I stand by my previous thoughts on INLAND EMPIRE as the auteur's ultimate cinematic work here: My take that it's a hypersigilic and comprehensive key to Lynch's themes and spirituality only intensified with another viewing, with his lore of pattern/colour significations popping out this time, along with narrative nods to his other works and my personal theory of Zabriskie as a (stilt-house-linked, lodgelubber, chicken keeping) Baba Jędza overseeing the whole multivalent initiation/healing process which Dern undergoes, in archetypally frightening fashion.…

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This whole experience lit me up like a cigarette and threw me to the curb: An adrenalised frenzy of statuesque bodies, billboard faces; sumptuously intense skylines and bravado turned up to 11 delivered with a wink; Willem Dafoe bareassing the furniture (I'll allow it), and some of the most superbly shot stunt work I've seen in years.

I'm charmed and alarmed and pumped and blown away, not least by the realisation of…

With introduction by Brogan Morris of BFI/The Guardian/BBC culture, an old friend and inspiringly observant critic whose career I'm immensely proud to have witnessed thusfar.

Pleasure to attend this screening from Distorted Frame, a local film club showing uniquely digital titles. We were at The Castle cinema this time - my first trip, and a delightful little indie venue with a gorgeous bar space for post-film chats! Londonites and digi-pilgrims, keep up with future digi movie nights via fb or…

Neon rorschachs of angelic antiquity for televisual transmission to the innocents: 'Be not afraid' captured and reduced within near-future pixellations and dissolved into timeless digitisations of raw human hue; of love blending and blinding. Shapes ignoring form; light transcending depth; film disregarding chronology or circumstance, for better or worse or neither-neither in the imminent and sensual end.

Zooming in on a feeling so much that you blur along with it. A loss of resistance, longed for and soaked in. A…

How bright do you want the world to get when the darkness seems intolerable? How formal and unanimous a reception should a dying man receive? ivans xtc. probes culture in a variety of highly skilled ways, but the most interesting to me are colour and visual limit.

In his seethingly brilliant polemic Chromophobia, artist David Batchelor describes the slow onset of an aspirationally self-absorbed and variantly prejudicial endemic of visual neutrality, sweeping the globe over hundreds of years, erasing different…

It feels terribly wrong to call this a 'new favourite' considering snuff and child abuse related subject matter, and even more perverse to say I 'loved' it and felt elated by its existence afterwards, but I'm not sure how to express how much this film impressed me in any other way. All this, despite thinking I knew exactly what it would entail - and being partially correct, if wholly unprepared. Without spoiling too much, if you'd have told me in…

Preamble: Bought on Prime as pre-work present to myself (a mere £3.99?!) before I head to the BFI Christmas thing and call time on cinema trips for the 10 or so days the Thameslink to London stops here. (Hope to catch some of you in person later 🎄 Ho Ho Ho ✨️)

It's still as bloody lovely as it is intitially repellant, with Emily Skeggs a clear highlight: She somehow softens the whole film, playing a bizarre and endearingly gawky…

'Through the infinite reaches of space, the problems of man seem trivial and naive indeed; and man, existing alone, is himself an episode of little consequence.'

Ever feel like something was created specifically with you in mind? I've been getting that sensation a lot lately - new recommendations, animal encounters, chance angles of city sunsets, even entire people seem so attentively (obliviously) perfect in the minor details of the moment. How thoughtful for apparent fluke to offer up such combinations.…

'The cameras suddenly zoom in on what they are filming. They zoom so much that he can distinguish the clothing a man is wearing, the design and the colour of the fabric. But this proximity alarms him.'

A beautiful and terrible documentary, in the romantic not derisive sense. I say that partially because I spent its runtime mentally excavating said beauty from the sheer and formidable weight of its subject matter - that being real footage from attacks on Syria,…

Edit: If you’re reading this, I CHALLENGE THEE

I suspect it will quickly become a clichéd thing to say about this film, but The Brutalist made me tearful a lot, and physically shook me at points. It moves and is immovable.

I cried about inspiration; about the client relationship vs the muse; about collaboration and dedication(s); about the holocaust and the people surviving and trying to comprehend its aftermath; about bringing together and shattering apart; about the cyclical dream of…

Sat at Riverside for a smidge of decompression after this (and having missed an anticipated movie to sit and digest the many emotions and ideas it brought up in me this time), I'm struggling to find the words to encapsulate what, for me, is one of the greatest films ever made... even if it may never be counted amongst the greatest cinematic achievements because of its deliberately obtuse and archetypally multivalent structure, alongside Lynch's divisive overall style and an unduly…

Surveillance as impending apocalypse: Initially a perfect short for a darkening train, but I soon paused and waited 2hrs to rewind and cast to projector at home: This thing demands awful, peripheral-lathering immersion where possible.

I saw the roots of Analogue Horror here, some of the upholstry of Vaporwave, and the precursors of images irritatingly given a 'core' suffix in perma-online aesthetic-geddon (where art as a response appears lost) - but the film is none of these things, nor a…