Media watch: Government keeps its distance from Japanese language learning for foreigners

Posted on February 9, 2026 by philipbrasor
Foreigners attending night junior high school (Withnews)

In Japan, compulsory education stops after junior high school, and though the vast majority of Japanese people now graduate from high school, it wasn’t always that way. Up until about 1980, many young people pursued full-time employment right after finishing junior high, and the jobs were not only plentiful but rewarding. I remember when I was teaching English in the late 1980s to company employees who needed intensive English training because they were being sent overseas during the go-go bubble era, a good portion of my students were junior high graduates who had gotten jobs in factories for major companies like NEC and Toyota and then worked their way up through the system. Many had become managers. In the 60s and 70s when these employees entered the work force, private companies were not necessarily looking for graduates of elite universities because their goal was to train new people on-the-job in order to make them fit their particular corporate culture.

But a junior high school education was still important, which is why at the end of the 1940s, so-called night junior high schools were established throughout Japan for the purpose of educating young people of junior high school age who otherwise could not attend conventional daytime public junior high schools because of poverty, family work, or even discrimination. That system remains in effect today, though its role has changed considerably over the years. In addition, there are fewer night junior high schools than there used to be. According to Satoshi Eguchi, an education expert writing in the Koron column of the Asahi Shimbun on Feb. 4, there are now only about 60 public night junior high schools in all of Japan, and they are barely getting by at the discretion of local education committees. 

The situation had become such that in 2016, the central government implemented the Education Opportunity Assurance Law, whose mission was to have at least one public night junior high school in each city whose population exceeded 500,000. By doing so, the government thought it could assure at least one public night junior high school in each prefecture. 

For the most part, students who entered night junior high schools in the late 1940s and 50s were children who worked on family farms or in family businesses and thus could not attend school during the day. Then in the 60s, after Japan and South Korea normalized relations, families of Japanese persons who were living in South Korea when the war ended and remained there started coming to Japan to live, and night junior high schools became a place where they could study the Japanese language. The same thing happened after Japan normalized relations with China in 1972, since there were many Japanese who had been abandoned as children in China after the war and who wished to “return” to Japan. Many could not speak Japanese and so they attended night junior high schools. By 1981, according to Eguchi, 69 percent of students at night junior high schools were returning Chinese and Koreans, as well as zainichi (Japan-resident) Koreans who had been prevented from attending regular public schools when they were young due to discrimination. What many of these students had in common was that they were adults, meaning not of junior high school age. Their main reason for attending night junior high schools was to become fluent in Japanese, but they also studied other required subjects in order to earn junior high school diplomas.

Shortly thereafter, many of these schools started offering Japanese language classes to general foreigners who were living in Japan. These programs came into their own in the 1990s when the government revised immigration laws to allow foreigners, mostly South Americans but also Chinese, who had Japanese relatives in their family trees to come to Japan to work and live. These new immigrants needed to learn Japanese fast, and the only free system for doing so was the night junior high school. 

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Review: Together and Frewaka

Posted on February 6, 2026 by philipbrasor

For much of the moviegoing public, suspension of disbelief remains a requirement, and not just with regards to fantasy, horror, or sci-fi genre films; but fantasy, horror, and sci-fi pretty much constitute the bread-and-butter of contemporary commercial filmmaking, so the ability to set aside one’s incredulity for the sake of a thrill is more important than ever. In his debut feature Together, director Michael Shanks obviously works backward from a body horror premise, but it’s equally obvious he had two routes to choose from, both of which require a considerable amount of suspension of disbelief: the sci-fi route or the occult route. Though he wisely chooses the second option, he nevertheless gets caught up in devising a logical explanation of the creepy developments that unfold in the movie, thus resulting in a check on the viewer’s ability to fall into the story in a natural way. 

