For more than a decade, Nicolas Jaar has seemingly been enslaved to the studio for a series of epic electronic soundtracks. In between his collaborations with emerging directors, he has crafted his own eclectic, experimental albums that venture through rave, ambient, driving techno, and atmospheric instrumentals.

His work might quietly fly under the radar, noticed only by arthouse movie enthusiasts and techno fans, but it deserves to be spotlit, awarded, and celebrated. Not least because Jaar’s music has also served as a tool of political advocacy. Whether composing for “Democracy EP: New Friends Vol. 2” in 2009, or performing live for Democracy Now! in October this year, the Palestinian-Chilean artist has fearlessly reminded us - in music, in written words, and in interviews, that our freedom to shape our governments, policies, communities, and our nations ultimately, is not a fait accompli.

As far back as 2016, on the album “Sirens”, Jaar’s track “No” was inspired by the 1988 campaign to overthrow Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. His parents both emigrated from Chile. His father, Alfredo Jaar, is a conceptual artist and architect. His mother, Evelyne Meynard, is a French Chilean writer and ex-dancer. The family has roots back to Bethlehem, Palestine.

In the Democracy Now! Interview, Jaar said: “…the news cycle has largely, in a way, forgotten that there is an ongoing genocide, to this day, in Palestine. And in a sense, these moments of musicians speaking out can, hopefully, bring a little — shed a little bit of light on this continuing horror and catastrophe that is happening and still happening, all thanks to and with the financial help of this country, of the American country.”

Before racing off to listen to Jaar’s interview and performance, which you ought to (later), some context for the musician/producer/DJ and composer’s work is due. There’s too much to cover in comprehensive details considering his eight studio albums, plus official soundtracks, and countless remixes of everyone from Brian Eno, Cat Power, Kanye West, Lydia Lunch to Grateful Dead, Missy Elliott and Michael Jackson.

So, if you listen to one Jaar soundtrack in addition to a handful of remixes and his live performance and interview for Democracy Now!, then make it Jaar’s incredible, club-ready soundtrack for director Pablo Larrain’s 2019 indie film “Ema” (the official soundtrack was released in 2021).

The film depicts a young, single mother whose entire life and identity - that of a professional contemporary dancer - is thrown into turmoil by the demands of early motherhood, the breakdown of her romantic relationship with her controlling boyfriend - and boss, near-poverty standards of living, and sexual manipulation of colleagues and potential sources of finance and a home. The reckless, wild thrill of dancing in the studio and the street pulses, throbs and grinds through Jaar’s layered, thrilling techno tracks. But the soundtrack is sprawling in its mood, often finding ambient, atmospheric soundscapes that feel thick with loneliness, reflection and evening melancholy. Jaar is a maestro of using silence, space, and the promise of emptiness like a loaded atom to build a universe in the listener’s imagination. When he’s not skittering a synthy melody across a scene, or pounding a dance scene with big, bouncing bass, there’s a sense of loaded, dangerous quietness. Jaar will both haunt you, and have you bringing down the house within less than an hour of a soundtrack, or an album.

In his interview with Democracy Now!, Jaar poignantly reminded us of the power of music, and lyrics, to remind us we are not alone (an increasingly, creeping sense of disconnectedness is pervading this tech-driven world, don’t you feel it?).

He says: “One thing that kind of blows my mind to this day about songs — for example, this song, “Sólo le Pido a Dios” — is that it’s a melody that is recognizable, that speaks to a certain feeling, and it can be used in order to tell a message. It can be used to bring people together. And it’s a technology, in a sense, not in the tech way that we talk about, but it is a technology. And I feel like it is a technology of resistance, of course, and it must be. It’s not the only one, and it’s not enough, I would say. But I do think that music speaks through so many layers. And I’m invested in all of those layers, not only the musical layer or the harmonic layer, but also in all the other ways that music can create a small change or just hold someone’s hand, which is enough sometimes.”

Daniel Mason’s novels are underrated to a degree I think almost verges on criminal. I have pressed copies of North Woods, his 2023 bestseller, into the hands of multiple friends and have a 100 per cent strike rate: it is that good. The premise can seem a little dry: the story of a single house in the New England woods, told over the 400 years of its existence. Along the way, there is comedy, tragedy, murder, lost love, poetry, weird sex scenes between beetles. “The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change” is a phrase that comes late in the book, and it typifies the simply beautiful writing of this book. It is funny and sad and meaningful, and pretty close to perfect as a narrative.

Country People is a return to New England, this time a Vermont college town; the house is ramshackle but not central to the tale. Instead, we have Miles, husband of Kate and father of Wesley and Olive, a man devoted to this family and, in theory, to his years-old and unfinished dissertation on Russian folktales. The family moves from California for the year after Kate lands a visiting professorship to teach on Milton and Paradise Lost. The book is contemporary; there are references to post-pandemic living and the impact of Zoom schooling on their kids, and there is a dreaminess to the folksy manner of small-town American living that is perhaps especially palatable this week following the midterms result.

Miles is a collector of acquaintances and interests, and it is the drifting enthusiasm that is hinted as the reason for his lack of professional success. While his wife and children clearly adore him, he cannot shake the lingering feeling that they are disappointed by his quasi failure to launch. A reset in New England might just be the catalyst for the rebirth of his academic career: but first there are hikes, and fairytales to spin for the children, and a charming local radio hour to listen to. Lurking underneath the charm of their adopted town is a strange and dark local legend that soon draws Miles into its web.

Country People feels smaller in scale than North Woods, but what shimmers in it is the depth of the supporting characters, all crafted by Mason with humour and humanity. From a manosphere-adjacent hollow earth theorist (think a flat earther, but significantly more deranged) who runs local ecology tours but specialises more in gossiping about celebrity visitors (Beyonce, he tells them solemnly, did not break in her luxury hiking boots and the resulting blisters resulted in complications for her upcoming tour), to “lapsed biochemist” Andrei Abramov, there is a delight in spending time with them. Slow Horses author Mick Herron praised Country People as “the book of the summer”, and its earnest celebration of the good to be found in ordinary humans is about as far from Jackson Lamb and Park antics as you can get.

The world of Martin McDonagh is populated by old men facing their mortality, swimming in a sea of regret. And next to them is often a younger version of themselves, full of sprite and ideological oomph, that holds the key to the old men’s peace. So it was in In Bruges and in The Banshees of Inisherin. So it is in his new film, Wild Horse Nine.

The old man is Chris (John Malkovich), an aging CIA agent assigned to Chile one year into the presidency of the (democratically elected) Marxist leader, Salvador Allende. The young man is his colleague Lee (Sam Rockwell), who is assigned to accompany Chris on a trip to see the “big heads” on Easter Island. Their boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi) stays in Santiago and regularly checks with Lee about the situation. This is not a simple holiday trip. As the agency is preparing the coup that will depose Allende, start the ruthless dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and signal the brutal murder of thousands of people, Chris is near the end of his cancer journey and slowly losing his grasp on reality.

The shadow of antidemocratic oppression floats through most of the film. On the way to the island, Chris jokes with two young Chilean students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) that he is in Chile to destabilise their democracy. It’s all true. He is there for that purpose. Every shot of MJ in Santiago is in the presence of high-ranking military personnel - the same people who will take over the country when Allende is removed. Chris’ career is brought up several times, first as a badge of honour, and later as a grim realisation of America’s postcolonial plan. This is part of the reason why he wants to write a memoir by rambling on a dictaphone. The CIA isn’t that interested in what he may reveal - in the end, they are also proud of the democracies they helped destroy. But MJ orders Lee to find out the details of one specific past mission. In 1963, Chris may or may not have been part of a CIA plot to assassinate JFK.

