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Stuff i watched recently, October ’25

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A montage of the undermentioned films

An odd commonality with many of today’s films is that, because either their production companies have gone default or nobody really cares about them any more, you can watch them for free on Youtube in varying degrees of quality right now. Videos have been linked where applicable.

Her (2013)

Every baffling product that’s come out of Silicon Valley in the past ten years can be explained by this film. They’ve all seen it, and they all desperately want to make it real.

The Humane AI Pin? Joaquin Phoenix carries around a little camera doodad in his pocket that he talks to instead of using a screen. Windows Recall? Scarlett Johansson helps organise his computer. People grieving the loss of their AI girlfriends? You know it. It’s a marvel they haven’t tried to abolish our keyboards yet.

It’s generally a strange experience watching Her in 2025, because it was right on the money about so many things that it now barely registers as science fiction. Mr Phoenix and Ms Johansson’s robosexual relationship is meant to be beautiful, and it is ­— the most tender sex scene of the twenty-first century occurs entirely through voice — but you have to work to quiet that little voice in your head going “lol, this loser fell in love with ChatGPT.” (8/10)

Weapons (2025)

Weapons takes the Silence of the Lambs approach to horror, being more of a nerve-wracking thriller with some spooky bits in it than a traditional “horror movie”, and is all the better for it. Satisfying as that ending was, it still seemed to be missing a little extra oomph to me. (7/10)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

“This is the universe. Big, isn't it?”

My word, how had i never seen this before? Seeing nineteen-forties Britain in Technicolor would be worth the price of admission alone, but everything about this tale of heaven and earth is so touching, even when it suddenly decides to be about British–American postwar relations. An all-time classic. (10/10) (Watch now!)

Breakdown (1997)

The best kind of 6/10: a serviceable mid-afternoon action flick where Kurt Russell does his take on The Vanishing. (6/10) (Watch now!)

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Possibly the best werewolf movie we’re ever going to get? They do some brilliant stuff with what’s clearly quite a low budget. “I hope i give you the shits” is going in the movie one-liner hall of fame. (6/10) (Watch now!)

Matinee (1993)

From the director of Gremlins comes a nice little film where John Goodman plays a William Castle–type gimmick-horror director trying to promote his new B-movie in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A wonderful watch, if a bit slow to get going — every second we see of Mant!, the fictional creature feature, is hilarious. (7/10) (Watch now!)

Lord of War (2005)

Great intro, good-but-messy everything else. It’s weird seeing a depiction of Ukraine in pop culture before it all got coloured by the war. Nic Cage delivers as always. (6/10)

Downfall (2004)

You know, this “Adolf Hitler” guy doesn’t strike me as a very nice fellow. (7/10) (Watch now… if you can speak German!)

Re-Animator (1985)

“And what would a note say, Dan? ‘Cat dead, details later’?”

Oh, this is glorious. It’s cheap and crummy, but in the best way possible. Every actor knows exactly the sort of film they’re in and delivers a performance to match. The special effects alternate between brilliant and hilarious. Watch it with your friends if at all possible! (7/10) (Watch now!)

Caught Stealing and One Battle After Another (2025)

These were the last two films i saw at the cinema, and they tread similar ground, so i thought i’d talk about them together.

“We’re in enough trouble with HaShem as it is without driving on Shabbas.”

The only other Darren Aronofsky film i’d seen before was π, and while my understanding is that the two are outliers in his filmography, Caught Stealing makes a great spiritual sequel, a stylish, high-octane, downward-spiralling crime caper squeezing every last drop of cosmopolitan flavour from its New York setting. Austin Butler is magnetic, and Matt Smith kills it in his role as the instigating punk, but the real star of the show is surely Tonic, the acting cat. Possible best-of-the-year material. (9/10)

“If you don’t give me the rendezvous point, i swear to God i will hunt you down and stick a loaded fucking hot piece of dynamite right up your fucking asshole.”

Of the two, One Battle After Another has been the better-received, rapturously applauded from all around as The Film Of The Year, a Very Important All-Timer Film with lots to say about The Issues. And while it is great, i can’t help but think… calm down? It’s not the Second Coming.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s excellence was already pre-assumed, but Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio is surely the coolest guy of the twenty-twenties. Everyone else does nothing but larp, larp, larp about how cool and revolutionary they are (or how bvsed and rvdpvlled they are, in the antagonists’ case), but he’s out there quietly putting in the work to protect his little community without needing to brag about him. How can you not love a man with a secret ladder with a carpet that unrolls to hide the entrance? (8/10)

Stuff i watched recently, August ’25

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A montage of the undermentioned films

Last time on “Stuff i watched recently”, i covered four thriller films. Today, we’re back to our normal farrago of assorted genres — and i must warn you, it’s been quite a while since i’ve seen some of these, starting with…

Mission: Impossible: The: Final: Reckoning (2025)

The first act of this presumably final entry in the Tom Cruise Tries to Kill Himself series consists of a clumsy, torpid recap of every attempted Cruisicide so far, interspersed with clips from past films1 and people talking up Tom Cruise as The Most Important Boy In The World. But, as soon as Tramell Tillman’s beautiful visage shines upon the Imax screen, we’re shocked back to life, and the ensuing setpiece — a palm-sweating scamper aboard a collapsing nuclear submarine — may well be the best, tensest, and invigoratingest this franchise has ever brought us. (7/10)

The Abyss (1989)

Never doubt James Cameron. (9/10)

Primal Fear (1996)

Fight Club, but boring. The most 1996 movie to ever 1996. It’s fine. (5/10)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Wes Craven dares to ask the unaskable: What if, in Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis wasn’t a complete imbecile who can’t even hold onto a knife for more than five seconds? Nancy Thompson enters into the pantheon of sensible horror protagonists by doing everything right, up to and including hiding a second instant coffee maker underneath her bed.

The special effects are the star of the show here, from spandex walls to bottomless tubs, lifting up some shonky performances (Johnny Depp acts circles around everyone else in every scene he’s in) and a truly abysmal ending. With a premise like that, it’s not hard to see why it became such a sensation. (6/10)

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

“Every species can smell its own extinction. The last ones left won’t have a pretty time with it. In ten years, maybe less, the human race will just be a bedtime story for their children. A myth, nothing more.”

John Carpenter knocks it out of the park again in this bizarre, prescient downwards spiral of metafictional cosmic horror. In an era of deepfakes, diffusion, and dripped-out popes, it can seem as though fiction and reality are merging. What happens when we as a society can no longer tell the difference? If you believe In the Mouth of Madness… it’s not going to be pretty. (10/10)

28 Years Later (2025)

“Hello, Alex. It’s Danny. The studio wants to make another 28 Days Later sequel. Any ideas?”

“Hm… What if we made it a touching coming-of-age story about coming to terms with the inevitability of death in a working-class North Eastern family?”

“What?”

“We can make it about Brexit too if you’d like. An island of strangers, and all that.”

“…”

“…”

“…I’ll get Young Fathers on the line.”

“Good, good. You’ve still got that pink Motorola Razr you shot the first one on, right?”

“Afraid not. I’ll have to use an iPhone instead.”

“Ah. Shame.”

“Shame.”

(8½/10)

Superman (2025)

The town crier came up to me and shouted, “Hear ye, hear ye! Superhero movies are good again!” So i gave James Gunn’s Superman a shot, and what do you know? He was right.

