Review: It Was Just an Accident

Posted on May 7, 2026 by philipbrasor

After It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes, its director, Jafar Panahi, accompanied it to many other film festivals, including Busan, where I first saw it in September and which honored Panahi with its Asian Filmmaker of the Year award. The movie was even nominated for a Best International Feature Oscar, albeit under the auspices of France rather than the country where it was made and set, Iran, which would never have submitted it for consideration, and Panahi was there in Los Angeles for the ceremony. Reportedly, he is back in his home country just as the regime that hates him so much is at war with Donald Trump. It’s a situation that’s difficult to comprehend. Panahi has been jailed at least twice for his films and forbidden from making any since 2010, and yet he has continued to do so in an underground fashion without defecting like so many other Iranian filmmakers who provoked the ire of the regime. Even more remarkable, Accident is, unlike the other samizdat movies he’s made, a pure fiction feature with full production values, and while it is obviously at least partially based on his own experience, Panahi has designed it as a generalized entertainment that is unsparing in its indictment of the regime as an organ of abject cruelty. He has said that he must return to Iran because his family is there. He refuses to abandon the country that made him, but, given what we know of the government, why it did not simply throw him in prison the moment he re-entered in the spring is a mystery that deserves an exploration with its own movie.

The accident of the title is almost treated as a non sequitur. A man, his pregnant wife, and his very young daughter are traveling at night through a sparsely inhabited area when their car accidentally hits and kills a dog. The girl is distressed and the mother tries to allay her sadness by saying it is all God’s plan, to which the child irreverently replies, “God had nothing to do with it!” Shortly thereafter, the car breaks down, though it’s not clear if the malfunction has anything to do with the dog. Nevertheless, the driver (Ebrahim Azizi) pulls into a small factory, where an employee offers to look at the car, and while he does, the employee’s co-worker, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), overhears them and freezes in his tracks, recognizing something about the driver that upsets him greatly. His colleague directs the driver to an actual auto repair shop. Vahid follows and kidnaps him, believing him to be the man he and his fellow political prisoners called Eghbal, an infamous interrogator who tortured them in detention while they were masked and thus couldn’t see his face. While Vahid prepares to bury him alive in the desert, the driver insists he is not the man Vahid thinks he is, and Vahid has second thoughts. 

From that point, the story becomes a tense comedy of errors, as Vahid attempts to confirm the driver’s identity with the help of other former prisoners who also were Eghbal’s victims. The roster of names that would like to see Eghbal dead grows, with each new addition adding to the confusion, since, for the most part, they are working on pure resentment rather than logic, and their memories, shaped by pain and fear, can hardly be called reliable. Add to this volatile, very loud mix an interrupted wedding rehearsal, a run-in with some police who demand a bribe (they even have their own credit card reader), and some more car trouble (which seems to be the movie’s leitmotif), and what you get is a tale that’s as relentless in its takedown of the regime’s self-servingly stupid methodology as it is plain about how that methodology has rendered the populace a churning mass of paranoid hatred. The ridiculousness of some of the dialogue and the almost slapstick story development do not diminish the intensity, and the penultimate scenes when the truth is revealed are the most savage that Panahi has ever realized. Though not as incendiary as Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another Cannes winner that enraged the Iranian government, It Was Just an Accident is less pulpy and more dramatically incisive. Rasoulof, it should be noted, now lives in exile, while Panahi does not. Go figure. 

In Persian. Opens May 8 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

It Was Just an Accident home page in Japanese

photo (c) LesFilmsPelleas

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Review: The Last Dance and They Will Kill You

Posted on May 6, 2026 by philipbrasor

According to the South China Morning Post, Anselm Chan’s melodrama The Last Dance is the highest grossing Hong Kong film in history, at least domestically; which is amazing given the film’s setting and subject matter. Cantonese standup comic Dayo Wong plays Dominic Ngai, a doggedly entrepreneurial wedding planner whose business is derailed by the COVID pandemic, sending him into a pit of debt he can’t crawl out of. His girlfriend’s Uncle Ming (Paul Chun), who’s planning to retire, offers Dominic half of the funeral parlor he manages with a Taoist priest, Master Man (Michael Hui), thinking that Dominic wouldn’t have to learn anything new. “There’s not much difference between newlyweds and the newly dead,” he quips with the nonchalance of someone whose familiarity with death has become casual. Dominic, as much of a go-getter capitalist as you can be in Hong Kong right now, relishes the challenge, but Master Man proves to be an obstacle, a stone traditionalist who looks upon Dominic’s new ideas for drumming up business as tantamount to blasphemy, since he sees the mission of a funeral as that of helping the dead, through ritual, pass on to the next stage of their cosmic journey while Dominic sees it as tending to the survivors. 

