Review: A Useful Ghost and The President’s Cake

Posted on July 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature, A Useful Ghost, has the opposite effect of being haunting. In tone and pace, it’s closer to the work of Aki Kaurasmaki, with actors striking disaffected poses regardless of what they’re reacting to. Moreover, the first spirit we encounter comes in the form of a household appliance, specifically a vaccum cleaner bought by a home-bound character identified only as the “academic ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) in order to get rid of the dust in his apartment kicked up by a nearby redevelopment project that itself is chronicled in detail as a kind of prelude. Eventually, all these seemingly disparate elements will be brought to bear on the movie’s main theme, but that is almost two hours away. When the vacuum starts coughing in the middle of the night, its new owner calls a repairman (Wanlop Rungkumjad) who shows up a bit too promptly and starts recounting the main story of the movie, which is about another possessed vacuum cleaner, this one by the spirit of a newlywed who wants to reconnect with her widowed husband.

This isn’t the only time that a story is presented within the frame of a larger story, and, in fact, the entire movie consists of characters relating tales that further Boonbunchachoke’s fairly simple idea that capitalism is the handmaiden of political corruption. The newlywed woman, Nat (Davika Hoorne), has actually married into the family of a wealthy industrialist who owns the appliance factory that manufactures the vacuum cleaner she possesses, and her exorcism, so to speak, involves electroshock therapy that allows her spirit to regain human form and look into the dreams of the factory’s workers on behalf of their employers. A powerful government minister then tries to appropriate Nat’s abilities to rid his own family and colleagues of the “ghosts” of those his regime killed in the past for their political views. 

Though Boonbunchachoke never makes it easy to follow one fantastic plotline into another (and often back again) his presentation is so light and amusing that the movie goes down effortlessly, but once it becomes imperative that we understand what he’s getting at the movie becomes laborious if only because the political ramifications are so serious. The ending, though meant to be a release of some sort, feels like a George Romero parody that’s gone off the rails. In the case of A Useful Ghost, the journey and the destination aren’t in sync.

The politics in the Iraqi feature The President’s Cake are more straightforward, though the story is an old-fashioned melodrama. The setting is Saddam-era Iraq on the eve of the Gulf War. Due to international sanctions and the looming conflict, food is scarce and water is rationed. Eight-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who is being raised alone by her grandmother, wins the dubious honor, through a classroom lottery, of baking a cake for the president on the occasion of his birthday, a task that presumably every school in the country has to perform (thus giving rise to a few pointed kid jokes about what Saddam is going to do with all that cake). Being even poorer than her classmates, Lamia doesn’t see how she can possibly afford, much less secure, the ingredients necessary, but she tries, an effort that involves an odyssey of sorts.

Accompanying Lamia on her journey is her beloved rooster Hindi, whose status as a meal-in-waiting lends the film a measure of anxious anticipation that is quickly overwhelmed by everyday reality and a plot that gallops along like the Kentucky Derby. On the way, Lamia hooks up with the requisite male scamp, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), whose knowledge of the underground economy helps Lamia acquire her wares, but not without frequent suspenseful encounters with criminals, fallen women, and, worst of all, the authorities in their many guises. There are, of course, also Good Samaritans who help Lamia and Saeed on their quest, including a woman who actually teaches the little girl how to make a cake, an endeavor whose double meaning (success! but to what end, really?) is played for all it’s worth. 

Death and destruction is never far away as the Americans launch their attack and Lamia is separated from her grandmother. The President’s Cake is the feature debut of Hasan Hadi, who received invaluable assistance from Hollywood heavyweights like Eric Roth, Chris Columbus, and Marielle Heller that can be seen in the superior production values and ingenious camera placements, not to mention the scary special effects. It’s an accomplished film whose emotional payoffs more than counteract the forced sentimentality of the setups, which feel more and more episodic as the movie progresses. The end may leave you slightly bewildered, but you’ll be glad you and Lamia got there in one piece. 

A Useful Ghost, in Thai, English and Teochew, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

The President’s Cake, in Arabic, now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

A Useful Ghost home page in Japanese

The President’s Cake home page in Japanese

A Useful Ghost photo (c) 2025 185 Films, Haut Les Mains, Momo Film Co.

The President’s Cake photo (c) 2025 TPC Film LLC

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Review: Bring Her Back and Good Boy

Posted on July 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

The Australian Philippou brothers, Danny and Michael, quickly followup their hit debut, Talk to Me, with Bring Her Back, an even more disturbing horror film that relies less on supernatural spookiness; which isn’t to say its plot doesn’t beggar belief, but rather that the constant sense of unease is based solely on the all-too-human aspects of the story and characters. Peril is present from the start, when teenage Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger stepsister Piper (Sora Wong) are suddenly orphaned by the death of their father. The Australian foster care system believes it is best to separate the two, who object strongly since Piper, who is partially sighted, has mostly been raised by Andy. A savior in the form of former counselor and experienced foster parent Laura (Sally Hawkins) appears. She agrees to take both siblings into her big remote house after initially rejecting Andy because of something he once did. The idea is that three months down the road when Andy turns 18, he can become Piper’s legal guardian, but getting that far proves to be not just a problem, but a nightmare.

