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. 

Sugar Minott - I'm Still Here

Imperial Remnant Snow Trooper by Mizmaru Kawahara

Mike D - What We Got

Toshifumi Hinata - Contemplation

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

The strangest thing about director Jon Favreau's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't that Disney have decided to relaunch the big screen aspect of their ailing space saga with an adaptation of an off-the-boil streaming series, it's that in centring Jabba the Hutt's offspring, Rotta the Hutt (voiced here by Jeremy Allen White), this adventure now becomes something of a sequel to Dave Filoni's unwatchable animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Speaking of Filoni, Lucasfilm's new Chief Creative Officer gets a co-writing credit with Favreau and Noah Kloor for this film; voices a couple of characters; and even scores a distracting cameo in the X-Wing pilot equivalent of a staff canteen. Actually, returning to Hutts, it's definitely more bizarre that, in detailing the living arrangements of Jabba's massive, slug-like species, viewers are treated to repeated instances of these creatures - sometimes even a pair that are related - writhing and intertwined. 

When Pedro Pascal (actually seen as well as heard)'s bounty hunter first arrives at the palace of these intergalactic gangsters, he walks along corridors lined with darkened rooms that appear, very much, like they have recently hosted gastropod orgies. The participants are abashed; pulling apart and reorganising themselves as Pascal (or Brendan Wayne or Lateef Crowder) stomp past. Perhaps it's the confrontational nakedness of The Hutts that gives pause? The film's repeated demand that we appraise blubbery bodies that sometimes look like puppets and other times look like their primitively textured ancestor from the 1997 revision of Star Wars? The grown-up Rotta - a gladiator who battles scaled-up monsters from Chewbacca's chess board - sports pumped-up arms and bulging pectoral muscles, an explicit point of departure from every other reptilian mobster we've seen so far. If nothing else it seems notable that Rotta's acceptance into the ranks of the Galactic Republic pointedly comes with a promise of clothing that is big enough to fit, and therefore conceal, his enormous body. 

This preoccupation with minor variations and the three-dimensionality of the film's participants speaks to, really, the piece's core appeal: these are the kind of adventures dreamed up by children as they played with their Kenner action figures. The first instance of connection with Star Wars for this viewer was, in the mid-1980s, seeing the overstocked occupants of Jabba's sail barge, from Return of the Jedi, heavily discounted in open-air markets. You might never come across a Luke Skywalker or a Darth Vader on these stalls but if you wanted a 3.75 inch reproduction of a Gamorrean Guard or a Weequay, you were in luck. You could slowly amass an entire collection of these bystanders and background players; characters who made basically zero impact on the unfolding saga but held their own creepy visual appeal as pure merchandise. Keenly aware that his film is, at its best, a rolling bestiary, director Favreau finds umpteen ways - beyond previous speculation on the Hutts' sex life - to fascinate and entertain. To wit: Pascal's delivery may be flat; his action so expert as to be dull, with a face buried beneath a gleaming helmet, but his side-kick is often delightful. 

A mixture of puppetry and computer-generated imagery, Grogu is of a piece with the Mogwais from Gremlins when sharing his scenes with larger characters. He's rapid and chaotic; possessed of an insatiable hunger for luminous snacks. When the film contracts to accommodate his tiny stature though, we are regaled with a sustained, wordless sequence in which this frog-like guru fashions a clay barracks around his deathly ill parent then traverses an inhospitable jungle and the swamp beyond, stealing smoked fish from Stephen McKinley Henderson's kindly, reptilian medicine man. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a truncated season of streaming television then this interlude is its own little bottle episode, reminiscent of similar asides in the Lone Wolf and Cub movies. As time passes to Ludwig Göransson's pitch-perfect Amblin score, and the camouflaged structure around the unconscious bounty hunter grows, there's a brief sense of a different, more ambitious movie: a Star Wars in which we are confronted with a melancholic permanence rather than just a temporary setback. Grogu seems to toil for days if not weeks. What if Mandalorians had a constitution closer to human? What if they were a little more fragile? What would that film look like then, if Favreau completely gave himself over to the Jim Henson of it all? Baby Yoda living amongst the bones of its parent, slowly honing his extra-sensory skills and fashioning his own approximation of armour before walking his own, vengeful path.  