In spite of all the big plot ideas, Wild Horse Nine plays with the quiet candour of a theatre play (understandable, as McDonagh started, very successfully, as a playwright). In almost every scene, Chris and Lee, like Vladimir and Estragon, exchange ideas while they wait for the inevitable. Sometimes it’s funny, like when Chris goes on a rant about how the gayer the country is, the better the cheese they produce. But it’s always enveloped in this sad cloak of a life dedicated to creating sadness and misery wherever it goes. Without realising it, Chris is responsible for the subsequent decades of war and oppression in the world. He is an angel of death, accepting his regret, not seeking redemption.

But it’s curious that McDonagh struggles to write American characters. I noticed the same in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Seven Psychopaths. His dialogue is sharp and sardonic. Too sharp and too sardonic for an American to convincingly say it. Even the emotional toll of regret and isolation is inherently Irish or, at least, Northern European. It’s way too earnest for the land of braggadociousness. Philosophically, the best moments for McDonagh are when he gets his protagonists interacting with someone from back home. Lee talks to his wife Margie (Parker Posey), a hateful drunk and entitled socialite who openly cheats on her husband; and Chris talks to his estranged brother Jim (Tom Waits), who lives alone in the middle of Monument Valley and whose relationship was destroyed because of JFK (curiously, not because of all the other democracies Chris helped destroy).

More than McDonagh’s, this is Malkovich’s film. His fragility is only comparable to his charm. In a great moment, he connects with one of the Chilean students (Di Girolamo, who excelled in Pablo Larraín’s Ema) and takes her on a date to a bar to listen to none other than Víctor Jara (“he’s on our list”, he tells her). If McDonagh’s style doesn’t fit Americans, his solemn tone with a dash of comedy fits Malkovich perfectly, who sells Chris’ monologues with precise detail. He nails the final monologue, so perfectly it rounds up the entire film. In doing so, he extracts the emotional core of that story that, without him, probably wouldn’t have worked.

The plus: Malkovich getting his overdue recognition. Only an actor with theatre and film experience could’ve done what he does here.

The minus: A liberal Chilean student would not arrive late to a Víctor Jara gig, spend the entire time talking, and then leave before the end. McDonagh wouldn’t do that to Shane MacGowa

Label: Fantasy Records

Release date: 30 October 2026

Having announced an audacious world tour for next year, beginning in Sydney no less, it would be negligent not to share New York-founded, LA-based band DIIV’s fifth album “ZIRP!” with the Neighbourhood readership.

This album emerged from a period of catastrophe, and the consequent discovery of community strength, and individual resilience. But the music itself speaks to the four-piece’s love of live performance, paired with digital layering and effects, and a willingness to head left of the path their last album. Not exactly prolific, DIIV delivered their 2024 album, “Frog in Boiling Water”, five years after the previous. The band had all the usual rock’n’roll diversions, which is not to dismiss the heinous personal cost of addiction, but it does explain the lengthy breaks between recordings. Lead singer Zachary Cole Smith had been arrested in 2013 for heroin possession, took a detour to rehab, and former bassist Ruben Perez had been booted for racist comments on social media. A temporary break-up ensued in 2016, before “Deceiver” announced the band’s return to form in 2019.

But there can be no beauty without some grit and grist, and Cole Smith knows that through hard-earned sobriety and survival. “Frog in Boiling Water” was a change of perspective for the singer, who had previously wallowed in the experience of depression and addiction. It cast a scathing eye to the “give me more, I deserve it” brutality of modern living, divided by tech overlords and working class civilians who merely scrape by above the poverty line. Having developed a palate for political commentary, Cole Smith took knife, fork, and spoon to the themes, lyrics, delivery - and yes, even outfits and performing personae - for “ZIRP!”

A satirical campaign told us the band had entered a partnership with ExxonMobil, though the actual partnership underpinning the depth of sound and vision on “ZIRP!” is the band with A.G. Cook, primarily known for his electronic wizardry. An initial proposal by the band that Cook could remix their songs once recorded was dismissed by the producer, who came along on tour with the band to see them at their wild, woolly best on stage. And having witnessed the integral role of live guitar to the band’s DNA, warped and made wondrous by a cacophony of pedals and effects, Cook has honoured the band’s best assets while enlivening it with his own toolkit.

DIIV have justifiably, and accurately, been described as shoegaze, but like rock’n’roll encompasses everyone from Iggy Pop to AC/DC, that’s a big universe to find a toehold in without creeping into territory like grunge, trip hop, nu metal and drone.

Over 11 tracks, DIIV don’t stretch the concept album to caricature proportions, thankfully. The ExxonMobil jokery and corporate suits for stage performances are largely where the “capitalism sucks” theme goes hard. The music, on the other hand, is more intimate and subtle, layering up guitar fuzz and melodies over the synth-based quirky beats and atmospherics. It’s both fun, and riddled with a sense of creepiness and looming doom.

Opener “The Fountain” sets the tone for “ZIRP!” with diffused, fuzzy guitar distortion, a lurking malevolence in the dreamy, gauzy wall of synths. The initial crackle and buzz of a guitar attuning to amps and finding its path is so human in its lovely, intentional flaws that any fears A.G. Cook might be giving us a rave club version of DIIV is thankfully diverted. Elsewhere, “Kid” is an ode to the inner child, and the traumas and coping mechanisms that perhaps never abate. Cole Smith urges us to lie on the floor, “hiding from your feelings, or something you did”.

There’s a languorous quality to Cole Smith’s croon, laden with both an innocence of seeing the world like his childhood self, and yet promising self-sabotage. The monster under the bed is always watching with hungry eyes in his world. But, to say it’s all gothic drama and doom in DIIV’s latest album would be to sell it vastly short. Past albums have wallowed in the worst of human traits and frailties, and that hasn’t been washed out with sunshine and lollipops by any means, but the outward-turned eyes, rather than “woe is me” is serving Cole Smith well.

Having gotten angry about the American aptitude for a win-at-all-costs capitalism, heightened by Cole Smith’s own experience of losing his house during the California wildfires last year, the singer is energised both personally and creatively. In this period, during which he also welcomed a son, he experienced the kindness and generosity of California friends and community, who gave the family space to stay and help to rebuild when they finally decided to remain in LA.

That exposure to the best of people, at the worst of times, is perhaps the lifeblood of “ZIRP!”, which is ultimately fun, not a term that past albums have warranted. Does that fun always translate to great individual tracks? That’s less consistent. The opening few tracks, including those mentioned above, are wickedly atmospheric, boasting clever, interweaving, distorted and hooky guitar lines that are so immediate and intimate in the way they create a whole universe within mere minutes. Elsewhere, and critics have blamed Cook’s heavy-handedness with bleeps, beats and vocal effects, the band push boundaries that perhaps didn’t need probing. Take “Trillions”, which is a bit too quirky-bedroom-pop for comfort. Cole Smith’s maple syrup voice doesn’t need an autotune any time, and if you skip this one, you’re forgiven.

