This is too important a documentary to skip over so here it is despite my own misgivings about its shallowness in some ways and how it looks and feels over-produced and over-dramatized to grab your attention in the exact same way that the social media it criticizes does. Like everyone says, the centrality of social media in today’s society makes this a near mandatory film to watch even as I wish that it could have taken a more measured approach with a wider perspective and less breathless alarmism.

One of the consequences of a blockbuster driven Hollywood with its need for scale and large budgets, is that modern mainstream films now rarely have sex and nude scenes. There is now probably far more sex and nudity in television shows which seems kind of strange. This one is an erotic thriller back from when this wasn’t the case, added to my list because it is considered one of the best of its genre. Unfortunately while it has some steamy scenes, it is actually overall kind of tame in terms of sex and makes up for it by being an excellent thriller.

Everyone should know this as the landmark Chinese propaganda film from last year and amazingly it was also the highest grossing film worldwide of the year due to US cinemas being mostly shut down during the pandemic. This made it a much watch for me, patriotic bombast notwithstanding. Overall I found it to be an effective action film with fantastic production values. It is however highly exaggerated and from what I can tell somewhat ahistorical, though probably not out of malice.

This one is apparently known as Hollywood’s most notable screwball comedies of the era though I don’t believe we’ve watched anything from this director Preston Sturges before. However I found that the plot to be so outrageous and the male lead character so stupid that it’s unbelievable. Still there is a certain charm in this kind of lowbrow humor that we haven’t seen in a long time and I suppose it must have been quite novel at the time to have the female lead character be so dominant throughout the entire film.

Sometimes it can be truly astonishing how such simple films with so little going on can be so effective. This is the first film we watched by director Kelly Reichardt but it seems that her reputation for such minimalism is already well established so more of her work is definitely going onto the to watch list. I dislike the ending as it feels abrupt and I would like to imagine a happy ending for our two plucky heroes. Nevertheless this is an amazing film that immerses you fully in its setting.

Odd how we’ve never watch a single Romanian film but here we have two in relatively short order. This one actually uses multiple different languages and attempts to be a kind of international thriller. Unfortunately it relies entirely on the central conceit of whistling as a language and is not otherwise a film to be taken very seriously. I do note it evinces a very cynical morality that says interesting things about Romanian society.

Here is yet another tiny, indie science-fiction film that has achieved a measure of critical acclaim all out of proportion with its budget. It’s the debut feature of its director Andrew Patterson who basically kept submitting it to many, many film festivals and finally got it to be shown in drive-in cinemas amidst the lockdowns of 2020. There’s is nothing new here to add to the extensive canon of UFO films but it does have an angle all of its own and I can’t help but love a film that knows exactly what it is trying to do as it is the case here.