Director Krzysztof Kieślowski is well known for his Three Colours trilogy which I’ve already talked about here. This one is an earlier work that he made while still based in Poland and some have noted that it can be seen as a sort of dry run of Blue, the two being similar in that they are about wives dealing with the grief of their husbands’ deaths. However this one takes place during the martial law period in Poland and so political events tend to overshadow one woman’s grief.

This is the first Saudi Arabian film to be featured here and the very first Saudi Arabian film to be made by a female director, Haifaa al-Mansour. Though as the director herself notes, there’s not much competition as the country had no movie theatres until 2018 and consequently not much of a film industry. Nevertheless this film is as good as the best from elsewhere in the world and successfully highlights how the kingdom is one of the worst places in the world to be born as a woman yet takes a balanced enough approach that the women are able to survive and find their happiness in all manner of small ways, and that in turn, makes this a highly entertaining film.

This is the third of three films by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon and directed by Tomm Moore based on Irish folklore and mythology. I wasn’t a big fan of the first two so I was surprised to find myself liking this quite a bit more. It has better unity in its theme and purpose and you get a real sense of peril to its characters. But I think it also works better because I walked into this with fewer expectations of how it would work as a werewolf story. It’s still a children’s show in that it holds back on having anything truly awful happen but the higher stakes do make an appreciable difference.

This remarkable film was originally made for television and essentially dramatizes the only surviving transcript of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. This was of course the famous conference in which Nazi officials settled on the implementation of the so-called final solution to the Jewish question. This film reenacts the meeting in almost real time, down to the smallest detail. You might think that a film that consists only of discussions in a meeting to be dreadfully boring, but it is amazing how much psychological depth can be discerned in here and the total commitment that the Nazi had to eradicating Jews never ceases to shock.

By its very premise, this at first seems to be the latest entry in the genre about artists who physically and mentally sacrifice for their art. Fortunately this film actually outgrows the initial premise and is a much better film for it. I was also very pleased to note that its very nuanced portrayal of the deaf community in that I don’t think it always shows them in the best light. I don’t think the heavy metal community is happy about the film however and in truth despite the title this has nothing to do with heavy metal at all.

I like to think that at this point I’m pretty on top of who’s good in cinema but I still keep getting caught by surprise. This film by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas is so superlatively good that I am aghast I have never watched any of his films before this. At three hours in length, this is a daunting film to take on but watching it is such a powerful sensory experience that I can’t help but wonder what it would be to like to see in a cinema hall. I do suspect that if I had followed the director’s career before this I may be less impressed as this is apparently derivative in some ways of his earlier work. But being hit with a distilled superdose of essentially Reygadas’ favorite themes and settings for the first time has just blown me away.

Most of the short, independent horror films we take a chance on turn out not so well but occasionally we do get something like this which makes it all worthwhile. This is the feature debut of its director Rose Glass and it works both as a horror film and as an aperçu into the mind of someone suffering from an all encompassing delusion. While there are plenty of seemingly supernatural phenomena, this film is unambiguous in showing that it is all in the mind of the main character but that actually adds to the horror.