Lulu on the Bridge (1998)

Written and directed by acclaimed novelist Paul Auster (who also wrote those other Harvey Keitel gems Smoke and Blue in the Face in the 90s), this is the story of Izzy Maurer (Keitel), a jazz saxophonist who plays live in a New York club regularly. Music is his world. He has no other interests and, as we discover later, would rather die than live without it. He is not wildly successful, but has, in the past, produced recordings which made it to CD releases.

He is a moody chap - laid-back and mellow, depressed at times and self-isolated. He is much more like the Keitel character we saw in The Piano (1993) than any up-tempo Tarantino film! Anyway, the story starts as we watch him going about his craft, when some fruit-loop bursts in with a gun, shoots Izzy in the chest and then shoots himself. Izzy survives a seven-hour operation but loses his left lung. Because his lung capacity is gone, his identity and his passion for playing are completely destroyed. He falls even deeper into an isolated depression.

Slowly venturing back into the world after a while, coaxed by his ex-wife Hanna (played by Gina Gershon), he goes to a dinner party she is throwing, where he meets film director Catherine Moore (Vanessa Redgrave). Meanwhile, we are briefly introduced to Celia Burns (Mira Sorvino), a struggling young actress working as a waitress who happens to buy Izzy’s CD, fascinated by the musician who can never play again. One night, walking through the wet streets of Manhattan, Izzy stumbles upon a dead body. Panicked, he steals the dead man's leather bag. Inside, he finds a serviette with a phone number and a strange, unearthly stone that glows with a brilliant blue light and levitates when the room is dark!

Intrigued, Izzy calls the number and Celia answers. He invites himself to her flat, demands to know what she knows about the dead man, and shows her the serviette and glowing stone. They are both transfixed by it, and when they touch it together, they experience a magical kind of surge of connection and immediately fall deeply, intensely in love! Izzy becomes entirely consumed by Celia. He gets a job at her restaurant just to be near her and when she auditions for Catherine Moore's new film - a remake of Frank Wedekind's classic tragedy Lulu - Izzy uses his connections to help her land the title role.

So Celia flies out to Dublin to begin filming, with Izzy promising to join her in a few days. But the moment she leaves, things take a bizarre turn for the worse for Izzy. Things are going swimmingly for Celia and she is doing a fab job with her acting, but he has disappeared. She tries to phone him (these are landline days, so there is no ready access to mobiles) but he doesn't answer. We see what happens to him, but I won't spoil that for you - from hereon in, you're on your own!

A young-looking Willem Dafoe pops in for a kind of cameo as a deeply unsettling Dr Van Horn, who seems to know something about the stone Izzy found, and wants it back! He seems to know everything there is to know about Izzy and his life, even his recent infatuation with Celia, who is still trying to phone Izzy at his flat between filming scenes. Turns out that through reflection, Izzy really has been a bit of a selfish cad his whole life and Van Horn brings it all up for us to know too.

Back to Dublin, then, and Celia is panicking by now because she hasn't heard from Izzy. She abandons her filming on the last day, much to the distress of those around her, and, like Izzy, disappears (with the stone). Nobody knows where she is, except for us, and huge searches of Dublin return nothing.

Keitel is terrific, as always, and the supporting cast is right up there with him. There's a very funny cameo when Lou Reed pops into a scene that Celia has filmed in the past and is showing Izzy, but she tells him that it's not Lou Reed - and in the credits, the character is actually called 'Not Lou Reed', but it is Lou Reed!

The film also has a 1980s feel about it, even though it's not, and for me, features many nods to Woody Allen. The music - solo piano with hints towards light jazz - and the story being about filmmakers and scriptwriters all hint at a romantic, tragic love story, though without being littered with Allen's signature one-liners! Then there's Mira Sorvino, who was fabulous in Mighty Aphrodite three years prior, and Gina Gershon from Allen's Rifkin's Festival in 2020. It might be my imagination, but it just feels like a largely dialogue-driven New York story of which he'd have been proud.

The cinematography was also interesting, as the director made good use of lighting and shadows, verging on a noir approach. When Izzy was alone, particularly, wallowing in self-pity, isolated, sad and reflective, he was often half-lit in dim interiors and other characters in long shots of wet streets were significant throughout. It also seems to have been shot in 4:3, adding to the nostalgic tone. It's a super little film which has some real depth to it, and which I enjoyed very much. Now for the spoilers...

Spoilers From Hereon In

When Izzy disappears, he has actually been abducted by Van Horn's heavies and thrown into a dungeon-style room, where the doctor interrogates him to find out where the stone is, as it's valuable and he needs it back. He doesn't buy the notion that Izzy stumbled on the body, but thinks rather that he knew the man. Izzy doesn't crack, though, even when Van Horn reveals that he knows all about Celia and that Izzy will never see her again if he doesn't hand over the stone. He's locked in this room for days on end.

Meanwhile, Celia, heartbroken in Dublin and thinking that Izzy has abandoned her, takes the stone and throws it into the river. She then suddenly realises that she is being cornered by Van Horn's henchmen. Believing life is not worth living without Izzy, she follows the stone into the drink and ends it all.

But hold on, because we now cut right back to the beginning with Izzy lying on the floor of the club with a bullet in him and we see him being loaded into the back of an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, he dies. He never had surgery. He never lost his lung. He never found a body, a stone or got abducted. As the ambulance pulls away, it passes Celia walking along the pavement. In reality, she and Izzy never met. She simply walks away into the night.

Lulu on the Bridge takes place entirely in the brief window of time between life and death. The glowing rock, the intense romance and the kidnapping are the subconscious mind desperately spinning a narrative to cope with sudden trauma. The rock represents the final spark of human consciousness. When Izzy and Celia touch it, they feel 'connected to everything' - the euphoric feeling of transitioning out of life.

