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.

This is another film whose title is part of the modern cultural landscape but I don’t think many people have watched it and I don’t think the 2004 remake was very successful either. I watched this somewhat out of a sense of duty and indeed its treatment of the Russians and the Communist Chinese is laughable. Still, I ended up being surprised by how it’s very watchable even by modern standards and even novel in some ways.

What with all of the drama in Hong Kong recently, I thought we might watch a film from there as it has been a while since the last one. This one was directed by Cheung King Wai who is apparently a documentary filmmaker of some renown but this is his first feature film. It stars Stephy Tang who is a pop star but otherwise everyone else in here are unknowns. Unfortunately this seems to have had a cheap budget and the subsequent production quality looks as amateurish as most of the actors.

Usually when I add films to my list from critics’ lists of the most notable releases of the year, they usually have stellar aggregated ratings. So I was surprised to note that this has a relatively dismal rating in the low 70s on Rotten Tomatoes. I decided to watch it anyway as my wife has a weakness for biographies of writers and was pleasantly surprised by its lyrical quality and tight focus on the final years of Wilde’s life.