Review: Heart of the Beast and Hen

Posted on September 25, 2026 by philipbrasor

Loyal dog movies and TV shows were once a staple of American entertainment, but if Heart of the Beast feels too much like a throwback it tries to make up for its anachronistic vibe by centering the central human-animal relationship on a shared case of PTSD, which is downright 21st century. Both James Belmont (Brad Pitt) and his German shepherd companion Odin were part of US military special forces, Belmont being Odin’s trainer and handler. When Belmont retired he took Odin with him. Throughout the movie, both occasionally suffer from violent flashbacks that clearly have an effect on the way they perceive their surroundings. Conveying PTSD from a dog’s point of view would normally be a chump’s game, so props to director David Ayer for not going overboard. That said, the notion that Odin can do his supercanine stuff with one prosthetic limb would seem to obviate the need for any illustrative flashbacks. 

This is purely an adventure movie. The whole story takes place in a pristine Alaskan wilderness where Belmont has flown his seaplane with Odin in tow. They camp out and bond with nature, each demonstrating native skills to contend with the wild. What dialogue there is is limited to Belmont as he talks to Odin about what’s on his mind and what he assumes is on Odin’s. At one point they encounter a former gold prospector (JK Simmons, almost unrecognizable behind the whiskers and Walter Brennan accent) who is also traveling solo down a river in his homemade kayak, albeit without a four-legged companion. 

The inevitable difficulties ensue, thus making the pair’s trip into a life-or-death one, as the elements, the landscape, and the local wildlife seem to conspire against them. Belmont risks his life to save Odin and vice versa, maybe more than once. The perilous incidents multiply so rapidly that it’s difficult to tell, and a lot of the bad things that happen feel more like stupid choices than bad luck, but, then, some people will tell you that bad luck is really nothing but stupid choices. Ayer knows how to stage dangerous situations, whether they involve raging streams or a pack of (digital) wolves, and the movie is both exciting and moving in the way man-and-dog look out for each other. But the only lesson I learned from Heart of the Beast is that you shouldn’t go to Alaska unless you have a place to stay for the night. 

Reportedly four dogs played Odin in Heart of the Beast. I don’t know how many birds played the titular fowl in the Greek movie Hen, but I assume it was a lot given how much editing the footage obviously underwent. The director, Hungarian György Pálfi, reportedly was inspired by the Polish movie EO, about the adventures of a donkey who goes from one owner to another. As with that movie, the feathered protagonist of Hen is mainly on hand to shift the plot from one human agent to another, though these agents are viewed through the chicken’s eyes. What makes Hen decidedly different from EO is that, like the chicken, the viewer is often confused by what they observe.

The hen’s odyssey is certainly compelling. After escaping from a delivery person who plans to make a meal out of her (her fate, since she was born in a battery farm), the chicken must outfox an actual fox, who pays dearly for his carnivorous ways. The hen then makes her way to a roadhouse convenience store whose elderly owner captures her and places her in his coop. There she is violated by a mangy rooster and while, thanks to her plucky (sorry) personality, she escapes the coop as well, she always gets recaptured and put back. During this time she has plenty of opportunity to watch the local humans do inhumane things, like traffic in refugees.

Though Pálfi wrings (sorry again) as much emotional expressiveness out of his poultry as you could hope for, it’s mostly due to his deft camerawork, which manages to catch the hen(s) at moments where she seems either baffled by what she sees or totally freaked out. It’s no spoiler to say that the hen fares much better in the end than some of the people. I cheered for her more than I did for the donkey in EO, and would have felt pretty put off if anything untoward happened to her. She’s a winner.

Heart of the Beast now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Hen, in Greek, now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

Heart of the Beast home page in Japanese

Hen home page in Japanese

Heart of the Beast photo (c) 2026 Paramont Pictures

Hen photo (c) 2025 Pallas Film-Twenty Vision-View Master Films-ZDF

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Review: Broken Voices

Posted on September 19, 2026 by philipbrasor

Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices was inspired by a real life scandal surrounding the Prague-based children’s choir Bambini di Praga. In 2008, the choir’s leader, Bohumil Kulínský, was arrested for having sexually abused two dozen girls in the ensemble over the previous two decades, almost all of them underage. He was later convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, and then released on parole after about two-and-a-half years. Not long after his release he died of kidney failure. Provazník’s film fictionalizes the principals and the story, limiting its time frame to several months in the early 1990s, not long after the Czech Republic emerged from communism and Czechoslovakia. The choir, here called Canticella, is a prestigious organization and the adolescent members are constantly in competition to rise up to and remain in the “A” choir, which is the main public face of the group, performing throughout the country and in Europe. The choir master, Vitek Mácha (Juraj Loj), is an imperious but not altogether cruel taskmaster, and the girls use their youthful feminine wiles to get on his good side. The protagonist of the story is 13-year-old Karolína (Kateřina Falbrová), a member of the “B” choir whose older sister, Lucie (Maya Kintera), is in the “A” group.