The resultant clash of sensibilities is instructive, and not just for those who want to learn about Chinese cultural norms. Man’s bullheaded approach to his profession isn’t just about preserving tradition, in which Chan repeatedly pokes holes. Compromising Taoist dogma would be a betrayal of his responsibility to his dead wife, a faith that curdles into stubbornness as far as his children are concerned. Daughter Yuet (Michelle Wai), who once aspired to take over the family business but is denied the opportunity because Taoism forbids women into its realm due to menstrual “impurity,” has taken the opposite path by becoming a paramedic to whom every death is personal. Son Ben (Tommy Chu), who Man insists will inherit his priestly robes, doesn’t want the job and secretly gets baptized, not because he has a Christian jones but because his wife wants their son to get into a fancy Catholic school. With this kind of resistance at home, Man takes his frustrations out on Dominic. “You don’t take the dead seriously,” he fumes when his new partner cooks up a marketing strategy to drum up business. But the younger man comes around to the ethical dimensions of his job, albeit in a way that Man can’t countenance. At one point a woman whose patronage has been refused by every funeral parlor in town begs Dominic to embalm her dead son, with whom she can’t part. It’s an affront to standard religious practices, but Dominic agrees and even performs the disagreeable task himself, much to Man’s initial disgust. 

One of the movie’s strongest suits is the way it doesn’t flinch from Dominic’s more difficult tasks—the cleaning and dressing of the corpses, the application of makeup to damaged features, not to mention the jokey mood engendered by those whose everyday work is attending to the departed (which the contractors refer to as “fish”). And while the main character arc is Man’s slow realization, as his own end comes into view, that his intransigence about his calling and how it affects his family is indefensible, Dominic’s journey is more affecting. When his girlfriend Jade (Catherine Chow) announces she is pregnant, he sensibly but compassionately says that at his age—he’s just turned 50—he cannot rightly accept bringing a new life into the world, since he may not be there when the child needs him the most. Though The Last Dance has been called a comedy, it doesn’t generate a lot of laughs, but it’s a banquet of food for thought.

They Will Kill You, which also deals with rituals of death, is a real comedy, though after a while the joke is stretched very thin. Zazie Beetz gets her John Wick on as Asia Reaves, who throughout the film is set upon by hordes of rich Satan-worshippers who can regenerate endlessly from horrific wounds, thus making Asia’s superior fighting skills, which she learned during a ten-year stint in the slammer, almost moot. 

Reaves takes a position as a maid at an exclusive Manhattan apartment building called the Virgil that’s like a Mad Magazine version of the Dakota in Rosemary’s Baby. Her mission is to find the younger sister, Maria (Myah’la), she hasn’t seen since she went up the river for shooting their abusive father and who she has heard is now employed at the Virgil. After a proper introduction and explanation by the building manager, Lilith (Patricia Arquette), Asia quickly finds out that she is the latest hire to be sacrificed to the Devil and makes chopped liver out of the quartet of followers dispatched to bring her to the altar, but the beheadings and amputations she visits upon her attackers are for naught, since they are immortal. 

Director Kirill Sokolov maintains the bloody action at a relentlessly fast pace, a decision that often undermines the cartoonish humor, which is as much about the profane street lingo (“Who the fuck are you?” “Take that, bitch!”) as it is about the manga-like panel framing. The through-plot is almost mind-numbingly simple—to extract Maria from these demons’ clutches, since it seems she’s decided to join them. However, once that aim is established Sokolov has not much to do but come up with one inventively gory set piece after another until the end, when he has to devise a satisfying conclusion to the mayhem and ends up with an over-complicated solution that requires more careful thought on the part of the viewers than they’ve been led to believe the movie would demand. With John Wick, at least, you knew exactly where he was supposed to land. 

The Last Dance, in Cantonese, opens May 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

They Will Kill You opens May 8 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).

The Last Dance home page in Japanese

They Will Kill You home page in Japanese

The Last Dance photo (c) 2024 Emperor Film Production Company Limited

They Will Kill You photo (c) 2026 Warner Bros. Ent.

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Review: The Life of Chuck

Posted on May 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

What Stephen King’s horror stories share with his non-horror stories are carefully constructed narratives based on humanist impulses. His characters, even the ones who are nominally evil, present with traits that everyone can easily identify and maybe even empathize with. Or maybe I should say that these characters present with traits that Americans can easily identify and even empathize with; which isn’t a complaint, since King has proven to be popular the world over. It’s just that his voice has always had a peculiarly Yankee accent in the most edifying sense, a force for democratic egalitarianism without the browbeating tone Americans are infamous for. The Life of Chuck, based on a short story that King published less than ten years ago, straddles his two fictional forms without fully committing to either, so all that’s left is the humanism dressed up as cryptic fantasy.

The title character, an accountant named Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), is introduced in the opening section in a series of weird billboards and TV commercials thanking him for his service of 39 years as the world is literally coming to an end, with earthquakes dropping California into the Pacific, sinkholes opening up willy-nilly, and all communication infrastructure failing. The overarching sense of doom forces two former lovers (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan) to reconnect as everything falls apart and the smiling face of Chuck persists in the background, as if watching over them. In the second section, which takes place in the same generically American suburban setting, we meet Chuck in the flesh as he saunters through a Disneyfied small town square after attending a bookkeepers convention. Passing a busker doing a solo performance on drums, he breaks into an Astaire-like dance that charms everyone else on the street, some of whom look familiar from the first section. Then, in the last, longest section, we find out how Chuck learned to dance so well as an adolescent (Benjamin Pajak, who eventually turns into Jacob Tremblay) and why he chose accountancy over the terpsichorean life, mostly due to the counsel of his kind but firm grandfather (Mark Hamill). By this time, anyone versed in the niceties of Hollywood fantasy films like It’s a Wonderful Life and especially those familiar with King’s typical moralistic m.o. will have figured out how to tie the three disparate chapters together, but the director, Mike Flanagan, keeps you guessing until the last moment what exactly it all means.