Laura is already taking care of another foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), whose bizarre demeanor, almost complete reticence, and tendency to bruise and self-harm make him an immediately scary housemate. In contrast, Laura is indefatigably upbeat and affectionate to all her charges, though even these seemingly positive attributes creep out Andy and Piper rather quickly. The movie’s mystery is Laura’s reasons for adopting these two because we slowly intuit that she has an ulterior motive—the prime clue is in the title—but one that the Philippous keep at a confounding remove with small-bore horrors that don’t always make sense in the scheme of things. Piper’s wetting the bed on an almost nightly basis initially indicates her mental instability—or maybe it doesn’t, since Laura is revealed to be a seasoned gaslighter behind her benevolent exterior. 

The Philippous keep the viewer intrigued with snippets of what looks like an eastern European pagan ritual, but in general their method of sprinkling clues haphazardly only serve to undermine the integrity of the overall rationale for Laura’s and Oliver’s behavior. Unlike the simplistic spirituality at work in Talk to Me, the more psychological texture of the horror in Bring Her Back is often too dense to comprehend. You want the movie to shut down every few minutes so that you can process the unbelievable thing you just saw before watching the next unbelievable thing. It’s effective, but exhausting.

The rationale behind the short, sharp horror film Good Boy is even trickier, though once it comes into focus the movie feels as if it couldn’t end soon enough. The good boy of the title is a Nova Scotia retriever named Indy, which is the actual dog in real life of the movie’s director, Ben Leonberg. Indy is by far the main reason to watch the film because he’s expressive in ways that make complete sense within the movie’s field of logic. Almost the entire film takes place in an old house in the woods that was once owned by the grandfather of Indy’s owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), who has retreated there by himself after undergoing punishing treatment for a chronic illness that’s never identified, though the most prevalent symptom is fits of violent coughing. Todd’s sister, Vera, whom we only encounter as a voice on the telephone, worries about Todd retreating to what she calls a “haunted house,” thus placing the seed of unease in the viewer’s mind.

The movie is supposed to be told from Indy’s perspective, which means we almost never see a human face, including Todd’s. As Todd’s days in the house accumulate, the dog keeps picking up on strange noises and fleeting shadows that he obviously perceives as threats to his master, and Leonberg’s intentions come into focus as tidbits of information surrounding the house—that the grandfather died of a disease not unlike Todd’s, and that he also owned a very faithful dog—are explained through indirection. There is almost no conventional plot to speak of, but rather a series of occurrences that feel like an extended setup for something monumental. The monumental thing does eventually occur, but it mainly comes as a realization on the viewer’s part and not an actual entity, and thus may feel like a cheat. Good Boy has merit as an exercise in intensifying dread but it doesn’t quite sell its aim of surveying the emotional landscape of a loyal canine. 

Bring Her Back opens July 10 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Good Boy opens July 10 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

Bring Her Back home page in Japanese

Good Boy home page in Japanese

Bring Her Back photo (c) 2025 Rackaway PTY Ltd

Good Boy photo (c) 2025 Whats Wrong With Your Dog, LLC

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Review: Nouvelle Vague

Posted on July 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Richard Linklater is much too practical a director to make a movie that doesn’t attempt to entertain, regardless of the subject matter or mode of expression. As the title of his latest film attests, he means to address the French New Wave of the late 50s-early 60s and gets a lot of visual and aural mileage out of cliches attached to the cinematic movement—cool jazz, chain smoking, epigrammatic line readings, monochrome palette—but presents it all in a playful way, as if he’d studied the trend as a graduate student would for a thesis and then just goofed on it. The film is breezy and non-confrontational, even when the characters aren’t. Cinephiles who might prefer something more scholarly or  nuanced should still find the movie a pleasure to sit through regardless of whether it tells them anything new.

Linklater doesn’t try to explain the movement. The movie simply focuses on the making of the film that capped the New Wave and, in doing so, defined it from then on: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. By the time Godard finally made it in 1960, all the other French film critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema had already directed their debut films. The sunglass-sporting Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is presented as a stereotype, constantly speaking in aphorisms that betray a condescending attitude toward his peers. He has no use for conventions as professed in what amounts to his creative motto: “Make your own mistakes.” His confidence in his untried methodology is disarmingly magnetic. Getting Belmondo (Aubrey Dullin) to play the small-time crook in his movie is no big deal, since the struggling B-actor is perfectly willing to commit “career suicide”: It’s not the challenge he’s interested in but the freedom Godard offers. Securing the services of Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) is more difficult, since she’s been tainted by Hollywood success, but thanks to her marriage to a Frenchman who, as her manager, wants to broaden her professional horizons, she takes the role of the American expat without really knowing what she’s getting into. Then again, given Godard’s willfully experimental creative rationale, nobody does, including his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst), who becomes increasingly frustrated by Godard’s structureless shooting schedule and penchant for hiring people (stuntmen, makeup artists) he later decides he has no use for. The production becomes a series of non sequiturs. No one involved has any idea of what the movie is about or what it might look like in the end, including Godard.

