Shockwave by AZOINAB

Tape Arcade & Voyage - Solaris

Sky Ferreira - Leash

Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain

A ghost story designed around extreme emotional denial and stifling tradition that expresses itself with pulsing backgrounds and unnatural colour. Nominally, Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain revolves around an impending celebration in a highly ordered harem that is being disrupted by supernatural events. The reason for this ceremony, the birth of a child, is of zero concern to director Kenji Nakamura's film. There is no wailing to be heard; and no danger directed at this infant. There are whispers that perhaps the baby will be an unsuitable heir, thanks to their gender, but that is simply muttered to massage the ascension of a different concubine to the lord's bedchamber. Glimpses of either the sitting power that conducts hundreds of women in total fealty or that of the uncanny underside that swallows up their dearest possessions are so brief as to be absent. Instead we are focused here on the human churn that caters to the uninterpretable. Adapted from a Toei Animation television series about a travelling spiritualist who is little more than an observer here, Phantom in the Rain is reminiscent of the work of Mahiro Maede, specifically his Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo TV series, in that every inch of every surface is alive with textured information. Patterns clash and combine, travelling over an environment that refuses to offer the viewer any space that could be considered safe or even normal. Everything here is blaring and aggressive, a setting of kaleidoscopic intranquility that crushes pleasant young women, transforming them into faceless automatons. 

The Cure - I Can Never Say Goodbye // Endsong

Knight by James Bousema

Junior Varsity - New York

Caligula - The Ultimate Cut

The latest in a long line of attempts to extract something artistically permissible from a Penthouse sponsored production that could, nevertheless, claim Gore Vidal as its screenwriter, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is a reforging of director Tinto Brass' film that aims to re-make the piece into something more befitting of a cast of luminaries that can count the likes of Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and Malcolm McDowell amongst their number. This newest assembly now sits alongside unrated theatrical versions, censored theatrical presentations, a variety of bowdlerised home video edits and even a 'clean' Director's Cut that was prepared for transmission (by Channel 4) on British terrestrial television. Compiled from nearly a hundred hours of dailies by editor Aaron Shaps, under the supervision of art historian Thomas Negovan, this Ultimate Cut proudly boasts almost zero commonality between itself and any previously sold release of Caligula. Although Negovan has spoken about his discovery that the takes selected by financier Bob Guccione were often not the most impressive, in terms of acting performance extracted, this particular edit does jettison some of the more memorable aspects of the original releases. 

As expected, the more volcanic sexual acts have been completely snipped away but also the odd aside that gave insight into the unusual thought processes of McDowell's bullied princeling. Gone is the moment where Caligula inquires of John Gielgud's Nerva, who sits in a tub of steaming water with his wrists open, what it is like to die. As well the end credits no longer march up the screen, laid over images of a murdered family, blood-stained marble and McDowell's lifeless, accusatory gaze. It's unclear if these moments have been deemed tonally counterintuitive or just extraneous by a project whose stated remit is to stick a little closer to Vidal's original screenplay. Perhaps they had no equivalent in the alternative footage that was made available? Presumably, this film has been changed so thoroughly for a very specific reason, be that a pressing copyright related issue or a personal challenge set by the new compilers. Regardless, this Caligula - which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival - is now packaged to denote discovery. As well as an expanded and reorganised scene order, we have a prologue and opening titles centred around rotoscoped animation of McDowell's pained march, created for this revision by artist Dave McKean; pristine digital attributions at either end of the film; a suite of unconvincing library sound effects; and a new musical score that forgoes the previously spliced-in music from Sergei Prokofiev's ballet, Romeo and Juliet. 

As ever though, Caligula is a tapestry of human cruelty. Cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti takes a theatrical perspective, often using audience-addressing master shots of production designer Danilo Donati's dizzyingly vertical sets; all of which teem with naked, vulnerable extras who behave as if they are being held at gunpoint. The removal of the hardcore pornography that Guccione previously insisted be threaded into the film not only goes some way to de-scandalising Caligula it also eliminates any sense of digression or levity in this emperor's unfolding madness. The sex we are shown in The Ultimate Cut is now either firmly based around imposed, hierarchical relationships or employed as an instrument of terror. With the likes of Lori Wagner and Anneka di Lorenzo clipped away, it is very clear now that absolutely no-one is enjoying themselves. Beyond these tonal corrections, Negovan's principle additions are a more detailed look at the relationship between McDowell's Caligula and Mirren's Caesonia. Previously a leashed accessory, Mirren's character is now, in the latter half of the film, clearly attempting to provide the same maternal comforts to her husband as Teresa Ann Savoy's ill-fated Drusilla did. The rote savagery of Caligula's rule is underlined in deed and conversation as well, harkening back to the words of Peter O'Toole's syphilitic Tiberius that his adopted grandson should be a punishment visited upon Rome. Most importantly, for anyone considering McDowell's career, there is now clearer connective tissue between this performance and A Clockwork Orange's Alex DeLarge. Both characters are plucky lunatics raging inside treacherous socio-political machinery who find themselves completely incapable of experiencing happiness and so turn to self-destruction. 

