I rated The Suicide Squad as probably my favorite of the DC superhero films I’ve seen so if James Gunn is making a spin-off television show from it, I’m all onboard. Though this is a DC show, it features characters so obscure that their comic book origins barely matter. This gives Gunn a free hand in doing pretty much anything he wants with them and that’s key to why this series is so good. It has great character development, funny dialog, even if there’s a little too much of it at times, a good enough plot and surprisingly strong action scenes. I’d characterize this as an attempt to copy the MCU’s formula but with something close to an R-rated sensibility. As far as I’m concerned, the formula is a winning one.

Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are an established comedic duo and I suspect that how much one likes this film directly depends on how much you like their act. I’ve never seen any of their work before this and I have to say that I was totally flummoxed by the tone of this film and who it’s meant for. Eventually I was able to work out that it’s really a power fantasy for middle-aged women while embracing maximum silliness. This isn’t really a film that is to my tastes but I do acknowledge how well-made it is and how fully committed it is to its particular vision of female friendship.

Pretty much the same gang of filmmakers seem to be making the most highly acclaimed films in Taiwan and so I keep watching them. We’ve seen work by director Chung Mong-hong a few times before this and I have mixed feelings about them. I’d rank this as one of the better ones due to its solid foundations and how it treats the topic of mental illness with maturity. It does unfortunately have the same kind of shock twist ending that this gang seems to favor but that I feel is detrimental to treating it as a serious film.

As a big fan of Jacques Demy’s musicals, I’ve had this musical by Jean-Luc Godard on my to watch list for a while now. This is one of Godard’s earliest films though and not considered among the best. Indeed it plays off the musical aspects as a kind of joke and even the title is a silly bit of wordplay. Underneath the absurdity the plot is rather straightforward and readily accessible. I enjoyed its sense of fun and humor and as well as how it puts the romantic couple in an entirely mundane domestic context but it’s also deliberately designed to frustrate fans of traditional musicals.

I almost never cover any Malaysian films here and that is because even the best of them are rather mediocre by international standards. Still, my wife wanted to watch this while it was showing in local cinemas as a small show of support. Tan Chui Mui is one of the most internationally prominent Malaysian directors these days, and she even wrote and stars in it herself. For my part, this definitely counts as an eccentric arthouse film and I’m fairly confident that I understand what the director was going for. Yet I do not like it at all and consider it a personal vanity project that was never intended to have wide appeal.

This Coen brothers film opens with a prologue set in the 19th century about a Jewish couple in Eastern Europe. It seemingly has nothing to do with the rest of the film. The brothers wanted something that felt like a traditional Yiddish folklore and not knowing of anything suitable, seems to have wrote one themselves. The audience is left confused as to what it means and this may well be the point as the film is about the protagonist experiencing a series of setbacks in his life and being unable to make any sense of it. This film draws heavily from Jewish culture and as such parts of it are inaccessible to me. I enjoyed its bleak humor and admire how this seems to be very much a personal project of the brother, being directly inspired by their own familial backgrounds, but this won’t be one of my favorites.

This is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut feature film as a director and it’s a very strong entry. She doesn’t appear in it herself but there is plenty of other female star power in this woman-centric film. I’m not a fan of its central plot device since it’s transparently there just so that the main character has something that she can be involved in. But I do love it as an exploration of some of less discussed aspects of of motherhood including the sensation of it being a prison.