Allegorically, Shanks knows exactly what he’s doing. Millie (Allison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) have been in a relationship for more than ten years and now lead the kind of emotional routine that long-term lovers do. But when Millie is offered a job at an elementary school in the countryside, the couple’s move out of the city upsets Tim’s dream of becoming a professional musician, which the audience sort of understands will likely never happen because Tim is not driven or talented enough. Shanks handles this setup with enough insight so as to make it feel not as trite as it should, and thus the supernatural stuff that soon starts happening seems like an extension of the couple’s relationship problems. One day while hiking in the woods near their new home, Millie and Tim are caught in a downpour and take shelter next to a pool of water from which they gain refreshment. Sometime later, whenever they touch each other their skin fuses, a physical manifestation of their becoming a real couple, so to speak, though one that is going through a crisis owing to their changing circumstances. 

The fusing starts to become a problem, as you can imagine, and while Shanks derives sufficient gross-out power from this anomaly, he dilutes the overall horror effect by attempting to explicate why it’s happening—something to do with an ancient cult in the area that is still somehow active and bent on bringing the couple into their midst. The metaphors are so handily executed that the story could have done without the hocus-pocus. If you’ve ever been in a really close relationship with someone, you know what Tim and Millie are going through. It’s what “getting under someone’s skin” is really about.

The cult in the Irish folk-horror movie Frewaka is more above board in terms of how it’s used in the story, and while there are allegorical depths to mine, they aren’t compromised by the curse that follows a young woman who is assigned as a live-in care worker for an elderly shut-in. In a sense, Siobhan (Clare Monnelly) is only too happy to take the assignment because her estranged mother has just committed suicide in Dublin and she doesn’t feel like sorting through her things, leaving it, unfortunately, to her pregnant Ukrainian girlfriend (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya). The assignment is in a remote northern village and the charge is an old cranky woman named Peig (Brid Ni Neachtain) who lives in what we immediately peg as a haunted house, complete with a cellar door with multiple locks. 

Peig is a handful. In addition to refusing to take her medication she warns Siobhan that beyond the cellar door evil lurks though she doesn’t seem to really know what it is or how to stop it. And while the night is filled with odd, ominous sounds, the daylight doesn’t bring any relief. Siobhan’s occasional forays into town are met with all sorts of uncomfortable glances by the natives, who know where she’s staying; and on top of that someone—or someones—is following her. 

There are no out-and-out scares in Frewaka (Irish for “roots”), but the creepiness is potent as director Aislinn Clarke mixes a heady brew of Catholic guilt tripping and Satanic devil worship. But like Together, Frewaka has someplace definite to go and Clarke’s effort to make all the connections feel natural aren’t that convincing. Apparently, Siobhan was destined to end up in this house. It was a lot chillier when there didn’t seem to be a real reason for the ghostly shenanigans.

Together now playing 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 Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Frewaka, in Irish and English, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

Together home page in Japanese

Frewaka home page in Japanese

Together photo (c) 2025 Project Foxtrot, LLC

Frewaka photo (c) Frewaka Films & Screen Market Research T/A Wildcard 2024

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Review: Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants

Posted on February 5, 2026 by philipbrasor

Though two-and-a-half-hours long, Tsui Hark’s distillation of a good portion of Louis Cha’s historical fantasy epic (which has been called China’s Lord of the Rings) feels rushed, at least for the first hour, probably because there’s so much stuff going on in the source series of books that can’t be elided without causing mortal harm to the overall story. At bottom, the movie takes place during the Mongol-Han wars (whether fictional or not) and concerns two fated lovers who find each other by accident, lose each other due to spiteful ignorance, and then spend the rest of the story trying to get back together against ridiculously rough odds. Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan) is a scion of the Song clan that has been defeated by the treacherous and brutal Jin Dynasty. Raised by his mother (Ada Choi) among the Mongols under Genghis Khan (Baya’ertu), who adopts Guo Jing as his son, the young man has divided loyalties that don’t really come into their own until the action-packed ending. During a pilgrimage to study some arcane martial arts and locate the tomb of his father, he meets the free-spirited Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei), the capably independent daughter of an evil wizard who has taken up with a band of warrior brigands. While Huang Rong expands Guo Jing’s understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the martial arts he studies, the two come into possession of something called the Novem Scripture, knowledge of which can make one all-powerful, which is why another evil wizard, Venom West (Tony Leung Ka-fai), pursues the pair. 

