Carpenter Brut - Cherub Rock

The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshteyn

In splicing together this new, shorter Director's Cut of his 2008 feature, writer-director Chris Carter (co-writing with Frank Spotnitz) has removed perhaps the most uncanny element of that film: Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny's former FBI agents, after years of will-they-won't-they television serial teasing, are now seen to share a firmly established, middle-aged domesticity. Only in this film's theatrical cut do we see the couple, lying sleepless in bed, discuss a difficult medical case for Dr. Scully; a subplot that has been similarly snipped of a confrontation between a penny pinching Priest (who now register as a creeping presence, per his patient's unease with his looming) and Anderson's MD. Quite why Carter felt that this The X-Files: I Want to Believe - Vrach Frankenshteyn edit no longer required a disarming moment of intimacy or an interlude in which Scully is seen to almost physically grapple with her Catholicism isn't particularly clear. Given that much of I Want to Believe's front-end sees the production straining to re-establish a Monster of the Week framework, perhaps this pruning is simply a way to batter closer to the material that actually works? Speaking of which, by the time David Duchovny's Mulder - dressed in layers of jumpers and a cold-weather coat, something of a uniform for Millennium-era tension - is hiking down snow-covered roads, hunting vivisectionists armed only with a stolen wrench, I Want to Believe takes on certain qualities of contemporaneous (and similarly firearm free) Japanese or South Korean thrillers. Of course, the Mulder character is more of an endangered damsel in these kind of situations but, for a brief spell, it's pleasant to watch a dishevelled Duchovny trespassing around chain-link fences, backed by Mark Snow's eerie, electronic notes. 

Mark Snow - Photo Evidence

Col. Kusanagi by Matías Bergara

Michael Giacchino - Suite New Day

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Tom Holland's web-slinger, by now the surest bet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, returns with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, an atypically well-crafted superhero film that dispenses with the flat virtual backlots and insincere humour that has come to define these later, less-successful phases. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous Marvel feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings seems to have been condemned to the continuity black hole that swirls at the centre of the Disney series, takes the reigns from Jon Watts, who steered Sony's previous three instalments. Although Watts started strong with Spider-Man: Homecoming, his follow-up episodes stumbled largely thanks to intractable demands placed upon this property. Spider-Man's newcomer position within a wider, exploding brand tracked into an insistence that the queasy militarisation of Iron Man was mapped onto the otherwise working class Peter Parker. The chopped-up, off-putting simulacrum of Covid-era filmmaking hasn't helped either.  

Despite lingering Starkism, Cretton's take is refreshingly distinct from its immediate predecessors. The director's most obvious contribution then is that this Spider-Man sequel plays like an event unto itself rather than a prolonged reassessment of past glories or a carefully rationed prologue for the next team-up. Quite the feat considering the amount of guest players that appear in Sony's tentpole: Jon Bernthal's lunk-headed Punisher intrudes, making a lot more sense when paired with Holland's bright and assured Spider-Man (Castle, driving around in an armoured van and blasting bazookas is surely a nod to a similar appearance in the 90s Spider-Man: The Animated Series); Mark Ruffalo's increasingly savage Hulk represents a worst-case scenario for Peter's mutating superpowers; while Sadie Sink, as an emissary of The X-Men, is utilised first as a terrifying new enemy, later as an unlikely confidant. If anything then, this new Holland episode appears to have inherited the care, not to mention the billion dollar machinery, that the Japanese electronics firm marshalled during their tenure with Daniel Craig's shaken but not spared take on James Bond. 

Naturally, we're not skipping from continent to continent like 007, but there's a level-headed confidence in how the clashing tonal bandwidth of computer-assisted vehicular pile-ups and more personal, human drama are navigated that speaks to a piece designed for a slightly more discerning audience than the usual Marvel staging. Although credited to series regulars (and future Avengers: Doomsday scribes) Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, stars Holland and Zendaya have eagerly shared that this draft was treated to a transformative, and uncredited, rewrite by director Cretton as well as Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, as released, then not only gives Zendaya's workforce ready MJ more to play with than simple scowling, it also raises Marissa Tomei's sadly departed Aunt May to new heights of sainted, maternal radiance. Her flickering presence is presented throughout the film as the core, positive memory of a deeply depressed superhero. So powerful is this recollection though that it is able to be transmitted to others; to allow them to step into Peter's shoes and know what it is to be truly adored by a loving mother. 

Madonna - Drowned World/Substitute for Love // Blur - Tender // All Saints - Pure Shores

The Avalanches - Can't Get Over Losing You ft. Portraits Of Tracy

Havoc #4 by Barry Windsor-Smith

Open Mike Eagle x Kenny Segal - She Swear I'm Colorblind feat. billy woods

Chinatown

Jack Nicholson stars as JJ Gites a private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles who, despite both his sleazy profession and the fact that he's the spitting image of Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel when captured in a similarly defeated repose, is completely above board. In fact, Chinatown - written by Robert Towne and directed by a despondent Roman Polanski, following the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate but before he fled to France with a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor hanging over him - cannot unfold quite the way it does if Gites isn't unusually committed to uncovering the truth. This gumshoe doggedly picks at LA's rapacious ruling class as a way of reconciling his own part in a cruel hatchet job. Hired by a middle-aged, moneyed woman to trail after her husband Hollis Mulwray, who she believes is having an affair with a much younger woman, Gites dutifully complies. The paparazzi-style photographs that the PI hands off quickly find their way into a local newspaper, much to Gites' consternation.  