As a comedy, Nouvelle Vague feeds off Godard’s intended flouting of cinematic rules, but it also gains considerable traction from Linklater’s obvious tribute to the period and its attendant self-consciously artistic sensibility. Perhaps the most emblematic scene in that regard is the one where Rossellini, while being feted by the cream of the French movie industry at an event in his honor, hoards sandwiches from the buffet for later consumption. Whenever Linklater wants to drop a name, he simply hauls up the famous filmmaker, sets them squarely in front of the camera, and provides their name in bold typography on the screen. The French New Wave thus becomes a kind of running joke, all these pompous men (except for Agnes Varda) acting pompously…but all for a noble purpose! Linklater defends his thesis admirably, if not necessarily seriously, and everyone has a good time in the process.

In French and English. Opens July 10 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Nouvelle Vague home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 ARP – Detour Development LLC

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Review: The Love That Remains and Good Valley Stories

Posted on July 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

The Icelandic filmmaker and visual artist Hlynur Pálmason requires his audience to put in some effort—not a lot, but enough to force you to pay close attention—in order to make sense of the domestic dynamic at work within the family unit at the center of his movie The Love That Remains. The film’s scope takes in a full year during which we notice the seasons pass, but the structure is episodic so home truths can only be understood through patterns of behavior. Moreover, Pálmason often tosses in non sequiturs and fantasy sequences that can throw the viewer off the scent of his narrative quarry. 

In the beginning, the only thing that’s clear is that the couple involved, a visual artist named Anna (Saga Garðarsdöttir) and a long haul fisherman named Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), have decided to end their marriage, and that both will continue to live in their rural Icelandic community so that Magnús can be close to their three children—twin boys and a teenage girl, all of whom are played by Pálmason’s own kids—and the family dog, Panda. Though the split is an amicable one, Anna and Magnús seem incompatible from the get-go. She’s an earthy, outgoing artist with a worldly sensibility, and he’s a simple working man who is nonetheless insecure in his masculinity. A running joke has him constantly hitting her up for sex that she withholds for one offhanded reason or another (“It would confuse the kids”). But Pálmason’s main method of demonstrating this incompatibility is to show them at work. Magnús spends months at a time on a big boat surrounded by other men insecure in their masculinity while Anna attends to her abstract environmental art mostly by herself. In one extended sequence she entertains a pompous Swedish art dealer with superhuman patience before seeing him off with a muttered “Asshole!” The children, meanwhile, seem to do alright without Magnús around, which isn’t surprising since he wasn’t around that much when he was married to their mother, and it eventually becomes obvious that Anna gave birth to their first child when they were teens. 

Much of the mood is light, even comical, especially in the dream sequences that are usually staged at Magnús’s expense. The ending, which finds Magnús mourning the passing of his role as paterfamilias in a particularly bizarre manner, doesn’t provide much in the way of closure. As a chronicle of connubial disintegration, The Love That Remains is perhaps overly coy in its attempt to prove a point, but it’s also beautifully shot (the landscape is bare and treacherously gorgeous) and disarmingly honest about what a family is all about. 

The photography of the rural setting in the Spanish documentary Good Valley Stories is equally lovely but the effect is entirely different, since the setting is the stories. Director Jose Luis Guerín has always been interested in Barcelona and here focuses on an isolated pocket of humanity located just outside the city in a valley called Vallbona that has mostly been overlooked by the authorities owing to historical and bureacratic happenstance. Vallbona is surrounded on one side by a river, on another side by a major highway, and on a third side by a railway. The people who have settled within this triangle are mostly outsiders who have built their own homes and live a subsistence existence when they aren’t commuting to the city for work. As the opening titles explain it, Vallbona developed as “people from the South arrived,” and by “south” he doesn’t just mean the south of Spain.

Guerín filmed for more than three years, during which the area underwent drastic changes due to new development that displaced many residents, forcing some to abandon their makeshift dwellings and move into state-run apartment complexes. In addition, many of the vegetable and flower gardens that had been attended by generations of immigrants were appropriated for the construction of a new railway passage. Guerín samples the multi-ethnic community in a manner so casual that it’s apparent some scenes were staged for their poignancy and aesthetic impact (an idyllic sequence showing residents enjoying a communal day at the canal is interrupted by shouts that “the cops are coming,” but after everyone flees only Guerín remains and no police show up). And while he shows effectively how disparate cultures can maintain their distinctive lifestyles while adapting to native mores and languages, he seems more interested in their mutual loss of a sense of place, mostly through the stories of the community’s elders, who have been here since the 40s when Franco’s shadow was still a threat. Certainly the most entertaining and edifying scenes are those in which these elders discuss everything from the French revolution to the delicacy of small-plot agriculture over good food and alcohol. Scripted? I wouldn’t be surprised, but I also wouldn’t change a thing.

In the end, Guerín seems to be saying, the world can’t be denied. The newest refugees are Russians and Ukrainians, united not only by a linguistic bond but by their sense of uprootedness on account of a war they could only escape. To them, Villbona is paradise, and not just because of the absence of daily strife. They seem to have stumbled upon it and in doing so believe they’ve won the lottery. 

