Both my wife and myself somehow missed watched this film by Tsui Hark from back when he actually a good director. I thought about looking for it later but it seemed impossible to find anywhere except for YouTube. Recently my wife’s interest in it was rekindled after watching an online lecture about it and so we settled for the YouTube version despite its inferior quality. It is very much a film of its era with its kitschy special effects. Yet it is amazingly, even shockingly shock though perhaps much of the credit should go to Lilian Lee, as the author of the novel this was adapted from.

We’ve seen plenty of films by Akira Kurosawa already but we’re far from done. It’s another film set in post-war Japan and is loosely based on an American novel. It starts out as an old-fashioned kidnapping story of a type that we don’t really see nowadays any longer but nothing too remarkable. So it’s only when we see the police embark on a massive manhunt for the perpetrator that the film truly comes into its own. The investigation is so sophisticated and the step by step process shown here so detailed that I felt compelled to check if this was based on a true story.

Obviously I’m way late on this one. It’s that I have an established routine of stuff to watch and I’m loth to just skip through the stuff in my backlog. Though I don’t know League of Legends as I never play any multiplayer games, I was always going to watch this due to the fantastic reception it has received. I’m pleased to say that I found it every bit as good as everyone says it is and it’s powerful repudiation of the old rule that videogame adaptations inevitably suck.

Naturally I’m going to slowly go through Kelly Reichardt filmography given how much I like her work. Here’s one that was made a couple of years after Old Joy and stars the very same dog. This is a less complex film given that it’s mostly just Wendy in many of the scenes and using a dog to pull at the audience’s heartstrings feels like cheating. Still films don’t have to be complicated to be good and this is a brutally straightforward take on being down and out in Oregon.

Director Robert Rossen is best known for the great classic The Hustler and I noted then the surprisingly complex psychologies of each character in it. Here’s another film of his that is even more explicitly psychological, set as it is in an upscale asylum. Unfortunately I like this less as it quickly falls into a familiar pattern and I would prefer it if the characters acted less mysteriously. But it is a well executed film and the presence of Jean Seberg even lends it a bit of an European air.

This came out a couple of years ago but it was only a few weeks ago that the official count of missing persons in Mexico hit the 100,000 mark so this seemed to still be a pertinent topic. Unfortunately this film is all about the emotional journey of a Mexican mother looking for her missing son and has little interest in offering more context around the crisis. I applaud it for being highly effective as a drama but it tries so hard to avoid specific details about the real-world problem that I suspect even the filmmakers fear retaliation from criminals.

So this is considered one of the worst of the MCU films and having now seen it, this is definitely true. I was always going to watch it anyway, if not because it’s MCU then because it’s because it was made by Chloé Zhao. It’s undeniable that she made a mess of things here but then it’s hard to see how so sprawling a story with such a huge cast could ever have succeeded. It fails even as an action spectacle as the special effects are really bad at times and it fails as an MCU film as it has so few connections to the shared multiverse that it would have been better off as its own film. By all accounts Zhao actively sought to be a part of this project, but from the results we see here, I don’t believe she really understands comics superheroes.