Just a little something to break the monotony.

A pinch and a punch for the first of the month! Or say ‘white rabbits’ three times! Or pinch and/or punch a white rabbit, whatever floats your boat – here at MostlyFilm we don’t care about things like that – we’re just glad to see the back of June, quite frankly.

We’re a non-political-ish site, so we won’t be making too much of the ongoing situation, but we will say that if you *did* want to take a moment or two away from the ghastly selection of aching clusterfucks spurting nutloads of purest depression that is ‘the news’ right now, then you could do worse than cast a distressingly pink eye over what we’ve been doing recently.

For example, we’ve been delving deep into the latest offerings from the Criterion collection, with looks at Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Vidor’s Gilda, alongside the possibly less-heralded releases of Overlord and Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

As for recent releases, we cast verdicts on such treats as video-game extension Warcraft, jungle-exploring documentary Embrace of the Serpent, folk-tinged road-trip Where You’re Meant To Be, Penelope Cruz-starring breast-cancer melodrama Ma Ma, and sweaty-palmed arthouse fare Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story). Phew!

On top of all that, we even managed a look at the latest pop music for young people, got down with a new biography of Eric Rohmer, wandered around the new bit of the Tate Modern for a while, enjoyed a brace of white-hot dispatches from the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and had our special correspondent tell us what he saw in Dubai, because he could and we wanted him to.

We also voted to leave Europe, like a bunch of inward-looking, shit-scared, medieval pricks.

(That’s ‘we’ in the more general sense, obviously, not actually *us*. But don’t worry, that bit will never get through editing).  

So, we said, changing the subject entirely, if you were thinking of a trip to the cinema soon, what treats await you? Well, today sees the release of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, only eight thousand, six hundred and thirty-two days after the original programme was first shown on BBC1. It’s been given a couple of strangely lukewarm reviews, possibly because ninety-one minutes in a dark room is preferable to being outside in the world right now. We’d usually link to the trailer at this point, but it turns out that Wee Jimmy Krankie is in it, yellowfaced-up to play a Japanese designer, and frankly, they can all go and fuck themselves.

There’s also Central Intelligence, with Kevin Hart and The Rock, no doubt doing some sort of noisy, gun-tinged comedy shouting. We bet it’s not very good, but that The Rock is totally amazing at being funny in it – possibly the sort of thing that a desultory reach for the Cineworld card might reward if not in spades, then in a selection of small trowels.

The Legend Of Tarzan is out next week too. Did you know there was a new Tarzan joint about to drop? We didn’t! Did anyone think we needed a new Tarzan? Well, we’ve got one, and the hero is Meekus out of Zoolander, which is a good thing, and the villain is Christoph Waltz out of The Green Hornet, which is a bad thing. More than that, and you’re on your own.

Oh, and yes, a week on Monday sees a little thing called Ghostbusters, what’s become less of a movie event and more of a hot-take delivery-system. People will like it! People will hate it! The reasons for people liking it or hating it are going to be impossible to avoid and inevitably fatuous! Still, it’s only a film, and will be eleven quid at the stand by the tills in Sainsbury’s Local in four months’ time, where the hottest take available will be half a rotisserie chicken. 

But if you’re quick, you could spend your weekend watching Dissent & Disruption, the full set of Alan Clarke’s 70’s and 80s BBC work, finally available in one collection. Yes, it might be depressing viewing in places, but take a look out the god-damn window, why don’t you? See? Not so bad now.

Okay, that’s enough from us for one Friday. Go out and try not to break anything else. Assuming that the weekend doesn’t end with the total collapse of society, we’ll have a report from Il Cinema Ritrovato, some dick-measuring involving the various Scandinavian countries and their films, a look at a long-lost William Burroughs documentary, some wondering why Veep got so much better after Armando Iannucci pissed off, and a scoot around some Buster Keaton shorts. Not his actual shorts, mind. That would be ridiculous.

(We’ve got a bit on Ghostbusters too. Only ours won’t make you want to deliberately cross the streams.)

See you then.