I held off on this as I didn’t want to go to cinema again so soon after Toy Story 4, but I was always going to watch this. I’d loved Homecoming and this is by the same director Jon Watts. It also serves as an epilogue of sorts to Endgame. Shockingly, this seems to be the last MCU entry for a while yet as the next one Black Widow is a year away. I’m amused by the parallel between the themes in this film and the fact that the people at Marvel Studios who probably feel that they need a bit of a break.

This title was drawn from my notes and lists, likely because some critics put it among the best films ever made. Its director Haruki Kadokawa is not that well known but he had his own production company and made many commercially successful films for the Japanese market in the 1980s to 1990s. This one was also very successful. Unfortunately it leans heavily on the audience being familiar with the historical events that the film is about and is rather cryptic and dry if you know nothing about them.

This was directed by Debra Granik who we know from Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout vehicle Winter’s Bone. This work is recognizably similar in its reverence for the wilderness and sympathy for neglected communities in the US. Unfortunately while the lead actress Thomasin McKenzie turns in a very strong performance, this film is ultimately too soft edged to be anywhere near as good as the earlier film.

Here we have another modern Russian film and for once it isn’t one by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa, this one is as visually different as you can get from Zvyagintsev’s style due to its warm, rich and bright color palette. But don’t be mistaken, as we have come to expect from the tortured Russian psyche, this is just as searing and incisive a critique of contemporary Russian society as anything in Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre.

This film had some of the shine taken off of it due to sexual misconduct allegations against James Franco. This supposedly caused the film to lose out on many of the awards it was widely expected to win at the time. Still I’ve always been an advocate of separating the artist from the art, even if there is a strange resonance between the events depicted here involving a sex scene starring the main character and Franco’s apparent actions in real life. Franco may or may not be a good person but this is still an amazing film.

So a number of critics drew attention to this as a film to take note of but obviously to international audiences the real draw here is that it stars Iko Uwais who first shot to fame in Gareth Evans’ Merantau and The Raid. This one was written and directed by a different director, Timo Tjahjanto, and Uwais is actually a co-star here but if you come in expecting plenty of gory, visceral violence you won’t be disappointed.

Like everyone else I thought that the Toy Story series was done with the third film which was just about perfect. Trying to tack on anything more to the franchise seems cheap and doomed to failure. Yet after this came out we heard nothing but rave reviews about it and more than a few made particular remarks about its emotional ending. This persuaded my wife and myself to catch it at the cinemas before it has been pushed out by the new Spider-Man film.