This film by Satyajit Ray feels utterly different from his other works yet we loved it just the same. I understand that this is the only one of the director’s body of work made in the Hindi language and indeed this one deals with the fate of an entire kingdom, the state of Awadh. I kept expecting the two parallel storylines to converge at some point but I suppose this is part of the joke as the film is all about recounting a historical tragedy with a powerfully incisive sense of humor.

We’ve watched several films by Pedro Almodóvar and quite a few of them star Penélope Cruz. This is another one of his films that really only has woman characters and every single man in the lives of these women are monsters. It’s darkly amusing and for a while there’s a bewildering sense of not knowing quite where the director might be going with this. This film is highly rated by critics but I don’t see the point of it at all and I find it ludicrous how lightheartedly it treats such weighty topics like sexual assault. I suspect that I’m missing something here.

This was adapted from a novel and that usually means a denser, richer film. It’s certainly long but I didn’t find it especially rich or insightful. It’s a beautifully shot film, somewhat anime-style in its aesthetics even, and director Naomi Kawase gets al of the basic building blocks of her craft right so it manages to convey plenty of emotion. Yet it’s also a film that plays things completely safe and breaks no new ground whatsoever. This means that I had no difficulty enjoying myself while watching it but at the end I found myself asking: just why?

We’re probably going to be slowly working through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville next. This director is considered a spiritual father of the French New Wave and this was his first feature film, itself based on a book written when France was under occupied by Nazi Germany. It’s such an impressive film that does so much with so little. Most of it consists of just the same three people in a salon, and this is very much a monologue driven film. Yet it conveys so much of the pain and humiliation of being occupied and how one must passively resist even when active resistance is impossible.

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the modern grandmasters of American cinema so his oeuvre is usually a must watch. I held off on this one for a long while as it didn’t sound like something I would like and unfortunately it turned out to be true. This is one of those made by Hollywood for Hollywood films that is difficult for those on the outside to decipher. The central story about an inappropriate, and perhaps toxic, relationship felt unappealing to me though I find it amusing to think of it as a kind of antiromantic romance film.

This is a film noir that is remarkable on multiple measures for something from the 1950s. The lead is a black man, played by superstar Harry Belafonte. It’s nominally a film about a bank robbery, but the robbery itself is the least important part. It’s instead an in-depth portrait of two very different men and why they were driven to commit this crime. Finally, even though it’s a noir, most of the scenes actually take place in the day time. It’s all the better for it too as we then get all these outdoor shots of the New York of the period. The anti-racism message is too on the nose for us now but the film as a whole is solid and well worth watching even today.

If the last couple of films by Luis Buñuel have been less surreal than usual, this one more than makes up for it. It’s less a film than a series of vignettes about a group of friends who keep trying to sit down for a meal yet fail for increasingly ridiculous reasons. This counts as black humor but instead of laughing, you’d probably be wincing instead. The critique against the bourgeoisie is well observed and I love how Buñuel was seemingly inspired by a simple story of friends showing up unexpectedly. It’s a little too silly for me to care much about however and I’m not sure I even want to spend the brainpower to figure out what some of the weirder stories even mean.