Are “honourable criminals” lying to themselves? Is servitude worse than death? Less a criminal drama and more a criminal soap opera Prime Video’s Yakuza has thoughts on these questions.

Focusing on four orphans, two male and two female, on the cusp of leaving their orphanage the four protagonists here walk themselves into a nightmare of a heist gone awry. Gangsters who come looking for stolen money don’t shut up. The assassins who will kill them at their leader’s whim don’t talk. And the one who makes the room go silent when he speaks is now speaking to them. What’s it going to be, kids? Death or servitude to the Yakuza? You can have a bullet now, or you can work yourself to death at manual labour or in the sex trade.

With the characters' back stories developed through time jumps we’re shown the build up to the situation that changed their lives and what the results are a decade later. This isn’t the strongest story telling device and the show lost my attention when it went back in time. The Yakuza operation and its politics I found more interesting. Much of their code of honour is a way of controlling street scum on the ground but their ceremonies have reverence. There is no room in the sprawling criminal organisation for those who don't know when to take a blade and cut off their fingers. Self-mutilation to restore honor is a tradition.

Like all organisations rooted in tradition even gangsters are under siege from modernity. The difference is that their idea of pushing back against the pressure to change comes in the shape of a psychopath with a sword and a gun.

While our protagonist recruits see their transformed lives as more glamorous they become more isolated. Their criminal association is a stain on them that never fades. In the case of women, the world becomes something they see through luxury car windows. The show gives them lifestyles of high-end escorts while avoiding any mention of sex. In the main character’s case the world is something he perceives from inside the illegal fighting ring or through prison bars. Enforcing immoral people's will puts him in a cage.

Based on the video game franchise of the same name the characters dress pixel perfect at times. But there’s decent human drama here and the fights are competent. There’s good English audio dubbing for those who don't want subtitles and the story has a Japanese method of story telling that makes it different. I’ll watch episode 4.

I commend Francis Ford Coppola for taking an idea he wanted to do for 40 years, putting his money into it and bringing it to the screen. But this is an experimental movie overstuffed with his fancies which does not resonate with an audience. He brought it to life through his will, but he is the intended audience. It may not matter to him if no one else watches it.

Set in a modern age pastiche of the Roman Empire, Adam Driver’s Catilina is a blend of Roman history's Catiline, John Galt from Atlas Shrugged and New York City architect Robert Moses. He has bent matter to his will with the creation of Megalon, a Noble prize winning piece of materials science that unlocks the next phase in construction. Time is also not beyond him since he can pause it. He even scrubs back through it to clear up a bit of exposition in the second act.

For the budget it has this movie looks wonderful on the big screen. But the message of the superior man and superior woman willing the future into existence, like the director who dedicates this film to his recently deceased wife, may not go down that well. Catiline in history was a demagogue who used the people for insurrection. The Empire obliterated him and his forces at Pistoria. Driver here couldn’t be further away from the people. They suffer as he demolishes their homes to make room for his future. You may want him to succeed if only because it’s preferable his opponents fail but you won’t like him.

Nathalie Emmanuel is likeable here. Even if she starts out as a vain hedonist and becomes a worthy collaborator to Driver’s character in no screen time at all. Aubrey Plaza plays an Aubrey Plaza type character again. As an actor, her range was explored in its entirety during her run on Fox’s LEGION and you see the limits of that range here. Shia LeBouff remains an underrated actor. Change his hair and clothing and he can play anything.

This is an art movie infused with improvised moments. Go into it for the spectacle and cling on to the end, because you feel the running time before the two-hour mark, and you might find something that interests you among its ideas. Even if I had control of time, I wouldn't do a deep re-watch of this. On a repeat viewing it's a movie to glance at over the top of a second screen.

This doesn't work as a musical or a villain movie but it held my attention for most of its running time. The massive flaw in the production is that it's not supposed to be this horrific a musical.

The wasted life is a goldmine for an operatic performance. That's what Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) life is. A grinding misery that gets more miserable in increments. Every day the sun rises life takes a razor blade to Arthur's soul and shaves off another thin slice. But then there is love, and music, and comedy and tragedy. Or there would be if this was a better written movie. This is where it all falls apart. The love isn't love. It's someone who wants you to be your worst self. The musical numbers neither fit into what's happening nor propel the story forward. They're well lit karoeke numbers. Nothing here is funny. Even when we step into Arthur's inner life, where he should be everything no one else sees, he remains as unfunny to the viewer as he is when shuffling along Arkham's halls.

Your actor won an Oscar for an interesting take on a tired comic book villain. The hit movie you made had nonsense ideas about wounded men and their fragile egos projected onto it. You think to yourself "we don't want to encourage this." So you, correctly, say this broken man can't kill six people and expect to prosper.

But does it have to be so shallow? I'd have read this script and sent the writers off to watch Pagliacci. Several times. And if an opera about a tragic figure in deep emotional pain who swings from manic clowning humour to powerful murderous rages in a gritty setting can't improve the script? They've failed.

