It has been almost exactly a year since we watched the well loved 1994 adaptation so it’s still quite fresh in our minds. We were always going to watch this new version due to its stellar cast and the fact it is directed by Greta Gerwig. Unfortunately while this completely blows away the older film in terms of production values and visual beauty, it also makes some unconventional decisions with regards to presenting the sequence of events and emphasizing different aspects of their lives. This serves to differentiate the new version but I’m not sure that it’s for the better.

This most definitely not a musical film is the first directorial feature of its director Ladj Ly who previously made a name for himself for similarly themed short films. It immediately made waves upon its release and it’s easy to see why. Even from the very first shots, it seizes your attention with its energy and urgency and never lets up. As usual with such things, it can offer no easy solutions to longstanding intractable problems, but its revolutionary message rings loud and clear and it certainly lives to its adopted title.

Sometimes I add a film to my list and leave it there for so long that I forget why I did so by the time I get around to watching it. This is the case for My Cousin Vinny which doesn’t seem to be that significant a film. Interestingly this film is basically about New York Italians who are forced to stop and deal with the locals in a small Alabama and much of the humor is in the clash of these two very different worlds. Yet the director Jonathan Lynn is British, best known for the Yes Minister television series.

So this definitely counts as a sports biography type though knowing nothing about the world of motor racing, I had hoped it really was about a showdown between two industrialists like the title says. Instead it’s about the two men hired by Henry Ford II to create a team that would win the 24 Hours of Le Mans in order to get back at Ferrari. This one suffers from the usual set of simplifications and the predictable story beats of sports dramas, but the racing when the film gets to it, is really quite good.

So I’ve never heard of this film before but apparently many people think that it’s a decent wuxia film and so I always have a weakness for the genre. Upon realizing the nature of the character played by Michelle Yeoh here, my wife immediately remarked that she seems to be too old to play a role like this. Little did we know that this whole project was specifically made to accommodate her. The producer wanted her in a new wuxia film but had no idea what to make and Su Chao-pin so is also the director wrote up this story.

This is another of those strong European animated films for adults, and seems to be the directorial debut of its maker Jérémy Clapin. It has a macabre premise about a disembodied hand and uses it brilliantly to make a powerful point. However I’m not sure that I can agree with the particular philosophy of life that it espouses, thus I ended up not liking as much as many critiques seem to have.

This was one of the biggest releases of last year so it’s a given that we would get around to watching it eventually. I’m not a big fan of director Sam Mendes however and this film didn’t improve my opinion of him either. While this film is quite beautiful on a technical level, and the much vaunted single-take of the soldiers’ journey is a big reason for that, I feel that this film is overall underwhelming, being unable to live up to the promise of what it is trying to accomplish.