I’m once again back for the next MCU film and this time I had been looking forward to it, having liked the first film so much. This one is pretty much a standard sequel with all the same people involved except that the heist film template has been replaced with something simpler and, sadly, less interesting. The upshot is that the Wasp has now been upgraded to being a full peer and indeed director Peyton Reed has her doing all of the kickass stuff while Ant-Man is more or less her assistant.
I like to think that we’ve made a decent start at working through Akira Kurosawa’s most famous films but here is something completely different. Though the director is best known for his period samurai films, his filmography is wider than that. This one, made immediately following the end of the Second World War makes for a great example and it reveals a side of the director which isn’t evident in his later epics.
Ruben Östlund was the director who made Force Majeure, a film that both of us liked and has remained fresh in our minds. The Square is the first film that he has made since then, suggesting that he takes his time with his projects and it won plenty of accolades and awards. Though this is a Swedish film, it features two recognizable Anglo-Saxon stars, Elizabeth Moss and Dominic West who speak only English in their performances here.
Our only previous experience with films by Jafar Panahi was the impressive but difficult to watch This is Not a Film, notable mainly in how it showcased his determination to continue to make films despite a 20-year ban on such activity imposed by the Iranian authorities.
This is another Taiwanese film that is a recommendation from our cinephile and though it was directed by a new guy, Huang Hsin-yao, it’s visibly from the same team as the ones who made Godspeed. The addition to the plus symbol which forms part of the title seems eccentric but apparently is meant to represent that this film is an expansion of the director’s previous short film bearing the same title that was nominated for a Golden Horse Award.
Since we’ve both watched and loved Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, seeing this was inevitable and we already know what we’re in for. It’s a little strange to see all those British actors with their accents playing supposedly Russian characters while Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev but it’s easy enough to grasp who’s who especially with the convenient title cards when each character is introduced.
After watching The Shape of Water, I thought it might be amusing to follow it up with another fantasy film, this one from South Korea. As far as I can tell this is director Um Tae-hwa’s first real feature film and the young actress who plays the female lead is a newcomer as well. This is a piece of mass market entertainment and not an art film, so with my expectations calibrated accordingly, I found it to be perfectly cromulent fantasy film.