The trailed husband, the Chief Engineer at the Department of Water and Power as it turns out, is found dead in a storm drain; meanwhile Faye Dunaway has arrived at Gites' office claiming to be the real Mrs. Mulwray. Better experienced than described, Chinatown is a guided tour around a powerful, emerging metropolis and the spectral forces who wield both appalling wealth and act with an unconscionable barbarity; power brokers who are, quite apparently, immune to the legal and moral laws that govern everybody else. Dunaway's Evelyn Cross-Mulwray, who would seem to be a manipulative femme fatale, an archetype inextricably linked with film noir, is instead a deeply tragic character. What we learn of her relationship with her much older husband and her father, John Huston's Noah Cross, conjures up despair rather than reassurance. Evelyn's life a commodity that has been traded back-and-forth between men who would presume to own, basically, everything. As Gites presses closer to understanding why Los Angeles is experiencing a manufactured drought, he demands of the creaking Cross what more he could possibly want in this life. The elderly millionaire's answer, delivered and repeated in haste, is that he wants to own the future. And, watching his enormous, arthritic fingers curl greedily around a screaming child's face, you believe him. 

Jerry Goldsmith - Love Theme from Chinatown (Main Title)

Cinema Noir by Bendik Kaltenborn

Mai Yamane - Tasogare

The Return

The Return, director Uberto Pasolini's adaptation of The Odyssey, forgoes mythical beasts and seafaring voyages, preferring to interrogate ideas of permission in fraying, familial relationships. Ralph Fiennes stars as Odysseus, the Ithacan king who washes up naked and newborn on his homeland's shores twenty years after abandoning his wife and child to go off to war then, according to the whispers that precede him, live with another woman. Posing as a beggar, Odysseus slowly circles his former household as unruly noblemen take full advantage of his absence. Trapped in the palace are Juliette Binoche's Queen Penelope and Charlie Plummer's Telemachus, the mother and son being pulled in different directions by the presence of these greedy suitors. Penelope is tired and wavering, apparently at least somewhat taken with Marwan Kenzari's Antinous, a ringleader among these slavering dignitaries who is proving to be the least boorish of a bad bunch. 

The would-be couple's dealings, which largely revolve around Antinous promising to divert attention away from Penelope's twilight deceptions, are suggestive of a much more equitable relationship than perhaps the Queen has been used to. With Antinous as her husband Penelope could expect to be a partner rather than a beloved subject, it seems. Comparatively, Telemachus, who has never known his father, boils with resentment; speaking to his mother with a level of reproachment that hints at a possessive, even sexual jealousy. He calls her a whore for transgressions that exist only in his head then, later, demands to be part of the contest that will decide Penelope's new husband. This unusual, even Oedipal arrangement of the young prince is underlined when, following Odysseus' resumption of rule, Telemachus leaves on his own adventures, declining to stay with his newly complete family. Odysseus, for his part, welcomes this absence. 

Before he's back in his marital bed though, the disguised and dawdling Odysseus must reckon with the idea that, actually, he isn't welcome home at all. Speaking to Penelope as a transient claiming to know her husband, Odysseus is pressed to answer questions about the sack of Troy. Did the King of Ithaca kill women and children? Did he give his men permission to pillage? Did Odysseus join in with these outrages? Did he indulge himself in rape? Odysseus' stunned silence here speaks volumes. Pressed to act only when the squatting noblemen make an attempt on Telemachus' life, Odysseus reveals both his identity and a gnarled, tightly knotted physique. As indirect and circuitous as the preceding 90 minutes have been, Pasolini's description of the climactic archery contest is thrilling. Odysseus' approach to the stringing of the bow he left behind demonstrating not just his physical strength but a thoughtful expertise when handling an uncooperative weapon; while his cold-blooded, almost mechanical murder of the defenceless suitors offers an alarming insight into how the Ithacan King may have dealt with the cowering citizens of Troy. 

keio けいお - Satisfaction [bump]

Dredd Good vs Evil (for Gosh! Comics) by Mike McMahon

ALISON - Alpine

Fleaureque - Kosmos

Possession

We are assured, repeatedly, during Andrzej Żuławski's audio commentary for Possession that this film is, as horrifying as it sounds, autobiographical in nature. The piece a spitefully arranged reaction to the dissolution of the writer-director's marriage to actress Małgorzata Braunek and the blame that he, and Żuławski isn't afraid to share this, apportioned to her. On the same track, which is really more of an extended interview with film scholar Daniel Bird, a combative Żuławski even goes as far as detailing the marital difficulties experienced by cinematographer Bruno Nuytten and lead actress Isabelle Adjani. The pair, he implies, grew apart during the film's emotionally gruelling, low budget shoot. Aside from any interest prickled by ancient gossip beamed-in from a bygone era, this detail feels critical to understanding the hypnotic appeal of such a savagely candid film. It isn't enough that Adjani's doe-eyed Anna is, despite her obvious and sustained mania, stunningly beautiful. She is portrayed as actively intoxicating to orbit. 

An interlude in which Anna's husband, a sad sack former spy played by Sam Neill, is sent a short reel of film shot by her guru-cum-affair partner, Heinz Bennent's Heinrich, neatly encapsulates the tensions experienced by an audience wavering between rapture and revulsion when beholding Adjani's performance. In this clip Anna, presiding over a troupe of young ballet dancers, prowls the room, moving from girl-to-girl. She barely acknowledges her students, maintaining eye contact with the camera - knowing that she is the subject of this short and drawing power from being so permanently considered - while she harshly manipulates a shrieking girl's limbs. Nuytten's hand-held camera pushes in on this scene, the frame filled with Anna's pleading, mock innocent stare and that of a wailing, distressed child. We are being asked, directly in this moment, not to focus on the genuine horror that Anna is almost casually creating. We are to look past the sobbing face of an innocent and focus only on the woman, the trusted teacher, who is very deliberately conducting these would-be ballerinas with scathing words and physical pain. 

