Review: Sound of Falling and Hallan

Posted on April 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

Multigenerational stories that focus on an extended lineage are usually called epics, a term that could apply to Mascha Schilinski’s second feature, Sound of Falling, except that the unifying force over the years depicted isn’t strictly a family but a family farm located in rural eastern Germany. And while the narrative is liberally spread out over four time periods, each is filtered through a girl’s narrowly delineated point-of-view rather than presented as a sweeping portrait. The stories aren’t in chronological order, but rather diced and scattered over the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time. All four are self-contained while relating to one another in ways that is best appreciated in retrospect. Following the various threads can be frustrating at times owing to Schilinski’s overly subjective treatment of how her characters interact with their environments, but there’s an intrinsic logic at work that connects everything historically and emotionally.

The earliest story takes place around the First World War, after 7-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) soon realizes that she is named after another child of her parents who died before she was born. Her understanding of death, a constant reality on the farm where she lives with her many siblings, a chronically ill and ill-disposed mother, and a father of quiet tyrannical purpose, is thus clear to her and colors her understanding of the way life itself is addressed in her household, whether through ritual (funerals “fool the Lord into believing the deceased was a believer”) or customs that are frankly horrifying, such as the housemaids’ mandatory sterilization so that pregnancies do not interfere with their duties (while at the same time making them convenient rape targets for the male servants). Erika (Lea Drinda) is older but still growing up on the same farm during the Second World War, where she creepily stalks her immobile Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), whose loss of a leg was explained in the earlier story. Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) anchors the GDR-set tale, when the farm has become a kind of ramshackle collective where incest is common if not exactly acceptable, and dreams of fleeing to the West are interpreted as death wish fantasies. Those impulses are realized in the only section that takes place in the 21st century, wherein a family of smartphone wielding urban hippies buy the old farm to make it into a rural idyll. Their eldest daughter, Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), yearns to escape the safety of this milieu by befriending a local punk named Kaya (Ninel Geiger) simply because her mother died tragically and Kaya doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it.

Schilinski cuts abruptly between eras and related scenes without any loss of logical cohesion, though often the meaning of one scene doesn’t become apparent until much later. Most of her characters learn things by looking through keyholes, windows, doors left ajar, and cracks in walls, fortifying the idea that these girls, some sexually aware, some not, are gaining forbidden knowledge through their natural curiosity, and while that’s not a particularly original device, their curiosity invariably infects our own. A necessary caveat is that one shouldn’t come to Sound of Falling looking for insights into German history, despite the richness of incident depicted in each of the time segments. But Schiliniski trusts her viewers to bring whatever historical knowledge they have to the film, thus making it a much more disturbing viewing experience than would any straightforward melodrama that covers the same well-trod ground. 

Ha Myung-mi’s Hallan is a more conventional historical feature in that is centers on a specific event, and while its viewpoint is as circumscribed as those in Sound of Falling its purpose is clearly edification. The historical circumstance is the so-called Jeju 4.3 incident, a term that refers to a riot on the Korean island of Jeju on April 3, 1947, to describe a whole 8-year uprising wherein various forces from the mainland then under U.S. and newly liberated Korean control killed tens of thousands of natives who were thought to be communist sympathizers. Ha’s movie boils the action down to a small coastal village whose inhabitants decide to flee up a nearby mountain in order to avoid roaming groups of police, Korean government troops, and right-wing paramilitary groups, who they’ve heard are killing civilians indiscriminately. The main character is Ah-jin (Kim Hyang-gi), a young mother whose schoolteacher husband belongs to a left-wing cell that once fought the Japanese colonizers and now opposes the 1948 elections because they will only take place in the portion of the peninsula controlled by the U.S., and thus, they believe, will effectively split the country in two. The husband has already retreated up the mountain and Ah-jin plans to join him there with a number of other residents, leaving behind her 6-year-old daughter, Hae-saeng (Kim Min-chae), in the care of her elderly mother, assuming the marauding soldiers won’t harm a child and an old woman.

