Monthly Archives: January 2022

Media watch: Bicycle accidents receive extra scrutiny from public, police and media

Posted on January 31, 2022 by philipbrasor

On Jan. 26, Tokyo District Court began hearing a case in which a bicycle delivery person is accused of riding recklessly and causing the death of a 78-year-old man in Itabashi Ward last April. Prosecutors are demanding a 2-year prison … Continue reading →

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Review: Crescendo

Posted on January 29, 2022 by philipbrasor

German-Israeli co-productions have emerged as an almost distinct subset of middlebrow art house cinema. Invariably, all the movies in this category deal either directly (Plan A) or indirectly (The Cakemaker) with the two countries’ fraught relationship owing to history, but … Continue reading →

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Review: Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm

Posted on January 28, 2022 by philipbrasor

If you assess music documentaries by how many interviews with rock stars it contains, Rockfield, which is about the titular Welsh recording studio built on the premises of a working farm, will probably be right up there at the top … Continue reading →

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Media watch: High court “forgives” trainee convicted of abandoning baby, but only up to a point

Posted on January 24, 2022 by philipbrasor

Technical trainees who come from overseas to work in Japan are subject to conditions that don’t necessarily apply to foreign workers who come to Japan with conventional work visas. There are many people who feel these conditions are unreasonable, especially … Continue reading →

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Review: Silk Road

Posted on January 23, 2022 by philipbrasor

Writer-director Tiller Russell’s highly dramatized recreation of the rise and fall of the darknet website Silkroad.com takes a novel approach to the classic protagonist-antagonist dynamic in that the two main characters are really antagonists. In fact, it’s safe to call … Continue reading →

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Review: Third Time Lucky

Posted on January 22, 2022 by philipbrasor

When it premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2015, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour revived interest in Japanese art house cinema among those who had mostly given up on it since the dawn of the 1990s. A long, intimate portrait … Continue reading →

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Review: Riders of Justice

Posted on January 21, 2022 by philipbrasor

Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s revenge film manages to hit all the expected beats in terms of violent actions and righteous payback while undermining most of the narrative justification necessary to get the audience rooting for said violence. But unlike … Continue reading →

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Review: CODA

Posted on January 20, 2022 by philipbrasor

After reading the synopsis for the American film CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) but prior to seeing it, I felt as if I’d seen this movie before, and, as a matter of fact, it is based on a 2015 French … Continue reading →

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Review: Stillwater

Posted on January 18, 2022 by philipbrasor

Director Tom McCarthy gives the viewer every opportunity to offer his painfully thoughtful movie every benefit of the doubt, especially in the beginning when he introduces his protagonist, Bill Baker (Matt Damon), a laid-off oil worker from Oklahoma who wears … Continue reading →

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Review: I’m Your Man

Posted on January 17, 2022 by philipbrasor

Ostensibly a romantic comedy about android love, this subversively heartbreaking German feature, written (with Jan Schomburg, based on a published short story) and directed by Maria Schrader, makes too much sense for a tale that, while remaining stubbornly cerebral to … Continue reading →

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