The Love That Remains, in Icelandic and English, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Good Valley Stories, in Spanish, Catalan, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, and African dialects, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Love That Remains home page in Japanese

Good Valley Stories home page in Japanese

The Love That Remains photo (c) Still Vivid, Snowglobe, Hobab, Maneki Films, Film I Vast, Arte France Cinema

Good Valley Stories photo (c) 2025 Orfeo Iluso – Perspective Films – 3CAT – Los Ilusos Films – Los Films de Orfeo

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Review: Count Basie: Through His Own Eyes

Posted on July 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

This documentary purports to reveal a more intimate side of the legendary pianist and big band leader through “private correspondence and home movies” that, supposedly, have never been made public before. Most of these documents seem to consist of letters he wrote home from the road, notes he was making for a memoir, and genuine home movies. However, as the narration, spoken by actor Clarke Peters, says more than once, Basie was a man of few words who wasn’t fond of talking about himself, and these personal materials are actually much less revealing than the requisite talking head interviews, which in this case include noted jazz critics like Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald, former band members like John C. Williams and collaborators like Quincy Jones, as well as relatives and family friends. In the end, the only real new information I gleaned from the doc had to do with Basie’s daughter, Diane, who was born with cerebral palsy. 

The chronology is maddeningly inconsistent, often jumping from one timeframe to another in order to follow a theme and, in doing so, running over the same incidents (and using the same visuals) without adding anything fresh. Basie’s development as a pianist is shortchanged by the filmmakers. He goes from accompanying carnival acts and vaudeville productions in Red Hook, New Jersey, to hustling gigs in Harlem in the 1920s without any mention of how he got to that point professionally except to say that he greatly admired Fats Waller. And while Basie was an excellent stride pianist, it wasn’t what made him unique as an instrumentalist in the long run. More time is given over to the founding of his big band in Kansas City in the 30s and how he then brought that particular sound back east, where his reputation for “swinging the blues” made him more popular as a dance act than any other swing era ensemble The fact that he was not celebrated at the time with as much general fanfare as those other big bands was, of course, due to racism, a matter covered extensively throughout the film, as it should be, though Basie himself never complained that much being the kind of closed-off personality that he was. The doc finally comes into its own when it charts the band’s rise as a jazz institution in the 50s and 60s, mainly because of the available footage of the band and the man in action.

Occasionally, the narrative does get into areas that might have been ripe for their own dedicated documentaries, such as the Nazis’ secret obsession with African-American jazz or how the militant Black movement of the late 60s resented older successful artists like Basie for having made their peace, and their fortunes, with white patronage. If you know nothing about him, this is a good enough primer, especially about how influential his spare piano style and super syncopated rhythms were on all the jazz music that followed in his wake, but given how meticulous a professional William Basie was, the overall documentary is quite disheveled. 

Opens July 3 in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

Home page in Japanese

photo (c) Eagle Rock Entertainment Ltd.

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Review: Gloaming in Luomo and Mothertongue

Posted on July 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Gloaming in Luomu won the inaugural Busan Prize in the Competition section of last year’s Busan International Film Festival. Zhang, a mainstay at the festival for two decades, is a master of characterization and setting, though he’s a bit weak when it comes to plotting, even if fans will likely counter that storylines are not his main concern. His previous film, The Shadowless Tower, however, which delved into one man’s middle age dilemma in a wholly believable way, proved that he can fashion a solid narrative when he puts his mind to it. 

The protagonist of Gloaming is Bai (Bai Baihe), a former dancer who visits the titular tourist spot in Sichuan Province because a boyfriend who ghosted her 3 years ago once sent her a postcard from there. Bai spends a lot of time drinking with the natives and wandering around the leafy town, which is striated with lovely, pristine canals. Bai’s purpose for being there—her visit stretches out into what some would call a long residence—seems to shift from one conversation to another, with the town’s beautiful ambient light providing a kind of counterpart to her constantly changing mood. Though the viewer is meant to think that Bai is searching for her old lover, or, at least, trying to find out what happened to him, not much detective work is accomplished, and not just because she tends to get drunk before any plausible answers can be discovered. Most of Bai’s conversations are with another day drinker, Liu (Liu Dan), who’s more cynical than Bai though her love for her ineffectual husband seems to provide a measure of inspiration for the newcomer. 

The viewer will likely not share in this inspiration, mainly because so many scenes are repetitive and pointless. The slow rhythms point up Luomo’s attraction as a destination, which, in the end, may be the movie’s most salient selling point. It would be a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there unless you were an alcoholic.

Zhang’s even more recent film, Mothertongue, screened in the Competition section at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, where Zhang shared the Best Director prize with two other filmmakers. Bai again stars, this time as a struggling actor named Chunshu who manages to land a choice role in a major motion picture because the character she will be playing is from Chengdu, which is Chunshu’s hometown. However, when the producers learn that she has lost her facility with the local dialect in the years since she left, they drop her. Dejected, she returns to Chengdu to reconnect with her past, in particular the acting coach (Liu Dan again) who convinced her to lose her regional accent in the first place, telling her “only actors who speak standard Mandarin” can get work these days.

