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EIFF 2026 – The Peril at Pincer Point

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EIFF 2026 – The Peril at Pincer Point,
Directed by Jake Kuhn, Noah Stratton-Twine,
Starring Alyth Ross, Dashiell Upton, Isobel Laidler, Jack Redmayne, Jason Hogan, Mat Wright, Mike Mackenzie, Oliver Woolf, Os Leanse

Now here we a delightful wee oddity – and I use the word “oddity” as a positive one. Peril is one of that small but hugely fun trend of really independent movies, the type made by a bunch of friends working together, using whatever money they can scrape together and whatever resources and locations they can get a hold of. Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) is a sound designer with problems – he’s a bit shallow but desperate to make his mark in “the industry” (he loves telling everyone he meets he’s “in the industry”), but his colleagues are giving him a rough time over his work so far, which falls short of what the legendary director PW (Os Leanse), is looking for.

Oh, and despite living in the upper levels of a multi-storey flat in London, he finds a crab lurking under his sofa. Which gives him a nasty nip.

After a stormy meeting with Jim’s colleagues, PW sees him and declares he’s the man he need – to the surprise of the same colleagues who had been telling him how bad his earlier efforts were. But PW thinks he sees a kindred soul, someone who will go that extra mile to help him realise his vision. And what’s his vision? Well he wants some sort of sound that’s never been heard before. Oh sure, that’s easy to find and record…

PW also wants the voice of the “sandwich girl” from a previous production, and so Jim is dispatched with his recording equipment to the tiny island of Pincer Point, to find this vague sound PW craves and to find the girl and persuade her to be recorded too. Easy, right?? Except the girl has vanished, and the island is populated by a range of bizarre, oddball characters – imagine some of the odder background characters from Spaced or the village in Hot Fuzz, and the girl, Marina (Alyth Ross) has vanished. And the man, Hollis (co-director Stratton-Twine), who is renting him a place to stay on the island turns out to be the brother of the missing girl.

Not that many seem that bothered about her being missing – in fact Hollis, the town drunk, seems more put out that Jim came to record his sister and not him (“I can do a woman” he complains). In time-honoured tradition he finds out bits and pieces from local characters, such as an old sea dog in the pub, or from Hollis. They all point to an old legend, of Sye Telson, who selects certain people to join his crew for ten thousand years, taking their very souls. And apparently Jim is just the type the captain likes…

 

This was such a good-natured hoot – funny and warm, making the most from its tiny budget, indeed often making something inventive and great out of the lack of big resources. In many ways it reminded me of other Indie flicks I have really enjoyed in recent years, like the fabulous Hundreds of Beavers. And like that film, on hearing the cast and crew talking about it after the screening, you get the impression they had as much fun making this as we had watching it, and that permeates this tiny budget, British indie flick. This is one to watch with a bunch of friends.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2026 – The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman

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EIFF 2026 – The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman,
Directed by Bart Simpson,
Featuring Adele Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, Gareth Gaudin, James Warren, Karen Green, Matt Groening, Meredith Kurtzman, Nellie Kurtzman, Pete Poplaski, Robert Crumb, Sarah Downs, Sergio Aragones, Terry Gilliam, William Stout

I usually find some interesting documentary work to watch during the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and this year I found one which dovetailed rather nicely with my own passions – comics. A film about a gifted and influential comics creator. That’s two of my favourite things in one, so of course I booked tickets to this Canadian-Scottish production.

For those unfamiliar with his name, Kurtzman was an incredibly inventive comics artist and writer and publisher. Some of his early work would involve a lot of research (despite the fairly fast and cheap nature of the medium at the time) to get details and ideas correct, especially for his war comics. These were not like most other rah-rah, here are our boys, the Good Guys, valiantly facing and vanquishing the Nasty Enemy. For starters these were aimed at much older readers, not kids, and Kurtzman managed to work in an anti-war sensibility while delivering the story, the sort of remarkable trick Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun would pull off decades later with the influential Charley’s War; no honour and glory antics here, this was war as hell and the effect is had on those who made it back.

Kurtzman started convincing the iconic EC Comics to start looking at new directions, not just their war, crime and horror titles, and his incredibly inventive sense of humour, combined with his distaste for those in authority, would really start to manifest (although some who knew him said this was already apparent when he drew cartoons even at high school). The road to the now-iconic MAD magazine was laid, and entire generations of creative talents would grow up influenced by this.


(restored version of the first MAD Magazine cover)

Simpson assembles some terrific talking heads scenes with people who knew Kurtzman, not least his youngest daughter, Nellie, who is a frequent “anchor” figure through the film, often talking with an old friend of her father’s, and a well-known name in comics circles in his own right, Denis Kitchen, who has carefully archived so much of Kurtzman’s work, and as they go through this material – from published work to personal notes and letters, we get more insight into Kurtzman’s varied output across the decades, while an animation studio took some of the artwork and brought it to a simple but effective form of life, to make it more visually engaging than simply showing a number of static images.

Another framing device used to structure the film is an old Canadian talk-show broadcast with Harvey, which, as director Simpson explained, allowed Harvey, gone now for some decades, to speak for himself about his work and his motivations. Around this and Nellie and Kitchen, we get quite the array of others who knew or worked with Kurtzman, including names from succeeding generations of creatives who would go on to become huge, influential names themselves, such as Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, not to mention Terry Gilliam and Matt Groening.


(cover for Help! Magazine number 1, with comedian Sid Caesar on the cover, the first of a string of famous figures who would gladly grace the pages)

Gilliam particularly is full of praise, and not just for the encouragement and work Harvey gave him when he was starting out, in Help! Magazine, but the connections – for a while they were playing with the photo-comic idea, but giving it their own subversive twist. One of the young actors used in such a strip, a man who falls for his daughter’s Barbie doll, was played by a very young John Cleese. As Gilliam notes, if he hadn’t had this comics connection to Cleese through working with Kurtzman, would he have travelled to the UK to become part of Monty Python? Would he have had the film career he had afterwards?

For me one of the warmest parts of this film wasn’t just those who knew or worked with Kurtzman reminiscing about him, it was about the influence, that ineffable effect where someone often doesn’t even know they are doing it, but they are passing on influences to a new generation, who take it and run with it, doing their own new things, which in turn influence more that come after them. With the run on Help! Magazine publishing early works from the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, who would go on to be pivotal figures in the emerging underground comics scene and the wider counter culture (as indeed did Kurtzman’s work). Or his teaching spell, alongside the equally legendary Will Eisner, at New York’s School of Visual Arts, frequently bringing in established creators as guests to his class.

There’s even a nice segment of Kurtzman in Europe, where his approach to comics and satire for adult readers inspired many in the Franco-Belgian comics scene. It was especially interesting to me as today in English-language countries, although the comics form is treated better than before, most comics creators here envy the way the medium is treated as a proper part of the arts scene in the Franco-Belgian world, so it was interesting to hear of a time when that influence was coming the other way and inspiring creators like Gotlib and Moebius.

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(Director Bart Simpson talking with the Edinburgh film fest crowd in the Cameo, after the screening of the Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, pic from my Flick)

And the nice thing about that influence is that, long after we lose the artist – or for Nellie and her family, they lost a loving father and husband, and too early – is that the influence remains, streamed into newer generations of creators, who in turn influence other, younger, newer creators, and so it goes on, a living influence. A warm-hearted look at not just a great comics creator and humorist, but a creator who genuinely influenced the popular and then the counter cultures (there’s a reason Steven Spielberg paid top dollar for a framed early MAD cover by Kurtzman, now, ironically, worth far more than he ever got paid in his own lifetime); today one of the major comics industry awards is named for Kurtzman, another way his legacy continues.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2026 – The Arrow at Rest At Every Instant of its Flight

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EIFF 2026 – The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight,
Directed by Theodore Schaefer,
Starring Constance Shulman, Daniel Zolghadri, Gus Birney, Jack Haven, John Early, Roberta Colindrez

The 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival – the oldest, continually running film festival on the planet – kicked off late this week, as Edinburgh embraces its traditional August festival frenzy (the International Festival and Fringe are already going, the Book Festival opens this weekend, it’s insane how many shows and events there are in our compact city in August). Late last night was my first screening for the 2026 edition of the EIFF, and it was a world premiere, no less! Theodore Schaefer brought us a hugely enjoyable Indie flick, with a very long title: The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight.

