Review: Urchin and Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill

Posted on October 23, 2026 by philipbrasor

European filmmakers do addiction and homelessness better than their North American or Asian counterparts, mainly because they avoid the sentimentality and presumably requisite pathos often associated with depictions of both conditions. In terms of British representation, I’d like to think this quality has something to do with Ken Loach, who has made explorations of the indignities of living on the margins his metier, but it probably has more to do with British naturalism, a staple of UK cinematic style that stretches back before Kes. The UK actor Harris Dickinson has chosen to look squarely at both conditions in his debut directorial feature, Urchin, which focuses on one individual, Mike (Frank Dillane), who is already at the bottom when we see him, sleeping rough on a London sidewalk within earshot of a Christian street preacher who seems oblivious to his plight.

Dickinson, who also wrote the script, doesn’t provide any background on the twenty-something Mike except a tossed-aside comment that he was adopted, and we aren’t given any clue as to how he ended up in his situation. His panhandling method is totally ineffectual, thus lending creedence to the old saying that homelessness is hard work. Moreover, maintaining his habit, which seems to encompass both alcohol and any illicit drug, feels random and sloppy. He essentially hits up other junkies for scores, including a skinny guy named Nathan (Dickinson himself) who looks worse off than him. Eventually, he does the unspeakable and mugs a man who is trying to help him get a meal. He gets caught and sent to prison for 8 months, where he kicks his habit and seems ready to lead a straight life. Dickinson includes a rather lengthy scene in which a social worker explains to Mike his new digs in a halfway house and his mandatory counseling sessions, a scene that recalls the best kind of expository work by Loach. After Mike starts working at a cheap hotel in the kitchen, he seems on the road to recovery. He even manages to make friends with a pair of female co-workers who take him out for a night of karaoke that Dickinson stages for ultimate empathetic value.

But if you’ve seen this kind of story before, whether by Loach or anyone else, you know the routine: Mike will fall down and get back up and fall down again. His flaw is a total lack of courage when he has to confront his true nature, so when his counselor suggests he meet with the man he mugged, he disintegrates. Later, the same thing happens when he falls in love with a fellow worker named Andrea (Megan Northam), who is attracted to his wounded candor but soon realizes how immature he is. He flinches and that’s that. The movie’s rock is Frank Dillane, who subtly shows us Mike’s insecurities in ways that feel not only natural, but insightful. And then Dickinson compromises these choices with occasional cutaways to Mike’s fantasy world, which explain really nothing and, in the end, just makes it hard to decide if Mike has any future at all. Probably not.

The singer-songwriter Judee Sill was herself homeless for a time and a junkie for most of her adult existence. She died from drug-related causes at the age of 35 in 1979. These aspects of her life were not hidden. If anything, she talked about them openly, even enthusiastically (she also admitted to being a prostitute, though some people who knew her felt she often resorted to hyperbole). The documentary Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill does a good job of connecting Sill’s personal problems to the uniqueness of her songs, even if it’s a bit pokey in execution.

A native Californian whose father owned a tavern with a piano, Sill was mostly self-taught as a musician, but after her father died when she was only 6 her mother remarried a man who reportedly abused her, so she ran away and fell in with a bunch of street thieves. In a juvenile reformatory she got into gospel music, which not only juiced her piano-playing skills but gave her religion that she never shook. However, after getting out her mother died of alcoholism and, unwilling to live with her stepfather, ran away again, this time shacking up with jazz musicians—she supposedly turned into a wicked bass player—who used big time. After quickly developing a $150-a-day habit she was busted repeatedly. It was at this point, around 1968, that she became a singer-songwriter and started hanging out at the clubs on the Sunset Strip, where a young David Geffen found her odd songs fusing spiritual ecstasy with romantic longing, classical-style melodies, and exaggerated vowels compelling enough to help her get an agent. Some years later when Geffen launched Asylum Records, the premiere Laurel Canyon folk-rock sanctuary, Sill was the first artist he signed.

Plenty of famous contemporary talking heads, including Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and J.D. Souther, a former lover, attest to Sill’s musical genius. Her journals, which are reproduced graphically, contain reams of self-lacerating prose that reveal she knew just how great she was but would never be able to break through in a commercial way. It takes someone like Linda Ronstadt (interviewed over the phone) to point out that Sill, who was not “conventionally beautiful” by the standards of early 70s rock-related show biz, was difficult to promote by Geffen or anybody else, and so while her more successful peers were in awe of her gifts, the public could not care less. For sure, her defeated nature fed her addictions, but it was the character of the business that denied her the living she deserved. Ironically or not, she is now revered as a foundational influence by many present-day indie folk artists, some of whom are also interviewed, including Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood) and Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek of Big Thief, who sing her praises to high heaven. The movie isn’t likely to draw a lot of people, but those who see it will certainly want to check out her music, which is where its real value lies.

