V/H/S

 Well, here it is - the little indie horror found-footage anthology film that could, with six sequels and counting. And... the thing is that as much as I like the series, I didn't really care much for this when it came out; A little too hit and miss. It was with the second one that I sat up and started paying attention.

 The brainchild of the folks over at Bloody Disgusting, the series came out the door with a truly impressive roster of horror luminaries: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, between You're Next and The Guest. David Brukner in between two other excellent anthology entries (one for The Signal, the other for Southbound). Ti West between Innkeepers and Sacrament. Glenn McQuaid, whose other work I haven't seen. Joe Swanberg in what I think is his only horror directorial detour (the guy was insanely prolific during that period). And last but not least, the Radio Silence team (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella) - this was their first properly distributed gig, and it's one of the good ones.

 The framing story, from Wingard and Barrett, stars a delightful bunch of delinquent assholes (two of which are Wingard and Barrett) who engage in such exuberant youthful shenanigans as vandalism and sexual assault, film everything and then sell the footage. Tired of just producing #content, they accept a gig to steal a special V/H/S tape from an old man in his run-down home. When they get there the homeowner is dead, and there are plenty of tapes with creepy stories on them strewn around the house; While watching them to figure out which one it is they were meant to take, they're hunted by something, and we get shown the shorts. It's a win-win, at least for us.

 David Bruckner starts things off properly with Amateur Night, the tale of three asshole kids (Mike Donlan. Joe Sykes and Drew Sawyer) who go out to pick up some chicks, try to get into their pants, and film everything with a pair of spy glasses. Unfortunately for them, one of the girls they pick up (Hannah Fierman) turns out to be weirdo and, more importantly, a succubus. It's a basic structure the V/H/S series would reuse several times over, but this is by far its best execution thanks to Fierman's fierce performance, unrestrained sleaziness, great gore and some great, intense filmmaking from Bruckner. It's really good, but you might feel like you need a bath afterwards.

 Ti West classes up things with his segment, second honeymoon, where a couple (Joe Swanberg and Sophia Takal) go out on a road trip down route 66. They do inconsequential, touristy stuff during the day, and at night someone enters their room and films them with their camera. The night segments are really creepy, and the couple have a really well-developed, lived-in relationship, but it takes too long to get to a fairly underwhelming payoff.

 Glenn McQuaid takes us back to a bunch of idiot young adults (Norma C. Quinones,Drew Moerlein, Jeannine Yoder, and Jason Yachanin) who go to visit a remote lake in the middle of the woods with a girl they just met. They have a picnic, some nice extramarital sex, and leave happy and contented to lead long, fruitful lives.
 Nah, they all get killed - it's standard slasher stuff with the usual cast of dillweed characters, but the short uses video glitches and weirdness in a really interesting way. The plot doesn't really go anywhere, but the visual gimmick at least keeps it fresh.

 We're next left in the hands of Joe Swanberg, who provides the strangest segment of the film. It's presented as a series of video chats as two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) keep their long-distance relationship alive while at different universities*. Sweet as it is, we still get some gratuitous boobage, because of course we do. The young exhibitionist confesses that she thinks her department is haunted, and soon manages to capture some proof on video... which leads to a nasty bout of self-harm, a couple of good things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares, and a truly batshit series of revelations. It's pretty evil, and a whole lot of fun.

 The last segment is by Radio Silence, and it's another good one. Here we follow another bunch of kids (the Radio Silence crew), but, amazingly, they're just good-natured dopes, not assholes. It also gets the best, most original justification of why everything gets filmed out of any found footage film I've ever seen: the main character's whole costume is one of those stuffed-toy nannycams!
 The kids are out looking for a Halloween party but get lost and end up in a real, honest-to-god haunted house. The early bits use that old Scooby-Doo trope of the kids thinking it's all make-believe and making fun of the paranormal stuff, but it's well executed, and when shit hits the fan it's appropriately hectic. There's some really dodgy, low budget CGI, and the whole thing looks about as tacky as the Blumhouse producer credit animation, but the concepts are good fun and the goofy tone sells it well.

 And there you have it. The only thing left is the standard song at the end which remixes some of the footage from the movie, including, ugh, the sexual assault. There's a line through which provocation curdles into bad taste, and this really crossed that for me.

