Though I’m sure there were cinematic treatments of the horrors of new motherhood before Rosemary’s Baby, it was Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s bestseller that first interpreted the phenomenon as a literal horror story, and we’ve have many variations on the theme since then. Nightborn takes a folk horror approach to the subject of post partum depression, a theme that’s been ripe for the picking lately by woman directors like Lynne Ramsay and Mary Bronstein. The movie’s director, Hanna Bergholm, is Finnish, and sets her story in a creepy, dark Finnish forest that the protagonist, a newlywed named Saga (Seiki Haarla), knew as a child because her grandmother lived in a big old house there surrounded by junk that, she was told, kept the forest’s malevolence at bay. So when Saga’s new British husband, Jon (Rupert Grint), endeavors to remove the junk from the property so they can fix up the delapidated house as their own home, you already know they’re in for it.
It’s clear that whatever subtexts Bergholm wants to impart about the psychological pitfalls of giving birth, she’s more intent on telling a straightforward Tale from the Crypt, and Nightborn essentially takes Rosemary’s Baby to its natural end. Nine months after Saga and Jon make love in the squishy moss under a forbidding looking tree in the forest, Saga goes through a very difficult labor and immediately feels that there’s something wrong with her new son, whom she impulsively names Kuura. What’s weird is that no one else seems to think Kuura is strange, despite that fact that the child has a distressingly shrill crying voice and draws blood when he suckles. Bergholm emphasizes this disconnect by never showing Kuura’s face, always having it turned away from the camera or hidden in shadow. As the baby starts to grow it develops a taste not only for blood but meat that Saga has no choice but to satisfy, a decision that Jon finds repugnant without even trying to understand, even as the forest itself starts encroaching more aggressively on the house. Family from both sides of the marriage come and go and tend to take Jon’s incurious side, thus driving Saga deeper into depression and frustration. Though she hates the baby, she also feels protective of it.
As a horror film, Nightborn is long on gore and short on scares, which may be the point. Even if Bergholm is avoiding metaphors, it’s obvious that her sympathies for Saga’s situation are at the expense of everyone else, especially Jon who, despite his genuine fear for Saga’s wellbeing, refuses to admit to what’s happening right before his eyes. In the end, Saga is forced to face her demon baby by herself, meaning she’s alone in her despair, and that’s a pretty chilling take on the so-called maternal instinct.
In English and Finnish. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Changer Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).
One of the problems that critics of AI encounter when they complain about its effect on movie-making is that a lot of green-lit content in Hollywood already feels as if it’s been produced by a computer program. I have little doubt that had this latest Jason Statham vehicle been written by ChatGPT it wouldn’t have been any worse than it is in its actual state. Statham’s action-hero parameters are unique, which also makes them easy to reproduce because they’ve become so familar, and there’s not an original idea or turn-of-phrase in Shelter. Statham has already played the former super-effective undercover operative hiding out from his checkered past more than a few times, and his characters tend to reenter the fray in order to save an innocent—in this case a young girl—from the evil intentions of powerful entities. The details may differ slightly, but who remembers details?
In this case, Michael Mason (Statham) manages a lighthouse on a deserted Scottish island. The man who delivers his supplies, usually on choppy seas, is often accompanied by his niece, Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), who tries to make a human connection with Mason but always fails because he’s such a reticent grump. When her uncle dies, Jessie takes over the route and Mason, who we learn worked with her uncle sometime in the past, decides to mentor the girl, teaching her how to use guns and such. Then suddenly bad men invade the island and Mason is forced to flee with Jessie to the mainland in order to confront the mastermind behind the invasion, an MI6 higher-up named Manafort (Bill Nighy) who used to work with Mason and wants to eliminate him because he knows something he shouldn’t, thus Mason’s reason for living the hermit’s life on an uninhabited island.
The usual mayhem ensues, which should be enough for most action fans, but except for one well-staged car chase, the only really interesting aspect of the movie is Naomi Ackie’s MI6 factotum Frost, who is charged with finding out why their agents are being disposed of so handily. She eventually comes around to the realization that her boss, Manafort, is up to no good. Ackie at least pretends that her character possesses a distinctive personality. Usually, Statham also transcends the mechanics of his characters as they’re written, but here he has nothing to work with and seems to give up on Mason fairly early on. The character’s actions are spurred by his need to keep Jessie safe, but the girl’s existence barely registers once the fighting and bloodshed begins. I would like to think that any self-respecting LLM would have striven for something better.
Opens Aug. 28 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Since the only film other than The Drama I’ve seen by Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli is his last one, Dream Scenario, I don’t have much insight into his approach except the feeling that he definitely likes his comedy to be as discomfiting as possible. Dream Scenario, which featured Nicolas Cage as an emotionally stunted college professor who suddenly appears in strangers’ dreams, sent up cancel culture, while The Drama goes for the jugular of a whole cinematic genre, the romantic comedy. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, two thirty-year-olds with cushy, creative jobs in Boston who, after two years of anodyne dating and vigorous, seemingly satisfying sex, decide to get married. The kicker occurs fairly early in the film during the couple’s pre-wedding tasting party with their best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), who happen to be married to each other. After condemning the behavior of a casual acquaintance who may or may not be using heroin, the four very drunk friends challenge one another to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done in their lives, and Emma’s turns out to be such a doozy that Rachel immediately banishes her from her life and Charlie begins wondering what he’s gotten into.
