CHVRCHES - Roses

Gigan by Manabu Yashiro

Beck - Run Away

Resident Evil

Despite a perfect opportunity to rest on his laurels - thanks to the rich, circuitous history of Capcom's video game property - Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil instead represents a change in storytelling technique that better serves the filmmaker's abundant horror comedy skill-set. Weapons, with its varying perspectives on a town bereft of children, was piecemeal by design but Barbarian, the writer-director's breakthrough hit, undercut several finely composed horror situations by journeying elsewhere at crucial moments. In fairness, Cregger used these breaks to consolidate unease and layer in alternative threats but there was a nagging sense that, perhaps, these distractions were being employed to avoid having to commit to a specific resolution. Not so with Resident Evil, which stays locked-in with Austin Abrams' medical courier Bryan as he struggles, impressively, to transport a much-needed organ across a landscape crawling with incomprehensible, cartwheeling threat. 

Rather than suit-up with the specially trained police officers that the video game series usually revolves around, Cregger's hero is a pleasant tweaker braving iced, pitch black roads and incoming calls from a (justifiably) pissed-off girlfriend to deliver his precious cargo. As a pitch, this Resident Evil is very much After Hours meets The Thing (and, latterly, An American Werewolf in London) but it's worth noting that Bryan doesn't invite his misfortune through antisocial behaviour or duplicity. If anything - and certainly for a movie character - he's honest and respectful, particularly when dealing with situations that demand he take responsibility. A would-be hit-and-run becomes an extended comedy of errors with Bryan attempting to transport a defrosting zombie; while a run-in with a conscious, vulnerable infected sees Bryan willing to maintain the social contract, despite an obvious (even blaring) red flag. This latter detail - that bodies threaded with the film's curling, castellan contagion remain painfully aware of their degrading faculties - allows a certain poignancy to creep into proceedings while still playing with an audience's willingness to side with a narrative subject over the squealing meat puppets thrown in their way. 

Motoko Again by Matías Bergara

@ - Bird

Optimus Prime: Awakening

Screened alongside the 40th anniversary re-release of The Transformers: The Movie, with this short playing directly after the main feature, director Joshua Wassung and The Third Floor's Optimus Prime: Awakening plays with metatextual concepts that would seem to go hand-in-hand with a toy franchise that is constantly reinventing itself. Disappointingly though, this funereal self-reflection is undermined somewhat by gauche pleas for further adventure. It's difficult though not to commiserate with Awakening's filmmakers. The short now carries the final performance of the late Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and is therefore expected, quite unreasonably, to function as something of an epitaph for the actor as well as the role he became synonymous with. Beginning with Prime's death, as seen in The Movie, Awakening follows the flicker of the Autobot Commander's life force as it journeys into a machine afterlife to commune with a swirling intelligence that describes itself as a repository of all Cybertronian consciousness. 

Instead of Primus, the creator of The Transformers in the Marvel comics continuity, this is, seemingly, a God that they themselves have created, through millennia of warfare and struggle. While it does feel appropriate that a race of robots who are locked into a never-ending civil war - that has raged for millions of years and completely drained the resources of their home planet - would be ruled, from a remove, by an entity reminiscent of The Idea of Evil from Kentaro Miura's Berserk, but it's outright weird to see the rhetoric of cosmic indifference being wielded as the precise summation of a character famously described by his voice actor as strong enough to be gentle. Really, the tension in the modern Transformers property is that adults (myself included) cannot disengage from a Saturday morning sales pitch that is nearly half a century old. Elements of Awakening speak to this fact directly, literally demanding that Optimus Prime lay down his vestments of office and stride, confidently into oblivion, but this effect is dulled by comparison to the work that precedes Wassung's film. 