I know the woman who was the Japanese-English interpreter/road manager for Bambini di Praga during the 90s, when they came to Japan almost every year to tour the country, and I asked her to watch a screener of the film and give me her opinion. She said the actor who portrays Mácha looks a lot like Kulínský, though despite what he ends up doing in the movie, he comes off as more likable than the man she worked with. Kulínský, she said, was a drunk and a bully, a man who lorded over the girls (and two boys—in Japan the choir toured as the Praha Shojo Shonen Gasshodan) with almost comical bravado. He terrorized the Japanese staff with his demands and while the interpreter got along with him to a certain extent, she didn’t like him at all, but he always insisted she tour with them as they went from small town to small town, and since the choir was a money maker for the Japanese organizer he got his way. Kulínský spoke English but the girls mostly did not, so the interpreter’s relationship with them wasn’t very deep; and while she found the maestro’s behavior around them creepy (if they stayed at a hot spring he would sometimes bathe with them, behavior duplicated in the movie when Mácha shares a sauna with Karolína) she never suspected him of sexual abuse, though when she eventually learned of his arrest, some years after she stopped working with the choir, she wasn’t really surprised. Kulínský was a seasoned showman, which is why the choir was so popular in Japan. He knew exactly how to present the girls to Japanese audiences—he even taught them popular Japanese songs—and at the inevitable post-performance parties with local bigwigs he knew how to show them off to middle aged men who thought they were cute. The interpreter felt he was just doing what he was supposed to be doing, promoting the choir for the sake of the Japanese organizer, as well as Czech culture and, most importantly, himself. He was very ambitious, and had inherited the choir from his late father, the previous choir master. It was a family business, and his mother toured with them as assistant choir mistress. What he really wanted to do was move beyond children’s choirs and become a legitimate orchestra conductor, a goal he was on his way to achieving when he was arrested. In that regard, Japan was always central to his aims since his many years of touring here had given him a certain professional cachet he could take advantage of. His first orchestral gigs were in Japan. 

In the movie, Mácha initially comes across as the urbane sophisticate, less a big brother figure than an unattainable hip uncle with his acoustic guitar, long hair, and colorful couture. He immediately singles Karolína out from her “B” choir peers and promotes her to the “A” choir, based on what he says is her native talent. As she gains his favor, we see Lucie grow more nervous and even jealous, thus leading to a cruel bullying incident that has dire health consequences for Karolína. She survives the ordeal and is selected as one of 20 girls who will embark on the choir’s first tour of the U.S. Along the way, she has to navigate the catty conflicts at play among the girls, some of whom we suspect have already been the victims of Mácha’s untoward attentions, though the extent of those attentions isn’t made clear until they get to their hotel in New York.

Despite one shocking scene, Broken Voices is almost too tasteful in its approach to its unsavory subject. It’s mostly concerned with how a monster like Mácha gets away with what he gets away with, since those who followed the real situation with Kulínský know he continued taking advantage of his charges for at least another decade. There are hints in the movie that Mácha’s mother, the choir’s “professor,” knows what’s going on, but like the Japanese interpreter with Kulínský, the general feeling among people familiar with the situation surrounding the choir is that sexual abuse was beyond the pale and thus unimaginable. Power dynamics between mentor and mentees in the art world is such a cliche that men like Mácha/Kulínský can confidently believe they will never get caught until, of course, they are.

In Czech and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Broken Voices home page in Japanese

photo (c) endorfilm s.r.o. Punkchart Films s.r.o. Ceska televize innogy Ceska republika a.s. Barrandov Studio a.s. 2025

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Review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Posted on September 18, 2026 by philipbrasor

Only a few seconds into this harrowing black comedy by Mary Bronstein, the protagonist, a fortyish Long Island mother named Linda (Rose Byrne), says to her complaining young daughter, “I’m allowed to be sad,” a massive understatement that will prove to be the foundational joke of the film. Over the next 110 minutes, Linda’s patience and sanity will be tested by a slew of misfortunes that will test the patience and sanity of the viewer as well. For the most part, Linda’s anxieties are justifiable. Her daughter, whose face we never see but whose voice and demeanor are those of a petulant brat, is suffering from some sort of ailment that has rendered her unable to eat and thus necessitates a feeding tube that requires constant care, and Linda’s rented apartment has just suffered broken plumbing that has forced her and her daughter into a cheap motel room while her cruise ship captain husband (Christian Slater, essentially a whining voice on the phone) is away at work for a few months, leaving her to her own devices and demons, some of which come in human form, though in the end Linda’s worst enemy proves to be herself.

