Review: Masters of the Universe

Posted on June 5, 2026 by philipbrasor

Disclosure: I came to this reboot of the Mattel toy franchise with almost no knowledge of its history or that it had a dedicated fan base cultivated in the 1980s. The reason is that I was busy doing other things in the 80s and Mattel toy franchises were way below my interest level. But while watching it I understood immediately that it was taking the piss out of the whole Masters of the Universe universe even if I didn’t always get the inside jokes. And it is a proper reboot, meaning it rehashes the whole origin story of Prince Adam/He-Man while supposedly trying to make it more appealing to Gen Z, though I would like to think that Gen Z is more savvy in its pop culture discernments. If that’s the case then the only receptive audience is those people who grew up in the 80s and collected the toys and watched the animated TV show. 

There’s not a whole lot of originality on display. As a boy, Prince Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) of Eternia is well-liked by his peers but something of a klutz in terms of the martial arts his father, King Randor (James Purefoy), demands he master. Fortunately, he has the ear and the heart of his father’s main soldier/trainer, Duncan (Idris Elba), who makes the unseemly killing games as tolerable as possible. This aversion to battle is made moot when Eternia is invaded by the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto) and his unsightly, unsavory crew, and Eternia’s resident Sorceress (Alison Brie) hurls Adam into a portal with the magical Sword of Power that Skeletor covets and which Adam loses on the way to…Kansas City? Jump ahead a decade or so and Adam is now a buff blonde bimbo, played by the affable Nicholas Galitzine, working a boring office job while still looking for the sword and writing his memories of Eternia as a kind of comic series. The best joke in the movie is how Adam actually locates the sword, since it lampoons the kind of otaku culture that you would assume fans of the toys comprise. Once the sword is back in his possession his childhood friend, Teela (Camila Mendes), helps him get back to Eternia to fight Skeletor and regain his kingdom as the rightful heir, leaving behind Kansas City forever, and rather rudely, I would say. 

The second half of the film is mostly a CG-heavy series of fights and sorcerous shenanigans leavened with a self-deprecating humor that doesn’t always stick. The main pretense is how Adam squares his basically laid-back demeanor with the new fighting skills imparted to him by the sword, thus making him a particularly post-millennial American hero. When he renames himself He-Man, the joke comes full circle and seems a bit late. In fact, the whole movie feels tentative in its ambition to satirize something as iconic as the MCU with characters who already can’t take themselves seriously even as fantasy action figures. I’m assuming the franchise will expand anew, but it doesn’t take much imagination to make up a fresh saga when all the super powers are so arbitrarily distributed.

In Japanese dubbed and Japanese subtitled 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).

Masters of the Universe home page in Japanese

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Review: The Testament of Ann Lee and The Moment

Posted on June 4, 2026 by philipbrasor

At first, director Mona Fastvold’s decision to fashion a biopic of Ann Lee, one of the founders of the Evangelical Christian movement Shakerism, into a musical sounds willfully counterintuitive, but, in fact, the Shakers were quite a musical bunch. As their name suggested, the act of worship was accompanied by a physical manifestation of their devotion that could, at least to the modern sensibility, look like avant garde dance. Daniel Blumberg’s original songs aren’t quite catchy enough to make an impression—they aspire half-heartedly to Laurel Canyon pop—but Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography incorporates the exalted tremulousness of religious ecstasy in inspiring ways, making for several moving production numbers. 

Fastvold’s script, written in collaboration with her partner, fellow filmmaker Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), seems to stick faithfully to Ann Lee’s (Amanda Seyfried) life story, which is fascinating in and of itself since the scenario does such an excellent job of couching that story in a vivid historical milieu. Ann is born into a strictly religious family in the city of Manchester, where everyone of lower birth works for the wool trade. As evangelicals her parents by definition oppose the Church of England, and while their belief in the second coming of Christ comes with an abhorrence of “fleshly cohabitation” they breed freely and often, much to young Ann’s disgust. This negative attitude toward sex will color her general outlook on human existence as she grows and becomes a powerful force within the fledgling Shaker faith, especially after she marries the blacksmith Abraham (Christopher Abbott) and bears four children, none of whom make it to their first birthdays. Though Abraham is nominally as devout as Ann, he is also callous about his sexual appetites, and after the Shakers emigrate to New England to escape persecution, Ann denies him what he claims are his conjugal rights and he feels justified in taking a new wife. Now free of the obligations of the flesh, Ann can concentrate all her energy on building a church, not to mention a culture built on the idea that God is, to use the appropriate term right now, non-binary. The Shakers not only had their eye on the prize—Christ’s eventual return to earth—but foresaw the inevitability of feminism and the commercial appeal of practical design (Shaker furniture, etc.).

