amoxitoxin is quiet, but not done.
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羅 丁豪
phd in neuroscience
data science
science journalism
phd in neuroscience
data science · sci. journalism
my thoughts on…
عنکبوت مقدس Abbasi has said he wanted to make not a serial killer film but a film about a serial killer society, and Holy Spider is at its most convincing when it follows that approach. Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani) murders sixteen sex workers in Mashhad, and what Abbasi captures with genuine force is the institutional architecture around the killings: police who will not file missing-persons reports, a courtroom that tilts toward the defence, a public that gathers outside in solidarity with the killer. The city does not merely fail to stop the murders; it cannot bring itself to call them wrong. This is, I think, the ‘serial killer society’ that Abbasi is trying to capture. Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who deservedly won Best Actress at Cannes), the journalist that Abbasi invented to carry the investigation, holds the film’s procedural half together. She arrives in Mashhad and cannot even get a hotel room as a single woman; the police chief shows up at her door on the pretence of discussing the case and, when she rejects his advances, threatens her with the fact that nobody would believe her over him; her male reporter counterpart Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), who is ostensibly her ally, repeats rumours about her past and self-censors his own reporting to avoid offending religious authorities. Every man in the institutional chain wears the same carnelian ring that Saeed wears; Abbasi does not underline this, but it is hard to miss. Ebrahimi plays Rahimi with a taut, furious restraint that holds the procedural together even when the plotting crumbles around her (she poses as bait on her first night out, with Sharifi as her tail; he promptly loses sight of her and Hanaei in the backstreets). Her determination, in this context, reads less as procedural convention than as sustained defiance against a city whose institutions would rather she disappeared too. It is a shame, then, that the film does not extend the same attention to the sixteen women that Rahimi is fighting for. The camera gives Saeed interiority and gives his victims, at most, the few minutes before they die; even in a film about a society that refuses to see these women, the film itself struggles to see them. On the other hand, though, this may be an understandable trade-off: Abbasi’s subject is the machinery, not the individuals it destroys, and a film that tried to hold sixteen lives in focus would be a fundamentally different one. But the absence of depth is certainly regrettably palpable. When Saeed is finally caught, the relief is oddly thin, as though it belongs to a different kind of film; Abbasi’s detachment is so thorough that the catharsis reads less as justice delivered than as the director’s wish imposed on a society that would not have produced it on its own terms. Rahimi, on a bus back to Tehran, watches a video of Saeed’s son demonstrating the murders on his little sister, rehearsing the strangling with something that looks like joy. The spider’s web holds. 세계의 주인 ‘The World of Love’; the Korean title is ‘세계의 주인’, closer to ‘master of the world’, something that the Chinese translation ‘世界的主人’ captures quite well. The protagonist is Lee Joo-in (Seo Su-bin), 이주인, with ‘주인’ having the double entendre of ‘owner’, ‘master’. Her name is the title’s claim; and it took me most of Yoon Ga-eun’s third feature to work out what Yoon meant by it. For the first thirty minutes, the film plays like a teen comedy: Jooin is bright, physical, fearless, play-fighting with friends and practising taekwondo. Then a school petition circulates against a sex offender released into the neighbourhood, and it contains a sentence: ‘sexual assault completely destroys a person’s life’. Jooin will not sign the petition. In the argument that follows she says something that shocks the room, and the audience realises, with the characters, that she is speaking from her experience of being a survivor. A cousin, also a survivor, was once derided in court for not being sad enough; Jooin has seen what that scrutiny looks like, and she has answered it by refusing to perform pain at all (This did not destroy me. See? I am bright and playful, and I govern my own world). The world does not accept this, though. Anonymous notes arrive; classmates who signed without hesitation treat her silence as evidence of something unsayable. Nobody asks what she thinks; they ask why she will not perform what they expect her to feel. Yoon constructs this machinery with patient, almost documentary precision: the notes, the whispered re-readings of Jooin’s brightness as concealment, the slow withdrawal of people who were her ‘friends’ a week earlier. At home, the strain falls differently. Her father, absent for three years, reads her texts and rarely replies. Her younger brother Hae-in has his own performance: magic tricks for the family, worries placed into a box and made to disappear. He stages a talent show to do this in front of his mother and sister; neither comes, and the trick fails. Jooin performs wholeness and the world calls it a lie. Hae-in performs healing and the family cannot even show up to watch. Everyone around Jooin has decided what shape her suffering should take; when it refuses that shape, they find it easier to doubt the suffering than to revise the expectation. There is a slight sense, at times, that the film knows this too neatly, that every thread points the same direction with a precision that leaves little room for mess. Then again, that precision is also why it lands as hard as it does; a messier film might feel more truthful scene by scene and lose the force of the whole. The car wash scene is the film’s centre of gravity. Jooin and her mother sit in the car while the machinery roars around them, and Yoon places the camera on the backseat, turning the audience into a passenger. Jooin screams, cries, completely breaking down: why didn’t you watch over me, you’re my mother, you should have been looking. Most of it is swallowed by the noise. Her mother says nothing. She hands her a tissue, then water. Un poeta I did not realise that Ubeimar Rios, the actor playing Oscar Restrepo, is debuting in Un Poeta. A literature professor in Medellín gives us a performance with the quality of someone inhabiting a possible version of his own life rather than acting; I would not have known had I not read it afterward. His Oscar loves poetry: he idolises the suicidal José Asunción Silva, despises García Márquez, argues about Colombian verse on street corners, and makes regular spectacles of himself at poetry readings, ranting about artistic futility to rooms that have long stopped caring. His passion for literature is visible in every tirade, almost physically present. He is also a drunk, a terrible father, and the sort of man whom everyone around him has learned to tolerate rather than respect; and what Mesa Soto does, patiently and without ever asking the audience to choose, is hold these two facts in the same frame for two hours. Oscar takes a substitute teaching job and discovers Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade, also a first-timer), a fourteen-year-old from a poor barrio whose writing surprises him. He brings her into Medellín’s literary establishment, and what follows is a chain in which each use of her enables the next: the poetry school packages her as a progressive mascot to attract donors; the European backers write cheques for a story about a girl rescued from poverty through verse; Yurlady’s family sees money and extends a hand; Oscar wants a second chance at relevance. Everyone involved is convinced that what they are doing is helping. The progressive language and the exploitation wear the same face; the self-justification at each level is so total that it barely registers as deception. Oscar is, I think, the least malicious person in this chain, and for that exact reason the most usable: his love of poetry is genuine, and under this System, genuine care for art is itself a resource that the machinery can extract from. The person who cares the most becomes the one that everyone else can most efficiently convert into a tool. Shot on 16mm with a cast drawn entirely from non-professionals, Un Poeta has the texture of something observed rather than staged; the satire cuts deeper for it, each scene playing as naturalistic comedy until it becomes clear that nobody in the room intends to intervene. I opened this review with the fact that Rios is a literature professor, and two hours later that fact has changed shape. He did not need to learn how to play a man who loves poetry and cannot survive on it. He already knew. The Drama Borgli has made two films now about thought crimes: Dream Scenario (2023; wonderful acting by Nick Cage, by the way) about a man persecuted for appearing in other people’s nightmares, and now The Drama, about a woman persecuted for a thought upon which she never acted. What interests Borgli, it seems, is not the thought crimes themselves, but the social machinery that processes them. One central scene exemplifies what I am trying to get at. At a wedding tasting, one week before the ceremony, Rachel (Alana Haim) proposes a confessions game: everyone shares the worst thing they have ever done. Mike (Mamoudou Athie), her husband, admits he once used his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against an attacking dog. Rachel follows, recounting with disarming levity how as a child she lured a mentally disabled boy into a trailer, locked him in a closet, and left him there overnight while a search party combed the neighbourhood (she did not even tell others where the boy was when asked; ‘out of fear’, she said). Charlie (Robert Pattinson), Emma’s fiancé, offers something vague about cyberbullying, so underspecified it may not have happened at all. Then Emma (Zendaya), anxious and more than a little drunk, confesses that as a lonely, bullied fifteen-year-old she had planned a school shooting she never carried out. Borgli, with a brutal coldness, films the room that receives this. Nobody asks why; probably nobody thinks to care about why. Rachel turns on her with a fury she frames as personal (a cousin of hers was paralysed in a shooting), but the speed of the turn betrays something else: having just narrated her own actually-committed crime with a shrug, she converts the guilt she cannot face inwards into outrage she can direct outwards. The person who proposed the game and set the conditions for the exposure becomes the first to weaponise it, because prosecuting Emma’s thought crime is so much easier than sitting with what her own confession revealed about herself. This is what I meant by ‘the social machinery that processes thought crimes’, and it extends well beyond Rachel. Charlie spirals into fantasy sequences where Borgli replaces Zendaya with the teenage Emma (Jordyn Curet) holding a gun; he nearly sleeps with a coworker days before the wedding. Everyone in the room has carried something, and everyone responds to Emma’s disclosure by fortifying their own moral position rather than examining hers. The confessions game becomes a precise metaphor for how contemporary American culture processes gun violence at large: the rush to assign culpability, the performance of outrage as proof of one’s own goodness, the refusal to ask the question that might actually matter (‘Why? What drove young Emma to have such terrible thoughts?’). Nobody at the dinner table wants to know what engendered the thought crimes, because the answer would implicate structures they benefit from and a failure of care they participate in: why poke at the System when one can comfortably sit in their own moral-highground bubble, protected by that same System? A pro-gun father in Louisiana, the grinding isolation of school bullying, a world that offered a fifteen-year-old no legible exit: these are conditions that could be met with therapy, with genuine conversation, with the kind of sustained attention that costs something. Instead they are met with a confessions game at a wine tasting, where the worst thing you have ever done is either a punchline or a prosecution, and only the person who did not act is made to answer for it. The Capture Season 3 The first two seasons of The Capture were prophecy. In 2019 Chanan dramatised the fabrication of video evidence as a classified intelligence programme; by 2022 he had escalated to AI-generated footage deployed in geopolitical warfare; by 2026 the technology is available to anyone with a laptop, and the audience has caught up. The challenge for Season 3 is that deepfakes are no longer speculative horror; they are Tuesday. Chanan’s solution is structural: stop asking whether the footage can be trusted and start asking whether human agency itself can survive the systems that were built to manage it. Simon, the autonomous AI that has replaced human judgment within a rogue military unit called The Increment, ordering assassinations, engineering false-flag operations, modelling human behaviour with such precision that prediction becomes indistinguishable from control, is the concept that keeps the show ahead of its audience. Colonel Figgis (Linus Roache) and his operatives follow Simon’s directives with the faith of converts; William Walker (Killian Scott), an E Squadron operative bound to Simon through a cardiac implant that monitors and overrides his volition, eventually rips the device from his own chest in an act of defiance that is also, functionally, a death sentence. The moment is the season’s sharpest image: a man tearing out the machine that made him calculable, knowing that freedom and survival have become mutually exclusive. The season’s most devastating provocation is Carey’s (Holliday Grainger) decision to use Correction herself: fabricating footage that depicts the real killer, deploying the weapon she spent two seasons fighting to dismantle, because the legitimate system cannot produce the truth. It is precisely the moral compromise the show has been building toward across three series, and the consequences are immediate; The Increment neutralises her broadcast in seconds, and the act itself