That mouthful of a title likely refers to one of Zeno’s paradoxes (recorded by Aristotle), which considered the flight of an arrow, something seemingly swift, but, he argued, at any given instant that arrow occupies a fixed space and therefore, within that instant it is not really moving. Given Arrow’s Raymond Carver-style series of individual short narratives, which then start to overlap, this seems appropriate, as, through the various characters and their individual narratives we are seeing individual slices of time, moments offered up for observation, but also, of course, able by the end to see an entire tale, like stepping back from a close look at a detail on a tapestry to take in the entire thing.

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(director Theodore Schaefer, co-writer Patrick Lawler, and actor Jack Haven, talking with the film fest crowd after the screening, pic from my Flickr, click for the larger versions on my Flick stream)

There are three main stories here, at first seemingly not connected, although eventually we will see the threads pulling them together. The woman with a suitcase (Constance Schulman), is possibly the closest to the philosophical arrow of Zeno, in that we glimpse her repeatedly throughout the film, starting with confusing glimpses of her in various spots around the city. Sitting on a bench, by the river, passing a building. Each time, to her shock she sees someone else – passing in a car, leaning out of an apartment window – who looks exactly like her. These form the opening, intercut with rapid scene changes, interspersed with fast-moving glimpses of New York, set to a jazz score, mirroring the Suitcase Woman’s own confusion at what is going on, and reinforcing the central idea that what we interpret as a grander narrative is really made up of frozen moments of time (not unlike analogue film itself, single frames, each capturing a split second of time, then run at speed to create what we see as a moving image).

In the main strands we see a pair of younger people, including Violet (Gus Birney), bored with their lack of prospects, working in an arcade, dreaming of some way out, even if it involves committing a crime, while in another, we see a woman, Sinopia (Gus Birney again), a professor, in the middle of an affair, but questioning her life and her choices, especially of her committing to her fiancée for a possible wedding. The final main strand sees Jade (Birney again, really earning her pay here!), this time a hustler, a gambler and a pickpocket, but one with a conscience – after picking some wallets in a busy bar she finds one with a suicide note in it, and follows the person she lifted it from, in an attempt to help.

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Arrow is one of those films where summarising some of the plot really doesn’t do it justice, however. This is one of those little jewels that Indie cinema sometimes offers up to movie lovers, it’s a film to experience. Not that the overlapping structure of the stories isn’t important, but it’s more about experiencing it and the way the different angles of the different stories keep changing our expectations and our notion of what is happening, which I found very satisfying (I’m sure some might find it annoying, but it worked beautifully for me).

Director Schaefer, co-writer Patrick Lawler and actor Jack Haven (who you may recall from the excellent I Saw the TV Glow, which I reviewed here previously), were on hand to chat to the audience after the premiere, and their talk reinforced the impression I had from the film itself, that this was a labour of love. Shot on 16mm film stock, giving it a grainy edge with its black and white film, and the jazz score, the fast-moving intercut scenes of the city between events, it reminded me very much of a lot of avant-garde films from the 1960s and 70s, when film-makers were playing with what you could do with the medium.

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And indeed at the after-film talk, Schaefer confirmed that they were very much inspired by those older films from the 60s and 70s US indie scene, French New Wave and especially some from Eastern Europe, such as the Czech New Wave, while the choice of analogue 16mm, black and white film with the jazz score just suits the New York location perfectly. An absolute delight for Indie film fans.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Reviews: Classic Atomic Age film with On the Beach

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On the Beach,
Directed by Stanley Kramer,
Starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, Donna Anderson, John Tate

“Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, you’ll come a waltzing, Matilda, with me...”

When I was a teen, back in the 1980s, the Doomsday genre was pretty well-established, from works like the BBC’s unbelievably powerful and bleak Threads dramatisation of a nuclear attack on a UK city to the Apocalypse War in the pages of Judge Dredd in the venerable (still going and approach its fiftieth anniversary!) 2000 AD comic. But, arguably, Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of Neville Shute’s acclaimed novel is the godfather of the genre. While the style screams the period (1950s), the story, message and, importantly, the refusal to sugar-coat any possible ending is remarkably unusual for a mainstream Hollywood film from 1959.

For those not familiar with the book or the film, it is an early depiction of World War III – not one that takes in combat scenes or the sight of nuclear weapons being dropped by bombers on cities, though. No, On the Beach is set in the aftermath – as far as anyone knows, the entire northern hemisphere has been destroyed, everyone annihilated. Entire nations are simply gone, thousands of years of human civilisation vanished into the blinding light of the atomic age.

Australia is one of the last safe havens, and even that is temporary – scientists and the military plot the clouds and winds carrying radioactive particles, and realise that it is a matter of weeks until they blow across the oceans to that massive island continent. There is no defence, nothing that can be done, no last minute, desperate plan that might just work. No, instead the government is making ready large supplies of painless suicide pills for the entire population, as the only alternative to a slow, lingering, painful death by radiation poisoning. Yes, it truly is that hopeless.

Into this we have the USS Sawfish, one of the last surviving vessels – ironically one of the new nuclear powered subs – which only escaped obliteration because she was submerged at the time. Captain Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck) is her skipper, trying to maintain a calm, thoughtful demeanour befitting a captain, to reassure his men, while internally grappling with the realisation at the large scale that his entire nation, and soon the world, is gone, and on the personal level, that his wife and children are gone too. There’s a lot of the attempting the stiff upper lip approach by both Towers and many of the other characters, especially the naval personnel (a young Anthony Perkins as an Aussie officer Peter Homes, assigned to be liaison to the Sawfish also tries to maintain that keep calm and carry on approach, which makes the odd sudden and very understandable outburst of emotion all the more powerful).

Knowing the end is approaching, some take a desperate, almost carnival approach of parties, drink and even dangerous pursuits – tired, often drunk atomic scientist Julian Osborn (Hollywood royalty, Fred Astaire, here playing a very dramatic and serious role very distant from his famous song and dance work) is restoring a beautiful Ferrari racing car, which he enters into a road racing competition, where it s clear both he and the other drivers are going beyond reckless. Why bother about any danger by pushing it as far as you can? You’re going to die slowly in a few weeks anyway, why not crash and burn now, as many of the drivers do.

Against this,two events offer a slender hope – a Morse code signal coming from the West Coast of the US; gibberish, but constantly broadcasting, in a place where they thought nobody could still be alive, requires investigating. And some scientists theorise the winds and rains may disperse the radioactive clouds into the ocean before they cross into the southern hemisphere, meaning perhaps Australia, or at least Antarctica may be spared (no mention of New Zealand, curiously!).

As a nuclear sub, only Sawfish has the range to make this trip safely (although an Australian submarine was used in the film, the US Navy reluctant to help in a film with this topic), so Peter and Julian are both seconded to the submarine for the voyage. Peter worries that the cloud could reach Australia before he returns, and desperately tries to get the suicide pills early, for his wife and baby daughter, just in case. Later scenes when the pills are made generally available, closer to the end, depict patient queues of Australians lined up at government facilities, giving their names and family member’s names to receive a box of the pills; no screaming, no histrionics, it’s more reminiscent of the queues of patiently resigned folk lining up for their rations during the previous war, which of course would still be fresh in the memory of much of the original audience back then.

Spoiler warning: yes, I know this is from 1959. but I have to assume a few people have not seen it and have never read about the ending, so if that’s you and you don’t want to know more before seeing it, skip to the final paragraph.

When the submarine reaches the frozen north and takes samples, it finds that the radiation is actually higher – the theory it may disperse is wrong. The last hope that Australia at least may be spared is gone, the men know now that the end is coming and there is nothing anyone can do against it. That leaves the signal. The sub stops off the coast of San Franciso, Towers peering through the periscope at a city still standing, but entirely devoid of people. In an eerie scene he allows his men, one by one, to take a look through the periscope, their last view of their homeland. Each looks silently, lost in their own thoughts before pushing up the handles of the scope with a bell-like clang, again and again. It is simple, but powerful.

