I did not truly understand director Pedro Costa’s last film Horse Money but it did seem to have some interesting things to say. This one is puzzling in many ways as well but I felt that I more or less understood its themes. Unfortunately I also felt that it oversells itself by being so focused with its visuals that almost nothing else matters. This is a film that truly tries to aspire to being a painting in every frame, but shows its hand so much in doing so that we are reminded over and over again that none of this is real.

This is of course the final installment of a trilogy that started all the way back in 1989, rumored but delayed for so long that it seemed increasingly unlikely it would ever be made. But of course the delay has been incorporated into part of the story with Bill and Ted being well into middle age with grown up daughters. While it is kind of impressive how they pull out all of the stops for this and the plot is fitting, this film lacks the spark of brilliance that made the first two so memorable. It makes for an adequate ending to the trilogy but no more than that.

Barbra Streisand’s song should be familiar to just about everyone but far fewer people should have watched the film it was made for. The film itself is quite highly regarded but I have difficulty saying that I enjoyed watching it. Yet I am blown away by its boldness and how it is in effect a brilliant transposition of the usual gender roles in a romantic film. I want to like it so much but it is held back by the very fact that it remains at its heart a romantic film.

Tsui Hark is of course a household name and this one was made smack in the middle of his heyday as a maker of Hong Kong kung fu films. Yet most people probably would not have watched this one as I think it was considered a failure at the time. Modern critics however have reevaluated it as with its brutal violence and cynical attitude to morality, it makes a bold statement that is markedly different from its peers. It remains poorly made in many ways and has many flaws, yet just by being so different it deserves our attention.

Director Ken Loach’s latest and perhaps final film is a work that inhabits the same space and fights the same battles as his previous one I, Daniel Blake. I like this one quite a bit more not least because I’m much more sympathetic towards a family who has to face a succession of escalating problems rather than a single big crisis. Yet at the same time, I think this is another example of Loach being too out of touch with society as it is today and too dead set on interpreting everything through the lens of capitalism vs socialism when this seems like an increasingly outmoded way of looking at the world.

This ought to be the last of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films as we’ve pretty much watched everything else. It’s also very different from his other works in that there seems to be less emphasis on the sheer visual beauty of each shot. Instead this film is more ambitious in scope and features several large scale scenes. The sheer density of themes in it is impressive but unfortunately that also means that there is more here for me to fail to understand or simply miss.

This is considered a thriller film but I think it really should be horror instead, as in old-fashioned Brothers Grimm tales meant to scare children. The villain is so evil that it’s a wonder Robert Mitchum agreed to play him. The film was a failure on release such that it became the one and only film of its director Charles Laughton. Today it is considered one of the all-time greats with lines and shots from it having influenced numerous other films. Personally I could do without the ending that goes the traditional route of trying to impart a moral lesson but otherwise it truly is a very frightening film, surprisingly so for one of its era.