Avatar: Fire and Ash

Avatar: Fire and Ash occupies a special place in James Cameron's filmography: it's the first occurrence of a second feature-length sequel for the writer-director. Given Cameron's ability to amplify previous entries, arriving at a hair-raising timbre that pulls apart and reexamines prior works from a (somewhat) metatextual perspective, there's a confidence going in that stakes can be raised; that our conceptual understanding of these well-established circumstances could be exploded. It's disappointing then to report that Fire and Ash does not make any great strides to push this story forward. Described in press meetings by Cameron as the other half of Avatar: The Way of Water, Fire and Ash isn't so much a distinct second portion of that particularly story, more a strange sort of echo that could very well be taking place concurrently alongside (or instead of) its own prequel. 

If anything, this threequel repeats set-pieces and situations that already felt fairly well examined in Way of Water - the children of Zoe Saldaña's increasingly bitter Neytiri and Sam Worthington's Jake Sully are relentlessly imperiled or captured and a concluding battle shifts thanks to the participation of this planet's enormous sea life. Even Brendan Cowell's repulsive human whaler returns, complete with a robotic arm and a concluding note, in this chapter, that still doesn't feel definitive enough. We all want to see this guy reduced to bleeding viscera, right? Why this obvious repetition then? Oona Chaplin's bloodthirsty Na'vi chieftain Varang, easily Fire and Ash's greatest addition, promises blasted terrains and some kind of volcanic framing for a third-act struggle but sadly this doesn't come to pass. Although Stephen Lang's cloned Quaritch beds down with this witch, transforming her tribe of psychopaths into a subordinate, human-allied fighting force, we don't sink into their perspective like we did with the tree-dwelling Omatikaya or the sea-faring Metkayina. This collection of orphans simply enjoy burning or mutilating other sapient life. 

In a sense Fire and Ash could be likened to T2-3D: Battle Across Time, the Universal Studios stunt show attraction that Cameron co-directed a live-action element for. Both of these follow-ups frame their predecessors, in Battle Across Time's case Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as totemic license to be wielded rather than expanded; re-deployed rather than re-examined. This state of re-telling is key to the overall product's appeal then, no matter how disappointing that might be for a more demanding audience. With all that said, Fire and Ash is far from a complete misfire. Wētā's work is exemplary, even if the constant frame-rate changes do, unfortunately, replicate the passage from jittery pre-rendered cutscenes to more stable interactive sections in video games. Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (with Josh Friedman and Shane Salemo given story credits) have crafted a film that not only gallops relentlessly forward, even if the route often feels circuitous, but also registers as a furious askance at the American project. Save the odd Antipodean accent, Fire and Ash's many human villains are pointedly white, middle-class and American. 

They are a people likened to alien invaders; hairless, diminutive apes capable only of murderous and consumptive waste. Their blubbery vulnerability, and the vast compounds they seal themselves in, evocative of the Martian invaders in HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. These colonisers are biologically incompatible with this environment yet still they persist, grasping for any kind of leverage or claim they can then transform into a revenue stream. Perhaps the film's biggest biome reveal then is the enormous human machinery that Neytiri buzzes through on her bioluminescent pterodactyl. It is a gun metal blot on this landscape; a concrete and steel melanoma that scales up the terraforming complex seen in Aliens to a city-sized mechanism that seems to produce nothing but fire and smoke. Again and again we are reassured that these pink-skinned trespassers offer nothing constructive and that their only purpose on Pandora is to be slaughtered by gigantic, alien fauna. These deaths described in gleeful, computer-generated detail with The Walt Disney Company both footing the bill and distributing the images worldwide. Nevertheless, with Fire and Ash Cameron is two sequels in and still failing to deliver on the promise of the original Avatar's coda: Na'vi festooned with explosives and automatic weapons, ordering mankind off their world and, perhaps, even making a claim on their would-be conqueror's home planet. 

