This German film was highly regarded enough to be placed on the top of multiple critics’ best of lists but I find it to be mostly a missed opportunity. The script, the acting and the themes it invokes are all great but the setting is just all wrong and the visuals don’t at all match what is supposedly happening. It turns out that this was an adaptation of a novel set during the Second World War but the director Christian Petzold transposed it to the present day. I presume that this was due to budgetary reasons because it was dreadfully done and really harms the overall quality of the film.

Peter Bogdanovich is another director I’ve never seen anything from before. Associated with Orson Welles, he was heavily featured in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The film was also the debut of Cybill Shepherd. It was filmed in black and white, an unusual decision for the time apparently made after discussing it with Welles. Indeed the whole film, set as it is in the 1950s, feels like it belongs in a different era and right off of the pages of a novel.

This film was released in 2019, which means that the project must have started at least a year or two before that. Yet events that need not be mentioned this year have made it so cogent that it feels almost too raw and too potent to watch today. It is frequently described as the black Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself even drops that line, but it is so much more than that and intelligently uses the reference to demonstrate how differently black people are viewed and treated.

I love watching films from countries whose cinema I’ve had no prior exposure to as everything seems so fresh and novel and there’s a wonderful feeling that anything is possible. This is truer than usual for this Senegalese film, the directorial debut of its woman director Mati Diop. Diop was born in France but it seems that her family is a fairly prominent one in Senegal and this certainly feels both authentic and powerful to me.

So I finally got around to watching this because, hey, it was directed by Michael Mann. This turned out to be a disaster that is completely unindicative of the work that he is capable of. I was never a fan of the television show this was based on but from what I know this film has no relationship with the show beyond the shared name. I really do not understand what Mann thought he was doing with this film.

So a laudatory biographical documentary about a popular pop star isn’t something that I would ordinarily be interested in but the critical response to this is undeniable. To be fair, this isn’t anything like a raw exposé of Taylor Swift. This was made with her full cooperation and is thus very much part of her messaging to publicize her newfound wokeness. Yet what Swift wants to say is so fascinating and so noble in her stated intentions that it’s still worth watching.

This is a rather obscure film, set in Norway and with dialogue in English, Norwegian and a smattering each of Mandarin and German. Yet the director Rob Tregenza is American. It’s also meant as a showcase for the poetry of Norwegian poet Tarjei Vesaas which limits its potential audience even more. Though it’s a beautiful film and I’m receptive to its message, my unfamiliarity with the poetry makes it difficult to forge a strong emotional connection with it.