I was going to pass on this since it’s a three hour long film with only middling reviews. Our cinephile friend recommended it though, so I thought we should watch it in order to have something interesting to talk about. Even looking at the premise, I was apprehensive about Joaquin Phoenix taking on yet another role as a mentally ill character and the first sequence set in what looks like a dystopian city even reminded me of the Joker. Fortunately that turned out to only the first of many such sequences, each weirder and more surprising than the last. I concede that it’s enthralling just to see what happens next but there’s no point to any of it at all and so my conclusion is that this is just a plain bad film.

We’ve only watched one other film by Douglas Sirk and it was the very surprising romance All That Heaven Allows. This one, Sirk’s last film, similarly has the superficial trappings of a Hollywood soap opera but is shockingly rich with issues of racial identity and gender roles. It gets seriously dark at times and I wondered if it were only because Sirk is German that he is able to dissect American society in this way. Its main failing is that it’s a little too long and even so its ending is a bit of cop out, meandering to a stop without a satisfactory resolution. Still it’s one of the most fascinating films of the era and is so bold that it should raise eyebrows even now.

I haven’t watched an MCU film in ages but I couldn’t miss Deadpool’s official entrance into the Disney-owned Marvel. I was actually prepared to miss this if word-of-mouth was bad but reports indicated that this was exactly what I’d expected out of Ryan Reynolds. The film bored my wife and I both agree that it’s too long and can see why. It’s unashamedly a deep dive into over twenty years of superhero movie history so it’s not surprising that it offers little to non-Marvel fans. It’s a little too much even for me and it’s definitely not a good film in its own right without all that weight of history behind it, but it sure is a lot of fun who those who understand what it is doing.

Nature documentaries are always spectacular and easy to watch. This one however does choose to do things a little differently. While the subject is the search for elusive snow leopard in the Tibetan highlands, it also puts two of the filmmakers, wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and writer Sylvain Tesson, in front of the camera instead of behind it. So in conjunction with the breathtaking shots of the landscape and the animals, there’s also extensive commentary by the two as they reflect on the beauty of what they see and lament how spiritually impoverished the modern world feels in comparison. It’s a nice idea but I don’t think it worked very well as their observations are simply not that original.

When I added this to my list, I had no idea that it was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. I almost never watch remakes but in this instance, there is such a gulf of time and even culture between the two versions that it might be worth exploring. In the event, this is an extremely faithful adaptation of the original. It’s interesting how its Britishness makes it more humorous and entertaining to us than the Japanese original. Yet in the end there’s no real contest. Ikiru possesses layers of depth that are simply absent here, only to be replaced by sentimentality. It’s a nice effort but this is no great film.

This French film is usually considered a documentary and indeed, some call it one of the greatest documentaries of all time. I think it’s more like an experimental art film and even its maker Chris Marker calls it a home movie that others somehow are willing to pay to watch. It consists of both footage that Marker shot himself along with stock footage from others. There’s a lot going on in the extensive narration but some key themes include the impermanence of memory and imbuing meaning through rituals. I’m not convinced that there is anything truly deep in it though. I rather think of it as a carefully constructed puzzle box, meant to pleasingly tickle your mind as the film guides you into making strange, unexpected connections.

My wife has been paying close attention to this latest film directed by Chong Keat Aun as it seemed impossible that it would ever be released in cinemas here in Malaysia. That’s because this is a film, supposedly the very first one, about the 13 May 1969 racial riots in Malaysia, a notoriously touchy subject in our country. Surprisingly it eventually did appear in our cinemas, possibly because the current Prime Minister is Anwar Ibrahim. However it has been significantly censored with lines muted and parts of the screen in some scenes blurred out. My wife was disappointed that it only touches on the historical events lightly, preferring to evoke an emotional reaction by focusing on a very small set of fictional characters. I thought it worked fine but it’s hard to see how non-Malaysians will be able to get much out of it.