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.

This documentary has been well-liked enough to appear on various critics’ best of year lists. But what convinced me to put this on my list is a strong recommendation by Tyler Cowen of it offering plenty of social science to think about while urging the audience to be skeptical of its conclusions.

This second part follows directly from the first one and as they were shot together should be seen as a single epic. Nonetheless there are discernible differences. Unlike the first one, this one takes place across a much shorter span of time as we approach the present. With the level of violence escalating drastically in this one, it also starts to feel more like a conventional action movie.

Once again I heard about this epic from The Economist which annoys my wife to no end as Indian films tend to be tediously long. This one more than qualifies for being long as the whole thing comes to well over five hours. It was divided into two parts for theatrical release and so this post covers the first part.