It means a lot; or, at least, it’s supposed to. Since Chuck’s insightfully average middle class American life is dictated by a kind of hybrid pop cosmology—a combination of Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman, both of whom are quoted extensively in the script—it’s difficult to commit fully to its existential pretense. Many people have been seriously moved by The Life of Chuck, and it’s hard to deny King’s and Flanagan’s skill at explicating the worth of a single individual, but it comes across more as a metaphor for a life rather than a recreation of one, and there’s a difference. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Life of Chuck home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Dance Anyway, LLC

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Review: Deaf

Posted on April 30, 2026 by philipbrasor

When it comes to movies about disabilities, people with hearing impairment comprised one of the first groups to receive dramatic treatments that were not only sympathetic but insightful into the peculiar challenges they faced in a hearing world. Coda, a movie that explored the unique family dynamic between a hearing daughter and her deaf parents, won the 2022 Best Picture Oscar. The title of this Spanish movie, which has won a number of awards in Spain and at international film festivals, is about as blunt as you can get in terms of describing what it is about, and the movie is quite candid about its protagonist’s specific difficulties in navigating a world that isn’t always cognizant of her needs.

Angela (Miriam Garlo, the deaf sister of the film’s director, Eva Libertad) is a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who has been deaf most of her life due to a congenital condition. She is married to Hector (Alvaro Cervantes), a farmer who we assume has learned sign language in order to be with her. Almost as soon as we meet her, Angela, a professional potter, becomes pregnant, a development that delights her and Hector but seems to concern her own parents, both of whom are hearing. Before learning about the pregnancy, Angela’s mother (Elena Irureta) comments carelessly that it would probably be better if she and Hector don’t have children. When the couple consults their obstetrician as to whether the child might be deaf, the doctor takes Angela’s family history—her maternal grandmother and an aunt were also deaf—and ventures that the chances are 50-50, but they won’t know until the child is born. As her pregnancy progresses, Angela pays close attention to her deaf friends and their relationships with their own children and starts to become anxious as she notices how one deaf couple’s 12-year-old hearing son often blows off his parents because he’s tired of signing. However, when she signs with a group of deaf children she comes alive to the prospect of being a fully engaged mother. This mood is undermined when her parents offer to have her fitted for a new model hearing aid and she rejects their “charity,” saying that she hates hearing aids anyway. This emotional roller coaster continues without pause into her labor, which is long and difficult, with nurses trying to communicate what she should do through Hector’s interpretation, which becomes a blur of misunderstanding that only adds to the pain and confusion. Perhaps as a result, Angela’s post-partum depression is particularly pronounced and intensifies when the doctor announces a few months later that her daughter, Ona, is not deaf, information that would normally be received as happy news but which Angela finds dispiriting as she envisions her daughter slipping away from her.

To its credit, Deaf is more about the tribulations of pregnancy and immediate motherhood than it is about being hearing impaired, and Libertad might have made a more involving movie had she emphasized that aspect. Hector is portrayed as a superhumanly empathetic partner whose measured reactions to all of Angela’s fear and anger can come across as overly compensating, but it’s actually this sensitivity that is most frustrating to her, since she sees his efforts to bond with their hearing daughter as inadvertently cutting her off from her relationship with the child. Toward the end, Libertad uses a tired cinematic device to highlight Angela’s difficulties—she has the sound design recreate Angela’s aural perception of the world. The device makes its intended effect but feels unnecessarily showy. Garlo’s impassioned performance does a perfectly good job of conveying Angela’s pains and joys as a woman and new mother. We don’t need the movie to artificially mimic her sensory circumstances, which come across as more of a distraction than an illustration.

In Spanish and Spanish sign language. Opens May 1 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Deaf home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Distinto Films SLU, Nexus Creafilms SL, A Contracorriente Films SL, Diverso Films AIE

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Media watch: Local government disappears elderly man for reasons it can’t credibly explain

Posted on April 29, 2026 by philipbrasor
Minato Ward office

Last month, the government adopted a bill in the Diet to overhaul the adult guardianship system, which allows family courts to appoint guardians for elderly people whose cognitive functions have diminished to the point that they cannot be expected to handle their affairs responsibly. Over the years, the guardianship system, which was implemented in 2000, has been criticized for its complexity and lack of transparency, especially by families who feel that they have been cut off from elderly loved ones who happen to fall under the sway of the law. 

A recent news story highlighted this lack of transparency in a stark way. Asahi Shimbun explained how a man in his 90s, living by himself in a condominium he owned in Minato Ward, Tokyo, was brought by ambulance in March 2022 to a hospital in Saitama Prefecture. This action was carried out by Minato Ward officials in accordance with guidelines for something called Medical Rescue Hospitalization. The man’s daughter, who lives in the Tokyo metropolitan area, only learned about her father’s hospitalization two months later when she received a letter from Minato Ward, which explained that her father’s mental faculties were subsequently deemed to be “insufficient.” The daughter immediately contacted Minato Ward, which told her that they were not required to inform her of her father’s actual whereabouts. 

