Director Diao Yinan made international waves a few years back with his noir Black Coal, Thin Ice and this is his follow-up. It’s hard to call this a noir however as it is mainly about police on a massive manhunt for a gangster. It does feature beautiful visuals and a great sense of atmosphere with its night scenes. But on all other counts it is a failure, with flat characters, a directionless plot and no real central theme of any kind.

As with The Lady Eve, this is another comedy by director Preston Sturges and was even released in the same year. However while I didn’t really like that other one, I found this to be a work of pure genius. Its comedic skits are just as inanely dumb but it leans into the inanity to justify its worth and even features an unexpectedly dark turn. This is a film that surprised and delighted me at every turn while being mostly respectful about the poor and downtrodden in it.

Once again sports film are very formulaic and often not worth the time. This one is a bit more promising, being less of a sports film than a personal redemption one about a one-time sports star turned coach. Unfortunately while it’s not bad, it’s not really that good. Oddly enough once you realize that the main character’s depression stems from the loss of a child, it starts to look like an inferior version of Manchester by the Sea, which of course starred Ben’s brother Casey Affleck.

This marks the first film we’ve watched by legendary Italian director Roberto Rossellini and part of his so-called Neorealist Trilogy, so named because they most use non-professional actors. While it is solid work, I didn’t find it particularly noteworthy because we’ve seen so much like it already. What is remarkable is that this film was made just one year after the real events it depicts about a Rome under German occupation, and hence the difficult conditions and crude production quality were due to the very limited resources available to the filmmakers.

The release of a new adaptation of this famous story a couple of years ago reminded me that I had yet to view any version of it. Yet after some research the best version seems to be this one directed by Sidney Lumet who have come to be one of my favorite directors of the era. Naturally it also features a star-studded cast for its many characters, led by Sean Connery and including Ingrid Bergman is a small supporting role.

I am not generally a big fan of Seth Rogen’s brand of humor but this title in particular was noted by a number of critics and the premise sounded. I suspected almost immediately that this was a mistake once I heard the faux accent Rogen adopts as an Eastern European of the early 20th century. It’s a sign that the film isn’t just not taking the subject matter seriously, it’s actively trying to mock and belittle everything. Sure enough this film turned out to be pretty much trash.

This film was the first of the director’s collaborations with actress Setsuko Hara and forms part of his so-called Noriko Trilogy. In all three films of the trilogy, Nara plays an unmarried woman named Noriko though they are all of course different characters. I feel that this is actually the most sophisticated and avant-garde of the director’s films that I have seen so far as the themes here go beyond the traditional ones of wholesome family values to venture into darker territory.