Akira Kurosawa is of course one of the greatest Japanese directors of all time but he is also judged to make films that are very Westernized. I mention this because this one feels particularly Westernized to me from the nature of its plot to its esthetic. Indeed I later read that it is considered a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and yet is firmly set in Japan’s postwar era, known both for its poverty and its endemic corruption.

This is another one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more experimental films, set in a single location and elaborately planned out to create the illusion of a single continuous, uninterrupted take. Even the plot is novel as the audience is shown the body and who the murderers are right at the beginning so the whole thing is an elaborate game over which, if any, of the other characters catch on. This film had a mixed reception on release and some critics thought that it was technical cleverness and nothing else. Like much else of Hitchcock’s oeuvre however it has been redeemed nowadays and I don’t consider it a minor film at all.

I found it amusing to watch both Black Widow and this film with a rather similar premise in short order, young women superspies being a Hollywood staple now. This one seemed to have rapidly dropped off the radar soon after release which is a shame because it is an excellently made film in many respects and I really appreciated how it creates a character who comes across as every bit as deadly as Black Widow, if not more so, without feeling at all like a superhero movie. Unfortunately it also has flaws and might have made for a more impressive spectacle with a bigger budget.

The Russian people have suffered more than most under the Second World War and this is well represented on film. The Cranes are Flying is one of the earliest and most well known such efforts. Unfortunately while there is a lot of emotive power in the simplicity of this drama, it is a very traditional and old-fashioned film and as such feels to me more like a sort of prototype in what it is trying to achieve that has since been superseded by other films. It’s also a little too obviously nationalistic propaganda for my tastes.

The personal story of Britney Spears as a musician and a celebrity isn’t that interesting to me but this film’s focus is on the media’s reaction to Spears than the person herself. It won critical acclaim and no wonder, it is one of the rare activist documentaries to actually succeed in its objective. Shortly after it was released, a judge ordered an end to her father’s involvement in her conservatorship and it certainly seems that this film had a part to play in that decision, so that’s quite amazing.

This is a French thriller which was commercially very successful and won its share of critical acclaim as well. It felt very much like an American thriller to me, and no wonder, for it was adapted from an American novel of the same title, with the story transposed to France. While there’s some novelty in seeing a French film in this style and some excitement when the main character is on the run from the police, I did not much care for the film by its end. It’s just too overwritten with too many characters and the protagonist has so little agency that he’s seems more like an observer than a participant.

Everyone knows about My Fair Lady but before that was this much earlier adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the dramatist himself supervised this production and wrote the screenplay. Though it has been outshone by the musical now, this film was very successful in its day. Without the music, this is less fun but I feel that it does make the drama of the situation feel more serious and highlights the inherent unfairness of how much the way one speaks can alter a person’s fate.