Rather than cling weakly to life, like his tyrannical rival Megatron, the Prime of The Movie is almost ecstatic in his passing; commanding his subordinates not to grieve and quickly anointing a successor, assured that his knowledge and vitality will pass from this life into The Autobot Matrix of Leadership. This gleaming, crystal device a holy Cybertronian relic that promises relief in times of insurmountable hardship, inspiring a kind of religious reverence that crosses faction divides. That Prime was content to die then. It is we, the audience, who demand that he return in increasingly implausible and less impressive ways. Similarly, the vision quest that Prime is poked down by his haranguing celestial overseer is not a tapestry of phantoms drawn from this dying robot's memories. Although we are suddenly transmitted into speculative moments of the Cybertronian civil war, the characters within them enjoy an agency that is both distinct from the events of the preceding feature and the voyage of enlightenment that Prime has been bullied into. These are not archetypes, within a fading consciousness, pulling this trembling mind in different directions. 

A battered and bloodied Bumblebee begs Prime not to depart while a beautifully rendered Megatron - who looks almost exactly like a John Stokes illustration from the 1986 UK Annual - is seen, in an aside that follows Prime's decision to depart, to take possession of a discarded Matrix. So, rather than unite the disparate sects of the Cybertronian race through mercy and understanding - perhaps even reestablishing some common ground with the D-16 aspect of Megatron, introduced in Transformers One - or physically pass the Matrix to another young subordinate, this Prime tosses the Godly relic into a boiling pit and removes himself from the equation. Presumably, the filmmakers believe this divine vestige is a weapon? Wassung's film then preaches self-sabotaging pacifism in the face of genocidal violence - doing so with pat allusions to a cyclical violence that our lead character does very little to perpetuate - and is, in this particular moment, genuinely disturbing. An affection for Peter Cullen's crackling performance (and Frank Welker's come to mention it), as well as the weight of real-life events, smooth over this bizarre axial shift but it's difficult to shake the impression that, somewhere along the way, this piece was designed to function as a jumping off point rather than a sainted conclusion; a misbegotten pilot for an ongoing Transformers series without Cullen or his Prime. Such harsh economic considerations are nothing new for a property that has made it its business to sweep old toys off the animated tie-in board the second they're no longer for sale (no matter how beloved they are) but it registers as completely baffling that we are all supposed to solemnly nod that a fitting denouement for this character and that performance is to imagine that, in some tangential continuity, they never existed at all. 

My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When

Undertaker from Nightreign by KakoKito

Jeremiah Chiu - Plastic Mind / Elastic Machines

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway is an animated Mobile Suit Gundam feature film that is completely disinterested in depicting its namesake powered armour in heroic or, really, even particularly exciting terms. Director Shukou Murase's film - adapted from a series of light novels co-written by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - relinquishes any sense that these towering machines are simply substitute, metal bodies for warring humans, preferring to depict them as the magnified horror of an international police state or a particular tempestuous form of aerial technology. When dealing with top-of-the-line suits, Murase's film obscures a relatable, human outline with layered designs that resemble an unholy mix of mythical predator and fighter jet. So, rather than build itself around futuristic armoured warfare, this flash of Hathaway leans much more heavily on the sociopolitical intrigue implied by the futuristic premise. 

We have an almost abandoned home planet slowly being bought up then fenced off by the ultra-wealthy while a cell of eco-terrorists busy themselves by attempting to assassinate members of this hoarder class ahead of an important cabinet meeting in Australia. Hathaway then is closer to a spy thriller or a police procedural than any familiarity with endless Bandai model kits might have you expect. Indeed, a pre-credit sequence set abroad a luxury passenger flight, that is shipping dignitaries between the Moon and Earth, is an opening gambit not just worthy of high-level James Bond filmmaking but exactly the sort of unassuming-then-explosive set-piece that should be utilised when introducing a new actor into the 007 fold. Hathaway Noa, our anchor in these events, foils this hijacking then (after introducing himself surname first to the audience) finds himself in the company of a young woman, named Gigi, who seems able to psychically intuit that which Noa would prefer not to share: rather than a post-graduate student of botany, Hathaway is actually a high-ranking member of the Mafty terror group. 

