This Finnish film had the bad luck of extremely poor timing. It’s a film about an unlikely friendship with a Russian man and how Russians in general aren’t so bad underneath their gruff exteriors. Then in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off the largest war in Europe since World War 2 and with it went any hopes of this film being a success. It’s a solid art house film, not an especially outstanding one but certainly good enough to win more acclaim under more favorable circumstances. It’s especially poignant to us given that my wife once had a somewhat similar encounter on a train ride in China in her youth.

After quite a spate of Malaysian films, here’s a Singaporean one that has won critical acclaim on the international level. I went into this blind as usual without knowing anything about it and it really makes a difference. The film starts slow and gives little insight as to what the protagonist is really thinking. It took a while for it to sink in for me that this is a somber examination of the death penalty as it is carried out in Singapore. The sparse narrative and plain presentation make sense in order to treat the subject matter respectfully. It doesn’t fully commit to its ending which is a shame but it left me with an uneasy feeling about how capital punishment and the effects it leaves on the executioner and that is a sure sign of a successful film.

I keep adding films to my watch list due to their reputation but that doesn’t always mean that I’ll end up liking them. This epic Western film is considered one of the greatest American films of all time but I struggled for a long time to understand why. It has decent gunfight scenes and a complicated story and that seemed to be it. Later I realized that it has a very cynical take on the genre and that are really no good people in it on any side. I had to read up on it to understand that it’s a response to the Vietnam War and director Sam Peckinpah wanted to show audiences what he felt was the grim reality of real violence. As he later discovered, he failed because it turns out that there is no violence, no matter how horrific or graphic, that we humans won’t glorify and get excited over.

German cinema is underrepresented in the films we’ve watched so far and this marks the first work we’ve seen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Not being used to his style or German cinema, it’s difficult at times to parse if it’s meant to be humorous. Its story of an African immigrant in Germany is a powerful one yet it makes its point so bluntly and the scenario is such a patently unrealistic one that I keep thinking it’s some kind of satire. It’s a very stylized film and an effective one but I think I need more exposure to German cinema to better appreciate it.

Here’s one Studio Ghibli film my wife said she had difficulty getting into back in the day. And no wonder because rather than focusing on particular characters, it’s a larger story about the civilization of raccoon dogs having trouble adapting to the urban buildup of Japan. It actually goes so deeply into their culture and their magical abilities that I wondered how they are relevant, since after all this is all made up. It doesn’t hold back though, delighting in crude references to their balls, and explicitly shows both raccoon and human lives being lost as part of the conflict. Of course, this can’t be a story that has a happy ending but it strikes a heartfelt bittersweet note and that’s good enough.

This film leaves me with very mixed feelings. For much of its first half, I was convinced that this was a superficial film about the spring break-type wild holiday that I don’t get the appeal of at all. But then when the main character Tara starts having doubts, I realized that it has a lot of psychological depth after all. As my wife explained, this may well be the most realistic portrayal of a young girl’s first experience of sex yet made. There’s a lot going on under the surface, Tara’s feelings, the actions of the boy, the reactions of her friends. This won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and deservedly so.

Louis Malle is a famous French director so it’s sort of funny that the onl;y films we’ve watched so far by him have been his later American ones. It’s good then to go back to this earlier one that helped establish his career. Despite its year of release, this absolutely isn’t New Wave as it actually has a straightforward narrative. The main character Alain Leroy isn’t a person that I would ordinarily have much sympathy for, being a former alcoholic who has difficulty finding purpose in life now that he is sober. Yet Malle’s direction really spoke to me and I can see why this is one of Wes Anderson’s major inspirations.