Bronstein exacerbates the tension and fear by keeping the camera tight on Linda’s face, a landscape darkened by constantly changing emotional heavy weather. Though some have characterized If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (a phrase I didn’t hear used during the movie) as another study of post-partum depression, Linda’s daughter is not an infant—I would guess her age to be around 7 or 8—and Linda’s psychological condition, while certainly in dangerous territory, seems initially a product of the outside forces rallied against her. For sure, she is beset by assholes at every turn, whether it’s her daughter’s doctor (Bronstein), who scolds her for not taking the support group for mothers with ill children seriously; her own psychiatric patients, whose insufferable neediness would be hilarious if taken out of context; her mentor-colleague (Conan O’Brien), who receives her litany of complaints during requisite therapy sessions with unconcealed contempt; or the various service workers—receptionists, clerks, parking lot attendants—who refuse to see her as a woman under the influence because she makes their job that much more difficult. The only character at all seemingly cognizant of what Linda is going through is James (A$AP Rocky), the custodian at the motel who helps her acquire alcohol from the front desk and drugs on the dark web, tasks that at first smack of a kind of perverted charity but, of course, end up being disastrous choices, and not just for Linda, because everything Linda touches turns to shit, including, it would seem, her daughter.

The incontrovertible conclusion is that Linda is not fit to be a mother, an observance that Linda herself makes multiple times to herself and others, and any viewer with a modicum of pity will agree, though I’m not sure if Bronstein wants us to maintain that conviction through to the vaguely suggestive final scene. For sure, Byrne gives us a howling performance of female instability that rivals anything Gena Rowlands manifested back in the day, but since everything is channeled through Linda’s claustrophobic POV it’s difficult to tell how much of her suffering is imagined. I would guess very little, because the world is famously full of assholes. Some people are equipped to confont that world regardless of what it throws at them, and Linda ain’t one of ’em. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Legs Film Rights LLC

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Review: The Odyssey and Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?

Posted on September 11, 2026 by philipbrasor

At this point, it seems impossible to talk about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey without addressing his faithfulness—or lack of it—to the original text, which is more than 3,000 years old. It’s an issue I can’t rightly address since I don’t remember the poem that well, though I did read it in junior high school, or, at least, some version of it. But it’s obvious that Nolan’s own version is a revision if only because it feels very much like a Hollywood movie, a definite throwback to the kind of big budget storytelling attached to Biblical epics in the 50s and early 60s, except that the sensibility is more enlightened (or “woke,” depending on how you feel about such things) and the technical aspects much more accomplished, even cockily assured. But it’s with regard to the former aspect that I found the movie most intriguing. However dodgy my memory of reading The Odyssey as an adolescent is, I do remember it as being hung up on violent purpose. It is, after all, a tale told in the wake of a horrible war that the hero not only supported but led. In Nolan’s retelling, the hero has serious misgivings.

Being a Hollywood production, the love story takes precedent. After defeating the Trojans through subterfuge and murderous abandon, Odysseus (Matt Damon) spends the entire movie trying to get back to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), whom he hasn’t seen since he left for the campaign many years ago. In the meantime, Penelope has carried the torch for her husband, so to speak, fending off a mob of suitors who covet Odysseus’s property and title and assume he isn’t coming back. Her steely resolve transcends love to embody a kind of noble suffering, as if sacrifice was a prerequisite for privilege. The suitors plunder her store of wine and food while she sits in her room weaving a tapestry. For his part, Odysseus undergoes sacrifice in more physical terms, braving actual fire and ice, monsters and supernatural forces, in order to return to his family, to home and hearth, as it were. The nobility inherent in such an endeavor is sort of ridiculous, and he seems to require the counsel of at least one god, Athena (Zendaya), in order to decide if the grinding trip is really worth it. For several years he seems to abandon the journey, shacking up with the wraith Calypso (Charlize Theron) in what looks like a Greek island travel advertisement, all sandy beaches and bonfire cookouts. Nolan emphasizes the temptations that pull at Odysseus’s resolve as much as he does the guilt that haunts his memories of war. Our hero is a mess, but a mess with a conscience. 

Much has been made of the IMAX experience, and it is impressive in how it conveys the scale of Nolan’s ambitions in the most vivid way possible. However, it also reduces most of the plot and characterizations to their bare essence, and since the poem is an epic much of it is sketchy. Too many of the episodes are strung together. The ellipses are obvious. The story progresses by fits and starts, and there’s no indication of time passing. Except for Penelope and Odysseus, every character feels like a walk-on, meaning you probably will only appreciate Nolan’s accomplishment if you’ve actually read the poem and remembered it, which I’m sure wasn’t the aim. 

