Matthew Culnane

Ubisoft Montpellier’s hand-drawn platformer arrived on Switch in 2017, four years after the Wii U version, and I’ve only just played it. Docked, solo, fifteen hours.

The stretchy physics never quite became second nature. Ten hours in I was still misjudging momentum, which perhaps says more about me than the game.

The underwater infiltration levels were my favourite, dodging searchlights rather than sprinting. The bosses are good too, though it isn’t always clear whether you’re inflicting damage. They have tricky moments, as do the chase levels, but checkpoints are plentiful, which takes the edge off.

Structure is the real complaint. There’s so much here that the main path is hard to separate from the extras. I could see the bonus world waiting to be unlocked and assumed it was the finale, so the credits caught me out. I spent a minute convinced I’d rolled them a world early.

I finished with 403 of the 826 teensies, the Switch version having generously added 126 to the original 700. As with Odyssey’s moons or Korok seeds, I’m going to leave the rest.

Minor gripe: in the levels where you run along walls and ceilings I was never sure which direction to point the d-pad. Not this game’s fault alone. Nobody has solved that convention.

Christophe Héral’s score is great, and the rhythm levels are the most purely entertaining stretch of the game. Retold is out on 1 October. I’d leave those exactly as they are.

This review may contain spoilers.

Marty Mauser is a confidence man, and the film is built almost entirely out of his energy: when he talks the world seemingly rearranges itself around him. I spent the whole thing wanting him to fail to the point where it coloured my enjoyment of the film.

Some of that is the Safdie method pointed somewhere new. In Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner was unbearable in a similar way, but he was prey: always the smallest man (figuratively) in the room, owing money to bigger ones, hunted through every scene. The sympathy was more structural; you root for anything being chased. Marty has the wind behind him. He gets the components of the underdog (small man, big rivals, sport as the ladder out) while functioning as a predator on everyone within reach. I didn’t enjoy the mismatch.

The consequences do arrive but they’re a little more bureaucratic rather than escalating: too late to enter the Championship because of his own scheming, flying home with GIs because he’s burned his passage, missing the birth of his son. Every closed door in the last act is one he built himself.

And he never seems to notice. He talks his way past each of them exactly as he’s talked his way past everything else, right up to demanding a real rematch with Endo. The confidence man suddenly insisting on the genuine article, perhaps the neatest trick he pulls and, like me, if you aren’t charmed, the one worked on the audience rather than by the character.

Which leaves the recognition nowhere to happen except that final shot: hands clamped over the mouth that ran the whole con, glasses still on, weeping at a baby behind glass in a room full of other people’s children. It’s beautifully played, almost entirely through containment. It’s also the only available location for a humbling the film never dramatises anywhere the camera can see, and the readings I’ve come across all say the same things: trading fame for family, coming to terms, the repercussions sinking in, etc. I don’t agree. He didn’t trade anything. He ran out of options and then cried where nobody could watch him do it. And anyway, who’s to say fatherhood isn’t the next scheme he’s going to try to exploit?

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Umpteenth rewatch and the nostalgia has gone recursive on me. Linklater made this in 1993, looking back mid-70s he half-remembered and half-invented. I’m now looking back thirty-odd years to a film that was already looking back, which means the object of my longing is itself an act of longing. Turtles all the way down!

I was reading Svetlana Boym last week and she’d call this the reflective kind of nostalgia: not trying to restore anything, just steeping in the ache of it, aware the ‘76 on screen never quite existed and that my own first watch has been smoothed by the same process. I get older, the film stays the same age.

What holds up is how little happens, and of course how completely that’s the point. It’s a last-day-of-school film where the freedom on offer is mostly the freedom to drive around. Nobody’s having the time of their lives; they’re circling the parking lot waiting for lives to start, which at seventeen is exactly what it feels like.

The boxy aspect ratio squeezes the Alps into a portrait shape, which makes the peaks feel tall rather than wide. It also means the landscape never quite escapes the two men at the centre of it. All perfectly fine stylistic choices yet I still spent the first twenty minutes wishing someone would open the curtains.

Narratively it’s straightforward, and there’s no reward in coming for the plot. Two boys meet in Grana; one leaves, one stays; they build a house together decades later. Directors Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch let it run to 147 minutes and not all of that is essential. The Nepal digressions are interesting but you could skip one and lose nothing. What accumulates instead is a study of class and social mobility working itself out inside a friendship: Pietro’s family can afford to consider adopting Bruno, and that offer is the wound the rest of the film and their friendship circles.