This confrontational approach to deceit is crucial since Anna shares many of her scenes with men who she is attempting to emotionally manipulate in some way or other. Be that her husband; their long-suffering child, Bob; the heartbroken Heinrich; or the pair of snoops who turn up, unannounced, to the rotting hovel in which Anna shelters her darkest, bloodiest secret. Adjani's Anna is, we discover, constructed in layers, with each of these men only able to access a particular level of attention or information which always leaves them wanting more. None are permitted to possess a complete understanding of Anna or her actions. She withholds, violently at times. Equally though, Anna's hold must extend beyond the figures dancing on a flat, two-dimensional screen to the viewer themselves. Nuytten and Żuławski's startling camera work makes our involvement explicit. Our perspective is essentially voyeuristic: a prowling, encircling presence that sweeps at and around these hysterical figures as they bite and claw at each other. Possession rubs our faces in domestic neglect and an escalating, apocalyptic sense of violence. The viewer is incriminated then, judged as a participant for daring to peak into these lives. Perhaps, since we're privy to scenes and sequences outside of the experience of Neill's Mark, we can delude ourselves (at least for short spell) that we have a more complete view of this relentlessly complex woman but, as Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi's presence in the opening credits begins to take shape, it becomes clear that we're just as clueless and susceptible to manipulation as the rest of the people that Anna gleefully deludes. 

Kazuki Tomokawa - Doushita

The Odyssey by Dani Torrent

The Avalanches - Blue Shadows ft. Karen O

Ludwig Göransson - Hades

The Odyssey

Writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, as expected from the creator of the temporal pincer movement, a non-linear telling of the ancient poem that is steeped in queasy memory and elided thought. As with the director's own Oppenheimer, this Odyssey hinges on an individual who seems, for all appearances, to be an emissary from a forthcoming, dreadful new era of human extermination. Where J. Robert dreamed of quivering, sub-atomic galaxies, the lost king Odysseus chats candidly with the cosmic entities that bridge the hemispheres of his brain. Their faces are anchored in his own failings, while the thoughts they prompt demand consideration of his unholy ingenuity. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus' visions relate to the application of an original but fundamentally terrible new thought, ideas that have rolling consequences; waves that crash and echo far beyond the sand on which they were plotted. The equivalent here to Oppenheimer's fission-based nuclear weapon is The Trojan Horse itself, a deception that works so well because, we are told, it undermines the most basic tenants of human decency. 

The sacking of Troy then isn't organised as a great or ingenious victory; it's a crime that damns mankind. Somewhat of a piece with the director's breakthrough film Memento, in that the present for Matt Damon's mislaid monarch is a fog of unconscious, reflexive action (he scours a blasted beach for signs of his ship or crew) and winding conversations with a woman, Charlize Theron's bronzed Calypso, in which critical information is deliberately withheld, prolonging his agonies. While Tom Holland's Telemachus steps away from a household packed with seditious suitors to brave a trip to Sparta, in the hope of hearing word of his absent father (finding little to nothing), a stirred Odysseus answers his child's queries but only for our benefit. Odysseus giving detail to a horrifying voyage premised on a desire to physically split with the ungrateful allies who share their wrongdoing. By straying from the shipping lanes, Odysseus inadvertently abandons himself and his crew to the Gods and the elements they personify: Zeus in the ferocious thunderstorms above them, Poseidon in the churning waves beneath. 

The light of knowledge that prompted Odysseus to pack himself into a holy object - apparently a gift for petty Gods, intended to curry favour - is absent on this expedition. In this section mankind's brightest, most devious mind is confronted with how much he doesn't, cannot know. Nolan's film then taking the island-hopping form seen previously in Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, only absent the certainty or good-natured bonhomie that kept the Argonauts from Jason's throat. In Nolan's telling Odysseus meets the men he has failed, including Elliot Page's Sinon, and is then cursed to know, by figures who emerge from black sands, how events can play out. The decisions he will be pressed to make and how lives will be lost on each path. Forced to treaty with powerful supernatural forces - from Samantha Morton's Circe, a witch who can remake men in the slovenly image of beasts, or a massive, one-eyed man who is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son rendered in, as behind-the-scenes images would have us believe, Royal de Luxe-style puppetry - horror in Nolan's Odyssey is not just the unknown but the unknowable. All around them are thought and method that exceed the grasp of these pillaging sailors. 

Finally returned to Ithaca, Damon's king prospers again by deception, breaking another siege - this time of his own palace - by exploiting the social norms of the day. He enters his household as a beggar, a disguise that we are told is beloved of earthbound Olympians. Telemachus, desperate for any connection to a father who has been transformed into contemporary myth, repeatedly voices entreaty that acknowledges that the person he is speaking to has displayed some aspect, so beyond the norm, that it raises suspicion that they are Godly. Odysseus, again, uses this human reverence for something beyond themselves to his advantage. Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope may weep at the straining sound of an unstrung bow; Odysseus tearing apart the challenge he has conquered only to clatter the jerry-rigged debris against the fleeing bodies of his enemies but the lasting impression of Nolan's film is its description of hubris. Damon's Odysseus as a man arrogant or foolhardy enough to consider himself in terms that are not instinctively beneath Greece's vengeful pantheon. Odysseus as an agnostic in the age of antiquity who, when judged against governing Gods who personify aspects of human life, makes a case for himself as a new deity of deceit. A line drawn from Prometheus, the fire-giver, and the failed sculptor Dolus to Odysseus. A figure so powerful he can even deceive himself. 

idialedyournumber - Limbs

Sonatine by Alexye

Dry Cleaning - I Have the Key

Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys

The Snow Woman

The striking Shiho Fujimura stars as The Snow Woman, a gliding wraith that stalks the frigid depths of a feudal forest, freezing elderly snoopers when they dare to bed down in abandoned cabins for the night. Rather than hold this supernatural character at arm's length, director Tokuzō Tanaka's film (clocking in at a concise 79 minutes), welcomes her into the household; describing her pained attempts to maintain a consistent emotional presence in the human realm. Beautifully shot by Chikashi Makiura, The Snow Woman largely elides location work, and any verisimilitude such a practice can confer, preferring to stage its spontaneous blizzards on a succession of cramped, delicately lit sound stages. This beatific falseness reflective of a central character who works extremely hard to maintain their own staged, and temporary, reality. 

