbusters. Any reduction in scope is therefore unnecessary. The peaceful community this time is, again, one filled with apes but, rather than huddle in bric-a-brac sets, these primates now scale the overgrown frames of rotted skyscrapers and practice falconry. Their aggressors are a different tribe of chimpanzees, an army of slaves who are lead by a wily monarch who has become obsessed with looting the treasures promised by a long sealed, nuclear bunker. 

Although digital technology is used to describe the decomposed expanses of the far-flung future, in the main the computer trickery of Kingdom is more illustrative and actorly than other, similar budgeted blockbusters. The majority of the film's cast are painstakingly animated apes who must share a prolonged amount of screen time with Freya Allan's very real and very live action Mae. Not only do these figures interact physically, they do so emotionally. The prevailing tenor of these encounters isn't always one of camaraderie either. As the film rolls on, it becomes clear that Mae has her own agenda, one not necessarily in keeping with the aims of her friendly ape allies. So it is that the film's many digital effects vendors, including Wētā FX, and the motion captured actors sitting hunched on green screen sets have to simulate a creeping sense of unease or suspicion, one that prickles up in characters who are, fundamentally, naïve but not necessarily childlike. Planet of the Apes then, as a property, continuing to represent something different in the big spend, American filmmaking space. As with its nearest contemporaries, the desire to reproduce something uncanny remains but the execution here is much more subtle. Awe and tomfoolery obviously have their place but Kingdom's appeal is an ability to transmit empathy, or clear interpersonal connections, and accomplishing this in such a way that Ball's film consistently overrides any favouritism that could be informed by the viewer's native species.

John Paesano - Human Hunt

The Uncanny X-Men #207 by Artyom Trakhanov

LTJ Bukem - Cosmic Interlude

Lucy in Disguise - Passing Mirrors

The Killer

Director John Woo's second pass at The Killer is a peculiar film, one that feels frozen in a specific, cinematic moment. The screenplay, credited to Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Brian Helgeland, although presumably penned (or at least punched up) recently bears marks associated with the American studio system of the 1990s. Back then, when the likes of Walter Hill and David Giler were circling Woo's original for a remake, it seemed as if Hollywood, as an industry, was obsessed with ironing every property set before it into an easily digestible mulch. As if working on behalf of an audience of buffoons who would, it was then assumed, refuse to entertain the more impressionistic thematic axis of the original piece or, really, any sense of ambiguity at all. Despite retaining Woo at the helm, this Killer - Nathalie Emmanuel's extremely photogenic Killer - is exactly as feared. An overly literal remake that decodes the 1989 film along stringent, and far less interesting moral lines all while insisting that this supernatural murderer have a tragic, flashback-stated past. Omar Sy, the star of Netflix's Lupin series, is a highlight though. The actor a pleasant alternative to Danny Lee's Detective, able to play up the more cartoonish, Spy vs. Spy aspects of the film without allowing them to slip completely into farce. Woo does have some fun here as well - literalising the connection between his Hong Kong project and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï through the Paris location; while also taking scissors to the frame when mapping out the competing perspectives found in heists, much like Norman Jewison did when assembling The Thomas Crown Affair - but this juiceless exercise is best described in terms of the lack of excitement its gadgets generate: a puttering, electric motorcycle that glides about, responsibly or the silenced competition pistols that track sad, computer generated splatters onto their targets. 

Unfound - Nine O Nine

Alien: Romulus by Shimhaq

Fontaines DC - In the Modern World

Benjamin Wallfisch - Raine

Alien: Romulus

Ever since Star Wars: The Force Awakens netted two billion dollars for Disney it seems that the done thing, when resuscitating VHS-era franchises, is to remix the instalments that imprinted themselves on the audience. These kind of deliberately nostalgic quotations are a difficult thing to get right though, especially in such a late-arriving sequel. Obviously, co-writer-director Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus plunders its beautifully appointed predecessors for grist - quite apparently the gap between productions is too long and too creatively disconnected for it to be otherwise - but it's how these pieces are refined or transferred into the new whole that really matters. So, hearing notes in Benjamin Wallfisch's Romulus score that are reminiscent of Elliot Goldenthal's turbulent, shrieking Alien³ Adagio, while an astronaut thrashes around with clawed horrors in the void of space, isn't just thematically fitting, it underlines the sheer, surging quality of the sampled work. The move is celebratory too: Goldenthal's music a beloved (and perhaps underappreciated) aspect of an unfairly maligned sequel. 

What absolutely does not work though is the decision to reanimate an actor who has, sadly, already passed on. Romulus' recreation of Ian Holm's face is frozen inside a role that the actor played over forty years earlier. This is perhaps the most overt aspect of Disneyfication that Romulus is subject to: ransom demand-level amounts of money spent on deep fake AI processing (and, no doubt, scores of end-of-pipeline tweaks courtesy of multiple computer animation vendors), all to spit out a dented puppet that is far more physically repulsive than any of the other, evolving nightmares on display. These periodic reminders that Disney is very heavily invested in these uncanny regurgitations of extremely real people has never not been alarming. It goes beyond the simple revulsion of a human face untethered from time or the personality that previously animated it. The practice is reductive, imagining human value in stark, temporary terms: the periods in which a person impacted upon some property that can be franchised off into the future. What is the end game here? Summer blockbusters packed with marionettes of these digital undead? The resurrection we're subjected to here isn't even canny enough to be brief. This shade lingers, relentlessly regurgitating lines from its point of origin. 