Mr Gunn kicks off his newborn cinematic universe by cannonballing straight into the deep end. The Superman experience is akin to starting a long-running comic at issue #387, in the best way possible. Superman has already been doing his thing for three years. Lex Luthor has a pocket dimension and Vladjamin Putinyahu has promised him his own personal settlement in Gazkraine.2 Mr Terrific is there. Who’s Mr Terrific? The greatest character ever, that’s who. Absolute cinema. (8/10)

🔄️🎮️ Celeste (2018)

I forgot my Itch.io password in the move over from Windows to Linux, so the recent Steam sale was my first time in ages playing the GOAT platformer. I’m proud to say i finally beat The Farewell (and got the moon berry) legit. Fuck that comb room. (10/10)

A Room for Romeo Brass (1999)

Fun little flick! Every town in Britain has its own Morell. (6/10)

📺️ Murderbot (2025)

Yeesh. I wanted to like this — “autistic robots” is a favourite trope of mine — but my sense of humour and its just did not get along. A great example of how every show on Apple TV+ just looks fake. (3/10)

Red State (2011)

There was a moment when i thought this was going to deliver the most singularly insane twist ending in cinematic history. It didn’t. So what we’re left with is a miserable film about horrible fundamentalists kidnapping horrible college students and going up against a horrible ATF agent. Kill me now. (2/10)

Shallow Grave (1994)

What a palate cleanser! Danny Boyle’s first film gives him the template he’d perfect with Trainspotting soon after. Thumping techno tunes, a perfect mix of comedy and tragedy, and Ewan McGregor’s boyish face. (Plus, an incongruously spacious sitcom apartment.) You simply must see this, if only for the novelty of Christopher Eccleston with a full head of hair. (9/10)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

The vibes are immaculate; the story not so much. This is a lean two-hour-long 6/10 that’s begging to become a plump and juicy two-and-a-half-hour 9/10.

That said, when the Four are heading to space in their sleek pulp-futuristic retro rocket ship, and the Human Torch gets smitten with the Silver Surfer… there’s a lot i can overlook. A good half of these points are just down to swish art direction and a triumphant score: (6½/10)

Stuff i watched recently: Oops! All thrillers! edition

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A montage of the four movies mentioned below

Last weekend i found myself with an unexpected glut of downtime, and i figured i’d put it to good use by crossing four films, all thrillers, off my “to-watch” list. I went into most of them essentially blind: for two out of the four, i had no idea what the premise even was, and for one of the remaining two i guessed incorrectly. Without further ado — here’s what i thought of each.

Eight Millimeter (1999)

What i “knew” going in: Nic Cage tracks down the creators of a child porno.

The celluloid macguffin is, blissfully(?), merely a teenage snuff film rather than a full-on porno — for the best, given they occasionally show snippets of the thing and i doubt Joel Schumacher wanted to be put on a list.

Regardless: Mr Cage is our greatest living actor, and, this being the nineties, he goes “full Cage” in a gloriously grimy thriller that sinks him into the depths of Los Angeles’ erotic underworld. Also featured is a disconcertingly young Joaquin Phoenix1 and Peter Stormare as a comically evil crossbow-wielding porno director. The third act gets pretty over-the-top, at times nearing John Wick territory. But that’s fine by me: i like over-the-top! It’s better for a film to go out with a bang than to die with a whimper.

When this came out, it was slammed by reviewers, and it still only sits at a six out of ten on all the major movie-buff websites. I hesitate to invoke the word “underrated”, so often misused, but… come on. The only assumption i can make is that it that the critics still held a grudge against Mr Schumacher over Batman and Robin, and that, four years after Showgirls, Eight Millimeter’s frank sexuality was still considered too much. Bah.2 They wouldn’t know kino if it hit them in the face. (8/10)

Frailty (2001)

What i “knew” going in: I thought it was going to be about a really, really old man.

It’s not. I’m willing to say Frailty, a directorial effort by Bill Paxton (of all people) ostensibly starring Matthew McConaughey, is good, even if it is mostly told through flashbacks (and, ergo, a child actor doing much of Mr McConaughey’s heavy lifting). But the twist veers things so sharply and so suddenly into a supernatural direction that the audience deserves a bit more time to take in the ramifications. And since for most of the film the viewer has been focussing not only on a child actor, but the wrong child actor, by the end of it i still felt i didn’t really know Mr McConaughey’s character — which is a problem when we’re talking about our alleged protagonist! (5½/10)

Misery (1990)

What i knew going in: Stephen King adaptation about a crazy fan who traps the author of her favourite book in her bed and demands he write Glup Shitto back in.

This is the only one i had a solid grasp on going in, since it’s hard to avoid learning about by osmosis. Great in concept, great in performance, great in script… but i could never quite shake off the fact that i was watching a psychological horror film from the director of The Princess Bride. (7/10)

Prisoners (2013)

What i “knew” going in: Denis Villeneuve. Jake Gyllenhaal. Hugh Jackman. I’m in.

Probably the best thing i’ve watched all year. It’s a punishing watch, but, my god, the talent on display from all cylinders is like nothing else. Behind the camera you have Denis Villeneuve, right in the middle of his transition from Québécois dramas to Hollywood blockbusters, and Roger Deakins, the legendary cinematographer who shot Fargo and No Country for Old Men.3 In front, you have a powerhouse ensemble cast of actors who could all easily carry a film by themselves. Hugh Jackman! Jake Gyllenhaal! Viola Davis! Paul Dano! David Dastmalchian!4 A masterpiece through and through — i hope we might some day get to see the original NC-17 cut, censors be damned. (10/10)

Stuff i watched (+played) recently, May ’25

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A montage of the undermentioned films’ posters

The Naked Gun (1988)

I couldn’t possibly give a better review than a paraphrase of Roger Ebert: First, you laugh at the joke; then, you laugh at yourself for laughing at something so stupid. Brilliant stuff. (7/10)

Death of a Unicorn (2025)

I was ambivalent enough about this film that i already wrote a whole post about it to explain my feelings. A utilitarian’s worst nightmare. (5/10)

A Real Pain (2024)

Poignant and funny in equal measure. The scene that really stuck out to me was near the end, in Krasnystaw, as our two Jewish-American main characters visit their late grandmother’s old home and place stones in remembrance… only to be chided by an angry neighbour, who has no idea about the tradition, but does know that the old woman living there now is infirm and might well trip. He says this, of course, in Polish, but the two leads don’t speak it, and need his son to translate for them.

The short-term tragedy of the Holocaust, the cruel annihilation of the six million, has been well-trodden in cinema, but this film gets to the heart of the long tragedy — the hole left in European culture by the hollowing out of its Jewish communities (the angry man who doesn’t know), and, equally, the alienation of the survivors from their own roots (the two travellers who need an interpreter for their own ancestral tongue). (9/10)

Sinners (2025)

If you need any convincing at all to watch this, i have five words: Vampire musicians in 1930s Mississippi.

A rare successful original blockbuster that must be protected at all costs. It takes a while to get to the vampires, but it puts that time to good use setting up its characters so you can, like, care about them and stuff. (A lost art.) (8/10)

Companion (2025)

“Did you jailbreak your sexbot??”

Companion is better than it has any right to be. It’s a schlocky premise, but it mines every last twist and turn it can get out of it, with snappy dialogue, a galloping pace, and a magnetic cast. It might not be the best movie ever, but it’s the best movie Companion could ever be. (8/10)

Zatōichi: The Blind Swordsman (2003)

This Tarantinoesque rip-roarer of a period action film has all you could ever ask for: yakuza gangs, cross-dressing geishas, card-counting, a celebratory ending tap-dance routine, and heaps of dodgy CGI blood. When i found out the director’s name was Beat Takeshi, my first thought was “surely it’s not that Takeshi”. Reader… it was that Takeshi. The guy with the castle. We love a man of many talents. (7/10)

Oblivion (2013)

On the left, a generic sci-fi picture. On the right, a generic sci-fi picture with a Scientologist in it.

