I picked this up expecting another corporate history and got something more affectionate. MacDonald, the Guardian’s games editor, has covered Nintendo for long enough to be in the story herself: there’s a lovely passage about queuing for the Wii at Gamescom 2006, calling her parents from the hall to try to explain it. The book is at its best on the through-line that limitations beget creativity: Koji Kondo writing the Zelda title theme in an all-nighter after the team realised Ravel was still in copyright; the D-pad emerging from the constraints of the Game & Watch; Mario’s mustache existing because pixels couldn’t render a mouth.

The Iwata material is the heart of it. His 2004 line about the industry being on a dead end (“Nintendo is called ‘conservative’ and ‘quiet’ nowadays, so we hope to show our nature as an innovator”) frames everything that followed, from the DS through to the Switch. The hidden tribute to him in the Switch’s OS, accessed by recreating the Nintendo Direct hand gesture on the date of his death, is the kind of detail MacDonald is alert to throughout.

Game development, she notes, has gone from a band to an orchestra. So has the writing about it.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.

Body Sound is the debut from a Chicago trio who have paired off before in various combinations but never as a three. The method is improvise first, sculpt later: string and vocal sessions recorded across three locations, then run through analogue tape loops and effects before being recombined into eleven short pieces.

Some of it is very graceful. “dawn | pulse” opens in clear Max Richter territory. Others go in different directions: “burning | counting (sleeping)” gets agitated and screechy, and “cough | laugh” sets pizzicato plucks against a slowed, smeared swell of strings—the most overtly experimental moment. Cinematic while never becoming background noise.

Star Moles is Emily Moales, a Philadelphia songwriter whose previous records leaned hard into knights, dragons and Arthurian legend. Highway to Hell puts all that aside: the opener spells it out (“Gone are the albums of knights and dragons / Gone are the kings and queens of Camelot”), and what’s left is the everyday, observed with a wry, slightly bewildered eye. Postmasters general, days off, parties skipped. Kevin Basko’s production at is loose in a presumably deliberate way: a flubbed intro on “The End” stays in, and stray vocal moments a tidier record would have scrubbed are left to breathe. It suits songs that sit in the same 70s Laurel Canyon folk-pop territory that you’ll have noted I keep finding myself drawn to lately—warm, melodic, hazy, but with arrangements that reward attention.

If you spent time this year with Courtney Marie Andrews’ wonderful Valentine, Natalie Jane Hill’s Hopeful Woman slots neatly alongside it. Same warm, country-tinged singer-songwriter mode the 70s did so well.

Hill’s voice gets compared to Hope Sandoval and Karen Dalton in the press notes; fair enough, though it’s a sturdier instrument than either. The arrangements are remarkable mostly for how much of them come from one person: Mat Davidson plays bass, fiddle, flute, keyboards and pedal steel, and the record feels fully populated without ever sounding crowded.

Billed as an EP, but at nine tracks Hetta Falzon’s debut is really an album. The twenty-one-year-old has Norah Jones’s vocal warmth and the writing to match—confessional, wry, occasionally cutting on ‘Belly Laugh’. She’s at home with spare piano (‘Freckles’) and the fuller build of ‘Switch It Off’ alike, and ‘I Hope You Notice Me’ is the one that makes the case for both her melodies and her voice. A perfect Sunday morning record.

The marketing was the bait: sold to teenage boys who turned up for Megan Fox and got a feminist horror about the intensity of teenage girl friendship and what men do when they need a sacrifice. In 2026 the reading is unmissable; in 2009, a year after “I Kissed a Girl” had pitched queerness as a party trick for boys, Fox’s casting read as more of the same. She is magnetic and clearly having a great time weaponising her own image, and the script gives her some of the best line readings of the decade. Diablo Cody, Karyn Kusama and the soundtrack each earn the reputation they’ve developed since release. Seyfried almost convinces you she’s the plain one.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

King Tuff is Kyle Thomas, Vermont-based and well-connected. He’s toured with Ty Segall’s Muggers and fronts WITCH alongside J. Mascis, so the centre of gravity here is no surprise: 60s psych pop, 70s country rock, the same well that I’m always happy to see come back into fashion every few years. MOO offers nothing new. It’s just very well executed.

Recorded on the same Tascam 388 he used for his 2013 debut, the album swings between garage punk cuts and looser, more playful songs. ‘Stairway to Nowhere’ is at the glam end of power-pop and recalls David Vandervelde’s “Nothin’ No”, itself a Marc Bolan facsimile — Bolan being a clear influence on both men. ‘Invisible Ink’ is the most catchy thing here, even if it might inadvertently summon ‘Rock Got No Reason’ from School of Rock. ‘Crosseyed Critters’ is a country-rock stompalong sandwiched between garage cuts. ‘Delusions’ could be Cotton Mather, masters of a previous power-pop revival, doing a Tom Petty tribute. ‘Backroads’ closes things out on a feel-good note, and makes me want to hit play again.

