Despite a long and prolific directing career, Hou Hsiao-Hsien had never made a wuxia film before this one, which explains why its release was so highly anticipated in the Chinese-speaking world. Its English title makes it sound boringly generic but its more informative Chinese title indicates that it was adapted from an ancient story that is a classic of the genre.
Foxcatcher is one those films that I added to our to-watch list out of a sense of duty since it earned multiple Academy Award nominations and showed up on several critics’ lists of the best films of 2014. I’d heard that it was based on a true story and had some vague idea that it was about wrestling but since I don’t much care for sports I didn’t really think much about it and simply thought that it was just another sports biopic. Boy, was I wrong.
If one didn’t already know that this film was directed by the same director, Jacques Demy, who made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, you surely will within five minutes of it starting. Like the previous film, this is a musical though it is a more traditional one with musical set-pieces in between normal scenes with dialogue. There’s plenty of dancing too as it features Gene Kelly as a sort of special guest star.
A Passage to India was David Lean’s final film and he made it only after a pause of some 14 years. I’d previously written about Brief Encounter as being one of the best romantic films I’d ever watched and before that we were very glad to have spent the nearly four hours required for Lawrence of Arabia. It stands to reason that we were expecting similar greatness out of this film.
This one was picked for three reasons: it stars both Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, it has the single most famous musical performance over the course of Monroe’s entire career, and it was directed by Howard Hawks, the man who can and will seemingly direct anything. It isn’t generally considered one of Monroe’s or Hawks’ best films though the characters played by Russell and Monroe are now icons in popular culture.
This animated film was made by the same production team behind The Secret of Kells, headed by director Tomm Moore. This shows both in its art style and the way that it showcases Irish folklore. As with the previous film, it’s traditionally animated, not CGI, which is always a novelty and once again it’s a story with children as protagonists.
As I noted earlier when writing about Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel is remembered more for his surrealist works and this pick, The Exterminating Angel, is a fine example of that. The strangeness of the situation here doesn’t take long to show up either. The setting is a lavish dinner party in a huge mansion, one so luxuriously appointed that it looks impressive even today. Yet even before the dinner party starts getting underway, the servants beg permission to go off one by one, each for unrelated and trivial reasons until only the majordomo is left. We also see that there is inexplicably a herd of sheep and a small bear inside the house. What’s even stranger is that some scenes seem to be repeat themselves, at least to us as the audience but the characters in the film never seem to notice anything.