Given Fox’s poor track record with the X-Men films, whether or not I should watch this wasn’t exactly a sure bet. It was released while I was distracted by family stuff during the Chinese New Year and seems to have been very well received while I wasn’t paying much attention. That explains why I’ve also just now gone to the cinema to check it out.
Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian filmmaker of some reknown so it is somewhat regrettable that the first film of his that I watch is also his first film to be made entirely outside of Iran. Certified Copy is set and shot in Tuscany, Italy and its dialogue is a mix of English, French and Italian. The entire film is essentially one long conversation between its two leads over the course of an afternoon.
We’re still taking it relatively easy after our long absence and in most cases, nothing is easier to watch than an animated film. A few minutes in however, I realize that this isn’t your average animated film, which makes this not easy to watch at all. While I recognized the names of actresses like Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher, I began to doubt that this could be an American film. That’s because this turned out to be one of the creepiest animated films I’ve ever seen and I doubted that a Hollywood studio would have the courage to make such a scary children’s movie.
Despite the incessant advertisements for Ola Bola on local radio stations, I have still not watched it yet. After all its director was responsible for the execrable The Journey which was the whole reason why I started writing about films in the first place. Meanwhile, I have recently watched this Taiwanese-Japanese film about baseball. I’m not a fan of sports film in general. Unless a given film has some sort of unique twist, the genre tends to conform to predictable tropes so to a certain extent they are all alike. Kano is no exception in this regard.
This is another of those classic films that everyone is supposed to have watched but I never have. In fact, I’ve never even watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, widely considered Audrey Hepburn’s most defining role. Roman Holiday is where she got her start though so it feels appropriate to watch this first. Watching this, I was certainly struck by how astonishingly young she looks here.
I’m pretty sure that I got this pick from a review in The Economist. That publication doesn’t talk about films very often and since I’m subscriber I pay attention when it does. This film did fairly well on the awards circuit, was listed among the best films of 2014 and perhaps most of all, I suspected that it would be a film that my wife would enjoy.
Swept Away is the second of the two films that my wife asked to add to our list by Italian director Lina Wertmüller. The first one was Seven Beauties which we watched about half a year ago. This one also stars Giancarlo Giannini, apparently he is one of this director’s favorite performers, and he is joined here by actress Mariangela Melato. These two seem to have had a very successful partnership under Wertmüller’s direction and their chemistry here is so strong that they have no problems carrying the film without the need for any other characters.