Director Robert Rossen is best known for the great classic The Hustler and I noted then the surprisingly complex psychologies of each character in it. Here’s another film of his that is even more explicitly psychological, set as it is in an upscale asylum. Unfortunately I like this less as it quickly falls into a familiar pattern and I would prefer it if the characters acted less mysteriously. But it is a well executed film and the presence of Jean Seberg even lends it a bit of an European air.

This came out a couple of years ago but it was only a few weeks ago that the official count of missing persons in Mexico hit the 100,000 mark so this seemed to still be a pertinent topic. Unfortunately this film is all about the emotional journey of a Mexican mother looking for her missing son and has little interest in offering more context around the crisis. I applaud it for being highly effective as a drama but it tries so hard to avoid specific details about the real-world problem that I suspect even the filmmakers fear retaliation from criminals.

So this is considered one of the worst of the MCU films and having now seen it, this is definitely true. I was always going to watch it anyway, if not because it’s MCU then because it’s because it was made by Chloé Zhao. It’s undeniable that she made a mess of things here but then it’s hard to see how so sprawling a story with such a huge cast could ever have succeeded. It fails even as an action spectacle as the special effects are really bad at times and it fails as an MCU film as it has so few connections to the shared multiverse that it would have been better off as its own film. By all accounts Zhao actively sought to be a part of this project, but from the results we see here, I don’t believe she really understands comics superheroes.

American horror films usually follow a very predictable formula: a group of friends encounter a danger in some remote area and are slowly killed off one by one. The Empty Man seems at first like a typical example of the genre but then we learn that it’s just the prologue and the real story starts shortly after. It’s a little longer than typical horror films but it makes excellent use of its running time to deliver a dense plot that is built around a wonderfully rich mythos. This was adapted from a graphic novel series and it does strike me how unlikely that an original horror film script could be allowed to be this complex. Needless to say I loved it and consider one of the best American horror films I’ve seen in a while.

I didn’t care too much for director Huang Hsin-Yao previous film The Great Buddha+, finding it too overwrought, but I found this dark comedy much more up my alley. It has all kinds of references to the first film and as it is mostly in Taiwanese, even with the help of subtitles I’m afraid I probably missed quite a few of them. But it’s still enough to appreciate its black humor and uniquely Taiwanese identity, not to mention the eminently relatable stories of four middle-aged friends.

Any documentary that is three and a half hours long would be formidable to approach, let alone one that is about a library. Yet this is exactly that, a documentary about the New York Public Library, which is really a whole institutional system spread out across the entire city rather than a library in a single building. I do think this might a little longer than it needs to be and I can’t say I found every part of it that interesting. But it is an illuminating look at a system of much greater scale and breadth than I’d imagined by a director, Frederick Wiseman, who work I had not previously seen, and who seems to specialize in documenting the institutions of American society for posterity.

Films that are centered around other artistic endeavors are tough to judge when we have no basis on which to decide whether how good that art is. This is doubly true here in a film about a very specific form of north Indian classical music. Even if it’s hard for us who don’t even understand how this form of music is supposed to work, the reverence that the film holds for the art form shines through. Yet what elevates this film to greatness is that this is not blind reverence but a powerful memoir of one man’s journey and how he matures past the teachings of his beloved guru.