Review: In Water

Posted on January 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

The spoiler about Hong Sangsoo’s In Water has nothing to do with anything in its meager plot. It has to do with the main formal decision to present almost the entire thing out-of-focus, so, from a critical viewpoint, revealing that aspect to readers is more of a caveat than a spoiler. Hong aficionados could be put off by this revelation because they will see the movie anyway, but everyone else may appreciate the intelligence because if they didn’t know what to expect and then sat down to a film that was blurry for almost its entire length, they very well might feel cheated. There are a number of possible reasons for this odd decision, but Hong is notoriously fickle about the Gestalt of his films. Everything is geared toward a certain outcome that he may not actually have figured out until the movie has already been shot, and I assume that’s what happened here. (During a Q&A following the festival screening I attended, the cast admitted that they didn’t know the film would be out-of-focus until they saw it in completed form at another, earlier festival screening) The story, as it were, is essentially about how he himself makes movies in his own peculiar way. 

The protagonist, Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho), is a novice filmmaker who is planning a feature with his crew and cast in a location by the sea. It’s clear from the beginning that Seoung-mo has no script and not much of an idea about what kind of movie he wants to make. He wants the setting to dictate all that, and the tension generated during the film is based on how this lack of foresight and assertion affects those who have invested their time in an artistic vision that they soon realize doesn’t exist. The entire movie is about scouting the location, since almost no actual filming is done until the end. As is often the case in a Hong feature, there’s a lot of conversation over meals and drinks, and for once these epicurean episodes have consequences, since Seoung-mo has a very limited budget and the more he spends on non-filmic elements like food the less he will have to complete the project. Eventually, the director’s indecisiveness starts to irk his DP, Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk), and sorely inconvenience his overly indulgent lead actor, Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun), thus lending the whole movie an atmosphere of impatience and discomfort. When Seoung-mo finally gets around to shooting a scene, it’s based on something he just observed—a woman cleaning up trash on the beach—and whose meaning he doesn’t fully understand and thus can’t convey to his actors. 

Close followers of Hong will understand that this amorphous storyline mimics Hong’s own methodology, in which he shows up with a coarse outline that is explained to his cast and crew right before shooting individual scenes and then later shaped into something like a narrative—or not. The out-of-focus gimmick seems to mirror Seoung-mo’s own opaqueness toward those he’s working with, with the blur getting denser as the project refuses to coalesce in his mind. The real problem here isn’t the overall concept, which is kind of brilliant on paper (though probably never actually written down), but rather the endgame of having a protagonist-artist who isn’t mature enough creatively to operate as a real artist. Hong gets away with a lot in his films because he is a real artist, so depicting himself as someone who shows no aptitude for the game has limited thematic resonance and almost no real appeal to anyone but completists.  

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

In Water home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Jeonwonsa Film Co.

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Review: The Outrun and The Great Lillian Hall

Posted on January 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

The term “recovery drama” should induce winces and feelings of trepidation in serious moviegoers. Seeing yet another sad individual overcome the depredations of addiction and stand fully sober in the sun is meant to be soul-lifting but because the genre is loaded with cliches the thinking has become, you’ve see one you’ve seen ’em all. Nora Fingscheidt’s movie, The Outrun, based on a bestselling memoir, induces that feeling early on, mostly by reflex, but due to Saoirse Ronan’s deep sympathy of the complex protagonist, Rona, the movie quickly overcomes its unfortunate allusions to recovery dramas past and makes its own unique statement about what it means to truly get over a destructive, all-consuming habit.

This difficult feat is accomplished with the help of Fingscheidt’s novel structure, which drops us will-nilly into parts of Rona’s life in both London, where she is a graduate student in biology, and the rural, windswept Orkney Islands, where she grew up on a sheep farm. Fingscheidt doesn’t bother to prepare us with time stamps and indicates where we are in Rona’s development by the color of her hair, but we get the idea that, freed from the monotony of life on a farm, Rona overcompensates in the capital by partying a bit too hard, and soon progresses from sloppy drunk to full-bore alcoholic, one who endangers not only herself but her new friends, in particular her lover Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), whose feelings for her shift from tender sympathy to caustic repulsion. She eventually enters a rehab program that cleans her up and she decides that if she remains in London she’s likely to fall off the wagon, so she goes home, initially planning to stay only a few months before resuming her studies, but the Orkneys prove to be trying as well, what with her born again mother hosting Christian hootenanies and her bipolar father living separately on the farm barely keeping it together. Attempting to build a bridge between these two estranged parents, Rona does fall off the wagon with a huge crash, and thus realizes that her only solution is complete isolation, and so takes a job as a nature survey observer on Papay, one of the most desolate islands in the Orkney archipelago.