Structured in chapters and narrated by one of Ann’s acolytes, Sister Mary (Thomasin Mackenzie), the movie displays an old-fashioned adherence to narrative convention that sometimes gets the better of Fastvold in that it tends to wallow in exposition, and the themes get lost in the extended ending, which feels more like a coda than a climax. But if you like historical films for the history, this is for you. 

History is much more immediate in the self-styled mockumentary The Moment, though, to me, Charli XCX’s Brat Summer seems much longer ago than 2024. Director Aidan Zamiri’s concept for the movie splits the difference between shameless self-promotion and a satirical bringdown of so-called pop-cultural moments. To its credit, the movie doesn’t make some kind of inflated case for the artistic importance of the Brat album, though it does insist that Charli herself is a dedicated musician with valid artistic intentions. The point is that the record company and other interested parties have agenda that are naturally at odds with those intentions, and Zamiri aims to show how as a result conflicts arise that inevitably make everyone miserable, a theme that is a lot more conventional that either he or Charli probably thinks it is.

The sticking point is pure meta: a movie about the Brat Summer concert experience to be directed by a hotshot filmmaker who isn’t really that interested in Charli or her music. This filmmaker, a Swedish blowhard named Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), is portrayed from the start as having pretensions that outstrip Charli’s influence over her fate in terms of her relationship with management, which is represented by a stereotypical cold fish (Rosanna Arquette) who only listens to Charli’s desires when it suits her professional prerogatives. Caught in the middle is Charli’s creative director and close friend, Celeste (Hailey Gates), who works with the artist to realize her “vision” and is second-guessed every step of the way by Johannes, whose amiable bro vibe becomes creepier with each compromise he demands. Johannes wants a more “family-friendly” concert experience, a proposal that eventually terrifies Charli when she realizes how much sway he has with her management. 

It’s difficult to deny The Moment‘s snarky entertainment value, but the movie basically doubles down on the kind of anti-corporate sentiment that has been central to the business of pop music since Colonel Parker engineered Elvis’s military service. Bizarrely, the music is given short shrift in favor of supersaturated dramatic episodes that are almost comical in their seriousness. That’s not what satire is.

The Testament of Ann Lee opens June 5 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109). 

The Moment opens June 5 in Tokyo at Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

The Testament of Ann Lee home page in Japanese

The Moment home page in Japanese

The Testament of Ann Lee photo (c) 2025 Searchlight Pictures

The Moment photo (c) 2026 Rights By Lloyd LLC

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Review: Sirât and Adam’s Sake

Posted on June 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

Much of the power of Oliver Laxe’s Sirât comes from its disorienting intentions. The viewer is dropped fully into an alien, forbidding environment that is nevertheless programmed, at least temporarily, for pleasure, and the feeling of being out of one’s depth can be overwhelming, especially if you’re watching the movie in a theater. The forbidding environment is the Moroccan desert, initially a sun-baked valley surrounded by high brown cliffs. The situation is a moveable rave, a contrived musical experience wherein severe, anonymous techno music is pumped out from stacks of speakers at ear-splitting volumes that envelope the dancing hordes. The ringer is a middle aged Spaniard named Luis (Sergi López), who walks among the entranced, drug-addled revelers with a confused look on his face. He is here with his preteen son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), looking for his daughter, Ana, a rave aficionado who has been missing for several months. A friend of hers said she might be pursuing her obsession in North Africa.

Luis’ fish-out-of-water predicament drives what passes as a plot, though most of the action is dictated by forces beyond the control or, for that matter, comprehension of humans. It’s not just the harsh weather and impossible terrain. It’s the exigencies of a world where order has no purchase. The rave where Luis and Esteban, not to mention their little dog, Pipa, search for Ana is eventually broken up by government troops who endeavor to escort the participants, most of them European, to someplace else due to an unexplained military action that one person chillingly describes as “the start of World War III,” though it’s impossible to know. When two trucks full of seasoned rave nomads whom Luis has casually befriended—they haven’t seen Ana but think she could be at another ad hoc rave happening soon in Mauritania, where they may be heading—break out of the convoy, Luis impulsively follows them in his Citroen station wagon into the desert for an adventure he has no business embarking on. This caravan must stick to unpaved roads to avoid government troops, and most of the movie is simply about survival even as Luis is grudgingly accepted by the quintet of ravers as an outsider they are willing to tolerate. Laxe has hired non-professionals to play these wanderers, scouted at real raves, and they’re a suitably ragged bunch who carry their iconoclasm as convincingly as they do their visible scars (two members are missing limbs). 

