German cinema is underrepresented in the films we’ve watched so far and this marks the first work we’ve seen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Not being used to his style or German cinema, it’s difficult at times to parse if it’s meant to be humorous. Its story of an African immigrant in Germany is a powerful one yet it makes its point so bluntly and the scenario is such a patently unrealistic one that I keep thinking it’s some kind of satire. It’s a very stylized film and an effective one but I think I need more exposure to German cinema to better appreciate it.

Here’s one Studio Ghibli film my wife said she had difficulty getting into back in the day. And no wonder because rather than focusing on particular characters, it’s a larger story about the civilization of raccoon dogs having trouble adapting to the urban buildup of Japan. It actually goes so deeply into their culture and their magical abilities that I wondered how they are relevant, since after all this is all made up. It doesn’t hold back though, delighting in crude references to their balls, and explicitly shows both raccoon and human lives being lost as part of the conflict. Of course, this can’t be a story that has a happy ending but it strikes a heartfelt bittersweet note and that’s good enough.

This film leaves me with very mixed feelings. For much of its first half, I was convinced that this was a superficial film about the spring break-type wild holiday that I don’t get the appeal of at all. But then when the main character Tara starts having doubts, I realized that it has a lot of psychological depth after all. As my wife explained, this may well be the most realistic portrayal of a young girl’s first experience of sex yet made. There’s a lot going on under the surface, Tara’s feelings, the actions of the boy, the reactions of her friends. This won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and deservedly so.

Louis Malle is a famous French director so it’s sort of funny that the onl;y films we’ve watched so far by him have been his later American ones. It’s good then to go back to this earlier one that helped establish his career. Despite its year of release, this absolutely isn’t New Wave as it actually has a straightforward narrative. The main character Alain Leroy isn’t a person that I would ordinarily have much sympathy for, being a former alcoholic who has difficulty finding purpose in life now that he is sober. Yet Malle’s direction really spoke to me and I can see why this is one of Wes Anderson’s major inspirations.

Here’s a film by a director Nicole Holofcener whose work I haven’t really seen before. It’s the kind of film that I’m not inclined to like, being set in New York in which nearly every character is a creative artist of some stripe and are each obsessed with their personal foibles. Fortunately this is a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and the characters themselves are well aware that their problems are insignificant in the greater scheme of things. This is no psychological deep dive but it’s clever, occasionally funny and that’s good enough.

My wife wanted to watch this local film for the longest time due to the international accolades it won. Yet when it was finally screened in Malaysian cinemas, it was censored so badly that this version was disavowed by its director Amanda Nell Eu. Fortunately for us, it’s now available on Netflix so we can see for ourselves both why it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and why the Malaysian government is uneasy about it. I am in awe of the director’s ability to coax such strong performances out of its young, untrained performers and her courage in confronting the problems of female puberty in a conservative society. It struggles to land its ending but I can understand what the director is going for so it works out alright.

Even before it won all those Oscars, I was always going to have to get around to watching this eventually as much as I didn’t relish the prospect of watching a three-hour biopic. Critics have praised Christopher Nolan for successfully framing this as a thriller with the use of jumps in the timeline to add tension and uncertainty yet to my mind it is still a biopic. The unique angle that Nolan adds is elevating the character of Lewis Strauss to serve as the principal antagonist of the film. I understand that this was a major brouhaha at the time but as Nolan observes himself, it really is much ado about nothing. It feels unworthy to make such a big deal out of it and in the same vein, I don’t think very highly of this film either.