This is another of those strong European animated films for adults, and seems to be the directorial debut of its maker Jérémy Clapin. It has a macabre premise about a disembodied hand and uses it brilliantly to make a powerful point. However I’m not sure that I can agree with the particular philosophy of life that it espouses, thus I ended up not liking as much as many critiques seem to have.

This was one of the biggest releases of last year so it’s a given that we would get around to watching it eventually. I’m not a big fan of director Sam Mendes however and this film didn’t improve my opinion of him either. While this film is quite beautiful on a technical level, and the much vaunted single-take of the soldiers’ journey is a big reason for that, I feel that this film is overall underwhelming, being unable to live up to the promise of what it is trying to accomplish.

I added this to my list because it is highly rated and seems to have been a particular favorite of many actors. It features a stellar cast, many of whom took pay cuts just to appear in this low budget production, and the director had to turn away many more A-list actors. Unfortunately I think this must have worked better in its original form as a stage play because although the characters keep talking and talking and talking, they ultimately say nothing at all and the film feels empty and pointless.

Here’s something a little different, a Hebrew-language television series from Israel that was highly successful some years back. I first learned about this years ago when it was featured by The Economist and kept running into references to it here and there but as you can expect, trying to actually watch it before streaming became commonplace was difficult. But I never forgot about this and kept it on my watch list and so here we are.

So we finally sat down to watch The Irishman which really is quite an endeavor given its length and I can’t say that I enjoyed the experience much at all. Given that it’s by Martin Scorsese and all of the accolades it picked up, we couldn’t have skipped it but perhaps we should have as it feels like a retread of the director’s greatest hits, complete with his favorite actors, plot points, themes and characterizations. It’s excellent work to be certain but it all feels like something we’ve seen before, stretched out to epic length.

I’d planned on watching this a little earlier but it does seem appropriate to watch this alongside the drama of the 2020 US elections. This is a documentary that tells the story of how Dilma Rousseff was impeached as president of Brazil and how Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ended up being imprisoned. It is highly relevant to Brazil’s current situation as the eventual victor of the whole kerfuffle is Jair Bolsonaro who remains president today.

My days of reading H.P. Lovecraft are long behind me and though I’m now innured to the literary tricks that he used to infuse his stories with mystery and horror and I’m wise to the more problematic elements in his characters, reading them is still a treasured childhood memory. Given how pervasive Lovecraft’s influence has been, it’s been mind-boggling that no one has thus far made a good adaptation of his work. Some have tried, but they’ve mostly been low budget, poor quality stuff. This particular film isn’t completely faithful to the short story but I think it’s good enough that we can consider it a success.