As the evenings get darker earlier, and the leaves turn from red to orange, I can’t help but find myself returning to Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox – which most definitely takes the title of the most autumnal film of all time. The film’s aesthetic pays homage to Quentin Blake’s iconic illustrations that famously brought Roald Dahl’s book to life, it is full of rich colour and the simultaneously unnerving and charming stop-motion animation feels like the ideal way to capture the quirkiness and character of his writing. Anderson knew that in making this feature animated he would lose a percentage of audience interest instantly, yet the film has persevered and remained a firm favourite for thousands. I credit this to how funny, relatable and emotionally engaging the story is in its portrayal of an identity crisis from the perspective of a fox. The story explores themes of acceptance and encourages celebrating difference – a sentiment that is more topical than ever in the current cultural climate.

The stop-motion masterpiece centres on Mr. Fox (George Clooney), who finds his wild animal instincts clashing with the responsibilities he has both as husband to artist Felicity (Meryl Streep) and as father to angsty Ash (Jason Schwartzman). When he decides he doesn’t “want to live in a hole anymore” and moves his family to a cosy house in a tree, he finds it is perfectly positioned opposite the looming industrial farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The delicious possibilities of their presence become an obsession for Foxy, who decides on one last hurrah to steal from each of the farms, and chase the highs of his youth. His actions end up enraging the farmers, who form a plan to fight back, putting the other animals in the community in danger.

Fantastic Mr. Fox was the first Wes Anderson film I ever had the pleasure of watching, and what captured my attention was how unique, engaging and different his style of filmmaking is. It seems poignant, then, that the celebration of difference is one that Anderson explores emphatically in this story. Ash, my favourite character with his small stature, distinct all-white ensemble (cape included), insecure outbursts and insistence that he’s an “athlete”, stands as a representation of difference. Characters repeatedly dismiss him as such, even his father who does not understand his son, but he has an unwavering sense of self-belief. His strong-willed nature in the face of persistent judgement means that when he finally has his hero moment, his realisation that being “little” is not a bad thing is all the more sweet. Foxy’s line is inspired “I think it may very well be all the beautiful differences among us that just might give us the tiniest glimmer of a chance” is my favourite sentiment in the film. The idea that everyone has quirks and distinctions, and the acceptance and appreciation of those traits are what builds a community. It’s a particularly beautiful message to include in a children’s film and one that remains important as we move through life.

It seems strange for a children’s film to centre on the mid-life crisis of its lead. Yet Anderson effortlessly transcends generational boundaries by creating a layered film with a simple ‘David and Goliath’ story at its surface about an underdog (or under-fox in this case) sticking it to three nasty farmers that simultaneously navigates the pretty adult sensation of feeling dissatisfied with the hand you are given and wanting more from life. His world is full of juxtapositions – he justifies his thieving behaviour with the statement “I’m a wild animal”, an ironic statement given the very domesticated life he leads, working a white collar job, wearing a tailored suit and moving his family above ground like a human to not “feel poor”.

“Who am I, and how can a fox ever be happy without…a chicken in its teeth?” Fox says early on; a notion that shapes the entirety of the film. His dreams conflict with his wife who is focused on keeping their family safe, and prefers to exercise her self-expression through painting lightning bolts in her artwork. Mr. Fox’s unrest is the major cause of conflict in the story, as he is itching for more from life, chasing the idea of being “the quote-unquote Fantastic Mr. Fox” – a beatific version of himself intent on perpetually impressing people with his thrill-chasing and perfectly executed heists. The inclusion of the lonely psychotic rat (voiced by Willem Dafoe) who guards Mr. Bean’s cider cellar is almost a warning to Foxy of what he could become if he continues this path of pure reckless desire. Mr. Fox only truly understands what he wants when what he has gets put in jeopardy. The ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ he becomes accepts failure and tries again anyway, shifting his focus from his own glory and channelling that energy for greatness into leading his friends and family to survival.

Foxy’s final stage of acceptance comes when he meets a wolf, a symbol of untameable wildness and the only thing he truly fears. When he sees one in the wild, standing on all fours and wearing no human clothes, Mr. Fox sheds a tear and they raise a paw to one another in solidarity. In this moment, he realises that though he is an animal, he is not as wild as he truly thought. This chance encounter gives him perspective and allows him to make peace with his existence, learning to balance his innate animal behaviour and his domestic life.

Wes Anderson is such a special filmmaker, with his distinct stylised symmetrical visual masterpieces and his ability to not let style overtake substance. 15 years later the emotive themes of identity, the acceptance of change and the idea that “there’s something kind of fantastic” about being different are still just as moving. The message to take away is comforting; as you learn more about your existence, as you grow older and perhaps become a parent, your perspective changes. But this doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it just means that the adventures you’re going to have might be a bit different to the ones you imagined. The Fantastic Mr. Fox he thought he would be isn’t the Fantastic Mr. Fox he became – but that does not make him any less brilliant.

There is nothing special about a morgue in the city of Pittsburgh. One could argue there is also nothing special about Pittsburgh itself – but American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage decided to train his eye on institutions (policing, healthcare, coroner) in urban Pennsylvania all the same. The result was what is now referred to as his “Pittsburgh Trilogy” consisting of Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.

The morgue situates us in the final of these films (The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes), a Brakhage title that’s gained cult-classic, almost grindhouse-level status. This status really only means anything in niche cinephile circles and underground film fandom, but I think it should be required viewing in a general audience sense for the Halloween season. Brakhage achieves an extremity of body horror that splatterhouse auteurs and David Cronenberg could only strive for, but most notably, he does so without extraordinary explanation, escapist mythology, or brand construction.

That’s not to mention the fact that The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is incredibly hard to find, lending it a forbidden, taboo reputation. It’s also silent, as with all of Brakhage’s work – another tough but unusual selling point for casual moviegoers. This allows for a visual experience untethered by sensory accompaniment. You are not directed how to feel by the addition of music, dialogue, ambience, or narration. You just feel it all.

I saw a 35mm print of it at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which was one of the most intense and exhilarating screenings I’ve ever attended. In the deafening quiet, all you could hear were people fidgeting in their seats, breathy groans, nervous laughter, and concerned whispering. A dizzying, voyeuristic camera lingers on actual cadavers posed rigidly across cold, obelisk-like slabs. Often faceless morticians handle them like manufactured goods, measuring their limbs (and genitalia, which provoked a loud involuntary chuckle from a guy in the front row), carving into skin and lifting and pulling it like taffy, scooping out brains from skull chambers with gloved hands – need I go on?

Well, I will. A couple of the most stomach-squirming scenes will forever be wriggling like nematodes through my memory, including blood being vacuumed from the corpse through a tube, and then not smoothly cascading out of it into a chasmic industrial sink. No, much worse: sputtering. A ch-ch-ch-ch motion, like a sprinkler. That one really got me. The other is a face’s flesh being snipped enough to become stretchable and rolled back entirely, exposing the inner workings beneath.