Hathaway lingers in Gigi's company, ostensibly to see if she intends to blow his cover, ending up as a vertex in an emerging love triangle. His competition? A Federation Colonel named Kenneth Sleg who is, actually, quite taken with Hathaway himself. Sleg threatens young, hot-shot Lane Aim - the kind of upstart character these narratives usually revolve around - that he'll happily replace this subordinate, as the pilot of the flight-capable Penelope, with Hathaway if Aim doesn't buck his ideas up. Hathaway, no stranger to human dynamics in which a tragic heroine is being pulled between ideological opposites, fixates on his role in this drama, almost seeming to contextualise the whole situation as something beyond his ability to influence. Hathaway though, through this romantic drama, finally allows himself to assume the role of an adult protagonist, rather than remain a child bystander. His longing is so despairing then as to be grimly metatextual. The abstracted and functionally useless persona that he has created for himself is commented upon, directly to him, by the few working class voices in the film as well. While Hathaway Noa strives towards a future in which the heavily polluted Earth is relinquished by mankind and left alone to heal, the taxi cab drivers and stall merchants struggling to make ends meet - with the threat of a forced expulsion by Federation jackboots hanging over them - would prefer it if he just did something about the fascists twisting the screws. 

Beach House - April Suzanne

Vangelis - Thermo Vision

Cable by Jesse Lonergan

Ex:Re - Radio Station

Destiny's Son

Destiny's Son (the film also known as Kiru) accomplishes so much with its scant, 70 minute runtime that, thinking back on it, you'd swear it was far longer. Director Kenji Misumi's film offers an unhurried and elliptical overview of a life lived within the strange, death-obsessed system of Bushido. Raizo Ichikawa plays Shingo, the child of an assassin who bumped off a black toothed concubine and the man who would be, in the fullness of time, her executioner. Misumi's film doesn't belabour this point but Shingo does, therefore, seem to have an uncanny aptitude for extinguishing lives. Forced to compete in a local Kendo tournament - and pressed to wield a real katana rather than a bamboo sword - Shingo proves so intimidating that he unseats a twirling champion just by adopting an unusual stance and staring straight at his opponent's throat. These abilities never take hold of Shingo though, he remains almost childlike in his desire to seek father figures who delight in his expertise. Perhaps the strength of Destiny's Son is that it immerses us in the thought patterns of someone who has been thoroughly deranged by his closeness to so much death? 

Cinematographer Shozo Honda captures images both alluring and alarming; while editor Kanji Suganuma ensures that these striking tableaux intrude just at the right moments, when Shingo is at his most troubled. Presumably a virgin, Shingo has little interest in taking a wife and drunkenly boasts that he cannot dishonour the memory of three women who are important to him. Cherished recollections of a bratty younger sister, who was murdered by jealous rivals, and second-hand reports of a mother he never knew make a juvenile sort sense when considering Shingo's reluctance to connect with another but it's the third woman who represents a more adult, and even alarming, perspective. Masayo Banri's Sayo was thrust suddenly into Shingo's life with an edict to protect her from a gang of rampaging samurai. When her brother came under attack, and looked to be losing, Sayo disrobed and placed herself between her brother and his assailants. Quickly struck down by her enemies, flickers of her boldness clearly lingered on with Shingo. It's only as the film begins to wind down that we fully understand the impression that she actually made. Shingo's recollections revolve around her nakedness: strings of her dark hair matted to a sweating neck or a dribble of blood that slowly snakes towards the cleft of her pale chest. As he sadly heaves a sword into his own body, we learn that death carries an erotic charge in the mind of this deeply depressed man. 

