No Man Of God

  Serial killer Ted Bundy (played here by Luke Kirby) spent the last decade of his life - from 1978 to 1989 - in jail and later death row, coming up with increasingly desperate strategies to postpone his execution. During that same time, the FBI's fledgling Behaviour Science Unit took an interest on the case and sent profiler Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood) to engage with Bundy and see if he could extract anything from interest from him.

 No Man of God focuses on Bundy through the eyes of agent Hagmaier and (mostly effectively) attempts to demystify the man by zeroing in on his humanity; The film consists on a series of conversations between the two across the years as Bundy's options slowly run out.
 Both of them agree to see each other harbouring a hidden agenda: Hagmaier is trying to get confessions and details out of Bundy. Bundy, for his part, is trying to see if he can use the FBI agent somehow, but really what he wants is to impress Hagmaier. Both are fully aware of each other's motivations, but nevertheless a sort of rapport develops between them, something on the vicinity of an actual friendship.

 The script (by the great C. Robert Cargill, under the pseudonym Kit Lesser) is tight, smart and entertaining, and full of brilliant little moments and details that ring true even when they aren't. It's a fictionalized account off the records of the conversations kept by the real-life Hagmaier, and the man himself served as a producer on the film. If nothing else, it provides one hell of a showcase for the perfectly cast Kirby and Wood, both of of whom absolutely nail their characters.
 Meanwhile, Director Amber Sealey keeps the proceeds from feeling too theatrical, and makes the very effective decision of keeping the women of the movie purposefully sidelined until a late, short but scathing interjection from Bundy's defense attorney (Aleksa Palladino). They are ever present in the margins, looking in from the outside - a pretty powerful thematical choice. And, unexpectedly, one that provides a huge laugh early on.

 The film also portrays the corrosive psychological effect of getting close to someone like Bundy would have; It's a trite point, but I think it's also handled well, allowing you to decide whether Hagmaier is actually being swayed by Bundy when his gaze lingers on attractive women, or if he's just considering what could possibly make someone pull the sort of shit Bundy did; I think the text only really supports one of those interpretations.

 I really liked the soundtrack by Clarice Jensen, too, which consists of more-melodic-than-usual droning synths.

 

 Technically No Man of God is a product of the pandemic, a film with a limited scope built around isolation restrictions. But Sealey's direction again gives it some breathing room - The experimental, voyeuristic snippets of imagery she sprinkles throughout didn't really work for me, but apart from that there's a good spread of different locations and situations, and an on-point extended cast that includes Robert Patrick and Christian Clemenson. The case's historical sweep and clips from actual footage from the time help give the film a minor grandeur that also offsets the claustrophobic limitations imposed by budget or COVID.
 It's a great movie, in other words. Another one of those people like to complain no one makes any more.

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD

 First things first: 2000AD is a seminal punk-spirited British weekly comics magazine that started in the late '70s and is generally credited with a fuckload of innovations in comics- especially in introducing a darker tone and acid, satirical social commentary into their pulpy adventure yarns. It's very well-loved in the nerd community here in the UK, and it was where a lot of famous creators made their names before moving on to better known titles (mostly at DC): Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Dan Abnett, Grant Morrison... the list goes on and on and on. And then on some more.

 Midway through Future Shock!, a documentary that tries to chronicle 2000AD's colourful history and legacy, legendary comic scribe John Wagner complains that because of the way their contracts were stipulated, the publishing arm of the comics he worked for sold the rights to his comics to American and other markets without him ever seeing a single penny of those sales.

 And... that's exactly how I first got to see his work; Sorry, Mr. Wagner. I'd been telling my folks I wanted superhero comics, which weren't that easy to find in the corner of the world I grew up on; Instead, they got me a series of Spanish magazines that reprinted a bunch of comics from 2000AD. And... that's pretty much why I never got into superheroes; When you grow up on Judge Dredd, a deadpan satire featuring a fascistic policeman upholding the law in a corrupt dystopia, it's really, really hard to take Batman seriously.

 The documentary is structured into fairly standalone chapters, each one dealing with a discrete subject: An introduction with the state of British comics and how the magazine came together, a chapter on (the lack of) female creators in the magazine, various run-ins with censorship, the unacceptable working conditions and various ways the staff were cheated out of fair compensation for their creations... It's all brought together by an amazing array of talking heads: with the conspicuous absence of Alan Moore, whose contempt for the comics industry is legendary, a ton of people involved in the magazine are given a chance to speak up - pride of place is given to artists and creators, as it should be, but we also get folks on the publishing side (in the unenviable position of having to defend themselves from accusations they know the others will inevitably have made), other creators that were influenced by the comic (most notably novelist Lauren Beukes and Scott Ian off Anthrax), plus Alex Garland and Karl Urban (who made their excellent Judge Dredd adaptation just before this came out). 

 Most of the people they rounded up make for good company, and the movie easily coasts on their not-always fond memories and anecdotes; Grant Morrison cheekily winding up Wagner with his foppish persona, Pat Mills on how a coloring mishap got a whole line of comics shut down by the censors, that sort of thing.

 Also present: a lot of minutiae on beloved characters like Dredd, Strontium Dog, Slaine, Rogue Trooper (my boy!) and Nemesis the Warlock. No love for Peter Milligan's Dan Dare run, though.

 There's also a very interesting (to me, at least) section on how instrumental Karen Berger (who is also interviewed) was in wrangling all the British talent once they left ship (to Pat Mills' amusingly lingering resentment) and migrated to the US; Basically, the DC Vertigo imprint was partly built on the back of 2000AD defections to house the more adult-oriented titles all these people wanted to create. It's obvious when you look at the list of names, but I'd never thought about it like that.

Yeah, 2000AD definitely helped define the productive citizen I grew up to be

 I do think it's a little too focused on pleasing fans of the magazine, though. Many of the segments feel undernourished, and there's a complete lack of context on many aspects. When discussing ownership over art, characters and storylines, for example, no effort is made to compare it with how that was treated elsewhere; How much better off where these people at DC? - I mean, it's not like Alan Moore was impressed. For someone without only a little knowledge about comics like myself, it leaves some pretty important stuff unsaid; The less you know, the less satisfying this is probably going to be.

 There's also a self-congratulatory tone which is allowed to go on for a little too long. Not just people reminiscing on how much fun they had, which is great, but them speaking about how capital-I-important the magazine's legacy is (especially Mills, who sometimes fails to thread the line between entertaining and overbearing) can get a bit grating by the end.

 There's also no mention of all the 2000AD 8-bit video games that came out from the then-thriving British bedroom-coder-based computer game industry; I know it'd be a deep cut, but a digression into the weird graphic/text adventure they made out of Slaine would have hit my withered nostalgia glands dead in the center.

 But on the whole it's an entertaining, informative romp; It's appealingly presented, with a ton of great artwork often animated seamlessly (by production houses Zebra Post and 3PS) to a guitar-driven score by Justin greaves. Director and editor Paul Goodwin does a great job of splicing the interviews so that any given subject often gets multiple commenters. And the level of access is astonishing; the assembled talking heads span a huge range of comic book luminaries, all of them seemingly happy to be there.

 Most importantly it gives a good overview on what 2000AD was and why it was important. Definitely makes a great case for why it does indeed deserve to be called The Galaxy's Greatest Comic.

Robot Dreams

 Delightful, like liminal, is one of those words which have been so overused in some quarters of the internet that they now sound slightly annoying to me... but it's the first adjective that springs to mind to describe writer/director Pablo Berger's animated debut. Robot Dreams is a lovely, bittersweet-but-upbeat meditation on companionship, loss, and resiliency set in an effective recreation of pre-Giuliani New York, presented with a clear-lined art style full of winning character designs.

 When Dog sees an ad for a DIY kit for a companion robot late at night while eating a TV dinner, he can't order it quickly enough; It seems like the perfect solution for his loneliness, which is economically established in a few, expressive scenes, and... well, the fact that he's channel surfing alone at night eating a TV dinner.

 Surprisingly, there's truth to advertising: Robot, once assembled, turns out to be the perfect friend, a naive, relentlessly upbeat companion who's happy to share that summer with his creator (to the tune of Earth Wind & Fire's September).