This is another, vivid problem in Romulus. Although the special effects departments, the stunt performers, the creature effects people and the actors themselves are very often working in fabulous concert, Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues (or perhaps the Disney bean counters) cannot help themselves, excreting famous lines from previous instalments all over this film's crowning moments. It's actually kind of maddening. Why work hard to add something new or genuinely exciting to such a well-worn property if the final revision is so desperate to remind its audience of older, greater episodes? Are viewers really so enamoured of reading these signposts? Of being given the opportunity to elbow the neophyte they've tricked into sitting next to them, then confidently state which sequel the quip originated from? It all depends on how you view these films really. Are they important milestones in science fiction cinema or are they the latest opportunity for a sentimental, box office haul? Thankfully, for those of us who would put the first three Alien films over any similarly lauded trilogies - Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings shrink beneath their brilliance - there is still meat to get your teeth into. 

Ron Cobb's design for an atmospheric processing tower is lifted out of Aliens then deposited onto the mining colony where this film begins. Surrounded by open-air markets and an abundance of human squalor, the pyramid takes on a sinister quality. Although it never made it into the final film, when prepping Alien, Giger imagined the egg chamber residing in a bulbous, organic pyramid; an enormous boil that had been deposited onto this inhospitable landscape then, somehow, flourished. Cobb's mastaba serves a similar function here. Not only is it a risen symbol that denotes an extraterrestrial befoulment, it allows the audience to get a sense of what one of Weyland Yutani's shake and bake colonies looks like a couple of decades down the line. Comparatively, the twin facility we saw back on Acheron was trapped in a specific moment in time. Hadley's Hope was staffed by young families looking to make a name for themselves on an unknown and unmapped planet. Jackson's Star, the Romulus equivalent, is the home of Cailee Spaeny orphaned Rain. It is a full-blooded company operation that imprisons generation after generation of its citizens into a hopeless, life-draining servitude. The frontier romance experienced by the Jordans, before they trespassed onto a prehistoric derelict at least, has long been paved over. 

Accompanying Rain throughout Romulus is David Jonsson's Andy, a gentle and childlike alternative to the other, usually far more malevolent, synthetic beings in this universe. Liberated from a rubbish tip by Rain's now deceased father, Andy is a decommissioned artificial person that has been reprogrammed to be a guileless and ever-present companion. The simplicity of this rewiring, as well as the obvious misuse of Andy before he became a part of Rain's family, has left this mechanoid vulnerable and prone to debilitating seizures. Although Rain treats Andy with the fatigued care of a glass child, her friends respond to him as either a useful gadget or as a target for bullying derision. Unexpectedly, Romulus takes a similarly sympathetic position as Ridley Scott's prequels, asking us to identify with a being built purely for slavery while still worrying what shape his self-determination will eventually take. As Andy trespasses deeper into Romulus' decaying mausoleum, his fragged directives begin to reorganise and re-emerge. Jonsson effortlessly switches back and forth between these two, clashing perspectives, using the slights aimed at his depleted form to inform an angry, emergent personality that has been radicalised by company doctrine. 

Despite any worries generated by Romulus having such a young and apparently carefree cast (not to mention the project's beginnings as a straight-to-streaming feature), Álvarez's film is actually far more considered than expected: a conscious effort to return the series to its blue collar roots. No longer are we stowing away with billionaires as they pursue their follies. We're generations removed from middle-class, middle-aged professionals attempting to hot desk in from a wooden cabin that resides in a different galaxy. The subjects here are the children that followed in their wake. The displaced, despondent youths forced to grow up malnourished under churning, leaden skies. Their dreams are tiny: Rain genuinely yearning only for a feeling of warmth on her face. No wonder they want to escape, to raid a deteriorating satellite and pilfer enough stasis tech to die a little death and be transported somewhere that has slipped through The Company's grasp. Romulus' slower, earlier passages are its best: bickering teenagers trampling over the wreckage of some doomed, inhuman experiment, completely oblivious to the danger that they are in. Although we are eventually subjected to an entire menagerie, Álvarez's film happily builds several set-pieces around the scurrying threat implied by the facehugger; that leathery-looking arachnoid that has been side-lined as a serious, ambulatory threat since the mid-1980s. 