Ludwig Göransson - Grogu's World

Vince Staples - White Flag

Binaltech Version Yellow Tracks by びー (@samhoshi7)

Scab - Bongo Man

Yusuf Gökcül - Untitled 87

The Punisher: One Last Kill

Although mercifully brief, writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green's The Punisher: One Last Kill, co-written with bellowing lead Jon Bernthal, is an aggressively wrongheaded take on Marvel's vigilante character. Set in a mouldering New York straight out of a Michael Winner movie, Green and Bernthal's take on Frank Castle is, God help us, subject to the kind of Campbellian archetypes that demand that this Punisher be a hirsute shrieker who repeatedly denies the call to adventure (slaughter). Heaven knows which comic runs Green and Bernthal have immersed themselves in but it is utterly bizarre to see minutes on minutes of screentime revolve around a stooped, drunken Castle breezing round a burning neighbourhood in which stunt performers are freely terrorising elderly day players. Not to pretend to be any great expert in The Punisher (the sum total of my experience with the character would be a Marvel UK Autumn Special, several US issues published in the early 1990s - #34, #37 and #48 - as well as Garth Ennis' Welcome Back, Frank, the Richard Corben collaboration The End, and the first trade of The Punisher MAX ) but I haven't read any floppies in which Frank wasn't, at default, completely consumed with his mission. 

The self-pitying, self-flagellating superhero seen in One Last Kill - who will soon be seen playing second fiddle to Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day - then plays like shallow, student short pretence when measured against such an obsessive, elemental character as his four colour equivalent. Hasn't The Punisher always been something of the American comic equivalent to Takao Saito (and Saito-Pro)'s Golgo 13? An expression of middle-aged wish fulfilment so finely curated that the doubts and painful introspection usually ascribed to such expert extermination are judged completely superfluous? Green and Bernthal are, plainly, far too fixated on the martyrdom complex inherent to their nation's violent law enforcement to fully grasp such concepts. So, in their picture, an incredibly damaged soldier is given free licence by the smiling, appreciative children of America to work out his demons by bloodily mauling a rampaging, multicultural underclass. Similarly, the Brutalist, high-rise architecture and Soviet era weaponry seen in this film's action scenes recall stints spent in Call of Duty: Warzone (rather than, say, The Raid or Dredd) and, while the extended takes of this well-drilled ultra-violence are where Bernthal seems most at home, the computer generated sparks and muzzle flashes work contrary to any implication that we're viewing a dangerous sequence that has been captured, rather than a safe stunt that has been finely orchestrated. 

The Punisher Autumn Special by John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson

JPEGMAFIA - War Over Land

Ravi Shankar - Improvisations on the Theme Music from Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali

It takes a special kind of talent to depict grinding, relentless poverty without ever resorting to either an overwhelming sense of despondency or, swinging in the opposite direction, an unconvincing, simplistic parade of hardscrabble virtue. Writer-director Satyajit Ray has exactly that knack though, his Pather Panchali (or Song of the Little Road) is the tale of a crumbling ancestral home and the family who huddle shivering inside its draughty rubble. Adapted from a 1929 novel of the same name by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Pather Panchali may well be the first part of The Apu Trilogy but wide-eyed child actor Subir Banerjee is more of a deputy presence within this instalment. Thanks to his youth, an elevated social position within his setting - not to mention his mother's relentless toil to keep him fed - Apu gets to remain something of a cheery bystander to the harsh difficulties facing his family. 