For the rest of the film, which mostly takes in the week leading up to the wedding, we see Emma’s and Charlie’s relationship deteriorate, mainly from Charlie’s point of view, though Borgli’s method of exposition makes it difficult to tell. He gives us flashbacks to Emma’s adolescence, when the dastardly deed took place, as well as jump-cut inserts that illustrate various aspects of the seemingly doomed relationship, such as Emma’s short temper and Charlie’s supreme lack of self-confidence. These scenes are clever and well-staged and successfully get the viewer squirming over how close-to-the-bone they cut, but it’s often difficult to tell which are based on things that actually happened and which are imaginative leaps; and if they are imaginative leaps, whose imagination do they spring from, Emma’s or Charlie’s? The upshot is that our two principals are so caught up in their romantic illusions that they can’t call the wedding off and thus head right into it like a runaway train over a cliff. The darkly comic climax doesn’t necessarily write itself, but it’s pretty much what you expect and you may end up watching it through your fingers.
Pattinson has the meatier role. Zendaya’s Emma is presented as something of a cipher. She comes across as more of a solid character in flashback as a teenager (played by Jordyn Curet, who doesn’t much look like a younger Zendaya) than she does as an adult woman. Part of the problem is Borgli’s presentation of contemporary American life. He’s uninterested in the attendant racial dynamics—both of the main couples are interracial—and plays by the rules of the American rom-com in that the production design is invariably upper middle class without realizing how such class depictions might affect our observation of the interpersonal difficulties on display. We don’t even meet the parents until the wedding scene, and then learn almost nothing about them. The Drama does one thing right: it shows how unreliable romantic comedies are as a genre. But we already knew that. It’s probably why we liked them in the first place.
Enzo is also cringe-inducing, but in a more traditional European art-house way. Based on a script by the late Laurent Cantet and directed by his associate Robin Campillo, it’s a coming-of-age film where the protagonist goes through more than his fair share of soul-twisting, self-inflicted psychological trauma, though at first blush these interior conflicts seem clear-cut. Sixteen-year-old Enzo (Eloy Pohu) has dropped out of the “traditional school system” and endeavors to become a certified mason through a trade school that finds him employment with a construction crew. We quickly learn that Enzo is not very good at his job, though it seems to have more to do with attitude than ability. When his foreman drives him home one day to talk to his parents about his difficulties, we learn that Enzo lives in a villa in a swanky hill area of southern France overlooking the Mediterranean. Enzo’s family is well off, his father (Pierfrancesco Favino) a tenured math professor and his mother (Elodie Bouchez) an engineer (who, it’s pointed out, makes more money than her husband). Liberal and open-minded, the folks seem fine with their son’s choice of vocation, but we soon come to understand that Dad believes it is just a phase and that he will eventually come to his senses and go back to school. This clash in perspective gets under Enzo’s skin and drives him further into silent rebelliousness, though to what end he never seems certain.
However, the initial plot conceit of a kid bucking his bourgeois pedigree and getting his hands dirty in solidarity with the hoi polloi gives way to something different. Enzo finds himself attracted to a pair of Ukrainian emigrants who are working on the job site, especially the cruder of the two, Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi). When both men are called back to help their country fight off the Russian invaders, it is Vlad who resists the request, a decision that appeals to Enzo because it seems to indicate an expression of will that transcends Vlad’s sense of responsibility. As friction with his father intensifies, Enzo draws closer to Vlad, developing sexual feelings that only further complicate his nascent selfhood, sending him into a tailspin of emotional and physical self-harm.
Though it’s easy to see what Cantet and Campillo are getting at, I regretted that my original take on the story—Enzo’s rejection of his privilege—turned out to be a misconception of the movie’s overall dramatic thrust. It turns out to be a red herring, something that lured me into a more conventional tale of a teenager confused by hormones facing choices he doesn’t really comprehend. Though Enzo’s destiny is entirely believable and even moving, it’s also disappointing in the larger scheme of things.
The Drama 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), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Enzo, in French and Ukrainian, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
As a filmmaker, Guy Ritchie hardly has any original ideas, but he’s developed an action-movie style that puts the viewer at ease quickly and painlessly. His films, regardless of the subject matter or the intensity of the violence, eschew any pretense of seriousness, and usually the only obstacle to full appreciation of their intended entertainment purposes is the quality of the script. In the case of this disposable semi-heist flick, Ritchie himself writes self-consciously hard-boiled dialogue that attempts to serve a plot whose intricacies border on the incomprehensible, and so he is careful to make the explanations of what is happening at any given moment plain to the point of redundancy. Early on, there’s a sequence where he outlines in detail the contingencies of an emergency escape plan that the principals hope they won’t need, but, with perfect Chekhov’s Gun logic, you already know they’ll resort to it in the end.