Besotted with the apprentice sculptor who wandered into her chilly domain, Fujimura's Snow Woman disguises herself as a beautiful, ageless woman and quickly ingratiates herself with the widow of the man she flash-froze, all to win her beloved's heart. Based on a folk tale included in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaiden: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the spell of The Snow Woman is that this paranormal presence is, essentially, both sympathetic and, unless threatened, benign; a lonely creature that really only represents an aspect of nature that just so happens to be associated with death. Yuki, as she is known to her husband, simply wants to be in love and raise a family. The outside forces determined to degrade or undermine this partnership then seethe with jealousy: the brutish local lord who wants The Snow Woman for himself or the ancient medicine woman who blisters Yuki's pearlescent skin with boiling, ceremonial waters. 

LTJ Bukem - Demon's Theme Part II

The Major by Vallez Gax

Robert Glasper - Everything in its Right Place

Supergirl

Aside from a pair of brief flashbacks featuring David Corenswet's Superman, that ground the picture in the ongoing present of this newly minted DC cinematic universe, director Craig Gillespie's Supergirl often appears like it could all be happening hundreds of years into the future. In fact, given that every other humanoid very specifically resembles the exact kind of people found on Earth, it seems like it'd be less distracting if Kara Zor-El's adventures where disentangled from the now and took place when mankind has journeyed into the stars. Much like Starlord and pals in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies though, this Supergirl is both contemporaneous with DC's unfolding superhero phase and proceeds from a place of airtight, space-faring slobbery. The interiors of this film's physics-defying spacecraft are caked with everything from shredded papers and stale cereal to fluorescent green dog piss. The leaky, lived-in aesthetic that George Lucas was so keen to evoke in Star Wars is taken here to a depressive, bed-rotting conclusion. 

Away from her adopted home planet, Milly Alcock's Kara celebrates her impending birthday by travelling to solar systems without yellow stars. By avoiding this specific spectrum of light radiation, Supergirl is able to both drink herself into a stupor and become vulnerable enough for Gillespie's film to entertain ideas of jeopardy. Bereft after being sent away from a surviving shard of the dead planet Krypton, Kara - quite reasonably - seeks distraction from her decaying memories of the family she left behind. Unlike the strident colonisers who sent Kal-El to Kansas to be its conqueror, Kara's parents (her father, played by David Krumholtz, is dressed very much like a retrofuturist scientist from a Fleischer cartoon) are far less megalomaniacal. Their decision to fashion a similar craft and have Kara follow her cousin to Earth done so simply to preserve the life of their beloved daughter. Of course, given that the audience is supposed to sympathise with Supergirl, it makes sense that she isn't seen to be mourning the passing of monsters. Indeed, there are asides from her parents here that are directly critical of Jor-El and Lara; positioned within the text as if to reassure us that not all Kryptonians are intergalactic imperialists but Kal-El's parents definitely were. 

Brief, compared to its comic book movie contemporaries (the film doesn't even hit the two hour mark), Supergirl plays like an overly tidied telling of a much messier journey. As is often the case with Warner Bros. tent-poles, trade magazines have rushed to detail the ways in which the various filmmakers fell out behind the scenes but even on the night, Supergirl is very obviously lacking in finer, lyrical detail. Characters may expound on their backstories or act decisively but there's little sense that they are growing closer and coming to rely on each other. At its conclusion Gillespie's film may outright declare that Eve Ridley's Ruthye (essentially Mattie Ross' vengeful teen from Charles Portis' True Grit) has, in fact, grown on Kara but there isn't a great deal within the piece that underlines this assertion. Although his screentime is comparatively brief, there's more of a sense that Jason Momoa's snarling Lobo has become a fan of this unusually principled child. That said, and although this film concludes in ways that are at odds with its source material - Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes' Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow - it's difficult not to draw real satisfaction from the sight of Kara, in full blue and red super-costume, placing the edge of an ornate sabre on the neck of a quivering, unrepentant sex trafficker then drawing it across his throat. 

Antônio Carlos Jobim - The Girl from Ipanema

Supergirl by Tom Scioli

Tricky - I'm Yours (feat. Mitch Sanders)

Assault Girls

Writer-director Mamoru Oshii's Avalon follow-up is a breathtakingly dull trudge beneath static skies that, somewhat, simulates the dawdling rhythms faced by video game players when they're putting off attempting a particularly difficult encounter and don't want to suffer their way through a team-up. Meisa Kuroki, Rinko Kikuchi, and Hinako Saeki are the Assault Girls, a disparate group of solo adventurers stuck on the same enormous, cybernetic worm combat event. Unlike this film's predecessor though, there's almost zero sense of a real world life that exists for any of these women outside of the all-consuming app. An extended opening passage - that perfectly replicates the feeling of being trapped, mid-level, by an unskippable interruption - details the jump from the derelict, post-Soviet aesthetic of the previous instalment to the much more obviously fantastical, Monster Hunter-esque design that props up the current iteration, Avalon(f). This transformation which, for all appearances, is a tremendous downgrade is, apparently, symptomatic of the stagnant Neoliberalism that has the twenty first century firmly in its grip. Oshii is still effortlessly prescient then, even if Assault Girls is not particularly entertaining to actually sit through. Edited with the all the stuttering imprecision of a post-round replay running on a shorting System 11 board, Assault Girls is less a full-fledged feature and more a dangling, discursive DVD freebie. The kind of compressed, live action distraction you might expect to find taped to a Japanese gaming magazine in the early 2000s, destined for the landfill. 

