Feels like we’ve been watching too many films about mountain climbing recently so I should try to cut down on them. This one at least is a little different being a French language animated film that is an adaptation of a Japanese manga series. As the story is wholly fictional, it is allowed to take a far darker turn than any film about real life climbers who mostly want to be seen as inspirational. So while the characters here are just as obsessed with mountaineering as the real climbers we’ve seen, here it is portrayed almost as a kind of curse and that plus the fact that this one is animated marks it as being different from the other films.

Once again I’m not a foodie so I hardly need much convincing that avant-garde haute cuisine is a ripe subject matter for mockery. Still, this exceeded my every expectation in how perfectly crafted it was and as I suspected would be the case, my wife was riveted too. The increasingly pretentiousness of the menu is expected and so too is the pivot to full on horror. What I didn’t expect is how it managed to work in passable backstories for all of the diners and tie everything together so well. It’s fantastic as comedy and a send-up of food culture and honestly one of the better all round films I’ve seen recently.

After years of not a single Malaysian film being featured here, we’ve seen a succession of them recently. This is a Malay language film to boot and was shot in black and white giving it an artistic flair. I really wanted to like this one and indeed the premise of a Malay man from Pahang trying to get by in Kuala Lumpur has a lot of promise. Unfortunately the film’s idea of a main plot is weak and makes poor use of the main character. Bella is a terrible supporting character and every interaction they have together is so clichéd and unconvincing that it really brings down the entire film. It’s still worth watching in my opinion for its portrayal of Kuala Lumpur but it could have been truly great.

People have tried to make live-action Dungeons & Dragons films before and the results were not great. More than a decade later the game itself is more popular than ever thanks to YouTube videos and this feels like an underexploited franchise. This revival is instantly recognizable as being far more successful even from its trailers. It’s easy to see why: it appropriates the Marvel formula of combining action with humor and of taking the lore seriously while not obligating casual viewers to study up on it to enjoy the film. Needless to say, I’m all for it and I’d love to more fantasy films made in this style.

I think this will be the last of the films of Yasujirō Ozu we’re going to watch. It’s as highly rated as the rest but is considered one of the director’s darkest films. Indeed if you’ve been frustrated by how the characters in Ozu’s films maintain their reserved demeanor and never break down despite their difficulties and stresses, this is the film for you. I don’t like this as much as the director’s other films. Perhaps this isn’t the most comfortable space for him to explore after all and even tries to end with a moralizing lesson. Still it’s a very strong film and it gives you a look at Ozu’s regular cast playing characters a little outside of their usual range.

I put this on my list because I wanted to watch a definitive and faithful adaptation of the play. I’m no expert on Shakespeare but this version does seem plenty authentic to me down to casting leads who are closer in age to the characters as originally intended and having the men wear ridiculous looking tights. Romeo and Juliet hasn’t been considered anything close to an admirable love story for a while now but watching this really drove it home for me what a terrible example the couple are. Shakespeare’s writing still shines even though the plot is dumb and it’s very satisfying to recognize how the lines here are reused just about everywhere.

I’ve never watched a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi but in 2021 he shot to prominence by releasing two critically acclaimed film practically back to back. It took a while to get around to watch this, it being a three-hour film and I’m very glad when I did. This is exactly the kind of quiet, contemplative film that I like and it’s even a chance to get to know the work of Haruki Murakami a little. I don’t actually remember much of Vanya on 42nd Street but I did find it useful to understand a little more about the play at it center. I really enjoyed how dense this is with stories, meanings and subtleties.