Troubadour is a record of genres in conversation. Sag uses on a melodic phrase that briefly nods at Smashing Pumpkins’ Today before settling into something that’s part alt-country, part emo. Other tracks lean folk, country, shoegaze, post-hardcore. None of this is the maximalist everything-at-once approach; the genres are deployed song by song, deliberately, with the range emerging across the album rather than crammed into individual tracks. Singer Brendan Wright calls it “farm emo”, which is both funny and accurate.

It’s a breakup album, but a quiet one. The lyrics circle reflection rather than recrimination, even when the music goes loud. If you want a single comparison, it’s Uncle Tupelo plus Modest Mouse—the alt-country sturdiness of one, the restless dynamics of the other.

Moab and Redwood are the standouts. Both let the band’s range surface inside a single song without losing the deliberate per-track approach that defines the rest of the record.

Sadie Sandler and Chloe East have the right uneasy chemistry, Sarah Sherman’s framing-device dean is doing a lot with very little, and Lyonne and Garofalo turn up exactly when you want them to. Then the third act swings somewhere else entirely—a different film, a different register, a different idea of what the joke is. Whatever it was meant to do, it lands as a shrug. What came before deserved a closer.

Cameron Picton’s first record outside Black Midi (a band whose shtick I never totally warmed to) and a tonal world away from Geordie Greep’s The New Sound, whose calypso pastiche left me cold. My New Band Believe is the Windmill alumnus I didn’t expect to like. Almost entirely acoustic, built from strings, woodwind, harpsichord and pianos stacked into something that keeps tilting underfoot, it has the orchestral curiosity of Van Dyke Parks without the kitsch. “Love Story” sits in the middle like a small domestic scene that won’t quite hold still. The whole thing is intriguing in a way I’m still working out, which is the better kind of intriguing.

Sean Solomon spent the better part of a decade fronting Moaning on Sub Pop before that band wound down, and went back to making animated videos for Run the Jewels and Unknown Mortal Orchestra in the quieter stretch that followed. The World Is Not Good Enough is his first solo record, on ANTI-, and it sounds like a record made by someone who took the long way round to it.

Hushed, melodic, personal; “Postcard” is the standout and “Black Hole” is the most honest: “I’m afraid if I have children / I might pass this sadness on”. Coping mechanisms, fears named rather than dodged.

I bought Young Team when it came out, back when £15 in HMV bought you an album you’d only ever read about—which meant playing it over and over until it gave up its secrets, partly because you had the time, partly because £15 was £15. Young Team confused me. It challenged me. It took a while to really click. Click it did.

“Yes I am a long way from home” sets the template—and, as it turns out, the template for Mogwai’s whole career: the gentle build, the sense of something unfurling, controlled bursts of noise punctuating the calm. “Like Herod” then takes that template and stretches it in every direction at once: longer, quieter, louder, more hypnotic, messier, more majestic. “Tracy” is unhurried and contemplative, a feeling magnified if you turn the volume up at the end and catch the phone conversation about what sounds like a sizeable physical altercation within the band. “R U Still in 2 It”, with its spare instrumentation, repeating refrain, and lyrics about a narrator trying to right a relationship that’s already gone, remains darkly affecting nearly thirty years on.

The sequencing is immaculate, culminating with “Mogwai Fear Satan”, which justifies its sixteen minutes and remains the best thing the band have ever done; apocalyptic, cinematic, the sound of a group throwing vast amounts of noise and feeling at a wall via a handful of chords and a few simple riffs and somehow constructing elegance out of it. The flute that arrives near the end sits atop the chaos and offers clear juxtaposition to the insistent drumming beneath.

Young Team doesn’t immediately come to mind when I list my favourite albums, and I sometimes wonder whether I’m too forgiving of the records I first heard as a teenager. This one passes the nostalgia test. It still thrills.

There’s something faintly perverse about covering an artist’s self-titled debut in full; you’re not just borrowing their songs, you’re borrowing the album that was meant to be them. Asher White seems to know this, and the strangeness is part of the appeal. Pratt’s 2012 record still sounds like nothing else—at once ancient and contemporary—and White, working from a louder, more experimental-pop palette, reimagines it without trying to outdo it. “Mountain’r Lower” becomes something akin to a proper rock song; “Casper” has blasts of noise. Elsewhere, prepared piano and synths drift in where there used to be only fingerpicked guitar. You don’t need to know the original, though, if you do, the recognition is half the pleasure.

The plot creaks and Cruise does his earnest-sprinter routine, but the real pleasure is watching Pollack assemble the deepest supporting cast of the decade. Hackman (weary, rueful), Hal Holbrook’s avuncular menace, Ed Harris doing more with a sigh or a “fuck!” than most leads manage with a monologue, Holly Hunter stealing twenty minutes outright, plus Strathairn, Brimley, Busey, Tobin Bell, Sorvino, Dean Norris: every door that opens, someone you recognise walks through.