Urchin now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill now playing in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Urchin home page in Japanese

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill home page in Japanese

Urchin photo (c) Dream Space Films Ltd/British Broadcasting Corporation/The British Film Institute 2025

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill photo (c) 2023 Onwards & Upwards LLC. Exclusively licensed to TAMT Co., Ltd. in Japan

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Review: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Posted on October 22, 2026 by philipbrasor

In the stop-action claymation world of Nick Park’s Aardman Studio, pets and domesticated animals not only display more common sense than their human overlords, they often possess specific skills that would put tech bros like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to shame. Gromit, the pet canine of inventor Wallace in Aardman’s most famous series, is arguably the genius behind the duo’s creations, and the more juvenile Shaun the Sheep, who first gained exposure in a Wallace & Gromit short, demonstrates similar talents in his new feature-length film, which is essentially a horror comedy, but part of the horror is what can go wrong with technology that is not properly vetted.

Timing is often everything with Aardman, and this latest adventure takes place before and during Halloween. The farm animals Shaun lives with are looking forward to the holiday when their dumb farmer-master accidentally destroys the pumpkin patch that Shaun has so lovingly cultivated. Deflated but not defeated, Shaun, using a science manual, concocts a growth formulation that will bring the pumpkins back to life quickly, but the process gets out of hand and the pumpkins grow to monstrous size. Moreover, some of the serum contaminates the farmer’s bathroom and gets into his own hair growth medication (he’s bald), and once the formula does its stuff too well, he essentially turns into Bigfoot; or that’s what the folks in town mistake him for, resulting in a Frankenstein-styled persecution campaign, complete with torches and pitchforks. The script mostly cycles through horror cliches for its jokes (watch out for the Psycho reference), but also finds time for Aardman’s typical sentimental side, which is mainly concentrated in the subplot of the local female veterinarian falling in love with the farmer even while he’s covered with fur and despite his intelligence issues.

Unlike the previous two Shaun features, this one feels more like the TV show, which is not a complaint. Essentially, the slight plot is there to string together the wildly inventive slapstick set pieces, something that Aardman has always excelled at. It should be noted that The Beast of Mossy Bottom was not directed by Park (Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, if you’re keeping score), which may explain the relative lack of cohesion. Few writer-directors in the animated world outside of Pixar possess Park’s totally harebrained approach to storytelling, best represented by his masterpiece The Wrong Trousers. Shaun is a spinoff, but a proud one.

Opens Oct. 23 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Humax Cinema (03-3462-2539).

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026/Aardman Animations Ltd & Richard Davies

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A conversation with Neeraj Churi

Posted on October 17, 2026 by philipbrasor
Cactus Pears

Neeraj Churi is a UK-based Indian businessman who runs a company called Lotus Visual Productions, which provides production assistance and advice to independent filmmakers who address LGBTQ+ themes and characters.

Churi’s most well-known production is probably Cactus Pears, an Indian film about a young man who returns from the city to his home village to preside over the funeral of his father and in the process reacquaints himself with a childhood friend who, he soon surmises, is having casual sexual trysts with men who live in the vicinity. They reignite their friendship, which soon turns erotic, while both navigate the various familial and social pitfalls of the village culture. The film has won several awards over the past year or so, including the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo Filmex.

I met him in early October at the Busan International Film Festival, where two of his feature films were being screened. Lovers in the Blue Night centers on a Muslim couple living in Mumbai who are flood refugees from Bangladesh. The husband works as a rat killer while the wife does phone sex work at a night club. The husband eventually falls into a sexual relationship with a thief from the Untouchable caste.

The other movie Churi accompanied was About an Intimate Matter, which deals with two childhood friends living together in Kolkata. One teaches at a public secondary school. A student leaks some private FB photos of the teacher, who is then called before the school administration and interrogated about her private life, since it is assumed she is having an intimate relationship with another woman. The interrogations affect both her job and her relationship at home.

Our conversation took place at the guest lounge in the Busan Cinema Center.

