Brief reviews #2 – Erik Gahner Larsen

Here are a few brief reviews of some of the things I have been watching and reading lately.

Movies/TV series

A Complete Unknown (2024): A somewhat conventional and great movie about Bob Dylan (i.e., much better than movies like I’m Not There). Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan is great and deserved an Oscar (much more than Adrien Brody). Not necessarily a must watch, but I can recommend it. Especially if you are a hardcore fan of Bob Dylan (or not familiar with Bob Dylan at all).
American Graffiti (1973): Car Wars. A classic but, alas, not a must-watch in my book. There are several good scenes and the cinematography is stunning, but as a coherent movie it feels very much like a 50+-year-old movie.
Amsterdam (2022): You will find all the ingredients for a good movie here, but what is being served here is not a good movie. The acting is superb, and while I do enjoy a conspiracy thriller, there is simply too much going on. With some of the movie taking place in Amsterdam, and especially with the title of the movie in mind, I was expecting to see at least some of Amsterdam. Overall, a disappointing experience.
Better Man (2024): Take that, Robbie Williams. You will find some interesting ideas in this biopic, most notably the idea of making Robbie Williams look like a monkey. Despite these ideas, I found it conventional in its structure. I am not sure what this movie can say about addiction, if anything, and there are many other movies I would recommend over this one that explore topics related to fame, insecurity, relationships, drug addiction, etc.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025): The first Bridget Jones movie was good, the second one was bad, and the third one was ridiculously bad. I would rank this somewhere between the second and the third movie. There is really no reason for this movie to exist. The worst thing is that the movie seems to be aware about this. The movie is doing everything it can to evoke a feeling of nostalgia. Even the credits are full of images and scenes from the previous movies. No need to watch unless you are feeling nostalgic for the Bridget Jones universe.
Companion (2025): This is a great movie. The less you know about it, the better. I wanted to compare it to a mix of two specific movies, but I believe even doing that will be somewhat of a spoiler and ruin the experience of the movie.
Das Millionenspiel (1970): A German sci-fi movie in the same category as The Running Man. I found the fictitious television show a bit too on the nose, especially the advertisements, but overall a good movie. You can find it with English subtitles on YouTube.
Hard Truths (2024): Mike Leigh is slowly becoming one of my favourite directors. Not because of his more recent movies but by a combination of me being late to the game and just getting older. This is a strong movie with great acting and great dialogue (and, in specific scenes, deliberate lack hereof). If you like movies such as Secrets & Lies, High Hopes, and Life Is Sweet, this one is also worth watching.
I, Daniel Blake (2016): Here is a depressing fact about the UK: there are more food banks than public libraries. Since this movie came out in 2016, the number of food banks have also increased, which is even more depressing to think about. This is a sad but important movie, both at a societal and psychological level. I recommend watching it back-to-back with Sorry We Missed You.
In the Shadow of the Cypress (2023): This movie won an Oscar for the Best Animated Short Film. It is interesting that both animated winners had no dialogue with water playing an important role. Alas, the movie did not do much for me and I found it a bit too slow.
Majo no takkyûbin (1989): Miyazaki’s movies are beautiful and this one is no exception. While the plot is not as engaging as many of his other movies, there is still a lot to get out of the movie. In other words, if you like Miyazaki in general, this one is also worth watching.
Mo (2022): If you liked Ramy, you should also pick up this show. And even if you did not like Ramy, you might enjoy this show. There are only two seasons with eight episodes in each, so this is a relatively easy show to get through. There are specific weak subplots and characters, but those are easy to ignore. I would go as far as to say that the show is worth watching for the final episode in the second season alone.
Paris, je t’aime (2006): A collection of 18 short films all by different directors. A few of these are really good, but most of them are just mediocre. I watched it while I was in Paris which definitely made the viewing experience better. While Paris of course has changed over the past twenty years, it is funny how much it looks the same. Compare, for example, with the view of London today and in Love Actually.
Rokjesnacht (2024): Once in a while I check out new Dutch movies just to get some exposure to Dutch popular culture. It is always fun to see the city you live in on the screen, but damn this is a bad movie. The plot promotes toxic behaviour. It is not a romantic movie, nor a comedy, and definitely not a romantic comedy. Avoid.
Searching for Sugar Man (2012): Is it possible to be famous in one country without knowing it? And how does that happen? And if you know it, how would you live your life? Searching for Sugar Man is an interesting documentary dealing with one unique story, but I have a lot of questions upon watching this movie about how unique and real this particular story is. I am open to the possibility that this is a one-to-one representation of reality, or at least as one-to-one we should expect documentaries to be, but there is something about this movie that felt off. You will most likely find this documentary interesting, and the question is primarily whether you will find it good interesting or bad interesting.
Secret Mall Apartment (2024): A fun idea but not an idea that can fill up a feature-length documentary. The story is about a group of friends that create a secret apartment inside a mall. Luckily, they recorded a lot of what they did making it fun to watch for the most part. However, overall this is a weak documentary.
Sult (2025): Based upon a book but, alas, not by Knut Hamsun. Yet another generic Danish movie on Netflix. This movie deals with relationship issues in the context of fertility treatment, but there is little to no depth to the characters (especially the supporting characters) and the plot is predictably boring.
The Brutalist (2024): Pretentious and overrated Oscar bait. Some good cinematography at play but that is all there is to say about this movie. Funny how the movie needs an intermission to defend its lack of coherency (and the second part of the movie is just bad). Adrien Brody’s acting is just a weaker version of his performance in The Pianist (i.e., nothing new under the sun — or, the only new thing is a bit of AI). I doubt we will talk about this movie in a few years.
The Order (2024): This is by no means a perfect movie, but it is much better than the review scores available online would make you believe. Based on a true story and, alas, dealing with themes that feel as relevant today as ever.
Valerie a týden divu (1970): I can see this movie being described as a ‘Gothic coming-of-age dark fantasy film’, and while I do not necessarily disagree, I did not really get anything out of this movie. It is too surreal with mediocre acting. One of the few movies I do not understand is part of the Criterion Collection.
White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2007): A documentary about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The majority of the movie consists of interviews with the (few) survivors of the bombings, and it is sad and thought-provoking. An important documentary to watch.

Books

All you need to know about the Netherlands by Jonas Hoffmann-Schmidt: A short book that does not contain all you need to know about the Netherlands. There are several repetitions and while I am not saying it is written with the help of LLMs, it does give that vibe.
Class Wars: A Field Guide to Being British by The Daily Mash: It is difficult to write a funny book, sure, but with the source material being the class divide in Britain, I was expecting a lot more from this book. A few funny bits here and there, but overall not a book I can recommend.
Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi by Mark Boyle: If I had read this book when it came out ten years ago, I am sure I would have hated it. I do not agree with a lot of the points in this book, especially its bleak view on modern society, but I enjoyed this book a lot. It is food for thought and in a lot of ways it is just as relevant today as ten years ago, if not even more.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering: Plan and Build Robust Data Systems by Joe Reis and Matt Housley: While the book technically speaking covers the fundamentals of data engineering (as promised by the title), I was disappointed by the structure and content. It is more of a checklist of concepts and topics to be familiar with than an introduction to the fundamentals of data engineering. Accordingly, the book works better if you want to identify potential blind spots in your knowledge rather than providing said knowledge. In terms of actually getting into specific topics, there are other books and tutorials I would recommend instead of this one. I believe the problem with this book is that it is trying to cover too much material and thereby ends up covering very little. It is also one of those books where it is clear in the writing style that there is more than one author involved in writing the book. Interestingly, I can see that the book has a lot of positive reviews, so I am aware that I might be in the minority here.
Puzzle Me Twice: 70 Simple Puzzles (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong by Alex Bellos: A series of small puzzles with a brief explanation for the correct answer as well. Several of the puzzles deal with statistical concepts and probability theory, and a lot of them touch upon cognitive biases (hence, the subtitle of the book). Easy to read.
R Data Science Quick Reference: A Pocket Guide to APIs, Libraries, and Packages by Thomas Mailund: If you are familiar with base R but would like to have a detailed introduction to the tidyverse, this would have been a perfect resource when it was published. The main limitation is that a lot of things have happened over the past five years and I would recommend for the author to work on a 2nd edition. That being said, I can still recommend picking it up as there is a lot of good material in this book, especially on topics such as functional programming with {purrr}.
R for the Rest of Us: A Statistics-Free Introduction by David Keyes: A great book on doing data wrangling and presentations in R. There is a heavy focus on visualisations and presentations, in particular using ggplot2 within tidyverse. I found the tips on how to improve parameterised reporting great, but I am not sure why there is a chapter on R Markdown reports and a chapter on Quarto (despite minor syntactic differences).
Taskmaster: 200 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne: I like Taskmaster. It’s a fun show. It is about extraordinary people doing ordinary tasks. This is a book full of various tasks (solo and group tasks) and a few bonus facts here and there. I don’t understand the appeal of this book at all and I don’t understand why (ordinary) people would ever try out most of these tasks.
The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter: I see this as a sequel to ‘The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data’. Accordingly, if you liked ‘The Art of Statistics’, you will also like this one. It is an easy book to read and you can skip the parts that you are already familiar with. It also felt like specific points were repetitions of ideas from his previous book ‘Covid By Numbers’, but again, easy to skip those parts.
The Joy of Numbers by Arthur T. Benjamin: If you like mathematics but do not know a lot about numbers (e.g., Fibonacci numbers and irrational numbers) or heuristics for mathematical operations, this is a brief and engaging book. It is an audiobook available on Audible, so good for the commute (even if the author says you need to follow along with specific tasks with pen and paper).
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White: I really liked the idea of this book, but upon reading it I can understand why most memoirs do not follow this structure or concept.