In fact, Romulus so successfully repositions the parasite stage of the Alien as a legitimately entertaining danger that its eventual progeny registers as somewhat superfluous or, maybe more accurately, formulaic. Ever since Paul WS Anderson's AVP: Alien vs Predator, the creature's lifecycle has been in overdrive, with chest-bursters following rapidly after even the briefest of infection. Romulus does not buck this trend, with towering drones nosing around dripping corridors seemingly moments after their rib-cracking birth. The presence of these adult creatures foretells a rough, structural gear shift in Romulus as well, a move away from sweaty, creeping tension and on to a more triumphant style of redress. Of course Rain gets her hands on some heavy weaponry. Naturally, the creatures line up to get their pearlescent domes detonated as well. What else where we expecting? To Álvarez's credit though, these fist-pumping moments quickly segue into the immediate and unintended consequences of all this blood-letting, with weightless nebula clouds of hull-melting acid spiralling towards heroines dressed in little more than company-stamped sweats. It helps as well that, prior to Rain's zero gravity manoeuvres, we have a recent reference point for the kind of danger this substance represents: fingers instantly melted down to their knuckles; sternums, and the organs they encase, reduced to smoking boreholes by only a trickle. 

Finally there's Romulus' addition to the Alien lifecycle, a fourth act creeper who reveals its hairless head after several overlapping countdowns have concluded. Romanian basketballer Robert Bobroczkyi, underneath a thin layer of desiccated make up appliances, plays Offspring, another example of a ruthless biomechanoid's vision for an evolved, space-faring human being. In Romulus that brief is interpreted as a swaying, sexless giant riddled with pulsing orifices and a barbed tongue that it uses to extract sustenance. This Offspring also provides the filmmakers an opportunity to tweak and reassess Chris Cunningham's Newborn, a creature designed for Alien: Resurrection that began its life as a diseased etching that combined the black carapace of Giger with the overlong and atrophied limbs of the terminally undernourished. Unfortunately, that chimera was rendered for the screen as a slathering goo monster. Resurrection's failure to accurately translate this sickly intermingling of human-presenting flesh and airbrushed Necronom is to Romulus' benefit though. While not as visually striking as a Big Chap, Offspring allows the filmmakers to portray an Alien in the same singular, hair-raising terms as the original film. 

Although only a final stretch player, Offspring impresses because the threat it implies isn't simply that of the tooth or claw. It stalks and looms, appraising its quarry with a leering fascination that is genuinely uncomfortable to consider. Successive sequels have drained the series of the idea that the Alien isn't a static creature that will always grow to similar dimensions, it's a reflection of humanity: our basic, reproductive drives written into a massive, androgynous insect that is incapable of coupling with or even raping its prey. Hives and matriarchal scaffolding have elbowed out the notion that this orphaned mayfly doesn't necessarily want to strike and bite on sight. In Scott's film, the Alien certainly slaughtered the men it encountered but the women trapped on the Nostromo gave Kane's son pause. It appraised them, fascinated by the sight of their soft skin or some (undetectable to the audience) scent that issued from them. Romulus follows suit, even having a shot of its Offspring - drawn up on its hind legs - as if about to issue some awful, engorged member from the little crocodile button that sits centred in the frame. Romulus doesn't subject its battered cast to that kind of outrage but some underlying intent does seem to be on display. The Offspring doesn't nuzzle the bleeding mother that birthed it. This infant invades her space and prods its beak-like nose at her, using it's size and weight in such a way that an intent is clear: it's demanding to be noticed, it wants to be embraced by the shrinking, dying woman beneath it. 

Benjamin Wallfisch - The Chrysalis

Giant Robot Hellboy Returns by Duncan Fegredo

Peel Dream Magazine - Dawn

Kupla - Fade

Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (The Director's Cut)

Parked at Netflix and issued by the streaming giant in ways that - having viewed both films in longer, bloodier cuts - now registers as a strange and cynical kind of self-sabotage, Zack Snyder's pass at Star Wars is both appropriately massive and acutely humourless. Unusually for a writer-director rapidly approaching his sixties (and therefore perfectly placed to have had his mind zapped back in 1977), Snyder is better tuned to the wavelengths emanating from George Lucas' prequel trilogy. To wit: the feeling that you're viewing an instalment rather than a self-contained piece; the self-seriousness of the characters; as well as a narrowing of outlook that exchanges naïve teenagers in alien spaces for human empires and garrulous in-fighting. Snyder even shouts out the plaid grandmaster with extra shots of scurrying, computer-generated rodents. These superfluous, distracting additions to scenes of Sofia Boutella navigating winding corridors are evocative of the charming visual noise Lucas insisted upon for his Special Edition re-releases back in 1997. 

When considering these Director's Cuts as a whole though, it quickly becomes obvious that these are (moment to moment) the better experiences. Overstuffed and exhaustive where the previous episodes felt clipped and oddly anaemic, Chalice of Blood, and now Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, offer up a double helping of the excesses that have become synonymous with their extended edition loving director. Paced around two battles - one fought against fields of alien wheat, the other with skinhead invaders from this galaxy's equivalent of the East India Company - Curse of Forgiveness benefits from the extra sense of danger, not to mention gore, that the new, stronger R certificate implies. Basically, the bloodless extermination of the PG-13 cut simply cannot entertain in the same way as the bodily detonations on offer here. The truncated, previously released edits carry with them no sense of shock or satisfaction; built, as they are, around confrontations that have had their sudden, stunning acts of violence snipped away. 

