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The Guardian
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mektoub My Love: Canto Due review – gobsmackingly weird series drops another surreal sex shocker
So here it is – the third but, incredibly, perhaps not the final episode in the most bizarre arthouse franchise in film history, and which, for its sheer melodramatic ker-aziness it commands attention. So, as it were, previously on Mektoub My Love … The first film in the series from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche, who had won the Cannes Palme d'Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (for which he was famously required to share the award with his two acting leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux), arrived in 2017. This first MML (called Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno) turned out to be an epic erotic summer romance set in the early 90s about a guy called Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) who comes back from Paris to his hometown of Sète, having abandoned his medical studies to follow his dream of being a screenwriter, and finds himself immersed in his friends' intrigues; Ophélie (Ophélie Bau) is engaged to a guy away doing military service, but having an affair with Amin's cousin Tony (Salim Kechiouche). But the follow-up, Mektoub My Love: Intermezzo from 2019 was one of the most gobsmackingly weird films ever shown at Cannes: a 212-minute drama featuring a mind-bending continuous three-hour sequence set over one evening in a nightclub. It also showed more of Kechiche's new softcore sex enthusiasm and obsession with female buttocks. Was this experimentalism deliberate? Was Kechiche, like Walerian Borowczyk before him, a serious director pivoting to arthouse-erotica for good? Aghast audiences wondered if they were witnessing a midlife male breakdown in real time. Now the third film is here and … well, it's shorter at least – just two and a quarter hours, and the only explicit sex is at the end. As with the previous films, the characters' most serious personal problems seem to co-exist with a dreamily laidback attitude from one and all. But then there is a staggering finale, which had the Locarno audience gasp and splutter with incredulous shock. The situation now is that big-shot Hollywood producer Jack (Andre Jacobs) has improbably come to town with his poutingly discontented young TV star wife Jessica (newcomer Jessica Pennington). He claims that Jessica tried out for the Taxi Driver role that went to Jodie Foster and it's not clear if this transparent untruth – Pennington and Foster are patently not the same generation – is deliberate. The couple show up at Tony's family restaurant demanding service, and Amin and Tony wind up delivering couscous to their luxury villa. Amin shows Jack his screenplay – which Jack apparently loves – and Tony does a lot of very dangerous flirting with Jessica. The scene is set for a monumental farcical meltdown. And where on earth are we going with this, given that the last shot of Amin running appears to leave the way open for yet another baffling episode of Mektoub My Love? Could it be a surreal film project that will continue to evolve on an almost improvisational basis? Maybe so. Mektoub My Love: Canto Due screened at the Locarno film festival.
Top Gear
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Top Gear
Death Stranding 2 is a masterpiece, but is it a decent driving game?
Gaming The long and winding road that leads to Hideo Kojima's art Skip 10 photos in the image carousel and continue reading You'll no doubt have heard something about Death Stranding 2 since its release. An artisanal piece of game design presented with arthouse strangeness, it's a game about shifting boxes around in the apocalypse that somehow makes that incredibly mundane task feel captivating, but also retains the lingering sense that the whole thing might be a practical joke at your expense. It is, ultimately, a masterpiece. The world that protagonist Sam Porter-Bridges occupies has been changed almost unrecognisably by the Death Stranding event, a mysterious phenomenon that has allowed the dead back into the realm of the living, and now there are Beached Things, or BTs, roaming around on the surface. Being killed by a BT causes a massive and devastating explosion called a Voidout, so all surviving humans have fled underground to their bunkers. Advertisement - Page continues below There's some pandemic allegory in there, and no shortage of discourse about how we connect with each other in the digital age. It has much more to say than the vast majority of games do, and a much more vivid, esoteric, and fascinating way of articulating it, too. The preposterously A-list Hollywood cast helps, of course – Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus and Elle Fanning are just some of the big names among many others. However you feel about being a post-apocalyptic DPD man, the sheer quality of Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima's world-building and storytelling steamrolls your reservations about the prosaic hiking gameplay and forces you down onto a reverent knee by the time the credits roll. You might like But is it a good driving game? That's the question nobody dares tackle. Here's a game in which you're frequently tasked with driving vehicles full of cargo for upwards of 20 minutes across a vast open-world map of Australia (albeit an off-kilter, slightly Scandi version of Australia with a massive snowcapped mountain in its centre), and yet nobody's talking about the handling physics. An oversight which it falls to TG to rectify. What are the vehicle options? There are just two vehicles available, and wouldn't you just know it, they're both EVs. Advertisement - Page continues below As such, the battery life on both the Tri-Bike and the Pickup Off-Roader is a major purchase consideration. On the plus side, charge time is almost instantaneous, and if you're travelling within the Chiral Network – territory that's been hooked up to Death Stranding 2 's mega-internet