Mikio Naruse is a contemporary of Ozu and indeed you can recognize many of the same actors and actresses the more famous director uses in this film. Yet while this is visually very similar to Ozu’s work and it is also a drama about ordinary people in what was then modern Japan, the tone of the film could not be more different. Unlike Ozu’s films which are always pleasant no matter the ignoble motives of some characters, Late Chrysanthemums does not shy away from confronting head-on the ugliness of people and the decrepit conditions under which they sometimes live. This film perhaps lacks the finely-tuned sense of drama of Ozu’s masterpieces but it feels to me like a more realistic portrayal of ordinary life in that era.

I do so love the black humor in British crime films and this underappreciated gem is a fine example of it. Made by Stephen Frears, another director whose work I should definitely pay more attention to, this was the feature film debut of Tim Roth and also stars British film greats John Hurt and Terence Stamp. In addition to the always funny capers the characters get to up in it, I was surprised by the seriousness with which the film treats the prospect of imminent death as well as the respect it pays to its female lead, who usually in such films is very quickly killed and forgotten about.

This is the latest of a whole series of horror films, none of which I’ve watched as I’m not a particular fan of these things. They are anthologies in the found footage genre, though I find that their commitment to the narrative device varies by each film. This one consists of four separate short films plus a frame story in between the others. The production quality is deliberately bad as an inherent aspect of the found footage style but I find that by now this actually detracts instead of adds to their verisimilitude. There are some clever ideas and the inclusion of one Indonesian film is just amazing, but by and large I am not impressed.

I said earlier that I really ought to watch more films by Agnès Varda and this film only cements that certainty. La Pointe Courte was her directorial debut and some also consider it to be the very first French New Wave film. Most of her films seem to be pretty short and so is this one but it manages to pack in such a wealth of content. On one level it tells the story of a couple who are trying to find their way through their marriage during a trip to the small fishing village but on another level it’s also a kind of documentary about the way of the life of the villagers there. Combined with the exquisite cinematography that she apparently achieved at a very low budget, this is an incredible masterpiece that I think I like more than many of the more well known French New Wave films.

This wouldn’t be my first choice of a television series to watch but my wife mentioned it and it is intriguing to have a faithful adaptation of a novel be directed by Barry Jenkins. My concern was that a series like this would amount to little more than a testament to almost endless suffering. As it turned out, this series is mostly fantasy with little reference to real historical events. That allows it to throw in all kinds of ideas that can be interpreted as metaphors. But that also means it never feels quite real and the series is structured entirely as the main character Cora running from one situation to another with no end in sight, making watching it an unsatisfying experience to me.

Since it’s not likely that I will ever get to actually watch a live performance of this musical, I will have to be content with this recording of one such performance. In case you’re living under a rock, this is of course the musical biography of American founding father Alexander Hamilton, written and composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda and starring himself as Hamilton. With a running length of two hours and forty minutes watching this is a serious commitment but it is worth it as this is truly a masterpiece that so perfectly encapsulates that piece of American history. It commemorates the deeds of the Founding Fathers, and serves as a surprisingly complete biography of Hamilton, but it also highlights their flaws and how they were, in the end, mere mortals.

Magnus von Horn is an up-and-coming Swedish director who studied in Poland which explains why he has made a Polish film about the life of a social media influencer. This is of course a very hip subject and it might be easy to imagine what direction such a film might take. Yet this film continually surprised me with its choices. I’m not sure that it’s all good and plenty of the problems experienced by the protagonist are unrelated to her being an influencer. But it is well made and intriguing and that’s enough to win von Horn plenty of fans among the critics.