Most of this setup is explicated in truncated fashion using a lot of visual shorthand, including action montages, and by the time Guo Jing returns to Mongolia and the princess whom Genghis Khan long ago decided he should marry, befuddlement at what transpires in the movie’s core plot will naturally occur to those of us who aren’t familiar with the books. It’s obvious why Tsui focuses on this part of the story, since it provides plenty of opportunity for both large-scale battle scenes and more circumscribed one-on-one kung fu dustups. The Jin are now encroaching on Mongol land, and Khan feels it is his “heavenly duty” to punish them, but in order to do that he will have to lead his troops through the last territory controlled by the Song, and the Song say no dice, thus setting up a showdown between Guo Jing’s adopted people and those he is bound to by blood. Meanwhile, he longs for Huang Rong, who has infiltrated the Mongol camp without his knowledge, and Venom West is tailing him to extract the magical text he covets. Without giving away too much, it’s this latter conflict that provides the big climax of the movie, not the Mongol-Song one.

Though the CG can get pretty cheesy, Tsui, the most versatile action producer-director in Hong Kong, knows how to control the emotional temperature of his scenes, whether they contain fighting or not. He seems to know this material inside-out, as if he’s read the books multiple times, and while he probably trusts his Chinese audience too much to understand how the various members of this huge cast of characters get from point A to point Z, his pacing in the second half improves remarkably. The action becomes quite relentless during the monumental fight between Guo Jing and Venom West, which even the assembled armies can’t affect. At this point the elevated diction becomes as pompously florid as the ridiculously convoluted kung-fu moves (with names like “the 12-palmed dragon quake” and “the toad miasma”), which might make you crack up at how seriously you’re supposed to take it. It’s a caveat I offer only to cover my ass. If you’ve never seen a Chinese martial arts historical fantasy, then you’ve just never seen one. 

In Mandarin and Mongolian. Opens Feb. 6 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 China Film Co., Ltd. 

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Review: Holding Back the Tide

Posted on January 31, 2026 by philipbrasor

As a nature documentary whose chief purpose is to say something about protecting the environment, Emily Packer’s unique film has a significant advantage: it’s about an animal that is considered a kind of luxury food, the oyster. Limiting her setting to New York City and vicinity shorelines where oyster farming was once a lucrative undertaking, she taps into a colorful local ethnographic history that provides structure to her story. Consequently, she decided to use professional actors as dramatic onscreen narrators and witnesses and not just people and organizations who are directly involved in the oyster trade, though sometimes it’s difficult to tell, since even the genuine fishmongers depicted have a poetic style.

One of the first oyster traits that Packer latches on to is that they change gender over the course of their lives, usually from male to female, which makes it possible for them to fertilize their own eggs. The movie emphasizes this capability by having people of indistinct sexual identity present and interact with the narrative, showing how the shellfish’s adaptability makes it not only the ultimate survivor, but tasty in a sublime way. There’s a related sensuality to the presentation that plays up the oyster as a perfect food, meaning one that doesn’t need preparation or added ingredients (“serve it with lemon…if you must”). Even the shell, which, after all, produces pearls from irritants, has its own special visual charm that’s been an inspiration to artists for centuries. Environmentally, of course, oysters remove excess algae and other byproducts of pollution, which is why there are more than half a dozen NGOs in the NYC area alone working to reseed oyster beds. Such work not only keeps the water around New York cleaner, but provides work and marine produce for innumerable businesses like restaurants and hotels. 

