I have not thus far watched a single one of Disney’s CGI-heavy live-action remakes of their old animated classics, judging them to be of doubtful artistic merit. However as a friend recently asked us to find a full set of them for her children, I thought we might as well watch them ourselves, spreading them out over time. They take very little effort to watch and might even be a little entertaining. I picked this one to start with as it is chronologically the earliest.

As big a fan as I am of the STALKER games, there was no way I wasn’t going to watch this. I’m rather surprised that a miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster was funded and made at all and even shocked that it’s so well made and high profile. It’s not perfect by any means especially as it tries too hard to neatly categorize characters as either heroes or villains but it’s much better than I’d hoped. It would be fantastic if more shows of such quality were made to dramatize important real events.

Nicholas Cage has been something of a joke ever since his tax troubles led him to accept any and all acting jobs without discrimination and he has indeed appeared in many awful films. On the face of it, this looks like another such project: a low budget, cheesy film by an unknown director that seems destined to go straight to video. Yet director Panos Cosmatos makes such bold, uncompromising choices that this turned out to be a rather unique creature that is really quite good.

This Polish film made the news a while back as it had ruffled quite a few feathers in its country of origin. That’s no wonder as it directly attacks the Catholic Church in Poland on multiple fronts, accusing it of many, many types of wrongdoings. Most surprising to me is that it was a commercial success and broke box office records. That’s extraordinary for a serious drama like this and really speaks of how important this issue in is Poland.

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.