You Were Never Really Here (2017)

This one arrived on my list via the usual recommendations and I thought it was simply a new, notable work by relatively unknown people. It turned out that it was directed by Lynne Ramsay who also the excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin and of course the male lead is Joaquin Phoenix though I could not recognize him at all due to how buff he made himself for this role. It’s one  of those astonishing transformations that some actors pull off from time to time that seems unhealthy to me.

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Lola (1961)

Considering how much I adore both The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I got to this, director Jacques Demy’s first feature length film. The preamble states that it was restored as the original negative had been destroyed and the person in charge of that was Agnès Varda. We’d just seen Varda of course in Faces, Places but somehow I never realized that they were husband and wife.

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Infinifactory (Resistance Campaign)

As previously promised, I went back to play Infinifactory’s Resistance Campaign or at least tried my best at them. Story-wise, this set of missions takes place after the end of the first campaign and as its title indicates, covers the efforts of the escaped engineers to create a resistance against the Overlords. It’s a fair bit shorter than the first set of puzzles but more than makes up for it with the large sizes of the puzzles and their bewildering complexity.

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Shuttle Life (2017)

The last feature length Malaysian film covered in this blog was the execrable The Journey. Since then several other Malaysian films have been widely acclaimed but I’ve skipped them all. This one has been promoted a fair bit on the awards circuit but the real difference is that its newcomer director Tan Seng Kiat somehow managed to persuade veteran actress Sylvia Chang to appear in his film. That’s enough for me to give it a chance but unfortunately I once again found myself disappointed on every level.

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A Taxi Driver (2017)

Once again this film stars the ubiquitous Song Kang-ho but at least this time the director Jang Hoon is a newcomer. Though the film’s innocuous title and poster doesn’t drop any hints, this is really about a historical event, the so-called Gwangju Uprising that took place in 1980. I haven’t known about this event beforehand so learning about it was good. However a cursory reading up on it reveals that this version involves substantial artistic license.

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Isle of Dogs (2018)

The last time I wrote about a Wes Anderson film was for The Grand Budapest Hotel when I said that his films are essentially cartoons for adults. This is doubly true for Isle of Dogs. It features Anderson’s usual regulars plus one or two new names like Bryan Cranston all in service of a film that is well made and delightful but amounts to nothing more than pure entertainment.

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The unexamined life is a life not worth living