Soldier’s guilt is addressed head-on in Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest antiwar movie, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? The title character, an African-American named Allen Nelson (played by Mark Merphy as a young man, by Rodney Hicks as an older man) who fought in the Vietnam War as a Marine, is shown at different periods in his life after returning from Southeast Asia with a severe case of PTSD. The episodes that show his time in Vietnam make it look as if his batallion carried out daily My Lai-level massacres, enough nightmare fodder for a hundred lifetimes, and Tsukamoto stages these atrocities in his patented visceral style, stressing the savagery of the American troops, most of whom are Black in this telling, thus suggesting that they are taking out their own frustrations with being subjugated in America on the Vietnamese. Nelson becomes a killing machine as if through hypnosis and his eventual owning up to the horrors he committed is presented as someone waking up from a bad dream. Much of the story development is presented through his sessions with a soft-spoken therapist (Geoffrey Rush), who keeps asking him “why” he killed people in Vietnam, a question that, understandably, perplexes Nelson—until it doesn’t.

Nelson is a real person who died about twenty years ago. He is famous in Japan for giving more than a thousand lectures about his experiences in Vietnam, and Tsukamoto wants to connect that experience and Nelson’s everlasting guilt to the experiences of Japanese soldiers in Southeast Asia in World War II, which he believes were never aired in an appropriately candid manner because of the shame involved. But that aspect isn’t clear until the end, when we see Nelson traveling to Vietnam to talk about his experiences in the company of a Japanese man named Kuroi (Lily Franky), who has sponsored his lectures in Japan and whose own father died without ever talking about what he did during the war. 

Mr. Nelson is effective in what it sets out to do, even if Tsukamoto’s direction relies more on production design than on narrative elements. Nelson is portrayed as a man constantly on the verge of total mental disintegration—there is not a scene in the movie when he isn’t sweating profusely—and so he comes across more as a symbol than as a complete person. A more literal approach would have been that much more powerful.

The Odyssey now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX; 050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX; 050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (03-6709-6410), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, in English and Vietnamese, now playing in Tokyo at Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

The Odyssey home page in Japanese

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? home page in Japanese

The Odyssey photo (c) 2026 Universal Studios/Melinda Sue Gordon

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? photo (c) Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? Film Partners

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Review: Bob Trevino Likes It and Linka Linka

Posted on September 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the nicer touches in Tracie Laymon’s reportedly semi-autobiographical movie, Bob Trevino Likes It, is the perpetually cracked screen on the cell phone used by the protagonist, Lily Trevino (Barbara Ferreira). As the title suggests, Lily spends an awful lot of time checking her social media feeds and messages, and the condition of the screen, which is never explained nor repaired, becomes a constant reminder of how damaged Lily’s life is. A private care worker living in a nameless American Midwest suburb, the twenty-something Lily walks around with a huge chip on her shoulder thanks to her emotionally abusive father, Bob (French Stewart), who still hasn’t gotten over Lily’s drug-addicted mother walking out on them many years ago and takes his frustrations with the world out on his daughter. Lily internalizes his insults and complaints, seething at his selfishness but afraid that any pushback on her part will just drive him further away, but with each passing encounter her self-hatred and fear of abandonment only increases, to the point that when she finally seeks help from a therapist (Ashlyn Moore), the therapist breaks down in tears after Lily tells her story. Did I say that Bob Trevino Likes It is a comedy?

Well, it is for most of its first half, during which we get the lay of the land of Lily’s psyche, her tendency to seek help by any means necessary on the internet, and the relationships that keep her going—or not. Following a particularly disastrous dinner outing with her father and a middle aged woman he hopes to get jiggy with (“You gotta make me look good,” is her father’s demand), Lily is banished from his life (it’s implied this isn’t the first time he’s done so) and she goes into a depressive tailspin, desperately trying to figure out how to get back into his relatively good graces. While searching Facebook she comes across what she believes is her father’s page, which is doubly perplexing because she didn’t know he had one, but when she tries to friend him she discovers the page belongs to a different Bob Trevino. He accepts her request, thus opening a door to a new relationship. As it turns out, this other Bob (John Leguizamo) is not only her father’s age, but also someone going through his own family-oriented turmoil: He lost a child, a tragedy his wife, like Lily’s father, can’t get past. They eventually meet, and while acquaintances and strangers find their budding friendship unsavory, they turn out to be exactly what each other needs. 