Despite the attempt to conjure up an emotional atmosphere of mutual empathy, Sirât is unrelentingly a downer, mainly because the viewer can never quite get a handle on what Luis thinks he can accomplish on this ad hoc rescue mission, which seems desperate and doomed from the start. And because he drags the others down with him, the empathy can be questioned as well. By turns gorgeous and terrifying, the movie’s visual effect is exhausting and in the final stretch feels downright nihilistic. A movie that tries to plumb the spirit of outlaw community ends up just punishing those who fall for its hallucinating charms. 

The quest in the Belgian hospital drama Adam’s Sake is similarly quixotic, maybe even pointless, but driven by a sense of moral certainty. Léa Drucker plays Lucy, the head pediatric nurse in an overburdened urban public hospital. Immediately we’re shoved into the issue at hand. A young mother, Rebecca (Anamaria Vartolomei), is trying to comfort her 4-year-old son, Adam (Jules Delsart), who has fractured both his arms while playing, a situation the doctors say was caused by weak bones brought on by malnutrition. Social services has become involved and restricted Rebecca’s access to the hospitalized Adam. She disapproves of the diet the hospital has prescribed and insists on feeding him what looks like baby food. Lucy, from the start, seems to sympathize with Rebecca’s position, being a single mother herself, and constantly tries to intervene on her behalf, thus setting up her own opposition to the law and her immediate superiors.

The director, Laura Wandel, doesn’t try to hide the impression that Rebecca is suffering from some kind of pathology. Her refusal to feed her son what the doctors recommend is clearly based on nothing other than resentment for being told how to be a mother, but the film’s portrayal of anyone in authority other than Lucy is that of manual-toting technocrats. Wandel follows Lucy around the halls of the bustling hospital with the doggedness of a Dardenne, showing her selfless devotion to her patients and giving us pointed examples of topical concerns—an African immigrant family who sees the hospital as a convenient housing solution; a Muslim girl undergoing an abortion that will be recorded as an appendectomy. It’s like a greatest hits of the P.R. downside of universal health care. When Rebecca is injured trying to abduct Adam from the hospital, Lucy calls his father, and you get some idea of where Rebecca’s misanthropic attitude comes from. The father, who already has a new partner and a new baby, claims that Rebecca rejected him as a co-parent from the get-go, but there seems to be something else at play in his disaffected attitude, hinting not at domestic enmity but rather a kind of terminal incompatibility. Rebecca’s mantra is that she is the only person who can take care of Adam and that without him she is nothing, which convinces Lucy that to ignore her demands is to condemn her to death.

Tension is generated by the notion that Lucy herself may be going too far, which begs the question: What to do about a problem like Rebecca? The story resolves itself in a satisfying way but leaves her fate open to interpretations that aren’t necessarily happy ones. Wandel poses a compelling argument that she can’t really win in the end. 

Sirât, in Spanish, French, and Arabic, opens June 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

Adam’s Sake, in French, opens June 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Sirât home page in Japanese

Adam’s Sake home page in Japanese

Sirât photo (c) 2025 Los Desertores Films, A.I.E., Telefonica Audiovisual Digital, S.L.U., Filmes da Ermida, S.L., El Deseo Da, S.L.U., Uri Films, S.L., 4A4 Productions

Adam’s Sake photo (c) Dragons Films – Les Films du Fleuve – Les Films de Pierre – Lunanime – France 3 Cinema – Be TV & Orange – Proximus – RTBF (Television Belge) – Shelter Prod. 

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Review: Materialists

Posted on May 29, 2026 by philipbrasor

As a filmmaker, Celine Song is nothing if not self-aware. Her first film, the lauded Past Lives, referenced her own story as a Korean immigrant to North America in order to plumb the depths of romantic longing as portrayed stereotypically in movies, specifically American movies, even if her cinematic attitude came across as more European. The film it best resembled was Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise in the way it conveyed that unmistakable but indescribable quality called romantic attraction, a phenomenon that can feel immutable whether it occurs between people who have just met or people who have known each other for years but are just now getting seriously acquainted. For her second feature, Materialists, Song takes this concept to the next natural level, into the realm of the classic American rom-com, and while she manages to nail the genre without succumbing to the cliches that have made it less than compelling in the internet age, I wish it were funnier.

