A pandemic sci-fi thriller that might be too much for those exhausted by the last few years but that offers an eerie atmosphere and some interesting twists and turns. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if I get frustrated by clumsy tropes because I’ve watched too many films or if it’s an unfortunate element of the script. Either way it’s a shame that this starts so promisingly and descends into a third act of genre tropes, most egregiously the computer that auto-plays the most narratively pertinent recordings when it turns on.

LA CHIMERA has an odd tempo, like a half-remembered story from long ago that becomes clearer when there’s a little rhyme to help you along. Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is a rogue archaeologist, robbing graves and raiding Etruscan tombs. His quasi-mystic gift for finding lost things through a weird dowsing ritual gives the film a mythic quality, rich with allegory.

SORCERY (BRUJERÍA) tells the fascinating story of the La Recta Provincia witch trial in 19th century Chile in a dull and dreary way. There’s resonant anti-colonial themes and an amazing performance from newcomer Valentina Véliz Caileo but the whole film around it feels so lifeless and flat, a slow burn that doesn’t lead to any explosion. SORCERY is interesting as an attempt to do what critics said KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON should do and show the murder of Indigenous people by white settlers from the perspective of the victims rather than the murderers but the overall result is disappointingly forgettable.

Lousy Carter (David Krumholtz) is dying and Bob Byington’s film invites us to ask, who cares? On paper, he’s an unlikeable American literature professor, a narcissist with few friends who halfheartedly pursues a relationship with a student. But David Krumholtz brings him to life with a genuine humanism and dry charm. It’s a comedy that is wonderfully ambivalent about its own existence with the ultimate joke being that, despite openly hating itself, an audience can watch it and enjoy it.

The last two seconds of SAINT MAUD prove Rose Glass is a visceral filmmaker and that’s on full aural and visual display in LOVE LIES BLEEDING: we hear the sounds of muscles stretching and throats constricting; we see jawbones breaking and blood spatter squelching. This visceral cinematic expression is in service of a modern-day THELMA AND LOUISE where queerness isn’t the backbone of the narrative but just one element of this love and revenge story. In different ways, Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian) both learn to embrace the metaphorical monsters that society has turned them into and use that self-knowledge for liberation.

Like THE CREATOR, RESTORE POINT (BOD OBNOVY) showcases what CGI visual effects can be produced on a small budget in a way that puts much more expensive Hollywood blockbusters to shame. The BLADE RUNNER 2049-type skyline and the MINORITY REPORT slick technology all look great and fit into the world without obvious CGI aesthetics or horrendously offputting green-screen. Unfortunately the story also liberally borrows plot beats from other sci-fi films ultimately making the whole thing feel very familiar and very predictable. If you’ve seen I, ROBOT or Bodies, then you’ve seen this and it won’t surprise you to learn that the corporation behind the future technology might not be entirely trustworthy.

Though a little off-putting, there’s something charming about the vourdalak puppet who looks something like a Jan Švankmajer creation crossed with one of Mike Mignola’s skeletons from Hellboy in Hell. This strange puppet takes you out of the film but in a way that is at least interesting to look at and charmingly analogue.

Rub your tummy or I’ll think you’re an asshole. UNCUT GEMS in Glasgow: a tense, strange, and frequently hilarious psychological drama that gradually turns a ridiculous situation into the cosmic metaphysical horror of painful and anxious rebirth. Lorn Macdonald and Orlando Norman deliver terrific performances respectively as a hot mess of a tattoo artist and an anonymous popstar turned trickster god. It’s a wholly unexpected delight and a spectacularly confident debut feature from director Ciaran Lyons. Rub your tummy or I’ll think you’re an asshole.

A love story told backwards taking us from the devastating impact of a couple’s long-running emotional affair to the tragedy that cemented their lives together in the first place. THE BURNING SEASON joins a long lineage of media that I’ve discussed extensively elsewhere where trauma is represented through the depiction of non-linear time, through time warping around a traumatic event and pulling the characters back towards it like a black hole. A slight romantic drama made effective by some convincingly couple-y dialogue and performances that ground the central relationship.

It may be strange to say at the end of a series reviewing late-Bond through a political lens but NO TIME TO DIE works by focusing on the personal. Instead of the thin political themes of QUANTUM and SPECTRE, we get a back-to-basics terrorist supervillain with an evil lair and zero motivation for his genocidal ambitions but also an actual narrative arc for James Bond and a script that gives Daniel Craig something to work with: the early scenes of Bond too broken by trauma to trust anyone are some of his best work in the role. There’s a smidge too many lines of dialogue that overexplain things to the audience but this is the first Bond script since CASINO ROYALE that does more than shuttle us from set piece to set piece.