As always, it is real pleasure to be immersed in the cinema of a country for the first time, in this case Romania, so long as they are decently made. This one with its slew of honors including ones at Cannes more than qualifies and looks like it’s a brutally assessment of modern Romania. However it also make some directorial decisions that makes it feel oddly paced and ends on a somewhat unsatisfying note.

This is a film that purports to be science-fiction but is probably best described as psychological horror. It looks reasonably realistic and features some well thought out details of how a near future in which space travel within the Solar System is commonplace might play out. However it plays fast and loose with scientific facts which seriously impacts some major points of its plot. Still it is beautiful and works very well as a very personal mood piece.

Orson Welles is a very inconsistent director to say the least as he is known for plenty of stinkers along some of the most celebrated films of all that time. This noir was at the time of its release considered one of those stinkers but opinion on it has improved since then. I don’t think I like it very much given that it tries too hard to be clever rather than to be true to its theme. But it is a fascinating film that uses some inspired and beautiful camerawork so it probably is worth watching all the same.

As usual this was added to my list a while ago while gleaning through critics’ picks of most notable films but unsurprisingly as Israel isn’t a large country, we can recognize a couple of faces here from the television series Srugim. This one deals with the topic of marriage among observant Jews as well but doesn’t otherwise seem as if it was made by the same creative team. I did not like this film at all but I am amused that it is very different from what I would expect out of an American film using the same premise.

This is the follow-up to the surprisingly good Chinese animated film Nezha and part of what they are calling the Fengshen Cinematic Universe. In truth, it doesn’t look like there is much connection between the two films save that they are set in a sort of mythological version of China. If anything this one is even more fantastic and, yes, it is just as good. The art looks amazing and more importantly has a single consistent style and there’s certainly no begrudging the soaring ambition of its story.

It’s safe to say that everyone has heard of Anton Chekhov if only because of his famous dictum of creative writing using a gun as an example. But I don’t believe that I have actually read or watched any of his work. So it’s neat to watch this adaptation by essentially the same core team who made My Dinner with Andre. As usual, this is a talk fest that threatens to be deadly boring at first but it is very engaging once you know all the characters.

This has a slick, instantly memorable title that brings to mind perhaps a light, romantic comedy but I would never in a million years be able to guess the context in which the phrase is actually used. It is in fact a serious film about pregnancy and abortion and is shot from such a studiously objective point of view that it sometimes feels like a documentary. Nevertheless it makes for a powerful statement about the needless pain to which America subjects its young women in deliberately making it difficult for them to get an abortion when they want to.