just sent this month's newsletter, on Pokemon Emerald and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (have a read + subscribe maybe?)

best firsts, Jan '26 Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000) A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992) To The Starry Island (Park Kwang-su, 1993) The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966) The Family Game (Yoshimitsu Morita, 1983)

currently consumed by an overwhelming desire to once again play through (and finally complete) Trauma Center: Under The Knife

Eternal Sunshine still holds up, thank god

watched Amadeus yesterday morning (first time in ~15 years, never a film I held with much reverence) in a cinema filled with old people talking loudly to each other and not turning off their phones — even so, a good time at the movies thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2026/01/amad...

absolutely wild that this exists

Yoshimitsu Morita's The Family Game (1983), a very funny movie about a family who speak but don't listen, wedged awkwardly around a table facing a camera but never each other

another good year of watching movies at home boxd.it/EBS8e

some A+ secondhand pickups this afternoon

finished my thirtieth novel of the year this morning, hitting the arbitrary target I set in January — best one, either Paul Auster's Leviathan (1992) or Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos (1985). Ready to go again in 2026.

it's nice to keep the old traditions alive, so I've written about my 2025 in cinema (and beyond) this Xmas Eve, including fav new films, best discoveries + some stuff about music + novels + other miscellany — have a wonderful festive season! 💫💫💫 thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/12/2025...

Avatar: Fire and Ash (great movie, imo) has got me wanting to revisit Aliens and The Abyss, feel like I've been severely underrating most if not all of the Big Jim Classics and these two have always fared quite poorly in my mind, for reasons I cannot even begin to remember

Saul Bass's Phase IV (1974) is such a great feel bad movie, and a surprisingly lowkey one considering it's about a plague of superintelligent ants in the Arizona desert — Bass should've directed more movies!

credit where it's due, the Dijon album is a very good soundtrack to making a basa biryani

spent a bit of time writing about my history with Kill Bill, and how extraordinary it was to see it for the first time in more than a decade last week thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/12/kill...

so so fun to see Kill Bill in its entirety last night, and wild how much of it I remembered word-for-word, shot-for-shot — I guess that's what happens when you watch a movie 20+ times as a teenager (see also: Face/Off, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Goldeneye etc etc)

watched Jun Ichikawa's Kaisha monogatari: Memories of You (1988) this afternoon, a lovely film about lost time and the sad anonymity of a decades-long corporate career coming to an end — and how, sometimes, the joy of starting a jazz band with the boys is enough to make up for everything else.

I spent a few days at the Viennale a couple of weeks ago and I've (finally) written about some of the films I saw — a good festival! thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/11/vien...

the two-year anniversary issue of Strange Days has just been sent to subscribers — on Annie Ernaux, Claire Simon, and Yasunari Kawabata. Read it here if the algorithm makes it visible, subscribe if you haven't already etc thistheaterishaunted.substack.com/p/strange-da...

The Vanishing is such an evil movie

Vienna is a fun city to watch movies in, I gotta say. Good festival! 16 films in 5 days, five great cinemas, lots of good food / coffee, only a mild sense of fear and danger when attempting to cross roads. Hard to fault it!

wrote about the four films I managed to see at this year's London Film Festival (all of which are fascinating in very different ways) thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/10/lond...

it's amazing how much the theatricality of The Fence works in its favour, just two horrendous men standing in spotlights and monologuing deafly to an audience, only for it all to fall apart when the lights come up.

i've written some capsules on the three Sho Miyake films I've been able to track down and watch over the past week or so — an excellent filmmaker! thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/09/sho-...

The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young, 1960)

watched Rosa la rose, fille publique (1986) tonight, which is such a great, beautiful, devastatingly sad movie, and the best thing I've seen all year — need to see more Vecchiali ASAP

i have never pre-ordered anything faster in my life

v late to this, but caroline 2 is such a great, strange album that i haven't been able to stop listening to all day caroline.bandcamp.com/album/caroli...

stormy skies on a gloomy saturday morning is maybe the ideal backdrop to say that the new Alex G album is really very good

wrote about Death Stranding 2 and Paul Auster and Test Match Special for this month's letter, pls enjoy thistheaterishaunted.substack.com/p/strange-da...

i think the music opinion i am most disappointed in myself for holding (but will continue to hold it anyway) is that i really like The 1975 in spite of the many reasons not to (i am watching Glastonbury on iPlayer on my sofa with a hangover and a berocca and this headline set is going down a treat)

having fun with lists again

missing Haruomi Hosono in London because I'm going to see The Maple State in London, or the old me defeating the new me once again

beat Persona 3 Reload tonight, hard to be rational about something that demands 100+ hours of time but i thought it was a pretty spectacular game about the value of time + using it wisely (will be playing something much shorter next)

instagram keeps pushing me slow asmr adjacent videos of people walking around cities very quietly and you better believe i am watching every single one of them from start to finish

hadn't listened to Blonde for a while, but threw it on today and it's still so so good — wild that it's been nearly a decade since it came out

I spent the best part of a decade resisting the work of Seijun Suzuki because Tokyo Drifter screengrabs popped up a little too often on Tumblr back in the day, but I just watched Youth of the Beast and had a great time — which begs an obvious question: what are his best movies?

Radiance are doing it again (Rosa La Rose! The Beast To Die!). Coincidentally, I wrote about two of their previous releases in this month's letter (the hit rate is v v strong) thistheaterishaunted.substack.com/p/strange-da...

maybe says a lot about how i'm feeling about nintendo these days but i'm more excited about the prospect of gamecube games on the switch 2 than basically anything else

having just reacquainted myself with it, i'm happy to report that last year's Balance and Composure album is v v good

feel like i dropped off Soderbergh when his movies started going straight to Sky Movies so I now have a lot of gaps, but after having a good time with Presence I had an even better time with Black Bag — maybe I gotta go back letterboxd.com/mattmansfiel...

Materialists looks good, James L. Brooks is back. 2025 already looking to be a big year for the good old romantic comedy.

not seen a lot this year so far, but Jan / Feb new to me favs (chronological): Pale Flower (1964) The Conformist (1970) Tausend Augen (1984) Suzhou River (2000) Takeshis' (2005) In The Wake (2021) Afternoons of Solitude (2024) Hard Truths (2024) The Shrouds (2024)

i've been trying to write more this year + share it where it makes sense to do so, so here's a quick piece on Takeshi Kitano's three semi-autobiographical films from the late 2000s, each one fascinating in a different way thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/02/kita...

I didn't realise I wanted this and now it's all I think about, but I would very much like to see the Radu Jude Rossellini movie

last week i went to Rotterdam for a few days of IFFR + I've written about two of the best films I saw there: Albert Serra's Afternoons of Solitude + Wei Shujun's I Dreamed A Dream thistheaterishaunted.blogspot.com/2025/02/inte...

whoever programmed a triple-bill of new films by Hashiguchi, Yamashita, and Zeze in London today, thank you 🙏

for my newsletter, I wrote about my chaotic + tumultuous history with the films of David Lynch, and how his cinema quite literally changed my life (photo of a rainbow taken from my living room window, unrelated) thistheaterishaunted.substack.com/p/strange-da...

leaving Rotterdam having seen a lot more boring movies than good ones, but Wei Shujun's I Dreamed A Dream was pretty good, and Jia / Cronenberg / Serra have never let me down