As with Gloaming, the purpose of Mothertongue seems mainly to be to promote its setting as a desirable tourist spot. Chengdu’s main claim to fame is the defunct Emei Film Studio, where many notable Chinese films of the past were made. Zhang was able to shoot the movie on the premises, which were abandoned and, by now, have probably been demolished, so the film has an intentionally marked sense of nostalgia. This sense is heightened by Liu’s retired acting coach, one of the few people who still live in the studio’s residential complex and who claims to be suffering from dementia, meaning she has forgotten much of the studio’s history, just as China has, Zhang suggests. 

Mothertongue feels more coherent that Gloaming in Luomo if only because Zhang seems more engaged in the things he’s showing. It’s a more personal movie, which, to an instinctive filmmaker like Zhang, means everything.

Gloaming in Luomo and Mothertongue, both in Mandarin, open July 3 in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Home page in Japanese

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Review: The Outwaters and The Long Walk

Posted on June 26, 2026 by philipbrasor

Horror movies have been ascendant for decades, but in the last few years, certainly since the end of the pandemic, they’ve become even more commercially viable since they seem to be the only genre outside of children’s animated films that can bring young people into movie theaters; which means, of course, that horror in and of itself is saving world cinema for the future. And it’s worth pondering just what it is about current horror films as opposed to horror films of, say, 30 or even ten years ago that make them appealing to Gen Z, and one inescapable factor is how independent-minded directors like the young men who made Obsession and Backrooms on shoestring budgets have refashioned horror cliches to reflect their own insecurities in ways that resonate with their cohort. The Outwaters, a horror movie by Robbie Banfitch, who not only wrote and directed it, but stars and did the editing and cinematography (not to mention most of the music), may actually be too subjective for the new generation of horror fans, and certainly lacks the narrative rigor that the most striking horror usually has to deliver, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t scary as shit. 

The main narrative issue is that The Outwaters is another found-footage film in the style of The Blair Witch Project. The movie opens with audio from a 911 call against a black screen of a woman screaming hysterically while the operator tries to calm her down to find out what is going on. The call is being made in 2017, and this sequence is followed by a title card explaining that police found memory cards in the Mojave Desert in 2022. So what we subsequently watch is the content of these cards, which were from the camera or phone of amateur L.A. filmmaker Robbie (Banfitch), who plans a trip to the Mojave with his friend Michelle (Michelle May), a budding indie singer who wants to make a music video, and so, of course, Robbie thinks “desert.” To turn the job into a kind of jaunt, Robbie invites his older brother, the quiet, thoughtful hunk Scott (Scott Schamell), and another female friend from the east coast, Angela (Angela Basolis), to do hair and makeup, since she’s never been west. Most of the footage in the first half of the film is rote setup—what kind of people these characters are—and it’s obviously Banfitch’s intent to show them as not being particularly interesting. Once the movie gets into the desert, where the quartet will be camping as they make the video, things initially progress without incident as the characters adapt to the weird, forbidding environment. And then at one point the weather gets strange, odd noises emerge from the night, and everything goes seriously south without let-up.

Visually, Banfitch doesn’t stray from the found-footage template. The horrors are mostly suggested, especially since much of the action in the extremely disturbing last 45 minutes takes place in total darkness, with only Robbie’s iPhone flashlight illuminating tiny patches of seeming reality. However, the accumulation of disquieting images within these patches—frightened faces, insects, weird snakelike creatures, and lots and lots of blood—have the effect of forcing the viewer to draw conclusions that are very unpleasant but impossible to verify based on what’s available. Banfitch seems more interested in this effect than in telling a coherent story, since many of the images clearly could not have been recorded on the memory cards that the video is ostensibly taken from; which sets up Robbie, who is operating the camera, as the ultimate unreliable narrator, making us wonder if maybe he isn’t the perpetrator of these atrocities. For sure, he is definitely going mad without any indication in the beginning that he had the potential for madness, but the disconnect between his point-of-view and the content of the found footage is a problem that Banfitch the director doesn’t even attempt to solve, and perhaps for that reason alone The Outwaters—what does that title even mean?—is a new kind of horror movie, one in which logic itself becomes a terrifying uncertainty. 

The Long Walk is a horror movie in the old school sense, since it is based on a Stephen King story, one he wrote in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Like The Running Man, another Bachman story that’s been turned into a movie (several times), The Long Walk is premised on a game of life-and-death survival staged to distract a disenfranchised populace from the indignities of the dystopia they live in. The movie, as directed by Francis Lawrence, is more class-conscious than The Running Man, with most of the action actually focused on discussions among the contestants regarding social theory and the like, though couched in King’s peculiarly spiky vernacular. 

