Author Archives: philipbrasor

Review: The Blue Caftan

Posted on June 19, 2023 by philipbrasor

Maryam Touzani’s Moroccan drama is all about beauty: Beautiful people making beautiful things in the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. The opening credit sequence features billows of colorful satin fabric shot with eye-popping attention paid to the tactile … Continue reading →

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Review: Marlowe

Posted on June 18, 2023 by philipbrasor

Since Liam Neeson has reinvented himself as an action star so successfully in his old age, it shouldn’t be surprising that he is the oldest person to ever play Raymond Chandler’s iconic mid-20th-century L.A. private eye on the big screen, … Continue reading →

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Review: Klondike

Posted on June 17, 2023 by philipbrasor

Maryna Er Gorbach started filming Klondike in 2020, before Russia invaded Ukraine, but it’s obvious where her loyalties lie. Set in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014, when local separatists aided Russian forces in taking over the area, the … Continue reading →

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Review: The Flash and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Posted on June 16, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though it was often called something different, the multiverse has been a fixture of science fiction novels and superhero comics for many years, and at the moment it seems to be an inescapable feature of any sort of fantasy feature … Continue reading →

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Review: The Card Counter

Posted on June 15, 2023 by philipbrasor

In a recent New Yorker profile The Card Counter was described as the second work in a trilogy of films by Paul Schrader about “the man in the room.” As the article points out, almost all of Schrader’s scripts, whether … Continue reading →

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Review: The Assistant

Posted on June 14, 2023 by philipbrasor

Dehumanizing by design, Kitty Green’s debut fiction feature (she has already directed a number of documentaries, mostly on Ukraine) about the punishing workload foisted upon a young female employee of a movie production office in downtown New York doesn’t necessarily … Continue reading →

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Media watch: My Number card system could be Trojan horse for individual-oriented society

Posted on June 11, 2023 by philipbrasor

The government’s scheme to get everyone in Japan, Japanese national and foreign resident alike, to apply for a My Number card has been plagued by problems. The aim of the My Number system is to assign a unique number to … Continue reading →

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Review: M3GAN

Posted on June 9, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though hardly significant, Gerard Johnstone’s comic horror film arrives at a moment when the debate about the meaning of artificial intelligence is finally getting a serious airing, owing mainly to the emergence and popularity of ChatGPT. M3GAN has nothing to … Continue reading →

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Number 1 Shimbun column for June

Posted on June 8, 2023 by philipbrasor

Here is a link to our Number 1 Shimbun column for June, which is about the so-called 2024 Problem related to a shortage of delivery drivers and truckers.

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Review: Peter von Kant

Posted on June 2, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though it’s not surprising that François Ozon would admire the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, you’d have to stretch to find points of thematic intersection. The most obvious thing the two directors have in common is that Fassbinder was and … Continue reading →

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