 Soon, though, the friends are pulled apart when an immobilized Robot is left behind in Long Beach for the winter season, and dog is unable to get to him until the beach reopens in summer (a knowingly silly conceit that the script treats seriously while still mining some jokes out of). So begins a long separation in which Dog embarks on a few side adventures and Robot suffers from a bout of the titular dreams.

 The storytelling is a bit scattershot, with long stretches consisting of mostly plot-free vignettes. But as time advances the thrust of each one of the characters' trajectories elegantly arches back so that they intersect one final time in a wonderfully conceived and immaculately edited - not to mention emotionally affecting - final scene.

 The film exists in a pure, innocent head-space where relationships are uncomplicated and always honest. Accepting that in the spirit in which it's offered is the best way to approach the material; Otherwise, you run into some thorny questions that the film doesn't even begin (and isn't interested in) addressing: things such as how healthy is a relationship where one of them was literally created to be a companion, and isn't he basically a child anyhow? (And that's before all the kooks who worry about Disney pushing a homosexual agenda or something crawl out of the woodwork).

 To support that point: Sara Varon originally wrote the comic this movie is based on to get over the loss of a beloved dog.

 Despite its innocence and the fact that every character is an anthropomorphic animal, it's a very grounded film; Its (very funny) humour is rooted in the everyday and its wonderful character designs, and the presentation of '80s New York is surprisingly detailed and textured. But it's the mature, thoughtful story that resonates the most - especially the way it acknowledges that we don't all get happy endings, and sometimes that's all right. Eventually.

Nightwatch (Nattevagten)

 In a deliciously perverse touch (in a movie that's full of all sorts of perverse details), the morgue Martin (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, in his first film role) starts working in as a nightwatchman has pull-cords on each of its mortuary slabs attached to an alarm system installed in his office. In case any mistakes were made, you see; I guess the architect in charge had read a little too much Poe.

 That's not the only morbid little detail. As his ghoulish predecessor gives him the tour, he also mentions that a former co-worker who got a little too friendly with the deceased. I don't want to be distasteful here or anything, I like to keep things classy and I think you get the gist of it so let's leave it at that. In any case, that corpse fucker left the premises long ago, so those days of giving the stiffs the stiffy, porking the cadavers, filling the dead with life if we want to get poetic - it's all in the past; I'm sure none of that will ever come up again or have any bearing on the story.

 Less morbid, but also kind of fucked up: part of Martin's duty is to do hourly rounds, and the way it works is pretty ingenious - there are a series of keys hanging off chains strewn around the building which Martin needs to turn in a sort of clock-like device on his fanny pack to prove that he's been to each stop on his patrol. The kicker is that some sadistic soul placed one of the keys on the far end of the morgue hall, forcing the poor nightwatchman to traipse among all the corpses to punch in, as it were. Managers, am I right?

 Writer/director Ole Bornedal has a lot of fun putting spooking Martin at work, but that's a minor part of the story. Prostitute are being murdered around the city, a thread which will inevitably intersect with the morgue storyline but for a while the mystery and thriller elements take a back seat to Martin's relationship with his best friend Jens (Kim Bodnia), an unlikeable, full-fledged self-destructive asshole who does what he can to sabotage everyone around him. Martin is fascinated by Jens's not giving a single fuck about anything, and it drives him to be a shittier person - a toxic dynamic that's sadly believable in someone of that age.

 It's Jens that introduces Martin to Joyce (Rikke Louise Andersson), a teenaged prostitute, and manipulates him to have a dinner date with her. Said date hosts the film's most uncomfortable moment, a cruel scene where Jens psychologically tortures the poor girl, and one that gives the film a nasty misogynistic edge. Not the least because she'll soon be dead, a sacrificial offering to the gods of plot and character development. Sorry, lady, you're just a plot point, turns out we weren't supposed to give a shit about you.

 The mystery itself is fun, but very simple - the elements to solve it are all available from very early on except for the killer's identity, which narrative economy demands be one of the few established characters. The resolution is a bit drawn out, but it's an effectively tense showdown that makes good use of Martin's workplace location-wise, even if it doesn't capitalize on all the elements that had been carefully established earlier. Why doesn't anyone get thrown into the vat of severed feet or whatever that was?

 The acting is pretty good, especially Martin's girlfriend (Sofie Gråbøl) and the detective trying to crack the case (Ulf Pilgaard). Above all he film has an excellent, creepy atmosphere - which I guess is not that hard to do on a mortuary, but cinematographer Dan Laustsen makes it look great. The script has its problems - including severely miscalculating our investment in Jens's rehabilitation and our sympathy for his and the protagonist's escapades - but it's off-beat enough to hold a few surprises, and is never less than engaging. And I love some of its stylistic touches, like a bottle of red, red wine spilling its contents as someone discusses the prostitute murders off-screen. Cheesy, but very effective.

 It won't blow anyone away, but it's an entertaining, slickly executed genre exercise with more than enough personality to be memorable. That its two main characters are so unlikeable is pretty unique, too, though I wouldn't necessarily list that as a asset.
 The same director would remake it a couple years later with a script written by Steven Soderbergh. And now there's a legacy sequel, too, which I'll get to in due time, since I did like this one.

Hundreds of Beavers

 After his applejack brewery is destroyed by beavers, Jean (Ryland Brickson Cole Thews, MBCT from here on because... come on!) is left to fend for himself in the frigid reaches of the American upper midwest somewhen around the eighteenth century.

 Survival is the first order of the day. Hunting for food is hard at the best of times, but poor Jean happens to inhabit a reality that's closer to the old Looney Tunes cartoons than ours; so when he tries to hunt for rabbits, say, by the perfectly reasonable method of building a rabbit snow woman as a lure and then trying to kill them with a giant bowling snowball, his intended prey survives by standing exactly where the bowling ball's holes are when it rolls over them.

 As Jean explores his surroundings he starts wooing the furrier daughter (Olivia Graves) of a hostile frontier merchant (Doug Mancheski), is taken under the wing of a rugged trapper (Wes Tank), and falls afoul of the woodland's powerful beaver empire as he tries to hunt down Hundreds of Beavers to convince the shopkeeper to allow him to marry his paramour.

 Hundreds of beavers is an awe-inspiring, low-budget mix of animation and live footage shot in black & white digital video that tries to mimic the earliest slapstick films of the silent era. Like other similar  digital-age pastiches, it looks aggressively artificial, almost surreal. But this low-fi, anything goes aesthetic allows the film to shuffle a huge number of influences: Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges, videogames, the aforementioned Looney Tunes, Guy Maddin's go-for-broke weirdness... It's a disparate, heady cocktail that the film wrangles into a coherent and wholly original tale of deeply hilarious woodland genocide.
 It is fucking grand.

 All the woodland animals are either people dressed in full-body mascot costumes or, for smaller animals, simple marionettes or (very charming) sock puppets. There's very little dialog - people and animals do make sounds, but it's mostly simple vocalizations, one pretty catchy song, and wall-to-wall music (the last two courtesy of Chris Ryan and MBCT's dad Wayne Tews).

 The script, by director Mike Cheslik and MBCT, keeps a constant stream of gags and surrealist conceits coming. As the film advances the jokes are layered upon each other until they reach a really impressive Rube Goldberg-style level of complexity in which many different established elements are combined to build new, more elaborate visual gags; This movie has no business being an hour fifty, and indeed, it starts to wear out its welcome late in the first act. But that's quickly reversed thanks to the sheer density of gags and an almost infinite level of invention; The final hour or so is both enthralling and hilarious.

 So it's a much more successful version of The Lake Michigan Monster, basically, which was made by many of the same people.

 Also in its DNA: videogames; This may be the first movie I see with a shop interface. Normally that'd a bad thing, but the way they're integrated here is seamless, with a plot that effortlessly weaves computer gaming conventions into the story. So the challenges and progression of a survival game ("get three beaver skins and one rabbit pelt") actually drive the plot, and Monkey-Island-esque puzzles provide some pretty big laughs. Visually it also reaches back to the early days of SNES/C64 gaming for some of its compositions, which mirror both old 2D platformer game single-screen layouts and isometric points of view. Aside from that the film's not afraid to make copious reference to things both apposite (Buster Keaton's Seven Chances) and completely bizarre (one of Clive Barker's weirder short stories).

 Honestly? This might be the best new comedy I've seen in a very long time; I can't recommend it enough. 

