Category Archives: Films & Television

Rocketman (2019)

Though I quite like Queen, I ultimately skipped out on watching Bohemian Rhapsody because I read that it’s a very straightforward and conventional biopic. I have much less affection for Elton John but I heard that this is very stylistic musical and so here I am. Ironically though the directorial credit for Bohemian Rhapsody goes to Bryan Singer, it seems that he left before finishing the film and it was completed by Dexter Fletcher who is the director of Rocketman.

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The Woodsman (2004)

It occurs to me that even though Kevin Bacon is well known for the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, I’ve actually watched very few films starring him. This one is that not that well known a film but I was intrigued by it being one of the very rare ones that takes a sympathetic view of pedophiles. It seems to me that it took a remarkable amount of courage from every involved to participate in this project at all.

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The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

Faces Places turned out to be Agnès Varda’s last film but she herself thought that this one, made ten years earlier, would have been it. This is a documentary as well and despite being highly stylistic, serves as a sort of autobiography of her own life. She recreates scenes from out of her memories and intersperses it with scenes from her own films and those of her husband Jacques Demy.

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American Factory (2019)

So this just won the Oscar for Best Documentary but got somewhat lost amidst the fuss over Parasite. Yet it’s quite remarkable in its own right. Taking its subject as the opening of a factory in the US owned by a Chinese company, it tries to present itself as equal parts an American and a Chinese film. American directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert were assisted in this by Chinese filmmakers Yiqian Zhang and Mijie Li, resulting in extraordinary access to the Chinese side of the story.

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Donbass (2018)

We loved director Sergei Loznitsa’s previous work A Gentle Creature despite not understanding many parts of it so I was looking forward to this newer film. However this turned out to be less of a coherent film than a series of unrelated vignettes, many shot in a way as to suggest a documentary style. This one may be even more difficult for foreigners unfamiliar to the region to understand but the expressive power and sense of outrage present here transcend language and culture.

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Match Point (2005)

We’re dipping back into Woody Allen’s extensive filmography. This one isn’t particularly well known but I’ve heard that it’s underrated and it marks the first collaboration between the director and Scarlett Johansson. This is also a British film though Allen originally didn’t mean for that and changed the locale for the sake of raising money. This does matter as it feels like he doesn’t quite know what to do with the British setting.

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