Tracking the signal to a refinery near San Diego, one crewman goes ashore in a radiation suit, but finds nobody. Hydroelectric power means the electricity is still running, the machines ticking over for now, but not a single person there. He eventually finds the radio room, and a Morse key – the drawstring of a window blind has caught in it, and an empty Coke bottle has landed on the key. When the wind blows, the blind moves, the string lifts the key, then the weight of the bottle makes it go back down, sending a gibberish signal. No, there isn’t some desperate survivor, just this accidental happen-stance.

As I said, this is a story which eschews the idea of a last minute ray of hope or plan that can save someone or anyone, it is resolutely bleak about the prospect, and indeed so it should be. By the 1970s and 80s the peace movements like CND and others had exposed the utter lunacy of the two superpower blocks facing off with weapons which would leave no winner, only annihilate our entire species (and much of the other species of animal and plant life with it), and those of us growing up in that era were well aware that the sound of an air raid siren could mean nuclear annihilation in a few minute. But this is one of the first major media productions to grapple with that idea, and it is powerful, despite also being very of its time (not the modernity of the more optimistic 60s, some of it closer to the 1940s wartime movies in many ways, just with a terrifying new weapon, a legacy of the last days of that conflict).

Towers, when ashore, has been introduced to Moira, another Hollywood legend, Ava Gardner. Ava pretends to be a lush, the older but still single party girl, but Gardner gives her more humanity, a woman who has reached her forties in that era but not married, no children, now finding there is almost no time left for love, or anything. Her flirtations with Towers go nowhere at first, understandably – he has only just lost his family after all. But slowly the two of them find that talking to one another rather than drunken seduction brings them closer, and they start to fall for one another, even although they know how little time is left (again shades of those classic WWII movies, the desperate making the most of the moment because you never knew when your number might be up, except here everyone knows it).

Which makes the final scenes all the more quietly heartbreaking. With little duty left to perform in the final weeks, Towers tells his crew to choose what they want to do. Some will stay for the end in Australia but most vote to sail back to the US. They know they are all going to die regardless of where they are, but they would rather do it back home. Towers understands – he would dearly love to stay to the bitter end with Moira, but he is the skipper, and he simply cannot abandon his men on a final voyage, so he goes with her. A last scene of Moira, standing on the coast, watching the Sawfish sail out for the final time is bitterly sad, and, as it does throughout the film, the unofficial Aussie anthem of Waltzing Matilda plays over one of the saddest, bleakest endings in cinema.

Kramer was never the flashiest of directors, and this is often fairly staid, but actually that is to its advantage – that quieter, stiller approach adds to the power in the way that more mobile camerawork and more histrionic behaviour by the characters just wouldn’t (and this is, like the previous war era, still a time when you were expected to button it up, keep a brave face on, stiff upper lip and all that). But he was a master of social commentary – this is the man who directed The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind and Judgement at Nuremberg, among others – and this comes through here, A world just really starting to understand the implications of the awesome power that had been unleashed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but now vastly more powerful and in numbers enough to devastate the entire planet, entering the era of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), where each side stockpiled more and more powerful nuclear weapons to scare the other side into hopefully not daring to use their stockpile in fear of retaliation.

It’s quiet but incredibly powerful, and as I indicated earlier, it’s pretty remarkable for the period it was made, a window into a dawning global consciousness of the rising threat of atomic annihilation, and it is an absolute classic that deserves its place in cinematic history. I’m glad to see it getting this shiny new, high-res BFI release, complete with a slew of extras, including a choice of two commentaries, some rare 8mm film footage from behind the scenes, interviews, and short film Operation Hurricane (1952), which documents the British push to develop its own nuclear weapons alongside the Soviets and Americans. I apologise for the longer than usual review, but it’s a classic, and an important part of film history, and it deserves it.

“Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of the Earth?”

This new high-def release of On the Beach is available from the BFI now.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Reviews: Exit Party

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Exit Party,
Emily St John Mandel,
Picador
Hardback, 320 Pages
ISBN: 9781035081288

Toronto Book Award and Arthur C Clarke Award winner, Emily St John Mandel returns, following her excellent Sea of Tranquillity (reviewed here), with a new novel Exit Party. As with Tranquillity, this narrative takes in different places and times, with different characters who are connected. Indeed the times, places and people are more connected than they can know at the start.

It’s the very near-future, and Ari has just been released from a long prison sentence, sharing an apartment in LA with her friend, Gloria. A civil war has just finished, and the US no longer really exists, having broken up into a series of competing regions, states and even city-states, with warring militias everywhere. Ari and Gloria are celebrating the end of the curfew and the removal of the last peacekeeper troops from the streets of the Californian Republic.

It’s at a party hosted by Kareem, a friend of Gloria’s, that Ari first starts to notice strange things – she’s always had a knack, an intuition of sorts for when something is about to happen or something peculiar is about, even when others don’t notice at first. In this case she observes a beautiful woman in a gorgeous dress, then later the same woman, now dressed down. At first she assumes she changed – perhaps she spilled something on her dress? But then she sees both women at the same time, something unusual happens to Gloria, and then Kareem vanishes. She sees him, goes to talk to him, but he’s gone from the room he entered, and she can’t see how he could have exited without her seeing him.

What begins as a gentle tug at her senses that something peculiar happened starts to build slowly, bit by bit, over the narrative. Ari’s intuition tells her when to move to another location to escape possible danger, and in this fragmented former US, danger is everywhere. She meets Nico in another city, who was also at that party, except she knew this woman under another name, but yes, this is the same person. Or is it? They talk warily and eventually Nico confesses she too saw odd things at the party, and confirms Kareem has never been seen since, and she confirms the double sightings of others, almost like there were two, slightly different versions of the same people. In fact Nico calls Ari “Ibari” when she first meets her, not a version of her name that Ari goes by, so she is puzzled how Nico would even know it.

As with Tranquillity, we move through different character perspectives, including “Ibari”, who is a federal officer, a kind of not so secret police officer in a US that didn’t disintegrate like Ari’s, but which is now a totalitarian regime, where children inform on their own parents (but hey, crime is low and the trains run on time!), a total opposite from Ari’s fractured, disintegrating US. We move through the characters and through the years, and as with her previous book, Mandel rather deftly takes all of these pieces of the puzzle, and arranged them, facet by facet, until we have the whole jewel, bringing all the connections together, each illuminating the other strands.

I don’t want to go into it any further because of possible spoilers, but suffice to say that as with Sea of Tranquillity, I found this not only an interesting narrative, but a beautiful bit of writing craft, to float various characters and spaces and times, then slowly bring them together; as with that previous book I found this highly satisfying.

Exit Party is published in Hardback by Picador/Macmillan on the 17th of September; this review was originally penned for The Shoreline of Infinity

If you are able, please support your local independent bookshop for purchases – if you don’t have one nearby, you can buy through Bookshop.org , and nominate a local bookshop, which will get a cut of the sale (to hell with Spamazon!)

Reviews: The Red Sacrament

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The Red Sacrament,
Sara Hinkley,
Titan Books,
Paperback,
ISBN: 9781835410820

It’s Paris, 1869, an era when this most famous of cities is claiming its title as “the city of light”; the new Haussmann boulevards, enormous department stores like the famous Au Printemps dazzle with size, light and sheer range of goods, the pavement cafes bustle, the opera and theatres are busy, the many new squares and garden spaces are lined with flaneurs, and the new gas lighting illuminates everything.

This is not entirely to the taste of our main protagonist, Arnault, who runs the small Théâtre Saint-Siméon , tucked away from these elegant, wide, new streets. It is an unusual venue, where one cannot purchase a ticket – instead black tickets are distributed out among certain sections of society, free of charge, and many are keen to obtain one. How does the theatre sustains itself with no box office, you may ask? It transpires the cast has, shall we say, other methods of obtaining an income, and that income is only secondary to something else they require more urgently: blood.

Yes, this is a theatre of vampiric actors and singers and jugglers; some have only been undead a few years, others performed their stage trade at the open-air fairs of the old Paris, centuries before. Arnault himself is the oldest; a monk and scribe once upon a time, chosen by a pale nobleman to become his painter apprentice. Despite his centuries of existence, he maintains the low, careful profile for himself and his troupe, and truth be told, he takes little interest in the events of the outside world, which tend to surprise him when he notices, giving him a slightly grumpy old man aura, despite his youthful appearance, as he mutters about everything changing around him, as the Modern Era really starts to show.

