Review: Where to Land

Posted on April 25, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

Where to Land home page in Japanese

photo (c) Hal Hartley/Possible Films, LLC

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Review: Arco

Posted on April 24, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

Arco home page in Japanese

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

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Review: Twiggy and This Is Sparklehorse

Posted on April 23, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twiggy home page in Japanese

This Is Sparklehorse home page in Japanese

Twiggy photo (c) Soho Talent Limited 2024

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Review: The Old Oak and Lost Land

Posted on April 22, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Old Oak home page in Japanese

Lost Land home page in Japanese

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

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

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Review: Song Sung Blue and Is This Thing On?

Posted on April 17, 2026 by philipbrasor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Song Sung Blue home page in Japanese

Is This Thing On? home page in Japanese

Song Sung Blue photo (c) 2025 Focus Features LLC

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

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Review: Köln 75 and It’s Okay!

Posted on April 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

The cheeky German film, Köln 75, purports to tell the true story behind a famous musical event, the 1975 solo concert by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in the West German city of Cologne (Köln). The recording of that concert went on to become the biggest-selling solo piano LP of all time. Right at the start, there’s a title card telling us this is the story as recalled by the promoter of that concert, Vera Brandes, who was only 18 at the time and, as we soon learn, is not only capable and headstrong, but given to outbursts of inflation when it comes to the facts, so as the movie proceeds merrily along we naturally come to wonder how true some of the details are; which isn’t to say the whole thing feels like a tall tale, but rather that the drama director Ido Fluk chooses to highlight is probably exaggerated. 

The story starts even earlier, with 16-year-old Vera (Mala Emde) sneaking into jazz clubs with her best pal, the beret-sporting socialist Isa (Shirin Lilly Eissa). On a dare, she introduces herself to sax player and famous British club owner Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts), who is so impressed with Vera’s boldness that he asks her to book his next German tour, something she knows nothing about. When she asks why Scott thinks she is capable of booking a tour for him, he says, “I can’t imagine anybody turning you down.” A promoter is born, and Fluk does a painstaking job of showing exactly how Vera overcomes her lack of business savvy to set up an entire tour for Scott and make some money in the process. Fast forward two years to 1975 when Vera, now modestly established as a local jazz concert promoter, catches Jarrett’s solo performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival and becomes determined to bring him to Cologne for a show at the city’s famed opera house. What seems like a relatively easy gig to arrange—Jarrett does not travel with an entourage or instrument—becomes more trouble than it’s worth, what with the intransigence of the opera house management, which has never held a jazz performance in its venue, and the peculiar personal situation surrounding Jarrett (John Magaro), a moody musician who literally suffers for his art (bad back). The concert becomes not only a test of will for Vera, who is forced to commandeer all her acquaintances not to mention her highly disapproving parents to make it happen, but a huge challenge to Jarrett’s mental health and that of his road manager, ECM Records president Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer). That she pulls it off is a small miracle.

Fluk supplements the thriller aspects of the story with some amusing filler that constantly breaks the fourth wall, mostly thanks to American music writer Michael Watts (Michael Chernus), who is on hand to interview the infinitely testy Jarrett and gives a marvelously personal capsule history of jazz improvisation at one point, complete with audio-visual illustrations. Much of what’s entertaining about Köln 75 is made to go a long way and sometimes feels stretched out of proportion, implying that Fluk’s inventiveness is necessary to cover up plot holes and a lack of essential ingredients, such as recordings of Jarrett. For the early scenes of him playing in Berlin Fluk hires a pianist who can passably impersonate Jarrett’s unique solo improvisation style, but for the recreation of the Köln concert he abandons any attempt at verisimilitude and plays Nina Simone’s upbeat version of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” over the soundtrack as we behold the beaming, tear-streaked faces of the audience being bowled over by Jarrett’s impromptu lyricism. It’s a bit much, but, given the portrait of the pianist painted by the movie, did Fluk ever really believe he would grant the producers permission to use his music?

