Book of Love - Boy

Companion

Does it strike anybody else as notable that Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, both top-billed 80s stars, have a son who may have followed his parents into showbiz but has specifically carved out a niche for himself as the premier choice when filmmakers are casting unkind or outright manipulative boyfriends? Quaid junior then unexpectedly happy to build his career out of being the disappointing, unreliable component in onscreen relationships rather than, say, the intensely masculine, experimental aviators essayed by his father or the energetic stability characteristic of his mother's girls next door. Regardless of this pleasant counter-programming, Jack Quaid is on fine, dipshitting form in writer-director Drew Hancock's Companion, a film that has been done no favours whatsoever by an ad campaign that couldn't wait to tell you way too much about the true nature of Sophie Thatcher's worryingly malleable Iris. 

Dressed in sixties pastels and grinning nervously, Iris is an intruder from a completely different universe, one that has been erected upon meet-cute scaffolding rather than the commodified human interaction experienced by the other, money-grubbing thirtysomethings cozying up to Rupert Friend's shady (and, they presume, rip-off-able) Russian businessman. Compared to everybody else in Companion's simmering pan, she's an innocent. A person who, by design, is unable to offer up much beyond passive, plastic obedience. Her one tell that she might possess an unexplored knack for defiance is her voice: she speaks with the same lilting murmur as Juliette Lewis, an actress who spent the 1990s playing a variety of difficult, even homicidal women. Unexpectedly timely, given that the entire data apparatus of the richest country on the planet has recently been given over to similarly vindictive young white men, Companion is a ninety minute worry about what it is to be trapped at somebody's else's beck and call; to experience only fleeting hints of real agency before your emotions and aspirations are packed away, lest they upset the people controlling your sliders. 

Imprints - Theme // Woods

Mixmaster by Kiron Fan

Motohiro Kawashima - Urban Jungle

Hard Truths

Even setting aside Marianne Jean-Baptiste's superb performance as Pansy, an anxious agoraphobic who struggles to halt the invective that streams from her mouth, writer-director Mike Leigh's Hard Truths does a fantastic job of simulating the feeling of being trapped in a familial relationship with such a damaged and damaging person. There are, therefore, obvious and enjoyable lulls in which Pansy is just elsewhere. Characters such as David Webber's Curtley or Tuwaine Barrett's Moses, Pansy's husband and twentysomething son, are seen to be almost flourishing outside of their grey, sinkhole household. These brief reprieves from the criticism being blasted their way offer us tiny insight into each of these men but, as well, the audience needs and is given even more opportunity to get a feel for the lives that are lived in Pansy's absence. We spend a few minutes here and there with her nieces Kayla and Aleisha (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown), the pair a younger and much more psychologically healthy reflection of Pansy and her patient, saintly sister Chantelle, played by Michele Austin. 

Although there are a few mild notes of disquiet in Kayla and Aleisha's relationship, any evasiveness we're able to pick up on very obviously hasn't curdled into the strident bitterness of Pansy. The pair are close enough to make time for each other away from stricter family obligations; supportive enough to enquire after the work stresses that have clearly been the subject of a previous conversation. Of course, Hard Truths isn't about this cohesive sororal relationships, it's all about Pansy. Initially, Leigh's film is grimly humorous, with Jean-Baptiste creating arguments and aggro out of thin air everywhere she goes. At least one of her targets is even more aggressive than she is: a supermarket car park roamer who interrupts a meditative moment to demand that Pansy make space for his clapped-out car. Pansy is indiscriminate though. Her tireless bark quickly becomes punishing and oppressive, especially when directed at those unwilling or unable to mount some kind of defence. Pansy sucks all of the oxygen out of every room she enters; her mere presence a dangling and wearying threat. Finally though there is a feeling of dismay: for all her faults, Pansy is herself trapped. A person fully in the grip of something that cannot be dispelled, no matter how many loved ones she badgers or belittles. 

