Edge of madness: "Ken Russell's The Devils"

Amazingly - one is tempted to go further and say miraculously - 1971's The Devils has been returned to us as Ken Russell's The Devils: the director's cut, complete with the Rape of Christ sequence that became such a hot potato on first run that Warner Bros. felt compelled to purge several minutes from subsequent release prints. This is, in short, the fullest version of the strong meat Russell set before his audience; the caveat remains that it is strong meat, a great British film that nevertheless shows you, with every OTT, in-your-face frame, exactly why certain viewers loathed it so. (If you took against it during the ribald pageantry of its opening five minutes, I can see why you might emerge from the concluding showtrial wanting to see the entire print go up in smoke.) Something about having a name in the title, however, only enhances one's understanding of the directorial control in play here. Seeing this version of The Devils on the big screen, you're struck anew by Russell's extraordinary command and organisation of screen space, the painterly compositions he arrived at with genius cinematographer David Watkin; and while the film teeters on the brink of mania and hysteria from the word go - not least at the level of performance - it's never allowed to lose its head completely, allowing this story to make the points the crusading Russell wanted to make. Whatever your thoughts on this film, it does succeed in gripping us, which means it can't be so easily shrugged off or dismissed: the level of hatred The Devils inspired in 1971 was, in its own way, proof of its effectiveness. The effect remains that of one long, ululated topnote, sustained in such an intense way that it fulfils its maker's purpose as either warning signal or battle cry; were you not to heed it, it could well go right through you and set both your teeth and guts on edge.

Having the complete picture set before us allows for a reappraisal of The Devils' flaws and strengths. On this second viewing, I was struck by just how closely the narrative - sourced from such highfalutin texts as Aldous Huxley's historical account The Devils of Loudon and John Whiting's play The Devils - resembles the kind of penny-dreadful plot the sensation-chasing Russell surely ate up in his youth: sexy priest, the women who fall for him and the functionaries who used those women to bring the priest (and his high-walled empire) down. But Russell succeeded this time in bulking such gossipy misadventures out. There may well have been no greater bulking agent in 1971 than Oliver Reed, found in something like his prime, and invited to embody an imperfect (and, if we're being completely honest, not terribly likable or heroic) man who in no way deserves the fate that befalls him. (In an age where our movie execs insist upon that drab quality relatability, the presence and behaviour of Father Grandier is the foremost sign we're negotiating a work of art that is properly adult.) This once, the actor's judgement was wholly sound: it would be impossible to overstate how important it is for The Devils that Reed never tips the audience the knowing or reassuring wink that would allow us to banish the movie to the outer realms of Seventies camp. Yes, Reed's Grandier is fleshy - fleshy enough, it seems, to have stirred up conflicted emotions among young feminist viewers of the film in 2026 - but he's also plainly flesh-and-blood and thus perishable when he attracts the attentions of the powers-that-be. Against him, Vanessa Redgrave applies some of her rare early Seventies genius to a similarly difficult role - again: a character we could find hateful if she wasn't also so intensely human, a woman at the mercy of her own desires - while the supporting cast is a cherishable repertory of faces like they just don't make today: Georgina Hale, Gemma Jones, Murray Melvin, Roger Sloman, Dudley Sutton.

It's a pageant in itself, then, but one further fortified by still-pertinent themes: state censorship, the rise of fascism, the evils men do in the name of religion. (Immediately, you spot why critics as openly religious as Alexander Walker and Paul Schrader took against Russell's vision so.) Crucially, though, it's never dully literal in articulating those themes, as so many "good British pictures" have been over the years; if it's in your face for a lot of its extended running time, it's never on the nose, which may be one reason it continues to seem so pertinent to the travails of the modern world. When The Devils re-emerged in October 2026, it seemed to speak to the fascism then back in play on the streets of downtown America; with its underlying tension between self-governance and kowtowing to a higher power, it also seemed to be speaking to post-Brexit Britain. (For better or worse, you can bet Russell would have had plenty to say on that unhappy episode.) It could just be that the irrationality, superstition, quack science and mob rule The Devils describes is everywhere nowadays; it's an example of a film finally catching up with a world that often appears unhinged, or a sign of just how far backwards society has slid. Either way, as this gleaming restoration illustrates, Russell constructed his world with uncommon craft: The Devils reappears as the sharpest imaginable rebuke to the notion this director was merely a pedlar of tat and filth. Yes, we get the nuns in various states of undress - it is true the old boy couldn't help himself sometimes - but the second half gains some of its rhetorical force from the sight of the authorities doing terrible things to the young Derek Jarman's next-level production design: the destruction wrought by the State is as much architectural as it is physical. The Devils remains forceful cinema whether you care for it or not: it stands, now intact again, as proof of the power this medium can generate when it's not kowtowing in its turn to banality and mediocrity. Can we do something similarly restorative for Peter Greenaway - another divisive film artist who's spent the second half of his career languishing in exile, reviled in his homeland - before it's too late?