Though Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill are the nominal stars, the protagonist is a young lawyer named Rachel (Eiza Gonzalez), a kind of fixer specializing in the titular legal frontier. Rachel forcefully comes to the aid of a New York asset management company that is owed a billion dollars by a Spanish crime boss, Salazar (Carlos Bardem), who not only refuses to pay back the money he borrowed but has already murdered the man the company dispatched to retrieve it. Rachel promises to get the principal back, with interest, for a hefty sum using the extra-legal means at her disposal and two former mercenaries whose names are Sid and Bronco (Cavill & Gyllenhaal)—as if they were a Jewish rodeo tag team—to draw up and carry out the scheme, which mostly involves stealing the money rather than talking Salazar into giving it up, since it’s obvious he believes he’s beyond the reach of international law. Nevertheless, Rachel does manage some legal hocus-pocus to sieze Salazar’s assets temporarily during their fraught “negotiations” while Sid and Bronco set up their aforementioned elaborate escape plan with the help of some super-efficient hired guns, not to mention a whole arsenal of real guns.
Though the movie’s grunt work is carried out by Ritchie’s able-bodied direction of the myriad action scenes, its pleasure principle is situated in the profane, faux-homoerotic banter of Sid and Bronco as they carry out their nefarious plan. Lots of people die and while the whole “grey” area inhabited by the plan is supposed to make you wonder who’s really “bad” in all this, it’s obvious who you’re going to root for. But if you’re not entirely sure Ritchie has a few ridiculous plot twists in the end that will make you come to the appropriate conclusion.
Opens Aug. 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
A movie whose main promotional hook is that it’s produced by J.J. Abrams and features dinosaurs is probably a sure box office bet for its opening weekend. Cinephiles who may need more convincing might be intrigued by the director of The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell, whose debut feature was It Follows, one of the more inventive indie horror movies of the last decade. But likely the aspect that will attract the most attention, at least from people of a certain age, will be its setting: American suburbia in the early 1980s, thus raising the possibility, given its genre (sci-fi), that it will deliver classic Spielberg thrills and emotional payoffs to those with a nostalgia jones for that kind of stuff, like viewers who made Stranger Things the most successful streamed drama series of all time.
The Platt family is suitably generic, but Mitchell’s script tosses some dramatic spice into the stew by making them borderline dysfunctional. Unbeknownst to his family, dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) has been laid off from work and is “moonlighting” as a pizza delivery man, a job that irks his homemaker wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who secretly channels disillusionment with her domestic lot into auto-fiction. Teen daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is for some unexplained reason put down for her obsession with astronomy, while her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) is going through the requisite rebellious motions by acting out in ways that border on the violent. These soap opera elements get tossed one night when the earth shakes, the house is bombarded by strange lights, and the power and water shut down. In the morning, things seems to have changed, but it takes a few minutes for the Platts, as well as their neighbors, to realize that their street has somehow been transported back to the Jurassic Age and that big lizards are hiding in the newly emergent tropical flora. Chasing, munching, and screaming ensue.
Because It Follows, per its title, was centered on people being stalked by an invisible entity, Mitchell knows how to stage elaborate chase-and-run scenes, and the set pieces are quite clever; some, in fact, disturbingly graphic in the way they relieve tension, but nonetheless funny for the exact same reason. But while Mitchell throws around clues regarding the mechanism of the time-slip that brings all this mayhem about, everything feels arbitrary. A good fantasy does not need to explain itself in order to be effective, but The End of Oak Street keeps teasing a familiarity with hard science that it never delivers on, which means the Spielbergian sentimental ending, designed to resolve all the existential problems in the story, including the interpersonal ones plaguing the Platts, feels even phonier.
The gory humor in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is even more cartoonish and works more successfully within the narrow scope of its entertainment purview. The story begins at the exact moment the first movie, Ready or Not, ended, with Grace (Samara Weaving), having survived a night of being hunted almost dinosaur style by her new in-laws, the Le Domas family, as part of a bizarre tradition regarding new members, sitting on the steps of the mansion she’s just burned down, covered in blood and waiting for an ambulance. However, Grace’s delivery from evil is short-lived as members of the Satanic cult her in-laws belonged to assemble from across the globe at the order of the paterfamilias (David Cronenberg, of all people) to exact their revenge on the young, resourceful woman.
This time Grace is accompanied by her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), who just happens to be at the hospital when the two surviving Le Domas heirs, Ursula and Titus (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy), come to abduct her. As in the first movie, killing is not really the point. Grace must be allowed a chance to elude her pursuers in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, but this time the firepower is more sophisticated, not to mention more internationally sorted.
The plot, as it were, mimics the first movie’s to a T in that it is nothing more than a series of violent confrontations between the cult’s various members and Grace, now aided—or maybe hampered is a better word—by her less savvy sister. What keeps the story interesting is the competitive rivalry among the cult participants to be the one who brings Grace down, an attitude Grace successfully exploits to her own superhuman advantage by tapping into her proletarian hatred of hubristic oligarchs. Here I Come doesn’t necessarily improve on the bloody shenanigans of its predecessor, but it does take it to the next class level.
The End of Oak Street 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 ) (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).