He's the beloved son, given access to education and indulged enough to be able to wander around his rural duchy, playing with his bow and arrow. Apu is never expected to assist with the day-to-day work associated with keeping a destitute family's head above water. Similarly, Apu's father Harihar, played by Kanu Banerjee, is barely present, away from his home eking out a meagre living as, variously, a debt collector or temple priest. Even when he does deign to return, Harihar is an oblivious, even frustrating presence, who speaks with the certainty of the terminally blinkered. Instead it falls to three women to form the backbone of Pather Panchali: Chunibala Devi's extremely elderly aunt, Indir; Karuna Banerjee's Sarbajaya, the long-suffering mother; and Apu's older sister Durga, played by Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta. If Apu's strengths are forthcoming, unlocked over the series' two remaining films, then Durga is life and vitality now, a child defying her diminished station through sheer force of personality. 

We meet a younger Durga 'stealing' from a neighbouring orchard that, in the fullness of this picture, we learn used to belong to her family anyway, before it was schemed away by greedy moneylenders. Although indulged by Indir, who Durga bequeaths her sweet spoils to, this child's youthful effervescence is resented by her penniless mother, a woman crushed by the unceasing responsibility to keep everybody fed while maintaining some sense of social propriety. As well as the fuss created in the nearby village by Durga's light fingers, Sarbajaya perhaps intuits a similarly bleak future for her daughter, left freezing and alone to raise ravenous offspring, but Durga doesn't seem to see her life in those terms. Like all children she is enjoying the now. She prefers to roam, instilling in the little brother who trails behind her a sense of adventure. The pair follow electrical pylons into marshland, chew on sugar canes and watch with awe as steam trains clatter by. Ray's film then as much a testament to curiosity as it is steadfast and unbreakable maternal love; the picture buoyed by the beautiful bird song compositions of Ravi Shankar. Pather Panchali, and Durga in particular, symbolise a dignity seized rather than conferred. 

Boards of Canada - Prophecy at 1420 MHz

You & The Explosion Band - Silhouette

The Horror of Godzilla by ZORNOW MUST BE DESTROYED

Father John Misty - The Payoff

The Rolling Stones - Rough and Twisted

Cure

Around fifteen minutes into writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, our perspective character, Koji Hashimoto's police detective Takabe, strolls into a brightly lit dry cleaners on his way home from work. The clerk apologises to him, indicating that he is already busy with another customer. As the clerk disappears into the back of the shop this other customer, a haggard looking salaryman, begins mumbling to himself. This strange, murmured autocommunication is a stream of pure venom. Takabe glances at him, taken aback, then stares straight ahead as this blank-faced professional loses himself in a whispered, discursive invective. Initially, and based on the subtitles present, this rambler appears to be addressing absent colleagues who've disagreed with his way of approaching work. He then changes tact, directing his hisses at an absent clerk who has, maybe, lingered too long picking out the man's laundered clothing. The salaryman snarling the kind of accusatory insults that basic propriety demands he otherwise keep to himself. 

When the clerk returns, apologising profusely, the salaryman accepts his plastic-wrapped clothing with flat thanks, then exits the shop. The scene concludes without comment from a clearly bemused Takabe. In a sense, this is the crux of Cure: the idea that, in this paint-peeled Tokyo, everybody harbours bubbling resentments that they cannot express. The city crammed with unfailing polite people who are neither seen nor catered to and, precisely because of that, this engenders in them a terrible but untapped anger. Which brings us to Masato Hagiwara's Mamiya. Seemingly an amnesic vagrant and, therefore, someone so vulnerable that they have slipped out of any implied social order. When conversations with Mamiya end he cannot recall the beginning of these queries; he responds to every question directed at him with increasingly incisive prods of his own. Despite his dishevelled and disorientated demeanour, Mamiya proves himself a powerful broadcaster, apparently able to either intuit the deeply personal prejudices of who he is addressing or, perhaps, even able to craft them for a receptive person out of thin air. 

