I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a proper Japanese Godzilla film before this and I consider the American version one of the worst films I’ve written about. Given the critical reactions to this latest reboot, I had high hopes for this one and largely wasn’t disappointed. Hollywood is agog that it managed to look so good while spending so little on special effects but it’s still obvious that this isn’t a state of the art film. The story is kind of simple as expected but at least it isn’t too stupid and wrapping a life affirming theme around it is a laudable twist on post-World War 2 Japan.

A while back, I mentioned how Martin Scorsese always seems to make the same type of mobster film. Well, he certainly proves me wrong on that count with this epic about a conspiracy to kill practically an entire American Indian tribe. Three and a half hours is long even by Scorsese standards, yet he makes good use of every second of it and just barely manages to tell the whole story. Telling it through the perspectives of Ernest and Mollie made all the difference as it creates this creeping sense of dread as Ernest is one of the conspirators killing her people all along. It’s the perfect material to be adapted to film really as you really want more people to remember this heinous crime.

We’ve worked our way through a fair number of the films of Satyajit Ray and while this one wasn’t made that late in his career, it feels more modern to me than many others. It takes place almost entirely on a train and while there are several supporting characters, the sole purpose is to shine light into the psyche of its main character. Between the flashbacks and the dream sequences that are rife with symbolism, it even has something of a postmodern feel to me. I had a little difficulty getting into it at first because I thought the stories of the other characters would matter more. Once I realized what it was going for, I was impressed by the richness of the characterization and how full of nuances it is.

I was going to pass on this since it’s a three hour long film with only middling reviews. Our cinephile friend recommended it though, so I thought we should watch it in order to have something interesting to talk about. Even looking at the premise, I was apprehensive about Joaquin Phoenix taking on yet another role as a mentally ill character and the first sequence set in what looks like a dystopian city even reminded me of the Joker. Fortunately that turned out to only the first of many such sequences, each weirder and more surprising than the last. I concede that it’s enthralling just to see what happens next but there’s no point to any of it at all and so my conclusion is that this is just a plain bad film.

We’ve only watched one other film by Douglas Sirk and it was the very surprising romance All That Heaven Allows. This one, Sirk’s last film, similarly has the superficial trappings of a Hollywood soap opera but is shockingly rich with issues of racial identity and gender roles. It gets seriously dark at times and I wondered if it were only because Sirk is German that he is able to dissect American society in this way. Its main failing is that it’s a little too long and even so its ending is a bit of cop out, meandering to a stop without a satisfactory resolution. Still it’s one of the most fascinating films of the era and is so bold that it should raise eyebrows even now.

I haven’t watched an MCU film in ages but I couldn’t miss Deadpool’s official entrance into the Disney-owned Marvel. I was actually prepared to miss this if word-of-mouth was bad but reports indicated that this was exactly what I’d expected out of Ryan Reynolds. The film bored my wife and I both agree that it’s too long and can see why. It’s unashamedly a deep dive into over twenty years of superhero movie history so it’s not surprising that it offers little to non-Marvel fans. It’s a little too much even for me and it’s definitely not a good film in its own right without all that weight of history behind it, but it sure is a lot of fun who those who understand what it is doing.

Nature documentaries are always spectacular and easy to watch. This one however does choose to do things a little differently. While the subject is the search for elusive snow leopard in the Tibetan highlands, it also puts two of the filmmakers, wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and writer Sylvain Tesson, in front of the camera instead of behind it. So in conjunction with the breathtaking shots of the landscape and the animals, there’s also extensive commentary by the two as they reflect on the beauty of what they see and lament how spiritually impoverished the modern world feels in comparison. It’s a nice idea but I don’t think it worked very well as their observations are simply not that original.