Books:
Fear and Trembling (1842, Søren Kierkegaard) – I’m generally more inclined to discuss fiction here, but this little philosophical classic kind of blew my mind. I was raised fully atheistically, but have always been surrounded and fascinated by religion. Over the years I’ve come to see faith as a very important part of life, yet also something necessarily far too personal and mysterious to be fully shared or standardised in the way that organised religion purports to have achieved. As such I really appreciate Kierkegaard’s courage in pretty much disregarding all pretense of contemporary organised religion in order to grapple directly with theological problems in a way that is at once individual and universal. It was exciting and rare to relate so much to something so old. Yes it’s still full of the usual impenetrable enlightenment-era jargon, but in terms of the style and actual points he was making, I often felt the author could be talking from 2025. This is not a book about enforcing a bunch of dogma or poring over detailed biblical exegesis, or trying to get to some kind of rational or logical proof of the fundamentally unknowable. It’s about the timeless struggle to find comfort and understanding with your own place in the infinite flow of life. This book has helped me become more comfortable in saying that I have faith, and I think I’ll be exploring that conclusion for however much time I have left on this planet.
She’s Always Hungry (2024, Eliza Clark) – I have mixed feelings on this collection, almost literally a fifty-fifty split as I liked/loved five of the eleven stories but was disappointed/annoyed with the other five. (The one remainder is just a few pages of pretend Just Eat reviews for a surreal takeaway restaurant, and I hesitate to actually call it a story at all. To me it really was just empty literary calories – perhaps that’s the point? I saw it as a waste). The five I really liked were Hollow Bones, Goth GF, Nightstalkers, Shake Well, and The King. I would especially recommend The King and Hollow Bones, which for my money contain the best writing and also best encapsulate the collection’s general themes of desire, manipulation, gender, and a sort of darkly comic social cynicism that can be quite disturbing. These stories also have great characters and at least try towards a plot – two things I found lacking from the other five, Build a Body Like Mine, The Problem Solver, She’s Always Hungry, Extinction Event, and Company Man. I did like aspects of each of these, particularly Company Man and She’s Always Hungry, but as actual stories, for me they fell somewhere between unrefined and unfinished. I think material this intense and topical needs more than the surface level and sometimes cliché treatment given here. Still, no anthology is ever free from duds, and the variety alone is definitely impressive. There’s something for everyone here, so I do recommend it.
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967) – My only issue with this was that I really felt I needed notes to better appreciate the historical/biographical context. I recommend familiarising yourself with the author’s life and career in Stalinist Russia a little before reading – I only did so afterwards. As a result, much of my experience felt like an endless and meandering series of surreal episodes sharing no meaningful connection. It is extremely heavy on themes, satire, and symbolism. But even as the story tested the limits of my narrative preferences, I was never less than delighted by the imagination and creativity of what was happening. It is beautifully written (I had the Michael Glenny translation), very funny, and overall just vastly more joyous and flat-out entertaining than I ever presumed a piece of Soviet-era literature would or could be. I also loved how philosophical things got. There is a really amazing depiction of Jesus that I’ve been thinking about ever since reading it. And once I did learn a bit more of the context, I could better appreciate Bulkagov’s artistic brilliance in creating such a singular novel in the first place. Of all things, it reminded me in many ways of Twin Peaks in its seamless interweaving of melodrama, slapstick comedy, and dark spiritual abstraction. And I love Twin Peaks. I will certainly revisit this thing some day, and recommend it to anyone.
This Mournable Body (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 2018) – (currently reading)
Films:
Chopping Mall (1986, Jim Wynorski) – This was only sporadically fun, but I admired its commitment to stupidity.
Carry-On (2024, Jaume Collet-Serra) – A script with some potential, hampered by super bland direction and widespread miscasting. I would have liked a much schlubbier protagonist and a much slimier villain, for example.
