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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Review: The Smashing Machine

Posted on May 13, 2026 by philipbrasor

Much has been made of Dwayne Johnson’s lead performance as real-life mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr. Critics have lauded his ability to move beyond his action movie appeal to portray a complex individual going through a difficult set of circumstances both professionally and personally, but it should hardly be surprising. Johnson has been a movie star for two decades now and he started his professional fighting career as the Rock in the more theatrical realm of professional wrestling, thus giving him actual experience as an actor, you might say. Moreover, the character’s most salient dramatic trait is his inherent goodness, which was also Johnson’s most noted attribute when he transitioned from the role of a pro wrestling heel to a soft-spoken likable screen hunk. He’s actually made for the part.

This quality is stressed right at the beginning. MMA, unlike the freestyle wrestling Kerr excelled in as an amateur and pro wrestling from which MMA naturally evolved as an entertainment, is really about how much actual punishment the body can take, and after Kerr debuts in the fledgling sport at an event in Brazil, he’s seriously bruised and battered, occasioning frequent visits to the doctor. In an early scene he’s confronted in a physician’s waiting room by an old woman who’s startled by the condition of his face, and he’s obliged to explain how it got that way. Despite her initial horror at what he does for a living, he wins her over because of his gentle, personable nature. This dynamic continually comes into play as his star rises in MMA and the injuries never let up. Kerr becomes hopelessly addicted to painkillers, which seriously puts his relationship to girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), who has her own codependency problems, in jeopardy, finally resulting in a suicide attempt. 

These disturbing domestic episodes are juxtaposed with realistic recreations of bouts that take place all over the world, including quite a few in Japan, scenes that director Benny Safdie stages with admirable verisimilitude owing in no small part to Johnson’s extensive experience in the ring (or cage, as the case may be). Unlike his estranged brother Josh’s own recent sports movie, Marty Supreme, or the brothers’ previously jointly directed features, Benny’s The Smashing Machine takes no advantage of the comic potential of the subject at hand and comes across as a relentlessly brutal downer in the Cassavettes style. However, Cassavettes got his point across by providing context that reinforced the melodrama. Here, the protagonist is an infinitely nice guy who can’t quite put up with the nastiness of his job and what it does to his body and soul, but there’s not much else to the movie except his suffering. 

Opens May 15 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Smashing Machine home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Real Hero Rights LLC

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Review: The Sheep Detectives and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

Posted on May 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Until Aladdin, big movie stars weren’t normally used as voice actors for animated features, and, in fact, Robin Williams’ Genie set a very high bar that few big names have been able to reach, mainly because of his brilliant ad libs, which the animation crew had to work around. We’ve now come to expect familiar voices coming out of cartoon characters to the point where it’s often the main marketing hook, thus relegating real voice actors—meaning people who make a living by doing voiceovers only—to lesser work. The animation in The Sheep Detectives is all CGI, meaning the voice actors have to work against real actors like Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson, a task that animation voice actors of the past didn’t have to contend with, so, in a sense, having real world acting chops is necessary, though I’m not sure the synergy works as well as it’s supposed to in this case. For one thing, the animated sheep for whom the voice actors voice never speak in human language with their nominally human interlocutors. They simply bleat, because the movie is one of those fantasies where the animals only talk in sentences with one another.

And the fantasy extends to the setting, which is a kind of idealized rural village that’s 3 parts English heath and two parts New Zealand highland, with a liberal mix of Commonwealth and American accents to further confuse the situation. Here, the bohemian shepherd George Hardy (Jackman) lives out of a very American-looking silver trailer while tending in a hands-on way his loyal flock, which he profits from only through their wool (lovingly shorn, as the movie is careful to point out) and not their meat. They’re a happy, diverse lot, though there does seem to be a pecking order, with respectable older male types voiced by Bryan Cranston and Patric Stewart lording it over the females (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, etc.) and the iconoclasts (Chris O’Dowd). As the title so plainly lets on, these sheep are called upon to solve a mystery, a task they are suited to because George puts them to sleep every night by reading classic detective fiction to them. So when a murder occurs in the village, the sheep hop to it in a more organized manner than the bumbling humans, who include the lawyer for the deceased (Thompson), the constantly flummoxed head of the local constabulary (Nicholas Braun), an inexplicably aggrieved postmistress (Hong Chau), and the local butcher (Conleth Hill), whose interest in the sheep is hardly a mystery.

Director Kyle Balda brings the same jaunty mood to the comic component of The Sheep Detectives that made his Despicable Me series so successful, with most of the supporting sheep fulfilling the slapstick prerogatives that catapulted the Minions to their own separate superstardom. It helps also that, thanks to the voice actors, the sheep themselves have distinctive qualities: as Louis-Dreyfus’s character so forcefully puts it, “I refuse to be a sheep!” However, the mystery aspect of the story, which is adapted from a bestseller by German author Leonie Swann, is hardly worth pondering. It’s a rickety scaffold that’s merely designed to support the various physical comedy set pieces. Kids of a certain age and their parents high on edibles will best appreciate this kind of entertainment, which has become so laser targeted as to comprise a genre all its own.

The mystery that propels the plot of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the third movie in the Four Horsemen magician series, isn’t that interesting either, though that’s mainly because the plot itself is a little too complicated for this kind of lightweight heist flick. The four big magicians, J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritte (Woody Harrelson), Jack (Dave Franco), and Henley (Isla Fisher) are joined this time by a trio of young punks who mean to grab their title as the world greatest illusionists, and, of course, get their asses handed to them.

All seven eventually join up to steal a diamond from the CEO of a South African mining company (Rosamund Pike) who is pegged as evil for the way she runs her company and exploits her workers, which is perfectly believable, but in the realm of the story the robbery, like the murder in The Sheep Detectives, is just an end to various means, which is the magic tricks the good guys use to divert the attention of the bad guys, and as with all magic tricks in movies, it’s hard to be impressed since editing and special effects are obviously being utilized. In the end, the main drama is how effectively the vets will show up the young upstarts, and everyone gets what they deserve, illusions be damned. 

The Sheep Detectives, in Japanese subtitled 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), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t now playing in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011). 

The Sheep Detectives home page in Japanese

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t home page in Japanese

The Sheep Detectives photo (c) 2026 CTMG

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t photo (c) 2026 Lions Gate Ent. Inc.

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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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