What Fingscheidt gets particularly right is that feeling of being totally alone with nothing but your thoughts. The last twenty minutes of The Outrun is almost impressionistic in its depiction of Rona’s life in a small house at the end of a dirt road, her days spent looking for evidence of an endangered bird called the corncrake and combing the beach for different species of seaweed. There’s a stillness and beauty to these scenes that convey Rona’s struggle to just be with herself as a huge achievement. Melodrama is unnecessary, as is any demonstrative acting out. After all she’s been through, you breathe her sigh of relief for her.

The Great Lillian Hall addresses an addiction of a completely different sort. The fictional title character, played by Jessica Lange, is a legend of the Broadway stage, a “serious” actor whose name seems to be known to everyone, or at least in Manhattan where she lives in a huge, luxurious East Side apartment. As the movie opens, Lillian is in rehearsals for a new staging of The Cherry Orchard directed by a young buck, David (Jesse Williams), as a way of forging the old and the new into something that generates big bucks, or that’s what the producer hopes. Unfortunately, rehearsals aren’t going that well, mainly owing to Lillian’s tendency to forget lines, a situation that’s concerning because she’s done this play many times before and should know it backwards and forwards. Eventually forced by the producer to see a doctor, Lillian discovers she has Lewy body dementia, a debilitating condition that not only makes it difficult for her to remember anything, but also causes hallucinations. 

Lillian tries to hide her condition from the cast and crew, as well as from her daughter. The only person who knows is her feisty assistant, Edith (Kathy Bates), who saw her own father succumb to a similar condition and can recognize its effects on Lillian. Since Lange is still one of the best screen actors who can do BIG SCENES without making a fool of herself, the emotional payoffs are rich, but most of the surrounding business has a schematic feel to it. There’s the sexy neighbor (Pierce Brosnan), also an artist (a sculptor, which automatically makes you wonder how he can afford the upper West side), who draws out Lillian’s hopes and fears with witty banter. There’s the daughter (Lily Rabe) who felt neglected in childhood because her mother had no time for her. And there’s the constant visions of Lillian’s dead husband who, of course, was also her most celebrated director. In fact, the whole production may be too much of an inside job, since all the main actors have won or been nominated for Tonys and the director himself, Michael Cristofer, is a seasoned Broadway polymath. Using Chekhov’s play, which is about leaving your old life behind, is probably a bit too on-the-nose, but it’s mainly the dialogue, which is theatrical to a fault. Don’t theater people want to talk like normal human beings when they’re off stage? 

The Outrun now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

The Great Lillian Hall now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

The Outrun home page in Japanese

The Great Lillian Hall home page in Japanese

The Outrun photo (c) 2024 The Outrun Film Ltd., Weydemann Bros. GmbH, British Broadcasting Corporation and Studio Canal Film GmbH

The Great Lillian Hall photo (c) 2024 Crazy Legs Features LLC

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Review: Caught Stealing and Yadang

Posted on January 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Production designers are the new superstars of the cinema; or, at least, they should be since so many mediocre American movies in recent years have been lifted to near-greatness by their sets and general ambience. Darren Aronofsky’s newest film veers off the well-worn path he’s beaten for himself as a director. Caught Stealing is a conventional crime comedy-of-errors that’s mostly elevated by its 90s NYC mise-en-scene courtesy of Mark Friedberg and a self-deprecating performance from Austin Butler as a former high school baseball star who loses out on a chance to go pro and now tends bar in the West Village. But the back story isn’t really so important since the movie has an irresistible forward momentum that just keeps accelerating, something Aronofsky is already famous for. The script by Charlie Huston, based on his own novel, relies on a lot of violence and threats of violence to get its plot points across, and while the development isn’t predictable it rarely rises above the usual. But it delivers style in spades.

The story launches late one night when Hank Thompson’s (Butler) wannabe punk-rocker neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), asks Hank to cat-sit for him while he’s back in England for a few days to attend to a “family emergency.” However, as soon as Russ is gone, some gangsters show up looking for Russ and the money he owes them. Believing Hank knows where he is they put the squeeze on him. Hank manages to lose an actual kidney in the process, but that isn’t the end of his troubles. Even Russ’s cat, Bud, doesn’t really take to Hank and continually bites him. Aronofsky manages to distinguish each subsequent encounter in Hank’s misbegotten Odyssey across Downtown NYC by giving his persecutors vivid identifying qualities—two of the guys are Orthodox Jews (played by Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber, no less), and another pair has thick Eastern European accents. As despicable as these people are they are played for laughs, as is the cynical female cop (Regina King) who is investigating Hank’s situation. 