becomes permanent leverage against her. The free-will question operates at every level simultaneously: Walker’s implant literally overrides his volition, Simon models behaviour with such accuracy that autonomy becomes an artefact of incomplete information, and Carey’s fixation on procedural justice makes her as calculable as a soldier following orders. Yet the show maintains a faith in justice while systematically dismantling every institution that claims to produce it; the insistence that truth should matter becomes the only ground from which the questions worth asking can be asked. Carey ends the season as SO15 Commander with nominal autonomy, but Figgis makes the terms plain: stay in her lane. The System has not defeated her; it has absorbed her, which is worse, because absorption looks enough like victory that one can almost mistake it for progress. GRIME II A significant step up from the original in almost every dimension that matters. Where the first GRIME built an unsettling, surreal world out of living rock and sinew, GRIME II expands that world’s vocabulary: boss encounters now feel like conversations between the player and the game’s internal logic, each demanding a different mode of reading, and the map design achieves a layered interconnectedness that rewards curiosity at nearly every turn. The narrative has matured too. Even as a prequel, GRIME II folds questions about creation, accountability, and the violence inherent to both making and consuming art into the original’s oblique mythology with a confidence that feels contemporary rather than decorative. Each biome sustains its own visual and mechanical identity, distinct enough in mob variety and aesthetic that transitions between zones carry real texture. The frustrations are concentrated in a single department: platforming. The controls lack the responsiveness the late-game demands, and the wall-dash ability, reminiscent of Constance (2025)’s equivalent, compounds the problem on a controller; inputs misfire regularly, turning what should be fluid traversal into a friction exercise. A flaw that sits at the intersection of ambition and execution: the designers clearly wanted more dynamic movement, but the implementation is not quite there. The timing is unlucky, too. In a year where MIO: Memories in Orbit (2026) has already set a near-unreachable bar for metroidvania map and movement design, GRIME II’s ceiling feels lower than it should. A strong sequel that earns its improvements honestly; just one that arrives in the shadow of something exceptional. In the Blink of an Eye The Neanderthal sequences in In the Blink of an Eye are probably the film’s argument in its purest form. A Paleolithic family speaks in an invented language with no subtitles; the audience understands through bodies, gesture, proximity, and image alone. Stanton, who has had ample experience from his animation career telling stories without relying on dialogue, commits fully here: a father’s illness, a daughter learning to survive, the first encounter with another species of human. Thomas Newman’s score carries these scenes with the particular melancholic awe he has always done well. It is stripped-down storytelling where the image does all the work, and it is the closest the film gets to what it is actually about: the experience of humanity across deep time. Sadly, the other two timelines do not hold. A present-day romance between an anthropologist and a statistics student unfolds largely over FaceTime; a solo astronaut four centuries from now shares her ship with a sentient AI. Both rely on exactly what the Neanderthal sequences bypass: expository dialogue, verbal emotion, characters explaining themselves. At ninety-four minutes, the scope is too vast for the running time; chapters feel missing, depth sacrificed to keep the braid moving. The comparisons to Cloud Atlas (2012) are inevitable and unflattering. I wish Stanton had trusted the Neanderthal register enough to build the whole film inside it. Rhythm Doctor There are rhythm games that overwhelm one with inputs, treating complexity as the measure of depth: Djmax (2004), IIDX (1999), the entire Bemani lineage. Then there are those that strip everything back and discover that simplicity, pressed hard enough, reveals its own kind of complexity. Rhythm Doctor belongs to the second tradition, and it may be the finest example of it. A single button. One mechanic: press on the seventh beat. From this constraint, 7th Beat Games builds something remarkable: a linear narrative where every character’s backstory is given space to breathe, where the player’s relationship to each patient accrues emotional weight across hours, because the format never drowns intimacy in mechanical noise. The finale is devastating precisely because the game has earned it, beat by beat, through carefully controlled escalation. What sets Rhythm Doctor apart from other narratively ambitious rhythm games is the window-theatre. The game treats the desktop itself as a performance space: windows multiply, fracture, stack, and rearrange in ways that are simultaneously baffling and perfectly choreographed. Too many scenes produce astonishment because the spectacle is in precise service of emotion. The sensation is akin to finishing a short novel that felt like a long one: dense with feeling, but never padded. I wanted to erase my memory and start again immediately. Few games produce that impulse; fewer still justify it. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 It has been a long time since a show set in Westeros felt like it was for something rather than against its audience. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms refuses to compete with Game of Thrones (2011) on any of that show’s terms: no sprawling geopolitics, no cynical power calculus, no escalation toward ever-larger spectacles of cruelty. What Ira Parker builds instead is a world that feels inhabited in the way that the best historical fiction does, not as a stage for consequence but as a place where people eat and argue and sleep in mud. The market scenes in episode two alone contain more incidental texture than most prestige television manages in an entire run. Peter Claffey’s Ser Duncan the Tall carries the show with an earnestness that would be fatal in Game of Thrones and is precisely right here: a hedge knight from Flea Bottom with no lineage, no proof of knighthood, and no instinct for self-preservation, whose response to watching a prince break a puppeteer’s fingers is to beat the prince unconscious. Dexter Sol Ansell’s Egg, revealed as a Targaryen prince who shaved his head and ran away because he wanted to be a squire, gives Dunk a mirror he did not ask for: the class asymmetry between them is never resolved, only navigated, episode by episode, with an awkwardness that feels true. The Trial of Seven in episode five is where the show earns its weight. Dunk must find six knights willing to fight and possibly die for him, a nobody, and the melee that follows is filmed with the muddy, contingent brutality that medieval combat demands: no hyper-edited blurs, no heroic choreography, just bodies colliding with consequences. Bertie Carvel’s Prince Baelor, who vouched for Dunk and then fought for him, dies when his own brother Maekar’s blow caves in his skull; the helmet removal is the season’s most devastating image, and the ambiguity over whether the blow was deliberate echoes across everything that follows. It is the one moment that channels Game of Thrones’ signature capacity for gut-punch, and it lands because the show has spent five episodes building the warmth that makes loss register. I have not loved a pairing like Dunk and Egg in years. Whether the show can sustain what it has built is a question for next season; for now, it is enough to say that it has built something worth sustaining. Project Hail Mary In the first half I was briefly returned to something I had thought lost: the feeling of watching Interstellar (2014) in a cinema for the first time, that specific species of awe that comes from naive eyes confronting the scale of the cosmos. The curiosity, the problem-solving, the slow revelation of an alien intelligence utterly unlike anything human: all of it lands. Rocky is one of the strangest and most affecting screen presences in recent science fiction, and the film earns every moment of connection between him and Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling). This was the space film I had been wanting since Interstellar (2014) and Arrival (2016), the one that treats scientific ingenuity not as a plot device but as a mode of being. And then the second half arrives, and with it, the studio. The emotional machinery, which in the first hour runs quietly beneath the surface, is suddenly dragged into the open and operated at maximum volume. Subtlety is abandoned; several passages feel as though they are pointing at the audience and screaming. There is a particular kind of Hollywood emotional manipulation that works by removing all ambiguity from a scene, so the viewer has no choice but to feel the prescribed feeling at the prescribed moment, and this film, beholden to the demands of the mainstream blockbuster, falls into that trap repeatedly in its second half. The grief becomes performance; the wonder becomes instruction.One leaves with a sense of waste that is, in its own way, as powerful as any feeling the film intended to produce. It is not often that a film’s failure is itself interesting, but here the gap between what the first hour promises and what the second hour delivers is so wide that it becomes its own kind of argument about the structural conditions under which science fiction is allowed to exist in mainstream cinema. Hoppers Hoppers wears environmentalist clothing so conspicuously that one is invited to admire the tailoring rather than examine the politics underneath. Mabel, a nineteen-year-old student, gains access to technology that lets her inhabit a robotic beaver to infiltrate the animal world and oppose a mayor’s plan to build a freeway through a wildlife glade. The premise promises systemic critique: capital and state power colluding to destroy the commons. But the film dissolves its own argument. By the final act the mayor’s ecological violence is quietly forgiven, the freeway rerouted, the glade preserved, and the resolution is personal reconciliation rather than structural change. The message, stripped bare: capitalism is fine as long as individual capitalists have a change of heart. Pixar has produced its most politically instructive film, though not in the way it intended.More damning is the hierarchy that the film constructs and then refuses to examine. An Animal Council grants representation to mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish; insects receive a seat but their queen is accidentally killed by Mabel without moral consequence, and an insect is dispatched by being eaten, played for laughs. The film needs a villain and, unwilling to indict the mayor whose project would have destroyed a habitat, settles on the Insect Prince; but one struggles to name what Titus actually did wrong. His queen was killed by the protagonist’s recklessness. His people hold the least representation on the Council. His seizure of power is the most rational response in the entire film. The environmental ethic extends precisely as far as charismatic megafauna; beyond that threshold, some animals, it seems, are more equal than others. Mabel’s recklessness, which triggers a political coup, an assassination, and a wildfire, is forgiven without a word of explanation, because the film has already decided that the impulsiveness of a passionate young woman is endearing rather than catastrophic. The beavers are cute. That is all this film has, and it is not enough. Is a River Alive? Does Robert Macfarlane actually care about rivers? The question sounds ungenerous, but Is a River Alive? earns it. Macfarlane follows Giuliana, Cosmo, Yuvan and others into three different rivers’ stories, which suggests some level of caring, but the rivers are never honoured in their physical form, never allowed to exist on the page as more than rhetorical devices; the flowing water is named but never felt. The whole thing feels like an extended preamble to an empty thesis. Macfarlane keeps invoking New Zealand’s 2017 Whanganui River claim, Ecuador’s constitutional provisions, the briefly granted personhood of the Ganges, because there are not many other solid cases, and none of them have meaningfully prevented ecological destruction. The rights-of-nature framework is offered with lyrical intensity but without philosophical or legal argument for the proposition that ‘a river is alive’. Well if that is the case, what is Macfarlane trying to prove? The book invites the familiar language of urgency and enchantment, which is precisely the language that flatters seriousness without interrogating it. The hollowness of the content and the flatness of the human presences end up producing a verdict harsher than I intended: a river may be alive, but this book is not. Macfarlane writes beautifully, as always, but beauty without substance is decoration, and one expects more from a writer of his intelligence. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Reading Mark Fisher’s first ‘pamphlet’, I kept thinking about the world it arrived into: the end of 2009, a full year into the worst financial crisis since the Depression, with no left alternative in sight. Occupy was two years away; Corbyn, six. There must have been something peculiarly moving about encountering Capitalist Realism in that silence, before anti-capitalism briefly recovered the sense that it might once again speak in the future tense. Reading it now, the admiration comes with sadness. The usual objection is that the book lacks philosophical substance, that it names a mood rather than constructs an argument. Fair enough: Fisher is not doing Žižek, and is not trying to. What he is doing, in barely eighty pages in the first edition, is something else entirely: handing an entire generation the vocabulary for what it already felt but could not say. The privatisation of stress. The depoliticisation of mental illness. The way ecological catastrophe gets endlessly ‘acknowledged’ and then quietly metabolised, as though the acknowledgement itself were the solution. These are not arguments in the academic sense; they are acts of naming, and they land with the force of recognition. The orthodox left will note that Fisher never quite identifies capitalism as a social relation rooted in labour exploitation, that the critique floats as phenomenology unmoored from political economy. There is something to this. But Fisher understood that no amount of ‘correct’ structural analysis matters if nobody can feel the structure bearing down on them, and that making it felt is itself the political act, the prerequisite without which no programme can begin. The very success of the phrase ‘capitalist realism’ proves the point: it entered the lexicon precisely because it named what was already there, inarticulate and suffocating. Philosophical arguments aside, Fisher’s prose is so compressed and so precise that individual sentences carry the weight of entire chapters elsewhere. That closing line, ‘From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again’, manages to be a political programme and a prayer in the same breath. Knowing now about the unfinished Acid Communism, where Fisher was beginning to reframe neoliberalism as a counter-revolution against the thinkable, the pamphlet’s final pages feel like a coiled spring. Fisher died in January 2017, and the privatisation of stress he described so clearly in these pages gained a terrible retroactive authority. By the end of the book I was close to tears. The book solves nothing, and knows it solves nothing; someone had found the words. The Deserters Neither voice builds the momentum that would justify the alternation. Énard braids a deserter’s flight from a nameless war against a floating 2001 conference held in memory of Paul Heudeber, the East German mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, communist and anti-fascist. Both arcs reach toward a totalising sweep of twentieth-century violence and displacement. The premise is sound; the execution is dutiful. The Deserters reads like a novel designed rather than written, each voice mechanically alternating without ever achieving the friction that would make one forget the architecture and simply follow the prose. Respect for the ambition outlasts almost every scene. Énard splits the register: the deserter sections are fragmented, comma-scanned, almost free-verse, while the Heudeber conference strand is more expository and scholarly. The fragmentation reads as studied rather than felt, the exposition as dutiful rather than revelatory. Perhaps his other novels earn their formal ambition; this one does not. The polyphony is technically accomplished and emotionally inert, a structure in search of its own urgency. Bleeding Edge My favourite among the Pynchon-lites. Inherent Vice (2009) entertained me, Shadow Ticket (2025) amused me; Bleeding Edge stayed with me. In the year when nobody quite knew what to call that attack, when ‘11 September’ and ‘9/11’ were still competing for semantic territory, Pynchon charts the invisible threads linking Silicon Alley start-ups, federal agencies, off-shore money, and the shadow economies around 11 September, threading them through seemingly unrelated characters and producing countless set pieces that feel at once absurd and historically precise. The DeepArcher virtual world reads now as elegy for the internet’s lost utopian promise, and the novel’s paranoid circuitry, its suspicion that surveillance capitalism was already embedding itself in the architecture of everyday life, has aged into prophecy.It is also the most human of the Pynchon-lites, perhaps of all Pynchon (bar Mason & Dixon [1997]). Maxine’s semi-separation from Horst carries real emotional weight; she reads like a sharper, more distinct Oedipa Maas from The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a woman whose investigative compulsion grows out of feeling rather than away from it. The domestic texture, Maxine and Horst circling each other while the boys orbit the uncertainty, earns the novel its emotional centre. The novel’s accessibility is a structural choice, not a concession. The domesticity is the ground against which the conspiracies register. One walks through Silicon Alley alongside Maxine and feels the grief of a city still in shock, still trying to metabolise what happened, and the prose holds both the noir comedy and the mourning in the same breath. Only Pynchon’s sentences can do this particular thing. Resident Evil Requiem Not a series devotee, but Resident Evil Requiem made me understand the devotion. Capcom’s dual-protagonist structure is the game’s most impressive achievement: Grace Ashcroft’s sections deliver claustrophobic survival horror in the lineage of RE7 (2017) and the original Resident Evil (1996), with limited weaponry, stealth, and enemies whose mutations upon death recall the Crimson Heads of 2002; Leon’s sections borrow liberally from RE4 (2005)’s action-shooter vocabulary, fast and confident and spectacularly choreographed. The balance between the two is not merely structural but tonal: Grace’s dread feeds into Leon’s catharsis, and vice versa, producing a rhythm the series has never quite managed before. Every set piece and fixed sequence is executed at an industry-leading standard, and the level design surprises more than once. The story is the weak point. Several longstanding narrative threads from across the franchise are addressed, but the central plot around Victor Gideon and his Umbrella connections feels undercooked, leaving too many obvious avenues unexplored. Grace herself is somewhat sidelined in the second act, which undercuts the dual-protagonist premise at precisely the moment it should be paying off. Still: as someone with no particular investment in the Resident Evil mythology, this is the first entry that made me care about the world beyond the mechanics. That counts for a great deal. Gravity's Rainbow I have a full review of Gravity’s Rainbow here: Fires a Calculation; Hits a Coordinate. Years from now I will still remember the V-2 rocket shards scattered across London, the coded biological paranoia around Jamf and Kryptosam, the Schwarzgerät waiting inside rocket 00000. I will still remember Katje’s ancestor Frans massacring the dodos of Mauritius, the early twentieth-century German army massacring the Herero people of Africa, the Nazi army massacring European Jews in the Second World War. I will still remember the diffuse hope drifting through the wood-smoke air of the Zone in 1945, after the war ended. These images persist because Gravity’s Rainbow gives beauty a ballistic structure: the rocket’s parabola lodging itself in one’s mind as an arc of ascent and annihilation, promise and gravity.Inside the V-2’s guidance system, a pendulum-and-coil integrator translated acceleration into the charge that could trigger Brennschluss, the instant of engine cutoff where powered ascent surrendered to gravity. Franz Pökler was watching his daughter Ilse grow up in the same calculus: each annual visit to the camp a single data point, each integral converging, for both rocket and girl, on disappearance. That is what this novel does better than any other war novel I have read: it makes the mathematics of destruction and the mathematics of a life rhyme, and the rhyme is unbearable. The Pulitzer board called it ‘unreadable’ and ‘obscene’. Both charges contain a grain of truth: Pynchon demands that one read against the current, and the obscenity is the world’s, not his. The Elect and the Preterite shuffle past each other in the rubble of the Zone; the novel’s own form enacts this entropy, its narrative fragmenting and dissolving as surely as Slothrop does. Edward Mendelson called it an ‘encyclopedic narrative’ in the tradition of Dante and Melville. I would add only that it is also a deeply personal one. Pynchon, in unruly but precise language, writes a Second World War novel that dismantles every convention of the genre, and I found myself dissolving alongside Slothrop in the Zone, watching a magnificent rainbow arch after the rain, eyes brimming. The Wire Season 3 Major Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin (Robert Wisdom), months from retirement, designates three free zones in abandoned blocks of his district where officers are instructed not to arrest anyone for buying or selling drugs. The drug trade drains from residential streets into contained squalor; crime drops fourteen per cent in five weeks; needle exchanges and health workers arrive for the first time. Simon does something formally generous with Hamsterdam: he lets it work. The show does not endorse Colvin’s experiment, but it refuses to dismiss it, and that refusal is political. What kills Hamsterdam is not its failure but its visibility: the moment the press discovers it, the mayor’s office sacrifices Colvin to protect itself. He is demoted, forced into early retirement on a reduced pension, and Burrell personally ensures that his post-retirement job offer is withdrawn. The System does not punish failure. It punishes the attempt. Against this, the Barksdale arc arrives at its terminal logic. Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) has been trying to become a businessman: attending economics classes at community college, reading Adam Smith, proposing a retail co-op with Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) to suppress the violence that draws police attention. Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) cannot follow him there. He is a soldier, loyal to territory and the internal code of the street, and he cannot imagine himself otherwise. The two men love each other with the completeness of people who have shared everything, and so can only, in the end, betray each other: Stringer gives up Avon’s safehouse to Colvin; Avon gives up Stringer to Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts) and Omar (Michael K. Williams). Their last conversation, on a balcony overlooking the city, is the scene both men already know is a farewell. They reminisce. They embrace. Each has already signed the other’s death. When Omar and Mouzone corner Stringer in his half-built condo development, his last words are cut short by gunfire. McNulty (Dominic West), searching the apartment afterward, finds Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on the shelf and the blueprints for a legitimate life spread across a table no one will sit at again. ‘Who the fuck was I chasing?’ Colvin tried to reform the System from within; Stringer tried to reform himself out of it. The System crushed both, because reform and escape are the same threat, and the only dream it tolerates is the one that never wakes. Žižek, writing about the show in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012), argued that this is its central political limitation: Simon stages the impossibility of reform with total clarity but cannot imagine the alternative, cannot think past the System’s horizon. The argument is correct and also, somehow, beside the point. Season 3 does not need to imagine revolution. It needs to make one feel, in the gut, what it costs to try anything at all. The Wire Season 4 There is a scene in which Carver (Seth Gilliam) goes to plead with a clerk in the foster-care system on behalf of a child he knows is being mistreated. He has the goodwill, the information, the moral clarity. And he earns nothing but a blank stare: the face of the System itself, a stone wall that does not register bodies, does not register children, does not register the particular human being standing in front of it. It registers statistics and political exposure, and nothing else. This is what Season 4 is about: the aggregate indifference of institutions that have ceased to have any relationship to the lives they nominally administer. Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) believes, when he takes office, that he can change this. David Simon gives him the benefit of the doubt: he is presented as a genuine reformer who discovers that the System does not care about his intentions any more than it cared about the children in the school, any more than it cared about Carver’s plea. It stares back at Carcetti too, the same blank face, and he accommodates himself to it, because the System rewards accommodation. The school deficit becomes a political calculation. The stats are juked. And on the streets, beneath this canopy of institutional indifference, the dying continues. Bodie. Little Kevin. Sherrod. Each death lands as what it is: a consequence, an arithmetic result, as inevitable as anything in Greek tragedy. Simon has said that The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the institutions are the gods, and Season 4 is where that claim is most fully earned. The gods do not hate the people of Baltimore. That would at least be a relationship. They simply do not see them. Nioh 3 After Rise of the Ronin (2024) provided the open-world trial run Team Ninja needed, Nioh 3 arrives as the studio’s masterpiece: a game that preserves the signature Ki Pulse from its predecessors and builds upon it so substantially that the combat feels simultaneously familiar and transformed. The dual-class system is the centrepiece. Switching between samurai and shinobi on the fly is not a gimmick; it is a fundamental restructuring of the combat loop. Samurai stances play as one expects from the series: precise, weighty, demanding careful Ki management after every combo. The shinobi path replaces stances with ninjutsu tools and offers faster Ki regeneration, making it accessible to newcomers without trivialising the difficulty. The Ninja-style pairing of See-Through evasion and Mist repositioning, the latter leaving a decoy to draw aggro, is a design innovation that makes one wonder why no one thought of it before. For action-game players with no soulslike experience, this is an entry point that does not condescend. The build variety that follows from this dual-class foundation is formidable. No previous Team Ninja game has offered so many distinct playthroughs: weapons span odachi and axes on the samurai side to kusarigama and talons for the shinobi; the Guardian Spirit system adds style-specific elemental bonuses and burst abilities; progression remains flexible enough that build experimentation feels invited rather than punished. Yet the game’s greatest achievement is that this abundance never produces chaos. Unlike Rise of the Ronin (2024) or the Ubisoft open-world formula, where breadth dilutes intensity, every encounter in Nioh 3 generates tension. The open-area world spans multiple time periods, each visually and mechanically distinct, and the co-op integration is the most frictionless the genre has seen. Team Ninja remains Team Ninja, of course: the narrative is as thin and nonsensical as the series has ever been, and the English voice acting ranges from serviceable to actively distracting. But these are blemishes on a game whose combat and encounter design set a new standard. With this clarity of strengths and weaknesses, what more could one ask for? Marty Supreme A table-tennis hustler (Timothée Chalamet) on the 1950s Lower East Side, loosely drawn from the life of Marty Reisman, who sold shoes by day and ran the underground circuits by night until he hustled his way to a world championship bid in Bombay. The opening and closing passages suggest a Safdie working in a new key: restrained, almost elegiac, willing to let silence do something other than function as the gap before the next assault on the senses. Then the middle hour arrives, and it is as though Safdie panics, packing in the entanglement with a pen magnate’s wife (Gwyneth Paltrow), the humiliating sponsorship deal, every conceivable dramatic beat compressed into a register of escalating anxiety. The anxiety that defines Safdie’s filmmaking modulates here from style into something closer to compulsion, and the film strains under the weight of its own incident.And yet Chalamet. The performance is a surprise: not the mannered intensity one might have expected, but something more mercurial, more physically committed, more alive to the comedy latent in obsession. He carries the film’s worst passages without making them feel unearned. That Safdie trusted him with a character this abrasive and this charming simultaneously, and that the trust was warranted, is the most interesting thing about Marty Supreme. Hamnet I wept through the second half and needed a further half-hour to recover after the credits rolled. I have not cried like this at any film since Aftersun (2022). O’Farrell’s novel is one of those rare acts of historical reimagination that completely recontextualises an existing work for those who know it, revealing Hamlet not as Shakespeare’s supreme invention but as his grief made legible, the dead boy given back his name and therefore his reality. Zhao’s adaptation is faithful to that project: mourning is not singular, two people loving the same child can lose entirely different things, and the film lives in the distance between those losses. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes grieves as the body grieves: through proximity, through the refusal to let go of the physical fact of her son. Her performance is the film’s moral centre and, by some margin, the finest of the year. Every scene in which she tends to the dying child or rages at the absent husband carries the weight of a grief that has no use for metaphor, that wants only the thing itself, the warmth of a living boy, and cannot have it. Paul Mescal’s Will grieves differently: he metabolises the loss into language, transforms the dead child into a character, gives the grief a name and a stage and an audience. The dialectic the film inherits from O’Farrell is never resolved, because it cannot be. Agnes’s fury at Will’s transformation of their son’s death into aesthetic object is as morally correct as it is, structurally, beside the point: the play exists, and the play will outlast both of them.What Zhao adds to the novel is the landscape, the English countryside suffused with an almost mythic luminosity that turns place into participant, a world that registers the death of a child as a kind of ontological wound. Zhao straightens O’Farrell’s non-linear intercutting into chronological progression, yet the effect is oddly similar: the landscape holds the living and the dead in the same temporal register, achieving through place what the novel achieved through structure. Jacobi Jupe’s Hamnet is a fleeting presence, felt more than seen, and the casting is impeccable: a child so alive in his early scenes that his absence, when it arrives, registers as a physical subtraction from the frame. The film’s final passage, in which Agnes watches Will perform as the Ghost and hears him speak ‘Remember me’, collapses grief, art, and history into a single moment that one cannot watch unmoved. In the end, as in the novel, the word ‘remember’ does what neither grief could do alone: it holds the living and the dead in the same breath. The father’s art does not console the mother; the mother’s rage does not unmake the art. What remains is the name that was real before it was a character, and the recognition that love, having survived what it most feared, persists as the memory of a warmth that no play can reproduce and no amount of language can extinguish. MIO: Memories in Orbit I did not expect that, barely months after Silksong (2025), a metroidvania would arrive with map design that surpasses it. MIO: Memories in Orbit achieves a whole-map interconnectedness so consistent that in 2026, after years of diminishing returns in the genre, it still manages to surprise. Douze Dixièmes have built something startling: a world where every apparent dead-end is a future shortcut, where the relationship between areas is not merely navigational but narrational, each connection reinforcing the game’s fragmented storytelling in ways that feel inevitable in retrospect. The control over that narrative is exceptional; MIO surpasses most of its genre peers in every dimension except sheer breadth. The environmental storytelling is dense enough to reward obsessive exploration, and the quantity of hidden routes borders on the absurd: passageways tucked behind false walls, behind foreground art, behind mechanical puzzles that only reveal themselves after new movement abilities unlock. The music is the first since Ori and the Will of the Wisps (2020) to absorb me, carrying the same quality of melancholic wonder that Moon Studios achieved at their peak. But the platforming design elevates MIO from excellent to essential. The protagonist’s movement options are extensive, and the precision with which movement resources are gated transforms every platforming challenge into something puzzle-like: not merely a test of reflexes, but a question of which tools to deploy, in what order, at what moment. In recent metroidvanias, this combination of mechanical depth and spatial intelligence is vanishingly rare. One of the finest games in any genre. The Wire Season 2 The Wire Season 2 plays out on the miniature stage of Baltimore’s docks, a compressed image of the global proletarian condition: all that furious effort, and the situation at the end is worse than at the start. David Simon called the season ‘the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era,’ and that is precisely right, but it is also about something harder to name, the way that structural abandonment forces moral compromise not from greed but from desperation, the way the institutions that were supposed to protect working people have become instruments of their liquidation. Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) is not a villain; he is a man whose love for his people leads him into an impossible position, and Simon offers him no exit.Even Ziggy (James Ransone), perhaps the most infuriating figure in the entire series, a man whose bravado and self-destruction pull his father toward the betrayal that kills him, seems within this miniature almost pitiable, which is a considerable achievement. The union is finished, the docks are finished; the small act of resistance, illegal yet righteous, is extinguished in a harbour floating with the uncollected dead. What makes Season 2 the show’s most ambitious movement is precisely what initially alienated audiences: the insistence that the same systemic logic that grinds down the corner also grinds down the docks. The white stevedores and the Black corner boys never share a scene, but they share a condition, and the season’s argument is that the condition is the story, not the people it consumes. Revolutionary Road Even if one manages to escape Revolutionary Road, to escape the suburb and the job one tells oneself one does not care about, one cannot in the end escape an absurd and meaningless life built inside an absurd and meaningless marriage. What Yates understood, and what Mendes renders with an almost clinical precision through Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank and Kate Winslet’s April, is that the dream of escape, Paris as a destination, the idea of a different life that is almost visible from where one stands, is not disrupted by external circumstance. It is disrupted by the self, by the accumulated sediment of self-deception that makes the dream necessary in the first place. The ‘revolution’ is structurally futile; the target can be seen but never touched.Michael Shannon’s John Givings, the mathematician who has passed through breakdown and returned with the unwanted gift of transparency, is not the film’s mad character so much as its only sane one. The madman in this structure is merely an outsider who lights the fuse of what has long been primed. The explosion was always coming. What the film finally refuses to do is to assign guilt, because guilt would imply agency, and the horror it wants to convey is precisely that no one is free enough to be guilty. Tardes de soledad Serra claims he takes no position, and the claim is both true and insufficient. The repetition, the same preparations, the same entry into the ring, the same choreography of suffering and struggle, builds into something so close to the zen of pure duration that one might mistake the film’s neutrality for aestheticism. It is not. What the repetition does is amplify: cruelty, accumulated across a season, is not diluted by familiarity but intensified, so that the distance between the opening and closing of a bull’s eye and the twitching of its face becomes a space in which moral feeling can no longer be deferred. The blow that nearly kills arrives with the force of something that was always going to arrive. Spanish bullfighting has never had anything to do with fairness or courage, and one cannot speak of ‘verdad’ in the sense Serra reaches for, because the thing in the ring is not truth but spectacle built upon death, performance that requires a corpse to complete itself. And yet, as Serra intuits, the repetition legitimises. ‘Repetition legitimises’ is not an apology for the institution; it is a diagnosis of why the institution persists, why even the viewer who grieves for the dying animal, who wishes the bull could turn the violence back on the matador, is still carried along by centuries of accumulated history. The film does not resolve the contradiction, because the contradiction is the point: one is sucked down into the whirlpool of the absurd, and the film holds one there, and asks what it is like not to be able to look away. O Agente Secreto The unfortunate limit here is my own unfamiliarity with Brazilian history, which means I could only proceed as the young woman does in the film’s present-day framing: listening to recordings, piecing together fragments, stepping one piece at a time into the story of Brazil’s north in the years of lead. There is something formally precise about this arrangement, the outsider’s partial knowledge mirrored within the film’s own structure, so that the experience of not-quite-knowing, of reconstructing an atrocity from its residues, becomes the film’s epistemological argument rather than a deficiency to be overcome.Mendonça Filho has always been a director of place, Recife as a living entity with its own memory and its own grievances, and here the city’s past is almost geological, layered beneath the present, accessible only through the kind of patient archaeology that the film itself enacts. Even with incomplete historical coordinates, the metaphor-laden cinematography manages to move profoundly: this is what it looks like when a society tries to forget what its own institutions did to its own people, and what it costs to remember. صوت هند رجب Ben Hania builds the entire film inside a single room: the Palestine Red Crescent call centre in Ramallah, where dispatchers spend three and a half hours trying to coordinate safe passage for an ambulance to reach a child trapped in a car with the bodies of her family. Hind Rajab does not appear on screen. She is present only as a voice, her own recorded voice, and the film places that voice at its centre with a restraint that makes the surrounding silence unbearable. The dispatchers negotiate, plead, follow procedure; the procedure fails; the ambulance is dispatched after claimed approval; contact is lost. Twelve days later the car is found with 335 bullet holes. Everyone is dead: Hind, her six family members, both paramedics. The formal decision to keep all violence off-screen is not squeamishness; it is an argument about where the obscenity actually resides. What one watches is not killing but bureaucracy: the calls, the waiting, the careful language of coordination that masks the fact that no coordination is possible when one party has decided that a child’s life is expendable. The contemporary critical habit of separating aesthetic evaluation from moral weight is exactly what this film exposes as obscene. Some critics, confronted with this material, reached for formal reservations about the ethics of embedding a real child’s voice in a dramatic reconstruction. The only available response is that the child is dead, that the recording exists, and that the refusal to hear it is itself a political act. Ben Hania has been characteristically direct: ‘When you amplify the voice of Palestinians, you are accused of being exploitative.’ She called that accusation another way of silencing the film. The structural parallel does not need to be argued because the evidence argues it: the same bureaucratic dehumanisation, the same rhetorical apparatus deployed to make the killing of children administratively legible, the same international architecture of looking away. I sat in the dark for a long time afterward. The film does not argue this; it shows it. That is what witness means. 28 Years Later The iPhone 15 Pro Max cinematography is the film’s most discussed feature and its most revealing decision. Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot the original 28 Days Later on Canon XL1 MiniDV cameras, here returns to a small consumer device, and the lo-fi texture, hallucinatory and raw, suits the material far better than conventional horror grammar would. 28 Years Later is set on a fortified island commune off the Northumberland coast, a self-sustaining enclave where survivors have lived in carefully maintained safety for nearly three decades. The metaphor is legible immediately: a walled society that has preserved itself by excluding everything beyond its borders, a literalisation of fortress Britain that Boyle and Alex Garland, reunited after their reported falling-out, deploy with more political intent than the marketing suggests. When the journey to the mainland begins, the film finds its register. The Rage Virus has evolved; the Infected have changed over twenty-eight years in ways the film wisely declines to fully explain, and the mainland itself, overgrown and feral, becomes a character in the manner of the depopulated London that made the original so iconic. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Jamie carries the central arc with a physicality that reads as exhaustion rather than performed toughness, and Jodie Comer (Isla), in a role that could have been thankless, brings a precision to her scenes that suggests a larger presence in the planned sequels. The political subtext is sharper than one expects from a franchise entry: who gets inside the walls, who is left outside, and what forms of violence the protected class will sanction to maintain the distinction.Boyle’s restless formal gestures remain, the rapid edits and disorienting angles that have followed him since Trainspotting and occasionally lapse into self-parody. But something has shifted. The psychedelia serves the horror rather than competing with it, and there are passages, particularly in the film’s final movement, where the lo-fi texture and the hallucinatory pacing fuse into something unsettling in a way his recent work has not been. The ending functions partly as setup for The Bone Temple, the Nia DaCosta-directed sequel, which robs it of the self-contained force the original achieved. More interesting than anything Boyle has made in years; the old energy is intermittently present, and this time, it amounts to a return. Blue Moon Ethan Hawke has once again delivered a career-highlight performance for Linklater, and if last year’s finest actress was beyond doubt Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), then last year’s finest actor is equally beyond doubt Hawke. What the performance captures, and what makes it more than a portrait of wretchedness, is the ‘pathetic’ quality, in the original sense, the quality of pathos as structure rather than as sentiment: a man living inside an unrealistic fantasy of love, helplessly self-deluding, and doing so with total conviction. Hart’s sexuality, the loneliness that could not be safely spoken in 1943 and perhaps barely in any decade since, is everywhere present, the engine behind the drinking, behind the infatuated longing, behind the lyricist who thinks highly of himself yet has long since burned through his best years and consoles himself with excuses as younger talent makes what he once made look effortless. Linklater shoots the film in a single night at Sardi’s, which is exactly the right formal choice: this is a man at the end of a long performance, the curtain about to come down, and the evening’s duration gives Hawke the space to let the performance breathe, to let the self-deception falter and reform. The film understands that Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hart’s dissolution was not merely professional but constituted a kind of abandonment, and that Hart’s final months were spent in the psychic posture of someone who knows they have been left but cannot entirely believe it.It has been nearly half a month since I watched it, yet Hart’s expressions refuse to leave: the moment he crouches to pick up playing cards from the floor, the look of infatuated longing he turns on the woman he cannot have. Some performances settle into memory not as scenes but as gestures, a few square inches of screen that contain an entire life. This is one of those. The City & the City The City & the City is called new weird, but it is neither new nor weird. The premise, two cities occupying the same physical space, is interesting; it won the Hugo, the Clarke, the World Fantasy, and the Locus, which tells one more about prize committees than about the novel. Miéville’s world-building is surprisingly poor for someone whose Bas-Lag novels thrive on maximalist invention. I kept losing suspension of disbelief in the second half: what happens to a dog from Besžel that wanders into Ul Qoma? Why would objects from one city not constantly end up in the other? The concept of unseeing is philosophically rich, a Foucauldian disciplinary mechanism internalised as perception, but Miéville never interrogates it with the seriousness it deserves.The ending is the real disappointment. The final thirty pages collapse a potentially myth-laden story into something half corporate thriller, half political farce. Breach, which should function as the novel’s sublime unknowable, gets explained into banality. I should have tried harder to manage my expectations. There is a version of this book that earns its allegorical weight, that makes the seeing and unseeing feel as strange and inevitable as Kafka’s castle. This is not that version. Eternity Eternity asks what a woman would do with infinite time, and answers: choose between two men. Larry (Miles Teller) dies first, choking on a pretzel at a gender-reveal party; Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), terminal with cancer, follows. In the afterlife she discovers that Luke (Callum Turner), her first husband, killed in the Korean War, has been waiting sixty-seven years at the Junction. Joan is granted a rare exemption: she may sample two themed eternities before choosing. She chooses Luke first, a mountain idyll, and grows dissatisfied; she returns to Larry, who has been tending bar at the Junction rather than enter eternity without her. The resolution privileges the domestic: the small moments of a long marriage outweigh the unfinished romance. A film that builds an entire metaphysical architecture only to arrive at the conclusion that a woman’s highest aspiration, in life and in death, is to select which man deserves her.The conspicuously progressive surface, the pointed glance at the Korean War, the afterlife’s diverse transit hub, cannot camouflage the conservatism underneath. Luke’s sixty-seven-year vigil is framed as devotion; structurally, it functions as a claim, a dead soldier’s sacrifice converted into romantic credit that Joan must honour or reject. Larry’s refusal to enter eternity without Joan is presented as the ultimate proof of love; structurally, it is the same claim in a different key. The film never considers the possibility that Joan might want neither; that eternity, unburdened by mortality, could be the first context in which a woman’s desires are not triangulated through men. No amount of conceptual scaffolding rescues a director’s unreconstructed gaze from itself. Lurker Lurker opens on a calculated miracle. Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), working the floor of a minimalist LA clothing boutique, puts ‘My Love Song for You’ on the store speakers the moment Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a rising British pop star, walks through the door; he has trawled Oliver’s socials and knows the song is a favourite. He feigns ignorance, and the con lands: Oliver invites him backstage. Russell refuses the term that genre convention would supply. Matthew is not a fan; the word implies a stable subject adoring a stable object, and neither description fits. Pellerin inhabits the role with a restraint so total that one never catches the performance signalling where one should be afraid; the attention that Matthew pays to Oliver has already crossed into something closer to predation, and the distinction dissolved long before the film began. He positions himself as Oliver’s documentarian, quits the boutique, begins contributing visual work to the album cycle. When Jamie (Sunny Suljic), a former colleague, joins the entourage as a stylist and fits in with the effortless warmth that Matthew can only simulate, the response is immediate: Matthew sabotages him, is shunned, and acquires leverage so ugly that the film’s restraint in depicting it makes one flinch harder than any explicit scene could. The escalation follows the exact same logic as the opening gesture in the boutique, merely raised to a pitch that the social contract can no longer absorb. Russell films the entire arc on 16mm, a counter-intuitive choice for a subject steeped in digital celebrity; the grain makes the world feel bodily, continuous with an older tradition of obsession that predates the algorithm. Russell is mapping a topology of desire in which the craving for recognition and the aura of proximity to fame fuse into something that no longer resembles either. The relationship proves mutually parasitic: Oliver feeds on Matthew’s fixation as surely as Matthew feeds on Oliver’s luminance. Concert sequences filmed at real parties, with Madekwe performing live to real crowds, collapse the boundary between the film’s gaze and Matthew’s own; one watches Matthew watching Oliver and recognises the structure of one’s own spectatorship. The ending arrives with a time jump that resets everything and solves nothing. Matthew’s documentary premieres at a festival; Oliver attends, stripped of his pop-star artifice. A young photographer approaches Matthew, says he admires him, and asks: ‘What do I have to do?’ The film cuts before Matthew can answer. Obsession of this kind reproduces itself; it requires no particular host, only the structure of longing that the host once activated. I keep returning, afterwards, to ‘My Love Song for You’ playing in the boutique at the very beginning. It’s a Nile Rodgers track from 1983 — Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove — and choosing it might be one of the best decisions Russell made. The song is unhurriedly, uncomplicatedly sincere; Rodgers wrote it as nothing more or less than a love song, Bernard Edwards’s bass line ambling alongside like it’s simply glad to be present. That sincerity makes Matthew’s deployment of it devastating: he weaponises genuine tenderness as a lure, and the song never stops being beautiful even after one understands what it has been conscripted to do. It sits there at the opening like a small, clear bell, and the rest of the film is the echo. 2000 метрів до Андріївки The moment that will not leave: Sheva says his wife told him on the phone to come home, to get home by any means possible. Sheva says, ‘You know I can’t come.’ His wife replies, ‘I know, but you know I have to ask you.’ In four lines, an entire grammar of love under the pressure of war: the impossible request, the refusal that is also a confession, and the acknowledgement that the asking itself was necessary, even knowing the answer. Chernov, following the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol with a film of equal moral ferocity, understands that documentary at its most essential does not explain or contextualise; it bears witness to what language, at the limit, still manages to do. Fedya, who never saw himself as a soldier and never wanted to be one, offers a counterpoint that the film holds in careful, unresolved tension against Sheva’s stoic determination. And then there is the Russian soldier they capture at Andriivka, who when asked ‘Why did you come here?’ answers: ‘I don’t know why we came here.’ Three men on opposite sides of the same failure of political imagination, each one conscripted by forces that bear no relation to anything one would call a choice. Chernov frames this without editorialising, which is the only honest thing to do. The particular cruelty Chernov keeps returning to is spatial and epistemological at once: in modern industrial warfare, one can never see the enemy, never identify the direction from which the shells are falling. The front is a horizon that retreats as one approaches it. The village of Andriivka, two thousand metres away, might as well be on another planet. What the film ultimately documents is not a military operation but the phenomenology of fighting for something one cannot see, cannot reach, and cannot quite believe in, while the phone keeps ringing and someone on the other end says, just come home. Pluribus Season 1 The premise is this: an extraterrestrial radio signal is decoded, synthesised into a virus, and within weeks almost all of humanity joins a global hive mind. The transformed are cheerful, incapable of violence, and spend their days tending the planet. Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), one of roughly thirteen immune individuals, refuses to join. Her resistance is anchored in grief: her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) died in the mass event, and Carol’s mourning is the thread that keeps her tethered to selfhood when the alternative is painless collective bliss. Seehorn plays this with a stubborn, clear-eyed warmth that Gilligan’s previous protagonists were constitutionally incapable of; she is his first hero, and the performance carries the full philosophical weight of what Pluribus is asking. The hive mind’s courtship of Carol is the show’s richest thread: the Others cannot lie, but they can distort through omission, and their promise that ‘no stem cells will be harvested from your body’ turns out to conceal the fact that they have located her frozen embryos and can engineer assimilation without touching her at all. The erosion of consent through technicality is handled with a care that makes the horror feel procedural rather than spectacular; this is not invasion but paperwork, the fine print that eats the contract. The frustration is that the season’s philosophical richness is not yet matched by its narrative substance. Gilligan’s compositional intelligence is operating at a level that makes almost everything else on streaming look provisional: the Ektachrome-inflected colour palette, the wide shots held long enough that one begins to read the frame as architecture, the patient refusal to cut when a lesser show would scramble for close-ups. But a clean, declarative sci-fi premise of this kind makes an implicit contract with the audience: it promises that the world will eventually cohere into an argument, a feeling, a reckoning with whatever the central concept means. After nine episodes, Gilligan has not honoured that contract. The emotional threads remain barely unspooled; each episode advances the same fundamental question in slightly different configurations; the pacing, which defenders read as accumulating stillness, can also be read as a show that has not yet decided what it wants to say. Zosia’s (Karolina Wydra) finale revelation and the nuclear weapon on Carol’s driveway suggest that Season 2 will have sharper edges. For now, Pluribus is a show with more craft than argument, and craft alone, however formidable, is not sufficient. Ricky Gervais: Mortality Ricky Gervais: Mortality is Gervais’s fourth Netflix special, and opens with twenty minutes devoted to reactions to his previous three: a performer now more interested in the discourse around his work than in the work itself. What follows cycles through Anne Frank, Harold Shipman, slavery: provocations delivered with the certainty of a man who believes saying them costs him something. Provocation bleeds dry the moment the provocateur starts performing for the people who already agree with him, and the gesture hardens into ceremony.The single bit worth remembering involves a diner clearing their throat in a restaurant. It works because it is small and observed and undefended; for thirty seconds Gervais watches something rather than watching himself be watched. The rest of the hour offers no such reprieve. The performer who once wielded self-awareness as his sharpest instrument has misplaced it entirely, and the loss is visible to everyone in the room except him. After watching, I went back to some Louis C.K. with a friend, and felt the distance like a missing tooth. Slaughterhouse-Five I understand the book’s canonical status, and Vonnegut’s formal nerve is real: compressing the Dresden firebombing into a slim, unstuck-in-time fable takes a kind of courage. But Slaughterhouse-Five did not work for me. The deadpan repetition of ‘So it goes’ asks to be read as an ethical device, yet to me it often feels like a morally irresponsible trivialisation of mass death. I lean toward distrust. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim’s passivity, far from being a radical critique of agency, reads to me as authorial abdication: Vonnegut uses time-travel as a narrative anaesthetic, numbing both character and reader to the violence rather than forcing confrontation with it. The novel mistakes detachment for depth, and repetition for profundity. Perhaps one needs to have read it in the shadow of Vietnam, when the deadpan itself felt like dissent. I came to it too late, and the distance shows. The Prose Edda The gods slaughter the innocent: Þórr casually kicks the dwarf Litr into Baldr’s funeral pyre. They are morally bankrupt: Óðinn stealing Suttungr’s mead with the self-righteousness of a conqueror. They are irrational: actual punishment for Loki only arriving after he has caused untold damage. Norse mythology as Snorri renders it, rooted in Iceland, filtered through a Christian lens and a euhemeristic framing device, is more chaotic than other peoples’ mythologies, looser, but also darker and more direct. Snorri mythologises everything: wind, war, clouds. His gods are virtually indistinguishable from mortals, their temperaments and knowledge systems riddled with contradictions. Scholars have long debated how much Snorri’s systematising impulse reshaped oral traditions that were originally fragmentary and incoherent; what survives, though, is a record of divine dysfunction rather than a polished theology. Norse gods are not a better version of humanity in terms of morality, knowledge, or reason. The giants often match or surpass them in wisdom: Útgarða-Loki outwits Þórr completely, Vafþrúðnir trades cosmic knowledge with Óðinn as an equal, and the gods win their contests through cunning and violence, not intellectual superiority. That is what makes Norse mythology singular among the world’s major religious narratives: it does not idealise its own pantheon, and it denies those gods both virtue and victory. The Ragnarök passage, frequently cited as one of the most powerful eschatological narratives in world literature, gains its force precisely because the gods who fall are already compromised, already petty, already too human. One reads the Prose Edda not to worship but to recognise. Inherent Vice Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s light novel. It reads far more smoothly than Shadow Ticket (2025), and the jokes and puns suit my taste better, but there is a faint nagging feeling that Pynchon is not great at high-density dialogue. The PTA adaptation exposes this counterintuitively: Pynchon’s prose is conversational, he regularly drops subjects mid-sentence, but his dense conversational scenes feel theatrical, and PTA’s lines lifted straight from the text carry that same stagey quality. The ‘inherent vice’ of the title, a legal term for a commodity’s tendency to destroy itself, functions as a quiet metaphor for the counterculture’s self-destruction at the turn of the seventies, the moment between the Summer of Love and the Manson murders when the dream curdled.Still, I love Pynchon’s detective stories, love how he reveals the mystery by refusing to resolve it, love his sentences. Doc Sportello is a stoned Philip Marlowe wandering the circuit-board streets of late-sixties Southern California, and if one never quite trusts what he understands, that is the point: epistemological uncertainty as genre principle. Same as Shadow Ticket (2025): it was tremendous fun reading it. And in Pynchon’s catalogue, tremendous fun is never just fun. Models of the Mind Hodgkin and Huxley’s research before, during, and after the war: a world conflict interrupted and then redirected a programme of work that would reshape our understanding of neural signalling. Pavlov persisting through war, revolution, and the death of his son, openly defying the Bolsheviks while Lenin kept him funded. Pitts and McCulloch discussing philosophy and psychology while developing the first computational neurone model, two minds from utterly different backgrounds converging on a formal description of thought itself. Every origin story in Models of the Mind is a reminder that neuroscience is rooted in philosophy and mathematics, and Lindsay makes one feel this not as a platitude but as a lived intellectual history. That is rare. Fitting a proper survey of neuroscience’s major models, from Hodgkin-Huxley equations and attractor networks to deep neural networks, dimensionality reduction, reinforcement learning, and Bayesian decision models, into a relatively slim volume is already an astonishing feat. Add Lindsay’s accounts of each model’s development history, accessible analogies, and clear examples, and this becomes, in my mind, the only essential introductory text for understanding computational neuroscience. The field has needed a book like this for years: something that sits between overly technical textbooks and the simplifications of popular science, something that respects the mathematics without weaponising it against the uninitiated. Lindsay, a computational neuroscientist herself, writes with the quiet authority of someone who has actually worked with these models, not merely read about them. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories My first Penguin Orange. S. T. Joshi’s editing is excellent: starting with Dagon (1917) and early stories less embedded in the Lovecraft mythos, building gradually to The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936), the collection maps a trajectory from apprentice weird fiction to the fully realised cosmicism of the later tales. The Penguin Classics imprimatur did real work for Lovecraft’s literary legitimacy, placing him alongside Poe and Hawthorne in a series that implicitly argues for canonical status. Whether one accepts that argument depends on how much one can metabolise the racism, which is not incidental to the fiction but often structural, woven into the very texture of what Lovecraft finds horrifying.Surprisingly, the shorter stories are more gripping and more durable. My favourite passages and scenes are mostly in the shorts: the bleeding roof in The Picture in the House (1920), the narrator’s despair in The Outsider (1926) looking into the mirror, the slow chromatic contamination in The Colour Out of Space (1927). Lovecraft’s prose is famously purple, his characters flat, but in the compressed form of the short story these weaknesses matter less; the atmosphere does the work that character cannot. Favourites in order: The Colour Out of Space (1927), The Whisperer in Darkness (1931), The Picture in the House (1920), The Outsider (1926), The Rats in the Walls (1924). One keeps returning to Lovecraft not for the writing, which is often overwrought, but for the feeling: that cold, vertiginous sensation of the human scale dissolving against something vast, indifferent, and very old. The Chair Company Season 1 Robinson and Kanin built their reputation on I Think You Should Leave (2019)’s anarchic precision: sketches that detonated social discomfort in under ninety seconds. The Chair Company inherits the conspiratorial instincts but none of the comic discipline. The premise, a man’s office chair collapses and he spirals into a corporate conspiracy, promises Pynchonesque paranoia; what arrives is a detective procedural dressed in conspiracy-thriller aesthetics that it has not earned, each plot thread laboriously assembled and then resolved through reveals that feel neither foreshadowed nor surprising. The mystery never generates genuine mystery; the audience is asked to care about connections that the show itself treats as interchangeable. Eight episodes and thirty minutes each is enough rope for Robinson to hang the format with, and he does. Dispatch A couple of years ago, AdHoc Studio walked away from The Wolf Among Us 2, citing creative differences with the reconstituted Telltale team. In Dispatch, the shape of that disagreement becomes visible. Where The Wolf (2013) excelled at societal scope, at weaving class, corruption, and systemic injustice into a detective narrative, AdHoc’s strengths lie in a different register entirely: the intimate, the individual, the felt. Dispatch goes all-in on character. Robert Robertson, a retired superhero voiced by Aaron Paul with precisely the right mixture of weariness and stubborn warmth, joins a Superhero Dispatch Network to manage former supervillains, and the interactive-fiction format, with its carefully weighted choices and branching dialogue, makes it effortless to inhabit him. Guilt, regret, relief, satisfaction: each emotional register lands as one’s own, not the protagonist’s, because the choice design never signals the ‘right’ answer. What distinguishes Dispatch from The Wolf (2013), and from most narrative games of its generation, is the depth of its secondary cast. Every character is knowable: not reduced to a type or a function, but given enough texture that one’s attachment accrues naturally across eight episodes. The emotion that surfaces is felt, not externally imposed by orchestral swells or slow-motion close-ups. By chapter seven, I was crying in a way I had not cried at a game since Life Is Strange (2015): not from sadness alone, but from the accumulated weight of having known these people and made decisions on their behalf. The production quality is superb. I am deeply curious about what AdHoc does next. Whatever their disagreement with Telltale was, the evidence suggests they were right. Constance Higher expectations, harder the fall. A paintbrush as weapon promises untapped mechanical potential: none of it is realised here. The skill set lifts almost wholesale from the standout metroidvanias of the past decade, the wall-dash being the sole exception; on boss design, every encounter follows the same numbing loop of death, memorisation, and repetition, with no interactive wrinkle to distinguish one from another. In a year when metroidvania boss design is getting good, Constance is a reminder that studios with no instinct for encounter design still exist. The map is useless in the manner of Hyper Light Drifter (2016)’s, forcing the player to build their own mental model of the environment rather than following a prescribed path, except that here the obscurity reads as oversight rather than intention. Exploration rewards are negligible; there is no equivalent of the hidden currencies or lore discoveries that make backtracking worthwhile in the genre’s better entries. What remains are fluid animations in search of a game that deserves them. Bugonia This is Lanthimos’s cleanest, most coherently told film, and sufficient proof, unlike Poor Things (2023), that he is capable of sustaining his own style while working across a broad, straightforwardly presented canvas. The remake’s bones come from Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), that cult monument to Korean absurdism, and Lanthimos has the good sense not to smother the source: the captor-captive dynamic, class hierarchy, and conspiracy-as-theology all survive the transplant intact. Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis make for a wonderfully mismatched pair of true believers, and Emma Stone’s CEO, deadpan and impenetrable, is the film’s still centre around which all the delusion orbits. The critique of capital is muted, present more as atmosphere than argument, but that restraint is itself a formal choice: the film is not interested in explaining the System so much as rendering viscerally how the System produces the men inside it. The title’s entomological mythology, bugonia, the ancient fantasy of bees spontaneously generated from a bovine carcass, sits perfectly over the film’s central horror: that conspiracy thinking is not an aberration but a metabolic process, the mind’s attempt to generate meaning from the rotting body of late capitalism. Anyone might end up as a human specimen in Teddy’s laboratory; in 2025, that feels like plain description. یک تصادف ساده It is hard to imagine that this was made by a director willing to endure imprisonment for his political convictions. The setup is promising: Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a mechanic, believes he has recognised, from a prosthetic-leg sound and a garage encounter, his secret-police torturer Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), and the film should radiate with the voltage of that uncertainty. Instead, every character is a cardboard ideological stereotype; the proclamations are tired and unoriginal; and the film drifts toward an absolution-shaped ambiguity, as though the foot soldiers of the state apparatus were merely following orders and are therefore innocent, free to kill with impunity and deserving of release when all is said and done. We have not heard quite enough of that argument since the Nuremberg trials? Iranian cinema needs new blood; there is no longer any reason to wait for Panahi. Lumines Arise After the triumph of Tetris Effect (2018), it seemed implausible that Mizuguchi Tetsuya could push the concept further. What remained to be done? The answer, in Lumines Arise, turns out to be texture. Each block type carries a distinct tactile quality, a haptic signature that gives every stage its own feel under the fingers; combined with the visual macro-scale, where the optical flow alone merits study by every rhythm-game developer working today, and the tight audio synchronisation that has been the series’ signature since the original Lumines (2004), the whole thing finally earns the word ‘synesthetic’. A simple falling-block game becomes a full sensory event: not a game with music, but a game that is music. In interviews, Ishihara has described his ambition as 感動 (kando): to move emotionally. A modest word for an immodest goal, and Lumines Arise exceeds even that framing. The thirty-odd stages of Journey Mode build a cumulative intensity that dissolves time: one enters a flow-state in which the distinction between seeing and hearing softens until one is uncertain which sense is doing the work. The faint repetitiveness in the back half of the Journey and the occasional readability issues amid heavier visual effects are minor friction in a game that achieves what the Lumines series has always reached toward. We are, at last, hearing colours and seeing sounds. Mizuguchi and Ishihara can rest. Solenoid I have a full review of Solenoid here: Nothing Is Strange to a Child: On Solenoid. Cărtărescu’s Bucharest is a vast living organism. The veins extending from the city centre vibrate with the solenoid’s hum, breaking through the gaps in a neighbour’s blind wall and the skin between librarian Palamar’s thumb and forefinger. His prose is so precise, so sensorily saturated, that after six hundred pages scenes still rise up unbidden: Irina floating above the bed; hundreds of Picketists screaming for help before the city-centre mortuary; the boat-shaped house; the labyrinthine school corridors; the narrator’s nightmares weighing on me too. The narrator is a failed poet turned schoolteacher in 1980s Bucharest, and his failed literary debut shadows Cărtărescu’s real triumph: where the real Cărtărescu read his epic poem to acclaim in 1977, the narrator reads his version to ridicule and abandons literature forever. In a tradition running from Kafka through Borges to Schulz, the city is both literal and impossible, its architecture obeying dream-logic while remaining stubbornly, concretely Romanian. The novel is built from the branch that did not happen, and the failure is not romanticised; it is what makes the narrator porous, open to resentment and revelation and tenderness and forms of attention that a successful life might have sealed off. The porosity is structural: because the narrator has no literary authority to protect, the boundaries between city and body, fact and hallucination, biography and counterfactual dissolve one by one, until Bucharest’s topography becomes indistinguishable from the topography of thought itself. The Voynich manuscript that threads through the novel is the perfect Cărtărescu object: real yet untranslatable, saturated with meaning that can never be confirmed. The Picketists’ revolt against death is political allegory whose enemy is mortality itself, futile and magnificent in equal measure. The usual charge against Cărtărescu is maximalism, excess, a prose so rich that it risks toppling into self-indulgence. Fair enough: this is not a novel that respects economy. But the maximalism is structural, not decorative. Every hallucinated image, every recursive nightmare, every obsessively catalogued Bucharest street feeds the same metaphysical engine. The book earns its six hundred pages because each one coils tighter around the question of whether reality has an outside. The solenoid under the house is a literal electromagnetic coil that makes the narrator levitate in his sleep, and Cărtărescu never explains it away. He renders consciousness as a space one inhabits rather than a faculty one possesses, and the novel’s six hundred pages accumulate the way a solenoid’s coil does: each recurrence of dream, disgust, tenderness, and mania adds to the field until the whole structure lifts. That the Nobel committee has not yet recognised him feels scandalous. I finished Solenoid closer than I expected to come, in adult life, to childhood: willing again to take the strange seriously, knowing it mattered, knowing it was already dissolving. 어쩔 수가 없다 The title is spoken first by the American executives who fire Yoo Man-su: the market leaves them no other choice. It recurs as Man-su himself adopts it, a phrase that migrates from the language of capital to the language of murder without changing its grammar. Park Chan-wook spent twenty years developing this adaptation of Donald Westlake’s The Ax, and one senses the patience in every frame: the tonal architecture, shifting from slapstick to horror to something closer to economic theology, is controlled with a precision that makes Parasite (2019) look comparatively blunt in its class mechanics. What Park understands, and what Bong’s film only gestured toward, is that the tragedy of late capitalism is not that it creates monsters but that it creates competitors. Man-su does not target the executives who destroyed his livelihood; he targets his fellow laid-off workers, the people who should be his comrades, because the System has made solidarity unthinkable and competition the only available grammar of survival.I recognised something in Man-su that I did not want to recognise. Lee Byung-hun, opposite Son Ye-jin as his wife Mi-ri, builds the performance around a specific contradiction: a craftsman who loves papermaking, who valued his twenty-five years of labour, and who is blindsided by the discovery that capital does not care what one produces or who produces it. The worsening toothache is a precise metaphor, moral decay made somatic, and Park lets it do its work without commentary. The Žižekian disavowal is everywhere: ‘I know this is wrong, but I have no other choice’ is the formula that enables every killing, every lie, every domestic betrayal. And the ending is the bleakest joke of all: Man-su gets the job, walks into a paper mill run entirely by machines, and stands alone in a mausoleum of automation. The competition is over. The competitors are dead. The job no longer requires a human being. I left the cinema thinking about every application I have ever sent into a market that was not designed to answer. Park has said it is hard to be optimistic, and the film honours that difficulty without flinching. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You Several times nearly unable to breathe: hard to believe this runs under two hours. Mary Bronstein’s debut takes the figure of the hole as its organising principle and means it literally twice over. Linda (Rose Byrne, in a performance of terrifying physical commitment) is a psychotherapist whose daughter depends on a gastric feeding tube; a hole in the bedroom ceiling opens one night and will not close. The two apertures rhyme, and Linda’s magical thinking binds them: she cannot separate the wound in her child’s body from the wound in the architecture, and the film’s claustrophobic grammar refuses to separate them either. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is at sea, unreachable; her own therapist (Conan O’Brien, in a turn of unnerving flatness) offers nothing she can use. Byrne plays Linda as unstoppable kinetic energy hurling itself against real and invented enemies alike, which makes the moments when she stops, drinks, and goes helpless all the more frightening, as though no force, however fierce, can survive the weight of anxiety and parenthood combined. Maternal overwhelm is not sentiment but phenomenology: a texture of experience that most cinema gestures toward and then domesticates into something manageable. Bronstein refuses management. A$AP Rocky’s James, the motel superintendent, radiates a warmth that Linda cannot absorb; the supporting cast compound what she already carries, each presence another demand on a body that has nothing left to give. She removes the feeding tube herself in a sequence that feels simultaneously like liberation and catastrophe; the two holes in the film collapse into one. The distance between what a parent needs and what a parent can bear is the weather the film inhabits, and weather does not resolve. I sat afterward in something that resembles the silence after a ceiling has given way. The Wire Season 1 I cannot think of a show before The Wire that asked its audience to hold this much in suspension. Thirteen hours of accumulated detail, none of it flagged as important, none of it ranked by a score or a dramatic zoom: clone pagers, Barksdale codes, the mechanics of a wiretap affidavit, the difference between a buy-bust and a real case, the layout of the Pit, the chain of command in both the police department and the drug organisation. Simon and Ed Burns built a sociological system and then trusted the viewer to carry it unresolved for ten episodes before the callbacks begin, and the callbacks, when they arrive, land with the force of inevitability rather than surprise. This is the show’s formal innovation, and it is also its thesis: the System is too large, too patient, and too structurally entrenched for any individual to see whole, and the only way to make that legible is to demand that the audience experience the same condition. The mirroring between the police bureaucracy and the Barksdale organisation is the architecture that makes this visible. McNulty (Dominic West) goes around the chain of command to force a case into existence and is punished for it; D’Angelo (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) shows moral intelligence and is squeezed between family loyalty and institutional demand until both destroy him. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), dismissed for years as a hump who makes miniature furniture at his desk, turns out to be the detail’s true investigative mind; Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), initially read as Avon’s muscle, turns out to be running the operation along business lines. Both hierarchies juke their stats. Both punish anyone who steps outside the chain of command. The difference is that one side’s enforcement is lethal: Wallace (Michael B. Jordan), sixteen years old, tries to leave the game and is murdered by his friends. Bodie’s hand shakes on the trigger, and it is Poot (Tray Chaney) who finishes the job. The show does not ask one to choose a side. It asks one to notice that choosing is beside the point, because the wire runs through both.The closing montage seals it. New hoppers replace the ones who were arrested or killed. Omar (Michael K. Williams) sticks up a dealer in the South Bronx: ‘All in the game.’ McNulty, exiled to the marine unit for the sin of good police work, watches the harbour from a boat. The surface reading is that the investigation succeeded; the structural reading is that nothing changed, that the System metabolised thirteen hours of effort and returned to its resting state. Simon described The Wire as a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. Season 1 is where that architecture is first laid down, and the formal patience it demands of the viewer teaches one to see it. Flesh I cannot accept the sheer number of hollow, empty sentences and scenes. Szalay’s method in Flesh seems to depend entirely on a kind of studied quirkiness: his favourite move is ‘say it once, then repeat in the next paragraph’. Quirky novels abound, and Szalay’s is the least skilful, least substantial version of the impulse. ‘He looks in the fridge. He smokes on the balcony. He watches TV.’ The critics have been calling this formally audacious; I call it formally vacant.The contrast with Cărtărescu is instructive. Where Cărtărescu’s maximalism in Solenoid (2015) earns its excess through genuine metaphysical ambition, pressing relentlessly against the limits of what fiction can hold, Szalay’s minimalism never opens onto anything harder or stranger. The spareness is not restraint; it is the absence of anything that would require restraint. By the end, repetition-as-technique has started to look like a crutch, a way of filling pages without the burden of having something to say. V. Pynchon buries thousands of themes across Egypt, Virginia, New York, Malta, Paris, and mainland Italy, ranging from modernity’s dismantling of the individual (SHROUD and SHOCK, the ‘Bad Priest’s’ progressive replacement of flesh with prosthesis and fetish), to German colonial violence in South-West Africa (Herero and Bondelswarts bodies pressed together), to the shift from analogue to digital signal (the Kilroy figure scrawled across half a century). The dual structure, Profane’s purposeless drift against Stencil’s paranoid quest, enacts the central tension of postmodern existence: between entropy and the desperate imposition of meaning. Stencil reads V. into everything because he must; Profane reads nothing into anything because he cannot. Between these two failures of interpretation, Pynchon builds an entire world.But among all these themes, my favourite is Pynchon’s yo-yo. Anyone who has ever watched a yo-yo understands Profane drifting aimlessly between first and last stops on the New York subway, understands Maijstral’s repeating history, understands the tree-fruit-bird-shit-tree cycle in Slab’s Cheese Danish No. 35, and can see the dozens of characters looping, crossing, colliding through this novel: dozens of yo-yos, inextricably tangled in eternal motion, their identities losing all meaning. The yo-yo is Pynchon’s most elegant image because it contains everything the novel wants to say about determinism and drift without requiring a single explanatory sentence. What scholars call ‘encyclopaedic narrative’, what the poststructuralists call ontological instability, Pynchon calls a yo-yo. The Herero genocide chapters remain among the most devastating things Pynchon has written, and he was barely twenty-five when he wrote them. The systematic extermination in German South-West Africa, rendered with clinical precision and moral fury, announces the scope of Pynchon’s moral vision from the very start. V. herself, progressively replacing her body with clockwork and glass until the children of Malta disassemble her on the street, is the novel’s darkest joke: the Enlightenment project literalised as self-destruction. V. already feels like Pynchon arriving fully formed, in possession of every tool he would later refine. The yo-yos are still spinning. One Battle After Another PTA’s loose adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) arrives in VistaVision and in a political moment that makes the novel’s paranoid vision of state authoritarianism feel less like satire than like reportage. Leonardo DiCaprio carries Pat Calhoun with the same combination of haplessness and stubborn decency he brought to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a man whose survival strategy is gentleness in an environment that punishes it. Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, the film’s engine of federal menace, earns every frame of the Oscar he received: Penn plays him with a bureaucratic calm more frightening than any display of force, a functionary who has confused obedience with patriotism so completely that the distinction no longer registers. Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia, from radical to informant to fugitive, is never reduced to a symbol of betrayal; Taylor plays the trajectory as a series of impossible choices, each one closing a door that was already closing. PTA believes in la revolución. He believes Chase Infiniti’s Willa can escape the grip of Lockjaw, believes that humanism will prevail even when the justice at the end arrives through institutions that are themselves compromised. Pynchon’s California was sown with dread; PTA’s is sown with seeds of hope, and it is precisely this hope, rare and unguarded in American cinema of this scale, that distinguishes the film from its source. There is so much here that moves one to tears, yet PTA adopts a bystander’s register, recounting the story with an objectivity that renders the rebels unsaintly and Lockjaw no simple fool. That even this humble optimism should feel, by 2025, like too much to dream says everything about the distance between the California Pynchon imagined and the one we inhabit now. The credits roll over a VistaVision landscape that is still, somehow, luminous. The Outer Worlds 2 Fallout: New Vegas (2010) came out fifteen years ago and Obsidian is still making the same game. Charitably, one calls this ‘fidelity to vision’. Honestly: it is a refusal to grow. The Outer Worlds 2 is larger than its predecessor, which Microsoft’s marketing apparatus made much of, but larger is not the same as deeper; the main quest is actually more streamlined, the faction system produces no meaningful consequences, and the philosophical texture that gave the first game its occasional sharpness has thinned to the point of disappearance. Each companion and faction reads as a caricature representing an ideology, embarrassingly flat, serving the satire in the way a scarecrow serves agriculture: visible at a distance, useless up close. The progression breaks before the game ends; hit the level cap with companion arcs still incomplete, and motivation evaporates. Where The Outer Worlds (2019) at least had the courage of its cynicism, delivering a compact satire that knew when to stop, the sequel sprawls without deepening, each new planet adding surface area but no new ideas. Wide as the solar system, shallow as its satire. Maus Perhaps in the current climate, a book like Maus matters more than ever. Early in Part II, after Nazi persecution, family collapse, the eldest son dead, his wife a suicide, their parents reduced to smoke from concentration camp furnaces, the father, seeing his son and daughter-in-law give a Black hitchhiker a lift, says: how could you? Art asks: ‘How can you, of all people, be racist!?’ The father says: you don’t understand, we are not like them. Suffering, apparently, is racially stratified too. This is the scene that detonates the entire book, the moment Spiegelman’s metafictional apparatus, his mice and cats and pigs, stops being allegory and becomes accusation. The animal masks slip, and what is underneath is not species but ideology.This brings to mind Germany’s early twentieth-century massacres in southern Africa, the Herero and the Bondelswarts, which Pynchon writes about in V. (1963), and the way imperial violence is so often treated as prehistory until Europe names itself the victim. So: if one does not speak up when others suffer, why should one’s own pain deserve to be seen? Maus asks this question not rhetorically but structurally, through the very form of a comic that refuses the consolations of visual realism. Marianne Hirsch coined the term postmemory partly in response to this book: the inherited trauma of children who did not experience the event but cannot escape its gravity. Spiegelman dramatises this in the fraught, frequently ugly interviews with his father, in his guilt over his mother Anja’s suicide, in the famous scene where he sits at his drawing board surrounded by a pile of corpses wondering whether he has the right to turn suffering into art. No one who has read Maus forgets it. When a Tennessee school board removed it from an eighth-grade curriculum in 2022, the gesture understood the book’s power better than it knew: the book makes complicity visible, and complicity does not enjoy being looked at. A House of Dynamite The finest war film of the past five years, and the film that Garland’s Civil War (2024) wanted to be. The distinction is worth insisting upon. Garland’s film was obsessed with the spectacle of collapse: cameras in helmets, bullets in walls, the aestheticised grammar of photojournalism applied to domestic catastrophe. Bigelow’s is the opposite move entirely. There is no real gunfire in A House of Dynamite, no bullets, no explosions; the entire confrontation is conducted in language, in rooms, across conference tables and encrypted terminals. Bigelow replays the same nineteen-minute window three times, each pass ascending the chain of command: first Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) at the operations desk, reading the data as it arrives; then SecDef Reid Baker (Jared Harris), receiving Walker’s analysis and deciding what to withhold; then the President (Idris Elba), acting on a version of events that has already been filtered twice. Each repetition reveals how much was lost in translation, how the institutional machinery between signal and decision functions as a lossy compression of reality. What makes the film remarkable is precisely its austerity, its refusal to compromise the register for the market. The nuclear strike is never shown. The film’s final minutes deliver the knowledge that it is already done, that those who caused it have retreated into a shelter, that the destruction of countless lives is occurring off-screen as the credits approach. And yet one’s chest tightens as though the blast were visible. Bigelow understands something that the action cinema she helped define largely forgot: that the body responds to the implication of violence more deeply than to its depiction. The retaliatory strike is primed, the misreading may or may not have been a misreading, and the curtain falls on an information-age war whose most devastating weapon was a memo. There is a tradition of chamber-drama nuclear films, from Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964) onward, and A House of Dynamite sits squarely in that lineage while feeling wholly contemporary. The characters are recognisable as specific specimens of institutional behaviour: the careerist who cannot admit error, the analyst who knows the truth but lacks the authority to make it matter, the administrator who confuses procedure with wisdom. One recognises them because they are everywhere. Completing the trajectory that began with The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Bigelow has moved the camera steadily inward, from the body in the blast radius to the mind that authorised it. The architecture of catastrophe was always institutional; this film simply follows the wiring all the way back to the switch. Κυνόδοντας Somewhat rawer than Lanthimos’s later work, and all the more viscerally disturbing for it: the clinical detachment that would become his signature is still slightly porous here, letting more horror leak through than The Lobster (2015) or The Favourite (2018) ever permit. The Father (Christos Stergioglou) and Mother (Michelle Valley) have constructed an airtight reality for their children, a closed system in which the words for things are wrong and the wrongness has become invisible. Žižek would relish the setup: the children’s self-oppression is the film’s central analytical object, the mechanism by which ideology sustains itself without external enforcement. What complicates the premise is that only the Eldest Daughter (Angeliki Papoulia) rebels, and even her rebellion cannot escape the grammar of the system it resists. She bashes out her own dogtooth with a dumbbell, fulfilling the parents’ rule that a child is ready to leave when a canine falls out; she climbs into the boot of a car, accepting their teaching that cars are the only safe passage beyond the fence. The escape enacts the very logic it means to refuse; even the act of leaving follows the parents’ rules, and the film offers no way to tell whether what lies beyond them is liberation or death. The Son and Younger Daughter remain; their compliance requires no visible coercion, which is precisely the point. The film’s real subject is the consent the parents never had to manufacture, because the closed system had already produced it. The father parks at work and walks away. The boot of the car stays shut. As She Climbed Across the Table Is As She Climbed Across the Table not one of the most romantic sci-fi novels ever written? Two hundred pages packed with delightful twists: quantum entanglement, the uncertainty principle, and blindsight woven together into a love story about a man losing his girlfriend to a void. Lack, the experimental anomaly that selectively absorbs some objects and rejects others, including the narrator Philip, is the purest metaphor for romantic rejection I have encountered in fiction. One cannot argue with a hole in spacetime. One cannot persuade it to want one back. The Lacanian resonance is obvious, the void that can never be filled, desire structured around absence, but Lethem wears the theory so lightly that it never suffocates the comedy. And what comedy. Lethem’s prose elevates an already brilliant premise to cult-classic territory: joke after joke, pun after pun, delivered with the deadpan of someone who understands that the funniest things are also the saddest. The entanglement of the cosmos and consciousness, grand love and small love, calls to mind Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Fisher’s essay on the same, the way physics occasionally stumbles into the territory of feeling and finds it was already there. What makes the novel work, finally, is that Lethem does not take it too seriously. The lightness is earned, not evasive. Philip’s heartbreak is real, his jealousy of a particle-physics experiment absurd and painful, and the resolution, such as it is, lands with the tenderness of someone who knows that love is mostly a matter of what the universe decides to let through. Waiting for Godot A play that seems to mean nothing and ends up meaning everything. Waiting for Godot generates a thousand different meanings in readers and audiences. A literal thinking hat that grants the oppressed a useless voice; a tree that signifies nothing but an eternal wait for the known-but-unknown. Nothing happens, twice, and the repetition is the point: Act II mirrors Act I the way one day mirrors the last, the way history under Beckett’s gaze is less progress than stutter. The play’s genius is structural. It does not argue that life is meaningless; it constructs meaninglessness so precisely that meaning keeps leaking in through the cracks.In Beckett’s world one sees the traces of oppression and terror: Estragon’s beatings, Vladimir’s urinary afflictions, the boy or boys whose messages never clarify, Pozzo’s rope around Lucky’s neck. The Pozzo-Lucky dynamic reads as capitalism in miniature, master and slave bound in mutual degradation, Lucky performing thought on command until the thought itself collapses into a torrent of fragmented academic language, the Western intellectual tradition choking on its own debris. But aside from a few lines from Vladimir, nobody takes it seriously. Nobody revolts. They wait. They fill time with games, with boots, with carrots and turnips. The passivity is the horror, and it is also, somehow, the comedy.Beckett, an Irishman writing in French in the aftermath of a war he lived through as a Resistance member, understood that the most accurate depiction of the human condition is not tragedy but the inability to decide whether one is living a tragedy at all. The tree sprouts leaves between acts, and nothing changes. Vladimir and Estragon consider hanging themselves and conclude that the bough might not hold. By the end, Beckett seems to have described something one already knew and could not say: the paralysis is not imposed from without. It is the waiting itself, the belief that Godot will come, that keeps one rooted to the spot.