If you were to forensically analyse a single half-hour in the shared life of a couple, would it be possible to extrapolate out from that point to deduce the full shape of their life together? Could you chart their emotional topography from a single fight or a passive-aggressive gesture? As the film progresses, we see there’s no more emotional truth to this kind of analysis than there is in reading a novel as autobiography.

Xxxxx’x x xxxxxxxxxx xxxx xx xx made that A VERY ENGLISH CHRISTMAS is a psychological reflection of the main character’s narcissism in how it moves hollow characters around on the chessboard of the narrative with no regard for their feelings or interiority. Kate’s (Kimberley Nixon) American mother is brought over to England from California at one day’s notice for the wedding of her ex-husband’s daughter and the mother is blankly accepting of this: she doesn’t even get a scene with her ex-husband to say ‘hello’ let alone acknowledge complex feelings.

Janus Films’ restoration of INLAND EMPIRE’s original low-definition 480i29.97 digital video into UHD/4K 16x9 using Gigapixel AI machine-learning software introduces digital artifacts into many shots that give those shots the uncanny effect of images generated by text-to-image machine-learning programs like Midjourney or DALL-E. They are aesthetically unpleasant but in such a different way to the original’s low-definition digital graininess that the restoration almost seems to exist as an entirely different film in a different context.

Xxxx xxx xxxxx Xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xx xxxx xxxx, xxxx xxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xx Xxxxxx. Xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxx of ‘London’ use stock footage of Glasgow streets and Glasgow buildings specifically around George Square and Merchant City. This is the kind of detail that might be lost on anyone but an amateur film critic like me who has lived in both London and Glasgow and is why you should commission me for your publication. The film itself is bland.

From the title and the poster, you’d be forgiven for thinking NIGHTMARE CITY takes place in apocalyptic urban streets like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Surprisingly little of the film takes place in una città. Instead we alternate between scenes of women’s blouses being torn open and their breasts mutilated by zombie-vampires to scenes of characters wandering through fields or an abandoned theme park delivering the film’s tacked-on accelerationist message about the cyclical nature of civilisation and humanity bringing this on themselves with capitalist conveniences. Don’t climb a rollercoaster to escape from zombie-vampires.

As in M. R. James’ ghost stories, Joanna Hogg shows how memories gradually accrete in places—rooms, landscapes, countries—until those spaces buckle under the weight of meaning and become haunted by the past. When you return to these places, time slips out of joint and it’s not clear how many days or years pass in the same place or even when you are. You’re left haunted by the ghosts of feelings: an uncomfortable conversation, an awkward misunderstanding, a yearning to make another person happy in a way you never can, the slow-dripping sorrow of emotionally repressed Englishness.

David Fincher doing what he does best: exposing the facile hollowness and obsessive self-delusion of a particular kind of man. In this case, The Killer (Michael Fassbender) is the kind of 4chan-pilled Sigma who recites the 48 Laws of Power to himself, refers to other people as “normies” or NPCs, and relies on the silent labour and concealed structures of the gig economy to minimise his contact with other people. In his internal monologue, he’s a cool and efficient assassin with an unearned self-belief that is unshakeable no matter how many times he spectacularly fucks up or falls asleep on the job. Fincher hasn’t been as brutally ironic about a protagonist he clearly hates since THE SOCIAL NETWORK.

A British man saying the word ‘bullshite’ is a load-bearing element of the narrative in BEST SELLERS which is unfortunate since that’s not a word that any British person has ever said. Michael Caine presumably could have told the production team this if only he hadn’t obviously looked at the script for the first time seconds before the camera started rolling. A dull and formulaic comedy-drama with limp performances (apart from an effervescent cameo from Cary Elwes) and no real understanding of how mainstream publishing works. The second-best book tour movie I’ve seen, far below THE END OF THE TOUR.

A succinct documentary on Western liberalism’s discomfort with criticising Israel or advocating for the BDS movement and how this censure limits leftist response to Israel-Palestine.

It took me like five or ten minutes to dial into the tone of BOTTOMS because it’s a lot more heightened than I expected for a high-school comedy. But once I tapped into the specifically absurdist satirical tone, lying somewhere between MEAN GIRLS and THE NAKED GUN, I found one of the best comedies of the year. The story is a little formulaic but there’s more than enough wild subversion and basically every joke in the script (and improvised!) lands. Ayo Edebiri should be cast in everything (apart from the MCU).