I didn’t care too much for director Huang Hsin-Yao previous film The Great Buddha+, finding it too overwrought, but I found this dark comedy much more up my alley. It has all kinds of references to the first film and as it is mostly in Taiwanese, even with the help of subtitles I’m afraid I probably missed quite a few of them. But it’s still enough to appreciate its black humor and uniquely Taiwanese identity, not to mention the eminently relatable stories of four middle-aged friends.

Any documentary that is three and a half hours long would be formidable to approach, let alone one that is about a library. Yet this is exactly that, a documentary about the New York Public Library, which is really a whole institutional system spread out across the entire city rather than a library in a single building. I do think this might a little longer than it needs to be and I can’t say I found every part of it that interesting. But it is an illuminating look at a system of much greater scale and breadth than I’d imagined by a director, Frederick Wiseman, who work I had not previously seen, and who seems to specialize in documenting the institutions of American society for posterity.

Films that are centered around other artistic endeavors are tough to judge when we have no basis on which to decide whether how good that art is. This is doubly true here in a film about a very specific form of north Indian classical music. Even if it’s hard for us who don’t even understand how this form of music is supposed to work, the reverence that the film holds for the art form shines through. Yet what elevates this film to greatness is that this is not blind reverence but a powerful memoir of one man’s journey and how he matures past the teachings of his beloved guru.

This film opens with the name of the production company and the title and nothing else, as if allowing the film to speak for itself. And speak it does. The director’s name and the acting credits only appear after the end of the film. The two leads apparently play some fictionalized version of themselves and the director Ramin Bahrani isn’t exactly a household name, but he was the scriptwriter for The White Tiger that we watched not long ago. As different as the settings of these two films are, both are about under the underclass of society and Chop Shop may well be one of the best films about the lives of illegal immigrants in the United States ever made.

Wikipedia’s description of this as a noir misled me as this has nothing to do with private detectives or criminal cases. This is instead Billy Wilder’s treatise on alcoholism, apparently based on Raymond Chandler. As usual with the director’s work, it is well made and must have been quite an eye-opener in its time. But by now it has been superseded by far grimmer and more realistic takes on various types of addiction and to my eyes is actually more fascinating in the choices that it must make to ensure that the main character retains the sympathy of the audience.

If the strange poster which is also the film’s opening shot isn’t enough to clue you in, this is one very odd film, more like an art installation than any kind of narrative film. Apparently director Roy Andersson has made a whole career out of similar projects but this is my first experience of his work. It consists of long series of vignettes shot with a mostly motionless camera, most of which aren’t unconnected to anything else. It reminds me of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames in that regard but the intent and the effect is completely different.

I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a full episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows but there’s no denying that he is a household name. Even so I wouldn’t have watched this documentary if it weren’t for its sky-high ratings. The first half of this film is largely uninteresting, being about his rise to fame and success and meanders about without coming to a point. But the second half takes a darker turn into Bourdain’s problems with addiction and his depressive personality. As it ends as we all know with his suicide, it is undeniably much more engrossing even if it feels wrong to look so deeply into the private details of the man’s personal life.