She assumes wrongly, though Hae-saeng manages to escape the carnage—approved by an American officer on-site—and goes up the mountain alone looking for her mother. For the most part, Hallan is a mix of wartime melodrama and action potboiler, with various characters fulfill roles that are basically invented to move the agenda-laden script in the intended direction. The civilians are divided between innocents who simply want to live their lives peacefully and leftist guerillas who are determined to fight back against government oppression, even if it means killing their own to protect their interests. On the other side, there’s a hodgepodge of sensibilities, with the sadistic Sergeant Park (Hwang Jung-nam) at the fanatical anti-red end and the Christian Private Moon (Kim Won-joon) providing the bad guys with a countervailing conscience. As is often the case in war stories, the women set the moral tone while the men act out the historical prerogatives, which are presented in such a way as to point out that violence was endemic on both sides. If the authorities come off worse, it’s because they wield it against anyone with even a suggestion of proletarian instinct. The villagers are proudly working class people who get their sustenance from the sea, which automatically lends them an independent spirit that the dialogue plays up. As a result, the soldiers come across as cartoon villains beholden to an evil force that remains hidden behind a curtain off screen. It’s reductive, but moving nonetheless.

Like Terrence Malick, Ha makes the most of the lush mountain landscape, showing how beauty can turn deadly with the change of the seasons. She gets carried away with multiple endings that keep jerking the viewer’s emotions around before settling on an absolute downer that can’t be denied due to what we now know. For years, the truth about the Jeju genocide was kept from the Korean people, and Hallan (the name of a mountain orchid) is one small attempt to set the record straight, even if it doesn’t provide the larger picture. It’s a survival thriller with a context that demands further study.

Sound of Falling, in German, starts April 3 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Hallan, in Korean and various Jeju dialects, starts April 3 in Tokyo at PolePole Higashi Nakano (03-3371-0088).

Sound of Falling home page in Japanese

Hallan home page in Japanese

Sound of Falling photo (c) Fabian Gamper – studio Zentral

Hallan photo (c) Whenever Studio

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Review: Chain Reactions

Posted on March 28, 2026 by philipbrasor

Documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe has made a tidy living out of studying scary movies, having already put The Exorcist, Psycho, and Alien under the microscope. This 2024 feature takes on what many believe to be the Rosetta Stone of slasher flicks, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, originally released in 1974. Rather that actually go through the film and discuss its various themes and technical accomplishments, Philippe this time interviews five prominent fans of the movie who explicate their personal connection to it. By doing so, he not only avoids the dissonance that often comes with multiple talking heads working at cross purposes, but brings out aspects of the work that even people who’ve seen it dozens of times may have overlooked. That’s because he’s a good interviewer who zeroes in on his interlocutors’ obsessions, encouraging them to go deep into ideas and theories they may have entertained without interrogating them at length.

Comedian Patton Oswalt comes across as the ultimate TCM fanboy, who first watched it as an adolescent in the early 80s on a friend’s primitive VHS player (“It didn’t even have rewind or fast-forward”). Though he’s seen it 30 times, his reaction is still wonder, because, as he says, the movie plays on the viewer’s expectations as conditioned by Hollywood cliches to intensify the scares. Philippe obligingly illustrates all of Oswalt’s findings with appropriate scenes from the movie, but even more he presents a mini-montage as proof of Oswalt’s claim that TCM is basically about an entire world that’s been driven insane. Director Takashi Miike gets even more personal, relating how he accidentally happened on to a screening of TCM in the late 70s when the Chaplin movie he traveled two hours into Osaka to see was sold out. Miike is the Japanese master of torture horror, and his base appreciation of TCM is for its “beauty,” which is conveyed through its extremely visceral depiction of pain (that meat hook). He claims that his entire ouevre would have been impossible without TCM. Critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas provides the most parochial take on the movie, pointing out that its color palette, which was washed out the first few times she saw it because the prints were so degraded, perfectly matches the experience of growing up in her native Australia, where it was banned until 1984. She’s always interpreted the movie as an environmental disaster story wherein a family responds to the destruction of their land by killing every living thing that crosses it. Stephen King, certainly the most famous person here, approaches the film from the most technical standpoint, focusing on its use of “real people” and director Tobe Hooper’s brilliant use of distraction, a tool that he ended up adopting for his own horror fictions. He also appreciates the movie’s total disregard for good taste, describing Hooper, whom he knew personally, as a “psychotic” behind the camera. Filmmaker Karyn Kusama saves the hyperbole for last, saying that TCM is a flat-out masterpiece of cinematography and pacing, with every character mapping out a “clear agenda.” As a woman, she sees the movie as a treatise on “broken masculinity.” “Leatherface isn’t a monster,” she exclaims. “He’s us.”

What one takes away from this critical discourse is that, as Kusama puts it, “America is a form of madness,” and while it’s been many years since I saw the film, that sounds pretty close to how the movie resounds in my memory. Though I don’t share these people’s enthusiasm for the film, there’s no mistaking it for anything but an extreme vision of a peculiarly American misanthropy. People in the movie kill at will because that’s what real freedom is about.

