Having at least a couple of films by Takashi Miike, I can’t say that I’m a fan but this one has a decent Rotten Tomatoes rating and there are always moments such as now, given the high drama of politics in Malaysia, when we just don’t feel like watching anything too heavy. I thought that this fantasy samurai film, adapted from a successful manga, might at least be entertaining and pretty.
Late on this one as I was out of the country for almost all of last week, though of course I was always going to watch this. This is a highly anticipated film even to me and I still own the original Infinity Gauntlet comics. Still I kept my expectations to realistic levels and on the whole found this to be solid superhero film and about a good a capstone to the MCU as one could hope for though it isn’t exactly transformative.
This one was another recommendation from our cinephile friend and given his leftist sympathies, it’s not hard to see why he wanted us to watch this. British director Ken Loach is quite well known and has made a career out of making films like this but I don’t believe I’ve ever watched any of them. After watching this one however I can see that the director means well but I’m not sure that I can agree with his cause.
This is an older film by Stanley Kubrick that neither my wife nor myself have watched so it was automatically put on the list. I doubt that we will ever watch his earliest films made independently of the major studios but I certainly intend to watch all of the others eventually. His most famous collaboration with Kirk Douglas is of course Spartacus but before that they had made this lesser known film set during the First World War.
Based on how much both of us liked Right Now, Wrong Then, I had high hopes for this latest film by its director Hong Sang-soo. It also features the same actress Kim Min-hee as the lead as well as many other familiar faces from the earlier film. Unfortunately neither of us liked this one, finding it self-indulgent and almost incomprehensible.
This is an American independent film that was a recommendation from our cinephile friend, an unusual one for him as it falls square into the romantic comedy genre. What sets it apart is its interracial pairing, a Pakistani man and a white American girl, which even in our enlightened times is probably still worth a raised eyebrow.
So I read about this in The Economist and thought that it might be a good idea of watch one of these as it’s considered a classic of Chinese cinema even though of course it’s explicitly Communist Party propaganda. Unlike most other films of its genre and period this one is very highly regarded outside of China and was made by Xie Jin, a member of the so-called Third Generation of Chinese filmmakers.