I had no interest in watching this until I read the now famous interpretation that Maverick died in the opening scenes and the rest of the film essentially depicts his heaven. Sure enough this is such an apt interpretation that it’s impossible to view this film in any other way, particularly near the end when it abandons any semblance of realism. Yet this is produced so slickly, plumbs the nostalgia well so effectively and is overall so unabashedly positive that it’s infectiously likeable and entertaining. I think it’s a dumb film and I don’t want to like it, but damn if this doesn’t manage to win me over anyway.

This was Ingmar Bergman’s first English-language film, or at least many parts of it are in English anyway, and he also called it the first love story film he ever made. Unlike the rest of the director’s filmography, this one has very low ratings and it left me frustrated with its abrupt ending and deliberate ambiguity. Nonetheless it is a very visceral depiction of raw passion and it’s loaded with references to religious imagery to grant it some deeper meaning. It may not be Bergman’s best work but I think it deserves a better reputation than what it currently has.

I loved Knives Out so much I wanted to watch this in the cinemas the moment it came out. Unfortunately this turned out to be streaming only so it took me until now to get around to it. This is a sequel only in that it features Benoit Blanc as the investigator of a murder mystery but it keeps the same style and the large ensemble cast and that’s good enough for me. Sequels are generally not as good as the film that spawned and this is the case here as well. It’s too heavy-handed on the whole Glass Onion metaphor and the murderer’s plan is indeed really dumb even if that is the entire point. Still this is probably still the best whodunit since the first film and I enjoyed every moment of it.

Feels like we’ve been watching too many films about mountain climbing recently so I should try to cut down on them. This one at least is a little different being a French language animated film that is an adaptation of a Japanese manga series. As the story is wholly fictional, it is allowed to take a far darker turn than any film about real life climbers who mostly want to be seen as inspirational. So while the characters here are just as obsessed with mountaineering as the real climbers we’ve seen, here it is portrayed almost as a kind of curse and that plus the fact that this one is animated marks it as being different from the other films.

Once again I’m not a foodie so I hardly need much convincing that avant-garde haute cuisine is a ripe subject matter for mockery. Still, this exceeded my every expectation in how perfectly crafted it was and as I suspected would be the case, my wife was riveted too. The increasingly pretentiousness of the menu is expected and so too is the pivot to full on horror. What I didn’t expect is how it managed to work in passable backstories for all of the diners and tie everything together so well. It’s fantastic as comedy and a send-up of food culture and honestly one of the better all round films I’ve seen recently.

After years of not a single Malaysian film being featured here, we’ve seen a succession of them recently. This is a Malay language film to boot and was shot in black and white giving it an artistic flair. I really wanted to like this one and indeed the premise of a Malay man from Pahang trying to get by in Kuala Lumpur has a lot of promise. Unfortunately the film’s idea of a main plot is weak and makes poor use of the main character. Bella is a terrible supporting character and every interaction they have together is so clichéd and unconvincing that it really brings down the entire film. It’s still worth watching in my opinion for its portrayal of Kuala Lumpur but it could have been truly great.

People have tried to make live-action Dungeons & Dragons films before and the results were not great. More than a decade later the game itself is more popular than ever thanks to YouTube videos and this feels like an underexploited franchise. This revival is instantly recognizable as being far more successful even from its trailers. It’s easy to see why: it appropriates the Marvel formula of combining action with humor and of taking the lore seriously while not obligating casual viewers to study up on it to enjoy the film. Needless to say, I’m all for it and I’d love to more fantasy films made in this style.