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

Chain Reactions home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 QBPIX LLC

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Review: Young Mothers

Posted on March 27, 2026 by philipbrasor

The Belgian filmmaking brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, extend their usually focused attention on a single troubled individual in their realistic style to take in a quartet of teenage mothers who are in the early stages of coping with their unplanned situations. The setting is a shelter for young mothers in the town of Liége, where the residents are given common sense advice and dosed with tough love for the maternal journey ahead—or not, as the case may be. At least one of the girls is seriously considering giving up her newborn child for adoption, while another is having second thoughts when she finally figures out that the father isn’t really into settling down and being a father. We’ve heard these stories before, and the Dardennes’ purpose seems to be that they are universal for a reason. By juxtaposing them all within the same movie framework and somehow making them work against one another, they endeavor to present a provocative analysis of how such dilemmas are timeless and insoluble owing to the vicissitudes of individual will and character. The best thing society can do to make these girls’ choices easier is to not prejudge them and simply try to understand.

Fifteen-year-old Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), the aforementioned girl who is considering adoption, has a compelling reason for that decision: Her mother (Christelle Cornil), who desperately wants her to keep the girl (“We can raise it together”), is an alcoholic prone to abusive relationships . In fact, it turns out that the mother talked Ariane into not undergoing an abortion, and now Ariane fears she has brought another child into a world that will only destroy her, just as it almost destroyed her. In contrast, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), who looks even younger than Ariane and is still pregnant when the film opens, plans to keep her baby because she herself was given up for adoption as an infant and refuses to leave her child to the same fate. She spends most of the movie stalking her birth mother, Morgane (India Hair), who initially is adamant about the choice she made as a teenager as well as her refusal to commune with either Jessica or her soon-to-be-granddaughter. Perla (Lucie Laruelle), the child of a broken African immigrant family, is also bent on keeping her son but for a different reason. She believes the child binds her to his father, Robin (Günter Duret), who has just been released from juvenile detention and from the get-go seems disinterested in the boy. (His first question is whether Perla has brought a spliff for him) Deluded by a connubial fantasy, Perla spends most of the movie figuring out that Robin will not be there for her or the boy, during which time we learn of the extent of the abuse she suffered at the hand of her own mother as she recalibrates her emotional compass while almost losing her child to the system. The oldest of the mothers, Julie (Elsa Houben), is in a loving, stable relationship with Dylan (Jef Jacobs), a fellow recovering addict who really is set on settling down, but Julie’s lingering self-esteem problems threaten to drive her back into drug use. 

There’s a fifth example, Naïma (Samia Hilmi), a girl who has been exiled from her Muslim family for choosing to live as a single mother—when we meet her she has already secured a good job and an apartment through the public welfare department and is leaving the shelter—and it would have been interesting, given the cultural aspects of her circumstances, had the Dardennes followed her as closely as they did the others (for one thing, her mother seems to have come around to her decision). Perhaps the brothers weren’t confident enough in their own objectivity to explore her world as thoroughly as they did the other girls’. As it stands, Young Mothers is one of their most moving, honest, and edifying films, which is saying a lot.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Young Mothers home page in Japanese

photo (c) Les Films du Fleuve – Archipel 35 – The Reunion – France 2 Cinema – Be Tv & Orange – Proximus – RTBF (Television belge)/Christine Plenus

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Review: The Thing With Feathers

Posted on March 26, 2026 by philipbrasor

It’s been difficult to take the famous title epigram, adapted from a poem by Emily Dickinson, seriously ever since Woody Allen had fun with it in one of his New Yorker humor pieces. For Dickinson, the thing with feathers was hope. To Allen it was his nephew. In this movie and the novel it’s based on, it’s grief, and the film wastes no time bringing us down. The grieving party is an unnamed graphic novelist played by Benedict Cumberbatch who has just lost his wife. We aren’t told what she died of but the death seems to have been unexpected if not sudden. Dad is left with his two young sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) who are also devastated by the loss but not as demonstratively as is Dad, who isn’t emotionally equipped to raise two children on his own, and for a good part of the action I got the feeling that the boys were coping with their grief much better than their father was. Moreover, they seemed more worried about their father’s lack of parenting wherewithal than they are dispirited by no longer having a mother. 