Though at first Lily seems desperate for a father figure who acts the way she believes a father should act, eventually she sees how Bob needs her not as a substitute offspring but as someone who proves to him just by listening that he has value as a human being. It goes without saying that Lily really only wants the same thing, and their give-and-take is heartfelt and grounded in the redemptive power of unselfish love. However, all the other characters are written as stereotypes: the haplessly cruel parent, the ineffective social worker, the deluded spouse, the fair weather friend, and countless minor players who might as well have no faces to go with their respective single defining traits that merely add ballast to the plot. Warning: You will cry your eyes out in the end, but you may wonder if the movie deserves your tears.

A difficult father-daughter relationship also centers the drama in Linka Linka, the debut feature of Tibetan writer-director Kangdrun, whose take on the Tibet Autonomous Region of China eschews most of the cultural peculiarites and sweeping mountain vistas and steppes characteristic of films from the area, instead concentrating on the social milieu of the capital city of Lhasa, which is much more cosmopolitan than you might expect, especially for young people, who are shown dancing in nightclubs and engaging with one another mostly online. Like Kangdrun, the protagonist of the film, Samgyi (Tsering Yangkyi), is sent to Shanghai at an early age to receive her education, and when she returns years later she is a budding filmmaker who intends to make her first fiction feature about a formative event in her girlhood that, at the time, traumatized her and her best friend. However, more than dredging up some bitter feelings in the process, Samgyi’s return also preciptates a reckoning with her musician father, who disapproves of her choice of profession, an attitude that renders what was once a loving relationship into a prickly one. 

Linka Linka (the title refers to a kind of traditional picnic) has a dual structure, alternating between Samgyi struggling to make her movie on location in Lhasa and flashbacks to her adolescence when the formative incident the movie is about took place. Kangdrun often complicates this structure by further bifurcating the flashback tale between what supposedly happened in her mind and how she describes it in the movie-within-the-movie. At issue is a lost wallet whose provenance figures prominently in the fates of Samgyi and her best friend, Lhamo. Each friend remembered the incident differently, which is why they never spoke afterwards. This disconnect carries over to the viewer, who automatically wonders how reliable a narrator Samgyi is.

The resolution of the central mystery turns out to be less consequential than the idea that you can go home again and take up where you left off, at least emotionally. Due to Kangdrun’s ambitious approach to storytelling, the movie sometimes gets away from its premise, and the sideshows are so enchanting that the viewer can be forgiven for losing the thread of the plot. I wanted to know a lot more about Suoso (Ze Ren Dun Zhu), Samgyi’s fashion-conscious influencer pen pal, who essentially represents contemporary Tibetan youth in their desire to embrace the wider world. His presence is conceived as comic relief, but he’s got more soul than anyone else in the movie. 

Bob Trevino Likes It opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musahinokan (03-3354-5670).

Linka Linka, in Tibetan and Mandarin, opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Bob Trevino Likes It home page in Japanese

Linka Linka home page in Japanese

Bob Trevino Likes It photo (c) 2024 Chosen Family, LLC

Linka Linka photo (c) Tibetan Antelope Films Co., Ltd.

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Review: Starve Acre

Posted on September 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

Folk horror meets generational family trauma in this confusingly intense exercise in sophisticated campfire ghost storytelling. It’s the bleak 1970s in Yorkshire, England, where academically embattled archaeologist Richard (Matt Smith) has moved his wife, Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and possibly schizophrenic young son, Owen (Arthur Shaw), to his own childhood home, partly because it has some sort of anthropological significance and partly because he believes Owen’s perilous mental state (he hears voices) might be relieved with a change of scenery, though a house where he himself was subjected to parental abuse hardly sounds like an improvement over anywhere. Owen’s situation worsens, exacerbated by the mutterings of a local named Gordon (Sean Gilder), Richard’s father’s best friend, who believes the estate, called Starve Acre, is the realm of some kind of pagan demon. 

Suffice to say that things go from creepy to tragic before you can say Jack Grey, which is the nickname of this evil entity. Grief, of course, drives Richard and Juliette farther apart, with Richard applying himself to his work as a kind of distraction—or is it actually to confront the trauma at the base of his own obvious psychosis? Eventually, digging on the site of a vanished supposedly possessed oak tree on the property, he uncovers something sinister that leads him to a box of his father’s possessions containing the skeleton of a hare that starts to come to life in front of his eyes. Could this be Jack Grey in the (putrefied) flesh? 

