This is Akira Kurosawa’s second last film and generally the last few films he made were not very well received. This one is conventional in terms of story and style but was nevertheless criticized at the time for serving an anti-American agenda, something which Kurosawa has never been known to do. Personally I thought this might have been a little too heavy-handed in its messaging but it’s far better than I expected and does exactly Kurosawa set out to do: restore the power of the atomic bombings to shock and terrify modern audiences.

This purely black and white film is an amazing exercise in photography and with only two actors, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, it’s a tour-de-force of acting as well. It was made by the same director, Robert Eggers, who made The Witch. Unfortunately this is one of those films that is so jam-packed with hallucinations, insanity and symbolic references that one never knows how much of what we see is real or whether that even matters, and I tend not to like this kind of film as much.

Given that these historical epics seem to do well at the South Korean box office, it’s no wonder that they keep making them. This one is about the invasion of the Goguryeo kingdom by the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century and is rather cool if you like siege battles as the whole thing is one long extended siege. It goes too far in hyping up the exploits of the heroic commander Yang Manchun but does boast rather decent action movies and more interestingly, doesn’t go overboard on the nationalism.

This is a notable early Marlon Brando film that in of itself probably isn’t that important in the annals of cinematic history. Yet the iconic image of the tough biker in a leather jacket that we are so familiar with today probably first got its start here. In its own time, this look was copied by people like James Dean and Elvis Presley while closer to our time, this look helped launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to stardom. The film itself isn’t that good but it is interesting in that it doesn’t completely condemn the motorcycle gang that comes to wreck a small town as one might expect for a film of this era.

This is another Chinese American film in that the writer and director Alice Wu is Chinese and so too is the female lead and her father. However what is especially fascinating about this film is that it is firmly about American life and the Chinese ethnicity of the main character is treated as just another kind of American-ness. Apart from that it’s among the new crop of current generation coming-of-age film. It pulls its punches too much and is just too plain nice to be truly great but I’m still amazed how far we have come since the toxic teen comedies of the 1980s and 1990s.

I rated director Céline Sciamma last film Girlhood as being well-intentioned but having problems with authenticity. This one is another all women film about women’s lack of power to make choices about their lives, this time taking place in late 18th century France. The story was written by Sciamma herself and isn’t based on anyone’s life but it’s the more poignant, powerful film for me.

So somehow I made it to middle-age without either reading Charles Dickens’ novel or watching any one of the numerous film adaptations even though like most people some of the scenes in it are so iconic that they are seared into my consciousness through cultural osmosis alone. This one is of course the grand-daddy of all the adaptations by David Lean. There have been other film versions before this but only this had any staying power and it influenced all other adaptations that followed.