Bohūko - Milina

Merry Christmas by Tetsuya Fujie

Phases - Calma

Films 2025

Fascinating and repulsive in equal measure, director Albert Serra's Afternoons of Solitude is unwavering in its commitment to photographing Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and really nothing else, as he goes about his business. Serra and cinematographer Artur Tort Pujol's camera locks in on the irritable matador, following him from his monogrammed mini-van to several successive bullrings where he dances around massive, bleeding beasts before packing himself back into his personalised cab for a mobile debrief with a sycophantic entourage. An adoring (but offscreen) public bangs on their windows, raising the odd, nodding grimace from Roca before he defaults back to an indignant glare aimed directly into the camera. Pointedly, there is no interview element to Afternoons - Roca is never jabbed for insight or some form of context regarding the blood sport that has elevated him. 

Detailing then is teased out through the meaning that we, the audience, ascribe to image: Roca's blaring eyes and darting tongue as the moment of execution draws near or the visible frustration that ripples through this coterie when a bull's death throes are judged to be uncooperative. The unkind, invective-laden way in which these men describe the animals they have just killed is perhaps the documentary's most shocking disclosure. Their dissatisfaction, even anger, when a bull has knocked one of them off their feet, or even just failed to die exactly on cue, speaks to frustrations within a finely orchestrated performance that has been designed around sacrificial gesture and almost ceremonial movement, rather than a sporting contest between two warring parties. These torero don't see these genuinely impressive animals as equals; they are instead potentially recalcitrant props. In another life, Roca's ambular fluency might've made him a ballet dancer. In this one though he's found his niche in an ability to read the final, frothing efforts of livestock. Of knowing how to position himself so that these charging bulls jostle rather than pulverise him; marking his resplendent traje de luces with their life's blood, rather than his. 

Although director Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides isn't unique in terms of photographing a lead actor over a prolonged period of time, what remains completely unrepeatable about this film is that we are often watching embedded, documentary-level footage of an entire country shifting on its axis; its people hurled into not just a modern but futuristic era. As is often the case in Zhangke's films, Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao who is love with a man named Bin who pales in comparison to her. Here Zhubin Li's Bin is an incompetent showbiz manager who leaves his protege-cum-girlfriend behind to pursue his fortune in unscrupulous construction projects. 

Compiled from aimless (Zhangke's words) digital video experiments from the early 2000s and deleted elements from films such as Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and Ash is Purest White, Caught by the Tides is a collage of pillarboxed pixelation and various grades of grainy, cigarette-burned celluloid that, as well as illustrating the upheaval caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, charts China's path through the COVID-19 pandemic to the country's current position as a technological superpower. Zhangke's camera catalogues a near silent Qiao as she is catapulted from the chipped paint and crumbling brick of her home village to an oppressively lit mall staffed by precocious robots. A pulverising experience then, to live through many generations worth of progress in just a few short decades. 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud dabbles in the mechanics of urban horror, specifically the shared kind of hypnosis that compels half a dozen men, of varying age, to break with their social programming to violently pursue Masaki Suda's Yoshii across the country. Although this gang's motivations vary wildly - from a workplace snub or unrequited crush to indirectly landing one dud in trouble with a criminal gang - they all willingly burn their lives down to intimidate another nonentity who posts out counterfeit handbags. 

Original review

Everything creeps in director Lucile Hadžihalilović's The Ice Tower. Headlights worm along winding mountain roads, catching sight of scurrying figures; runaways tiptoe around draughty film studio sets, seizing treasures then nestling in piles of discarded costume; and tranquilised movie stars slowly encircle their prey, dangling material comfort in exchange for consumptive pact. Clara Pacini plays Jeanne, an orphaned teenager who has fled from a group home and made her way towards a nearby town, in the hopes of seeing an ice rink - a modest ambition. When she reaches her dream destination, Jeanne doesn't dare participate either. Instead she watches older girls twirling on their skates, drinking in this untouchable frivolity until darkness takes hold and everyone else departs. 

