Juliette Binoche turns up so often in recent French films of note that it’s frankly embarrassing. I base all of my picks on critics’ recommendations so it’s not like I particularly like her. Here she’s in a film by a director whose work I’ve never seen before, Claire Denis. This is apparently loosely adapted from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes which explains the eclectic nature of the main character’s relationships.

This is another film that went straight to the top of all of the critics’ lists. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about this one as I had it stereotyped as a cowboy film but it turned out to be better than I had expected. Most surprising of all is that its director Chloé Zhao was born in China, yet she somehow managed to make a very authentic film about modern rodeo riders in the US.

This is the second part of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s coming-of-age trilogy that began with A Summer at Grandpa’s. Considering what a great film that was, it would always be a hard act to follow and indeed this one is a much less impressive effort. It is not of course actually a sequel as it has an entirely different set of characters but it roughly covers the teenage years of its main male character and so can be thought of as a spiritual successor.

It’s been a while since we last a quirky independent science-fiction film and what could be more indie than a project in which the two directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are also the lead actors. This project was made with a tiny budget and involved no one who is well known. Nonetheless it earned sufficient notice and praise from critics to make it worth paying attention to.

This came to my attention when I read about critics including it as one of the most important films of the 21st century so far. I also found the premise of a long documentary about post-industrial decline in China very interesting. Tracking down a watchable copy was a real chore however and that’s not surprising as not many people would likely want to watch a documentary film with a total running time that exceeds nine hours. My wife and I spread out the experience over many days, treating it essentially as if we were watching a television series.