Little Women was a highly enjoyable (if somewhat saccharine) film. I wasn’t previously familiar with the novel, but after seeing this I looked into the source material and previous adaptations to contextualize what I saw. Ultimately, I think Greta Gerwig did a pretty good job at grounding and animating a PG story that has been told many times in many different ways.

Gerwig notably changes the plot structure in this version of Little Women, using the non-chronological order to reflect interesting parallels from the sisters’ childhood and adulthood. I found this be effective in conveying themes and character development, and with that, it also reflects Gerwig’s thorough understanding of the text. The ending, in its own meta way, acknowledged the fact that Alcott never wanted to marry off Jo’s character–in the same way the author herself never married. As much as I appreciate Louis Garrel’s work, I somewhat wish Gerwig took the final step of just eliminating his character and the convenient marriage ending for Jo. At the same time, though, I still can appreciate the awareness and nods to Alcott’s intentions reflected in Jo and her discussions with her editor.

There were many actors and actresses I like in this film, but I was surprised to find that Florence Pugh had the best performance of them all. This is the first time I’ve seen her work (to be fully transparent, I’m just too squeamish for Ari Aster’s movies), and I found her to inhabit Amy in a very believable and watchable way. Sometimes her performance honestly contrasted the others to their detriment. Maybe this is due to her character being more traditional, but Emma Watson’s Meg seemed a lot less three dimensional compared to Florence Pugh’s Amy. Lastly, I thought Bob Odenkirk as the father of the March family was an interesting casting choice. His comedic presence precedes him for me personally, so seeing him inserted into this drama felt like an act of satire. While that took me out of the story a little bit, I think it also created this meta-textual feeling that this adored father figure as a cornerstone of the family is a joke. The older March sisters and their mother are the ones actually sustaining the family, so at the end of the day, I think that choice (if it was an intentional choice) and that new meaning was smart and added another layer to this generation’s adaptation.

Little Women is an enjoyable film that makes you consider the nature of adaptation when one takes a look at the many, many other versions over the past 100 years. It’s interesting to use this text as a way of diagnosing society’s changing attitudes towards women and feminism, past simply its utility as a warm story of family and love. I highly recommend seeing this film and doing a little research into this culturally significant story and its implications through time.

Little Women is the story of a group of sisters in the mid-19th century all trying to find their place in the world. The film is directed by Greta Gerwig, whose previous work Lady Bird proved her to be a highly insightful and skilled director and writer. Lady Bird also featured actors Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, and so to see these great creatives working together again gives me great confidence that Little Women will definitely be a film worth seeing over this winter break, even (especially?) if its trailer portrays it to be slightly sentimental.

A Hidden Life, at its core, is the story of a man that refuses to swear an oath of service to Hitler. Beyond this guiding plot point, though, this film displays and questions important themes found back then and now. Ideas like the effect of the individual, the meaning of citizenship, and the value of morality are abound in this movie, and I enjoyed the way they were explored: openly and with a steady pace.

A specific aspect of the film that I found interesting was the language choice. The setting changes between Austria and Germany, and both English and German are used throughout the film. Ultimately, to me, it looks like English was just used for contemplative voice overs and when necessary in the plot. This was really intriguing, as you would experience characters speaking both languages. I don’t speak German, so piecing together the German and English-speaking sides of each character added another layer to my closeness to and contextualization of these characters. Another aspect of this language choice was that (outside of plot-essential points), the Nazi figures in the film pretty much just spoke German. It’s definitely a different effect to hear prison guards screaming abuse in German rather than English– this had me thinking about how Americans conceptualize and stereotype the German language. Not to say the director was trying to do anything more than stay historically accurate, but there’s definitely a certain public cultural memory that’s accessed with the German language being used like that.

Terrence Malick’s form of storytelling may not be for everyone, but I find the contemplative and non-linear aspects of his work to be the most compelling. Shots move in thoughtful, visually challenging ways that aren’t afraid to linger and create highly meditative moments. The beautiful Austrian mountains and a gritty Berlin prison offer two central settings that aren’t hard to make visually intriguing. That may be true, but by the end of the film I found myself taken by the sense of place achieved by Malick. When the setting returns to the lush hills of Austria, one feels the heartache of home. When one re-enters the prison setting throughout the film, one feels the tension of the compound. The places created in A Hidden Life are transferred quite vividly to the viewers’ minds, and thus create an intense, seemingly intimate understanding of the aura and symbolic relevance of the place.

I encourage people to see this film, to take the time to let Malick’s world swallow you whole, and to experience the cerebral yet very grounded and real work he has created.