Tales From the Crypt

 Hello boys and ghouls! Except that we can't have any of that rubbish here, this is a respectable crypt. Take your screeched word play and punning across the pond, thank you. Here the crypt keeper is an imposing monk played by the Supreme Being himself (Sir Ralph Richardson). He presides over a chamber in the catacombs* into which five doomed souls wander, their secrets to be spilled on the cold ground for our perusal like so many shambles for the haruspex to rummage through; Their sins exposed, and the exact manner of their deaths foretold.

 You know the drill - it's horror anthology time!

 The first tale is that of Joanne (Joan Collins), a woman who decides to end her marriage on a Christmas eve with the business end of a fire poker... only to be terrorized herself by a maniac (introduced by an urgent radio news report, which helpfully tells us he escaped from an asylum; Classic).

 It's an immaculately crafted short, with some truly memorable shots and ideas. The murder itself is iconic, and the fact that Joanne decided to do her husband in with their cute little daughter sleeping just a staircase away gives some extra kick to the proceeds - not to mention a really fun twist later on. The ironic wall-to-wall use of Christmas carols are also a nice touch. 
 Note that it predates Christmas Evil's killer Santa by nearly a decade.

 Next up is the story of a man (Ian Hendry) who tries to abandon his family for his mistress, only to suffer a car accident as they drive away. The rest of the episode is shot from the point of view of the man as he gets away from the flaming wreck, sees people screaming in horror as the gets near... and yeah, it's pretty easy to see where things are headed. There's a fun shot at the end when we get to see the face the filming style was so studiously hiding, but it's too little, too late, and not enough to compensate for a mediocre, predictable story with a hilariously naff crash scene.

 Then it's time for some nasty class warfare as a rich douchebag (Robin Phillips) takes it upon himself to get rid of a saintly older man (Peter Cushing) whose house is driving prices down in the neighbourhood, in as cruel a way as possible. It's a remarkably sad segment, made particularly heartbreaking by an incredible performance from Cushing at his most charming and vulnerable; we can see the exact moment his will is broken, and it's not pretty. This being a Tales From the Crypt tale you can take heart that at least there will be some gory comeuppance... but that feels like an afterthought. The actual horror is done by then. Great make-up, though.

 Richard Greene and Barbara Murray then act out their own version of The Monkey's Paw as a married couple who try to wish themselves back to wealth, with foreseeably tragic results. The twist is that the characters are aware of The Monkey's Paw, comment on how their situation is similar to it, and try to avoid their wishes... to no effect. It's not a great tale - the script (by Milton Subotsky, Al Feldstein and Johnny Craig) clumsily ties itself into knots whilst guiding the tale to its gory ending; Then again... it really is one hell of an ending.

 Last we dive again into the trenches of class warfare with the tale of another rich prick (Nigel Patrick) who takes over a nursing home for blind people, and tries to run it as he did his military camps. In a brutal drive to cut down costs - reducing heating and rations and even the number of available blankets - he incurs the enmity of one of his charges (Patrick Magee), especially since the asshole is living the high life in his well-appointed office.
 When one of the blind men dies as a result of the superintendent's miserly nature, they grimly set about the task of getting even, Tales From the Crypt-style. The vengeance itself is grand and well worth the price of admission but I found the lead-up to it, as well done as it is, to be too bloated for my taste.

 Once that's done all that's left is to tie up the framing story, which the movie does with verve and a lot of charm. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and as usual one of the stories doesn't really fit in with its logic at all. Not a huge issue, but it is a bit jarring.

 It's a fun compilation - the stories are of variable quality, of course, but that's ever the case. What most struck me is the quality of the acting: the bar is set very high by Cushing, but Collins is great as a beleaguered ice queen, and Patrick McGee's wounded dignity is also something to behold.
 Director Freddie Francis does some superb work in the first and last segments, especially, and while this is a 1972 movie, there's a surprising amount of blood and yes, gore - even if the blood is the era's signature bright-red tempera.

 Amicus co-founder and co-writer Milton Subotsky was reportedly a long-time fan of William Gaines's EC Comics source material, and the love for it is very apparent throughout the film. It doesn't have the cheeky sense of humour later Amicus films would be known for, but it revels in its nastiness in a way that's undeniably fun.
 If I have to be honest I think I prefer some of the studio's other 'portmanteau' collections, but this is still a great anthology with some classic moments and a couple of really great stories. I do wonder just how much its impact on me has been dulled by exposure to this film's legacy... including many gorier interpretations of the same source material; Maybe if I'd seen this as a kid I'd rank this quite a bit higher.

*: A fun localization detail: These catacombs are said to house the remains of the Carthusian (and other) monks martyred by Henry the Eight, which makes sense of this film's version of the Crypt Keeper. Also, it's the same cemetery the camera pans through during the title sequence of From Beyond the Grave.

Executioners From Shaolin (Hong Xi Guan)

 When the evil Qing dynasty learn that the famed Shaolin Temple is harboring rebels, the ruling manchu send the undefeatable kung-fu priest Pai Mei (Lo Lieh) to destroy it. He kills the headmaster of the temple handily after... trapping a low kick with his crotch in a scene that could only be improved if he screamed "prehensile groin technique!"

 The surviving students flee into the countryside, and after a narrow escape from imperial forces (aided by an extremely heroic sacrifice from fellow student played by Gordon Liu) they decide to spread out and crew the red boats that ply the rivers of China, passing themselves off as theater performers. One day, they hope, to get their revenge against Pai Mei and those nasty nasty Qing.

 Thus the stage is set for another traditional tale of sedition and revolution - but a funny thing happens: While alighting at the riverside, one of the rebellion's leaders, the inventor of tiger boxing Hung Hsi-Kuan (Chen Kuan-tai) has a meet-cute with Fang (Lily Li), a local beauty who also happens to be a master of the crane style.

 His quest for revenge is delayed as they court, get married and have a child. Honour demands a confrontation, however, one for which his skill in the tiger style may not be powerful enough.

 Executioners From Shaolin is another classic Shaw Brothers film from director Lau Kar-lung, and its tone is far lighter than its premise might lead you to think - this is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because love story itself and the Hung family life are genuinely charming and sweet; Bad, because there's a lot of grating comedy about idiots behaving like children that I could not manage to find endearing - Cheng Kang Yeh (I think), specifically, is insufferable, and the film gets a lot better once the film leaves Hsi-Kuan's compatriots aside to focus on his family life and quest to kill Pai Mei.

 The fights are impeccable - very old school in that you can set a metronome to them, but pretty inventive and the athleticism of the performers is above reproach. The fighting is a lot dirtier than most other Kung Fu movies I've seen, with a bunch of eye gouging and a lot - and I do mean a lot - of attempted testicle crushing, kicking, snatching and clawing. Many of the moves are pretty comedic, too; I'm not sure how to feel about the climactic move that brings about Pai Mei's final defeat on a dramatic level, but I can't argue that it got a huge belly laugh out of me.

 There's also a good share of cool and original training montages, the highlight of which is a target dummy with marbles running through it to represent chi flows. Or something, I'm no expert (clearly). But it is pretty cool.

 More than anything else, the film ends up telling a very satisfying, deeply felt story about inter-generational revenge that manages to make kung fu techniques and philosophies integral to their development. I love that sort of thing.

 There's so much to like here. Fang's mastery of the "two-adduction stance", where she locks her legs in an unmovable fighting stance, comes into play at her wedding night in a very cute, funny, and successful show of pride; Years later, her son (Wong Yu) trains with her father in a brilliant fight that begins over the dinner table (a chopstick duel that predates Fearless Hyena's by a couple of years) and then moves to wreaking havoc among the clotheslines. The final result? The almost mythical warriors chastised, one mending clothes and the other doing the washing.

 I think this film suffers from being placed next to the other classics Lau Kar-lung produced during his decades as a director. And to be perfectly honest, I found the film to be a little on the slower side, with a little too much time devoted to unsuccessful comedy. But it's a great story, well told, with the requisite amazing kung fu and characters that are a lot easier to root for than these movies normally manage. It's another good one.

The Quiet Earth

 1985's last-man-on-earth sci-fi drama The Quiet Earth has a bit of a reputation as a cult movie, an arty meditation on loneliness, accountability and humanity's self-destructive drive. I've had on my radar for ages but always put off because I feared it'd be a slog. A guy wandering abandoned sets, raging against the dying of the light for two hours or something.