Which is more chilling – these images themselves or the thought of viewing them in total silence? The answer is both in equal measure. Brakhage extensively engaged with the distinctions between documentary and document in the context of moving images; this difference took on many forms, but the general paraphrasing is that he viewed documentary as a manipulative tradition of presenting factual occurrences as objective, without acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in the camera’s frame. Document, on the other hand, was a bit more complicated but crucial to his practice as a filmmaker. It was, as Marie Nesthus observes, not simply a matter of whether there’s “a presence or absence of the artist’s mark, but rather in the degree of its visibility.”

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is, through and through, a document. Contrary to some of his earlier work, Brakhage shrugged off the urge here to intercut the morgue footage with more impressionable imagery, like mountains and open sky and snow, for he “knew it was impossible … to interrupt THIS parade of the dead with ANYthing whatsoever, any ‘escape’ a blasphemy.” There’s still an acknowledgement of the director’s imprint, with hyper close-ups and bodies framed in fragmented tableaux. But it’s arranged in such a way as to evoke the forceful machinations and oversight of institutional documents.

Brakhage is running us through the factory line, shoving the fine print of autopsy protocol right in our faces, prying our eyes open to make us look. In one of the starkest works of body horror, he strips away all the storytelling, all the shock, all the worldbuilding, and makes the monster our very own perception. While this has always been present in Brakhage’s work, nowhere is it done so insidiously.

It is a document in the sense that the filmmaker decided to make his imprint visible, but just barely enough to let the images and processes on display speak volumes in our registering of them. Without any literal volume – silent in often unbearable ways – this morbid work leaves all the heavy lifting on us. For that reason, it’s horror. Right to its disemboweled, de-brained core.

In a seminal essay, Stephen King argues that “When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.” While it’s a lot more expensive now (and personally, I don’t like the center of a row)King’s point is that, whether we are cognizant of it or not, we all desire the experience that horror affords. So why not add The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes to that pantheon that we cycle through every October? It’s a unique class of nightmare unto itself, daring us to spend 32 un-accessorized minutes of silence in a sub-basement that doubles as a city morgue, the only thing guiding us being Brakhage’s uncomfortably intimate curiosity behind the lens.

In most horror cinema, no matter its forays into various subgenres, you’re presented with a sense of hope (the final girl in slashers), the lack thereof (everything in torture porn), a message (high-concept, A24 fare), or a bonkers playground (ultraviolent weirdo stuff like Mandy). As shocking as a more contemporary cult breakthrough like Terrifier 3 may be, it’s too…fun. The bells and whistles make it so, and it doesn’t have the leverage of real, unfictionalized gore. With this unforgettable short, you’re in Brakhage’s world, with no higher power on which to anchor your resilience. You may find beauty, you may find despair, you may find meaning, or, most likely, you’ll find nothing at all — nothing but yourself, dressed down, literally nude, and tinkered with like clockwork.

A fitting experience for the season of All Hallows: in Brakhage’s world, there is no god. No anti-god either. Only flesh.

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Slowly, the closed door hiding perpetrators of domestic violence and abuse away from prying eyes is creaking open. In 2017, the #MeToo movement empowered women (and men) across the world to speak out against their abusers. In 2024, the man versus bear dialogue ignited intense debate in nearly every corner of the Internet. These viral moments – among countless others – gave voice to the silent social compact so many women are raised to understand: Love and violence rarely exist on opposite sides of the continuum.

It’s an emerging dialogue, spurred on by new media challenging the shame and silence that bloom in the wake of intimate violence. Trace those threads of conversation back a decade: Before posting #MeToo or choosing the bear, there was your stance on David Finch’s 2014 Gone Girl.

Following Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) through the (literal) saccharine origins of their picturesque relationship, the film retraces the slow death of their marriage to reveal the danger we open ourselves up to when entering such fraught compacts.

The story of Nick and Amy unfurls gradually. Scenes of the present – as Nick comes to grips with Amy’s disappearance and his growing complicity in it – entwine with scenes of the past, each narrated by an entry from Amy’s diary. In this way, viewers are introduced to a carefree young couple that promises never to be like “every other couple [they] know.” Simultaneously, it juxtaposes this naive promise with an older version of Nick and Amy, a couple that has become just that: unhappy, at odds, and violently so.

Here, Amy is the film’s authoress. Her entries peel back layers of escalation, evolving from love and respect to the disrespect and depersonalization that culminate in physical abuse. For many, hers is a familiar, well-trod path.

That’s precisely how it’s meant to feel. Just over an hour into the film, this expected arc grinds to a halt: What happens is not the graduation from spousal abuse to murder – it’s the graduation from prey to predator.

From her nondescript getaway car, Amy smugly confesses the truth: All of it, from those early, perfect stories to the later, gripping admissions of a relationship gone wrong, is history rewritten. Her diary was no archival endeavor; it is instead a modern retelling, vengefully recorded in response to her husband’s affair.

This diary has one purpose: To create a believable record that lures observers into making assumptions, drawing conclusions, and framing Nick for Amy’s death. These diary entries are torn directly from the pages of Flynn’s novel, yet they are all the more impactful for the intimacy and immediacy that emerges through the act of viewing.

Watching Amy’s gradual reduction introduces a certain air of voyeuristic complicity. Viewers become culpable in her degradation simply because they have stepped behind closed doors to bear witness. It’s precisely because they have borne witness – seeing events unfold before their eyes – that doubt never truly enters the picture. Guilt and presumption: The film introduces these two powerful forces, each of which draws further into question the line between story and reality.

A veil of uncertainty falls over events. Pieces of Amy’s story – Nick’s resentment and distance, the fraying threads that once bound them together – have been substantiated elsewhere. Others have not. The viewer, then, must decide where fiction meets fact.

So while Nick and Amy’s is a shared annihilation, each complicit in their own (if unequal) ways, it is far easier to forgive Amy and accept her story, which feels too raw to dismiss entirely. The reason for this blind faith is disturbingly simple: Amy’s story is ubiquitous. Her words, spat out in the throes of a recognizable rage, resonate:

“Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That’s murder. Let the punishment fit the crime.”

Perhaps Amy’s diary is manufactured, written in the vengeful script of a woman scorned for the final time. Perhaps her words are not to be trusted. What is true, however, is the core of her grievance: Her marriage was a death by a thousand cuts.

It is this gradual diminishment so many women fear. Marital rape, financial abuse, weaponized incompetence, and unbalanced mental loads – what is a mauling in the face of such utter destruction?
Gone Girl answers this question with another: Why not return the favor?

Amy Dunne is no lamb to the slaughter. Neither man nor bear, she is a third predator in the woods, complete with a set of claws and an oh-so-pretty head full of cunning plans to see justice served. While her actions are amplified for theatrical effect, they nonetheless illustrate that one needn’t always bow to the blade.

This air of righteousness makes Amy unbelievably difficult to condemn, no more so than in the case of her long-time stalker, Desi Collings (Neal Patrick Harris), whom she turns to when her carefully laid plans falter.