Even at the outset, before any of the film's adults have attempted to manipulate this lonely child, The Ice Tower is crushing in how it portrays the brittle longing of Pacini's Jeanne. Hadžihalilović's film applies the dreamy caution of fairy tale storytelling - where curious, and frequently parentless, innocents slowly trespass into dangerous situations - to a seventies milieu that hovers somewhere between sunken French-Italian postcard and something starker and more Soviet. As The Ice Tower goes on, and this runaway is drawn into a deliberately overripe film shoot, Jeanne becomes involved with Marion Cotillard's capricious, predatory actress. The natural procession of information begins to crack then distend. Events and situations become unstuck from each other with Pacini's foundling trying desperately to apply desires based in a naïve, childlike yearning for affection to a truly evil Ice Queen who assumes that all are in her thrall. 

Lee Byung-hun plays Yoo Man-su, a former big wheel at the paper factory who finds himself without a job and simmering in a prolonged, dispiriting unemployment. Struggling to pay his mortgage, even after his family have jettisoned every possible luxury up to and including Netflix, the thoughts of this perturbed paterfamilias begin to turn criminal. Man-su decides that, if he cannot eclipse the rivals in his field with a finely honed CV, he might as well begin eliminating them. Adapted from a Donald E Westlake novel, previously filmed by Costa-Gavras as The Axe, director Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice is a black comedy built around, on the face of it, a specific kind of middle-aged, lower-middle class malaise. The film is also, perhaps, indicative of a timely anxiety facing the entirety of the modern workforce though, what with corporations bound and determined to sneak automation into every (formerly) human process. 

Lee, a pin-up who has built a certain notoriety based on his ability to disappear into highly-motivated assassin roles, plays against type here as a grinning and sometimes bumbling amateur. Man-su is slow to get to grips with the sticky business of murder, often behaving in ways premised on despairing human frailty rather than machine precision. In this sense, No Other Choice is (at least in its earliest passages) very much like an Ealing Studios comedy of manners, with Man-su stalking blaring personalities as they all struggle to navigate the same barren job market. We watch as Lee's salaryman creeps closer and closer to a decisive confrontation, slowly drinking in the routines and rhetoric of his targets, then repeating them back to his own puzzled wife. All too quickly though Man-su's thinking adjusts to the terrible task that he has set for himself. His actions becoming increasingly brazen and pitiless; eventually, even becoming outright cruel. That Man-su fights so hard for so little - really not even parity with the life he enjoyed before he lost his first job - is the (bitter) cherry on top. 

This latest Nosferatu is clearly the work of, in writer-director Robert Eggers, someone re-examining a piece that wields a massive, totemic power in their imagination. Although a basic beat-for-beat structure remains in place from FW Murnau's silent shocker (and, of course Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novel it plagarised), the specific detailing or connective tissue are being reconfigured to please the current custodian. There's a fluency on display here, a piece stewarded by someone who has very clearly turned these ideas and images over in their mind until they have become innately enormous and striking. Nosferatu's emotional volume is cranked way up in this telling, attempting to simulate the pulverising electrical currents that were sent through Eggers when he was himself a young, receptive viewer.

Original review

Although it's Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob at the forefront of One Battle After Another's absurdist ad campaign, his character is more of a subordinate presence to both Teyana Taylor's Perfidia and later their daughter, Chase Infiniti's Willa. Bob, armed with a dressing gown and a pair of absolutely gigantic sunglasses, must fight through the depressive fog he has generated in the decade and a half since the mother of his child absconded. Quite unable to focus, Bob is buoyed by sympathetic parties, like Sergio, who guide him step-by-step through these events. Although clearly past his prime, Bob's former life does still inspire respect, with Willa's big cat fixated sensei even referring to him, in conversation with the skate crew about to guide him across burning roofs, as a 'Gringo Zapata'. Throughout the film's many, intersecting predator-and-prey chases, Bob is stuck trailing far behind his targets. The beleaguered father never quite arriving on-time to rescue his loved ones, often only able to offer a fleeting distraction or sobbing commiseration.