The Avalanches - Far Away feat. John Glacier and Khadija Al Hanafi

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Shredder by Alexye

Mitski - My Love Mine All Mine

Appleseed

A lesser adaptation of a Masamune Shirow manga, director Kazuyoshi Katayama's Appleseed doesn't come close to scaling the same cyberpunk heights as either of Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell features or Science Saru's recent The Ghost in the Shell television series (and, if we're being completely honest, this OVA isn't in the same league as Black Magic M-66 or Manga Video fav Dominion Tank Police either). Although Katayama's film fails to adequately translate the core appeals of the Appleseed manga - a beautifully rendered work that is, as the volumes go on, increasingly a futuristic, special tactics slice-of-life seemingly informed by newsagent holds on every motorcycle engineering or firearm magazine the author can lay their hands on - it does develop dropped threads about human estrangement in a seemingly perfect city built by androids. 

In a way this dull, chummy film even anticipates Oshii's Patlabor: The Movie (released the following year) by beginning with a stylised suicide that, in the fullness of the story, spells doom for this forward-looking city. Cop-turned-terrorist Calon Mauthos, who conspires with cybernetic criminals to hand over an enormous gun platform to deliberately ill-defined foreign interests, actually acts upon the alienation that is threaded throughout the first two volumes of Shirow's manga. This bubbling sense of disaffection with utopia was promptly dropped as Shirow developed as a draftsman of speculative weaponry, knife combat and muscular female physiques. Pleasantly rather than expertly realised by a pre-Gunbuster Gainax, this Appleseed plays like a bigger budget pilot episode for an unrealised TV series. Sort of like The Real Ghostbusters for Combat Magazine and Monthly GUN subscribers. 

King Geedorah - Monster Zero

M83 - Blister Sunrise

Dengekiman by Shoko Nakagawa

Bert Jansch - Open Up The Watergate (Let The Sunshine In)

The Death of Robin Hood

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood is a film of two halves and, as it happens, two aspect ratios. The first, weaker section is a muddy, 'scope reorganisation of Sherwood Forest mythology with Hugh Jackman's gruff outlaw living in a fog-shrouded wilderness, pursued by the youthful descendants of his many victims. In this pointedly revisionist telling Robin Hood does not redistribute wealth from corrupt nobles and is instead a pitiless bandit who has killed more people than he cares to count. As well as clawing the life out of the middle-aged men attempting to settle some forgotten score, Robin is pressed (only very lightly) in this section to kill a woman and blast an arrow through the head of a child. This latter detail placing Jackman's Hood in the same cinematic company as Henry Fonda's Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West or Clint Eastwood's William Munny from Unforgiven. They are all men who have indulged too greatly in their evil and cannot, therefore, hope for redemption. 

The muck-caked misery of this opening act is somewhat marred then by an approach to violence that teeters on the absurd, with Jackman's ferocious highwayman able to force torches through the blubbering, blancmange-like bodies of his enemies. Presumably a front-end packed with such gruesome incident is a sop to back-end that is almost completely still and meditative. Sarnoski twists fragmented ballads of courteous outlaws - that date back to the earliest days of the printed press - to arrive at a piece that presents like a half-remembered slither of Arthurian legend. The height and width of the film changes to a more European standard while cinematographer Pat Scola fills his frame with landscapes that are crafted out of faces. So, although Jackman's snarling, horizontal Santa struggles to come to terms with his truly awful past, Jodie Comer's prioress and Faith Delaney's Little Margaret are seen to bask in the strange stability that this chained animal offers. Unable to lift a weapon or otherwise retreat from this Avalonian isle, Jackman's Hood detaches from his mainland persona and begins talking through thoughts and feelings that are unencumbered by levity or cod psychoanalytical insight. Instead, we have the final address of a monster teetering on the edge of an oblivion proposed, centuries earlier, by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius. 

Mitch Murder - Hurricane

Tarn by IBI

Sakanaction - Wasurerarenaino

Black Magic M-66

Very loosely based on the "Booby Trap" chapter from Masamune Shirow's Black Magic series, the mangaka's debut work in the comics field, Black Magic M-66 dispenses with the self-published story's interest in Venusian political intrigue, preferring instead to transplant an interlude regarding doll-faced robots into a more familiar, near future setting. As well, and unlike other concurrently produced adaptations of Shirow's work, Black Magic has the writer-illustrator's fingerprints all over it. He wrote, storyboarded (these delightful scribbles later released in their own right by Shirow's Japanese publisher, Seishinsha), and co-directed the OVA with Hiroyuki Kitabuko, ensuring that this video cassette release captures a career at a specific moment - when his interests where attractively drafted women in tense cyberpunk environments; long before pornographic art books with overly expressive names like Greaseberries became the totality of his output. 