Yet, Desi offers only a brief respite. From his luxurious, remote home, he half-heartedly hides his intentions beneath a veil of faked concern – a mask that falls away the instant he tells her: “I won’t force myself on you.” The subsequent threat, “unless you make me,” echoes between them, unspoken.
With Desi, Amy dons her truest form: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, well-versed in the art of expectation. Chameleon-like, the predator lurks just beneath the surface of her lacy blue nightgown, freshly waxed legs, and “cool girl” facade donned to distract and disorient.

Amy’s ability to switch on the version of herself Desi desires may seem more like a defence mechanism than an instrument of violence. Yet, it is ultimately effective, leading him to meet his fate where he least expects it: at the hands of the woman he thought he caged.

Gone Girl does not ask viewers whether Amy is right or wrong. Instead, it asks them to consider why she behaves the way she does, and how she is so deft at doing so. Violence, it tells us, is synonymous with love. The annihilation of self, replaced by a version of “cool girl” tailor-made to suit the male gaze, is a party trick learned at a young age. But “cool girl” doesn’t need to be a cage. For Amy, it is a weapon to be wielded at will – a tool of past victimization reshaped into the key to freedom.

As Gone Girl turns ten, know this: Seeing Amy as vindicated is different from condoning her actions. In fact, they are two entirely different conversations. Amy may very well be a psychopath, but she is also a symbol in an ongoing conversation about female agency and the way it is stifled and extinguished in relationships with men. She’s a perverse comfort, confirming that while gendered violence is still to be expected, one need no longer see oneself as prey and prey alone.

For the sheltered teenager unable to talk to their family about sex but afraid to use their dark bedroom to search the unfiltered web, movies are the perfect middle ground, providing a subtle, indirect path to experiment with yearning while safely displacing their identity onto another. Sex in film may not look the same as it used to, but where the present wanes, the past prevails for confused adolescents to stumble upon.

I don’t remember why, at 14, I had the living room to myself long enough to watch Purple Rain, but I do remember finishing the film and, for the first time, feeling aroused enough to do something about it. I was indoctrinated into 80s aesthetics from an early age, with the era taking on more hallowed meaning as I’ve gotten older. The androgynous New Wave style was instrumental in my realizing my gender expression – I am a shoulder pad enthusiast, and I pity those who don’t get it – and, in turn, my own queer identity as nonbinary. Though the 1980s are notoriously considered the worst-dressed decade, the way the era celebrated experimentation and oddity across fashion as well as music deeply resonates with me. To find a musical film like Purple Rain led by someone who was not a woman, not a man, but something I would never understand, was, as his band suggests, revolutionary.

Prince created magic with most of his projects, so ethereal that when words end, symbols take hold. His first film, Purple Rain, and the soundtrack album widely regarded as one of the greatest ever, turn 40 this year, and seeing as that is double my own age, I can attest to the longevity of its cult value. Prince’s The Kid is unkind to women and selfish about the artistic process, but his literal and figurative performance of false unity actualizes a fluidity and euphoria that reverberates across decades.

In what director Albert Magnoli noted as a pre-MTV vision, the opening montage captures the made-up but still faces of the audience who stare beyond the camera and frame. Expressionless, their aurora and glamor speak for them: the color swiped across their eyebrows and the glitter streaking down their cheeks are quintessentially 80s. They exist on the fringes, lips puckered and tongues out, inviting you to witness and exalt the music with them. Speaking as someone whose love for cinema sprouted from an obsession with 80s music videos, it’s immediately captivating.

When The Revolution takes the stage, the lines of gender blur even further. On stage left is Wendy Melvoin, right is Brownmark and in the middle is the unknowable artist, dramatizing in the liminal space. The three all dance in perfect sync, their handsome square shoulders and theatrical hair in harmony but never conformity. Like us, aspiring performer Apollonia watches and dreams of being them. In Purple Rain, lust for the body exists, but lust for what the body can do musically is just as meaningful: “Is that what turns you on? Making it?”

Even before the sex scene 40 minutes into the film, my virgin eyes were glued to Prince, following the way he moved his body, a slim muscularity under leather. Though it isn’t until after he and Apollonia fight that he more overtly gyrates and taunts the audience, The Kid’s sensuality is instantly palpable. His smirk alone is enough to send you reeling; no texture could feel sexier than his white lace against your skin. His falsetto cooing leaves Apollonia in tears, the camera slowly pushing in on her fixated gaze. There is no doubt she – we – are his.

The teasing pull of a puffy shirt to expose his chest is sufficient foreplay, or so you think, because when the two make love that night, the film doesn’t show intercourse with a rock and roll fury. Apollonia and The Kid begin slowly, their desire pulsating, the tension growing alongside electric blares. His ungloved hands caress her own lace as they rhythmically grind against each other. And that’s it. Watching it now, I’m surprised I incorrectly remembered blatant sex on screen. But this scene, along with two other quick flashes of sex, transcend the conspicuous. What is alluded to in bed is sweated on stage, consummated in concert. Wendy on her knees face to face with The Kid’s guitar-covered crotch. The scarlet-cloaked screeching of “Darling Nikki.” These fleeting instances of eroticism were enough to set my juvenile self on fire, but even upon revisiting, they remain seductive. Passionate. But, as The Kid further isolates himself and loses touch with reality, love and sex become brutal and ugly: “Your music makes sense to no one but yourself!” club owner Billy Sparks tells him.

What makes Purple Rain feel so otherworldly are the lyrics that reckon with the existentialism of life itself When The Kid sings “Things are much harder than in the afterworld; in this life, you’re on your own,” in Let’s Go Crazy, it reflects an artist’s uncertainty with their identity, seemingly at odds with the demands of the world. Raging against The Time, we put our faith in The Revolution. We fear we will become jaded like our parents, who failed in ways we hope we don’t. Queerness can feel apocalyptic, like you’re at the end of the archaic and on the cusp of a new future. The reality of the AIDS crisis exacerbated this out-of-place, out-of-time sentiment. Paradoxically, being nonbinary, against basic codes of ones and zeros, can be likened to a futuristic cyborg identity, and the extended version of “Computer Blue” seizes this ennui with synth poetry of feeling programmed incorrectly. Distorted dysphoria articulated by the same electronic sounds that would help materialize my gender euphoria, often found on the dance floor. In Prince’s vein, other Black and nonbinary artists, such as Janelle Monáe, have reclaimed such imagery of science fiction and annihilation, illustrating the alchemy of fluid queer futurism. Where there is experimental music and dance, there is communal ascendance.

The titular performance of the film is the culmination of The Kid’s struggle, but ultimate achievement, of welcoming such profound connection through music. Inheriting his father’s violent streak, he slaps Apollonia and grossly shames her for the sexual outfit she hides from him, even pushing her to the ground. It’s a conflict not dealt with through dialogue but instead through an achingly sung atonement. In finally honoring Wendy and Lisa for crafting “Purple Rain,” dedicating it to his father, and apologizing to Apollonia, he learns that one can accomplish collectivism without appealing to commercialism and that music doesn’t have to be self-involved to be authentic. It’s a puzzling and unfinished way to explore abuse, but when you hear him sing “I never meant to cause you any sorrow,” you want to believe him. A silver hooped earring shared among the lovers (indicative of beautiful 80s androgyny) reflects forgiveness and reconciliation with your flaws, as well as acceptance of one’s identity.