It’s perhaps a natural outcome of these narrative choices that Cumberbatch feels the need to act his ass off, falling easily into weeping jags every ten minutes as if on cue. The story essentially makes him a victim of his grief, which takes the form of a giant crow, voiced by David Thewlis, which hangs about in his London apartment and points out his failures as a father, an artist, and a human being. He’s also being pestered by his editor, who thinks that if he throws himself into his work—and gives him the new comic he’s contracted to deliver—he’ll return more quickly to a normal state of mind, but, of course, the work just becomes more morbid, thus compounding his misery and self-torture. Under the hissing influence of the crow, Dad himself takes on crow-like attributes, his hands at one point turning into claws and his blackest thoughts realized in what are obviously hallucinations. Though The Thing With Feathers is not a horror movie it uses a lot of horror devices in order to externalize Dad’s suffering, but the various scary incidents are arbitrary and never add up to anything coherent. When the boys start referring to someone they call the “crow-man,” you first get the feeling that they are seeing Dad’s tormentor as well, but in the end they are most likely just talking about Dad, further muddying the movie’s message.

And, in fact, what I took away from the story was that Dad was destroyed not so much by grief but rather by disappointment. “I wasn’t the amazing dad they thought I was,” he says at one point to his father-in-law, referring to his sons, and if that line seems central to explaining his mindset then the whole tale loses much of its power. Grief is a stronger dramatic theme than self-pity, so I don’t understand why the director, Dylan Southern, didn’t include a flashback to when the wife was alive in order to give us some sort of clue as to what it is exactly that Dad lost. In the end, he manages to retain his sanity, but we are given no idea as to how he accomplished this feat. The crow, it would seem, is not a destructive force but a constructive one, since he did manage to get a book out of the ordeal. The thing with feathers is a bird with an assignment. 

Opens March 27 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

The Thing With Feathers home page in Japanese

photo (c) The Thing With Feathers Ltd./The British Film Institute/Channel Four Television Corporation 2025

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Review: What Does That Nature Say to You

Posted on March 21, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the most common figures of romantic stories down through the ages is the unreliable artist-lover. Extrapolated into narratives, such characters often end up being secondary to the protagonist, who is usually a woman and falls for the artist due to his creative endeavors and searching intellect, only to discover later that when it comes to more practical concerns he’s something of a loser. Hong Sangsoo adapts this theme to his own unique cinematic aesthetic in his latest film, which misleads the viewer for a while by complementing the artist-character’s obvious delusions about himself with his interlocutors’ seeming willingness to humor them. The reasons for this dynamic aren’t revealed until the end of the movie, and even then there’s a sense that Hong has it in for everyone on screen, and not just the artist.

Dong-hwa (Ha Seong-guk) is a poet and the son of a celebrity attorney, though he’s quick to point out to anyone he meets that he lives “independently” from his family. The story takes place during one day and one night when Dong-hwa drives his girlfriend, Jun-hee (Kang So-yi), to her family home in a leafy, hilly suburb of Seoul in his 1996 Kia—a personal possession that comes to bear more than its share of thematic baggage. Though his intention is only to drop off Jun-hee, when he gets a glimpse of the fine old house on the hill and Jun-hee explains how her father built it for his mother in her old age, he becomes intrigued and she invites him to get a closer look. Naturally, he runs into Jun-hee’s father, O-ryeong (Kwon Hae-hyo), and we learn it’s the first time he’s met his daughter’s boyfriend, though they’ve been dating for almost 3 years. Over the course of the day, father and potential son-in-law talk about many trivial things in the Hong style, meaning over alcoholic drinks and in a kind of arch, artificially genteel manner. (“You don’t need to speak so formally to me,” Dong-hwa says repeatedly) The young man later meets Jun-hee’s older sister, Neung-hee (Park Mi-so), who suffers from depression and lives at home now, the implication being that she’s unmarriageable; and in the evening Jun-hee’s mother, Sun-hee (Cho Yun-hee). The parents constantly take Dong-hwa’s self-deprecating philosophical pronouncements at face value as he becomes progressively inebriated, and it’s up to Neung-hee to finally administer the dose of common sense that breaks the poet’s aura of self-possession, thus exposing him as someone who isn’t at all in control of his destiny. 

Though Dong-hwa’s sudden eruption during the climactic dinner scene is a shock to the movie’s previously placid surface, it’s not really a surprise, and Hong follows it up with an extended coda that finds the parents dissecting his character, which they knew as soon as they met him was not something they would want for their daughter (“He’s never faced anything hard in his life”). Meanwhile, Dong-hwa, who has passed out, wakes up in their home and goes about his business as if nothing of consequence has happened, thus confirming the viewer’s suspicion that he’s not only a wimp, but a phony aesthete. If What Does That Nature Say to You is Hong’s most blatantly obvious critique of the artistic sensibility, it’s also a bold analysis of what’s wrong with Korea’s post-Gen X youth when it comes to affairs of the heart. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I learned more about the country’s notorious marriageability crisis from this movie than I have from a whole raft of New York Times special reports. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Eurospace Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

 What Does That Nature Say to You home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Jeonwonsa Film Co.