The Womack Sisters - If I Let You

Punisher 2099 by Nuri Durr

Voyage - Ascend

Kenji Kawai - Log Off

Avalon

After a break of nearly a decade, director Mamoru Oshii returns to live action with Avalon, a dystopian science fiction film concerned with the extremely forward-thinking idea (for 2001) that digital lives can be so lucrative and personally rewarding that they demand priority when judged against tranquilised participation in a crumbling, post-Cold War present. Małgorzata Foremniak stars as Ash, a highly-skilled e-sport pariah (who is, therefore, forced to play a team game solo) who excels at an illegal, highly-addictive multiplayer game in which players, with small arms loadouts, take on everything from tanks and helicopter gunships to sauntering, computer-generated mechanoids. Unlike the American productions that seem to default to high-flying, stunt show agility when photographing helicopters, Oshii and cinematographer Grzegorz Kędzierski regard their subjects, on loan from the Polish armed forces, as hovering monsters: bulbous, even insectile in shape; radiating incredible noise and landscape blasting power. 

Their human victims, of which there are many, are instantly zapped into two-dimensional snapshots of death throes that then crumble into pixelated cinder. Complete a mission and the hovering hardware's final agonies are similarly frozen, pulsing with amber congratulation. Comparatively, Ash's sepia-stained waking life is drained of danger or, really, purpose. Her illicit earnings may be enough to procure fresh fruit and vegetables but her living space remains bare. She inhabits a pointedly impersonal lodging, not unlike Melville's Le Samouraï, anchored only by the come-and-go presence of Oshii's trademark basset hound. Stylistically similarly to the director's animated features, Avalon's early passages revolve around the kind of slow-motion, gestural movement that entrances when rendered in successive cels but registers as dawdling when considering real, unhurried people. The observational element, communicated in brush strokes, has been removed, you see. The simulacrum proving much more arresting than a captured, human equivalent. 

Later though when Ash, very much like Major Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, pursues an abstract reward as a way to make sense of her diminished, depressive sense of self, Avalon really comes into its own. Although largely found wanting when compared to Oshii's 1995 masterpiece, Avalon does excel when detailing the intense, perception-shifting enlightenment experienced by its main character. Whereas Kusanagi's electronic apotheosis is strange and unknowable by design, the ascension experienced by Ash is vividly described as a movement from a flat, haunted fiction to something much more brilliant and tactile. Having cornered the interlaced Angel that allows passage into the more mysterious corners of the game, Ash advances to a complete new, secret area entitled Class Real. The hustle and bustle of the Polish city of Wrocław is re-framed here as a technicolor wonderland; a confusing and beguiling Oz, with its own inscrutable tasks, for Ash to explore then conquer. This reframing of the contemporary, in which a modern Polish city is transformed, largely through comparison, seems indebted to similar interludes in Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe. There, brief glimpses of shoppers traversing escalators was used to paper over footage either missing or never shot and served to remind viewers that the mundane and everyday becomes equally unusual, even alien, when judged against landscapes and situations powered by pure imagination. 

Nirosta Steel - English Party

RoboCop by Alexye

Dev Lemons - Eat the Pavement

Kupla - Honeydew

Mortal Kombat II

Presumably indicative of the creaking audience the film expects to attract, director Simon McQuoid's second pass at adapting Midway's ancient arcade series proposes itself as The NeverEnding Story for the washed-up, straight-to-video action stars of the 1990s. Karl Urban is recruited to play Johnny Cage, a character originally designed as something of a stand-in for Jean-Claude Van Damme when game designers Ed Boon and John Tobias were working on their coin-op calling card. Here, Cage is middle-aged and unsuccessfully working the convention circuit before he is enlisted by an inter-dimensional God to fight on behalf of Earth. Although apparently poised to build itself entirely around Urban, whose star has ascended thanks to Amazon's The Boys television series, Mortal Kombat II never fully commits to this handover, preferring to - and this is to the film's credit - maintain an interest in Ludi Lin's Liu Kang, Hiroyuki Sanada's Scorpion and, introduced in this instalment, Adeline Rudolph's Princess Kitana (Tadanobu Asano's Raiden is sadly sidelined, with Pink Floyd's laser show leaking out of his freshly cleaved throat). Initially off-puttingly by-the-numbers, Mortal Kombat II successfully pivots away from the hand-holding character development of the previous Mortal Kombat to concentrate on bloody battles staged inside computer-generated infernos. Following a stand out confrontation between Liu Kang and Max Huang's zombie Kung Lao - which takes place on a churning portal stage quoted directly from Sega's 16-bit adaptation of the Mortal Kombat II cabinet - McQuoid's film weaves several interconnected, and task complimentary, climaxes together. These cross-cut incursions simultaneously allow for your standard universe saving amulets as well as a feature opportunity for a vengeful daughter to slowly mutilate and dissect the faceless monster that murdered her father. 