According to the law, if a local government suspects that an elderly person is being abused by their family, the local government has the right to isolate that person from their family. However, in this case, the person who was “isolated” did not live with anybody, so the matter of who was abusing the man is not clear. The daughter, unable to gain any information about her father’s location from the relevant Minato Ward officials, started calling every hospital and elder care facility in the Tokyo metropolitan area (Minato Ward would not even tell her in which prefecture her father was). After about 100 phone calls she finally located him. 

In July 2022 she went to the hospital accompanied by a lawyer and managed to get her father discharged. Minato Ward had gone to Tokyo Family Court in order to apply for a guardian to be appointed to her father based on a diagnosis carried out by the Saitama hospital that said her father suffered from “Alzheimer’s type dementia.” In September 2022, the family court approved the “search for a guardian” requested by Minato Ward based on the hospital’s diagnosis. However, the daughter reported that her father showed no particular cognitive problems and that he seemed to be perfectly capable of taking care of himself. To prove her point, she had her father examined by several physicians who said, at worst, he displayed only “mild cognitive impairment” that was actually less serious than what a man his age usually displayed. She brought these findings to the Saitama doctor who made the original diagnosis and he changed his mind, saying that the loss of cognitive function detected was obviously “momentary.” Consequently, she asked the Tokyo High Court to vacate the family court decision to appoint a guardian. 

In October, the high court accepted the daughter’s claim and told the family court to reconsider its decision. The family court then halted its search for a guardian, saying that the original diagnosis submitted by Minato Ward had undergone an “unnatural correction.” Depending on the assessed cognitive function of the subject, the local government will provide three levels of supplementary living support. The original application received by the court recommended the most serious level of support, though a lesser level of support was originally recommended and then crossed out, with the diagnosing doctor’s seal attached to the correction. The doctor told the high court that he does not remember changing the recommendation to the more severe level, which effectively indicated that the man could not take care of himself at all. 

Eventually, in February of this year, the daughter contacted local police saying that she suspects Minato Ward of fraud for forging the diagnosis and the recommendation for the highest level of support, thus placing her father under the ward’s authority. The police accepted her complaint. When Asahi contacted relevant officials in the Minato Ward office for a comment, the officials said they do not discuss individual cases. However, the ward mayor told the newspaper that local governments are required to refer to family court seniors who are suspected of either being either abused or neglected by their families.

Apparently, this is not an isolated case. Minato Ward has become the target of a number of similar suits brought by families who say their senior members have been referred to family court to appoint guardians for them even though there is no real proof that they need guardians. The matter is now supposedly being discussed by the ward assembly, with third parties appointed to investigate the matter. 

Asahi does not speculate as to why exactly Minato Ward would want to secure guardianships for seniors without contacting their families first. Usually in such cases, family courts appoint lawyers or notaries as guardians, and in the past there have been many cases of these guardians abusing the system to appropriate assets of the seniors they’ve been appointed to help. But once a family court appoints a guardian it is almost impossible to reverse the decision, even when the subject’s family sues to regain control of the subject’s life and assets. That’s supposedly why the government is now trying to change the law to make it easier for families to challenge the system. 

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Review: Where to Land

Posted on April 25, 2026 by philipbrasor

Though Long Island indie filmmaker Hal Hartley has worked fairly steadily since his heyday in the 90s, the movies he made in the 00s and 10s didn’t seem to gain as much traction, even among the kind of cinephiles who previously championed his brainy comedies. As far as I can tell this is his first feature of the 2020s, and while it feels undernourished at 75 minutes, it is by no means a minor work and is certainly one of the funniest movies he’s ever made. His favorite leading man, Bill Sage, is on hand, looking better than ever, as a man who could well be a stand-in for Hartley. Joseph Fulton is a beloved director of romantic-comedies who seems to have been out of the game for a while. We first see him at a NYC church cemetery, inquiring of the skeptical groundskeeper, Leonard (Robert John Burke, another Hartley regular), about a job as his assistant. Given Fulton’s age appropriate outfit—blue jeans, grey sport coat over black T—Leonard justifiably wonders why someone as old and overqualified as him wants a job in “husbandry,” and they have a lively conversation about the working life. As it turns out, Fulton isn’t hard up for a job. He just wants to do something that utilizes his hands and sends him home “tired at the end of the day.”

As Leonard and a number of others who meet him on this fateful day comment, Fulton seems to be going through a late midlife crisis (he’s 58), but the reasons for his sudden change in career trajectory are something more subtle, and Hartley interrogates his protagonist’s state of mind in a series of philosophical conversations that lead to comic misunderstandings in the fashion of a classic American romantic comedy from the 70s or 80s, the kind that presumably Fulton directed and to which Hartley often gestures in his own work, though never this explicitly. Due to Fulton’s interest in the cemetery job, his meeting with his lawyer to draw up a will, and a mysterious unopened letter from the hospital that his niece/assistant Veronica (Katelyn Sparks) finds on the desk, a rumor soon spreads among friends, relatives, and strangers alike that Fulton is dying, and while it’s not a spoiler to reveal that he isn’t, the potboiler nature of the misunderstanding provides Hartley with fodder for the kind of existential jokes he is so fond of, and most of them—to borrow the metaphor of the movie’s title—land exactly where he wants them to. Fulton, we eventually figure out, is put off by anyone suggesting he’s at the end of his line. When he meets a scholar (Aido Johannes) who’s writing a book about him, he refuses to get involved because he doesn’t want to hear the woman’s “theories” about his work, which would imply that work is finished. When he drops in on another writer, an elderly woman (Kathleen Chalfant) who seems to be in assisted living, he admits reluctantly that he’s not sure if he wants to be around in a future where competition for water is the most pressing concern of the day. The friend, whose opinions reveal a mind that isn’t about to call it quits anytime soon, feels the opposite: “Change is always interesting.” 

