I was under the impression that this was a documentary about the ill-fated Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and so was blown away that it’s a dramatic reenactment with best in class production values. Everything else about the film is on point as well, the acting, how it handles cannibalism, how the survivors struggle to make sense of it all. It’s only the latest in a long line of adaptations about this disaster but it might be the most authentic one yet with its use of Uruguayan and Argentine actors.

Venturing a little outside of our usual picks for television shows, here’s a drama about Koreans who are in migrants in Japan. It’s really an American production, being an adaptation of an English-language novel by a Korean-American writer. That’s probably why this accords better with our tastes being a compact series with a fast moving pace, unlike the interminably long shows common in Asia. It covers multiple generations of the same family from roughly 1915 to 1989. We really liked the stories set in the distant past about the beginnings of the family but the material set in the 1980s seem uninspired. We’ll have to wait for the reviews to decide if we’re going to watch the upcoming second season.

This is another one of Agnès Varda’s documentaries, or video essays really, that she made late in her life. It won me over right from the beginning with the title card of her production company Ciné-Tamaris being her cat in her own house. Since everyone likely is wondering what gleaners mean, she goes straight to explaining the word from the Dictionnaire Rousseau. The film follows Varda as she travels all over France with her handheld digital camcorder to meet the people who gather the leftover crops after the harvest from fields in the countryside or scavenge food and trash in the cities. As the French title makes clear, Varda considers herself a gleaner as well as she gathers ideas, inspiration and meaning from those she meets.

I’ve soured on the works of Wes Anderson of late but after dithering for a while, I gave in and watched this one. Once again, it’s an ensemble film featuring an insane number of Hollywood luminaries and doesn’t really mean anything at all apart from the usual pathos of its characters. Yet I ended up rather liking this one because it’s very overt in telling the audience not to worry too much about it means and to just enjoy the show. It also helps that like the other Anderson films that I’ve most liked, it has more in the way of young adult characters and of course the retro-1950s science-fiction setting is great fun.

I’ve left this, perhaps the most heartbreaking of the Studio Ghibli films, for among the last. I couldn’t help but be partially spoiled in advance as this is so well known but it turned out to be very different from what I expected. For example the famous firebombing scene takes place at the very beginning. It sets the stage for the trials of the brother and sister duo but doesn’t really play a part after that. In fact it seems to me that what causes their deaths isn’t the war at all and I found the situation that the two found themselves in to be implausibly contrived in order to maximize their suffering. Contrary to expectations, I didn’t much care for this film.

I didn’t actually believe that this would really turn out to be a comedy action movie but I suppose I really should have believed in the poster and all of the clues. It’s so weird watching this after Ms. Marvel because it’s doing so many of the same things and even has the same actress playing the villain despite not having any superpowers involved. In some ways, it’s even better since having people with superpowers resort to fisticuffs in the end always looked dumb. There are some points in this film where it crosses the line over into cringe territory but I’d say it’s a decent action movie in the growing girl power genre.

We’re continuing with the recent spate of Malaysian films I suppose as my wife insisted on catching this in the cinema to support local filmmakers. I admit that the idea of a Malay director, Tunku Mona Riza, directing a mostly Chinese cast in intriguing and I do like how it’s set in the town of Taiping. Unfortunately the material she has to work with is television drama level crap. It feels like something out of the 1980s with its moral conservatism and naive take on the human condition. I do want to watch something interesting set in Taiping but this isn’t it.