The left image is the result of asking an image-generating machine-learning model to draw the prompt “still from a science fiction movie”. It was made by a soulless, unthinking machine, and represents, roughly, the average of every science fiction film in its dataset. It is utterly generic, because that’s what happens when you average out thousands of film stills into a grey smoothie.

The right image is from the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion. Do you see the issue here?

Oblivion is a film with no identity of its own, an empty bottle of milk drifting along a back street. It’s just entertaining enough to keep you watching, and no more. The only saving grace is that — for those of you keeping track — it includes a full Tom Cruise Triathlon; he runs, he gets on his motorbike, and he swims (in a skyscraper pool, but a swim is a swim). (5/10)

A Complete Unknown (2024)

If you’re going to make a generic music biopic, the least you could do is spice it up with some fantastical musical sequences, like Rocketman and Better Man. This “effort”, starring the unavoidable Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, has none of that, instead falling into all the usual tired biopic tropes. Mr Dylan is not a character in this — he is a vessel that spouts platitutes and occasionally sings. At least the music was good? I guess? (2½/10)

🎮️ n++ (2015)

I buy, like, one video game a year, and this is 2025’s entry, a tough-as-nails momentum platformer that’s the third in a series based on a Flash game i have fond memories of. The noughties vibes are truly immaculate, not just in the futuristic æsthetics but the trancey EDM soundtrack as well. (8/10)

Thunderbolts* (2025)

I had sworn off Marvel after all the characters i cared about had their stories wrapped up with a bow, so, though i had heard through the grapevine that this was actually quite good, i was fully prepared to put on my clown makeup and order my “Fell For It Again Award” rosette if i tricked myself into watching two hours of super-slop for nothing.

Thankfully, it was great! My understanding is that all the characters here have shown up in MCU projects in the past, but the film does a great job at getting you up to speed with what their deal is that you never feel out of the loop. The action is on point, the comedy got some good laughs out of me, and the climax, thank fuck, eschews the usual “incomprehensible CGI battle against a giant laser beam” in favour of a more introspective talk-’em-up approach. Special commendations should go to the soundtrack, by Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Son Lux. Go watch it. (7½/10)

Stuff i watched recently, April ’25

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The posters for “Jackie Brown”, „Spoorloos”, “The Monkey”, “Quiz Show”, “The Mist”, “The Blues Brothers”, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, “Severance”, “Flow”, and „Felidæ“.

Jackie Brown

What a great flick! My beef with Tarantino is that you can often tell that, just behind the camera, he’s jacking off at the thought of how clever he is and how many obscure seventies TV shows he knows, and while that’s still true here, the electric pairing of Pam Grier and Robert Forster washes all those eye-rolling feelings down until you’re left with the aftertaste of nothing but a good-ass crime thriller. 8/10 — my Tarantino power ranking goes something like Inglourious Basterds > this > Pulp Fiction > Django Unchained >>> Reservoir Dogs.

Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

This grim Dutch crime thriller is consistently mentioned alongside Paul Verhoeven as proof that “see? Dutch cinema isn’t all bad”, which is something you could almost convince me of if it weren’t for every top-five list’s inclusion of a film about an evil lift.

Anyway, while Spoorloos does occasionally veer uncomfortably close to “TV movie of the week” territory, it’s carried by its villain, an exemplar of the banality of evil. He does what he does because he’s experienced being a hero, and he’s just curious what it feels like to be a villain — and that’s what makes him fucking terrifying. Check this out if you get the chance. 7/10.

The Monkey

Osgood Perkins returns right soon with another horror endeavour, this time a gory comedy about an evil cuddly monkey. The Monkey doesn’t reach the highs of fear and tension that Longlegs does, but neither does it completely bottle the ending, so let’s call it a draw, shall we? 6¾/10.

Quiz Show

I put this on on a lazy afternoon. I was suitably entertained. I remember nothing from it. A platonically perfect 5/10.

The Mist (rewatch)

The Twelve Angry Men of horror puts modern (well, 2000s) American society up against a mirror and examines how people would really react to a mass calamity in a way that hits different in the post-covid era, where everyone’s brain has had time to cook in the sun. Plus: the cruelest twist ending in cinematic history. 8/10.

The Blues Brothers

Dan Aykroyd is an actual crazy person and that’s why The Blues Brothers works. This is two-and-a-half hours of overindulgent insanity, the cinematic equivalent of a five-year-old playing with their toys, and i wouldn’t want it any other way. I nearly had an asthma attack laughing so hard. 10/10.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Warm. Fuzzy. Inessential. It’s weird seeing Adam Scott with a beard. 6/10.

Severance (season 2 finale)

The back half of Severance’s sophomore season fell victim to some shonky pacing decisions, placing two self-contained, slow-paced bottle episodes right before the final two, messing up the flow we were in and negating the chance for an epic Season 1-style three-episode ramp-up, but nonetheless, the double-length finale successfully sticks the landing. The camcorder conversation, where Mark’s innie and outie finally “meet”, may as well be what the whole show has been building up to, and it just keeps going from there. Every company needs a Choreography and Merriment department. 9/10.

Flow

The first part of a feline double feature, about an adorable black kitty who goes on a maritime journey after the world is inundated by a mysterious flood. The gimmick (if you can call it that) is that the film is told without a single line of dialogue — just animal noises and a backing of beautiful C418-esque music composed by the film’s director.

It’s a beautiful, serene, lovely experience — all animated in good ol’ open-source Blender, no less! It got me to really feel things for these animals — it was a good idea to dial the anthropomorphism down to, like, 10%, rather than 75%. They’re intelligent enough to steer a boat, but that’s about it. The kibby bats around a lemur’s tail and hates dogs. 9/10.

FelidĂŚ

The second part of the double feature: Felidæ1, a 1994 German film about… okay. Okay. Look. Bear with me here. The idea is that it’s a film noir except everybody is a cartoon housecat. And for the first twenty minutes or so, i was thinking, okay, that’s a nice idea, but i don’t know if it has much more than that idea? And then it goes full-tilt into Crazytown. This movie contains, in no particular order:

  • Cat buttholes
  • Cat sex
  • Cat homophobia
  • Cat eugenics
  • Cats speaking Latin
  • Cats reading German
  • Cats using a computer
  • Cat murder
  • So much gory cat murder
  • An electroshock cat cult
  • Genetically engineered lab cats
  • A cat psychopomp who takes care of the cat dead in his cat catacombs
  • A dream sequence involving a giant evil Gregor Mendel commanding a literal sea of dead cats

And it’s all done in the animation style of an eighties-nineties-type Disney film (with some budgetary concessions and dodgy lip-synch, because, hey, nobody’s actually going to watch this). It reminded me, weirdly enough, of an old Garfield cartoon i watched as a kid — the one where he had nine lives, specifically that segment where he was an escaped lab cat. I have only the haziest memory of it, but damned if it (and the annoying-ass little girl in the Garf-den of Eden) didn’t stick with me…

I don’t know who the fuck the audience for this is other than furries and sicko Europeans, but i fucking love that it exists. I’m gonna be thinking about it forever, whether i want to or not. All hail Claudandus? 9/10.

Stuff i watched recently, February ’25

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A collage of the belowmentioned works
Not pictured: the Robbie Williams monkey movie.

I’ll confess i’m skipping past a lot of Christmas films for this recap, because i’d seen most of them before and those memories are blanketed in a thick fog of advocaat and chocolate. Nevertheless: here’s — if not all — most of the things i’ve watched over the past couple of months.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Perhaps i’m being unfair to a film that’s a rounding error away from a century old, but this was nightmarish in the literal sense. A terrifying parade of disconnected events where things just happen without rhyme or reason. By the end of it, i just wanted to wake up. (2/10)

Conclave (2024)

“If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts.”