But the most intriguing aspect of Packer’s film is its lively history of oyster farming, which in the past—meaning the 18th and 19th centuries—was carried out by people of color, who do the bulk of the explaining here, whether they are representing the past or the here-and-now. The oyster, as it were, is not only the perfect food, but the most honest representative earth product of New York’s multicultural industrial revolution. It’s ironic, then, that in the 20th century the oyster has become synonymous with high living white people, since only they could afford a food that, due to scarcity born of a damaged environment, became a delicacy. Holding Back the Tide is most edifying when it points out that oysters were once a common edible for all peoples, regardless of class or income. By boosting the oyster population to its once abundant levels, these people will not only help realign New York’s salt water ecology, but make the oyster a food that everyone can enjoy anytime. 

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

Holding Back the Tide home page in Japanese

photo (c) Marginal Gap Films 2023

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Review: The Running Man and Mars Express

Posted on January 30, 2026 by philipbrasor

There’s something both thrilling and slightly deflating about the continued popularity of Stephen King after a gazillion novels and short stories, most of which have been adapted as films or TV shows. On the one hand, his lean prose and inventive storylines have elevated horror-pulp to the realm of near-literature (he has, after all, been published in the New Yorker and Harper’s); but by the same token he’s become such an industry unto himself that there is very little in his work any more that’s capable of surprising us, especially now, when many of his better stories are being adapted for the second or third time—or creating their own separate spinoffs. This is the second movie version of a story that King pubished under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, and it’s obvious that director Edgar Wright saw enough parallels between the plot premise and our current sociopolitical predicament that warranted a retread. But the idea of a state-sponsored televised death chase is hardly fresh any more, regardless of which narcisstic bozo is in the White House, and, besides, the Hunger Games series said pretty much everything you could about the concept.

Still, Wright is one of those action directors who favors colorfully unique characters over explosions and gunfights, and his use of the soon-to-be overused Glen Powell as the hunted protagonist is what distinguishes the movie from its ilk. Powell is Ben Richards, a recently downsized worker whose sick daughter requires a special drug he can no longer afford. When it’s first suggested he audition for the titular reality show, where contestants win a billion bucks if they can evade teams of professsional assassins for one month, he scoffs because he knows that no one has ever survived the ordeal, even though the consolation prize is that the dead contestant’s family is taken care of in perpetuity. Nevertheless, the show runner, Killian (Josh Brolin), using some sort of A.I. talent scout, sees in Richards the perfect foil for his game, a savvy, resourceful misanthrope who will boost ratings over the course of the month-long broadcast, and eventually “persuades” him to take part by giving him an offer he can’t refuse. 

Wright gloms onto the satirical elements of King’s story with more verve and imagination than they probably deserve, showing the slovenly citizens who can make money by snitching on Richards’ whereabouts (they’re pointedly modeled on current MAGA stereotypes) while pumping up the advertising opportunities as touted by the show’s oily host (Colman Domingo). All the while, Powell makes the most of his character’s ingenuity and ruthlessness as he dispatches whole hordes of faceless goons with flesh-rending efficiency. Though I could have done without the pat, crowd-pleasing ending, Wright knows how to satisfy your basest impulses without insulting your intelligence; kind of what King has made a living out of.

The dystopian elements of the French anime Mars Express are less political in intent but no less destructive. Writer-director Jeremie Perin has an excellent familiarity with the real world effects of robotics and A.I. and has smoothly and credibly extrapolated their possibilies into a future where the differences between various levels of artificial provenance and actual humans have become difficult to distinguish. In a particularly brilliant touch, Perin’s protagonist is a blonde female private eye with a drinking problem whose specialty is hunting down androids that have been “jailbroken,” a situation that has become socially untenable since jailbroken robots have a tendency to cross over the so-called singularity threshhold and gain self-awareness. Once that happens, they tend to kill. 