Carly Rae Jepsen - On Wires

Godzilla Against Mothra by Leiji Matsumoto

Paycheque - Heatwave

Orbital - Halcyon + On + On

The Hidden Fortress

Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara play Tahei and Matashichi, two ambitious feudal peasants who have sold all of their worldly possessions so they can march off to war, convinced that this will be the (financial) making of them. As is often the case with societies woven around intractable class distinctions, the pair are quickly driven into a kind of slavery; pressed to dig graves and search for a hidden treasure in the ruins of a castle with the rest of the interchangeable commoners who have followed defeated, as well as victorious, noblemen. After escaping this servitude during a violent uprising, the duo are recruited, somewhat against their will, by Toshiro Mifune's glowering stranger. Their task? To transport a fortune in gold across a war torn and strictly divided country. Mifune's Makabe enlists (rather than murders) these men after hearing Tahei and Matashichi's plan to travel back-and-forth between several neighbouring states as a way of avoiding the heavily guarded checkpoints dotted along the more direct routes. 

Despite Tahei and Matashichi's lowly, pitiful station in life, and everything that implies to this samurai, the mysterious Makabe is impressed with their plot. Such expert deception would never occur to a valiant but straightforward warrior such as Makabe. Their slinking procession diligently plays the part of dirt poor commoners transporting their wares - even subjecting themselves to the indignity of having to sell their horses, simply because a nobleman decided he wanted to buy them. When discovered, Makabe literally springs into action, drawing his opponent's swords and killing them before they can even formulate what exactly it is that is happening to them. The Hidden Fortress was director Akira Kurosawa's first widescreen, Tohoscope feature and, like Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood before it, the film absolutely soars whenever Mifune is in motion. The comparative dullness of having to slowly move great stacks of firewood, laced with gold, lulls the film's audience with stalled, rained-out progress and sleepy rhythms, all the better to showcase sudden explosions of incredible violence or gallantry, all courtesy of Mifune. 

Riding alongside Makabe, Tahei and Matashichi is Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki, the subject of a manhunt that has already claimed the lives of several other young women, including Makabe's younger sister. This handmaiden posed as a decoy for the Princess and gave herself up to a rival clan, whereupon she was promptly executed. Yuki, especially when compared to the comparatively crude Tahei and Matashichi, is a strange, alien presence in The Hidden Fortress. In her own way, equally magnetic as Mifune's fallen general. Having had haughtiness drilled into her from birth, the Princess is naturally theatrical and prowling, even when attempting to pose as a put-upon peasant. Makabe, recognising the very obvious otherness of her shrieking, insistent manner of address, forbids her from speaking on the journey, lest they be discovered. Posing as a mute, the peculiarity of Yuki's behaviour is somewhat mitigated, allowing her the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to genuinely mix and observe the sort of people she would otherwise only come into contact with as her grovelling servants. A willingness to participate then, as well as her headstrong nature and a genuine decency, allows Yuki to get a sense of what life actually means to people who do not reside in castles, worrying about their dynastic obligations. Her enthusiastic acceptance of fate, having sampled genuine turbulence and misery, proves so impressive (and atypical for people of her rank) that it even stirs something in the group's enemies, eventually drawing them to their cause. 

PJ Harvey - Voyager

Del The Funky Homosapien - Mistadobalina

The Amazing Spider-Man #1000 by John Romita Jr. and Devmalya Pramanik

Yasushi Miyagawa - Teresa's Sigh

Backrooms

Even before Chiwetel Ejiofor's divorced store manager noclips his way into the Backrooms, director Kane Parsons' feature debut is packed with the chromed, overstuffed interiors indicative of a period aspiration that now reads as alienating and deeply impersonal. These living spaces appear (and, even in some cases, actually are) staged for show, rather than settled into or lived-in. Set in the 1990s, Backrooms treats that decade as a lingering, radioactive presence that transmits itself beyond standard confines into an enormous other. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox - as well as production designer Danny Vermette, art director Alan Derksen, and set decorator Trevor Johnston - set their focus on the dying moments of the twentieth century, when a post-Cold War upswing, as well as the dotcom bubble, ensured that cavernous retail units were packed with cheap, gimcrack garbage.

These towering monuments to consumerism have mutated, rendered here as a never-ending labyrinth of harsh big lights and damp wallpaper. By the time Parsons, born in 2005, had picked up a camera and shot his original YouTube shorts these spaces had long since passed into mouldering abandonment, fit only for urban exploration. The once mighty shopping centre now reduced to the paint-peeled ruin of a bygone, and crucially not experienced by Parsons, era. The horror in Backrooms then the very potent realisation that younger generations will spend the rest of their lives shovelling through a detritus, both socially and economically, that was blinked into being decades before they were even born. Presumably this is the horror of Backrooms? It's a shame then this feature follows dozens of short, online episodes about this very subject matter and therefore feels no obligation to treat its audience as if they are discovering this maze at the same time as Ejiofor's Clark or Renate Reinsve's Dr. Kline. An exposition dump placed at the film's conclusion, that is delivered with all the wit and verve of an unskippable video game cutscene, doesn't help matters either. 

Boards of Canada - The Word Becomes Flesh

Yoshiko Sai - Yukionna

Doom Patrol by Ian Bertram

2ADDICT - Da Phat Kat

Disclosure Day

Perhaps because the film is set in a present parked up and ready to plunge into the kind of nuclear conflict we were warned against in The Abyss, director Steven Spielberg's latest, Disclosure Day, is best enjoyed as throwback: a pre-war on terror thriller that has convinced itself there could possibly be a development - an all-consuming societal shift - that would bring everybody together, instantly putting all of humanity on the same page. Josh O'Connor plays Dr. Daniel Kellner, a shadow government whistleblower with a backpack full of portable hard drives that, it is implied, will be instantly discredited and deleted should he attempt to file share them. Emily Blunt deploys her governess charm as Margaret Fairchild, a weather girl whose ambitions to sit in the anchor's chair are complicated by a sudden onset of uncanny insight into the interior landscapes of everybody she comes into contact with. To lock eyes with this woman is to lay your secrets bare; revealing the treacherous interpersonal structures that prop up the persona you present to the world. 