Nosferatu (2024, Robert Eggers) – This didn’t disappoint. Completely sumptuous in its atmosphere and evocation of a specific time and place. Excellent performances across the board, with an honestly jaw-dropping turn from Bill Skarsgård, who is clearly an actual vampire posing as a human actor and not the other way around. I was also pleased with the depth of the themes of lust, gender, sexual assault, and repression; it actually moved me a fair bit. I also know I’m not alone in finding this a surprisingly erotic and romantic experience. All in all, a truly unique and memorable take on the Dracula story, which is no small feat given the hundreds already on record. I might even call it the best adaptation I’ve seen, though I guess it’s not quite as flat-out entertaining as the Coppola one. A strong recommendation, anyway.
Smiley Face (2006, Gregg Araki) – There’s a YouTuber I like called Karsten Runquist who says this obscure stoner comedy is one of his all-time favourite films, and he’s not even a smoker. I’m no stranger to the devil’s lettuce myself, and I also like Anna Faris. If you like Anna Faris at all, watch this. There never was a film with more Anna Faris content. I certainly enjoyed it; a rather odd story, but likable and entertaining.
Slither (2006, James Gunn) – Of the James Gunn films I’ve seen, I like but do not love them. This one is no exception. It was impressively disgusting and creepy but throughout it all I had the sense something was missing, though I couldn’t figure out exactly what. It may be to do with the protagonist’s mantle kind of shifting around between three different characters, none of whom are very developed. Or maybe it needed just one more twist or turn in the story to keep things interesting all the way to the end. I dunno. Worth a watch if you want some cheap thrills and cool monster makeup.
Mission: Impossible (1996, Brian De Palma) – Another film that I would mildly recommend if you’re looking for a bit of excitement and nothing more. Like all the movies in this franchise, there is that one sequence that is really intense and well-executed and will guarantee to make you excited. I’ve seen most of the series, and sadly this first one failed the hardest to make me actually care about the mission itself. Tom Cruise is quite an asshole in this actually. I wanted him to get caught!
Heretic (2024, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) – Yeesh. Easily my least favourite watch of the year thus far. This one hurt even worse on account of it being the product of one of those evenings where we all spent ages trying to decide on something to watch, only to horribly regret our ultimate choice. Heretic has garnered good reviews all round, which I can only explain as some kind of anomaly in the space-time continuum. It’s not remotely scary, it’s interminably slow, the story is utterly incoherent, it’s not half as clever or compelling as it thinks it is, and I honestly have no clue at all what the point was ever supposed to be, other than to sell tickets via surface level similarity to other, vastly better A24 films. Hugh Grant is fun and all but even he is totally wasted by these filmmakers – who, it turns out, are the very same hack frauds behind 2023’s The Boogeyman, which is literally my go-to example of a 0/10 movie. It almost feels like my fault for not knowing that ahead of time and sparing myself this entire experience. Almost.
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003, McG) – Genuinely incredible. 10/10.
Godzilla (1954, Ishirō Honda) – I had the pleasure of seeing this on a big screen and really liked it. Artful, never boring, and surprisingly haunting. You can see why it took off the way it did. I want more Godzilla in my life, hopefully I can get it soon.
Alien: Romulus (2024, Fede Álvarez) – I’m not much of a gamer but I recently played through Alien: Isolation and completely loved its recreation and expansion of the original film’s indelible atmosphere. Clearly the series went off the rails over time, but that first one remains perfect. Romulus, on the other hand, I genuinely forgot I had even seen for some time before remembering I meant to write about it. Supposedly this instalment was intended to take things back to the original vision, and to that end, the filmmakers even took a lot of inspiration from the game. Plus it actually got a lot of good reviews from fans and critics alike. Going in, I knew about the unfortunate CGI reanimation of Ian Holm, and hated that on principle, but still, my hopes were high – only to be dashed almost instantly. The characters are insultingly low effort and uniformly unlikable. Everything is very heavy-handed and unconvincing, with none of the subtlety or psychology of the original whatsoever. And it is just chock-full of distractingly baffling decisions: the android swapping (terrible) accents without anyone seeming to notice, the nonsensically speeded up evolution of the creatures, the shamelessly forced inclusion of famous lines from the other films…. I hated it. Say what you want about Prometheus, but at least it was memorable in its own right. Soon I will go back to not thinking about this movie ever again. My sole compliment is that I did appreciate the effort to not rely entirely on CGI for the monster effects, but that almost makes it worse. Like that’s all they think matters. I imagine the superficial elements were all conceived and designed long before anyone had a halfway interesting script. This is all to say that I would not sincerely recommend Alien: Romulus to anyone.
