A while back I wanted to watch a Israeli television series, Srugim, after reading a lot of discussion about it but ran into trouble getting good English subtitles for it. I suppose it’s more readily available now that it’s more well known. In any case, Jewish media seems popular in the US recently and this film has been getting plenty of praise. It counts as an American film but is entirely in Yiddish, being about a community of Hasidic Jews who live in New York.
After a lot of searching, I finally managed to find this film that my wife wanted so long ago. By now this is the third film we’ve watched by director Jia Zhangke but it’s the oldest one yet. Once again, it stars Zhao Tao who I have since learned is married to the director himself. I note that the English title for this is very inappropriate. Not only does it bear no relation with the Chinese title but the usual meaning of the phrase seems different from what the director intends here.
I added this to the list entirely due to how much I liked most of director Denis Villeneueve’s work and of course Sicario is highly regarded in its own right. I know that the posters on Broken Forum mention it often with mixed feelings and I’d vaguely heard that there is going to be a sequel later this year.
This is a Tibetan film that I first read about in The Economist but I would have heard of it nevertheless due to how it has been making waves in film festivals all over the world. It was made by Chinese director Zhang Yang but judging from its credits and title cards which are in English, this seemed to have been made mostly for an international audience.
This one I’m pretty sure I heard about on the popular Lowyat forums, normally a cesspit of dumb opinions but there is enough of a critical mass of people there to discover interesting bits of news. It helps that this Thai film is very popular, being currently the most internationally successful Thai film after having done especially well in China. Plus of course its high Rotten Tomatoes rating means that it likely isn’t commercial crap.
I’m pretty sure I got this pick from The Economist and since I try not to spoil myself, I thought that this was an Indian film. As it turned out, even though about half of it is set in India, it’s really an Australian film, being based on a real-life event that was apparently quite a big deal in the country. I believe it’s the feature film debut of its Australian director Garth Davis.
Again it’s Oscar season and I thought it would be cool to catch some of the nominees and winners in an actual cinema. Unfortunately session timings for The Shape of Water didn’t work for us so I picked this instead, a film that received a number of nominations but failed to actually win anything. It helps that we’ve already seen Saoirse Ronan in a number of roles and it’s the first feature film directed by Greta Gerwig, an actress who both my wife and myself liked in a couple of films.