Although Shirow's original work prefigures the release of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator by a year, the malfunctioning and much more easily defeated androids of his amateur work didn't have any specific targets programmed into their circuit brains, instead driven by a petty vindictiveness planted via psychic suggestion. For this breathless, rental tape feature the M-66 cyborgs are redesigned as armoured marionettes, capable of moving their human-like bodies in impossibly fluid ways, and tasked with eliminating a helpless damsel who is introduced in her underwear. Essentially one long chase sequence, with an investigative reporter named Sybel as the protector character, Black Magic represents something of an ideal in OVA releases: it lifts liberally from big screen sources - Aliens, Blade Runner and First Blood are all in the mix - but this material is explored in ways that would be almost impossible for live action filmmaking of that period to portray. So not only do implacable cyborgs toss around soldiers (and their armoured transport) with wild abandon but futuristic buildings contort and collapse around our hapless heroines, leaving them dangling on scaffolding above a neon-lit abyss while a glitching Machinenmensch closes in. 

Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer - Mad Technology feat. Method Man

Optimus Prime by Birdie

Luci Gang - Headlock

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Well acquainted with life-altering misfortune himself, director Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth makes a point of rubbing its audience's nose in all of the upsetting bloodshed that would otherwise, in a more traditional telling, be occurring off-stage. We are compelled to gaze at bodies - women and children - bloody and bent at uncanny angles, the film offering up a blunt human horror that is evocative of crime scene photography. Jon Finch - a former reservist for British special forces and a Hammer Films veteran - plays Shakespeare's title character, at least initially, with a mod insouciance. His is a much younger Macbeth, a newly elevated lord who has quickly ascertained that he can beat a path to Scotland's throne with increasingly daring acts of violence. Egged on by his equally grasping wife, played by Francesca Annis, Macbeth finds himself in his monarch's bed chamber, his fingers clasped around a dirk. 

The murder of Nicholas Selby's King Duncan then is portrayed as the outcome of an acute kind of mania: an intense and hypnotic greed has bewitched Macbeth, urging him to act as fulcrum for the predestined bloodshed that has been sung to him by hags. He stabs his naked king as if in a trance, his body acting on auto-pilot. The guilt that Macbeth then struggles to come to terms with, for this murder and the many that follow, manifests in Polanski's film not so much as explicitly supernatural occurrences, rather as figments of an imagination fired by brain lacerating trauma. The ghost of a former friend, Martin Shaw's Banquo, who appears only to Macbeth in a room crowded with feasters, is readily organised within this filthy, miserable telling as the hallucinatory experience of a man suffering through a psychotic break - this subconscious strata explicitly accessed within the piece by the decision to transform Shakespeare's soliloquies into a whispered internal monologue. 

While Lady Macbeth slips away into a stupor - Annis, naked with her eyes locked on the audience that compelled her to commit these acts - the new king does eventually come to terms with himself as a kind of mythic entity that cannot easily be vanquished. Another visit to the Weyward Sisters convinces Macbeth he is living inside a riddle that indicates an apparent invincibility. Armoured battles with the opposing underlings who arrive to end his reign are therefore short and brutal; Macbeth believing himself to be unbeatable and Finch doing an excellent job of portraying exactly that. With respect to the real-life tragedies experienced by Polanski immediately prior to the filming of The Tragedy of Macbeth, Terence Bayler's Macduff would seem to take on a more personal dimension, since Macduff's wife and children have been slaughtered on the orders of a madman. This information is relayed to him as he stands before a massing army; his would-be monarch pleading with the sobbing father to get a hold of himself. 