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Review: Truth & Treason

Posted on October 16, 2026 by philipbrasor

Angel Studios is a production company that makes Christian-themed movies. Along with the seemingly requisite New Testament reenactments you also get things like Sound of Freedom, an action movie, according to their PR page, that’s about a “former government agent turned vigilante who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hundreds of children from traffickers,” which tends to sound more political in nature. This is the second Angel production I’ve seen centered on the true story of a German person who actively opposed Hitler during World War II. The first one, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, was about a Lutheran clergyman who took his faith’s pacifist dogma as gospel and thus not only refused to serve Hitler’s war machine but conspired in his assassination. Like that movie, Truth & Treason has English dialogue (spoken by mostly English actors), presumably because its target Christian-leaning audience is not the subtitle-reading type. Also like the previous movie its dramatic thrust is difficult to resist.

Our hero is Helmuth Hübener (Ewan Horrocks), a member of the Hitler Youth whose precociously fine prose style earns him an internship at City Hall at the tender age of 16. We see Helmuth clowning around with his pals, all of whom seem to dig American jazz, which, of course, is verboten in 1941 when the film opens; but Helmuth also dislikes bullies, thus preparing the viewer for his eventual anti-Fascist development as a political thinker. At first, Helmuth dedicates his literary skills to the fine art of bullshit, but after his older brother returns from France with a contraband short-wave radio, Helmuth starts listening to the BBC and becomes completely converted, convinced that Der Fuhrer is lying to the masses. However, the straw that breaks the camel’s back is when he notices how his Mormon-Jewish friend, Solomon, is persecuted by his very own bishop. Helmuth then turns into an underground pamphleteer, clandestinely turning out anti-Nazi screeds on red paper and soliciting like-minded friends to post them all over town. These notes attract the attention of the local Gestapo investigator, Mussener (Rupert Evans), who launches an all-out search for the author, thinking, of course, that it must be an academic of some seasoning since the style is sophisticated. It takes him time to come around to the truth that the red cards are being written and distributed by mere adolescents. 

Director Matt Whitaker employs a parallel narrative structure meant to rachet up the tension as Helmuth’s activities become more involved and Mussener slowly closes in. The story thus becomes a kind of detective tale on Mussener’s side and a breathless series of anti-authoritarian epiphanies on Helmuth’s, reinforced by the self-serving hypocrisy of the bishop of the Church of Latter Day Saints and the obvious use of torture against resisters to the Reich. In that regard, it’s effective as melodrama but deficient in introspection. All the characters’ motivations are right there on the surface so when the hammer comes down, it comes down exactly when and where you expect it to. Unlike with Bonhoeffer, in which the doomed protagonist is given plenty of opportunity to contemplate his small place in the universe, Truth & Treason gives us a hero whose overriding impulse to do right springs from youthful hubris. Ironically, it seems to be the older, more cynical Mussener, whose philosophical nature has been compromised by his loyalty to a corrupt state, who expresses the most human qualities in the face of Helmuth’s truth-telling. Helmuth remains a sincere Christian stalwart to the end—protective of his friends, defiant toward Nazi bullies—but comes across more as a scriptwriting construct than a genuine human being. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Truth & Treason home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Truth&Treason, LLC

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 12

Posted on October 12, 2026 by philipbrasor

For some reason I didn’t have any trouble getting tickets to the movies I wanted to see yesterday, my last full day at the festival. Of course, since it was my last full day, I spent half of it in the video library trying to catch up on some movies I didn’t get to see over the previous 5 days. I was surprised that only about half the Competition films were available in the video library. I would think those would be the films they want to promote the most.

I’ve only seen two Competition films, and one was yesterday: Ibuku, from Indonesia. The title means “my mother,” but the character whose mother is described only appears in the beginning and at the end. She is a young Indonesian woman who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for killing her employer, purportedly to save her honor. Sri went to SA as a migrant worker to escape an abusive marriage that was forced upon her by her parents. Her father has already committed suicide, presumably due to his gambling debts, and the titular mother, Sum, does nothing but struggle to survive. Sri leaves the country because she doesn’t think her mother supports her leaving her husband, but the bulk of the movie just shows Sum’s struggle, and then her desperate attempt to raise money when she discovers her daughter’s plight. It’s a fairly standard Southeast Asia melodrama, though it has a kind of twist ending I found compelling, in that Sum’s ultimate sacrifice is not for her daughter, but for her community, making it all the more moving.