The protagonist of the Korean film It’s Okay is another headstrong teenage girl. In-yeong (Lee Re) attends a prestigious arts high school in Seoul, where she is a member of the school’s famous dance troupe. Though her single mother was once a member of the same troupe, In-yeong is attending as a scholarship student mainly due to her financial situation, and when her mother dies in a car accident she’s left completely alone because there are no close relatives to take care of her. Though she obviously fears that her sudden orphan status will force her removal from the school, in a larger way In-yeong just doesn’t want to be controlled, and so she continues living alone in her rental house, dodging social services who come looking in on her every so often. When the landlord finally kicks her out due to non-payment of rent, she moves her things clandestinely into a storage room at school, where she spends the nights, but her secret is eventually uncovered.

All the while, she navigates the usual rocky high school journey, but of course it isn’t usual because of her membership in the dance troupe, where she’s constantly bullied for being a charity case. This is typical teen melodrama material, but what makes It’s Okay! different is In-yeong herself. She never suffers her tormentors—she doesn’t fight back in a purely physical way but instead refuses to acknowledge her interlocutors’ complaints and digs. She shrugs at their insults, deflecting them with her couldn’t-care-less attitude and in the end they have no choice but to give up in the face of her refusal to take them seriously. In this regard, the movie has something vital to say, not only about resilience but remaining happy under trying circumstances. But that isn’t enough for writer-director Kim Hye-young, who introduces a new character in the second half that completely changes the emotional tack of the movie. Former dancer Seol-ah (Jin Seo-yeon) is appointed as the head choreographer for the troupe and proves to be the stereotypical hardass taskmaster. Having been part of the troupe herself when In-seong’s mother was a member, she admires the girl’s pluck and, once she figures out her material situation, invites her to live in her luxurious apartment with her, where In-yeong invariably acts up in order to deal with her feelings of being condescended to because of that material situation. Sparks fly as mentor and mentee cope with the troupe’s upcoming 60th anniversary performance, which Seol-ah was hired to oversee. The conflict leads to a kind of entropy, with Seol-ah learning how to relax and In-yeong figuring out how to dislodge that chip from her shoulder.

As a teen drama, It’s Okay! is better than average, though the second half, clearly designed to be as edifying as possible, is less tolerable than the first, where In-yeong’s natural energy wins you over immediately. It’s nice to see a young person in a Korean movie put up with the bad hand life has dealt them with intelligence and humor rather than self-pity and despair. All that good faith work is thrown out in the latter part of the movie.

Köln 75, in German and English, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

It’s Okay!, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Köln 75 home page in Japanese

It’s Okay! home page in Japanese

Köln 75 photo (c) Wolfgang Ennenbach/One Two Films

It’s Okay! photo (c) 2023 Twomen Film

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Review: Hamnet

Posted on April 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

It’s obvious from the start that Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel (both collaborated on the screenplay) is not meant to be taken as a fact-based document about William Shakespeare’s married life. Though I haven’t studied Shakespeare as a historical figure, the whole tone of the movie is more cinematic than literary, not so much in visual terms but rather verbally and culturally. For the first third, during which pre-Globe Will (Paul Mescal) courts the hippie-like Agnes (Jessie Buckley) much to the consternation of both their guardians, the atmosphere has a rom-com vibe that’s not just anachronistic but also forced. Even when the dialogue gets purplishly elevated and Will recites the story of Orpheus to Agnes as a means of seduction it comes off as a meet-cute moment designed to advance a familiar romantic agenda that the film definitely wants you to believe in. 

The most appealing thing about the couple’s love is the aspect that always plays out in romance movies, namely the difference in station that challenges this love. Will is the educated son of a tanner who doesn’t see much value in his son’s education, since he believes it’s turned him into a moony dreamer who sits around writing poems when he should be working on his trade. His side gigs as a tutor to wannabe bourgeois children in his village places him only a step or two above a mere kitchen maid, and so he sees nothing wrong in wooing Agnes, the illegitimate daughter of a dead woman who practiced a kind of New Age mysticism that relied heavily on a deep connection to nature. But to her aunt, who has raised her, as well as the rest of her household, Agnes is practically a witch. It’s an interesting contrast that might have been even more interesting if the differences had been maintained rather than flattened out after Will and Agnes marry and have children. The tragedy of the couple’s young son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), dying of illness is compounded by Will’s always being away in London pursuing his dramatic craft, an occupation that Zhao and O’Farrell hardly address at all until the very end, where his genius is revealed as not only insightful but superhumanly empathetic. It’s not a spoiler to say that he translates his grief into Hamlet, but it’s difficult to believe it could have happened that way without some indication of how Will himself brought the play into being. As it stands, almost all the suffering we see is on Agnes’s part, and while Buckley gives it her all—it’s why she won the Oscar—it adds up to, as one critic so aptly put it, “grief porn.” 