It’s a classic three-hander. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a modern-day professional matchmaker and a seemingly successful one in that she can afford not only an office in Manhattan but a paid staff. Lucy is good at her job because she weighs compatibility in terms of quantifiable measures like salary, political sensibility, and whether or not the candidates want to raise families in the long run, but also those unquantifiable qualities that are mostly gauged by instinct. The opening scene is a brilliantly thought-out explication of her methodology as she attends the wedding of her ninth successful union. However, at the reception she runs into one of her old beaus, John (Chris Evans), who is working for the caterer. John is a still struggling actor with whom Lucy was quite serious for a while until she realized that waiting for John to actually make it as an actor was something of a chump’s game, even if she really dug him and maybe even was in love with him. He’s funny, intelligent, and considerate, but his material prospects were never assured, and one thing Lucy has learned by bringing suitable couples together is that material factors can’t be discounted (“Isn’t marriage essentially a business deal?”) even when true love is involved. At the reception, she also meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a rich investor who is intrigued by Lucy’s profession and her single status, and they start dating. As Lucy’s assistant puts it, Harry is a “unicorn,” meaning that he uniquely checks all the desirable boxes for what would be the perfect mate for Lucy—or any woman, for that matter. Harry is not only rich, he’s just as funny, intelligent, and considerate as John is. What’s there not to love? 

And that is the question the movie goes to great pains to ask over and over again. Song inserts every possible variable into Lucy’s relationships with John and Harry, thus challenging her fundamental concept of the dating scene as a “marketplace.” And while this theme at first feels overly schematic the script never resorts to predictable conventions, mainly because each of the principals is so finely drawn and imaginatively portrayed. The problem is that such a theme has an inevitable end point that Song can’t quite navigate, and the situations feel more strained and less realistic as the movie progresses. This consideration might have been less important if Song had a sharper sense of humor, but only Evans sees his job as lightening the mood. I have a feeling Song is not yet through with the rom-com genre, and I would suggest teaming up with a real comedy writer on the next one. We all can’t be Nora Ephron. 

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).

Materialists home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Adore Rights LLC

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Review: The Forbidden City and Keeper

Posted on May 28, 2026 by philipbrasor

A popular item at international fantastic film festivals for the last year, The Forbidden City presumes to mount an action-packed kung fu extravaganza set in Rome, and for most of the first half lives up to the promise, but it’s an Italian production and refuses to give up any part of that country’s hallowed cinematic sensibility. The premise may feel beside the point to anyone with any knowledge about recent Chinese history. A family in rural China hides its second daughter, Mei, from the authorities because, at the time, the one-child policy was in effect. Mei is locked away while her older sister, Yun, leads a normal life. Cut to some 20 years later and Mei (Liu Yaxi) is searching for Yun in Italy, where Yun has apparently been trafficked after seeking work to help her parents pay off a debt that has something to do with the one-child policy, even if it’s no longer being enforced. This disconnect is never explained, but Mei seeks the same sort of work in order to trace her sister’s whereabouts and finds herself “auditioning” for a sex worker gig in the labyrinthine basement of a Chinese restaurant called the Forbidden City in the foreign quarter of Rome. Instead she breaks out the kung fu moves her martial arts expert father taught her in lockdown as a child and handily vanquishes all comers.

This opening fight scene is fast and furious and funny. It’s the best thing in the movie, which means the director, Gabriele Mainetti, blows most of his wad right at the start, and the rest of the film doesn’t quite maintain the same level of excitement. Thanks to an older woman who works in the brothel under the restaurant, Mei finds out Yun has married one of her customers, the owner of a rival restaurant located nearby. As it turns out, this other restaurant is run not by a bloodthirsty triad-like organization but a family of earthy Italians whose paterfamilias has run away with Yun, leaving his wife, Lorella (Sabrina Ferilli), at the hands of his unscrupulous best friend, Hannibal (Marco Giallini), while his put-upon chef son, Marcello (Enrico Borello), struggles to run the place on his own, something he never really envisioned. Mei, of course, is not interested in this gnarly domestic situation but has to put up with it in order to find Yun and, when push comes to kick, carry out the revenge scheme that all great kung fu movies—or spaghetti westerns, for that matter—stake their mojo on. 

Though the suitably depraved villain, Forbidden City owner Wang (Chunyu Shanshan), makes a formidable adversary, the movie becomes mired in the emotional complications of Marcello’s beef with Hannibal regarding the future of the family business and the latter’s exploitative relationship with the immigrant underground of Rome, the result being that the remaining fight scenes provide diminishing returns in relation to the operatic melodrama of the intergenerational conflict as the two modes of entertainment vie for Mainetti’s attention. His lack of solid commitment to either causes his mind to wander, thus leading to a long, gratuitous homage to Roman Holiday. And that’s a shame because Liu is a real talent as a martial artist, though not so much as an actor.

A similar clash of genre prerogatives characterizes the action in the latest Osgood Perkins’ thriller Keeper. As with Perkins’ previous two movies, Daddy Longlegs and The Monkey, Keeper is a horror movie whose bloody outcomes are driven by supernatural forces. What made those earlier movies successful in their own right was Perkins’ refusal to explain the spooky premises behind the terrors. Here he goes to painful lengths to create a kind of alternate reality where the bad things are supposed to make sense, but, in the end, don’t.