 I shouldn't have worried; Yes, it's definitely on the artsier reaches of the spectrum, and it does feature long stretches of its protagonist roaming abandoned cityscapes - but said protagonist, Zac, is played by an excellent Bruno Lawrence, who leavens his existential angst with wry self-deprecation and some truly inventive ways to go nuts alone at the end of the world.

 Zac wakes up buck-naked at the turn of the apocalypse, his prominently featured free willy as much of a statement of intent of the film's more artistic ambitions as the slow-as-molasses title credits. He comes to just after something strange happens to the rising sun, and quickly discovers everyone else seems to have disappeared without a trace. The radio is silent, the streets are empty, and as he wanders into a gas station staff room looking for someone, he discovers a boiling kettle and a half-eaten pie.

 It's like this all over as Zac moves from the sleepy suburbs to town center - the whole world as a Mary Celeste, or the Roanoke colony. It's all engagingly presented, and on a grand canvas that includes completely empty city blocks, car wrecks and the site of an airline crash. An explanation for "the event" quickly becomes apparent, too, as it's revealed Zac was working on a mysterious US-backed project that had the potential to destabilize reality.

 From there, we witness Zac's descent into slight madness as he realizes the enormity of his predicament. That doesn't preclude all the fun bits of post-apocalyptic movies, like moving into a higher-end house, building a large artwork collection (most recently referenced in Will Forte's Last Man on Earth) and using his engineer skills to find creative solutions to the many of the problems he runs into.

 The plot unspools methodically, and while the pacing is slow, the script (by Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence and Sam Pillsbury) ensures there's a steady stream of developments that keep things interesting and engaging. Things get more complicated when it turns out that [slight spoilers ahead!] other people seem to have persisted through whatever happened (Alison Routledge and Pete Smith, both great).
 Dialog is a bit stilted and prone to making grand statements, all of which contributes to the film's unique, slightly off-kilter feel. As artificial as many of the interactions are, there's a warm, affectionate seam of humanity underlying many of them. There's a lot of spontaneous hugging, maybe the best type of hugging.

 Director Geoff Murphy ably moves things along, sprinkling the film with a couple of excellent action beats and a surprising number of explosions. His unfussy framing is always crystal clear, aided by crisp cinematography from James Bartle. Add in a lovely, old-school (even for its time; depressing reeds ahoy!) soundtrack by John Charles and a clever, truly excellent ending with an instantly iconic image, and it all adds up to an excellent, idiosyncratic little gem.

Alien: Romulus

 Warning: I try not to do spoilers, but this is a movie best enjoyed without knowing anything about it. I'd avoid the synopsis below and read on from after the image if you haven't seen it yet. Hell, avoid the trailers if possible.

 A bunch of no-future kids in a hellish corporate mining world band together to explore a mysterious derelict structure they've found floating in the skies above them. They think it might hold cryostasis pods, which would allow them to escape away from the system and a short life of wage slavery in the mines.

 Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is invited along, partly because the self-proclaimed leader (Archie Renaux) seems to be sweet on her but mostly because her adoptive brother (David Jonsson) is a Weyland-Yutani android - and he might be able to help them bypass some of the corporate security when they break into the structure.

 Said structure turns out to be a full blown Wey-Yu space station... and the resting place for the frozen remains of the xenomorph from the original alien, recovered by an automated probe from the wreck of the Nostromo in the film's cold-open. Things proceed about as well as you'd expect.

 Alien: Romulus, like the space station that lends the film its title, is a film split into two halves: A serious, grounded, tense and very well-thought-out thriller, chased by a gleefully batshit latter-day Alien franchise film with maybe one too many references to the series' past. The first half is clearly superior, and there's some tonal clash to reckon with as things get more and more over the top, but the final stretch remains extremely enjoyable as long as you adjust to a new, more ridiculous status quo in which things just don't quite make as much sense any more.

 It makes sense, then, that it's directed by the great Fede Alvarez (who also co-wrote the script with regular collaborator Rodo Sayagues); This story structure seems to be his MO, after all. His direction here is excellent, muscular and mercurial as the action demands, with the addition of stately (and beautiful) sci-fi vistas to his repertoire. Cinematographer Galo Olivares helps him cleave to the dark and gritty visual style of the first two Aliens, but the camera movements are freer, more prone to indulge in slightly show-offy stunts. It looks great.

 Well... mostly great. There's one particular effect - an act of digital necromancy featuring an android from the series' past - that's distractingly bad; Some of the worst dead-eyed zombie puppeteering Hollywood has offered up yet, made even more insulting because it's shitting over the memory of a well-loved actor, and because it gets a surprising amount of screentime. Romulus started its life as a Hulu streaming exclusive, and I do wonder if these scenes are an artifact of a prior, lower-budget incarnation of the film. This is not the only problematic element (I have my issues with this film's incarnation of the now-obligatory 'final threat' Rain has to face alone)... but it's by far the worst.
 The rest is good to great. The production design (Naaman Marshall) in particular remains incredible, keeping that weird, lovely, stolid 1970's take on future space functionality - and most of the new elements feel of a piece with what's come before.

 The characters get a little lost amid the turns of the busy story, but they are still well-developed enough that it's easy to root for -or against- them. Civil War's Spaeny is particularly good, but the film belongs to Jonsson, who has a lot of fun playing the many changes his android goes through while providing the script's most interesting conundrums.

 Alvarez tones back his bloodthirst slightly, but this is still the most graphic gore we've gotten so far in an Alien movie - including a very grisly, memorable death of a type I've been waiting for ever since we found out the nature of the blood running through the xenomorph's veins. The back half finds some fairly inventive ways to put the various characters through the wringer, and even if it relies a little too much on callbacks (did we really need as many references to the famous Xenomorph lovingly sniffing Ripley shots?), there are still some tense, enjoyably ridiculous horror and action beats there.

 As well as focusing on the bloodshed, Alvarez also pays special attention to the more depraved aspects of notorious pervert H.R.Giger's original designs. Expect a lot of phallic and vaginal imagery, and a very uncomfortable, sexualized depiction of what can only be described as oral rape. Tasteful, it ain't, even before the rest of the story around it descends into madness; Even a discarded chest burster skin looks like a used condom. I have no idea how this managed to get a 15 rating here in the UK.

 Alien and Aliens will forever stand as the ur-text of games that have any sort of action, horror or sci-fi trappings. It's appropriate, then, that this movie was directly inspired by the (excellent) 2014 game Alien: Isolation; Even when the script makes sense of them, there's something very videogame-y about the setup and many of its setpieces - how complications stack on top of each other to provide poor Rain and her friends a proper survival horror gauntlet.

 I can't overstate how good the first hour of this film is. If the movie had reined in its more outré instincts and self-referential impulses for the back half, I'd be perfectly happy to hold it up as one of a piece with the first two installments. As it is, this is a flawed, somewhat disappointing, but still very fun Alien movie; Easily the fourth best - which, to be clear, I don't consider an insult whatsoever. 

Corner Office

 The Authority Inc. company building looks like a sort of brutalist version of the tower of Orthanc; It doesn't rise as much as it looms, its furthest floors forever lost in a wintry mist. This is the sight that greets Orson (Stuart Hamm), the company's newest employee, as he gets off his car - black, like all the rest, in a sea of snow. Down drab, institutional hallways he goes, until he reaches his office - A seventies-style open-plan layout with the wrinkle that all the desks are arrayed surrounding their boss's crystal-walled room, in a clear nod to Bentham's panopticon.

 So far, so very Kafka. But here's another gentle twist to the formula: Orson is a willing, enthusiastic drone, a true believer in corporate drudgery. As he acclimates to his new role, it's not existential angst that gnaws at him, but the feeling that his talents are being ignored, and that he's being passed over in favour of his deeply mediocre colleagues.

 Orson's voiceover narration is constant, but it works in the movie's favour because: a) Hamm is a ridiculously charismatic actor and his delivery is on-point, and b) Ted Kupper's script is well-written and unorthodox enough to pack a lot of surprises and more than a few laughs, at least for a while. Our protagonist, we quickly discover, has a noxious cocktail of mental health issues - paranoia, social anxiety and dissociative episodes, not to mention an almost complete lack of empathy; A highly functioning sociopath, basically.

