My wife wanted to watch this local film for the longest time due to the international accolades it won. Yet when it was finally screened in Malaysian cinemas, it was censored so badly that this version was disavowed by its director Amanda Nell Eu. Fortunately for us, it’s now available on Netflix so we can see for ourselves both why it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and why the Malaysian government is uneasy about it. I am in awe of the director’s ability to coax such strong performances out of its young, untrained performers and her courage in confronting the problems of female puberty in a conservative society. It struggles to land its ending but I can understand what the director is going for so it works out alright.

Even before it won all those Oscars, I was always going to have to get around to watching this eventually as much as I didn’t relish the prospect of watching a three-hour biopic. Critics have praised Christopher Nolan for successfully framing this as a thriller with the use of jumps in the timeline to add tension and uncertainty yet to my mind it is still a biopic. The unique angle that Nolan adds is elevating the character of Lewis Strauss to serve as the principal antagonist of the film. I understand that this was a major brouhaha at the time but as Nolan observes himself, it really is much ado about nothing. It feels unworthy to make such a big deal out of it and in the same vein, I don’t think very highly of this film either.

I was aware of this documentary’s reputation as a real tearjerker but it still managed to leave me in shock. This is a very personal film made by a single person, Kurt Kuenne, in honor of his friend Andrew Bagby who had been murdered. The horror is that his murderer is his ex-girlfriend who was at the time pregnant with his son and the intent behind this film is to let the son Zachary know what kind of man his father was. The story develops into so much more than that as it touches the lives of so many people and resulted in the law being changed. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen another documentary that is as charged with personal rage and frustration as this one as Kuenne really invests so much of himself into it.

This is one film that I probably wouldn’t have watched if it weren’t for a friend’s recommendation and the fact that it’s easily available on Netflix. It has passable and it did get nominated for an Oscar for cinematography but its premise reads like a gimmicky B-movie. This turned out to be a fair assessment as it’s a beautifully shot comedy horror with a dumb plot, crammed with dark jokes of a political persuasion. I can even see why my friend liked it, as it has something of Wes Anderson’s surrealism except that it’s monochrome and is unrestrained when it comes to sex and gore. But it isn’t really the sort of thing I like.

We’re nearly done with the slate of Studio Ghibli films and here we come to an old one that my wife said she fell asleep watching back in the day. This is admittedly one of Hayao Miyazaki’s lightest and simplest films. It encapsulates nothing but Miyazaki’s love of aircraft and specifically the aircraft of the pre-World War 2 era. There is combat but it’s treated as comedic playacting with no one dying or even getting seriously hurt. This is barely more sophisticated than a children’s cartoon but I found I rather liked the purity of its vision. Miyayaki knew exactly what he wanted to express here and so he did it without caring about what anyone else thought.

This is commonly cited as one of the great Australian films even if there is some debate over whether it counts as being Australian at all. Director Nicolas Roeg and the two white actors are English. I’d say it easily counts as this is probably the definitive film about the Outback. I’m not a big fan of this use of the noble savage trope and I found its core message to be similarly outdated and simplistic. Even so I can appreciate how perfectly this film conveys that message with its vivid, almost hallucinogenic vision of the Outback and its boldness in using nudity and sheer physicality for both the male and female characters.

This represents one of the rare occasions during which Hou Hsiao-hsien worked outside of the Chinese languages and indeed should be the only non-Asian film he ever made. It feels like a gimmick that shouldn’t work given that Hou doesn’t speak French and the French actors all don’t speak Chinese. Yet it does and the result is a wonderful view of the daily life of a Parisian family seen from the perspective of an outsider. I’ve never watched the 1956 film that serves as the inspiration but the references are obvious enough. I’m even more impressed that Hou manages to work in connections to Chinese culture that really are enriching and meaningful.