Tatiana Maslany plays Liz, a painter spending her first weekend alone with her new doctor boyfriend, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), at Malcolm’s expansive, remote, high-end family vacation house-in-the-woods. Actually, they aren’t completely alone. Next door lives Malcolm’s eccentric cousin, Darren (Birkette Turton), who makes an unsettling entrance one day with his own new girlfriend, a Russian model named Minka (Eden Weiss) who doesn’t speak any English. At first, Darren’s strong suit as a negative plot element is that he’s infinitely annoying, though whether it’s due more to his creepy behavior or to his terrible lines (“Don’t let this one get away,” he says conspiratorily to Malcolm) is difficult to tell. Liz is already feeling uncomfortable for reasons that have more to do with the ambience of the house than Darren or Malcolm, whose own behavior starts getting weird when Liz refuses to eat some cake left by the housekeeper because she doesn’t like chocolate. “I thought all women liked chocolate,” he says, clearly peeved and, for the viewer at least, giving much of the game away. As the title suggests, the plot’s main subtext is two people seriously trying to make a go of their relationship after obviously failing in previous ones, a theme that’s squandered in order to make room for scares. 

A sort of enhanced atmospheric vagueness persists for the bulk of the movie, and while Osgood, thanks mainly to Maslany’s way with a startled look or a stifled cry, manages to conjure up a general mood of something about to go terribly wrong, he couches it all in tableaux that split the difference between hallucinatory and suggestively paranoid, but without building tension. Eventually, he breaks down and explains what’s going on in a rush of confused exposition that feels patched together, undermining the horror set pieces that have been hastily shoved to the end.

The Forbidden City, in Italian and Mandarin, opens May 29 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Keeper opens May 29 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

The Forbidden City home page in Japanese

Keeper home page in Japanese

The Forbidden City photo (c) 2025 Wildside S.R.L. – Goon Films S.R.L. – Piper Film S.R.L.

Keeper photo (c) 2025 Shadowless Horse Pictures Inc.

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Media watch: Lawyer bashed for trying to prevent refugees from being bashed bashes back

Posted on May 27, 2026 by philipbrasor
Demonstrator protesting anti-Kurd speech in Kawasaki in 2025 (Japan Assoc. for Refugees)

On May 20 Saitama District Court began hearing a defamation lawsuit brought by a lawyer named Kim Yeong-gong against someone he says directed “hate speech” at him in a blog post in 2024. Kim is demanding ¥7.2 million in damages. During the first court session, the defendant rejected Kim’s claim in oral arguments.

According to the Asahi Shimbun, the suit stems from Kim’s work trying to prevent demonstrations outside the offices of his client, the Japan Kurdish Cultural Association (JKCA), in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, which had been planned for November 2024. Kim claimed that the demonstrators were going to use hate speech in their denunciation of the group, which the demonstrators say is a front for undocumented Kurdish workers from Turkey who claim to be seeking asylum from ethnic persecution in their home country. The government has mostly rejected Kurdish refugees’ request for asylum on the grounds that there is no demonstrable persecution against Kurds in Turkey, and some Japanese right wing activists are saying that the Kurds’ real reason for coming to Japan is economic self-enrichment. Kim, as a representative of the group, requested local authorities stop the demonstration.

Consequently, Kim’s name circulated among the demonstrators, many of whom belong to organizations that oppose immigration. Kim says that the defendant posted on his own blog in November 2024 false and misleading information about Kurds while also mentioning that Kim is a Zainichi Korean, meaning a Japan-resident of Korean background who is not a naturalized citizen of Japan. Like the Kurds, wrote the defendant, Zainichi Koreans are in Japan “illegally” and exploiting Japan’s welfare system. Both Kurds and Zainichi Koreans are also committing crimes against Japanese citizens, according to the blog post. In addition, the post said that Kim is a “Chosen-related” left-wing lawyer and included a photo of Kim next to the phrase “Retaliation against the Japanese.” “Chosen” is a common term in Japan for North Korea. 

In March 2025, Kim asked the portal site that hosts the blog to reveal the name of the author. When contacted by Kim, the author apologized for the post but did not offer anything in the way of compensation for it. Kim insisted that the information contained in the post undermined Kim’s position in society by promoting discrimination against him due to his background. Such discourse constitutes defamation based on racist language, both against the Kurds whom Kim is representing and Kim himself. In court, Kim said the blog post used hate speech in an attempt to silence “those who defend minority groups in Japan.”