 His co-workers are not painted very sympathetically either. His neighbour Rakesh (Danny Pudi) is the best of the lot, but quickly earns Orson's contempt by... basically not being very tidy. The rest include a paranoid lifer (Bill Marchant), a caricature of a schoolyard goodie-two-shoes (Allison Riley), a vacuous bimbo (Kimberley Shoniker), and at the center of it all their genial but distant boss (the great Christopher Heyerdahl, doing his best Cushing-as-a-sweet-old-man impression).

 While wandering around the halls, Orson soon finds an abandoned office that suddenly swaps the rest of the movie's palette completely around: wood-panelled walls and exquisite furniture, a plush leather chair, muted lighting, tasteful paintings and a vinyl collection. He soon discovers that while working in that office he is deeply in the zone, producing documents that almost reduce his boss to joyful tears.

 His co-workers, though, do not appreciate his find; They insist that there is no room in that hall, that Orson just stands there like a statue when he claims to be in the room. As Orson sets a plan in motion to finally get the respect he feels he deserves, his colleagues band against him because, well, he's clearly fucking nuts.

 Corner Office is both deceptively simple and surprisingly complex mostly because it throws a lot of elements into what at its heart is a simple character study: How neurodivergent people are mistreated, sure, but that's complicated when the person being discriminated against is such a douchebag. The dispiriting crush and petty backstabbery of large corporate workplaces, set against someone who finds meaning in the rat race and said back-stabbing. The film is anchored to a deeply unreliable narrator, but it expertly charts a course that gives us a feel for what's actually going on even as it indulges in showing us Orson's delusions. None of the themes are especially novel, and the film doesn't pack any major surprises, but it's beautifully realised. Maybe it could stand to get twenty minutes or so trimmed off, but I didn't ever really feel it overstayed its welcome.

 The writing is sharp, Joachim Back's directing is assured, and the acting excellent. Stuart Hamm anchors the film and is, as always, on-point and very, very funny; It's a pleasure to watch him use his considerable charisma (which not even a conservative haircut, a beer belly and a dad 'stache can conceal) to fuel the most banal, deluded pronouncements.

 It's a hard movie to recommend in the sense that it's studiedly unspectacular, the sort of thing that only gets hurt by heightened expectations. Having said that, if you're not averse to a dry, idiosyncratic almost-cringe comedy, you can do a lot worse than this. I kind of loved it.

Shoot 'Em Up

 It's hard to argue against the greatness of Shoot 'Em Up's first five five minutes. It starts with a very close shot of our protagonist Smith (Clive Owen), his face filling most of the foreground as he eats a carrot. Violently. Chewing with a sort of rageful gusto, angrily masticating the fuck out of it.

 Then he sees a very pregnant woman stumble along, passing in front of the bus stop he's sitting at, turning into an alley way. Nearby a thug gets off his car - trash and takeout cartons tumbling out in the process - and follows the woman into the alleyway. As he goes in, he pulls out a gun and gives Smith a nasty look, as if daring him to do something about it.

 And because this is Clive Owen starring in a very silly-ass movie, he of course does do something about it. He kills the thug with a (surprisingly sharp) carrot, while delivering an Arnold-worthy one-liner ("eat your vegetables"). Then, as Nirvana's Breed kicks in, he gets into a shootout with a horde of faceless goons; There are  a few memorable action gimmicks like using an oilspill to slide on his back while shooting, or shooting the legs of a table to turn it into a ramp so he can dive through a window to outmaneuver and shoot a few surprised ne'er-do-wells.

 All the excitement ends up sending the nameless woman (Ramona Pringle) into labour, so then we're treated to a scene where Clive Owen delivers a baby while shooting a bunch more bad guys. The kicker? He cuts off the umbilical cord by shooting it.

 I cannot stress how fun it is. In game design people talk about the 'verbs' that any given game allows its players; Things like Jump, Run, or sometimes more abstract concepts like Explore, Tinker or Subject Yourself to Reams of Poorly Written Dialogue (AKA the 'talk' button).

 This film takes its title from an ancient (in gaming terms) genre where you, as a spaceship, kill loads of other spaceships - you know, like Galaxian. But its form is, as you might have fathomed by how many times I've written the word Shoot so far, well... a shooter. And it's kind of awe-inspiring just how pure the result is. Shoot shoot shoot, like a player mashing on the triggers on his gamepad, and the film gets a hilarious amount of mileage from it. Or else the film puts obstacles before the act of shooting, like small puzzles that get in the way of Smith getting to use his favourite mean of self-expression. The reward? Why, more shooting!

 Somewhat surprisingly, videogames are not the main inspiration for the movie, at least according to writer/director Michael Davis; That becomes apparent when the mother dies, soon after that initial scene, leaving our laconic, supremely killing-proficient protagonist to look after a baby that's being hunted down by what seems like hundreds of hitmen.

 Yes, the main inspiration here is explicitly John Woo's masterpiece Hard boiled. And that's a great inspiration! but therein lies the main problem with the movie... because Michael Davis has a long way to go to get to John Woo levels. He covers some of the distance by filling the film's many, many action scenes with a ton of fun ideas... which he then mangles by keeping the camera too close to the action, cutting far too many times, not establishing geography properly, and generally just not getting what makes Woo's classic... well, a classic. It's a huge shame.

 But it's not nearly bad enough to sink the movie - things never get to Crank's hard-to-parse levels, and it's relatively good for '00s action standards. Just a wasted opportunity, is all. This is not a movie that, like Smokin' Aces, uses action sparingly and focuses on specific moments or beats - here there's an attempt to carry you through every step of a whole gunfight, but it still ends up fragmented and disconnected. Clarity matters, especially when you're inviting comparisons with some of the all-time-best action filmmaking.

 Plot-wise... it's relentlessly, knowingly silly and over-the-top, with overt references to old Looney Tunes cartoons, preposterous plot developments and some really fun lines. The script devotes a lot of energy to finding more and more outrageous ways and places for Smith to shoot buttloads of people, which is just as it should be; A great time.

 The stacked cast really, really helps. Monica Bellucci plays a lactating prostitute with a heart of gold; She doesn't get a lot to do other than to be a love interest, but at least we get a very funny Paul Giamatti playing against type as a deranged hitman - a great character and performance. Clive Owen is perfect as the grumbling, antisocial Smith, and though some of his lines are a little overcooked, that's on the script, not him.

 The film has a great eye for character actors with memorable faces or voices, too, featuring the likes of Julian Richings and the great Stephen McHattie.

 Unfortunately its look hasn't aged very well - it shares a desaturated palette with other 00's films, giving the film an aggressively artificial look and not much else. Unlike (again) Smokin' Aces, it never develops it into an aesthetic. The CGI effects don't look great either, but it lets the film get away with some inspired lunacy on a tight budget, so I'm happy to let that slide.

 More seriously, there's also a whiff of misogyny to the proceeds. Even if you ignore Giamatti's sexual menace (that is not a phrase I ever thought I'd write), which is intentional, some of the jokes, added to the callous treatment given to most of the film's female characters (all beautiful, al either victims or whores) come off as a bit mean-spirited. I don't think it ever goes overboard, but it's noticeable. Definitely a lad's film all the way through.

 Still - some iffy content and action problems aside, it's an excellent action comedy. Despite becoming a bit of a cult movie, it was a bit of a commercial failure; Sadly, Davis hasn't been able to release any other films since then. 

Bug

 Agnes (Ashley Judd) spends her days between the dive bar she works at and her motel room, trying to avoid her abusive ex Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.) who's trying to find her after getting out of jail.

 Things seem to look up slightly when a friend (Lynn Collins) introduces her to Peter (Michael Shannon), a painfully shy, overtly courteous guy. You can see those traits might seem attractive to her, especially after Jerry catches up with her.

 There's something off about Peter, though, and I'm not just saying that because he's played by Shannon. There's a certain intensity, a slightly concerning way of evading some questions, which promise trouble down the road. But they hit it off anyhow, and soon they're shacking up together.

 The script - by Tracy Letts, adapting his own stage play - sets out an obvious course only to derail it once the couple find some insects nesting in Agnes' bed and Peter shows an unsettling amount of knowledge regarding aphids. The less said about where things end up the better because this is a short, relatively straightforward story, but it accurately depicts certain societal ills which have only gotten a lot worse since 2006.