It might have worked better for me if the protagonist wasn’t actually William Shakespeare, because the historical allusions just get in the way of the melodrama, which isn’t up to Shakespeare’s level; but, then, what is?

Opens April 10 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5069), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Hamnet home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Focus Features LLC/Agata Grzybowska

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Review: Dirty Angels

Posted on April 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

The title sounds like a Roger Corman exploitation flick from the late 60s, and while the movie does carry such a vibe and will probably please the kind of people who go for that kind of thing, our post-p.c. entertainment environment requires a wider, more worldly sensibility, or, at least, an awareness of it. The angels of the title are a crew of badass American female commandos charged with saving a group of adolescent girls taken hostage from a Pakistan school by an IS offshoot that wants to use one of the hostages—the daughter of an Aghanistan government minister—as a bargaining chip, though it soon becomes clear that their purposes are even more nefarious. The film fulfills its base mission as a shoot-em-up military thriller in the classic mold and extends the carnage by tapping into certain stereotypes about the inherent bloodthirstiness of radical Islam, but there’s nuance in both the plotting and the characterizations that add substance to many of its video game prerogatives.

The reason the U.S. military is involved is that many of the hostages are daughters of American diplomats and businesspeople stationed in Islamabad, a situation that adds complications to the extraction plan grounding the action. The CIA and its military cognates assemble a group of female soldiers who will impersonate an NGO delivering medicine to Pakistan, meaning neither the local government nor Taliban spies are to know who they actually are, despite the fact that Pakistan is a nominal ally of the U.S. and the Taliban are sworn enemies of this particular IS offshoot. These complications make all the difference in the way the story develops, enriching the usual double-crosses and mission setbacks that are endemic to extraction tales. It helps immeasurably that the main character, Jake (Eva Green), is a cynic whose professional principles were betrayed during an earlier mission where she was forced by her superiors to leave comrades behind to be slaughtered. She enters the new mission with a lot more baggage than she can carry and when the male leader gets picked off in a gun battle she has to take over. Green, a resourceful actor who always knows the assignment, manages to transcend her character’s macho schtick, especially compared to her surbordinates, who are all identified by their specialties (The Bomb, The Shooter, Geek, Medic) and don’t much color outside those delineated descriptions. The IS leader, Amir (George Iskander), provides the dastardly goods by being more about his personal power trip than any religious fundamentalism, and his sadistic inclinations will probably do nothing to mediate the American public’s toxic attitude toward Muslim politics of any stripe. 

Martin Campbell, who directed Green previously in Casino Royale, serves the movie’s action mandate well and builds the story to an appropriately apocalyptic climax that’s more ambiguous than you might expect from this material. Though explicit gore, mindless wrath, and pat retribution still rule, Dirty Angels at least pays lip service to historical and geopolitical realities that most similarly inclined actioners ignore outright. 

In English, Pashtun and Arabic. Opens April 10 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955). 

Dirty Angels home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Dirty Angels Productions, Inc.

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Review: The Legend of Ochi and Pilot

Posted on April 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

Having mostly passed through the 80s in a blur of distraction, I wasn’t fully up on current pop culture at the time the way I was in the 70s and 90s, and so the 80s revival has never really felt like a revival to me. Though The Legend of Ochi is clearly aimed at youngsters, its 80s vibe will appeal to adults who came of age during the golden age of Spielberg and Joe Dante; and, in fact, the inclusion of Finn Wolfhard in the cast seems intentionally geared toward that kind or audience, since he stars in the mother of all 80s revival projects, Stranger Things. 

