(dir. Coralie Fargeat) Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an aging Hollywood star who decides to take “The Substance” to try and retain her job and celebrity. She spawns a second, younger self, “Sue” (Margaret Qualley), but the delicate balance between these two selves cannot be maintained indefinitely….

I was unimpressed by the first half of this film, which seemed unoriginal in conception and execution. However, the second half gleefully takes its body horror to a degree that is both deeply revolting and hilarious. I am not squeamish, but some of this I had to watch between my fingers. This will become a cult classic, at least for those with strong stomachs. ★★★★☆

Careless People: A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025)

This exposé by the former Facebook Directory of Global Public Policy reveals the social media giant’s leadership is even worse than you imagined. It is the degree of ignorance of the wider world and the lack of attention to anything apart from the company’s growth that was most damning to me, although Sheryl Sandberg’s sexual harassment of her staff and Zuckerberg needing others to explain to him how Facebook helped Trump get elected (the first time) are equally dispiriting. ★★★★☆

(dir. Steven Soderbergh) George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is a British intelligence agent tasked with discovering which of his fellow agents has stolen a classified piece of software code-named ‘Severus’. The first step in his investigation is to throw a dinner party at his home, inviting all the suspects, including his wife (Cate Blanchett)….

Soderbergh (also handling the Director of Photography and Editing roles) is very effective here with a tight, dialogue-heavy script from David Koepp (Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park, Raimi’s Spiderman and more). Its London spies are a blend of John le Carré and modern Bond film, with the casting of Pierce Brosnan and Naomi Harris a not-so-subtle metatextual wink about its inspirations. The film is more funny than tense, but a speedy 94 minute running time and a cast clearly enjoying themselves make the time fly by. ★★★★☆

(dir. Hirozaku Kore-eda) This tells the story of a poor family living in cramped conditions in Tokyo; the father, Osamu (Lily Franky), has taught son Shota (Kari Jo) to shoplift to supplement their limited income. One evening they find a young girl left outside her apartment, and after taking her home discover that she has been abused by her parents.

Despite their various flaws and criminality the film portrays a loving family who care about one another in the face of society’s indifference. The state’s eventual breaking apart of the family is legally correct but leaves the viewer regretting the severed bonds between adults and children, all in need of love. ★★★★☆

It has a Saturday-morning-cartoon plot, script, and voice acting, but its action gameplay is thrilling in a moment-to-moment way that Alan Wake 2 never was. Superb high-tempo electronic guitar music, good graphics (although I can’t help thinking it would be better at 60fps on something more powerful than a Switch) and a unique chain mechanic for you to control your beast buddies. It made me smile every time I turned it on and started bashing enemies.

I played this on Easy difficulty–people who are actually good at this kind of game might want challenge, but I just wanted fun and spectacle. The final boss, however, seemed impossibly hard, and it turns out there is a world of complexity in the upgrade trees and modifiers that I had completely missed in my hammer-the-buttons playthrough. Usually I loathe having to spend time in menus rather than playing the game, but figuring out of a configuration of abilities to defeat the boss made me appreciate just how cleverly assembled this game is.

If the other games by director Takahisa Taura and supervisor Hideki Kamiya are half as good I have many happy hours ahead of me. ★★★★★

House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company (by Eva Dou, 2025)

The subtitle made it seem this would be a China-panic book about the evils of Chinese companies, but Eva Dou writes a much more nuanced book investigating how Huawei went from selling then manufacturing telephone branch exchange switches in the early 1990s to the leading suppliers of telecommunications equipment in the world by 2012–and then to target of Western sanctions and prosecutions.

There is a slight disappointment in the fact that, despite Dou’s excellent reporting, founder Ren Zhengfei 任正非 and his family remain somewhat opaque characters. Ren believes in hard work and undercutting his competitors, but there is little evidence of him being an ultra-nationalist plotter for Chinese global dominance. He is more likely, it seems to me, to be a keen capitalist who has managed to thread the needle of running of globally-successful private company headquartered in a country firmly controlled by the CCP. The European-style Ox Horn Campus in Dongguan and his younger daughter’s (Annabel Yao 姚安娜) Harvard education and attendance at a Parisian debutante ball point only to a tawdry ultra-wealthy cosmopolitanism.