Aline, the P.I., works with an “augmented android” named Carlos, a cop who died but had what was left of his consciousness attached to an artificial body, thus making him theoretically immortal, though the curse of everlasting life is apparent whenever Carlos tries to negotiate with his former wife, who has moved on with their children to another flesh-and-blood man. As for the case at the center of the story, a student hacker named Jun is missing, and her disappearance may have something to do with her own abilities to jailbreak certain kinds of androids for large-scale catastrophic purposes. Perin borrows heavily from Blade Runner and Japanese anime (he has pointed to Akira in interviews as a foundational work), but the story has enough potent detail to stand as an original; though you may need a scorecard to keep track of the intertwined threads of tech logic that make the plot work.

The title is misleading. Aline’s base of operations is Mars, and that’s about it for the space travel. (The prologue is the only part of the movie that takes place on Earth) And while an apocalyptic conflict between humans and robots is implied by what the story projects, Perin never squares the philosophical with the practical in a way that makes you scared for anyone’s future. Aline, for instance, seems to have more to worry about from falling off the wagon. The violence depicted is as realistic looking as you can get in an anime, but it still feels stylized into insignificance. Robots got to be free, too, I suppose, but none of the ones in this movie feel that vital. 

The Running Man 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).

Mars Express, in French with Japanese subtitles and Japanese dubbed versions, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

The Running Man home page in Japanese

Mars Express home page in Japanese

The Running Man photo (c) 2025 Paramount Pictures

Mars Express photo (c) Everybody On Deck 0 Je Suis Bien Content – EV.L. Prod. – Plume France – France 3 Cinema – Shine Conseils – Gebake Films – Amopix

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Review: Queendom

Posted on January 29, 2026 by philipbrasor

In recent comments about Shiori Ito’s Oscar-nominated Black Box Diaries, fellow documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki pointed out that documentary films should not be considered journalism but rather the viewpoint on a particular topic by the filmmaker. This isn’t to say that documentaries shouldn’t be truthful, only that no one should expect them to take any “side” other than that of the filmmaker. For sure, no viewer will argue with Agniia Galdanova’s Queendom, a documentary about the queer performance artist Gena Marvin—birth name Gennadiy Chebotanov—that it should also take into consideration the viewpoint of the Russian authorities under Vladimir Putin who make Marvin’s life a holy hell simply because of who they are and the form their art takes. Born a man, Marvin dresses up in bizarre costumes of their own making that scan as feminine to a certain extent and parades these creations in public. Anyone who knows anything about Russia right now knows that LBGTQ expressions have been criminalized as “propaganda” by the government, so Marvin’s explicitly out-there self-expression gets them into hot water again and again, sometimes with violent results; but their situation became doubly dangerous with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, since the state sees Marvin as a man and thus eligible for the draft. 

Because of these various issues, which Galdanova captures on film with as much courage as Marvin demonstrates just by walking out in public, Queendom is one of those documentaries whose making poses as many questions as the content itself. By eschewing explanatory voiceover narration, Galdanova effectively leaves these questions open, and I, for one, felt continually frustrated when important context was left out. Marvin was raised by their grandparents in the Siberian gulag town of Magadan, but is technically considered an orphan, and it might have been helpful to our understanding of Marvin’s situation to know about their parents. (At one point, their grandfather, in another outburst of anger, says they are going to die on the street “just like your mother”) Many times, Marvin is picked up by the police or other agents of the state but we rarely find out what happened to them in custody. Near the end, when Marvin is desperately trying to leave Russia—the only country they know—because their life is at risk, we aren’t really clued in to how exactly they managed to defect to France.

