We’ve seen interesting work by Lou Ye before and here we have one with Gong Li as the lead. It’s a spy thriller that takes place when Shanghai was an international settlement nominally outside of Japanese control, a setting that I will note is popular for Chinese serials. Naturally Lou Ye adds his own artistic touch and plays around with what the protagonist is really up to. Unfortunately while it sets things up nicely and hints at a complex political situation with multiple factions in play, in the end it all amounts to nothing. All of the prior artistry feels almost superfluous when as it all but devolves into a conventional action movie.

I ordinarily wouldn’t pay any attention to these nondescript action show made especially for Netflix but this one has decent reviews and strong word-of-mouth recommendations. I’ve long thought that more grounded action movies would work well and ‘lo and behold here one is. This film intelligently uses corrupt police in a podunk rural town as the antagonists because there’s really no scarier villain in modern day America and even weaves in a vaguely plausible plot about civil forfeiture. Unfortunately the production is competent at best and mostly uninspiring. It’s not bad as an action movie but it’s not going to win any awards.

With its ostentatious displays of wealth and portrayal of the high life, this is another film that loudly announces itself as escapism amidst the Great Depression. The twist here is that it’s no rags to riches story but about thieves who pretend to be rich in order to rob them. It was made by Ernst Lubitsch who truly does have an artful touch in directing these things so it’s great fun for a little while. Still, the only question towards the end is which of the two female leads the male hero will choose and that’s the full extent of how sophisticated the film is.

Europeans make so many films about the Holocaust that watching yet another one isn’t particularly interesting to me. Jonathan Glazer’s newest one however takes a completely different tack by not showing a single Jewish victim at all. Instead it focuses on the home life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss whose family has established a mundane and pleasant existence just outside the camp’s walls. There is effectively no plot as it merely shows their everyday routines. Glazer claims that he aimed to demystify the perpetrators of the Holocaust to show that they are not evil in the mythological sense. Yet they most certainly are evil at least in the ordinary sense for being able to enjoy life under such horrendous circumstances.

Given its subject matter, it’s particularly poignant to watch this now as Donald Trump has just won the election to once again become the president of the United States. This short film effectively consists of just one extended scene in which FBI agents arrive at the home of Reality Winner, a US Air Force veteran and translator for the NSA, and interrogate her. All dialogue is taken from the recording made by the FBI itself, with portions redacted as per the transcript. It’s remarkable how much tension director Tina Satter was able to inject into the material and it works especially well if you have no idea who Reality Winner is before watching this.

I briefly considered the recent Steven Spielberg remake but it received only middling reviews and I realized I’d never seen the original anyway. I wasn’t too enthusiastic either about watching yet another iteration of Rome and Juliet but I should do it anyway as a kind of completionist achievement. Unfortunately I found it to be fairly underwhelming. It’s a dance-centric rather than a music-centric and almost all of its songs are forgettable. The two sides, the Sharks and the Jets, are very much not equal as the Puerto Rican Sharks have a far more compelling story to tell. I think I prefer pretty much any of the other versions of the familiar story to this.

There’s no indication of it in the film itself, but this was based on the real-life murder of an infant by her mother in France and director Alice Diop attended the trial just as the main character here does. As a courtroom drama, it’s very talky with long scenes of the characters delivering their statements. It’s also a case in which all of the facts seem immediately clear, plain as day. Yet the lesson Diop teaches here is that there is still the matter of perspective as each person presents the facts in a way that benefits themselves as we struggle to understand the incomprehensible horror of why a mother would kill her own child.