Nevertheless, this book lays out all the evidence available for you to make your own decision about whether Huawei is friend, foe, or just another big tech company simply looking for profit. ★★★★☆

(dir. Andrew Niccol) Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) is a genetic “invalid” in a world of gene-engineered perfection. He borrows the identity of Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), a paralysed “valid” to be able to work at Gattaca and dreams of making it into space on one of their missions. The investigation around the murder of a Gattaca administrator, however, threatens to reveal his secret identity.

I hadn’t seen this since around its release in 1997 and remembered very little. It is still visually striking–not for its sci-fi special effects, but for its careful photography and heavy use of colour filters that render the film off-putting but beautiful. The distinctive faces of Hawke, Law, and Uma Thurman add to the otherworldly intensity of the visuals. Sławomir Idziak (Three Colours: Blue) was the Director of Photography.

The film is really not interested in creating a plausible vision of the future–the cars and fashion are retro-styled, the astronauts wear suits and ties, and it all seems more 1950s than 2050s–but that’s perhaps because the real interest is in sibling rivalry, human frailty, and imperfection. From Vincent, to Irene, to the mission director, all the characters fail to hide their flaws from those around them.

Michael Nyman’s music is also key to setting the melancholic tone of the film. It all should seem portentous and heavy-handed–it even has bookending voice-overs!–but there is nothing wasted here. It’s an exceptional film, and I won’t wait twenty-five years before watching it again. ★★★★★

(dir. Quentin Tarantino) There are two stories of wartime France here that join together in the final act: Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leading a team of Naxi-scalping soldiers behind enemy lines and Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) as the polyglot ‘jew hunter’ for the Reich.

Pitt is the funniest he’s ever been, Michael Fassbender relishes his role as German-speaking film critic & commando Archie Hicox, Daniel Brühl is hilarious and terrifying as sniper hero Zoller, but it is Christoph Waltz who steals every scene with a charmingly sociopathic performance as Landa. He quite rightly won nearly every supporting actor award the year the film was released.

Tarantino’s talent is evident from his dialogue writing to his shot composition to his anachronistic but excellent use of music. Here he crafts numerous smart, funny, and tense scenes. Ultimately, though, I found this a rather slight film that, while entertaining to watch, didn’t leave me feeling like I hard learnt anything new. ★★★★☆

(dir. Ken Loach) This is the story of Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) who, after suffering a heart attack, is refused the UK’s Employment and Support Allowance and told to go back to work. He goes on to meet Katie (Hayley Squires), a Londoner single mum who has moved to Newcastle, hundreds of miles away from home but the only place where a house is available for her and her two children.

The scene with Katie in the food bank is the most disturbing and horrifying moment in film I have seen for a long time. Hayley Squires’ performance there was outstanding. Even gloomier, though, is that Katie never gets a neat resolution–as far as we know she ends the film still doing sex work so she can feed herself and her children without the food bank’s help.

Daniel’s story is also grim. My only critique would be that I felt the timing of his death and the discovery of his letter slightly undercut the verisimilitude that Ken Loach had crafted so well in the rest of the film. The film didn’t need to be that dramatically neat to make its heartfelt and important points about the cruelty of unemployment bureaucracy. ★★★★☆

Cowboy Bebop’s idiosyncratic story-telling and cool style impressed me enough that I went looking for other well-regarded anime to watch. Neon Genesis Evangelion was widely praised, so I picked up the Blu-ray set.

I had thought Faye Valentine’s outfit in Cowboy Bebop was crass but it’s got nothing on the obsession with boobs and general sexism in Evangelion. Yes, the protagonist, Shinji, is a fourteen-year-old boy, but there is no reason the show itself needs to follow his pubescent gaze so slavishly. This mistake is part of the wider problem of the series: following his teenage desires and angst is just not that compelling after a while. By the latter half of the series I had had enough of Shinji and wanted him and the series to grow up; watching him to continue to yell and sob time after time became irritating rather than profound.

The original TV series ending (not the one in End of Evangelion) weren’t great episodes, feeling like heavy-handed psychoanalysis, but they made sense for a show that was ostensibly about giant mechs but really about the mental struggles of their teenage pilots. The film ending added bombs and bombast but doesn’t really change the fundamental direction of the story. It does have more of Shinji yelling and sobbing, if that is your thing.