Ready of Not 2: Here I Come now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
It’s not taking anything away from director Tsou Shih-ching to point out that her debut feature was co-written, co-produced, and edited by Sean Baker, whose last movie, Anora, swept the Oscars in 2025. There’s some Baker DNA in Left-Handed Girl, from the iPhone cinematography to the focus on women living at the margins of whatever social milieu they inhabit, but that said, Left-Handed Girl is a better film than Anora or maybe any other Baker movie except The Florida Project. Tsou has been assistant director on many of Baker’s films, so in a sense it’s perhaps better to think of their work as a joint enterprise. Tsou, who lives in the U.S. but grew up in Taiwan, sets her movie in Taipei and obviously knows the city like the back of her hand. It opens with an assured montage of shots of a small rental truck entering the city by highway. The truck contains a family: the driver, Shu-fen (Janel Tsai), and her two daughters, 20-year-old I-ann (Ma Shih-Yuan) and 5-year-old I-jing (Nina Ye). I-ann lived in Taipei up until just before I-jing was born, when the three moved to the countryside, so to I-jing the city is brand new, a wonderland of colors and lights and hard surfaces, and Tsou gives us her viewpoint through the fractured prism of a kaleidoscope. It’s a bustling mix of images that perfectly sets the pace of the subsequent story.
Shu-fen is returning to Taipei to open a noodle stall in a busy night market in the center of the city. She is trying to reboot her life after paying off the debt of her ex-husband, who used to own some sort of factory and then disappeared when it went under. Her parents and two married sisters live in relative middle class comfort in the city, while her brother lords over a successful company that has business on the mainland. She is the black sheep of the family owing not only to her poor choice of spouse, but the inexplicable presence of I-jing, who, after all, is 15 years younger than her sister. Most of the movie’s through-plot addresses Shu-fen’s worsening financial situation, but the camera stays mostly on I-jing, who, as the titular character, dismays her old-fashioned grandfather (Akio Chen), who still believes that the left hand is the instrument of the Devil and tries to make her favor her right. These complaints lead the girl to believe that she actually is possessed, at least partially, by an evil force, but rather than try to exorcise it she allows it free rein in carrying out actions, like shoplifting, for which she feels no responsibility. Meanwhile, I-ann exercises her rebellious streak by securing a job at a semi-legal betel nut shop where she has sex with the owner for the worst of reasons, and Shu-fen is courted by a fellow night market operator named Johnnie (Brando Huang) who deals in a wide range of cheap sundries.
Tsou’s and Baker’s script nimbly weaves all these disparate threads into a satisfyingly dense tapestry depicting how modern urban sensibilities, not to mention the appetites they engender, can’t help but come into conflict with the filial virtues the characters pretend to honor. Though the story is closer to real life than Anora, Left-Handed Girl is still a movie in love with the kind of magical artifice that only movies can provide, and the facility with which Tsou propels her irrepressible story forward gives the entire production a sense of joyful immersion that’s impossible to resist. The characters go through hell, but the film is a kind of heaven.
In Mandarin and Min Nan. Opens Aug. 14 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
No movie franchise has genericized the high-concept plot dynamics and pop culture jokiness of post-Pixar American style animation as much as the Despicable Me series. It’s why the Minions, those yellow, oblong, goggle-sporting sidekicks have become an offshoot franchise in their own right: They perfectly personify the juvenile mindset that connects so readily to a certain audience sensibility that has proven to be more universal than we would like to admit. The third Minions feature—and the seventh in the overall Despicable Me universe—has been lauded as a vast improvement over the first two, which were characterized as merely a series of childish sight gags attached willy-nilly to skeletal plots. Actually, that pretty much describes this movie also. The difference, apparently, is that the plot flatters our affection for and knowledge of classic Hollywood films, and by “us” I mean viewers who are critics or pretend to be.
It helps that the movie’s scope is ambitious. It opens with a short history over millennia of the Minions tribe, whose age-old quest has been to find an evil entity—a “big boss”—to serve. Amidst the montage of slapstick battles and encounters with savage civilizations we are introduced to James and Henry, two Minions who possess a more creative mojo than their compatriots, whose interests rarely transcend fart humor. As the centuries roll up to the 20th, J&H manifest a taste for visual art that places them front and center when the yellow horde encounters its first silent film set. Accidentally setting themselves up as stars after becoming involved in a filmed runaway train sequence, they eventually decide to serve not a villain but rather the German-accented expat director Max (Christoph Waltz). From here the film adheres more closely to the Minions storyline credo, meaning episodic comic sketches based on well-known base material, in this case famous movies from the studio era, like Modern Times and Citizen Kane. However, once James and Henry decide to make their own movies they hit on sci-fi and creature features, the latter of which allows them to actually call forth a real monster from who-knows-where, a goofy blob called Goomi (Trey Parker) who proves to be a real terror. Predictable action-movie mayhem follows.
At no point do any of these disparate narratives gel into something organic, but the use of cinematic cliches is at least fresher than the aforementioned fart humor, which is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility. Minions are gonna Minion, so don’t expect anything out of the ordinary.
In Japanese subtitled and dubbed versions. 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).