(Portrait of Clémentine, Mrs Alphones, by Henri Lehmann, in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the original artwork the book cover design is based on)

Into this fairly static existence – select pieces to perform, rehearse, put on a season on the stage, arrange the usual bribes and covering charges, putting aside takings from their victims into a pool that accrues interest for these immortals over the years – disruption is about to arrive, partly in the form of something unusual. Not just two new vampires from another country (from the New World, the islands of the Caribbean!), but a brother and sister, both vampires, both beautiful, elegant, happy in this new world of artificial lights, masked balls, operas and department stores where they can buy whatever they desire.

The other disruption bearing down on them, almost unnoticed at first – such is Arnault’s disinterest in the wider world – is history itself. As anyone familiar with European history will be aware, this is the era of the Franco-Prussian War, which the French assumed they would win easily, but in fact lead to a humiliating defeat, a long siege of Paris itself (the infamous one where the restaurants butchered the zoo animals and served them in fine sauces as food became scarcer), the surrender of territory and the establishment of what would become a united Germany (laying the groundwork for all the alliances and grievances which would lead to disaster in 1914). How do the citizens deal with the cold and hunger or a months-long siege? And how do vampires sustain themselves when their prey is harder to find at night, and what they find is mostly weak and starving?

(The Siege of Paris, 1870, by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier)

There are obvious nods to the queen of vampire fiction, Anne Rice – her sequel to the now iconic Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, also boasted an exclusive theatre in Paris run by vampires, and both are clearly paying homage to the famous, or infamous, real Théâtre de Grand Guignol, which was a fixture in the city’s demi-monde for many decades. And while Rice fans (myself included) will find some familiar material here, this is, I am happy to report, its own beast, albeit one Rice fans will enjoy, I think. Sumptuous descriptions of the new, improved Paris, and especially of the styles of the period (Hinkley herself is a costume designer for film and stage) are rich, and it all comes with a nice sense of the Gothic.

Add in a witch from a backward, rural part of France (not even touched by “the iron rail”, as Arnault refers to the trains), this young, new vampire brother and sister who they know next to nothing about (exciting new friends? It has been decades since they last saw a new vampire visit the city. Or are they a threat to their comfortably carved out existence?), a potential queer romance as Arnault finds himself, despite his normal reticence to anything new, towards Victor, the visiting male vampire, who in turns seems quite taken with Arnault (unlike his sister who seems to disdain the entire group), and then the historical siege, and you have a rich, Gothic, romantic, bloody stew to enjoy, which also makes gentle commentaries on ageing, on the nature of change and moving on.

The Red Sacrament was published by Titan in July; this review was originally penned for The Shoreline of Infinity

If you are able, please support your local independent bookshop for purchases – if you don’t have one nearby, you can buy through Bookshop.org , and nominate a local bookshop, which will get a cut of the sale (to hell with Spamazon!)

Reviews: the Mortuary Assistant

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The Mortuary Assistant,
Directed by Jeremiah Kipp,
Starring Willa Holland, Paul Sparks

Jeremiah Kipp (Slapface), returns with a delightfully creepy and atmospheric horror in The Mortuary Assistant, co-written by Brian Clarke, who created the original video game which inspired the film, and Tracee Beebe). Yes, this is that unusual beast, a fascinating flick born from a video game, brought to us via Shudder. We meet Rebecca (Willa Holland), undertaking her final practical examination in mortuary science – she performs an embalming procedure on a corpse by herself, but supervised by Raymond (Paul Sparks), which adds a touch of nervousness to the already somewhat macabre work; not only do we watch all the tools of the mortician’s trade being used, we also have Rebecca having to look up to her supervisor frequently, wondering if she is performing correctly, the sort of thing that would make most of us nervous, no matter how much we have practised an learned.

At first it is hard to tell how he is rating her – Raymond seems very quiet, very unemotional and hard to read, but when she pauses once or twice and asks if she was doing something wrong, he quietly reassures her she is doing fine. She is now qualified to work for him, to her relief. We start to learn that Rebecca is in recovery, in a sponsored programme for addiction recovery, and this is her one year anniversary of being clean, so passing her exams, getting her new job secured and being free of her addiction all coincide.

However, all of this also makes her a target for what will follow. After initially telling her she didn’t need to volunteer for the “graveyard shift” (sorry, bad pun for a mortuary based film, I know), he later calls her to say something has come up and can she go in to take care of some work overnight, which she is happy to do. As you can imagine, a funeral home at night, with just bodies in storage and a single, solitary live person is a fairly creepy setting to begin with, and Kipp takes this and uses it to slowly build atmosphere. We already saw Raymond gently remonstrate with Rebecca for going to a basement storage space for more supplies, saying she doesn’t need to go down there, which right away signals that there is something here she is not meant to know… And of course there is.

Kipp starts it quietly and slowly – tiny little things, like reading a list of preparations for a body which is then to be simply cremated – why carry out all this work if the body is just going to be burnt to ashes?? Still, these are the instructions, and Rebecca dutifully follows them. And that’s when we start to notice little things, like the way an eye suddenly blinks or the head tilts on a corpse on the preparation table when she isn’t looking. Just little movements, no big jump scare, and it is far more effective this way.

Noises and strange visions soon start to come to Rebecca, and some seem to tie back to events in her past, involving running away while on substance abuse, her father desperately trying to find her, but something happens to him, for which she blames herself. At one point she becomes even more freaked out when she finds herself back in her own apartment, with no memory of leaving the funeral home, then a banging on the door – her sponsor from the addiction programme, who she called (but again has no memory of doing so). Obviously her sponsor takes this as a sign that she has relapsed, despite Rebecca’s protests, but then things just get stranger. And then Raymond calls for her and tells her urgently that she has to go back. She says no, she is scared to go back after the weird experiences there, but he insists she must, and that, for reasons he won’t elaborate on, she will be safer there than at home.

Now we become even more suspicious of Raymond – he clearly knew something was likely to happen, has been waiting and watching for it to unfold, but what is it and why? What is his role, is he helping her or using her? It becomes harder to tell even after he explains some of it – demonic beings trying to take control of recently deceased bodies, but they use links to certain people, people with troubled pasts that the demon knows all about and exactly how to exploit, people like recovering addicts like Rebecca…

I don’t want to ruin too much of this by explaining too much more. Suffice to say Kipp ratchets things slowly, and puts us alongside Rebecca in not knowing exactly what is going on or what to do – should she trust Raymond? He hasn’t told her everything, this is clear, but why? And then there are moments when he does seem to explain something to her on the phone, but gives her very odd, harmful instructions, only for the phone to ring again moments later and it is Raymond saying he didn’t just speak to her, he has in fact been trying to call her for some time. Was he lying? Was it the demon impersonating him, trying to trick her to its bidding? Both? The levels of creepiness and the inability to tell who to trust, or if she can even trust her own senses, builds continually, and we feel ourselves being drawn into this nightmare with Rebecca,

The film evoked memories of the excellent Brian Cox-starring The Autopsy of Jane Doe, partly because of the funeral home setting, but also because both chose the slow, something isn’t quite right approach that gradually unfolds from there’s something wrong here to what was that, to oh my god, and that just works so well, loading the atmosphere and tension. It doesn’t hurt that when we get glimpses of the demon, in its own form, outside of any cadaver it is trying to control, it is a simple but very creepy looking critter. This is one to watch late night, with the lights down.

The Mortuary Assistant is available on demand, DVD and Blu-Ray from Acorn Media Entertainment from the 20th of July

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Reviews: Exit 8

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Exit 8,
Directed by Genki Kawamura
Starring Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi, Naru Asanuma, Kotone Hanase

I’ve been looking forward to seeing Exit 8, having been unable to make it to the cinema release, and having heard a lot of good things about this – gasp! A good video game to film adaptation! I was not disappointed.