 Overall I think I liked the movie better this time around, but I'd still rank it relatively low - at two hours, it feels a little too drawn out, and some of the shorts really overstay their welcome. That's especially true when you have to endure some pretty loathsome kids. I was surprised at just how sleazy it is, too: Several full frontals, including a bunch of floppy bananas as well as the expected amount of melons (which is many; many, many pairs of breasts) and unsurprisingly high levels of horniness.
 A lot of it is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is a bit of a running theme (even in the "happily" married couple, the guy tries to pressure his wife into something she doesn't want to do), but I can't really say it's taken anywhere more interesting than the standard Tales from the Crypt morality play. Except maybe for the Swanberg short, which is just nuts.

 It's definitely worthwhile, though, with at ton of caveats - as usual the high points are pretty high. Wonder if I'll like V/H/S:Viral more this time around, too.

*: I originally mistyped this as universitities at first; Proof that this sick filth truly has a degrading effect on impressionable, innocent minds like mine.

Exhuma (Pamyo)

 When they discover a rich man's infant son is cursed and haunted by the spirit of one of his ancestors, two shamen (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) enlist the help of two geomancers (the great Choi min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin) to try to exhume said ancestor and pacify him. Things... do not go smoothly; Thanks to one doomed idiot and to a further secret buried under the ancestor's grave, things go pretty much the opposite of smoothly.

 Exhuma is an excellent, handsomely produced horror movie (and the top-grossing movie of 2024 in its native South Korea).

 It's composed of two very different halves; In the first, quieter part, the four paranormal experts carefully grapple with the menace posed by the interred body, and try to unravel why it's become a nasty occult minefield. The second part gets surprisingly over the top as several spirits (several of them based on Japanese Yokai) come out to play, and a couple of them go ballistic on the rich man, his family, some locals, and a whole lot of pigs.

 Just about everything in the film works beautifully. The acting is excellent, and writer/director Jang  Jae-hyun keeps an impeccable atmosphere and a beautiful autumnal palette (cinematography: Lee Mo-gae). It's not hugely bloody (most of the gore in the film belongs to farm animals), but there are some pretty cool, very tasteful special effects later on. No matter how strange things get the film, while never dour, maintains a carefully controlled, serious tone throughout.

 The mystery is slightly perplexing, coming at it from a western perspective, but it's relatively easy to parse - and I love that at its core it is indeed a geomantic puzzle. Plus, it keeps things fresh: I'd love it if more western curse/possession movies had floating fireballs, a small tribute to Kwaidan, coffins wrapped in prayers and barbed wire, and tiny human-headed snakes.

Jeruzalem

 Jerusalem, but with zombies and a very shitty eschatological (scatological?) bent.

 Two deeply uninteresting but hot twenty-somethings (Rachel Klein and Sarah Pullman) head out to Israel for a short holiday. One of them has a Hololens-style mixed-reality camera glasses she got as a present, so that's the conceit for the found footage angle of the movie; It's kind of a fun idea, with facial recognition and maps popping into the frame every now and then, but the execution is all low-hanging fruit (cat videos start intruding at one point) and it doesn't really end up adding much to the movie.

 The two girls meet an anthropology student (Yon Tumarkin) on the flight to Israel who's kind of interested in how dead people are coming back to life as 'dark angels' all over in Jerusalem, something that the three major religions (Judaists, Muslims, Christians) are covering up for some reason - I dunno, I think incontrovertible proof of some sort of afterlife would be a pretty good boost for their credibility. We know that this is true, by the way, because the film begins with a short where a bunch of religious figures try to exorcise one of these resuscitated demons; It's pretty funny that the priests have a gun in their box of exorcism essentials.

 Nothing really happens for about fifty minutes; We just follow a bunch of insufferable characters around Jerusalem while they do inane party girl shit and some light tourism. At least the city is interesting, I guess. When shit finally hits the fan the night of Yom Kippur, the demons come out and our protagonists go on the run from rarely seen zombies and a zombie kaiju that's stomping on stuff off-screen as the army tries to contain the situation. The film is extremely indebted to Cloverfield, but deeply, irredeemably stupid and uninspired.

