We are past the halfway point for the Decade. What are your favorite films from each year so far?

2020: Birds of Prey
2021: Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage
2022: How To Blow Up a Pipeline
2023: They Cloned Tyrone
2024: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
2025: Caught by the Tides

Ado SPECIAL LIVE "Shinzou" in Cinema is one of the best concert films I have ever seen. Great Music, inventive visuals around the anonymous nature of the singer and an absolutely heartbreaking speech about Imposter Syndrome

Overall it's a solid film. Not quite competing with his previous works Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman, but it's very much on the same wavelength in a really interesting way. Do still recommend

By the end of it, Bullet Train Explosion is a lot more interestingly morally complicated film that it's premise or initial 30 minutes indicate, but I think it still comes together. This something that should be expected from Shinji Higuchi

In the same film though, it has a racist caricature of a Native American played by a Chinese actor in brown face. This film is a film of horrible clashes. I cannot recommend this film.

Again, overall I like both films, and I find the different ways they adapt the material fascinating. I have heard about a TV movie adaptation with Alfred Molina that I will have to track down at somepoint, but this has been a very interesting experience overall.

All of this said, the 2017 film can be very brisk with it's clues, and the way they shuffled some things around make it much closer to a thriller than a traditional mystery, and make it harder for the audience to solve the film ahead of the movie. In that way, the 1971 film has an upper hand

I am not, and have never been an adaptation purist, which I know is some of what people have criticized this film about but I think a chunk of the changes really do improve the film overall.

The ending shot is something that has stuck with me so distinctly from the first time I saw it in theaters, that's how great the cinematography in the this film is. I also really like the change to the ending.

Kenneth Branagh's adaption is gorgeous (I don't know what people talk about when they say it's ugly.) While I think the set design is a huge part of the beauty, the real winner, and what pushes this adaptation over the 1971 one as a film, is the gorgeous shot composition

That said, when I go to compare them, they also feels so different as films, with very different ethoses on how to present their renditions of the same material. In the end, I think that I end up liking the 2017 one more as a film, but the 1971 one more as a presentation of a mystery