So I don’t recall seeing lead actress Blythe Danner in anything even though she has had quite a storied career. It turns out that she is the mother of Gwyneth Paltrow and her performance in this film is great. Brett Haley’s direction here is solid as well and does an admirable job of expounding on its theme of relationships as one grows older.
So this is an unusual documentary made by two persons: Agnès Varda and JR. Varda is a director of some reknown with a body of work that mostly predates the French New Wave though I’ve never watched any of it. JR is a photographer and artist who refuses to reveal his real name and apparently wears his hat and dark sunglasses combo non-stop. This film is a sort of travelogue as they make their way through rural France in a specially designed van.
As my list of films has been running down, I’ve been lowering standards and adding less significant works. No Way Out is frequently cited as one of Sean Young’s most memorable performances and was very well reviewed in its time. It turns out that I must have watched this long ago as I have a very clear memory of the scene with computer processing the image but it was good to rewatch it anyway as I certainly did not understand the twist at the end at that time.
Leaving aside the rarity and hence novelty value of a film about Burmese emigrants, I don’t think I could resist checking out something named after the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling. It was made by Midi Z who was born in Myanmar but is now Taiwanese. Its most notable star is Kai Ko who shot to fame due to You Are the Apple of My Eye but subsequently fell into disgrace after being caught in a drugs bust.
It’s a little embarrassing to keep going to the cinema only for superhero films but after their brilliant marketing campaign there was no way I would be missing out on Deadpool 2. I was initially skeptical of decisions such as making Domino a black woman but as it turned out this film is clearly made by people who understood what the 1990s comics scene was like and I ended up like this more than Infinity War.
I’m pretty sure we’ve never watched a Hungarian film before but this is only one of two films from that country currently on my list. It was directed by Ildikó Enyedi, a female Hungarian director who appears to have quite a respectable filmography. It’s all new to us of course but I do note with some interest that the film’s credits appear in both Hungarian and English and its main song is by Laura Marling, a British folk singer.
This is a must watch due to how it quickly rocketed to the top of various critics’ best of the year lists and garnered a slew of awards. Some may also remember it hitting the news due to the crew’s unauthorized filming inside Disney’s Magic Kingdom Park though it turns out to be for only a very short scene.