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Review: Project Hail Mary and Jules

Posted on March 20, 2026 by philipbrasor

According to reports, Andy Weir, the author of the novel Project Hail Mary, did deep research into the science behind the story’s science fiction, in particular the viability of the sun-consuming microbes called astrophage that trigger the titular extraterrestrial mission. Weir’s theory is that these microscopic animals are literally eating the sun, thus leading to certain disaster on earth due to global cooling. A worldwide concerted effort has identified a distant sun as being resistant to astrophage and endeavors to send a crew of scientists there to find out if there’s a solution for our solar system. As it happens, a lowly junior high school science teacher, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), once wrote a paper on the possibility of astrophage and the head of the worldwide endeavor, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), tries to recruit him for the years-long mission. This part of the plot is spliced into the exposition in tandem with the mission itself after Grace awakens on the spaceship to find that his two colleagues have died during their induced coma and that he is alone millions of kilometers from earth. In a very real way, Weir, along with the directors of the film, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, known mainly for The Lego Movie and the Spiderverse series, make everything as difficult to follow as possible, not just with the technology that has to be carefully explained and completely understood in order for the viewer to really appreciate the story, but with the weird pacing and confusing time shifts between before liftoff and after liftoff. And then they throw in a cute alien counterpart to Grace because, well, this is supposed to be a comedy.

The alien, a blocky, multi-appendaged creature Grace dubs “Rocky” has also been sent from his own dying planet to this faraway sun to find out how it’s resisting the astrophage and has also found itself the only surviving member of its crew, so after Grace rigs a computer with AI to provide the two with a linguistic interface, they set about working on the problem, and then the science gets even wonkier. And while I could easily believe it all as it was being explicated within the workings of the plot, the rapid accumulation of scientific input proved to be too much and I eventually gave up trying to make heads or tales of it after Grace and Rocky devised a means of destroying the astrophage; which is to say that regardless of Weir’s thoroughness in making the science in his science fiction viable, it made no real difference in terms of me buying the overall premise, which, of course, is central to the enjoyment of a good science fiction story—or any fantasy tale, for that matter. The effect on the comedy was thus significant, and while I could fully appreciate the friendship that Grace and Rocky forged through one monumental setback after another, I came away less heartwarmed than depressed. 

Consequently, the parts of the movie I enjoyed the most were those that took place on earth before the liftoff, and for reasons that most viewers will likely take for granted: the interactions between the self-deprecating nerd Grace and the northern European efficiency stiff Stratt. There’s something about their tense, almost combative conversations that felt particularly human and astutely expressive of the catastrophe that Weir’s premise envisions. Rocky is a good E.T. manque, but regardless of how cleverly designed the motion-capture and putatively AI-generated English are, the character couldn’t hold a candle to Hüller’s bone-dry epigrammatic line delivery, which was where the comic elements really came into their own due to how subtle they were. Whenever she was on screen, I could relax and actually enjoy what the movie was trying to accomplish.

The extraterrestrial in the totally earthbound comedy Jules leans more toward the usual pop culture stereotype: humanoid in form with smooth, silvery skin, a bulbous head, and inky black eyes. This creature’s equally stereotypical flying saucer crash lands in the backyard of Milton Robinson (Ben Kingsley), a lonely senior citizen whose main pastime is showing up at town council meetings in his small rural Pennsylvania burg and requesting a traffic light for a particularly tricky pedestrian crossing. Though E.T. is the obvious plot model for Jules (which Robinson names the alien because he “looks like a Jules”), the twist is that the earthlings who help get the alien home are not guileless children but oldsters on the verge of senility, which is the central joke. Whenever Milton or his elderly co-conspirators, Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin), try to get help with their alien “problem” they are thought to be suffering from acute dementia; that is, except for the predictably venal and mostly off-screen Feds, who have pinpointed the UFO’s landing somewhere near Milton’s ranch house and are silently closing in. The fact that no one in town has done the same is the movie’s second big joke.

