There ordinarily wouldn’t be much reason to watch this very old pre-Hays Code American film except it is set in China at the height of the Chinese Civil War. We have plenty of Chinese films and television shows set during this tumultuous period but this is an American film made while those events were still ongoing in China. This I had to see. The film was entirely shot in the US but the sets look convincing enough that it had us wondering. The Chinese extras in it all speak Cantonese which we all know to be wrong for the location but I’m still impressed that they managed to get enough Chinese and realistic enough props to pull off this fake China.
Earlier I talked about the wave of Asian-American cinema we’re seeing and here’s one about the Korean-American experience and it’s even set in the 1980s. This one seems at least partly autobiographical on the part of its director Lee Isaac Chung who indeed was born of a South Korean immigrant family and grew up on a farm in Arkansas. It’s so specific in its detail that it feels authentic. At the same time it’s the kind of slice-of-life that doesn’t really lead anywhere and so didn’t leave a particularly deep impression on me. It’s still a strong film that deserves its many award nominations and wins.
This is a tremendously successful and well known documentary, having won an Oscar for its category last year. I held off on watching this for a while however as its title seems incredibly presumptuous and having read a little of its premise, it seems likely to be a just-so story made up in the editing. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m pleased to say that it doesn’t go so far as to say that the main character tamed an octopus while the images they captured are absolutely amazing. I could have done with less dramatizing but this is a truly impressive documentary.
In a way this counts as an entry in the wronged woman exacts her revenge genre except that it takes place in the real world where a crazy spree of unbridled violence would never work and the protagonist is intelligent enough not to even attempt such a thing. This is the debut feature of its director Emerald Fennell and I’m very impressed with how far the film takes its central conceit. This is a little too straightforward in its direction as it pretty much lacks any subtlety whatsoever but it really doesn’t dumb anything down and avoids making any mistakes with regards to plausibility. That makes it a solid win in my book.
Director Krzysztof Kieślowski is well known for his Three Colours trilogy which I’ve already talked about here. This one is an earlier work that he made while still based in Poland and some have noted that it can be seen as a sort of dry run of Blue, the two being similar in that they are about wives dealing with the grief of their husbands’ deaths. However this one takes place during the martial law period in Poland and so political events tend to overshadow one woman’s grief.
This is the first Saudi Arabian film to be featured here and the very first Saudi Arabian film to be made by a female director, Haifaa al-Mansour. Though as the director herself notes, there’s not much competition as the country had no movie theatres until 2018 and consequently not much of a film industry. Nevertheless this film is as good as the best from elsewhere in the world and successfully highlights how the kingdom is one of the worst places in the world to be born as a woman yet takes a balanced enough approach that the women are able to survive and find their happiness in all manner of small ways, and that in turn, makes this a highly entertaining film.
This is the third of three films by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon and directed by Tomm Moore based on Irish folklore and mythology. I wasn’t a big fan of the first two so I was surprised to find myself liking this quite a bit more. It has better unity in its theme and purpose and you get a real sense of peril to its characters. But I think it also works better because I walked into this with fewer expectations of how it would work as a werewolf story. It’s still a children’s show in that it holds back on having anything truly awful happen but the higher stakes do make an appreciable difference.