Kendrick Lamar - Luther (with SZA) // Dodger Blue (feat. Wallie the Sensei, Siete7x, and Roddy Ricch)

Julia-Sophie - Lose My Mind

Megatron by AZOINAB

The Cure - Warsong

Gladiator II

Gladiator II ties itself in knots to place its hero, Paul Mescal's Hanno, on the same path to the colosseum as his predecessor Maximus, as played by Russell Crowe. The latest from 86-year-old Ridley Scott is a belated sequel that he (somehow) found the energy to film in the year following Napoleon, another of the director's enormously detailed historical epics. In terms of pure storytelling, David Scarpa's screenplay twists and turns around a shallow dynastic intrigue that seems rather obvious given this sequel's photostat plotting. Although charming in a five-a-side sort of way, Mescal isn't quite able to channel Crowe's strange, tractor beam turbulences; those arresting eyeline tremors that physical communicate a mind seesawing back-and-forth between temperance and explosive violence. Similarly, Connie Nielsen's performance as Lucilla, the daughter of former emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a shadow of her preceding act. The actress now flat and robotic where previously her Lucilla had registered as guarded but still extremely cunning. 

This lack of gravitational pull from two of the most important characters, as well as the aggressively blunt storytelling employed to get a gladius in Hanno's hands, means Gladiator II is a subordinate experience in comparison to the 2000 film. But that's not to say that Scott isn't having or transmitting fun. Like his twin Alien prequels, Gladiator II represents an opportunity to reappraise concepts and sequences that never made it into the parent piece, often because of budgetary rather than qualitative concerns. So while Prometheus allowed the director to reclaim Giger's pyramid designs, this second Gladiator inherits costly colosseum battles built around massive African beasts and duelling, burning battleships encircled by sharks. An arena battle involving a rhinoceros doesn't just deliver on the broad strokes of Sylvain Despretz's twenty five year old storyboards (images of which were tucked away in the special features of two-disc DVD sets for the first Gladiator), it also reproduces the unusual little details that Scott himself etched into his Ridleygrams. This fascination with macabre match-ups also allows for Hanno to be subjected to hand-to-hand combat with hairless baboons, rendered here as muscular teeth and claw that wouldn't shame Scott's pitiless Alien: Covenant. 

Gladiator II's vision of Rome is denser and dirtier as well, journeying beyond repeatedly re-dressed bedrooms and flat, computer-generated vistas to really stick its nose into the filthy stalls or subterranean tombs that are threaded into this ancient city. This vivid, lively approach to antiquity is best expressed by Denzel Washington as Macrinus, Hanno's ambitious, arms-dealing slavemaster. Washington's role could very easily default to a rehash of Oliver Reed's curtailed Proximo: an entertaining, storied actor for the less experienced leading man to bounce off or commiserate with. Macrinus' role in proceedings does overlap somewhat with Proximo's but, again, this sequel goes in directions that the previous film could not. Reed's untimely death meant that Maximus' master could not become an antagonistic presence in the Spaniard's life. Not so here. Macrinus is an actor, able to present whichever image his audience expects. So, with pompous senators, Macrinus pretends to be a rich gadabout. When in the company of real power, his servility may ratchet up slightly but it is always tempered with a ruthless focus. In all things Macrinus strains to appear useful; instantly solving problems that he himself has cultivated. The closer he creeps to the throne, the more venal and bloodthirsty he becomes. At his peak he's endangering maidens and galloping away from pursuing heroes like a serial villain. Washington's is a wonderful performance, one that combines the actor's Shakespearean bona fides with a more modern-presenting flamboyance reminiscent of an entitled, record label mogul. 

Harry Gregson-Williams - Gladiator II Overture

Astrotrain by Kiron Fan

Arooj Aftab - Aey Nehin

Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard - Now We Are Free

Gladiator

Following sepia studio logos and an introductory text that swirls inside the mists of time, Gladiator gives its opening seconds over to a hand touching the tips of long, wheat stalks during golden hour. While unseen children laugh, off in the distance, we watch as bronzed fingers lightly grasp at this waving grass, enjoying the prickly sensation. This interlude does not represent the present for Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, they are either his memories or a fantasy of home that has wriggled into him then refused to budge. Crowe's soldier blinks himself out of this trance to discover that he is still trapped on enemy territory in the midst of winter, preparing for an imminent, apocalyptic battle. It is, in a way, a dichotomy that is just as pronounced as the one experienced by Rick Deckard in the various Director's Cuts of Blade Runner: a dream that is pointedly disconnected from each character's current reality. Whereas Deckard's drunken, future-shocked reveries depict a muscular unicorn crashing through a forest, Maximus' interior perspective is softer, suggestive of a private moment that this man may have actually physically encountered. 

These personal desires instantly propose Maximus as romantic but beleaguered, an instrument honed by decades of bloodshed that would, quite happily, pack up then leave this place if he enjoyed that level of authority. Maximus returns to these visions again and again as the film presses forward. They expand in scope to explicitly include his wife and son, the situations curdling into precognitive glimpses of their death at the hands of bloodthirsty Praetorians. Later they are fleeting comfort for Maximus, following his failure to show fealty to Joaquin Phoenix's murderous heir. The visions are now drained of colour and life, taking on the same stark, funereal quality as that present in Arnold Böcklin's painting Die Toteninsel, specifically the monochromatic third version, painted in 1883. Scott's film portrays the afterlife as a place of family and comfort, an escape from obligation otherwise thwarted by the machinations of madmen. Happiness then is something always just out of Maximus' living reach. Even before his diseased body is sold into slavery, the General is very specifically a pawn in larger schemes. The dying emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, may trust and appreciate Maximus but the younger man is still just a tool, a way for this war-mongering monarch to realign a legacy that has emptied his kingdom's coffers and allowed for the rise of Phoenix's poisonous, self-obsessed Commodus. 