Silver Bullet (1985, Dan Attias) – A pretty solid werewolf movie, which isn’t something you get to say very often. Poor werewolves, nobody cares about werewolves. It isn’t quite as good as the Stephen King thing it’s based on (which is something you get to say every ten minutes) but it was still good. Gary Busey is great. I was also very happy because my main man Big Ed Hurley from Twin Peaks is here and looking absolutely fabulous. I might have to make him the featured image for this page.
The Monkey (2025, Osgood Perkins) – I got quite little out of this experience overall. Theo James is quite good in one role and quite not good in another. There are some fairly memorable comedic beats. The opening scene is impressively disgusting. But I feel this is a film which has not got enough confidence in the simple brilliance of its premise (which is basically the only aspect unchanged from the source material, written by – you guessed it – Stephen King) and thus tries to overcompensate with a bunch of really plotty stuff that is way too convoluted to care about. I think if you’ve got such a specific central device as the monkey itself and what it represents, then your best course is to simply pursue that alone, as straightforwardly as you can, for ninety minutes. Like, just chronologically tell the story of these guy’s lives, punctuated by the episodic death sequences, all the thematic stuff is inherently woven in, and that’s enough. If you instead begin with the insane premise and then proceed to tell an increasingly absurd story in an increasingly confusing way, soon you, like Dean Pelton, are just doing random crap. So, I liked parts of this but it did not approach the heights of Longlegs for me and I remain fairly neutral about Perkins’s filmography so far.
Ju-On: The Curse (2000, Takashi Shimizu) – This is a really low-budget, direct-to-video horror movie that was technically the first instalment of the Japanese horror series The Grudge. I’ve always heard good things about the series so we decided to rent it, only to realise later that there was also a sequel which reuses 30 minutes of footage from the original and was released immediately after it, and that the third in the series, which was the first to be released theatrically, was also basically a higher budget remake of the first movie, and it’s that film which is actually called Ju-On: The Grudge (2003) and is what we were actually wanting to watch. I think. And even The Curse is an expansion of two short films that preceded it, Katasumi and 4444444444. Not to mention the American remake series which began the following year. It’s all very confusing. But there’s something extremely apt in this constant retelling of the same accursed story. I’ll watch the others at some point. In any case I thought this movie was shockingly good. Its super low-grain, digital look makes it a retroactive example of what the kids today are calling ‘analog horror’. There is something so creepy about the way early digital cameras render the world. Very Inland Empire. And speaking of Lynch, the sound design is nothing short of masterful. So few films make full use of sound, but it’s especially powerful in horror. When this was over it was very hard not to experience little auditory hallucinations. The whole aesthetic is perfectly uncanny. And I also loved its disregard for a conventional narrative. There’s just a real palpable hopelessness and confusion to everything, that sense of doom and tragedy. I love it when the supernatural really feels supernatural, and the emphasis is on the resistance to any attempt at human reasoning or explanation. The movie is also really short and really focused. For what it is, I’d call this nearly perfect.
The Love Witch (2016, Anna Biller) – I watched this when it came out but hardly remembered it – this time felt like seeing a new movie. And I very much liked what I saw! Maybe 19 was too young to appreciate the fairly deep and disturbing movie obscured under all the artifice. But what impressive artifice it is, flawlessly recreating its 70s aesthetic in beautiful colour, lighting, costuming, makeup, and cinematography. It’s just an absolute treat for the eyes. The casting is perfect too – I didn’t even know they made people who look like this anymore. The main actor’s performance is so alien. It keeps alternating between hilarious and horrifying. There are some great characters. I feel it’s maybe ever so slightly lacking something on a story level where the characters sort of lose momentum towards the end, but I can’t put my finger on it. Thematically there’s a lot to read into here about sex, power, and madness. A really singular work that I’d strongly recommend.
Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) – Sadly disappointed by this. While I was a big fan of the aesthetic – the visuals and the use of sound – that’s sort of all I got out of it. I was baffled by the way the story was told; it seemed wrong somehow. And unfortunately I just couldn’t get on board with the turns the plot was taking towards the end. Still worth a look if you’re big on J-horror, and the whole first third is undeniably very spooky.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970, Jaromil Jireš) – This is fucking mental. I felt at various points that I had actually been transported into someone else’s dream. It’s a Czech fantasy film about a girl whose grandmother turns into a vampire or something, and also her brother is in love with her, and another vampire man wants to marry her or something. Funny, creepy, and trippy in equal measure. A uniquely disorienting experience – the sort of thing I value implicitly. Seek it out if you dare.
The Apprentice (2024, Ali Abbas) – I wasn’t expecting to like this so much. The filmmaking has a scummy and soulless quality that is intoxicating, like doom scrolling – perfect for the subject matter. I was not born until 1996 so had little experience of pre-presidency Trump. By the end of the movie I felt I understood him much better not only as a person but a whole cultural phenomenon. Somehow it makes him even more repulsive. The acting is fantastic – Jeremy Strong nails it of course, but Sebastian Stan stole the show for me. Rather than another rote imitation, he creates an incredibly distinct cinematic character while being nonetheless uncannily evocative of the real man. I was really really impressed by him. Overall, it’s naturally a very depressing film, but one that earns its inherent historical weight. I’m just glad they were able to make it at all.
Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock) – I really ought to do a full Hitchcock run-through sometime. Psycho and Rear Window are two of my favourite movies, but while I remember enjoying North by Northwest and Vertigo when I saw them many years ago, neither much stuck with me. My experience of Rope fell somewhere in between. Despite some admirably pulpy (and, pleasantly surprisingly for the time, queer) performances from the killers, I was finding myself slightly bored for the first few scenes. But as soon as Jimmy Stewart arrived I was totally hooked. Near the climax, I actually declared to my friends “I think this might be my favourite fictional character of all time”. I’ve never seen Stewart go quite as dark as he does here. His character is so thoroughly dripping with smug contempt that you can actually see the mischievous joy beneath it all. The script does a brilliant job of introducing him first by reputation, through the proselytising of his deluded students, so that when he actually does appear in person he manages to be simultaneously more and less slimy than you expected. And he is just so clever. Sometimes all you need is two clever assholes fighting it out. The cat-and-mouse game that develops is genuinely intense and takes some ingenious turns. In a way, I knew the ending probably couldn’t quite live up to that cleverness, but even so, it was a touch too contrived and phony for my liking. Oh yeah, and with regards to the whole one-take thing, it was fantastic for the most part but Lord, some of those ‘hidden’ cuts are ugly. Overall, not a perfect movie, but one I thoroughly enjoyed and am sure to revisit for Jimmy Stewart alone.
Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler) – Like many, I had next to no idea what this movie was actually about until I was watching it. And it’s about a hell of a lot! I think in fact it’s maybe about too many things, if one can say that. There is a lot going on, many characters, and many themes, some worn on the sleeve and some more ambiguous. It even has three or four different endings. I think perhaps a rewatch is in order for me to be able to get it all. But the main thing I enjoyed about this film (and I did enjoy it quite a bit) was what an honest-to-goodness movie it is. From top to bottom the whole thing is just brimming with passion and love. You can feel how much everyone involved actually cared. It actually tries to be entertaining, moving, shocking, thought-provoking – it’s even sexy hot at times! The acting is great, the photography is great, and the music is excellent. Nowadays such things are sadly a rarity in big-budget Hollywood. Here I could actually see where the budget had gone. It was so filling; nourishing. I would say the weak point is the screenplay, but even then I really liked a lot of it, particularly the character work. Like Rope, Sinners is not exactly perfect but I’d definitely recommend it to anyone.