As Aronofsky showed so vividly in his last movie, The Whale, he can put his protagonists through a physical as well as emotional wringer, and Butler, for all the joshing that goes on around Hank, really does look like the constant punishment is taking a toll on him as an actor, and not just Hank as a character. So Aronofsky obviously gets what he wants—a violent crime comedy that looks as if it were filmed during the time period it depicts—but you may find the experience of watching it less amusing than he intended. 

A lot of Korean crime movies are comedic by default, and Hwang Byeong-guk’s Yadang is no exception, though in the beginning you may not appreciate the laughs because of the way Hwang frames the action. The word “yadang” means “snitch,” and is used to describe Lee Kang-su (Kang Ha-neul), who is a self-styled professional snitch, though it took a while for me to understand exactly how he came to embody this lowly term. In actuality, Kang-su is a kind of liaison between people arrested for drug crimes and the police. He gets the former to give up names of associates and dealers to the latter and somehow profits mightily from this service, though exactly how isn’t made clear. So technically he’s really a “snitch facilitator,” but I’ll take the movie’s terminology at face value. However, the pacing and would-be whip-smart dialogue are so frantic it takes a good 30 minutes to get a handle on the plot.

I would assume Korean viewers have less trouble understanding the mechanics of the story, since it involves knowing how Korean prosecutors work. For all intents and purposes Kang-su works for Deputy Chief Prosecutor Koo Gwan-hee (Yoo Hae-jin), who, naturally, is gunning for the chief prosecutor job and uses Kang-su to steal high profile drug cases away from the police, in particular a captain named Oh Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon), who gets mightily pissed off when Kang-su and then Koo swoop in to arrest the principals of a bust that Oh had laboriously set up with the help of a cooperative meth junkie who also happens to be an up-and-coming starlet (Chae Won-bin). Making an enemy of Oh turns out to be not wise for Koo, but when Koo decides to use a particularly nasty drug dealer who owes him a favor to get Oh off his back, Kang-su gets swept up in the betrayal. The second half of this very brutal movie is mostly concerned with Kang-su, Oh, and the starlet teaming up to get revenge on Koo and his criminal minions.

Kang’s performance as Kang-su sets the overall mood: He’s flashy and hyper-active, whether he’s cajoling drug-addled snitches or going cold turkey himself, and thus provides high contrast with Yoo, who shunts aside his usual goofy comedic persona for something intense and sinister. Eventually, the muddled aspects of the first half congeal comprehensively in the second, but we’ve seen this kind of revenge plot a hundred times before, and no amount of gotcha table-turning can make it fresh.

Caught Stealing opens Jan. 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Yadang, in Korean, opens Jan. 9 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).

Caught Stealing home page in Japanese

Yadang home page in Japanese

Caught Stealling photo (c) 2025 CTMG

Yadang photo (c) 2025 Plus M Entertainment and Hive Media Corp.

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Media watch: LDP still haunted by the ghost of religions past

Posted on January 5, 2026 by philipbrasor
Han Hak-ja (Chosun)

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party continues to be plagued by associations with the former Unification Church (UC), which, of course, was the main source of the resentments that allegedly led a man to assassinate former LDP president and prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. The South Korea-based church is officially known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), a name change implemented in 1994. The FFWPU no longer wields the power it once did in Korea and its leader, Han Hak-ja, the wife of the late founder of the UC, Moon Sun-myung, is something of a pariah there. In Japan, a country that Moon supposedly despised and exploited accordingly, the former UC has always been a political and social force to reckon with, mainly by getting close to the LDP. Abe, in fact, inherited the group’s grip on his party from his grandfather, former prime minister Shinsuke Kishi, who first made friends with the church back in the 1960s.

The latest revelations, while reported to a certain extent by the Japanese press, were broken by the Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, which came into possession of “reports” written by Eiji Tokuno, the head of Japan operations of the FFWPU. These regular and detailed reports were directly sent to Han, referred to in the missives as True Mother, and describe Tokuno’s meetings with various LDP leaders, including Abe, over the years in a bid to reinforce the organization’s influence over the party by lending the LDP “support” for candidates in various general elections. NHK and Asahi Shimbun have said that the FFWPU will not confirm whether such reports exist and thus have offered no comment on what Hankyoreh and another Korean media outlet, Yonhap News Service, revealed in their reporting. 