These strict states of being for Maximus have structural purchase as well. The General is always subordinated; always stuck answering for somebody else's life-or-death demands. After he is unceremoniously ejected from the Roman army he is bought by Oliver Reed's Proximo, an ex-gladiator turned slavemaster. Later, when he fights before crowds in the Colosseum, he acts on behalf of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, functioning as a male proxy who can lower himself to violence and vanquish her creeping brother. It is in these later passages that Gladiator reveals itself as a sports movie masquerading as a historical epic. Ridley Scott's film, written for the screen by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, may begin with massed, strictly regimented armies blasting flaming rocks at treelines but once the principal characters have returned to Rome, Gladiator gives itself over to a mode of storytelling that has more in common with a pro-wrestling television show than pious, Technicolor biblical blockbusters. Above all there is a complete submission to a very specific format. Secondary characters may plot and plan in shadow but nothing in Gladiator can truly be accomplished unless it involves armed combat staged for sadistic spectators. Scott's film then pointedly elides any of the contextualisation typical to this genre: Maximus isn't saved by the Christian faith. Similarly, he doesn't allow himself to be martyred or transformed into a messianic symbol. His final act is to relay the message, the albatross-like burden, that Marcus placed around his neck at the beginning of the film. He does this job, admirably, after getting to enact a ferocious, truly triumphant beating on the new, nepotism hire. 

System96 - Terminal

Optimus Prime by AZOINAB

Ultramagnetic MC's - Give the Drummer Some

Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 2

The Beast

From the outset writer-director Bertrand Bonello's The Beast seems to be building a very specific kind of scaffolding, one that uses a science fiction premise and the fantastical technology available therein, to detail a would-be affair that occurs again and again, across multiple centuries and lifetimes. In an emptied-out, Covid-compliant future, Léa Seydoux's Gabrielle argues with machines of varying sophistication about her career prospects. Gabrielle's reluctance to sink herself into oil and have her past lives audited for emotional irregularities means that she is only able to perform the most menial of tasks. The artificial intelligence that presides over the Paris of the 2040s simply refusing to collaborate with persons who haven't subjected themselves to strange, somnambulist experiments that resolve certain, unseemly emotional responses. Despite a very obviously shrunken human population, the machine masters of The Beast have little use for anyone who isn't attempting to match their serene, robotic neutrality. 

The horror here then is that not only has an impartial kind of intelligence mapped out human suffering to such an exacting degree, arriving as well at an inhuman sort of solution, but that mistakes made lifetimes ago can still impact upon the now, damaging a person who hasn't even had a chance to influence those experiences. The ability to dip in and out of these scenarios and participate in this latent trauma doesn't seem to be particularly therapeutic either. More of a blunt force correction that fails to make any concession for the wants or desires of the fixed, human identity trespassing outside of their own era. When Gabrielle does take the plunge, subjecting herself to lengthy, fragmented dreams in which she relives key instances of stress that have stained her karmic soul, the sticking points always revolve around George MacKay's Louis. He first appears as a chaste, Victorian suitor who refuses to act upon the signals being beamed directly at him by Gabrielle's married equivalent. This sumptuous interlude, premised around an expected sort of propriety wrongfoots the audience about the kind of person that Louis is. 

When we meet Louis again a hundred or so years later, this inability to act upon his desires has curdled into something violent and reproachful. The hesitance of a high-society (supreme) gentleman now fully realised as a ranting incel who creeps around at night, following women in his car while trying to build up enough courage to do something awful. Loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, Bonello's film disdains the dithering, male perspective on commitment to detail how terrible it is to be the subject in somebody else's problem. To be both incredibly vital and yet somehow still extraneous. In all of their meetings Gabrielle is quite capable of recognising the connection between herself and Louis. She pursues him, using the apparatus of her age to appear open and amenable. It is Louis who resists, unwilling or unable to be truly brave and take a chance. The Beast is a cumulative experience then, a forlorn piece that makes its point out of fragments that, very deliberately, fail to congeal into anything romantically satisfying. Léa Seydoux, as photographed by Josée Deshaies, is our only real constant. The actress very rarely anywhere but the centre of the frame. Often the camera will slowly close in on her face, eliminating all extraneous information to fill our screens with a pair of big blue eyes that permanently look like they are on the verge of weeping. 

Bertrand Bonello - Fractal, pt. 1

Okay Kaya - The Wannabe

A World's Finest by Paul Jon Milne

Junior Varsity - Cross the Street

Madara 1000 - Visions V1

Who Can Kill a Child?

Director Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? begins with seven minutes of punishing black and white documentary footage that details, again and again, the immense suffering that has befallen children throughout the twentieth century. These newsreels obscure nothing. We are asked to peer directly at the bloated bodies of innocents; the tiny, mutilated people who have either starved to death during a famine or been murdered by other genocidal apparatus. These episodes seep into the events of the film itself, recurring as a news report on a portable TV set that sits on a shop counter while an English tourist, Lewis Fiander's Tom, buys his wife, Prunella Ransome's heavily pregnant Evelyn, a few rolls of film so they can document their island-hopping adventure. Although the Spanish salesman who serves the couple is moved by the rolling misery on display, Tom and Evelyn are more interested in resuming their getaway. They are escaping reality, rather than embracing it. 

Filmed and released in the mid-1970s, Who Can Kill a Child? wasn't necessarily intended to be pored over with a mind to present-day paedological concerns but it is striking that this couple have, and it's stated a few times, deliberately left their children at home, denying them access to this sunny break. Similarly, the duo's nationality (within the context of a Spanish film) and Tom's self-appointed role of expert fails to arouse much sympathy for the duo either. They are very deliberately tourists, the kind of transplanted visitors who might deign to mumble a few words in the local language but are still comfortable enough to complain about regional customs and the crowds that they attract. Tom is fixated on a remote, nearby island that he holidayed on many years previously which has, in the meantime, become the flash point for a mass uprising of children. The specifics of this mutiny are left mysterious but the intent to kill any and all adults seems to be communicated psychically, child-to-child. It says something as well that the message is always so greedily received. Given the very real evidence offered upfront as explanation for this reprogramming, as well as the self-involved subjects navigating this turmoil, it's difficult to side against the revolting youth. 