Ken Russell's The Devils is now showing in selected cinemas; a 4K boxset and Blu-ray will be available through the BFI on April 20, 2027.

"Traces of Justice" (Guardian 10/11/26)

Traces of Justice ***

Dir: Chen Sicheng. With: Zhang Yi, Ma Li, Arthur Chen, Chen Minghao. 140 mins. Cert: 15

The latest from Chen Sicheng, prime mover behind the hit Detective Chinatown franchise, offers a disarming mix of propaganda, copaganda and grabby, gripping narrative strategy. It’s essentially a portmanteau biopic, its hero Cui Xun a fictional stand-in for the venerable Cui Daozhi, a still-extant figure who so revolutionised local forensic science he became known as “China’s Sherlock Holmes”. Ripping three-and-a-bit tales from the Daozhi casebook – involving a Seventies child killer, a grisly Eighties multiple murder and a Nineties bus bombing, plus one lingering loose end – Chen constructs a history of forensic investigation that is also, in variably oblique ways, a history of Chinese law enforcement, shown evolving from boozy, gloveless crime-scene trampling to something far more streamlined and professional.

Within a handsome period framework, Chen follows the science: one era’s crazy innovation becomes commonplace in the next. The rookie Cui (played here by Zhang Yi, aging up subtly) uses boiled potatoes to take dental imprints; when those run out, he and his colleagues start biting one another’s cheeks to make their points. (Their scars are a terrific visual gag: scientists literally showing their working.) By the Nineties, when Cui’s heading a team working out of a vast, well-staffed warehouse, we seem mere moments away from David Caruso’s sunglasses and the most memorable Who guitar riffs. The forbidding subtext is presumably that, after fifty years of such breakthroughs, there’s no more getting away with it; as one suspect insists, “everyone pays for what they’ve done”.

Yet Chen’s impressively limber storytelling also accommodates thumping setpieces and knotty forensic puzzle-solving, remaining necessarily alert to key details: Yi, in a likably unshowy turn, really does look like someone who’s spent long afternoons studying fingernail structure. If the character’s personal life soon drifts out of focus, the wider picture compels: a nation both becoming more baroque in its sociopathy – the bus bombers are an Asian Leopold and Loeb – and sharpening its eye. (End titles cite the centrality of Cui’s work to China’s current surveillance schemes.) Hardly Memories of Murder then – Chen’s pursuing reassuring closure – but a fascinating counterperspective for anybody in this field, and an arresting, effective entertainment besides.

Traces of Justice is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 23-25, 2026):

1 (new) Wicker (15) ****

2 (new) Primetime (15) ***

3 (1) Ghosts: The Possession of Button House (PG) ***

4 (2) Clayface (18)

5 (4) Wildwood (12A) ***

6 (6) Forgotten Island (PG) **

7 (5) Street Fighter (12A)

8 (10) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

9 (7) Verity (15)

10 (8) Other Mommy (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Raise the Red Lantern [above]

2. Pan's Labyrinth

3. Ken Russell's The Devils

4. I Love Boosters

5. Wicker

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12) ***

2 (12) The End of Oak Street (12) ***

3 (4) Obsession (18) *

4 (new) Pressure (12) ***

5 (40) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

6 (3) Practical Magic 2 (12)

7 (5) Minions & Monsters (U) **

8 (6) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

9 (new) The Frighteners (15) ****

10 (32) Monster House (PG) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Invite

