The faces of white people are always obscured in BROTHER, either positioned just out of frame or out of focus in the background of a shot. The film tells us that we don’t need to see the face of the oppressor: they are faceless, formless. Instead we see the effects of Black trauma reverberating through non-linear time, ripples spreading backwards and forwards through the timeline of a life from one devastating moment. Aaron Pierre is an incredible on-screen presence as Francis, the one person in Michael’s (Lamar Johnson) life that makes him feel safe and the entire film is structured around that relationship and that sense of safety. How do you continue when that safety is suddenly taken away?

Like BARBARIAN, it’s disappointing how X uses elderly women’s bodies as a locus of horror especially when Natalie Erika James’ RELIC so effectively subverted this trope to much less popular acclaim. To its credit, X does complicate its depiction of elderly sexuality with some degree of sympathy for its antagonists and its depiction of sexuality as fundamentally human. It builds tension effectively enough and its self-awareness is somewhat fun but the film is ultimately too in thrall to its 1970s slasher references especially THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and simply isn’t enough of a subversion of the rural horror subgenre to be any more than a retread.

An interactive romantic comedy with a frustrating lack of both comedy and interactivity. There simply aren’t enough choices: why does Cami (Laura Marano) have to end up with any of these irritatingly bland men; why can’t she end up with all of them; why couldn’t she make some friends who aren’t her sister; why couldn’t she have beaten up the kid who picked on her niece? Bizarrely structured, cheap looking, and less fun than a standard Hallmark.

A film with incredible depth of detail. On the big screen for the 30th anniversary, I caught so many small background details in almost every frame that catch the eye but aren’t visually overwhelming and make the world feel lived in. There are subtle character moments peppered throughout the screenplay that quietly expand the characters (despite abundant places for a helipad across the island, Hammond has deliberately placed it in a valley with wind shears so that it’s next to an amazing waterfall underscoring his prioritisation of spectacle over safety). Seeing it in the cinema, I was struck by the sound: the subtle ‘80s-style synth in the opening’s score and the incredible sound design of all the various dinosaurs’ different calls, especially the T. rex and velociraptors.

A formative action blockbuster for me that, for better or worse, formed the mould in my mind along with JURASSIC PARK and STARGATE for what blockbuster entertainment looks like. So, despite its obvious defects—gaping plot holes, thin characterisation, a jarring sense of American triumphalism—, I can’t help but look on it favourably or see it as anything less than great.

Where I praised INDEPENDENCE DAY for its sincerity, RESURGENCE comes across as very cynical, relishing in the kind of self-conscious and self-aware quippily non-naturalistic dialogue of a lot of modern blockbusters. Despite the grander scale (mostly conveyed by the physics-defyingly huge alien ship of this film), there are several elements that come together to make everything feel much smaller than the original film. The green screen soundscape visuals and CGI effects look worse and feel smaller than the original’s exterior shooting and impressive miniatures. Rather than a rag-tag cast of characters who come together in the end to triumph as one, all the characters start the film already connected and never actually need help from any other nation on Earth.

In the depth of his drunken despair, Tank (Julian Mayfield) stands in front of a carnival mirror and gives a funhouse description of the Black revolution to some credulous rich white people. It’s a great representation of Tank’s character: a successful union man who has unfortunately discovered he loved industry rather than the militancy required for revolution. UPTIGHT is deeply enmeshed in the radical politics of Black Power and the debate about the need for revolutionary violence but finds the personal amidst the political by centering the crisis of conscience of a man who would snitch on his brothers. Gorgeously lit and terrifically edited.

PHANTASM resonates with a specific Lynchian frequency while also operating with a Buñuelian sense of dream (nightmare) logic. It almost seems to anticipate elements of Lynch’s DUNE, BLUE VELVET, and Twin Peaks and shares Lynch’s preoccupation with the weirdness of the American suburbs. Specifically PHANTASM explores the uncanniness of suburban funeral parlours and cemeteries: monumental edifices built for mourning and death that take up prominent space in our towns but which by unspoken understanding we as a society have all agreed to turn away from as much as possible.

Look, I’m not a stickler about spoilers and often think hysteria about spoilers is ridiculous but I feel I would have gotten more out of this if Amazon Prime Video’s description wasn’t a concise summary of the last five minutes of the film. Cronenberg is at the cusp of something with this film: a move from more straightforward filmmaking towards something more abstract yet somehow more visceral, more psychological, more—what will eventually be known as—Cronenbergian. THE BROOD’s mix of these elements isn’t quite right yet and doesn’t quite cohere. Uneven but entertaining.

Continuing a series of films about deeply frustrating German men. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is always watching people from a distance and talking to them through windows accentuating the gulf he perceives between himself and other people. He’s one of life’s naysayers—saying no to others, to himself, to joy, to creative expression—and can be a real asshole but he’s relatable nonetheless. Christian Petzold directs with his characteristic light touch deftly commenting on narcissism, publishing, and climate crisis in ways that feel effortlessly natural. Even though the whole is a little uneven in tone, the film comes together beautifully and tragically in its final moments.