 It's one of those movies where absolutely nothing makes sense - one of the tourists has a nervous breakdown and is immediately sent to a mental asylum (which is later explored, and has immediately become one of those spooky derelict horror movie/game asylums over the course of a single  evening's events). Our protagonist consistently makes terrible - just fucking terrible - decisions, which no one else in her group contests successfully despite them being clearly stupid. And there's no coherence to the action even in the short term; A cave might be full of zombie demons one moment, only for them to disappear while some stupid shit goes on, and then they're all back chasing our merry band of idiots.

 I can't really think of anything good to say about this one, other than that it has an interesting backdrop. The effects are mostly ugly, cheap-ish CGI, the direction is artless (although at least you can blame that on the format). The acting is atrocious (the anthropologist in particular is painful to watch) and the script is pure half-arsed bullshit.
 I almost didn't watch this one thanks to its dumb title - should have gone with my gut.

Sea Fever

 From A Dark Song to Oddity, the Irish have neatly bookended the last decade with some of my favorite low-budget horror films. 2019's Sea Fever... doesn't rank anywhere as high, and to be brutally honest I doubt I'll remember much of it in a couple of months. But it's a solid, well-crafted bit of modern nautical horror.

 Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) is a socially awkward marine biology student who books a slot on a fishing trawler to work on her PhD. The ship (the Niamh Cinn Óir, named after a little-known member of the mythical Tuatha De Danaan clan) is fairly small, and its crew of six immediately balks at taking on a red-haired passenger, as it's a sure sign of bad luck. Siobhan balks in turn at their superstition... but guess what? They're all in a horror movie. Superstition turns out to be correct, much like that excellent 'curse' gag in Master and Commander.

 In this case, bad luck means that when the boat ventures into an 'exclusion zone' chasing after a large shoal of fish, it's captured by something that starts causing several spots in the wooden hull to rot away, awash in a weird blue slime. When Siobhan gets in her diving gear and goes out to see what's causing it, she finds a beautiful giant creature that looks like an upside down bioluminescent jellyfish, with its tentacles latched onto the hull.

 The crew manage to get free of the creature's clutches, but soon they find that it's left a virus-like contagion in the ship. And then people start dying.

 It's... all right. I didn't feel the script, which starts out very promising, goes anywhere particularly interesting - the middle section, especially, feels very aimless and unstructured. The characters are relatively well drawn, but once they find that they're trapped in the ship they unravel in ways overtly familiar from a hundred movies like this. The same is true of the situations the crew must work their way through- It's all oddly perfunctory, a little too familiar, and the science is pretty iffy. The bones of a good science thriller are there, but the flesh is all second-hand and not assembled very well, and it lacks the spark that would bring it to life.

 Speaking of flesh: there's quite a decent amount of gore, thanks to the messy way the infection makes an egress out of its human hosts. Nothing too extravagant, but it's solid and it results in a hanful of decent horror moments. The atmosphere is well developed, too; I'm not a fan of Neasa Hardiman's script, but her direction is fairly impressive, especially given the budget she's working with.
 At this point I could stretch my already tortured Frankenstein's monster metaphor and say something like the skin of the creature is well stitched together and the makeup gives it at least a semblance of life. But, dear reader, know that I respect your time too much for such shenanigans. I would never dream of wasting your time making you go through even a single paragraph of such pointless drivel, not even were I to deliver it in pointlessly convoluted, flowery prose.

 Where were we? Oh, yeah - the actors are all decent - the cast is rounded out by Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as the captain and her second-in-command, plus Olwen Fouéré, Jack Hickey, Ardalan Esmaili and Elie Bouakaze. They're a decent bunch to spend ninety minutes with, even if the script doesn't have a lot of time for them.

 For good or for ill, this one doesn't leave much of an impression.

Ballerina

  Any doubts about whether Ballerina will be a worthy addition to the John Wick universe are quickly dispelled by its prologue. Not by an early action scene where a bunch of assassins attack a cabin; It's a decent sequence, but not up to the series' ridiculously high standards. No, we know it's a proper John Wick movie because when we first meet the Ballerina (Victoria Comte) she's a just-orphaned, tiny little girl clutching a blood-splattered music box. Meat-headed symbolism, right from the get-go! All it's missing is someone solemnly intoning a world-weary "CONSEQUENCES"... but don't worry, that comes later.