Willem Dafoe's character isn't a mobster, a government agent, or a doctor, he is Izzy’s own conscience forcing him to confront his selfishness, his coldness and his ego before his 'soul' can move on. Izzy's captivity in the room is the painful process of dying - a dying man's dream. He is trapped inside his own failing mind, often half-lit, as mentioned above, because he is transitioning from the light of life into the darkness of death. It's a heavy, hauntingly poetic film about what might have been if two souls had crossed paths under different circumstances and well worth a look. Particularly if you didn't read these spoilers!

I have the DVD from years back and shockingly never watched it! I'm sure it can be found by now in various places though being 28 years old!

Saccharine (2026)

Directed by Natalie Erika James (Relic, Apartment 7A), this is a dark body-horror film centred on eating disorders, a toxic, media-driven diet culture and people full of self-loathing! It is available via the Shudder channel on Amazon Prime Video (depending on your region, so VPNs at the ready)!

The story follows Hana (Midori Francis), a Japanese-American-Australian medical student living in Melbourne who struggles with body image, low self-esteem and late-night binge-eating. She has a crush on her gym coach named Alanya (Madeleine Madden) but feels too insecure to act on it. Her anxiety is further compounded by a screwed-up family life, dominated by her nervous, overbearing mother, Kimie (Showko Showfukutei), who constantly monitors her food intake.

Hana bumps into an old school friend, Melissa, who has achieved a dramatic weight loss. She attributes it to an expensive new 'miracle pill' therapy. Unable to afford the drug, Hana uses her medical school lab equipment to reverse-engineer a single sample pill Melissa gives her. To her horror, Hana discovers the core ingredient is human ashes. Desperate to lose weight and win over Alanya, Hana takes a dark cue from Frankenstein - during her anatomy class, she steals tissue and bone fragments from the deceased female corpse her group is dissecting, incinerating them to cook up her own homemade supply of the diet powder!

The DIY drug works well and Hana loses weight. Her confidence returns and, as a result, she successfully starts dating Alanya. However, the physical and mental side effects are horrific. Hana begins suffering from severe nighttime blackouts, during which she compulsively 'sleep-eats' massive quantities of junk food, yet continues to lose weight. She soon realises she is being terrorised by a supernatural entity linked to Buddhist folklore - a Gaki (Hungry Ghost) - an anguished spirit condemned to an insatiable, eternal hunger that acts like a parasite, draining her nutrients!

I think you will get the gist of where this is going by now as we establish the film's central 'rule' - that there is a ghost haunting Hana, but she can only see it when looking into convex reflective surfaces, like the backs of spoons or 'security' mirrors or the like! As Hana gets thinner, the ghost grows larger, physically - but invisibly - appearing as deep indentations in her mattress and causing floorboards to creak. The film forces us to wonder whether Hana is hallucinating all of this, whether she is indeed possessed and how far she will go to alter her body without causing herself fatal harm.

This is where the gruesome, graphic body-horror gets going in earnest. Can Hana escape? Will she keep her confidence, or will her mind unravel completely? The best is saved for last, as the final scenes deliver a fairly unexpected turn and more gore when she visits Alanya again. It is a total 'they thought it was all over' or 'Jason' moment! Without giving away the exact nature of the tragedy, the final visual is a pitch-black, haunting masterpiece that mirrors the cold, clinical anatomical paintings from Hana's medical school.

Hold onto your hats! It is super, gory fun and the cinematography is superb, focusing on claustrophobic close-ups of eating scenes, internal body functions and the clinical cutting of corpses in the classroom. The filmmakers clearly had great fun with the special effects and have created what is certainly a work of art - in many ways! But you won't like it if you are lily-livered or queasy, so stay away!

VTC (2021)

This French thriller is internationally known as Surge and was directed by Julien Bittner. It's a fast-paced, high-tension thriller set entirely over the course of one night in Paris. The reason I'm here, though, is Golshifteh Farahani. Regular visitors here will know that I'm a fan and that she can do no wrong - or at least, I haven't found it yet!

You might see this out there as both a film and a five-part TV series (currently on Apple TV). Apparently, this was a direct result of how the show was financed and distributed by the French network Canal+ (specifically via its Création Décalée label). The project was developed by creators Julien Bittner and Sébastien Drouin as a single, continuous, real-time narrative. In total, the runtime is about an hour and a half, so it's the perfect length for a film too. They wanted it to appeal to TV viewers and on-demand streaming audiences alike, so they decided to break it down into five 20-minute chapters. It was shown as a film too, though, so you might find it in that format somewhere, but don't get confused by the likes of IMDb!

The other thing that you might not know is that VTC stands for Véhicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur (essentially the French equivalent of Uber). Golshifteh's character, Nora, is one of these ride-share drivers in Paris and we join her, going about her work, at the beginning of this particular night. Just to complicate things, she's pretty much addicted (though trying to stop) to amphetamines to stay awake on the night shift. She's also supposed to be attending her daughter's birthday party at her ex-husband's house. Having no home of her own, she is sleeping in the car when she can, trying to save enough to get an appartment. As if this wasn't bad enough, she has a brother, Ben (Vincent Heneine), who, unknown to her at the outset, seems to be involved with a shady bunch of people.

During her shift, Ben, who is also a night driver, gets into a car accident. Nora races to the scene, but Ben is quite messed up and has to go to hospital. He doesn't want to go because he is carrying a bag which he has agreed to drop urgently at a destination as part of his driving role. He begs her to take it to the location and drop it for him, which she agrees to do. What she doesn't realise is that Ben was working on the side as a courier for a dangerous, underground criminal syndicate. The moment she takes possession of the package, she inadvertently signs herself up for a terrifying descent into the Parisian underworld.