Original review

Writer-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's latest is a handsome, fracturing take on 60s Eurospy films that accounts for both the underlining cruelty of the gamesmanship explored in those pieces as well as the simmering damage that these covert agents have had to live with in the decades since. When Reflection in a Dead Diamond opens, Fabio Testi's John Diman is a sozzled seventy-something living by the sea in the present and making a pest of himself with the kind of women he used to sweep off their feet. Diman isn't exactly sprightly for his age, even his walking looks pained, but the former button man is still able to shuffle along after suspicious-looking goons. At least as much of Reflection is told from the paranoid perspective of Diman as a younger man though. 

Played by Yannick Renier, this frothing policeman is hot on the trail of a diamond thief who conceals her identity under layers of leather and plastic skin. This Diman finds himself lost in contradictory accounts of his adventures that, variously, cast him as the former subject in a long-running movie series that has powered past him or frozen in still black and white snaps on the pages of Italian fumetti strips. Cattet and Forzani display a charming fluency in how they arrange their influences, collapsing concepts from Angela and Luciana Giussani's Diabolik comics or Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner television series in on a curdled kind of Bondian brutality. Even the writer-directors' approach to this totemic misogynist is strange and singular: the young Diman accomplishes his various, violent interactions with the detached, manual montage that concealed a returning Sean Connery in the pre-credits sequence of Guy Hamilton's Diamonds Are Forever.

Despite a bleached post-processing that leaves the film looking like a lifestyle magazine that has been left to curl in Earth's yellow sun, James Gunn's Superman, in casting a net wide enough to include minor (or simply old-fashioned) DC characters like Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon's Metamorpho, betrays an adoring sort of fluency for this material. One that goes beyond the expected deification of Christopher Reeve's caped adventures or the violent, satirical comics that were published in the 1980s and put the zap on DC's previous phase.

Original review

28 Years Later concerns itself with the offspring who have been born in the ruins of the twentieth century; the innocents whose daily reality is a brutal and ever present reminder that the generations who came before them were not just unreliable but actively destructive when pursuing their own ends. Told almost entirely from the perspective of a child, Alfie Williams' Spike, Years allows itself to unfold around crucial absences - largely those associated with the basic transmission of information - that are themselves willfully elided by people who presume to play the role of parent. 

Original review

Video Games 2025

Guard Crush Games build on lessons learnt co-developing Streets of Rage 4 - specifically the escalating sense of progression seen in the sensational Mr. X Nightmare survival mode - then apply them to a slightly different kind of Sega-style, scrolling beat 'em up. Absolum is, to be overly specific, like the Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder or Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons: Shadows Over Mystara arcade cabs but filtered through the colourful, high-contrast art style of bande dessinée comics then reimagined, mechanically, as a rolling roguelike. Delightful to play, particularly in couch co-op where you can bicker over power-ups with your nearest and dearest, Absolum is designed to be replayed in short, satisfying instalments. The paths that stung players beat back, on their way to repeating unsuccessful boss attempts, differ ever so slightly every time; remixing and rearranging set-piece encounters based around the goons who are embedded in each mini kingdom. Beautiful in a way that screenshots don't quite do the game justice, the sublime Absolum is the result of a multi-media collaboration - the aforementioned Guard Crush working alongside French television animation studio Supamonks, all under the aegis of publisher Dotemu. 

All my Dreamcast favourites in one place! There are a few games included in this Capcom Fighting Collection 2 that, on their original release, were only really available on (expensive) Japanese import. Yeah, you could get a barebones version of Capcom vs SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 in the EU region and it even, as far as I'm aware, supported a 60Hz display option. But what you really wanted to do was invest in a DC-X boot disc then take yourself down to a local importer to be charged far in excess of any reasonable retail price for non-sealed copies of minor upgrades like Capcom vs SNK Pro (£65, back at the turn of the century, courtesy of Liverpool's own Chip Shop 2000). In fairness, any lingering feeling that you'd been completely ripped off was instantly (and forever) dispelled by the heavy duty CD jewel cases and full colour manuals that were standard for Japanese consumers. In the case of Pro, this meant a pleasant smelling leaflet packed with beautifully illustrated examples of the Street Fighter and King of Fighters cast as envisaged by Kinu Nishimura and Shinkiro. Really all we're lacking here, in terms of perfectly replicating my personal DC library, are the For Matching Service releases of Vampire Chronicle and Super Street Fighter II X: Grand Master Challenge (£75 a piece, the extra tenner presumably due to the fact that these discs were only available through a Japanese mail-order website), both of which were, for some reason, incompatible with the Dreamcast's SCART output. 