The titular contest is one of eugenics. Fifty boy volunteers from across the U.S. take part in an endurance walking race until only one remains. Anyone who falls behind the established pace is warned to keep up and if he doesn’t is shot dead. That’s pretty much it, so what you have is various characters illuminated as to their mental state and backstories as they talk to one another while walking along an empty highway followed by truckloads of armed men and TV cameras. Predictably, the principals are a colorfully varied bunch: a kid with serious emotional problems (Charlie Plummer), a weak boy with an amazingly big heart (David Jonsson), and the obvious leader type (Cooper Hoffman) whose goal seems not to be winning but rather to prove to the powers that be that they can be beaten by the solidarity of defiance. 

Lawrence means to comment on the current political climate, and not just in America, and so The Long Walk, for all its dramatic effect and excellent acting, often feels over-extended, lacking in the kind of subtlety that would make it thoughtful rather than merely provocative. And as a horror movie it adheres faithfully to one facet of the genre that is unavoidable, which is fantasy. It has compelling things to say about the terrors of authoritarianism and the power of resistance, but the fantastical trappings automatically make it less scary than the purely visceral terrors of The Outwaters. 

The Outwaters now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

The Long Walk now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).

The Outwaters home page in Japanese

The Long Walk home page in Japanese

The Outwaters (c) Outwater Road X, LLC. 2022

The Long Walk (c) 2025 Lions Gate Films Inc.

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Media watch: Zainichi Koreans often had it harder in Korea than they had it in Japan

Posted on June 24, 2026 by philipbrasor
Seoul Central Prosecutor’s Office

We’ve often written about the discrimination that Japan-born-and-resident “zainichi” Koreans have to put up with in Japan, but as it turns out, they also face a certain amount of discrimination in Korea, too. A June 14 story in the Asahi Shimbun explained the situation of 71-year-old Kim Byung-jin, who lives in the city of Sakai in Osaka Prefecture, where he teaches Korean language and culture along with his wife. Kim was born in Kobe and attended university in South Korea. In 1983, while a graduate student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, he was arrested by state security police and his wife and two-month-old baby were placed under house arrest. 

This was at the height of the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship, when anyone suspected of having anything to do with North Korea was tortured, imprisoned, and sometimes disappeared. Kim was accused of spying for the North in the 1970s and duly tortured for three months. His case was sent to state prosecutors with the expectation that he would be tried as a spy. However, according to the National Security Act, a prosecutor may suspend the filing of an indictment while considering the motive behind a violation of the security law and the circumstances of the suspect following the commission of a crime, and during that period the suspect is released pending a formal indictment. 

During this period when the prosecutor supposedly studied his case, Kim remained in Korea under surveillance and forced to act as a Korean-Japanese interpreter for the Defense Security Command (DSC, now defunct), where he worked for two years. In 1986, the prosecutor had still not indicted Kim and he returned to Japan with his family, settling in Sakai. In 1988, he published a book in both Japanese and Korean editions about his ordeal that was heavily critical of the South Korean military government. As a result, the DSC subpoenaed him to return to South Korea for violating the Military Confidentiality Protection Law, but he ignored the subpoena. 

Nevertheless, Kim’s wife, Kang Yon-mi, has said their son was being “observed” by strange men at his kindergarten and feared that he might be abducted. When Kim tried to renew his South Korean passport, he was turned down at the consulate. It wouldn’t be until 2000, when Kim Dae-jung became president, that he would be able to obtain a new passport. 

In August of last year, Kim went to the Seoul prosecutor’s office with a lawyer to submit a petition to cancel the still pending indictment, explaining in an attached letter that he has been living in constant fear for more than 40 years. On May 28, the prosecutor’s office finally decided that there were no grounds to suspect Kim of spying and that he was cleared of all charges. However, this conclusion was reached in a rather roundabout way. Since Kim’s case had never gone to trial, there was no procedure in place to acquit him of the crime he was accused of. As it happens, another man who was accused of being Kim’s “accomplice” had been indicted and convicted, but after Korea underwent democratization in the late 80s, the man won the right to a retrial and was acquitted, so the prosecutor simply deemed that had Kim also been indicted and convicted, he would have been acquitted also. According to the Asahi, this was the first time in Korean legal history that such a set of circumstances led to the dropping of charges. 

Kim says he didn’t even know he had an “accomplice,” but the information was not surprising. Under South Korea’s military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, many young Zainichi Koreans were arrested as North Korean spies and sentenced to death or long-term prison stays. After 2010, many were retried and acquitted. Zainichi Koreans, who weren’t necessarily trusted by the Korean citizenry, were always stuck in a legal limbo between the country of their birth and residence, Japan, and the country of their heritage, which after the mid-50s was either South Korea or North Korea. They were thus easy scapegoats, especially those who originally declared themselves North Koreans for nationality purposes and then switched to South Korea when they wanted to attend a South Korean university, since they couldn’t attend a Japanese university and North Korea didn’t have any such programs. Kim’s lawyers told Asahi that there were other Zainichi Koreans arrested during the dictatorship and never tried, and that he hopes they can be exonerated as well. 