Over the next few hours, Nora is pushed to her physical and psychological limits. Every passenger she picks up brings a new layer of threat or chaos. She encounters aggressive drug dealers, erratic clients and a shady handler named Paul Martin (played by the French rapper/actor Gringe). As the night progresses, Nora is forced to navigate a toxic web of extortion and violence. She has to constantly abuse amphetamines to maintain her focus and outrun the escalating danger, all while maintaining the veneer of a regular ride-share driver to avoid drawing police attention.

The tension peaks as Nora realises that the people she is delivering for have no intention of letting her go quietly, and that her brother Ben’s accident may not have been an accident at all. To survive the night and get the money she needs to save her relationship with her daughter, Nora has to endure the claustrophobic confines of her own vehicle, turning it into a weapon against her pursuers. So, the rest of the film becomes a race against time - and potentially getting bumped off by the crooks if she fails to comply, meet deadlines or do as she's told.

It's a real thrill-ride and most of the footage comes claustrophobically from within the car - some of it from her actual dashcam - and we ride along to find out if she makes it out alive, what happens to Ben, if the pair of them can escape death from the clutches of these nasty people and if Nora can get to her daughter in time to save her status as a mum. Golshifteh is fabulous, but you knew I'd say that! She's such a good actress and totally embraces the horror of this role as her character leaps from crisis to crisis, physically shattered and traumatised as a result of this brutal night. It's really very well done and well worth tracking down in these great bite-sized pieces to binge in an evening.

Dollhouse (2025)

The original title of this Japanese psychological horror-drama, directed by Shinobu Yaguchi, was Doruhausu. The film blends parental grief, psychological trauma and ancient Japanese spiritual folklore regarding the disposal of dolls. It is clearly quite low-budget, but the filmmakers have made the most of horror and suggestion, often leaving the viewer to piece things together with a surprised realisation. Having said that, it is all fairly predictable.

The film opens with Yoshie Suzuki (Masami Nagasawa), who leaves her five-year-old daughter, Mei, playing hide-and-seek with friends at their house while she quickly pops out to the shops for snacks. When she returns, there is nobody in the house; the other children have gone home and Mei is missing. The neighbouring mums all get together to search for her, but she is nowhere to be found until Yoshie, having given up for the day, finds her in the washing machine, where she has suffocated.

We leap a year forward, and Yoshie is in therapy for grief and loss. She cannot contain her feelings and pours out her emotion to her self-help group members and therapists. She seems to be beyond recovery: on medication and a fragile mess. Her husband, Tadahiko (Koji Seto), a nurse, copes by throwing himself entirely into his work, leaving Yoshie isolated.

One afternoon at an antique market, Yoshie spots a beautiful, life-sized antique doll that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mei. She buys it instantly. Back home, Yoshie begins engaging in what is known as "doll therapy" - but to an extreme, unsettling degree. She bathes the doll, cooks meals for it, buckles it into a pram for shopping trips and even poses with it for family photos.

It is worth seeing her husband's reaction the first time he spots it sitting at the dinner table, with Yoshie suddenly happy again. He leaps out of his skin, comically - it is worth tracking the film down just for that bit! I was clutching my sides! Anyway, the therapists tell him to play along with her, suggesting that she will, eventually, get past it and return to normal life. So he does. And the therapy seems to work. Yoshie's mental health stabilises and, shortly after, she becomes pregnant again, giving birth to their second daughter, Mai. With a real baby to care for, the emotional hole is filled and the antique doll is abruptly stripped of its "daughter" status, treated strictly like an inanimate object and shoved unceremoniously into a dark storage closet!

Another leap takes us five years on, when the second daughter, Mai, is about the same age as the first one was. While exploring the house, the young Mai uncovers the forgotten doll in the wardrobe. The doll introduces itself to Mai as Aya. It seems to talk to her, though not so any adults can see or hear - and spookily seems able to grow hair and nails like a real child. Mai and Aya become inseparable, but the doll is no longer just a passive toy. Harbouring a deep jealousy for being abandoned and replaced by a real child, Aya begins terrorising the household. Anyone who threatens Mai's bond with the doll is met with terrifying, covert supernatural threats!

Realising the danger to Mai, Yoshie and Tadahiko attempt to discard the doll, but no matter where they dump it, it magically reappears somewhere in their lives. It is at this point that they are both sold on the idea that something spooky and supernatural is at play, so they head off to seek help from some religious folk - but not before investigating the history of the dollmaker and the strange background and circumstances surrounding its creation.

That's enough scene-setting now; no spoilers. From here, we head off into an atmospheric, spooky journey of discovery and surprises. There are not really any jump-scares here; as I say, much of the "scare" stuff is slightly off-camera, or involves figures passing by the other side of doors or crossing the frame. For a low-budget outing, that is a really good decision, rather than spending money on second- or third-rate special effects. It uses the viewer's mind to create the horror. Well, not exactly horror, but certainly spookiness.

The rest of the story is very much about what they find, the people who help them, and the ancient history behind the tale. It is done pretty well given the budget, and although it isn't edge-of-the-seat stuff, it is thoughtful and smart at times. There is a half-decent ending to look forward to, though again, it's fairly predictable. We can also learn a bit about Japanese culture here - you have to love the process of the children getting on the school bus and everyone bowing to each other; so polite!

The cinematography uses subtle changes in lighting to reflect Yoshie’s state of mind. Her depression, for example, is bathed in heavy, dark shadows, which briefly turn bright and warm when the doll enters the frame, only to decay into ominous, dim colours when Aya turns malicious. The two main leads, and the little girls do a decent-enough job here, especially Nagasawa in suffering grief, but also the broader cast keep up nicely.

The most unsettling aspects of the film are often the organic ones - the slow growth of the doll's hair, the trimming of its nails and its expressionless face captured on security camera footage. It offers a creeping, atmospheric sense of dread that is actually quite cool. Recommended.