Perfectly hits that Twelve Angry Men nerve in my brain. What i love about this, apart from the truly devious vape hits, is that rather than some grandiose, ancient, mysterious cabal, the Catholic Church is treated as exactly what it is: the world’s oldest bureaucracy.1 (10/10)

Nosferatu (2024)

“I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!”

I’m playing a dangerous game here, because i watched this on the first of January, 2025 — meaning that, once again, there’s a good chance that my “favourite film of 2025” will have come out in 2024. Not that i’m complaining.

Robert Eggers hits it out of the park again in this incredible adaptation of an adaptation of Dracula. Visually, it’s immaculate, drenched in chiaroscuro, the Count himself heralded by a sudden desaturation to bluish silver. The actors bring their A-game all around: Nicholas Hoult, perpetually an up-and-comer, seems finally to be breaking out, and having long forgotten the trailers, the midway appearance of Willem Dafoe was a most welcome surprise. Plus, despite owing her career to a surname, Lily-Rose Depp brings it all to a role that in a lesser actor’s hands could have been yet another generic traumatised wife.

Tl;dr: Don’t go to Romania. (10/10)

Brazil (1985)

I have such a love–hate relationship with Terry Gilliam. His films are so inventive, so wonderful, in theory, everything i love. But they’re always coated in this layer of grime and ugliness that brings them down for me. Here, he finally puts it to good use, building a horrifyingly relatable surreal dystopia that’ll make any Brit who’s ever had to deal with the welfare system cry-laugh in how true it all is. Have you got a 27B/6? I’m a bit of a stickler for paperwork… (8/10)

Heretic (2024)

Talk about wasted potential. Heretic starts out brilliant — two Mormon missionaries are trapped in the house of a Reddit atheist, played marvellously by Hugh Grant, who knows how to make every conversation drip with tension. If it was just two hours of uncomfortable theological arguments, i’d be strapped in.

But, nope! The third act starts, they go into his eeeeevil basement, and there’s a creeeepy emaciated woman talking in cryptic breathy half-sentences!!! Are you scared yet??? (4/10)

Better Man (2024)

I forgot i saw this and had to quickly retract the blog post and edit it back in, which says just about all you need to know. It’s pretty good, and the monkey gimmick’s fun, but i’m not itching to rewatch it any time soon. (5¾/10)

Severance, season 2 (2025)

We are so fucking back. Ben Stiller and company haven’t missed a single step in the three-year-long gap. I’m tearing my hair out trying to figure out the mysteries over here!

The Name of the Rose (1986)

The main message i got from this was reinforcement that the mediæval era is, indeed, the least interesting (to me) of the three broad ages of history. Still, there’s stuff to like here: Sean Connery is always great, and there are so many weird-ass little guys in the monastery that you have to begrudgingly love the energy. (5/10)

The Zone of Interest (2023)

“I wasn't really paying attention… I was too busy thinking how i would gas everyone in the room.”

Behold, the anti–Schindler’s List: a quiet family drama where the head of the family just so happens to be the KZ-Kommandant of Auschwitz.

The magic’s in the sound. We never get to see what goes on behind the walls of the camp, but the implication is enough. Stacks of smoke. The noise of industry. Yelling of orders. Screams of pain. It’s enough to make anyone throw up. The music’s no respite: John Williams this ain’t; what little there is is harsh, discordant, pained.

Sandra Hüller is incredible as the commandant’s wife, a woman who cares much more about the stability of their marriage and financial security than anything her husband might be doing for a living. There’s a chilling conversation where her and her friends, gathered round for tea, chat idly about the clothes of liquidated Jews they won at auction.

Still, it’s a little disjointed; some fragments and branches never quite meet back up with the main trunk of the film. It’s a hard thing to rate… but let’s say (7/10).

Stuff i watched recently, December ’24

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GoodFellas (1990)

The first time i’ve actually enjoyed a Scorsese flick.1 I love how it uses music to illustrate the main character’s psychological decline. (8/10)

Evil Dead 2 (1987) (again) and Army of Darkness (1992)

Watched as a double feature for the Hallowe’en season — Evil Dead 2 is as funny as ever, and all you need to know about Army of Darkness is that it’s a film where a stop-motion skeleton explodes, and if that doesn’t sell you, it’s not for you. (I did find myself wishing i’d watched the theatrical cut, rather than the director’s cut — the studio-mandated happy ending has so many iconic bits i didn’t realise i was missing!) (7/10)

Synecdoche, New York (2008) (again)

In honour of Megalopolis2, Tyneside Cinema were doing a season of films with dizzying ambitions and variable results, from Southland Tales to Synecdoche. I jumped at the chance to finally see my favourite film on the big screen — and, yep, still a certified 11/10 masterpiece.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

I have a “hear me out”. (7½/10)

Poltergeist (1982)

Steven Spielberg did not technically direct this, but come on now, we all know this is as spiritually Spielberg as it gets. Some fun stuff, especially the motley crew of paranormal investigators, but it’s weighed down by the jarring tonal mish-mash and a glued-on fourth act where they seem to have suddenly realised they forgot a “0” in their special effects budget. (5½/10)

The Fisher King (1991)

I knew absolutely nowt about this going in, so when Robin Williams showed up, it took some time for me to mentally adjust to the combination of his zaniness, Jeff Bridges’ shock-jock sleaze, and the trademark layer of Gilliam grime coating it all. All of it comes together beautifully in a surprisingly good-hearted fantasy tale of big-city redemption. (8/10)

Juror №2 (2024)

I had bought the tickets and everything for Clint Eastwood’s final film — but it was the day after the U.S. election, and fifteen minutes in, i thought, cripes, do i really want to be sitting through a drama about the dysfunction of the American legal system right now? (N/A/10)

AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

There’s nothing i love more than a big, ambitious, messy film, and this hits all three. You can see the joins between the Kubrickian rigour and Spielbergian spectacle, but i don’t care. Viva the mess.

Haley Joel Osment is incredible in this. You can totally see why Kubrick thought no child actor could ever pull off the script.

All the tech has this glorious early-noughties Orion’s Arm-style shimmer and sheen to it, and let me tell you, i live for that shit. (9/10)

Summer of Sam (1999)

I kind of forgot i even watched this? (3/10)

🎵️ Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want to Turn into You (2023)

Favourite tracks: “Welcome to My Island” (especially the George Daniel remix), “Blood and Butter”, “Billions”. (7/10)

Se7en (1995)

It’s good. I have little more to say on the matter, except that the title is pronounced /sə.ˈsɛ.və.nən/. (8/10)

The Lighthouse (2019)

This is some kind of primordial film, one that you’d find washed up at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and six months later, radiocarbon dating would show it to be older than civilisation itself. (Very glad i had subtitles — those old-timey wickie accents don’t mess about.)

Also, Robert Pattinson is really, really hot in this. No man has ever been this Fucked Up. (10/10)

Wicked (2024)

I didn’t know Hollywood still had it in it to pull out all the stops for a big, colourful show-stopping musical like this. Ariana Grande stole the show, but the goat stole my heart. (9/10)

Stuff i watched recently, October ’24

Tagged as films, monthly recaps☞ One comment
Posters for the undermentioned films

Big Fish (2003)

Tim Burton, you bastard, you’ve done it again. Hit a remarkable 0.7 Titanics on the cry-o-meter and made me want to call my papa. (8/10)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. (7/10)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Seeing Christopher Lloyd in this was like seeing Jeff Goldblum in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like, hey, you’re not meant to be famous yet!