Another predictable component of the story is how our three senior citizens discover what is missing from their lives by helping the mute and outwardly expressionless Jules. For Milton, it’s acknowledging how cold he was toward his now-adult children when they were growing up, an aspect that’s actually hard for the viewer to accept given how blankly Kingsley plays him. And while his veterinarian daughter Denise (Zoe Winters) rightly worries about the possible onset of Alzheimer’s, despite a few instances of absent-mindedness Milton does not especially present as a doddering old fool. If anything his attention to detail when it comes to Jules’ welfare is humanely clear-eyed, and if the movie had adhered to this line of thought it probably would have been quite affecting, but once the intrigue of authoritarianism is introduced the movie has to follow through with it, and it becomes pretty generic. 

Project Hail Mary 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). 

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

Project Hail Mary home page in Japanese

Jules home page in Japanese

Project Hail Mary photo (c) 2025 CTMG

Jules photo (c) 2022 Apple Slice Productions LLC

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Review: Small Things Like These and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

Posted on March 19, 2026 by philipbrasor

According to Tim Mielant’s drama Small Things Like These, based on a novel by Claire Keegan, Ireland in the mid-1980s was stuck in a time warp. By the end of the decade the country would be enjoying an economic boom, mainly thanks to tech businesses, but the smallish city depicted in the movie seems to exist in a continuum that stretches from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, though there are enough specific references to indicate that it’s actually 1986. This anachronistic quality is important to the movie’s theme and subject, which is how young unwed mothers were treated by the Catholic Church, the overarching political power in Ireland at the time. There have been a number of films and lots of literature produced about the so-called Magdalene Laundries, a catchall term for the way “fallen women” and their babies were deposited at convents and other institutions run by nuns and then made to work as slaves for the Church’s profit while their children were essentially sold to couples. The system wasn’t really addressed until the 1990s, when its abject cruelty was finally exposed, but Mielant’s film is more about how it affected the community, in particular one working man who couldn’t live with what he knew about it.

Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong, who delivers heating coal for a living. One of his customers is a convent run by the authoritarian Sister Mary (Emily Watson), where he notices young women being badly treated. One day he encounters a battered girl named Sarah (Zara Devlin) hiding in the coal shed and undergoes a crisis of conscience. As the father of five girls and the son of a single mother who gave birth to him when she herself was a teen, Furlong has an emotional stake in the convent’s exploitation of its female wards, despite Sister Mary’s warnings that she is watching him and anything he does could adversely influence the futures of his daughters, who are attending the school run by the convent. The movie does a fair job of showing how the Church lords over the town in subtle ways that makes Furlong even more depressed as he acknowledges that this monolithic power is unassailable.

The movie explores Furlong’s state of mind as he tortuously reaches a decision that is small in the scheme of things but consequential in terms of his own spiritual well-being. Though Mielant’s presentation is gritty and forceful, and the story quite moving in its simplicity, it’s also rather obvious, setting up an almost innocent working stiff against a monumentally evil religious bully. The point would seem to be that it’s small gestures like Furlong’s that eventually brought the system down, and while such a point is satisfying dramatically, it’s not particularly persuasive. 

The past is also a strange country in Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s animated feature Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, the country literally being Japan and the time period the 1960s. The title character is the infant daughter of a Belgian diplomat who, for some unexplained reason, is stationed in what looks like the countryside of Kyoto Prefecture. He and his wife already have two young children, and in the opening scenes Amélie narrates, with philosophical self-awareness, her own birth, thinking herself a “god.” The middle-aged Japanese male obstetrician blandly characterizes the newborn as a “vegetable,” a label that doesn’t seem to alarm the parents. Since the viewer is privy to Amélie’s thoughts we know she is not a vegetable, but it takes her a while to decide that it’s worth proving she’s a sentient being that can react to normal stimuli.

The story, as such, deals with Amélie’s growing acceptance of her surroundings, which are Japanese as filtered through a European intellectual sensibility, meaning that the filmmakers are very cognizant of the cultural differences. In this sense, the most important character besides Amélie is Nishio, the young Japanese woman who once lived in the kominka Amélie’s parents are renting and who is now their housekeeper/nanny, much to the chagrin of their stern landlady, who eventually reveals she will never not look upon white people as anything but the enemy. Amélie, of course, despite her godly attributes, is innocent of history and can only observe these intrigues, but the movie is more about her journey of discovery, especially with regard to the inevitability of death and the way nature has a way of not caring what you want or think. She’s also a bit of a feminist as illustrated by her encounter with some nasty carp, all of which remind her of demanding boys and their harsh appetites. 