and where other players can build shared structures for anybody to use – recharge stations are frequent. Since it's your job to connect human settlements to the Chiral Network, though, you're often travelling outside of it. If you hit zero charge out in that barren territory, your options are as follows: get out and walk, or throw your head back, shout some expletives into the sky, and then get out and walk. How do they handle? Let's start with the Tri-Bike. In a way it's bang on trend – we've seen boxy Eighties design principles find their way back into the zeitgeist in EV form recently via the Hyundai N Vision 74 and Renault 5, so why not a Reliant Robin, too? While the latter was designed primarily to transport market traders' goods to and fro or go round corners on two wheels in BBC sitcoms, the Tri-Bike is an all-terrain vehicle capable of navigating rocky trails and scaling formidable hills. It's a marked upgrade on its inspiration, in that sense. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox. However, very little joy can be extracted from the driving experience. That's partly down to the punishingly trundling top speed, partly down to the fact it takes corners like a shopping trolley, and also partly down to the scarcity of actual roads in DS2's Australia. Not strictly the vehicle's fault, but worth bearing in mind for any potential buyers. Oh dear. Does the Pickup Off-Roader fare any better? As a matter of fact, it does. The basic factory model might not excite, but this thing's got serious upgrade potential and – importantly for the end-times courier – cavernous boot space. A near-infinite amount of cargo can be loaded into the rear, and even when driving with heavy loads the steering maintains a lithe, responsive feel that Tri-Bike owners can only dream of. The fun really begins should you opt for anti-gravity module and mountain tyre upgrades, though. With this spec you can jump the car several feet in the air to clear substantial boulders, and drive up sheer mountain faces at full throttle. It's hard to find fault with that. It's also worth calling out the avant-garde seating position: the driving seat is positioned several feet clear of the giant front wheels, leaving you dangling in the air as you drive for extra ground clearance and, let's face it, cool points. Can you race them? Not really. Part of Death Stranding 's bizarre but lingering appeal is its slow, deliberate pacing, so anything quicker than walking pace feels nippy in this world. With that in mind, it's probably no surprise Hideo Kojima didn't think to build a banked oval circuit amidst his meditative hiking game about human connection. If you were particularly determined to find a performance angle, you could replay missions while trying to beat your previous time and refine your route on the map each time. But that doesn't suddenly turn it into Gran Turismo 7 . It's almost like this isn't a driving game at all. We'll level with you: it isn't. And yet it's a game in which driving accounts for the majority of your gameplay. What a curious dichotomy. If you can stomach the absence of lap times, there's a genuinely wonderful and thought-provoking experience to be had here, even though the cars handle like washing machines. There will be extended passages in which you grow bored, and moments in which you might actively come to dislike it. But Death Stranding 2 is a special kind of game that rewards perseverance with imaginative sci-fi, dreamy imagery and poignant social allegory every few hundred miles.
Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review — a stunning triumph
When Hideo Kojima releases a new video game, all eyes are on it. It's like a new Quentin Tarantino film hitting cinemas. It's history. The 61-year-old Japanese games designer made his name at Konami in the Nineties by creating the influential Metal Gear Solid franchise. A messy separation in 2015 led him to establish his own studio. The world expected another game like Metal Gear Solid; instead we got the divisive Death Stranding (2019), a post-apocalyptic walking simulator hailed as a masterpiece by some. Others, including me, thought it painfully meandering and pretentious. Now we have a sequel worthy of the masterpiece mantle (and despite that awful subtitle, On the Beach). Kojima has tweaked tons but has done so without sacrificing emotional complexity and beautiful writing. Death Stranding 2 is simply more engaging to play than its predecessor. He still doesn't want the game to appeal to everyone, though — and it won't. It's self-indulgent and filled with his famous buddies such as the Hollywood director George Miller (Mad Max). It remains bizarre and complicated but this is Kojima at his outrageous best. It's set 11 months after Death Stranding. Our hero, Sam (The Walking Dead 's Norman Reedus), has lost his job as a porter. He hides away with his adopted daughter, Lou, cleaning up her toys and wandering the mountains of Mexico. He's reunited with his pal Fragile (Léa Seydoux) but things go awry. Haunted by visions and grief, Sam goes to Australia via a strange portal. Like the rest of the world, the country is now a desert. Society is fragmented. People mostly appear as holograms. Spectral ghouls called Beached Things lurk in the rocks. Sam is tasked with connecting everyone to the Chiral network — this game's internet — by delivering goods to their camps. With connectivity comes knowledge and so the villains know where people are now. That means conflict and a new emphasis on action, something the first game sorely missed. Aside from traipsing across harsh terrain (which requires careful planning), Sam is armed with shotguns and grenades to wipe out bandit camps. There are shades of Kojima's Metal Gear Solid V in the tactical espionage and stylish shootouts. There are also spectacular battles against giant mechs and monsters, and thrilling set pieces such as a race on a futuristic bike through a burning forest to rescue a kangaroo. Kojima's games are always entrenched in cinema — here we get Denis Villeneuve (Dune) in the sweeping camera shots and David Lynch in the abstract horror. Death Stranding 2 is stunning and everything the first game should have been. ★★★★★ Available on PlayStation 5 from June 26
