Year: 2014 Director: Jonathon Glazer

Glazer’s third film, the product of ten years work, topped many best-of-year lists in 2014, without setting the box office on fire. Watching it it’s clear why, it’s a sombre, beautiful and largely wordless experience that remakes Glasgow and the Highlands as deeply alien worlds. Scarlett Johansen, unearthly in beauty in most contexts, here is an alien wandering the streets of Scotland tasked with abducting willing Scotsmen. We see her don a dead woman’s clothes, then stalk her prey in a white transit van – picking them up on pretexts and taking them back to a house that appears to house an enormous subterranean oil tank, into which her victims sink. The plot is slender, so I won’t dwell on it too much. Glazer isn’t interested in the details of why the aliens are here and what happens to the abductees – this is explored much more in Michael Faber’s source novel. Rather, he’s interested in how Johansen’s predator moves through the human worlds of shopping centres, ring roads and hotels as a tiger might through a herd of gazelle. It was much noted on release that Glazer used non-professional actors and hidden filming – » Continue Reading.

Year: 2014 Director: William Eubank

According to legend, Kevin Rowland stormed into Dexys’ rehearsals one day, slammed a load of classic Stax records on the table, and said his band’s ambition should be to sound “like this, but better”. William Eubank’s first feature “Love” seemed like an audacious attempt to out-Kubrick Kubrick. 2001-style, it came in three parts – the first historical, the second set aboard a space craft (in this case The International Space Station) and the third a trippy finale which dared to walk the line between profound and pretentious (did I mention it was his first feature?). Like 2001, it divided its audience sharply, with as many infuriated or bewildered as awestruck. For Eubank’s second film The Signal we are in more familiar genre territory. Three young friends have traced a hacker who has jacked into their computers and curiosity causes them to pay him or her a visit. When they arrive at the location something weird happens and in the next scene the main character, Nic, awakens in what appears to be a government containment facility surrounded by men in decontamination suits but with his friends nowhere to be seen. From here the plot twists in » Continue Reading.

Year: 2014 Director: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

2 American films were set in Puglia last year. The execrable Walking On Sunshine and this rather cool indie horror/scifi/romance. Starring indie darling Lou Taylor Pucci (‘Thumbsucker’) -seemingly recovered from the horrific violent attack he endured in 2010- as an American who comes to Puglia to escape, only to fall in love with a very mysterious, enigmatic beauty, German actress Nadia Hilker. Mostly filmed around where I live, the scenery is, of course, stunningly beautiful! But aside from that, it’s one of the most original ‘horror’ flicks I’ve seen for a long time. Sensitive and thoughtful rather than scary.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

It has perhaps a tiny bit of a Doctor Who vibe to it, but slower and creepier. A touch of Under The Skin too.

Year: 2014 Director: Shinobi Yaguchi

Yuki Hirano has just failed his university entrance exams, and been dumped by his girlfriend. After a drunken night out with his college bound friends he stumbles upon a flyer for a one year forestry course. In no small way encouraged by a picture of a pretty girl on the front, he signs up, and leaves the busy metropolis for rural Japan on a succession of smaller and smaller trains. The first intimation of disaster comes at journey’s end, when he realises there is no cellphone signal at his destination shortly before his first encounter with a pit viper…

We follow him though a month’s training, and several failed escape attempts, until he takes an apprenticeship that turns out to be under Iida-san, the toughest of his instructors and the one with least patience for pampered city boys. Even when he finds the model from the pamphlet cover she is scornful, believing he will head back to Tokyo as soon as he can. It’s probably no great surprise to say that as the year progresses he becomes more enamoured of the rural life, and begins to integrate with the village, but the pleasure is in » Continue Reading.

Year: 2009 Director: Yoshihiro Nakamura

In 2012, a giant comet is about to hit the Earth, bringing total devastation. Japan is expected to be totally submerged by a huge tidal wave. The population have fled to high ground, but as one doom loving character reminds us, that won’t help. The streets of Tokyo are deserted. But one small record shop is still open, and the owner is confident the apocalypse will not come. His certainty is rooted in Fish Story, a forgotten record made in the 70s by a band no one remembers. This song will save the world, he insists.

A good chunk of the film is the story of Gekirin. They are a proto punk band, stealing a march on the Sex Pistols by twelve months, but this is 1975 Japan and no one is interested. They gradually succumb to low sales, record company antagonism and a dispute with their singer, but not before recording the song Fish Story. The song disappears without a trace, but other parts of the film set in 1982, 1999, 2009 and 2012, just hours before the comet’s impact, follow its afterlife, and show how it does indeed save the world.

» Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: The Wachowskis

On a rainy day at the end of half-term I accompanied two 12-year olds to the Wachowskis first original sci-fi script since The Matrix. The 12 certificate is probably an indicator that there would be less cod philosophy and more pecs. The set up sees Mila Kunis as Jupiter, eking out a life as a frankly unconvincing house cleaner whose life is changed etc when she discovers she’s a member of an aristocratic family who rule the galaxy. But of course as many people want her dead as want to help her, and only Metallica-roadie look alike Tatum Channing and – oh my it’s Sean Bean as a roguish world-weary ex-cop – are really on her side. It looks great – at times a bonkers mix of cyberpunk, medieval gothic and Boris Vallejo fantasy. Mila gets hitched in a spaceship that appears to have been cut and shunted with Salisbury Cathedral. Bean and Eddie Redmayne chew the scenery most satifactorily as the Brits Who Can Act. Mila Kunis does not have much to do except look scared, control the world’s bee population, and run away again in the company of some male saviour. Until the » Continue Reading.