In Curse it's not just faceless stormtroopers who explode into satisfying clouds of weightless viscera either. Cowering civilians (perhaps even children?) have their heads blasted through with molten laser fire by advancing, bearded operators. The sequences in question crossing the pitiless carnage seen in big screen Yoshiyuki Tomino anime (Snyder being one of the few American directors who proudly namechecks influences drawn from Japanese animation) with the instinctual unease generated by the sight of private military contractors. What was previously presented as, more or less, a full-on rout now has an element of wincing, human pain threaded through it. The tweaks that have been applied to Curse then, including tiny instances of dialogue that reframe the imperial war machine in starker and therefore more logically consistent terms, help to massage some individuality into a film that is, by design, deliberately derivative. Perhaps the biggest impact of these differences though are the ways in which Curse accentuates not just the barbarism but the racism of its advancing Imperium. 

Previously, when writing about the first instalment, I insisted that Rebel Moon mishandled its re-telling of Seven Samurai by failing to translate the hierarchical structure of Japanese society in the16th century. Although Boutella's Kora can mix and engage with Djimon Hounsou's disgraced general or Bae Doona's sword master on an equal footing, that's not the important element in these relationships. What unites the warriors recruited to protect Veldt - and even the shorter cuts state this outright - is that they are, predominantly, non-white casualties of a white European coded empire that has either smeared their civilisation (for no detectable advantage) or recruited these people then used them as cannon fodder. Here, the betrayals premised on the social inferiority of non-white instruments land a little harder when the floors and the braying, invective spewing accusers are themselves fouled with recently spilled blood. Even the bone eating engines that the Imperium's ships run on are now named for Hindu Gods; towering women shackled in iridescent prisons that are only able to disobey their sneering conquerors in tiny, barely detectable ways. Where Star Wars used stuffy British thesps as a natural antithesis to its louche, American freedom-fighters, Rebel Moon broadens this conceit to focus in on actors who can trace their real-life lineage to countries that have suffered horribly under colonial aggression: Boutella is Algerian; Hounsou is Beninese; while Staz Nair spoke about his Malayali heritage when promoting Game of Thrones. Hardly a fix all for a film that is desperate to immediately undermine its hard won victory with graceless pleas for further sequels, but it's not nothing. 

Fontaines DC - Here's the Thing

The Punisher by Gavin Mitchell

Peel Dream Magazine - Central Park West

Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood (The Director's Cut)

The first part of writer-director Zack Snyder's streaming serial returns, half as long again and brandishing a stricter ratings board certificate that allows for swearing, nudity and varying degrees of sexuality (including gagging submission to a mass of writhing tentacles), as well as moments in which heads are blasted into glowing, molten slag. Really, everything that was originally expected upon hearing that Snyder was plotting a course to a galaxy far, far away. Although, like its first draft, Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood does eventually flounder, the film's opening passage - already the better section of the feature - benefits further from a new prologue that portrays Ed Skrein's Admiral Noble departing from a drop ship that looks very much like White Dwarf's scratch-built Grav-Attack vehicle (made from a used stick deodorant, Zoid sprues and several plastic cough syrup spoons, back in the late 1980s), before slowly advancing on a cornered, royal family. 

Flanked by necrophilic clergy, Noble is in his element: wearing a furrowed brow when surveying the cultural detonation he is party to but, nevertheless, delighting in the powerlessness of Lim Yu-Beng's rifle-racking monarch. Apparently considered extraneous when compiling the original, holiday season-friendly 'theatrical' cuts, this twenty five minute prelude is, comfortably, more personal and emotionally excruciating than anything else that this saga has previously offered up. The central dilemma of the addition - should a son stave in his father's head to save his weeping sisters - has broader consequences within the piece too: it foreshadows the unexpected bravery of Michiel Huisman's Gunnar when faced with another no-win situation; knitting this naïve farmer into a collective of hardened warriors. Staz Nair's Tarak actually congratulates Gunnar, perhaps recalling his own powerlessness when faced with the might of the Imperium. Similarly, frequent visits to the wheat planet to see how Anthony Hopkins' robot pacifist, Jimmy, is getting on helps massage the bullet point plotting of the theatrical cut's middle section, even if these scenes basically repeat the same idea over and over again. 

