We’ve seen so much of the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon that it would have been criminal to miss this one. Even those of a certain age who haven’t seen Le Samouraï will certainly be famliar with Delon’s iconic look here with his hat and trenchcoat. It’s a gorgeous, slick film of competence on all sides put on display. The title is pure cultural appropriation however meant only to evoke a particular mood. Similarly the plot is more style than substance and the ending is the usual unsatisfying death, Melville-style. I wouldn’t call this a particularly deep film but it sure is cool.
As promised, I’m on the second book of Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy and with the entire Confederation now aware of the crisis, it’s action-packed right from the start. I’d complained earlier that my main issue with the first book was the character of Joshua Calvert being set up as the stereotypical action hero. He does get a little less of the limelight but unfortunately we also get another copy of him? While still very entertaining, I like this somewhat less than the first book, partly because the Confederation is rather smart about containing the possessed, so they don’t turn out to be as large-scale a threat as they initially seemed. Plus, I strongly dislike the new possessed leader characters such as Al Capone. I mean, really?
I only knew of this film recently when I read it being described as having Dark Souls vibes. Indeed the styling of the armor seen here, the ickiness of the monsters and the general atmosphere of this dark fantasy world seems to have been inspired by multiple video games. Unfortunately the overall look is all that we get because the budget is so low that we don’t even get any decent action scenes. I commend director Jordan Downey on executing a specific vision well but this is too small in scope and too cheaply made that it should have been a short film.
Whatever the results of the awards circuit, critics were more or less unanimous in pronouncing Sirāt to be the best film of last year. Freely shifting between Spanish, French, Arabic and English, this film defies genre expectations and has been described both as a road trip drama and science-fiction. To me, it is one thing above all, as pure a religious experience as you can achieve on film, without being explicitly about any religion in particular. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of its director Óliver Laxe to interpret the rave scene in this manner and I would agree that it’s the most outstanding film of 2025.
It hasn’t even been that long since the last time I played a 4X strategy game but this one has been sitting in my queue forever and I bought it back then because it was designed by Soren Johnson. This one innovates on the usual Civilization formula in two key ways. One is that its setting is only the ancient and classical eras, hence its title. Two is that you’re constrained by the number of orders you can issue each turn. The intent is to streamline the gameplay and it works. At the same time, there are so very many rules and interactions to learn. I believe that this may well be the most complex 4X game I’ve ever tried. It’s honestly overwhelming. I can see why fans who love optimize everything to the smallest detail love this. Me, I just feel that I’m too old for this much micromanagement.
It feels like Chinese cinema is on a roll in producing neo-noir crime films, or at least ones that share similar vibes. Only the River Flows is set up like a textbook murder mystery set in a rural town in 1995. But despite the lead detective’s diligence in following the clues step by step, the case defies all logical explanation until we begin to question if this is really a murder mystery after all. It’s no real spoiler to say that this one of those mind-bending films in which nothing is as it seems. It looks fantastic, the abstract themes are at least worth thinking about and yet in the end I feel cheated out of a perfectly good police procedural.
I’ve read about the controversies surrounding this film, how earnest its apparent antifascist take is for example, before I learned anything about its story. Now after watching it, I still can’t make up my mind and I wonder if it doesn’t matter at all. This is a frustrating film on so many levels as it builds viewer expectations towards a certain direction but then refuses to give us the catharsis we need. Still we can’t pull our eyes away from it though due to its spectacular action scenes and sheer bizarreness. I wouldn’t agree that it’s the best film of the year but it’s auteur film, that’s for sure.
