I enjoyed the first Inside Out way back when it was released and it took a surprisingly long time for them to come out with this sequel. Arguably too long as we’ve long since lost any emotional connection to the characters and 2024 feels like a different era than 2015. The premise of Riley’s puberty ramping up all of her emotions and introducing a whole host new ones is a promising one. But it mostly feels like a reprise of the first film with the trite lesson that every part of Riley has a role to play. Even more disappointing is that it refuses to show any meanness whatsoever so it’s unconvincing and boringly low stakes throughout.

This is a film about a donkey and given that this is a tragedy and it is supposed to have been inspired by a passage by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it’s a given that the donkey dies in the end. It also suffers horribly but then so do many of the people around it. This is considered one of the greatest films of all time and of course it’s not really about a donkey in particular but life in general. I think its messaging is a little too simple by modern standards but it is very effective at engaging your emotions.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has earned huge amounts of goodwill as he has made some of the most memorable and beautiful films we’ve seen. It took a while for me to get around to his latest one as they’re always so long but I was expecting good things from it. Unfortunately while it has some gorgeous cinematography and is crammed full of the kind of wordy dialogue the director likes, I’m not quite sure he knows what he’s doing here. The whole time I thought the film was working towards a condemnation against the extremely petty main character but then the monologue at the end appears to be sympathetic towards him. I must conclude that either the film is a failure and there is some mixed messaging going on here or else the director has some strange views.

Knowing nothing about Greek politics, I was apprehensive being able to understand a political film based on real-life events there. It turned out though that this is a fast-moving, readily watchable thriller that shows the assassination of an opposition leader and then more importantly covers the investigation that follows. The details shown here of a conspiracy and cover-up at the highest levels of government comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with modern politics but it’s immensely satisfying to watch them play out step by step here. What shocked me was that the investigating magistrate was allowed to get as far as he did even though the entire government is obviously in on it.

So I both love and hate this latest film by Brandon Cronenberg. I have to admit that it got me good by purporting to be about Western tourists taking a risk on the wild side of a lawless, undeveloped country, but of course it’s the tourists who are the predators all along, joke’s on me. On the other hand, I really hate films in which the main character is sort of high and in an altered mental state the whole time as is the case here. He is never able to articulate why he does the things he does and just sort of goes along with the flow. It’s got some neat ideas, but that’s all there is and it has no interest in world building at all.

After reading Outlive, my wife and I dived deep into the longevity movement so we just had to watch this documentary about Bryan Johnson. The guy is pretty much the high priest of the movement and as this film shows, he seems to revel in that role. The film is about the man himself, so those looking for technical information on his Blueprint life-extension program will be disappointed. He’s obviously a very enthusiastic participant, yet director Chris Smith is to be credited for not turning this into just a hagiography. Johnson may be completely earnest in his aims and I don’t think he’s a scammer. But he’s also a deeply weird person with what seems like an unhealthy relationship with his son.

I haven’t seen many films by Mia Hansen-Løve and I’m mostly ambivalent about the last one Bergman Island. I was discomfited at first by how this one flits from scene to scene without dwelling on any given moment for very long but I soon grew to appreciate how it paints a broad portrait of the main character’s life. In fact, the style reminded me of the director’s even earlier film Things to Come and I realized that both are deeply drawn from her real-life emotions and experiences with her parents. The focus here is on the father character’s drawn out decline from a rare variant of Alzheimer’s disease. It is complemented by the story of the main character’s embrace of love at a later stage in life, an unusual combination that nonetheless works very well.