After a spate of Disney CGI-heavy live-action remakes, here’s a palate cleanser featuring old fashioned hand drawn animation from Japan. With its heavy use of loud primary colors that makes it look very much like a comic book, this one looks even more traditional than usual. While its juvenile conception of romance is regrettably rooted in the young adult genre from which it was adapted, I do love its energy and originality. It’s easily one of the best animated films I’ve watched all year.

We keep going back in time for films by the Coen brothers and this is as far back as we can get as it is the very first feature film that they made. Apparently they had to scrounge for financing for a year after making a trailer for it on their own and yes, it does star an unrecognizably young Frances McDormand. It’s crude in some ways and bears some hallmarks of inexperienced directors but on the whole it is an excellent film and that is an impressive feat indeed.

Here’s another film by Noah Baumbach and he’s back working with his frequent collaborator and partner Greta Gerwig. One difference this time around is she isn’t playing the point of view character here as newcomer Lola Kirke is the lead. However she is credited as a co-scriptwriter, just as she was for Frances Ha, and I like how the two films share some similar themes.

Since Edgar Wright is mainly known as a director of comedy films, I initially dismissed this as more of the same, especially since my wife doesn’t get his English brand of humor. My cinephile friend told me that this is something else entirely and really quite good, so I put it on my list. But that was of course way after it had already finished its run in the cinemas.

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.