It’s a little petty of me but every time I watch a film from a new country, it’s like crossing off a number on my Bingo card. I’ve certainly never watched any film from Zambia before and this is a good one. Taking place against the backdrop of a funeral, it’s another film about how women are oppressed as we’ve just saw in The Great Indian Kitchen. But it’s even scarier here as the patriarchy is enforced by the elder women of the family. It starts out being funny in a very surreal way but towards the end, it’s just hopelessly depressing.

Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart made this shortly after the excellent Clouds of Sils Maria. I skipped it at the time because its reviews were only middling but I’m come back because the trajectory of Stewart’s acting career continues to be impressive. Unfortunately it turns out that the reviews were right. Combining a ghost story with that of a personal shopper for a celebrity is certainly unusual but I kept waiting for some connection to appear which never arrives. The film plays the usual games of ambiguity with the supernatural and that’s not satisfying either. Stewart’s performance here is impressive. Little else about this film is.

This immensely successful and popular Indian film has been remade multiple times in different languages. This original one is in Malayalam and was made by a director Jeo Baby and performers who were not that well-known at the time. I have little patience for misery porn these days and the great genius of this film is that while it highlights the continued oppression of women in India, it refrains from maximizing the wife’s plight in every way possible. The people around here are not deliberately cruel but merely acting how they believe to be right, as dictated by religious, gender and cultural norms. From this, a thousand small humiliations add up to an intolerably miserable existence for the wife that is all the more believable for how mundane it is.

Frieren is one of the most popular anime shows of the moment and was a recommendation from our cinephile friend a while back. We were feeling burned out by the general lack of seriousness in anime and so passed on it. I do rather like the premise of it being about an immortal mage who lives on long after everyone else she has known has died. Watching this now, I loved the early episodes with their theme of loss and time passing. This feels like a markedly more mature anime with less need to resort to dumb gags or provide fanservice. Unfortunately it does drag on too much and risks degenerating into the more usual fare.

This independently made low budget American film was never widely released but it slowly gained fame over time. To say that it’s odd would be an understatement. It’s in black and white and has almost no dialogue but does have sound. It uses crude costumes and graphics instead of expensive special effects. It’s basically a modern Looney Tunes cartoon except in real life and with gore. As usual, I’m a sucker for anything unique and original and this does have plenty of charm. But it could stand to be edited down for length as it starts to get boring once you understand what it’s going for.

I was pretty much sold on this horror film when it was described as an atheist haranguing in a reversal of the usual dynamic. The titular heretic is as charming and loquacious as you could hope for, played brilliantly by Hugh Grant. The religious arguments are superficial but a lot fun and the whole script is written with plenty of Internet-savvy humor. As with all horror films, the setup is way more interesting than the answers at the end but I’d still rate this as a great effort.

Sometimes a work feels too depressing, the problems it highlights so intractable, that I don’t look forward to watching them. This Polish film about the refugees trapped between Poland and Belarus certainly qualifies and one critic condemned it as being misery porn. While harrowing in parts, this is on the whole a balanced and fair portrayal of the crisis. It doesn’t only emphasize the cruelty of the Polish Border Guards but also shows the kindness of Polish activists and the generosity of Poland as a whole in their separate treatment of Ukrainian refugees. It’s an excellent treatment of a complex, politically charged issue and I applaud Agnieszka Holland’s heroism for making it.