Here’s another of Stanley Kubrick’s early films and though it’s said to be the best on his early career, I don’t believe it’s all that great. It’s a relatively short heist film that’s more about the plot than the directing. Apparently Kubrick cast Sterling Hayden as the male lead after seeing his performance in The Asphalt Jungle. Unfortunately for Kubrick this one is inferior to that other heist film in just about every way.

I ignored this when it first popped up on cinemas but it received enough critical praise to get my attention. Even my cinephile friend commented that it’s ‘pretty scary’. It’s the debut feature of its director Ari Aster with performers that are mostly not that well known. There is one exception in the form of a supporting character and unfortunately her first appearance is about when the film takes a turn for the worse.

This is an adaptation of an 1956 Argentine novel and won plenty of plaudits from critics. The novel is apparently rather important in Argentine literature but I haven’t read it and I believe this film makes some assumptions that make it difficult to understand for those who have no knowledge of the book. For example, I had no idea that the events depicted take place in Paraguay. Add to that the usual dose of surrealism that you often see in South American literature and you get a film that takes some effort to make sense of.

Here we return one of the earliest Coen brothers films, so early that the director credit is attributed to Joel Coen alone as apparently those were the rules back then. It is of course a noir which was how they established their reputation in the first place. I think it’s a little heavy-handed at times but it sure is a lot of fun to watch.

After Blind Massage and Summer Palace, here’s a third film by Lou Ye and it’s one of his earliest yet. Another reason for adding this to our list is because it stars Jia Hongsheng who life story was featured in Quitting as well as Zhou Xun who was his real life girlfriend for a while. It also felt appropriate to watch this after visiting Shanghai recently and we even recognized a bridge from our visit in the film.