Weekly Roundup #22, 2026

Hello and I hope you’re all ready for the incoming heatwave! I hear the best way to escape the pounding sun is the ice-cold embrace of your local movie theatre... so join me in the darkness (usually in the middle of the third row) and watch something interesting!
The pictures all this week, despite focussing on autos, were all shot with manual focus. They may be related to an exciting new project which you may hear more about soon... or you may never hear of it again. Who knows 😂

Movies

Monday 18ᵗʰ May - Pornostar (1998, ★★★+♥)

Despite the title, and despite that it was screened at the Nickel, this is in fact not a skinflick, but the debut feature of Toshiaki Toyoda, and what a way to make an entrance! Super saturated and visually playful—the cinematography hops from 35mm to a 16mm skate camera to slo-mo video, and even throws some early CGI in there to have the main character’s obsession (knives) literally come raining down from the sky.
There are so many bizarre stylistic choices here–like filling an apartment full of tomatoes and trying to burn it down, or having the killer be stalked by a dolled-up assassin with ‘Pussy Cat’ tattooed across her breasts (total Halloween costume inspo)–that are just so idiosyncratic that they remind me of a Suda51 game. Also, it has another example of what’s becoming my favourite shot, the 180º reverse.
I would have given this ★★★★★, but the third act kinda drags, and the greatest strength of the protagonist, viz. his monosyllabic-bordering-on-mute delivery, makes it sometimes feel like this is a film that could be happening without him. Again, though, it feels as though this is the point: to make the criticism of the society portrayed more incisive. Definitely one I will be hunting down the filmography of!

Wednesday 20ᵗʰ May - The Christophers (2025, ★★★)

I was really ready to love this, after the amazing Black Bag (2025): same year, but released a year apart - he just works that hard. Unfortunately, there were some really odd choices in the production that I couldn’t overlook, chief among them that Michaela Coel was underexposed for half of the film. Guys, it’s 10 years almost to the day since Moonlight (2016) showed how to make Black people beautiful in any light; and seriously, if you have to choose between overexposing Ian McKellen or underexposing Coel... pick beauty.
This aside, I have to laud the film for showing, for the first time I can think of, the beauty of Chinese food on the big screen. Okay, now more criticism: all of the painting shots are done with the canvas facing away from the camera! This would be forgivable in a lesser filmmaker, but this is Soderbergh, an artist who has mastered the montage, and in fact delivers a few off hand at the very end. The end result is that I feel disconnected from the process of creating art, which is unforgivable in a film about forgery.
Overall the feeling was that this was a sort of spurt of the COVID movie: trapped in a house, unable to develop outside of itself. I’m still giving it ★★★ because the performances are strong–Coel in particular captures the obseqious pleasantness of the British creative class–but I don’t think I’d rewatch this one.

Thursday 21ˢᵗ May - Montreal, My Beautiful (2025, ★★★)

Look, I get that having a lesbian awakening in your 50s is fundamentally cunty, but cheating on your partner is wrong, m’kay? That aside, the thing I remember most about this movie is all the places it could have ended—and then, bizarrely, it does just end without resolving itself. Which is messy like life, I guess.
Honestly, I forgot to bring my notebook for this one, and I had just eaten three lasagnes one after the other (shout out Senza Fondo) and was on a date, so I just enjoyed this one. Which is fine! But a lot of the plotlines were overdeveloped: everyone got a moment. Except Dong Dong, that mf just stared blankly the whole film. Maybe this is a home watch.

Friday 22ⁿᵈ May - Night of the Juggler (1980, ★★★★★) & The Last Horror Film (1982, ★★★)

Juggler was a real treat; a movie caught between two decades that managed to present the best tropes from each epoch. From the 70s, all the grit of a Scorcese picture, with vistas of slums in areas where the rent is probably more than my lifetime earnings now; from the 80s, a solid action movie with setpieces aplenty and a no-nonsense editing style that brings the heat. (Sidenote: apparently the lead actor was in the running to become the new James Bond after Roger Moore walked off set? Sidenote the second: apparently he’s Josh Brolin’s dad, which makes Josh Brolin a nepo baby??)
The film starts with enough people jogging for me to have made a note about it, which turned out to be foreshadowing, as it immediately rips into a foot-into-taxi-into-subway chase sequence that immediately had me sold. Another lovely artifact of the film’s era is that all of the police are laughably corrupt, with the only good cop being our hero, a down-on-his-luck truck driver who was fired from the force for exposing corruption. He also, in perhaps the film’s wildest b-plot, broke up the marriage of a former colleague, for the which said colleague (a fantastic Dan Hedaya, of Blood Simple and later Commando) relentlessly tries to murder him at every turn. The power of his pursuit is most potently felt in a scene at a dog pound, where the camera shoots through the chainlink fence to leave our hero trapped. You’ll have to watch it to see how that one ends.
One more honourable mention to a screen in a striptease booth where the mechanics of the mechanism lead our hero to waste a fair few quarters on the TRUTH™!

I wish I had equally positive things to say about The Last Horror Film, but unfortunately after a strong start, it drags its heels across the gimmick (that it was shot on location at the Cannes Film Festival) and becomes a rather schlubby B-movie. Great practical effects, and certainly wins points in my book for being only 90' long. This was another movie (perhaps because of the restoration... or maybe I’m getting cataracts) where the picture was unbearably dark - like it was exposing for the highlights (fine) in night scenes (baffling). Overall, not one I would recommend.

A close up of the empty headlight of a Datsun 240Z.

Saturday 23ʳᵈ May - In the Cold of the Night (1990, ★★★★★)

This was an amazing find—I had booked it a month ago, for reasons I can’t remember, and went into it blind. Given that it has no cult status, I would recommend you do too, and encounter the peak 90s vibes, the dialogue that’s so bad it becomes exactly what Sontag described in her Notes on Camp, and the violent jerking shifts from genre into genre. And also, what they do with those marbles...

Pockmarks and spraypaint on a Datsun 240Z bonnet.

Musings

This is the first newsletter in a long while that I’ve composed on a relaxed, sunny Sunday, and entirely at home too. Usually, I cram in a paragraph here and a paragraph there... but it’s quite relaxing to spend a bit of a morning and some of the afternoon doing it. Maybe I should do it like this more often!

Meetups

Repo Man–14:30. Saturday, 30ᵗʰ May at The Nickel Cinema

This is part of the ongoing Punk at 50 strand at the Nickel, and a correspondent of the blog has assured me that it’s a fantastic time. Come along and see for yourself!

Special bonus meetup: my choir is performing soon. If you like folk music, or just great harmony, you should come along!
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/oss-choir-summer-solstice-event-st-john-on-bethnal-green-tickets-1989658730824

Music

I love the quartet (who always have at least five dudes on the cover), even though I’ve never done any research into them (they have records dating back to the 1960s!). All I really need to hear is that sweet sweet basso profundo, and I am transported. And I love how weird the theology they sing is: they really find heresy in harmony. Try them out for yourself!