Header image: DIIV at Here at Outernet, London, 3 September 2025. Image credit David Maynard/WikiPortraits, licensed under Creative Commons.

The most revealing thing about Lance Oppenheim’s first feature, Primetime, is how he realised the cultural shift that happened back in 2006 meant absolutely nothing to the building of modern society. It was like a cultural void, a moment in time that had an impact on those who lived but was as quickly forgotten as it was unexpected. Where is Chris Hansen nowadays? Even the media landscape didn’t replicate the hallucination that was the reality show landscape in the post-9/11. We lived through it and have nothing to tell. And Lance Oppenheim, who was only 10 years old when To Catch A Predator aired, understands that. And is maybe judging us for it.

The story of Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and his special series on Dateline NBC starts with an interesting moral conundrum. The victims deserve this even more. They were predators who were trapped by the production by thinking they were about to have sex with a minor, when Hansen appeared out of nowhere and said his iconic “why don’t you take a seat?” But outside of the cameras, Oppenheim takes the role of all the other predators that surrounded the program. Hansen himself, obsessed with his work and completely disconnected from his family, convinces the network execs to give him a prime time slot against the biggest TV show of the decade, Lost. The challenge that Hansen takes seriously as he tries constantly to one-up himself in search of the holy grail of reality entertainment: catching a government official. He’s aided by Andie (Merritt Wever), a cutthroat producer who revels in the chaotic amorality of the show she works on. There’s Xavier (Matthew Maher) as a digital vigilante who lures pedophiles by pretending to be a minor in chat rooms, and Del (Phoebe Bridgers, yes THAT Phoebe Bridgers) as a decoy girl who plays the teen that the men meet at home before Hansen appears.

And then comes Dan (Skyler Gisondo), a young actor whose boyish looks make him perfect for a new decoy. Dan wants to do musicals and is sort of thrown into the wolves with no preparation. A job is a job, but in the role of “the new girl”, Dan positions the audience into this weird conundrum that questions if what they’re doing here is morally correct. Sure, they are stopping monsters before they commit a crime, but doing it for entertainment removes the sense of justice their actions would have. There is no interest in creating a better world, only to beat Lost in the ratings.

There are two stylistic elements that Oppenheim employs that make Primetime work extremely well. The shots are a mishmash of different types, shot with over ten different cameras, from a professional digital camera to genuine broadcast cameras from the 80s (strangely, the TV sections look grainier than what I remember from 2006, but I suppose that’s how a kid sees the TV we used to watch twenty years ago). The more modern the camera is, the more Oppenheim uses close-ups and non-diegetic background or effects. It constantly merges what’s real and what’s fiction until the two are indistinguishable from each other, and it works particularly well.

The other element is the pacing in the editing. With the help of editor Daniel Garber, it reminded me of that middle section in PTA’s Magnolia when Job Brion’s score punctuates a sense of urgency, almost like a never-ending preparation for a heist that never comes. Downtime moments are few, and normally an excuse for a quick introspection before going back into the thick of it.

But it’s the three central performances that excel here: Pattinson, Wever and Gisondo. Pattinson evokes a lot of Hansen’s complexity without trying to mimic his mannerisms (a breath of fresh air after last month’s Jeremy Strong’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning). He portrays Hansen not as a moral void, but as a morally displaced person. Someone who believes in what he has set out to do, but can only do it with the incentive of a victory. Gisondo, on the other hand, is a confused kid who thinks he’s willing to sell his soul for validation. He has these adorable moments where, after his “acting” – usually so innocuous only he really notices it – he heads to the producer hoping for validation, even if he cannot help but know that no one cares.

But Wever is the star I wasn’t expecting, as a quiet and organised producer who spends most of the time managing her star, always with an eye on the final product. It’s hers, the final joke after the tragedy, a heartless comment thrown at the right time, that could only be pulled off by someone who has no shred of humanity left in her. She’s fantastic, and in a show that could’ve been just Pattinson, the scenes where she’s by herself prove how much gravitas she has.

The easy note is that Primetime is a vampire film (oh, hey, look at the logo, it kind of looks like two pointed teeth), but I think that’s a red herring. Oppenheim wouldn’t waste our time by making a film that conflates reality TV with blood-sucking living dead. It’s too easy. Instead, Primetime is genuinely a product of its time (2026) to reflect on a time where we’re still not sure how that product happened (2006). I don’t know if the concept would have worked without the talent of Oppenheim, Pattinson and Wever, but in the end, I don’t care if it didn’t. As a whole, it’s an intense experience about losing grasp of humanity. Twenty years later, the President of the United States is another reality TV star with even less compassion. It’s hard to imagine there was once a time when that was the anomaly.

The plus: Exciting to see a new young voice coming through with such confidence

The minus: In the middle of this compelling visual tapestry lies a very simplistic and reductive view of the world.

Rejoice. O, rejoice degenerate cinephiles of this world that Ken Russell’s heretic The Devils can now be presented in the full glory requested by its maker. The story of its release is one as infamous as the fame that precedes it. In 1969, United Artists offered Ken Russell the chance to adapt a John Whiting play loosely based on Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction book, The Devils of Loudun. When executives read Burns’ script, they passed on the film they had already signed on to produce when sets had already been built. Warner Bros. saved it from the limbo.

It would also be Warner Bros. that sentenced the film to the annals of film history. Before sending it for classification, the studio made several cuts to the film, including the removal of what Russell called a “key scene”. The butchering wasn’t enough to please censors in both the UK and the US, where the film received an X rating. Further cuts toned down the religious themes and other taboo topics finally gave the film an 18 rating. By then, Russell had lost love for the project.

The story goes that WB’s executives were so appalled by the two scenes they cut that they ordered that part of the negative be completely destroyed. Regardless, the studio found the new scenes in a London vault in 2002. Several years later, they confirmed they were working on a 4K restoration but until this year none of us believed that we would be able to see the film just as Russell intended. And yet now it’s here, for us to bask in our nerdy cinephile urge, and to introduce unsuspecting and curious audiences to what is probably, most definitely, one of the best experimental British horror movies.

In the 1600s, Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) conspires with King Louis XIII of France (Graham Armitage) to expand Catholicism to all the land. An obstacle is the small town of Loudun, where under the guise of the sui generis Catholic priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), Catholics and Protestants live in peace. To convince the King to take over the city, Richelieu uses the report of Sister Agnes (Vanessa Redgrave), who, driven by jealousy, confesses that she had been possessed by the priest to perform acts of a sexual nature. The plan is devised with the help of local nobles and an exorcist priest (played by Michael Gothard), profiting from the situation so he can find reason to commit acts of deviancy sanctioned by the church.

It’s hard to overstate how grandiose Reed’s performance is. He stands like the most manly, most beautiful, most fuckable human being that has ever existed. In one of the first scenes, a procession announces him as the new ruler of Loudun. The local nuns climb on top of each other just to catch a glimpse of him. Everyone wants to touch him. Even us, the audience.

And then there’s Redgrave’s Agnes. A tragedy from the first moment she appears, hovering over to scold the sisters for lusting over Grandier, so she can do it herself. A personification of heartbreaking obsession by someone who does not know how to cope with those larger emotions.

Like a psychedelic fever-dream, Russell delivers so much visual flair it almost becomes unbearable. The “scene” in question is colloquially known as “the rape of Christ”; if you need more proof why the censors were so concerned about it, it’s a chaotic orgy that Russell doesn’t flinch from. In an ultimate act of heresy, Russell adds the dizzying point of view of a priest masturbating as he watches the degeneracy.

