As I’ve mentioned on Broken Forum, Ne Zha can be thought of as China’s current best answer to Marvel and Pixar. It predictably sold well in China but performance outside of it has been lacklustre. Non-Chinese audiences probably found the title mystifying and I have to say that its trailer looks unimpressive as well. I was prepared to critique this heavily but ended up being rather surprised at how decent it is.

As I mentioned to my wife, our cinephile friend would never watch something like this, but I’m a soft touch for the occasional teenage romance or coming-of-age story. In addition, I like to think of this, together with Crazy Rich Asians and Andrew Yang’s campaign to be the Democratic nominee for the US presidential race, as part of the welcome phenomenon of Asian Americans coming out and becoming more visible amidst the broader American culture.

This marks probably the last significant oeuvre from the filmography of Jacques Demy that I’m going to watch and the final part of the trilogy that includes Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Yet though Anouk Aimée reprises her role as Lola here, this is an American film with English dialogue and was shot in California. Demy rather incredibly claimed that he was there on vacation and decided to make a film then and there. At the same time, this doesn’t feel American at all and comfortably fits into the broad strokes of the French New Wave movement.

I have zero interest in sports so a documentary about doping in the world of cycling is hardly something that I’m likely to get excited about. However while this was director Bryan Fogel’s original plan for his film, subsequent events played out in a way that must have been far beyond anything he could have predicted, and so he seemed to have pivoted his film in response. The result is a riveting watch that tests the boundaries of what documentaries are supposed to be.

This title instantly raced up to the top of all of the critics’ lists of best Hong Kong films last year, making it practically required watching. It’s the feature film debut of its director Siu Kuen Chan who raised the production budget from winning a government award. It does star Anthony Wong but that was only possible because the veteran actor generously agreed to work for free. Unfortunately this is another one of those cases in which the film’s aims are laudable and speaks well of the director’s intentions but is really not a good film at all.

This anime recommendation was from a popular Malaysian forum whose tastes in film I usually find execrable. I decided to give this a chance as it has decent reviews. Initial impressions based on its cast of stock high school characters and a very generic story within a story seemed at first to point towards a middling film but it soon turned out to be subtler and more intelligent than I had suspected.

While there is some historical basis for the events depicted in this film, it’s probably best to think of this as fiction that is only loosely inspired by history. The plot is straightforward enough but this film is shot in such a quirky, disorienting style that I immediately wondered who the director is. It turns out to have been directed by Yorgos Lanthimos who shot to fame for the near-indecipherable The Lobster.