This film opens with the name of the production company and the title and nothing else, as if allowing the film to speak for itself. And speak it does. The director’s name and the acting credits only appear after the end of the film. The two leads apparently play some fictionalized version of themselves and the director Ramin Bahrani isn’t exactly a household name, but he was the scriptwriter for The White Tiger that we watched not long ago. As different as the settings of these two films are, both are about under the underclass of society and Chop Shop may well be one of the best films about the lives of illegal immigrants in the United States ever made.

Wikipedia’s description of this as a noir misled me as this has nothing to do with private detectives or criminal cases. This is instead Billy Wilder’s treatise on alcoholism, apparently based on Raymond Chandler. As usual with the director’s work, it is well made and must have been quite an eye-opener in its time. But by now it has been superseded by far grimmer and more realistic takes on various types of addiction and to my eyes is actually more fascinating in the choices that it must make to ensure that the main character retains the sympathy of the audience.

If the strange poster which is also the film’s opening shot isn’t enough to clue you in, this is one very odd film, more like an art installation than any kind of narrative film. Apparently director Roy Andersson has made a whole career out of similar projects but this is my first experience of his work. It consists of long series of vignettes shot with a mostly motionless camera, most of which aren’t unconnected to anything else. It reminds me of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames in that regard but the intent and the effect is completely different.

I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a full episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows but there’s no denying that he is a household name. Even so I wouldn’t have watched this documentary if it weren’t for its sky-high ratings. The first half of this film is largely uninteresting, being about his rise to fame and success and meanders about without coming to a point. But the second half takes a darker turn into Bourdain’s problems with addiction and his depressive personality. As it ends as we all know with his suicide, it is undeniably much more engrossing even if it feels wrong to look so deeply into the private details of the man’s personal life.

Mikio Naruse is a contemporary of Ozu and indeed you can recognize many of the same actors and actresses the more famous director uses in this film. Yet while this is visually very similar to Ozu’s work and it is also a drama about ordinary people in what was then modern Japan, the tone of the film could not be more different. Unlike Ozu’s films which are always pleasant no matter the ignoble motives of some characters, Late Chrysanthemums does not shy away from confronting head-on the ugliness of people and the decrepit conditions under which they sometimes live. This film perhaps lacks the finely-tuned sense of drama of Ozu’s masterpieces but it feels to me like a more realistic portrayal of ordinary life in that era.

I do so love the black humor in British crime films and this underappreciated gem is a fine example of it. Made by Stephen Frears, another director whose work I should definitely pay more attention to, this was the feature film debut of Tim Roth and also stars British film greats John Hurt and Terence Stamp. In addition to the always funny capers the characters get to up in it, I was surprised by the seriousness with which the film treats the prospect of imminent death as well as the respect it pays to its female lead, who usually in such films is very quickly killed and forgotten about.

This is the latest of a whole series of horror films, none of which I’ve watched as I’m not a particular fan of these things. They are anthologies in the found footage genre, though I find that their commitment to the narrative device varies by each film. This one consists of four separate short films plus a frame story in between the others. The production quality is deliberately bad as an inherent aspect of the found footage style but I find that by now this actually detracts instead of adds to their verisimilitude. There are some clever ideas and the inclusion of one Indonesian film is just amazing, but by and large I am not impressed.