To think that this is a criticism of religion is to miss Russell’s point. The Devils is unashamedly a film about power and the amorality that comes from seeking it. Grandier is a free thinker who practises his own interpretation of the word of God, even if it goes against the establishment’s rule. There’s a plague afflicting the population, and Grandier is the only one who cares about offering some respite to those dying from it. Everyone else is too engulfed in their privilege to do something about it. Instead, they bend the rules to act on their own impulses, against the morals they preach. In this world, crooks, liars and opportunists get their way. While not perfect, Grandier at least stands by his beliefs, which is more than what the establishment can say.

It’s a bleak film that becomes progressively bleaker until its very apocalyptic last image. And it reveals a lot that religious figures accused Russell of apostasy, for a film that makes its protagonist go through the same ordeal Christ does, but at the hands of the Catholic establishment instead of the Romans.

The Devils is an event. A treat for art lovers who expect film to take and shape many forms. It’s a revolutionary cry against an organisation that justifies its atrocities with the word of peace and coexistence. It is, expectantly, still relevant in 2026 and perhaps even more so. As fanatics climb the ranks of government, or galvanise obvious heathens for political reasons, The Devils reminds us that power corrupts, and absolute power fucks us up.

The plus: An exhilarating experience that grabs us by the eyeballs from frame one and doesn’t let go until the end credits roll. Probably Oliver Reed’s most intense performance

The minus: Had this been released like this back in the 1970s, Russell would’ve been in the same conversation as Kubrick and Friedkin.

The popularity of cosy Japanese and Korean literature shows no sign of abating. You know the ones: central is the location (usually a café or bookstore) and the presence of at least one cat. Within them, there is one person, or sometimes several, turning to acts of nourishment like browsing books or drinking their favourite coffee, relishing the calm found in small rituals, to escape great or small sadnesses. The prose can be sparing (though as an English reader, I am curious as to whether the extent to which I find this is a matter of style or translation), which can make the big moments, when they hit, all the more quietly devastating. This week’s challenge is to read the closing pages of The Travelling Cat Chronicles and not break down into quiet sobs. Upon finishing these books, as readers, we are typically left with these lessons: the world is lonely and can find myriad ways to break and unsettle you (true);

In Plant Lady, by Minyoung Kang, our sanctuary is a quiet plant store in South Korea, its foliage so lush and well-nurtured that visitors feel more like they’ve stepped into a forest than an urban nursery made popular by Instagram. Store owner Yoohee has a gift for growing any type of plant or flower, knowing the exact measure of fertiliser, soil and sunlight to ensure not a single droop or browning leaf abounds. She also has a remarkable ability to extinguish life, namely those of the coercive, violent and cruel men who cross their path, or those of her favourite customers. So alongside gorgeous passages describing her plants, and the care taken in tending to them, are these staccato vignettes of violence, written in a quasi-absurd tone: I could almost see them as scenes in a Coen brothers film. Whether they are intended to be darkly funny is a matter of interpretation, but what is not up for debate is the commentary Minyoung Kang imparts regarding gender-based violence. Like many nations, South Korea has an endemic problem with male violence towards women, including domestic and family violence and technology-facilitated abuse, such as hidden camera filming (molka). Police and legal responses to this crisis are rooted in patriarchy and an alarming discrepancy in the number of male and female police officers and judges, to cite just two issues. Reading Plant Lady in the context of this, and also as an Australian reader in a news cycle once again dominated by acts of horrific male violence, is a complex and intriguing exercise.

Kang’s author’s note at the end is piercing; “women have suffered much, and for the longest time. If only we were seeing hopeful signs of a better society, this novel might have taken a different direction. But the world continues to fail us, and that’s why the novel is as it is.”

Far from a comfort read, this slim title is one that will challenge any reader to question their own ideas of justice and retribution. It might also encourage you to water your plants a little more too.

The Premonition

Banana Yoshimoto is one of Japan’s most treasured writers, and I am more than a little embarrassed to admit I first heard of her when reading a light-hearted interview that she gave to the in-house publication for the Blue Bottle Coffee franchise about her favourite cafes and other haunts in Tokyo. Her novels and novellas are renowned for their dreaminess, flirtations with the supernatural and using those liminal spaces to unpick family traumas or extraordinary situations. There is an ambiguity to the underlying sadness and melancholy. The Premonition is almost 40 years old but was only published in English in 2023, amid the surge in demand for healing works of Japanese fiction.

Fantastical though this book may be, soothing it certainly is not. Narrator Yayoi describes her life with her parents and older brother as “like you’d see in a Spielberg movie … our home was always full of sensible exuberance and never lacked for things like flowers on the table, homemade jams and pickles, crisply ironed outfits, sets of golf clubs, fine liquors.” Yet underneath the comfortable exterior lies Yayoi’s unsettling intuition that all is not as it seems. Supernatural forces at play, or something much graver?

I’m halting plot discussion of The Premonition at about page 20, because at fewer than 150 pages, to know even a hint of what is about to unfold would spoil the odd yet enjoyable sentiment that comes with the twinned storylines. The two central relationships at its heart develop in odd and uncomfortable ways (a third one especially so when reading in 2026), but there is not even a whisper of judgment from Yoshimoto toward her characters and bizarre choices. The Premonition is not always gripping, but it pulls you in easily. If you want to expand your Japanese fiction reading beyond cats and cafes (or cats in cafes), Banana Yoshimoto is well worth adding to your list.

Plant Lady cover image courtesy of Penguin Books Australia

Artist: Ex:Re

Label: 4AD

Release date: 30 October 2026

In a 2018 interview, Elena Tonra described her debut solo album as one of heartbreak and catharsis. Nearly a decade on, her second album “Save As” is perhaps more heartbreak and healing, with all the vulnerability, shame, revelation and setbacks that refuse to follow a clear, steady trajectory towards stability of mind and body.

The London-based singer-songwriter emerged in the indie music scene in 2010 as the singer for Daughter, a trio formed with bandmates, Igor Haefeli and Remi Aguilella. The band won attention on the London live scene, blogs, and the BBC. I want to admit that I was neither aware of, let alone a fan of, Daughter before I discovered Ex:Re. With the shimmering, deeply enveloping world of “Save As”, I suspect Elena Tonra will be a revelatory discovery for many listeners who were not long-time fans of Daughter. To my ear, in Ex:Re there’s a legacy of Fiona Apple’s mid-90s grungy alt-pop guitar ballads, Cat Power’s melancholic folk-pop, and Warpaint’s synthy, percussive dreamscapes.

Tonra’s debut album under Ex:Re was the classic breakup album, detailing the hollow-chested panic of loneliness, drunken early mornings, rehashing every minor argument, regretting things said and done in haste, and then finding reassurance in the daily grind of rebuilding independence.

By 2023, Tonra had the skeletons of songs she’d been scribbling and sounding out over the previous few years. She took them to Fabian Prynn, who produced her debut album, and the process of creating a full-bodied album began. The first single, “Radio Station” sets the tone. It hits the heartstrings immediately with an acoustic intro, sleepily dancing in a melancholy minor chord. There’s a pent-up, slowly drawn-out frustration and pensiveness that unravels gradually over an extended Californian roadtrip in which Tonra laments her inability to clarify her own thoughts. She is, she admits in a lilting chorus, “a changing radio station”. There’s plenty of drama, without grandeur, in the gorgeous directness and intimacy of Tonra’s voice. There’s no soaring solo guitar and sudden thrash of drums to announce a third verse – leave that to the 20-year-olds and their nostalgic, grunge-inspired pop chart hits. Subtlety reigns in Ex:Re’s compositions, and it’s captivating.