The pleasures inherent in historical dramas usually lift them above the average movie in terms of what the viewer can take away from them, which mostly has to do with placing the viewer in an unfamiliar time and place and telling them how to feel in that milieu. More significantly, the details of a historical moment enrich the story by conveying knowledge about that moment the viewer didn’t possess previously. Fatih Akin, a veteran German director whose heritage is Turkish, has adapted a screenplay written by his late cinematic mentor Hark Bohm about Bohm’s childhood during World War II on the small titular island off the northern coast of Germany, where the inhabitants spoke Frisian and practiced agriculture and whaling for centuries. The protagonist, a 12-year-old boy named Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), has been evacuated from Hamburg with his pregnant mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), and younger brother due to the Allied bombing, leaving behind his father, who serves in the SS. Though Hille grew up on Amrum, she has since acculturated to the German mentality and is a staunch follower of Hitler and the Nazi cause. Her homecoming is fraught with awkward reconnections since the natives are not staunch followers. If anything, they identify more with the enemy owing to historical factors that forced a good many of them to migrate overseas after the whaling industry faded. As one former “cowboy” who used to live in the U.S. and returned to Amrum when the Great Depression hit, there are more Amrumers in New York City than that are on Amrum.
This set of circumstances provide enough dramatic substance for a movie that doesn’t rely on a conventional plot, but Bohm’s and Akin’s screenplay is built on one that is meant to be sturdy on its own. Nanning, a member of the Hitler Youth whose own belief in the cause is mostly determined by what he’s told by adults, spends the entire film trying to provide his mother, who, following the birth of the new baby, suffers post-partum depression, a small bit of luxury in the form of white bread with butter and honey, none of which is readily available on an island where provisions are scarce because of the war. Even worse, it is clear to most of the natives, if not the interlopers, that Germany is losing, but to say so out loud invites the wrath of the local military authorities, as evidenced by an impromptu visit by a stern officer to Nanning’s employer (Diane Kruger), who has casually revealed her relief at these rumored developments. Believing correctly that it was Nanning who spilled the beans, however inadvertently, she fires him, making his culinary quest that much more difficult.
The quest itself gives the movie structure and purpose, but tends to detract from those elements that elaborate on the unique way-of-life pursued by the Amrumers, and as a result the island’s place in German society feels frustratingly undersold. It’s not just in terms of the brute primal methods that inform survival based on the land and the sea (to get what he needs, Nanning must learn how to finagle his neighbors, as well as butcher livestock and steal eggs from wild geese), but also in how an isolated population can achieve a more worldly sensibility than that of the general citizenry, which in this case has been ground down by fascism. Akin only occasionally allows these matters to rise to the surface, thus creating even more questions that he can’t hope to answer. More successful is his depiction of the natural setting—the film was shot on Amrum, which seems to have changed little over the past century—which is vividly unique and wondrous, not to mention dangerous. Amrum is a gorgeously evocative film that leaves you rushing to find a book somewhere that might tell you more about the place than the movie does.
In German and Frisian. Opens Aug. 7 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
It’s difficult to screw up a coming-of-age story if you have good intentions. The indignities of puberty immediately lead to internal conflict, and while the physical changes an adolescent goes through is central to the attendant drama, filmmakers are often squeamish about showing how the human body counteracts the confidence of people that age. The Malaysian film, Tiger Stripes, confronts the physical challenges of puberty head on, and does so in a milieu that is both enlightening and discomfiting for those of us who have little insight into that milieu. The story mostly takes place at a Muslim girls school in the countryside, where the spirited and irreverent Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal, intense and totally believable) is the first among her peers to have her period. We first encounter Zaffan making a provocative dance TikTok in the school’s toilet, throwing off her hijab and gyrating ecstatically in a tank top. When one of her pals, the more dignified Farah (Deena Ezral), remarks that Zaffan is wearing a bra, she quickly takes it off so that Farah can try it on herself, albeit over her clothing. Naturally, the two, along with their other BFF Mariam (Piqa), are busted by a teacher.
Zaffan is presented to us as a free spirit whose inherent rebelliousness will surely rub any adults of authority in her orbit the wrong way, but once the cycle of menstruation kicks in her classmates find out (she’s banned from classroom prayers while bleeding) and quickly resent her, claiming she smells bad. These girls, of course, will very soon undergo the same physical change, but as anyone who has ever gone to school knows, children’s cruelty is not logic-based. Predictably, Zaffan acts out, talking back to her scandalized mother (her father is genial and hands-off) and lashing out at her friends when they start to shun her. Most of this kind of plot development is par for the coming-of-age course, but director Amanda Nell Eu goes farther, depicting Zaffan’s bodily maturation as a literal metamorphosis, wherein her anger is physicalized as a predatory life force, complete with claws, glowing red eyes, a ravenous carnivorous appetite, and even a tail.
Though tame on the body horror scale, the movie nevertheless realizes in visceral terms the inner turmoil a young girl may go through in trying to square her expanding understanding of the world with the discomfort of impending sexual readiness, and the results are startling. Western viewers will likely fixate on the religious elements of the story, but Eu is not afraid of bodily fluids and the kind of violent temper that repressed adolescent urges can produce. For me, the cultural disconnections are most interesting in the way Eu wields humor: the school principal decrying the fact that the Chinese students always do much better academically (“The Malays have to work harder”), and an opportunistic shaman (Shaheizy Sam) exploiting Zaffan’s “possession” as a means of expanding his brand (“Remember to tag Dr. Rahim on your videos”). The shaman’s comeuppance is simultaneously the most shocking and funniest thing in the movie. Tiger Stripes never lets you forget it’s an allegory, and some viewers will wonder if all the magical realism is simply taking place in Zaffan’s head, but it doesn’t make what happens on screen any less relatable.