It’s one of those films that’s been talked about so much that i have very little new to add, but i will say that i wasn’t expecting this to be as funny as it was.1 (7/10)

Sexy Beast (2000)

Ugh. Once the plot gets moving two thirds of the way through it’s pretty good, but that first hour is æsthetically revolting in the most perplexing way. The Spanish countryside has never looked so grimy and clammy. I hate all of these people. (3½/10)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

I didn’t know Steven Spielberg had the capacity to be so… cryptic? I love how the film builds up the mystery of what’s going on, with an ending that leaves you wondering in both senses of the word. Contact’s better, yeah, but Contact wouldn’t exist without Close Encounters as a base to work off. (9/10)

Silent Running (1972)

Douglas Trumbull, 2001’s special-effects man, gets into directing with this sickeningly seventies environmentalist sci-fi fable. There’s a lot to like here, but i can’t help the feeling that this would have worked a lot better if you’d cut it up into five twenty-minute TV episodes and had Tom Baker show up midway through. (5/10)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Went to the cinema for this, for… some reason? Tim Burton is back, baby, having finally freed himself from Disney’s offputting computer-generated tendrils, and while Beetlejuice²: Beetlejuice Harder is ultimately inessential, it’s a fun legasequel that’s better than anyone was reasonably expecting, keeping up the same manic energy as the original. Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder haven’t missed a step since 1988. Willem Dafoe is great too, though like most of the new cast, his character doesn’t have much to do in the story, which struggles to commit to any of its three plot threads.

Also, the lead girl falls in love with a socially awkward zoomer who listens to Sigur Rós, which means there’s still a chance for me. So that’s… that’s good. That’s reassuring. (6/10)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Once you’ve seen one Woody Allen film, you’ve seen them all, and boy did i wish i was seeing Annie Hall instead. (5/10)

Casablanca (1942)

Come on. It’s Casablanca. What do you want me to say? Every five minutes there’s a line that made me point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio. “We’ll always have Paris.” (10/10)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Unnerving to see Dev Patel before his ongoing “sexiest man alive” era, but you can never go wrong with Danny Boyle, whose kinetic, saturated style elevates a simple feel-good rags-to-riches story. (6/10)

The Substance (2024)

I cannot fucking believe i roped my mum into coming to the cinema with me.2 Greatest decision of my life. Her fucking face!

The Substance is the goopiest [sic] movie i’ve ever seen, and that’s ignoring all the body horror. Demi Moore digs through wet rubbish to pick up a sticky USB drive and splatters eggs everywhere. Dennis Quaid eats a bowl of shrimp that makes the world’s most viscerally disgusting noise. Margaret Qualley’s teeth fall out.3

My one complaint is i wish it had gone further. Everyone on the internet thinks it went too far. No. They are fools. That blood-sprayed audience should have started melting into The Thing, and we all know that deep inside our hearts. (9½/10)

Videodrome (1983)

Long live the new flesh! A film starring a Betamaxussy and a man who exists exclusively through semi-sentient VHS tapes. So many ideas, so little time (the Cronenberg special). Watching this is like trying to remember a nightmare you just woke up from.

I’m filing this in the same folder as Rear Window, a film with a surprising amount to say about an internet that it couldn’t have reasonably foreseen. What are we if not, like Brian O’Blivion4, ghosts of all our past transmissions? Is the online avatar not the new flesh? Existenz tackles the internet more head-on, but suffers from the fact that David Cronenberg doesn’t know what a video game is. Videodrome is unburdened by the future facts, and so can say whatever it wants. (10/10)

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

A double feature with Videodrome. Sure. Why not. Let’s go.

This tickled the Gremlins 2 area of my brain in delightful Looney Tunes-esque fashion. What a silly little flick. (9½/10)

The A-Team (2010)

Stepdad’s pick for movie night. My review: “Stepdad’s pick for movie night”. (3/10)

Megalopolis (2024)

Francis Ford Coppola’s final fart is why Hollywood can’t have nice things, an incomprehensible schmaltzy mess about how Adam Driver is a Very Special Boy who is always right. I don’t know where the money went — everything looks like Spy Kids. What an embarrassing way to go out. (2/10)

Francis Ford Coppola shoots for the moon and misses with Megalopolis, his long-gestating passion project that shows why studio interference isn’t always the worst thing. Sometimes you need someone in the room to say “no”. Every creative decision made here is baffling: Adam Driver’s character can stop time, and this never comes up. Our main character can stop time, and this does not play a role in the film’s story! His political rival leaks a video of him having sex with an underage pop star, and within about five minutes, it turns out it was fake and she was 23 anyway, so that plotline’s resolved and never comes back up. Every conflict is like this. I don’t know what’s going on. (4/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable defies your puny human notions of “good” or “bad” in an ambitious sci-fi drama that’s like if Hillary Clinton wrote a Neil Breen film.5 You can neatly split the cast into “knew what kind of movie they were in” and “didn’t”. Shia LeBeouf knew — he chews the scenery with every line as if the sets were made of cotton candy. Aubrey Plaza knew, because there’s no way not to know what kind of movie you’re in when your character is called “Wow Platinum” and makes Mr LeBeouf give her head. Adam Driver probably knew? He can get pretty hammy, but he’s kind of trying to keep a straight face. Nathalie Emmanuel didn’t know — she’s the female lead, but her performance is so wooden i was genuinely shocked to find out she wasn’t a nepotism hire. Giancarlo Esposito is insulated enough from the properly weird stuff that i don’t think he knew. (6/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable is so sincere i can’t help but love it. It’s a man who built his fame on films about the criminal underworld and the hell of war going: “I refuse to let this be my legacy”. Megalopolis is about a man with a vision for a better future and the power to make it happen. (His vision for a better future mostly involves those moving walkways they have at airports. I never said it was perfect.) And, yeah, it’s a little undercooked. Yeah, it’s as subtle as a brick.6 But it’s the film the man wanted to make, and it’s a film that proudly stands against the cynical doom and gloom that has infested popular culture since the nineties. I can’t help but respect that. (8/10)

“Whaddaya think of this boner i got?” —Jon Voight, 2024 (10/10)

Stuff i watched recently, August ’24

Tagged as films, monthly recaps, Doctor Who☞ Leave a comment
A montage of the undermentioned works
  • First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin — Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens — but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isn’t necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
  • Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say “starring”; he’s not in it so much, as it’s more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plot’s a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes… pretty good! 7/10.
  • Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
  • Watched Schindler’s List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (“I could have got more…”) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
  • In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and i’m not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
  • The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: “The Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human race”. For a few glorious weeks, it doesn’t matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesn’t matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
  • After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. It’s hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, it’s on track for an easy 9.
  • I’ve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and “The Chimes of Midnight” might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish they’d gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.

Stuff i watched recently, Junely edition

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A montage of the undermentioned films

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Hyped up to me as one of the best horror films in history, i’m convinced it’s actually an incredible comedy. There is so much Gremlins energy oozing out of this whole film; every scene, you can just imagine George Romero sitting back and going “…can i, like, put that in a movie?” and then putting that in a movie. A zombie gets pied in the face. 8/10.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road is not the greatest film ever made, but it feels like the greatest film ever made while you’re watching it. I’ve never seen a film edited like this: a two-hour-long sugar rush where every shot is overcranked till it breaks and nothing ever stops moving. 9/10, with one point added solely because of the guy in the post-apocalyptic convoy whose job it is to play the guitar.

La La Land (2016)

It’s fine. Ryan Gosling’s great as always, but something about this failed to grab me in the way it clearly has so many other people. 5/10.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Stepdad’s pick, in honour of Donald Sutherland’s death. Great stuff, with a fascinating eerie soundscape, creepily good practical effects, and, hang on, is that Jeff Goldblum? 7/10.

