Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

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Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Of course, the single purpose of these kaiju movies is to stage spectacular cgi fights between the towering beasts, which this movie does impressively and without a boggly ping-pong eyeball in sight; everything else - a signing child, a conceptually confusing Hollow Earth, a mystical glowing axe, a plethora of unnecessary characters (many of them annoying children with no business being there at all), a visit to Hong Kong, mecha-robots, "skullcrawlers", is just a whole lot of nonsense to fill the time and whether you care less about this filler will depend on which side of thirteen you are. 

★★★☆☆ (my score)

★★★★★ (my nephew's score)

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Gamera VS Viras (ガメラ対宇宙怪獣バイラス) (US: Destroy All Planets) (1968)

My first encounter with Gamera, the beloved icon from Japan's long-running kaiju movie series, was watching this 1968 movie, the fourth, that pits the fire-breathing turtle-with-a-frozen-stare against a fidgetspinner from outerspace with a bumblebee paint job; the incoherent monster battles that make up a bulk of the movie's ninety-one minutes entertain on account of their rudimentary but serviceable special effects, but you'll want to experience them with the tv muted — kaiju battles make nails down a blackboard sound positively melodic.

★★★☆☆

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