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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Review: Immediate Family

Posted on June 17, 2026 by philipbrasor

Unlike that sprawling collective of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew (a moniker many of them disliked) who played on practically every record that came out of Southern California in the 1960s, the Immediate Family, a mere five guys who did pretty much the same thing during the 70s, became pretty well known by name as individuals to aficionados of West Coast MOR rock/the Laurel Canyon sound simply because record companies were giving credit where credit was due on album jackets by the time they were working steadily. So it’s sort of rich to hear fans like actor/musician Billy Bob Thornton refer to them as unsung heroes who “nobody knew about.” Even I knew their names, and I wasn’t a fan of everything they played on. 

To be specific, they’re guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, and Steve Postell; drummer Russ Kunkel; and bassist Leland Sklar. Except for Postell, they mainly started as the backing band for James Taylor, whose pianist on his first major tour was fellow singer-songwriter Carole King, so, of course, they played on her best-selling album Tapestry, thus cementing their legacy even before supporting people like Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Phil Collins, Don Henley, and even Keith Richards. They were as much the creators of FM radio as the DJs who soft-peddled their wares. The documentary director Danny Tedesco, who previosly made a movie about the Wrecking Crew, here has much fewer personnel to cover, and sometimes you get tired hearing these same five dudes verbally high-five one another about some riff they invented that has since become rock gospel. Also, each member gets enough time to explain his background in detail, but except for Kortchmar’s, which involved meeting Taylor as a preteen during summer vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, they all kind of blend into one big amorphous success story achieved through ambition, luck, and what Nicolas Cage once termed “the enormous weight of massive talent.” It’s the same old story: the unmistakably accomplished talking at length about their accomplishments.

And it’s terribly entertaining, especially when they discuss flawed geniuses like Warren Zevon and Neil Young (they proudly cop to playing behind Shakey on his certifiably worst album, Landing on Water), but for the most part they sell their brand with slightly off-putting vigor. That they inevitably formed a touring/recording group called the Immediate Family comes across not as valuable intelligence important to their legacy but a commercial gambit that will see them through their dotage, as if they hadn’t made enough money as it is. 

Opens June 19 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Yebisy Garden Cinema (0570-783-715). 

Immediate Family home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Thunk Enterprises, LLC

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Media Mix, June 15, 1995

Posted on June 13, 2026 by philipbrasor
Screen shot of Ai Iijima on Gilgamesh Night

Here is a column I wrote about the late Ai Iijima back in 1995 for the Japan Times, which is not available online. At the time, Iijima was at the height of her popularity as a TV personality in Japan. I have not changed anything, so all the prejudices, rhetorical pratfalls, and stylistic faux pas are in tact. 

“How to succeed in show business…”

Sallie Tisdale, in her book-long essay on pornography, Talk Dirty to Me, writes that “censors are concerned with how men act and how women are portrayed.” This has always been the crux of the sex industry debate: Because women are perceived as the commodity rather than the consumer, the images produced are aimed specifically at men who want sexual control.

Tisdale’s position in the essay, as a woman with an appetite for hard-core videos, is to deflate this notion of women as victims. She finds that the theme of most pornography is “virility, endurance, and lust,” rather than men wielding power over women. She says that “women in modern films are often the initiators of sex.” 

Tisdale is talking about American porn. In Japanese “adult videos” (AV), the women, in order to project the coyness that male viewers seem to demand, either act passively or resist (the most commonly heard word in Japanese pornography is “yamete” [stop it]). “Act,” of course, may not be the most appropriate verb to use here, since another characteristic of adult videos is a lack of credible expression, a tendency that makes AV actresses interchangeable (the men don’t even merit video credits).

Many of these women occasionally wander over to mainstram television, either hawking their videos on late-night “information” programs or filling up screen space as background. Either way, they don’t stay long. The only AV actress who has made the transition completely is Ai Iijima. She is now a tarento in her own right, but that doesn’t mean she has more control over her career.

According to Tokyo Journal, which ran an interview with Iijima in its April issue, her managers won’t let her discuss her hard-core AV past. It’s hardly a secret, though, since her tapes are still readily available. In my local video store, her shelf is labeled “Ai Iijima—retired.”