At the end of “I Would Die 4 U” Prince does this unforgettable kinetic move. He shuffles in a circle, twirling his hands around his face and groin, licking his fingers and indulging in himself, the camera indulging too as it spins with him. It’s a glorious and sexy moment during a song that transforms his father’s words of abuse to express selflessness. An encore of all the affection at work in the film.

For a Pride party, I once dressed up as Kelly from the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. Clad in purple, curls, and pearls, everybody thought I was Prince – an honorable mistake I’ll accept. That other Gen-Zers like me were quick to identify Prince’s image of queer sexuality and flair speaks to Purple Rain’s legacy among a youth ecstatic to honor the trailblazers of the past. Queer celebration is often realized within music and the places that house such worship: clubs or house parties that encourage bodies to jostle against each other in melodic rapture. That this imagery of the eighties and the memorable weirdness of Prince was responsible for my sexual awakening is not only a testament to the everlasting allure of androgyny but also the gender euphoria we can reach once music reminds us that a body does not have to be a prison, but a vessel for glorious movement.

As night descends on a gloomy industrial landscape, Shopping dares to find the beauty in that darkness. Aerial shots of cooling towers and naked flames set against the sky evoke a lower-budget, more realistic Blade Runner. However, fast forward a few decades and this haunting vision of the near future pales compared to the real thing.

In 2024, you no longer need to crash through a shopfront window to hit the headlines or strike fear into the hearts of columnists. Amid a cost-of-living crisis in the shadow of a global pandemic, shoplifting such extortionately expensive goods as bread, butter and baby formula is enough to stoke a media firestorm.

But the irreparably broken Britain of Shopping has many parallels with our own. Life is a losing game for the younger inhabitants of this urban underworld; one filled with desolate industrial estates and brutalist tower blocks packed to the brim, surveilled around the clock by a fascist police force, and rigged from the start in favour of the ruling class.

When we meet Billy (Jude Law), he’s about to leave his cell for the last time – he’ll put on his trademark leather jacket and head south, ready to die in a blaze of B-movie glory sooner than get caught again. Waiting outside is Jo (Sadie Frost), over a no parking sign in a shoddy stolen car, having fled the Troubles for a conflict less close to home.

From the opening scenes of his debut feature, the trademarks of Paul W.S. Anderson’s video game aesthetic are all present and accounted for. A symmetrical centred shot of Billy strutting down the corridor flanked by a guard on either side, followed up with an overhead shot of him stepping out of prison and straight into a vehicle, possess the look and feel of live-action cutscenes. They could just as easily serve as the player’s introduction to a dystopian, GTA-style sandbox in which carjacking is the only way to get from A to B.

As soon as they’re together, side by side in the same car, it’s as if these doomed lovers and partners in crime, somewhere between Bonnie and Clyde and Sid and Nancy, were never apart. To feel alive, but mostly just to kill time and make the news, they go on a shopping spree long after closing time.

Not far from where Billy spent the last three months bored to death behind bars (and where writer-director Anderson grew up), the ‘ram raid’ made its earliest known appearance in the pages of the Newcastle Chronicle. For much of the eighties and nineties, as the end of the century drew nearer, this neoliberal Wild West was the locus of the press’s worst imaginings.

Even the MetroCentre, then the largest shopping and leisure development in Europe and a veritable bastion of consumerism, was at risk of an unprovoked attack.

In 1991 it provided the backdrop to the most recent in a spate of ram raids caught on CCTV and broadcast for the pleasure of viewers at home, cowering in the shattered safety of their living rooms. Suddenly, or so it seemed according to the media, an epidemic of violent crime was sweeping the nation, and it was en route at breakneck speed by pre-internet standards, from stills of security footage splashed across the front pages all the way to your doormat delivered by the paperboy. The stakes could not be higher, life and death be damned: private property was in peril!

Under cover of this manufactured panic, the security-industrial complex became a permanent fixture of Shopping’s Tory dystopia. Since Billy’s arrest, the inner city has undergone a series of insidious renovations. What used to be a “beautiful little shop” until “people kept driving cars into it” is now a miniature fortress with metal shutters, security cameras and staff trained to spy on anyone deemed suspect (i.e. poor).

To ease their way into this hi-tech frontier, Billy and Jo start small with a yuppie’s BMW convertible. Anything offensive to either’s taste, along with the previous owner, gets spit out onto the street below. Except, that is, for a handheld game console to keep them entertained until the battery dies, or they finally run out of road.

Bar the finale, every chase scene that follows, by cutting back and forth between reality and a 16-bit rendering, transforms their hyper-policed world from waking nightmare into non-stop thrill ride. But as the action escalates, culminating in a shopping centre suicide mission, the size of the response grows at an exponential rate.

It’s a pleasant surprise that by the end the police aren’t armed with weapons of war. The second the glass breaks and the alarm goes off, a pack of vehicles is already snapping at their heels. And yet, in the heat of the moment, there’s time to turn the sprinkler-drenched shopfloor of a fancy department store into a musical soundstage, umbrella in hand.

Inevitably, Billy and Jo fall short at the final hurdle. Inside the mangled wreckage of a brightly coloured bimmer, their lucky cassette tape unspools like redemption tickets from an arcade machine. The middle-class mannequins and opulent domestic scene set out neatly in the window display opposite their bloodied bodies is left without a scratch. All is right with the world.

Alongside a rogue’s gallery of legendary British character actors (including Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce, Ralph Ineson and Jason Isaacs), Shopping gave a young, outrageously beautiful Jude Law his first major film role. But the real star has to be Sadie Frost at the peak of her nineties powers. Fresh off of playing a vampirized bride in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and only a year away from pushing the trolley down the disco supermarket aisle with a tiny Jarvis Cocker in tow, she steals every scene she’s in.

Thirty years later, despite having been thwarted in its commercial ambitions, this post-industrial tragedy still stands as a highly resourceful example of what is creatively possible in British cinema, even amid a fallow period of negligent, wilfully destructive policymaking. With another superficial regime change on the horizon, it also offers us an evergreen reminder.

To really get away with robbing the rich, we all have to do it. Until that day comes, things can only get worse, no matter who’s in charge. Or as The Smiths, channelling Marx and Engels, more famously put it: shoplifters of the world, unite and takeover!

Jip (John Simm) is pissed off at the world and at himself. He’s sick of working in retail and he’s sick of overthinking everything, sometimes to the point of sexual inadequacy. At least his friends are just as disaffected as him – Nina (Nicola Reynolds) can’t stand her job, Koop (Shaun Parkes) is worried about his dad and Lulu (Lorraine Pilkington) is through with dating. But it’s finally Friday night and as proud members of the chemical generation, they will spend their weekend forgetting the woes of their daily life by whatever means necessary.

