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.

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.