March begins with a few scattered film comments.

Hamnet (2025), directed by Chloe Zhao. Death, grief, and the power of art. This pretty much sums up Hamnet, I think. This fanciful recreation of Shakespearean England has its emotional moments. These arise from the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at the age of nine. It also has its visually stunning moments. Lighting, compositions, shades, and colours bring to mind such visual artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Caravaggio, and others. We alternate between lush visuals of the forests and outdoors and those of dimly lit interiors where light highlights certain features and images. I am not sure what all the chthonic mystery is about, the emphasis on Agnes (Jesse Buckley), mother of Hamnet, as an outsider, an earth mother (pretty much literally), a witch of the woods, amounts to, but it does lend itself to the magical aura of the film. The emotional intensity of the action reaches a climax (!) in the performance of Hamlet that works as both an end to the film and as an emotional catharsis both for the groundlings watching the performance (including Agnes) and for the film viewer. The moment when the actor playing Hamlet reaches down and touches Agnes’s hand and the hands of the front row groundlings brings together art and reality. In a way, Hamnet underscores life as a stage on which men and women, merely players, strut and fret for an hour or two and then are heard no more. I confess to having mixed feelings about this film. As far as I can tell, it plays fast and loose with the facts of history, and yet it manages to humanize characters from history who remain just out of range of facts. And finally, we have those magnificent tableaux that invoke Renaissance art. And by the way, do I not recall that an earlier play, earlier than Shakespeare’s work, exists called Hamnet?

All We Imagine as Light (2024), directed by Payal Kapadia. Blue is the predominant colour here, from the blue of the nurses’ uniforms, to the sky, to towels, to various shades of blue turning up throughout the film, both inside and outside. Much of the filming takes a painterly form giving us shots that stand out as looking like paintings. This painterly quality, in a way, belies the film's focus: the city of Mumbai. The opening documentary-style footage announces the focus on a city of dreams that is crowded, bustling, run-down, and filled with poverty. As things proceed, we focus on three nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha has been married for about a year, but right after her arranged marriage, her husband traveled to Germany and he no longer communicates with Prabha. She has taken Anu as a roommate. Anu is flighty and younger than Prabha, and she has a boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), who happens to be Muslim. Finally, there is Parvaty who lives in a slum and has been evicted because she lacks papers. These three women we come to know well, their anxieties, their dreams and aspirations, their failures, their loneliness, and their desires. When Prabha receives a mysterious package from Germany containing a fancy rice cooker, she is unsure whether this is a gift from her husband or not. As for Anu, she dresses as a Muslim woman in order to visit Shiaz, but at the last minute he cancels her visit. Parvaty decides to return to her seaside village, and the other two women accompany her to help her carry all her belongings. Here at the seaside, Prabha has a surreal encounter with her estranged husband after she revives a man on the beach and save his life. As the film rolls to a finish, we have the three women sitting, at night, at an outdoor establishment, sharing intimacies while the young server dances and twirls in the background. This is a quiet, intensely intimate story of three women. As a piece of cinema, it offers the colours of Wong Kar Wai and the humanity of Satyajit Ray. This is an impressive film.

The Beast (2023), directed by Bertrand Bonello. If I may understate the case, this film is a loose retelling of Henry James’s novella, The Beast in the Jungle. Here the focalizing character is female rather than male. Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) is an enigmatic character in an enigmatic movie; she appears in three times, as a concert pianist in Paris around 1910, as an aspiring actress and model in Los Angeles in 2014, and as a woman going through “purification” to control feelings and make her a better worker in 2044.  The film opens with the aspiring actress in front of a green screen acting out a scene in which an intruder threatens her life. The unseen intruder (to be added later) is a beast. Indeed, the beast in this movie is amorphous, unseen, more an existential dread than something concrete. The elusiveness of the beast is reflected in the elusiveness of the narrative(s). Things move along without clear transitions. One of the more powerful parts here involve the male character who, like Gabrielle, appears in all three “stories.” This character is Louis Lewanski (George MacKay), and in the 2014 segment he plays an incel who stalks Gabrielle. This segment is chilling. In any case, Louis and Gabrielle are lovers fated never to love. The film has several recurring images, one of which is the doll. In the 1910 segment, Gabrielle is married to a man who manufactures dolls, in 2014 models are dolls and Gabrielle has a sort of Chucky doll, and in 2044 AI generates dolls, one of which is Gabrielle’s companion and would be lover. The doll is a mark of the emotionless state towards which humanity moves. Another recurring image is the pigeon, a bird that signifies both freedom and death. Indeed, freedom and death are perhaps the two most prominent themes here. As for cinematic influences, we can identity allusions to Godard, Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), David Lynch, Spielberg, and perhaps even Scorsese. This film will not appeal to everyone, but it is provocative.

A House of Dynamite (2025) directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Devastating. A combination of Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, this film takes us to the edge of nuclear disaster. It leans closer to Fail Safe than to Strangelove, and this may be both its strength and its weakness. The U.S. government here is peopled with serious, earnest human beings desperately trying to sort out a dilemma of world-shattering proportions. We, however, live in times that more closely resemble Strangelove with its nutjob generals and numbskull politicians. This has the effect of making A House of Dynamite even more terrifying. This film is meant as a call to renewed sanity and it arrives at a time of unprecedented insanity.

What We Did on Our Holiday (2014), directed by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin. Heart-warming is probably as good as any description of this film. Heart-warming is both praise and criticism. Some will find this film attractive, and some will find it bland. I found it attractive. The cast, especially the three children, are superb. The script is often witty. The Scottish scenery is fabulous. The scene in which the three young children give their grandad a Viking funeral is worth the price of admission. The plot is straight forward: a couple with three young children is having marital difficulties, but they decide to go as a family to Doug’s (David Tennant) father’s 75^th birthday party in the Highlands of Scotland. Doug and Abi (Rosamund Pike) bicker all the time. Grandad Gordie (Billy Connolly) has terminal cancer. Doug’s brother Gavin (Ben Miller) has social aspirations, while his wife Margaret (Amelia Bullmore) has had a meltdown in a convenience store that has made its way to YouTube. Then we have the scene at the beach with Grandad and the three kids, Lottie (Amelia Jones), Mickey (Bobby Smalldridge), and Jess (Harriet Turnbull). As I say, heart-warming. What we have is a film about family, its frictions, its dysfunctions, its strengths and its weaknesses. Celia Imrie turns up as a social worker, and Annette Crosbie turns up as an owner of ostriches. One ostrich has a way of streaking every now and then. The film too has a way of streaking every now and then.

From Vegas to Macau 111 (2016), directed by Wai Weung Lau and Wong Jing. This film has a 2.6 rating on IMDB and user reviews are uniformly negative. Well, I confess to not having seen the first two From Vegas to Macau films, but I can say that this one is off the wall bizarre. It has two robots, Skinny and Stupido, who fall in love. It has Transformer scenes. It has gadgetry that surpasses anything in a James Bond film by far. It has dozens of Andy Laus. It has two Chow Yun Fats. It has martial arts. It has soldiers that look like the dark side of those in Star Wars. It has characters who wildly overact. It has colourful eye-catching costumes. It has many pies in the face scenes. It has much shooting and a few explosions. It has Psy. It has scenes of gambling. It has a plot that left me wondering what was going on. In short, it is a mess. And yet, it left me feeling upbeat. Its zaniness is contagious. Its two main stars, Chow Yun Fat and ageless Andy Lau are likeable. So if you are seeking diversion in these troubled times, this film just may provide it.