This was the feature film debut of Laura Samani and pretty much everyone else in it are total unknowns as well. It’s very much the kind of film in which the filmmaker had to gather funds from many sources to make and at times visibly looks like it was shot with a not too expensive digital camera. Still, it successfully evokes an Italy of an earlier era and a world in which Christian miracles are real and are to be taken seriously. It’s a short film and there’s not too much going on in it but it’s effective and original so that’s enough.

I’m not the biggest fan of Makoto Shinkai but I’m aware of how popular he is and I know that at least it will be a visual feast. Indeed, if nothing else this is an audiovisual delight, with intricately detailed scenes and enjoyable music that calls back past eras. Initially the story seems promising as well but it all falls apart very quickly as the supernatural world it introduces follows no consistent rules and its themes are a mess. Shinkai knows how to evoke strong emotions but these feelings are unearned as they are achieved through a series of misleading tricks. It’s spectacular and fit for the big screen but ultimately superficial.

I’m no fan of Sacha Baron Cohen and this is certainly not one of his better films. Still, I’ve seen plenty of clips from it circulating online and I thought it might at least be a comedy that is worth a few laughs. As it turned out, the best parts of it are the ones already being widely shared and from when the character in Wadiya itself. Once he arrives in America, it’s an endless series of increasingly implausible skits notable only for their readiness to cause the most offence possible. It’s mildly amusing at most and not something I would recommend watching, but it is surprising how Cohen could convince famous Hollywood stars to make cameo appearances that involve degrading themselves.

This was added to my list at some point because it is a highly celebrated film with many awards and is considered one of the last of the great musicals of the era. So when its very first big song, Thank Heaven for Little Girls, started up, I was shocked by the very obvious pedophiliac message in it. Things just get worse from there and the whole thing seems like a very malicious caricature of the French conception to love and romance. It’s a pretty film to be sure as it really was shot in Paris and even features scenes in the famous Maxim’s restaurant. But the music is banal and the morals are execrable as few other films are. I cannot believe that this film is as highly regarded as it still seems to be.

I learned about the existence of this film in a roundabout way, from reading an article about the historical figure by the economist Alice Evans. It’s strange to me that I’ve never heard of her before as she was Indonesian and this biographical film about her is available on Netflix. It’s a little too sentimental at times and tries too hard to achieve a happy ending when in fact the real Kartini died tragically young at the age of 25. Overall though it’s an outstanding production by the Indonesian film industry that champions a feminist heroine in a part of the world that is distinctly hard on women.

With its fast-paced dialogue and strange world in newspaper columnists are seemingly all powerful, this was a difficult title to get into initially. But I appreciated the attempt to film this unusual and complex subject and having both main characters be total sleazeballs is an amazingly bold decision. Even apart from the world itself, there are so many things in here that are so weird including J.J.’s obsession with his sister, but I loved it all, especially the savage pettiness of the characters and how it never lets up right up to the end.

I loved Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo but I haven’t had cause to watch his later films. Here we have him directing a very Chinese film with crisp visuals that evoke works such as Black Coal, Thin Ice. Yet this is no noir, it is instead a drama about the angst and aimlessness of Chinese youth, with a dose of confused romance. In theory, this is a thematically rich film with a lot going on. Unfortunately it never gelled together into a coherent whole for me. Reading up on it, it seems like Chen threw the script together in a matter of days while he was under quarantine in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combined with the objective of making a freer, looser film, this does indeed seem to be the inevitable result.