This is probably not one of the better known American films but it has a good claim to being one of the most controversial and hated. It was given an X rating and by the end of the film, you can certainly see how it earned it. I have some issues with the story being framed as a police investigation which I feel is misleading. But it is extremely powerful as a portrayal of a codependent relationship between a beautiful, neurotic woman who refuses to be pinned and a man who is obsessed with completely owning her.

Here’s another Eastern European film, from Romania this time, that talks about migration. While it follows a fictional main character, the story is based on a real incident that took place in 2020. Of course, an art film would be expected to take a stand against xenophobia but this one goes deeper into the underlying divisions in Romania. Unfortunately I found it very inaccessible as fully understanding what is going on would require being able to differentiate between the Hungarians and the Romanians in the film and there are surrealist moments that are hard to make sense of. Even the choice of Matthias as the main character seems questionable, so as much as I admire the effort, I don’t much like it at all.

Despite reading tons of news, I’ve never been a regular reader of The New Yorker. At most, I’d read some particularly noteworthy article when it goes viral and gets shared widely. But this caught my wife’s attention as she’s a writer herself so why not. As the title indicates, this is a documentary commemorating the 100th anniversary of the magazine. Unfortunately they hype up the anniversary so much that it’s off-putting. Nor is getting celebrities to talk about the significance of the publication itself terribly interesting. What does work is highlighting the few special articles that has since gone down in history. The magazine itself may be great but this film about it is merely mediocre.

It’s a little petty of me but every time I watch a film from a new country, it’s like crossing off a number on my Bingo card. I’ve certainly never watched any film from Zambia before and this is a good one. Taking place against the backdrop of a funeral, it’s another film about how women are oppressed as we’ve just saw in The Great Indian Kitchen. But it’s even scarier here as the patriarchy is enforced by the elder women of the family. It starts out being funny in a very surreal way but towards the end, it’s just hopelessly depressing.

Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart made this shortly after the excellent Clouds of Sils Maria. I skipped it at the time because its reviews were only middling but I’m come back because the trajectory of Stewart’s acting career continues to be impressive. Unfortunately it turns out that the reviews were right. Combining a ghost story with that of a personal shopper for a celebrity is certainly unusual but I kept waiting for some connection to appear which never arrives. The film plays the usual games of ambiguity with the supernatural and that’s not satisfying either. Stewart’s performance here is impressive. Little else about this film is.

This immensely successful and popular Indian film has been remade multiple times in different languages. This original one is in Malayalam and was made by a director Jeo Baby and performers who were not that well-known at the time. I have little patience for misery porn these days and the great genius of this film is that while it highlights the continued oppression of women in India, it refrains from maximizing the wife’s plight in every way possible. The people around here are not deliberately cruel but merely acting how they believe to be right, as dictated by religious, gender and cultural norms. From this, a thousand small humiliations add up to an intolerably miserable existence for the wife that is all the more believable for how mundane it is.

Frieren is one of the most popular anime shows of the moment and was a recommendation from our cinephile friend a while back. We were feeling burned out by the general lack of seriousness in anime and so passed on it. I do rather like the premise of it being about an immortal mage who lives on long after everyone else she has known has died. Watching this now, I loved the early episodes with their theme of loss and time passing. This feels like a markedly more mature anime with less need to resort to dumb gags or provide fanservice. Unfortunately it does drag on too much and risks degenerating into the more usual fare.