From California to London and Paris, songs were written on tour and personal trips over years, and “Save As” is all the better for not being a concept album, but one that tells a story of how break-ups, rebounds, regret and revelation come not in a coherently structured timeline, but over years and cycles. “Sleep”, penned in a Paris hotel room, sounds deceptively like spoken-word poetry in a sing-song, lullaby voice. Gradually a subtle percussive momentum carries Tonra’s sweet, somnambulant vocals over a trippy beat. It reminded me of Warpaint’s dreamy, hypnotic electronic folk concoctions, or perhaps, the xx.

If the first two singles are lamenting, however danceable “Sleep” is, there’s an urgency to “Am I Even Real?” that sounds like a 4am fever dream. It is the sudden realisation, alone in an empty bed, that “it’s only me ... am I even real?”

Tonra narrates the common break-up self-talk. Was it my fault? Was that the moment things truly fell apart? What’s it going to take to get through the bleakness of this car-crash of emotions? Will I ever be loved again? Do I matter if I’m not seen and lusted for by someone?

Though heartbreak and loneliness may not sound like fabulous fodder for an incredibly melodic, hummable album that earworms into your mind and plays on repeat all day, then think of all the pop songs built on breaking up and moving on. Kylie Minogue and Destiny’s Child can attest, nothing makes you want to let loose on the dancefloor more than the desperation for ecstatic, emotional recovery. With “Save As”, Tonra has valiantly unbound her journals, her late night realisations, conversations she both entertained and overheard, seeking icecream in the wake of a breakup, in all her candour and fearlessness. The sound is shaped by a sea of synths, pared-back blendings of acoustic and electric guitar, subtle, momentous percussion, and the simplicity and humanity of humans in a studio together. For all the clever, graceful combination of live instruments and electronic flourishes, at its heart, one woman’s beautiful voice carries this album, and our fragile hearts, through grief to acceptance. Catharsis, though? Perhaps that’s the next album.

Header image from Ex:Re’s performance on the BBC Radio 6 Live Music Room, courtesy of YouTube.

Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun starts from the familiar place of many stories about the nature of being human. Klara (Jenna Ortega) is a robot from a discontinued model that is still for sale at a ragtag robot shop managed by a lady only known as Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne). Klara, like all of these things, is special. A different kind of robot that all the other discontinued models find peculiar but charming. Her hair is rowdy like a young Einstein. She lifts her leg at random times for apparently no reason (though it seems to happen mostly when she meets someone new). And she idolises the sun like a deity, which baffles every other robot in the shop who doesn’t understand the concept of religious dogma.

Maybe that’s why she hasn’t been sold, which can condemn her to deactivation and being torn down for parts. Maybe it’s because another shop just opened across the road and they sell a new model of hot robot friends who look like K-pop stars and unattainable supermodels. Whatever it is, Klara catches the eye of Josie (Mia Tharia), the adolescent daughter of a rich interior designer, Chrissy (Amy Adams). Josie is lonely in the big country house where she lives with her mother and housekeeper, Melania (Rachel House), surrounded by wheat fields and barely anything else. Josie is also a kind of augmented teenager (called “lifted”), who undertook a procedure to her brain that makes her hyperintelligent and talented, but with that, the burden of separation from the local boy she fancies, Rick (Aran Muprhy), a genuinely talented mechanical whizz who rejected the same procedure.

It feels like on top of this mundane episode of a little house in the wheat field, is a dark, traumatic secret. Chrissy’s first daughter passed away young. Chrissy never recovered from the loss, and Josie never recovered from failing to meet her mother’s expectations. And if that wasn’t enough drama, Josie herself suffers from a potentially terminal condition.

It’s in this tableau that Klara arrives, like Amélie Poulain via Encino Man. Klara behaves beyond child-like, closer to an alien still learning spatial awareness. The one truth she holds, which no one disputes, is that the sun is a powerful, all-knowing being, and he lives in the barn across the hill.

It’s A.I. and After Yang, but without the sense of wonder in the face of unknown adversity of the former, or the quiet introspection of the latter. Waititi’s sin is that he can’t find a way to perfectly connect his zany comedic timing with the darker tones the story hints at. This is, at the end, adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (who also appears on the credits as executive producer), and though I never read this particular work, I know his style. A couple of years ago, Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru in the wonderful Living, a film that permeated its subtlety with a strong emotional flair. So why is Waititi’s film so heavy-handed?

Characters don’t really talk — they expose their feelings and thoughts like they are dictating emotional cues to a clueless actor. The plot exposition in Klara and the Sun is also the subtextual exposition: all platitudes about grief, life, and death so inane they wouldn’t even fit on a third-rate condolences card.

And that’s disappointing because there are moments where Waititi hits a stride, especially when he’s allowed to veer off the main plot. There’s a whole sequence where Josie and Rick hang out with a group of obnoxious lifted teens who humiliate Josie for fraternising with a non-lifted and an expired robot. Waititi adds a bit of Terry Gilliam satire to the scene that works really well, especially because it feels genuine without needing to make a philosophically moot point. He brings Michael Giacchino to sign this Elfman-esque soundtrack, which reveals Waititi’s intentions, but even Burton had some nuance to his style.

Ortega’s choice of adding a unique physicality to her performance is also great. Klara is annoyingly infantile, but Ortega doesn’t turn that into a weakness. Her movements and jerky, odd moments have touches of Chaplin. She stumbles around like a smiling rag doll, which adds this element that other similar films with companion androids miss - to remind us that this protagonist is not human. It’s a welcoming contrast to Adams’ stiff and uninspiring Chrissy. Near the end, the film adds a genuinely disturbing dark tone that I thought would let Adams shine, but Waititi caves in and lets his characters out of the hole by reciting another dull cliché.

The frustration is that Klara and the Sun almost works. It’s best when Waititi lets his kookiness run amok, which reveals the themes of this story more effectively. But then he doesn’t trust his audience to read between the lines.

The plus: Jenna Ortega, please, you deserve better. Can’t keep being positive in mediocre films.

The minus: As Gen-Z says, it’s the cringe. The eye-rolling cringe.

Mastering the voice of a twelve-year-old girl is the first thing Shannon Kelly-White gets right in her debut novel, Billie King. So often in books a child carries inside them a preternatural wisdom, necessary to be imparted on all adults who encounter them. They speak with the experience and occasional weariness of middle or even elderly age and appear to have seen it all dozens of times more than every other character who has at least four decades of life on them. They are never frightened, impatient, cold or hungry. Sometimes this can be charming, but often it can be a tedious device to easily make the adults around them understand an important life lesson.

The title character in this Australian feminist western may be whip-smart, fearless, and decent with a slingshot and a saddle, but she is still very much a child: missing her mother, too often left adrift to her own devices by her father. Enter a female bushranger on a mission to complete one last job and throw Billie’s quest to make some cash before the cruel town overlord seizes her home, and forces her into a children’s home, and we have the makings of a terrific adventure story.

