Category Archives: Movies

Review: Work to Do and About Us But Not About Us

Posted on January 17, 2026 by philipbrasor

The dramatic tension generated in Park Hong-jun’s debut feature, Work to Do, comes from an unusual place. The time is 2016 and the protagonist is Kang Joon-hee (Jang Sung-bum), a young employee of a Korean shipbuilding company who has been … Continue reading →

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Review: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Posted on January 16, 2026 by philipbrasor

With Danny Boyle taking time out from the 28 Days Later series for the second time, it’s up to original screenwriter Alex Garland to provide thematic continuity with this fourth installment, and thus the third installment, which took place 28 … Continue reading →

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Review: Good One and Treasure

Posted on January 15, 2026 by philipbrasor

India Donaldson’s insightful debut feature, Good One, has been called a coming-of-age story, but given that the protagonist is a 17-year-old Brooklyn-bred girl who is about to go off to college, it seems more appropriate to call it a post-coming-of-age … Continue reading →

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Review: Warfare

Posted on January 14, 2026 by philipbrasor

For all its narrative shortcomings, Platoon remains a hallmark of warfare cinema in that it left little to the imagination. War movies have since become almost rote in their presentation of carnage to the point where if you don’t see … Continue reading →

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Review: In Water

Posted on January 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

The spoiler about Hong Sangsoo’s In Water has nothing to do with anything in its meager plot. It has to do with the main formal decision to present almost the entire thing out-of-focus, so, from a critical viewpoint, revealing that … Continue reading →

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Review: The Outrun and The Great Lillian Hall

Posted on January 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

The term “recovery drama” should induce winces and feelings of trepidation in serious moviegoers. Seeing yet another sad individual overcome the depredations of addiction and stand fully sober in the sun is meant to be soul-lifting but because the genre … Continue reading →

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Review: Caught Stealing and Yadang

Posted on January 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Production designers are the new superstars of the cinema; or, at least, they should be since so many mediocre American movies in recent years have been lifted to near-greatness by their sets and general ambience. Darren Aronofsky’s newest film veers … Continue reading →

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Review: A Working Man

Posted on January 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

If it’s New Years, you can bet the latest Jason Statham movie will be opening in Japan. One of our more reliable action heroes, Statham can generally carry a lame script just with the cut of his scowl, and this … Continue reading →

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Review: In the Lost Lands

Posted on January 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

There’s obviously some guarantee of box office success in the husband-wife team of director Paul W.S. Anderson and actor Milla Jovovich that’s based on their long-running game adaptation series Resident Evil. Now that the series is reportedly finished, their dwindling … Continue reading →

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Best movies 2025

Posted on December 29, 2025 by philipbrasor

With each passing year it gets more difficult to adhere to the qualifications for this list. It used to be simple: Any movie released theatrically in Japan for the first time. At some point I started eliminating films that were … Continue reading →

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