According to Yonhap, Tokuno reported to Han 220 times between 2018 and 2022, laying out how he and the church “supported” 290 LDP members as candidates in the 2021 Lower House general election, support that he said was successful and which was greatly appreciated by Abe and the rest of the LDP leadership. (It should be noted that the UC and FFWPU have been known to support candidates from other Japanese parties as well, as long as those candidates align ideologically with UC’s anti-communist, pro-family agenda.) 

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Media watch: The grift that keeps on ticking

Posted on January 2, 2026 by philipbrasor
“Make sure the sleeves aren’t too long”

According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, human behavior is motivated by a “hierarchy of needs” that start at the bottom with physiological needs and then proceeds up in pyramid fashion to “esteem” and “self-actualization,” meaning psychological needs that must be met in order for us to feel comfortable with ourselves. To an extent, these psychological needs are governed by social mores that help us create a place for ourselves within the larger society. One of the arguments about Maslov’s theory, which was formulated in the 1940s, is how much of one’s esteem and self-actualization is fortified by one’s own efforts. Good looks, for example, can do wonders for one’s ego but are dictated by luck as well as arbitrary social and cultural forces. One can, of course, actively adjust these determinants through efforts such as a strict exercise regimen and seeking plastic surgery, but it’s also a matter of genes

In modern capitalist society, the surest route to the top of the pyramid is wealth, which we are taught is earned through hard work; but not necessarily. Some people are born into wealth while others get there through good fortune and unique qualities (talent, intelligence, ambition) that obviate the need for hard work. Then there are people who self-actualize by simply taking on the trappings of wealth. It’s these people who are often the victims of other people who use that need to make money themselves.

A recent article in the Tokyo Shimbun described a special kind of “sharing service” where companies connect people with expensive watch collections to people who need expensive watches for some kind of function, be it a specific occasion or something more long-term. The service pays a kind of rental fee for the use of the owner’s expensive watch and in turn rents it out to users while taking a cut for itself. 

The former president of a company that runs one such service called Toke Match—”toke,” pronounced “toh-keh,” being a shortened form of the Japanese word “tokei,” meaning clock or watch—was arrested by Tokyo police for fraud on Dec. 26 after being extradited from Dubai. The suspect, Takazumi Fukuhara, is charged with defrauding 650 owners comprising 1,700 luxury watches valued at ¥2.8 billion by allegedly selling 1,300 of these watches to dealers, thus violating the agreements he had with the owners. Reportedly, he used the money from the sale to gamble online and buy crypto assets. 

Fukuhara’s company, Neo Reverse, launched Toke Match in March 2021 by soliciting owners of collections of expensive watches—Rolex, Omega, what have you—to entrust New Reverse with their property so that the company could rent them out to people who might need those time pieces in order to meet their own esteem and self-actualization needs. Neo Reverse even took out print and broadcast ads to not only solicit owners but attract users. And while the company did well in getting owners to lend them their valuables, there weren’t quite as many users as they needed. The police told the media that they suspect it was always Fukuhara’s intention to sell the watches and take off with the money, and one former employee of New Reverse told Tokyo Shimbun that Fukuhara and an associate who was also arrested “fooled owners” by promising limitless returns for the rental of their watches. 

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Review: A Working Man

Posted on January 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

If it’s New Years, you can bet the latest Jason Statham movie will be opening in Japan. One of our more reliable action heroes, Statham can generally carry a lame script just with the cut of his scowl, and this particular vehicle was produced and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, based on a novel, so it held some promise when it first came to my attention. (David Ayer is the co-writer and director.) As the title suggests, Statham plays a blue collar bloke named Levon Cade, who’s the foreman for a struggling family-owned contruction company in Chicago. The opening credits fill us in on his background: a career soldier in what appears to be a joint British-American commando unit. Further exposition tells us his wife died by her own hand and that his rich ex-father-in-law (Richard Heap) blames him for her death because he thinks Levon can’t overcome his violent nature, and thus tries to keep his daughter from him. The script doesn’t necessarily refute this assertion because Levon himself confesses that the construction company CEO (Michael Pena) saved his life by giving him a job despite his “untreated PTSD.” Such personal struggles are thrown out the window when the boss’s daughter (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring and Levon straps on his guns and knives in order to bring her back.