 It's a deeply strange film, and somewhat underwhelming in its simplicity - but you can't fault it for lacking courage; The film peaks at the end of its second act with a truly excruciating horror scene, and the whole of the third act is all campy intensity. Director William Friedkin has described the movie as a comedy, and that's easy to believe when it features a scene where someone declares -with utter conviction- to be part of an insect monarchy. I can't really say the tonal mix works, but the story does, just about, mainly for its very strong first two thirds and because both Judd and Shannon are excellent, and fearlessly, fiercely committed to their deeply unglamorous characters. Agnes's arc in particular is heartbreaking; Give the poor woman a break!

 For a very stage-bound chamber piece, it's as well directed as you'd expect from an old pro like the late Friedkin, who mines the single location for claustrophobia and ably keeps the tension high and the filmmaking unobtrusive. As alluded above, don't expect a 'proper' horror movie - it's, if anything, a slightly experimental, unremittingly bleak psychological drama - but there's a couple of grisly sops for us jaded gorehounds in the audience, and enough substance to its darkness to chew on for a while. Letts and Friedkin would collaborate again on 2011's much more successful Killer Joe, but Bug is well worth exploring on its own batshit merits.

Smokin' Aces

 For a while there Pulp Fiction had an outsized influence on the 90s. Sometimes it was incidental - a few flowery exchanges, some mixed up chronology - but most of the time, it was pretty clear directors and writers, consciously or not, were a little too indulgent in their borrowing; Even movies that staked out a fairly distinct area from that film, like, say, Get Shorty, ended up feeling like they owed maybe a little too much to Tarantino.

 Smokin' Aces came out in 2007, nearly ten years after that trend had mostly died down, and it felt like a weird relic from that time - but here's the thing: it might be the most honest one of them all. Bizarrely, it's not particularly similar to any of Tarantino's movies; It just feels like a continuation (and escalation) of the stylistic efforts of all his imitators.

 I say it's honest, because time's given us more than enough chances to come to grips with writer/director Joe Carnahan's sensibilities, and as it turns out that this might be their purest expression: a sprawling, over-the-top action movie, an ode to operatic excess and manly, manly men and women which happens to be shot through with a rich vein of deeply batshit strangeness. More than yet another attempt to do Reservoir Dogs, it feels like a smartarse, coke-addled take on a John Woo epic.

 The plot is simple: A wannabe mobster (Jeremy Piven) has holed up at the penthouse of a hotel, surrounded by flunkies and whores. He's about to turn informer for the FBI, and his old comrades have put a million dollar bounty on his head.

 So a bunch of disparate hitpeople converge on the hotel, while a couple of FBI agents (Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds) and a host of footsoldiers do their best to keep their ward from expiring. There is a ton of exposition - way more than the movie can comfortably sustain - and a pretty cheesy (and very easy to guess) mystery at its heart, but really there's not much of a plot here; Just the chaos that results as all these people bounce off each other.

 And it really is chaos, because the killer cast (rimshot!) is about as diverse as it could be. Every group of assassins seems to come from a different genre. Among other, you've got: a suave master of disguise (Tommy Flannagan), the Tremor Brothers, a bunch  of refugees from a Mad Max film (led by Chris Pine), a duo of professional contract killers (Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson, the most Tarantinesque of the lot) and an Elmore-Leonard-esque crew put together by a hapless bondsman who somehow got wind of the bounty.

 Death comes quickly, and is treated surprisingly seriously. In the film's best, most bizarre scene, one of the Tremor Brothers tries to get forgiveness from one of his victims by, uh, finger-puppeteering the corpse's face and acting out both parts of the conversation.

 Elsewhere one of the killers tenderly shepherds one of his victims into the next world, and another shows a surprising amount of mercy when she runs across two dying men. It's a running theme, in other words, and it anchors a film that can otherwise come across as excessively flippant.

 It's flawed as all hell - all the exposition takes a heavy toll on pacing, and as good as Carnahan's script can be in the moment-to-moment, he writes himself into a corner far too many times. Plot threads are unceremoniously dropped, characters are forgotten, and some situations get a little too ridiculous even for this film. And since it's aping some of the worst excesses of the post-Tarantino era, there are a few bits which seem to be straining to be a little too hard to be all In! Your! Face!

 But mostly, I think it works. I like the movie lot. The cinematography (by Mauro Fiore) is surprisingly good, the action, which is mostly intended to be confusing, has plenty of cool moments and concepts, and Ryan Reynolds - who can indeed act when he is asked to, instead of being his usual Canadian-whimsy-and-dad-joke-dispenser - anchors the film with a surprising amount of gravitas.

 Time's been mostly kind to this movie; It didn't review too well on release, but seems to be fairly well regarded these days, which sounds about right. It's not a classic or anything, but compared to the movies in its DNA, it might as well be. I mean, the closest thing to it is the fucking Boondock Saints, right?

Deadpool & Wolverine

 Remember a few years back, when at the climax of the godawful Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds got a hold of a big box of Disney(c) merchandise and used it to beat the bad guys? Hulk Hands, Cap's shield, and -the movie paused for effect - OMG, a freakin' lightsaber! Squeal, nerds, squeal!

 This cynical act of corporate fellatio did not go unnoticed. Only instead of leaving some money on the bedstand, the Disney powers that be instead awarded its director - consummate hack Shawn Levy* - the keys to the closest thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe's got left that's close to a sure thing: a crossover project between the Deadpool and The Wolverine franchises.

 It gets off to an extremely poor start. First we have to endure Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) commenting on just how awesome the Marvel intro music is, which unfortunately sets the tone for much of the movie, and then an introductory fight/credits sequence in which our protagonist digs up the Wolverine's skeleton from the grave he ended up in Logan, and ends up using the corpse's adamantium bones to kill dozens of faceless henchmen. It's a fun idea on paper, but it's spoiled with a joyless, very computer-assisted execution and extremely tacky, unfunny, endless cutaways to Deadpool dancing - foreshadowing his inevitable appearance as a skin in Fortnite.

 And then of course the film pulls a 'how did I get here' move (the script is nothing if not forthright about its own shoddiness) to pull back a little. Deadpool, it turns out, has been in the dumps after failing an audition to join the avengers (whose off-screen presence is lionized by the cinematography and soundtrack). He's left his superhero/merc days behind and is working as a used car salesman, his long suffering wife abandoned him (they didn't fridge her, at least, but this movie still finds a way to do without poor Morena Baccarin), and... well, basically, he's in your basic slump hacky scripts use to provide a bog-standard "rise to the occasion" heroic arc.

 The occasion here is that the TVA, an organization from one of those Disney plus shows I refuse to watch on principle**, tries to get him to mercy-kill his own timeline which is slowly dying off because Logan died when... he wasn't supposed to, I guess? (Don't even start poking holes on that because it's basically all holes.) They try to bribe him with the opportunity to join the avengers on a non-doomed timeline, but oh shock, surprise, Deadpool does indeed rise to the ocassion/hero's call, tells them to get bent, and goes across the multiverse to find a replacement Wolverine (various actors, but mostly Hugh Jackman).

 He does end up finding one that doesn't kill him outright, the worst Wolverine, apparently, one that committed a crime so heinous he's infamous across the universe (get ready to be disappointed when you finally learn why). Then our mismatched buddies are kicked out of reality by the TVA and dumped into a wasteland ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corin). There they meet some other castoffs from Marvel history and hatch a plan to get back to reality to stop Deadpool's timeline from being erased... and I should probably stop here before I spoil any of the bright spots in this otherwise fairly mediocre movie.

 Do you love Ryan Reynolds? Are you heavily invested in the Marvel comics and movies? If you do/are, chances are you'll like this. It's basically Ryan Reynolds doing his motormouth, sometimes low-key funny, sometimes annoying schtick, for about two hours, peppered with a ton -and I really mean a ton- of reverential fan-service, with a tiny side of (very gentle) making fun of Marvel and Disney. And while there's some obvious affection for the material and some odd turns in the script, it's patently, overtly cynical. A film created by market forces rather than any sort of authorial voice. Saying that it's 'Spiderman: No Way Home' but without a heart or a decent story might be taking things too far, but.. it kind of fits. The previous two Deadpool movies managed to carve out their own identity, but this feels first and foremost a mid-tier MCU movie - albeit one with a 15/R rating.

