This is very much not great cinema but it’s so well known and so deeply embedded in popular culture, that I felt that I had to watch it for completionist reasons. This is after all the origin of the phrase, “build it and they will come” though the film actually says he will come. Surprisingly the phrase turns up quite often in the field of economics, such as when people argue that building infrastructure even in the middle of seemingly nowhere will be enough to spark an economic boom.

This is a bit of an obscure Taiwanese film by a director we’ve never heard of before, Stan Lai. This was a recommendation from our cinephile and I bet that was due to how much we both liked the Peter Greenaway films we’ve watched. It really was a play originally as unusual as the format is, and it seems that it’s still performed as such today. But it was so successful that this film adaptation was made, retaining the same director.

So I put off watching this for a long while but I knew I had to eventually due to its winning multiple Oscars and the controversy that engendered about this being an undeserved win. It’s just part of being involved in the cultural conversation. In the end, my opinion falls in line with the other critics. It’s a sweet and decently made film but the time when something like this could be considered one of the best films of the year should be long gone.

Given that I thought director Bi Gan’s first film Kaili Blues was far and away the best of its year, this follow up was always going to have a lot to live up to. This is especially so given that he has managed to attract serious acting talent in the form of Tang Wei and Sylvia Chang this time around. Unfortunately as is often the case, while this remains very recognizably the work of the same director, I found it to be markedly inferior to the first film even as it tries to draw on many of the same elements.

So we’re far from done with delving the deep well of nostalgia so here is another live-action remake of a Disney classic. This one was heavily derided on its initial announcement for the casting of Will Smith as the Genie with his skin a ludicrous shade of blue. But I like how the casting now proper reflects, more or less, the appropriate ethnicities of the characters and I love how director Guy Ritchie completely commits to this as a musical. This is probably my favorite of the Disney remakes so far.

This film received some decent press last year and it was directed by Steve McQueen who shot to fame following 12 Years a Slave. Given that its three leads are all women and their leader is a black woman, it’s obvious that there’s a female and minority empowerment theme going on in here as well. Yet this is a heist film, not a serious drama, and one expects the requisite excitement and entertainment value from it. This unfortunately is not forthcoming.

This one is an Indian documentary that is a little obscure so I’m rather happy that I managed to find it at all. It was the director Rahul Jain debut film and it has no narration and indeed very little dialogue at all. There are a few very succinct interviews and that’s it. Jain for the most part allows the images to speak for themselves in a manner that is very similar to Tie Xi Qu.