My wife is a huge Studio Ghibli fan so it’s always a happy surprise to come across one of their films that she hasn’t watched yet. It’s always so wonderful to see these hand drawn animated films that are so full of detail today and the setting of what must be the most perfect and idyllic Japanese small town ever adds to the pleasure. The plot is too sweet for me though and the main character is so much the ideal, diligent good girl that she’s just unreal. It’s a very beautiful and pleasant film to watch but not anything to engage with seriously.

I added this to my list because I loved the two previous films I’ve watched by the filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger so much. Unfortunately this turned out to be a lesser film that at times comes close to being campy. It takes some interesting twists that keep it from being trite including pitting the United States against Britain in a contest over moral superiority. There is some startling imagery and some fascinating perspective presented here, but ultimately this is too shallow a film to worth bothering with.

I’m pretty much done with the films of Jean-Luc Godard but I just had to watch this one which I believe is his only one that can be considered truly science-fiction. Godard’s films are famously obtuse but this one is pretty transparent to me about a secret agent who infiltrate a technocratic dictatorship. Everything in it, its themes, its ideas and concepts has been done to death by now. It is still impressive as a very early showcase of these tropes and how Godard appropriates plain old Paris to look dystopian is fascinating. My least favorite part is the utter ineffectiveness of the security apparatus of the police state. Godard isn’t an action movie director of course, so what passes for action scenes in here are just laughable.

This was the other film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi that was released in the same year as Drive My Car to similar critical acclaim. It’s anthology of three stories, all written by the director himself and all featuring a very feminine perspective. They’re very talky stories about romantic entanglements, unusually so for a male director, and it’s true that they are exceptional in drawing the viewer in and holding your attention. Still the situations are sometimes very contrived and it’s distinctly inferior to Drive My Car. It’s not bad, but not really what I like either.

This really counts as a remake since there was already a 1947 version adapted from the same book and they seem quite similar. You can tell from the subject matter how this is a good fit for Guillermo del Toro and it does a fantastic job of immersing the viewer in the world of carnivals. The film gets less interesting once the protagonist leaves the carnival with the main plot being rote and predictable. It’s lifted straight from the novel of course but it’s old fashioned and traditional that it would have been better to come up with a more modern twist.

I haven’t played Cyberpunk 2077 yet because my current computer probably isn’t powerful enough to run it. But I actually own the pencil and paper Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game so it’s kind of crazy to think that I’m watching an anime adaptation of it thirty years after I had this book in high school. This adaptation has a rather straightforward storyline and I can’t say I like the protagonist’s motivation being about getting a girl. Still it nails the dystopian, life is cheap and meaningless theme of the cyberpunk genre perfectly and the hectic visuals capture this vibe well.

We’d previously watched The Disciple by director Chaitanya Tamhane but I’d actually encountered his name before that. This older film was hard to find and so it took me until now to watch it. I’m very glad I persevered and kept it on my to watch list because this is one of the best films I’ve seen recently. Not only is this a revealingly honest depiction of the court system in India, it also provides a window into the lives of the people of different social classes who are embroiled in this case. I am simply in awe of the richness of the themes touched upon here and how it has so many moving parts and so many characters, yet everything fits together perfectly.