 Five people are credited with writing this. Five! That's about how many times I laughed out loud! That's not as bad as it sounds, as I was reasonably low-key-amused by Reynold's affable antics (I don't mind him, though his routine is pretty shopworn by now). And I appreciated a few other jokes even if I didn't find them particularly funny. Some casting choices and the meta-level humour are kind of inspired, if overtly geeky. Still, it was about half an hour until the film actually managed to make me chuckle. That first act is really dire.

 Having a serial fourth-wall-breaker like Deadpool take on Disney and Marvel and the current state of the MCU has a lot of potential for transgression, but this is ever the faithful corporate product. Punches are pulled and claws are sheathed at every single opportunity, leaving only the gentlest possible of digs to show that these corporate monoliths can laugh at themselves too - provided nothing too hurtful is said.

 And let's face it: if the movie were to be honest to itself, it would be built around a long, explicit sex scene featuring its two main characters. Wolverine and Deadpool, sitting on a tree, f-u-c-k-i-n-g. There's absolutely no way of getting around that, and you know it's true.

 But no one expects that - for all its posturing, this is still mainstream entertainment, same as it's ever been; And that's fine. The first movie, after all, made a huge show about not being your grandaddy's superhero origin story, while still being very much your grandaddy's superhero origin story. But with graphic violence and swearwords.

 What's depressing is how predictable everything in Deadpool & Wolverine is, a mish-mash of superhero media from the last decade, complete with life lessons and rote character growth. In a facepalm moment, it even tries to make a joke out of how we're all sick and tired of multiverse stories. Lampshading, the practice of making fun of how shit what you're doing as you do it, deserves a slow and ignominious death.

 Director Shawn Levy fails to bring anything to the table yet again, other than a basic competence at juggling the needs of a modern blockbuster and making his movie look pretty expensive. Not good, not cohesive, just expensive. If you want proof of this, look at his attempt to capture some of the Mad Max magic; The guy's got two of the most visually distinct films ever to crib from, and his version is still the visual equivalent of a bad SNL parody. Even worse, that whole element is completely, utterly unnecessary, as there are no action sequences or jokes that actually make use of all that (mediocre!) production design.

 The action is messy and uninteresting, with every fight shot in a completely different style; It's as if none of the secondary units were talking to each other or the director. I have to admit the very last one is pretty decent, though. I did like that one. Good job everyone involved.
 As for the acting... it's fine. You know exactly what to expect, and most of the actors are at least engaged and committed to their roles. Jackman, especially, whom we're dangerously close to taking for granted. It was unexpectedly nice to see some of the others again, even in these circumstances.

 So I didn't laugh much, and I didn't get excited at any point (except when a character I do give a damn about appeared to play second fiddle for a while)... but I also didn't get bored, mostly because the film does try and get weird quite a bit, and that's kind of interesting to see plastered on the big screen with such a huge budget. More interesting still is how muddled the film becomes as it goes along.

 For all its jingoism on how awesome the MCU is (aside from its current slump, which is duly noted), in the end the script is more about paying homage to the Sony and Fox incarnations of past Marvel movies, which... even if it's a little cynical, well, it's still rather sweet. The screenplay botches this and doesn't really know what to do with the new/old characters (they're literally just disposable accessories in the protagonists' quest) but the way things are set up hints at an interpretation where a rich cast of diverse characters are arrayed against a large, faceless organization where corporate synergies trump experimentation and individual voices.
 That's pretty clear, right? You can almost see the bones of something much more interesting somewhere behind the surface, intuit rough edges and actual commentary from maybe a few drafts ago, sanded down since so as to not cause any offense among the corporate overlords.

 But we're in a boring timeline - we only get a bland, mildly amusing shadow of that.

 Deadpool & Wolverine is not terrible, but it's pretty far from being good. It's already, depressingly, a huge success, which means that we're stuck with Shawn Levy for ages henceforth, and probably with the worst synergistic tendencies of modern superhero films too. But hey, at least there's a heartfelt homage during the credits, and the post-credits sequence is very, very funny.

 *: Levy, one assumes, has gotten really good at deep-throating big corporations by now; He's probably still got the taste of Google's dick in his mouth after (the also fucking dreadful) The Internship.

**: It's yet another cynical, shitty move, but honestly it's not nearly as bad as Scarlet Witch Featuring Doctor Strange; The organization's function is explained quickly, apparently it's basically a really shitty, poorly thought out version of Isaac Aasimov's Eternity but with multiple timelines. That's good enough for me.

The Gate

With Imaginary we saw what modern kid's horror looks like - I hope it was aimed at kids, anyhow. It must have put me in the mood for an actual, non-pusillanimous attempt at kid-friendly scares, because here I am, revisiting The Gate for the first time in more (depressingly more) than twenty years.

 It's definitely from a different era. Where Imaginary desperately avoids showing any sort of injury, and spends considerable effort trying to convince us a bear moving in tiny increments is scary, The Gate gives us an eye gouging, some deliciously gooey shots of disintegrating flesh, a truly grotesque use of an animal carcass, and a sprinkling of very imaginative (and disturbing) surrealism. Instead of following a grown-ass woman going through hoary, overtly clichéd family drama, the eighties version features actual kids dealing with their own sibling issues in a comparatively subtle way.

 And this is not a case of comparing a bad movie with an older classic, because I'm not entirely convinced The Gate is... well, good. I find it incredibly hard to be objective about it because it's a well-loved movie I saw as a teen. I still love it, but it's impossible to deny that it's got issues.

The kids ain't one of them. Our protagonist, Glenn (a teeny tiny Stephen Dorff, in his first role) is a remarkably good child actor, and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) and sister Al (Christa Denton)... well, they're enthusiastic, and perfectly acceptable for the sort of film this is. Denton's got the distinction of being the one older kid at the movie who actually looks like a teen, and that's because she was fifteen when this was shot! Definitely a rarity at the time.

 Glenn and Al are latchkey kids, left to fend alone for three days while their parents go off somewhere; Terry is Glenn's misfit friend, who spends most of his time at their house and whose acting out is handled surprisingly empathetically by the film's script (by Michael Nankin).

 The thing is, the parents (unwittingly) left open a mysterious but clearly evil gaping hole in the backyard. Parenting styles were different in the eighties, but come on folks, leaving your kids alone with a gateway to hell was probably frowned upon even back then. Things start going wrong almost immediately, starting with a fairly cheesy/upsetting nightmare and the subsequent death of a beloved family member - but Al won't let Glenn call their parents back because it's her responsibility as a teen to throw non-stop parties with her airhead friends (which include a very young, but still 22, Kelly Rowan).

 There are some mysterious events surrounding the satanic hole which Terry, being a Troubled Kid (tm) manages to spot because he of course listens to weird European metal records with liner notes that include instructions on how to open and close them. Yeah, it's very much a kid's horror film script. There are clever touches, like geodes leaving satanic imprints on a tracing pad... but the cheesy ideas have them vastly outnumbered. It's knowingly campy.

  A more serious problem is that it takes rather a long time for thing to get going - there's some rising weirdness, but it's not until the halfway mark that the pit disgorges troops of tiny demons and other monsters to terrify the household. Once it does, though, it really gets going. The visual and practical effects are an absolute delight, and in House or Poltergeist fashion, the supernatural threat changes form and tactics continuously.

 All this allows director Tibor Takács and his crew throw horror concepts around with abandon, rendering the already creaking plot almost nonsensical, but... I mean, why would I complain about a kid getting an eye implanted on the palm of his hand when I could instead be savouring a very weird slice of tween-friendly body horror? I'd even argue that all the craziness gives the film a welcome fever-dream edge.

 I'd say it's got enough going for it to compensate for its pacing issues and some iffy acting and plotting, but... of course I would. And you know what? Objectivity is overrated.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E

 It's kind of obvious when you think about it: who better to direct a frothy Bond-like spy movie than Guy fucking Ritchie? After Sherlock Holmes's unlikely success divorced him from both his grittier, street-level crime comedies and the twin debacle of Swept Away and Revolver, he finally got his chance at it when he was offered a script that had been in development hell for more than twenty years - an adaptation of a 60's TV series that had been previously attached to Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and Matthew Vaughn.

