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.

So this is certainly an eye-catching title for a film. My contention in this post will be that while the main character may be seen be as a bad person as judged in accordance to conventional values, director Joachim Trier employs the title ironically and tries to portray her in a mostly sympathetic light. As always the mark of an interesting film is how much discussion it engenders and this makes for a wonderful subject of conversation. I’ve never watched any of Trier’s work before this but I believe he is really on to something when it comes to the future of human relationships.

This Pixar film didn’t seem to make much of a splash on its release and I even preferred to watch Turning Red from a year later before this. I came back to this after seeing some beautiful still images of the fictional town of Portorosso it is set in and realized that it’s inspired by Italian culture. Pretty as its art is, its themes and its story make it too juvenile to take seriously and its references to Italy too generic to be meaningful. It’s watchable but it feels almost boring next to Turning Red.

I had this pegged as an American film on my list, was surprised to see the opening set in London and that’s it’s full of British characters and then later read that it is American after all. That actually makes sense given how much it exaggerates English mannerisms and makes fun of how one is supposed to behave according to one’s class from a perspective of an outsider to their society. Unfortunately while this film has its amusing moments, its many flaws causes it to fall short of true greatness and it isn’t that memorable.