John Lennon: The Last Interview review – Soderbergh imagines there’s no people with bland AI clipshow

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Succession of pointless AI-generated snippets does nothing for film about the artist’s final interview, which took place on the day of his murder Coming just after his superb feature The Christophers , Steven Soderbergh has now made a surprisingly moderate documentary, dominated and frankly marred by uninteresting and pointless AI. It is about the inadvertently poignant final interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in New York’s Dakota apartment building, hours before his death. The interviewers were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. On their way out of the building with the conversation on tape, they were accosted by a creepy stalker-fan; in attempt to calm the man down, Kaye gave him a brand new copy of John and Yoko’s new album Double Fantasy. This sinister man was Lennon’s future murderer who got him to sign an album – perhaps this very album – and later shot him dead. It is a chilling, stomach-turning twist of f...
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The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep review – gore flows in bloody animated mer-western

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Lovejoyish dude with magical powers wanders into a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads

This animated feature is part of the larger Witcher fantasy franchise which started with short stories by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski and has evolved to survive on all manner of platforms, from video games and comics to live-action TV series and films. Thanks to the wealth of wiki knowledge out there, you can get the gist pretty quickly. There’s a dude with magical powers, fearsome pectorals (and the platinum hair of a Finnish metal band lead singer) named the Witcher, AKA Geralt (voiced here by Doug Cockle); he wanders around a medieval-ish countryside battling monsters, partly for hire and partly out of the goodness of his own gruff heart. He’s like a ronin or a knight or TV-show amateur detective of the Lovejoy vintage, but with a sword. Geralt’s wisecracking sidekick Jaskier (Joey Batey) is cowardly and comical, and plays a lute-like instrument on which he performs ballads celebrating Geralt’s heroics. We also meet (mostly in flashback) Geralt’s on-off romantic partner Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) who can visit his dreams in order to flirt with him, but she’s less of a big deal here than in other Witcher products.

Instead, Geralt and Jaskier wash up in a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads because the humans keep decimating the oyster beds in search of pearls. Shockingly, they don’t make use of the oysters as food, which depletes food sources for the various fantasy animals the merpeople feel are their buddies because they all live in the sea together. It’s the equivalent of a post-colonial western where the merfolk are the Native Americans and the humans are rapacious land-grabbing whites. But the script also threads in a star-crossed lovers’ story involving a mer-princess and a dopey human prince which plays out like a blend of Romeo and Juliet and The Little Mermaid. Plus, because no gen-Z skewed animation would be complete without a trans subtext, there’s a bit of that too at the end.

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