What have you watched recently? 3D!

First Love - Takashi Miike’s 150th-odd (I’m just guessing) film is unmistakably a Takashi Miike film. Takes its time to build up: lots of yakuza nonsense to get through in the first hour. But when it hits its stride, it hits it hard: the last hour is a gleefully bloody and playful extended chase where Japan’s most prolific filmmaker is happy to inflict all manner of goofy harm upon his characters. A surprisingly sweet, unlike central relationship underpins it all... but you’re here for the cartoonish hyperviolence, and this is a fun ride in that regard. Audition it ain’t, but still a fun addition to the vast Miike canon.

Blow The Man Down - Quietly dropped on Prime, but worth seeking out if you have an account. Directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy offer up a film that, if not exactly mind-blowing, has plenty to recommend. Featuring an almost all-female cast, this is blackly comic thriller about how two vaguely connected acts of violence end up unbalancing the fragile manufactured order of a Maine coastal town. Secrets bubble up after blood is spilled. The film boasts some strikingly good ideas, most overtly a Greek Chorus of singing fishermen that pop in at opportune moments with a few lively sea shanties.

Army of Shadows - Melville’s French Resistance drama has few heroes: basically a few folk trying to stay alive and avoid arrest while getting a few hits in at the Nazis now and again. It’s absorbing in its matter-of-factness: there’s a persistent tension and danger, but the filmmaking is admirably and artfully down-to-earth. Cinematography is masterful - befitting the subject matter (and title) much of the film takes place in near-darkness, and that really conjures up the sense of these rebels both lurking waiting for their moment but also desperately attempting to avoid Gestapo attention.