Doctor Who: “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”/“Empire of Death” (2024)

Well, that sure was a Russell T. Davies Doctor Who finale, wasn’t it? Part one’s always great, and then, as always, he can’t write an ending for the life of him.

Now the season’s over, it’s clear that it needed more room to breathe. Eight episodes of forty minutes just isn’t enough for a show to do both monster-of-the-week and a longer arc; with two episodes taken up by the finale, two Doctor-lite episodes, and one where she’s unconscious for half of it, we’ve barely gotten to know the relationship between Ruby and the Doctor, which is a shame, because what we do get is brilliant! They play off each other so well, and i wish we could have seen more of them together.

The Bikeriders (2024)

Seen on a whim. A nice little drama about a motorbike club, starring Elvis and Jodie Comer, who’s doing a… fascinating… Midwestern-type accent. 6/10.

Roadgames (1980)

“It’s like Rear Window, but on a lorry.” This scrappy Australian flick delivers just what it says on the tin, with an early turn by Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiker who gets picked up in the second half. 6/10.

🎵️ Brat (2024)

I’m out of touch with music these days, but listening to Charli XCX’s pulse-pounding new hyperpop record, i can’t help but think this is what pop music must sound like in the next universe over. I was sleep-deprived after staying up for election night and that definitely helped the vibe… 8/10.

Stuff i watched recently, Maypril edition

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A montage of the undermentioned films

  • Tombstone (1993). I have this pathological aversion to westerns, so i wasn’t expecting much — but once i turned off the part of me that was waiting for Richard Pryor to show up i realised that this the “’em” in “they just don’t make ’em like they used ta”: just a solid, well-made flick, regardless of my thoughts on the genre! I cried manly man tears at the end. 7/10.

  • The Thirteenth Floor, everyone’s fourth favourite film about a simulated world from 1999. I found it surprisingly interesting whenever it didn’t remind me too much of The Matrix, and a bit pathetic whenever it did. (Don’t try to do action, simulated world movie from 1999. You’ll never measure up.) 6/10.

    As a bonus, since nobody cares about this movie, you can just watch it on Youtube if you want.

  • Little Shop of Horors (1986). My pick for family movie night. Utterly charming from leaf to toe — the best example since Gremlins 2 of a film where you can see the craft that went into making every frame. Incredible effects, wonderful music, magnetic comedic performances from the whole cast… 10/10!

  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the impromptu double feature to the above. My brain has been completely frazzled by watching this. I went from loving it to hating it to complete bafflement to examining it like a scientist would a new species of frog. This film may very well have invented homosexuality. Defies numerical rating/10.

  • Late Night with the Devil (2023). Always nice to see David Dastmalchian, even if it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before — 6/10.

  • The Fall Guy (2024). Ryan Gosling’s a brilliant comedic actor, but him and some great setpieces struggle to save this film from a shoddy script and baffling editing choices. The jokes aren’t funny, the dialogue scenes linger for far too long, half the stuff from the trailer is gone from the movie… the whole thing desperately needs a trimming down to a tight ninety minutes. 4/10.

  • Eurovision 2024. Bullet-pointed, as per tradition:
    • I went in totally blind this year, having missed the semi-finals while building a new PC. Oops!
    • Sweden appear to have trapped the Backstreet Boys in the Matrix.
    • There is no country named the Netherlands and never has been. Doesn’t exist. Not real. We begin bombing in five minutes.
    • Big fan of Spain’s bizarre campy cougar energy, even if the audience and juries weren’t!
    • Estonia are frankly embarrassing.
    • Completely maxed out my scorecard for Ireland, who have sent in Xanthe-bait of the highest order. Yes… hahaha… yes!!!
    • Greece’s song is the most annoying thing since Crazy Frog and it baffles me how highly it scored.
    • I think the UK is just cursed at this point. We send a legitimate star with the world’s gayest performance (admittedly more in the “getting sucked off in a dingy bathroom” way than the “campy drag queen” way) and not a single point from the audience?
    • God bless Finland. I usually hate it when acts try deliberately to be funny but i died laughing at a pantsless man in a censored Windows 95 T-shirt emerging from an egg while pyrotechnics go off.
    • Switzerland have taken Sam Ryder’s mantle as this year’s designated golden retriever… a great performance from someone who’s clearly happy beyond words to be there. A deserving winner if there ever was one.
    • Croatia’s catchy pirate dance is great but i cannot forgive that abominable stage name. I don’t care how many records you sell; there is no excuse to call yourself Baby Lasagna. Go back to the drawing board. Now.

  • T2 Trainspotting (2017). Mama’s pick for family movie night. I wasn’t so hot on the idea going in… and then it was, to my surprise, pretty great! It uses the idea of the legacy sequel to its advantage — it’s a film about nostalgia, the good and bad of it all. It really does feel like you’re catching up with these characters twenty years later, all wondering where their lives have gone. Some beautiful shots, too — a film from 2017 that bothered hiring a gaffer?? What a concept! 8/10.

  • 127 Hours (2010), continuing the Danny Boyle theme. Probably the best film a film about a guy whose hand is stuck next to a rock could ever be, it convinced me of the occasional merit of a good biopic over a documentary — this would not and could not work if you only had access to the original crummy camera footage and talking-head interviews. Also perhaps the only movie in history to contain an inflatable Scooby-Doo jumpscare. I was going to give it an 8, but then they played Sigur RĂłs in the triumphant ending scene, so sod it, it’s a 9/10.

  • Chris Chibnall is dead and Doctor Who is alive! I thought Ncuti Gatwa was playing the role too young at first, but the season proper has me totally convinced. His Doctor, the first Doctor to Fuck™, has this infectious energy and zest for life that’s totally new to the character, and a great rapoport with his companion — even when the new series is bad, it’s unhinged in a fun way, rather than the forgettable doldrums of the Chibnall era.

Stuff i watched recently, i forgor edition

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A montage of the undermentioned works

  • Aniara (2018). I actually watched this one back in February, but forgot to mention it at the time — a Swedish hard(ish) sci-fi tragedy, where a colony ship on its way to Mars gets knocked off course with no fuel left to turn back. This is unrelentingly bleak, sometimes to the point where my brain would shut off and stopped caring, but there’s a lot to like.

    I love the idea of the Mima as a character/narrative device/whatever: a living AI that uses people’s memories to bring them back visions of Earth as it was, then gets depressed because too many people are using it and flooding it with memories of the apocalypse. Giving the holodeck a soul? Genius.

    Unfortunately it doesn’t so much end as it just fizzles out — i guess you could make a case that that’s on purpose, since that’s how these situations go in the real world, but i found the whole dénouement deeply unsatisfying excepting the veeeery final shots (if you know, you know). 6/10.

  • Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Caught this one at the Tyneside, where it happened to be the next film on at the time i got in. This spoke to me not just because of the powerhouse performances from Sandra HĂźller, a dog named Messi (how did they get him to do that?), and the fifteen-year-old(!!!) Milo Machado-Graner, who i wish nothing but the best in his future, but because it matches up with events in my life to a frankly concerning autobiographical extent. This would never, ever be in my wheelhouse were it not for random chance, but i teared up thrice over. 10/10, and i’m annoyed i couldn’t make it my best of last year.

    Ten seconds after watching… Wait, people online think she killed the husband? Are they fucking stupid? What? It’s obviously an accident. Did we watch the same film? Did the cut they saw not have all those carefully-inserted moments where people almost fall off of ledges or get hit by cars to hammer home that accidents can, in fact, just happen? What?? I — am i just projecting my own experiences here and not wanting to believe that my mum would kill someone? And then if they don’t think she killed the husband, they’re like, oh, well the husband deserved it, he was so awful in that argument, and like, no!!! The mum in the film near enough turns to the camera and says “the worst moments in someone’s life are unfairly cherry-picked as evidence for a trail and do not represent them as a whole”; again, did we watch the same bloody film? Are people stupid? Am i stupid? Is Justine Triet stupid? Am i dying?

