Brandon Cronenberg may be following in the footsteps of his father in terms of style but he sure isn’t in a hurry about it as this is his first film since Antiviral in 2012, which we really liked. I found this one less impressive unfortunately. It is of course very visceral in its depiction of a killer of takes control of the bodies of others to commit murders but the theme of her sense of self blurring as a result just isn’t a particularly original one.

Here is another film by Satyajit Ray who is of course the great director of the masterpiece The Music Room. This one is a short film that is much smaller in scope, being in effect an in-depth psychological study of its main character. It is nowhere as impressive being so much less ambitious but it remains a competently made film about a very specific human failing.

I put this off for a long time due to the awful reviews but I always knew I would get around to it eventually. As I feared, this is pretty bad, not so much because it is confusing but because it seems so sloppily made. The central conceit of moving backwards through time is sound enough but everything else around it is so generic and flat. At times, it was so bad that I wondered if Christopher Nolan was deliberately making fun at the inherent silliness of James Bond films but I fear that the humorless Nolan was being completely earnest.

I did not truly understand director Pedro Costa’s last film Horse Money but it did seem to have some interesting things to say. This one is puzzling in many ways as well but I felt that I more or less understood its themes. Unfortunately I also felt that it oversells itself by being so focused with its visuals that almost nothing else matters. This is a film that truly tries to aspire to being a painting in every frame, but shows its hand so much in doing so that we are reminded over and over again that none of this is real.

This is of course the final installment of a trilogy that started all the way back in 1989, rumored but delayed for so long that it seemed increasingly unlikely it would ever be made. But of course the delay has been incorporated into part of the story with Bill and Ted being well into middle age with grown up daughters. While it is kind of impressive how they pull out all of the stops for this and the plot is fitting, this film lacks the spark of brilliance that made the first two so memorable. It makes for an adequate ending to the trilogy but no more than that.

Barbra Streisand’s song should be familiar to just about everyone but far fewer people should have watched the film it was made for. The film itself is quite highly regarded but I have difficulty saying that I enjoyed watching it. Yet I am blown away by its boldness and how it is in effect a brilliant transposition of the usual gender roles in a romantic film. I want to like it so much but it is held back by the very fact that it remains at its heart a romantic film.

Tsui Hark is of course a household name and this one was made smack in the middle of his heyday as a maker of Hong Kong kung fu films. Yet most people probably would not have watched this one as I think it was considered a failure at the time. Modern critics however have reevaluated it as with its brutal violence and cynical attitude to morality, it makes a bold statement that is markedly different from its peers. It remains poorly made in many ways and has many flaws, yet just by being so different it deserves our attention.