2. Coyote vs. ACME

3. Normal

4. Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition

5. Dead Lover

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. In Which We Serve (Tuesday, BBC Two, 2.40pm)

2. Die Hard with a Vengeance (Friday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Misericordia (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.30am)

4. This is England (Friday, Channel 4, 12.10am)

5. Hell or High Water (Thursday, BBC Two, 11pm)

Contenders: "I Play Rocky"

Not so much triumph of the underdog as history rewritten by the victors, I Play Rocky returns us to the formative days of one Sylvester Stallone, when he was just a hopeful with a speech impediment, pounding the New York streets in a succession of odd jobs: fishmonger, ticket-tearer, valet, softcore porn star. Above all else, it's yet another of Hollywood's recent legacy projects, greenlit because a) there's IP money on the table, b) there's something worth commemorating (whether fifty years since Rocky, itself returned to cinemas this weekend, or the publication of Stallone's memoir The Steps) and c) some sharp-eyed casting director has found a dead ringer for the film's subject. Here, it's newcomer Anthony Ippolito, giving an uncannily accurate impersonation of Sly in the first phase of his career, all swelling muscles, mumbled consonants and shrugging bearing. One early victory for Ippolito is that he reminds you the original Rocky Balboa was a street stray, a wounded animal: not so much a Raging Bull as a dumb mutt, kicked around from pillar to post. (It took a pet shop gal to take care of him.) The doggedness with which this fictionalised Stallone refuses to take the money to step away from his self-penned Rocky script feels believable enough: he's like a mastiff with a shiny new chew toy his handlers can't prise from his jaws. But I Play Rocky isn't shy about introducing notes of good old Hollywood bullshit, either. Early on, the film suggests Stallone was cast in softcore for the size of his package, which anybody who's ever witnessed 1970's The Party at Kitty and Stud's - retitled and rereleased as The Italian Stallion years later, in the wake of Rocky's success - will know simply isn't true. Still, the scene might be corralled into a useful working definition of contemporary star privilege: once you've made it, not only are you empowered to endlessly rehash and retcon your most enduring creations, you will also be afforded a movie about the making of your own making, which will insinuate to a captive global audience of millions that your dick is bigger than it actually is. Fame gives you inches; it turns a light-middleweight into a super-heavy.

If that seems at all crude, bear in mind that I Play Rocky is the handiwork of director Peter Farrelly, rejoined here on Oscar-baiting Green Book form rather than irreverent Stuck on You form. The script he's alighted on (by Peter Gamble) is Hollywood trad, never particularly backward about congratulating movieland for handing this scrapper a break in the first place; Farrelly locates within it the most basic movie building blocks, and constructs from them a movie that even the dumbest mutt could easily follow. We get an actual puppy named Butkus (another Dick joke); romance with usherette sweetheart Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who types up Stallone's scripts and gives him notes, and whose tears upon reading Rocky confirm that our guy is onto something; and plentiful homilies along the lines of "if you don't believe in yourself, who will?" Farrelly and Gamble's canniest move is to stress the struggle - showing this Sly having to put back groceries at the checkout and even sell the dog - in such a way that the eventual uplift will land all the more effectively with cinemagoers taking time out from their own cost-of-living crisis. It's corn, but it's good, hearty, satisfying corn, the kind of corn that wins you round and sends you home with a full belly, the kind of corn the American studios once reliably traded in, the kind of corn that rounds out a Best Picture longlist. Even in its nerdier second half - handed over to what seems like a Rocky Re-Enactment Society, for the benefit of the original's most obsessive fans - IPR gets a boost from having to re-engage with that rich strain of character acting that was Rocky's bedrock. There's fun stuff with Tracy Letts as United Artists' carnivore-capitalist production chief Sandy Maddox; Toby Kebbell and P.J. Byrne do a nice, light-comic double act as producers Chartoff and Winkler; Stephan James catches Carl Weathers' ebullience in passing; there's a very sweet cameo from Farrelly loyalist Matt Dillon as Stallone Sr.; and a final push to glory from Jay Duplass as a hyper John Avildsen. (Farrelly remains a generous director: everybody gets their flowers.) Anyone with any degree of media literacy will spot the tricks the film is playing, but also that they've been played well - and I think having fresh(ish) faces like Ippolito and Robb centre frame helps, too: these younger performers are having to sell this script's more idealistic schtick as if for the first time, with minimal cynicism, in the hope of making their own careers. (This was Rocky's trick, too, of course - though nobody thought to call it a trick at the time.) So it's not just Hollywood talking about itself, it's also Hollywood talking to itself, at a moment when its gatekeepers have rarely seemed so cowed and risk-averse. If the film it comes in appears somewhat safe - a foursquare box-office and awards contender - the message here is one about the risks and rewards of more adventurous creative thinking. Take a chance on someone, the movie urges. Take a chance on a longshot, even. You never know. You never know.

