Despite what I wrote last time around, I still haven’t gotten around to watching the first two films of the so called Dollars trilogy. This one however is another Spaghetti Western, that is an Italian-made film set in the American West. It was directed by Sergio Corbucci and even features a score by Ennio Morricone. With all of the leads here being played by Europeans rather than Americans, it does feel much more European than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which we found quite discomfiting.

Given its title, this film is probably not what you think it is. This one was the first and so far only film directed by Tim Roth and it’s an extremely dark family drama about incest. It’s based on a novel by Alexander Stuart that was itself highly controversial, having first won a literature prize and then later rejected when a judge strongly objected to the subject matter.

In all of my copious reading I believe that I have read about the Acali raft expedition of 1973 before and came away with the impression that it involved some kind of crazy sex cult. This of course is a complete fabrication on the part of the media at the time as this documentary by Marcus Lindeen makes clear. Using old footage, a wooden recreation of the original raft, testimony from participants who have survived until today and an actor reading from the journals of expedition leader Santiago Genovés, this film presents a surprisingly positive take on what happened.

This probably isn’t that well known a film but I’d had it on my list for a while now and it is considered as being inspired by the original Hong Kong Umbrella Movement of 2014. This isn’t exactly evident from the plot itself, which is incredibly convoluted, but can be in the motivations and ideals of the main antagonist.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched almost the entirety of David Lean’s filmography. All that is left are his Charles Dickens adaptations and Doctor Zhivago. After a long pause, I thought I’d get back to it, so here is Great Expectations. I’ve neither watched any version of this nor read the original novel, so the entire thing was new to me.

I planned to watch this earlier film by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan long before our trip to Turkey, but actually visiting it seemed to give me a much better appreciation of the place and its people. This one was made before even Winter Sleep and so we were somewhat surprised to note that it has much less dialogue than we expected. Also, while we were both disappointed by The Wild Pear Tree, this one is simply excellent.

Though I quite like Queen, I ultimately skipped out on watching Bohemian Rhapsody because I read that it’s a very straightforward and conventional biopic. I have much less affection for Elton John but I heard that this is very stylistic musical and so here I am. Ironically though the directorial credit for Bohemian Rhapsody goes to Bryan Singer, it seems that he left before finishing the film and it was completed by Dexter Fletcher who is the director of Rocketman.