The film’s water-color palette and somewhat pokey pacing are meant to mimic classic anime, though the physical stylings of the characters don’t look particularly Japanese. That may be intentional. From Amélie’s point of view, everything is Japanese—the title refers to her name, which Nishio shows her means “rain” when written as a Chinese character—because that’s all she knows, and at the end of her toddlerhood, when she learns the family is moving back to Belgium, she undergoes a kind of identity crisis, a feeling I’m sure the author of the source material had to inflate in order to interpret her inchoate fear of the future. Little Amélie is a little too self-aware to qualify as anyone’s idea of a blank slate, regardless of the environment she springs from, and while she’s often amusing company she’s obviously the conceit of adults who believe that pre-school childhood is the closest we ever get to the divine. 

Small Things Like These opens March 20 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, in French with Japanese subtitles and Japanese dubbed versions, opens March 20 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Small Things Like These home page in Japanese

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain home page in Japanese

Small Things Like These photo (c) 2024 Artists Equity

Little Amélie of the Character of Rain photo (c) 2025 Maybe Movies, Ikki Films, 2 Minutes, France 3 Cinema, Puffin Pictures, 22D Music

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Review: Marty Supreme

Posted on March 13, 2026 by philipbrasor

It feels more like providence than serendipity to note that the recently sundered Safdie Brothers filmmaking team has now produced two movies about real-life sports figures whose forceful personalities up-end their competitive effectiveness. However, in the case of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (which opens in Japan in May), the titular MMA fighter’s problems as an athlete have no venal attributes. If anything, his drawback is that he’s too compassionate for someone whose job is to maim and mutilate his opponents. Josh Safdie’s protagonist, Marty Mouser (Timothée Chalamet), on the other hand, is a hotshot table tennis player whose win-at-all-costs sensibility is not only too intense for the powers that run the sport, but dangerous to all he comes into contact with, including loved ones and sponsors. Anyone who has seen a Safdie Brothers film will agree their aesthetic is highly visceral, and what’s perhaps ironic when you compare their respective solo debuts is that the ping-pong movie is a lot more driven and violent than the one about the cage fighter. 

Mouser is based on actual table tennis champion Marty Reisman, a larger-than-life character who didn’t quite make his chosen sport into an American obsession despite a heroic effort to do so; and it is this obsession alone that Safdie is interested in. Marty’s closest cinematic cognate is the title character of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a 1974 Canadian film based on a Mordecai Richler novel. As played by a young Richard Dreyfuss, Duddy is the ultimate Jewish hustler, a motor-mouthed con man who always needs to stay one step ahead of his crazy schemes in order for them to work the way they are supposed to. We first meet Marty in the early 50s as an effective Manhattan shoe salesman in his uncle’s store, banging his childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) between the shelves in the back room right before he hits up his uncle for an advance of funds to get him to the world table tennis championships in Europe. The movie immediately sets up the character as a slave to appetite, and when things don’t always go the way Marty wants them to go, he invariably comes up with a wilder, more desperate plan to get what he needs, and in almost every case someone is screwed. Marty barely makes it to Europe, where he immediately blows his chances by offending the worldwide ping pong organization, seducing a washed-up Hollywood actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose rich husband he boldly hopes will bankroll his dreams, and then losing to a deaf Japanese star (real life champion Koto Kawaguchi) in a final that exposes him publicly as a loud-mouthed boor and reduces him to playing the heel in theatrical exposition matches as a warmup to the Harlem Globetrotters. The rest of the movie is one breathless attempt after another for Marty to redeem himself as not only a real champion, but a human being worthy of respect, and it becomes supremely clear early on that he may accomplish the former but not the latter. He’s just too pathologically willful.

Just as Marty lacks the ethical facility to understand how his machinations ultimately harm the people who admire and rely on him, Safdie lacks the capacity for restraint that might make Marty’s story more nuanced as a portrait of blind ambition. The difference is that Safdie is endeavoring to make a movie, not a personal impression, and while his creative bullheadedness is reportedly the quality that prompted the split with his brother (over Josh’s use of an underage actor in a sex scene, no less), he’s obviously the one who’s more responsible for the relentless momentum of movies like Uncut Gems and Good Time. Marty Supreme matches the manic energy of those two films, and then outstrips their velocity. 

In English, Japanese and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shibuya Parck White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Marty Supreme home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 ITTF Rights LLC

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Media watch: Electric buses bought for Expo almost dead on arrival

Posted on March 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

By pretty much every metric last year’s Osaka Expo was a success, an outcome that surprised a lot of people given the problems leading up to it. However, there was one problem that remains unsolved even six months after the event ended and that’s the fleet of 150 buses that was purchased for the Expo. By the time it ended 134 of them were sitting in what automotive journalist Kumiko Kato calls a “bus graveyard” in Osaka.