I’m a fan of Asgher Farhadi, even his previous French language feature, The Past, though I didn’t see his last movie, which was in Spanish. Parallel Tales screened in Competition at Cannes and received mostly bad reviews, so I wasn’t expecting much. And, yeah, it isn’t half as good as some of his best Iranian stuff, but I found it entertaining. Isabelle Huppert plays a cantankerous novelist who lives in squalor in a nice Paris apartment. She derives inspiration for her latest book by spying on the apartment across the street, where three people do sound effects for movies and videos. She essentially makes up a story about their various love lives. Into her own life comes a young, supposedly rehabilitated thief who her niece has hired to help her clean up the apartment to prepare for its sale, and this guy somehow inserts himself into the cross-neighborhood situation, causing heaps of trouble in the process. The biggest complaint I’ve read is that none of this is even vaguely plausible, though I still thought Farhadi got the disparate pieces to fit together fairly snugly. And it’s got a pretty impressive cast. Other than Huppert there’s Vincent Cassel, Catherine Deneuve (as Huppert’s snooty editor), and Virginie Efira, whom I saw the day before in All of a Sudden.

Speaking of Iranian masters, I watched On the Road With Abbas Kiorastami in the video room. A documentary put together from various videotapes the late Kiorastami recorded while driving around the country revisiting some of his most famous filming locations, it has a rambunctious, mischievous air to it. Since he was famous for using non-professional actors, he tends to run into many of the people who were in his films, now living lives that are slightly elevated since they were once in a Kiarostami production. On hand in a lot of these clips is his former assistant, Jafar Panahi, who’s like the crew’s class clown, mugging and carrying on for the camera. It’s mostly a film for film nerds, because it doesn’t really reveal anything about Korastami’s methods or even his feelings about movies; though he’s always saying things like, “that boy’s face is perfect for the cinema” and commenting on how photogenic a landscape is. He’s also naturally great with kids. 

The last movie I saw seemed an appropriate closer. Homesick is a documentary by the Danish filmmaker Tanya Sorensen, who was adopted from Korea as a baby by a Danish couple in the late 80s. The movie is essentially an attempt to come to terms with her heritage, which she has slowly pieced together over the years even though she has never been able to meet her birth mother face-to-face. Though Sorensen does a good job of explaining how the Korean adoption system essentially trafficked in babies, she also puts to the lie the cliche that these babies had better opportunities by being adopted to so-called first world countries. Sorensen’s adopted parents divorced before she was 2, and then her father, a violent man, destroyed a second marriage before drinking himself to death, leaving her alone. I wasn’t too crazy about the stylistic touches that tried to connect the director to her Korean heritage, but it’s a very powerful indictment of the paternalistic state.

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 11

Posted on October 11, 2026 by philipbrasor

I was finally able to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden yesterday at the only screening that would be taking place while I’m in Busan. I had missed it when it opened in Japan and, since it is mostly in French, decided it would be better to see it with English rather than Japanese subtitles. Of course, I was unable to get tickets through the guest ticket system, so I arrived early to wait in line for any empty seats. And it’s a good thing I got there early. More than 20 people ended up in line. I was #3, and when they finally counted the empty seats 15 minutes after the film started there were only 5, so I made it.

Fifteen minutes is a fairly big chunk, but All of a Sudden is three hours and 15 minutes, so not as big a chunk, relatively speaking, as it would be for a shorter film. It’s easy to get into, especially in the beginning, which takes place at a for-profit nursing home in Paris, where the manager has implemented a care system that privileges the elderly person’s “humanity” by treating their dementia seriously and adjusting the care to make sure they are not only comfortable but also engaged. The conflict arises when money comes into it, not to mention human resources, because the caregiving staff have to be trained to carry out this system and that takes time and money that the owners don’t want to spend. 

However, that’s just the starting point. The manager, Marie-Lou, is understandably frustrated by the pushback she gets when trying to make the system work and by accident meets a Japanese director, Mari, who is staging a theater piece in Paris. The theater piece deals with the idea that the so-called insane are not really that different from so-called normal people, and it speaks directly to Marie-Lou’s predicament. She corners Mari and they have a long discussion into the night that takes in everything from late stage capitalism (complete with white board presentation) to the behavioral changes that accompany aging. As it turns out, Mari is at the end of her own life because she has stage 4 cancer and could die at any time (thus the title). Some of the movie’s narrative premises are, on the surface, outlandish (both principals are fluent in each other’s language), but Hamaguchi makes them work through the strength of his convictions. In the end, it is simply a moving story about the bonds of friendship, and how they can actually transcend life itself.