Last year, Iijima replaced calendar girl Fumie Hosokawa as co-host of TV Tokyo’s late Saturday night soft-core “information program,” Gilgamesh Night. Given her background, Iijima is a much more natural choice for the role than the genuinely demure and totally unopinionated Hosokawa. Iijima can interview and comment on the models and AV actresses as someone who knows the business from the inside. She understands why these women do what they do: They want to make money, and some of them are making a lot of it.

This is important to remember, especially when you’re watching a show like Gilgamesh, which is really more about leering than sex. Women walk around in various states of undress while a bunch of soft-bodied male comedians drool and stumble over themselves. Iijima’s comments during the show have become increasingly candid about how fatuous she finds it all, but she at least treats the women as peers with not only brains but actual lives.

Iijima continues to co-host Gilgamesh, but she has, in the past year or so, moved even farther from her AV past. She’s achieved mainstream appeal as a TV personality because of her frankness, and not just about sex. She doesn’t suffer hypocrites lightly and, though she seems to know her place, as it were, she won’t allow herself to be bullied or humiliated. What’s more, she’s quick-witted, which makes her the ideal guest for quiz shows and “talk-variety” programs. These attributes have endeared her more to young women than to men, who still see her primarily as a sex symbol.

Iijima’s success is particularly striking when her situation is compared to that of other female talent with similar backgrounds. Natsuki Okamoto, for instance, has never appeared in adult videos or nude photo spreads. Before she became a talent she was a “race queen”—a woman who stands around in a “high leg” bathing suit at auto races representing a sponsor.

The media and TV producers are currently singling out Okamoto as their favorite bimbo. A tall woman with a full figure, she often appears in outlandishly ugly costumes that accentuate her cleavage and long legs. What’s more, she’s treated as a stupid woman. In a “scoop” about an alleged scene she made at a Chiba hotel, the magazine Shukan Josei actually called her “Heisei’s stupidest woman.” Several weeks ago at a celebrity golf tournament, she was heckled to distraction by a gallery that kept demanding she bend over and show her underwear. And she can always be counted on to come in last on Fuji TV’s academic quiz show Heisei Kyoiku Iinkai.

A few years ago, Okamoto tried to steer her career into less degrading territory, and was successful insofar as she was allowed to wear mature clothing, but then she dropped out of a movie because she didn’t want to do a sex scene. For a while she couldn’t be found anywhere, and there were rumors that she’d had a nervous breakdown. Since coming back, she’s been appearing regularly on Heisei and the Friday night “sexy variety” show Donmai, as well as in a number of commercials. She now seems resigned to the dumb costumes and the “stupid woman” sobriquet, as if it’s the price she must pay to stay in show business.

Which brings us back to the question of control. If Iijima seems to have more than Okamoto does, it’s only because she can say what’s on her mind. Iijima wouldn’t have held back as Okamoto did at the golf tournament, even though lifting her skirt for the masses was something she used to do for a living as a “T-back girl.”

But like Okamoto, Iijima is still an employee of a production company. Her outspokenness is part of her image, and therefore a commodity that must be managed just as Okamoto’s “stupidity” is. In the Tokyo Journal interview, she admitted that her recent book, which capitalizes on that image, was ghost-written and not something she wanted to do.

In the same interview she also said that she didn’t necessarily see herself remaining in show business 10 years down the road. Apparently, the 29-year-old Okamoto thinks she has no choice but to give in to her unflattering image, since she’s practically over-the-hill by Japanese show business standards. Iijima is only 22, so she could very well change her mind. But quitting is the ultimate expression of control. 

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Review: Die My Love

Posted on June 12, 2026 by philipbrasor

I agree with the critical consensus that John Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence is the definitive cinematic treatment of female mental illness in a connubial setting. The movie stakes its credibility on a marital dynamic that is perhaps specific to its time and place, but from Gena Rowlands’ harrowing portrayal of Mabel Longhetti emerges a universal understanding of just what it is about being a housewife and mother under those particular circumstances that can drive you crazy. Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love covers similar circumstances but tends to shade more toward post partum depression as its malady-du-jour, but if it comes across as less convincing than Cassavettes’ vision it’s mainly because of Ramsay’s expressionism, which in the end dilutes much of its power. A Woman Under the Influence was as raw as you can get, a mode of presentation that’s much more difficult to pull off, but if you can the results are devastating.

