This anime is like an explosion of tropes: living a new life in an online virtual world, a magical girl who can stop the world in its tracks through the power of song, even freaking Beauty and the Beast. All presented in the form of fantastically dense and beautiful art, this is almost overwhelming to the senses but more or less does work. I think there’s some mixed messaging in its treatment of online spaces and I’m not fond of high school romance stories. Still this is a worthy update of the familiar tale and as my wife notes, one far more suited to the current era than the Disney version.

Kelly Reichardt is probably my current favorite American director and this is another film that cements my love for her style. The Oregon Trail game was really before my time but I too briefly tried it and raged over how every one of your pioneers seem to eventually die of dysentery. Well, this is the story of one small group lost on that trail. As with Reichardt’s other films, the plot is straightforward and simple. It really is all about giving the audience an idea of what it was like to be a settler on the trail in 1845, complete with all of their trials, dreams and prejudices.

Here’s a film whose story we already know as we’ve watched the more recent American adaptation The Talented Mr. Ripley some years back. I judged this far earlier French adaptation, made only a few years after the publication of the Patricia Highsmith novel, worth watching anyway as it’s very well known and it was the film that turned Alain Delon into a star. It also helps that this version differs markedly from the American film which I believe is more faithful to the source material. This version is in some ways more traditional, both in Ripley’s motivations and in its ultimate resolution. In my opinion, that makes it less psychologically interesting but there are still good reasons to watch it.

I know this should really be watched in the cinemas but the three-hour running time put me off at the time. In the event as great as this would have looked on the big screen, I was glad I watched it at home as it’s dense enough that spacing out the experience makes it better. This film has its share of detractors but I think it’s utterly fantastic and certainly better than Christopher Nolan’s version. It’s a portrayal of a Batman that is less superhero and more obsessed ordinary man who puts on a costume to be a vigilante. Accordingly director Matt Reeves has drawn inspiration not from superhero action movies but noirs, political thrillers and spy films. The result is a film that transcends its genre and deserves to be taken seriously.

It’s really quite insane that the current Golden Age of television has brought us an actually good adaptation of a property as notoriously unfilmable as The Sandman. I’ve never read the Neil Gaiman comic book series not being much of a DC fan but I couldn’t help but hear of it and even learned many of the stories in it through sheer osmosis. As I understand it, this isn’t a perfectly faithful adaptation and distances itself from being too directly tied to the DC universe. But it’s faithful enough in spirit and intention as approved by Gaiman himself that its far better than I ever imagined could be possible to see within my lifetime.

I think this counts as an Asian-American film as not a single white person appears in it. More than that, it stands out as a distinctively Hawaiian film by a director, Christopher Makoto Yogi, who I haven’t heard of before this, but seems to ground almost all of his work in that state. This kind of close, personal association is always a good sign in my book. This film didn’t always work for me as it sometimes reaches for the sublime and doesn’t quite touch it. Still, it’s a very fine film that contemplates a man’s death after a long life.

I’ve loved every one of Asghar Farhadi’s films I’ve seen so far and I do consider this to be another great film. However the story seems to have been inspired by a real-life event as covered in a documentary made by a student of Farhadi named Azadeh Masihzadeh. She claims that Farhadi pressured her to sign a statement that the original idea came from him which she now denies and the two have since been embroiled in contentious lawsuits. I don’t think ideas belong to anyone as execution is everything but Farhadi seems to be in the wrong to me at least in being so insistent about not acknowledging any contribution whatsoever from someone so much further down the hierarchy of power than himself. Ironically this is itself the theme of the film and makes its statement about Iranian society much more powerful.