This should have been a musical about a tragedy. It's just a tragic musical. A big movie that's too oppressive to be anything but small.

The Substance
About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because this is a movie of ludicrous escalation.

Sue (Margaret Qualley) is so refreshing she's the condensation on the Coca-Cola can. Her firm buttocks enter the shot several times before she does. Her breasts defy gravity. Everything is tight. But she has the arrogance and appetites of youth. While this movie is positioned as a feminist body horror it is a movie about a parasitic system.

Yes, the movie's men are grotesque. They were in the director's previous genre movie, Revenge, too. But unlike that movie where all the men were abusers. Or this movie where men participate in a abusive system. Women do unforgivable things here.

After a chemical pickup from a dead drop that screams evil life sciences corporation, Sue emerges from Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Sue are one person but must alternate between seven days of active and resting cycles. There are side effects to breaking this rule. You'd have to be dumb like a character in a movie to ignore potential abuse. Abuse here begins with disregard, the resting party left on a cold floor, and slowly progresses to ghoulishness.

Sue transforms from born yesterday wandering to electronic dance music strut in hours. She is not Barbie Mr. Hyde but she is genetically better than Elizabeth and she can be cruel. With seven days of opportunity open to her she gets Elizabeth's old job and takes it to heights the older her could not achieve. While they are one person you know that has to hurt.

Were it the lazy "all men are pigs" trope I'd have tuned out fast. But the nicest character in the movie, a low bar, is an awkward former schoolmate of Elizabeth's who asks her out. This leads to a brilliant scene with Demi Moore later that is her finest work in the movie. It also brings what drives this story into focus.

Focus is something used to make Dennis Quaid's, leering, sleazy, network producer fill the screen. He's ghastly and even more so when he's eating. Sue is his next dish after he exploited Elizabeth's beauty and celebrity to make money for the network's share holders. Sue and Elizabeth have their own relationships with nutrition. It's not healthy.

This world here has many stark block colours and sometimes feels like it's attacking you from the screen. That's intentional. The body horror is disturbing enough to make you wince so it succeeds. The flaw here is that the movie is indulgent and too long. At a bloated two hours twenty minutes the journey to the mania in the third act tested my patience.

This was an uncomfortable but interesting watch. It is a decent body horror movie with a high level of visual gloss that is uncommon. While it is more female than similar movies if you go into it sold on the idea of feminist politics you're in for a rough time. It is a genre movie first.

A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t.

The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium. Seeing ghosts is not a gift. Beetlejuice has been tormenting her from the periphery of her vision for decades. Lydia is an unusual protagonist for a movie like this. There is no expectation that her life will get better here. It did in the first movie, but now we find a woman weighed down not by a problem but by the disappointments in her life.

This is the most adult of approaches to take with the material because none of the characters change. No one gets better. No one is redeemed. No one has a conversion on the road to Damascus. This lack of change isn't bad for Delia. In a great performance by Catherine O'Hara, she has perfected her taste and artistry. But, she is still hilariously shallow. Now a widow, she finds her husband's death both inconvenient and heartbreaking. Jenna Ortega's Astrid is more activist than artist. She has friction with her mother, Lydia. She's so strong and independent that she falls in love with a guy with great hair overnight. Well come on, he listens to great music and is tall. If he'll go to a protest with her he's the dream.

Like the first movie, repairing the imperfect family is the connective thread throughout the story. And like the first movie Michael Keaton here does Beetlejuice as a chaotic force. But he doesn’t feel as present here as he did in the past. We get several musical numbers; I particularly enjoyed the underworld train one. The production design looks good. The classic movie house looks impressive.

But, as I put in the opening paragraph, this is a movie for those who want more Wednesday quirkiness. It lacks sharp edges because the Beetlejuice of 1988 would be canceled if he showed up again in 2024. Studios are afraid modern audiences will trash their movies. I was in a theater filled with Gen X and older. Studios might want to rethink who the audience that pays to watch movies is.

Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series.

The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet. Malcolm Lee, its creator, makes poor arguments for human survival. Again hubris. If we were looking to enlist an artificial champion we would hope our most talented minds would engage with it to build our case. But no, here we have the heartbroken computer scientist who can’t muster enthusiasm for his own children. This is the man who thinks he can use philosophy and rhetoric to prevent the AI he has built from agreeing with the army of red-eyed metal skeleton killers on the way.

The balance here as in other movies is the idea that Skynet has overwhelming technical superiority but is too inept to finish the job its nuclear strike started. But then, "AI wipes out humans and now reigns over cockroaches" isn’t that much of a story. Here we get a robot action girl, a human action girl and three ghastly children. By anime standards it doesn’t look like the state of the art. It's too computer animated and looks cheap at times.