I also saw two Iranian films. The first, Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal, is in the Competition Section and seems to have a good chance of winning, given the buzz around it. There aren’t that many Iranian fiction features at this year’s festival, and some of them were made outside of Iran because of either their subject matter or the director’s status vis-a-vis the government. Majidi’s movie seems relatively safe in that regard, and harkens back to the classic pre-millennial Iranian cinema, which addressed social problems by subsuming them in children’s stories. Midday Meal is about a village teacher who struggles to keep his school open after the regional “benefactor” cancels their support for school meals. Most of the kids, it turns out, are mainly coming to class for these meals, and once they are no longer available, they drop out, thus threatening the school’s existence, because the education ministry won’t fund a school if the classroom size falls below a certain number.

The teacher desperately tries to raise money so that he and his mother can feed the children themselves, and the movie credibly sets up one barrier after another to make these projects more and more difficult. In the end, the teacher resorts to subterfuge that feels almost immoral, and Majidi keeps the stakes high. It’s a great script, one that never feels strained for credibility despite its desperate reach for melodrama. 

The other Iranian film was completely different. Head to Head was made by a woman director, and the film’s protagonist is also a woman director, who is making a samizdat film at a relative’s residential compound featuring men wearing women’s clothing. The plot or even concept of her film is never explained, but she insists that the male actors stay in costume even while off camera, a directive that eventually makes them annoyed since the scarves on their heads are so stifling. That, in fact, seems to be the director’s point, and she becomes dictatorial in her insistence that they never remove their scarves. At first, this dynamic is played for all its comic potential, but about halfway through, after a police raid (mainly to arrest the female crew, who go about their jobs without any headwear; and not the men in hijabs, who, as it turns out, aren’t breaking any laws), the story turns serious and even scary. Though I’m pretty sure the movie was made in Iran, it would have had to have been made in secret, like the film-within-the-film. And it is pretty provocative.

The last film I saw was Revolving Lanterns, a Japanese documentary about a man who returns to his home town in Fukushima Prefecture after many years living in Tokyo. The earthquake and tsunami convinced him that he needed to reclaim his roots, but his town is in the mountains, and only contains 500 people, 70% of whom are over 65. I was expecting a fairly stylized, even abstract treatment of the area’s natural beauty, but it’s mostly the director hanging around old folks and getting their opinions on life in Fukushima and life in general. It’s very well made but has little value beyond its ability to capture a very small community’s vibe, which turns out to be not that special. It could easily be shown on NHK, though I’m sure NHK would insist on more voiceover narration. 

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 10

Posted on October 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

This is frustrating. I logged onto the guest ticket website yesterday morning at exactly 8:30 a.m. and was unable to get any tickets for the movies I really wanted to see. It appears to be a problem for others as well. I talked to one old hand who lives in Korea and asked if it was because there were so many more guests this year, and he pointed out that the festival anticipated a larger turnout and thus increased the number of screenings per film, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to meet the demand, especially for that handful of films that they should have predicted would be very popular. And, as it turns out, those are the movies I want to see. Many of them are Korean movies that have already opened theatrically in Korea, but Korean people want to see them here because the directors and actors are showing up for Q&A sessions. In any case, he agreed the system has to improve if BIFF wants to be as big as its dreams.

I had an interesting interview yesterday with Neeraj Churi, the head of Lotus Visual Productions. He produced two of the Indian movies I saw on Thursday, both of which dealt with LGBTQ themes. That’s pretty much what he does. Probably the most famous movie he’s produced is Cactus Pears, which won an award at Sundance and the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo Filmex. It’s a movie about two gay men who connect after many years when one of the men returns to his home village to attend his father’s funeral. Right now he’s mainly producing movies for Indian directors but he wants to start working with Southeast Asian filmmakers. We talked for about an hour, not just about films but also about the social situation for LGBTQ individuals in India, in particular how that situation compares to the West. I will post a transcript of our conversation at a later date on this blog.

