One of my favorite sources of interesting films to watch these days are recommendations by the economist Scott Sumner on his blog and here is one of his picks. It’s a little hard to see the point of this at first as it’s about a guy who just commits murders seemingly at random. But immediately one suspects that this is based on a real event, so haphazard and pointless are his crimes, and this is indeed the case. Sumner even comments that these look like real murders and not movie ones. By the end, I’m convinced that this is an underappreciated masterpiece and one of the darkest films about Japanese society I have ever seen.

Here is another screwball comedy from the classic Hollywood era starring two of the biggest stars of the era, William Powell and Carole Lombard. The director here, Gregory La Cava, isn’t as well known but he did lead a career as a pre-Disney animator before he started making films, and that might explain the rather creative animated opening title card used in this film. This is only one of the many comedies of this era but I think it is an exceptionally good one, well suited to distract audiences from the then still ongoing Great Depression.

I had no great hopes for this but it did get decent reviews and it is the first Disney animated feature to be inspired by Southeast Asian culture so it seems almost obligatory to watch it. Unfortunately it pretty much falls in line with my expectations: it’s technologically impressive and the art design is fantastic. But it is an American film through and through with only a very superficial veneer of Southeast Asian aesthetics pasted on. In being very much a kids’ only show of little interest to adults, it also feels like it’s Disney and not Pixar, which is kind of interesting given their ownership structure.

Since I’ve developed an appreciation for the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, it makes sense to want to see more of his acclaimed films. Red Desert is the director’s first color film and I think even that fact holds significance in the film itself. Unfortunately I found it difficult to parse the director’s intended meaning here beyond a general indictment of industrialization and a nascent environmentalist message. Such a reading feels a little facile to me however and indeed the director himself insists that is not the whole story. Certainly this isn’t going to be one of my favorites.

It feels like Daniel Kaluuya is in all of the good black American films these days. Not bad for a guy who isn’t even American but this is most certainly an excellent film. I don’t think director Shaka King has done much else of note on the big screen but this is a very impressive, well-rounded biographical drama. Though it is about events in the late 1960s it feels highly relevant today and it seems like the right time to reexamine American’s historical perception of the Black Panthers. I have no particular knowledge of this history but from what I can tell, shocking as this account is, it all seems broadly true.

So this was the media phenomenon of last year when even our niece came up to us to rave about how great this film is. Due to pandemic conditions it was even the highest grossing film of the year globally. But watching this necessitates actually sitting through the television show itself first which took a while. Overall I have not impressed as this is very much a standard shōnen show made for a younger audience. It may be well be the best shōnen around at the moment but it never aspires to anything more than that and I see nothing outstanding in it at all.

Following up on the amazing First Cow which we both absolutely loved, here is an older film by the same director Kelly Reichardt and also set in Oregon. This is an even more minimalist film with basically just the two characters, plus a dog to liven things up a little. Not much happens here and really not that much dialogue either. Yet there is so much understated meaning in between these lines that you can sense how much effort has been put in crafting. Reichardt really is my favorite cinematic discovery this year and I sure as heck am putting more of her work on my list