And of the four principal human characters in the movie, Wolfhard’s feels the most gratuitous. The protagonist, Yuri (Helena Zengel), is an adolescent tomboy living on a fictional island in the Black Sea with her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), and adopted older brother, Petro (Wolfhard). The communities on the island have been terrorized for centuries by the mysterious ochi, an ape-like species that kill livestock and generally cause mayhem—or, at least, that’s the story imparted by Maxim, who has made it his life’s mission to wipe out the ochi. How serious his neighbors take this mission is illustrated by his methodology, which is recruiting adolescent boys from surrounding families as his hunting crew. Yuri, whose main interests are bugs and death metal, seems to have little interest in these nocturnal excursions, though she wants to please her father. After one eventful expedition, she has an argument with Maxim who then tells her to go out and check the traps he’s set, and on her rounds she finds a juvenile ochi with his leg caught. Though told to kill an ochi whenever she encounters one she finds it impossible to dispatch the adorable creature and instead brings it back to her room where she patches it up. When Petro discovers the animal in her room she and the ochi escape so that she can return it to its home, wherever that is. On the way, and with Maxim and his boy troops in pursuit, Yuri is rescued by her shepherd hermit mother, who left Maxim and her years ago due to some primal disagreement that had to do with the ochi, with which she can communicate through music and even speech. 

As a cockeyed adventure The Legend of Ochi obviously owes a lot to E.T., and Zengel conveys the proper mix of childhood awe and teenage cynicism that makes her character more than just a device. The unusual milieu allows for a lot of cheap but effective jokes that take advantage of Eastern European peasant stereotypes (most of which were probably developed during the 80s, when the area was still under Soviet sway). Writer-director Isaiah Saxon knows he needs to be inventive enough to avoid being compared to the usual suspects, and while the actual “legend” of the ochi, not to mention their culture, is intriguing, it’s couched in a New Age sensibility that’s laughable in the end; or, at least, it is to a real 80s cynic like me, which is why the sentimental ending registers as just so much cream corn. Anyone who lived through the 80s but was not engaged in the decade will probably understand my point.

The Korean comedy Pilot operates within a completely different fantasy environment, but one that is also uniquely movie-oriented. Though plots centered on cross-dressing characters are common in Korean movies, they usually take place in historical fictions where young girls pretend to be boys in order to fulfill some kind of life ambition, like joining the court bureaucracy. 

The protagonist of Pilot, Han Jung-woo (Cho Jung-seok), is a hotshot celebrity airline pilot who during a big reception thrown by the company he works for makes a patronizing speech that insults the female cabin attendants, thus sparking public ridicule and ending with Han’s being let go. Though his professional credentials are impeccable, his reputation is now dirt thanks to the predatory Korean media, and he can’t get a job at another airline, but learns that a subsidiary carrier of his old company, headed by the go-getting sister of his former boss, is purposely recruiting female pilots in order to make a point socially and commercially, and so he borrows his sister’s name, gets all dolled up like a woman, and applies for a job, which, of course, he gets. This vector of cross-dressing—man turns into a woman—is much more common in Western pop culture, as evidenced by the canonical status of Some Like It Hot, and is almost by definition comical in nature. It’s also pure fantasy. As convincing as Dustin Hoffman was in Tootsie and Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, no sentient being in real life would have believed these two to be actual females for such an extended period of time. And that’s the comic precept of Pilot, which takes the fantasy to the most ridiculous ends imaginable. The imposture becomes too successful after Han pulls off an impossible emergency landing and becomes an even bigger celebrity pilot than he was before.

Which is where the movie’s basic idea runs off the rails. Pilot is obviously trying to make some sort of point about institutional sexism, but the celebration of a female pilot proving she’s every bit as good as a male one in a situation that requires mad skills and nerves of steel loses some of its power when you know that the pilot is actually a male. For what it’s worth, there is a female pilot in Pilot who seems every bit as capable as Han if not more so, but the filmmakers simply set her up as the movie’s conscience, meaning she doesn’t have much to do as a real person. Priorities, people, priorities. 

The Legend of Ochi now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551). 

Pilot, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

The Legend of Ochi home page in Japanese

Pilot home page in Japanese

The Legend of Ochi photo (c) 2024 Kurkamart LLC and IPR.VC Fund II KY

Pilot photo (c) 2024 Lotte Entertainment, Solaire Partners LLC, Shotcake Corp., Movierock Inc.

