Though made by a Spanish production company, this animated film is set in a pre-9/11 version of New York City and is based on an American graphic novel. Not that it matters as there isn’t a single line of dialogue in it. The story is instead conveyed through nonverbal sounds, body language and on rare occasions text. The themes of friendship and loneliness here are simple and the plot a little silly. Still, the emotions are intense and both the visuals and the music are appealing, so I’d consider this better than what the big American animation studios mostly produce.

It’s strange to think that barely weeks after Jafar Panahi announced that he would be returning to Iran after completing the awards circuit for this film despite knowing that he will certainly be arrested that the current war broke out. The director has always a critic of the regime yet in tackling the subject of torture head-on here, he is at his harshest yet. Through the dialogue of the victims, he exposes not just details of what the torture was like but also what he himself would want to say to those responsible. I’m not sure if this is his best film but it certainly is the hardest hitting one and fully deserves the acclaim that it has won.

One would think that the subject of androids questioning what it means to be human is already oversaturated but Kogonada shows us here that it is not so. Similarly to his feature film debut Columbus, this one brims with a quiet, understated power set in a world that is far more fascinating that it initially seems. I have doubts about just why their android cannot be repaired and how it tries to introduce some conflict in a film that really doesn’t have any. But it is in all other ways a masterful film that I believe has been underrated.

After the acclaim he won for his first two films, Bi Gan certainly isn’t lacking in choices when it comes to what to make next. His latest film takes full advantage of the expanded resources available to him to execute an extremely ambitious vision. He stretches beyond the city of Kaili to tell what seems like a fantastical story with possibly science-fiction elements. But it’s really about cinema itself and the director’s intent seems to be to experiment and show off his mastery of a large variety of different genres and styles. I tend to dislike films that are overly meta and this is the case here as well. It’s a riveting watch as you’re never sure what Bi Gan is going to show you next but it doesn’t seem to me that he has anything interesting to say here.

Coming from the same creative team behind Talk to Me, this one bears many of the same hallmarks and lacks the unique imagery that defined the earlier film. Yet it fixes one of the most glaring flaws I complained about by developing the characters enough that I actually care about them and so I would consider it the better film. I am somewhat disgusted that much of the horror is achieved by victimizing children who have little ability to fight back or even understand what is going on. But I can’t deny how viscerally effective the technique is.

I wasn’t intending on watching this documentary but clips for it are going viral and my wife seemed vaguely interested. I’m familiar with neither Louis Theroux’s work nor any of the male influencers featured here. Still Theroux seems like a skilled interviewer and the influencers are obviously huge celebrities in their own niche. That means this does have value after all even if I’m familiar with most of the talking points. The most fun parts are certainly when Theroux speaks with the women in the lives of these men but the scariest part is when it suggests that political power is the logical next step of the movement.

I haven’t seen enough of Mike Leigh’s work and after taking the time to watch this one, I continue to be wowed by his ability to depict the lives of the British working class. This is ostensibly a film about abortion, one so realistic that it feels like it should be based on a real person. But it’s also about the lives of the working class, their concerns and their problems and how they’re forced to solve them in their own way because the laws as written were made by and for the rich.