Clairo - Terrapin

The Dismasters - Small Time Hustler

Starscream by Casper Pham

Endless Withdrawal - We Don't Have to Talk About It

Dog Man

Writer-director Peter Hastings' Dog Man, based on a deliberately primitive comic-within-a-comic from Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series, comes on like Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop but (explicitly, this time) for children. Officer Knight and Greg the Dog are the law in a marzipan city that is constantly under threat from Pete Davidson's aimlessly evil ginger cat Petey. After coming a cropper during a bomb defusal, thanks in part to Greg the Dog's colour blindness, what's left of Knight and his canine friend is sown together to create the mute but energetic title character. Although the primary dramatic knot in Dog Man belongs to Petey and his clone kitten Li'l Petey, as they slowly undo the despairing self-image that has been passed down to them by an indifferent parent, Hasting's film doesn't shy away from suggesting the horror experienced by the chimeric Dog Man, even if such interludes are largely played for laughs. As well as echoing Omni Consumer Product's fragrant disregard for bodily autonomy, Hastings' Dog Man movie also steers its subject back to their former residence, to mourn a failed relationship and recall the happier times both components of this new composite identity experienced in a now hollowed-out household. In that respect Dog Man wields the same kind of power as a vintage The Simpsons episode: this is homage deployed with an intent that goes beyond just absurdist reproduction, managing to retain some, prickly remnant of real human sentiment. 

Solid Snake (Hurt) by Hungry Clicker

RÔDEZ - Shell

mdvsn - rpm

Wolf Man

Morose and taciturn even before anybody gets themselves swiped by a hirsute trapper, director Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man, co-written with Corbett Tuck, pays special attention to the diminishing mental faculties of a person who is slowly transforming into an animal against their will. After an aggravated window smasher sinks their talons into his forearm, Christopher Abbott's Blake, the unemployed father in a family slowly running aground, mottles then begins gnawing on himself. This autophagia apparently a welcome distraction from the thundering household insects and blaring, featureless family members that slowly become the totality of this would-be werewolf's sensory experience. Although tense in terms of moment-to-moment conflict on the back end, the biggest problem with Whannell's latest is that the film's disinclination to communicate is felt even in the piece's earliest chapters, long before we are given any inkling of the gasping, crouching terror to come. 

Blake and his wife Charlotte, played by Julia Garner, are the barest sketch of a couple growing apart from each other. Any connection felt between them is more down to physical proximity and their very obvious role as parents rather than any speech or situation that might offer insight into their (seemingly rather shallow) marital discord. Blake, Charlotte, and their daughter Ginger, all feel artificially estranged from one other, as if all of their contradictions and complications have been cruelly snipped away. They are all exhausted and defeated before we ever get a chance to know them. Yes, Whannell's Wolf Man has scaffolding that loudly proclaims generational trauma to be their underlining thesis but Blake barely blows his top before his voice is taken away from him. Similarly, the film contextualises its nail-popping transformation in terms of an aching terminal illness, but then never spares a moment to sit with the effect this expedited decay is having on Blake's powerless loved ones. Sadly, the kind of familial implosion that Wolf Man reaches for is only really felt when it's clear that something genuinely precious is being lost. 

Madara 1000 - _04

Logan by AZOINAB

Tyler, The Creator - Puppet

90sFlav - Step Up

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera comes on like a jaundiced Eurothriller spin-off of the The Fast and The Furious franchise, a heist film packed with command rooms, superfluous computer-generated car stunts and hip-hop adjacent actors being positioned as world-class cat burglars. Pantera then the much more gently paced side mission in which Gerard Butler's extremely divorced policeman travels to Nice and cosies up to O'Shea Jackson Jr's diamond thief, eventually becoming something of a collaborator then confidant. A holiday romance told exclusively in varying shades of amber, essentially. Although writer-director Christian Gudegast's sequel may be prone to the same overplotting seen in Vin Diesel's drag racing saga, comfortably saddling itself with a pair of twists that add very little except further complication, but the specific way this well-worn story is told is just different enough to be entertaining. Following some photostat complications that place Jackson and Butler in the same Riviera neighbourhood, Pantera enjoys a pleasant Americans abroad middle-act in which the cop and the criminal bond over their shared otherness in this setting. They drop ecstasy, get into fist-fights with jealous heavies then debrief over kebabs and cans of Stella Artois. The robbery that follows is refreshingly low tech as well, repudiating high-tech gadgetry to concentrate on the Melvillian delight of stocky men clambering up giant hooks or huddling up beneath massive plexiglass shields to avoid the ever present glare of CCTV.