The real lesson in all of this, which Chalice of Blood enthusiastically underlines, is that Snyder is often at his most purely effective when using compressed time and collage as a means of leaping, anthropological study. The director then more naturally attuned to telling tales in massive, sweeping strokes that match the grandeur of his vision. Snyder and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, have compiled a terrible path for mankind's future, one that looks to the smoking, industrialised empires of the 19th century then blows them up to function on an intergalactic scale. As with the Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence in Watchmen or 300's demented opening narration, Sofia Boutella's Kora, and Rebel Moon as a whole, are at their most engaging when this brainwashed orphan takes a moment to detail her path through the screaming, bone-shovelling machinery of conquest. A whispering Kora, confiding in a would-be lover, is given the space to talk through the complicated pride and intermingled guilt she feels about collaborating with, and succeeding within, the regime that doomed her civilisation. These embellished interludes, which now feel complete thanks to a greater scope for emotional incongruity, have a vulnerability and dimensionality to them that was previously lacking in Rebel Moon. 

Red Arremer by Jack Teagle

Caribou - Volume

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Something More

Kubi

Set during a period of Japanese history in which the country was trapped in an almost constant state of civil war, Takeshi Kitano's latest, Kubi (or Neck), is a darkly comic period piece that charts the rise and fall of several scheming warlords. Originally conceived back in the early 1990s, in tandem with Kitano's commercially unsuccessful (at least at the domestic box office) Sonatine, Kubi works a similar sort of genre-dismantling magic. Just as Kitano drained the heroism, anti or otherwise, out of hardboiled cop and organised crime films, Kubi similarly refuses to venerate its historical figures, lasering in on their selfishness or self-absorption and how the depressed permissiveness central to samurai chivalry allowed that mania to then be transmitted out onto a quivering nation. Although the cast stretches into the dozens, with each person's name and standing announced by an onscreen scrawl, Kitano largely focuses on three main, competing camps: those of Ryo Kase's Nobunaga Oda, Hidetoshi Nishijima's Akechi Mitsuhide, and Kitano's Hashiba Hideyoshi. 

Kase's Nobunaga is completely demented, the Great Unifier of Japan portrayed as a swaggering gangster who plays his subordinates off against each other with promises of succession while he plots with his children to plunge the country into an even deeper level of chaos. Rarely seen without an entourage that includes Jun Soejima's Yasuke, a Portuguese-speaking African who knows when to cut and run, Nobunaga conducts himself as an object of great, physical desire. When he deigns to touch his inferiors it is, very often, calamitous. In one instance Nobunaga demands one of his generals chew on his blade (not a euphemism) before Oda forces his tongue into their bloody, ruined mouth. These strange demands for supplication are a constant in Kubi, a film that depicts a society where lives are constantly under threat, often condemned in casual or even flippant ways. Even a character like Mitsuhide, nominally heroic because he defies his bloodthirsty monarch and houses Kenichi Endo's fugitive Murashige, uses his social inferiors as expendable playthings. Before he spends the night in Murashige's arms, Mitsuhide strolls his grounds, blasting condemned men with a matchlock rifle, the act positioned as a curious form of foreplay between these two samurai. 

Lastly, there's the actor credited as Beat Takeshi. His ageing Hideyoshi is a great, swollen bully who cackles in shadow while his rivals tearfully sign their own death warrants. Referred to as Monkey by Nobunaga, either for his curious countenance or the impatient, mischievous way he presents himself, Hideyoshi is actually the Daimyo's biggest rival largely thanks to one of his lieutenants, Tadanobu Asano's Kanbei, who comfortably runs rings around the other, creakier lords. Kitano's minimalist approach to portraying Hideyoshi is key to extracting enjoyment from Kubi: as an actor, Kitano has a magnetic pull based largely around his casualness or indifference to the harrowing strife that surrounds him. This aspect of his performance has only deepened with age, as Kitano has grown larger (at least in this role) and even less mobile. Hideyoshi, who frequently makes reference to his beginnings as part of the peasant class, isn't constrained by the same circuitous logics of pride and propriety that cage his suffocating peers. The studied ceremonies of the people he has infiltrated are actually physically excruciating for him, largely because a great deal of it is premised on extended displays of suicidal etiquette. He finds it all just plain boring. Kitano, a comedic actor through and through, approaches each new, outrageous development as a hassle rather than a calamity. Despite the (comfortably) hundreds of lives violently extinguished over the course of Kubi's runtime, Hideyoshi views all of the film's churning developments as the latest wrinkle in some ongoing cosmic joke aimed squarely at him.

Shuggie Otis - Purple

System96 - Shift

Popeye by Jonathan Edwards

Lucy in Disguise - Drip (Slowed Mix)

Chime

Given the title of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest, it's tempting to organise the changes in perspective that Mutsuo Yoshioka's cooking teacher, Matsuoka, experiences around the strange, shrill notes that assert themselves on the film's soundtrack. An attentive audience might scour the short film's sound design, in search of the specific note or reverberation that triggers the changes we are privy to. Is there, as one of  Matsuoka's students believes, a Chime of activation that turns off certain parts of the brain in those that can hear it? Of course Kurosawa's film is packed with all manner of surging, overlapping uproar: waves that travel far beyond their source, just waiting to be deposited inside the heads of those unlucky enough to be attuned to them. Viewed with headphones, this din is oppressive and inescapable, a bubble that batters the viewer from the left and right stereo channels. 