Son of Godzilla (1967, Jun Fukuda) – I may as well pack it in right here because you cannot show me a more enjoyable movie than Son of Godzilla in 2025 or in any year, for the rest of my life, or until time stops. 10/10.
The Craft (1996, Andrew Fleming) – This just proves my point above. It was fine, I liked Fairuza Balk’s performance, and it had some cool moments, but there were zero giant mantises and not even one scene where Godzilla’s son Minilla did anything. Look at him! Why would anyone bother making a film where he was not the main character? At least put him in one scene. He could just be in the background farting around. Even if the witch girls had just been watching Son of Godzilla on TV or something it would have bumped the whole thing up to a 9/10. I don’t know what the actual score would be, I don’t like scoring movies. I like giving movies tens or zeroes but that’s just for laughs. Scores annoy me.
Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman) – While this film also lacked any appearances from Godzilla’s son Minilla, we’ll let that slide seeing as it did predate his existence. Also, the movie was actually really good in spite of that obvious flaw. I’m finally back on some Bergman after my last encounter with his work in late 2024 (for reference I am writing this part in May 2025). That was Autumn Sonata, a horrifically depressing two-hander wherein two women (one of them Liv Ullman) sit in a house and go gradually mad together, tearing into each other’s souls, each one revealing themselves a kind of reflection of the other. Persona felt almost like a feverish recollection of Autumn Sonata even though the latter came out many years afterwards. I was completely unprepared for how abstract and surreal Bergman goes here. It is a straight-up art film, and beautifully done. My admiration for his filmmaking has gained an entirely new dimension. There were a great many things here I was unprepared for, actually. It’s violent, intense, and sexual in a way that is uncomfortable even by today’s standards. I can hardly believe it came out when it did. It’s also one of those cases where I’ve seen (and loved) a number of later movies without even realising they were referencing this one. Like most people, I haven’t much of a clue what Persona means but I was very effectively hypnotised and more than a little freaked out. I’m sure I’ll come back to it again and again.
Slade in Flame (1975, Richard Loncraine) – This was an odd one. Apart from Merry Xmas Everybody, my main experience with Slade is from their amazing portrayal in the works of Vic and Bob, which I have since learned is even less accurate than I always assumed. I watched this with my dad, who actually saw it in the cinema when it came out but said he remembered nothing of it. It was fun as a time capsule, and the story did take an interestingly dark turn towards the end, but overall I didn’t get a whole lot out of it other than a slightly increased appreciation for Slade’s musical range. Tom Conti was good in it.
Audition (1999, Takashi Miike) – I simply loved this movie. It was extremely well made in every single respect. There was just a style and a mood that made me crazy I liked it so much. And then it was completely and utterly fucked up and I actually got a bit angry at how horrific it becomes towards the end. But of course that was the whole point. A fantastic movie that is nonetheless wholeheartedly diabolical. I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anybody except my fellow depraved aesthetes. If you know, you know.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025, Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein) – I have no real love for this franchise, having only seen the second and third outings (though I remember the second has a few admirable moments). But I found this movie shockingly well made. The opening at the restaurant is genuinely captivating and tense for the most part. I straight-up loved the whole garden party sequence and the garbage truck scene. It has a lot of skilfully executed examples of playing with expectations and visual trickery that are just very fun to experience. And I did enjoy a few of the characters quite a bit; there’s some good acting here, which lends actual stakes to the preposterous story. Focusing it on a family was a good idea. In general there seemed to be a bit more empathy this time than I remember from the other movies, and I can’t praise that enough. Taking the time to create likable characters makes it far more impactful when they are inevitably crushed by piano or what have you. And the cameo from Tony Todd was so meaningful as to quite literally transcend the film it’s a part of. So yeah, I liked it a lot. The main flaws are the boring main character and the abundance of bad CGI. Why not just build some mannequins and fill them with jelly? It would look so much better. Overall I recommend it if you’re looking for a very silly time that nonetheless had a fair bit of care put into it.