As with the Kotake Create game, the bulk of the movie is confined to one location, following the perspective from The Lost Man, Kazunari Ninomiya. We start with him on a typically crowded underground train, where he pauses listening to his headphones to look up and see a rude, aggressive Salaryman type angrily berating a young mother because he baby is screaming. Like the other commuters around him, he looks, is not impressed by the bad behaviour, but does nothing to intervene.

When he alights on his platform and starts to walk to the titular Exit 8, his phone rings. His ex-girlfriend is calling, and she has news – she is in the hospital, and she is pregnant Our Lost Man is unsure how to react to this, but it feels very much like he is reluctant to be a part of this situation, and looking for a way out of it (the irony, given the situation he will soon find himself in). As he walks into the sterile, shiny tiled corridors towards the exit, the phone signal breaks up and then is gone. He continues walking, taking the turns, then the long straight passages, then the turns again…

…And this is where it goes from a normal, if cold, public space to a more liminal one, then to downright disturbing. He takes a corner, walks past a row of lockers, a pile of sheets dumped next to them, and a photo booth, then another sharp turn into the longer, white, tiled corridor, and another man, known as The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), in his business shirt and tie, attaché case and phone, striding down the corridor towards him and past him, but seemingly utterly oblivious to The Lost Man. He continues, turns another sharp corner, and finds himself passing identical lockers, sheets and photo booth, turns the next corridor feeling an uneasy sense of deja vu, and yes, this corridor also looks the same, but then so do most in such places.

Except around the corner he hears footsteps, and it is the same Walking Man coming around the corner and then walking past him again. Now The Lost Man is getting worried, grabbing his asthma inhaler from his bag as he starts to panic a bit. He tries to keep going, but he can’t – he is in a loop, like something from an Escher print crossed with Groundhog Day. In fact among the advertising posters on a wall he passes, is one for an Escher exhibition, featuring ants trapped in a Moebius loop, the shape imitating the “8” of the eponymous Exit he is searching for.

He finds instructions on one wall, which he struggles to understand at first – it tells him to keep walking forward, unless he spots an anomaly, in which case he should go backwards. Unsure what this means, he starts walking again, pondering their meaning. When he encounters the Walking Man again, they pass as usual, without any acknowledgement. But then he hears his footsteps stop suddenly, so he turns slowly and the Walking Man is standing stock-still behind him, a creepy grin on his face. Somewhat freaked out, he realises this is some kind of anomaly and retreats. He notices another sign, where the number changes each time he passes, from a zero to a one and on, if he completes a stage correctly, indicating how many times he must succeed to reach Exit 8. This simple sign becomes quite an emotional touchstone, and you really feel the desperation or elation when he passes by it again and finds it has gone down or up.

The anomalies start small, but soon start to become more disturbing. We also start to get a handful of other perspectives – we see a little but from the perspective of The Walking Man, a small boy (Naru Asanuma) and a young high school girl (Kotone Hanase), which adds a much-needed, but carefully rationed element of interaction and alternative views of what is happening in this strange space. We also start to find that some of the phenomena they think are new anomalies – in fact it may be that some of them are some sort of life-lesson, but how to understand which is which is not always obvious (until passing the number sign and seeing if it has gone up or reset itself). It also breaks the repetitive corridors a little for some flashbacks, or possibly flash-forwards, hinting that his moral choices as well as his ability to spot anomalies, may play an important part in any escape.

This is a compact, atmospheric, clever piece of work, slowly taking its time to build the sense of unease from boring, everyday location to the feeling something isn’t right, to downright disturbing, and many of us will empathise because we too have experienced the way these liminal spaces that seem so ordinary most of the time, can start to feeling different, say late night when almost nobody else is there, and it plays on this beautifully, as well as that repetitve nature of our own daily commutes, seemingly the same thing again and again. I watched this the same week I got to see the much-acclaimed Backrooms film, and I thought that superb too, although I think Exit 8 slightly superior, largely because it feels like whatever force puts each person into this loop is doing so not out of malice, but partly to try and impart a personal lesson in their lives too, and that adds another level to it.

Wonderfully disturbing and creepy in places, but taking its time to build that sensation up, we really start to become immersed, walking those same repeating corridors with our protagonist, seeing much of it from his perspective, feeling what he feels, that mounting sense of frustration that then becomes desperation as he realises he is not merely lost, not taken a wrong corridor, he is stuck in something unnatural. The endlessly repeating cold, white tiled corridors could easily have been boring after a few scenes, but the camera work keeps it fresh, and you find yourself looking with the Lost Man for anomalies, for the tiny differences – was that door handle always in the same place? – as you are all but walking around with him. Exit 8 sits well among films like Backrooms, Groundhog Day or River. Highly recommended.

Exit 8 makes its digital platforms debut from Monday 8th of June, and will be available on Blu-Ray from 29th June

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Reviews: the Cars That Ate Paris

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The Cars That Ate Paris,
Directed by Peter Weir,
Starring John Meillon, Terry Camilleri, Kevin Miles, Rick Scully, Bruce Spence, Melissa Jaffer, Kevin Miles

I first saw The Cars That Ate Paris way back in the 80s, on home video – it was one of those cult movies you just heard about (prior to the internet and the ability to look anything up instantly), and I have vague memories of it, mostly dominated by the now-iconic images of some of the monster cars (notably the VW Beetle covered in spikes, which pretty much became the image for this film). But this 1974 Aussie film is no Mad Max car-smasher, although you can see hints of it in the later DNA of the original Max movies.

In fact, the famous monster cars are mostly kept back until quite late on by Peter Weir. Yes, that Peter Weir – Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poet’s Society, The Truman Show – this was his first feature film, and it is very interesting to see this early work by such a now-major director of some landmark films. The Paris in question is not the City of Lights, not even Paris, Texas, but a tiny outback town in Australia, in which the main driver of the economy appears to be deliberately creating the conditions for traffic accidents on a winding, steep, badly maintained road. The locals like to use flashing lights or mirrors to distract or dazzle drivers, leading to crashes, then they salvage personal belongings and any useable car parts, like the wreckers of old who would light beacons on beaches by rocks to mislead ships in the dark to founder, then pillage their contents.

Arthur (Terry Camilleri – probably better known to many of us a Napoleon in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and his brother George (Rick Scully) are driving through Paris with their caravan in tow, when George is dazzled by a light, leading to the vehicle going over the edge and rolling down a steep slope. George is killed, but Arthur survives with just bruises and cuts – and a lot of guilt. Guilt for surviving while his brother perished, guilt that maybe if he had been driving it may have been different, and an older guilt, we learn, from before – he killed an elderly man by accident with his car, and hasn’t been able to sit behind the wheel since.

John Meillon’s mayor decides the quiet, gently withdrawn Terry is alright and should stay on in the town, inviting him into his home and arranging a job for him. He’s soon introduced to the family, which includes a pair of young girls adopted when they were orphaned – in another car crash. Yes, you can guess where that was going. Still processing the accident and death of his brother, Arthur meekly goes along with the Mayor’s suggestions, and also seems warmed by his talk of becoming part of his family.

But as in many a folk horror film, this is a small, rural town where it all looks like a nice place, where nobody locks their doors at night and everyone knows one another, but of course there is something much darker here. Both the elders and the younger generation cause and profit from these car wrecks, but the younger ones are getting more and more restless with the conservative attitude of the Mayor and the other council members, spending their time modifying their monster cars, and you just know that at some point the simmering conflict will boil over (and those fabulous cars will finally be let off the leash!).

We mostly follow the events from Arthur’s perspective, and with his almost shell-shock from the accident and guilt, he moves slowly through everything, almost as if it is a slightly disturbing dream, one of those dreams where everything looks almost normal, but you just know that something is wrong, underneath it all, and it is waiting to claim you. Much of the film passes in that almost dreamlike state, Weir saving his limited budget for the petrol-driven mayhem later, deploying the most iconic of the monster cars, the spike-studded Beetle, right in the final reel.