The two of them see the world in completely incompatible ways and understand each other perfectly, which is a harder thing to dramatise than it sounds, and the leads Marinelli and Borghi do it mostly in silences. It builds to something genuinely affecting and it looks utterly beautiful.

Third in the summer’s John Cusack rotation, and the first where he’s actively running the con rather than absorbing someone else’s. Nick Easter arrives with the whole thing planned, and the fun is watching him work rather than watching him decide.

Which makes him the odd one out. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway trades his principles away a concession at a time. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out is ruined for a compromise he never actually made, done for standing in the room. Even Martin Blank, who at least chose his profession, spends Grosse Pointe Blank trying to reverse out of it. (Incidentally: one of my favourite films. Cannot wait to rewatch it.) Here, Easter is the one who got there first, and knew what he was doing when he did.

The film belongs to the excellent Hackman. Rankin Fitch (a name that simply screams “Grisham adaptation”) with his wall of monitors is doing what Cusack usually does: playing it straight while everything around him gets sillier. And, of course, the plot gets sillier by the minute.

Hoffman, sharing a screen with Hackman for the first time in their careers, is somehow given nothing to do. I’ve seen this film before but had very little memory of it, and I suspect that will be the case again should I ever press play once more.

In the early '90s I read Super Play, a Super Nintendo magazine whose staff were unusually well versed in Japanese culture and the parts of it that bled into gaming: anime, manga. Helen McCarthy’s reporting and Wil Overton’s artwork did a lot of the teaching. That’s how I came to the likes of Akira, Fist of the North Star and Golgo 13 fairly young, and how I knew something about what Akira was supposed to mean before I’d managed to see it.

When I finally got a VHS copy of Akira through a subscription offer, it didn’t change my life. I think I found it hard going. What I couldn’t place at that age was Japan’s post-war relationship with technology, and its recurring critique of the abuse of it: nuclear power and weapons, biotech, the running conclusion that humans make irresponsible stewards. As the only nation to have been hit with nuclear weapons, Japan is uniquely placed to warn against reckless use of dangerous things, and by now that warning has practically settled into its folklore. Like Godzilla before it, Akira is folklore of that kind, which is why it survives the specifics of its plot.

Thirty-odd years on, and that reading is obvious. I’ve caught the film once or twice in between, but only now do I see it whole. It’s more violent than I remembered, though I’m a father these days and softer on that sort of thing. The hand-drawn animation has aged into something remarkable, and a good deal more likeable than the computerised work that’s followed it.

The one place its influence never properly landed is the medium that introduced me to it. Akira never got the game adaptation it deserved: an apparently duff Famicom title that never left Japan, and a Super Famicom version I remember Super Play trailing as in-the-works, which came to nothing. The film shaped Cyberpunk 2077 and the genre around it instead. The magazine got me there; the games it covered never quite followed.

That scandal that Field of Dreams turned into myth, this time told straight. Where the other film lets Shoeless Joe walk out of the corn to be forgiven, this one keeps things factual: how the 1919 White Sox actually threw the World Series, and how they were ruined for it.

Another film I’m mostly watching for John Cusack. Here he plays Buck Weaver, the one who knew the plan, stayed quiet and took nothing. And who still paid the same price as the men who sold out. Not the same as his other characters’ moral slides: here a decent man is ruined for being in the same room. You want him to escape it all and you know he won’t.

Incidentally Strathairn and Sweeney are both good here. Actors you wish the industry had handed bigger careers.

Segel and Weaving are clearly having the time of their lives, trading insults with the ease of a couple who’ve had years to sharpen them. The best running gag is physical: injuries accrue and stay, so by the closing stretch Segel genuinely looks like a man who’s been through everything the film has put him through. War of the Roses crossed with cartoon splatter, and mostly a delight. Less charming is the mid-film swerve into a rape threat played for tension. It doesn’t land, and the film would lose nothing without it. Plenty of fun regardless.

Cusack, in the Allen role, plays David Shayne, a playwright certain of his own genius, and spends the film discovering he isn’t the best writer in the room. That honour goes to Palminteri’s mobster bodyguard, who keeps improving the script from the wings. Cusack plays the straight man to all the noise and never begs for sympathy.

Playing moral compromise is something Cusack has always been good at. Shayne trades his principles one small concession at a time, and Cusack maps that slide without softening it or asking you to forgive him. It foreshadows the negotiated conscience he’d later bring to Grosse Pointe Blank.

Mixed feelings about Woody Allen, clearly, but this is one of my favourites of his.