Asahi explains that Kim’s law office is in the city of Warabi, which is adjacent to Kawaguchi. Kim says he offered to defend the JKCA because they are his neighbors and he believes they are being persecuted unfairly. The fact that Zainichi Koreans are also targeted by right wing groups in Japan made Kim think that it was his moral duty to help the Kurdish group. In a discussion of the case on the web program No Hate TV, journalist Koichi Yasuda, who has covered Kurdish immigrants in Japan extensively, said that other lawyers who have helped Kurds in Japan have also received “bashing” from right wing groups, but not nearly as much as what Kim has received. 

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Review: Boys Go to Jupiter

Posted on May 22, 2026 by philipbrasor

Since the mid-90s, American animated features have stuck to a seemingly successful pattern: stories aimed at children spiked with visual and verbal jokes that can still appeal to their parents. Needless to say, adults of a certain professional sensibility are charged with pulling these movies off, but Julian Glander’s quirky Boys Go to Jupiter actually looks and feels like something a kid would come up with, which isn’t to say it will automatically appeal to everyone under the age of 11, but rather that the freewheeling attitude that bolsters its humor and world view is childlike in the most natural way. First of all there’s the look, which consists of super-bright primary colors and 3D-graphic plastic/ceramic textures and rounded shapes that look as if not much thought was put into them, and yet they are more expressive than a lot of what you see lately from Pixar; or maybe it’s just that we’ve become so used to Pixar that the expressions have become predictable.

This demeanor extends to the characters, who are mostly adolescents or younger kids with too much time on their hands. Our hero, Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), is a teenage high school dropout living in his older sister’s (Eva Victor) garage in a lower middle class Florida suburb. The plot line follows Billy’s determination to make $5,000 through his gig job for the food delivery service Grubster (his mode of transport a wave board), whose motto is “Have a grubby day.” Though it’s clear Billy has not much use for formal education, he’s well read and something of a math wiz, explaining the recession to bored elementary school-age neighbors and devising an ingeniously complex currency transfer system that he believes will get him to his monetary goal more quickly. However, his well-laid plans are constantly foiled by matters he can’t foresee, such as customers who refuse to pay for stupid reasons and dodgy infrastructure. During one delivery to a corporate greenhouse where “designer fruits” are being developed, he meets and falls instantly for one of the workers, Rozebud (Miya Folick), who happens to be the daughter of Dr. Dolphin (Janeane Garofalo), the billionaire mastermind of the company, a combination of circumstances that allows Glander to bolt off on a tangent about the history of genetically modified food that sounds exactly like something a bunch of smart but smart-alecky 6th graders would come up with if prompted to do so by a particularly charismatic teacher. Rozebud wants to humor Billy if only because it might get her out of the greenhouse and away from her domineering mother, and not necessarily because she thinks Billy is a catch. As observers, we’ve already determined that he isn’t.

There’s not much plot outside this sketchy outline, and sometimes the juvenile quality of the storytelling feels undercooked, meaning it only really comes into its own in shorter, self-contained vignettes, as when Billy’s collection of neighborhood pals hang outside the local convenience story faking traffic accidents in order to extort drivers into buying them beer. But the movie’s strongest suit is its dialogue, which is hilariously perceptive and sometimes downright wise. “Sleep is for rich people,” Billy retorts to one of his sister’s nags. “Wash your hands if you’ve been touching money,” she complains before serving dinner. “Renting the fantasy!” Billy exclaims as he buys a lottery ticket. It’s obvious from the thrust of almost all the conversations that Billy is not as in control of his fate as he thinks he is, which is a common delusion of youth and one that Boys Go to Jupiter explores with rare, albeit absurd, insight. But then, everyone in the movie, including the town’s genius hot dog entrepreneur and even Dr. Dolphin, knows you can’t always get what you want. What else should anyone living in Florida expect?

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Shibuya White Cine Quinto (03-6712- 7225). 

Boys Go to Jupiter home page in Japanese

photo (c) Glanderco, LLC

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Review: Oxana

Posted on May 21, 2026 by philipbrasor

A biopic with a built-in provocation, this French-Ukrainian-Hungarian co-production purports to tell the life story of Oxana Chatchko (Albina Korzh), one of the co-founders of the feminist organization Femen, which made headlines in the 00s by staging anti-sexist and anti-authoritarian demonstrations in Ukraine while topless. The controversy surrounding Oxana’s story is whether other members of Femen, specifically co-founder Inna Shevchenko, co-opted the organization for their own glorification when they took it to France and launched it as an international movement. According to the movie, as well as Oxana’s own words in a 2014 documentary about her, once Femen set up shop in Paris it became a “fashion brand.” For the most part, the movie, directed by Charléne Favier, adheres to this line of thought, though it goes about its explanation in a melodramatic way that the real Oxana likely would have taken issue with.

