This is the first film by Joanna Hogg that we’ve watched and she is an up and coming British director whose name often pops up. But it’s also notable as the first significant performance by Honor Swinton Byrne who plays the lead here while her mother Tilda Swinton takes on a supporting role as the main character’s mother. Unfortunately I don’t like it much as it feels so indirect and seems to leave so much unsaid. Then after reading how it’s at least partially autobiographical on Hogg’s part, it’s easier to understand how painful it must have been to confront these issues head on.

This is of course the sequel to L’Auberge Espagnole that I wrote about last year by the same director and writer Cédric Klapisch and starring many of the same performers. The previous film had a very large cast of characters but had a very simple structure about a household full of exchange students from all over Europe. This one however sprawls just about everywhere across time and space as it follows the main character Xavier’s life without seemingly much tying the narratives together but it still has some charm and the same total commitment to his citizen of the world ethos.

I did grow up with American comics but it was all the superhero stuff that is derided in this film. This is a part biography, part documentary film about the life and career of Harvey Pekar, the writer of a series of comics about real life in the US. Since his comics are about himself, this means that the film also serves as an adaptation of his work. His is a fascinating life that makes for a story well worth telling but the unique format of this film itself outshines its content for me.

This is the earliest of the films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan we watched so far and unfortunately it’s also the roughest one. This one is set in Istanbul so it’s great to watch scenes of the city, especially in the winter. However while we can just about discern what this film is about, it’s a struggle to make out what he is trying to say and the lack of refinement makes it feel subpar in comparison with his later works.

It’s a little annoying to me how casting Jesse Eisenberg in this is playing exactly to his type as a nervous, socially awkward nerd. But then again, it works so why not? Riley Stearns is a very new director even if this isn’t his debut and there’s no doubt that he has made here a very interesting and thought-provoking work. While ostensibly a martial arts film, this is in reality a critique of the toxic masculinity that we often see in that culture. At the same time, it’s so stylized that I’m not sure that the critique hits all that close to home.

Director Jennifer Kent’s debut The Babadook was a huge success and this is her immediate follow up. The poster and some elements tease it as being another supernatural horror film but it isn’t really one even if some parts of it are horrifying to watch. It more resembles that genre of film that involves a wronged woman who subsequently attempts to enact vengeance against her aggressors. It does twist in a way that makes it more interesting but I’m not sure that it’s for the better.

This film was based on a book that was hugely successful in South Korea and was itself a major cultural phenomenon. Watching this, it’s obvious that it must have must touched a nerve among South Korean women who recognized themselves in the story of its protagonist. I think it tries to do a little too much. The range of topics that can be comfortably covered in a novel is necessarily wider than what we can accommodate in a film. Nonetheless it is a bold and timely rallying call for the country and a wonderful sign that its traditionally patriarchal society is changing.