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.

I expected this Macedonian language film about witches in the 19th century to be squarely in the horror genre but as my wife notes, it really isn’t horror at all. It’s actually a sort of fantasy drama with very strong humanistic themes. The core premise is sound and fits the setting well. Unfortunately it is let down by lackluster production values including a weak eye for cinematography and cheap visual effects. It’s solid work but it’s perhaps more ambitious than what director Goran Stolevski could actually pull off.

I’ve skipped all of the Star Wars shows after the second season of The Mandalorian. No point in sticking with shows after they’ve jumped the shark. This one however caught my attention due to its rave reviews and best of all, it’s a prequel that builds up to perhaps the best Star Wars film of all time, Rogue One. I can say without exaggeration that this show is amazing and adroitly captures what it means to build a resistance movement from the ground up. It’s also one of the darkest interpretations of the franchise I’ve yet seen, as the rebels can and do make moral sacrifices in the name of the greater good.