There’s no way we would be missing this latest film by the Coen brothers, especially one that’s so much fun. This is one those films that seems like it’s a personal vanity project, possible only because the brothers are now so successful and well known that they can make pretty much anything they want. It’s incredible how the brothers are the farthest thing from being complacent in their success and keep trying new things. The wonder of it is that they make it all work and it’s fiendishly good.

When I told my wife we would be watching a long, modern Turkish film next, her first reaction was to ask whether or not it’s by the same director as Winter Sleep. Indeed this was made by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and its screenplay was co-written by him and his wife Ebru Ceylan. Unfortunately while I found the dialogue in Winter Sleep to be almost magical, the dialogue here while being similarly wordy feels mostly dead to me, as if it tries too hard to be insightful but reveals nothing much of note.

We’ve watched plenty of classic Hollywood films but I realized that we’ve never watched a single film starring Elvis Presley. That’s probably because although his films were commercially successful, none of them are considered especially noteworthy from an artistic perspective. This one doesn’t particularly stand out either but it does star Ann-Margret who was pretty good in Bye Bye Birdie so it seemed as good a choice as any.

I knew going in that this was a documentary about a chimpanzee that was trained to communicate in sign language. As such I thought it would mainly be about the scientific data gathered from the experiment and the consequences for our understanding of language. Instead, this film is focused on how the entire project is unethical from its very conception and how almost everyone involved in it seems to have regretted it. That makes it a far more powerful documentary than I had expected.

This Swedish film defies convention and expectation on every level. Its genre is billed as fantasy and given that it’s about trolls in modern day Sweden, that’s understandable. Yet it is a deadly serious film, touching on paedophilia and genocide, as well as pride in the characters’, by human standards, very unusual sexuality. It was also made by an Iranian director Ali Abbasi and based on a Swedish short story. It’s easily one of the most original works I’ve seen so far this year.

So yeah this is a film that everyone has watched but I haven’t. In fact I didn’t even know what it’s about, only that it was basically made by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and it was both a critical and a commercial success. Its director is Gus Van Sant but I feel that he was brought in to work on spec on what is very much a project led by Damon and Affleck. My own opinion is that it’s easy to see why people liked it but it’s way overrated.

This isn’t that well known a film and it’s Rotten Tomatoes rating is only average. I heard about it because The Economist cited it as a rare example of the EU being praised in a cultural work during a time when no European country seemingly supports it. The premise about a house full of exchange students from all over Europe rather grabbed me and I also knew that it would likely be an easy watch.