The Flaming Lips - Evil Will Prevail

Quincy Jones - Killer Joe

Godzilla Got a Nintendo GameBoy for His 70th Birthday!! by Brett Marcus Cook

Quincy Jones - Ai No Corrida // Razzamatazz

Joker: Folie à Deux

A sequel that doesn't just refuse its place in the ever-expanding comic book movie pantheon, but actively works to sabotage and undermine such an enterprise altogether. In that sense Joker: Folie à Deux can sit proudly alongside other, hectoring second episodes like Exorcist II: The Heretic or Gremlins 2: The New Batch instead. All three films are, after all, the result of the entity formerly known as Warner Bros. demanding a second visit to well-trodden turf. Folie has (similarly) been received as disappointing, if not actually upsetting and outright frustrating, for its obstinate desire to not give the audience the Clown Prince of Crime they so desperately desire. The film very obviously having next-to-no interest in assuming the role of gritty predecessor for a series of period Gotham City spin-offs. Despite this incalcitrant outlook there are a few, brief allusions to DC's wider world of criminality, but they are all so abashed or plain out-of-focus that they might as well have been clipped away in the edit bay. It's as if the piece itself cannot bare the studio notes that have, presumably, been foisted upon it. 

A promise of the kind of gauche, multipurpose continuity that the various Marvel universes have staked their future on does intrude very late in these proceedings but it's all so blurred and indistinct, occurring way in the background while Lawrence Sher's camera stays locked in on Joaquin Phoenix's gasping, drowning performance as Arthur Fleck. That thing that audiences say they want is present then but the execution is deliberately aggravating and disappointing, framed as a wrinkle casually unfolding on the periphery. Wouldn't you rather focus in on the character that the filmmakers actually want to tell you about? Hasn't Phoenix's all-consuming act sated your need to see this heavily merchandised monster revert to trick flower type? With Folie, writer-director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver have delivered a follow-up that isn't just ambivalent about its billion dollar ancestor, it's angry about it. Put out that the incredible marketplace success that the previous film enjoyed demands another instalment; appalled that a substantial amount of the film's audience saw in Joker an insurrectionist façade that could be applied to social movements from the shallower end of the political waters. 

Phillips' solution then is to underline the foibles and flaws inherent to his interpretation of this character: Fleck is physically meek and easily dominated; his grasp on reality is slippery and prone to fantastical delusion; and perhaps most crucially, he lacks the healthy, psychological scaffolding required to make good on his dearest make-believe. All of which very deliberately works against the expected assumption of a cackling super-identity for this jailed psychiatric patient. The captive audience of an ongoing court trial, as well as the introduction of Lady Gaga as Lee, a shade of Harley Quinn, would seem to suggest an opportunity for mass, cathartic slaughter but the pieces, by design, never quite click into place. Lee isn't the elasticated sidekick we're otherwise used to, she's a troubled rich kid holidaying in her idea of somebody else's mania. She's a fan. In love with the branding rather than the person that is actually stood before her. When Lee's fantasies are not being served she eagerly pouts and recriminates, damning Arthur for his failure to measure up to the persona that she has herself concocted. For his part, the wrinkled and emaciated Fleck doesn't fantasise about orchestrating the kind of orgiastic violence his beloved would seem to prefer. Instead he dreams about himself and her as brightly coloured subjects in a gently mocking variety show. Happiness as a Saturday night television broadcast. Unlike his would-be partner, who at first seems to be a particularly vivid agent of Fleck's imagination, when left to his own devices Arthur is quite happy to sit there medicated, soaking in Technicolor musicals. 

Joaquin Phoenix - True Love Will Find You in the End

The Cure - Alone

Savage Street Vigilante by Simon Mallette St-Pierre

Prince - Trust

The Invisible Man

James Whale's The Invisible Man is a delinquent's delight, a film completely disinterested in anything other than the chaos perpetrated by a mad man who cannot be seen. Played by Claude Rains, Dr. Jack Griffin has toiled in secret, discovering a way to make his body disappear. This boon thanks, in part, to an Indian drug with uncommonly powerful bleaching abilities. These experiments have rendered him permanently transparent, with an antidote for this affliction just beyond the good doctor's scientific grasp. Although griffin's stuffier former colleagues talk up the psychosis associated with the miracle drug that forms the basis of his studies, there's ample evidence here that simply being beyond any conventional sense of redress have allowed this man to completely unravel. 

Whether wrapped in gauze or animating a pair of stolen trousers, Griffin can be heard ranting and raving like a lunatic. Rains' voice is a thundering, ever-present instrument that squats over the soundtrack and overenunciates every syllable available to it. His booming sentences register as a series of jabs and swipes; a tongue that clatters like a machinegun aimed at anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing space with him. What makes Griffin's mania even more entertaining though is the overt cloddishness of his victims: the citizens of the town he terrorises are slow-witted and screeching; the police who attempt to trap him are similarly clumsy and doltish. These dragnets offer absolutely zero amusement when measured against an amoral spectre who is perfectly happy to crater the heads of choking policeman. Even Griffin's contemporaries pale in comparison. So-called equals, such as William Harrigan's Dr. Kemp, can do nothing but tremble at the ungodly terror that is able to breeze in and out of their homes. 

