Continuing through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville, here’s a film that is known as being one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites. The intertitles explain that the title is slang referring to a police informant and so the audience is lead to wonder which character is the real informant the whole time. This is a twist movie that is only really good for watching once and I can’t say anything about it without spoiling it. So consider yourself warned if you continue reading. I admit that its gimmick is original and the visuals are beautiful but I wouldn’t consider this a great film.

This is a relatively recent British film but it looks very old because it was shot on a vintage hand-cranked camera. This anachronism nicely matches the film’s subject matter, about a curmudgeonly fisherman upset about the gentrification of his fishing village. I really wanted to like this and I felt that director Mark Jenkin was being remarkably fair even if his sympathies are obviously with the fisherman. Yet between the technical constraints of his chosen form and the amateurishness of the production, it’s too poorly made to be more than an interesting experiment.

Here’s yet another Senegalese film, an even earlier one that is apparently the first sub-Saharan African film to be internationally acclaimed. I didn’t like this very much as it’s just too simple and not very well made at all. None of the actors are very good and it’s infuriating to me that the main character Diouana has all these internal thoughts yet never voices any of them out loud. I get that this is really an allegory about colonialism but it’s so abstract and the ill treatment of Diouana by her employers so minor in the grand scheme of things that I found her reaction a shocking overreaction. I mean I get the point but this is all so removed from any real world situation that I found it impossible to get into it.

As with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind I keep being forced to revise my opinion of the works of Hayao Miyazaki. This is another extremely violent title, complete with death on a large scale. The environmentalism theme is familiar but the death and violence gives the conflict real bite and it’s not obvious which side is in the right. Unusually for the genre, this film provides good reasons for both humans and the animals of the forest to have the right to live. The fights look spectacular without glorifying the violence and the art is as amazing as ever. As my wife notes, it stumbles at the end by being unwilling to fully commit to a specific vision for the future but I’d easily rank it among the best of Studio Ghibli’s works and consider it a film that is definitely intended for adults.

I originally had no interest in watching this, thinking that the whole 1MDB saga is over and done with. What changed my mind was Najib Razak’s interview in it and his recent request to have the documentary taken down from Netflix. Hooray Streisand Effect! I’m not sure that this is actually a decent film as some of the editing choices are questionable and the interstitial scenes they made are downright cringey. I’m not sure how much sense it would make to non-Malaysian audiences either. I personally was able to follow along because I already mostly everything. Overall I’d say it was a worthwhile use of my time mainly due to the Najib interview and the perspective it offers from the FBI agent attached to the US embassy in Malaysia.

This is such an iconic film that not having watched it would be embarrassing to any serious cinephile. I always suspected that I wouldn’t like it and this is notable mostly because of it was a pioneer in so many filmmaking techniques. This was indeed largely the case as the film reads as being too obviously propaganda to me to have any emotional effect. I suppose it is impressive in being able to muster such large crowds for huge scenes, no CGI crowds back then, and it’s cool to see the Soviet-era battleships up close like this. But even the much vaunted Odessa Steps scene felt like nothing special to me because its lessons have been so thoroughly absorbed by other filmmakers already.

I do so love the films of Kelly Reichardt and though this one is set in Montana instead of Oregon as with most of her work, it’s not any less good. This consists of three individual stories of different women, adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy. As always, there is so much depth and understated emotion in the characters, different as they each are, through the landscape of Montana adds an element of isolation to all of them. Without being able to focus on one specific protagonist here, the emotional impact is more muted than something like Old Joy but every story is strong and enjoyable.