Pebble Time 2 (2026)

If you remember the original Pebble Watch from a decade ago, getting your hands on this new Pebble Time 2 (released via the rePebble/Core Devices reboot) will feel like a massive hit of tech nostalgia - but with a modernised hard/software experience. It uses Pebble’s e-paper display (a reflective kind of LCD). Specifically, a 1.5" 64-colour e-paper touchscreen with a flat Gorilla Glass front glass. It is optically bonded to reduce distracting reflections, meaning the brighter the sunlight outside, the easier it is to read - kinda like a Kindle!

The build quality is a big step up from the plastic, blocky steel Pebbles of old. It apparently features a CNC-milled 316L stainless steel case with a hardened, ceramic-like PVD coating! The buttons are also stainless steel with a nice, tactile cross-hatch texture. The big and chunky bezels from the 2015 era are gone and the screen fills the watch face to the edges nearly. On the back, we have various sensors, confirmation that it was made in China and also that it's water resistant to 30M.

It's certainly a small watch and (dare I say) might suit someone with femininity about them or a child - but certainly someone without huge limbs like me! But I could get used to it. I currently favour my Moto Watch Fit because it's slim and (what I thought) small, but this is even smaller. I do like the oblong shape of it (over a round watch) as it just makes more sense for those who can get away from a 'clock' needing to be traditionally 'round'. You can get much more data onto it and see things more clearly.

In the box, you get the watch and a little charging 'puck'. It connects to the back of the watch with magnets and pogo-pins. On the other end of it there's a USB-C port, so plug in a charger that you already have as there's not one supplied here. The box is a simple affair, reminding me very much of a Sony Xperia one - white cardboardy stuff which fits into a paper-like sheath sliding over it lengthways.

In a separate box (maybe it will be included in the same one when this gets to mainstream retail) there's a strap which appears to be made from that nasty silicone material, which I find slippery and irritating to my skin, but each to their own! It's a two-part strap with a choice of two lengths for different size wrists, so three-part really! Fortunately, the watch takes standard 22mm pins at either side, so, if you're like me, you can ignore that thing anyway and put your own quick-release strap on made of what you like!

The watch has three buttons on the right, running top-to-bottom and one on the left, very nearly at the top. The one on the left seems to act as a back-to-base button whatever the watch is doing and the three on the right, for navigating menus - top-up, bottom-down and middle-select/OK. The maximum amount of time you can set the blue-like backlight to stay on for (with no activity) is 8 seconds. I do think that could be longer, given that the battery life is clearly going to be super. I'd settle for about double that. You can set it to tap (or double-tap) or move to wake (for those 8 seconds again) though the 'move' is actually more like a 'shake' to get it to work (double twist like Moto's flashlight)! Update - see Shane Craig's video linked below for a geeky workaround to fix this. You can also assign long-presses on the right-side buttons to execute a number of functions.

The screen is much like you'd expect an e-paper screen to look like, really. Very much like any e-ink/paper screen and has the feel of such (not physical, it's just glass, but the style). The blue 'glow' when backlight is active is a lovely 'Pebble' thing which is very attractive. It is a colour screen, as I said above, with 64 of them! Most of them are 'muted' though - again, very much as you'd expect from the modern trend of OEMs having put colour into e-book readers and tablets these days - people want colour! It's also fair to say that if you're dwelling in the shadows indoors, you'll probably not be able to see what's on the screen - but in every other situation, outdoors for sure, but also under any kind of lighting, the more, the brighter it'll be for you!

First thing to do is to download the Pebble app and pair the watch up to your phone by Bluetooth, which was a simple affair here. For those who can't type and search in the Play Store, there's even a QR Code on the outside of the box which you can get your phone to scan! Open up the app and explore the very old-fashioned, retro-feeling software UI. It reminds me very much of what Nothing Phone are doing in many respects, even utilising the orange/black/white accents throughout.

You're invited to add some watchfaces from a few options and similarly, some apps - Compass, Stopwatch, Obilisk (game), Timer and Home Assistant have been picked for the initial intro. You can also here add a Language Pack to ensure that everything is localised. It seems to default to USA English (but of course!) but I was able to change it to English (general), whatever difference that makes!

You're then led through the setting of some basic options like 12/24hr clock, Enable Health Tracking and Heart Rate Monitor as well as how often various functions will 'sample' the biometric data. Activity Insights, Sleep Insights, a switch for Imperial Units and setting of age, height and weight. You can allow it to talk to "your phone's health platform" or not, so I said OK (and gave permissions) for the new-look Google Health and Offline/cloud Speech Recognition - so I guess one can talk to the watch, which I hope to explore the parameters of later.

We're then offered an App Homepage with two main 'tabs' for Faces and Apps. Faces is the landing page of the two and offers a horizontal list of My Watchfaces (ones that you've downloaded and used/tried) then a link out to the Pebble App Store with thousands more! Some of which are paid-for, bought via the Play Store. The Apps 'tab' is much the same but for Apps, obviously, instead of Watchfaces! One thing to note is that you can filter the options via a button at the top, to only show Watchfaces and Apps that have specifically been designed for the new era of Pebble. Leave it unselected, and you get all the historic ones too, which they say still work fine.

Down the bottom of the page, we have Devices (a list of connected-to-phone devices), Health - with a basic overview of collected data, graphs and charts, by the day, week or month, Notifications - which is basically a clone of Android's Notification History, with toggle-controls to turn any one (or all) of them off, mute them, and a list of contacts - which can 'allow through' (or not) one-by-one. Lastly, there's Settings, which, as you'd expect, allows for a detailed drill-down of all sorts of settings and adjustments for the app and watch. I shall highlight some of these as I go rather than hope to cover each one!