The clatter of empty cans, as they leave plastic bin bags bound for recycling drop-offs, is transformed from series of light, musical clinks into a thunderous, all-consuming cacophony; a white-noise waterfall of unwanted physical contact. Similarly, passing train carriages blast dimmed classrooms with dancing light and rumbling, screeching racket. In Chime all the ambient, receding tones have been cranked up, taking on an aggressive shape and demanding alertness or attention. Following the disastrous demonstration of an invasive thought by the student who swears he can hear uncanny music, the amount of people attending Matsuoka's lessons shrinks dramatically. All that remains is Hana Amano's Akemi, another unhinged young person who rabbits on about perceived or invented slights; broadcasting relentlessly to her seemingly passive lecturer. Unfortunately for her, Matsuoka has recently discovered that the sight of a kitchen knife slowly disappearing into the base of teenager's skull wasn't something that he found particularly alarming.

Adieu Aru - Analogue

Carpenter Brut - Eyes Without a Face (feat. Kristoffer Rygg)

AKI Outift 3 by Quasimodox

Foewidemos - Fizzy Beat

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three

The present phase of the DC animated universe limps to its own, reality collapsing conclusion with Jeff Wamester's Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three, a flat finale that is presented to us, almost exclusively, through crowd shots and cameo appearances. Notionally a victory lap for a recent spate of direct-to-streaming releases that have very much failed to capture any past glories, Part Three of this multiverse-spanning saga has to delve deeper into the pre-history of the so-called Tomorrowverse to arrive at any genuine pathos. Before every major character is compelled to willingly have their identity crushed into a gestalt, 'prime' version of their super-persona, Crisis on Infinite Earths visits Earth-12, the home of the heroes who began their adventures with Fox Kids' Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series on Kids' WB before burning out brightly with Justice League and Justice League Unlimited on Cartoon Network. 

This belated appeal to one of the deepest veins of branded nostalgia that the DC animated stable has to offer is (despite any associated cynicism at either end of the exchange) comfortably Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three's highlight. Although the dark deco establishing shot used to introduce this brief sequence lacks the pearlescent pow of the original opening title image, the short punch up that follows is, compared to the static posturing that surrounds it, actually quite thrilling. The brawl, between Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's take on The Joker and The Caped Crusader, beautifully describes how a Clown Prince of Crime might stumble on his feet following some sizable and sustained head trauma. Animated flourishes aside, this clip also contains the late Kevin Conroy's final line reading for his signature role. Hissing through his teeth, the voice actor reaffirms his inextricable connection to the Batman character. It's a performance that spanned multiple decades and creative teams but remained so perfect and singular that Conroy could, if heard at the right time in your life, capture your imagination forever.

Morrigan by Ratt

BVSMV - And Waves of Dreams

Moose Dawa - See Me

In a Violent Nature

Although obviously and intentionally indebted to the Friday the 13th films, writer-director Chris Nash's In a Violent Nature isn't content to mindlessly appropriate that series' premise of horny teenagers gathering at a rundown summer camp to be slaughtered. Nash's reconfiguration is much more granular than that, preferring to tune itself (almost completely) into the stoned, somnambulant rhythms present in the earlier, more ramshackle episodes while transforming the monster - in this instance Ry Barrett's hulking Johnny - into an adored, centre-frame subject. There's actually precedence for this kind of reversed perspective in Paramount's slasher serial. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives briefly toys with the idea of the peeping tom-style observation inherent to the Jason character being turned back against the creeper. In Tom McLoughlin's '86 slasher, the machete-wielding killer is caught in his equivalent of a private moment, mindlessly hacking away at some long dead victim. Nash's film goes far further than this brief, metatextual gag though. In a Violent Nature is consumed with its killer, the camera dutifully trailing in his wake as Johnny crashes through undergrowth, in search of a totemic locket. Outside viewpoints and performances are, for a majority of the film, pointedly irrelevant then. The anonymous victims who invade Johnny's space are contextualised using his point of view: they are therefore flat and one-note, nothing more than badly essayed irritants who demand to be silenced in increasingly ingenious ways. The time and energy usually apportioned to a more human frame of reference has been drained away here, leaving only the strange tranquillity of an untiring monster methodically battering through the woods, that used to be his prison, in search of something to silence the buzzing inside his skull. 

Techno Westerns - Lover Boy

Sting by Ramon Villalobos

Kupla - Sunflower

Bob Dylan - Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1988 Turner Preview Version)

Scored with unhurried, percussive sketches by Bob Dylan and arriving in 1973, director Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid seemed well positioned to evoke plaintive pangs for the old, American west and the rascally outlaws that enlivened it. Peckinpah and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer's film proves much meaner than that though. It's a period piece balanced precariously on the cusp of the twentieth century and shot through with a palpable bitterness. Its subjects are lousy with the tetchiness of thwarted ambition; an all-consuming regret seems to roll off the screen and into the audience. James Coburn's Pat Garrett and Kris Kristofferson's Billy the Kid are former friends who have, in the fullness of time, found themselves on opposite sides of the law. Garrett, the older of the two, has sided with the money men who are slowly dividing up this formerly unconquerable expanse. Garrett, newly elected to the office of Sheriff for Lincoln County, immediately endeavours to prove his usefulness to the emerging system by assassinating Billy and sundry hangers-on. 