Designed around the limitations of Sega's 16-bit Mega Drive (but nevertheless available on all modern video game systems), Earthion is a presentation-first side-scrolling shooter that betrays a particular kind of consideration when it comes to how players are enveloped by the sounds generated by Yamaha synthesiser chips. Developed by Ancient Corp, the studio founded 35 years ago by musician Yuzo Koshiro and his game designer sister Ayano Koshiro, Earthion may pack its screens with drifting hazards and advancing alien forces but the real meat of the piece is a brand new, coin-pumping score by Koshiro and a cacophony of crunching, cracking sound effects that would be very much at home in the high-end releases that Konami were regularly issuing on Sega's system in the early 1990s. Like WaterMelon's beleaguered Paprium, Earthion represents the Mega Drive both freed from number-crunched concerns, like the increasing expense of (at least relative to that time) higher capacity ROM cartridges, and the hardware completely at the mercy of a development team skilled enough to confidently skip between arcade-style genres. 

A baffling proposition when first announced. Why are FromSoft trying their hand at a roguelike with mechanics on loan from extraction shooters and battle royale games, rather than building yet another towering action-RPG? Have the Bandai Namco bean-counters stepped in and tugged, hard, on their reins? Even in the moments following release, when pre-orderers was taking their first steps through the tutorial segment, Elden Ring Nightreign felt strangely counter-intuitive. The game's request that players speed through these sumptuous environments, making split-second decisions about what to cram into their meagre inventory on the way to another colossal boss, seemingly at odds with every prior lesson in how to play the development studio's games. 

Brave a few silent expeditions with strangers though and the method begins to emerge. It's as if director Junya Ishizaki and the rest of his staff took a look at the absurdly truncated speedruns possible with FromSoft's longform output and then designed a game that simulated a similar experience for players less able to internalise the location of every fragment in these worlds. Nightreign is a minor miracle really, a game crammed with content on loan from its parent company's heaving portfolio that still manages to feel new and alive in hand. A lot of this ability to satisfy lies in how well tuned each of the available characters are. How each of the eight (now ten, thanks to DLC) Nightfarers fills a specific niche but can still, nevertheless, be piloted and redefined through equipment or upgrades to fulfill others. A clearer idea of tiers within this cast did emerge - especially when players sank deeper and deeper into overtuned post-release modes - but we're still looking at a roster of characters that are every bit as rewarding to learn and play as the original eight World Warriors of Street Fighter II. 

Nestled in amongst Gradius Origins' beautifully presented arcade ROMs, discarded prototypes and hidden console versions (accessible by entering the Konami code on the version selection screen for certain titles) is Salamander III, developer M2's take on what they believe a late 90s sequel to the original arcade spin-off could've played like. Almost comedically challenging - even on the lowest possible difficulty setting - at least in terms of the moment-to-moment expectations placed on this player's waning reflexes, Salamander III takes with one hand but gives back with the other, allowing recently scuttled ships to hoover up their fumbled upgrades, if they're quick enough. And if they're not, then the goon-level enemies that fill these crumbling civilizations-cum-oozing digestive tracts are very likely to drop enough power-ups to get you back to something resembling threatening. Short but triumphant, and very susceptible to coin feeding to power your way through, Salamander III is a feast of pinks and glowing, radioactive greens - a shooter that scrolls in whichever direction it pleases and is never very far away from an enormous alien life form covering their flashing weak point with hovering, embarrassed appendages.

