This film was released in 2019, which means that the project must have started at least a year or two before that. Yet events that need not be mentioned this year have made it so cogent that it feels almost too raw and too potent to watch today. It is frequently described as the black Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself even drops that line, but it is so much more than that and intelligently uses the reference to demonstrate how differently black people are viewed and treated.

I love watching films from countries whose cinema I’ve had no prior exposure to as everything seems so fresh and novel and there’s a wonderful feeling that anything is possible. This is truer than usual for this Senegalese film, the directorial debut of its woman director Mati Diop. Diop was born in France but it seems that her family is a fairly prominent one in Senegal and this certainly feels both authentic and powerful to me.

So I finally got around to watching this because, hey, it was directed by Michael Mann. This turned out to be a disaster that is completely unindicative of the work that he is capable of. I was never a fan of the television show this was based on but from what I know this film has no relationship with the show beyond the shared name. I really do not understand what Mann thought he was doing with this film.

So a laudatory biographical documentary about a popular pop star isn’t something that I would ordinarily be interested in but the critical response to this is undeniable. To be fair, this isn’t anything like a raw exposé of Taylor Swift. This was made with her full cooperation and is thus very much part of her messaging to publicize her newfound wokeness. Yet what Swift wants to say is so fascinating and so noble in her stated intentions that it’s still worth watching.

This is a rather obscure film, set in Norway and with dialogue in English, Norwegian and a smattering each of Mandarin and German. Yet the director Rob Tregenza is American. It’s also meant as a showcase for the poetry of Norwegian poet Tarjei Vesaas which limits its potential audience even more. Though it’s a beautiful film and I’m receptive to its message, my unfamiliarity with the poetry makes it difficult to forge a strong emotional connection with it.

Martin Scorsese keeps making these insanely long epics. I understand that his latest The Irishman is three and a half hours long. I will have to watch it eventually but the length is just so daunting. This one is a more modest three hours and while we did watch it over two days, it proved to be a slick, fast-paced watch because it’s packed full of details about how the Las Vegas casino scene in the 1970s really worked.

This is another film by Thailand’s most celebrated filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul thought it predates the other two we’ve already watched. It consists of two distinct halves, one seemingly set in the past in rural Thailand and the other in the present in Bangkok. Some characters and situations recur but there doesn’t otherwise seem to be any connection. Unfortunately while I liked the cinematography and the atmosphere, I couldn’t really make head or tails of what the director was trying to do here.