I added this to my list purely because of how much we loved Paul Newman’s performances in the previous films that we’ve watched and this is considered one of his notable works. At first glance this seems like a fairly standard story of an up and coming pool player who wants to challenge the most famous pool player in America and as such it ought to follow the familiar trajectory of sports films. Yet it turned out to be much more complex and psychologically deep than that.

So here’s a film that is both in the martial arts genre and is from Hong Kong, ticking off two boxes denoting other films we’ve watched recently. The Ip Man franchise is of course well known and commercially very successful spawning many sequels and spin-offs but we’ve mostly skipped them as they are formulaic and distasteful. I wanted to give this one a chance as foreign critics have praised it and it’s a spin-off about a character who was defeated by Ip Man in a previous film and so might be promising. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered as it’s just more of the same dreck.

I described this to my wife as a cowboy film and indeed though it’s set in the 2010s, it feels like one. This is the first film I’ve seen directed by David Mackenzie and it’s one of those strange twists that he is British and not American. Yet there’s no doubt that this film succeeds brilliantly in revitalizing the Western genre and showing a path to making it work in the modern era.

Being a total philistine with zero knowledge of opera, I had no idea who Maria Callas was. All I saw was that this was considered a notable documentary plus as my wife notes it feels appropriate to watch this after we had just been to see the Phantom of the Opera here in Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately while this film does convince you that Callas is undoubtedly a legendary singer, it is a terrible documentary as the director Tom Volf is a clearly a devoted fan who absolutely refuses to show her in any kind of a bad light.

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.