According to an article that appeared last December in the magazine Shukan Kinyobi, in 1975, a number of Zainichi Koreans were arrested in South Korea as North Korean spies during the so-called Nov. 22 Incident, when suspected communists were rounded up by the security police in the wake of the collapse of Saigon. Zainichi Korean students were specially targeted because so many were studying in South Korea at the time due to an atmosphere of violence against Zainichi Koreans that prevailed in Japan, thus prompting many to want to learn more about their heritage. Nine were sentenced to death, and 29 were sent to prison. In 1987, when South Korea adopted democracy in the runup to the 1988 Olympics, many of these Zainichi Koreans were retried and acquitted. Those who were not retried had either died in prison or had not applied for a retrial and simply been released. The article states that the archive for the democratic development of South Korea is now housed in the intelligence offices where much of the torture of suspected communists during the military regime was carried out. 

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Review: The Last Viking and Pretty Crazy

Posted on June 19, 2026 by philipbrasor

A lot of comedies, especially those that favor a blacker hue, posit worlds that are in and of themselves insane. The Danish writer and director, Anders Thomas Jensen, creates characters who are eccentric in weird and sometimes dangerous ways. In his previous film, Riders of Justice, the protagonist was a professional soldier played by Mads Mikkelsen who attempts to avenge the death of his wife in what he believes was a terrorist act by teaming up with a statistician played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas who survived the terrorist act and presents him with a meticulously calculated theory that the “accident” could not have been “natural,” thus setting in motion a revenge thriller that is both brutally violent and ridiculously improbable. In Jensen’s new film, The Last Viking, the two actors reverse the roles, so to speak. It is Kaas who now plays the character with the perilously short fuse, an ex-convict named Anker who is trying to find the stolen money his brother buried for him while he was up the river, and it is Mikkelsen who plays the pathetic accomplice, namely the brother, Manfred, who, suffering from dissasociative identity disorder, can’t or won’t help his brother locate the cash. It says a lot about Jensen’s world view that the constantly fuming Anker is the only character in the film who seems grounded in any kind of recognizable reality.

One of the reasons the preternaturally anxious Manfred is uncooperative is that Anker, to whom he was once very close, refuses to call him by the name he now prefers, John W. Lennon. Along with Manfred’s penchant for self-defenestration, this running joke is expanded upon by a psychiatric doctor, Lothar (Lars Brygmann), who, claiming he’s dying of cancer, wants to go out with a possibly world-shaking experiment by teaming Manfred with two other psychiatric patients who also think they are Beatles, convincing Anker in the process that it is the only way to get Manfred to cough up the location of the money, which is supposedly on the land of their remote childhood home in the woods that in the meantime has been converted into an AirBnB by a couple (Søren Malling, Sofie Gråbøl) who come across as just a few shakes of the ass more lucid than Manfred. Meanwhile, one of Anker’s old criminal associates, a psychopath named Flemming (Nicolas Bro), is hunting for Anker to claim not just his share but Anker’s.

As with Riders of Justice, The Last Viking alternates highly subjective comedy sequences with scenes of unspeakable violence, creating an ethically dodgy mix of intention that challenges the conventions of plot-oriented screenwriting in ways that are often intriguing but just as often thematically dissonant. Some movies just don’t deserve happy endings.

The Korean comedy Pretty Crazy is also set in a world that feels uncomfortably askew, though in many ways that world will be familiar to anyone who has seen more than a handful of Korean comedies. The protagonist is a certifiably unemployable young man named Gil-goo (Ahn Bo-hyun), whose only skill is beating those claw crane games so popular in arcades (and which are known as “UFO catchers” in Japan), but spends most of his days in bed and most of his nights wandering around. During one late sojourn he encounters a hysterical woman in the elevator of his apartment building and soon learns that she and her cousin have opened a bakery on the first floor, except that during waking hours, this woman, Seon-ji (Yoona), is perfectly calm and reasonable. It’s love at first sight during the daytime, so when he sees the crazed Seon-Ji being manhandled on a different night by a middle aged man, he runs to her aid only to learn that the man, Jang-soo (Sung Dong-Il), is her father.

Jang-soo, sensing that Gil-goo has a crush on his daughter, offers him a job as her nighttime caretaker. It turns out that Seon-Ji is possessed by a demon that only emerges during the wee hours. Gil-goo, perhaps unwisely, takes the assignment and over the course of the movie learns about the family curse that Seon-ji has inherited, a curse her daytime incarnation doesn’t know anything about, which means the demonic incarnation is the only one who has a full understanding of where she’s at. Naturally, Gil-goo tries to figure out a way to rid Seon-Ji of her demon, who isn’t really demonic, just mean to weaker people (she tries to convince a man contemplating suicide to jump off the top of a building). In the end, the demon has more of a recognizable ego than the Pollyannish daytime Seon-ji, and Gil-goo falls equally in love with it (her?). His romantic dilemma becomes no less poignant for the ludricrous position it puts him in. 

The director, Lee Sang-geun, presents Seon-ji as the embodiment of the steady girlfriend who can be agreeable one minute and terribly contrary the next. But what he does that makes Pretty Crazy pretty appealing is showing the viewer how Gil-goo could be more in love with the devil than with the constantly accommodating baking enthusiast, and not for any overt sexual reasons (sex isn’t even alluded to). What Gil-goo does for love in the end is not only selfless, but rather smart given the consequences. The movie is equally smart, or at least as smart as a romantic slapstick Korean comedy can be.

