Alexander Skarsgård takes on the role of the vine-swingin’ hottie in The Legend of Tarzan, opening this northern summer. Somebody give Christoph Waltz a medal for Best Bad Guy, already.

Hot on the heels of feel-good, against-the-odds, based-on-a-true-New-Zealand-story chess film The Dark Horse comes Disney’s feel-good, against-the-odds, based-on-a-true-Ugandan-story chess film Queen of Katwe. It’s directed by Mira Nair and stars Oscar winner Lupita Nyongo as the mother of Phiona Mutesi, a child chess prodigy.

Who thought a remake of Ben-Hur was necessary? We can tell you one thing: if the chariot race scene in this new version involves any CGI and runs any shorter than nine minutes, we’re done. (Mind you, if you’re not keen on either version due to time constraints, settle in for all 15 minutes of this 1907 adaptation.)

“Agnès Varda’s direction is stylish and stimulating in its passion, honesty, and formal transgression. Her sense of rhythm—especially in editing—gives the film a sublime symphonic flow that makes every frame a complex emotional experience. It’s magic. Also, her implementation of street photography not only enriches the Parisian atmosphere, but engenders a tone of urgency and historical relevance.

“Cléo’s (Corinne Marchand) long walks through Paris are captivating and wholly immersive… The last twenty minutes of the film tell one of the most surprising and affecting love stories that I’ve ever seen on screen. The bit about ‘half-love’ is so simple but rings so truhhooooho *sobs uncontrollably*.” —p-chips

“Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is painfully honest and forthright in his first feature film, about a nameless young woman from Dakar contracted by a French couple to work for them in a coastal French town. The Senegalese thinks she’ll be free; she instead suffers as a prisoner of her cold colonizers.

“Stasis is Black Girl’s forte; in Ozu-like, imperfectly-composed long shots, we gaze at the black girl calmly going through her daily motions. This is how the colonizers view the colonized: we see a calm Jeanne Dielman-like woman going through the typical motions of maiddom. But her agitated, hate-filled narration paints a different picture. Her lines, Kabuki-like in their stylized immediacy (yet not ‘obviousness’), are how the colonized actually feel. They never get the chance to speak, because their chances are always stifled by what they feel the supposed ‘masters’ consider more important. Thus, they (like the black girl) are literally speech-less.

“The ending shots rank among the most powerful, metaphoric, beautiful, thought-provoking, poetic images I’ve ever seen. In less than an hour, Sembène sets himself a goal, achieves it, and expects nothing more or nothing less from us than to understand it and understand how the world works in Senegal. Goal achieved. A masterpiece.” —Carlos Valladares, marking the 50th anniversary of Black Girl’s release.

“The villains here are presented as horribly evil stereotypes. With this, [director Jeremy] Saulnier can allow all of this violence and triggers (i.e. using the n-word and having swastikas everywhere) and point to his antagonists. That way he takes no blame in his third-grade antics, and we’re subjected to horror after horror in the hopes of scaring us.

“So morally I oppose this film, but even if I could ignore all that, this still fails on a technical level. I get that these are supposed to be regular people fighting and they have no experience here, but there’s no excuse for how atrociously most of the action is shot. It adds up to only bodies rubbing up against one another and eventually one gets stabbed/shot. The actors here have nothing to go off [other] than ‘look scared and scream’ and barely get by on that. There’s not even much of a story … for it’s obvious Saulnier views all of this just as excuses for the carnage.” —Paul Attard

“Green Room is not for everyone. Its violence is brutal, its tension constant and its cultural setting (the US hardcore scene) is comparatively obscure. But for those who it is for, Green Room stands as a shining example of how to tell a story about violence (both physical and ideological). Without getting bogged down in lengthy, draggy exposition, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and Green Room’s titanic ensemble—in particular Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Macon Blair and Sir Patrick Stewart—rip the contemporary white supremacist movement to shreds by pitting a scared, flawed punk band against an equally scared and flawed band of murderers who hide behind the puffed-up, hate-driven nonsense of the US ultra-right.” —Justin Harrison

Pride month is coming up in June. Get yourself primed with this showcase of LGBTQI movie releases from Wolfe Video. It was compiled by Letterboxd member Jenni Olson, author of The Queer Movie Poster Book and a leading expert on LGBT cinema history.

A concerned Letterboxd citizen would like child services to intervene in The Parent Trap. Another concerned citizen isn’t convinced that Sting’s former students gave him such a cool nickname as Sting: “They’d have called him Bumble Bollocks or something.” Yet another concerned citizen has questioned the casting choices in countless films, suggesting they might have been better if they had Nicolas Cage in them.

This review of Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet is a great entry in the category of ‘revisiting films you loved in your youth only to have the scales fall from your eyes’: “Alas, fifteen years down the track, fond recall all died violently.”

Every now and again you just want the best, right? Two new lists will help you here. The all-time community favorites—that’s every film on Letterboxd watched by at least 2,000 members and with an average rating of 4.0 or higher—has been compiled with great effort by Callum Perritt. Champion! Member Jack Moulton will be updating his list of Letterboxd’s Top 50 of 2016 every Sunday. And don’t forget Dave Vis’s tireless effort to catalog our all-time 250 highest-rated feature-length films, complete with regular commentary.

A very short list of movies in which the song I’m Too Sexy plays while someone tries on clothes and hats to get ready for a big date.

It’s always good to be reminded of films that pass the imperfect but useful Bechdel Test.

Hey, why don’t you turn around and face the camera, already? Oh, okay.