On the more positive side, the visual designs of the Angels and the Evas are wonderfully weird, and the music is memorable (the “Decisive Battle” drum theme tribute to John Barry’s 007 scores being my favourite). ★★★☆☆

(dirs. Matthieu Delaporte & Alexandre de La Patellière) This is a glorious and thoroughly entertaining version of Alexandre Dumas’ novel. The sumptuous costumes, sets, and cinematography elevate the familiar tale, and Pierre Niney captures both the wounded and vengeful sides of Edmond well. Laurent Lafitte also clearly relished playing the mustachioed and detestable Villefort. Great fun. ★★★★☆

The rock musical level of Alan Wake 2 is one of the most enjoyable and creative sections of a game that I’ve played. It’s a shame, then, that I found much of the rest of the game uninspired. Combat feels clunky and does not evolve significantly in the course of the game. The “deduction” mechanics did not make me feel smart. The plot is neither particularly original nor surprising–and the cliffhanger ending filled me with no anticipatory excitement.

To be fair to Remedy, I should say that the audiovisual craftsmanship is highly impressive. The graphics, cut-scene shot composition, sound design, and musical choices make this the closest thing to prestige drama that there is in gaming. It’s stylish. It just wasn’t that much fun to play. ★★★☆☆

(dir. Brady Corbet) From the disorienting first shot following Lázlo below decks on a ship arriving in New York to the slanted credits at the end this is a visually striking film. This works with David Blumberg’s unsettling but propulsive score to establish a tone of wrongness that undercuts the prosperous 1940s and 50s American setting.

Adrien Brody as Lázlo is good, as is Felicity Jones as his wife, but it is Guy Pearce’s weird performance as Van Buren that was the real highlight for me. He is always nearly charming, but with something lurking beneath that surface that only reveals itself more clearly near the end of the film.

It is a film that seems to wants to challenge simple interpretation, so if you are someone who is frustrated by a lack of clarity it will likely irritate more than please over its three-and-a-half-hour (plus intermission) runtime. It is a gruelling watch in many ways–the sex scenes are particularly difficult–but I never found it anything less than fascinating. And it is also occasionally also very funny, with Lázlo’s putdown to a rival architect delivered perfectly:

Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid — but, most importantly, ugly — is your fault.

★★★★☆

Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World by Kelly Clancy (Penguin, 2024)

This is a well-written book examining the rise of game theory and how it has been used across different fields. The central argument is that what started as narrow mathematical models of game strategy have been widely applied in often unsuitable contexts. Reality is not a game, but we have created systems where, for example, war, economic markets, or even social interactions can be gamified and ’explained’ by reductive winner-takes-all theorizing. As she concludes:

Any consequences too subtle to measure–environmental costs, civic discord, troubled diplomatic relations–are simply omitted from the score.

If our systems are built around assumptions that we are all rational (“greedy” would be Clancy’s preferred term) agents seeking only to win, then we should not be surprised when people begin to act that way. I hope she is correct when she writes the “average person is more empathetic than Machiavellian” and would like to think that co-operation, not conflict, is humanity’s optimal strategy. ★★★★☆

For a long time I was running piCorePlayer on my RaspberryPi 4 Model B with a HiFiBerry DAC+ Light without any problems. The little Pi 4, however, is capable of much more, so I decided to try to put NixOS on it. It wasn’t entirely straightforward.

The guide on the NixOS Wiki is pretty good for the first parts of the installation–flashing a MicroSD card with a recent image (I used 25.05), generating a config, and updating the firmware. Where it got trickier was trying to get the HiFiBerry DAC+ Light to be recognised.