The Last Viking, in Danish and Swedish, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Pretty Crazy, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Last Viking home page in Japanese

Pretty Crazy home page in Japanese

The Last Viking photo (c) 2025 Zentropa Entertainments 4ApS & Zentropa Sweden AB

Pretty Crazy photo (c) 2025 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., Filmmakers R&K

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Review: I Was a Stranger and Rich Flu

Posted on June 18, 2026 by philipbrasor

It would be hard to name a recent movie that is more timely than Brandt Andersen’s feature debut, I Was a Stranger, which explores, in a granular manner, the circumstances that prompted many people living in wartorn areas of the Middle East to seek refuge in a Europe, which, increasingly, refuses to let them in. In Andersen’s case, the conflict is the civil war in Syria, particularly the city of Aleppo, which, in 2015 when much of the movie takes place, was where Assad’s army was most fiercely fighting rebel forces (not to mention the Islamic State). Andersen’s expository method is to follow a series of disparate characters whose experiences during a particularly fraught period of the war overlap in ways that compellingly illustrate how refugees are not only created but exploited. 

The movie provides its own spoiler in the opening scene as its jumps ahead to 2023 to show that at least one of the refugees made it out alive, but once it starts following its own chronological logic it can become quite tense. A surgeon (Yasmine Al Massri), who treats wounded rebels alongside Syrian soldiers, is forced to flee Aleppo with her daughter after her family compound is bombed. Now targeted by her own government she has to sneak out of the country into Turkey. A Syrian soldier (Yahya Mahayni) whose father is a fugitive anti-government scholar becomes fed up with the regime after he is forced to witness the execution of a child for the crime of writing grafitti. A poet (Ziad Bakri) desperately tries to move his entire family, under cover of dark, out of the country. All these characters eventually find their fates in the hands of a gruff, glaring people smuggler (Omar Sy), who sneaks them out of the Turkish refugee camp where they end up and piles them into rubber boats for the perilous trip to Greece. Perhaps the most dramatic story is that of the PTSD-addled Greek Coast Guard captain whose everyday job is saving these refugees, since often he can’t. 

Viscerally, I Was a Stranger can be a tough movie to sit through, though its structure sometimes undermines the drama just when it reaches its most climactic junctures. It also relies emotionally on trite plot points—the abandonment of a pet dog, the smuggler’s love for his ailing son, the Coast Guard captain’s foolhardy selflessness—that hardly seem necessary given the rawness of the experiences depicted. But if Andersen’s aim is to show us why these people risk their lives to go to a place that doesn’t want them, then he definitely succeeds.

The fantasy-satire Rich Flu follows a very different kind of refugee odyssey. Laura (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the protagonist of Galder Gatztelu-Urrutia’s movie, is a go-getting film production executive who, in the beginning, believes she is up for a hefty promotion at the conglomerate that owns her production company, but is rudely shunted aside by a rival, not to mention badmouthed by the owner-founder’s ridiculously callous son. These scenes set up the dog-eat-dog brand of international capitalism that provides the ripe atmosphere for the film. 

Laura is in the midst of a contentious divorce from Tony (Rafe Spall), who wants their teenage daughter to live with him in Barcelona while Laura’s base of operations is London. The loss of the promotion muddles these plans even more, but then Laura is mysteriously summoned to the Alaskan wilderness by the owner-founder (Timothy Spall), who offers her and a chosen group of other employees stock in the company that will soon make them multi-millionaires if they join him in a “philanthropic effort” that isn’t convincingly explained (they are given copies of Walden as assigned reading). The story’s whiplash-inducing pacing keeps the jokes smarmy and pointed until people start dying off screen, and then the movie suddenly lurches into potboiler mode. 

These people are dying of the titular malady, which for reasons that no one can explain, only affects those whose net worth is above a certain astronomical level. With her unexpected windfall, Laura believes she is now a member of this unfortunate club and is desperate to isolate herself from any traveling contagion that might make her susceptible, since it proves to be fatal. Consequently, it is rich white people manning rubber dinghys and going in the opposite direction—into Africa, where they believe the virus cannot penetrate—and risking their lives in the process. I’ll hand it to Gatztelu-Urrutia. He manages to reconstitute a totally stupid premise into a capable thriller, but the anti-capitalist theme, though deserving of attention, can’t really stand up under scrutiny. Given all the conspicuous consumption on display, you would expect at least someone with a science background to explain it all, and that person never shows up.

I Was a Stranger, in Arabic, English, and Greek, opens June 19 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Rich Flu, in English and Spanish, opens June 19 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

I Was a Stranger home page in Japanese

Rich Flu home page in Japanese

I Was a Stranger photo (c) 2025 Refugee The Film, LLC

Rich Flu photo (c) 2023 Rich Flu A.I.E., Nostromo Pictures S.L., Basque Films Services S.L., Mamma Team Sonder Entertainment S.L.

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