This French science-fiction film has only middling reviews and after watching it, that feels fair. It’s very loosely based on the Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle but has none of its elegance. It takes its time to very clunkily make a trite point that captures little of the essence of its inspiration. At its best, there are brief moments that recall the surreality of David Lynch. But these are outweighed by the mediocrity or downright cringiness of many scenes. This one gets a thumbs-down for me and not just because of the facile anti-AI messaging.

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a proper Hong Kong action movie though this may not quite qualify. It’s set in Macau and mainly uses Mandarin with a odd smattering of English. It’s even adapted from a Hong Kong movie from not too long ago. It’s overly long, is too hung up on twisty plot points and escalates the scale of the action to absurd levels. Nonetheless it genuinely is an spectacular action flick, probably Jackie Chan’s best in years, and with Leung Ka-Fai turning in a fantastic performance as a scarily threatening villain.

This horror film has enough of a hold on the public imagination to be regularly talked about even years after its release. I hesitated to watch it as the reviews are middling and director Ari Aster’s work is inconsistent for me. In the end I’m very glad I did despite it being too long and psychologically less complex than it needs to be, as this is one of the rare horror films that can aspire to break out of the confines of its genre. The setting featuring intense, unrelenting sunlight and bright, cheery colors instantly marks it as being unique, proving that horror doesn’t have to exist only in the dark.

This series has been on my radar for a while due to it supposedly being about the succession of a company and the fact that it’s loosely based on the Murdoch family. As usual, I like to wait until the whole series is complete and so here we are. The bad news is that this is not really about business as all as it tends to gloss over the day-to-day of corporate life. Instead it’s all about the family drama. The good news is that it’s very good at it and all of the characters are villains that you’ll love to hate. I do worry that the pattern will become too repetitive but for now I enjoy it and will be down for the second season.

As a film that is all about a hiking trip, Good One invites comparison with Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy that I so loved. I didn’t much care for it at first. It felt that there was little hiking compared to everything else, sitting around a campfire, by the river, in the car. But of course I’m a clueless guy just like the two men on the trip with the lone girl and missed the character dynamics until the issue was shoved straight into my face. This was the directorial debut of India Donaldson and I do still think the pacing issues are real. But it brilliantly dissects how men are sometimes blind to everything but their own problems.

Films that provide the Japanese perspective of the Second World War remain comparatively rare, reason enough to watch this. It was also made by Kon Ichikawa who made the more famous The Burmese Harp. Both are anti-war films but while there was something transcendent in the earlier film, this later film is viscerally and unrelentingly bleak. It graphically depicts the Japanese soldiers suffering in the worst ways imaginable and committing atrocities in order to survive. No one would want a repeat watching of the horror shown here, but it is worth watching once.

Watching Ennio was like a quick refresher on the Westerns of the 1960s so it’s fascinating to compare them to McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In making this, Robert Altman’s guiding principle seems to have been to identify the common tropes of the genre and do the exact opposite. This plays out so slowly and unremarkably that I was getting bored until I realized what it was trying to do. It’s not even gritty or anti-heroic. It’s that the characters are all cowards, there are no higher ideals and there is no glory whatsoever in violence. Its commitment to what I might call anti-Romanticism is total and that’s what makes it so unique and memorable.