So begins Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic, the comedy exploring the drug-induced highs of the 90s rave scene and the dopamine-deficient lows where family dinners are spent trying meekly to hide a comedown. Kerrigan’s debut was released amid drug-filled cinematic features such as Trainspotting (1996), The Acid House (1999) and later It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2005). These films demonstrated Britain’s raving youth and tendency towards recreational usage of Class As, but Human Traffic had a lighter tone than the heroin-induced tragedy that is Trainspotting. But 25 years on from its cinematic release, what Human Traffic truly understands is the widespread disenchantment of a generation.

At the pub, Jip decides that Britain needs a new national anthem which captures social anxiety during rapid technological advancements. Pint raised high he sings “I’m trying to be myself, understand everyone, it’s a mission and a half.” The whole pub chimes in, expressing the widespread alienation of the youth and how hard it is trying to be cool. It’s a moment that reminds me of something Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath says in the TV show Girls, which debuted more than a decade after Human Traffic: “I have work, then a dinner thing, and then I am busy trying to become who I am.” Hannah and Jip couldn’t be more different but the sentiment remains the same. Trying to discover who you are, compared to who society expects you to be, is an exhausting task. Especially when you also have to be a productive member of late-stage capitalism, pay your rent on time and be ready to get absolutely annihilated every weekend. Seriously, who has the time?

Human Traffic has more in common with the housemates of the British sitcom Spaced, which debuted the same year. Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Hynes) are energetic amateur grifters trying to have a great time and work as little as humanly possible. Much of Human Traffic’s vibrancy seeped into later shows that centred teen culture – Skins (2007 – 2013) may have swapped the jungle beats and house tracks for the electro-indie sounds of Crystal Castles and Bloc Party, but its characters share much with Jip and co. The wasted youth of the Bristol suburbs are all in the throws of an identity crisis while the yoke of adulthood is being tightened around their sweaty necks.

Jip would never claim to be the “voice of my generation“, but in many ways he is, and shares much with Skins’ Sid and Spaced’s Tim. Fears of sexual inadequacy haunt them all and they are constantly questioning their masculinity because of it. But Jip has a certain buoyancy that is lost in Tim and certainly in mopey Sid, as the cynicism and dull reality has set in by the noughties. Back in the 90s, the lack of social mobility was – at least for Jip and his friends – a slightly tragic game. Jip encourages his mate Moff (a young Danny Dyer) to move out of his parent’s house, suggesting he can easily get a flat “on the social”. This might have been as Jip puts “a piece of piss” in the 90s when there was some assemblage of a UK welfare system, but today obtaining social housing is nigh impossible in the UK, even for the most desperate. As documented by Shelter, many candidates wait more than two years for a home. Where demand is higher it can be much longer.

When Jip’s gang enter the club, they’re approached by reporters attending to understand the “youth of today’s” inclination towards Class As and dance tunes above 120 BPM. This scene is a direct reference to the BBC’s 1992 documentary E is for Ecstasy about British rave culture, in which the subjects explain the power of uppers transforming the drones of the working world into happy weekenders. But the gang are wise to their mission – another journalist can’t get usable quotes from Lulu and Nina, who even in their wasted state joke about their impressionable young minds. There’s no spiritual pretence to their drug intake; the only truth in their sarcastic responses is that they’re here to get “absolutely trashed”.

It’s not just the welfare system that has crumbled in the two decades since Human Traffic. Rave culture is dying a painful death. Kerrigan’s film may mock the drug utopia the talking heads of the documentary describe – comparing the rave culture to a religious experience – but today Human Traffic looks like a paradise compared to UK club culture’s current state. Thanks to years of austerity politics, greedy real estate developers and combative drug laws, the hedonistic experiments of youth are less common than before. We are living through an accelerated closure of late-night venues, with 3000 venues closing since the pandemic in London alone. Time Out cites “soaring energy bills” and “sky-high rent” while “young people are changing their going out habits to cut back spending”.

But if you are inclined to pop a pill or cut a line at the weekend, buyer beware. Jip and his mates feel drug use is a habit they will soon brush off, but today the dangers of drug use have rapidly increased with overdoses at an all-time high. Ella Glover’s recent Dazed article addresses how the mental health care crisis is a huge factor in fuelling the rise in ketamine addiction, and according to The Face, modern ecstasy pills contain less than 50% MDMA, with some containing none at all. Arguing this rapid decline in quality down to a multitude of factors, namely the pandemic, and the police crackdown on dark web wholesalers. Instead of a society that decriminalises drug use and works towards safer consumption and education, years of anti-drug policy have made suppliers cut more corners, making illegal substances more risky for users.

All generations have their own history of drug abuse, and there’s no sense in romanticising partygoers past. But Human Traffic almost invites a nostalgic lens; for Kerrigan chemical experimentation and hedonistic expression are a right of passage, today limited by physical and financial costs that make the risks far greater. Human Traffic was always intended as an affectionate salute to rave culture, but only 25 years later this world seems lost to us. Reaching for the lasers is becoming a rapidly distant memory.

Ask any English teacher and they’ll tell you that convincing a classroom of teenagers to care about Shakespeare if they aren’t already predisposed to theatre is an uphill battle. A bunch of adults dressed in period outfits, speaking a barely recognisable version of English does little to entice a classroom of bored teens. But if you swap the stage for a screen and trade the formidable seriousness of RSC-trained actors for a cast of bright young things, suddenly their interest is piqued.

When 10 Things I Hate About You was released in 1999, no one could have predicted that 25 years later the film would still be fondly remembered as one the best modern-day adaptations of a Shakespeare play. Loosely based on The Taming of the Shrew, the story of a loveable rogue softening the heart of an embittered female lead delighted audiences and launched Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger into superstardom, following the trend of teen-film-as-star-vehicle set by Baz Luhrmann in 1996 with the release of Romeo + Juliet.

When Luhrmann swapped fair Verona for Venice Beach, California (with gaudy floral shirts and frosted tips to match) he captured the attention of teenagers worldwide, creating what was dubbed ‘Shakespeare for the MTV generation’. The film very quickly became a staple in high school classrooms, and the role that it played in cementing Leonardo DiCaprio as the heartthrob of his generation is undeniable. In much the same way, Heath Ledger’s cheeky smile and effortless charm as rebel-without-a-cause Patrick Verona made him a certified Hollywood heartthrob, and what followed was a decade of filmmakers trying (and failing) to recreate that same magic.

The turn of the century brought with it an onslaught of modern-day Shakespeare adaptations, all of which met varying levels of success. In 2001, Miramax released Get Over It (loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream) while Lionsgate had O (a high school basketball take on Othello, also starring Julia Stiles, which had been pushed back from a 1999 release due to the Columbine tragedy). 2006 gave us not one but two Shakespeare adaptations in the form of John Tucker Must Die (loosely based on The Merry Wives of Windsor) and She’s the Man (inspired by Twelfth Night and written by the same writers of 10 Things). While the last two films were minor box office successes, these films failed to achieve the critical success of Romeo + Juliet or 10 Things I Hate About You, resulting in Hollywood taking an extended break from modernised Shakespeare adaptations for the better part of 20 years.