In Malay. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
The weather forecast for this year’s Fuji Rock Festival hasn’t been encouraging. Rain pretty much every day, but right now the sun is out and the temperature is quite bearable. It was cloudy last night for the pre-festival party but I only felt a touch of mist around 11 pm.
The crowd wasn’t as big as it’s been for the past two years, which seems to mean the post-Covid “revenge” is over, though I’ve heard that Saturday is sold out. The free party last night, which is thrown mainly to thank the locals for their hospitality, seemed relatively low-key, and you could actually get food and drink without waiting. Even the fireworks, which officially kick off the festival, seemed subdued. There were no big break beats in the Japanese fashion.
That said, the live entertainment was as rowdy as always. The Mexican band Son Rompe Pera, started things off with a loud raucous set that fortified the group’s cumbia skills with punky determination. I mean, the main instrument was a marimba, played by a shirtless guy who seems to have copped his stage moves from Angus Young. Since the energy level started high and never flagged, there were no heart-stopping moments, but the prefest crowd is always raring to go so the band might be surprised today when they do their regular set at the White Stage and not that many people show up (they come on around lunch).
The second band I never heard of: FCO, who aren’t part of the official lineup. Apparently, they’re a side gig of one of the members of Tempalay, who are playing the festival. I was pleasantly surprised by the music, which had a solid pulse and some wild, caustic guitar work. I didn’t really care what the acronym stood for but once I found out I had questions.
Saturday morning
Contrary to forecasts, yesterday’s weather was almost perfect: partly cloudy and cool, with only a little drizzle in the early afternoon.
It being a Friday, the festival was not full, and I only experienced one bottleneck, which, of course, happened near the White Stage. They’ve actually opened up another forest path, supposedly to get around this problem, from the Gypsy Avalon stage to the Green Stage, but it still has to go near the White Stage where it connects to another forest path, so in a sense it’s not really a solution during times when certain shows at the far end of the festival grounds end at about the same time.
Today is sold out, so the bottlenecks will probably be worse. According to the Japan Times, the reason for the sellout is Fujii Kaze, who plays the penultimate show on the Green Stage. This repeats the pattern last year, when that slot on Saturday was filled by city pop veteran Yamashita Tatsuro, who rarely gives concerts these days. By that token, it would seem to be a kind of strategy by the promoter, Smash. The real headliner, Khruangbin, like last year’s headliner, Vulfpeck, isn’t nearly that popular in Japan, but I assume Smash still feels it has to put a foreign act at the top of the bill. Besides, if people are coming just to see Fujii, they have to have time to make it back to where they’re from afterwards.
I saw most of the acts I wanted to see yesterday. Three of them are nominally “ethnic music” groups whose members do not necessarily belong to the ethnicities whose music they play. Les Khmers, which performed in the early afternoon at the newly revamped Orange Echo, plays Cambodian pop of the 60s and 70s, though almost every member is Japanese, including leader Samut Nobe, who apparently was an exchange student in Phnom Penh some years back. I’ve always thought that Japanese kayokyoku (popular song) sounds a lot like other Asian countries’ pop music or vice versa and Les Khmers kind of fortifies that theory. The crowd really jumped, especially when the tempos revved up and Nobe started doing his awkward dance moves. He was helped enormously by a female vocalist who might have been Cambodian (her name was not listed on the festival program) and seemed to have the native moves down.
Altin Gun definitely has at least one Turkish member, vocalist and baglama player Erdinc Ecevit, but the band is headquartered in the Netherlands and, according to their bio, boasts members from all over. Still the music they play is very much based on Turkish psychedelia from the 70s that’s punched up with a more club-friendly rhythm sense. They’re one of the funkiest bands in the world at the moment, and while they held their own during the mid-afternoon at the Field of Heaven, there was a feeling that they were holding back—just as the music was building toward something monumentally ecstatic, the song would end. It was pretty amazing, but also less than what it could have been.
Antibalas is one of the foremost Afro-funk groups on the planet, and has been for almost 30 years, though they contain no musicians from Africa. Heirs to the rebel tradition of Fela Kuti, they use funk as a means to incite change, and baritone sax player Jake Pinto mentioned the current dire situation in the US. during their early evening set at Heaven. Unlike Altin Gun, they never held back and the field was jumping high during their vocal-less set, which consisted mostly of brand new material. The veteran ensemble, who haven’t played in Japan for nine years, seemed genuinely humbled by the reception.
As usual when there is too much good stuff on offer I tended to do a lot of running around from one end of the festival to the other and back again. At the far end of the grounds, where I saw the above mentioned acts, I also saw Arlo Parks, whose gently insistent dance music was heavily laden with a therapeutical component that I’m sure most of the audience, regardless of their spiritual wholeness, didn’t get, but they definitely got the groove. The Japanese electronic group Black Boboi, three women dressed completely in black, threw a hypnotic spell over the early evening crowd who had settled in the Orange Court for dinner. They held their own extremely well given the competition on other stages.