The Verge
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Death Stranding 2 is much more approachable, if you're prepared
It took me a long time to appreciate Death Stranding. I'm not even sure I fully got it after my initial playthrough, which was equal parts mesmerizing and dull. The game, in which you play as a postapocalyptic delivery man in a world ravaged by a breach with the afterlife, demands a lot from players. The gameplay is fiddly and frustrating, and the storyline is often inscrutable, at times seeming to make no sense. While it borrows elements from walking sims and stealth games, there's nothing like Death Stranding, and so it's hard to calibrate your expectations accordingly. It really wasn't until the end of the game that I felt I finally understood what director Hideo Kojima and his team were going for. And with all of that out of the way, playing the sequel was a more rewarding experience. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a direct follow-up. You once again control Sam (played by Norman Reedus), who now is living in hiding with his adopted child, Lou, after previously connecting all of America to an internet-like network by walking across the entire country. But it's not long before his life of domestic bliss is interrupted. At the request of Fragile (Léa Seydoux), Sam agrees to connect Mexico as well, and, after strange gates begin appearing, he eventually heads to Australia to connect them too. Along the way, he continues to gain a deeper understanding of the event known as the death stranding, and does a lot of digging into where Lou actually came from. Structurally, Death Stranding 2 is very similar to the original. It's all about taking on jobs. As Sam trudges across the continent, he makes lots of deliveries and completes other tasks, in the hopes of getting people on board with this new connected world. The future of Death Stranding is one of isolation; the landscape is bleak and empty, cities exist almost entirely independent of each other, and Sam mostly only encounters other humans through their holograms. Oh, and deadly ghost-like creatures haunt the landscape, which is what makes Sam — who has the rare ability to be able to return from the dead — the one person who can link everyone back up. Practically, this means that the game is built around walking. Sam must prep for each trek carefully, loading up with weapons, traversal gear, healing items, and precious cargo. Then he walks the long distance from point A to point B, navigating rivers, mountains, and angry ghosts, all while staying balanced to keep the cargo safe. The big change in the sequel is that there is a great variety of missions, and it opens up much more quickly. You rapidly get more weapons (including guns with special bullets for fighting those ghosts, known as BTs) and tools to make things faster and easier, like 3D-printed trucks and trailers for transporting big orders. The missions are generally more interesting. Sometimes you have to worry about keeping the cargo above a certain temperature; other times you're tasked with rescuing a hostage. One of my favorite quests involved finding a kangaroo in the middle of a raging brushfire and returning it to a sanctuary. The Australian landscape is much harsher and more diverse, forcing you to also deal with strange creatures that sap your gear's battery and epic-scale sandstorms. For the most part, the variety is very welcome, and helps break up the monotony that occasionally plagued the original. But some of the missions are a little too much like a typical action game, which Death Stranding does not excel at. Any time things devolve into combat, which is slow and clunky, the game loses a lot of its momentum and unique flavor. There are other quality-of-life tweaks. Fragile and her crew — which includes a navigator named Tarman who has a pet demon cat and is modeled to look like Mad Max director George Miller — operate aboard a flying craft that can be used for fast travel. There's also a robust codex for reading up on terms like 'timefall' or 'stillmother' that you might not understand, as well as a very helpful 'story so far' section that I consulted every time I booted up the game. The biggest change, though, is actually me — and the fact that I have some idea of what's going on. That's not to say that Death Stranding 2 is any less weird. In fact, it might be even stranger than the original. Now you're accompanied by a talking marionette called Dollman, and the new cast includes Shioli Kutsuna playing a woman who creates a healing rain (she's named Rainy, naturally) and Elle Fanning as someone with mysterious powers that are somehow connected to her hatred of wearing shoes. But with much of the narrative heavy lifting out of the way, I was ready for this, and able to lose myself in Death Stranding 2 more easily. I still don't understand everything, at least not fully. Even after dozens of hours with the original, I had to regularly refresh my memory on terms, while also trying to grasp new ones (there's so much to learn about tar). But the basics that kept me in a state of confusion initially — who Sam is, why he carries a baby in a jar, what the heck a Beach is — are now part of my lexicon, letting me immerse myself a lot deeper into this world, and letting Kojima's team get even weirder. That might make Death Stranding a tough series to recommend for some. It's possible it won't fully click until you play one long and confusing game, and then jump into its similarly demanding, if more accessible, sequel. But for me, that struggle was worth the effort, because, again, there just isn't anything like Death Stranding. It's haunting, beautiful, and forced me to focus all of my attention on it, something that's becoming increasingly rare in modern games. It can just take some time to get past that barrier. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on the PS5 on June 26th.