The Specials - Ghost Town (Extended Version)

Hookjaw by John McCrea

Caribou - Honey

Arachnophobia

Not satisfied with the alien malevolence implied by the sneering confidence of your average house spider, director Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia, written by Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick, imposes a hierarchical, hive-based structure upon these creepy crawlies. For, you see, somewhere in Venezuela, deep in the core of a table-top mountain, there exists a tree that is home to dozens of species of undiscovered butterfly and a generalissimo spider that can pump out its own, subordinate colony. Setting aside the kind of farcical war on drugs-era alarm that a South American import could, slowly and methodically, infiltrate small town America, Arachnophobia is still unusually strict about how it separates its villain, in this instance a terrifyingly fertile prehistoric spider, and its many rosy-cheeked victims. The spiderling scions sent out from the collapsing barn of Jeff Daniels' newly rehoused GP are not only pure, prowling evil but seem to be laser-target at the elderly. 

These adventurous and resoundingly unsympathetic arthropods knit themselves into an older lady's lamp, or they trample their way into the abundant snacks of an aging mortician, then lie in wait to deliver their deadly venom. The elimination of the more doddery inhabitants of this picturesque, Californian village coincides with the arrival of Daniels' Dr. Jennings and, perhaps more crucially, his snubbing by a mummified practitioner who had promised this San Francisco import the inheritance of his medical beat. This would seem to be a persistent source of comedic exasperation for Jennings, but this doesn't quit pan out. Although a Doctor Death label is briefly proposed by his cagier neighbours, it fades into the background once secondary characters like the late Julian Sands' softly spoken entomologist or John Goodman's bug exterminator begin gobbling up everybody's attention. Although handsomely photographed by Mikael Salomon, Arachnophobia is a touch too genteel to really dazzle. Like many of its Amblin stablemates, the film is a high concept in desperate need of the neurotic mania that a director like Steven Spielberg (or Joe Dante) is able to, effortlessly, access. 

Bert Jansch - Needle of Death

The Monster by Mizmaru Kawahara

MF DOOM - ?

The Invasion

Even without the knowledge that director Oliver Hirschbiegel's original cut of The Invasion was deemed too dull by producer Joel Silver (then taken back to the drawing board by new writers Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as well as reshoot director James McTeigue), the finished product betrays an obvious feeling of bifurcation. Once a rolling start is packed away to be returned to later, introductory scenes are icy and tinged with misanthropy, as if preparing to detail a microscopic invasion using the syntax of a self-satisfied political thriller. Despite the dryness of the acronyms firing around, Nicole Kidman's prescription dispensing psychiatrist is shot to be luminous; cinematographer Rainer Klausmann arranging the frame around the light and heat rolling off this star. In the non-harried pieces of the film that can (presumably) be attributable to Hirschbiegel, Kidman betrays the blonde, Hitchcockian glamour of a Tippi Hedren or a Kim Novak. Later, when the film has defaulted to a checkpoint sprint with dozens of drone people hanging off a speeding sedan, Kidman is green and frazzled. Sunken deeply into a diet of Mountain Dew and pearlescent poppers as she struggles to stay awake. The Invasion then is trapped between these two clashing wavelengths: one frequency tuned to the buttoned-up description of a planet plunging into somnambulism. The other a much trashier take on human paranoia that allows Kidman's Dr. Carol to subject neighbourhood children to alarming head trauma or mow down advancing supermarket employees while her perspective slips in and out of focus. Neither element feels entertaining enough to really stake a claim on this film though. Instead, the two incompatible tones work against each other, undermining this strangely pod positive piece. 

VIQ - I See

Electronic Visions - Forest Language

Amityville II: The Possession

Director Damiano Damiani's Amityville II: The Possession doesn't sit around. As soon as the Montelli family move into the film's fateful Dutch Colonial residence, the evil spirits within begin their campaign of terror, slamming doors and daubing lurid graffiti all over bedroom walls. Burt Young, as this family's father, is something of a stumbling block for these apparitions though. Rather than twig to the supernatural happenings in his new household, Young's Anthony instead batters at his youngest children, lashing them with his belt and snarling cruel invective at his screaming, defeated wife. Before long his oldest son, played by Jack Magner, is possessed by a leering entity but it's clear that this family was already shaking itself apart long before demons intervened. Anthony is a tyrannical presence, using his heft and unrepentant manner to dominant his cowed family. In that sense Magner's Sonny is positioned as something of a corrective influence in the household, at least initially. His mother and sisters seem to recognise that Sonny is the only one of them who will be able to summon up the physical strength to put this horrid little man in his place. Although Damiani's film builds its latter half around a fairly entertaining exorcism and James Olson's guilt-ridden priest, it's the first portion of Amityville II that leaves the strongest impression: the strange sympathy, or adulation, that Rutanya Alda's Dolores and Diane Franklin's Trish have for Sonny. Both mother and daughter consider him in ways that are, very obviously, completely unstuck from typical, familial affections. 

Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

The Bride of Frankenstein by Mizmaru Kawahara

Lucy in Disguise - Digital Campfire

Exhuma

Writer-director Jang Jae-hyun's Exhuma begins with a spiteful, intrafamilial haunting. An elder ancestor, whose agitated spirit apparently loathes the place where it has been laid to rest, exerts a cross-continental hold on its descendants. This bony grip afflicts the children of Kim Jae-cheol's Park Ji-yong, smothering out their young lives just as they are struggling into the world. And so this wealthy, Korean American real estate developer gathers a team in South Korea - including Oldboy's Choi Min-ski as a feng shui expert and a strikingly composed shaman played by Kim Go-eun - to excavate a remote gravesite, overlooking the North, in the hopes that this will appease the jealous spirit. Told on bitter grounds that teem with supernatural pests, Exhuma strikes an unusual note when describing its ghosts. Jang's film is less interested in the interpersonal strife of this autophagic family than expected, leaving damning tales of abuse or neglect unspoken. Instead, Exhuma prefers to examine the kind of rotten bastard that would smother its descendants in their cots on a much broader canvas, one that encompasses the destruction of Korea as a unified country and this great-grandparent's collaboration with the insidious, colonial designs of a foreign power. Jang's film is told in a series of ceremonies, each given power and meaning by those practising these many, clashing rituals. Unlike, say, The Wailing, in Exhuma we are always in the company of experts, all of whom are desperately trying to make sense of a haunting that seems unending, or perhaps more accurately, unquenchable. 

MF DOOM - Red and Gold

The Wolf Man by Mizmaru Kawahara

Bert Jansch - Black Water Side

Type O Negative - (We Were) Electrocute

Freddy vs. Jason

Structurally and stylistically, Freddy vs. Jason is far closer to the A Nightmare on Elm Street side of its family than anything hailing from Camp Crystal Lake. So, as well as focusing on hallucinations and the special effects showcases they can facilitate, this film's prospective victims are much more emotionally damaged than the mosquito country regulars. Instead of stoner teens knowingly circling the drain, Freddy vs. Jason's cast are tranquilised, middle-class children; double-damned by parents who conjured up a vengeful ghost then lulled their offspring into an addled fog in their attempts to thwart it. This idea of unwilling subordination extends to the title characters as well, with Ken Kirzinger's Jason Voorhees tricked into the role of an understudy, toiling on behalf of a truly noxious interpretation of Freddy Krueger. 

As if to vanquish all memory of the quipping slasher that found purchase in 80s pop culture, Robert Englund's movie maniac is re-introduced in a sequence that elevates the paedophilic underpinning of the character from unspoken (but obvious) into vivid, repulsive text. It's not enough to imply that Krueger has murdered a little girl then cremated her body in his furnace, we have to see him licking a copy of her school portrait before stamping the image into his serial killer scrapbook. The uncomfortable darkness emanating from Krueger, which elsewhere demands that a father jab his tongue at his daughter's screaming mouth, is offset by the comparatively humdrum fantasies coursing through Jason Voorhees' skeletal remains. Six feet under, Jason dreams of chasing topless co-eds through endless woods, their flight thwarted by the kind of ineffectual motion found in real-life night terrors. 

In director Ronny Yu's film, Jason is a violent, lumbering expression of childhood helplessness. Even freed from memories in which this physically disabled boy is bullied to his death, Jason's feedback loop is one premised on expectation and denigration. His mother, a screeching phantom conjured by Krueger, screams at him to redress her own demise while Freddy himself is positioned as a repellent, patriarchal influence that demands Jason labour, thanklessly, for his new master's gain. Yu, a Hong Kong film industry veteran responsible for The Postman Strikes Back and The Bride with White Hair, approaches these creatures with neither the scraping awe of a fan or the bored indifference of a jobbing director. He's here to work, finding new perspectives on everything from the killers themselves to the steaming environments they inhabit. In one instance, when Krueger has an advantage over a soaked, cowering Jason, Yu and cinematographer Fred Murphy dial up the shadows then blasts Elm Street's broiled menace with greens, transforming Freddy into Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West.

Similarly, the tracks of repetition that have been worn into Jason's decayed mind are framed here as almost Sisyphean in their monotonous and unending futility. While at the mercy of a gloating Krueger, Jason retreats into his safe space: imagining himself relentlessly gathering the bodies of brutalised, naked teens only to hurl these cadavers into an infinite void that lingers just beyond the confines of his well-stocked wardrobe. This en suite exists in the kind of comfortably well-off, suburban boy's bedroom that this engorged, single-parent child has, likely, never actually inhabited. A dream inside a dream then. For Jason the nascent twang of an adolescent sexuality - thwarted not only Jason's childhood death but by an overbearing, nagging mother - has curdled. The drive to embrace and hold onto someone has been transformed into something horrible and inhuman. Similarly, an idea of clashing objectives, to be expected in a film titled Freddy vs. Jason, is expressed here in stronger terms than a simple, blood-splattered battle. These two invincible sex criminals track in on this film's unusually unhappy cast (cosmetic surgery and substance abuse are recurring fascinations), each vying to be that special someone who will snuff out their miserable little lives. 

Snoop Doggy Dogg - Murder was the Case

The Invisible Man by Mizmaru Kawahara

Dr. Dre & Ice Cube - Natural Born Killaz

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

Rather than plot a fresh excursion into Konami's blighted burg, writer-director MJ Bassett's Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is a straight follow-up to Christophe Gans' 2006 film. This explicit connection means that Revelation is conceptually hobbled, forced to build upon a big screen scenario that had already been, bloodily, settled. So, even though the fanatical citizens of this tephra-town were previously revealed as tormented ghosts using a scarred, thwarted saviour to hang onto our reality, Bassett's take ties itself in knots to make them a plotting, physical threat, able to send out scions that flatter and cajole. Still, this is a horror sequel. Of course it picks at the bones of its predecessors rather than try something a little more daring. Unfortunately, Revelation's issues don't end there. Whereas Gans was able to conjure up an all-consuming feeling of concussed dread, Bassett's sequel defaults to a boring, syrupy skulk through a haunted house attraction. Teenager Heather Mason, as played by Adelaide Clemens, isn't as compelling as Radha Mitchell's single-minded mother either. Mitchell's interpretation of the sullen line-readings found in the early Silent Hill games was equally flat but still betrayed an unusually intense determination. The actress therefore able to communicate an idea of being spellbound and unable to turn away from the task at hand. That performance was an agreeable reading of a video game character, a state of being that demands a person consistently and willingly place themselves in incredible danger. Clemens enjoys no such detail in her direction. 

Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka - Armless / The Missionary Attacks

Dracula by Mizmaru Kawahara

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Annihilation

Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka - Sanity

Silent Hill

Although a significant departure from the themes and events of the video games being adapted, director Christophe Gans' Silent Hill does capture something of the actual, linguistic experience of a player puzzling through this type of interactive story. Screenwriter Roger Avery even apes the structural and narrative devices employed by both Konami's Team Silent and the similar, largely Japanese development studios who specialised in survival horror during the PlayStation 2 era. To wit: expositional flashbacks instantly impose themselves on the unfolding action following the activation of some inscrutable trigger and Radha Mitchell's despairing mother, Rose, finds herself in a safe, congratulatory space after having surmounted a climactic danger. Keys are also crucial to Rose's basic progress within an environment that is smothered with low resolution textures and shifts in then out of relative safety. These solutions are scavenged and context-sensitive; premised around the tiny, everyday inventory that Rose is able to hold. Of course, these items are then immediately lost after their use. Whereas other video game adaptations work hard to translate the sprawling mess of interactive entertainment into a tight, three-act structure, Silent Hill instead attempts to emulate the dissociative quality experienced when playing Japanese video games that are themselves inspired by an American film or television series. Those messy, parapsychological doomsdays that have been transcribed and reinterpreted back-and-forth between two languages that read in completely different directions. Gans' film, which centres around a Bible Belt town's revulsion at the idea of a messiah born out of wedlock, even finds time for the listless wandering that occurs when players are unfamiliar with their brand new maze. 

Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka - Night Drive

Spawn by Peach Momoko

Madara 1000 - DDDDDD

Deadpool & Wolverine

Ryan Reynolds, who is already plastered all over Disney+ with his Welcome to Wrexham documentary series, finally makes his presence known in the big screen Marvel universe with Deadpool & Wolverine, a long-promised meet-up that keeps some plates spinning for a cinematic slate that is, we are repeatedly told here, no longer in the rudest of health. Rather than immediately have Reynolds' talkative (or annoying, if you prefer) avatar brushing shoulders with what remains of The Avengers, director Shaun Levy and his co-writers, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Reynolds again have concocted a slightly more metatextual premise for their crossover event, one that uses the Whovian claptrap present in cancelled streaming serial Loki to draw in characters from films that were either made when Marvel was happily licensing off any property it could to stay solvent or released under regimes now obliterated by enormous, monopoly-flouting mergers. 

So, as well as an eternally reliable Hugh Jackman essaying a particularly grumpy take on The Wolverine, Jennifer Garner's Elektra is wished back into being, along with Dafne Keen's X-23 (from Logan) and Channing Tatum as a version of Gambit that never quite made it out of development hell. All are welcome distractions from the relentless motor-mouthing - particularly Tatum who ably demonstrates the difference between genuine, comedic irreverence and a strain of humour, otherwise omnipresent in this film, in which the audience often feels like they've been taken hostage by a brand ambassador - but it's the film's use of Wesley Snipes as an older, grouchier Blade that turns out to be the biggest double-edged sword. Of course, in the week that Kris Kristofferson has passed away, it's wonderful to see Snipes back in his tacti-Goth get up, now with a fine line of grey creeping up the knife-edge of his hairline, but the brief machete-twirling seen here is not an adequate resolution for a performance and persona that has cast such a massive, sun darkening shadow. 

As Deadpool & Wolverine rattles ever closer to a resolution, the false expectations engendered by its premise become more apparent, even glaring. The fourth-wall breaking muddies the conceptual water: are these heroes refugees from their own, individual franchises or orphaned ideas tossed off from our higher, indifferent reality? Is the plane of existence that we, the viewer, inhabit something that can be accessed by the onscreen characters? If Deadpool can directly address the audience, shouldn't his allies harbour some resentment for, if not the cinemagoer that did not turn up for each of their individual instalments, then perhaps the executive regimes that so mishandled their incredible destinies? The crumbling edifice of the 20th Century Fox logo is frequent background flavour in a topographical realisation of a desktop recycle bin but is that really enough to sate our collective bloodlust? Basically, is The Daywalker cleaving David S. Goyer, the writer-director of New Line's Blade: Trinity, in twaine a realistic expectation for post-modern, early-2000s nostalgia bait or is it merely the delusional desire of this terminally chippy weirdo? 

Regardless, Ryan Reynolds' latest charm offensive absolutely peters out, content to build for itself yet another world-destroying machine then have it be destroyed. Like a great many Marvel films then, Deadpool & Wolverine peaks while the credits are rolling. Although, unusually, the entertainment being extracted here isn't premised on even more completely unrealistic (or, in their more recent instances, unlikely to be referred to again) expectations. Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day plays over interlaced B-roll footage from the Fox era and, for once, it feels like the shattering of motion picture kayfabe is being leveraged in a genuinely affectionate, rather than cynically advantageous, way. As a device, these behind-the-scenes glimpses are typically limited to comedies, deployed as a way to reassure anyone watching that of course the crew were absolutely delighted to be on set that day when the highest paid actor decided to waste everybody's time by ad-libbing. Here though, the effect is sincere and cumulative, tracking through a couple of decades worth of both success and failure; most of which hinge upon the unfailing likeability being broadcast by one Hugh Jackman. A superhero actor who, at this point, is surely second only to Christopher Reeve in terms of being able to remain dignified, even immune, when surrounded by hare-brained nonsense.

