The Scent of Green Papaya

Stunningly gorgeous.

A lusciously-beautiful film, this memory tale charts the life of a young Vietnamese girl as she works as a servant for two different families.

Her first job lands her with a rich, but deeply-fractured family, giving her a front row seat as their lives crumble.

Later she goes to work for a pianist who’s more interested in his servant than in his own fiancée, setting up a not-totally unexpected finale.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, and an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film, this remains, 27 years later, a thoroughly enchanting slice of world cinema.

It Follows

You can run, but you can’t hide.

There’s a killer STD on the loose (or something like that), as teens are stalked and dispatched after having sexual encounters in this crackling horror flick.

It takes various human forms, but the assassin is relentless, pursuing each new target, getting ever closer until WHAMMO!

You can pass the curse on by boinking someone else, but there’s always the chance it’ll come back to get you as well if your new mark on the bed-board gets iced.

Favoring creepiness over gore, this one will put some ice down the back of your shirt.

Microcosmos

What’s buggin’ you?

I used to get mixed reactions when I played this stellar nature documentary on Videoville’s TV screens.

The imagery is stunning, capturing bees, slug, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies in their natural environment – documented in pristine close-ups by revolutionary cameras.

Delivered with just a brief voice-over, the filmmakers largely let the action speak for itself.

And it’s mesmerizing.

Unless customers had an aversion to those same creepy-crawlies.

Then, seeing them beam back at you from multiple screens hovering over the video rows could have been a little disconcerting.

Not that it ever stopped me from hitting play.