I saw another Indian movie yesterday, a world premiere, though it didn’t have any LGBTQ characters to my knowledge. The title character of Selvi is a home caregiving nurse who works for a private service in Mumbai, meaning that all her customers are well off financially. She is studying to get a caregiving license in Singapore. She is pretty much the breadwinner for her family, who still live in the town where she grew up. She has also managed to secure employment for her best friend since childhood, a young woman who is emotionally unstable and tends to take a lot of days off, which means Selvi has to cover her shifts. The movie has the nervous energy of those medical dramas where the doctors and nurses are overwhelmed by their work, except that Selvi is a caregiver, meaning she looks after old people in their private homes and thus doesn’t get any help while actually on the job. Most of the time she just sits around, but when an emergency happens she is sort of helpless. But the main drama revolves around Selvi’s unreliable friend, which makes it more of a personal story.

I managed to snag a ticket for Filipiñana, which has generated quite a bit of buzz at other festivals. It’s a rather dry black comedy that takes place at an upscale golf club in Manila. The comic dynamic springs from the class differences between the patrons and the staff. It’s got a kind of languorous Finnish vibe that flattens all the emotions, regardless of what actually happens on screen. A few of the rich characters are cartoons, and I wanted to know more about the “development” in the countryside that displaced many of these employees. Essentially, they have been forced out of agriculture in the rural north islands to work in the big city, except that they are working at a country club, which is really a simulation of rural circumstances in that the grass and trees are all part of a design. The movie has a shock ending that, due to the artificially imposed stillness, doesn’t have much of a shock effect, but I suppose that was the intention. 

It’s My Time, a Chinese film, is in the Gala Section, though I’m only glancingly familiar with the director, Bai Xue. The main attraction is its lead actor, Michelle Yeoh, who is this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year. It’s a pretty standard Chinese entertainment, fast-moving and overly sentimental. Yeoh plays a 70-year-old woman who moved into an assisted living facility after suffering a stroke. She’s much better now thanks mainly to her rebel spirit, which doesn’t suffer fools lightly. The gimmick is a young  Rubik’s Cube master who is down on his luck and takes a gig teaching how to beat the toy to the assembled seniors since the manager of the facility thinks that such knowledge will ward off encroaching senility (though, in fact, he thinks it will just put them to sleep, which is his real goal). Yeoh’s character fully gets into the toy because she was once a math teacher (she appears to have had a lot of jobs in the past). Eventually, she becomes really good at it with the help of the young master. It’s like a kung fu action movie except all the acrobatics are in the brain. The technical stuff surrounding the complicated competitions went way over my head, and while the movie was predictable from the get-go, Yeoh is appealing in a feisty way. She looks her age and, to a certain extent, acts it, too, even more so than in that movie that won her an Oscar. 

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 9

Posted on October 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the older venues being used to screen films at the festival is the Busan Community Media Center, which looks as if it were built in the 1970s or 80s. I’ve already seen several movies there this year. Obviously when it was built Korean people were smaller, because the seats are cramped and there’s almost no leg room for someone who is over, say, 175 cm tall. They make an announcement before every screening, asking people to not move around so as not to bother the people around you, which is pretty difficult to do. I wonder because today’s young Korean men are noted for their height, or, at least, the movie stars and K-pop artists are. 

I saw two LGBTQ movies from India yesterday. Both are produced by Neeraj Churi, who I am trying to get an interview with. The first one, Lovers in the Blue Night, is about a couple living in Mumbai who are Bangladeshi refugees. The husband works as a rat killer while the wife works in a bar mainly as a phone sex worker. It is slowly revealed that the couple, who are Muslim, have never had sex or much of any kind of intimate contact, though the wife never seems to suspect that her husband may be gay. He seems to know it, though, and when he serendipitously helps a thief elude the police, they become partners in crime and in bed. Though the social issues are obvious, especially with regard to women’s position in this particular kind of milieu, the movie is foremost a melodrama, and quite an effective one. All the characters exist at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, and it’s implied that everyone has to lie, even to loved ones, just to get by.

The other Indian movie I saw was About an Intimate Matter, which deals mainly with the Indian public school system. As it turns out decorum is more valued than academic skills and student empathy, both of which are possessed in abundance by the main character, a female teacher at a high school in Kolkata who happens to live with a woman. When a student somehow gets into her private Facebook account and shares some photos with other students, the teacher is suspended pending an investigation, which is quite shocking in how deeply the school administration feels it can probe into her private life while giving lip service to the idea that one’s private life is off limits. It’s a canny film that shows how such matters tend to take precedence over what is supposed to be the priority—children’s education. In the post-screening Q&A the actor who played the teacher said that her love of teaching was more pronounced than her love for the woman she lived with, and that is the real tragedy. Churi, who said he has been out for 30 years, made the point that such couples should be deemed families, but that the social order does not permit them to call themselves that. But in any case, society’s prejudices go deeper than any legal concerns.