With each additional encounter, which includes Fulton’s present lover, a popular TV superhero actor (Kim Taff); his affectionate ex-wife (Edie Falco); a scriptwriter who thinks he may be Fulton’s son (Jeremy Hendrick); and a neighbor (King Mustafa Obafemi) who gets squeamish when all this talk about death hits a crescendo in Fulton’s apartment after everyone has spontaneously assembled there, the movie raises the comic and thematic stakes with ever more profitable returns. Hartley keeps the tempos brisk, the characterizations distinct, the musical cues outlandishly on point. Now deep in his own late period, he’s never been this entertaining. 

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

Where to Land home page in Japanese

photo (c) Hal Hartley/Possible Films, LLC

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Review: Arco

Posted on April 24, 2026 by philipbrasor

This French animated film, which was nominated for an Oscar, is set in two time periods, 2075 and 900 years later. The world of 2075 is carefully extrapolated from the world we live in now, a place of deadly downpours punctuated by raging wildfires. The inhabitants of the suburban anywhere depicted live in regular homes protected by retractable transparent bubbles, and adults are forced to work in cities and visit their children through holographic projections, while the everyday needs of those children are tended to by robot servants who have been programmed to sacrifice everything for their charges. We experience this world through the eyes of a little girl named Iris, a withdrawn child who has never adjusted to her situation despite the material comforts on hand, and one day while cutting class she sees a rainbow in the distance, but instead of the arc that such an apparition usually follows, the rainbow is a squiggly trajectory. When she traces it to its source she finds a boy her own age in a colorful rainbow suit. Actually, we’ve already met this boy, Arco. He’s from the future, where people live in the clouds and can talk to the birds and time travel, except that the law prohibits children from time traveling until they are 12, a rule Arco resents and so one night he borrows his sister’s time travel costume and the crystal used to fuel it and tries it out, hoping to go back in time to see some dinosaurs, but ends up in 2075 instead.

The notion that Arco comes from a future where the serious problems of 2075 have all been solved gives the movie an odd kind of tension, since it would seem to be the worst possible year Arco could visit (though the implication is that things will get worse before they get better). And for what it’s worth, the writer-director, Ugo Bienvenu, has fashioned his movie as a straightforward adventure tale, with Iris desperately trying to help her new friend return to his world and his family. In his fall from the sky, Arco has lost the crystal, which is soon found by a trio of awkward, nerdy UFO investigators who think they’ve stumbled upon an alien life form, though for a while at least Iris leads them on a wild goose chase. Interestingly, there are no overtly evil elements in the movie—no dastardly villain out to claim the crystal for himself or capitalist/authoritarian juggernaut hunting Arco for whatever reason. The conflict springs completely from the contrast between the two children’s respective experiences. Iris is basically a neglected child, and it’s suggested, especially through her friendship with her classmate Clifford, who has a crush on her and becomes jealous of Arco (though in the end he does what’s right and helps him), that her situation isn’t unique. Arco, on the other hand, is from a close, loving household and a place where he doesn’t have to worry that his house will burn down the next day or get swept away in a flood. 

As an adventure Arco moves swiftly and suspensefully, and though it isn’t spoiling anything to say that there’s a happy ending, it’s a qualified happy ending as a result of Arco’s mischievous act, one that we assume he will always regret because he can never undo it. It’s an appropriately bittersweet conclusion to a marvelously inventive tale that uses science fiction in a responsible way—as a means of showing us where we are headed and that it still isn’t too late to change things. 

In French with Japanese subtitles and Japanese dubbed versions. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Arco home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Remembers/mountainA/France 3 Cinema

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Review: Twiggy and This Is Sparklehorse

Posted on April 23, 2026 by philipbrasor

The moral of the story that comes through in Sadie Frost’s fawning documentary about 60s fashion icon Twiggy—born Lesley Hornby to working class parents in Cockney London in 1949—is that good character will always hold sway even during the most difficult personal travails—not that Twiggy ever suffered any truly catastrophic setbacks. It’s more that her no-nonsense attitude, coupled with a disarming candor and a modest native talent for every vocation she tackled, went far to make her the star that she has remained throughout her life. I mean, at 77 years old she’s still quite the celebrity item, as this movie takes great pains to point out.