Then came 2023’s Anyone But You. Loosely inspired by Much Ado About Nothing, the film found an audience amongst both Shakespeare aficionados and those yearning for an alternative to the franchise tent poles that have dominated the multiplexes over the past ten years. As a result, Will Gluck’s charming film became an unlikely runaway box office hit and earned the title of highest-grossing live-action adaptation of a Shakespeare play, claiming over $200 million at the global box office.

Alas, the film’s financial success couldn’t shield it from the usual criticisms that plagued the Shakespeare adaptations of the early noughties, disappointing viewers who went in expecting a more faithful adaptation of the play and suffering from a weak script and predictable plot. Hoist by its own petard, the film may have failed to impress Shakespeare connoisseurs, but the surprising box office turnout proved that the appetite for modernised Shakespeare adaptations is still very much alive. But what exactly is the unique formula that has evaded filmmakers since 10 Things?

The success of Gil Junger’s film, written by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, lies in its reverence for the text and genre, and in modernising the original text the film was able to remedy problematic aspects of the play. Where the play’s Katherina is manipulated into submission by suitor Petruchio, Stiles’ Kat Stratford remains firm in her feminist beliefs, even when she is being romanced. Kat is facetiously referred to as “the shrew” but isn’t made to compromise her ideals – rather it’s the other characters who must meet her in understanding. She is argumentative, but her anger is borne out of a deeply upsetting incident she experienced, therefore her stand-offish nature feels justified rather than misplaced. In its willingness to blend contemporary teen life with classic Shakespearean ideals, 10 Things elevates itself from a run-of-the-mill teen comedy with wit and charm, challenging the original text whilst still paying respect to the Bard.

It is through this process of modernisation that 10 Things sets itself apart from even Romeo + Juliet. Where Romeo + Juliet is modern in everything but speech, preserving the language of the play to create blended material perfect for high school essays, 10 Things is unabashedly a teen rom-com first and a Shakespeare adaptation second. It captures that specific, earth-shattering feeling of being young and in love – a core tenet of many Shakespearean plays and teen rom-coms alike – and that lightning-in-a-bottle magic of perfect casting and clever writing can’t be easily replicated without care for the genre. In 10 Things, teen love doesn’t feel frivolous or unimportant; when Kat breaks down in front of her class, admitting in despair that she can’t hate Patrick no matter how hard she tries, the moment feels as important as if we were watching a monologue delivered on stage. When Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Cameron lifts a quote directly from the original play to exclaim “I burn, I pine, I perish!”, we believe in his sudden state of lovesick anguish.

Of course, the most memorable performance in the film comes from Ledger as charming brute Patrick Verona. When Patrick slides down a flagpole and dances his way across bleachers crooning along to Frankie Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, you can practically hear the hearts of a million teenagers melting. Not many can pull off the public declaration of love, but in Ledger’s deft hands, a cringe-worthy display of public affection becomes an endearing moment for the romantic comedy history books. No one has quite managed to capture people’s hearts as quickly as Ledger did in 10 Things I Hate About You, and the utterly ridiculous image of him lighting a cigarette with a Bunsen burner and holding up a copy of The Feminine Mystique had a devastating impact on my psyche, the effects of which I’m still dealing with today. These moments don’t feel forced or contrived but are paid off by a strong script and fully realised performances from the cast.

A successful Shakespeare adaptation will last long in the minds of its audience and offer a way into the text without relying too heavily on rigid formulae or archaic language. As seasoned Shakespeare veteran Sir Ian McKellen once said, to fully understand a Shakespeare play it needs to be seen, not just read. True skill lies in being able to adapt these plays to pique the interest of a younger audience, and writers Smith and McCullah laid the blueprints with 10 Things – with a sprinkling of quotes from Shakespeare and a character who declares herself “involved” with the playwright, the film stands out as a strong Shakespeare adaptation. The lasting impact of 10 Things I Hate About You 25 years after its release and the recent financial success of Anyone But You proves that Shakespeare’s plays are still rife for interpretation – whether or not someone can make a film as memorable and sincere as 10 Things is another question entirely.

If your ears have ever been blessed by the voice of the late Kevin Conroy – perhaps through any of the countless animated shows, direct-to-video films and video game franchises in which the actor played Batman over the last three decades – you’d quickly be able to recognise that deep, soulful tone of his. For a first-time listener, it’d be easy to mistake the actor’s voice for that of a jazz crooner tucked away in an underground speakeasy rather than a frequent face on the comic convention loop. But for many other people around the world, the mere whisper of his words connotes a whole flurry of emotions, one that evokes both an elusive magnetism and an irreparable sense of grief that have become hallmarks of the Dark Knight character ever since.

When Batman: The Animated Series first premiered, there was little indication the show would introduce what is widely regarded today as the definitive take on the hero. Up until that point, the character’s perception in the public eye was at the mercy of its live-action adaptations; first with the campy, tongue-in-cheek 60’s series led by Adam West and then later with Tim Burton’s 1989 eponymous blockbuster starring Michael Keaton. It wasn’t until Conroy’s voice first graced the airwaves in the autumn of 1992 (in an after-school children’s show no less) that television audiences would first familiarise themselves with the character’s inherently mature themes, raising the mainstream profile of both men substantially in the process.

As is the case with any iteration of the iconic hero, the animated series’ success hinged on the performer who would end up portraying the Caped Crusader throughout the show’s three-year run. The honour would ultimately go to Conroy, a Juilliard-trained theatre actor who had primarily done guest spots on sitcoms and soap operas before being cast as Batman. The thespian approached the role as an “archetypal hero” in the same way he would playing Hamlet during his days at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. In addition to the rave reactions Conroy’s performance received, the animated show would quickly prove to be both a critical and commercial juggernaut; its rapid success led to 1993’s Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a theatrically released feature film that contains the actor’s finest hour as the character.

The film, rolled out on Christmas Day 30 years ago, is told in a bifurcated structure that switches between past and present, with its dramatic tension centred around Bruce Wayne’s inner conflict between settling down and living the life his parents envisioned for him or continuing his mission of justice as Batman. The last time Bruce saw Andrea Beaumont, a childhood friend and a fellow member of Gotham high society, she left him heartbroken by walking out on his marriage proposal – a deeply emotional scarring that would finally propel him to commit to his heroic mantle. Ten years later, Andrea strolls back into town looking to settle some family business once and for all. On the same night, a new masked vigilante called the Phantasm begins to haunt the streets of Gotham, murdering a local crime boss and framing Batman in the process.

Mask of the Phantasm’s twin narratives allow Conroy to flex his talents across the character’s two distinct personas, anchoring one of the most heartbreaking renditions of the hero’s origin with his wrenching vocal performance. “I’ve always thought Batman was the real character, and Bruce Wayne was the disguise,” the actor explains on a featurette that accompanies the recently released 4K remaster of the film, “for Bruce, he has to play the society scene…he’s the bachelor in town.” It’s an approach that’s evident in the flashbacks we see of Bruce and Andrea’s courtship, Conroy deploying a bouncier, more energised tone to signify the lifted emotions of Wayne in the days before his descent into obsessive vigilantism.