Pillarboxed and packed with shrieking noise and jagged brown polygons - that seem to imply pungent, butyric whiffs - Labyrinth of the Demon King traps our fragile peasant soldier in a stagnant, feudal hellscape and asks that they mooch about crumbling environments, solving opaque puzzles and fending off emaciated corpses armed with broken furniture. Although the implied objective would see players fending off satanic royalty, the moment-to-moment gameplay experience is actually much more desperate. Even armed with weapons that have had a considerable amount of the game's scarce resources sunken into them, the player is still left with the unshakable impression that should they fail to learn how to adequately parry an incoming chair leg then their life in this realm will be short. To their credit, one-man dev team JR Hudepohl doesn't attempt to compound this potential for misery by replicating the inflexible checkpointing of the PlayStation 1 games that have clearly inspired Labyrinth. As soon as a player picks up an item, or completes a puzzle step, that progress is fixed. Tune into this deliberate expendability and Labyrinth is suddenly a much less daunting proposition. 

Although nowhere near as transformative as Capcom's recent pass at their own survival horror back catalogue, or Bloober Team's re-evaluation of Team Silent's sequel for that matter, Konami Digital Entertainment (and Virtuos, and PlatinumGames)'s Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater does sneak in a few changes. On the face of it these corrections shouldn't cause too much hassle, most of them are balance-related and therefore address the ways in which players stressed game logic or the classic input system to leverage advantageous outcomes. Like, say, snappily dismissing weapons then re-equipping them to work around lengthy reload animations. In practice though, this remapping and re-tuning upends how well-drilled players can approach a game that is a lot more focused around successive boss battles than perhaps they might remember. Old strategies are suddenly either absent or now much more cumbersome, demanding players tighten up their controller navigation or even think up alternative approaches for the foes they vanquished twenty years earlier. And isn't that what everyone wants out of this trend for modern updates? For these games to feel new again? 

The other half of the Streets of Rage 4 equation, developers Lizardcube and publisher Sega, were busy this year too. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance keeps the action-platformer blueprint of earlier games but updates combat and traversal to be more in line with modern, Metroidvania expectations. So, rather than be limited to a confident stride, shuriken tossing and close-up sword swipes, Art of Vengeance's Joe Mushashi now has an entire suite of upgradable and expandable, combo-focused movement at his disposal. In that sense, Lizardcube have managed to take the more free-flowing motion seen in the 3D PS2 entries, such as 2002's Shinobi or its sequel Nightshade, and transposed a version of that back into the swaying 2D environments that demand Mushashi climb, avoiding swarming enemies to seek out progression-blocking switches. Art of Vengeance then elbowing aside the less fondly remembered Saturn exclusive Shinobi X to stake its claim as the true descendent of Sega's brief, 16-bit obsession with ninjutsu. 

Even more successful than Bloober Teams' remake of the second Silent Hill game - at least in terms of offering players something that is not only brand new but actually somewhat mechanically transformative in comparison to the classic PlayStation releases - NeoBards Entertainment's Silent Hill f shifts the series' settled, mutative fog to a different time and country: another forgotten, failing mining town as well as a central person with a head full of thoughts and memories that they cannot bear to face. Perhaps this obvious uptick has more to do with the player character than anything else? Shimizu Hinako, a high-schooler utterly throttled by her place as a working-class teenager on the cusp of adulthood within 1960s Japan, makes for a more engaging onscreen marionette than a middle-aged sad sack. 

James' Silent Hill flowed out of his guilt and neuroses; Hinako's labyrinth is an entire society's worth of expectation caving in on her, crushing her before she's had a chance to become her own person. Hinako's town, already crumbling into destitution before thick Martian vines begin ensnaring the buildings, is therefore a trap of dead ends and winding, isolated paths. Pals race ahead and leave you behind, forcing you to creep along after them, metal pipe in hand (firearms are completely absent), vulnerable to the ambushes that they have disturbed. As you nose around draughty school buildings and abandoned households, hidden stashes of crumpled paper begin to become a regular pick-up - the notes themselves containing the kind of excoriatingly personal criticism that can only come from the closest of friends. Hinako frantically updating an in-game journal in an attempt to make sense of this poison. The player's perspective, slowly, begins to align with the more ruthless predilections that your avatar explores in her waking nightmares; a darkness that threaten to spill out into some version of the real world. 