It’s an interesting and peculiar film – it’s adjacent to the then-growing Ozploitation films that were just getting going, but not really a part of them (although if you liked those, this is something you really should have a look at). It does have some vehicular mayhem, but much of the film is more about Arthur and the people in Paris, with Weir capturing that languid, too damned hot, almost dreamy atmosphere, something he would also work into parts of Picnic, later on, and there are even hints of a very Aussie kind of folk-horror, but again it isn’t really a folk-horror flick. It’s hard to describe – some films just have a certain vibe that is hard to explain easily, you just feel it, and some will get it, others wonder what it was about, but to me that’s part of the beauty of oddball flicks like this, and I’m glad the BFI have this restored version coming to BluRay and UHD. It’s the sort of unusual film that those of us who used to stay up late to watch Alex Cox’s Moviedrome love.

The Cars That Ate Paris has a 4k Restoration release on BluRay and UHD, remastered by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, as a limited edition, two-disc set, which also includes Weir’s psychological thriller, The Plumber (1979), a whole slew of extras, including interviews with Weir and Camilleri, features, commentaries and even a booklet, with original essays on the film and a new, written interview with Weir. All this plus an early film appearance from Bruce (Mad Max, LOTR) Spence!

The Cars That Ate Paris is available on BFI BluRay, UHD and also online from Apple TV and Prime from May 25th.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Reviews: Oh, Canada

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Oh, Canada,
Directed by Paul Schrader,
Starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, Victoria Hill

Adapted from the novel Foregone by the late Russell Banks, this is the second of the author’s works Schrader has spun a film from his friend’s writing (the previous one being Affliction). We have Richard Gere, playing an acclaimed American-Canadian documentary film-maker, Leonard Fife, now reaching the final stages of his life. Gere, known, of course, for his leading man looks, here starts off as far from that image as possible: Fife is dying, slowly, of cancer. We see him being woken by his much younger wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman) and his nurse, his face sunken, his strength mostly gone, his hair sparse on his head, his face unshaven, totally reliant on the help of others now as the end closes in. They are readying him for a final documentary.

However, this time, as Fife himself tells the camera, while looking directly at it, after a career spent encouraging others to open up and tell him things they normally never would, it was now, finally, “his turn”. His former students, Diana (Victoria Hill) and Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), with their younger assistant Sloan (Penelope Mitchell) arrive at his grand Canadian residence, rolling up a thick carpet, moving decorations, including a Christmas tree, in a large, oak-panelled room, setting up cameras and film lights.

Malcolm and Diana have talked him into being the subject this time, a final documentary for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company), which they assure him will cement his already formidable reputation among cinephiles for documentary movie making (Fife, we learned, earned that reputation exposing secret shames of the country, such as the vicious seal clubbing trade, which those of us of a certain age will recall with horror, and the way the children of indigenous peoples of Canada had been treated by parts of the school system to “fit in”). And it appears he wants this, not so much as a last piece of his legacy in cinema, but more because he is a dying man and welcomes the chance for a final confession before the final curtain. The camera will be his confessional priest, his wife he wants nearby as his witness.

It starts in a fairly standard manner, Fife talking to the camera about his early life before we cut to seeing it in flashback, with Jacob Elordi playing the younger Gere, taking us back to the US in 1968. Fife’s wife, daughter of a wealthy businessman, is pregnant and we see a touching scene of him reading to their first child and whispering to her baby bump, it all seems ideal, but also far removed from the old man we saw at the start of the film who is a respected documentarian.

Fife finds himself faced with choices – he has been offered a teaching job at a small but respected college he and his wife plan to move to, which would support them while he tries to write his novel on the side, but his father in law also offers him an incredibly generous and lucrative deal to be a part of his multi-million dollar business, which would set up his young family for life. There is also the looming threat of the draft, this being the era of Vietnam. In the end Fife chooses to run away from both obligations and to Canada, while along the way we see him indulge in numerous affairs.

This, understandably, upsets his loyal wife, Emma – he insists he is not being cruel, but she should know the sort of man she has been married to these last several decades, a man who ran away from his marriage, his children (his estranged son will turn up later and also add his voice to the narration). She, however, was never sure this documentary was a good idea, given his illness and medication, and believes that those are confusing him, that he’s not confessing buried truths but half-remembered other stories or wholly invented ones, and that the filming should stop, while Malcolm and Diana insist this is what Fife wanted and agreed to (we get the impression that despite their respect for his position, there’s also a distinct tension between Malcolm, Diana and Fife).

As I mentioned, Schrader does use Elordi for the younger Fife in flashbacks, but this, however, is not exclusive – there are scenes which start with Elordi as young Fife, such as the one I mentioned earlier with his pregnant wife, which then cut to Gere himself (as he is now, not as the older, dying version of Fife) playing his character. This happens several times throughout the film, while other flashbacks show Emma, Diana and Malcolm in their days as Fife’s students, but played by the same actors, only styled more for the period. It’s an interesting visual device, and a signal that Fife is a very unreliable narrator.

As the stories continue, Emma protests more, Fife insists he has to continue and that he is finally telling the truth, but there are moments when someone comments that couldn’t have happened when he said it did because he was known to be elsewhere at the time. Then he we see him stumble, confused, wondering where he got to in his narrative, losing his own thread in the labyrinth of his memory, that labyrinth not a solid, permanent structure, but a crumbling and shifting edifice. How much is real, how much is age, illness, the medication, a dying man who feels guilt for something, but what is real? Which of these sins did he really commit, if any?

Some of the film, notably those scenes with the dying Fife, are not only about a documentary being filmed, they use some of the conventions of the documentary film-maker, such as the subject, head and shoulders, talking directly to the camera (a trick we are told Fife used often himself as a way to get people to open up and talk). Those of us familiar with documentary film are almost pre-conditioned to accept that style as a form of verite, but here Schrader is playing with it undermining that filmic convention, reminding us even the realism of a documentary is artifice, it is choices, cuts, edits, omissions, inclusions, prejudices (conscious or otherwise), it is, in short, a constructed media, not reality, even if it is attempting to reflect it.

This confusion and tension builds through the film – did Fife really have this secret life before fleeing the draft to Canada? Did he really abandon a marriage and children his current wife had no idea about? The appearance later of his estranged son seems to confirm at least part of that, but by this point it is clear we can’t really take anything we see in the flashbacks, or what Fife tells the camera, as gospel. This will likely frustrate some viewers, which I can understand, but at the same time, to have then come out with a “this is what really happened” approach later would, I think, have betrayed the film.

An older man, full of regrets, seeking some sort of absolution, is, of course, not new territory for Schrader, so while this ay not be novel, it is however interesting, with the unreliability of what we are hearing and seeing leaving the viewer to make up their own mind about truth, reality and memory in the film (and by extension, in our own lives and in any other media). The actors give their all, especially Gere – this was the young, handsome, leading man who played the Gigolo for Schrader way back in the day, and while the flashbacks to Fife’s many youthful dalliances hint at that, the present day, weak, ill, dying, worn Fife, is in total contrast to that, and Gere plays it straight to the camera, documentary interview style, a brave move and a powerful one.

Not for everyone, but anyone who has followed Schrader’s career most likely knew that going in.

Oh, Canada will be available from Blue Finch on streaming platforms in Britain and Ireland from January 12th.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Best of the Year – 2025

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It’s time for a look at some of what I most enjoyed reading this year – fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels. As every it is not a complete list, and given how much I read over a year, there are always titles I will only remember well after posting this (with an oops, how did I forget that one? slap to the head, so apologies to anyone missed out).

If you are interested in buying any of these, please, if you can, consider doing so from your local, independent bookshop (Jeff Bezos does not need another yacht, as one of my colleagues put it!). If you buy online, you can use BookshopDotOrg which allows you to order a book and nominate a local Indie bookshop who will get a percentage of the sale (so you don’t have to use Spamazon)

Non-Fiction

The Sun Rising: James I and the Dawn of Global Britain,
Anna Whitelock,
Bloomsbury

2025 marked four centuries since James VI & I died, and there were several new history books marking this anniversary. I didn’t have time to read them all, of course, but Bloomsbury kindly sent me this one. Not so much a biography of the Scottish king who succeeded Elizabeth I to then sit on both the Scottish and English thrones, but about the world around him, changing, and laying the groundwork for what would come in later centuries (uniting the kingdoms, for both good and ill, something we’re still arguing about, the movement into colonialism that would lead to empire and to global trading, again something we’re still dealing with).

