It’s been a while since we’ve watched a Woody Allen film and as the director is currently out of favor in Hollywood due to the #MeToo movement, his career may very well be over. I added this one to my list after I read about it as being among his best work and I note that it’s also notable as being one of those in which he does not himself appear in it.
This came to my notice via the usual routes but I was apprehensive about it after learning that it contains gory content. I thought that it would be some variant of a torture porn film and I detest those. While the initial premise appears to bear this out it turned out to be a complete subversion and this is a far more original and effective film than I gave it credit for.
Next we have yet another Japanese film by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director seems to be on a roll as he is making noteworthy films every year. This one is unlike the others as it is a legal thriller and not a family drama. Yet somehow the director can’t resist filling it with flawed parental figures as well.
The second of the films that I caught on the plane is the latest work by Steven Spielberg and adapted from a popular young adult novel. Though I read plenty of crap on the Internet, I am not so juvenile as to think that stringing together a pile of pop culture references and packaging them into a game makes for anything resembling a decent novel. As such I had no real interest in watching this but then I did hear that this is a rare case of the film adaptation being better than the source material.
I had the occasion to do some travelling last week and so took the opportunity to watch a couple of more commercial movies that I would ordinarily have skipped during the flights. I liked the first one well enough and considered catching it in the cinema but I’d heard that it was a solid but not truly outstanding film and so ended up skipping it.
The fact that we liked both of Damien Chazelle’s previous films so much as reason enough to go to the cinema to watch this but privately I suspected that this would basically be a sequel to The Right Stuff and, ‘lo and behold, it was indeed so. Once again it stars Ryan Gosling in the leading role though Claire Foy as Neil Armstrong’s wife is a bit odd and it seems to me that her British accent comes out in one especially emotional scene.
Zhang Yang is a director who I thought is worth paying attention to ever since I’ve seen Paths of the Soul and this one in particular seems to have extra cachet in the West. It’s also a very unusual film that is difficult to judge and it purports to tell the real story of Chinese actor Jia Hongsheng while starring the actor himself as well as his real family members playing themselves.