While the film’s two storylines are initially presented as separate strands, one following Bruce in distant memories and the other shadowing Batman in the current day as he tracks down the Phantasm, it quickly becomes apparent to The World’s Greatest Detective just how intertwined these events truly are. As Batman works to uncover the identity of the Phantasm and clear his name in the present, Conroy’s voice switches to a noticeably lower register, not quite to the same degree as some of his gruntier live-action counterparts, but coarse enough to audibly signify his character’s inner anguish. In the film’s most devastating scene, a lovesick and internally conflicted Bruce Wayne visits his parents’ grave, tearfully confessing his doubts about his quest for vengeance. “That scene at the grave was [when] I realised fully that you can’t fake Batman,” Conroy recounts in a 2017 oral history. “You can’t just make a deep, husky sound with your voice. You have to base it in the pain of his childhood each time or it doesn’t sound right.”

Bruce’s traumatic youth would become a point of return for Conroy’s many performances as the character, the actor utilising his own experiences as a gay man to better convey the struggle of someone leading two very different lives. “I often marvelled at how appropriate it was that I should land this role”, the actor details in an autobiographical comic released by DC just before his death. “As a gay boy growing up in the 1950s and 60s in a devoutly Catholic family, I’d grown adept at concealing parts of myself. Of putting aspects of myself in a separate box and locking it away.”

Despite the self-admitted similarities between him and his most famous character, Kevin Conroy and Bruce Wayne possess two entirely different relationships to their iconic legacies. Mask of the Phantasm ends with Batman doomed to roam the streets of Gotham forever, his one chance at happiness slipping away as she sails out of the harbour for the very last time, condemning the hero to a life of suffering in the shadows.

It’s a strikingly bleak contrast when compared to Conroy’s own connection with the role – an honour bestowed on the actor that he seemingly never grew tired of up until his final days in the recording booth. If the Bat Signal serves as a constant reminder of Batman’s omnipotent presence perched high on the rooftops above, Conroy’s many outings as the character likewise allow him to live on in the minds of audiences forever, that bellowing voice of his echoing from our screens for the rest of eternity.

Is there anything more stirring than the game of football at its absolute best? To watch the great athletes and teams at work is to be riveted by the geometric intricacy of interplay; the precision of a pass threaded through a seemingly impenetrable mass of bodies; the balletic grace of a fleet-footed dribble; or the superhuman bodily contortion of a spectacular overhead kick. The football pitch is a canvas on which players paint their masterworks, sculpt with space, and craft kinetic poetry, all while a mob of devoted fans compose a raucous symphony from the stands.

Yet for all that beauty, movies that do justice to the thrill and spirit of the sport have historically proven elusive. How can a game so replete with visual delights, and so saturated with personal expression, rank amongst the least cinematic of sports? For avid fans of both football and film, it’s as frustrating as it is mystifying that nobody seems to possess the proper instincts to make a football movie that feels truly, swooningly romantic about a sport that’s always hummed with tension and possibility.

Nobody, that is, except Stephen Chow, that jester from Hong Kong, whose endless arsenal of good-natured, asinine antics wouldn’t make him anyone’s prime candidate to make a totemic football movie. From the moment he first stepped behind the camera on his gleefully juvenile Bond parody From Beijing with Love, Chow has persisted as one of the last great exponents of slapstick tradition, trafficking in a brand of absurd physical comedy that seems positively atavistic these days. His movies, with their simplicity, brazen immaturity, hyperactive visual style, and total lack of cynicism, feel like the works of an eternal teenager, brimming with ideas and idealism.

To watch them feels genuinely liberating, none more so than Shaolin Soccer, his maximalist masterpiece about an underdog group of Shaolin acolytes who must overcome their personal demons, master the game of football, and face off against the malevolent, steroid-enhanced Team Evil to restore dignity and purpose to their lives. Team Shaolin is spearheaded by Sing (Chow), an impoverished Shaolin master who sees football as a means of demonstrating the power of kung fu to the world, and coached by Fung (Ng Man-tat), a disgraced former footballer left destitute and disabled after being beaten by an angry mob for accepting a bribe to throw a match.

It might seem strange to suggest that Shaolin Soccer, a wacky kung fu comedy, remains the purest cinematic expression of the joys of football, but Chow’s commitment to goofy mayhem really does somehow crystallise, rather than obscure, so much of what makes the sport such a singular phenomenon. Chow, predictably, dispenses with any sense of reality, unyoking the football in his movie from the limitations of human biology and terrestrial physics. When the whistle is blown in Shaolin Soccer, logic gives way to total anarchy – all meteoric leaps, flaming overhead kicks, and supersonic headers. It’s football as pure entertainment, a frenetic highlight reel of flamboyant performances and outrageous special effects, as dynamic in its stupidity as any flowing counterattack.

It’s all completely removed from the actual game of football – I can’t say I’ve ever seen a goalkeeper use tai chi to produce a hurricane to wipe out the entire opposition team – but then, why shouldn’t it be? The movie is pure fantasy, unabashedly so, aspiring not for fidelity, but to capture how we envisage ourselves playing the game as kids (or as slightly more grown-up kids), pulverising the ball after an acrobatic leap, or slaloming from our own half to score. What the movie has in abundance that all those other lesser football movies are so desperately lacking is imagination. Like an unrefined, unvarnished young player still revelling in the sheer creativity and inspiration of it all, the endless possibilities of the game, unconcerned with strategy or structure.

But for all the full-blooded flourishes that make the movie’s matchplay so exhilarating, the movie’s greatest thrill is watching its characters embark on their individual journeys of rehabilitation. They rediscover, through the simple act of kicking a ball about with some old friends, parts of their personalities that they’d long ago sacrificed at the altar of modern mundanity. Sing acts as the catalyst for this reclamation, an accidental beating heart for the masses, inspiring people to reignite their old passions with his unapologetic sincerity. Just watch the sequence in which one of his impromptu songs inspires an entire street of total strangers from all walks of life, who’d until that point resigned themselves to the nothingness of modern existence, to erupt into an immaculately choreographed dance routine and resuscitate their old hopes of being great artists.

That dance, with its boundless generosity of spirit, is the movie in a microcosm. Team Shaolin’s journey from a motley crew of amateurs to a cohesive, dynamic outfit isn’t so much about studying the tactical minutiae of the game as it is about shaking off the lassitude that they’ve allowed to calcify in their lives. While their individual creative sparks inform their distinctive styles of play, each disenchanted team member has, like those dancers in the street with their hidden passions, surrendered their old joys to the soul-destroying mundanity of modernity.

In displacing their old passions and bonds of brotherhood, they’ve displaced their identities, simply accepting that they deserve no better than the boredom and abuse that comes with working a shitty job under a shitty boss. The football they play is only as beautiful as it is because of how much it feels like the ultimate act of therapeutic self-expression – their actions on the pitch, whether it’s propelling the ball at lightning speed from their midriff, or striking the ball with such force that it transforms in midair into a flaming tiger, are an extension of all their most profound aspirations. The ball in Shaolin Soccer is a conduit through which a person’s inner world blossoms, allowing them to realise their full potential.

