It’s pretty. It’s so very pretty. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is rolling out around the world and feedback is mixed, but mostly satisfied. “The movie seems to think I care about something as trivial as the universe being destroyed, when it has set up some perfectly good personal drama about daddy issues. But it’s vibrant and funny and makes me smile,” says Julius. “Works like gangbusters 80% of the time and feels only a tad tiresome during the rest,” says Rhys.

Our mate Taika has made another little independent film, coming out in October. While you wait for Thor: Ragnarok, enjoy this collection of Waititi’s earlier screen credits and appearances, including a rare clip in which he plays a version of the Flight of the Conchords’ manager, pre-Murray.

Bigelow is back! And she’s got Boyega in tow for Detroit, a re-telling of a 1967 citizens’ uprising and the subsequent murders that occurred during the Algiers Motel incident.

The writer of The Orphanage has at last helmed his first feature, and it looks terrifying. Sergio Gutiérrez Sánchez’s Marrowbone is out later this year.

It’s all a hair-pulling catastrophe, no doubt, but it’s nothing in comparison to the thought that pundits and fans shared their wrathful voices in regards to Scarlett Johansson’s casting and the big wimpy conglomerate did nothing to empathize with such complaints. … The “ghost” is missing, but that’s not all. It’s also been stolen, reconfigured, whitened like a pair of shiny chompers, and then twisted to bring out pity for a loss of culture even though its very desecration was written as an active attempt of justification by three white writers. It’s so nauseating and foul that even a giant robot spider couldn’t slide an unmoving line of horror off my face. —SilentDawn

The script acquits the supporting cast nicely and gives Scarlett Johansson a vehicle for her particular talents, which includes both fun wire-work and a softly spoken intensity in her performance. Her version of the Major is decidedly different from anything we’ve seen in the Japanese anime, without getting into spoilers, and the story around it is also somewhat Westernized in the variations the screenwriters chose with this particular theme.

And perhaps that was my biggest takeaway from the film: Ghost in the Shell, as an artistic statement, is not about any one particular story or person but rather a time and place, and an idea that is more fun to ponder than it is to answer—what makes us human. So despite the fact I grumped about the plot that wasn’t leading me in the direction I wanted to be taken, this film succeeds both on its own merits as sci-fi spectacle and as a pitch-perfect homage to a late 20th-century pop culture artifact that seems to be only growing in its legacy and significance as time goes by. —Kevin Nix

“I find it fascinating how powerful The Birds is in spite of the fact that the effects often draw attention to themselves as effects. Hitchcock used real birds in the production—lots of them—but he used mechanical birds and puppet birds, too, and the birds, depending on the shot, often do look mechanical: the motions are too slow, too jerky. Also, the blood is too red. It looks like paint. And there’s that moment at the party where the child just lies on the ground, her bare legs kicking out of the bottom of her pretty dress, while a seagull pecks at her rather slowly: why doesn’t she just get up? But I think, somehow, it’s that very lack of absolute realism (or what we think of as realism in film) that makes the film so haunting. It has the effect of a dream, where things are too big or too small or just surreal, and therefore all the more awful.” —Melissa Tamminga

“The way the camera glides so lightly around these suffocating spaces, every character in a cell of door frames and windows and mirrors and opulent furniture and chandeliers and cloaks and furs, always in tight spaces and the frame so full of the noise of excessive inanimate objects, is probably the best expression of how love can free you and imprison you at the same time—everybody’s locked in their gender and class roles, but so much of this oppression is self-inflicted, death being the only escape from the cogs of the spinning machine.

I love exquisitely crafted melodramas, I guess because my commitment to soap opera is my key to accessing this kind of rigid and immaculate art. Technical genius is all well and good, but sometimes I just can’t get it unless there’s some unrealistic love and tragedy. If a movie can speak to me enough to make me cry it’s done its job, if I have to take a class to understand it there’s no point. Preferably it’s a combination of the two.

What goes around comes around.” —sydney

Hollie Horror has done it again! Here’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting, her deeply disturbing new list of prenatal paranoia and embryonic eeks. Let us know when it’s safe to go back into the broken waters.

“How many people know that YouTube’s signature content has its roots in the work of cinema pioneers like William K.L. Dickson, or experimental directors like Maya Deren?” asks Graham Williamson. Behold, his list of experimental or documentary films starring a cat released prior to 2005, when YouTube launched.

Samuel B. Prime recently spent a Sunday evening doing what needed to be done, “because like the lowly Magikarp, we all must flail before we can succeed”. And thus, a list of Movies Whose Titles Directly Correspond to the First 150 Pokémon (But Are Not About Pokémon) was born.

Apologies for the spoilers in this list, but it’s been brought to our attention that Anthony Perkins has died on screen at a higher rate than Sean Bean. So of course, someone had to rank those deaths by how ridiculous they are. Nice job, Hayden.

Here are 124 things only a 90s vampire will remember. Bloody exquisite, this list.

An oldie but a goodie, a Letterboxd classic in fact: this review of My Neighbor Totoro has been doing the rounds on social media again, so we’ll just leave it here for you.