Obviously, given the licensed pedigree, Bitmap Bureau's Terminator 2D: No Fate has a certain commonality with previous passes at this killer robot property, sharing something of the varied approach to gameplay seen in the T2 adaptations published, in tandem with the film's original release, by Ocean Software or LJN Toys as well as the infrared aiming reticles, quoted from the T-800's big screen HUD then applied to Midway's arcade cab. There are deeper, metatextual connections though, specifically in terms of how this piece connects to the Mega Drive adaptation of The Terminator, a short but memorable release programmed by Dave Perry for Probe Software. In the decades since that game's debut, Perry has talked about the creative limitations placed upon him by the license's former holders, Orion Pictures. The game was to focus around Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese to the exclusion of everybody else - so no stages playable from Sarah Connor or the Terminator's perspective. Bitmap Bureau's latest, belatedly, redresses those omissions, building a scrolling beat 'em up stage around a pixelated Arnold Schwarzenegger or allowing players to not only take control of Linda Hamilton's likeness but to make decisions on her behalf that change how the well-worn story unfolds. 

Music 2025

Addison Rae - Headphones On // billy woods - Corinthians (feat. Despot & El-P) // Black Country, New Road - Besties // Bohūko - 11:10 PM // Burial - Comafields // Clipse (featuring Pusha T, Malice, and Stove God Cooks) - FICO // CoryaYo - Being // Division Street - Washed Away // Dry Cleaning - Hit My Head All Day (Edit) // Endless Withdrawal - A Garden Grows Between Us // Erika de Casier - Lifetime // feeble little horse - This is Real // Hannah Frances - Falling From and Further // Harachan - Paradise // Horsegirl - Switch Over // HulkHodn - Now // Jakob - Swan // Khruangbin - People Everywhere ii // Magdalena Bay - Paint Me a Picture // M83 - Echoes // MIKE - Artist of the Century // Momma - I Want You (Fever) // Ninajirachi - Infohazard // Nine Inch Nails - As Alive As You Need Me to Be // Olivia Rodrigo - Just Like Heaven (feat. Robert Smith) // Oneohtrix Point Never - Waterfalls // PinkPanthress - Illegal // Samia - Pool (Live) // Sharp Pins - I Can't Stop // Smerz - You Got Time and I Got Money // Tame Impala - End of Summer // Tyler, the Creator - Stop Playing with Me // VIQ - Sublime

Cocoon: From the Girls of Summer

Taken on it own terms, director Toko Ina's Cocoon: From the Girls of Summer is a short, sharp animated look at the Himeyuri students stationed on front-line islands during the Pacific portion of the Second World War. These real-life children, who were told that they were to work in Red Cross hospitals far removed from conflict, were actually bussed directly into battle to build shelters and perform nursing duties for a flagging Imperial army. Ina's piece, a television movie produced for NHK's satellite channel, uses a bright, idyllic colour scheme that suggests a big budget children's fantasy movie. Indeed, Cocoon's animation producer is one Hitomi Tateno, a veteran of massive Studio Ghibli productions like Princess Mononoke or When Marnie Was There (among a great many others). Unfortunately, writer-illustrator Machiko Kyo's serialised manga, on which this film is based, is a poor match for such a luxuriant approach. Comparatively, Kyo's linework is stark and simplistic; a story constructed around tremoring human outlines and their ghostly patients. 

