A Icelandic-Japanese film feels like an odd combination to me but it must have been natural for Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson. This film was adapted from a novel by Ólafur and he in turn is an Icelandic businessman who helped create the original PlayStation while serving as the CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. So this film spans both cultures across a gulf of some fifty years. It’s a heartfelt romance with an ending that is perhaps a little too perfect but it’s executed with so much finesse that I found myself being very much a fan.

At over three hours long and with so many award nominations, this is a true epic, even the swelling music it opens with proclaims it as such. Given its premise, I’d expected it to be similar to a biography of an artist even if the character is fictional. Yet the film resolutely refuses to stay in that box, spends as much developing other characters as the protagonist and is barely about architecture at all. In the end, all is explained and I have to admire the director Brady Corbet’s unique artistic vision. But it feels like a bit of a bait and switch to me and so I’m not a big fan of this film.

I’m not sure how or why a renowned director Hirokazu Kore-eda has the time to also make television shows but this is highly acclaimed and readily available on Netflix so I’m all for it. It’s a remake of a 1979 series and so is set in that year. The moment I read its premise about four sisters discovering that their elderly father is cheating on their mother with a mistress, I thought that Kore-eda is doing his usual theme of pointing out the failure of parental figures again. But it’s more than that as over the leisurely course of seven episodes, he is able to intricately map out the relationships between the sisters and their families.

With a large, modern apartment tower overlooking London that is seemingly inhabited by only two people, this film aims to be disorienting from the beginning. When the main character visits his childhood home and seemingly meets his deceased parents, we’re not sure if all this is in his head or if there is a supernatural element. Eerie atmosphere aside, I loved how it perfectly addresses the question of what a person would say if given the opportunity to speak to their parents as a peer adult. There’s more to this with the gay aspect but the relationship with the parents is the best part and I’m sorry to say that the film is weakened by attempting to do any more than that.

Give India’s size and cultural heft, the underperformance of its modern cinematic greats is noticeable. So here is one recent film that won major plaudits at Cannes but some controversy arose in India when the country’s film federation declined to nominate it for the Academy Awards. The stated reason was that the jury felt that they were watching a European film set in India. It’s an awful reason to reject this film but watching it, I can totally understand why they felt this way. I suspect though that the real reason is that it challenges the current moral orthodoxy in ways that are uncomfortable. I think it’s too insubstantial to be truly good but it does provide an invaluable look at contemporary life in a big city in India.

This was Luis Buñuel penultimate film and also one of his most highly regarded ones so it naturally belongs on my list. I have neither liked all of Buñuel’s work that I’ve seen nor can claim to understand them all. But I’m confident that just about everyone will find this black comedy hilarious even if you don’t much care for making sense of it. Since it has an episodic structure, there’s no overall story to track and you can take in the absurdity of each situation on its own. But if you do put your mind to it, you can try to discern a deeper meaning to it and that’s why Buñuel is such a genius of cinema.

I believe this is the first DreamWorks animated film we’ve seen in a very long while as the revamped studio title card stood out for me. I added this to my list as I’ve heard about the successful children’s book series it was adapted from and it does have great reviews. Initial impressions were great due to its vibrant visuals and watercolor-based art style. But the writing is nothing special at all, being an updated version of the standard mother-child bonding story. Mind you, it’s not a bad execution at all but it doesn’t deserve its rave reviews and it’s very much a film aimed only at children.