Oxana saw herself first as an artist, and a very accomplished one. Growing up in an orthodox household in Ukraine, she actually made money for her family, impoverished after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by selling icons she painted as a teenager. At university in Kyiv, she lost her religion and became politicized, mainly by the lot of women in the capital, many of whom could only get by as prostitutes. The creation of Femen with several other students was meant to protest Ukraine’s international status as a prime sex tourism destination, which many government officials were involved in. As Femen’s own reputation grew thanks to international coverage—bare breasts will attract media every time, they knew—their activities spread throughout Ukraine and spilled over into neighboring Belarus (where the local KGB kidnapped and threatened to rape and kill them) and even Moscow, where they specifically targeted Putin. During this time, Shevchenko, spooked by the authoritarian terror their demonstrations attracted, decamped to Paris with other Femen members while Oxana was left to rot in a Russian prison. Eventually, a French human rights lawyer negotiated her release and won her asylum in France, where she eventually gave up on Femen and concentrated solely on her art. 

The movie’s structure splits the development into several timelines, but mainly switches back-and-forth between her sentimental education as an activist and one fateful day in Paris as she tries to convince a doubtful immigration officer of her refugee bona fides and prepares for a major exhibition of her work. The structural conceit only adds to the movie’s confused state of mind when it comes to Oxana’s personal demons versus her actual commitments, both of which are difficult to parse because she’s presented as such an emotional mess, something the documentary refuted. Based on the testimony of those who knew her intimately, she understood exactly what she wanted and what she believed in, which makes her fate that much more difficult to accept. 

In Ukrainian, French & Russian. Opens May 22 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

Oxana home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 – Rectangle Productions – 2.4.7. Films – Hero Squared – France 3 Cinema – Tabor Ltd.

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Review: EPiC and The Choral

Posted on May 15, 2026 by philipbrasor

What made Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley so monumental wasn’t what it revealed—if you really want to know about Elvis’s life read Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography—or its dodgy insights into Elvis’s personality, but rather the way it appropriated Elvis’s peculiar attributes as a performer to create a spectacle that was every bit as flamboyant as the man. Elvis eschewed the dramatic arc typical of musical biopics for a more intense take on the singer as an American original in that there was very little distance between what he was and how he performed. It’s why he was so revolutionary as an artist. While researching the movie, Luhrmann came across unused footage from two of Elvis’s concert movies from his early Vegas days—Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour—and has patched it together with already released concert scenes from those movies to create EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a kind of impressionistic portrait of the artist as a concert animal. Even during the scenes when Elvis is not on stage, he’s performing, and thus walking straight into Luhrmann’s wheelhouse.

Much is made in casual comments from the King himself that he is through with his movie career, which he denigrates as phony and pointless, and wants to get back to the genuineness of live music, but what Luhrmann emphasizes with his selection of numbers and decision to present them in IMAX is the bigness of the Elvis production, thus clarifying that the music is only part of the show, a means for which the man can parlay his greatness; and as much of a cornpone as Elvis can be with his capes, karate chops, blue jumpsuits, and carefully cultivated perspiration, there is definitely a greatness in his presence as a performer that could only be appreciated by seeing him in person, and it’s this quality that Luhrmann is so desperate to convey. Wisely, he has chosen to do it with technology: the big screen (the digital restoration is excellent), the big sound (the remastering proves how great his band was), the attention to all the details. He gives us whole songs—the stage mashup of “Little Sister” and the Beatles’ “Get Back” with Elvis sitting down and strumming guitar is worth the price of admission alone—but also bits of rare conversation that don’t so much provide context as explore the thinking behind the spectacle. “It’s very hard to live up to an image,” he says during a press conference, and Luhrmann remains on his face an extra beat after he says it, as if trying to figure out if he really believes his own bullshit.

That’s because the movie is all image. Luhrmann only teases the possibility that we will get to know anything more about Elvis than we already know. This is before he became fat and confused. Luhrmann is only interested in the art, and he shows how Elvis’s whole approach to his craft was more artful than he’s given credit for. This is especially obvious in the sequences that cover rehearsals, where he’s impatient but adamant about what he wants, even if he sometimes has trouble explaining it. EPiC is one of the most entertaining concert movies ever made because it revisits a truism we now take for granted, that Elvis was talented but misguided, and shows us after all these years that we still have the capacity to underestimate him. 