Earth Shapers: How Humans Mastered Geography and Remade the World,
Maxim Samson,
Profile Books

Samson traverses the centuries and the continents, examining the way different human cultures have interacted, for good and bad, with their environments, from the astonishing road networks linking pre-Columbian civilisations in South America to the “green wall” across the edge of the Sahara. It takes in history, politics, psychology, sociology and nature, in a fascinating and thought-provoking manner. Ideal for those who enjoyed the likes of Power of Geography.

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: the Epic Story of the Making of the Godfather,
Mark Seal,
Gallery Books

Coppola’s movie has earned its place in the pantheon of greatest films of the 20th century, while Puzo’s novel which inspired it has remained in print for decades. This deep-dive explores both, taking in Puzo’s struggling writing career and gambling addiction, a struggling studio deciding to make a film of the book, the many problems that plagued the production, from personality clashes to problems with the real Mafia (from threats to suddenly wanting to be in the film), it is as compelling as the movie itself, and a great read for anyone who loves cinema.

It’s also a reminder that there was a time when now almost gods of cinema like Coppola and Pacino were all but unknown, with producers and studio execs wondering why they were bothering with them (seems bizarre to us now, from our perspective, of course)

Is a River Alive?
Robert MacFarlane,
Hamish Hamilton/Penguin

I love Robert’s work, and have been waiting several years, since his remarkable Underland book, and I was not disappointed. Travelling to different parts of the world, from South America to Canada to India, water is the connection here to each chapter, just as rivers and seas have traditionally been the connections between human societies.

MacFarlane doesn’t just visit these places, though, he travels with and listens to the local people who try to protect these environments, who explain its importance to them, not just a natural resource, but a part of their way of life. It doesn’t shy away from the awfulness of environmental damage, but it also underscores those fighting back – it is a warning, but it is also hopeful and inspiring, wrapped in MacFarlane’s beautiful, lyrical prose; one of those precious books that rekindles your sense of wonder about how remarkable our world is (and why we must take better care of it). My favourite read of 2025.

Graphic Novels

The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor,
Bryan Talbot,
Jonathan Cape

I consider Bryan Talbot to be pretty much the UK’s greatest comics creator, someone who has been at the top of his game for decades (I’ve also been fortunate enough to chair Bryan at the Edinburgh International Book Festival). His Grandville series was an absolute masterclass of clever storytelling (building layers with each volume), astonishingly detailed, rich artwork, and with multiple references (to history, art, films, other comics and more, demanding re-readings).

Here we have a prequel to Grandville, with LeBrock’s mentor, the great detective who trained him, Stamford Hawksmoor, a deliberately Sherlock Holmes themed character. It’s a superb piece of work, an engrossing mystery, woven through the last days of the old regime changing hands to the one we know in Grandville, and again layered with references, from Spiegelman’s Maus to The Outlaw Josey Wales (let no-one say Bryan’s influences are not diverse!). Although it is a prequel to Grandville, this could be read by anyone who hasn’t encountered that series, but obviously those who have will find more in the details to spot.

Muybridge,
Guy Delisle,
Drawn & Quarterly

I’ve taken photographs for as long as I can remember – my late Uncle Jim gave me a Kodak 110 camera (remember those?) when I was in primary school, then a few years later, my first 35mm camera – and I have been a huge fan of Guy Delisle’s work, especially his travel literature comics, so Guy looking at the odd life of Muybridge, one of the pioneers of early photography, was always going to fascinate me. If you’re not familiar with the name, you have almost certainly seen his astonishing sequence of still images that first captured a running horse, showing each step, and that the hooves did all leave the ground. Injured in a stagecoach accident, his personality noticeably changed (a head trauma?), and while his photographic genius remained, this is a man who would later commit murder (and get away with it).

It’s a fascinating insight into an unusual man attempting the impossible, and the influence that work had (not least cinema), although I think it could have done without the use of a photograph of animal abuse in one scene (that really wasn’t required, and should have had a warning, I think, the explicit scene not adding anything other than disgust, but that’s just one niggle in anotherwise fascinating book).

Low: Bowie’s Berlin Years,
Reihnhard Kleist,
SelfMadeHero

I’ve shouted out Reinhard’s work since the early days – back before his groundbreaking Cash: I See a Darkness graphic biography of Johnny Cash was published, on the FP Blog we highlighted it and said it needed to be translated and published into English. I’ve followed his work ever since, and had the good fortune to chair him at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Reinhard is a master at creating fascinating graphic biographies, especially of artists (his works on Nick Cave and Johnny Cash are amazing); he interweaves their artwork through the events of their life, knowing with an artist you really cannot separate them, giving a real flavour of the complex person who created that art.

Also, you have Bowie sharing a flat in then West Berlin (still Cold War, so Berlin Wall still up) with the equally iconic Iggy Pop, which almost sounds like the set up for a sit-com.

Second Shift,
Kit Anderson,
Avery Hill

I always find myself backing Kickstarter campaigns for some of Avery Hill’s new slate of publications each year, and this was one of them for 2025. A science fiction work, set on a distant world where three humans, working shifts and spending time between in isolation, plugged into “Station”, their AI, for distraction and amusement. There are echoes of the film Moon here and there – what are they really doing on this distant planet, does the mega corp that sent them even still exist, does the AI tell them the truth?

The discovery of a similar but now empty base to their own opens up a new line of enquiry for the main character, with Kit expertly sliding us into her world from the start so we discover things alongside her.

Dry Cleaned,
Joris Mertens (translated Julia Blackburn & Sandra Van Der Beek)
Jonathan Cape

François is a middle-aged man, the same suit every day, the cigarette dangling from his lips, doing the same work – a daily run in a van for a dry cleaning business. It always seems to be raining (symbolically he lacks even a raincoat), the raise he’s asked for over the years never appears, and now he’s training a younger worker, and worried they will take his job. His only lights are a local single woman and her daughter, who he dotes on, and he dreams of winning the lottery (playing the same numbers every time) and giving them and him a better life.

When a chance delivery for work leads to him stumbling into a bloody crime scene, there’s a chance to make easy money, and it is very tempting… I wasn’t familiar with this European creator until this book, and while I enjoyed the story, I did find it a little predictable in places, but oh wow, the artwork lifts it beyond that. Published in a larger format, it lets you enjoy that art – the rain-lashed streets of the city, the lights reflecting on wet roads, it is simply gorgeous comics artwork.

Fiction

Automatic Noodles,
Annelee Newlitz,
Tor/Macmillan

This was a lovely surprise – the publisher sent me a copy unexpectedly, and I was very pleased they did. A brief novella, it follows some robot workers in a bad fast food joint, waking each other up to discover their former employer has shut their awful business and fled, switching them all off and abandoning then. It’s near-future California, recovering from a war against “the Yankees” for independence (some of the robots also took part in the war, and have issues from it), and while the robots are nominally free, there are some who don’t like that, and the Yankee agitators operate social media sock puppets to sow dissension about things like robot rights.

In an attempt to keep their freedom, they all pool together to turn the abandoned business into a very good noodle place, something they can all enjoy working in and take pride from, while dealing with obstacles along the way. It’s brief, but it is a delightful read, and packs in a lot about identity, acceptance and second chances into a slim volume. Smile inducing.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye,
John Scalzi,
Tor/Macmillan

I’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s work for years, and his most recent works, such as Starter Villain (a man in a career-life crisis discovers he has inherited his estranged late uncle’s business empire, which turns out to be a front for a supervillain organisation, complete with volcano lair!), have veered towards a more light-hearted approach, partly in response to the dismal period of Covid and Lockdown. Moon is another fun read, taking one of the oldest comedy tropes in SF – that the Moon is made of cheese – and making it a reality.

Starting with panic in the Neil Armstrong museum as they realise their prize moon rock specimen is now cheese (“what kind of cheese?” someone asks), it then goes around a diverse cast of people coming to the realisation of what has happened, impossible though it should be, and what it actually means, from physicists to religious figures trying to make sense of it.

Dinner at the Night Library,
Hika Harada (translated Philip Gabriel),
Scribner

Japanese fiction in translation has been big in the UK in recent years, every since the success of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series (which I enjoyed), and it is a bit of a running joke in the book trade that so many feature a bookshop or library and a cat on the cover (as indeed this one does!). Our central character is offered a job by a mysterious employer who only appears online (with no video) to talk to them, at a remote library that houses collections from deceased authors, all the books they wrote, all the ones they collected.