The Kid, on the other hand, has refused any opportunity to transform himself. He deliberately dawdles in conspicuous hide-outs, seemingly inviting the challenge his former ally represents. Although the pair squat at opposing ends of society, in Peckinpah's film both men foretell ruin for those unlucky enough to find themselves in their orbit. Again and again, this separated pair brush up against figures from their earlier lives, men who have diverted and digressed, putting down roots or raising families, all in an attempt to draw a line under their past misdeeds. The outcome for these old accomplices is never favourable. Tension hangs in the air - every time - as evasive, sometimes incomprehensible chatter winds its way towards an inevitable flash of anger. Even this violence, when it finally manifests, avoids the out-and-out titillation suggested by pirouetting bodies packed with squibs. Always, these participants are trapped and damned, forced to comply with the whims of madmen who just so happen to be incredibly good at extinguishing life. In Kristofferson, comfortably a decade too old to be playing Billy the Kid, Peckinpah has found a smiling sociopath whose every action tells you that he has long worn out his welcome. 

Bystanders to Billy's carnage regard him with the shock and awe associated with celebrity. As bodies lie cooking in the midday sun, shredded by shrapnel, crowds gather round to make themselves party to the legend. To pick and poke at the blasted, bleeding bodies and get a closer look at what Billy is up to next. The stunning lack of empathy for the victims, or self-preservation when peering at an armed crook, reflective either of the everyday numbness experienced by these downtrodden people or the sheer gravitational pull of Billy. Either way, townsfolk gather again and again to observe this criminal. In this context the unbeatable bandit apparently fulfils the function of a slumming superstar who has deigned to mingle with the little people. A flash of excitement before the drudgery of the everyday resumes. Even Kid's compatriots are cowed and obliging in Billy's presence, presumably for fear that his lethal attentions may soon fall on them. Coburn's Garrett is even worse still, a Judas who has betrayed his former associates in return for the steady income and status offered by the expanding criminal enterprises, such as the Santa Fe Ring, that weave themselves into government then call themselves legitimate. 

Coburn's Garrett is a creature of pure, consumptive excess. Although the sheriff refuses food every time it is offered to him these are not the actions of an ascetic. Garrett instead prefers to extract his calories from the whisky in his hipflask or the sherries he sips with conspiring governors. Garrett then rarely seen not nipping at some pungent, brown liquor. Seated and coiled, Garrett is able to disguise the tremors that bottle after bottle have enacted upon his body. He can bully people from a stationary position in his chair, turning his cold, hard gaze upon them or, if that fails, his pistol. When he flees from these situations, Peckinpah allows us to see just how unsteady he has made himself: the wobbles, the grasping for balance as the world beneath him tremors treacherously. Garrett's appetites are not limited to alcohol either. When staying at a saloon, where he hopes to learn the whereabouts of his quarry, Garrett has half a dozen women sent to his room for entertainment. Billy, for all his faults, enjoys a string of semi-romantic couplings with partners who either bashfully or hungrily receive him. Garrett picks and prods at his gaggle, demanding to be treated like a king among courtesans. When he finally staggers from away from this orgy to pursue a lead on Billy's whereabouts, Coburn, by clattering down a flight of stairs like a stiffened corpse, is playing Garrett as completely empty. A man who has purged every finer, human quality he ever had in pursuit of pure, unadulterated greed. 

Bob Dylan - Main Title Theme (Billy)

Messmer the Impaler by Jan and Vlad (Artwins)

Khruangbin - May Ninth

Inside Out 2

Amy Poehler, and hardly anybody else from the original cast, return for Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2, another Pixar adventure set amongst the personified emotions that rule the interior landscape of an adolescent girl named Riley. Whereas before the action focused on a depressive episode for the child, one made possible thanks to disruption caused by the absence of Poehler's Joy and Phyllis Smith's Sadness to oversee a cross-country move from somewhere in Minnesota to San Francisco, Inside Out 2 revolves around a coup d'état engineered by new, invading emotions led by Maya Hawke's Anxiety. Explosively energetic and teeming with schemes, Anxiety initially seems better placed to traverse the creep of puberty, and the interpersonal complications that come with it, than the comparatively one-note Joy. This sequel, something of a star vehicle for Poehler and the fusspot persona she cultivated on television's Parks and Recreation, organises the little yellow sprite as the foundational tenant of Riley. 