So far, so perfectly formulaic for a Jason Statham movie, but the implausibilities that usually come with the territory are never addressed as such and so just pile up in a jumble of confusing cross purposes, draining A Working Man (remove the indefinite article from the title and it could have been mistaken for a superhero movie) of the tension that’s necessary for this kind of vigilante film. Early on we’re introduced to Levon’s fighting capabilities when a group of Spanish-speaking goons harrasses one of his workers for reasons never revealed, and so we wait in vain for the other shoe to drop, which it never does. Then there’s Levon’s sudden resourcefulness. In the beginning we’re told he’s broke because of the lawyers’ fees needed to regain custody of his daughter (he sleeps in his truck), but once he has a “mission” he’s suddenly got all this cash and expensive tech and weaponry. Is it because of his network of commando vets, including David Harbour as a blind gun hoarder living in the woods? These questions just hang in the air and never evaporate.

Even the fight scenes are a coin toss. An early confrontation in a biker bar is so incoherently choreographed that you lose track of who’s beating who; but a little bitlater, there’s a more carefully shot two-on-one brawl in the back of a van that hits every note perfectly. Unfortunately, once the search turns serious and a whole extended family of Russian gangsters gets involved, it’s all gunplay. I don’t ask for surprises in my Jason Statham movies, but I would have thought Stallone knew something about the basic requirements of a violent action thriller.

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).

A Working Man home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Cadence Productions Limited

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Review: In the Lost Lands

Posted on January 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

There’s obviously some guarantee of box office success in the husband-wife team of director Paul W.S. Anderson and actor Milla Jovovich that’s based on their long-running game adaptation series Resident Evil. Now that the series is reportedly finished, their dwindling star could get a recharge here with the adaptation of a not entirely different kind, namely that of a story by Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin. Similar to what she did in Resident Evil, Jovovich plays the kickass action lead, though in this case she’s a kind of rebel witch named Gray Alys who’s being sought by the religious authoritarians who rule this post-apocalyptic world. We first meet her as she’s ready to be hanged for apostasy, or what passes for apostasy in this place, as well as inciting the toiling masses to resist their overlords. She uses her hallucinatory powers to escape. One of Gray Alys’s peculiar personality traits—or maybe it’s some sort of innate quality of witches that Anderson fails to sufficiently explain—is that she can’t refuse a request for help, and so when a woman asks her to go to the Lost Lands to kill something called the Shapeshifter, she has to go. Along the way, she hooks up with a cowboy named Boyce (Dave Bautista) who uses twin-headed rattlesnakes as a weapon. As it turns out, Boyce, a lone wolf for hire, is snogging the queen, whose husband is old and decrepit and fixing to die without a male heir, so when the queen announces her miracle pregnancy all bets are off.

It says something about the story’s conception that every plot development feels arbitrary and made up on the spot. Anderson tries to mask this flaw with witty dialogue that immediately falls flat (“I never saw a man get emotional about a snake”), and he counts too much on the characters’ status as fantasy figures, which gives the actors little to work with. Jovovich is so stiff and monotonal that she sounds half asleep half the time. And it’s weird that Anderson and/or Martin doesn’t play up Gray Alys’s revolutionary bent until the last scene, when it comes across as an afterthought. It should have been central to the story in order to make it more compelling. Otherwise, it’s just the same random supernatural noise. 

Opens Jan. 1 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku )03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

In the Lost Lands home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Constantin Film Produktion GmbH, Spark Productions AG

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Best albums 2025

Posted on December 31, 2025 by philipbrasor

Since I typically wait until the last minute to compile this list I get to see other people’s beforehand, and the most common comment I read in the last month was that this was one of the best years for music ever. Given that it was a pretty shitty year in general, I interpreted this sunny outlook as an expression of over-compensation—good music made up for all that depressing stuff in the news. And though I did hear a lot of good music this year, when I later relistened to a lot of records I liked initially I found that much of it just washed over me; so I’m not refuting the above-mentioned consensus, just checking it against a critical sensibility that isn’t as rigorous as it used to be. There is, of course, no accounting for taste, but that probably has more to do with a declining attention span than with any drop-off in quality out there. There’s just so much to listen to, and I’m at the age where I can pretty much decide whether I will like an album as soon as I hear one song, or even half a song. The days of discovering an album’s charms over the long-term are gone, which is sort of a shame since now that I’m semi-retired I actually have more time to listen to music. But I don’t want to work at it any more. Almost all the albums on my list were ones that I liked immediately and still found interesting at the end of the year, meaning there were no ringers or surprises in the last month except for one or two records that were released late. But if I don’t necessarily follow the crowd with regard to how great music was this year, I definitely jumped on the bandwagon with my selections, since almost all of them were critical hits, so to speak. Not too sure what that says about my taste any more except that in my dotage I’ve probably become more impressionable than I’d like to think I am.