At the money end of the festival, Snail Mail delivered her strummy, personal rock songs to an audience that simply got off on the guitars—she’s quite capable on the instrument, even if she has a lead guitarist to do most of the heavy lifting. I’ve always been slightly dismissive of her songwriting, which sounds like what Taylor Swift in her post-pop phase is striving for, but the tunes stand up to scrutiny when played live. I was completely taken by a guy who was standing in front of me, dressed incongruously in a Mexican pro wrestler mask and flowered lounge pants. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to turn around so I could get a photo of his masked face with Snail Mail in the background (depth of field challenge?). That would have been Pulitzer-worthy.
Like Antibalas, The xx were making their first return to Japan in almost a decade and seemed really stoked to be playing Fuji Rock. As the Green Stage headliner for the day, they had a lot to live up to and delivered more than enough to send the crowd out into the late night maelstrom of obscure bands and DJs in high spirits. By presenting their chillest songs during the first half of their set, they could dedicate the latter half to their dance music, and while Romy got the lion’s share of camera shots on the big screen, it was bassist Oliver Sim who clearly commanded the stage. The guy is truly a sexy beast. Jamie xx’s occasional solo break beats were few and far between, but this is supposed to be a group comeback, right?
Maya Ongaku, a Japanese psychedelic trio, was the first act for the late shift at the Red Marquee, and while I was beyond faded at that point, they held my attention with long-form repetitive melody dumps that never quite fell into jamming, though, as with Altin Gun, they seemed to stop right when they were reaching liftoff.
But the show of the day was definitely Turnstile. I saw them when they played Fuji two years ago and liked it a lot, but then they were the penultimate act on the White Stage on Sunday, and it took a while for the crowd to warm to their emo-hardcore shtick. What difference two years make! The audience in front of the Green Stage for their late afternoon show was already quite rowdy 15 minutes before they took the stage, and remained raucous yet indefatigably sentimental during the whole of the punishing hourlong set. These people know all the words to the songs as well as their meaning, and the cameras that fed into the giant stage screens were more often trained on the audience than on the group, whose diversity makes them almost faceless. I counted three distinct mosh pits forming spontaneously early on and the band members catered to the feeling, which only grew as the hour stretched on and each emotionally impacted song built on the last one. There was even one guy who must have been a plant, but the moment was too perfect to tell for sure. During “Dull,” when lead singer Brendan Yates talks about “waiting for the call,” a guy at the front of the barricades held up an actual red landline telephone. I mean, who prepares for such things except stoned obsessives? But that’s what the Turnstile show was, one of the best hard rock performances I’ve ever seen at Fuji, because the band and the audience worked as one. Exhilarating doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Sunday morning
It rained quite heavily Saturday morning, but when the time the festival opened at 11 am, the precipitation had turned to drizzle and by noon the sun was out. It didn’t get hot, since there was a stiff, cool breeze coming down the mountains. The rest of the day was near perfect, weather-wise.
Encouraged by the strength of my selections on Friday, I decided against my usual regime of checking out acts I knew nothing about when there was nothing I especially wanted to see, so the first set of the day for me was the Beths at 2 pm at the Red Marquee. The New Zealand band’s brand of jangly guitar pop is the kind of indie thing that goes over very well in Japan, and the shed was suitably stuffed with people who knew their repertoire. Elizabeth Stokes’ self-deprecating manner and matter-of-fact vocal style make her effortlessly likable, even to people who may not understand English, and she communicated real personality during the group’s hourlong set, which gave them ample opportunity to cover a good deal of their recorded output. Almost everything galloped forward at a rapid clip, and each song was met with an even louder ovation than the previous one. It was a pretty satisfying way to start the day.
I decided to trek out to the other end of the festival to check out the Korean power trio Cadejo and, along the way, score some coffee, because there are more stalls to buy coffee out there than there are in the Oasis food court. Of course, great minds think alike and every place I passed that sold coffee had real long lines. I opted for some cold green tea, which supposedly has as much if not more caffeine than a similar serving of coffee, but the line was much shorter. The stall was in the forest next to Gypsy Avalon, which has become a kind of woodland mall—juice bars, art galleries, Japanese confectioneries.
Cadejo was something of a bust. From the one video I saw of them I had gotten the impression that they were a kind of avant-jam band, and they are in the sense that they constantly improvise on very loose established patterns, going from strict reggae to punishing noise rock in the bat of an eye, but this lack of a consistent tone made their music more frustrating than involving. The guitarist is surely some kind of genius, but the rhythm section was often out of sync with what he was trying to do. Still, the crowd seemed to appreciate what they were attempting and cheered them on. Their Japanese and English were good enough that they could actually maintain communication throughout the set I saw. I left about halfway through.
Needing a rest, I found a grassy spot on the hill in back of the sound booth at the Green Stage to relax, but was shooed away by staff with bullhorns who were telling people who had set up tarps and little campgrounds to move higher up because the area was going to get crowded. I assumed they were talking about the act I was waiting for, Basement Jaxx, but they were probably talking about the act after BJ, Fujii Kaze, who was the reason Saturday was sold out.