Colin Firth's Scanlon, Kellner's former boss, is hot on their trail. This high-ranking agent in an off-the-books intelligence service is a remote viewer, able to transmit thoughts and murderous action into oblivious accomplices half a country away. In the fullness of Disclosure Day we learn that Scanlon's Possessor-like hold over others is the brute force aspect of an attempted summit between humanity and another, extraterrestrial race. Scanlon's efforts - most of which are focused around transforming Eve Hewson's blameless ex-nun into an unwitting assassin - may be indicative of a military-industrial mindset that sees any technological scrap from beyond the stars as an opportunity to crush its enemies but, plainly, all communion in Spielberg's film is expressed in traumatic, involuntary episodes. The abilities developed by Kellner and Fairchild, as well as the blocked memories that bleed into their subconscious minds, were all placed there in horrifying childhood events premised on an invasive and unwelcome change being visited upon these shivering youngsters. Although both adults are treated like the twin prophets of a new faith, this status isn't one they've made any conscious decision to pursue. 

Unlike, say, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, there's no sense in this film that these space men are inherently good then, only uncannily powerful and perhaps even indentured to some secretive department within the American government. That their grand plan to establish a shared understanding with us is indistinguishable from the false memories that can be constructed around childhood sexual abuse seems pretty notable too. Are Kellner and Fairchild supposed to be grateful? Or is the wreckage of their lives just a means to an end? Naturally, this terrifying narrative about the malleability of mankind in the face of a wheezing master race resides in an expertly arranged chase film that even begins in medias res. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński consistently link together beautiful, successive perspectives on human and mechanical action. There are performance car interludes - in which farmhouses are driven through and the camera snakes around the straining drivers - that firmly underline why Spielberg was eager to take Michael Bay under his wing twenty years ago. Similarly, televisual techniques picked up while young Spielberg was making his bones with the parlour mysteries of Columbo - specifically an ability to find multiple, illustrative shots within an unbroken sequence - sing here. The restlessness of Spielberg's frame feels atypical now; even spritely compared to the increasing theatricality of the computer-generated epics that clog up the cinema screens. Not showy per se, simply indicative of an expert craftsman. 

John Williams - Memory...

Chaos Squats Death Guard by John Blanche

Yoko Katori - Savanna Sunset

Sudden Death

Famously favouring a self-centered method of film assembly that prioritises successive shots of his own tanned, pumped-up muscles, it's clear then that Jean-Claude Van Damme was barred from Sudden Death's editing suite. Never mind that the action star barely gets to strip down to his vest, there are even long stretches of director Peter Hyams' take on the Die Hard hostage-taking formula in which Van Damme's Darren McCord is nowhere to be seen at all. The film instead preferring to painstakingly describe the mugging cruelty of Powers Boothe's evil Secret Service agent, as he offs a series of wailing hostages while a Stanley Cup final plays out, or the specific seating arrangements of Jean-Claude's onscreen children - Whittni Wright as daughter Emily and Sleepless in Seattle's Ross Malinger as the thoroughly unlikable Tyler. It's as if entire workplace interludes showing McCord in his natural environment have been excised. An unguarded, human touch in his character's depiction having been deemed extraneous. 

This presumed disinterest in the Muscles from Brussels is compounded by a screenplay - credited to Gene Quintano but based on a story by Karen Baldwin, the wife of Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin - that offers almost none of the verbal back-biting you might expect from a stressed Everyman. Similarly, a style of visual arrangement and shot ordering that isn't particularly excited about highlighting cracking, blunt trauma impact doesn't help the action star much either. Director Hyams, also the film's cinematographer, is great at constructing stunning chiaroscuro tableau out of relatively drab sports stadium backrooms but, simultaneously, reveals a complete disinterest in the human stresses that might exist between two terrified combatants. That the closest Sudden Death gets to your standard martial arts throw-down features Van Damme uselessly kicking away at a heavily padded sports mascot seems to underline the deliberate physical ineffectiveness of his character. Generously, this tracks pleasantly with an absurdly contrived (but thoroughly entertaining) interlude in which McCord must step out on to the rink and pose as the Penguins' goalie. Massively out of his depth, despite arm-chair critiques that are repeated to the players by his son, Van Damme's stressed pleading contrasts nicely with the high-speed puck play barreling towards him. 

LTJ Bukem - Demon's Theme // Music

Mike D - True Colors

Orko by Mizmaru Kawahara

Daniel Pemberton - Eternia // Enter Snake Mountain // A Job for He-Man

Masters of the Universe

Barbie for boys, right? That had to be the pitch echoing around Amazon headquarters a few years back. Director Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe - screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham - attempts a similar sort of trick as Greta Gerwig's film by ascribing three-dimensional torments and traumas to plastic, two-dimensional characters. Although not directly dissected within the piece, this Masters of the Universe (like Barbie) posits an unchanging layer of reality, distinct from our own lived experience, that operates with the strange, impenetrable logic of children at play. Soldiers, who cannot understand that they are toys, stand glowering at their mutated opponents; the front line of a war trapped in perpetual stalemate. This impasse holding until the imagination that is arranging these battles returns and completes their game. They don't even have names without him. So, after escaping through a swirling portal in the midst of a coup, Prince Adam of Eternia is stranded on Earth for fifteen years, desperately searching for the power sword he lost in psychedelic transit. 

