Alien: Covenant

One of those films set in a future where we have technology so advanced we're able to create artificial life so smart it can break its own programming in order to take on autonomy, insanity, megalomania and the ability to grow hair, yet we still haven't mastered lights that stay on inside a spaceship when it has to land in a storm.

A Cure For Wellness

Like a really big turd, long and shit.

Colossal

A neat little idea about giant monsters that stumble over clumsy tonal shifts.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - Teresa Banks And The Last Seven Days Of Laura Palmer [Q2 Fan Edit]

In preparation for series three I have rewatched the entirety of the first two and rounded it out with this. Some clever fella has carefully reassembled the missing pieces back into Fire Walk With Me to get as close as possible to Lynch's original vision, and what a vision it is as it rocks back and forth between goofy idiosyncracies and bleak, harrowing traumas. Nobody does incest and doughnuts quite like Lynch.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 [IMAX 3D]

Irreverence elevated to art form.

The Bogey Man [The Boogey Man]

A tangled confusion of children murdering adults, haunted mirrors, teenagers suffering random death by sharp implement, ghosts with telekinetic powers, priests exorcising evil and eerie houses with glowing windows. But no Bogey Man. Rubbish.

Eyes Of Laura Mars

A thriller that explicitly ties the Giallo boom to American slasher movies. The subjective POV shots of a black gloved killer and themes of high fashion demonstrate just how much Bava and Argento scriptwriter John Carpenter had clearly watched before he went off and created Halloween, whilst the idea of a killer replicating murders shown in violent art would be later lifted by Argento for his return to giallo, Tenebrae.
As interesting as all that is though, the film barely musters average, mainly due to young Tommy Lee Jones looking weird as fuck.

The Belko Experiment

What could have been a witty riff on a familiar plot gets betrayed by mechanical direction that plunges everything into a seething mass of sudden brutal demise.

The Incident [El incidente]

An excellent head mash that avoids choking on all the over abundant exposition by just how far out its central concept eventually becomes.

The Handmaiden [Ah-ga-ssi]

For fans of sumptous visual artistry, Roald Dahl's adult fiction and scissoring.

The Fate Of The Furious [IMAX]

Eighth installment, this time directed by someone who clearly knows where to place a camera when they want to crash a few cars.
Diesel maintains his incredibly serious expression for the majority of the running time mostly as a method for holding all that air in but also because he's secretly upset that The Rock is now steering his affections towards Jason Statham instead.
There is a bit when Diesel smiles presumably because he's imagining that if they were to try and all kiss each other at the same time then from the top they'd look like a creature with three buttocks clenching it's ass muscles. Diesel likes this mostly because it's silly but also because it includes kissing, buttocks and clenching muscles which are his three favourite things.

Dellamorte Dellamore [Cemetery Man]

A certainly unique but ultimately very mopey meditation on death, love and abrupt episodic plotting that proudly wears a multitude of influences joining the dots that run through Raimi, Jackson, Jeunet, Gilliam and Hitchcock.

The Sect [La setta/The Devil's Daughter]

A curious tumble of Italianate logic and bizarre outbreaks of random terror that all conspire to make the birth of the antichrist come off as a bit of harmless stupidity. I quite liked it.

The Church [La Chiesa]

Would appear to actually be two films, the first hour is a woodenly acted relationship between a librarian and art restorer who between them uncover clues that begin to reveal hidden atrocity committed in the name of organised religion. The film then visibly becomes Demons 3 instead as the church doors close and everybody, including a wealth of bonus characters who've just rocked up, goes instantly insane except for the cool priest who must try to find the one place in the church which when activated will cause it to collapse.
Neither film really supports the other, the first hour being a staid introduction to the carnage that follows and the last part rendering all the carefully laid plot irrelevant as everybody goes insane and does whatever the fuck they want.

Raw [Grave]

Coming of age stories like this are usually told through vampirism so I did find it refreshing to watch cannibalism exploited as allegory instead. It was also refreshing to see a more subtle take on cannibalism, less chewing on intestinal rope and something more akin to the blood lust of vampire movies in its place. This balance is what made Raw excellent. That and the ending.