Our cinephile friend told us ages ago about the iconic scene from this film about a man trying to carry a lit candle across a courtyard. But it wasn’t until I watched the full scene that was included in the Jonathan Blow game The Witness that I bumped it up the priority list. I would say that rewatching the scene again here does lessen its impact but the whole thing is still an incredible triumph of the visual arts.

This is as high profile a release as some other shows, but it’s great example of how much innovation and experimentation is going on in television these days. It’s an anthology series of science-fiction shorts, each unrelated, of varying lengths and made by various animation studios. It’s also very much adults only as it has plenty of nudity and violence. This would have been pretty much impossible to pull off before the era of streaming video as broadcast television would have required consistent episodes lengths and likely more censorship.

In This Corner of the World is a wildly successful and highly praised animated film. It’s so well liked that it’s difficult to find anyone saying anything bad about it. In this era of computer graphics, its traditional hand drawn animation also gives it plenty of retro charm. I even like its premise of depicting a civilian perspective of the Second World War. However it’s pro-Japanese bias is evident and I am uncomfortable that so many international critics have let its politics pass without remark.

Juliette Binoche turns up so often in recent French films of note that it’s frankly embarrassing. I base all of my picks on critics’ recommendations so it’s not like I particularly like her. Here she’s in a film by a director whose work I’ve never seen before, Claire Denis. This is apparently loosely adapted from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes which explains the eclectic nature of the main character’s relationships.

This is another film that went straight to the top of all of the critics’ lists. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about this one as I had it stereotyped as a cowboy film but it turned out to be better than I had expected. Most surprising of all is that its director Chloé Zhao was born in China, yet she somehow managed to make a very authentic film about modern rodeo riders in the US.

This is the second part of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s coming-of-age trilogy that began with A Summer at Grandpa’s. Considering what a great film that was, it would always be a hard act to follow and indeed this one is a much less impressive effort. It is not of course actually a sequel as it has an entirely different set of characters but it roughly covers the teenage years of its main male character and so can be thought of as a spiritual successor.

It’s been a while since we last a quirky independent science-fiction film and what could be more indie than a project in which the two directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are also the lead actors. This project was made with a tiny budget and involved no one who is well known. Nonetheless it earned sufficient notice and praise from critics to make it worth paying attention to.