Metropolitan Mixtape: September 2026

In which we finally get time to watch some films again

Letterboxd Diary

What Tobias Sturt has been entering into his Letterboxd account.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)
★★★1/2

A spin off from a Canadian TV show that was a spin off from a Web series about a pair of idiot would-be pop musicians who will do anything other than actually practise. This appears to be a shambolic and oddball shaggy dog story but, as it unravels, it reveals itself to be an intricately plotted and increasingly lunatic confection. If you find yourself annoyed or bored by the first 20 minutes, consider sticking with it.

For us Brits, there’s something intriguing about Canadian subcultures; they are little glimpses of something that is neither our own culture nor the hegemonic American culture, but a secret, third way. The Canadian comedy album The Great White North had an outsized impact on me as an adolescent; the quietly-off kilter comedy felt like a weirdly parallel and deeply appealing world. I can imagine Nirvanna having a similar effect if I were forty years younger. Especially if paired with Back to the Future (starring the Canadian Michael J. Fox, of course), on which it riffs spectacularly.

House of Mirth (2000)
★★★★1/2

Terence Davies’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, starring Gillian Anderson as a young woman in Edwardian America who is slowly trapped and destroyed by upper-class social mores. A really terrific film in which Davies’s slow, watchful camera perfectly embodies the glacial prison of custom and the slow grinding of fate.

Pickpocket (1959)
★★★★1/2

Bresson’s brilliant portrait of a young man who descends into a life of crime, all the while excusing himself with Nietzschean philosophy. The central business of pickpocketing has been interpreted as many things, including a metaphor for homosexuality, but it struck me also as a dramatisation of more general masculinity. Michel insists on his being a ‘superior man’, who should be exempt from common laws and mores, but who lives off the scraps he steals from other people, not only the things he steals, but also his philosophies, his loves, his life. He himself is empty, desperately trying to fill himself with the things he picks up. It is not until prison forces him back on his own resources that he finally finds a purpose, in someone else. Watched in an age of the ‘manosphere’, it takes on a whole new resonance.

Our Man in Havana (1959)
★★★★

A sort of Ealing comedy version of The Third Man. Alec Guinness plays James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba, who gets recruited as a spy and starts inventing a network of fictional spies for the extra money they bring in. It’s a little uncertain in tone and lacks the beautiful clarity of purpose of The Third Man, but it’s still a Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene script starring Alec Guinness, and has a lovely, post-War cynicism to it.

Broadcast News (1987)
★★★★

1987 was the year that the FCC in the US abolished the ‘Fairness Doctrine’, which had required broadcasters to cover public interest subjects, and to give air time to opposing points of view on the news. This enabled, among other things, the growth of politically aligned talk radio, and the evolution of news as entertainment. The Doctrine had only been established in 1949, so in total it lasted for less than forty years; you could argue that that period was the anomaly, not everything that’s happened since. The awful evidence is that cruel, salacious and wildly untrue journalism is just very popular with human beings.

The muddling together of news and entertainment is what sets liberal hands a-wringing in Broadcast News, James L. Brooks’s satire of TV news journalism in the ‘80s; but the script also acknowledges that the development was probably inevitable. Even Jane, Holly Hunter’s serious and talented news producer, prefers William Hurt’s dim-but-handsome anchor man to Albert Brooks’s intelligent-but-neurotic reporter. Whatever you might think about the film’s editorialising, it does at least have something to say, and says it splendidly. It was frankly a relief to watch something with a grown up script acted by grown up people. William Hurt was great, wasn’t he?

Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
★★★1/2

Two men living on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s fall out, and begin to battle in increasingly lunatic ways. I tend to find Martin McDonagh’s films a little less than the sum of their parts, but when those parts are Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, you still have something to conjure with. Although I suspect my inveterate Englishness stopped me enjoying it quite as fully as I might, since I, inevitably, hadn’t even heard of the Irish Civil War, which forms the background to and core metaphor for the story.

Damsels in Distress (2011)
★★★1/2

A group of idiosyncratic but well intentioned young women try to help their fellow students at an American university. An odd little film from Whit Stillman, which has the stylised characterisation and dialogue of a Wes Anderson movie and the loopy plot of a Coen Brothers but which has a peculiarly strange flat affect, directed like a made-for-TV movie. This may well have been yet another stylised choice alongside the script and performances, but it felt oddly orthogonal to both, inaptly affectless and not really finding its feet (sic) until the daffy dance sequence at the end. Greta Gerwig is predictably great, though.