It helps that she started out in iconoclastic mode. As a fashion model who never aspired to be one, she arrived at 16 as an anomaly—rail-thin, childlike, with a short, boyish hairstyle and eyes whose elfin purity was enhanced by her own makeup choices inspired by her stuffed toys. Given Twiggy’s preternaturally blase take on the business, it required others to provide the initiative that would send her fame soaring, mainly her much older boyfriend/manager Nigel Davies, who assumed the posh moniker Justin de Villeneuve in order to promote his own brand, and therein lies the difference. De Villeneuve was an obvious phony, while what you saw with Twiggy was exactly what you got: a real girl with hopes, dreams, and enthusiasms rather than a broody chick or a highfalutin’ poser, the image that fashion models manifested at the time. The most delicious sequence is an interview by Woody Allen, who attempts to punch through Twiggy’s celebrity by asking her so-called intellectual questions that will prove her lack of brains, and she effectively turns the tables on his sexist designs. But while Frost makes much out of de Villeneuve’s put-on BBC accent and flair for flashy clothes, she also points out that Twiggy’s success would have been less feasible without his careful direction, which extended to protecting her from predatory photographers and editors (it was previously unthinkable that models be chaperoned to photo sessions by their managers). When de Villeneuve eventually proves to be inconstant and disposable, he leaves the picture, and the movie is a diminished thing for not having any input about him as a private person or, for that matter, even pursuing what happened to him later. He just vanishes from her life, and the movie.

Consequently, the rest of the narrative loses anything that could be called intriguing, since Twiggy goes from one career success to another without the slightest drop-off in popularity or critical favor. Whether she’s tackling acting on screen or stage, singing (country music, no less), product promotion, or even a return to modeling in middle age, Twiggy is nothing if not a smash, and Frost provides a hall-of-fame’s worth of celebrities to testify to her charms and smarts. Most of them are from the British fashion world, which I know nothing about, but there’s also Paul and Stella McCartney, Joanna Lumley, Sienna Miller, Tommy Tune, Brooke Shields, and…Dustin Hoffman? Since Frost doesn’t bother to explain the actor’s relationship to Twiggy his effusive comments feel merely gratuitous, as if he just happened to be in the studio when they were doing interviews. It’s filler, and while the doc does generate a bit of drama with the end of Twiggy’s tragic marriage to American actor Michael Witney, for the most part once de Villeneuve is out of the picture the documentary is a flat bore. Success will sometimes come across that way, no matter how deserving. 

Celebrities of an entirely different stripe comprise the talking heads in the biographical documentary This Is Sparklehorse, about the life of indie singer-songwriter Mark Linkous, who took his own life in 2010. Linkous’s project, Sparklehorse, was an extremely influential alternative rock band in the 90s, at least among the scene’s cognescenti, and many show up here to sing Linkous’s praises, including Gemma Hayes, Tom Waits, Jason Lytle, Adrian Utley, John Parish, Jonathan Donahue, and even David Lynch. Linkous’s music was difficult to describe, but, coming from a rural background in Virginia, he tended toward dark Americana that often layered over into hard rock textures. But it was his voice, thin and frail, that made the starkest impression, not to mention his cracked lyrics that alternated doom with hope, and which made him a difficult artist to not only market but like unconditionally. 

The directors Alex Crowton and Bobby Dass fashion a movie that’s equally impressionistic, thus blurring a lot of the factual material, much of which is provided through interviews with those closest to Linkous. It’s obvious from an early age that he suffered from mental illness that was difficult to diagnose due to his low-energy behavior. Though his background as a musician was in thrash metal, he never presented as a headbanger, and once he created the Sparklehorse persona he donned a cowboy hat and effected the air of an Appalachian hermit who read Southern Gothic literature. He was never an urban person, and as the years accumulated and his notoriety blew up in certain indie circles—especially in the UK, where bands like Portishead and Radiohead anticipated every new release—he grew more reclusive while the music became denser and less bothered by things like overt melodies. Many admirers, including Lynch, found these developments “beautiful” (the most common adjective used in the doc), though, of course, they never made Linkous a rich man or even a financially solvent one. 

Crowton and Dass concentrate as much on Linkous’s health situation as on his music, and while such attention can seem ghoulish given the stylistic decisions—low lighting, purposely scratchy visuals—they do an admirable job of presenting the artist as a real identifable human being with genuine emotional problems. As Lynch says at one point, Linkous conveyed “vulnerability and not a lot of self-worth.” The tragedy This Is Sparklehorse explicates so well is that Linkous never saw the value of his work in the same way others did, and while that’s true of many artists in his case it was especially damaging to the view he had of himself. 

Twiggy opens April 24 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Shibuya White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

This Is Sparklehorse opens April 24 in Tokyo at K’s Cinema Shinjuku (03-3352-2471), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Twiggy home page in Japanese

This Is Sparklehorse home page in Japanese

Twiggy photo (c) Soho Talent Limited 2024

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Review: The Old Oak and Lost Land

Posted on April 22, 2026 by philipbrasor

The Old Oak, the title of what is reported to be Ken Loach’s last film, refers to a superannuated pub in Durham, a small town in northern England that was once sustained by a local coal mine, which closed some time ago, thus leaving the residents in an almost perpetual state of economic uncertainty. So far, so Loachian. But, as usual, the director’s long-time scenarist, Paul Laverty, has injected a topical element that makes the movie more relevant than almost anything else you’ll see in a theater this year. The town’s population is now being supplemented by carloads of Syrian refugees whom the British government through an NGO is transplanting to vacant properties there without any input from the natives, and the latter aren’t very thrilled. The exception is TJ (Dave Turner), the owner and operator of the Old Oak, which is the community’s de facto town hall, where all grievances and gossip are aired openly and often loudly in the region’s colorful and often impenetrable vernacular. TJ, a soft-spoken, middle aged salt-of-the-earth type, seems to be the only resident who welcomes the newcomers as he is assisting the NGO in helping them settle in, and in time becomes not only their principal champion, but the moral conscience of the community.