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Review: The Bride! and Anaconda

Posted on April 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

It seems unfair that The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s very original take on Mary Shelley’s creation, is released within spitting distance of Guillermo del Toro’s more faithful version, especially given that the latter has gotten more love. Though Frankenstein is not an IP franchise, its stranglehold on popular culture 200 years after it was written means that everyone and their cat has an opinion about it. The Bride!, in fact, doesn’t riff on the novel the way del Toro did, but rather on James Whale’s movie and its sequel, both of which were made during the 1930s, when Gyllenhaal’s piss-take is set, and there’s a good reason for that. Though most critics have fixated on the movie’s eruptions of hyper-feminist bile, what it says about Hollywood’s commandeering of culture feels more relevant. Being set in the 30s, the movie not only takes full advantage of the original Bride of Frankenstein‘s quirky tone, but also gangster movies, glitzy musicals, and screwball comedies. The ultra-violence accommodates post-millennial sensibilities, but the offhanded humor in the way that violence is carried out hearkens back to the prime of Warner Brothers, the studio that also happened to back The Bride! (before it went on the chopping block). Even that presumptuous exclamation point in the title feels like a throwback—I’m sure Lorenz Hart would have something to say about it.

The so-called plot picks and chooses from 1930s themes without adding up to anything that’s narratively cohesive. Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) gives us what-for right from the start, demanding she be given a second stab at her creation after all it’s been through. She soon reappears as Ida, a moll whose salty mouth earns her a trip head-first down a flight of stairs courtesy of some underworld lunk. Cut to the anachronistic lair of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a mad scientist whose reputation for reanimation has reached the bolted ears of Frank (Christian Bale), the Karloff manque whose namesake creator never got around to making him a mate (to find out why, you have to read the book, or see del Toro’s movie), and so he hopes the good doctor will. Subsequently, Ida is dug up and brought back to life with her messy mouth and brief memory of the afterlife intact, not to mention an even more incandescent hatred of male human beings, especially those dressed in policemen’s uniforms. Frank loves it, and her, and who wouldn’t? If the newlyweds’ misadventures too closely resemble those that played out in Bonnie and Clyde the movie, just remember in which decade the real Bonnie and Clyde lived and died. 

As entertaining and surprising as much of The Bride! is, it doesn’t make as lasting an impression as it should, owing mainly to the way the outrage outstrips the meaning and blurs the exposition. Frank’s penchant for “Putting on the Ritz”-style effusions, expressed through his fanboy attraction to silver screen hoofer Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal) but closer in tone to Mel Brooks’ version of the franchise, is more memorable, as is the carefully delivered risque banter between the two detectives (Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz) investigating the couple’s killing spree (“I’m your gal Friday”). Ida herself is such a voluble hellion that you can’t keep up with half of what she’s saying or thinking, and I suppose that’s the point. You can’t keep a good—or bad—woman down.

A more recent version of Hollywood is sent up in the dumb comedy Anaconda, which purports to be a sequel to the popular 1990s creature feature but, like The Bride!, is more like a practical joke played on a beloved classic, the difference being that the new Anaconda has nothing interesting to say about anything, whether it’s Hollywood or big snakes. 

Jack Black and Paul Rudd play BFFs whose adolescent dream was to make it big in the movie industry, and as they enter middle age they find themselves severely short of the dream, with Doug (Black) sublimating his directing jones into wedding videos and Griff (Rudd) barely scraping by as a fourth-tier actor. In a last ditch effort to be recognized, they embark on an ambitious project to remake Anaconda, their favorite movie, using their own money and a crew anchored by the two friends (Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton) who used to share their adolescent otaku film spirit.

The movie’s faux-DIY energy bolsters the comedy during the first half of the movie as the group struggles to raise money and put together a production that isn’t total shit, but once the action moves to the Amazon and has to get jiggy with wild animals and a bunch of murderous gold prospectors, the movie loses its focus and jolts around on hit-or-miss sight gags. A few stars from the original movie show up to little effect, and what should be the film’s best meta-joke—they discover to their shock that Sony Pictures is already in Brazil making a genuine sequel to Anaconda—is flimsily developed. The whole thing comes across as half-assed: Black’s and Rudd’s inherent comedic charms get shoved aside by the purposely cruddy horror SFX, and the target of their satire—the studio that actually bankrolled this movie—gets the last laugh, literally. 

The Bride! opens April 3 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).

Anaconda opens April 3 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Bride! home page in Japanese

Anaconda home page in Japanese

The Bride! photo (c) 2026 Warner Bros. Ent.

Anaconda photo (c) 2026 CMTG

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