But when Basement Jaxx started their late afternoon show, I realized that the tarp clearing was being done for the folks who wanted to dance, because everyone all the way up to the tree line was boogieing for the whole hour. I’ve seen BJ several times, and I’ve seen the Chemical Brothers just as often, and while it may be a chump’s game to compare the two, they emerged at the same time with a similar m.o.: electronic dance music delivered as unified shows. The difference is that BJ really does put on a show, with extra vocalists and dancers, elaborate sets, and numerous costume changes. More significantly BJ’s musical preferences shade definitely toward African-American R&B, while the Chemicals is more into purely electronic rave type bangers. BJ had three excellent singers who were able to bend the enormous crowd to their will with their gospel-inflected encouragements. They avoided break beats in favor of dramatic flourishes that always hit harder. And the camp elements only added to the entertainment value.
As it happened, the Chemicals were represented at this year’s Fuji in the form of half the brotherhood, Tom Rowland, who was the mastermind behind the day’s headliner on the White Stage, Tomora, his side collaboration with Norwegian pop singer Aurora. Having grown bored with Green Stage headliner Khruangbin’s noodling I decided to check out Tomora’s show instead, and at first didn’t know what to make of it. Rowland’s influence is palpable in the loud, almost industrial edge of his beats, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the visuals. The crowd made it difficult to get very close (I have a paranoia about being caught in a stampede at the White Stage, so I usually hover around the edges) and all I could see were pre-produced videos on the jumbotron screens. Aurora was obviously on stage, and I assumed she was singing, but it felt beside the point when you had these storyline videos telling you how to feel and what to think.
But after a half hour, the action moved resolutely to the stage and the music made much more sense. And there was a story there of a sort too, because Aurora was doubled by another woman who was dressed and made up to look just like her. Whether she was also a singer or just a stage accessory, I couldn’t tell, but it upped the dramatic component and the music was more exciting as a result. I really wanted to stay to the very end, but, you know, paranoia.
There were rumors that Rowland was going to do a DJ set at the tiny Naeba Shokudo stage in the Oasis after midnight, and a huge crowd materialized there around 12, but I didn’t stick around to find out if he really showed.
After BJ I caught Thurston Moore at the Red Marquee. Though he didn’t play any Sonic Youth songs, he might as well have given the makeup of his band: SY’s Steve Shelley on drums, a female bassist whose singing voice sounded a lot like Kim Gordon’s, and a lead guitarist who complemented Moore’s buzz saw strumming with pure skronk. He also stuck mainly to standard rock song structures except during those predictable codas when everything just sounded like shredded metal. Moore, a septuagenarian, seemed quite fit, though he had to read his lyrics from sheets on a music stand, which he’d toss on the floor whenever he finished with them. Exuding a clear peace-and-love vibe appropriate to his generation (even if his iconoclastic rep as a young musician didn’t align with that of an unreconstructed hippie), he communicated fitfully with the audience, which wasn’t as large as I anticipated considering how many times SY toured Japan in the past. Before playing the song “Cantaloup,” he told a story from that morning about eating cantaloup in the artist’s quarters at the hotel. He seemed to think it had some kind of mystical meaning.
Though I’ve seen Fujii Kaze’s videos and one appearance on NHK, I don’t really know much about his music, and assumed it could be categorized as Japanese R&B. But after seeing him perform in front of a sea of adoring fans representing a wide swath of ages (a photographer friend said there were middle aged female Fujii fans at the barricades for BJ, obviously staking their territory), he sounds more like what Americans would call yacht rock. Of course, yacht rock as translated into Japanese would be so-called city pop, whose main architect, Yamashita Tatsuro, was last year’s big draw, so there is some consistency here, the difference being that Fujii is about 40 years younger. He’s also incredibly beautiful, in a very feminine way, with high cheekbones, a delicate nose, and flowing brown hair. For his Green Stage set he wore a white suit whose enormous size would put David Byrne to shame.
But my biggest impression is that the guy is definitely talented and not just another manufactured pop star. Apparently, he was a child piano prodigy, and his playing was impeccable. More significantly, his songs had melodic depth and breadth, even when they sometimes sounded romantically corny, whether he was singing in English or Japanese. His English, by the way, is fluent, and I assume the reason he spoke half his stage patter in English is because he wanted to connect to the foreign element in the audience, especially the Asians. Or he could have been showing off. He seems to like to show off.
Though BJ was my highlight for the day, I did see several DJ sets that made me quite happy. Almost all the DJs playing the Blue Galaxy are old men, Japanese or English. They play only 45s, no music files, and almost nothing that was released after 1975, concentrating mainly on vintage ska/reggae, Japanese kayokyoku, and American R&B. The tent is always hopping, with most of the dancers being young people who may or may not know this music but definitely can feel it at a primal level.
But there was another DJ that made an impression at Gan-Ban Square over at the other side of the Oasis. Tempalay’s AAAMYYY (or “Amy” to people with dyslexia) did a short, action-packed DJ set with the help of a bassist/guitarist and a rapper/dancer that was startling in its originality and refusal to resort to quirk (outside of an opening cut that she sped up to produce helium-quality vocals). Her electronica instincts are peerless in setting up where her melodies have to go to reach catharsis, and she isn’t a bad singer, either. Actually, calling it a DJ set may be shortchanging her. It was a pure high-wire solo act.
philipbrasor.com 