Billie King is steeped in sadness – lost parents, lost children, a land of abandoned hopes and dreams – but Kelly-White keeps the story moving along at brisk pace, and with brilliantly-written humour. In doing so, she succeeds in making her characters funny, rather than just sliding jokes onto the page.

The story is told through the voices of three women, across two timelines: in 1930, we are with Billie and the female bushranger Dulcie James, on the run for multiple murders. In 1918, we are inside the long-ago diary of Anna, Billie’s mother, who disappeared shortly after an encounter with Dulcie in their run-down farmhouse in the fictional outback town of Orilong. Billie is struggling to shrug off the attention of child services, concerned about her father’s alcoholism, her frequent absences from school, and the repeated trouble she lands in from the cruel nuns on the day she does make it to the classroom. Dulcie is exhausted from both life on the run and the circumstances that led her to it. In the past, Anna is frustrated and furious by her downtrodden circumstances and the forces at play that have kept her trapped in a nowhere town. She is also a young woman adjusting to the relentlessness of motherhood, following the unintended arrival of Billie.

Kelly-White infuses her characters with a spirit that is never unearned. They are tough because they have always had to be. A country woman herself, there is an authenticity to every person who appears in Billie King, their flaws always delivered with a human touch. There is never any punching down on those in the book who are down on their luck and perhaps make poor choices because of it. This is portrayed most tenderly through Ken King, Billie’s father, a war veteran and hard drinker, being unable to keep his small family afloat and dangerously close to losing it all.

For a debut, Billie King is remarkably assured, but it never insists upon itself. This is most apparent in the captivating closing act, which in a clumsier novel would have stretched the limits of plausibility. Instead, it is a ripping finale to a cracking novel. One for the women and forces of nature in your life.

A Spanish queer epic, inspired by the work and life of poet Federico García Lorca, the gay and socialist icon who potentially succumbed to Franco’s firing squad, is the kind of distinguished award bait that every American producer would be fighting for were this script in English, and Lorca a household name in British literature. I don’t use “bait” here as a pejorative. La Bola Negra is expertly crafted by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, the two filmmakers who make their stand toward international recognition by ensuring they don’t take a single misstep in this long and complex narrative. The Javiers direct the shit out of this picture, as if they had something important to prove. Not to us. Not to themselves. But to the memory of García Lorca.

The story jumps between three protagonists. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, we follow Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente), who survives an air raid in his village and joins the army on the side of the Nationalists. He gets appointed to the role of guarding a prisoner of war, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), a young and beautiful communist fighter who used to be part of a theatre group with Lorca.

In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) wants to join the membership of a local casino, but he is constantly rejected by the board (a mix of businessmen, local politicians and clergymen) due to rumours that Carlos is either homosexual or that he fraternises with known homosexuals in the town. And finally, in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a young playwright struggling to write his next project, receives news of the passing of his estranged grandfather, who left him something important in his will, provided he meets with the lawyer in the small, remote village where he lived.

The three stories develop at their own leisure, with the Javiers giving more importance to Sebastián’s, as the most romantic, and Alberto’s, as the most dramatic. Carlos’ story, the simplest of them all, becomes an important key to connect the other two. It’s also the most poetic of them, and like all poetry, it cannot overstay its welcome.

The Javiers, with their co-writer Alberto Conejero (who also wrote the play that inspires one of the stories of the film) paint an important picture of Spain at a crucial time in its history. Standing up against the freedom of the artists is the oppressive intensity of fascism, religion, patriarchy, nationalism, monarchy and homophobia. When Sebastián meets Nené (Penélope Cruz), a sort of Spanish cabaret dancer who entertained the troops, he learns about a world where gender rules are broken. Yet he also sees how Nené, when performing, is violently objectified by the soldiers. Freedom to be oneself remains a secret.

In contrast, Alberto lives in a reality paved by Carlos, Sebastián (and Lorca). He lives in Madrid with his boyfriend, Juan Pablo (Julio Torres), and can openly express himself, though he’s struggling to do it artistically. The only problem he faces is the tenuous relationship with his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas).

The biggest achievement in La Bola Negra is how perfectly directed it is. A visual tour de force that manages to surprise even after two hours. There’s a whole sequence near in the end, set in a mountain during a snowstorm, that felt like a reality I wasn’t expecting to see in a film like this. In another moment, the Javiers separate characters in their frames and reflect themselves in a mirror, using every available artifice to show how much they know their craft. And maybe, just maybe, that becomes the film’s limitation.

Neil Young is famous for rejecting the technically flawless takes of his songs because he sees the little mistakes as notes of unique personalities. Every shot in La Bola Negra is a visual flex. It gives the film this elevated, prestigious scent, but removes a little bit of sense of character. It’s strange to point at a film that its biggest flaw is that it’s too perfect, but this is exactly it. The Javiers come at this as if it’s the last film they’re making.

But as these intrusive thoughts crept on me, the film reached its conclusion with an overtly beautifully poetic sense of scope. It’s so emotional, it almost felt like cheating. In one simple detail, the Javiers focus on a bunch of papers falling on the floor (you’ll understand when you see it), and my cracking voice let out a “oh no come back” in despair. It makes sense that this, only the director’s second film, won the award for best director in Cannes this year. Not many other filmmakers approached their projects with this much academic reverence.

The plus: That beautiful soundtrack, especially Guitarricadelafuente’s La Nieve, which should be on everyone’s sad song playlist from now on. And those beautiful and exquisite shots.

The minus: It pays off at the end, but it’s maybe a little too 00s prestige drama for my sensibility.

Brian Duffield’s claustrophobic thriller starts and ends with the very simple proposition of how a man can survive inside a sperm whale. Everything else surrounding it could’ve been inconsequential, but Duffield has the intelligence to give its outlandish setup a raison d’être.

Jay (Austin Abrams) is not having a good time. His father (Josh Brolin) died of suicide by delivering himself to the will of the ocean before the cancer took hold of him. He came back to town for the funeral procedures, which evidently means finding inner closure. You see, Jay’s father was a rough-around-the-edges man of the sea, who wanted to imbue his son with his philosophy of respecting the ocean and resisting the philosophy of tourism that exhausts natural resources to feed the never-ending appetite of the capitalist machine. But Jay, being a teenager, reacts as disinterested teenagers ought to be. Now that he’s gone, he regrets his way and demands closure, which he decides comes by finding his father’s body in the bottom of the ocean.

So off Jay goes, equipped to the tee and holding the knowledge his father told him through the years, or at least what he paid attention to. Off he goes, appreciating the immense void in front of him, in a rare moment of calm before the nightmare. And then it happens. A sperm whale chases a giant squid, and in the middle of the fight sucks poor Jay, squid and all, into its stomach.

And that’s the story, the premise and the concept behind Whalefall. A man inside a whale eventually faces his demons until he can reconcile with them in a way that represents both his physical and emotional liberation. Duffield doesn’t explain much about the anatomy of an animal. He’s in a “chamber” (if we can call it that), the moth is that way, the stomach, filled with skin-eating acid, is that way. He finds ingenious tools that help him in his endeavour, including the beak of a squid as a makeshift pickaxe, and glowing jellyfish for light. Duffield doesn’t risk losing the audience’s interest by finding a good balance between the emotional narrative of the father-and-son story and the outlandish but objectively entertaining story of the man inside a whale.