Sometime after Osaka was chosen as the site for the 2025 Expo, the organizers decided to use electric buses for public transportation, both on-site and between transport hubs and the Expo. Eventually, they made a deal with a company called Electric Vehicle Motors Japan (EVMJ), which is headquartered in Kita Kyushu. In accordance with directives from the transportation ministry, the Expo said it would purchase buses that were produced domestically, and at the time several local governments in Japan as well as private bus lines had already made contracts with EVMJ to provide them with vehicles. 

However, Kato eventually discovered that the buses were not made in Japan. They were in fact made in China and brought to Japan in a parallel import arrangement. Parallel imports are essentially goods shipped from one country to another outside of authorized channels, as when someone buys a car overseas and ships it themself to the country they live in. An automobile brought into Japan under such circumstances is still subject to very strict inspection protocols. It’s why U.S. automakers have always claimed that Japan puts up non-tariff barriers that make it difficult for them to sell cars in Japan. However, in the case of the EVMJ buses, even these inspections were somehow not carried out. Kato found that the Chinese manufacturer of the buses imported by EVMJ essentially assembled them from inexpensive parts collected from various other manufacturers. 

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Review: Holding Liat

Posted on March 7, 2026 by philipbrasor

Since the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel, most of the documentaries made about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have been told from the Palestinian perspective. Holding Liat, directed by Benjamin Kramer, centers on an American-Israeli couple whose daughter, Liat Beinin Atzili, was kidnapped, along with her husband, by Hamas during the attack and their attempts to secure their release. Most of the movie follows Liat’s father, Yehuda Beinin. The opening scene shows him in closeup talking on his cell phone to an official of the IDF about two weeks after his daughter’s abduction and getting no useful information. From that point, Beinin and other family members try to gain control of a situation that is frustrating in more ways than one. It’s not simply that the Israeli authorities give them nothing useful, but that the family, Yehuda in particular, quickly believes Liat is of little importance to the Israeli authorities and never was.

As a New Jersey native who built a kibbutz in Israel based on strict socialist principles that envisioned an Israel where Jews and Palestinians could live together productively, Beinin is a constantly conflicted figure. He believes that “both sides are led by crazy people,” but eventually his wrath is reserved for Benjamin Netanyahu and his enablers. It’s an attitude that’s understandable but nevertheless becomes controversial among his own loved ones, who believe they can’t risk alienating the government while trying to make sure that Liat is still safe and can be included in the prisoner exchanges that will start to take place down the road. This campaign finds the extended family—Liat’s siblings and in-laws, not to mention the extant American branch of the Beinins—suffering intramural scuffles that can get quite heated, including one particularly loud argument between Yehuda and his heretofore patient, neutral wife (“Yehuda is better at talking”), Chaya. In Israel and U.S. the family courts the media to gain exposure to Liat’s plight, but the gambit often backfires by instead exposing rifts within the family. “It’s the human side of the story,” says one American reporter unironically. Yehuda’s temper flares into denunciations of what the IDF is doing in Gaza, and while he never utters the G-word, some of his relatives are quick to condemn him for losing sight of the main goal, getting Liat and her husband back, thus undermining that goal with his political statements. When one of his granddaughters says, “Hamas needs to be eradicated” in front of cameras, she’s criticizing Yehuda as much as she is those in the U.S. who sympathize with the plight of people in Gaza. In perhaps the film’s most awkward scene a Palestinian political activist approaches Yehuda to offer his own sympathies and Yehuda has to tell the young man, in a whispered aside, that it wouldn’t look good for them to be talking. 

Kramer’s attachment to Yehuda is understandable from a documentary standpoint since he is not only central to the story but also the most articulate member of the Beinin-Atzili clan. This focus itself sometimes undermines the movie’s balanced credibility because the other members can sound merely shrill in contrast, but for the most part Kramer gets at the heart of the problem, which is that politics itself has more to do with compounding the tragedy of Oct. 7 than any purely military actions, though, of course, it is those actions that have caused all the death and destruction. Despite the conditionally happy outcome, Holding Liat ends on the bitterest of sentiments when Yehuda reacts to the way his own efforts have been used for propaganda purposes: “This cannot be the way we live in the Middle East.”

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

Holding Liat home page in Japanese

photo (c) Meridian Hill Pictures

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