After loving Local Hero so much, adding this equally highly regarded earlier film by director Bill Forsyth to my watch list was a must. This is a really low budget production, so cheaply made that the actors apparently just wore their own clothes. Yet this back to basics production values actually heighten its sense of authenticity and provinciality. I can’t say that I always get the film’s sense of humor but I really loved its charm and especially appreciated how it treats the subject of teenage infatuation and horniness with kindness and sweetness.

Independent filmmakers come up with great horror concepts and this one mines the stuff of nightmares for its material. The director Anthony Scott Burns and the cast aren’t complete unknowns but they’re all new enough that most people probably haven’t seen anything they have been it. This film is imperfect in that it offers no satisfactory explanation to the strange phenomena that happens in it, yet as my wife notes that may be a deliberate decision to heighten its scariness and this is indeed one horror film that is undoubtedly scary.

Here’s another shot at a film by Claire Denis even though we keep not quite being able to get what critics love so much about her work. This one is a very subtle film, perhaps too subtle as it seems almost bereft of any plot, but after getting to know its characters, it comes closest to a film by this director that I actually like. It also presents a view of the Parisian suburbs that is almost completely inhabited by people of color. That isn’t directly relevant to the themes or the characters but it still is a rather startling portrayal of France.

Nicholas Cage does so much awful work these days that it was quite a surprise last year to see this low budget, independent film shoot to the top of critics’ charts. After learning about its premise, I was disinclined to like this, worried that it would be mostly about watching one or more animals suffer. As it turned out, this film isn’t really about the pig at all and is a lot more like John Wick than I ever imagined, albeit in a radically different direction. It sure is an interesting and creatively impressive film but it has as little to do with real cooking and food as John Wick has with real combat.

Due to how much I loved The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I am certainly going to watch more of the work of its two directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who as a duo call themselves the Archers. This is again a film that is really about Britishness itself, being inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but set during the Second World War. As Chaucer’s collection of stories is about a group of pilgrims travelling to Canterbury, so too is this film about a group of people who befriend each other on the road and find themselves going to Canterbury as well. In this way, it captures a little of what the pilgrimage experience might have been like for those in the Middle Ages and shows off the city and its surroundings to wonderful effect.

As I write this, director Jafar Panahi has once again been imprisoned. His sad fate contrasts sharply with the tone of this, one of his better known films that is about the oppression of women in Iran but is lighthearted and patriotic. This is about how the country stops women from attending football matches but this doesn’t deter a determined group of female fans. It was apparently filmed in a stadium during an actual qualifying match which gives this an electrifying atmosphere and incredible sense of authenticity. It’s fiction of course because no way would real soldiers and police officers be as empathetic and as easily bullied as the ones shown here as the director’s own fate demonstrates. But it sure does make for a fun movie.

This is a German film in that the production company, director and most of the cast are German but its heart and soul is Japanese. It is in fact an obvious homage to the works of Yasujirō Ozu transposed to Germany which is all well and good. But what makes it great is that it then builds on that foundation to explore the aftermath of the death of a spouse. I’m surprised that this doesn’t seem to be better known and more highly regarded and it’s true that it could stand to be a little less heavy-handed in its messaging which prevents it from being truly sublime. Still, I do believe that this is one of the favorite films I’ve watched so far this year.