Three Sisters – Wang Bing’s beautiful and heartbreaking documentary from 2012 traces a year in the lives of three sisters in an unconnected and undeveloped village in rural Yunnan Province. The three sisters, ages 4 through 10, are left to fend for themselves while their father works in the distant city of Kunming; the mother has abandoned the family. Yang Yang, the eldest, becomes the work horse and pseudo-mother to the younglings, performing all of the rigorous farm and house work in addition to attending grade school. The key sequence is late in the film, when the father takes the younger two children to the city, relieving Yang Yang of her responsibility, but leaving her completely alone as a consequence. It’s an overwhelming portrait of poverty, isolation and resilience. Often relying on a crew of himself, Wang captures it all with a hand-held, low-grade video recorder for a cinéma-vérité style. As a viewer, you almost never forget that Wang is in the scene filming and yet he rarely loses the fly on the wall invisibility that allows life to unravel in its natural rhythms.

British Sounds – Another Godard directed Dziga Vertov Group political film, this one set in Great Britain in the late ‘60’s. It’s divided into roughly 5-10 minute segments each with entirely different visual stratagems. The first and best sequence features one long continuous pan through a Renault automobile assembly line, Marxist commentary included. Another one features a newscaster reading over-the-top, politically incorrect right-wing political commentary. This segment is remarkable in how it resembles actually politically incorrect talking points featured any given day on Fox News. Godard’s satire is now just real life. A less positive sequence features a long take of a naked woman from the waist down, the voice over describing the need for female agency and empowerment in society. This didn’t offend me per se, in fact, it is quite powerful, but I would have been more comfortable with this scene coming from a female director.

Freer Gallery of Art – This took three attempts, but I finally made it through the entirety of the newly renovated permanent collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. Though the building isn’t particularly large, like any good museum, it rewards patience and careful consideration. It features ceramics, sculpture and painting from across the Asian continent paired with some American work for contrast. The Chinese and Japanese Art collections were my favorites, especially the Chinese jade Bi from the Liangzhu culture and the various Japanese wabi-sabi vessels. The former are particularly mysterious because historians are unsure what function they played in society. Sometimes individuals would be buried with them, and others would be passed down within families for generations.

Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s short avant-garde debut. This was a re-watch and I was blown away by the cinematography. The turbulent identity loop Deren’s character literally climbs through sits in a continuum, building on the promise of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, anticipating the later work of Jean Cocteau and even Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Thematically, the woman in psychological peril subject matter feels as accomplished as David Lynch’s oeuvre. A reminder that we should all be paying more attention to the avant-garde. Speaking of which, where is the avant garde in film today? Surely Lynch and Malick are too mainstream now. Who else?

Queer Eye – The first episode of this reboot is just ridiculous fun. I find that intimate moments in reality TV are harder for me to buy into than in fictional or documentary film; The staging and editing room manipulations tend to be too obvious. BUT, this Fab Five are so likeable and their feel good message of self-love and empowerment is so important that it was easy to forgive the show’s flaws. I particularly enjoyed the little montages each host gets before their segments. For example, Jonathan Van Ness, the hair stylist, will be twirling his admittedly amazing hair while dancing with a huge smile for multiple quick shots. Totally infectious.

Port of Shadows – Marcel Carné’s moody, noir-ish portrait of a world at the brink of oblivion. It’s 1938, Jean (a sterling Jean Gabin) has deserted the army and hitchhiked to the port city of Le Havre, intending to escape the dark shadow looming over Europe. In the city, Jean gets entangled with the locals and falls for the charming Nelly (Michèle Morgan), giving fate enough time to wrap its tentacles around him. Nearly everything and everyone is great here, most notably Carné’s expression of masculinity through Gabin. Gabin’s Jean is running away from his duty and his country, yet Carné directs only sympathy with this choice. Moreover, throughout the film Jean stands as a moralizing force for the other male characters, literally beating them when they get out of line. This code, a personal hierarchy of masculine values, strikes me as particularly French, a precursor to the type of cool masculinity that defines the later crime noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville.

A Quiet Place – Jim from The Office directing a pretty good horror film! I would give this movie an A for concept and a B / B- for execution. John Krasinski is a competent director and, if A Quiet Place is any indication, an ambitious one. The best scene is at the halfway point when the wife, played by Emily Blunt (Krasinski’s real-life wife), must give birth in silence after stepping on a nail. Also promising is Krasinski’s aptitude for spatial management on a massive farm set. Too much of this film is directed safely, the visual puzzle pieces are a little too big to make it challenging. Worse, I found myself grasping at straws to build a coherent thematic response from its swirl of Biblical and Americana imagery. Perhaps a larger interpretation will congeal over time. In the meantime, I am eager to see what this box office success will afford Krasinski next.