Such questions never stop presenting themselves because, while the screenplay is based on a novel, director Daniel Kokotajlo seems more interested in summoning delectably gruesome set pieces than making those set pieces serve an organic story. Owen’s sad situation is never satisfyingly connected to the hare’s terrorizing impulses or his father’s deteriorating mental state, which actually seems detached from any concern for his immediate family. Moreover, the dialogue feels purposely muffled, making it difficult to tell what people are saying half the time—call it mumblecore horror. Starve Acre is a handsomely mounted production with a classic gothic atmosphere, but it doesn’t really take you anywhere. It sort of does the rounds and then just leaves on the side of a dark road in the middle of the night. What exactly are you scared of?

Opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Starve Acre home page in Japanese

photo (c) House Starve Acre Limited, Acre Film LLC, British Broadcasting Corporation and The British Film Institute 2023

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Review: Numakage Public Pool

Posted on September 5, 2026 by philipbrasor

Frederick Wiseman, who died in February, was not only America’s greatest documentary filmmaker, but an anthropologist of rare insight. Though he is mainly famous for perfecting the so-called fly-on-the-wall observational doc, it was his wide-ranging approach to his institutional subjects that will be studied centuries from now, from public libraries to ballet companies, from local politics to government functions. Shingo Ota, whose previous film was about the day worker enclave of Nishinari in Osaka, brings the same kind of enveloping curiosity to his study of the last days of a public pool in the city of Saitama, but circumscribes it with thematic structure. The opening scenes of the film show the Numakage Public Pool being demolished, so we already know its fate. Over the next 90 minutes Ota frames its demise through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, which are usually experienced by a person who is told they are dying. In Ota’s case, the people suffering are the regular users of the pool, which has been a beloved fixture of the neighborhood for many decades and whose removal, we soon infer, is the result of a lack of imagination on the part of city officials. In documenting what is essentially an act of bureaucratic arrogance, Ota tries to make it into a kind of Greek tragedy. 

But along the way he gets some stunning footage, and conveys a clear sense of how a viable community can emerge from a common, casual interest. As he goes through the five steps—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—mostly by forcing the matter, he goes both behind the scenes to show us how a successful public pool is managed and operated, and head-on with users who have a deep emotional stake in the facility. Among the former are the lifeguards, who start and end the day with typical Japanese-style workplace rituals, and the meticulous custodial crew who maintain the impressively diverse attractions (three separate pools, a water slide, concessions, and a massive locker room) in tip-top shape. Two local businesses that cater to pool patrons are also covered in detail, a bento takeout/delivery service and a family-run dagashiya (snacks and cheap novelties for children). Among the users are a cohort of elderly women who look to be in great shape thanks to their daily pool exercise regimen and who badger Ota into joining them in the water; the usual gangs of mischievous kids and adolescents; and a subset of men who come to cruise other men under the radar, though signs in the locker room prohibiting more than one person in a stall at a time would seem to indicate that the operators know what’s going on. In addition, Ota shows a group of local activists lobbying city hall to keep the pool open, though anyone with any knowledge of Japanese government protocols will know that once such a decision is made—in this case, without much effort being made to solicit public input—it’s already a done deal, regardless of all the bowing and “kento shimasu (we’ll look into it)” assurances on the part of white-shirted office factotums. 

The five-step gambit ends up providing little in the way of meaning. Ota gets more substance out of careful camera placements that manage to catch evocative encounters and incidents—though a sequence at the end where one of the male regulars brings home another male regular unannounced for dinner with his elderly, seemingly annoyed mother is obviously staged (a title card during the introduction implies as much) and thus feels joltingly out-of-place. One of Wiseman’s skills was developing narratives out of completely disparate elements. Ota is not at that level. He still needs gimmicks.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Numakage Public Pool home page in Japanese

photo (c) hydroblast

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Review: The Voice of Hind Rajab and 2000 Meters to Andriivka

Posted on September 4, 2026 by philipbrasor

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has already proven herself to be an imaginative creator of documentaries with Four Daughters, a film in which she showed the real-life subjects of her story coaching actors who would play them in recreations of their experiences. The Voice of Hind Rajab takes this conceit to its next natural level. It is a wrenching dramatization of the events of January 29, 2024, as they unfolded in the offices of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) where workers tried to help the titular six-year-old girl via cellphone survive an Israeli attack in Gaza. Though what we see on screen is a minute-by-minute acting out of the story, much of the dialogue is the actual recording of the cellphone conversations.

