This was added to my list because it’s a film by the Archers, the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I can’t say that I like it all that much even if it is known as one of the best British films of all time, but I am astounded that this really is all about a ballet production. In fact, its central feature is a performance that goes on for nearly twenty minutes and most of its cast are professional ballet dancers. There’s a delicious uncertainty for a long while as to where exactly this film is leading but it becomes more conventional once two of the main characters fall in love with one another.

I believe this is first film we’ve watched by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the great directors of Golden Age Japanese cinema alongside the better known Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu. This one is naturally one of his best works, apparently adapted from a folk tale. It’s a real tearjerker, piling tragedy after tragedy on top of its characters yet doesn’t feel over the top because of their folkloric origins. It’s absolutely brutal in portraying how pitiless the slave-owning society in medieval Japan was like. By the midpoint, I was ready to watch the protagonist lead a slave rebellion and burn it all down. This being not only a Japanese film but one that is all about imparting a Buddhist sense of mercy, this is very much not what happens.

This is a slickly made gangster film that takes place entirely within the confines of a tailor’s shop and is suffused with black humor. There’s probably a clever word for this specific genre but for the life of me, I can’t think of what it is. This kind of thing has all the hallmarks of a writer having great fun and is usually written by the director himself. Indeed this was the directorial debut of Graham Moore and he is also a co-writer. I found it entertaining and fun, though predictably for the genre there are perhaps one or two layers of obfuscation and deception too many. If I were younger, I would probably have found it to be great. As I now am, I think it’s cleverly written and that’s all it has going for it.

I hesitated to watch this as I find biographies tiresome as a general rule and I have no particular affinity for the person of Leonard Bernstein. In the end, what made me come around was that it’s focused on his relationship with his wife, rather than his career as a musician, and I thought my wife might like it. Its specific focus actually made it better than I’d expected. On the one hand, it’s another case of the talented superstar who can’t help being involved in endless extramarital affairs. On the other, it establishes that his wife was still the love of his life the whole time, at least within the story that it wants to tell. I have too little emotional connection with any of these people to love this film but I do have to admit that it’s solid work.

The ongoing Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the worst humanitarian disasters of our time and certainly Malaysia is among the countries affected, yet there is still a paucity of films on the subject. This documentary focuses on the relationship between two women, Hla, a Buddhist Rakhine midwife, and Nyo Nyo, her Muslim Rohingya apprentice. This is a ground-level view of their daily lives filmed over a number of years and doesn’t have much in the way of a broad overview of the Rohingya people. I found the unfiltered and raw point of view invaluable and it helped me understand the tension of living as a Rohingya in Myanmar.

We’ve seen Ali Abbasi’s work before in the form of the excellent Border but I had no idea that the director of that Swedish film was even Iranian. Here he has made a film that is set in Iran and inspired by a real-life serial killer active from 2000 to 2001. This looks astonishingly close to an American-style thriller, except it is supposed to be in Iran and that makes all the difference. Even better is that it doesn’t immediately end once the serial killer is caught and as my wife notes, how Iranian society reacts to the ensuing trial is scarier than the murders themselves. This was actually shot in Jordan as this would never have been allowed in Iran itself and so Abbasi holds nothing back in exposing the seedy underbelly of the Islamic Republic.

Highly rated films from the past tend to hit more often than miss with me because there’s usually a good reason why they’re still remembered decades later. I’d say this one is an exception. Billy Bob Thornton delivered an outstanding performance, of that there is no doubt. But when I realized that this film is basically all him, he also wrote and directed it, I started to get queasy. Because this is such a dark and atavistic piece, it makes me wonder about the kind of mindset involved in creating it. In the end, Thornton got what he wanted as this project made him a superstar but this isn’t a film that I would recommend at all.