I like the Battery data - again, graphically presented with pie charts and options and all sorts - very nerdy/geeky which many will find fun and informative. General permissions throughout of course, keeping your data under your control, but also the ability to open things up to the default Calendar data that the phone has access to. Then there's that aforementioned Speech Recognition, inside which you can opt for Cloud only, Local only, Cloud with Local fallback or Local with Cloud fall back! This service is apparently provided by Wispr Flow. There's Weather data controls, though I'm not sure where it comes from (or perhaps it uses one's default data of what the phone is using). Anyway, yes, loads of settings to tinker with.

Physically then, on the back there's a heart rate monitor, a compass sensor and that basic step/sleep tracking via Pebble Health (shared with your default Heath App if you want it to). The watch features a speaker and dual microphones (the second mic is intended for environmental noise cancellation) that benefit from that 30M water resistance and a new linear, resonant actuator provides a much tighter, quieter and premium vibration alert than those buzzy motors of old.

Because this is a community-driven, independent reboot under the open-source PebbleOS, there are a few crucial nuances. The hardware is apparently engineered to hit a huge 4-week (30-day) battery life. However, it looks like from those already using it with the current early software builds, real-world usage is averaging around 14 to 18 days. That is still oodles better than most, but yes, further power optimisations are still being pushed out via OTA updates (via the App of course).

Some hardware features are physically present but not fully enabled in the software yet. For instance, the second microphone's noise cancellation and advanced speaker functionalities (like reading text aloud or custom developer tones) are still being ironed out in the firmware. It is a touchscreen, but right now the OS relies almost entirely on the 4-button layout (one on the left, three on the right). Currently, the touchscreen's primary function seems to be to tap it for that backlight.

As I hinted above, the watch launches with out-of-the-box compatibility for the entire legacy catalogue of 10,000+ existing Pebble apps and watchfaces via the rePebble platform, and CloudPebble is officially back for JavaScript developers. The founder, Eric Migicovsky, has noted that due to OS restrictions, Android users will get far more functionality out of the watch (like actionable notification replies and deep system integration) compared to iPhone users.

Delightfully (but basically) Pebble have made the App Store available online too, for browsers - which is great! Everyone should do this so it can be accessed on a big screen for workflows and easier viewing other than just mobile (or watch)! You can sign in with the same account established on the watch/mobile app and jump between Watchfaces and Apps. It's very barebones, but the whole catalogue is available, with a good search facility. You can select Watchfaces and Apps then 'send' them to the App and watch (presumably relying on being signed into the same account)! It all works really quickly, select something new, click on it, then nano-seconds later it arrives on not only the phone's app but also the watch! In fact, all the actions and communications work instantly and perfectly between my test devices here and the app/watch. Impressive and a sign of mature Bluetooth coding, I guess.

I downloaded a Mini-Golf app which works with the touchscreen too, thus proving that developers are working to make the touch experience more useful. I guess that Pebble themselves will in time start adding that functionality if it's clearly something that indie developers can do readily. Incidentally, you'd need very sharp eyesight in order to play this game! Obviously the screen is very small and yes, my 63-year-old eyes don't make that an experience I'd want to continue for more than a few minutes to see it working!

The search engine produces a stunning array of options, more than often. As an example, I searched for "Casio" and got a bunch of, sure-enough, Casio watch retro faces. But more interestingly, I tried "Bowie" and sure enough people, presumably fans, have put together various watchfaces with David Bowie AlbumArt, icons and more. So it's either pretty easy to code for this or there's a dedicated-to-Pebble bunch of clever geeks out there. I'll see if I can find out! Here, I find the Pebble Developer Website with all sorts of options to get started by getting the SDK, via PebbleCloud, build with JavaScript or C with all sorts of open source guides, examples, Blog and (clearly) a dedicated community. How hard can it be, I wonder! An exploration project for a rainy day.

So now, in practice - minute-by-minute use. You should be aware that I’m no gym-dweller, nor exercise freak, so most of what I’ll be testing will be the stuff I use (and will leave those who know about higher-end health antics to their reviews). Not saying that I won’t touch on it - I do steps and can work through the sleep stuff, but don’t expect me to be abseiling!

First up, the battery life. And testing so far pretty much upholds Pebble’s claims I think. I’ve had it connected to my phone now for 4 days and the charged-up battery is still showing 92% remaining. The display not being ‘always on’ clearly helps with this (and I always select that on any watch I use if I can) but don’t forget that it’s e-paper too, sipping at the power - and one could argue that the display is always-on, rather than always lit. So in most ordinary daylight (or artificial lighting) situations one can expect to be able to see it well enough to make out what it says. Again, think Kindle. Sitting in bed at night with no lights on, a Kindle needs a light of some sort, build-in or not. Same here. Fortunately, a light is a tap (or two) away if it really is that dark around you. Update after a week and, the way I'm using it, I'm getting 50% left, so it looks like (for me) it's a 2-week battery life. But, as I say, for those less cavalier with functions, they might get further towards the ultimate Pebble claim of a month. Interestingly, I watched a YouTube Video by friend of our Phones Show Chat podcast, Shane Craig - Pebble Time 2 Review: Perfectly Imperfect - which is a really useful 22-minute dive into so much of this stuff. He concludes that, for him, it's also a 2-week battery.

When notifications arrive, they seem to come onto the screen, the screen lights up (for, in my case, 8 seconds), then stay there until you do something about it. I’m OK with this, though as Craig points out, some joined up thinking about dismissing them with the phone (and vice-versa) needs attention from Pebble. If you press the middle-right button, 'OK' we’ll call it, you get a bunch of options pop up - dismiss, reply (using voice - which works really well), open on phone, mute the source of the notification (temporarily or for good) or start Quiet Time. This is basically a stop-notifications option which can, yes, be actioned here, but also in settings (on the watch or phone’s app). You can up/down through the options with the up/down buttons, the OK button to execute.