As always in a Loach/Laverty production, worst-case scenarios rule, and the refugees’ loss of homeland and family are exacerbated by the unhinged prejudice they confront in their new, strange surroundings; which isn’t to say Laverty is unsympathetic to the locals’ own troubles, but rather that he can’t ignore the huge gap in their level of suffering. The first affront cuts deep. One of the young refugees, Yara (Ebla Mari), is an amateur photojournalist, and she starts taking pictures of her new home as soon as she arrives, attracting a bunch of hooligans, one of whom snatches her camera. She eventually recruits TJ, the only kind face she encounters, to get it back for her and he agrees, humiliated by the boorishness of his compatriots. In the meantime he gives her an old working camera that’s been gathering dust in his back room, and the gesture offers him the opportunity to show Yara his own collection of historical photos of the town as well as regale her with a capsule history of the mine and its subsequent closure. In turn, Yara talks about her family’s escape from ISIS terror and the fact that her father remains in Syria, his whereabouts and situation unknown. Though the conversation is emotional and expository in equal measure, a device that Laverty and Loach always use to put across their socialist-working class-world citizen proclivities, it’s so plainly presented and passionately acted that you can’t help but fall under its intended spell. 

Subsequently, the actions of TJ’s neighbors can come off as unspeakably cruel, especially when their resentments of these Arabic-speaking, hijab-wearing interlopers spill over and result in the death of TJ’s canine companion. Laverty almost pummels us with wonkish factoids, like the attendant crash in property values and the paucity of social welfare for retirees, in order to strike a balance, but since the Syrians are at such an obvious disadvantage—even the NGO that brought them here is hard-pressed to do anything more—all empathy leans toward them. In the end, the dramatic components can overwhelm the social reality, which holds that the town is a victim of capitalist exploitation rather than bureaucratic neglect. Fans of Loach can of course expect a final act reckoning, and at risk of revealing spoilers, this time he extends some hope, not only for the refugees but for the town, if only because the residents finally recognize their better angels through the community-minded agency of TJ, one of the best characters Laverty and Loach have ever created. If this is their last film, it’s a beautiful way to go out.

The refugee story in Lost Land describes the journey rather than the destination, and it’s a harrowing one. Writer-director Akio Fujimoto has made the plight of displaced Asians his preferred topic in his work—he has lived and worked in Myanmar—and here he focuses on Rohingya siblings who are fleeing a refugee camp in Bangladesh for what they hope is a better life in Malaysia, where some Rohingya have formed their own community. Fujimoto’s presentation is documentary-like but it’s clear from the beginning that he will use whatever dramatic tools at his disposal to make you feel what these individuals are going through, and while some of it may feel contrived or inappropriately staged, overall it makes the necessary impression.

Since the siblings, Shafi and Somira, are, respectively, 4 and 9 years old, an atmosphere of imminent peril is never absent from the movie, which shows them losing their initial guardians—a grandfather and an aunt—and falling under the care of a series of shady characters. Inevitably they and their fellow travelers lose their way due to unforeseen circumstances, including bad weather, unscrupulous traffickers, and illness, which continually upset whatever flimsy plans have been formulated on the fly. Fujimoto keeps the viewer clued in on how the trip keeps getting sidelined. When the group ends up in Thailand by mistake, it’s pretty much every refugee for themself, and the possibility of the two children actually reaching their destination feels more and more remote. 

Fujimoto contrasts the realistic unpleasantries with dreamlike passages meant to recreate the kind of wonder that a child might feel when confronted by raw nature, and the elliptical narrative can be confusing in terms of navigating the story’s temporal and geographical contours. Unlike The Old Oak, it’s a movie that doesn’t inspire much in the way of hope, which is perfectly understandable because the actual Rohingya situation remains dire. It’s unlikely this kind of movie can affect that situation in any meaningful way, but it makes for an emotionally jarring experience. 

The Old Oak, in Engish and Arabic, opens April 24 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Lost Land, in Rohingya and Malay, opens April 24 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

The Old Oak home page in Japanese

Lost Land home page in Japanese

The Old Oak photo (c) Sixteen Oak Limited, Why Not Productions, Goodfellas, Les Films du Fleuve, British Broadcasting Corporation, France 2 Cinema and the British Film Institute 2023

Lost Land photo (c) 2025 E.x.N K.K.

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Review: Song Sung Blue and Is This Thing On?

Posted on April 17, 2026 by philipbrasor

As a producer-director, Craig Brewer has made a lot of music-related narrative works, including the florid hip-hop industry dramas Hustle & Flow and Empire, which address the business side of major label music more than the creative side. He’s never done a standard music biopic until Song Sung Blue, which isn’t about the real-life Neil Diamond, the composer of the title song, but rather a real-life Neil Diamond cover act, and it fits Brewer’s usual rationale by deriving most of its drama from the money angle, or, more precisely, the lack-of-money angle.