Like the title character in John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, any interim between the sacking of his kingdom and the mindless toil that greets him in manhood - the Cimmerian endlessly turning an enormous grain mill, singlehandedly; Prince Adam working for HR in a strict, backbiting American office - is deemed extraneous and elided here. Unlike Margot Robbie's doll though, Nicholas Galitzine's pretender to the throne isn't yet the finished article. He hasn't completely assumed the role of beloved action figure. The rotoscoped, cornball antics of Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe television series may exist as a yet-to-be-achieved state of success within Knight's film but, this blaring simulacrum aside, there is something very different about Prince Adam the person. Surrounded by stock characters and bullied incessantly as a child for his perceived weakness, Adam is, as his mother hints, unstuck and atypical in this setting. He doesn't instantly fulfil a role within the wider play setting. He is, in fact, a chimera: a hybrid that combines the imaginative energies that course through this fictional realm with the deeper, much more complicated emotional range of an actual human being. 

Adam's assumption of Grayskull's cosmic power then a condition of an uncanny birthright - his mother a lost astronaut originating from Earth; his father an unsparing, PVC warrior - that allows him to channel and iterate on hackneyed skirmish. This boon isn't then something that can passed freely between the rest of Mattel's product range. Impressively loud, thanks to Daniel Pemberton's thundering score and Brian May's superheroic licks, Masters of the Universe may betray a similar sort of studied irreverence as a Taika Waititi Thor (or last year's A Minecraft Movie for that matter) but Knight's vision is presented with a kind of 5½ inch fluency that registers as celebratory rather than mocking. So, Karg and even Pigboy (as well as Dolph Lundgren in a cameo that plays like a DVD extra) from 1987's Masters of the Universe cohabit with characters plucked out of syndicated cartoons, Little Golden Books, and a Trap Jaw, played by Sam C. Wilson, that could be kin to Chris Cunningham's Mean Angel from 1995's Judge Dredd. This lovingly curated brand maintenance (as that is exactly what this is) exists within a piece that, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakthrough hit, quotes liberally from the stadium rock wing of the action-fantasy canon: Queen tracks are lifted straight out of Highlander to serve space opera theatrics on loan from Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon. All of which is to say that, in presenting itself as a mutant patchwork of clashing, barely compatible sources, Masters of the Universe 2026 is an appropriately cacophonous adaptation of a 1980s toyline. 

Queen - Princes of the Universe

Hypnotize / Madara 1000 - abcdefg

Black Legion Chaos Champion by John Blanche

Memorex Memories - Farewell Atlas

Faces of Death

How to Blow Up a Pipeline director Daniel Goldhaber returns with Faces of Death, a cash-in-cum-companion piece to the original, 1978 video nasty that sees Dacre Montgomery's serial killer re-creating sequences from John Alan Schwartz's staged, mondo documentary with a series of micro-celebrity hostages then uploading them, anonymously, to a Tik-Tok-style video hosting website. Hot on his trail is Barbie Ferreira as Margot, a former content moderator for this short-form video app who lost her job quibbling with management over whether or not these highly successful snuff clips should remain on their site. Arriving at a point in time when allegedly subject elective social media platforms, like the former Twitter, have given themselves over to pushing all manner of x-rated or just plain alarming video footage in the name of the almighty algorithm, this Faces of Death is, strictly speaking, topical then but heavy-handed or, maybe more accurately, naive in its finger-wagging execution. 

The actually biting material sits in the front end of the film, when Margot is still gainfully employed, and relates to the strict, censorial parameters relating to drug and sex education (both are verboten) or the Martian double-speak of posters trained by summary deletion to type in childish euphemism. The numbing effect of seeing real people obliterated by unyielding machinery is fine but God forbid anyone actually type out words like 'killed' or 'dead'. The theatrical horrors dreamt up by Montgomery's Arthur Spevak, which in-universe are (incorrectly) taken to be elaborate fakes, pale in comparison to the steady stream of real-life combat footage that warring countries gleefully pump out or the partially obscured children trapped in the Epstein files. All of which land on timelines, unprompted, every day. The parameters for shock have shifted somewhat then, leaving this Faces of Death feeling rather quaint, specifically in its depiction of abyssal horror. This is no Red Rooms. Goldhaber's film shines though when we are allowed time with the victims powering Spevak's rental tape histrionics. A short section in which two parties attempt to make their escape, while Spevak plays suburban sniper (happily recalling similar situations from Peter Bogdanovich's Targets) is the film's highlight, proving again that Goldhaber has a knack for arranging bodies in adrenalised settings. 

Xiu Xiu - In Heaven

The Dark Knight Returns by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

Soleils Noircis - Un Collier De Silence

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

Director Joseph Kuo's The Swordsman of All Swordsmen proposes, as martial arts films often do, a tale steeped in vengeance. King Hu regular Tien Peng plays Tsai Ying-jie, the last surviving member of a household that was slaughtered while he was still a child. Having spent the intervening decades honing his skill with a sharpened scabbard - all that remains of his father's treasured sword - Tsai Ying-jie has grown to manhood, dedicating himself to the destruction of the bandits who murdered his family. Despite hailing from the late 1960s (1968, to be exact), The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is reflective, compared to some of its more declarative contemporaries; less concerned with the specifics of how bodies violently intersect and, instead, preoccupied with the churning natural landscapes that house these duels. How sunlight refracts through leaves (while blind men fumble for their swords) or the way waves crash and froth on a bleak shoreline. Tsai Ying-jie's mission isn't as clean cut as you might expect either. The outlaws he chases have all aged into subtlety different variations of the kind of men willing to kill innocents to possess an ornate blade. Although a few do remain bullies others have matured into grumpy teachers or a doddering minor lord, weighed down by regret. Kuo's film, the director co-writing with Tien-Yung Hsu and Shui-Han Chiang, refuses an easy path for its hero, subjecting him to armies of anonymous heavies, poison-tipped arrows and, most unsettling of all, sobbing inquiries from a series of attractive caregivers who cannot believe that this is all the dashing Tsai Ying-jie wants to do with his life.