It works because Duffield knows how to create an intense, claustrophobic environment. His previous directorial effort was the surprisingly good No One Will Save You, where a traumatised, anxious young woman tries to survive the night while an alien is invading her house. Before that, he wrote Underwater, a film that is undeservedly forgotten, in which Kristen Stewart is alone in a destroyed underwater research facility. Whalefall is the perfect conflation between the two.

Abrams, who, with this and Resident Evil, is having a great statement year and a calling card for casting agents paying attention, delivers the kind of effective performance that Hollywood appreciates. He doesn’t chew the scenery nor take protagonism from the story’s spirit. There’s something simple about his performance that reminded me of Michael J. Fox: an all-American wholesomeness that is grounded in relatability.

It’s no surprise Whalefall works so well. It’s validated by the pedigree behind it. But even then, it came as a surprise. After a lengthy introduction (which caught off-guard even the most patient filmgoer who was promised man-in-whale), the swallowing scene managed to grab the attention of the entire cinema. Expertly edited, with a pointed sense of pacing, it ends in a cathartic moment before it cuts to black. For a couple of seconds, Duffield lets the audience reason with what just happened and in the nervousness of it all, everyone starts to chuckle out of respect. Maybe the rest of the film doesn’t live up to the grandeur of that scene, but Duffield gives his best trying.

Maybe there’s not much more to it. At this point, I hope to see him grow as a filmmaker into something that strives to be more than just a good, well-paced thriller. Even the father-son story, like the trauma in No One Will Save You, is reduced to very simplistic beats that risk being distinctive for their universality. But for now, that’s not important. What he sets out to do, he delivers as promised.

The plus: Effective and emotional filmmaking, supported by a very experienced central performance

The minus: The third act is a bit of a stretch of suspension of disbelief that adds a strange spirituality to a story that does not warrant it.

In June, international sensation Tove Lo (”Too-ve-loo”) paired up with a dance music icon for the single “des fleurs”. That icon, Stromae, boasts more than a decade’s worth of albums, remixes, and live performances that the curious ear ought to seek out.

And musical curiosity is a must if you’re going to love Stromae, because the Belgian artist has variously called on his skills in singing, rap and production to craft smooth productions from hip hop to French touch, disco, funk and RnB. If I were to throw a Stromae record (of the vinyl variety) into a crate of like-minded acts, I’d pick his neighbours to be an international hotchpotch: Daft Punk, Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, LCD Soundsystem, Klaxons and Yeasayer. I guess, if you must, the 2026 version would be a playlist highlighting the best of all of these electro-punk clubkids of the mid-2000s.

My entry into the Stromae universe came with the release of hit single “Alors on danse“ in 2009. The repeated electro-synth pulse driving the track is deceptively simple: but layered up with spoken-word style verse-and-chorus in French, and the clever use of MIDI instruments, it becomes catnip for the club. That track led me to his debut 2010 album, “Cheese”, which propelled Stromae to number one in a handful of European countries. The vocals are entirely in French, defying the description of “rap” with a much more laid-back, almost disinterested delivery. There’s a charm to the singer’s indifference, not unlike the off-tune, sometimes ridiculous vocals in French electro masters Justice or the dance-punkers The Rapture.

For the many listeners who don’t speak fluent French, the thoroughly addictive synthpop melodies do the heavy lifting.

Though less evident on “Cheese”, later albums to date have seen Stromae (born Paul Van Haver) extend his delivery into balladry, sometimes channelling a heartbroken Edith Piaf, or a defiant Marlene Dietrich. While that might seem absurd for a young Dutchman born to a Somali-Rwandan father and Flemish mother, it sounds thoroughly romantic, melancholy and sincere in delivery. Perhaps it is his earliest influences. The artist has spoken of his love for Jacques Brel, a passion his mother stoked through his childhood.

Reviewers have persistently referred to Stromae as a rapper: isn’t wrong but it also doesn’t account for the many strings to his bow. Though his teenage years and early twenties were packed with performances in a rap duo, then solo, “Alors on danse” defies the genre pigeonhole. Indeed, hitmakers from the U.S. pop, hip-hop and dance worlds came calling on the heels of “Alors on danse”, including Kanye and the Black Eyed Peas. Years later, Lorde, Diplo and Coldplay all came with invitations to collaborate.

With the Tove Lo collab, “des fleures”, Stromae has again snuck into the pop world with his French synthpop stylings, without demanding the spotlight. But, arguably, newer synthpop artists Angèle and Aya Nakamura, who also unashamedly perform in full French, walk a path smoothed by Stromae, as well as the retro Euro-disco beats peddled by Dua Lipa and Harry Styles, that ghostly melodic legacy back to French Touch and Belgian pop lingers.

Most likely to pop up on compilation and soundtrack albums in recent years, I cannot recommend enough that those with a bent for hooky, Euro house-pop with (more than) a shade of retro kitschiness, to go exploring deep into the Stromae YouTube. You might find “Ma Meilleure Ennemie”, his slow trap, ethereal ballad with Coldplay’s crooning Chris Martin over a super-smooth two-step beat. You might discover cumbia-flavoured “Santé ”, or the melodramatic, celebratory beat of “ta fête” from the 2022 album “Multitude” (including the live version on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon), or - a personal highlight - the Tiny Desk Concert for NPR in 2023. You might discover first, as I did, a very young Stromae escaping his office job with one singular, endless mantra: “Alors on danse!” (”So, let’s dance!”)

On the rooftops of Tel Aviv, Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham talks with IDF whistleblowers whose faces are covered by shadows, and their voices, a title card tells us, have been digitally altered. The rooftops provide two important functions. They offer security to the men who are about to reveal undeniable proof of genocide in Gaza.

“From here we can see the city, but the city can’t see us”, Abraham says. But it also gives a chance for the filmmakers, Abraham and Rachel Szor, to observe from afar the passiveness of Israeli society towards a catastrophe around the corner, and in the process, witness the moral decay of the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East.”

Naza is an acronym for “nezek agavi”, Hebrew for collateral damage”, and it’s a term IDF soldiers use to quantify, with the precise inhumanity of mathematics, how many civilians (regardless of whether they are children or not: the soldiers do not seek that level of detail) are going to die in one single attack. The people involved talk with little remorse but also without bragging. They don’t come across as proud of their achievements or particularly worried about them. This is just the way it is. Palestinians, in their minds, are just numbers standing in the way of revenge.

Abraham and Szor interpose these conversations with shots at unsuspecting Telavivians in their homes. They watch television (often news pieces that further dehumanise the plight of Palestinians), they eat food, and they talk to each other in their living rooms. But what we’ll listen are reports of how surveillance waits for a little girl in Gaza to call her mother and say that “daddy’s home”, thus letting the soldiers know their target location and signal an attack. A child will die. The soldiers don’t care. The people continue eating their takeaway and watching television.

NAZA is unrelentless like that. Produced by Jonathan Glazer, the British-Jewish filmmaker whose previous film, the tremendous Zone of Interest, dramatised the daily life of a Nazi family who lived next to a concentration camp. NAZA elicits the same thoughts, but with the added disquiet that this is happening right now, not in 1941. As the film progresses, Abraham and Szor unveil more of the place they are filming, going back to the myth of Tel Aviv as a city that sprang from the desert. They film people jogging on the beach at night, behind them the remaining ruins of a pre-Tel Aviv building that still remains: a stark reminder this erasure of Palestinian life started almost eight decades ago.