One of the biggest disappointments for me so far has been my inability to secure a ticket for any of the screenings of Possible Love. Lee Chang-dong is probably my favorite living director, but given the guest ticket system I couldn’t get one, so I’ll have to wait until November when it’s shown on Netflix. However, I did get to see the new movie by July Jung, who used to be Lee’s assistant director. I loved her first two films, A Girl at My Door and The Next Sohee, so I had big expectations for her new one, Dora, but, alas, it turned out to be another big disappointment. The title character is an 18-year-old girl with a skin condition that appears to be psychosomatic. She sullen and constantly apologizing for things that are not her fault and her parents, rather than pitying her, seem exhausted by the effort. They take her for the summer to their second home on the beach, which is next door to the father’s old acolyte/colleague (he’s a designer), who is married to a Japanese woman played by Sakura Ando. Lots of sexual shenanigans ensue among the various characters and Dora falls hopelessly in love with the Japanese woman, who is at first intrigued but eventually finds the girl’s neuroses off-putting. Much screaming and yelling ensued. The whole thing was just way too much and none of the characters felt at all plausible. 

I finished the day with Hong Sangsoo, who is always reliable. His newest, Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, isn’t as good as the last movie I saw by him, What Does This Nature Say to You (there’s another movie that came out between these two but for some reason BIFF isn’t showing it), but it has its charms. Hong’s partner Kim Minhee plays the main character, a woman who makes experimental films for her own pleasure, a pastime her mother, a successful restauranteur who runs a pension on Jeju Island, can’t quite understand. The woman and her more passive brother visit the mother and her relatively new husband on Jeju and the tension underlying their polite conversations is so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw. Unlike in What Does This Nature, which has a similar plot, the other shoe doesn’t drop and mother and daughter don’t air their mutual grievances with force, but it gave me a nice buzz if only for Hong’s always unusual presentation, which in this case was represented by his comically harsh sound design and background music.

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Review: Digger

Posted on October 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

It isn’t difficult to determine director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s personal convictions regarding the state of the world as the overstuffed plot of Digger unravels. He is certainly a believer in deadly climate change as a function of human progress, and places the blame solidly on the shoulders of oligarchs of all industries and nationalities. However, as the story becomes more complicated and less narratively reliable, it also becomes obvious that he isn’t sure if art has the actual power to speak truth to capitalistic perfidy, a notion that automatically gives rise to confusion over the purposes of this particular movie, which seemed clear at the outset but murkier as the true nature of the story reveals itself. 

That isn’t to say Digger isn’t entertaining, only that its entertainment component feels beside the point given the huge consequence of González Iñárritu’s themes. The elephant in the room is Tom Cruise’s outsized performance as the title character, a stereotypically Texan oil baron-billionaire who struts and bellows and mugs shamelessly for his closeups, which he is not only ready for but constantly seeking out, as if by instinct. The best you can say about this stunt is that you really do forget you’re watching Tom Cruise, something I would have thought impossible since, to me at least, the definition of a true movie star is that you always see the star on the screen rather than the character. (I don’t necessarily say this is a bad thing, especially when it comes to stars of the classic Hollywood era, when stardom was the whole point) Digger Rockwell has been designed as a farcical presence, and when he wakes up one morning to find out that his rig on Greenland has ignited a methane explosion that’s released a hunk of ice the size of 60 Washington D.C.s, he goes from defiantly contrary to desperate and then back to defiantly contrary even before the president of the U.S. (John Goodman) and his ass-kissing henchmen show up at Digger’s palatial digs to talk about how to spin this disaster, which threatens millions of people in northern Europe. As it turns out, all these other characters, including the nominally level-headed climate scientist (Riz Ahmed) Digger grudgingly employs, are just as loudly mercurial and bug-eyed as Digger. Pandemonium ensues, but grounded by dialogue that tries to make sense of these characters’ fatuousness, and that’s when the switcheroo comes, heralded by a character played by Jesse Plemons who, as it turns out, has the last word on everything, thus throwing a monkey wrench into the satirical machinations on display. 

Digger‘s artificiality, from the animatronic cat that seems to be Digger’s only true object of affection to the painted backdrops, is the movie’s real point, and I’m not sure if the theme of “this is where our planet is headed” survives the complications of context that González Iñárritu imposes on it. The beauty of Dr. Strangelove, a movie that critics are unfavorably comparing Digger to, was that it created a whole black comedy world out of a terrifying scenario that had not yet happened but could. Digger presupposes global collapse, not as a warning, but rather as a phenomenon on which to apply the metaphysics of cinematic craft. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 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).