Disclosure Day (2026)
★★1/2

Or, close encounters of the fifth kind. A sort of sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which a band of heroic truth tellers attempt to reveal to the public (through the medium of… a local TV news channel?) that the American government has been secretly experimenting on aliens for seventy years.

The core problem here is the script, which basically intersperses set-piece action scenes with people telling each other the plot. Another problem is that, for a movie about otherworldly powers directed by Steven Spielberg, it is oddly lacking in awe. Even set-ups that had visual potential - a child’s bedroom full of wild animals, a suburban house built in an empty warehouse - were peculiarly prosaic. You can usually rely on Spielberg for exemplary visual storytelling, but even this seems to desert him here. You get the impression that he is so steeped in alien conspiracy lore - and seems to believe a lot of it - that he was unable to perceive that the audience might not share his obsession.

Let’s hope this wasn’t his last film, eh?

Masters of the Universe (2026)
★★

After the evil Skeletor took over Eternia, Prince Adam was hidden away on Earth, where he works in HR in an anonymous corporation while searching for the phallic sword that will enable him to turn into He-Man. I mean, it almost sounds promising, right? An attempt to use an ‘80s toyline to do for masculinity what Barbie (2023) did for feminism. Sadly this isn’t Greta Gerwig and Margo Robbie; it’s just grown actors (and Jared Leto) dressed as plastic toys, reciting ‘amusing’ self-referential dialogue in front of green screen backgrounds.

Maybe playing it straight could have worked, but Masters of the Universe is probably too silly for that. The media franchise only ever existed to sell toys, and the toys were mostly focussed on whichever mad new manufacturing process Mattel was trying out. Thus we had not only mechanical innovations like Man-E-Faces (a figurine with multiple faces on a cog-wheel) and Modulok (customisable, clickable limbs), but also the green-flocked Moss Man and the astonishing Stinkor, whose plastic was impregnated with an unpleasant smell. Obviously, there is material here for a comedy; and a musclebound hero called He-Man definitely lends itself to an inquiry into images of masculinity. But this isn’t what we get, maybe because neither Hollywood economics nor Mattel’s marketing department were up for it.

It’s impossible to tell who this movie is for. There hasn’t been a toy line in ten years or a TV series in twenty, so it can’t be for the kids; but it’s neither intelligent nor stupid enough for the Gen X dads. Maybe people should stop trying to turn toys and games into movie franchises. Unless it’s Micronauts. They can do that one.

Playlist

Tobias Sturt : Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

‘Hello’ - Girl and Girl

Spotify has been playing me a lot of excellent Australian indie rock recently and this is a cracking playlist opener.

‘Projections’ - José Junior

This is a kind of krautrock theme tune to a sixties spy thriller, which is absolutely something I would watch, tbh.

‘Lady Luck’ - Richard Swift

This, on the other hand, is very seventies soul, which is never a bad thing.

‘In Spirit’ - WHY?

I was thinking that this sounded like an acoustic cLOUDEAD and then I discovered that he was in them. Mystery solved.

‘Hasta La Vista’ - Dream Wife

This, on the other hand, has something very ‘80s post-punk about it, which is, inevitably, my favourite genre.

‘Bert & Ernie’ - Erobique & Jacques Palminger

And now something for our deutschsprachig audience. My German isn’t quite up to it, but I’m hoping this is about the Sesame Street residents or, failing that, the taxi driver and cop from It’s A Wonderful Life.

‘Sea of Moscow’ - Pioneerball

The theme tune to an American sitcom that was aired on BBC2 in the ‘70s and which you fondly but vaguely remember.

‘supermassive black hole’ - Bella Band

I can’t figure out whether this child is AI generated or just annoyingly talented but this is, at least, one of those covers that is better than the original.

‘Weather Me’ - BODEGA

This has got a lovely combination of punky verse and big, rousing grunge chorus.

‘Here’s The Thing’ - Sports Team

The Australians don’t have a monopoly on the cracking indie rock, though.

Everything is on a Spotify playlist as (mostly) usual:

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For those original Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a happier Spielberg experience, there’s always our series on ‘kids on bikes’ movies: