Review: Resident Evil and Absolution

Posted on October 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

As someone who doesn’t play games, either literally or figuratively, I have no opinion on how faithfully the new Zach Cregger-helmed reboot of the Resident Evil franchise follows the Capcom classic, but I did see a few of the Paul W.S. Anderson film adaptations that made so much money while—from what I understand, at least—veering widely from the feel and substance of the game, especiallly since they centered on a hero, played by Anderson’s wife, Milla Jovovich, who wasn’t in the game and reportedly had little to do with its whole vibe. Cregger’s version is nothing like Anderson’s, which was mostly about kicking zombie ass. Cregger simply places his protagonist, a young medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams), in a horror show situation in order to see if he can just survive it. What ass-kicking he does is mostly on the fly and conducted without anything approaching skill or finesse. Most of the time his survival is based on what we would call luck, though that may be taking something away from the gaming element. But that’s the thing: I’m assessing the movie purely as a movie.

And in that regard, it mostly succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is gross us out and make us root for the hapless hero. Unlike Cregger’s more celebrated previous two films, Barbarian and Weapons, his Resident Evil isn’t particularly frightening. The jump scares are telegraphed well in advance and the situations are staged for maximum visual effect rather than any emotional ones. The plot is so elementary it can be described in one sentence: Bryan is tasked with taking what he believes to be an organ for transplant from hospital A to hospital B, and on the way he is beset by zombies who have been infected with a virus that has somehow escaped from hospital B. What makes the biggest impression is the zombies themselves, which aren’t simply lurching meat-seekers but a wildly diverse group of monstrosities that have the power to fuse together to make more massive and more deadly monstrosities. Bryan, as befits a Gen Z hero who has probably not played the game, has to learn how to use guns along the way and keep cool under pressure, and in that regard he earns our sympathies without any effort. In fact, what makes this Resident Evil so involving is how cleanly he enlists our sympathies, a particular talent that Cregger displayed in his two previous movies. People say Cregger is the future of horror, and I wouldn’t disagree, because his protagonists feel more real than the horror stereotypes we’ve become accustomed to.

The stereotyped hero of the crime thriller Absolution is nailed from the get-go by the actor who plays him: Liam Neeson. The screenwriter, Tony Gayton, neglects to name this character (the credits list him merely as “Thug”), but Neeson quickly establishes his m.o. as an antihero: former boxer who ended up employed as an enforcer by a Boston crime lord (Ron Perlman) and, now at the end of his life and suffering from encroaching senility (CTE, to be exact), yearns to do something right for a change. The filigree is equally predictable: estranged from his children for years, he tries to reestablish ties with his daughter and then uses his inside knowledge of the Boston underworld to save a trafficked woman from the brothel where she is imprisoned. 

Since Neeson is the only real reason to see Absolution, a caveat is in order: this is not one of those stories where his character has to eliminate countless goons in order to retrieve a loved one. It’s more on the order of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, though not nearly as elegantly plotted. That said, Gayton’s script is well-constructed, with characters established in the beginning returning at the end to assert those qualities we’ve already learned about them to deliver on the story’s dramatic intentions. Also, Absolution is not really an action film, though there are a few bits of violence. It’s mainly Neeson acting his age and imbuing a less-than-sympathetic character with more humanity than he deserves. And while the dialogue is cleverer than it needs to be, it’s by the same token better than it usually is in a Neeson thriller. “It’s the family curse of the asshole father,” someone says sarcastically when the Thug inadvertently reveals he was abused as a kid. The guy’s brief affair with a much younger black woman (Yolonda Ross) he sticks up for at a bar is unnecessary, but at least their pillow talk feels more or less natural. And the requisite meet cute with a grandson he didn’t know he had is played strictly for heartstring-pulling. But it’s a surprisingly assured production with its own prickly rhythms and an atmosphere that’s convincing. It stands on its own. 

Resident Evil opens Oct. 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Absolution opens Oct. 9 at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001). 

Resident Evil home page in Japanese

Absolution home page in Japanese

Resident Evil photo (c) 2026 CTMG

Absolution photo (c) 2026 TG Movie LLC

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 8

Posted on October 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Since I arrived at the festival on its opening day, Tuesday, the weather in Busan has been great. Warm and sunny in the daytime and cool and dry at night. Nevertheless, my flight from Narita was slightly delayed and by the time I arrived at the Busan Cinema Center it was after 3 p.m. and I couldn’t pick up my badge and materials because they close the desk early for security reasons—the badge desk is in the same building as the opening ceremony, which started at 6 p.m. So I had to hunt down a foreign press person to get my invitations to the opening ceremony and reception.

This year the festival put me up in a hotel quite close to the Cinema Center, which is where everything happens. Usually, they give me a room in Haeundae, the resort area on the beach. Though it’s only 3 subway stops away, obviously being nearer the Cinema Center is better, except that most of the night action, meaning festival related parties and such, happen at Haeundae, and the subways stop at around 11:30 p.m. For instance the opening reception was at a hotel on the beach, so I had to take a taxi back to my hotel, though I seriously thought of walking the whole way since the night was so nice.

Because I’m a “guest” of the festival I get access to the guest ticketing system, which allows me four tickets a day to public screenings for free. However, the number of guest tickets is limited and they tend to sell out fast. In order to get them, you have to go online at 8:30 a.m. the day before the actual screening and register for them, but, of course, all the guests are online promptly at 8:30. Last year, when they introduced this system, I had no trouble getting seats for the movies I wanted, but so far this year it’s been difficult. On Tuesday, I was in a station waiting for the train to Narita Airport at 8:30 and had to get tickets for Wednesday using my phone. I was able to get a seat for the Korean monster movie Hope but nothing else. The same thing happened yesterday morning—I couldn’t get tickets for the movies I mainly want to see. It’s quite frustrating.

The opening ceremony was as long and boring as it usually is. Kim Min-ha, the actor from Pachinko was the MC by herself, which is unusual. In the past it was always one male and one female, so I suppose Kim has enough star power to handle the job herself. Or maybe it’s because she’s in the Opening Film, The Table: Day and Night, which was a very odd choice. As everyone knows, in the past year BIFF has had its rating as an international film festival boosted to the highest level, putting it on par with only a handful of other festivals, including Cannes and Venice. So this year’s edition is a big one for BIFF and may explain why I’m having trouble getting tickets on the guest ticketing system: there are just too many guests. Nevertheless, the last two years, as BIFF was gunning for its ranking to be boosted, it chose blockbusters for the Opening Film. The Table is more like a return to BIFF’s traditional mode of promoting smaller Korean films for the Opening Film, a tradition I approve of, though in this case it was something of a disaster. The Table, a kind of omnibus narrative set in a coffee shop, is ridiculously pretentious and shallow. I stayed until the end, but I would guess that a third of the audience walked out while it was on.

Being boosted to the top level also means that BIFF now has to have a Competition Section, the winner of which automatically gets submitted to the Academy for consideration for an Oscar. A lot of filmmakers I’ve talked to over the years actually admired BIFF for not having a competition section (instead they had the New Currents competition, only for up-and-coming Asian filmmakers), which is only put in place for publicity purposes. But at least the Competition Films at BIFF are limited to those from Asian countries.

Michelle Yeoh is this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year, and she gave the best of the speeches at the ceremony, thanking those Chinese directors who have helped her over the years. She said nothing about Hollywood, which I found refreshing. One thing about BIFF is that it very rarely screens Hollywood movies, though it does have a World Cinema section where such movies could be screened.

Come to think of it, Hope almost qualifies as a Hollywood production in terms of scale and professional savvy. It was the first movie I saw on Wednesday, in the CGV Multiplex’s IMAX theater. It was pretty breathtaking. The first hour or so is just nonstop action as the inhabitants of a coastal town near the North Korean border (there are signs everywhere alerting locals to stay vigilant) contend with a monster that seems to kill everything in its path. Director Na Hong-jin wisely keeps the monster off screen to increase the tension. However, once the monster is revealed as well as its provenance the movie loses a lot of its mojo even though the action itself becomes more intense (Na is a master of chase scenes, be they on foot or by vehicle). It seems like it’s gearing up for a sequel.

Na showed up for the post-screening Q&A, which was completely in Korean without English interpretation or one of those little huddles near the corner of the theater where an English interpreter whispers what’s being said to a clutch of foreigners. What’s really frustrating is that they even made an announcement IN ENGLISH that there would be a post-screening Q&A and that everyone should remain afterwards to participate. This has long been a problem at BIFF, and seems to be getting worse. If BIFF really wants to be a world class festival equal to its newly earned status, it has to do more to connect to non-Korean speakers.

I saw three other movies yesterday, none of which I had originally planned to see, having hoped I could get tickets to other films I really wanted to see. In the video room I watched a documentary called Birds of War, about a female BBC-Arabic reporter based in London who falls in love over the phone with one her sources in Aleppo during the Syrian civil war, a male photographer who was also an activist. She’s Christian Lebanese and he’s Muslim Syrian, but they manage to connect intimately as he constantly moves around to escape the attention of Assad’s military and eventually escapes to Turkey, where she finally meets him. They marry, but their professional and moral obligations keep them apart. It’s a stirring doc, but I needed more details about those professional obligations, especially the BBC reporter’s involvement with the situation in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion.

The best movie I saw yesterday was 9 Temples to Heaven, a Thai film by the longtime assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose name I am too tired to spell out here. It’s basically a comedy about Buddhist superstition, but only hints glancingly at the kind of spiritual enigmas that Weerasethakul is famous for. A businessman is told by his boss that he had a dream about the busineesman’s mother’s funeral and recommends he and his family, along with the mother, do a pilgrimage of 9 temples in order to extend her life. The extended family makes the trip in two vans and, predictably, sparks fly emotionally, though no one gets carried away. It’s all kept under the surface. Also predictably, the mother for whose benefit this trip is being taken rejects it all and demands to go home, perhaps thinking it’s not worth it to live long if I have to put up with this. The movie is long and slow, but the family dynamic is not only believable, but rather affecting in ways that I can’t describe, and I’m sure that was the director’s intention.

At night I took in a press screening for Hirokazu Koreeda’s Look Back, a film I didn’t intend to see initially. The movie is already in general release in Japan and I missed the press screenings there because I was so disappointed with the other movie Koreeda made this year, Sheep in a Box. Look Back is better. It’s about two girls who bond during six grade over their love of manga, and they work together to form a team that becomes quite successful even before they’ve graduated from junior high school. Eventually interpersonal tensions drive them apart and tragedy strikes. Most critics have compared it to the animated version of the same story that preceded it, a movie I didn’t see, so everything was fresh and, for me, rather unstimulating. My main problem, however, wasn’t with the story, which was boilerplate melodrama, but with the girls themselves and how they were portrayed, especially the elementary school versions (there are two sets of actors). I just couldn’t believe how they behaved and what they said. This is particularly disappointing since Koreeda is one of the best directors of children in Japan, as shown by Nobody Knows and Monster (where it was the adults whose behavior and dialogue were unbelievable). What happened here?

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Review: Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Posted on October 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

There is a subgenre of documentaries that interrogates the act of filming so-called truth while ostensibly presenting something true. This Oscar-winning film is centrally about Vladimir Putin’s propaganda push to support his war against Ukraine as it is carried out by the authorities’ in a public school in the Ural Mountains, but its premise is much more interesting and involving. The co-director, main cinematographer, and narrator is a young teacher at the school named Pavel Talankin, who goes by the playful nickname of Pasha. He grew up in the town of Karabash, celebrated as one of the most toxic municipalities on earth due to its copper mine and smelting plant, and works at the school he attended as a child and where his mother is still the librarian. He is beloved by his students and maintains his office as a kind of sanctuary where they can go to chill and talk candidly among themselves about whatever is on their minds. He recognizes immediately what the authorities are trying to do at his school and he means to expose it, but, of course, the very nature of the government’s brainwashing blitz means he cannot do so overtly. As it happens, Pasha is an AV nerd and thus the school’s de facto videographer, so it’s actually his job to record the propaganda efforts so that the government can know the school is doing what it’s being told to do. Meanwhile, Pasha’s post-dubbed narration explains what is really going on and, in the end, he has to escape Russia with the video data to Europe, where a professional director named David Borenstein puts it together to make the documentary we are seeing.

Though often scary and suspenseful due to the danger that Pasha is putting himself through to assemble his images, the film is relentlessly entertaining because of the kind of person Pasha is. Much of the humor in the voiceover is in the typical self-deprecating Russian style, but Pasha himself is an immediately appealing host with his colorful outfits, floppy hair, and chubby physique, not to mention his way of framing subjects both visually and descriptively in ways that bring out their true character. Pasha’s most stirring concern is how the demands of the propaganda-making machine, which are basically meant to condition these young people for a long war and the boys especially for a glorious death on the battlefield, replace anything that resembles proper education. Reading and writing are sublimated into one-sided history lessons that equate the Ukrainian “military operation” with the Great Patriotic War (World War II), and subjects like math and science are simply thrown by the wayside. Pasha showers special attention on one history teacher named Abdulanov who is completely down with the program, showing how this stiffly proper pedant is a throwback to the ideal Soviet Man (In a guerilla interview he says that he can’t decide which of Stalin’s henchmen is his favorite “historical figure” because their respective bloodthirsty jobs were equally “interesting”), and keeps his camcorder running as a bunch of elementary school students struggle to remember their lines when attempting to “act” as if they are ad libbing patriotic boilerplate. 

Needless to say, Mr. Nobody Against Putin is effective in revealing the insidiousness inherent in making children bend to one’s will without their actually believing in what that will represents. Pasha’s tragedy, as he so movingly explains, is that he knows that what he’s doing means he will have to leave Karabash forever, a place he adores while acknowledging how dirty and ugly it is. And while the tense escape plan he has worked out with his nameless female go-between on the phone has a thrilling air of intrigue, it feels secondary to the huge loss that this delightfully uncompromising man will obviously suffer when he leaves the people he loves so dearly. This realization is much more powerfully felt than the intentions of exposing Putin’s horrifying designs. 

In Russian. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Mr. Nobody Against Putin home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 made in copenhagen Aps, Pink Productions s.r.o.

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Review: Pompei: Below the Clouds and I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol

Posted on October 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

Documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi struck paydirt when he found a middle-aged female archaeologist to comment on her work in a storehouse for artifacts unearthed during digs of the legendary city of Pompei, which was buried under lava and ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. The woman speaks of the sculptures and fragments in her charge with the air of a poet (“they were all wrenched from their contexts”), thus reinforcing the airy tone of the epigram by Jean Cocteau that opens the movie: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds of the world.”

Pompei: Below the Clouds is mostly about Naples, the port city adjacent to Pompei, which remains under threat, not only from Vesuvius (which last blew its top in 1944) but also the Phlegraean Fields, a volcanic caldera located west of the city. Every so often Rosi inserts a shot of lava and steam arising from some huge vent in the field. Juxtaposing scenes of Pompei’s ruins and their ongoing painstaking excavation—much of it being done by University of Tokyo archaeologists and their students—with scenes of everyday life in Naples, Rosi attempts to forge a continuum of mortality, life in the stark shadow of death; which may be why he chooses to shoot in black-and-white. One of his favorite locations is the local fire department’s emergency response room, where employees field calls from citizens who report rumblings under the earth as much as fires, petty crimes, and domestic incidents (the most fraught scene in the film is a fireman talking to a woman being beaten by her drunken husband). When the poetic archaeologist talks about the life of Pompei, she uses the present tense, as if the lives of the people represented by these artifacts were simply interrupted by the eruption. In Rosi’s depiction of a homey cram school filled with books, he conveys the extension of lives and the knowledge they hold into the future, while a pair of Syrian sailors discuss the huge hold of grain they are delivering from Ukraine to the world via Naples, and their fears of going back to Odessa for more, since the city is being bombed. Though these disparate episodes feel disconnected from one another, they are stories about Naples and thus connect subterraneanly to its history as a city, adding to its reputation as a region of global consequence. 

Another leitmotif is tomb robbers, who have plagued the area for centuries, a reminder of the value of the past in a more material form. We see law enforcement officials inspecting age-old tunnels built by raiders who somehow made a living from stealing old frescoes and art works without getting caught. The more recent past is represented by old films, including Rodolfi’s silent The Last Days of Pompei and Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, which are shown being screened in a derelict Neopolitan movie palace. Rosi’s film is a fitting companion to these attempts to come to terms with the past, and, in a sense, may strike the viewer as a requiem. 

Archaeology of a very different stripe is attempted by the rock doc I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol. The “I” in the title is the legendary punk band’s original bassist, Glen Matlock, who was unceremoniously kicked out of the group just after they released their one-and-only album and replaced with lead singer Johnny Rotten’s severely dissipated childhood mate Sid Vicious. Matlock proves he knows the right attitude as a rock’n roll raconteur. “I’ve told this story a million times,” he says before he starts, and I think I’ve heard this story a million times, but it’s mainly been from Rotten’s POV, meaning it’s steeped in resentment-in-hindsight vitriol, because Rotten’s voice was the only one that filmmakers thought was important. Matlock doesn’t possess nearly the command of words that John Lydon does, but his rendering of this oft-told tale has angles and contours that make it a bit more believable.

And lighter, too. One thing that Matlock puts across quite handily is what a blast he had as a Sex Pistol. With candid comments also being offered by bandmates Steve Jones and Paul Cook and none from Lydon, we get a more rounded picture of a bunch of gormless juvenile delinquents who happen to love old time R&B trying to do something with that love before life itself destroys them. We already know about the mercenary designs of Malcolm McLaren, the fashion retailer who put the Pistols together and introduced them to Lydon/Rotten, but previously we never really heard much about the mechanics of the band, how they wrote their songs, and what sorts of stylistic limitations they had to overcome in order to become one of the most original sounding groups England ever produced. As the main interpreter of the story, Matlock predictably toots his own horn, explaining how he invented the band’s rhythmic signature, not to mention the way he channeled his love of mainstream pop (Rotten reportedly got rid of him because of his affection for the Beatles, but Abba seems to have been a more direct influence) into the chord structures he worked out with Jones. Even more vital is his descriptions of the recording sessions, which were not the chaos casseroles you might expect but workmanlike efforts to get a sound that was in his head down on tape.

The usual parade of big-name contemporaries lend their opinions of the impact of the band, and while it’s all quite sincere it’s hardly something we need to hear again. More vital to the story is Matlock’s overview, from a distance, of what his firing did to the band in the end. Right after Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was released, the group embarked on several ill-fated tours that ended with them dissolving in a puddle of disgust at Winterland. Matlock, of course, can’t help but feel vindicated, and the movie gives him the last laugh by showing how he went on to a steady career as a rock’n roll lifer, including an extended stint with Blondie. I’m not sure I don’t detect a bit of “what-could-have-been” in his confident septuagenarian swagger, but he deserves to tell his story just as much as we deserve to hear it.

Pompei: Below the Clouds, in Italian, Neopolitan, Japanese, English, Arabic, now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Pompei: Below the Clouds home page in Japanese

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol home page in Japanese

Pompei: Below the Clouds photo (c) 21 Uno Film SRL/Stemal Entertainment SRL 2025

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol photo (c) 2025, I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol Productions, LLC

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Review: Disclosure Day

Posted on October 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

It was certainly inevitable that Steven Spielberg, after the most enviably productive career of any American film director in history, would try to summarize that career in various ways as he approached his 80s. His last movie was the highly enjoyable, fiercely autobiographical The Fabelmans, one of his best, and now he’s dropped Disclosure Day, a capper to his various sci-fi works that envisioned mankind coming into contact with extraterrestrial species, and while it isn’t one of his worst, it really feels like an over-earnest attempt to make his obsession with outer space aliens make sense. Some critics have already made a connection between the two movies, saying that the kind of broken family narrative that Spielberg lived through as an adolescent informed his outlook on so-called messianic aliens (the ones in The War of the Worlds pointedly excepted) and the possibilities that their arrival could lead to a healing of all human suffering. After sitting through Disclosure Day‘s whiplash-inducing plot turns, it’s an easy theory to get behind.

The premise of the movie is obvious from the beginning: the U.S. government is hiding from the world evidence of extra-terrestrial visits. The central prophet in this story is a Kansas City weather reporter, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who starts acting weird on air at about the same time news outlets are reporting on the world tumbling into World War III. Margaret starts speaking languages she doesn’t know and having visions that set her on the same path as Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a former government contractor who has stolen some secret data from his old boss with the intention of exposing the existence of aliens to the general public. Daniel’s girlfriend is a former nun (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter, by the way, which adds subtext that’s just too rich) who risks her life to help Daniel’s cause, the greatest threat to which is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a private defense contractor whose business and, it would seem, very existence depends on the secret remaining buried. 

Spielberg’s special skills are exercised to the max, especially in the many tense and riveting action set pieces that often feel as if they’d been staged for their own sake rather than for advancing the plot, which gets seriously hairy at some points. Though it’s easy to understand and even sympathize with the director’s belief in alien salvation—David Koepp’s script is one of the few Spielberg has directed that’s based on his own story—in the end the movie feels almost self-referential, as if it were built backwards from the climax, which, like most Hollywood product, doesn’t offer many clues as to what may happen beyond the timeframe of the movie; and I’m not sure if that was Speilberg’s intention. He really yearns for those alien saviors and will obviously feel really let down if he doesn’t live to meet any. This is probably the closest he’ll get.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Disclosure Day home page in Japanese

photo (c) Universal Studios

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Review: Heart of the Beast and Hen

Posted on September 25, 2026 by philipbrasor

Loyal dog movies and TV shows were once a staple of American entertainment, but if Heart of the Beast feels too much like a throwback it tries to make up for its anachronistic vibe by centering the central human-animal relationship on a shared case of PTSD, which is downright 21st century. Both James Belmont (Brad Pitt) and his German shepherd companion Odin were part of US military special forces, Belmont being Odin’s trainer and handler. When Belmont retired he took Odin with him. Throughout the movie, both occasionally suffer from violent flashbacks that clearly have an effect on the way they perceive their surroundings. Conveying PTSD from a dog’s point of view would normally be a chump’s game, so props to director David Ayer for not going overboard. That said, the notion that Odin can do his supercanine stuff with one prosthetic limb would seem to obviate the need for any illustrative flashbacks. 

This is purely an adventure movie. The whole story takes place in a pristine Alaskan wilderness where Belmont has flown his seaplane with Odin in tow. They camp out and bond with nature, each demonstrating native skills to contend with the wild. What dialogue there is is limited to Belmont as he talks to Odin about what’s on his mind and what he assumes is on Odin’s. At one point they encounter a former gold prospector (JK Simmons, almost unrecognizable behind the whiskers and Walter Brennan accent) who is also traveling solo down a river in his homemade kayak, albeit without a four-legged companion. 

The inevitable difficulties ensue, thus making the pair’s trip into a life-or-death one, as the elements, the landscape, and the local wildlife seem to conspire against them. Belmont risks his life to save Odin and vice versa, maybe more than once. The perilous incidents multiply so rapidly that it’s difficult to tell, and a lot of the bad things that happen feel more like stupid choices than bad luck, but, then, some people will tell you that bad luck is really nothing but stupid choices. Ayer knows how to stage dangerous situations, whether they involve raging streams or a pack of (digital) wolves, and the movie is both exciting and moving in the way man-and-dog look out for each other. But the only lesson I learned from Heart of the Beast is that you shouldn’t go to Alaska unless you have a place to stay for the night. 

Reportedly four dogs played Odin in Heart of the Beast. I don’t know how many birds played the titular fowl in the Greek movie Hen, but I assume it was a lot given how much editing the footage obviously underwent. The director, Hungarian György Pálfi, reportedly was inspired by the Polish movie EO, about the adventures of a donkey who goes from one owner to another. As with that movie, the feathered protagonist of Hen is mainly on hand to shift the plot from one human agent to another, though these agents are viewed through the chicken’s eyes. What makes Hen decidedly different from EO is that, like the chicken, the viewer is often confused by what they observe.

The hen’s odyssey is certainly compelling. After escaping from a delivery person who plans to make a meal out of her (her fate, since she was born in a battery farm), the chicken must outfox an actual fox, who pays dearly for his carnivorous ways. The hen then makes her way to a roadhouse convenience store whose elderly owner captures her and places her in his coop. There she is violated by a mangy rooster and while, thanks to her plucky (sorry) personality, she escapes the coop as well, she always gets recaptured and put back. During this time she has plenty of opportunity to watch the local humans do inhumane things, like traffic in refugees.

Though Pálfi wrings (sorry again) as much emotional expressiveness out of his poultry as you could hope for, it’s mostly due to his deft camerawork, which manages to catch the hen(s) at moments where she seems either baffled by what she sees or totally freaked out. It’s no spoiler to say that the hen fares much better in the end than some of the people. I cheered for her more than I did for the donkey in EO, and would have felt pretty put off if anything untoward happened to her. She’s a winner.

Heart of the Beast now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Hen, in Greek, now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

Heart of the Beast home page in Japanese

Hen home page in Japanese

Heart of the Beast photo (c) 2026 Paramont Pictures

Hen photo (c) 2025 Pallas Film-Twenty Vision-View Master Films-ZDF

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Review: Broken Voices

Posted on September 19, 2026 by philipbrasor

Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices was inspired by a real life scandal surrounding the Prague-based children’s choir Bambini di Praga. In 2008, the choir’s leader, Bohumil Kulínský, was arrested for having sexually abused two dozen girls in the ensemble over the previous two decades, almost all of them underage. He was later convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, and then released on parole after about two-and-a-half years. Not long after his release he died of kidney failure. Provazník’s film fictionalizes the principals and the story, limiting its time frame to several months in the early 1990s, not long after the Czech Republic emerged from communism and Czechoslovakia. The choir, here called Canticella, is a prestigious organization and the adolescent members are constantly in competition to rise up to and remain in the “A” choir, which is the main public face of the group, performing throughout the country and in Europe. The choir master, Vitek Mácha (Juraj Loj), is an imperious but not altogether cruel taskmaster, and the girls use their youthful feminine wiles to get on his good side. The protagonist of the story is 13-year-old Karolína (Kateřina Falbrová), a member of the “B” choir whose older sister, Lucie (Maya Kintera), is in the “A” group.

I know the woman who was the Japanese-English interpreter/road manager for Bambini di Praga during the 90s, when they came to Japan almost every year to tour the country, and I asked her to watch a screener of the film and give me her opinion. She said the actor who portrays Mácha looks a lot like Kulínský, though despite what he ends up doing in the movie, he comes off as more likable than the man she worked with. Kulínský, she said, was a drunk and a bully, a man who lorded over the girls (and two boys—in Japan the choir toured as the Praha Shonen Shojo Gasshodan) with almost comical bravado. He terrorized the Japanese staff with his demands and while the interpreter got along with him to a certain extent, she didn’t like him at all, but he always insisted she tour with them as they went from small town to small town, and since the choir was a money maker for the Japanese organizer he got his way. Kulínský spoke English but the girls mostly did not, so the interpreter’s relationship with them wasn’t very deep; and while she found the maestro’s behavior around them creepy (if they stayed at a hot spring he would sometimes bathe with them, behavior duplicated in the movie when Mácha shares a sauna with Karolína) she never suspected him of sexual abuse, though when she eventually learned of his arrest, some years after she stopped working with the choir, she wasn’t really surprised. Kulínský was a seasoned showman, which is why the choir was so popular in Japan. He knew exactly how to present the girls to Japanese audiences—he even taught them popular Japanese songs—and at the inevitable post-performance parties with local bigwigs he knew how to show them off to middle aged men who thought they were cute. The interpreter felt he was just doing what he was supposed to be doing, promoting the choir for the sake of the Japanese organizer, as well as Czech culture and, most importantly, himself. He was very ambitious, and had inherited the choir from his late father, the previous choir master. It was a family business, and his mother toured with them as assistant choir mistress. What he really wanted to do was move beyond children’s choirs and become a legitimate orchestra conductor, a goal he was on his way to achieving when he was arrested. In that regard, Japan was always central to his aims since his many years of touring here had given him a certain professional cachet he could take advantage of. His first orchestral gigs were in Japan. 

In the movie, Mácha initially comes across as the urbane sophisticate, less a big brother figure than an unattainable hip uncle with his acoustic guitar, long hair, and colorful couture. He immediately singles Karolína out from her “B” choir peers and promotes her to the “A” choir, based on what he says is her native talent. As she gains his favor, we see Lucie grow more nervous and even jealous, thus leading to a cruel bullying incident that has dire health consequences for Karolína. She survives the ordeal and is selected as one of 20 girls who will embark on the choir’s first tour of the U.S. Along the way, she has to navigate the catty conflicts at play among the girls, some of whom we suspect have already been the victims of Mácha’s untoward attentions, though the extent of those attentions isn’t made clear until they get to their hotel in New York.

Despite one shocking scene, Broken Voices is almost too tasteful in its approach to its unsavory subject. It’s mostly concerned with how a monster like Mácha gets away with what he gets away with, since those who followed the real situation with Kulínský know he continued taking advantage of his charges for at least another decade. There are hints in the movie that Mácha’s mother, the choir’s “professor,” knows what’s going on, but like the Japanese interpreter with Kulínský, the general feeling among people familiar with the situation surrounding the choir is that sexual abuse was beyond the pale and thus unimaginable. Power dynamics between mentor and mentees in the art world is such a cliche that men like Mácha/Kulínský can confidently believe they will never get caught until, of course, they are.

In Czech and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Broken Voices home page in Japanese

photo (c) endorfilm s.r.o. Punkchart Films s.r.o. Ceska televize innogy Ceska republika a.s. Barrandov Studio a.s. 2025

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Review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Posted on September 18, 2026 by philipbrasor

Only a few seconds into this harrowing black comedy by Mary Bronstein, the protagonist, a fortyish Long Island mother named Linda (Rose Byrne), says to her complaining young daughter, “I’m allowed to be sad,” a massive understatement that will prove to be the foundational joke of the film. Over the next 110 minutes, Linda’s patience and sanity will be tested by a slew of misfortunes that will test the patience and sanity of the viewer as well. For the most part, Linda’s anxieties are justifiable. Her daughter, whose face we never see but whose voice and demeanor are those of a petulant brat, is suffering from some sort of ailment that has rendered her unable to eat and thus necessitates a feeding tube that requires constant care, and Linda’s rented apartment has just suffered broken plumbing that has forced her and her daughter into a cheap motel room while her cruise ship captain husband (Christian Slater, essentially a whining voice on the phone) is away at work for a few months, leaving her to her own devices and demons, some of which come in human form, though in the end Linda’s worst enemy proves to be herself.

Bronstein exacerbates the tension and fear by keeping the camera tight on Linda’s face, a landscape darkened by constantly changing emotional heavy weather. Though some have characterized If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (a phrase I didn’t hear used during the movie) as another study of post-partum depression, Linda’s daughter is not an infant—I would guess her age to be around 7 or 8—and Linda’s psychological condition, while certainly in dangerous territory, seems initially a product of the outside forces rallied against her. For sure, she is beset by assholes at every turn, whether it’s her daughter’s doctor (Bronstein), who scolds her for not taking the support group for mothers with ill children seriously; her own psychiatric patients, whose insufferable neediness would be hilarious if taken out of context; her mentor-colleague (Conan O’Brien), who receives her litany of complaints during requisite therapy sessions with unconcealed contempt; or the various service workers—receptionists, clerks, parking lot attendants—who refuse to see her as a woman under the influence because she makes their job that much more difficult. The only character at all seemingly cognizant of what Linda is going through is James (A$AP Rocky), the custodian at the motel who helps her acquire alcohol from the front desk and drugs on the dark web, tasks that at first smack of a kind of perverted charity but, of course, end up being disastrous choices, and not just for Linda, because everything Linda touches turns to shit, including, it would seem, her daughter.

The incontrovertible conclusion is that Linda is not fit to be a mother, an observance that Linda herself makes multiple times to herself and others, and any viewer with a modicum of pity will agree, though I’m not sure if Bronstein wants us to maintain that conviction through to the vaguely suggestive final scene. For sure, Byrne gives us a howling performance of female instability that rivals anything Gena Rowlands manifested back in the day, but since everything is channeled through Linda’s claustrophobic POV it’s difficult to tell how much of her suffering is imagined. I would guess very little, because the world is famously full of assholes. Some people are equipped to confont that world regardless of what it throws at them, and Linda ain’t one of ’em. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Legs Film Rights LLC

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Review: The Odyssey and Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?

Posted on September 11, 2026 by philipbrasor

At this point, it seems impossible to talk about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey without addressing his faithfulness—or lack of it—to the original text, which is more than 3,000 years old. It’s an issue I can’t rightly address since I don’t remember the poem that well, though I did read it in junior high school, or, at least, some version of it. But it’s obvious that Nolan’s own version is a revision if only because it feels very much like a Hollywood movie, a definite throwback to the kind of big budget storytelling attached to Biblical epics in the 50s and early 60s, except that the sensibility is more enlightened (or “woke,” depending on how you feel about such things) and the technical aspects much more accomplished, even cockily assured. But it’s with regard to the former aspect that I found the movie most intriguing. However dodgy my memory of reading The Odyssey as an adolescent is, I do remember it as being hung up on violent purpose. It is, after all, a tale told in the wake of a horrible war that the hero not only supported but led. In Nolan’s retelling, the hero has serious misgivings.

Being a Hollywood production, the love story takes precedent. After defeating the Trojans through subterfuge and murderous abandon, Odysseus (Matt Damon) spends the entire movie trying to get back to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), whom he hasn’t seen since he left for the campaign many years ago. In the meantime, Penelope has carried the torch for her husband, so to speak, fending off a mob of suitors who covet Odysseus’s property and title and assume he isn’t coming back. Her steely resolve transcends love to embody a kind of noble suffering, as if sacrifice was a prerequisite for privilege. The suitors plunder her store of wine and food while she sits in her room weaving a tapestry. For his part, Odysseus undergoes sacrifice in more physical terms, braving actual fire and ice, monsters and supernatural forces, in order to return to his family, to home and hearth, as it were. The nobility inherent in such an endeavor is sort of ridiculous, and he seems to require the counsel of at least one god, Athena (Zendaya), in order to decide if the grinding trip is really worth it. For several years he seems to abandon the journey, shacking up with the wraith Calypso (Charlize Theron) in what looks like a Greek island travel advertisement, all sandy beaches and bonfire cookouts. Nolan emphasizes the temptations that pull at Odysseus’s resolve as much as he does the guilt that haunts his memories of war. Our hero is a mess, but a mess with a conscience. 

Much has been made of the IMAX experience, and it is impressive in how it conveys the scale of Nolan’s ambitions in the most vivid way possible. However, it also reduces most of the plot and characterizations to their bare essence, and since the poem is an epic much of it is sketchy. Too many of the episodes are strung together. The ellipses are obvious. The story progresses by fits and starts, and there’s no indication of time passing. Except for Penelope and Odysseus, every character feels like a walk-on, meaning you probably will only appreciate Nolan’s accomplishment if you’ve actually read the poem and remembered it, which I’m sure wasn’t the aim. 

Soldier’s guilt is addressed head-on in Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest antiwar movie, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? The title character, an African-American named Allen Nelson (played by Mark Merphy as a young man, by Rodney Hicks as an older man) who fought in the Vietnam War as a Marine, is shown at different periods in his life after returning from Southeast Asia with a severe case of PTSD. The episodes that show his time in Vietnam make it look as if his batallion carried out daily My Lai-level massacres, enough nightmare fodder for a hundred lifetimes, and Tsukamoto stages these atrocities in his patented visceral style, stressing the savagery of the American troops, most of whom are Black in this telling, thus suggesting that they are taking out their own frustrations with being subjugated in America on the Vietnamese. Nelson becomes a killing machine as if through hypnosis and his eventual owning up to the horrors he committed is presented as someone waking up from a bad dream. Much of the story development is presented through his sessions with a soft-spoken therapist (Geoffrey Rush), who keeps asking him “why” he killed people in Vietnam, a question that, understandably, perplexes Nelson—until it doesn’t.

Nelson is a real person who died about twenty years ago. He is famous in Japan for giving more than a thousand lectures about his experiences in Vietnam, and Tsukamoto wants to connect that experience and Nelson’s everlasting guilt to the experiences of Japanese soldiers in Southeast Asia in World War II, which he believes were never aired in an appropriately candid manner because of the shame involved. But that aspect isn’t clear until the end, when we see Nelson traveling to Vietnam to talk about his experiences in the company of a Japanese man named Kuroi (Lily Franky), who has sponsored his lectures in Japan and whose own father died without ever talking about what he did during the war. 

Mr. Nelson is effective in what it sets out to do, even if Tsukamoto’s direction relies more on production design than on narrative elements. Nelson is portrayed as a man constantly on the verge of total mental disintegration—there is not a scene in the movie when he isn’t sweating profusely—and so he comes across more as a symbol than as a complete person. A more literal approach would have been that much more powerful.

The Odyssey now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX; 050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX; 050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (03-6709-6410), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, in English and Vietnamese, now playing in Tokyo at Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

The Odyssey home page in Japanese

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? home page in Japanese

The Odyssey photo (c) 2026 Universal Studios/Melinda Sue Gordon

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? photo (c) Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? Film Partners

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Review: Bob Trevino Likes It and Linka Linka

Posted on September 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the nicer touches in Tracie Laymon’s reportedly semi-autobiographical movie, Bob Trevino Likes It, is the perpetually cracked screen on the cell phone used by the protagonist, Lily Trevino (Barbara Ferreira). As the title suggests, Lily spends an awful lot of time checking her social media feeds and messages, and the condition of the screen, which is never explained nor repaired, becomes a constant reminder of how damaged Lily’s life is. A private care worker living in a nameless American Midwest suburb, the twenty-something Lily walks around with a huge chip on her shoulder thanks to her emotionally abusive father, Bob (French Stewart), who still hasn’t gotten over Lily’s drug-addicted mother walking out on them many years ago and takes his frustrations with the world out on his daughter. Lily internalizes his insults and complaints, seething at his selfishness but afraid that any pushback on her part will just drive him further away, but with each passing encounter her self-hatred and fear of abandonment only increases, to the point that when she finally seeks help from a therapist (Ashlyn Moore), the therapist breaks down in tears after Lily tells her story. Did I say that Bob Trevino Likes It is a comedy?

Well, it is for most of its first half, during which we get the lay of the land of Lily’s psyche, her tendency to seek help by any means necessary on the internet, and the relationships that keep her going—or not. Following a particularly disastrous dinner outing with her father and a middle aged woman he hopes to get jiggy with (“You gotta make me look good,” is her father’s demand), Lily is banished from his life (it’s implied this isn’t the first time he’s done so) and she goes into a depressive tailspin, desperately trying to figure out how to get back into his relatively good graces. While searching Facebook she comes across what she believes is her father’s page, which is doubly perplexing because she didn’t know he had one, but when she tries to friend him she discovers the page belongs to a different Bob Trevino. He accepts her request, thus opening a door to a new relationship. As it turns out, this other Bob (John Leguizamo) is not only her father’s age, but also someone going through his own family-oriented turmoil: He lost a child, a tragedy his wife, like Lily’s father, can’t get past. They eventually meet, and while acquaintances and strangers find their budding friendship unsavory, they turn out to be exactly what each other needs. 

Though at first Lily seems desperate for a father figure who acts the way she believes a father should act, eventually she sees how Bob needs her not as a substitute offspring but as someone who proves to him just by listening that he has value as a human being. It goes without saying that Lily really only wants the same thing, and their give-and-take is heartfelt and grounded in the redemptive power of unselfish love. However, all the other characters are written as stereotypes: the haplessly cruel parent, the ineffective social worker, the deluded spouse, the fair weather friend, and countless minor players who might as well have no faces to go with their respective single defining traits that merely add ballast to the plot. Warning: You will cry your eyes out in the end, but you may wonder if the movie deserves your tears.

A difficult father-daughter relationship also centers the drama in Linka Linka, the debut feature of Tibetan writer-director Kangdrun, whose take on the Tibet Autonomous Region of China eschews most of the cultural peculiarites and sweeping mountain vistas and steppes characteristic of films from the area, instead concentrating on the social milieu of the capital city of Lhasa, which is much more cosmopolitan than you might expect, especially for young people, who are shown dancing in nightclubs and engaging with one another mostly online. Like Kangdrun, the protagonist of the film, Samgyi (Tsering Yangkyi), is sent to Shanghai at an early age to receive her education, and when she returns years later she is a budding filmmaker who intends to make her first fiction feature about a formative event in her girlhood that, at the time, traumatized her and her best friend. However, more than dredging up some bitter feelings in the process, Samgyi’s return also preciptates a reckoning with her musician father, who disapproves of her choice of profession, an attitude that renders what was once a loving relationship into a prickly one. 

Linka Linka (the title refers to a kind of traditional picnic) has a dual structure, alternating between Samgyi struggling to make her movie on location in Lhasa and flashbacks to her adolescence when the formative incident the movie is about took place. Kangdrun often complicates this structure by further bifurcating the flashback tale between what supposedly happened in her mind and how she describes it in the movie-within-the-movie. At issue is a lost wallet whose provenance figures prominently in the fates of Samgyi and her best friend, Lhamo. Each friend remembered the incident differently, which is why they never spoke afterwards. This disconnect carries over to the viewer, who automatically wonders how reliable a narrator Samgyi is.

The resolution of the central mystery turns out to be less consequential than the idea that you can go home again and take up where you left off, at least emotionally. Due to Kangdrun’s ambitious approach to storytelling, the movie sometimes gets away from its premise, and the sideshows are so enchanting that the viewer can be forgiven for losing the thread of the plot. I wanted to know a lot more about Suoso (Ze Ren Dun Zhu), Samgyi’s fashion-conscious influencer pen pal, who essentially represents contemporary Tibetan youth in their desire to embrace the wider world. His presence is conceived as comic relief, but he’s got more soul than anyone else in the movie. 

Bob Trevino Likes It opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musahinokan (03-3354-5670).

Linka Linka, in Tibetan and Mandarin, opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Bob Trevino Likes It home page in Japanese

Linka Linka home page in Japanese

Bob Trevino Likes It photo (c) 2024 Chosen Family, LLC

Linka Linka photo (c) Tibetan Antelope Films Co., Ltd.

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