The frail figures on Kyo's pages are washed in blotted grey and black inks, suggesting an oppressive and all-encompassing fog of soot and death. These deliberately naïve illustrations could very well be a sketchbook diary that has been plucked directly out of this horror. Since the film was produced with a very specific audience in mind, there's a conscious dialing back of the palpable bitterness that underpins Kyo's comic. Although these young women try to power through for the sake of their national pride in both mediums, it's underlined for the reader that these girls are being fed into a meat grinder by the various layers of adults who should be looking out for them - from teachers and soldiers, all the way up to their own government. In the animated setting of Ina's film, insinuations dangle without clarification; the children much more tuned into the wider cultural objective of Imperial Japan. This Cocoon, very much like Kihachi Okamoto's Battle of Okinawa, depicts the American invasion of these islands as anonymous and almost spectral; an ever-present flame that licks at the despairing Japanese. The elisions applied to this adaptation - that jettison, amongst others, inked episodes in which trembling teens are directed to dispose of hacked-off, gangrenous limbs - do end up providing one impressive visual flourish in their efforts to conceal bloodshed: rather than animate youngsters riddled with bullets or rotten injuries that seethe with maggots, Cocoon's gunned-down students instead leak flower petals from their pulverised bodies. 

Duro - Boiling Point

Knight Artorias by Shimhaq

Katsuhiro Harada - TEKKEN: A 30-YEAR Journey (Harada's Final Mix)

Wet Leg - Pokemon

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

There are clear points of dissimilarity between The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, largely in how each film tells its portion of the story. Fellowship is hurried and clipped in its telling whereas Two Towers is much more gradual, slowly layering in tension and torrential threat before arriving at a crescendo. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King does not attempt to continue this trend with a brand new phase of storytelling though, what it does instead is marry the disparate voices of its predecessors, arriving at a wavelength that may struggle to be considered in the singular - this is very much a continuation of already extant episodes rather than a piece unto itself - but works wonderfully as a grand summation of this Middle Earth material. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Return of the King is best enjoyed hot on the heels of its prequels; the third-act in a unbroken chain rather than a second sequel. 

As if to underline this marriage of differing narrative objectives - Fellowship had to catch viewers up on thousands of years of imagined history while Two Towers simply has to set up an almighty battle - characters within Return of the King find their finer qualities reconciled before the curtain finally falls. This mediation is best expressed by this third film's approach to Gandalf. In the first instalment this grey wizard was a leaf-smoking, wrinkled adventurer; in the second, a bright angelic presence who foretold the salvation of morning and burned the eyes out of any who gazed upon him. Thankfully, Return of the King allows a little of the first episode's distracted crankiness to creep back into Ian McKellen's performance. Between battles he even gets to fire up his pipe. He's back to being a person who needs to sort through his thoughts then. At the other end of this world, Elijah Wood's Frodo, Sean Astin's Sam, and Andy Serkis' Gollum creep through a boiling, computer-generated inferno towards the summit of their quest. Perhaps it's just that volcanic regions read so well on film but, like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith a couple of years later, there's a sense in Return of the King that the armies of special effects teams that toil on these films are delivering several steaming levels above their previous, still extremely impressive, work.

On release, Return of the King was mocked for the inelegance of its endings - staggered sequences in which it felt like a clean break was being proposed but then instantly succeeded by yet another just-as-conclusive incident. Although the "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Tolkien's book has been omitted here (of all the interquel ideas that have been floated as a way of the following up the enormous success of this series, it's a wonder that a filmic adaptation of this discarded element apparently hasn't ever been considered), writer-director Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens find a wonderfully elegant way to contrast the enormous accomplishment of the Hobbits with the aggressive indifference of the people who have stayed at home, living lives completely removed from the war with Sauron. Young men wreathed in the livery of mighty human kingdoms? These parochial little gnomes are far more impressed by a truly massive pumpkin. As well, given the pervasive warmongering of the period in which this film series was completed and released, it feels not just notable but forward-thinking that Return of the King leaves us with the impression that combat takes more than a physical toll on its victims. It leaves invisible scars on all those that survive, preventing them from reassuming the patterns and rhythms of their previous lives. In this telling, Frodo is broken by his desire for the ring; reduced to a bleeding mess squabbling with another junkie above a crack in hell. There's just no undoing that. Even the overabundance of slow-motion photography in these epilogues, that seize on flickering facial gesture, is appropriate. It is as if the filmmakers themselves cannot bear to let these characters go. 

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