The couple in question is Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who aren’t married when we first meet them as they inspect a rural house in poor repair that Jackson has casually inherited from an uncle who we later learn killed himself. Grace subsequently becomes pregnant and a daughter is born, but even before the blessed event Ramsay provides haunting premonitions of psychic trouble to come, as if preparing us for the worst. Jackson’s occupation is never explained—he seems to spend a lot of time on the road in his pickup truck—and Grace is a writer, though it’s not clear if she’s ever been published or whether it’s a vocation she’s worked at. Ramsay’s script, which she wrote with playwright Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, is based on a novel by Arian Harwicz that throws out the idea that Grace’s emotional conflicts may be triggered by writer’s block, but as the movie progresses and the separation between reality and fantasy becomes blurred, the writer’s block theme feels more and more like an unfairly proferred red herring. She starts seeing a guy on a motorcycle (LaKeith Stanfield) who vrooms past their house and either has sex with him or imagines she does. She becomes willfully contrary to everyone she meets, including store clerks and hospital nurses, and her heightened sexual demands of Jackson are treated with suspicion, not because Jackson doesn’t want it but because the come-ons are theatrically creepy. The only person who seems to sympathize with Grace’s situation is her senile father-in-law (Nick Nolte), whose condition, it’s suggested, allows him to intuit her pain, and once he’s gone (again, Ramsay denies us any details about his death) it falls to his wife (Sissy Spacek) to assume the burden of being Grace’s sympathizer/confessor. 

The tension never lets up, mainly because there is always an infant around and Grace’s unstable behavior makes the viewer fear for the child’s safety. If Jackson proves to be an even less reliable husband in terms of helping his wife get through her trauma than Peter Falk’s Nick in A Woman Under the Influence it’s mainly because he seems inert as a character. Lawrence and Pattinson are fascinating to watch, especially together, but the lack of backstory and vague indications of past trauma only serve to highlight the drama of Grace’s actions, not the actual sickness. There’s a lot of sound and fury here, but little of it makes much sense. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551). 

Die My Love home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Die My Love, LLC

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Review: Eleanor the Great and The Rule of Jenny Pen

Posted on June 11, 2026 by philipbrasor

Though Eleanor Morgenstein is only the second leading film role that the 94-year-old American actor June Squibb has ever done, the novelty of such an aged person playing the titular character in a major motion picture like Eleanor the Great—the directing debut of Scarlett Johansson, no less—draws attention to Squibb’s ubiquity on TV, screen, and even stage (she was recently nominated for a Tony) as a supporting player since her breakthrough in Alexander Payne’s 2013 road movie Nebraska. There’s a naturalness to Squibb’s screen presence that doesn’t feel gratuitous or phony, which means she can flow from comedy to poignancy and back without changing much in the way of dramatic gravity. She’s the perfect person to play Eleanor, a woman who rediscovers her Jewish background (though, in fact, she’s a convert) through a lie that is more of an urge than an act of purposeful deceit.

In her old age, Eleanor has made what seems to be her best life in Florida, where she shares an apartment with BFF Bessie (Rita Zohar), a victim of the Holocaust who sometimes wakes from nightmares at 3 in the morning and relates her PTSD-triggered memories to an always receptive Eleanor. These early, establishing scenes set up Eleanor as a natural dissembler, quick with a clever made-up story to get what she and Bessie need from naive younger people who don’t always know their place in the generational scheme of things. Eleanor clearly sees herself as Bessie’s protector and rises to each occasion fearlessly. So when Bessie dies suddenly, Eleanor is left adrift, without purpose, and moves back to New York City, where she raised a family with her husband and where she met Bessie, in order to be with her divorced daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and college age grandson, Max (Will Price). Bored and constitutionally out-of-sorts, she constantly annoys Lisa with her complaints and bitter asides, and Lisa signs her up for a singing class at the local Jewish Community Center. There, she accidentally wanders into a support group of former concentration camp inmates who mistake her for a fellow survivor. Intrigued by the attention, she tells them Bessie’s story as if it were her own, and from there the lie just snowballs, with a young journalism student (Erin Kellyman), who recently lost her own Jewish mother, adopting Eleanor as a class project and, in the process, attracting the interest of her famous journalist father (Chiwetel Ejiofor). 