I Play Rocky is now previewing in selected cinemas; it opens nationwide on Wed 11.

Nag nag nag: "Wild Horse Nine"

After 2022's widely admired The Banshees of Inisherin, writer-director Martin McDonagh reverts to playing the hits. Wild Horse Nine centres on two white male malcontents abroad, bickering and busting one another's balls in the wider absence of anything more constructive to do. In this variation, they're a pair of CIA agents being flown out of Allende's Chile and deposited on the altogether more absurd territory of Rapa Nui - or Easter Island, as these thoroughly unreconstructed reprobates insist on referring to it. Unbeknownst to them, they're being put out to pasture, partly for knowing too much about previous American interventions in other countries' internal affairs, partly as punishment for failing to bring about the Chilean coup that will subsequently take place, initiated by more ruthless (and doubtless less chatty) operatives. And there's something else going on besides: the older of the two agents, first heard with a Movie Cough that may or may not be linked to his continual smoking, is keen to set the record straight on his time with the Agency by writing and publishing a memoir. The question this raises is whether the younger of the two has been sent this way as a means of managing his wayward travelling companion, or to walk a potential whistleblower towards a premature grave. For the time being, though, they sit and talk, sniping predominantly at each other, with their hapless hosts and innocent bystanders catching the odd verbal stray. I should at this point establish that the leads are played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, and therefore have a whole arsenal of tricks at their disposal to catch and retain the interest of those viewers who might otherwise feel somewhat queasy about being asked to care about - and maybe even root for - murderous functionaries of the State. One of the hits McDonagh is replaying here is the generation of sympathy for old devils, previously undertaken in 2008's In Bruges, where the heroes were stone-cold contract killers, and 2017's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a defining film of the Trump 1.0 era, where Rockwell made off with an armful of awards for playing Best Supporting Racist.

As encores go, Wild Horse Nine feels like a naggingly slight return, all told. Banshees, rightly, was acclaimed for its inherent soulfulness, its thoughtful gestures towards some diagnosis of How Men Are. (It made sense that the image of the Barry Keoghan character lamenting the death of a dream became a meme: there was a moment that meant so much more than just a director cramming ribald words into an actor's mouth.) This follow-up can be funny, in a glib way: Malkovich's breakfast-table spiel on the relationship between democracy, gayness and cheese has the much-workshopped air of a bit in an anti-woke stand-up's Netflix special. But even when it's funny, the film feels heartless, a bit of a coast for a director more than ever in love with his own writing. This is the project that confirms McDonagh as Tarantinoid in his default mode of expression: surfacey, posturing, determined to make flinty dialogue the entire show. You can still see why expert performers are drawn this way, but the rewards now seem less substantial. Casting director Sarah Halley Finn pulls off a coup of her own in landing Tom Waits for one (good, lived-in) scene as Malkovich's estranged brother - eccentricity runs in this family, clearly - but Parker Posey is wasted as Rockwell's philandering wife, a sour-joke character who doesn't even merit a punchline, and Steve Buscemi is left to trade in one-note crabbiness as the agents' junkie boss. It's all about the central double-act, this time: two vaguely different but essentially similar men, underlining the narrowness of this worldview. One Malkovich aside on protesting ("If you're not going to get what you're marching for, you may as well stay in bed") suggests McDonagh was aiming to chime with the overriding cynicism of the second Trump administration; if I Love Boosters, with its openness to societal and diegetic change, felt like the perfect release for the week of the 2026 midterms, Wild Horse Nine presents as the diametric opposite. Gone is Banshees' finely worked balance between the profoundly funny and the profoundly sad; in its place, a wobbly melancholy, tipping over into outright morbidity. Its organising image is that of a horse left to die in the road, while its theme and sensibility are summarised by one Buscemi tirade: "Life's sad. Everything's sad. That's why I take so much smack." For their part, Malkovich and Rockwell are eminently capable of replaying the hits: they're too wily not to feast on dialogue such as this (viz. the meal the former makes of the term "cahoots"). But there's too little difference between the Malkovich character when he's on morphine and when he's off it, and it struck me as revealing indeed that the film should end with the character worrying whether critics will find his suicide note overly verbose. These actors can give individual lines and scenes a lift, but they can't give Wild Horse Nine anything more than the most resigned and pessimistic idea of life: McDonagh has already given it nowhere to go but the grave.