As a portrait of a subculture, the movie starts strong with a jaded take on the nostalgia-act trade that has flourished since the 1980s, introducing recovering alcoholic Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman), a full-time freelance car mechanic, Vietnam veteran, and part-time musician who plays guitar with a Milwaukee R&B outfit when he isn’t impersonating singers like Don Ho for a friend (Michael Imperioli) who stages occasional variety shows for “the blue-haired crowd.” Mike’s dream, however, is to sell his own rock act as a character called Lightning, and his enthusiasm sparks a fire underneath hairdresser and fellow impersonator Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson), whose specialty is Patsy Cline. She persuades him to narrow his act down to his admiration of Neil Diamond. With Claire playing keyboards and providing harmonies and Mike on guitar and appropriately stentorian lead vocals, the pair peddle themselves as Lightning and Thunder, not so much a Diamond tribute act as a Diamond “interpretive” act, since Mike’s stage persona is even more outlandish than Diamond’s. And while Brewer, with the invaluable help of Jackman—certainly Hollywood’s most shameless showman—and Hudson, delivers mightily with a series of full-length Diamond stage productions, the movie is mainly about Mike’s and Claire’s eventual marriage and financial difficulties, since they put everything into their act at the expense of their children (from previous marriages) and their own well-being. When Claire is laid up after a horrific accident, their dream of fame, which the movie posits as within the realm of possibility, is waylaid, rendering the comeback road long and painful. Brewer appropriates the music biopic arc of success-downfall-resurrection for a couple who are always poor in terms of material comforts, a great idea he can’t quite pull off since the melodrama is laid on too thick owing to the lower middle class milieu, which, despite the spot-on production design, demands as much corn as heart.

The predictability of the dramatic beats also undermines the movie’s “based on a true story” conceit, since the highs and the lows feel so schematized. Even the elements that make it seem stranger than fiction—the pair’s unlikely opening slot for Pearl Jam, for instance—have a canned quality that fortifies the sentimentality while smoothing out the working class grit that gives so much of the performance—whether musical or thespian—its power.

Performance is even more of a psychic salve in the comedy Is This Thing On?, which is also supposed be based on a true story, though liberties were obviously taken with it; not because it’s melodramatic the way Song Sung Blue is but rather because it’s sometimes too brainy for its own good. Will Arnett plays Alex Novak, a “man in finance” raising a family in a posh Long Island suburb who, as the movie opens, is getting set for his first night away from his family as he and his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), prepare to separate after 12 years of marriage, wondering desperately how to break the news to their two young sons. For Alex the split is already proving to be traumatic, despite the jokey tone of the script, and when, high on edibles, he’s confronted with spending his first night alone in his newly rented Brooklyn apartment he opts to instead get a drink, but the nearest bar is having standup night and there’s a $15 cover, a charge Alex refuses to pay so he signs up as a performer without actually thinking he’ll be called, but, of course, he is. Alone on stage with no material and ten minutes to kill, he does the only thing he can, and explains the end of his marriage. It would be tempting to say a star is born, but director Bradley Cooper knows that the audience would never buy such an assertion. Suffice to say that the crowd’s positive reaction makes Alex feel better than he has for a long time.

Though the movie is more about Alex’s attempts at saving his marriage than it is about his burgeoning comedy career, the stage routines are carefully curated not only for their relevance to Alex’s attempts at self-therapy but as actual effusions of creativity, and while I found them less than hilarious, their organic integrity presents Alex as a sympathetic soul, one who may not have been as effective a husband and father as he wanted to be, but nevertheless someone who thought profoundly about such matters. Cooper and his co-scenarists, Arnett and Mark Chappell, make a major error by downplaying Alex’s real job—we only see him once on his way to work in a suit and tie—since it isn’t clear how he can afford a huge house in the suburbs and a fairly big apartment in Brooklyn without taking out a second mortgage, especially given the fact that Tess is only now thinking of getting back into the job market (as a volleyball coach—she was once on the US Olympic team). The one point you had to concede to Song Sung Blue is that the economics of the Sardina household figures centrally in the movie’s dramatic effectiveness. In Is This Thing On? it feels more like an inconvenient detail, especially when we compare Alex and Tess’s circumstances to those of their friends Balls (Cooper) and Christine (Andra Day), a much more bohemian couple who are also thinking of divorce. 

The movie’s gravy is its insider look at the rookie standup scene in New York. Key to Alex’s enlightenment with regard to his self-worth is the acceptance by this scene of his native talent. But there’s no indication that Alex is going to be able to give up his day job for a comedy career (another reason why it would have been more interesting if we saw what that day job entailed), an admission that grounds the movie in a more believable reality than the one we get in Song Sung Blue; but it’s supposed to be a comedy, and it succeeds on that level.

Song Sung Blue now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Is This Thing On? now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

Song Sung Blue home page in Japanese

Is This Thing On? home page in Japanese

Song Sung Blue photo (c) 2025 Focus Features LLC

Is This Thing On? photo (c) 2025 Searchlight Pictures

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