 The little ballerina is taken in by the concierge for the New York Continental hotel for civilized assassins (Ian McShane). He then takes her to the academy for young ballet dancers who are also badass tattooed assassins, and hands her over to the mistress there (Anjelica Huston). If you haven't seen any John Wick movies this will likely make no sense to you, and yes - it's exactly as silly as it sounds.

 There the Ballerina grows up to be Ana De Armas and learns the dual arts of ballet dancing and beating the shit out of people real good. There's some stuff about the dancers being trained to protect people, complete with a silly Slavic mythological connection* - but once the Ballerina graduates she's then shown killing loads of people for money, so I call bullshit on that.

 Anyhow, during the course of her work she runs into one of the assassins that killed her father (they have one of those convenient tatoos/scars that identifies them in a pretty visible place). This sends the Ballerina on an unsanctioned mission against an assassin cult led by a philosophizing asshole (Gabriel Byrne). Things get... pretty nuts, in the best way possible; The script takes the Wickiverse's conceit that every other person is an assassin, and it takes it to its absolute illogical conclusion. The film's last forty minutes or are made up of an escalating series of confrontations - the early stages reminded me of Gymkata**, and it builds up to a staggeringly awesome flamethrower duel that must last something like ten minutes. It is fucking glorious.

Seriously - if they don't get an oscar for this, fuck the oscars.

 The script, by Jay Hatten, was an independent piece written shortly after John Wick 2, and was retrofitted for the series once Lionsgate bought it. It also got Hatten a gig co-writing the latter Wick films, and he used the opportunity to introduce the threads that would lead to Ballerina in Part Parabellum.

 The connection to the assassinating world hurts the movie a little in that by becoming part of a franchise, it loses its potential identity. There are frequent visual callbacks, which include some action gimmicks (a few overhead shots of the action, a fight in a cavernous discotheque) and a lot of the elements of the John Wick world (some of which, at this point, Hatten had helped establish): Pneumatic tubes, the tattooed old lady operators, hidden shops catering to an assassin clientele. I did like that when they show the concierge for another branch of the Continental, it's Anne Parrillaud; Cute action movie homage there.
 The good thing is that within its guard rails it also manages to tweak expectations a little - the script is way more playful than it seems. I loved that one of the bigger massacres in the movie isn't shown at all, we just see someone navigating the aftermath... the action only comes crashing in (literally) just when the camera starts panning out. Beautiful concept, perfectly executed. There's also another fun subversion of a now-standard John Wick gearing up scene, and I cannot overstate how crazy the setting for the whole third act is.

 I've long thought of Len Wiseman as a good action director with bad taste (or luck) for projects, and Ballerina is actually excellent proof of that; Having to work within limits established by a franchise, and having access to one of the best stunt teams in the business lets him rip with near-constant, top-tier action. He flounders a little with the close quarters combat - his editing schemes and blocking are nowhere near as good as Chad Stahelski's (or David Leitch's) and he struggles to capture the action with the clarity the intricate choreography and wince-inducing stunts deserve. He fares a lot better in all the other types of action, of which there's a huge variety. I don't think it reaches the height of the last two Wicks aside from the aforementioned flamethrower cookout (which is an all-timer)... but it comes very close several times.
 Cinematographer Romain Lacourbas also does a good job aping the look of the main series, and manages to expand the palette with some wintry, alpine action later on.

 Ana de Armas looks great, and gets to wear a lot of cool-looking outfits***, but her character is a bit of a blank. And yes, you could say the same of Mr. Wick, but Armas lacks Reeves's presence, world-weariness, and flair for action. She's lithe, and manages some pretty impressive gymnastics, but even when the film insists that she had to learn to 'fight like a girl' (this translates to frequent nut shots, but doesn't really come into play all that much), she's just not badass enough to pull off the character convincingly. I wasn't a fan of The Princess****, but that movie had a better handle in how a small woman might fight off huge grizzled warriors, and Joey King sold her grit much better - Ballerina also puts the protagonist through the wringer, but it feels slightly off.

