This one was a recommendation from our cinephile while we were in the middle of talking about unusual animated films and it’s obscure enough that I doubt that I would have heard of it in any other way. It’s a Danish film made by director Anders Morgenthaler who apparently made his reputation from a newspaper-published comic strip. It’s also very much an adult film as it has explicit sex scenes and very unusually includes a significant amount of real-life footage.
Margin Call was one of my favorite films in the year of its release and to this day it’s one of the first things that come to my mind whenever I think of good examples of cinema that try to cover current events. It helps as well that the subject of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 is personally very fascinating to me as a key challenge to modern capitalism. Arguably we can even detect the seeds of the rise of illiberalism that we see everywhere today in that crisis as the economic damage that it did to the working classes was never fully repaired. So it makes sense that I was highly interested in this adaptation of the famous book by Michael Lewis about what is known as the worst recession since the Great Depression.
I loved each and every one of the Federico Fellini films I’ve watched so far so it’s not surprising that I had a high level of anticipation for this one. La Dolce Vita is one of the great director’s major works, coming in at three hours long. It’s also highly rated by critics. Roger Ebert notably considered it Fellini’s best film and wrote first ever review for it. Unfortunately I liked it the least of his films that I’ve seen so far. I find it great in parts but it just doesn’t add up to enough of a coherent whole for me.
This film has been on our watch list for a while as it is considered one of the most notable releases of 2014 so watching it now is a complete coincidence. Still, seeing it just after the Brexit referendum makes for a particularly poignant reminder not to take the national unity of Britain for granted. It’s the debut work of its director Yann Demange and as you should guess by now it’s a take on the Northern Ireland conflict, focusing on one particular night in 1971.
If you look past the fact that this is a French film that is set in France, Les Diaboliques feels eerily reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock film. In fact, the story goes that Hitchcock was interested in buying the rights to the novel that this eventual film was based on but director Henri-Georges Clouzot managed to get to the French authors a few hours earlier. The rest is history as it went on to be regarded as one of the best thrillers ever made.
Though I don’t really read that much original science-fiction any longer, I still go out of my way to put the most quirky and interesting science-fiction films to my watch list. This ultra low-budget film that has often been compared to Primer, perhaps the most convoluted science-fiction film ever made, certainly qualifies. It was apparently shot in director James Ward Byrkit’s own house over the course of five nights with no script and no crew. It went to win a number of awards and plenty of praise from critics, not bad for a directorial debut that was made with almost no money.
My wife insisted on adding this one, along with many others, in an Chinese television show introducing a bunch of lesser known animated films from Europe. I dislike those shows as they have no qualms about thoroughly spoiling the films they talk about but I guess they can be useful for getting to know about works that one would never otherwise get to hear about. This one is from Spain, by a director named Ignacio Ferreras who is so new that he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page yet.