First I had to add the nixos-hardware channel with the following commands:

$ sudo nix-channel --add https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/archive/master.tar.gz nixos-hardware
$ sudo nix-channel --update

Then add the following a line to the top of /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

  imports =
    [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
  # The line just below adds the hardware repository so we can add the Hifiberry board
      <nixos-hardware/raspberry-pi/4>
      ./hardware-configuration.nix
    ];

The next step was the hard bit to figure out. A post on the NixOS hardware github was key (thank you, Ramblurr), though I had to change which DTS overlay I copied from as I have a DAC+ Light not the standard DAC+. This is what works for me in my configuration.nix:

  # I'm adding this to enable the HifiBerry DAC+ Light board. Overlays, urgh!

  hardware = {
    raspberry-pi."4".apply-overlays-dtmerge.enable = true;
    deviceTree = {
      enable = true;
      filter = "bcm2711-rpi-4*.dtb";
      overlays = [
        {
          name = "hifiberry-dac";
          dtsText = ''
// Definitions for HiFiBerry DAC
/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/ {
	compatible = "brcm,bcm2711";

	fragment@0 {
		target = <&i2s_clk_producer>;
		__overlay__ {
			status = "okay";
		};
	};

	fragment@1 {
		target-path = "/";
		__overlay__ {
			pcm5102a-codec {
				#sound-dai-cells = <0>;
				compatible = "ti,pcm5102a";
				status = "okay";
			};
		};
	};

	fragment@2 {
		target = <&sound>;
		__overlay__ {
			compatible = "hifiberry,hifiberry-dac";
			i2s-controller = <&i2s_clk_producer>;
			status = "okay";
		};
	};
};
'';
   }
 ];
    };
  };

Then I could add the magical NixOS service line for squeezelite in configuration.nix:

  # Squeezelite, and the output sent to the Hifiberry.
  services.squeezelite.enable = true;
  services.squeezelite.extraArguments = "-o sysdefault:CARD=sndrpihifiberry";

And do the magic rebuild:

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

Then restart, and it should all work perfectly.

(directed by Yan Fei 闫非 and Peng Damo 彭大魔) This is another absurd comedy from the directing team who made Hello Mr Billionaire and Goodbye Mr Loser. Here the target is helicopter parenting, and the scenario (rich parents pretending to be poor to instill good values in their son) produces some very funny moments of Truman Show-esque manipulation. Silly but entertaining. ★★★☆☆

(dir. Shao Yihui 邵艺辉) This is a comedy-drama focusing on the lives of a single mother, her daughter, and her neighbour in Shanghai. Song Jia 宋佳 should win every award going for her driven and hilarious performance as the mother, Tiemei, but Zhong Chuxi 钟楚曦 is also excellent as the neighbour. The script, written by the director, is witty throughout and there are some genuinely funny scenes–the noodle dinner with the ex-husband and the new boyfriend is a particular highpoint.

The ending leans a little too much into cliché and sentimentality for me, but Shao is clearly hugely talented and has made one of the funniest Chinese films in years. ★★★★☆

(dir. James Hawes) This film is based on Nicholas Winton’s role in the rescue of children from Czechoslovakia in 1939. The recreation of occupied Prague is impressive, and Johnny Flynn’s performance as the young and awkward Winton is very appealing. Anthony Hopkins as the older Winton is–as you might expect–well-judged, and the script gives him room to portray the complex feelings that came from saving six hundred children from the Nazis, but failing to save many more. It may not be especially original as a film, but the story it tells deserves to be told over and over. ★★★★☆

(dir Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) I have mixed feelings about this film. On the one hand, I appreciated its beautiful cinematography and glorious early Technicolor, and admired Roger Livesey’s performance as Clive Wynne-Candy all the way from the Boer War to the Second World War. I was less impressed, however, at the argument it seems to be making about the failure of “gentlemanly warfare” in the face of the Nazi threat (it seems self-deception to pretend there were any “gentlemen” in these twentieth century wars), and was disappointed the film did not take the opportunity to develop the post-war resentment of Anton Walbrook’s Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorf into support for Nazism.

Perhaps a more self-critical film could not have been made in Britain in 1943–it was still criticised for the mild critique it did offer–but it does not go far enough for me in 2025. ★★★★☆

(dir. Josh Margolin) This is a sweet comedy about a ninety-three year-old (played by June Squibb) falling victim to a scam and vowing to find those responsible. The script is funny throughout and the gentle spoofing of Mission: Impossible action scenes adds to the pleasure. I think anyone with an older relative will relate to Thelma’s determined resistance to being patronised (and her struggles with computers!). ★★★★☆