We’ve been watching too many of these Disney live-action remakes recently. The reason for this latest one is The Lion King was one of my wife’s childhood favorites and she vacillated for a long time over whether or not to catch it in the cinemas. In the end she said yes but by now we’re at the tail end of the showings and it has been relegated to one of the less well equipped halls with markedly poorer sound quality.

Director Lee Chang-dong films have been very hit and miss for us. This was particularly anticipated since it was his first film in eight years since Poetry which we did like. It was also adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami. Unfortunately once again this one left me with mixed feelings as the story went in a direction different from what I expected and I’m not sure what to think about that.

Next up on the list of Disney live-action remakes is this one which seems to be relatively low profile as I wasn’t even aware that it existed. Unlike Maleficent, this is not a reimagining of the original with a modern twist, it’s a straight up remake with only cosmetic changes with perhaps a small update to the motivations of the evil stepmother.

If nothing else I know that documentaries about mountain climbing will always feature spectacular scenery. This one not only doesn’t disappoint in this regard but even one of the scariest, most thrilling films I’ve watched so far this year. It really does make a difference when you know that what you see is real and not a carefully crafted simulation made in a special effects studio. It’s actually scary enough that it merits a warning and it rather successfully convinces you that Alex Honnold who is the climber featured here is borderline suicidal.

After a slew of not that challenging to watch films, here’s one by Jean-Luc Godard whose works can always be relied on to mystify the audience. This one even stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, unrecognizable though he is from his The 400 Blows days, so its inclusion in the canon of the French New Wave is unquestionable. With almost no plot, a very idiosyncratic organisation and enlivened by unexplained odd events, it certainly makes you work to puzzle it out.

So last time around I said I was done with films by director Jia Zhangke, yet here is another one of those again. The answer is that this one dates from much back and is in fact one of the director’s earliest films. I had this on my list for a very long time but finding it was very difficult. As it turned out we found this one to be a fair bit better his newer films but it is still flawed.

I have not thus far watched a single one of Disney’s CGI-heavy live-action remakes of their old animated classics, judging them to be of doubtful artistic merit. However as a friend recently asked us to find a full set of them for her children, I thought we might as well watch them ourselves, spreading them out over time. They take very little effort to watch and might even be a little entertaining. I picked this one to start with as it is chronologically the earliest.