Back on the homescreen, if you press the 'up' button, you get a page telling me how many steps you've done today, then up again for current heart rate, then up again for sleep data overview. For any one of these you can then press the OK button for a deeper dive - then top-left button to step-back. Back to the homescreen and 'down' button, it gives me a list of my appointments for the day and two more, press again to get more if there are too many, with weather and sun-up, sun-down data interspersed.

Back again to the homescreen and press the OK button, which lands me in the list of system-type options, so Settings, Music, Notifications, Alarms, Weather, Health, Workout, Watchfaces, Timeline (list of Calendar events) and then any apps that are installed. So they can be launched from here via the OK button and each has drilled-down options. In Settings, we have Bluetooth, Notifications, Sounds and Haptics, the aforementioned Quiet Time, Timeline, Quick Launch, Time and date, Display, Health, Background App and System. Under System we have Information, certification, standby mode, debugging, shut down and factory reset. Phew! And inside all those, there’s plenty more for the curious!

The haptics are not bad - a little buzz on the wrist which I’m sure most people would be happy with - it can be set to low/high (or off), you can change the size of the on-screen text too, though I think that the default is a good balance between size and amount of scrolling needed. One of the good things about the forthcoming touch-screen expansion will be not having to reach around to the left side to go back, which is a bit cumbersome. I guess you could wear the watch on the right wrist, but then it would be even worse to access all 3 right-side buttons. Hopefully someone at Pebble is coding a 'Back' button for the screen somehow as I type! Or maybe one of these clever developer bods have already done it!

The Music app/function is nifty - not for playing music on the watch’s speaker like a Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra - but for direct control of the last-used Music app on the phone. You get a little red progress bar, cute icon of a cassette tape, name of artist and track title, then on the right, aligned with the three buttons, next track (bottom), previous track (top), three dots on the OK button - press it and you get a play/pause pop up for that OK button and the next/previous track buttons turn into volume up/down. It’s been very nicely thought out and works brilliantly well. Only thing missing for my pleasure is AlbumArt! A step too far maybe, but who knows, being open to developers. The use of colours throughout seems quite sparse for/with the built-in apps, but yes, they pop up now and again - as I said above, kind of muted because of e-ink, but that’s fine. That little golf app I downloaded and installed certainly looked very green for the grass, so it shows that with careful testing in development the colours can be more impactful.

Still exploring, but for now, that's it! I shall come back after a while if I can add anything. Certainly keeping an eye open for more touch adjustment - it'll no doubt come soon as updates fly in thick and fast, sometimes daily! It feels much more like a fun gadget than anything that's going to challenge WearOS or the like anytime soon! It leaves deep sports analysis alone and trades it for a charming, fun, retro yet premium-feeling device that nerds and geeks will love! The battery life, though maybe not quite what they claim, is still stonkingly good and if you can live with the muted colours and physical buttons, you'll love it.

Rich Flu (2024)

This is an intense, high-concept dystopian allegory that tackles wealth inequality, capitalism and human greed by Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, who also brought us The Platform (2019). The core premise functions like a dark fairy tale, really - a mysterious disease emerges that selectively targets and kills people based entirely on their net worth. Sounds a bit daft, and is really, leaning towards some sort of (unrevealed) supernatural intervention to make it happen - so don't expect rationale!

So yes, Rich Flu (the disease of Greed) is a virus which continuously recalibrates its parameters! It begins by killing billionaires. Once the billionaires are gone, it shifts its threshold down to multi-millionaires, then to anyone with over a million dollars - and continues dropping. The primary physical sign that someone has been 'infected' by the flu is that their teeth begin to glow a strange, bright white colour! The world seems to be treating it like an outbreak of Covid with officials gowning up, tented analysis with scientists at hand and military units trying to maintain control and isolate those who get it - or are likely to - not realising that it's not really biological.

This brings us to our main character, though - Laura, played flawlessly by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (but you knew I'd say that!). It is a good job, too, because frankly the first half-hour of the 1-hour-45-minute runtime was a bit of a bore, rescued only by her performance. The film spends far too long setting the scene, milling around Laura's world of Hollywood filmmaking at lavish events, rubbing shoulders with the elite and defining for the audience who was rich and who wasn't. I really think we could have got the idea clearly enough in five or ten minutes, tops!

Anyway, yes - we follow Laura, who is fighting a custody battle with her estranged husband, Toni, played beautifully by Rafe Spall (The English, A Room with a View), whilst trying hard to connect with her 16-year-old daughter Anna (Dixie Egerickx). At the same time, she is trying to climb ever higher up the wealth ladder, jet-setting here, there and everywhere, spending huge amounts of money left, right and centre in the process. Incidentally, Rafe's dad, Timothy, is also in the film for a few scenes, playing one of the uber-rich bods (and Laura's boss) in that slow first half-hour.

So, having money is a death sentence, it seems, and as the wealthy folk get the idea about what's going on, they all desperately try to offload their assets by signing them over to others or giving them away - thus lowering their stock value and net worth to survive. Or so they hope! The film flits between London, America and Barcelona as Laura tries to convince Toni that their daughter would be better off with her in the UK.

Unfortunately (as it turns out) Laura gets news of the promotion of a lifetime, and Timothy Spall's character hands her billions of dollars worth of company stock. Laura initially celebrates her massive new fortune, but the horrifying reality soon sets in - he didn't promote her out of kindness, but realised the virus was about to lower its threshold to his wealth bracket, and by dumping his billions onto Laura, he effectively passed her the death sentence to save himself. Or so he hoped!

So now, just over a half-hour in, things become much more interesting as the film turns into a survival yarn. The banks close down, global supply chains collapse and the stock market freezes - leaving Laura stuck with her massive net worth, at least on paper. She can't get rid of it now, so she basically awaits her white-teeth moment! Will it come?! Survival mode kicks in; Laura, Toni and Anna flee the city and head deep into the countryside. They seek refuge on a remote, commune-style farm - a money-free environment owned by Laura's hippie mum, Martha (Lorraine Bracco), with whom she, of course, doesn't get on!