Wild Horse Nine is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

"Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint" (Guardian 04/11/26)

Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint ***

Dir: Jack Spring. With: John Bradley, Richard E. Grant, Celia Imrie, Sophia Di Martino. 98 mins. Cert: PG

The annual drive to expand the festive film canon begins unseasonably early with a modest, sentimentally inclined Britpic that opens like a penny-pinching John Lewis ad and thankfully improves from there. The titular Mr. Flint (John Bradley) is a Napoleonic history buff whose animus around late December dates from seeing his (French) mother perish under tinsel; now he spends the holidays caviling at carolers and insisting that the icy pavements of his native York come with health-and-safety warnings. This very much not being the kind of film to confirm a fellow in such beliefs, Aubrey is instead nudged towards a developer-targeted retirement community planning one last theatre production: the OAPs’ choice – A Christmas Carol – all but closes the book on where Jack Spring’s film is headed.

The real hero here is casting director Lucy Amos, gathering familiar faces who deserve their Christmas bonus for making a formulaic narrative seem far livelier than it is; atop a mince-pie frosting of sugar, we get a welcome sprinkling of comic stardust. Sure, you may struggle to identify Richard E. Grant beneath the frizzy wig-and-‘tache combo that transforms his toy shop owner Mr. Hopkins into a modern Geppetto, but the care home alone gifts us Dave Johns as a former manager, Kiell Smith-Bynoe gardening under Karl Pilkington’s ever-irascible eye, and such eminent residents as Celia Imrie, Brian Bovell and Nigel Planer, whose eventual Ghost of Christmas Present forms a funny little coda to the Nicholas Craig story.

Collectively, these old pros stage a show of fellow-feeling which Dickens himself might have cheered, and while Chris Boyle-McQuarry’s script mostly runs on familiar tracks, potent little tangents suggest the creatives have themselves known amateur players and mirthless administrators in their time. The upcoming Ebenezer surely won’t match Jim Broadbent’s sporadic narration (you’d pay for the audiobook), while Imrie’s impromptu Scrooge audition shakes off cosiness and reconnects us forcefully with a foundational text. What Spring builds on these highlights is basically Costcutter Capra, but his stronger scenes form their own sort of advert for how good, well-synched performers can rescue a project from mediocrity. Even before Aubrey Flint’s inevitable redemption, that’s quite touching in itself.

Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint opens in selected cinemas today.

Anything is possible: "I Love Boosters"