 So that nagged at me while watching the movie, but we're talking about a series with armour-plated designer suits and people who routinely take on superhuman amounts of punishment. She's definitely fun to watch, and that should be more than good enough for anyone. Please feel free to disregard me.

 Ballerina has a slight but distinct second-hand feel, and the thin connective tissue between all the action won't convince people who aren't in it for the action. On the other hand it's relentlessly paced, loud, and proudly ludicrous, with some truly incredible stunt work, excellent choreographies, and some lovely over-the-top moves. But all this - good and bad - is a moot point, because the movie has a flamethrower fight. And a then water hose versus flame thrower fight (sadly spoiled in the trailer) that looks like a practical-FX version of one of those stupid Harry Potter magic beam fights, but cool. That alone makes this an eleven out of ten.

*: The Kikimora, which these ballerinas call themselves after, are basically house elves. Not as silly as calling the John Wick the Baba Yaga, I guess. John Witch!

**: Just to be clear, this is a good thing.

***: Even a flame-retardant suit looks fashionable.

****: I realize I said exactly the same about Joey King on that one, and I kind of stand by that, but King's acting was nowhere as vulnerable as Armas's here. The main issue in The Princess is still that the protagonist is completely eclipsed by Veronica Ngo.

Bramayugam

 Hey, what about a two-hour and something black and white Indian folk horror epic? I promise it's a good one!

 Bramayugam (which translates as Age of Madness) tells the story of Thevan (Arjun Ashokan), an ex-slave escaping the destruction of his former master's estate in some unspecified conflict. While travelling in the jungle he narrowly escapes the attentions of a Yakshi, a murderous nature spirit, and stumbles upon a dilapidated manor house. There, the cook (Sidharth Bharathan) takes him to the master of the manor - the sorcerer Kodumon Potti (Mammootty); When the old man finds out that Thevan is a folk singer of the panaan, he delightedly takes him in.

 Saved from starvation and the dangers of the wilderness, Thevan soon finds his situation in the mansion is almost as precarious. His host is a fickle lecher who seems to eye him with alternating paternalism, contempt, and hunger. The cook, meanwhile, is almost comically passive aggressive towards both Potti and Thevan. There are also stories of former guests who displeased the master, forbidden chambers, some mysterious entity chained up in the cellar... all that good stuff.

 It's a simple story that could definitely do with some tightening up, but the filmmaking and the characters are strong to support it. Mammootty, in particular, plays a magnificent asshole - it's pretty easy to see why the film gives him one of those rock star entrances where everything pauses as the camera pans from his feet upwards. Ashokan is also very good as the meek Thevan; you can almost hear the gears whirring in his head as the precariousness of his situation sets in.

 Writer/director Rahul Sadasivan and cinematographer mount a handsome production; The black and white isn't quite as visually striking as in Egger's The Lighthouse (another story centered around small number of perpetually sweaty men warily circling each other), but it still succeeds in giving the film a lot of character. There's very little in the way of special effects and next to no bloodshed, but the glimpses that we get of otherworldly stuff are very effective. The film looks gorgeous. It sounds great, as well. 

 The script is easy to follow, but it's hard to say how much I'm missing thanks to the cultural distance, both in the mythical and temporal realms. Power corrupts is a pretty universal message, but I'm left wondering if, for example, Thevan belonging to the Panaan (a historically oppressed people, Wikipedia tells me), carries other points. And it might give the film's ending a bit more meaning, I suspect.

 But the film remains perfectly enjoyable without that dimension. It's not particularly scary, but it's extremely atmospheric, with a great, pervasive sense of menace and many elegant, fairy-tale-like story beats. Recommended.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

 It is 1999, and James (Harry Shum Jr.) works at the archival section of some Chicago TV station. It's a lonely job: transferring tapes to CDs all evening, the only communication with another human (his supervisor, who works the other shift) handled via sticky notes. All this suits James just fine - he's still a mess after the disappearance of his wife Hanna four years prior.

 Predictably, he doesn't seem to have much of a personal life, either; his only activities seem to be repairing video equipment in his spare time and going to a support group for bereaved partners. So when he discovers the creepy titular Broadcast Signal Intrusion (BSI from now on) while transferring some news programme, he's got nothing better to do than to start poking around to see if he can find something out about it.

 A BSI is just what it sounds like; a pirate signal "highjacking" the daily programming, replacing whatever was on with home-made content. Primitive trolling. This one consists of a woman wearing a blank latex mask moving robotically, while electronic noises blare in the background. It's creepy enough, I guess - I thought it was trying too hard to be weird, but I suppose that makes it look authentic.

 James, who clearly needs a hobby, dives head-first into a series of rabbit holes, led on by (what else?) the internet - or rather, BBSs: in a cute detail, because the footage was originally released in the mid-90s, all the relevant information is still hosted on bulletin boards. 

 Morbid curiosity soon turns personal when he finds out a theory that links the intrusions (of which there are more than one) to missing women... and one of the intrusions took place the day after James's wife disappeared.

 And of course, weird stuff starts happening. James' place gets trashed. Some weird people contact him and some other weirdos follow him around. And all that's on top of the BSI footage itself, which keeps yielding additional information under close scrutiny. Soon James, with the help of a mysterious woman (Kelley Mack), hits the road, trying to track the mysterious TV pirate. It put me very much in mind of a 70s paranoid thriller (with some surreal elements); And sure enough, director Jacob Gentry mentions Alan J. Pakula as an inspiration.

 It's all really well handled, and the mystery and subsequent investigation is very engaging for a while. And therein lies a problem, because the film has an agenda, and it conflicts with the whole investigative aspect. I love the conclusion the film eventually arrives at, but it requires reframing what came before in a way that can be more than a little frustrating; It's a fairly big problem that I can't really go into without some major spoilers. Just be aware that you may need to be patient with some nonesense for a while.

 The director acquits himself nicely; this is a great-looking indie movie* with an excellent paranoid atmosphere courtesy of cinematographer Scott Thiele and an ominous soundtrack from Ben Lovett. I'm not a fan of the acting - Shum is a little too keen to let us know just how much pain his character is bottling up at all times - but he's not too bad otherwise.

 The script, by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall is respectably willing to remain obtuse to the end, and its use of obsolete technology is pretty endearing - any movie that mentions phreaking ("with a ph-") is all right by me. There's some stilted dialog, and at least one instance the old technology fetish gets a little too on-the-nose (a video nerd exalts how much better Betamax was than VHS), but it's all pretty enjoyable if you're an old nerd, and it shouldn't be too off-putting for the rest of humanity.

 So it's another hard one to recommend. If you're willing to meet it in its own terms, though, and give it the benefit of doubt until it has its say, I think it's very much worth your time. I liked it a lot.

*: It even includes a pretty solidly shot fight -  of the sad/pathetic kind, though.

La Chimera

 La Chimera is a deeply lovely Italian comedy/drama hybrid that's suffused with strangeness, mythic undertones and some interesting themes. Not bad for a movie that takes more than an hour to lay its cards on the table.

 Arthur (Josh O'Connor) is a British expat somewhere in Italy, sometime in the '80s. He cuts a dashing, standoffish figure in his cream suit. It's enough to make the local girls swarm to him, although his surly disposition quickly scares them off.
 The man is a fallen archeologist, just out of prison for tomb robbery. We follow him for a while as he visits his old home (a run-down shack in the shadow of a huge medieval wall), goes to visit the mother (Isabella Rossellini) of an old flame, and is accosted by his old partners in crime - a jolly gaggle of misfits who call themselves the Tombaroli - until he accepts to join them again.

 The thing is that Arthur is critical to their operation, which sees them roam the countryside looking for Etruscan burial sites to despoil: The archeologist is an eerily effective dowser who can sense nearby tombs. Conflict finally arrives surprisingly late in the movie, as his nose for treasure leads him to a spectacular find. Its fate - along with a tentative romance with a local woman (Carol Duarte) the film has been patiently building - sends the archeologist into an existential crisis.

 It's a slow, slow character study that happens to be charming as hell and pretty funny in that boisterous, slice-of-life Italian way while mostly steering clear of melodrama in a way that requires more than a little patience. But writer/director Alice Rohrwacher adds a lot more to it: a red thread (almost literally!) runs through the movie, serving as both an incarnation of the protagonist's restlessness and a nod towards Theseus and Ariadne, and the story also references the Orpheus myth. Hell, there's even a couple of musicians that follow the Tombaroli and sing a couple of songs that comment on the action like a Greek chorus. All that on top of many slightly surrealist (or magic realist, I guess) touches.

My favorite movie poster in ages. I mean, look at this thing - it's glorious!

 Arthur clings to memories of a happier time, as does Rosellini's character. Italia, Arthur's new love interest, unknowingly articulates the Tombaroli's justification for stealing historic artifacts (it they belong to everyone, they belong to no one?) and later turns it on its head. It's not a hugely deep movie, and there are some misfires such as a scene where a powerful woman compares the Tombaroli with tiny cogs in a huge machine... and then proceeds to frame Arthur between huge, gyrating engines. But on the main it's all pulled off with grace and wit; There's quite a bit going on here.

 The filmmaking is beautiful - lots of film grain and bright primary colours - and Rohrwacher and DP Hélène Louvart sneak in some clever camera moves and some fun touches like slightly undercranking a  ridiculous police chase. The acting is also incredible - O'Connor is incredible, as is Duarte, and most of the side characters are given memorable performances.

 As with so many of these movies that scratch deeply personal itches (eww!), I find it really hard to gauge how well it would play for others. As always, I can only try to articulate why I feel it might be worth your time. If any of the above sounds appealing, you can probably do a lot worse.

Redline

  Here's the plot for Redline: Sweet JP (Takuya Kimura) really wants to win the Redline, an interstellar racing championship, all the while nursing a crush for rival racer Sonoshee (Yū Aoi). He blows his chance to qualify, but gets lucky when two other racers pull out for the championship and he gets voted into the final lineup.

 Unfortunately, the reason people are pulling out is because the race is going to take place on Roboworld - the home planet of race of fun-hating fascist cyborgs (is there any other kind?), a whole race of Galactus wannabes that would like nothing more than to crush anyone who lays rubber on their homeland.

 And... that's pretty much it. There's a corrupt agent and an interlude in a demilitarized nearby moon where the racers mingle and prepare their rides ahead of the race, but the plot on this movie is minimal. The focus is fully on the insane detail spilling from every frame. Not just on the action, which is frequent and beautifully animated, but even minor scenes such as the one where JP tries to buy cigarettes is a visual treat where we get to see the weird nervature on alien currency, a weird, funky rabid merchant, and some gorgeous Mignola-esque corridors in the background.

 The art style on this thing is gorgeous - both scratchy and detailed - and the visual imagination is staggering. The story barely hangs together, but that doesn't matter because this movie is first and foremost about looking cool, and that's something that Redline does exceptionally well.

 Everything gets thrown in the blender. You've got a rockabilly protagonist and his zeppelin-breasted object of desire (who is shown topless while she complains about the angles the news choose to show her from...). There's a magic-using race of hot space elves whose racing candidates also function as a J-pop group. Two intergalactic bounty hunter's visual inspiration clicked for me halfway through the movie, making me laugh very loudly. The last third of the movie is a protracted battle scene that includes the expected racing shenanigans, but also mechs, Robotech-style flying battles, and a giant baby-shaped energy monster. It's a pummeling mix of annoying techno, eye-watering visuals and a serviceable (but surprisingly sweet) storyline. Exhausting, but glorious.

 This is the closest I've seen any studio come to the lush animation of Ghibli and classic Disney, and it's all in service of bringing comics - many different styles of comics - to life in a form that I'd vaguely describe as the love child of Speed Racer and Wacky Races. I don't really read a lot of comics or manga, so I could only identify a few the many, many references here (Kirby fort the Roboworld crowd, some Tesuka and a huge spider-limbed nod to master Miyazaki) - I expect proper comic and anime fans will have a field day with this.
 But even without that dimension, it just looks gorgeous, and the designs are phenomenal and often hilarious. I mean, look at this guy:

  Redline is pure joy, from start to finish. A lush love letter to everything its creators (director Takeshi Koike, with some heavy input from producer Katsuhito Ishii and others from Studio Madhouse) hold dear. It reportedly took them seven years to bring it to fruition, so the least you can do is spend a hundred minutes taking it in. Trust me, it's worth it.