The Lobster, by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, makes it onto my watch list not because it was highly praised or because it won many awards, but because most of the people who have watched it describes it as one of the weirdest films they’ve seen. One of the most surprising things about this is that for such a small and quirky film, it has some serious star power with the most famous names being Collin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux.
In line with our efforts to round out my film education by watching more films from China, this is the first film by Zhang Yimou to be covered in this blog. Appropriately enough this is also both Zhang’s directorial debut and the acting debut of Gong Li. I’ve never watched this before but my wife has many times, though she is happy to watch it again. I’ve simply never watched any of Zhang’s early films that made him famous.
The Revenant is way too high profile a release to miss watching. It won a slew of awards, it was directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu who deserves plenty of goodwill for Birdman and it has at least one scene that is now so iconic that its fame eclipses that of the film itself. Personally however I wasn’t too keen about the subject of the film which seemed to yet another survival in the wilderness story with an actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who doesn’t seem altogether together suited to the role.
Every time you see a truly old film being covered in this blog, you’d know that it must be because it’s one of the all time greats. This is especially true for Sunrise by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau which is usually considered as one of the top ten greatest films of all time. It also stars the extremely tiny Janet Gaynor who we’ve seen before in Street Angel.
This is the last of a series of recommendations of interesting European animated films from a Chinese television program that my wife caught a long while ago. This one is obviously French and unlike so many animated films we’ve seen is apparently an original creation instead of being based on another property. However as is appropriate it derives its art style from a variety of famous artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
This was a recommendation I read on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen, oddly enough, praised it for its depiction of modern Taipei. After reading its synopsis however I became a bit apprehensive: stories about geniuses who suffer from a mental ailment of some sort as a side effect of their talent is well-trodden territory and risk conforming to a standard formula. X + Y (known in the US as A Brillliant Young Mind) might be doubly prone to these tropes as its protagonist is a teenager.
It’s been a while since we’ve actually watched a film in a local cinema. This one was picked because it’s an animated film which always makes my wife happy, it has a stellar Rotten Tomatoes rating and at least one poster on Broken Forum had some nice things to say about it. It also helps that this was made by Laika, the studio that only does stop-motion animation, and was responsible for the impressive Coraline.