So this is technically a sequel to the 2016 film that confusingly shares the same name but as it was terrible I don’t regret not watching that one. Thankfully it’s the Suicide Squad which means their team members change all the time and continuity isn’t that important. I fully agree with all of the critics that this truly is an outstanding superhero action movie on all counts with almost no flaws. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have a good director like James Gunn who actually seems to like comic book stories instead of looking down on the genre and of course this wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been allowed to let loose on the violence with an R-rating.

While the more mainstream releases of Hong Kong’s cinema continues to fall to impress, we do get independent gems that worth our attention. Ray Yeung is a director who seems to have made a career out of highlighting homosexual issues and despite being himself gay and of Hong Kong nationality, this is his first film that is in Chinese and set in Hong Kong. I detect some inexpertness in the directing but the premise is both compelling and inarguably compelling.

We’ve got to run out of Alfred Hitchcock films to watch eventually and this one may even be it as I didn’t find it terribly interesting. It’s a war film that is a hodgepodge of different things: romance, spy intrigue, humor, action and so on and doesn’t gel together well at all. It isn’t at all like Hitchcock’s usual style and while it’s obviously based on World War 2, it uses fictional people and even a country to obfuscate matters, making it even more of a mess. Some critics at the time called it a glorified B-movie and that’s exactly what it feels like to me.

This film may not be straight out pornography but it sure looks like it. It is a film, an art film even as it has received the cachet of being shown at international film festivals, that is about the pornography industry itself. As such it has plenty of scenes that could be in porn but it shies short of actually depicting any sex. The film does depict the unsavory aspects of the industry but at the same time it actually makes it look like the industry isn’t that different from any other. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s all that good a film as it struggles with the characterization of its protagonist.

Just to have some variation in the television shows, I though I might try this, a British adaptation of Dracula that was advertised as being made by the creators of Sherlock. The showrunners being of course Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, this uses the British format of only three episodes but each one being about an hour and half long. The first episode seemed promising, adhering to the source material quite closely with some important and interesting variations including making Van Helsing a nun named Agatha. However it goes off the rails very quickly after that with the intent obviously being to be as different as possible from its inspiration. This is to its detriment in my opinion.

This is billed as an epic fantasy film but if you’re expecting an action fantasy movie you would be sorely disappointed as I don’t believe there is a single swordfight in the entire film. It is rather an adaptation of the 14-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Without prior knowledge of it, I fear that watching this would be quite a befuddling experience as this was the case for me. Still, the film evokes a feeling of old fantasy before it was completely colonized by games and paperback novels and as such there’s an undeniable lyrical power in it.

A discussion on the more notable Argentinean films of the recent past led us to Nine Queens, which we of course loved. The other film is this one which was considered good enough to merit being adapted by Hollywood. This one also stars Ricardo Darín as the lead but is otherwise a very different film. Though it seems at first to be a crime thriller, it is actually a very romantic film. This combination is strange enough to intrigue me and it is a very emotionally intense film. I think however that while this film does capture some of the political conflict in Argentina the earlier film still better represents it.