Performance is also the operative word in The Choral, one of those provincial historical comedy-dramas that the British can’t get enough of. The setting is a fictional English town in 1916, when the human toll of World War I was just being felt by the populace. Young men waiting for their own call-ups deliver death notices to households and older establishment types try to drum up patriotic feelings among a citizenry that has no idea what they’re fighting for. Amidst this emotional turmoil, the town is about to put on its annual choral society performance, which usually does a Bach mass, but since Bach is German, they have to think of something else. The main obstacle, however, is that the cream of their male vocal crop is off to the trenches, leaving old-timers, teenage boys, and—gasp!—women as the only substitutes, but the show must go on, and so in the absence of their usual choir master they hire Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), an organist whose credentials are suspect since he trained and worked in Germany. 

Guthrie’s loyalties, which he doesn’t necessarily dispute, end up being the least of the society’s worries in getting the performance off the ground. Guthrie acknowledges that Bach is a hard sell in these times, and suggests a little known oratorio by the British composer Edward Elgar, who is mainly known for having written “Pomp and Circumstance.” The great man is quite taken with the idea that this work, which is rarely performed, is being taken up by an amateur choral society until he meets Guthrie and discovers that he has had to alter the score to fit the choir’s much reduced resources. Royal-scale fireworks follow.

Written by playwright Alan Bennett and directed by the reliably stodgy Nicholas Hytner, The Choral is sturdy entertainment that nevertheless feels musty and, despite its musical provenance, tone-deaf. There are lots of offhanded jokes made at the expense of the dead and soon-to-die, and the constant harping on sex—all the boys who are about to go over there are desperate to lose their cherry to the town’s designated middle-aged prostitute—feels like it was imported straight from the late 1960s, when such matters were considered edgy. The music, however, is quite lovely. 

EPiC now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX, 050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX, 050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Choral now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

EPiC home page in Japanese

The Choral home page in Japanese

EPiC photo (c) 2025 Sony Music Entertainment

The Choral photo (c) Gerontius Productions Limited 2025

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Review: The Botanist

Posted on May 14, 2026 by philipbrasor

When most people hear of Xinjiang they probably think of the Uyghur people, who make up a sizable portion of the Chinese province’s population. In that case, they may also think about how the Chinese government has suppressed their culture and their religion. However, the sparsely populated northern edge of Xinjiang borders Kazakhstan, and many of the people who live on the Chinese side speak Kazakh and still follow Kazakh customs. This community is the focus of director Yi Jing’s debut feature The Botanist, whose titular protagonist is a 13-year-old Kazakh boy who studies local plants under a microscope and keeps copious notes about them in his native hand. Occasionally, Yi inserts dramatized Kazakh folk tales and legends into the story in order to illustrate certain plot points, but for the most part he follows the boy, Arsin (Yesl Jahseleh), on his daily rounds as he walks through the forests and fields collecting samples, tends to his grandmother’s flock of sheep alongside his distracted older brother (Jalen Nurdaolet), and plays with the Han Chinese girl Meiyu (Ren Zihan), whose family runs the village’s only grocery store. 

Yi dispenses with a conventional storyline, but there are dramatic developments that accumulate in an organic way to form a portrait of Arsin’s milieu. The brother, it turns out, has recently returned from Beijing, where he apparently got into trouble with the law. He still has a girlfriend there and is often seen on his cell phone talking to her. The brothers’ mother arrives one day unannounced but abruptly leaves after she herself receives a phone call, saying that she has to go back to “the city” in order to attend to some “paperwork.” Arsin’s wayward uncle, the man who turned him on to plants, has slipped from the grace of nature into alcoholism and disappeared, but his presence in Arsin’s thoughts (at one point a horse tells him what his uncle is up to) is almost constant. And while Arsin’s and Meiyu’s relationship is close when they’re together on their own, they are never together in the village; and after Meiyu informs Arsin that she is being sent to boarding school in Shanghai, he realizes, by calculating the distance and the time needed to visit her, that he will likely never see her again. When he tries to say goodbye at her family’s store, her brother pushes him away and calls him a “weirdo.” Arsin’s brother, having drunk the Kool-Aid called Beijing, can no longer stay away and is spirited off one day in a car. 

Yi’s pastoral visuals and sounds are pleasantly lulling, so when the modern world breaks in it can be startling. The movie proceeds at Arsin’s leisurely pace, which can shift from thoughtful to confused in the blink of an eye. Better attuned to nature than he is to human interaction, he looks at life holistically. “If history were an herbarium,” he muses, “it could be preserved forever.” His love for Meiyu is pure until he realizes that their relationship is frowned upon by others. Then the relationship itself is history, something he can write down in his journal and ponder the meaning of; or make a beautiful, heartbreaking movie about. 

In Kazakh and Mandarin. Opens May 15 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Botanist home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Monologue Films 

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