This is another cultural touchstone that I’ve somehow missed out on and not knowing anything about it just gets embarrassing. It is of course always a pleasure to watch a Coen brothers, even the ones that don’t particularly resonate with me, and this one features a crazily large cast of name actors and a really fun attitude. I didn’t like the familiar plot of chasing a briefcase of money as the MacGuffin at all but I then realized it isn’t meant to matter at all and then I loved the film all the more for it
Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan director of some renown and I believe this is the film of hers that has made the most impact internationally so far. It’s a romance about a couple of young lesbians and given the state of LBGT rights in Kenya, it’s no surprise that this was banned in its home country. The ban however was lifted after the director took the matter to court. It feels a little rough around the edges to me in terms of production quality but it is heartfelt and the Kenyan setting makes it doubly interesting.
This marks the first film that we’ve watched in the cinema since the pandemic started and I suspect that this will be the case for quite a few people. We really should have gone earlier to watch Dune but that was just after things started opening up again. Anyway we still waited until after the early rush of people to catch this and by now spoilers are everywhere so I won’t care about it that so much. This features a huge slate of characters, which ordinarily is a bad idea but director Jon Watts somehow makes it all work. I have major gripes about the nature of evil as presented here but in all other respects this is a top tier action movie and a wonderful return to form for the MCU.
Akira Kurosawa is of course one of the greatest Japanese directors of all time but he is also judged to make films that are very Westernized. I mention this because this one feels particularly Westernized to me from the nature of its plot to its esthetic. Indeed I later read that it is considered a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and yet is firmly set in Japan’s postwar era, known both for its poverty and its endemic corruption.
This is another one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more experimental films, set in a single location and elaborately planned out to create the illusion of a single continuous, uninterrupted take. Even the plot is novel as the audience is shown the body and who the murderers are right at the beginning so the whole thing is an elaborate game over which, if any, of the other characters catch on. This film had a mixed reception on release and some critics thought that it was technical cleverness and nothing else. Like much else of Hitchcock’s oeuvre however it has been redeemed nowadays and I don’t consider it a minor film at all.
I found it amusing to watch both Black Widow and this film with a rather similar premise in short order, young women superspies being a Hollywood staple now. This one seemed to have rapidly dropped off the radar soon after release which is a shame because it is an excellently made film in many respects and I really appreciated how it creates a character who comes across as every bit as deadly as Black Widow, if not more so, without feeling at all like a superhero movie. Unfortunately it also has flaws and might have made for a more impressive spectacle with a bigger budget.
The Russian people have suffered more than most under the Second World War and this is well represented on film. The Cranes are Flying is one of the earliest and most well known such efforts. Unfortunately while there is a lot of emotive power in the simplicity of this drama, it is a very traditional and old-fashioned film and as such feels to me more like a sort of prototype in what it is trying to achieve that has since been superseded by other films. It’s also a little too obviously nationalistic propaganda for my tastes.