Boosters, for the uninitiated, are shoplifters or fences or some extra-entrepreneurial combination of the two: you feel Boots Riley had to call his return to the big screen I Love Boosters rather than I Love Shoplifters to stave off potential objections from whoever's now sitting in the Mary Whitehouse seat. (There might have been full-on, old-school tabloid outrage had distributors Universal troubled to put the film in more UK cinemas.) Our heroines here are a less Caucasian variant of Sofia Coppola's Bling Ring: a ragtag girl gang - led by sisters Corvette (Keke Palmer) and Sade (Naomi Ackie) - struggling to get by in the graveyard of late capitalism. Operating out of an abandoned chicken shop, they earn a hand-to-mouth existence by nicking off with posh frocks from the collections of lofty designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore); this is, it transpires, a course of revenge former fashion student Corvette has alighted upon after seeing one of her more recognisably outré dress designs converted into haute couture without credit or financial restitution. Design will be key to the film. Every location has its own, Funny Face-like colour scheme, picked out by production designer Christopher Glass, set decorator Lizbeth Ayala and DoP Natasha Braier, and Riley has visibly determined to use a caper-movie template - get to the heart of capitalism, get even, get out while you're still alive - as a platform to stage vast, vibrant Tashlin-Tati-style setpieces. Among its many selling points, I Love Boosters yields the year's funniest sight gag. At an early juncture, Riley throws in an insert of Christie Smith's HQ, a cockeyed skyscraper looming over downtown Oakland. Ah, we think: a crack about postmodern corporate architecture. But then we head inside, where we see Smith struggling to navigate a K2-ish slope in her office: yes, it's capitalism as practiced from on high, but it's also capitalism on the brink of collapse, sliding into a precipice. This is, by most standards, an expensive film - everyone in it has been dressed and styled, shot and lit to look a million dollars - but this one gag alone was worth the ticket price: every time Riley circled back to it, it made me laugh.

Wonkiness, indeed, is the other key factor in play here: we're watching our world - the corporate exploitation, the low wages and labour disputes, the workplace liabilities - viewed askew at what begins at a 45-degree angle before Riley starts to turn the remaining dials. Anything is possible, and all bets are off - for these performers, as for those of us looking on. Entering into Bootsland allows Lakeith Stanfield to become a lachrymose French model who eats out women's souls through their nether regions; it allows Don Cheadle to don Whoopi Goldberg dreads as a self-help guru who is also, for some reason, a claymation zombie. The possibilities are endless: Taylour Paige plays a Black booster who, in holding her breath, can transform into a white society matron and thereby avoid detection. The set-up allows Moore to go full Cruella de Vil, in what feels like a far better use of her time, status and talents than anything in The Substance; it also allows Will Poulter to run off a neat Andrew Rannells impersonation as the prissy manager of one Christie Smith boutique. Not even the props sit still here. At some point, the girls take delivery (Temu?) of a Chinese teleporter that revolutionises their endeavours, functioning as it does like a T-shirt gun, a water cannon such as the authorities love to turn on unruly mobs, a portable particle accelerator, and a semiotician's opposites machine. Riley uses it to shoot holes in an already chaotic screen, allowing us to catch glimpses of another, more helpfully and healthily connected reality. Globalisation, he eventually posits, wouldn't be such a terrible, leeching, draining thing if it allowed workers to regain control of the means of production. There is, shall we say, a fair bit tucked away within these frames.

The joy of I Love Boosters - and this is, ultimately, a joyous film - is that that anything is possible credo applies for us, too. Atop my second page of notes, I scrawled two quick questions, first "where the fuck is this movie going?", then "is this film ever going to settle down?" The answer to the latter would be: no, it isn't. Unfolding to a consciously cacophonous Tune-Yards score, Boosters has no interest in settling into one of the old familiar grooves wherein individual artistry and personal vision are channelled towards saleable mass culture; it aims to be unmanageable, untameable, unclassifiable. (The BBFC's 18 certificate appears harshly punitive for what - even before the claymation zombies - often resembles a live-action cartoon, but equally it won't do anything to harm the movie's reputation as the Marxist caper flick the powers-that-be don't really want you to watch.) It is the anarchy it wants to see in the world, a rare show of American cinematic disobedience bound to irk those literalists who want to know what a pussy-eating succubus is doing here and how exactly that teleporter unit works. (There's another Avengers movie in a month, if you want hours of exposition and other nerdy shit.) For the rest of us, however, there is much to revel and delight in here, not least the sight of a big-screen comedy with bags - indeed, magic bags - of style, fashioned by a director who's plainly having more fun than anyone else turning money into light. In five, ten or fifty years from now, someone will look anew at I Love Boosters and wonder how on earth something this gleeful got made in America during the darkest days of the second Trump administration. The answer, I suspect, is that for all his surface goofiness, Riley has seen a fairer, happier world around the corner - and it's not one that lies beyond a shoplifter's reach.

I Love Boosters is now showing in selected cinemas.