This is likely the last Orson Welles film featured here since we’ve already covered most of the important ones and my wife has difficulty getting into them. I suppose it’s appropriate that Welles’ himself thought this was his finest work and fought hard to get it made, even lying to his financiers about what he was making to get it done. It’s an adaptation of Shakespeare, pulling plot details and lines from several plays, to tell the story of the character of Falstaff who Welles plays himself. Personally though I found this at times amusing and was impressed by the scale of the production, I think it says more about Welles’ own philosophy of life than anything. Welles’ attempt to rehabilitate the character is unconvincing to me and that makes this distinctly not the great film he thinks it is.

A string of some of the recent films I’ve especially liked feature a back to basics approach. The same could apply to this film too as the story of a young girl getting an unwanted pregnancy is all too familiar. Offhand though, I can’t recall a single one of these stories that doesn’t put the blame squarely on the girl or end with her making peace with delivering the baby. This is unapologetically a pro-abortion film and it is far past time that something like it exists, to show just how powerless girls feel to have no control over the course of their own lives and how unfair it is that the burden falls entirely on girls while the guys just walk away with no consequences. At the same time, it doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of what an abortion really is either, making it practically required watching for sexual education purposes.

The character of Ms. Marvel was created long after I’d stopped reading comics but I’d always thought it was a great idea and my impression was that they pulled it off very well. Introducing the character to the MCU was a natural choice so even though I’ve stopped watching most Marvel content, I wanted to give this a fair shake. As it turned out, the character as played by Iman Vellani is very likeable and it offers an intriguing look into the Pakistani Muslim community in the US. Yet it’s a pretty mediocre superhero show with poor action choreography, weak villains and weak worldbuilding. It’s about what I expected really and it’s a shame that this seemed to have been one of the least popular MCU shows.

Here’s yet another Studio Ghibli film as working through them is easy on Netflix. Watching this after Spirited Away is an especially illuminating experience as this one feels so much like a trial run for the later, much grander film. I like this a lot more however precisely because its restraint actually make the magical elements that are present all the more magical. That it’s more grounded also means that the shadow of grief and tragedy behind all of the sweetness feels more real and more poignant. The lessons here are that less really is more and it’s important to actually have things that matter even in a dream-like fantasy.

Like its title, this is a quiet, low-key film that breaks no new ground but is well made and its story so sweet that it’s impossible to dislike. It was adapted from a short story Foster by well known Irish writer Claire Keegan, and is the directorial debut of Colm Bairéad. But really it is child actress Catherine Clinch who carries the film. This is also notable in that it’s mostly in the Irish language and so most people will need subtitles for it. Yet the lines of English that it has are delivered in such a thick accent that you’d likely need subtitles for them too!

This is like only the second Swiss film I’ve written about here and it’s a very idiosyncratic one even by the standards of the films I watch. There’s no real plot as it’s almost purely exposition, portraying the way of life in the Saint-Imier valley in Switzerland in the late 19th-century. There are two distinctive elements here: the watchmaking industry that dominates the economy and the strength of the anarchist political movement among the residents. It’s an odd juxtaposition, made especially so by the film’s obsession with measurements of time, distance and money. Director Cyril Schäublin’s sympathy for the anarchists is obvious but I’m not quite sure what to make of the rest of it even as it continues to fascinate and engross me.

So it’s two politics heavy films this week and unlike Detention, this one is completely serious and actually worthy of its subject matter. It covers the so-called Trial of the Juntas in 1985 when Argentina put on trial the leaders of the military dictatorship that controlled the country from 1976 to 1983. It’s superbly crafted and seems to have been deliberately patterned after the best known political thrillers with a strong American influence. The only downside is that you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something truly awful to happen, and I suppose this film is too faithful to the real events to invent something so dramatic as that. What’s most inspiring to me is that this was the most watched Argentine film in its year of release, no mean feat for a legal drama that goes on for almost two and a half hours.