Everyone has been hyping this one up so much since its release and this once it’s absolutely justified. Not only is it far and away the best action movie of the year, it crosses genres and is as much a musical as a horror film. It looks and sounds fantastic, fearlessly imaginative while being grounded in the Jim Crow-era South and is perfectly paced. There’s actually not that much action, but when it arrives, it’s explosive and definitive. It’s what a blockbuster Hollywood movie should be and I only regret not catching it in the cinemas earlier.

Shih-Ching Tsou is a long-time collaborator of Sean Baker and now she finally gets her own feature film, one that is set in Taiwan. Shot on an iPhone and featuring highly saturated colors, it’s stylistically similar to Baker’s work and is about the lives of a downtrodden family in Taipei. It’s fascinating to watch a Taiwanese framed in a more American style and it’s cathartic to watch the family crash headlong against traditional Chinese mores. But on the whole it’s a fairly conventional film that doesn’t break any new ground.

Agnès Varda’s work never stops astounding me and this very early and deceptively simple film is a case in point. It’s shot in cheerily bright colors, reminiscent of the work of her husband Jacques Demy, and presents a postcard perfect picture of a blissfully married life. What’s brilliant about this is that Varda plays it so straight that you could plausibly take it at face value and never see anything wrong in it at all. But it would be uncharacteristic of her make something like that so seen from a different perspective, we can only conclude that it is a horror film.

Frankenstein was apparently Guillermo del Toro’s dream project for years and the filmmaker has certainly earned enough credit to be worth paying attention to no matter what he wants to make. I actually have read the book this time but accept that adaptations have their own take on the source material. In this instance, del Toro has chosen to cast the monster purely as the wronged party which seems a little obvious. He does know exactly where he wants to go with this version of Frankenstein but I was disappointed by the lazy path he took to get there. The result is underwhelming and even a bit boring.

This is probably not one of the better known American films but it has a good claim to being one of the most controversial and hated. It was given an X rating and by the end of the film, you can certainly see how it earned it. I have some issues with the story being framed as a police investigation which I feel is misleading. But it is extremely powerful as a portrayal of a codependent relationship between a beautiful, neurotic woman who refuses to be pinned and a man who is obsessed with completely owning her.

Here’s another Eastern European film, from Romania this time, that talks about migration. While it follows a fictional main character, the story is based on a real incident that took place in 2020. Of course, an art film would be expected to take a stand against xenophobia but this one goes deeper into the underlying divisions in Romania. Unfortunately I found it very inaccessible as fully understanding what is going on would require being able to differentiate between the Hungarians and the Romanians in the film and there are surrealist moments that are hard to make sense of. Even the choice of Matthias as the main character seems questionable, so as much as I admire the effort, I don’t much like it at all.

Despite reading tons of news, I’ve never been a regular reader of The New Yorker. At most, I’d read some particularly noteworthy article when it goes viral and gets shared widely. But this caught my wife’s attention as she’s a writer herself so why not. As the title indicates, this is a documentary commemorating the 100th anniversary of the magazine. Unfortunately they hype up the anniversary so much that it’s off-putting. Nor is getting celebrities to talk about the significance of the publication itself terribly interesting. What does work is highlighting the few special articles that has since gone down in history. The magazine itself may be great but this film about it is merely mediocre.