Resident Evil 8: The Village

As the first and second hour of gameplay relentlessly rockets the player forward through onslaughts of impossible monster encounters, many players like me will be tempted to give this eighth Resident Evil game away - too stressful, too punishing, and "Just let me play!" I wanted to yell at the next and next cutscene - but stick with it and it proves to be the sequel that, of all those released so far, most closely resembles the original in a number of ways - wait for the house! - and a game that elicits terror and smiles in equal measure. 

★★★★★

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The Stranger (2025)

My head was racing as François Ozon's adaptation of Camus' The Stranger started and, unlike my millions of thoughts, the movie proved glacially paced and yet its exquisite spell managed to entrance me: an enthralling moving artwork of black and white images that builds Camus' stark, existential, absurd treatise into a quiet fervour.

★★★★★

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All The President's Men (1975)

Two Washington Post journalists (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, showing everyone how it is done) are assigned to investigate a burglary, but little do they realise the story they are about to uncover will go right to the very top and result in the first resignation of a President of the United States - a riveting account of the Watergate scandal from start to...well, resignation, but not finish.

★★★★★

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The Day Of The Jackal (1973)

There is so much detail in Fred Zinnemann's riveting adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - European filming locations; real people on the street unaware they are being filmed, an audacious plot that sweeps through multiple countries yet also manages to detail the minutiae of the characters' day-to-day - that at times the political thriller starts to feel like a documentary, lending real-time urgency as we follow Edward Fox's Jackal, an assassin for hire meticulously plotting the assassination of Charles de Gaulle while the Parisian police struggle to track him, a faceless, nameless master of disguise.

★★★★★

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Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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Lara (2019)

All sorts of ideas about what is going on will run through your head watching this intense and drily funny character study of Lara (Lara Jenkins, the ubermother of a concert pianist) who, on her sixtieth birthday, buys up the remaining tickets for her son's premiere concert recital and spends the hours leading up to the event handing them out to her acquaintances, and exactly who she is and what she is doing and what drives her, and how and why she drives so many around her away, not just old coworkers who hate her but also her son who appears not to welcome her to his concert, isn't perfectly clear until the film ends with the formidable lead Corianne Harfouch's casting one last long deliciously ice-blue stare down the camera...and then you'll know.

★★★★★

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Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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Spider-Man:Across The Spider-Verse (2023)

First and foremost, this feature-length Spider-Man cartoon, which follows on from 2018's "Into The Spider-Verse", is art - captivating, enthralling mixed-media art that you can't take your eyes off - and then, on top of that, it is a thrilling sci-fi adventure, touching family drama, rousing coming-of-age story, love story and a superhero blockbuster against which all other superhero movies pale.

★★★★★

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

There are three minor issues to contend with watching this fifth and final Harrison Ford-led Indiana Jones adventure: one, the Uncanny Valley effect of Ford's de-aged face floating through the lengthy opening sequence; two, a plot development at the end that derails the whole movie (but only until one brief line of dialogue so glibly uttered you could miss it puts the minecart back on the track); and three, a moribund and frankly preposterous "go on without me, leave me here" moment at the end; but other than that, this is as good as Indiana Jones gets: a fun, fast, funny family blockbuster action adventure.

★★★★★

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Suspicion (1941)

By modern standards, the relationship between Cary Grant's Johnny and Joan Fontaine's "Monkeyface" - that's what he calls her - is chilling, not romantic: a wastrel, he binds her in a vicious cycle with her one moment suspecting him of plotting murder and the next feeling floods of relief and love once it's turned out he simply stole from her and lied about it - and Hitchcock plays similar games with his audience, combining moments of comedy (Nigel Bruce's duck calls and Grant's facial expressions and tickles) with murderous chills, referencing the real-life poisoning case of William Palmer as poor Monkeyface traverses that rollercoaster of love and giggles during the highs, and, during the dips, the fear her new husband is going to kill her for her money!

★★★★★

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End Of The Century (Fin de siglo) (2019)

In this beautiful slip of a film — a romance tinged with sadness — Ocho, an Argentine poet, encounters Javi, a producer of children's television, while knocking about Barcelona one day and after immediately hitting it off is startled to learn they first met twenty years earlier at a time when Ocho, perhaps due to the times, wasn't yet himself.

★★★★★

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Orlando (1992)

With her title character untethered by time and experiencing life in different male and female forms, Virginia Wolff in 1928 in her book Orlando: A Biography may have debuted the concept of the multiverse, not DC Comics in 1961; Sally Potter's adaptation of Wolff's book is full of painterly detail across the various times and locations, amuses with its sly humour, and lead Tilda Swinton transfixes as Orlando, staring out from the movie like a figure from a series of Romantic paintings come alive.