The moment is both public and tinged with shame then, as if the devastated Macduff should, for the benefit of all assembled, take the news on the chin and just instantly accept that everybody he loves is now no more. There's a sense then, come a finale in which Macbeth's bleeding body claws at its neck for a head that no longer resides atop it, that the onscreen Macduff is delivering a coup de grâce that Polanski himself never could: striking Charles Manson's head from his shoulders before a crowd of solemn well-wishers. This reading though elides the fact that, in his relentless pursuit of success, this strangely charismatic Macbeth has, like Macduff, come up short in his obligations to his family. Macbeth, by this point, has abandoned an uncooperative wife to a gaggle of doctors and failed to be present when her life has then hung in the balance. Macbeth and Macduff are therefore united in a shared damnation for their absence. So, rather than transpose our feelings for this pre-sexual assault case Polanski (who, it's worth noting, co-wrote this adaptation with theatre critic Kenneth Tynan) onto any one specific side of these onscreen combatants, perhaps these battling, equally matched husbands could be assessed as warring aspects within a grieving widower. Shakespeare's four hundred year old play then having been reinterpreted as autobiographical psychodrama. 

CoryaYo - Dollar Bin

Vince DiCola - Death of Optimus Prime

Optimus Prime by Daniel Warren Johnson

Earth Tongue - Dimly Lit Cadaver

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Seemingly just because he can, Gian Maria Volonté's police inspector pays a visit to his wealthy mistress, played by Florinda Bolkan, slitting her throat during a sex game. Before the act of murder we get a brief sense of a strange, sadomasochistic relationship between the two; a dynamic based around the power and access that this high-flying police officer presumes to wield. While his leisure class lover bleeds out, the Inspector makes only cursory, even contradictory attempts to conceal his presence at this location: he paws at drawer knobs with his fingers wrapped in a handkerchief but makes no such effort when cleaning arterial blood from his body in his victim's shower or when he handles her telephone. Not that it matters. When called upon, in a professional capacity, to examine his own crime scene the Inspector, conspicuously, places his fingers on nearly everything. 

Anything he doesn't touch while on the clock, that still bears his mark from the initial offence, is hand-waved by snivelling subordinates who swear blind they have witnessed events that never actually took place. Writer-director Elio Petri (co-writing with Ugo Pirro)'s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is very upfront then about the willing ignorance and abject inconsistency that powers authoritarian systems that dovetail with the repressive governance of fascism. Entrenched in his new position as the chief of a political intelligence division, the Inspector rants and raves about the imagined lawbreaking of the working classes; his need for complete and total control over the thoughts and feelings of his fellow citizens. Rest assured though that crimes committed by himself, and men like him, can be safely ascribed elsewhere. Pinned on student anarchists or homosexuals, if need be. After all, there's an entire machine in place that is designed to do exactly that. 

The Inspector goes even further though, introducing alibis and excuses that exonerate these usual suspects, primarily as a way of asserting his own unassailable position within a police force that aspires to be totalitarian. Daring the system to make an example of him, he makes only lightly guarded confessions to other looters, including an immediate superior who quickly changes the subject. Despite his new posting, the Inspector returns to his old offices and relentlessly places himself in the path of this floundering criminal inquiry. Flashbacks push their way into the piece, building a more complete picture of his relationship with the victim too - specifically, the pathetic emotional turmoil he experienced when he felt that his authority was being challenged. None of this matters though. Fascism is a pyramid scheme after all. Everyone who takes part shares the blame and, therefore, those who teeter near the top cannot be seen to do wrong. The ruling party, in this case a braying police force staffed with dead-eyed, middle-aged slobs packed into bum-freezer suits, cannot suffer any shred of power to slip through their fingers. 