As society falls apart, the rich are hunted down by the poor and the virus continues to lower its threshold toward everyday middle-class wealth. So I'm not sure why, by this stage in the tale, Laura hasn't got her Colgate Grin! Survival becomes a brutal nightmare and the nuclear family have to flee again, this time on Mum's small boat heading towards Africa and away from wealthy Europe.

From hereon in, the story is very much about the collapse of society, how they negotiate travelling the coast of Africa on a small boat and what it's like to end up with refugee status, hunting and fighting others for a crust of bread. By this stage, they are realising that there are more important things in life than the acquisition of wealth, which you can't take with you anyway! They end up owning nothing and relying on each other to find a way out of this harrowing situation.

It is, of course, an absurd notion for a story (unless you're going to introduce the supernatural, as I said at the outset), presented much more as an allegory to talk about class, capitalism and greed. It's fairly nicely shot and produced, with the best of it coming in the second half of the film as things get tough for the family. Most of the players around Winstead do a decent, if not good, job, but it's really her show. And she looks great. Now arriving on streaming platforms in the UK.

Animale (2024)

This is a French feminist body-horror film, directed by Emma Benestan, about a woman breaking into the traditional men's world of bull-running as the first female razateur. This is the non-fatal (for the bull) style of bullfighting in which the participants try, on foot, to snatch prizes from between the bull's horns without getting gored in the process. Arguably, it is still pretty cruel, as the bulls are taunted and exploited much the same as ever before.

The story follows Nejma, played by Oulaya Amamra, a fierce 22-year-old woman working as a ranch hand on a cattle ranch in southern France. Nejma is ballsy and determined to break through in this arena and show that a woman can do as well as any man. She's clearly a more than competent horse rider, having ridden her whole life, and she works hard. She is not interested in any of life's other trappings, like marriage and raising a family, much to the chagrin of her mum. We spend a fair bit of the film right alongside her as she experiences this world filled with sexism and objectification, but also the fragile egos of the men around her.

Despite the macho atmosphere, most of the men are quite nice to her on the face of it, including her in their world and social events as they let off steam together after each 'race'. Nejma makes a pretty good first outing in the arena, earning herself some respect from the blokes. To celebrate this, Nejma joins them for a chaotic night of heavy drinking, drugs and partying out in the swampy pastures where the wild bulls roam free. Pressured and taunted by the men, Nejma winds up past the safety fences, having pretended to them that she was used to recreational drug use. The next morning, she wakes up in the soil with severe memory loss, a hazy recollection of a chaotic struggle and a bloody gash on her arm. Her friends tell her she was attacked and mauled by a rogue bull.

Following this incident, Nejma begins to experience unsettling physical and psychological changes. Her senses heighten, her eyes occasionally turn wide and pitch-black, and she experiences hallucinations and nightmares - including a sequence where she physically feels the sear of a hot iron branding her skin, directly mirroring how we saw her do it early on in the film to a bull. Over time, she even notices her toes fusing and hardening into a kind of webbing that resembles hooves!

Simultaneously, a wave of terror grips the community. A mysterious, rogue bull begins brutally hunting, goring and stomping the males to death under the cover of night. As the bodies pile up, the local men form a posse to hunt down the killer. They pin the blame on Nejma’s favourite bull, Thunder. Despite Nejma's desperate protests, the men slaughter Thunder. However, after Thunder is killed, Nejma continues to black out at night, waking up covered in fresh blood that she is forced to wash away in secret. She realises she can feel the bulls and hear them screaming inside her head.

Amamra in the lead, appearing in pretty much every scene, is superb. She is totally convincing and great to watch. The direction, production and cinematography have been beautifully orchestrated with great use of shadow, texture, lighting and colours. The blazing white of the arena contrasts hugely with the scenes back at base, which are often at night with red glows inside the convincing sets. Then there are the nighttime, sinister-looking shots of the bulls amongst the mist and great long-shots and panning when Nejma heads off to the beach riding her horse.

It's an interesting film and well worth tracking down if you can find it. It's on limited release, mainly in Europe, so some smart VPN shenanigans might be needed. I suggest starting on Amazon Prime Video in Germany! Or wait. Or track it down at an arthouse cinema in Paris!

To round things off, spoiler alerts apply to this last paragraph.

It turns out that all was not quite as it seemed the night she passed out and the men of the group (or at least one of them) brutally raped her. Enter the body-horror element and Nejma taking matters into her own hands in order to right the wrongs done to her throughout the story - especially that night - through violent vengeance against man and/or beast, you could say! There's a shape-shifting transformation sequence in the style of An American Werewolf in London as she changes into a half-human, half-bull creature to snuff out the offenders!

Fuze (2025)

This is a thriller brought to us by director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water, Outlaw King) which is initially about an Army bomb disposal squad in central London headed up by Major Will Tranter, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (28 Years Later, Nosferatu). A group of workers on a building site uncover what seems to be a WWII bomb, so they stop everything and call in the police, who in turn call in the Army.

We get to know the key players in the police and army teams as the story and its backdrop unfold. It is going to be hard to review this without spoilers, but the best way to head into it is to suspect everyone of some sort of involvement!

The police evacuate the area so nobody gets hurt, but we see that there are four men in a flat who are lying low and ignoring the evacuation order. When the coast is clear, they leap up and put into action what is clearly a very well-planned bank heist, tunneling between the cellar of the block of flats and the vault of the bank next door. They have all the drilling equipment and power they need, even when the authorities cut the local grid for safety reasons relating to the bomb. This isn't really a spoiler, as all of this happens in the first 10 minutes as we jump feet-first into the action!