It’s in a distant location, so has its own dormitory and canteen, where the chef makes daily menus inspired by recipe ideas from novels. There’s a mild mystery or two, and it is a gentle read, very Japanese (everything done a certain way), but after a couple of heavy duty books, this was the perfect tonic, well-written but also easy going, and very much aimed at book lovers.

The Haunting of Hero’s Bay,
Amanda Block,
Hodder

I really enjoyed Amanda’s debut novel a few years ago, The Lost Storyteller, and recommended it quite a bit in our bookshop, so I was looking forward to her second book. Following a young man who finds himself drifting a bit following his long-time romance falling apart (and worse, his ex is now marrying someone else and inviting him and his family to the wedding), he takes a job with his aunt, swapping Edinburgh for the West Country, where she is renovating an old buildings as a hotel.

The tiny, seaside village is famed for an enormous painting showing a shipwreck in the bay, created by an aristocratic artist who lost his life swimming to the rescue of a similar shipwreck. The past of smugglers and wreckers on that rugged coast, art and modern day life start to converge in a very satisfying manner. Ghosts, art, history and romance.

Jesus Christ Kinski,
Benjamin Meyers,
Bloomsbury

Yes, this is that Kinski – Klaus, the famously insane German actor (and I do mean insane literally, he was certified and put into care at one point). This is quite a departure for Meyers, very different from his other works, and you find him pondering his choices as half of the book is Kinski’s inner monologue as he performs a one-man show about Jesus on stage in Germany in the 1970s, and the other half is the author debating with himself, why am I writing this, why does this performance by a much-maligned, egotistic, mad German actor most folk don’t remember compel me to write about them instead of doing another “hit” novel or another that gets filmed? It’s very different and totally compelling, one of the more intriguing and unusual novels I’ve read in 2025.

Dark Crescent,
Lyndsey Croal,
Luna Press

I’ve known Lyndsey for some time, through our Edinburgh based Shoreline of Infinity journal of science fiction, and our annual Cymera SF literary festival, and I was delighted to read this collection of short tales by her, ahead of us having an absolutely terrific launch night for it in our bookshops. Dark Crescent’s stories mostly riff on, or are inspired by, Scottish folklore, some with obvious roots, given their own, unique twist and angle, others are more her own invention, but feel very much like there is a real legend inspiring it, which you feel you could go and look up.

The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre,
Philip Fracassi,
RunForIt/Orbit

I really enjoyed Philip’s Boys in the Valley, a horror novel with icy teeth, set in a remote, early 1900s Catholic orphanage during a snowstorm, where a sheriff’s posse bring in a dying suspect covered in arcane tattoos, that looses something demonic within the walls. This new book is tonally totally different from that Exorcist-vibe tale – yes it is horror, there are multiple deaths, but it also much lighter and actually rather fun in places (despite the body count!).

Set in a retirement home where a couple of residents start to suspect the recent spate of deaths is not just due to the age and infirmity of the residents, but a cover for a serial killer to do their work, this is a total hoot – imagine your slasher movie “final girl” being in her eighties, and you start to get the picture. A terrific collision of humour and horror.

Reviews: Red Sonja

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Red Sonja,
Directed by MJ Bassett,
Starring Matilda Lutz, Wallis Day, Robert Sheehan, Luca Pasqualino, Michael Bisping, Martyn Ford, Rhona Mitra

I really wasn’t sure what to expect with this latest take on the iconic, flame-hared warrior woman. Let’s face it, Red Sonja is a much-loved character; since Roy Thomas and the legendary Barry Windsor-Smith created her for Marvel Comics (inspired by Robert E Howard, of course) back in the 1970s, she has undergone many variations and reboots in film, but mostly in comics and prose. But despite the large fan-base over decades, there’s a problem with how to depict her – that “chain mail bikini” may be iconic, and yes, very sexy, but it does come across as eye-candy for fan service, just another example of “the male gaze”, but at the same time she is also a powerful female figure, not just eye-candy.

It’s a problem with this kind of character – Xena had the same problem, if the character looks too visually sexy, does it cheapen them, or are they allowed to be both powerful women and sexually attractive at the same time? Numerous other female action figures are often drawn into the same debate, which is long and complex and is a bit outside the scope of a simple film review, but I think is also worth bearing in mind whenever considering a character like this (also worth considering how we rarely have these discussions about male action figures, which speaks volumes). I’d also note that, like the aforementioned Xena (a show I loved, not least for its dynamic between the two female leads), Sonja also boasts a significant female fan-base too, not least acclaimed comics scribe Gail Simone, who has written the character herself.

Okay, moving on from those considerations, let’s have a wee look at the film. Here we get early scenes of a very young Sonja’s village, an almost idyllic, peaceful, nature goddess worshipping community in the deep forest, being savagely attacked by a barbarian warlord. The young girl escapes, barely, but loses everyone in the process, spending years growing up in the forest alone, seeking any remnants of her people, her only companion a beloved horse.

We discover later that the warlord was in turn overthrown by a former slave he captured on one of those raids, a young lad who found half of a secret book of knowledge from that raid, and with a whip-smart brain, used it to free himself and then overthrow the warlord before installing himself as emperor, expanding his lands using new technology inspired by the texts he decoded, now searching for the remaining part of the book, which will bring him into conflict with Sonja.

The result is fairly predictable, but enjoyable for those of us who have waited ages for a swords and barbarians fantasy flick (I think Spine of Night, the rotoscope animated film a couple of years ago was the last one I enjoyed – you can read that review here). But despite being fairly straightforward on the narrative front, there are a few nice twists and turns thrown in there, using flashbacks to flesh out present day motivations, which means neither the hero or the villain come across as too one-dimensional. Sonja (Matilda Lutz) is powerful and angry, yes, but she’s no superhuman, she is not unstoppable.

Lutz gives her a melancholy and vulnerability that deepens her, while Sheehan’s emperor Draygan is not a simple power-hungry maniac, he genuinely believes he is building a better world, and we later learn some interesting facts about his youth that drove him into this direction. Even Draygan’s partner, the formidable Annisia (Wallis Day), a platinum-haired warrior woman, is given some depth, a woman literally haunted by the faces and voices of those she has killed, making her more than simply a foil to Sonja.

There are problems – apart from being a bit predictable, other than some of those interesting character twists, the lack of budget does show in places. When we have an emperor shouting about ruling the world, we really need something much bigger and more expansive, while this feels more like a small-scale war by a local warlord than a world-conquering empire, and it also feels like some of the blood and gore levels have been dialled down a bit, perhaps to get a lower censor rating. That said, if the makers didn’t get the budget they really needed, that’s not really their fault, so I’m minded to forgive that weakness, and it looks very much like the main characters really do throw themselves into the action scenes they have, while making both the heroes and villains less straight and more nuanced makes it much more emotionally interesting.

Even that issue of eye-candy is addressed in a scene in a gladiator-style school where a captive Sonja is handed the metallic garments by a leering armourer, who is clearly enjoying the idea of her being a sexual spectacle for the crowd – but even this character also gets a little more depth later, when Sonja makes him cry because “she’s the first one to remember his name”, which is a tiny moment, but a nice touch.

In conclusion, yes, plenty of problems, not least it really needed much more budget to realise itself a bit better, and perhaps a less predictable narrative, but I enjoyed the way Lutz managed to give us a Sonja who is both vulnerable, emotionally, and also at the same time powerful and vengeful, but without being some simple, unstoppable killing machine (she can, and does fail at some points). Sheehan looked like he was really enjoying his role as the emperor, and later revelations about his origins take the character – and also Sonja – in a different direction than I thought, which I appreciated. So, yes, problems, but overall it’s a guilty-pleasure, barbarian sword and action flick – it won’t set the critics or awards panels alight, but for those of us who enjoy that kind of flick, it’s a fun-enough, bucket of popcorn watch.

Red Sonja is distributed by Signature Entertainment, and available to stream on Prime from December 22nd

This review was originally penned for Live For Films