Linked to a series of murders in which unconnected persons have each carved x-shaped gashes into their victim's throats, Mamiya, in his every action, represents a disquieting break from the hierarchical norms that underline society. Formerly a psychology student, Mamiya faded away from school as his obsession with mesmerism grew; amassing a library on the subject and even fashioning fetishes out of caged animals. To converse with Mamiya, to even attempt to dissect his motives - the crux of all police procedural - proves to be alarmingly dangerous. The resilient Takabe, seemingly used to discursive conversation and droning, domestic undertones thanks to a mentally unwell wife, doesn't react to Mamiya in quite the same way as everybody else though. He is, at least up to a point, able to resist the suggestions that this Svengali is attempting to plant. To strike back at Mamiya's interrogations, not just verbally but physically, when others would slip under his somnambulic spell. As Kurosawa's film presses on, and Mamiya's power within the piece grows, significant sequences are given over to hallucination and paranoid fantasy, blurring the line between waking life and manufactured dreams. Through clipped scene assembly and ominous, overbearing noise we are made to understand what it is to experience intrusive thoughts and even a kind of growing, murderous psychosis. A sense of menace prevails in Cure, transforming every dangling sentence - every ellipsis recorded on the subtitle track - into an implied, imminent threat. By now Kurosawa has trained us to expect catastrophe. 

Miyako Kobayashi - One Sunny Afternoon

Horse Lords - First Galactic Utopia

Farewell, Tears! by Akahana Dragon

The Womack Sisters - Chauffeur

Futureworld

Futureworld, director Richard T Heffron's inert Westworld sequel, eschews any of the onscreen pleasures associated with barging around a theme park that caters to violent, randy divorcees to spend the majority of its screentime sneaking around in dimly-lit back-of-stage locations. These pipe-packed caverns look less like the credibly advanced maintenance and service tunnels you might expect to be threaded through a futuristic retreat and more like the leaking interior of a massive aircraft carrier. Somehow able to bounce back from the lawsuits implied by the complete extermination of its customer base a few years earlier, the android manufacturing Delos Corporation have actually increased their prices and expanded the operation. As well as the criminally underutilised Medievalworld and Romanworld, the restort now offers - just in time to host Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner's snooping reporters, as well as Soviet and Japanese dignitaries - a woozy Spaworld and an antwacky attraction called Futureworld. The latter of which demands that guests be packed into padded outfits then tasked with miming some half-hearted space exploration. 

Despite utterly failing to work up a similar sense of chilly inevitability as its Michael Crichton directed predecessor, Futureworld does manage a few stray notes of interest, largely due to this viewer's overfamiliarity with The Terminator. It's difficult not to wonder if James Cameron's film (and its sequel) were working both with and against this piece. Cameron has spoken in interviews about being disappointed with the FM radio transistors powering these improbably lifelike robots; the implausibility of their blinking circuits and wiring splayed on hospital beds leading him to speculate what kind of skeletal machinery would actually be required to ambulate the muscles of an artificial human. Even the top-of-the-line T-800 designation assigned to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg seems to have some root in the models described in this film: the primitive, unconvincing 500 series and the laser-focused 700s, who fill out the Delos rank and file and pass for human. A third act in which Fonda's Chuck Browning is followed through a factory by an emotionless duplicate foretells Leslie Hamilton's role in the climax of Terminator 2: Judgment Day while Futureworld's bizarre, revisionist use of Yul Bryner's stalking cowboy - he's the centrepiece in a televised sexual fantasy in which Danner's Tracy is protected then bedded by a reprogrammed gunslinger, who kisses with his blazing eyes open - anticipates the rehabilitation ascribed to Schwarzenegger's leather jacket wearing assassin. 

