Everything about this film, its title, the poster with John Travolta’s iconic pose and of course the Bee Gees songs, have long been subsumed into popular culture. But I’ve never watched it before now and I wonder how many people really have. It would be so easy to dismiss this as a standard dance movie about the protagonists trying to win a dance competition but it is so much more than that. In parallel with the disco dancing which is of course wonderful to watch, this is a fairly serious drama about a young man learning to grow out the milieu he has grown up in and I loved how both tracks complement each other so perfectly.

This film was such a major cultural phenomenon in China that it would be remiss not to watch it. It was adapted from a popular novel but it would be fair to say that it in turn was inspired by real suicides among high students. It was directed by Derek Tsang who most people will know of as being the son of Eric Tsang but this is a China film through and through. Although it is well made and the young actors deliver excellent performances, it is ultimately a sentimental and shallow romance that panders to the sensitivities of the Chinese government and does a disservice to the issue of bullying in school.

Finally we get to the end of what is supposedly a trilogy by Michelangelo Antonioni. This one is no easier than any of the previous ones when it comes to figuring out what it actually means, yet the incredible power present in every scene impresses you nevertheless even as you scramble to make sense of things. Monica Vitti is the constant across all of these films and here she is at once both incredibly beautiful and incredible resistant to any simple dissection of her motivations. There are any number of ways that one could interpret this film but as some critics have pointed out perhaps it is its open-ended nature that is the real point.

So this is technically a sequel to the 2016 film that confusingly shares the same name but as it was terrible I don’t regret not watching that one. Thankfully it’s the Suicide Squad which means their team members change all the time and continuity isn’t that important. I fully agree with all of the critics that this truly is an outstanding superhero action movie on all counts with almost no flaws. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have a good director like James Gunn who actually seems to like comic book stories instead of looking down on the genre and of course this wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been allowed to let loose on the violence with an R-rating.

While the more mainstream releases of Hong Kong’s cinema continues to fall to impress, we do get independent gems that worth our attention. Ray Yeung is a director who seems to have made a career out of highlighting homosexual issues and despite being himself gay and of Hong Kong nationality, this is his first film that is in Chinese and set in Hong Kong. I detect some inexpertness in the directing but the premise is both compelling and inarguably compelling.

We’ve got to run out of Alfred Hitchcock films to watch eventually and this one may even be it as I didn’t find it terribly interesting. It’s a war film that is a hodgepodge of different things: romance, spy intrigue, humor, action and so on and doesn’t gel together well at all. It isn’t at all like Hitchcock’s usual style and while it’s obviously based on World War 2, it uses fictional people and even a country to obfuscate matters, making it even more of a mess. Some critics at the time called it a glorified B-movie and that’s exactly what it feels like to me.

This film may not be straight out pornography but it sure looks like it. It is a film, an art film even as it has received the cachet of being shown at international film festivals, that is about the pornography industry itself. As such it has plenty of scenes that could be in porn but it shies short of actually depicting any sex. The film does depict the unsavory aspects of the industry but at the same time it actually makes it look like the industry isn’t that different from any other. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s all that good a film as it struggles with the characterization of its protagonist.