I’m still going to the cinema probably less often than I should but I really wanted to give this film a boost if I could. The trailer for this immediately grabbed my attention when it first popped up and the excellent reviews only cemented the deal. While multiverse stories are kind of the in-thing in science-fiction films right now, I loved how this was simultaneously both a very big and a very small film. I’ve never watched anything by new directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, credited collectively as Daniels, before and they sure seem like a team to pay attention to.

I’ve featured a few films by John Huston here already and likely there will be more down the line. This one though was his very last film. It stars his daughter Anjelica Huston and uses a screenplay by his son Tony Huston. It’s an adaptation of short story by James Joyce and it has pretty much no plot at all, which makes it hard to write about. It is of course a masterful work and though I have never read the original story, I can’t imagine a better adaptation than this. Even so it is obvious that this is something that would be better experienced in its original written form rather than as a film.

So this was another MCU film that we skipped over watching in the cinema due to the pandemic and the critical response was bad enough that I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it either. I would still eventually catch it up of course and so here we are. In the event, this film features surprisingly good action choreography and the moment to moment scenes are solid as well. It suffers though from shallowly developed worldbuilding and just trying to tell too large a story. I would have been happy with a street-level kung fu movie in the MCU but I guess they really needed it to be an epic fantasy movie to justify a big studio budget.

This was a huge hit in Hong Kong both critically and commercially, a feat made especially impressive by the fact that it is an independent production made with a very low budget. Unfortunately this is the kind of film that I categorically dislike as it relies on an outdated understanding of mental illnesses and how they are treated in modern times. The fact that this is really more of a romantic film than one about mental patients in general doesn’t absolve it of responsibility in misleading a large audience and it is very obvious that at no point did the filmmakers ever consult with actual doctors or psychiatrists in making it.

So this is obviously a tribute to Ingmar Bergman and can be expected to full of references to the director. Our cinephile friend liked it but I can’t say that I do. It’s nice to see it set on Fårö, the director’s favorite island, but apart from that this seems very shallow with not even the film within the film being very interesting. The references too are disappointing, basically acting as a kind of repository about trivia of Bergman’s life rather than any attempt to emulate his work or his themes.

Well, it’s not everyday that you get a film that unabashedly champions the drinking of alcohol, but this really is what this is. The premise of this film by director Thomas Vinterberg about a group of middle-aged men who take to drinking to improve their lives sounded promising to me but I thought for sure that they would get their comeuppance at the end as is traditional. Indeed there are consequences but it’s hard to argue that the ending isn’t a net positive for the protagonists. I’m all for artistic freedom and this film is very watchable, but socially I feel that this film sends all the wrong messages.

This is another one of those films that has almost no plot, adapted from a short story by Herman Melville but transposed to a completely different setting and cast of characters. I don’t much care of what plot there is but I did find it fascinating in how this feels almost like a documentary, a sort of anthropological study of the soldiers featured here from an outsider’s perspective and even living in an exotic locale. I don’t believe that I will ever be a big fan of director Claire Denis but I do admit that her films are interesting.