This was added to my list at some point because it is a highly celebrated film with many awards and is considered one of the last of the great musicals of the era. So when its very first big song, Thank Heaven for Little Girls, started up, I was shocked by the very obvious pedophiliac message in it. Things just get worse from there and the whole thing seems like a very malicious caricature of the French conception to love and romance. It’s a pretty film to be sure as it really was shot in Paris and even features scenes in the famous Maxim’s restaurant. But the music is banal and the morals are execrable as few other films are. I cannot believe that this film is as highly regarded as it still seems to be.

I learned about the existence of this film in a roundabout way, from reading an article about the historical figure by the economist Alice Evans. It’s strange to me that I’ve never heard of her before as she was Indonesian and this biographical film about her is available on Netflix. It’s a little too sentimental at times and tries too hard to achieve a happy ending when in fact the real Kartini died tragically young at the age of 25. Overall though it’s an outstanding production by the Indonesian film industry that champions a feminist heroine in a part of the world that is distinctly hard on women.

With its fast-paced dialogue and strange world in newspaper columnists are seemingly all powerful, this was a difficult title to get into initially. But I appreciated the attempt to film this unusual and complex subject and having both main characters be total sleazeballs is an amazingly bold decision. Even apart from the world itself, there are so many things in here that are so weird including J.J.’s obsession with his sister, but I loved it all, especially the savage pettiness of the characters and how it never lets up right up to the end.

I loved Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo but I haven’t had cause to watch his later films. Here we have him directing a very Chinese film with crisp visuals that evoke works such as Black Coal, Thin Ice. Yet this is no noir, it is instead a drama about the angst and aimlessness of Chinese youth, with a dose of confused romance. In theory, this is a thematically rich film with a lot going on. Unfortunately it never gelled together into a coherent whole for me. Reading up on it, it seems like Chen threw the script together in a matter of days while he was under quarantine in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combined with the objective of making a freer, looser film, this does indeed seem to be the inevitable result.

I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a proper Japanese Godzilla film before this and I consider the American version one of the worst films I’ve written about. Given the critical reactions to this latest reboot, I had high hopes for this one and largely wasn’t disappointed. Hollywood is agog that it managed to look so good while spending so little on special effects but it’s still obvious that this isn’t a state of the art film. The story is kind of simple as expected but at least it isn’t too stupid and wrapping a life affirming theme around it is a laudable twist on post-World War 2 Japan.

A while back, I mentioned how Martin Scorsese always seems to make the same type of mobster film. Well, he certainly proves me wrong on that count with this epic about a conspiracy to kill practically an entire American Indian tribe. Three and a half hours is long even by Scorsese standards, yet he makes good use of every second of it and just barely manages to tell the whole story. Telling it through the perspectives of Ernest and Mollie made all the difference as it creates this creeping sense of dread as Ernest is one of the conspirators killing her people all along. It’s the perfect material to be adapted to film really as you really want more people to remember this heinous crime.

We’ve worked our way through a fair number of the films of Satyajit Ray and while this one wasn’t made that late in his career, it feels more modern to me than many others. It takes place almost entirely on a train and while there are several supporting characters, the sole purpose is to shine light into the psyche of its main character. Between the flashbacks and the dream sequences that are rife with symbolism, it even has something of a postmodern feel to me. I had a little difficulty getting into it at first because I thought the stories of the other characters would matter more. Once I realized what it was going for, I was impressed by the richness of the characterization and how full of nuances it is.