Tory Kamen’s script follows these developments to exactly where you expect them to go, and Johansson’s workmanlike direction only plays up the obviousness of the depicted dilemmas, which are not limited to Eleanor’s expanding falsehood. The contrivances are practically flown in by courier, thus undermining not only the film’s questionable use of the Holocaust as a plot device, but the various domestic melodramas it engenders. Which isn’t to say that Eleanor the Great doesn’t succeed in evincing sympathy for Eleanor and her situation, but rather that without Squibb it would have been insufferable. 

John Lithgow is another elderly actor who was just nominated for a Tony and, in fact, won it for playing British author Roald Dahl as a raving anti-semite. The old man he plays in The Rule of Jenny Pen is also raving, but to different ends. Dave Crealey lives in an assisted living facility in New Zealand where he terrorizes the other residents, much the way a playground bully would terrorize fellow children who he senses are weaker than he is. The script’s allusion to one’s dotage as a return to childishness limits its scope to the most destructive adolescent impulses, an aspect of the story that Lithgow really gets into.

Though Dave is fairly indiscriminate in his domineering misanthropy, he reserves his cruelest intentions for Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), a judge who has suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralyzed but in full possession of his mental faculties. Though confined to a wheelchair, Stefan still acts like a judge, haughty towards other residents and condescending to the staff, who mostly ignore him because they’ve seen it all before. Stefan really isn’t much different from Dave in terms of attitude except that while Dave’s megalomania may be a side effect of dementia, Stefan’s intolerable pride is born of professional conditioning as someone whose word has always literally been law. As a result, Dave’s unspeakably crude persecutions, which are carried out by Jenny Pen, a plastic baby doll that Dave wields like a hand puppet, sometimes come across as being deserved, especially by other residents who hate Stefan only slightly less than they hate Dave. It also renders the staff less helpful when Stefan tries to get them to do something about Dave’s threats, which become deadlier by the day. 

Director James Ashcroft, working from a novel, knows how to develop an atmosphere of ever-heightening dread of what Dave is capable of, but he never provides a reason for all the horrible behavior except that this is what old people can be like. The most terrifying aspect of the story is that none of the residents acknowledge the truth that they are in this place for the rest of their lives, since they all claim to be there “temporarily,” including the judge. Dave seems to be the only person who understands he ain’t goin’ nowhere, which in a way makes him as sympathetic a figure as Eleanor Morgenstein, something I wish Ashcroft had paid closer attention to.

Eleanor the Great opens June 12 in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

The Rule of Jenny Pen opens June 12 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Eleanor the Great home page in Japanese

The Rule of Jenny Pen home page in Japanese

Eleanor the Great photo (c) 2025 Eleanor Invisible Film, LLC, and Tristar Productions

The Rule of Jenny Pen photo (c) 2024 Hyenas Rule Ltd.

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Review: Masters of the Universe

Posted on June 5, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

In Japanese dubbed and Japanese subtitled versions. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Masters of the Universe home page in Japanese

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Review: The Testament of Ann Lee and The Moment

Posted on June 4, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Testament of Ann Lee home page in Japanese

The Moment home page in Japanese

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

The Moment photo (c) 2026 Rights By Lloyd LLC

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Review: Sirât and Adam’s Sake

Posted on June 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sirât home page in Japanese

Adam’s Sake home page in Japanese

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

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

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Review: Materialists

Posted on May 29, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Materialists home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Adore Rights LLC

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Review: The Forbidden City and Keeper

Posted on May 28, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Forbidden City home page in Japanese

Keeper home page in Japanese

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

Keeper photo (c) 2025 Shadowless Horse Pictures Inc.

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