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Best movies 2025

Posted on December 29, 2025 by philipbrasor

With each passing year it gets more difficult to adhere to the qualifications for this list. It used to be simple: Any movie released theatrically in Japan for the first time. At some point I started eliminating films that were released for the first time in Japan but released elsewhere a long time ago. Japan tends to have a long lag time for releasing foreign films compared to other countries, so if a movie was released elsewhere two or even three years before, it qualified, but if it was, like, more than ten years it didn’t. That wasn’t a difficult change to make. But when streaming went big, some major motion pictures started being released simultaneously in theaters and online—and then later online almost exclusively. That’s not the part that made it difficult. What made it difficult is the combination of the above two exceptions to the original rule. If all new movies produced by streamers were released everywhere in the world at the same time, that would be fine, but they aren’t, owing to different licensing deals for different territories. What brought this awkward development to my attention this year was the Taiwanese movie Left-handed Girl, which I saw at the Busan International Film Festival in October and was one of the best things I saw this year. It was also screened at Tokyo Filmex in November, and has won a number of awards at other festivals, but film festival appearances don’t qualify for this list. When I searched around for a Japanese distributor, I discovered that Left-handed Girl was already being streamed overseas in some markets on Netflix. Since it was not being streamed by Netflix in Japan I assumed it would be picked up for theatrical release by a local distributor—after all, it was made by the same team that produced the most recent Best Picture Oscar winner, Anora. No luck. According to the rules, I shouldn’t include it on this year’s list, but I’m not sure when it will be released in Japan and if it goes straight to streaming instead, what should I do? In any case, if you get a chance to see it, do. It’s better than Anora. 

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Review: Sew Torn

Posted on December 20, 2025 by philipbrasor

Yet another acclaimed short subject expanded into a feature, Freddy Macdonald’s crime comedy definitely feels over-extended, but its main problem is that it’s weird for no good reason. First of all, it takes place in a small Swiss village where all the characters speak English with various Anglo accents. Second of all, the protagonist is a “mobile seamstress” whose skills with needle and thread are supposed to be the selling point of the movie. And thirdly, the plot structure is split into three what-if possibilities that never cohere in a way that justifies the conceit. 

Barbara (Eve Connolly) has inherited the business from her late mother, who died under extremely tragic circumstances it seems. She’s a depressive soul who makes talking portraits: needlepoint tapestry recreations of photos of her and her mother backed by chip-recorded loops of their conversations. She’s going out of business because, well, who these days really requires a mobile seamstress? One nasty customer, a middle aged woman who is getting married, harries Barbara relentlessly to get her wedding dress repaired in time for the ceremony, and Barbara butter-fingers it, thus requiring a return to the shop to get a new button. Along the way she happens upon a road accident involving two motorcycles, two badly injured men, two guns, some packages of what looks like heroin/cocaine, and a briefcase of cash. Immediately she sizes up the possibilities: should she a) pull off the “perfect crime,” b) call the police, or c) drive away? Macdonald explores all three possibilities in witty ways, all involving Barbara’s facility with darning and knot-making so as to solve immediate problems. She’s like the Rube Goldberg of colored rayon thread. As any fan of this genre of crime movie will tell you, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way, and here we get three instances of Barbara’s ingenuity that don’t differ enough in substance to make any of them more interesting than the last one, so by the end of the movie you may be needled out. 

More significantly, the crime under scrutiny is trite, as if Macdonald had studied a bunch of B-movies about drug deals gone wrong and distilled them, resulting in a flavorless concoction. Though there are a few good jokes—the old lady who acts as the village’s resident police chief and justice-of-the-peace is a hoot-and-a-half—most of the comedy is subsumed in the complications of Barbara’s inventions, thus rendering it inert. Since I haven’t seen the original short subject, I can’t comment on it, but I imagine its economy is what made it interesting, and funny.

Now playing in Tokyo at Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

Sew Torn home page in Japanese

photo (c) Sew Torn, LLC

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