★★★★★

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Black Christmas (aka 'Stranger In The House') (1974)

This 1974 movie starring Margot Kidder continues a long tradition of suspense movies about women (usually one, but here a whole sorority houseful) threatened by - but safe inside from - a lunatic, eventually realising the danger comes from inside, not outside, the safehaven (The Spiral Staircase, When A Stranger Calls, for example) and it is an exceptionally effective, intelligent horror thriller: well-acted, with a large number of characters all fleshed-out and strong; rich in detail, and with some good humour which helps make, by comparison, the last twenty minutes especially deranged and terrifying!

★★★★★

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While We're Young (2014)

Husband and wife forty-somethings find themselves caught between two worlds — that of their procreating couple-friends, and the hipster orbit of a couple of twenty-somethings whose grooviness reinvigorates them — in this really very funny comedy with witty things to say about Gen Xers getting old and having to "hurry up because they've changed the rules, honey."

★★★★★

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The Conversation (1974)

In writer, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed 1974 mystery thriller, lonely and anonymous Harry Caul, a man extremely protective of his own right to privacy and secrets, ironically works as a wiretapper able to listen in on the conversations of others no matter what barriers - walls or crowds or bodies of water - stand between him and them; when his work for a shadowy someone surreptiously recording a couple's private conversations looks like it is going to abet violence, he is troubled because of his complicity, of course, but perhaps troubled mostly because the situation accentuates for him the fact that even the latest hi-tech bugging equipment - voice actuators and enormous reels of tape - can't overcome his remove from others.

★★★★★

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Rojo (2018)

The comings and goings of people from a suburban house and an altercation in a restaurant between two men, one the calm respectable lawyer and community leader Claudio and the other an agitated stranger who briefly upsets the restaurant's convivial atmosphere, are the not quite commonplace, slightly skew-whiff scenes that launch director Benjamin Naishtat's exceptional thriller; how the scenes are connected is unclear and the disparate moments continue (a fleeting tv commercial in which a model kills rather than shares his drink, a tv detective and former cop with an easy case on his hands, and a teenager to whom the immorality of simply disappearing a rival never occurs) but the movie gradually, unexpectedly ties these threads together while in the background the military coup that commenced Argentina's Dirty War starts being felt in the day-to-day of the characters.

 

★★★★★

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The Raid (2011)

This Indonesian action flick with a minimal plot, about police on the sixth floor of a tenement building surrounded on all sides and up and down by ruthless drug criminals, is one of the most violent movies you'll ever see but you'll be unable to tear your eyes from the gore (the fluorescent tubes to the neck and the bodies smashed into concrete and the bullets through heads, and so on and so on) because you'll be completely transfixed by the lightning-speed balletic action, perhaps the best martial arts action - or best action, period - ever filmed.

★★★★★

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Compulsion (1959)

Surely Ttuman Capote, often touted as the pioneer of the true crime novel, was in fact influenced either by journalist Meyer Levin's 1955 novel, Compulsion - a fiction based on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case - or by this movie adaptation of it which turns the disturbing subject matter (the 1924 murder in Chicago of a schoolkid at the hands of two Nietzsche-spouting teens) into an utterly compelling thriller, one that keeps so close to fact it really isn't a fiction at all - consider for example the fact that Orson Welles adopts prosthetics to look like real-life lawyer Clarence Darrow.

★★★★★

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The Cat And The Canary (1927)

One reason to watch Paul Leni's 1927 adaptation of John Willard's 1922 stage play is to marvel at just how influential a film it is - the best of the four film adaptations of the play so far (this one, the one in 1930, the funny one with Bob Hope in 1939, and the 1979 movie) and inspiration for a zillion spin-offs and variations (The Black Cat, The Spiral Staircase, House on Haunted Hill, Haunted Mansion...) - and another reason to watch is that it is fantastic - an atmospheric German expressionist silent horror that makes great use of the cinetechnology of the day, spliced as it is with imaginative concrete poetry intertitles and shot with blue and yellow tones to distinguish the lit or unlit scenes, not to mention a handful of shots using a red tone for the creepy or alarming moments - afterall, it is a movie about a group of people trapped for a night in a mansion where they've gathered for a will reading and where they learn almost unbelievably that they are prey to a murderous lunatic somewhere in or around the house.

★★★★★

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Out Of Africa (1985)

Based on Karen Blixen's 1937 memoir of her time spent in British East Africa, Sydney Pollack's unhurried romance stars Meryl Streep, her porcelain skin, Robert Redford, and his blue eyes, and tells a sweeping, poetic, heartbreaking love story - no, not between Streep's Blixen and Redford's Denys but between Blixen and the object of her profoundest love: verdant, spectacular Kenya.

★★★★★

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