Warhammer Survivors treats preparing a miniature army as a source of military hardware. Measuring tape expands the area covered by your attacks, while Nuln Oil, normally used to shade painted figures, becomes a weapon that can spread lethal pools across the ground. Bristol-based Auroch Digital has reached into the British hobby culture behind Games Workshop’s fictional wars and given its equipment battlefield functions. The relationship between reference and effect matters. Measuring an attack and increasing its reach belong to the same activity; the absurdity comes from letting the measuring instrument do the fighting. These objects also provide common ground for...

Leah McAleer gathers with people who loved her sister to listen to an album its singer will never hear. Among them is the musician Kathryn Joseph; filling the living room is the voice of Beldina Odenyo, the Kenyan-Scottish artist who performed as Heir of the Cursed and died by suicide in November 2021, aged 31. Louise Lockwood’s documentary, Bel, allows this listening to retain its strange intimacy. They can hear the familiar turns of her voice. They cannot interrupt her, ask a question, receive an answer. Elsewhere, microphones surround an amplifier playing Odenyo’s recorded guitar. Preparing her unfinished music for...

Madame Sac sends her nightclub dancers to a rival gangster’s hideout to find out about overseas shipments. It is an assignment that makes the working arrangements at Kim Do unusually clear. The women provide the entertainment, attract attention, and take risks on behalf of a business whose interests extend into diamond smuggling. Among them is Cam Thanh, the star performer Sac has mentored. Thang Vu’s Madame in Saigon, set in the city’s 1960s nightlife, lets us see what that patronage now requires of her. The flashbacks give the assignment a different weight. Cam Thanh arrived poor and eager to dance;...

David invites influencers to his supposedly eco-friendly island resort, then struggles to conceal his contempt for the people expected to advertise it. Andy Nyman makes that dependence wonderfully unpleasant. His hotelier has to flatter guests whose habits disgust him, and the effort keeps breaking down into aggression. The launch party in Christopher Smith’s Spider Island is a commercial transaction conducted through mutual vanity: complimentary luxury buys favorable attention, while everyone pretends the invitation recognizes something special about its recipient. David wants the publicity without acknowledging the power he has lent his guests. The film enjoys humiliating those guests, though its...

Two police officers confront Kumanjayi Walker, who is wielding an axe. They withdraw without drawing their weapons. Everyone survives the encounter. Zachary Rolfe watches the recording repeatedly and regards their withdrawal with contempt. Before Darren Dale’s documentary reaches the shooting that gives it its title, this earlier footage has established a disagreement about what successful police work looks like. The outcome seems an obvious point in the officers’ favour. For Rolfe, their conduct counts against them. The axe matters. Removing it would make restraint an easy virtue, exercised when nothing threatens the person exercising it. Here, danger is present, and...

Getting on Pon’s BMX changes the mood before he has delivered anything. Electric guitar and pounding drums give the soundtrack’s traditional Japanese textures a sudden charge, as if this little tanuki has brought his own idea of a summer afternoon to work. TANUKI: Pon’s Summer makes riding feel like a small act of self-expression. A road can carry you straight to the next address, but the ramps and rails keep suggesting other possibilities. Even the telephone wires overhead are available for grinding. The music seems entirely prepared for that decision. The island becomes inviting through familiarity. Its initially confusing roads...