Ennio Morricone - Miraggio Secondo

Superman by Ashley Wood

Jalen Ngonda - Hang It On the Shelf

Bap Theory - One Day

Repulsion

It's a curious thing to come across ad copy for a film that seems so completely at odds with the experience of actually watching it. The deliberately feminine cursive adorning Repulsion's one sheet poster describes Catherine Deneuve's Carol as virginal and inexperienced, as if her very obvious fear of men is based in some unconscious desire to remain untouched; her sexuality untapped. Watching director Roman Polanski's film, not only is Carol's reticence around every man she meets entirely understandable - all are aggressive and demanding, attempting to overwhelm Carol with either breathless declarations or physically with their actual bodies - but her heaving disgust is, seemingly, symptomatic of a terrible lived experience rather than maidenly neurosis. 

Left alone in a crumbling, Kensington flat by an older sister who has absconded with a married man, Carol almost instantly begins to unravel. Her living space is filled with flies and widening cracks; a lurking, phantom rapist appears at night, clawing at our helpless heroine. Quite unable to take care of herself, Carol's psychological state regresses a step or two back into a choking, sarcophagal childhood. One that Carol isn't, and hasn't ever been, equipped to escape. We are shown brief glimpses of a cracked, family photograph throughout Repulsion. All the frozen subjects stare into the camera, posing for the picture. All except for a child, dressed and arranged very much like Carol is in adulthood, whose eyes bore holes in the back of an older man's head. An older man who, if not exactly the same, is certainly a dead ringer for Carol's violent, spectral intruders. 

Chico Hamilton - The Dealer

Benny The Butcher - Summer '26

Transformers Victory: Hero Set Battle by Guido Guidi

Alabama Shakes - Shoegaze

Denzel Curry & Kenneth Blume - DIFFERENCE ft. Yebba

Walker

Ed Harris, dressed as an itinerant minister, stands rigid; his eyes bulging with mania as he preaches the good, indigenous-peoples-trampling word of white, American exceptionalism. Set in 19th century Central America, Walker, director Alex Cox's final fling with the Hollywood studio system, is an excoriating description of the wrong-headed madness that has gripped (and continues to ensnare) all manner of wealthy, upper class weirdos who see the world beyond their borders as a proving ground that can be twisted and tortured for their personal benefit. After a farcical coup attempt in Mexico, Walker wavers between settling down with his beloved, Marlee Matlin's Ellen, or journeying to Nicaragua to ensure that shipping lanes remain available to American business magnates during a civil war. 

Despite his obvious pomposity, there's a sweetness to the relationship between Ellen and Walker, perhaps because the sign language they use to communicate remains private and unknowable to the bores who blast Walker with their own, psychotic take on American foreign policy. The charmingly forthright Ellen is therefore able to castigate her blundering fiancé in secret and, when her death removes any other future for this hireling, Walker can sob and sign uselessly over her body while it lies in state. A tearful Walker is now finally able to completely embrace the dreadfulness of his bloodthirsty destiny. Harris plays Walker, a real-life mercenary obsessed with Manifest Destiny, as a man completely deranged by his own baffling sense of superiority. The United States and the democracy they claim to wield are, quite rightly, recognised as a religious fervour that empowers incredible deviancy. 

So, while early passages of Cox's film are positively Pythonesque in their arrangement - Michael Palin and Terry Jones' Ripping Yarns, specifically - later sequences, in which Walker talks up slavery while relics and pop-culture signifiers of the 20th century begin to bleed back into proceedings, are built on a similar sort of reckless, colonial misadventure as seen in films like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Cox's film begins with the Universal Pictures globe, wreathed in Van Allen belts and proudly trumpeting its association with the MCA Company, then ends with Harris, directly addressing the camera, declaring that the United States will never leave countries like Nicaragua alone. Flimflam speeches from Ronald Reagan, intercut with images of a Nicaraguan wedding party shot to pieces in the 1980s by Contras, follow over the film's end credits. A creative decision that feels not so much brave but, in a 2026 where superhero blockbusters are routinely shelved for tax breaks, unrepeatably daring. 

Joe Strummer - Filibustero

Hornets - Concrete Rhapsody II

The Ghost Who Walks by Lee Gatlin

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.