The flaw in this show is that it attempts to ask questions the premise was never designed to answer. Terminator is a story about a stalker who cannot be reasoned with looking to kill a person who has to save themselves. It was never more complicated than that. While Skynet creator, Miles Dyson, should have engaged in four hours of philosophical meditation before building the thing that destroyed humanity, the rest of us don't need that. You can skip this series.

This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie.

Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered the 1994 movie every week since it came out, The Crow as a media property has a simple formula. It is a tale of vengeance, redemption and the supernatural told in a style that drips with atmosphere.

The film makers know the formula but can't agree on the mixture weights. The result is a movie that has all the parts of the formula mixed up in the dullest way you could think of.

Eric & Shelly have chemistry. The film displays signs of a pulse when after their nonsensical rehab experience, they spend the summer doing drugs, having sex and making music. FKA twigs looking like a vulnerable doll in one long shot while Bill Skarsgard towers over her radiating love. In that shot you believe them. But then she is murdered and it stirs little in him. What's on screen isn't someone who is heartbroken. It's a annoyed person. The emotional peaks in the movie have been flattened and boredom is what remains.

This is a movie about bored people. The villain is a malignant presence who encourages the worst in people. He's bored. He has a right-hand woman who does his dirty work for him. She's bored. The representation of the wizard in the Campbellian mono myth appears to provide supernatural aid to Eric and help him cross the first threshold into adventure. The wizard is bored. They're all just marking time. Cinematic. Depression.

Eric returns from purgatory to revenge his slain love. So far, so Crow. But he's still the same awful fighter who can't throw a proper punch as he was when he was human. That's clever and it could have been hilarious but because the movie needs to drip with atmosphere, that atmosphere being muted and grey boredom, the filmmakers go nowhere with a good idea.

I'm a big fan of tight 100 minute mid-budget movies. Funding constrains the running time, which in turn tightens the script. But 40 minutes in I considered the opportunity cost of spending another hour on this movie. In the end it turned out to be a waste of 100 minutes. If you are a goth girl, a reformed one or know one spare yourself and others this tedium and watch the 1994 movie again. It became a classic action horror picture for a sub-culture. This movie is only fit for the digital landfill.

I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is about the elite, their ideas and what it means to not be one of them in David's case. Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien Romulus is about the working poor and their life that is already horrific.

Rain and her friends are unskilled labourers with a flicker of hope but no future. Stretching humanity across the galaxy is a dirty job. Rain et al. are part of the underclass stuck digging in the dark as others float through the stars. With the deck stacked against them, and their only currency being the energy of their youth, when opportunity floats into orbit they go for it.

In a cast of dead young people walking, David Jonsson's Andy the synthetic stands out. Jonsson is vulnerable, empathetic, pragmatic and cold all in one scene. It's an impressive acting performance and he becomes another memorable Android in the Alien franchise. The rest of the cast do serviceable work. Cailee Spaeny sells Rain's original sin well in an early scene.

This movie relies on physical effects and practical ship models. It's all gorgeous to look at. Things have a sense of size and heft. Landing bay doors are huge. The monitors are Cathode Ray Tubes. The fonts used on screen are from the 70s. Internal communication screens have a VHS playback look and everything people interact with is a button or a handle. No swiping here as this is a gear porn and dripping slime movie. Things seem to be used and dangerous.

The main danger, of course, is the Alien. It all goes to hell exactly like it has gone to hell in every previous movie. There's a countdown to ratchet up the tension, face huggers come in waves and the endoparasite Xenomorph stalks the cast. There's a third act development you knew was coming but may not have seen developing like this. I found that development jarring but it worked fine as it was already set up.

Go into this expecting call backs to decades of Alien movies and nothing else. You'll enjoy it too.

It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it.

Yes it has the colourful character design, eater eggs and the 1080p CGI makes Pandora look like the dusty trash pile it is. But just as the CGI falls apart if you look at it in 4K the characters and nods to games are shallow too.

At a svelte 100 minute running time the shoe leather scenes here are tight. Characters set out to do something and do it fast. The tedium of that in-between part of the journey is minimal. I enjoy tight running times but there are so many characters and so many potential plot points that none of them get to shine.

The plot is stuffed with threads that are resolved but not satisfactorily. This may have started out as a complicated script during shooting only to be pared back later. However, the audience can only enjoy what makes it to the screen.

Claptrap (Jack Black) and Tiny Tina (Arianna Greenblatt) do good work here. They get memorable scenes. Cate Blanchette and Kevin Hart are good action stars but though Blanchette is the lead at no time did her character arc matter to me. Hart even less and Jamie Lee Curtis's character not at all.

This is a movie that needed more time but only it it had a much better script. The fact it had a poor script meant the short running time was a blessing. But even in a movie with as tight a running time as this I still checked my watch about an hour in.

If you want to see this, watch it at home. And watch it in HD and not 4K, you'll find the discount CGI less offensive on your good TV.