So last time around I said I was done with films by director Jia Zhangke, yet here is another one of those again. The answer is that this one dates from much back and is in fact one of the director’s earliest films. I had this on my list for a very long time but finding it was very difficult. As it turned out we found this one to be a fair bit better his newer films but it is still flawed.

I have not thus far watched a single one of Disney’s CGI-heavy live-action remakes of their old animated classics, judging them to be of doubtful artistic merit. However as a friend recently asked us to find a full set of them for her children, I thought we might as well watch them ourselves, spreading them out over time. They take very little effort to watch and might even be a little entertaining. I picked this one to start with as it is chronologically the earliest.

As big a fan as I am of the STALKER games, there was no way I wasn’t going to watch this. I’m rather surprised that a miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster was funded and made at all and even shocked that it’s so well made and high profile. It’s not perfect by any means especially as it tries too hard to neatly categorize characters as either heroes or villains but it’s much better than I’d hoped. It would be fantastic if more shows of such quality were made to dramatize important real events.

Nicholas Cage has been something of a joke ever since his tax troubles led him to accept any and all acting jobs without discrimination and he has indeed appeared in many awful films. On the face of it, this looks like another such project: a low budget, cheesy film by an unknown director that seems destined to go straight to video. Yet director Panos Cosmatos makes such bold, uncompromising choices that this turned out to be a rather unique creature that is really quite good.

This Polish film made the news a while back as it had ruffled quite a few feathers in its country of origin. That’s no wonder as it directly attacks the Catholic Church in Poland on multiple fronts, accusing it of many, many types of wrongdoings. Most surprising to me is that it was a commercial success and broke box office records. That’s extraordinary for a serious drama like this and really speaks of how important this issue in is Poland.