Director Ken Loach’s latest and perhaps final film is a work that inhabits the same space and fights the same battles as his previous one I, Daniel Blake. I like this one quite a bit more not least because I’m much more sympathetic towards a family who has to face a succession of escalating problems rather than a single big crisis. Yet at the same time, I think this is another example of Loach being too out of touch with society as it is today and too dead set on interpreting everything through the lens of capitalism vs socialism when this seems like an increasingly outmoded way of looking at the world.

This ought to be the last of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films as we’ve pretty much watched everything else. It’s also very different from his other works in that there seems to be less emphasis on the sheer visual beauty of each shot. Instead this film is more ambitious in scope and features several large scale scenes. The sheer density of themes in it is impressive but unfortunately that also means that there is more here for me to fail to understand or simply miss.

This is considered a thriller film but I think it really should be horror instead, as in old-fashioned Brothers Grimm tales meant to scare children. The villain is so evil that it’s a wonder Robert Mitchum agreed to play him. The film was a failure on release such that it became the one and only film of its director Charles Laughton. Today it is considered one of the all-time greats with lines and shots from it having influenced numerous other films. Personally I could do without the ending that goes the traditional route of trying to impart a moral lesson but otherwise it truly is a very frightening film, surprisingly so for one of its era.

Not being familiar with the music of David Byrne, I thought that this was closer to being a stage musical as it has a directorial credit to Spike Lee. But this really is a filmed concert performance of songs mainly from Byrne’s new album American Utopia and also songs from earlier in his career and maybe a couple from other artistes. It’s hard to develop a strong appreciation for a completely unfamiliar genre of music from one performance alone but this is a fantastic one and it’s also especially energizing due to how overtly political it is.

I thought this was a documentary on Jamaica but it’s a really an experimental art film. It was made by an American filmmaker Khalik Allah to explore his Jamaican heritage. While it’s quite impressive as a sensory experience, there’s no overall narrative here and no real attempt to convey any hard facts about the country. That makes it tough to sustain interest throughout the entire the film even though it’s a relatively short one.

This is a film of some renown, directed by the lesser known Stephen Frears but the project was initiated and produced by Martin Scorsese. It won some awards and stars some serious talent. However my expectations that it is a heist film of some kind was completely dashed and indeed everything in it was a complete surprise to me. Yet it is not in my mind a good film as it breaks too many rules of the genre and has a pacing that just feels too off. What a very odd film indeed.

This is an extraordinary South American film that was financed by multiple countries with funds contributed by various institutions but mainly shot in Colombia. It is effectively a case of activism by film, with the cause in this instance being the horrific tragedy of child or teenage soldiers. The film itself is free of ideology and non-specific to any country so it can be said to represent all armed insurgencies which employ child soldiers. Under the direction of Alejandro Landes, it is also very effective and one can only imagine the rigors the cast and crew must have endured to make this.