The PRCS’s job in this case is “coordination,” meaning they receive calls for help from people inside the occupied territory and then assist them, but they are required to do this by working with the Israeli authorities, and through the Red Cross, no less, thus adding several layers of bureaucracy. Consequently, much of their mission is tangled up in red tape, which in this case proves deadly because the girl is the only survivor in a car full of relatives that has been hit by Israeli fire. The aid workers on duty must contend with a little girl using a phone with dodgy reception and surrounded by the corpses of her loved ones. Then they have to direct an ambulance to the site of the carnage to save the girl, but not before gaining permission from the Israeli Defense Forces to let the ambulance through. These various challenges cause extreme friction among the aid workers, including the front line operatives Rana (Saja Kilani) and Omar (Motaz Malhees), who talk directly to the little girl and pressure their harried supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), to work around the IDF to get help to the girl as soon as possible. Ironically—or not, depending on your perspective—their task is complicated by the IDF’s tendency to jam signals from within Gaza. 

Predictably, the film is unbearably tense, and not just because the voice we hear is that of a real, frightened child. Ben Hania keeps the action tightly focused on her main core of aid workers, so viewers have no chance to catch their breath; and her actors treat the whole endeavor accordingly, as a chamber piece where every character’s attention is fixed on one thing and one thing only. In addition, Ben Hania has to master her own tricky coordination, making sure the various non-recreated elements, like the real-time audio and video of the incident, are incorporated into the dramatization in a way that doesn’t make them a distraction. She does this mainly by occasionally cutting away from the artifice and giving us the actual footage of aid workers doing their job. It is aggressively present-in-the-moment, demanding you not forget what happened on that day.

Presence in the moment is also the leitmotif of 2000 Meters to Andriivka, the latest documentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine by AP reporter Mstyslav Chernov, which chronicles up close and personally a grueling inch-by-inch retaking of the titular village by a Ukrainian battalion in 2023. Chernov is embedded in the batallion and speaks to the audience in post-dubbed English voiceover, explaining much of what’s going on and even providing context about individual soldiers and the general tenor of the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” that the Andriivka mission is a part of. He has also fitted some of the soldiers with GoPro cameras to capture the action from their point-of-view. Unlike his narration of the Oscar-winning 20 Days of Mariupol, his tone here is distinctively muted, less optimistic about Ukraine’s chances as he watches the destruction firsthand from within the chaos of battle.

And “chaos” is the operative word. The terrain is unusually limited: a thin stretch of forest about 40 meters wide set between two huge mine fields that leads directly to the village. The forest already looks like the moon, with burnt trees and crater-like foxholes sometimes occupied by Russians who have to be removed one-by-one. The Ukrainian soldiers are uniformly profane and understandably terrified of their mission, and while they often talk about what they will do after Andriivka is secured (“I will sleep for two days”; “I am going to take the longest shower in history”) there’s that unmistakable quality in their voice that no actor could possibly mimic of talking through their terror. 

2000 Meters to Andriivka is essentially the opposite of The Voice of Rind Hajab in that not only is nothing recreated, but the realness of the images and the sound become overwhelming. Bullets whizz by, clumps of dirt fly up into the camera lens, grenades go off a short distance away, and men scream. They scream a lot. More significantly, the exhaustion of being always afraid, contained rather obviously in Chernov’s voiceover, is a constant that can’t be erased by anything. Is it all worth it? Chernov implies that these soldiers are here because they feel they have no choice (“I came to fight, not to serve,” says one), because whatever their leaders in Kyiv and their enemy in Moscow decide, they will not rest until all Russians are out of Ukraine. The movie thus adds another layer of exhaustion to an inexhaustible war. 

The Voice of Rind Hajab, in Arabic and English, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

2000 Meters to Andriivka, in English, Ukrainian and Russian, now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Voice of Hind Rajab home page in Japanese

2000 Meters to Andriivka home page in Japanese

The Voice of Hind Rajab photo (c) Mime Films-Tanit Films

2000 Meters to Andriivka photo (c) 2024 Dogwoof

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Review: Backrooms

Posted on September 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

Horror movies work best when their scares are rooted in identifiable psychological unease. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, one of the most discussed American horror movies of the year, based on Parsons’ own internet photo postings and YouTube series, has a brilliant setup: The proprietor of a sad, under-patronized furniture store in a colorless California suburb in the 1990s is, as the movie gets underway, cycling through various low-level crises. In addition to being a frustrated, unsuccessful architect, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) drinks too much, has recently separated from a wife who continues to badger him for money, and is seeing a therapist, Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve), whose bedside manner seems to be making his depression worse. The breakdown in Clark’s psychic equilibrium is best exemplified by the hapless TV commercials he makes for his business, where he dresses up as a pirate and looks like a fool, thus fortifying the ridiculousness of Clark’s very existence, which already feels like a horror movie in that the viewer automatically wants to turn away from it.