Chief Superintendent Zuzana Greenfield, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle, Beauty and the Beast), is in charge and liaising closely with the Major in order to keep the public safe and let his team get on with defusing the device. As the Major inspects the bomb, it becomes clear that it's not just a simple WWII relic after all, but rather a highly complex device with a live trigger. Putting two and two together, it doesn't take much brainpower to work out that something fishy is going on between the two scenes of action!

Anyway, the Major tries all sorts of technical tricks to slow down or stop the timer from ticking down, buying him time to find another way into it. Meanwhile, we get to know the robbers a little: Karalis (Theo James), a cool diamond expert, alongside muscle-and-tech guys code-named X (Sam Worthington), Y (Shaun Mason), and Z (Nabil Elouahabi). With the surrounding streets completely abandoned, the guys are free to go about their crooked business.

However, Zuzana is no fool. She spots the heat signature of a generator (which the robbers are using) on the overview maps on her screens and starts to smell a rat. That's it now - no more spoilers from me, because the rest of the film twists and turns, keeping you on the edge of your seat with chases through the streets and sewers of London and loads more as the plot unfolds. Yes, of course, it's extreme and far-fetched, but it's all good fun - an action-adventure yarn taken to the extreme!

The tale all comes together in the final act as we find out who's who, how people are involved, the extended network of characters in the mix, and, ultimately, who gets away with what - if anything or anyone! It's chaotic in the end, with car chases and nasty people doing nasty things to one another amidst the realisation that pretty much all of what has gone before wasn't quite as it was presented! We also get some flashbacks in the final scene to fill in the missing links that hold the story together.

It's rip-roaring fun, well-directed, produced, and shot. The acting is pretty good from all the players and, far-fetched escapism though it might be, it's a great thrill-ride that I can't imagine anyone not enjoying for its 100-minute runtime. Well worth a look, and it's now just appearing on streaming services in the UK.

The Dead Don't Hurt (2023)

Viggo Mortensen’s Western is a mellow, character-driven film set in the 1860s. Mortensen directed, wrote and scored it, but the star of the show is certainly Vicky Krieps' character, Vivienne. It's a simple love story in many ways, focusing on two people - her, and Olsen, played by Mortensen - who happen to meet out in the old Wild West. She is a fiercely independent French-Canadian woman working as a flower seller in San Francisco, and he is a practical Danish immigrant carpenter who has travelled to San Francisco just to 'see the end of the world'!

Anyway, the two share an immediate chemistry, but Vivienne is being aggressively courted by a wealthy, pompous art collector called Lewis, played by Colin Morgan. Weary of his suffocating, upper-class expectations, Vivienne is delighted to bump into Olsen, who represents the exact opposite. So Vivienne, rebellious spirit in hand, walks away from Upper Class Twit of the Year, leaves the civilisation of the city and heads off to make a life with Olsen in his remote cabin in northern Nevada, near a frontier town called Elk Flats.

The film jumps about the timeline a lot, but it's obvious where we are at any given point, even without captions to guide us. In fact, the film opens with Olsen hunched over Vivienne's deathbed as she drifts away - and most of the film flashes back to before that, focusing very much on their relationship building, their bond and growing love. There are some scenes later on which depict the aftermath, but it's mostly done to mop up the loose ends and round the story off.

Vivienne is initially shocked by the remoteness of Olsen's cabin and living situation, hating that there are no trees and greenery, so she works hard to bring colour to the shack by planting roses, bushes and trees. She also takes a job in the town's saloon to help them build a life and fund her desires for their home. She's clearly artistic and, in many ways, ultimately wants more from life than Olsen. In order to preserve her independence, she even refuses to marry him, try though he does.

Elk Flats is a corrupt town entirely under the thumb of a powerful land owner, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), the weak-willed Mayor Schiller (Danny Huston) and Jeffries' sadistic, alcoholic son, Weston (Solly McLeod). The sleepy town's peace is broken when the American Civil War breaks out. Driven by a sense of duty to fight against slavery and a need for the $100 enlistment payout, Olsen impulsively decides to join the Union Army. Vivienne is deeply hurt and angered by his choice, which echoes a childhood trauma when her own father went off to war and never returned.

So Olsen clears off, leaving poor Vivienne to her own devices. The spirited Vivienne manages on her own, of course, continuing to work at the saloon. Weston Jeffries turns out to be a violent sociopath who terrorises the town's folk with drunken outbursts, taking the law into his own hands. During these spells, it becomes clear that he has fixated on Vivienne - and with Olsen out of the picture, he fancies his chances! But Vivienne fights him off at every turn, remaining faithful to Olsen, deeply in love. It doesn't stop Weston trying though and behaving badly.

Meanwhile, some time after Olsen has gone away, she gives birth to a boy she calls Vincent, raising him with unconditional love and tenderness. Olsen eventually returns and they resume their life together as a family until, as we found out at the outset, Vivienne gets sick from a fatal illness. Olsen sits by her bedside as she takes her final, wheezing breath, slipping away while hallucinating an image from her childhood dreams - a medieval knight in shining armour riding through a green forest. Olsen takes young Vincent away on his horse following this and rides as far West as the land will allow, eventually stopping where the frontier meets the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, reflecting on Vivienne's legacy of love and resilience.

It's a powerful, moving and interesting film, held together perfectly by the quite brilliant Vicky Krieps, previously seen in The Colony (2015), Old (2021), Father Mother Sister Brother (2025), and loads more. She's clearly a very talented actress who can turn her hand to many different roles and speaks multiple languages. Mortensen - Psycho (1998), The Road (2009), The Two Faces of January (2014) is not far behind her, but it is she who steals the show.

Very nicely shot with the scenery looking after itself - dry and dusty mostly, as you'd expect out West - the San Francisco sets are also nicely done, as is the cinematography with great camerawork. This is clearly a bit of a one-man show in terms of production from Mortensen, but he has the sense not to try and hog the limelight, resulting in a very nicely balanced, quiet, but engaging story. Recommended - now available on streaming services in the UK.