Galdanova likely believes these details are not important or that they may come with their own dangers for herself, so Queendom has to settle for a narrative that is sufficient without them, and in that regard the movie is both moving and shocking. Marvin doesn’t really make money from their art, another reality that frustrates her grandfather (“we live under capitalism now”), but has garnered an international following on TikTok. In fact, if their art is about anything it’s being out there in a big way, meaning it’s political by definition, and they makes a point of participating in any anti-government demonstrations they hear about. Being a backwater in the lowliest sense, Magadan offers them nothing except unique landscapes against which their getups look even more extraterrestrial, so they move to Moscow to attend beauty school, but are kicked out after the authorities harass the school about their provocations, which Galdanova samples liberally. Being the showoff they are, Marvin is almost too willing and too perfect a subject, and it’s the tension between their bold assertion of their own queer identity and the bigoted resistance of the macho-oriented Russian identity that makes the biggest impression. (Pointedly, almost all the women depicted in the movie, regardless of age, appreciate what Marvin is doing as both a person and an artist, including her grandmother, who affectionately calls them “my little oddball”) That, of course, could have been predicted by anyone, but it takes a brave and resourceful filmmaker to deliver it in such starkly incisive terms. 

In Russian. Opens Jan. 30 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Queendom home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Galdanova Film, LLC

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Masako’s Story on Substack

Posted on January 25, 2026 by philipbrasor

Several months ago I started a Substack called Masako’s Story, which is a running biography of my life partner Masako Tsubuku. Born to a Korean father and a Japanese mother who weren’t married, Masako had a rough childhood of poverty and discrimination, but besides being a moving (and often funny) tale of perseverance Masako’s Story also aims to be a close and vivid depiction of 1960s-70s Japan, which was coming into its own as a major economic power following the devastation of WWII. Please take a look and subscribe. It’s free.

Link to Masako’s Story

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Review: Olivia & the Clouds

Posted on January 24, 2026 by philipbrasor

It might come as a surprise to many dedicated movie freaks that Dominica has a vital animated film community; not a hugely influential one, admittedly, but large enough to make this singular production stand out in a world of inventive animated features. Apparently, the director, Tomás Pichardo Espaillat, recruited more than 20 local animators for the film, with several working on individual episodes in the story at once. The finished product is a kind of sampler of all their techniques and if Pichardo Espaillat doesn’t necessarily meld them all into a stylistically unified whole, he manages to keep things lively and intriguing. These styles range from conventional cell-like animation using watercolors, oils, and charcoal to mixed media using fabric, wood, paper, and cardboard and on to manipulated film stock of naturalistic settings and stop-motion clay figures. 

Consequently, the story, as it were, is beholden to the form rather than the other way around, with the POV shifting restlessly from one character to another.  At center is four related individuals whose stories overlap without any real temporal connections. In the introductory section, Olivia is an older woman who imagines that a former lover, Ramon, lives under her bed and communicates with her through cloud patterns. Her son, Mauricio seems only slightly concerned with what he obviously sees as his mother losing her grip on reality because he has more to worry about with his current girlfriend, Barbara, a professional animator who seems fed up with Mauricio’s lack of ambition and commitment. Pichardo Espaillat includes several wildly impressionistic scenes from Olivia’s past showing scenarios that may or may not trace her love life, from a piquantly fateful meeting with a sailor in a bachata bar—reportedly involving the input of six separate animators—that’s enlivened immeasurably by Cem Misirlioglu’s wildly original score, to a fantastic romance that has Ramon impulsively kiss a stranger in an open market and then spitting into a flower pot to produce a plant-lover who can’t help but be dependent on him, despite his not being prepared for such a serious relationship. 

The meaning of these episodes is less important than their emotional trajectory, which is dictated by the various textures and colors utilized. In the end, you feel less like you’ve sat through an art project and more like you’ve explored someone else’s dreamscape on drugs. The metaphors are rich and often funny—at one point Olivia treats Ramon as literal baggage, and at another Ramon, who’s an accountant, is rendered as a kind of origami aggregation of invoices—and don’t have to make sense to draw you in. Olivia & the Clouds has imagination to burn. 

