Having visited and loved the city of Istanbul, I naturally drawn to this documentary about Ara Güler, the celebrated photographer. He was nicknamed the Eye of Istanbul for his photographs that captured the city across decades beginning from the 1950s and much other work besides. Unfortunately while the man and his work are worthy subjects, this documentary itself is unremarkable, amounting to being little more than a straightforward hagiography that feels almost like a commercial for his legacy orchestrated by Güler himself.

This first came to my attention when it was featured in an episode of The Americans but of course we’ve already Night and the City before this. This one is now known as one of the greatest heist films of all time, featuring a heist scene so detailed and realistic that it was copied by real criminals to perform real crimes. I also didn’t realize until afterwards that director Jules Dassin was in this as the Italian safecracker. Unfortunately while the heist scene is indeed amazing, the extended denouement afterwards is nothing special.

Charlie Kaufman has a well-earned reputation for incredibly hard to understand films. This one is actually not as difficult to understand as I had feared but it still has its surreal and abstract moments. Unfortunately it is largely a retread of Kaufman’s usual themes, which as one Broken Forum poster puts it is about a self-loathing old man with a girl who wishes she were elsewhere. This plays even worse nowadays and comes across essentially as an incel’s lament.

Even without deliberately setting out to do so, I’m slowly making a bit of a dent in director Billy Wilder’s filmography. This one isn’t one of his major works but it’s still brimming with energy and feels topical in its critique of the media creating its own news. I was surprised however to learn that it’s partially based on real rescue events that turned into giant media circuses, one of them dating back to the 1920s. I was inclined to be skeptical of the huge crowds shown in the film but apparently that was all too real too.

Brandon Cronenberg may be following in the footsteps of his father in terms of style but he sure isn’t in a hurry about it as this is his first film since Antiviral in 2012, which we really liked. I found this one less impressive unfortunately. It is of course very visceral in its depiction of a killer of takes control of the bodies of others to commit murders but the theme of her sense of self blurring as a result just isn’t a particularly original one.

Here is another film by Satyajit Ray who is of course the great director of the masterpiece The Music Room. This one is a short film that is much smaller in scope, being in effect an in-depth psychological study of its main character. It is nowhere as impressive being so much less ambitious but it remains a competently made film about a very specific human failing.

I put this off for a long time due to the awful reviews but I always knew I would get around to it eventually. As I feared, this is pretty bad, not so much because it is confusing but because it seems so sloppily made. The central conceit of moving backwards through time is sound enough but everything else around it is so generic and flat. At times, it was so bad that I wondered if Christopher Nolan was deliberately making fun at the inherent silliness of James Bond films but I fear that the humorless Nolan was being completely earnest.