I added this to my list when BlacKkKlansman put Spike Lee back into the spotlight and many people pointed to this as the director’s best work. I found the newer film to be enjoyable but not all that great. This one however is fantastic and, no doubt as the director intended, is an amazing piece for sparking conversations about as everyone debates who in the film, if anyone, actually did the right thing and what the director really intended to convey.

We’ve watched nearly every film directed by Jiang Wen due to recommendations from our cinephile and probably because he’s one of the most interesting mainstream Chinese directors. After watching this latest one, I’m not sure I’m interested in seeing more of his work however as his recent films all share the same style. While they are visually exciting, they all seem thematically empty to me and make no sense in terms of plot.

We’re now up to date with all three seasons of this modest but very creative television show. It has picked up numerous awards, notably science-fiction ones, which it definitely counts as. I love it as a crazy, quirky shows that seems silly on the surface but is surprisingly serious about having intellectual depth.

This one has been sitting in my list for a while now but it was quite difficult to find a copy of it. With a running time of more than five hours, it’s also easily the longest film we’ve ever watched. It’s not an experimental film either so its long running time isn’t a gimmick. It’s legitimately a drama about four middle-aged women and justifies every minute of its time. However we did need to watch it over several days.

So I was planning on holding off of watching this for a while to avoid the early crowds but there’s way too much spoilery information floating around the Internet to make that feasible. Fortunately there are so many screenings that it wasn’t overly crowded. At the end of it, in a nutshell, this is indeed a near perfect culmination of all that has gone into the MCU and fully justifies every moment of its epic length.

Our previous experience with a film by Ken Loach, I, Daniel Blake did not leave a favorable impression. He is a highly lauded director however so I did want to try one of older works. Kes is in fact his second feature film though he had done plenty of work in television before this. This is in a word fantastic. It is authentic and completely grounded in the period it is set in.

Over the past several years, we’ve made a pretty decent go at sampling at least a little bit of the oeuvre of each of the great directors of cinema. One especially notable omission has been German filmmaker Werner Herzog so this one is probably his single best known film. This is the first Herzog film I’ve seen but there will likely be many to follow.