My wife likes to be forewarned before watching any films that might be particularly dense or difficult to parse and a documentary about Chile’s political history seems to qualify. Yet the first one third of this hour and a half film seemingly has nothing at all to do with politics as it discusses the country’s love for astronomy and how the dryness of the Atacama Desert makes it one of the best places in the world to observe the stars. But the film does eventually swing around to the massacred victims of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and so we see filmmaker Patricio Guzmán genius in linking these seeming unrelated topics. To be fair this style of documentary is too light on the facts for my tastes as it aims instead to make an emotional impact but I must admit it is critically acclaimed for good reason.

Horror films that try to combine a science-fiction theme with mysticism usually fail but this is one of the better attempts at it that I’ve seen. It’s also the first film we’ve seen that was made during the covid-19 pandemic and is set during the pandemic itself. Apparently director Ben Wheatley had gotten bored while everything was shut down and made this in a mere 15 days. This is still a quick film made on a small budget and a tiny cast and there are limits to how much one can achieve in this way but this truly is a solid horror film.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul now seems intent on expanding his career outside of his native Thailand with his first foreign film, this one set in Colombia and uses a mixture of both Spanish and English. His film before this was so cryptic that it was hard to even tell what is going on. This new one may leave you questioning the intent behind his choices but the overall plot is actually rather straightforward to follow. Towards the end there is a twist totally unlike anything the director has done before which I’m not sure I like but all directors must innovate I suppose. But overall this is another masterful work that reaffirms the director as being among the best working today.

Just a couple of months after Made You Look, here is another documentary about the art world. As you can see for yourself it’s about the famous Salvator Mundi painting, supposedly a long lost work by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci himself. I’d already read about this in the news but the full story here has plenty of detail that I wasn’t previously familiar with which makes it immensely interesting to me. Moreover I am fascinated that filmmaker Andreas Koefoed was able to secure the cooperation of many of the parties involved, including the Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier who is rather shady individual to say the least. Beyond the fascinating story of the painting itself, this also shows how money and political power shape the art world.

The announcement of Bruce Willis’ retirement from acting due to medical reasons has led to many retrospectives on his body of work. One of the most notorious of his films was this one which shocked everyone at the time with how bad it was when Willis was at the height of his career. This eventually did gain something of a cult following with fans claiming that this is so bad that it crosses over into being good. I’ve long wanted to watch this out of curiosity and I’m sad to report that this is just a plain bad movie. You can see in some places how it could have been decent and the character of Hudson Hawk himself does have some charm. But what we actually got was still trash and there’s no redeeming it.

We’ve watched and liked so many of Billy Wilder’s films that I’m always game for another one, especially one that was made in Europe and so might feel less American. Unfortunately with William Holden as the lead and the very Hollywood plot, this one still feels very American. The story relies on a huge twist that is revealed not at the end of the film but somewhere in the final third or so and so everything that is truly important all happened in the past. As the second last of Wilder’s feature films, it wasn’t rated very highly when it was released and although opinions of it have improved since then, I think this isn’t anything close to Wilder’s best work.

Here is another film that feels more like a documentary than anything with a straightforward narrative. It’s an account of the lifestyle of the African-American Gullah people who live on islands off the eastern coast of the United States. It’s a remarkable independent film made by Julie Dash, herself an African-American woman, as predictably no major studio would touch the project. While this is truly as spellbinding as everyone says it is, I fear that it is best to come prepared by reading up on the culture somewhat first as otherwise many details are likely to escape a casual audience.