Parsons then injects a supernatural element that at first feels gratuitous. Having decided to sleep in the store as a way to save money, Clark discovers some electrical problems and while checking the breaker in the basement accidently finds he can pass through a wall into a series of yellow-lit backrooms that seem to lead nowhere. Flummoxed by the discovery, he enlists two student filmmakers (Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell) to follow him back through the wall to record the phenomenon, but this time he and his assistants are attacked by an unseen force that traps them in these endless corridors. Since Clark told Dr. Kline about his discovery, she starts to worry when he does not show up for his appointed sessions and goes to the store to investigate. Kline’s experience in the backrooms is sufficiently disorienting to qualify as horror-adjacent, but it isn’t until she encounters Clark in what amounts to an extra-dimensional incarnation of his sublimated anxieties that the movie starts to get under your skin in a very unpleasant way.

Though there’s some violence and blood, the movie’s unsettling power emerges from the way it plays on the audience’s experiences with liminal spaces, which often have a discombobulating effect on the senses, epitomizing the idea of an unnatural environment. Kane intensifies the discomfort by increasing these unnatural qualities with weird angles, impossible perspectives, and attendant sounds that seem to emanate from within rather than without. If, in the end, he bites off more than he can chew by trying to provide some kind of meaningful explanation for what we see on the screen, he leaves you with enough fresh nightmare material for a month’s worth of bad sleep. I don’t think I ever need to visit a furniture store again.

Opens Sept. 4 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).

Backrooms home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026 Backrooms Rights LLC, PC Films, LLC

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Review: The Gullspång Miracle

Posted on September 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

The “truth is stranger than fiction” documentary is almost a movie genre unto itself, though its appeal is mostly ironic: no self-respecting novelist would ever countenance a story this outrageous or unbelievable. This Swedish film, the first feature-length doc by Maria Fredriksson, qualifies for the genre but in a back-assward way. It’s the entire making of the film that buggers belief. In fact, at one point, when the revelations become too much, the director herself can be heard in the background demanding in a conspicuously exasperated tone that her subjects “stop lying” and address her doubts about what they are trying to put across. In that regard, maybe the movie is its own genre: “untruth is stranger than both fiction and real life.”

Fredriksson did not initiate the project. She was asked to record the “miracle” that two sisters in their 60s had recently experienced, thinking that it would make a great movie. It started when one of the sisters, May-Elin Storslettin, who lives in Norway, visits the other, Kari Klo, who lives in the town of Gullspång, Sweden, and is badly injured during a mishap at an amusement park. Told by a physician that she should not travel, May lays up at Kari’s for a few weeks and then impulsively decides to buy an apartment in the town. She chooses a unit because of a still-life on the kitchen wall—a painting that both sisters think is some kind of omen—and when she and Kari meet the owner of the apartment, they are struck by how much she resembles their older sister Lita, who committed suicide 30 years earlier. Initially they wonder if the woman, a retired Swedish army lieutenant named Olaug Bakkevoll, isn’t actually Lita, since they never saw Lita’s body as the funeral was carried out with a closed casket due to religious proscriptions against suicide. Long story short, after some dodgy geneological research carried out by an over-eager cousin and a DNA test showing that Olaug is the sisters’ half-sibling (same father, different mother), they determine that Olaug is Lita’s twin, but because they were born in 1941 during the Nazi occupation, their father decided to give Olaug away to a family “living on the other side of the fjord,” since it was known that the Nazis were carrying out medical experiments on twins. The upshot is that Lita grew up in a strictly religious farm family with lots of siblings while Olaug was raised by a well-to-do couple who gave her a more liberal, worldly education.

At first, these differences feel insignificant in the blinding light of the movie’s incredible revelations, but once Olaug gets to know her newfound relations better, including the family members who still live on the farm in Norway, the relationship quickly curdles. Some of the simmering enmity has to do with class and some has to do with pedigree (Norwegians and Swedes have always harbored national resentments toward each other), but mainly what we see is these individuals’ true selves, as it were, coming to the surface. When Olaug grows suspicious of the police’s initial finding that Lita’s death was a suicide, she demands they reopen the case and then learns that an undisclosed autopsy determined she had no drugs in her system. The family is relieved because they now think she died of natural causes, but Olaug believes it was murder, an insistence that sends Fredriksson further down a rabbit hole and sorely offends the sisters. Fredriksson tries to keep up with the changing situation, but eventually lets it go where it will, and in the end it’s difficult to trust anyone, including Olaug, whose eccentricities now come across as stark bigotry and self-delusion. The “miracle” may be nothing more than wish fulfillment run amok, and while the story gets away from Fredriksson the movie itself never fails to fascinate. That it was even made is the actual miracle.

In Norwegian and Swedish. Opens Sept. 4 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Gullspång Miracle home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023, Ballad Film, SVT, Film i Vast, Film Stockholm, Mer Film, Good Company Pictures

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