This one is another Chinese film that has garnered a fair share of plaudits and its the debut film of its director Zhou Ziyang. Interestingly, it is set in the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, the same city that some years ago was paraded about in the Western press for being a prime example of China’s overbuilding spree, resulting in empty streets and buildings. I’ve read however that since that enough people have since moved to make it, if not exactly a thriving city, at least a real one.
I’m once again back for the next MCU film and this time I had been looking forward to it, having liked the first film so much. This one is pretty much a standard sequel with all the same people involved except that the heist film template has been replaced with something simpler and, sadly, less interesting. The upshot is that the Wasp has now been upgraded to being a full peer and indeed director Peyton Reed has her doing all of the kickass stuff while Ant-Man is more or less her assistant.
This is a novel that I would never have known about if not for the recommendation in What Makes This Book So Great. It was successful enough to spawn sequels but author George Alec Effinger died before a fourth book could be completed and the series never seemed to have won any major awards. Apparently a supplement for this setting was made for the pencil and paper role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 which I do own.
I like to think that we’ve made a decent start at working through Akira Kurosawa’s most famous films but here is something completely different. Though the director is best known for his period samurai films, his filmography is wider than that. This one, made immediately following the end of the Second World War makes for a great example and it reveals a side of the director which isn’t evident in his later epics.
Ruben Östlund was the director who made Force Majeure, a film that both of us liked and has remained fresh in our minds. The Square is the first film that he has made since then, suggesting that he takes his time with his projects and it won plenty of accolades and awards. Though this is a Swedish film, it features two recognizable Anglo-Saxon stars, Elizabeth Moss and Dominic West who speak only English in their performances here.
Try as I might, I haven’t really paid attention to new boardgames since I’ve stopped actively playing them. Even so, I managed to hear about this boardgame adaptation of the popular Pathfinder RPG and many posters on Broken Forum had good things to say about it. So I was very pleased when a videogame version of it was released on Steam. I knew that there are multiple DLCs out for this and so I didn’t expect much content in the base game itself but was pleasantly surprised by how long and involved even the main campaign is.
Our only previous experience with films by Jafar Panahi was the impressive but difficult to watch This is Not a Film, notable mainly in how it showcased his determination to continue to make films despite a 20-year ban on such activity imposed by the Iranian authorities.