I hesitated to watch this as I find biographies tiresome as a general rule and I have no particular affinity for the person of Leonard Bernstein. In the end, what made me come around was that it’s focused on his relationship with his wife, rather than his career as a musician, and I thought my wife might like it. Its specific focus actually made it better than I’d expected. On the one hand, it’s another case of the talented superstar who can’t help being involved in endless extramarital affairs. On the other, it establishes that his wife was still the love of his life the whole time, at least within the story that it wants to tell. I have too little emotional connection with any of these people to love this film but I do have to admit that it’s solid work.

The ongoing Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the worst humanitarian disasters of our time and certainly Malaysia is among the countries affected, yet there is still a paucity of films on the subject. This documentary focuses on the relationship between two women, Hla, a Buddhist Rakhine midwife, and Nyo Nyo, her Muslim Rohingya apprentice. This is a ground-level view of their daily lives filmed over a number of years and doesn’t have much in the way of a broad overview of the Rohingya people. I found the unfiltered and raw point of view invaluable and it helped me understand the tension of living as a Rohingya in Myanmar.

We’ve seen Ali Abbasi’s work before in the form of the excellent Border but I had no idea that the director of that Swedish film was even Iranian. Here he has made a film that is set in Iran and inspired by a real-life serial killer active from 2000 to 2001. This looks astonishingly close to an American-style thriller, except it is supposed to be in Iran and that makes all the difference. Even better is that it doesn’t immediately end once the serial killer is caught and as my wife notes, how Iranian society reacts to the ensuing trial is scarier than the murders themselves. This was actually shot in Jordan as this would never have been allowed in Iran itself and so Abbasi holds nothing back in exposing the seedy underbelly of the Islamic Republic.

Highly rated films from the past tend to hit more often than miss with me because there’s usually a good reason why they’re still remembered decades later. I’d say this one is an exception. Billy Bob Thornton delivered an outstanding performance, of that there is no doubt. But when I realized that this film is basically all him, he also wrote and directed it, I started to get queasy. Because this is such a dark and atavistic piece, it makes me wonder about the kind of mindset involved in creating it. In the end, Thornton got what he wanted as this project made him a superstar but this isn’t a film that I would recommend at all.

Continuing through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville, here’s a film that is known as being one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites. The intertitles explain that the title is slang referring to a police informant and so the audience is lead to wonder which character is the real informant the whole time. This is a twist movie that is only really good for watching once and I can’t say anything about it without spoiling it. So consider yourself warned if you continue reading. I admit that its gimmick is original and the visuals are beautiful but I wouldn’t consider this a great film.

This is a relatively recent British film but it looks very old because it was shot on a vintage hand-cranked camera. This anachronism nicely matches the film’s subject matter, about a curmudgeonly fisherman upset about the gentrification of his fishing village. I really wanted to like this and I felt that director Mark Jenkin was being remarkably fair even if his sympathies are obviously with the fisherman. Yet between the technical constraints of his chosen form and the amateurishness of the production, it’s too poorly made to be more than an interesting experiment.

Here’s yet another Senegalese film, an even earlier one that is apparently the first sub-Saharan African film to be internationally acclaimed. I didn’t like this very much as it’s just too simple and not very well made at all. None of the actors are very good and it’s infuriating to me that the main character Diouana has all these internal thoughts yet never voices any of them out loud. I get that this is really an allegory about colonialism but it’s so abstract and the ill treatment of Diouana by her employers so minor in the grand scheme of things that I found her reaction a shocking overreaction. I mean I get the point but this is all so removed from any real world situation that I found it impossible to get into it.