Seven Samurai by Tony Stella

Cocu* - Universal Friends

The Fantastic Four by Peach Momoko

Nia Archives - Boys in Blue

David Matthews - Main Theme from Star Wars

They Will Kill You

If Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is the Dante's Peak of action comedies based around rich elites kidnapping women for Satanic sacrifice, then this piece - director Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You - is the slightly later, much goopier Volcano. All of which is to say that neither film is particularly good but at least one of them (this one) is extremely interested in depicting hot, red liquids blasting out of ruptured structures. At the outset, Sokolov's film uses ornate buildings and inky, rain-lashed voids to prickle memories of Italian horror films directed by Dario Argento. When battle is joined though, Sokolov's reference points are instead the engorged violence and fitful flashbacks seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. 

Although Zazie Beetz maintains an impressive physical presence throughout, these stray notes of reproduction invite a level of comparison that does this film absolutely no favours. Sokolov's genre cross-fading plays photostat and Beetz is never given the opportunity to play anything like the plucky, Falconettian vulnerability that underlined Uma Thurman's signature performance. They Will Kill You is to The Whole Bloody Affair as 2 Days in the Valley is to Pulp Fiction then. As well, the crunchy invulnerability bestowed upon the hooded devil worshippers that hunt Beetz's vengeful housekeeper not only rob the audience of any satisfaction associated with a well-earned dispatch but this impermanence even undermines some cracking body detonations too. Still, Heather Graham's enucleated eyeball creeping around, while her headless trunk clatters about in an air vent is, at least, pretty funny.

Hi-Posi - あと何日

The Punisher by Frank Miller

Ayako Udagawa - Just Fallin' Love

3mitsu x Suyo - Pt.2

Ballad of a Soldier

At the height of The Great Patriotic War, a boyish Soviet soldat is given limited leave from the frontline to journey across a war-torn nation and help his mother fix her leaking roof. This unexpected and unlikely boon issued in recognition of the soldier's bravery in facing down, and wounding, a column of advancing German tanks. Writer-director Grigory Chukhray (co-writing with Valentin Yezhov)'s Ballad of a Soldier initially wrongfoots thanks to the sheer earnestness of Vladimir Ivashov's Private Alyosha Skvortsov. He's a guileless, likeable youth who cannot resist mucking in and helping all those who cross his path. From injured veterans to elderly truck-drivers, Alyosha is such easygoing sunshine that he either nudges these people away from self-destructive actions or he literally plants his feet and physically lifts them out of the mire that traps them. 

All too quickly, Chukhray's film expands its tonal scope from Children's Film Foundation pleasantries to consider warfare in starker, far less celebratory terms: how uniformed men present as inherently threatening to unaccompanied women or the ways in which solemn vows, made during peacetime, might then crumble in the face of the brutal, day-to-day realities of industrialised conflict. Beautifully composed by cinematographers Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva - the blocky, black and white Academy screen is equally at home examining Zhanna Prokhorenko's luminous face as it is peering at the twisting, urban wreckage that has been wrought by aerial bombardment - 1959's Ballad of a Soldier proposes that, in lads like Private Skvorstov, something deeply precious to the Soviet Union has been lost forever. An entire generation of gallant young men have been claimed forever by the foreign lands in which they fought and died. 

Vince Staples - Blackberry Marmalade

GF13-049NM Tequila Gundam by Ikka Niiro

Beck - Everlasting Nothing

Action Bronson - Triceratops (feat. Lil Yachty & Paul Wall)