Digger home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026 WBEI and Legendary

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Review: Resident Evil and Absolution

Posted on October 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

As someone who doesn’t play games, either literally or figuratively, I have no opinion on how faithfully the new Zach Cregger-helmed reboot of the Resident Evil franchise follows the Capcom classic, but I did see a few of the Paul W.S. Anderson film adaptations that made so much money while—from what I understand, at least—veering widely from the feel and substance of the game, especiallly since they centered on a hero, played by Anderson’s wife, Milla Jovovich, who wasn’t in the game and reportedly had little to do with its whole vibe. Cregger’s version is nothing like Anderson’s, which was mostly about kicking zombie ass. Cregger simply places his protagonist, a young medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams), in a horror show situation in order to see if he can just survive it. What ass-kicking he does is mostly on the fly and conducted without anything approaching skill or finesse. Most of the time his survival is based on what we would call luck, though that may be taking something away from the gaming element. But that’s the thing: I’m assessing the movie purely as a movie.

And in that regard, it mostly succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is gross us out and make us root for the hapless hero. Unlike Cregger’s more celebrated previous two films, Barbarian and Weapons, his Resident Evil isn’t particularly frightening. The jump scares are telegraphed well in advance and the situations are staged for maximum visual effect rather than any emotional ones. The plot is so elementary it can be described in one sentence: Bryan is tasked with taking what he believes to be an organ for transplant from hospital A to hospital B, and on the way he is beset by zombies who have been infected with a virus that has somehow escaped from hospital B. What makes the biggest impression is the zombies themselves, which aren’t simply lurching meat-seekers but a wildly diverse group of monstrosities that have the power to fuse together to make more massive and more deadly monstrosities. Bryan, as befits a Gen Z hero who has probably not played the game, has to learn how to use guns along the way and keep cool under pressure, and in that regard he earns our sympathies without any effort. In fact, what makes this Resident Evil so involving is how cleanly he enlists our sympathies, a particular talent that Cregger displayed in his two previous movies. People say Cregger is the future of horror, and I wouldn’t disagree, because his protagonists feel more real than the horror stereotypes we’ve become accustomed to.

The stereotyped hero of the crime thriller Absolution is nailed from the get-go by the actor who plays him: Liam Neeson. The screenwriter, Tony Gayton, neglects to name this character (the credits list him merely as “Thug”), but Neeson quickly establishes his m.o. as an antihero: former boxer who ended up employed as an enforcer by a Boston crime lord (Ron Perlman) and, now at the end of his life and suffering from encroaching senility (CTE, to be exact), yearns to do something right for a change. The filigree is equally predictable: estranged from his children for years, he tries to reestablish ties with his daughter and then uses his inside knowledge of the Boston underworld to save a trafficked woman from the brothel where she is imprisoned. 

Since Neeson is the only real reason to see Absolution, a caveat is in order: this is not one of those stories where his character has to eliminate countless goons in order to retrieve a loved one. It’s more on the order of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, though not nearly as elegantly plotted. That said, Gayton’s script is well-constructed, with characters established in the beginning returning at the end to assert those qualities we’ve already learned about them to deliver on the story’s dramatic intentions. Also, Absolution is not really an action film, though there are a few bits of violence. It’s mainly Neeson acting his age and imbuing a less-than-sympathetic character with more humanity than he deserves. And while the dialogue is cleverer than it needs to be, it’s by the same token better than it usually is in a Neeson thriller. “It’s the family curse of the asshole father,” someone says sarcastically when the Thug inadvertently reveals he was abused as a kid. The guy’s brief affair with a much younger black woman (Yolonda Ross) he sticks up for at a bar is unnecessary, but at least their pillow talk feels more or less natural. And the requisite meet cute with a grandson he didn’t know he had is played strictly for heartstring-pulling. But it’s a surprisingly assured production with its own prickly rhythms and an atmosphere that’s convincing. It stands on its own. 

Resident Evil opens Oct. 9 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 Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Absolution opens Oct. 9 at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001). 

Resident Evil home page in Japanese

Absolution home page in Japanese

Resident Evil photo (c) 2026 CTMG

Absolution photo (c) 2026 TG Movie LLC

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