If you’re Palestinian, NAZA is not an easy watch. Another subtitle explains most of this information has been known for many years, from reports in the magazine +972 and The Guardian (the British newspaper co-produces this documentary and will make it available for free on its website sometime in November). It shouldn’t be news to listen to the perpetrators explain their methods in excruciating detail, and admit the genocide is happening in Gaza. But absent for most of the film (to one exception at the end) are Palestinians themselves.

One of the criticisms Abraham and Szor received is why the suffering of Palestinians can only be documented by the same people perpetrating it. I don’t agree with the accusation. Abraham and Szor have unique access that other Palestinian filmmakers would not. Their previous documentary, No Other Land, which told the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank, was co-directed with two other Palestinian filmmakers, Base Adra and Hamdan Ballal. In the aftermath of the film’s success, which earned an Academy Award for best documentary, both men were attacked by Israeli settlers in their homes and captured by IDF soldiers. Adra’s home was raided by soldiers, and the filmmaker was blocked from returning.

Even for Israelis, the consequences of blowing the whistle are visible through the film. The soldiers are carefully framed so as not to reveal any physical details about them. The end credits reveal a series of “anonymous” individuals in the crew, hiding from the repercussions of a government that sells itself as a stronghold of free speech.

As the film progresses, Abraham and Szor’s camera becomes more rogueish. Opening its eye away from the rooftops, it meets people on the street, in their cars, enjoying the everyday life Israel denies to Palestinians. The sound mixes the shocking testimony of the soldiers with the droning ominousness of Mica Levi, another collaborator of Glazer. In the end, they find the courage to make the leap across the border, in the middle of the rubble of a city in Gaza. The footage shows a group of people looking for survivors of a recently blown-up apartment block. A man in despair shouts for his family, who were inside, hoping he could hear the faint sound of someone calling out for him from within the ruins. And suddenly it’s like Abraham and Szor give those numbers, the Nazas, a face and a voice. The despairing face of a father and a husband, and the guttural bellowing sounds of his cries.

I wish we lived in a world where NAZA is a work of fiction. What Abraham and Szor do here is nothing but a tremendous achievement of perpetual memory. Reports and news come and go in a stream of constant information. But art remains, never letting itself be forgotten, so long as there are people willing to see it. And if anything, this is the kind of documentary we deserve to see. It’s not what we want, but it’s what we deserve. For letting all of this happen. For not doing enough to stop it. For not holding our elected officials responsible for their inertia. Because it’s so far away, only accessible by our television screen. Where we can see it, but it can’t see us.

The plus: Crucial viewing to anyone, anywhere in the world. To the exception of Palestinians, who may find the testimonies too personal and disturbing.

The minus: Abraham and Szor shot this in 2023. I can only imagine how much worse everything got since.

Today, 10 October, marks Love Your Bookshop Day. If you are reading this page, chances are you have some idea of the perilous state of bookstores in Australia. As this article in The Conversation details, the number of stores nationwide halved from 2013 to 2023. Independent bookstores fight on many fronts: a decline in reading levels and the undercutting by discount stores and online behemoths are just two of their battles. Today is not the day to dwell on the dire (this article details some of the proposals being put to the Federal Government that could give greater certainty to indie booksellers) but to take part in a rare marketing ploy for good. Indie bookstores do more than stock the latest frontlist bestsellers: they champion local and debut authors, create organically welcoming community spaces (which, being Neighbourhood Review, we are all about), host book clubs, and can provide personalised recommendations that carry the impressive weight of coming from someone who knows exactly what they are talking about. So, this weekend, here’s where we suggest you pay a visit.

Gertrude and Alice Cafe Bookstore. Bondi Beach

Two books at the top of our house’s reading pile this week reminded me of exactly why this 25 year-old store is such a rightful institution in the local literary scene.

The first was Billie King, the debut novel of nurse turned cookbook author Shannon Kelly-White, which the shop has supported and championed, as they do so many local titles. This cracking feminist Australian western was also discussed this week at the Bondi Literary Salon [BLS], the store’s book club, which I have attended for the past four years. If not for the novel being displayed so prominently in the store, and the glowing recommendation of it by the store’s indefatigable owner, Jane and bookseller Nikki, I would not have heard of it, nor read it, and the loss would have been entirely mine.

The second was Dear Zoo, the Rod Campbell children’s classic and current favourite of my one-year-old daughter. Jane gave me the book, along with a gorgeous card, three weeks before I gave birth. Every time I read it to my daughter (and we are currently averaging about six times a day) I am reminded of how lucky I feel to be part of the BLS club. Through it, I’ve read books I never would have selected otherwise, and in doing so have broadened my go-to list of authors and genres significantly. It’s made me change my mind, or at least rethink my opinion on certain books, and I promise that if you are craving an antidote to the algorithmic echo chamber of social media, come spend 90 minutes here. I’ve witnessed instances of respectful disagreement that negotiating tables can only dream of. If you want to come share a glass of wine, some cheese and thoughts on Sense and Sensibility, I’m hosting the chat next month (tickets here). You can also follow Gertude and Alice’s Substack here.

Abbeys Bookshop. Sydney CBD

So frequently does our family visit here, one of the staff notices how swiftly our daughter’s hair grows. A bookstore that is equally expansive in its offerings of fiction and non-fiction is a rare treasure trove indeed (Abbey’s is described as “an Aladdin’s Cave for readers). Given its location, mere steps away from the QVB and Town Hall, it is amazing how easy it is to spend a quiet, peaceful hour roving through their collection. The staff here are also fabulous at ordering in books: bizarrely, I have one on pre-order in the paperback version as a gift for my husband, with an expected arrival time in Australia of Christmas 2027.

Upstairs at Abbeys is home to the Galaxy Bookshop, with scores of fantasy and science fiction, as well as the Language Book Centre, which stocks textbooks and guides to learning a language, but also plenty of novels and non-fiction reads for native speakers or more advanced learners (I am quietly confident you won’t find another bookstore in Sydney with as much of the backlist of French novelist David Foenkinos, par exemple.

If you’re looking for a crime novel - thriller, classic, cosy, modern - Abbeys again has a range that is difficult to beat. I was introduced to Josephine Tey, Celia Fremlin and Seicho Matsumoto thanks to this store.

The Best Little Bookshop in Town. Cronulla

The staff recommendations here (in a rotating shelf towards the front of the store) should be your first stop in this busy and charming beachside bookshop. I’ve plucked titles ranging from Milan Kundera to Maggie O’Farrell from them. They also have a great classics section too: I spotted and devoured The Return of the Soldier after a short conversation with the shop’s owner, which began by discussing Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, in which West is central to its premise. Visit all year around, but I especially love popping in here before a beach trip. Delightfully for my fellow insufferable morning people, it generally opens at 8am too.

Constant Reader Bookshop. Crows Nest

With a standalone children’s bookstore, this is an easy recommendation for anyone with little readers to buy for. The adult store also has a brilliantly-curated non-fiction selection, especially in matters of politics and history, and a great back catalog of general and literary fiction.

Harry Hartog. Penrith

Beautifully styled with the best classics section I’ve seen in a bookstore in Sydney. Their second-hand bargains are well worth seeking out: on my last visit, I got short story collections by Zadie Smith and William Boyd for $10 apiece, as well as a hard-to-find copy of Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada.