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There are quite a lot of bands I had no real expectation of seeing. These tend to be the ones that had split up either before I’d heard of them or before I could reliably go to gigs. Over the years, a good number of these have played special anniversary gigs - one off shows to celebrate the passing of a large number of years since their albums. Though these shows always come with a hint of…
2025 was a better year for reading than many a recent one. Though I didn’t get through as many as I’d have liked to, I think I have to accept that I literally never will! I did manage 24 novels or non-fiction. Not quite one-every-two-weeks but for fairly arbitrary reasons I didn’t include graphic novels. They’d have definitely bumped up my score. I also read more books by…
Kate Atkinson - Cold Histories Gripping and incredibly well written. Perhaps too many shadows of 90s lad culture ? Vicente Luis Mora - Centroeuropa One of the best I’ve read in a very long time. Magical realism in a muddy field in 1800s Prussia. Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre Grief and isolation and the crimes of the past. Very bleak and atmospheric. Oliver Burkeman - Mediations for…
A zombie romp set around a drag club night in Brooklyn. It’s a well made, well paced one. Having been very into zombie films for a long time its a while since I’ve seen one, and this is knowing, funny and silly, but places the zombie element with sincerity. There are some very funny set pieces, weapons you might not expect, and it’s all round a decent little zombie film. Nice.
A very Werner Herzog film. Is it about looking for elephants? Or about the very act of looking for things? Or about obsession? Or about mankind’s inability to live in harmony with nature? Or all of the above? It’s a powerful film, with some jaw dropping scenery, some glorious wildlife, and a lot about the humans of the story - their different backgrounds, their hopes, their fears. The…
The wonderful Carmen Maura is a retired widow, living alone in the bustling city of Tangiers. Her daughter, keen to make money by selling the house, pushes her out and starts a sequence of events that are all about finding community and conversation and purpose. It’s a small film in its way. But its an absolute joy to watch Maura pottering through the city, coming up with schemes and…
Quite good fun. It’s basically Russian Doll meets Day of the Triffids . A Groundhog day scenario playing out over and over again, every time the character dies. And there are some giant plant monsters which do seem quite intent on making that happen. It’s well put together, has some pretty cool scenes and builds the fairly familiar repeating day theme nicely.
Archive footage spanning decades of European train journeys. This was an interesting effort but I’m not sure it was edited as tightly as it could have been. After a pretty tense and at times gruesome middle section which covered the war wounded, Nazis on a train and all that Nazis do, the final third or so just sort of fizzled out. Though I could imagine it’d be pretty cool with live…
And part 2! A slightly weaker selection to my mind, with all 3 of my favourites coming from the other programme. Star for me here was the lovely handmade vibe of Progress Mining Monday morning at the Progress Mining Company is a decaying, cubist nightmare of monotony. As one worker shows round a new employer, another campaigns for its closure and reconstruction, as the long-buried secrets of…
Animation Part 1. It’s always a favourite, and always pretty hard to describe. My favourite by some way was Retirement Plan: Ray daydreams about how to spend his retirement once he finally has some free time. Wonderfully simple in style yet capturing a world of emotion as we delve through his list; this moving and sweet short invites us to consider how to live before the inevitable.
A love-letter to 70s and 80s giallo slashers. A mood, more than a story. The story, such as it is, is ridiculous. Liam is a food delivery rider who provides services on the side. He’s good at his job and in high demand from a series of Chicago oddities, all keen to satisfy their kinks and perversions, with a pizza on the side. But what’s this? Clients are being brutally murdered? And…
Pros: This had some very cool visuals (I love rotoscoped animation!) Lots of cool atmosphere (fog, churches, beasts, witchcraft) Some of it was pretty funny. Cons: Too many strands of story, which meant each was underdeveloped. Not enough werewolf. Felt way too long, even though it was a pretty tight 90mins. I do think there’s a good film in there, and a lot of talent, but this was too…
An impressive, hand-crafted animated retelling of the Little Mermaid, transplanted to a version of Shanghai in which big business and the King of the Sea are quarrelling. Only the union of the Fish Princess and uh… some junior guy at a shipping company can bring peace and unity. It’s fine. I did like a lot of the animation, and there were some lovely scenes (including a surprisingly…
A 100 year old cinema wonder, exploring the mysteries of space through cutting edge film effects. We cover the history of human understanding of space, the individual planets, the seasons, moons, and more. It’s truly stunning stuff, although the highlights are all the bits with people in (jumping in low-gravity on Mars! walking on the walls of the spaceship!). Matthew Bourne’s live…
Well this was utterly ludicrous. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, Mathias is an aspiring actor, competing for roles with his flatmate, Fabio. Mathias hooks up via an app with a new man, and they quickly discover how much they enjoy the thrill of having sex in public. Unfortunately, this isn’t very compatible with Mathias’ fledgling TV career, and still less compatible with Rafael’s…
Very much my sort of horror. This is a solid entry in the “it’s rough being a teenage girl” genre, with a gentle touch of supernatural thrown in. For me, the pacing was spot on. It felt slow but with a constant sense of threat, that only very rarely bubbled to the surface. Natalia and friends are all falling for Diego, but he’s been swept away by worldly, older Silvia.…
An animated, dialogue-free journey, following dandelion seeds on a (surprisingly cosmic) journey to where they can grow new plants. Or, as an allotment gardener: proof that even if you nuke the planet, the damn dandelions will manage to escape through a black hole to an alternate world and grow more weeds. This was very beautiful, with a frankly jaw-dropping blend of live-footage and animation. We…
A curiosity. An Estonian triptych of loosely connected stories. It’s a weird mix of serious issues (Estonian economy, emigrating for jobs, domestic violence) and uh… aliens. There are some fun bits (removing all of one willing alien-experiment volunteer’s limbs, putting the other volunteer in some sort of alien washing machine), but also quite a lot of ponderous bits.
A really powerful documentary. It centres on the right-to-roam movement, and how their aims come into conflict with the landed gentry of the country. Several landowners pop up and manage to be not-totally-awful human beings, treading a fine line between holding on to their inherited wealth and, somewhat grudgingly, consenting to share it. The villain of the piece, who’s name I didn’t…
A CEO is kidnapped in small town America. Her conspiracy-theory obsessed captors don’t want money. They want an invite to her mothership. Things get weird. It’s Yorgos Lanthimos. Of course things get weird . I loved this. Having seen a lot of hostage-and-kidnappers films, this never felt even slightly familiar. It was always going somewhere new and unexpected. Jesse Plemens and Aidan…