  • Reservoir Dogs (1992). Mama’s pick for family movie night. Every time i watch a Tarantino film i really get the sense that he’s jacking off to how clever he is writing the script and this is that tendency at its worst. I get why it caught on, i really do, but this is absolutely insufferable from start to finish any time someone who’s not a cop is on screen. I do not care about your thoughts on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, Quentin! 3ž/10.

  • Monkey Man (2024). I have been hyped as shit for this ever since the first trailer came out. You can tell this is Sexiest Man Alive Dev Patel’s first time in the director’s chair (looooots of shaky-cam close-ups), but it’s damn stylish, and he shows a lot of promise. I can also see why Netflix did not want to touch this with a barge pole given that the plot is essentially “Dev Patel kills the BJP”. (It has some, ah, terroristic overtones that would be a little concerning if it were even 10% less shlocky.)

    That aside, i really enjoyed the film, and thought it got better as it went along — early on, i wasn’t super clear on the character motivations at play, but then the most me-bait thing since The Northman happens: Mr Patel’s character has a near-death-experience flashback and wakes up having been rescued by a hijra priest at a secret temple to Ardha­nari­shvara, a half-male, half-female incarnation of Shiva. Into! my! fucking! veins! 6½/10.

  • De dolende god (2018), as seen previously on The Garden. This is pretty much designed to appeal to me specifically, and yeah, it’s really good. It’s sweet, heartfelt, absolutely gorgeous, and of course, extremely European. It’s the odd one out in this list, being a comic book rather than a film — a medium i don’t have much experience with, so it’s hard to give it a numerical rating in the absence of comparisons… but let’s say 8/10.

Stuff i watched recently, Marchuary edition

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Letterboxd screenshot of a list of “movies about spice worlds”, with the two adaptations of “Dune” and “Spice World”
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation, season three. How did i let myself not get around to this earlier‽ This is soft sci-fi running at peak performance — a crew of hyper-competent and endearing1 people on a starship, sometimes just going on wacky space adventures, other times using science fiction as a lens through which to view our own world. 10/10. My three favourite episodes so far:
    1. “Tin Man”. Our character actor of the week, Harry Groener, plays a member of a mildly telepathic species who has a small problem: he has Space Autism, thus can’t turn said telepathy off. Man, does this episode get it. Every little thing about him is painfully relatable, the ending reduced me to tears, and i would like seven seasons of a buddy cop spinoff show starring him and Data right now, please and thank you.
    2. “The Survivors”. The third episode in the season, this is the one that made me sit up and go: God damn, that’s good television. Our character of the week, John Anderson, is the man of the house for an elderly couple who are the only ones left after the decimation of their planet. I can’t reveal anything more than that, but he sells it like noöne else could.
    3. “Deja Q”. This one’s just funny.
  • The Revenant (2015). Stepdad’s pick for family movie night. When the credits rolled, i thought it one of the best films i’d ever seen… but a few weeks on, i’m not so sure. The cinematography is epic, and Tom Hardy’s brilliant, no doubt, but i really feel more could have been mined from the premise. Leonardo DiCaprio’s half-Pawnee son in particular is the heart of the film, and the key role through which to interpret the conflict between the three warring groups, but he gets unceremoniously killed off halfway through, for no other reason than to bolster Mr Hardy’s villain cred and, i am left to infer, because the writers had no idea what to do with his character for the rest of the story. Mr DiCaprio himself goes completely overboard and could really take Lawrence Olivier’s advice to heart: “My dear boy, have you tried just acting?” 6½/10.
  • True Stories (1986). My pick for family movie night. This sweet and mild-mannered musical comedy is David Byrne’s only director credit, and that’s a damned shame. Most places call it a satire, and i can’t help but think they’re projecting. This is a genuine ode to small-town American life, whatever its pros and whatever its cons, and next time i’m sick, i know exactly what i’ll be putting on. 8/10.2
  • The Wicker Man (1973). Figured i’d watch a whimsical musical from the seventies in preparation for the next one on the list. Great vibes, great music, great ending, great showing from the legendary Christopher Lee3, but good heavens, is our main character ever an unsympathetic, bigoted prick. He’s stumbled on a conspiracy to murder, and he just won’t let go of the fact that he saw some NEKKID WIMMEN prancing around a henge! 7/10.
  • Wonka (2024). Mama’s pick for family movie night. This is a bad idea for a movie and they should not have made it. That’s fine, though: lots of good films make poor ideas on paper. This isn’t one of them. TimothĂŠe Chalamet is terrible! You never once buy him as anything other than TimothĂŠe Chalamet in a hat. He’s far too much of a goody two-shoes — not a droplet of the sinister nature of Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp’s4 WonkĂŚ is anywhere to be found. 3/10.
  • An American Werewolf in London (1981). Stepdad’s pick for family movie night. A bit of a throwaway, but there’s some good stuff in here, especially the titular American Werewolf (Who Went Hiking In The North But For Some Reason Is Taken To A Hospital) In London’s zombified friend. 6/10.
  • I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020). Shades of Tenet and Asteroid City here: it’s not Charlie Kaufman at his best, but it is Charlie Kaufman at his most, and he may have finally metatexted too close to the sun. Some really interesting stuff spread out over a turgidly paced first and second acts and a completely nonsensical third. I presume Jesse Plemons’s directions were just “pretend to be Philip Seymour Hoffman”. 5/10.
  • Dune Reloaded / Dune 2: Dune Harder / D2NE (2024). Seen in Imax. A titanic achievement that improves upon the often unfeeling first in every way. I take back everything i said about Wonka — Mr Chalamet is magnetic in a way that cements him as the zoomer generation’s first true movie star. Every gushing ten-star review you’ve heard is true. See it now on the biggest screen you can, with bass that shakes the leather in your seat, because you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t. 9/10, with that final point conditional on the inevitable third part hitting the mark.

Stuff i watched recently

Tagged as films, videos, monthly recaps☞ One comment
A still from “Poor Things”
Poor Things (2023)
  • Some Like It Hot (1959). My pick for family movie night. I’ve been accused of being a bit of a “miserabilist” (i’m sorry, but Synecdoche, New York bangs, and i have no regrets on making them watch it), so i thought i’d kick the year off with something a bit funny, a bit light-hearted, and a bit gay, and cor, was this an absolute classic! A comedy from the fifties about two men cross-dressing to infiltrate a women’s jazz band should be positively radioactive, but this misses all the potential pipelines of “well, you know, back in the day…” sewage and instead hits a gold-mine of timeless commentary on gender relations. I’m on Team Daphne — he’s so much more confident in being a woman than Josephine and does not deserve that terrible toad man. (And, having seen both this and Rear Window, i can finally weigh in: Grace Kelly is a thousand times prettier than Marilyn Monroe. Sorry.) An instant 10/10.
  • “NoĂśne knows who created skull trumpet (until now)”. Had to click this as soon as it appeared on my feed. There’s really something beautiful about the amateurism of the early web, how a woman with no formal training in graphic design or anything of the sort could make all these wonderful, whimsical images, and have one of them persist into the present day. Rest in peace, Cathy Jarboe, you beautiful diamond, you. 6½/10.
  • The Master (2012). Mama’s pick for family movie night. Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible in this as an L. Ron Hubbard–style cult leader, to the extent that you often find yourself agreeing with him — i totally get why people join these sort of things now. Joaquin Phoenix, on the other hand… man, i hate to say it, but i might be falling off the Phoenix train? He’s always doing that same snivelling Joker thing, even when it’s totally inappropriate like in Napoleon, and it’s getting kind of old. Joaquin Phoenix Play A Character With Social Skills Challenge (Impossible). Paul Thomas Anderson directs the shit out of this. 6/10.
  • The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Rewatched with mama.1 Loved it even more than the first time, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character. Just a terribly good-natured film that only sits in obscurity because of its obsequious title. It’s a shame Tim Robbins disappeared after this — i looked up his filmography and he seems to have been in bomb after bomb (Green Lantern, Mission to Mars…). 9/10.
  • Poor Things (2023, but didn’t come out until 2024 here). Watched at the Tyneside. I’d been eagerly awaiting this since i saw the bonkers trailer back in September, and it didn’t disappoint. There was a moment 15% of the way through where i thought i might walk out, but good lord, did it ever win me back over! Bella Scissorhands goes on a steampunk adventure across Europe filled with childlike whimsy, discovers herself, has lots of sex, and winds up Mark Ruffalo. Everyone is absolutely brilliant in this — special commendation to Willem Dafoe as a Scottish mad scientist. Already the strong front-runner for my favourite of the year. 9/10.