 I don't think I ever watched a single episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E, but its reruns were an eternal presence on TV while growing up (enough for a popular local band to call themselves after one of its characters).

 This modern adaptation's plot concerns two excellently named spies - the smug, suave, sophisticated Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and the uptight, violent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) forced to work together along with an East German mechanic (Alicia Vikander) who is connected to a man with the potential to shatter world peace.

 The script (by Lionel Wigram and Ritchie) follows the expected trajectory - the two are antagonists at first, then bicker constantly as they grudgingly come to respect each other. It doesn't place much weight in plausibility (the villains end up being Nazis, for fuck's sake); This is firmly in the world-hopping, light entertainment camp of spy fiction: Ridiculously attractive, competent people charming and shooting their way through a conspiracy mostly set among 1963's Rome jet set society.

 Wry humour and competence porn are the order of the day, epitomized by the film's first-rate kick-off, a busy, exciting, and often hilarious exfiltration across the Berlin Wall that at one point has Illya chasing a car on foot, Terminator 2 style, and catching up to it and start dismantling it with his hands to establish just how badass his character is. Amazing.

 Plot is largely a formality; It's all about the characters, who are ridiculous but well thought out, funny, and bounce of each other in interesting ways. And sometimes, that's enough, especially when the surfaces are kept as carefully as they are here. Ritchie's slightly toned-down directing style fits the material well, injecting some well-made split frames on some of the action but mostly keeping the excesses limited. He flexes his formidable talents to keep the pace relentlessly bouncing forward instead. The Cinematography by John Mathieson is excellent, with a slightly de-saturated, kodachrome-like palette that only enhances the natural beauty of the summery Rome-set seaside locations on the film's back half. 

 Most of all, it's the actors. Cavill's outsized looks and charisma are a natural fit for a Bond figure, Armie Hammer's intensity works extremely well for his role, and Vikander is ridiculously good, as always, in a role that's quite unlike anything she's done since. How is this woman not a bigger star?

 Elsewhere Elizabeth Debicki cuts an imposing figure as the film's sophisticated villain, and Hugh Grant has a tiny, welcome role where he steals most of the film's best lines with his characteristic wry delivery.

 It's a hugely enjoyable film - lightweight by design but anchored with some fun action scenes, led by that initial chase across cold-war Berlin and quickly followed by a bathroom brawl which features a huge amount of destruction to the premises, as is right and proper (no porcelain was harmed during the shot, which results in a few points deducted.

 There's some romance to accompany the developing bromance, and it's disarmingly sweet - a good contrast to Solo's more callous Bond-style conquests. Possibly my favorite nod to Risky Business.

 Unfortunately the film noticeably runs out of steam towards the end, particularly with a pointless climactic vehicle chase that drags on forever and a fairly prosaic wrap-up to the whole affair. Ritchie also has a tendency to retread older scenes adding new information throughout, which becomes a little tiresome especially when those scenes only happened a few minutes ago.

 That might be something from the show? I have no idea how much the film lifts from its inspiration, aside from the premise and affection for the characters, but there are a couple of scenes - particularly the unveiling of a vehicle for that last, disappointing chase - that seem like they must be referencing something on the show.

 As weak as the final act is, the unfulfilled promise of a sequel is as maddening now as it was nine years ago. This is a far better take on the less serious branch of spy fiction than any recent Bond installment or any of the Mission Impossibles (whose star, Tom Cruise, was attached to star as Solo; That would have been a completely different, and maybe not as interesting, movie). Oh well.

One-Percent Warrior / 1%er

 This one would have been so easy to screw up.

 Here are the basics: Toshiro (Tak Sakaguchi) is an action movie star who's just too awesome and hardcore for most directors to handle; His last movie was ten years ago, and while critically successful, it was too niche to make any waves.

 The reason is that Toshiro's is totally focused on real action - not just making it good for the cameras, but actually being the best fighter he can possibly be and making his fights as real as possible. This leads him to train in 'assassination jutsu' with actual soldiers, and to develop his own fluid take on a zero-range technique he calls 'the wave'. All this is all presented in a breathless, "just how cool is this guy" style of fluff promotional material that would be grating if it wasn't so spot-on.

 And we soon find out that his quest for perfection, for... let's call it the essence of true badassness, Toshiro's alienated most of the industry and even his apprentices/members of the stunt team (understandable; We see him manhandling and belittling them in that introductory documentary). The guy is driven to the point that he's a complete asshole, but because this is an action movie, we know all that self-aggrandisement comes from a place of honesty. Thankfully Sakaguchi has the screen presence to pull it off, and the script (by director Yûdai Yamaguchi) undercuts some of the grandstanding with a little humour. It's always clear that there's at least a significant element of parody running through the movie.

 Sick of the artificial state of modern Japanese action (complete with a pointed dig at the Rurouni Kenshin movies' more stylised take on martial arts), Toshiro secures a location - an abandoned zinc processing plant in a remote island - and heads there with his only remaining pupil (a very likeable Kohei Fukuyama) to prepare an actual, honest to god action movie - no choreography, just action. Whatever the hell that means, and however he means to achieve it.

 Luckily for him, the universe provides. After running into a hot-shot, effeminate Chinese director who epitomizes everything Toshiro hates (an unsuccessful bit of humour and one of the film's more unfortunate takes), the setup finally starts paying off when a bunch of gunmen enter stage left, shooting indiscriminately and chasing after a teen girl  (Rumika Fukuda wearing a schoolgirl uniform because... of course she is. Japan!).

 The girl is the scion of a huge Yakuza family; Her old man has just died, and dozens upon dozens of thugs led by have descended on the island in search of two freaking tons of cocaine, along with a master assassin (an incredible Togo Ishii), and a psycho teen girl (Kanon Narumi) because, again, Japan.

 Toshiro, of course, starts taking down goons almost immediately, earning the moniker of Jackie Chan among the bemused criminals who find the trail of unconscious thugs he leaves behind. (I'm more of a Bruce Lee, Toshiro observes with his characteristic humility).

 The film shifts gears completely; Its visual style becomes a lot more cohesive, and the rest of the runtime is devoted to a series of brutal, quick fights, often with inventive gimmicks to liven things up. There's some routine, pointless drama threads in between all the combat, and a late, very half-baked existential twist at least adds some sorely needed nuance to all the braggadocio and swagger of the film, ultimately casting it in a very different light. Maybe. I don't think it's entirely successful, but at least it's interesting.

 Aside from that last tonal swerve (which comes in too late to help), the main risk here is that the movie lionizes its star and his worldview a little too much. I don't know that much of Tak Sakaguchi off-screen, but Toshiro does feel like a mythologized version of his on-screen persona, incorporating many elements from past characters. And while the movie's takedown of more wuxia martial arts styles might be funny, it feels a little mean-spirited.

 Luckily the movie has an impish, subtle sense of humour running through it, and Toshiro as a character is not nearly as insufferable as he could be - Sakaguchi's charisma helps a lot.

 (Unfortunately, it's come out since that the actor has admitted to multiple sexual assaults, which does not.)

 The fights are... uneven, and they do drag on a little - The combination between stealth takedowns and more tactical fighting between one overpowered combatant against many low-level mooks in a drab industrial location reminded me a little of a more brawl-focused One Shot, and it's slightly tiresome in a similar vein.

 If I have to be honest, I've never really enjoyed Sakaguchi's fighting scenes as much as, well, the more choreographed style this movie likes to poke fun at, and with a couple of exceptions, it holds true here; He's very quick, but I don't think he sells the powers behind his punches, and that makes some of his moves come a little close to looking like a slap fight. It's telling that my favorite scene of the movie doesn't even feature him, pitting his two former students against Togo Ishii instead.

 The action director is the prolific Kensuke Sonomura, whose work I tend to love, but there are better showcases for his talents... As there are for Sakaguchi's, by the way - like, say, Bad City.

 But I'm being way too harsh - The action is still more than worthwhile, and while the choppy editing sometimes makes it harder than it should be to follow (everything is framed more to make its star look cool than for clarity) there's a lot to like here, including an excellent final fight. Director Yûdai Yamaguchi uses some fun camera moves and is good at keeping things moving, and the soundtrack is surprisingly decent. It's a surprisingly fun film that works both on a surface level and as a meta commentary, even if it's not always clear what it's trying to say.