In Spanish with English and Japanese subtitles. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Olivia & the Clouds home page in Japanese

photo (c) Cine Chani/Historias de Bibi/Guasabara Cine

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Review: Mercy and Project Y

Posted on January 23, 2026 by philipbrasor

Last week a video of Ben Affleck talking in depth about A.I. in the film industry went viral. Affleck’s assessment of the commercial and financial impact of A.I. on his business was sober and measured, which actually made his pronouncements startling when set against the background of severe unease at how artificial intelligence will totally destroy movies as we know them. But what he’s right about he’s right about right now: Bad movies are bad not because of A.I. itself, but because filmmakers are lazy, a deficiency that A.I. is not necessarily going to exacerbate. Case in point is this movie, which happens to be about A.I. and could have been written by an early version of ChatGPT. The screenwriting credit goes to someone named Marco van Belle, a journeyman filmmaker with a bunch of mid-level titles in his resume. Whatever other talents van Belle possesses, he knows his crime-action cliches inside-out. There is no character depth or plot intricacies in this movie: it’s all geared toward second-by-second intrigue. Everything serves the action, as if programmed to do so.

The setting is Los Angeles in the near future, after the LAPD has adopted an A.I. judicial system that tries murder suspects whose chances of being convicted rise above a certain line of probability. The suspects have 90 minutes to make their case, without legal representation, before an A.I. judge. Verdicts are rendered immediately and sentencing is carried out, which in the case of capital crimes means instant, painless death. Van Belle explains this system breathlessly during the opening credit sequence so that when the movie properly opens on a suspect already confined to a chair in front of the A.I. judge screen we’re as discombobulated as the suspect, a cop named Chris Raven (Chris Platt), who is accused of killing his wife but claims he remembers nothing. This is a calculated move by van Belle and the veteran action director Timur Bekmambetov, who doesn’t let up on the pace for a minute. Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), who for some reason is given a name and a countenance as if that makes her A.I. pronouncements more emotionally acceptable, flatly explains the procedure and gets down to business as Raven splutters and pleads his innocence while the clock, in real time, ticks down his 90 minutes. The relentless courtroom proceedings are augmented by quick cutaways to “witnesses” outside the sealed courtroom whom the judge can call up instantly, including other cops, Raven’s distraught daughter, and neighbors, all of whom seem to think Raven is guilty because they’re convinced the A.I. system is infallible. In fact, Raven was one of the law enforcement agents who stumped for the system, dubbed Mercy, because too many criminals were slipping through the conventional law enforcement process. Hey, we can all relate, right?

The mystery itself—did he or didn’t he?—becomes ludicrous by degrees because van Belle’s assigned task is to use the A.I. gimmick to jam as many plot twists into 100 minutes as humanly (or inhumanly, if we’re really talking machine learning) possible, and he succeeds on that level. The adrenalin rushes keep coming in waves thanks to Bekmambetov’s penchant for overdoing everything, whether it be a gunfight with drone-perched cops or a freeway chase featuring a bomb-laden tractor trailer. This movie, as they say, has everything and yet leaves you feeling as if you’ve just binged on a mountain of junk food: unsatisfied and slightly nauseous. 

By contrast, the action in the Korean neo-noir Project Y is measured and focused, its milieu no less contrived than that of Mercy but more emotionally substantial. Like most Korean crime movies, melodramatic excess is as central to its appeal as the requisite brutal violence and credible motivation. The director, Hwan Lee, has confessed to being a Tarantino acolyte, and QT’s fondness for sharply delineated characters is apparent even if they lack the moral nuance that Tarantino is famous for. And also like Tarantino Hwan and his co-writers highlight women protagonists with the kind of moxie movies traditionally ascribe to men. In this case it’s a pair of BFFLs, Mi-seon (Han So-hee), a nightclub hostess, and Do-gyeong (Jeon Jong-seo), a driver-for-hire, who are fixtures of the Seoul entertainment underworld ruled by ruthless men with no feelings for anything but their wardrobes and stashes of excess loot.