Joy is the aspect that rules all the other emotions and holds sway in times of crisis, vanquishing negative thoughts and feelings to the darkened rear of Riley's mind. Whereas the central clash between Joy and Anxiety would seem to suggest that a more unified, complementary approach might result in the most complete being, Inside Out 2 still ends with Joy ruling the roost. This despite Anxiety being equally able to conjure up an incandescent flower that pulses with Riley's (wavering) inner monologue. Really the only real challenge to Joy's continued governance is the inner turbulence suggested by a brief meltdown in which the emotion reveals a self-awareness that seems to indicate that she herself is being piloted by competing senses of self. Unfortunately, Inside Out 2 isn't particularly interested in pursuing these kind of farcical, metatextual concepts, preferring instead to treat a prolonged hockey try out with the paralysing solemnity being experienced by a youngster taking their first steps into a wider world. 

Valmont - Un Carré

Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) by Hungry Clicker

Fontaines DC - Favourite

Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes

In the far flung future of the twenty first century, space-faring has lost its appeal. With everyone on Earth living comfortably and content, mapping the cosmos has fallen to the armies of criminals being tugged about in space freighters so massive that their interiors can believably take on the demeanour of sunken, Soviet infrastructure. Director Piotr Szulkin's Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes follows one such expedition, undertaken by Daniel Olbrychski's Scope, a prisoner with very little interest in committing crimes who, when pushed to detail his preferred mania, describes himself only as recalcitrant. Packed into a malfunctioning spacecraft and fired off into the void, this political dissident lands, seemingly by design, on a dark, snow-tracked planet called Australia 458. This Antipodean satellite, that Scope is instructed to claim for mankind, has not only already been visited by humanity but so long colonised that the people stranded there have fallen into the mouldering destitution of a dependent state. 

There are signs that money was spent here at one point: the hotel Scope stays in has high ceilings and a certain amount of ornamentation but such ostentation has long been defeated by sodden cigarettes and taps that dribble sewage. As well as coalescing around a wintery, one-horse town, Australia 458's inhabitants have become obsessed with rotting digits as a delicacy and televised, ceremonial execution. Scope is intended to figure into the latter, one-third of a trio of ritual sacrifices with obvious, Christian overtones. Scope is selected to pay the part of one of the thieves crucified at Christ's side; encouraged to indulge in any and every crime; and issued with a teenage sex worker to help him on his way. Rather than lower himself (like the impenitent thief racing around 458 fucking and shooting everybody he sets eyes on), Scope prefers to bend the rules in an attempt to work a variety of gimcrack miracles. It's not that Scope is particularly Godly then - he spends the majority of the film chasing after Katarzyna Figura's pointedly underage escort - but Glory to the Heroes does make a point about societies that are too busy re-enacting the pageantry of a barbaric past to notice when a potential candidate has wandered into their midst. 

Romy - Always Forever (Live)

LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends (Live)

Janelle Monáe - Lipstick Lover (Live)

Lizzie Esau - Bleak Sublime (Live)

Barry Can't Swim - Kimbara (Live)

The Devil

Freed from a filthy jail, one that sits beneath a nunnery packed with bleeding soldiers, Leszek Teleszyński's delirious Jakub is pulled hither and thither by Wojciech Pszoniak's Stranger, a grinning maniac wrapped in a swirling, black cloak. Despite spiriting Jakub away from a variety of massing dangers, this mysterious meddler still doesn't strike the viewer as being particularly altruistic. Although the specifics of his interest in Jakub aren't immediately apparent, it is clear that this Stranger is unusually focused on the opportunities this newfound freedom represents. He delights in the moral and spiritual decline experienced by Jakub, urging the hapless wanderer towards further and greater indignity. Thomas, a uniformed ally who has kept his wits and is seen sharing Jakub's cell, is instantly blasted with a flintlock pistol by the Stranger, presumably on the suspicion that he may prove to be a leavening influence outside these walls. As the injured upstairs are ran through with Prussian bayonets, Jakub is packed onto a horse with a catatonic nun, played by Monika Niemczyk, then directed towards the remains of his life. 

Structurally, writer-director Andrzej Żuławski's The Devil could be categorised as a mutant strain of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol: a supernatural tale in which a disgraced or despondent man is instructed in the ripple effect created by his actions. Whereas Dickens, and later Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, dealt with the stability and goodness (intended or otherwise) generated by the individual, Żuławski's tour is one concerned with terrifying societal upheaval, human savagery then, finally, madness. An increasingly shell-shocked Jakub is, when visiting his former haunts, treated as inexplicable: either a restless ghost who has returned to frustrate those that have prospered in his absence or a figure who inspires a strange kind of sexual idolatry. Repeatedly set-upon, regardless of his relationship to the initiator, it is as if everyone Jakub comes across recognises that he has somehow become unstuck in the natural order and has, therefore, become something transcendent. Every response to Jakub then is premised on making him submit, be that a tongue on his throat or a lash at his back. Possessed of a genuine mania, Żuławski's film is teeming with these violent energies, all firing in every direction. The figures onscreen wrestle and cavort, tearing at each other's clothes; they communicate in shrieks and barks, all while cinematographer Maciej Kijowski's galloping camera struggles to keep pace.