Youth of the Beast

It could be a quirk of the English subtitles stamped on the viewed video but, at one point in director Seijun Suzuki's Youth of the Beast (and following a lengthy cab ride in which Joe Shishido's ex-cop Mizuno lays out his suspicions about a blackmail ring to a former colleague), our hero leaps from the still moving vehicle with an instruction to the driver to take 'him' home. We presume Mizuno means the policeman that he has just spent the last couple of minutes outlining a conspiracy to. However, as Suzuki and cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka's jittery camera bounces around, facing into the back seat of the taxi, we notice - through the rear window - that the policeman has already darted out of the car. He silently keeps pace with Mizuno, leaving us behind with the camera, rocking uselessly and forlornly as we recede from this renewed meeting. We have, ever so briefly, been dismissed from the unfolding proceedings. The pervasiveness that we, the audience, enjoy has been thwarted. This sort of textual playfulness is all over Youth of the Beast, a film in which malevolent pimps are transformed into receding optical effects in the mind of despairing junkies or a scene in which an interlude of sadomasochistic foreplay is presented as the swirling eye of a tumultuous dust devil. At the film's outset, Joe Shishido's Mizuno reads as expert and conniving, a front he largely manages to maintain when dealing with two opposing gangs of uneducated, low-level street toughs. However, when his investigation expands to include women from a variety of backgrounds - from weeping widows to scheming madams - Mizuno's control over the unfolding counter-crosses quickly slips away. 

Takuya Nakamura - Liquid Nice

Zabolo - Cálida Tarde

Ken by Kandoken

Beck - Ride Lonesome

Send Help

It does the soul good to see an arch, remorseless face-prodder like director Sam Raimi back at the helm of a film, like Send Help, that isn't premised on an enormous, swaying franchise. Rachel McAdams (who, in fairness to the thundering Disney machine crossed paths with Raimi as an inherited love interest on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) stars as Linda Liddle, a cubicle-bound company backbone who is continuously passed over for corner office advancement because she doesn't wash her hair often enough or instinctively swipe away the tuna mayonnaise that clings to her cheek. Shipwrecked on a Thai island with her nepotism hire superior, played by Dylan O'Brien, who was keen to fill out his boardroom with the frat buddies that have just provided entertainment as uncontrolled decompression events, Linda is in her element. Finally, she is able to leverage all the wilderness, self-sufficiency trivia she's soaked up while striving to be a contestant on the never-ending American reality series Survivor. Her ability to tune out the squelching goops now constantly about her person has become an obvious benefit. Conceptually, Send Help has trace structure inherited from morality plays, with the indefatigable Linda now in an unexpected position to make literal claims on her indispensability to a cowed boss but Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's screenplay does quickly press into entertainingly amoral waters. As Linda becomes increasingly comfortable exercising control over O'Brien's quivering injured ingrate, revealing a genuine desire to keep him trapped in her web, Send Help threatens to coarsen but, in truth, Linda has fought so hard (and so bloodily) to amuse us that it's difficult to really hold a couple of murders against her. 

Elliott Smith - Son of Sam

Nine Inch Noize - Closer

Godzilla by Manabu Yashiro

Daniel Deluxe - Realms Long Forgotten

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Given the film's premise - a blushing bride is pursued by evil billionaires participating in a satanic ceremony, this time joined by her younger sister - you might be forgiven for thinking that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is acquainted with prolonged instances of jeopardy. This isn't really the case, the film's tonal dimension is much absurd and comedic. Scenes track towards clipped punchlines here rather than take the time to construct excruciating tensions that terminate on a retributive release valve. Samara Weaving's Grace, the winner of Ready or Not's previous attempt to curry favour with the literal devil, takes the majority of her persecution in her stride; soaking up an incredible amount of punishment that, a frenzied finale aside, isn't really turned back against her tormentors. It's not that a protagonist wallowing in sadism is definitively the preferred destination when considering this kind of highly personalised danger but, if you want an audience to consider something like a dimensionality in your characters, it's perhaps best if they respond, proportionally, to such slights. With that in mind, Kathryn Newton as Faith, Grace's sister (the actress looking distractingly similar to Virgina Madsen when wearing her hair up), is largely used as a substitute body for these absurd elites to work out their ongoing frustrations with an uncooperative and unkillable Grace. The slow-motion used to describe the pummeling that Newton's character is subjected to by Shawn Hatosy's Epstein class weirdo is particularly off-putting, suggesting that some level of decision maker on this film really enjoys seeing beautiful blonde women hissing blood through their pearlescent teeth. 

Takuya Nakamura - Liquid Kid

Bizarro by Ramon Villalobos