Geordie Greep - The New Sound

Frank's Monz by Buster Moody

Burial - Dreamfear

Walter Rizzati - Tema Bambino

The House by the Cemetery

Free association filmmaking from writer-director Lucio Fulci that combines the creepy au pair of The Omen with the housebound, psychic maelstrom of The Shining to little actual effect. These lifts aren't conceptual fragments that fellow screenwriters Dardano Sacchetti and Giorgio Mariuzzo have plotted their story around, they're blaring instruments that are (infrequently) deployed to keep the film's wheels spinning. Ania Pieroni's babysitter may gaze longingly at her employer, Paolo Malco's Dr Norman Boyle, but Fulci's film has neither the time nor the inclination to suggest the beginnings of an affair, even when it becomes clear that a previous tenant of the building they inhabit brutally murdered his own young mistress. Lucasian rhyming couplets be damned then. 

Similarly, when Pieroni's Ann wakes early to robotically smear the blood that has seeped out of the cellar and into the kitchen, it may seem that she is being driven by some unseen, supernatural force to cover their tracks but, if she is, this lingering horror isn't above immediately trapping this governess under the building so she can be mauled by a mummified monster. Set in and around a decaying, Boston mansion, The House by the Cemetery is packed with clashing, contradictory ideas; all of which are being tipped into a steaming, maggoty slop, faster than they can congeal. As with The Beyond, whose original, Italian release was less than six months before this feature, Cemetery's stand-out moment is a truly tremendous animal attack. This sequence, in which a plump bat attaches itself to Norman's hand, is both alarmingly violent and, in terms of the filmmaking techniques used to detail the assault, massively distended. The fanged ambush goes on and on, battering back-and-forth between treacly repulsion and a more comedic kind of over-indulgence. 

Walter Rizzati - I Remember

Lizzie Esau - Cool

Stilz - Scarlet Lips

Thunderwing by Paul Jon Milne

VIQ - Ghost

Return of Bastard Swordsman

Return of Bastard Swordsman is an unusual sequel, one that almost completely dispenses with its title character to spend vast tracts of screentime in the company of Tony Liu, recast here from the treacherous mole he essayed in the previous instalment to an, apparently unconnected, fortune teller. Norman Chui's orphaned superman Yun Fei Yang is a fleeting presence then, his diminished role in proceedings perhaps somewhat premised on the enlightenment the character experienced in the prior film? So, having shown mercy at the conclusion of writer-director Lu Chun-Ku's Bastard Swordsman, by refusing to erase the Wudang martial arts school that had mercilessly bullied him, Yun strode off into an uncertain future rather than stick around and assume leadership of his devastated former home. Yun's ambivalence has left Wudang rudderless though. Easy prey for the nearby Invincible school, who are spoiling for a fight, and a clan of Japanese ninja who have shown up to encroach on this territory.

As an aside, it's hard not to delight in the Ega force's violent assault on Wudang headquarters, slaughtering a selection of newly imported big shots as well as the ageing law makers who, previously, made Yun's life a living hell. If only the silken superman had done it himself. Far less deranged in either its plotting or the film's physical construction, Return is a misshapen retread that ties itself in knots to (re)deliver on the reincarnation beats established in its predecessor. What Lu's sequel does have going for it though is any time spent in the company of Alex Man as Master Dugu, the cuckolded sifu of Invincible school and the means by which Return dissects a specific kind of middle-aged anxiety. Having dedicated his life to training in seclusion, Dugu finds himself alone and unloved as he nears the end of his life. As well as driving his wife into the arms of another, Dugu's mastery of laser-blasting martial arts has, understandably, caused his blood pressure to spike dangerously as well. It's a diagnosis that sees this cackling, well-dressed madman shit out of luck when he battles against an Ega ninja master who can puff out his own, incredible chest then use the oversized, jackhammering organ within to disrupt the rhythm of Dugu's broken heart. 

Clairo - Thank You

Kupla - Treasure

Bastard Swordsman

Writer-director Lu Chun-Ku's Bastard Swordsman refuses to sit still. Structured around the tangled webs woven by competing martial arts schools, the film is constant movement and counter-movement. This rush of gesticulation isn't just the weightless figures blasting around the frame either. Onscreen energies have sunken into the piece itself, resulting in an assembly that reads like a tape stuck on fast-forward. Lu and cinematographer Chin Chiang Ma (who previously collaborated on the similarly mind-boggling Holy Flame of the Martial World) approach even basic head-to-head conversations as an opportunity to hurl the camera into their actor's faces or stalk around them in an aggressive, agitated manner. Editors So Chan-Kwok, Lau Shiu-Gwong and Chiang Hsing-Lung are the willing accomplices, paring down their director's raw footage until Bastard Swordsman is nothing but breathless motion. 

Perhaps this method of delivery is reflective of an overstuffed screenplay? One that aims to condense a 60 episode television series (the show in question, Reincarnated, was broadcast on Hong Kong TV in 1979) into one, ninety minute movie? Lu crams in factions and sub-factions; secret identities and betrayals; as well as heart-breaking familial disorder, into a story that is, broadly, a kind of wuxia Cinderella. Norman Chui, who passed away recently, plays Yun Fei Yang, an orphan who overcomes his diminished station in life to fight on behalf of the kung-fu academy that used him as a live target during throwing dart lessons. Transformed from a virginal whipping boy into a supernatural demi-God, thanks to the combined efforts of several (deferred) love interests, Yun vanquishes the pretenders that have besmirched the good name of Wudang. Having won the day, it's a shame that Yun doesn't go even further, tearing down the pillars of the sect that so relentlessly mistreated him. Unfortunately, for this blood-thirsty audience, by that point in the story Yun towers over such earthly concerns.