The July media catchup

Tagged as monthly recaps☞ Leave a comment

I’ve missed, erm, quite a lot of “monthly updates”, so here’s me catching you up on everything i’ve watched, listened to, and otherwise done since February.

(I should note that from here on out i’ll be using numeric ratings instead of letters — i find it much easier to figure out whether something’s a 7 or an 8 than whether it’s an A or a B.)

🎥 Films on the big screen

Michelle Yeoh with a googly eye on her face in an office
  • There are few films i would recommend unconditionally to anyone and everyone, but by Gods, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) is one of them. It’s belly-laugh funny, has brilliant action, and features some of the most truly ridiculous scenes ever put to film, but all without ever losing its sincere, heartfelt core. Just go watch it.a (9)
  • The Northman (2021) is Robert Eggers’ first attempt at a big blockbuster film — and probably his last, looking at the box office. Which is a shame — this weird, grim, beautiful, gory Pagan epic just tickled me in all of the right places, and very well might be in my top 3 films ever made. I loved how it struck the balance of “maybe it’s magic, maybe it’s mundane”; BjĂśrk and Willem Dafoe absolutely steal the show in their brief appearances. (10-)
  • Top Gun: Maverick is everything a blockbuster should be. It’s so, so refreshing to watch something so grounded in the real world after what feels like decades of fantastical superhero CGI fluff dominating the box office. Yes, it’s a recruitment ad for the US Navy and probably the Sea Org, but who gives a shit? It had me glued to my seat start to finish.b (8)
  • The same, alas, cannot be said of its predecessor, which i tried to watch to bring me up to speed. Tried is the operative word there: homoerotic beach volleyball and extreme Dad Movie energy can only go so far to prop up flat characters and stakeless action; i ended up turning it off halfway through. I can’t recommend it to anyone who’s not a Dad Who Likes Planes. (2)
  • Sam Raimi takes the wheel at the newest Marvel theme park ride, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Mr Raimi’s hectic style shines through in some glorious, fleeting moments, but most of it is just another by-the-numbers intellectual property orgy which left me sorely disappointed. I considered walking out of the screen several times. (5-)
  • The Batman is a very good adaptation of a story we all know by now. I loved, loved, loved Paul Dano’s weird incel version of the Riddler, the Pat-man’s eyeshadow, and that one part where he flubs the landing with his cool flying squirrel suit. (7+)
  • I watched Morbius in the cinema. Dear god, why did i watch Morbius in the cinema? Why did i do that to myself? Don’t believe the memes. Excepting one truly glorious scene with Matt Smith, this isn’t the funny kind of bad. It’s just plain bad. (2+)
  • Moonfall, on the other hand… now that’s a good bad movie. I swear my IQ dropped several points after walking out of the cinema. (5) Here are some things that actually happen in this actual movie that was actually released into actual cinemas across several actual countries and made millions of actual dollars:
    • The government successfully covers up the fact that the moon is falling, and not a single person notices except for a crazed conspiracy theorist.
    • Said conspiracy theorist is inexplicably British.
    • The characters take the Space Shuttle out of a museum because their other rocket broke, and it still works just as well as the day it was put in there. Also, someone graffiti’d it with the words “fuck the moon”.
    • The day is saved by superior Chinese technology, because of course it is.
    • On that note — there is a character in here whose sole purpose, i’m pretty sure, is to just stand there, say some lines now and then, and be Chinese for the Chinese audience. You could cut her out of the film and literally nothing would change.
    • You can guess what the department of defence wants to do to the moon. That’s right, they try to nuke it!
    • But they don’t because a five-star general knows his ex-wife is up there.
    • There is a shot of the moon falling on New York City in which, i shit you not, every building except the World Trade Centre gets absolutely blown to smithereens.
    • Someone’s brain is uploaded to the moon.
    • One of the main characters’ friends owns a Lexus™ dealership. All of the characters drive Lexus™ cars, and they escape oxygen thieves(??) by activating Turbo Mode on their Lexus™ automobile.
    • The Space Shuttle is vaguely “secured” by the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, who, just weeks after my screening, got sanctioned by the EU in the wake of the special peacekeeping operation™.
    • A main character gets trapped underneath a log and he escapes because the moon’s gravity pulls it off of the ground! This really happens! I am not making this up! Someone says “Sonny, the moon will help us!”
    • “I know; that’s why we lost the house.” — a seven-year-old

💿 Music

  • Sigur RĂłs’ () — I may now have a new favourite album. At the very least, it’s my favourite album where none of the tracks have titles and my favourite album where every song is sung in asemic gibberish. Check out the opening track. (9)
  • John Grant’s Queen of Denmark — A surprise gift from my papa. A really lovely piano record — check out the title track. (7+)
  • Spinvis’ Spinvis — Hallelujah, Dutch-language music that doesn’t suck donkey dick! Check uit „Voor ik vergeet”. (7-)
  • After acquiring it on black plastic, i thought i’d give Green Day’s American Idiot a spin — last time around i gave it a C+, but it’s much better when you’re able to properly appreciate each track on its own merits. You know the hits, so check out “Letterbomb”. (8)
  • Charli XCX’s Crash is pretty good, but anchored too firmly in the mainstream for my liking. Check out the hyperpop-inflected “Lightning”. (7)
  • Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s new side gig, The Smile, released their debut album A Light for Attracting Attention, and it could easily pass for a tenth Radiohead album. Check out Pablo Honey 2 “You Will Never Work in Television Again” and “Skrting on the Surface”. (8)

🌍 Everything else!

  • 📺 Apple TV+’s Severance is some of the best bloody television i’ve ever seen. I pray to the heavens above that they don’t fuck up that cliffhanger. (9+)
  • 📺 Netflix’s animated Inside Job has a wonky start, with an abundance of forced pop-cultural references, but really finds its footing by the end of the season. Here’s hoping they don’t cancel it — i can’t wait to see where it goes next! (7)
  • 🖥️ On the Youtube side of things, Captain KRB is a fantastic and underrated (only 40 thousand subs) videomaker who you should consider giving a shot. Check out his video about The Stairway to Stardom, an obscure public access show. (6+)
  • 🖥️ Kane Parsons continues to breathe new life into a worn-out e-horror setting with his Backrooms series. (7)
  • ⛰️ I am, as of last month, an official sponsor of the otters at Northumberland Country Zoo. My only regret is that i’m not allowed to hug them. (cute/10)
Three Asian small-clawed otters resting on a log
Cat tax. Otter tax?