One such stash is the target after Mi-seon, who has saved a bunch to buy a flower shop that will provide an escape from the demimonde she and Do-gyeong are stuck in, gets scammed out of the money she’s set aside for a Seoul apartment by the realtor who fooled her and her fellow hostesses to use him as their agent. On one of her runs, Do-gyeong overhears the wife of a powerful club owner (Kim Sung-cheol) tell her host club lover where her husband has hidden loot he’s accumulated through bets on fixed basketball games and decides she and Mi-seon can dig it up before the host and his slimy accomplice do. Of course, once they get their hands on the loot, which also includes a bag of gold bars, they themselves become targets, not only of the host and his slimy accomplice, but of the club owner and his sadistic, leather-clad female goon. Complicating matters is Do-gyeong’s mother, Ga-yeong (Kim Shin-rock), a junkie and veteran hostess who is closer maternally to Mi-seon than she is to her own daughter. The two friends tell her about the gold because they want her to escape Korea with them to Japan, but Ga-yeong has plans of her own.

Outside of the touted female buddy element, Project Y has no distinguishing features that sets it apart from other similarly flexed up Korean crime flicks, though Tarantino would likely be impressed, especially by the violence. But be warned: almost all the women in the movie get brutalized mightily, and while that brutality is designed to make the payback sweeter, it’s difficult to sit through and you have to wonder how many viewers find it thrilling in and of itself.

Mercy now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 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).

Project Y, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Mercy home page in Japanese

Project Y home page in Japanese

Mercy photo (c) 2025 CMTG

Project Y photo (c) 2025 Plus M Entertainment, Climax Studio and Wowpoint

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Review: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2

Posted on January 22, 2026 by philipbrasor

The inevitable sequel to the very successful 2023 movie adaptation of the equally popular video game slightly improves on its predecessor in that its storytelling is more abstract. The problem I had with the first movie was its byzantine plotting around a premise it couldn’t avoid, since the weird logic of the game had to be taken into consideration. Consequently, there was a lot of baffling stuff about the titular family-friendly pizza parlor’s back story and a bunch of kids who were somehow lured to their doom by the guy who designed the animatronic creatures that were the eatery’s main attraction. It didn’t have to make sense, but it sure needed to be easier to follow if it was going to be as scary as the game. 

The main attraction of the sequel is that the animatronic killer monsters leave the confines of the abandoned pizzeria to terrorize the surrounding environs, but how that happens requires more than the suspension of disbelief usually required of these kinds of horror films. The central idea of the stolen children is repeated at the beginning of the film with a flashback to Freddy Fazbear’s heyday, when a little girl watches as a little boy is abducted right in front of a crowd of unaware restaurant patrons. Though she saves the boy she’s killed in the process and later her spirit enters the animatronic body of a marionette that didn’t appear in the first film. The marionette conveniently causes all the mischief in the sequel, presumably as a form of revenge. Abby (Piper Rubio), the girl who was the main person-in-danger in the first film, is back, slightly older, and still under the impression that she can connect with the possessed robots, much to the chagrin of her older brother, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), who used to be a security guard at Freddy’s after it closed for obvious reasons. Also returning is Mike’s romantic interest and action figure foil Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who is the daughter of the evil Freddy’s mastermind (Matthew Lillard, making a brief cameo here in nightmare mode because his character was killed in the previous movie) and so has dibs on some of the payback stuff that’s central to the movie’s mojo. 

When I say that Freddy’s 2 is more abstract, what I mean is that all roads lead to the robots laying siege to the town, so story arcs are replaced with elliptical episodes that simply get us from here to there without a lot of narrative fuss. Unfortunately, the only really interesting thing that happens is the creatures interrupt a student science fair, severely trying the patience of the mean teacher (Wayne Knight) in charge. Since he gets what he deserves, you then understand who the target audience is: brainy junior high schoolers who think they’re smarter than their science teachers. 

Opens Jan. 23 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Humax Cinema (03-3462-2539), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Universal Studios

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