After being so impressed with the films of Satyajit Ray that we’ve seen so far, it was inevitable that we would watch Pather Pachali, the Indian grandmaster’s first and best known film. This is the first part of a trilogy so that helps explain why its ending doesn’t seem quite complete. It is of course a masterful work of cinema, detailing the extreme poverty of a family living in a village. I found that I liked it less than his later works however as it doesn’t seem to have a more specific theme than the condition of poverty itself.

This film was among the casualties of the pandemic, forced to be released online instead of in cinemas. I think it largely flew under the radar as a result and I wouldn’t have paid attention to it myself if it weren’t for strong recommendations on Broken Forum. This may not exactly be great art but it a perfectly cromulent action-adventure film set amidst the apocalypse and featuring giant monsters. I especially love how it proves that you don’t need to rely on existing intellectual property to make a solid action movie. Unfortunately it also seems to prove that you may need to in order to make a financially successful one.

Here’s another Charlie Chaplin film, picked for its fame and because my wife has fond memories of it. This also marks the final appearance of Chaplin’s The Tramp character and apparently serves as a kind of farewell. Knowing this fact actually helps make more sense of some of the choice made in this film. For my part, I am once again immensely impressed by Chaplin’s prowess and the factory scenes are truly memorable. I found the other skits are less interesting however and the film gets repetitive and drags on after a while.

This very unusually named film is a Swedish-Danish co-production and apparently uses both languages but of course I wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s a horror film with a strong dose of absurdist fantasy and that means that many elements in it are just inexplicable. At its core though is a time loop phenomenon and it is clever to incorporate this into a horror story. Unfortunately over-exposure to time loop stories seem to have gotten me stuck in a rationalistic mindset when considering them and as such I have difficulty finding this film to be at all scary.

Steven Soderdergh is of course best known for the Ocean’s series of films which I’m not really a fan of but he has made more serious crime films as well. Judging from the praise it won from critics, I thought this period crime film would fall on the more serious side, and for a while it does seem that way. But after a rapid spate of mutual betrayals, this starts looking more like a darkly humorous caper film with an ensemble cast instead. It’s a lot of fun but it’s not a film that really cares about character development or even having them behave in ways that make sense.

The China-made fantasy films we watched recently have been pretty great so far and this latest one is just as impressive. This one is particularly striking in how it conflates multiple disparate issues in China into one film: the popularity of online web fiction, the kidnapping of children on the streets and the scary power of the founders of the tech giant companies. This isn’t great art and there is no point in looking for deeper themes in it but it is rollicking great entertainment and a wonderfully imaginative spectacle even if some of its inspirations are very obvious.

This is very much a rich people problems kind of film but you do have to admit that the story is fascinating. It is about the forgery scandal that rocked the art world some years ago when dozens of paintings were found to have been made by a Chinese painter Pei-Shen Qian. This film focuses particularly on the role of the Knoedler & Co gallery in facilitating the sale of the forgeries to rich collectors. It is extraordinary how filmmaker Barry Avrich was able to obtain the cooperation of many different parties, including the ones implicated in the fraud, to speak on camera and hence capture opposing perspectives.