Football is never more exhilarating than when it’s at its messiest, and it’s in supercharging this mess that Chow becomes the perfect filmmaker for the job of making the greatest of football movies. There have been good movies about the experience of being a football fan, and great documentaries about the staggering highs and lows of football’s mercurial geniuses, but Shaolin Soccer still stands alone as the movie that best captures the game’s magical ability to revert us to a juvenile state and reveal to us all the possibilities of a world vibrating with potential. It taps into our most extravagant fantasies of stepping onto the pitch, scoring the most ludicrous goals in the most dramatic of circumstances, and carving ourselves into football folklore. By combining football with the ridiculous, Chow therein finds the sublime.

A young Buddhist monk and a wizened old man are soaring through the forest, running on air as if weightless. The old man’s white hair and robes stream behind him as he amiably tells the young monk he’s been training for over 200 years. The monk, named Fat-hoi, feigns amiability for a moment longer. “What a shame. I’ve only been training for 20 years,” he says, before a switch flips. “I can tell you’re not human at first sight. Show your true form!”

Forcibly revealing the old man to be a spider demon, Fat-hoi sucks him into a bowl-like prison in the palm of his hand. The demon begs for mercy, appealing to the monk’s “kind heart”. He’s been training to reach enlightenment for hundreds of years; he’s almost human now, but if the monk banishes him, he’ll never be able to reincarnate and will be forced to return to evil. “Shut up,” Fat-hoi says, staring down at the spider demon, whose shrunken body is doubled over torturously in his cage. “Evil will always be evil.”

Thirty years ago, Tsui Hark’s Green Snake introduced itself to the world with this always-prescient moral prologue. Laying bare the philosophies of its universe with a few swift narrative strokes, the film tells us that while some beings desire transformation, others have the power to punish and deny it. In Green Snake – and everywhere else, it seems – power is the authority to construct the truth and enforce it on others, with the might of hegemony behind you. Redemption and transformation are impossible for demons, according to the monk: all beings are either born human, or evil. This cannot change. Dreaming of becoming something else can be deadly in a world like this. Many do, regardless.

Based on Lillian Lee’s novel of the same name – itself a retelling of the Chinese folktale ‘Legend of the White Snake’ – Green Snake tells the story of two snake demons who have trained for centuries to take the form of human women. Myths have always been fertile ground for mutually enriching interpretations, yet one particularly irresistible way this story may be read is as a work of trans world creation: one about existing in opposition to fascism’s attempts to control and define the body, exposing the artifice of things deemed divinely ordained, and remoulding the world to affirm life, rather than deny it.

The original Legend of the White Snake centres on the older and more experienced snake sister and her love affair with human scholar Hsui-xian; though intended to be a horror story, centuries of storytelling have burnished their attraction with the lustre of a forbidden romance, not in spite of, but because of, its transgressions against the laws of nature.

Lee’s novel and Hark’s film, however, flip the perspective of the myth to foreground the younger and more insurrectional sister, Green Snake. Though she usually plays a supporting role in the backdrop of White Snake and Hsui-xian’s story, in Green Snake, it is through the titular sister’s eyes that we discover the pleasures, dangers, and ongoing rebellion of bridging the worlds of demons and humans. Played by a lithe and sensual Maggie Cheung – sensual in its basest and most animalistic form, meaning ‘of the senses’ – the chameleonic icon of Hong Kong cinema enthrals with her uncanny, deliberately theatrical performance, one befitting a powerful, centuries-old supernatural being confronted with the task of making herself small enough for the human world.

It is a rather momentous shift to observe this strange world through her eyes. As an outsider, not tethered to a human lover like her sister (Joey Wong is an equally delightful, albeit less impulsive snake demon), her only desire is to understand her place within this reality. The two sisters use their magical powers to summon a house into being, and Hark’s film is wonderfully unfussy about the way this is communicated: a swathe of colour wipes laterally across the screen, painting over a desolate plot of land with beauty. Lotus flowers suddenly bloom, pink and plump, over the glittering waters of an illusory pond. Reality is mere surface, remade with ease. Why must Green Snake limit herself?

Intrigued by the human world’s foreignness yet unimpressed by its rules, Green Snake is eager to seek out what her sister implores her to avoid. Refusing to fall in line, she destabilises the fragile boundaries between human and demon, truth and deceit, good and evil. Wanting to experience love or desire for herself – or perhaps discover the difference between them – she drapes herself around Hsui Xian (Wu Hsing-Kuo) only for her sister to tell her to find another man to quench her amorous curiosities, so long as it’s not the dangerous Fat-hoi. Yet the monk has been harbouring spiritual doubts about his ability to renounce bodily pleasure and asks Green Snake to test his resolve. He loses quickly, but while Green Snake believes she has exposed Fat-hoi’s hypocrisy, the monk doubles down and decides to hunt down the snake sisters, ensnaring countless mortals in his wake. (ACAB means you too, transphobic monk!)

Unlike White Snake, Green Snake never seems fully committed to the idea of becoming human; it feels as though she’s merely testing the waters. Witnessing her sister and Hsui-xian falling in love, the younger snake remains uncertain of what that means. Is love what makes her sister more accomplished at being human, and herself less so? Is love the same as desire, or is it something else? Why do some humans run away from it? And if the world-transforming bond between her and her sister or her sister and Hsui-xian still isn’t enough to prove their humanity and capacity to love, then does Fat-hoi really know any more about what it is to be human than two snake demons?

Green Snake is a wuxia fairytale drenched with dazzling colour – gauzy and sensuous greens, pinks, and blues drape operatically across the screen, romantically embellished with glittering light leaks. The camera is a fantastical creature all of its own, tracing the billowing fabrics of the snake sisters’ robes and the monk’s surplice as they unfurl beyond material limitation, a kind of dream physics somersaulting on screen, responsive and alive. The film’s artificial and heady beauty is a constant estrangement. Even the mismatch of its curiously out-of-sync ADR feels like yet another storytelling device beckoning us to find meaning in the gap between real and not real.

Witnessing all of this, Green Snake herself asks: what would it mean to exist in ambivalence, and not in the violent imposition of incomplete truths? “I come to earth but have been misled by the world,” Green Snake says, jaded and mournful, as the film swells to its calamitous and tragic ending. “You say there’s love in the human world, but what’s love?” She stares down at a river of drowned souls, collateral damage to Fat-hoi’s ideological war. “It’s ridiculous. Even the humans don’t know.”

Only one thing is for sure in the world of snake demons, carceral monks, and lovelorn scholars; in the world of filmmaking; and the world beyond: the surfaces and narratives we weave together to tell our stories are malleable. This can imprison us if we are the monk, caught in a losing battle to extinguish the spirits of those determined to live the life they desire. But it can also free us if we embrace the idea that the world can always be what we make of it.

Green Snake tells us that if one day we figure it out, maybe she’ll make her return. And with that, after centuries of learning to be in this world with us, she vanishes into the water.