Review: Anora

Posted on February 28, 2025 by philipbrasor

What’s refreshing about Sean Baker’s movies isn’t so much their realistic take on the lives of sex workers and others who survive outside of what could be called polite society, but rather how those characters’ status informs their outlook in ways you wouldn’t expect. The contradictions are always compelling, whether it’s Red Rocket‘s former porn star protagonist’s reductive and self-serving sexism or The Florida Project‘s apartment building manager who looks out more for his tenants than he does for the interests of his boss. The titular character of Anora is a 23-year-old New York stripper (Mikey Madison) whose spiky self-confidence is exemplified by her relatively gung-ho approach to sleeping with customers for cash. She isn’t naive, as evidenced by how cavalierly she gets away with defying her employer, but she isn’t jaded either, and when she’s swept off her feet by Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the even younger son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, she can tell where this sort of fling might end up. She wants to improve her life, and marrying this heavily accented puppy would do the trick. Besides, she likes the guy, though God knows why.

As it happens, Ani, as she’s known to her friends, speaks Russian, so she already has a pretty good cultural inkling of what Ivan’s father will think when he finds out his son has eloped with a person he is likely to assume is a gold digger. By that time, Ani is already installed in Ivan’s palatial Brooklyn digs, living the life of Riley. It makes perfect sense that the wedding, in fact, takes place in Vegas during a whirlwind weekend courtesy of dad’s private jet. At one point the audience is clued in that maybe Ivan is simply after a green card, but he’s such an effusive child that you can’t believe he’s capable of such subtle subterfuge and, besides, if the marriage is transactional at all, Ani’s the one who’s got the better end of the deal. On the other hand, Ivan is pretty immature, and his resolve seems less than solid, so when dad sends a team to annul the match it’s Ani who has to stand up for her and Ivan’s connubial rights. In fact, she has to do it alone, because Ivan chickens out and disappears, leaving Ani in the clutches of Dad’s fixer (Karren Karagulian) and two ineffectual goons, Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan). 

Though all of Baker’s movies could be called comedies, Anora is the only one that evinces actual belly laughs, as the Russian contingent confronts wild cat Ani and finds that cancelling the marriage isn’t going to be that easy. While Igor and Garnick search for Ivan with the resistant Ani in tow, the three form a kind of triumvirate of outsider sensibility, with Igor falling hard for his feisty charge while she makes his life hell in return. This is classic screwball romantic comedy fare with a vibe that’s up-to-the-minute, and if it doesn’t quite hit as powerfully as The Florida Project or Tangerine, it’s fully entertaining without being pandering. Baker seems to be going a bit lite here, but Anora nevertheless adheres to his usual ethical priorities. 

In English and Russian. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Anora home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Focus Features LLC

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Review: Revolver and Project Silence

Posted on February 27, 2025 by philipbrasor

Korean cinema’s special facility with genre movies has allowed it to veer from reliable formulas even while exploiting those formulas to the max. Revolver is a shakily plotted crime noir that sticks so resolutely to a single idea that it’s almost a parody of a crime noir, though not quite up to the Coens in terms of wry bite. The great Jeon Do-yeon, who won a Best Actor prize at Cannes for the stultifyingly depressing Secret Sunshine, seemingly works against type as Soo-yeong, a former police detective who is just finishing a 2-year prison term for bribery. We soon learn that Soo-yeong wasn’t the only cop involved in the corruption, but she’s the only one who got time, having taken the fall for her colleagues with the assurance that she’d be compensated for her sacrifice in the end. Once she’s out she expects to get paid, not only in large amounts of cash, but a nice apartment in Seoul. Consistent with the formula, she gets stiffed: No one meets her at the prison gate; no one contacts her later; and the person who was supposed to arrange all these things, she soon learns, has been killed under suspicious circumstances.

A good portion of director Oh Seung-wook’s film is spent renavigating the original crime that sent Soo-yeong up the river, an approach that often makes it difficult to follow the story, but in a sense that isn’t Oh’s purpose. He’s more interested in the mood and atmosphere of the various set pieces, which eschew flashy action for ironic, clever dialogue and head-spinning reversals of expectations. Jeon brings a deliciously dry fatalism to the proceedings. Soo-yeong is damaged goods right from the beginning, and she doesn’t pretend to have been rehabiliated by her stretch in the slammer. If anything, she’s more determined than ever to get what she believes she deserves, and doesn’t mind risking her life for it because, in this world of everyday treachery, she knows she’s right and knows her enemies know she’s right. So even if you don’t always get the motivation behind specific actions and how certain characters fit into the puzzle, the main impetus—Soo-yeong’s single-minded determination to get what’s owed her—keeps things interesting. 

It helps enormously that the jerks she’s up against are a peculiarly depraved lot, and when she dispatches them (or, just as often, they end up dispatching themselves) the satisfaction factor is more thrilling than it usually is in these situations. And while Jeon’s predecessors in this kind of comic noir exercise are invariably male, she pulls off the stunt without sacrificing any of Soo-yeong’s feminine wiles. She even seems to be an inspiration for the other damaged goods that populate the movie, an exemplary model of female self-possession.

The box office hit Project Silence is a disaster flick, a genre that Korean cinema has been poking at for a good while with limited success. Usually, Korean disaster movies go long on the special effects, and here they don’t always work visually, though viscerally they bring the noise, mainly because Korea is excellent when it comes to vehicular mayhem and the disaster depicted is a huge fog-generated pileup on a long, high suspension bridge that starts to buckle from a perfect combination of fiery conflagration and mass overload. The scene where cars carom into one another and tractor trailers jackknife and slide along the pavement is a terrifying wonder to behold, but as Daffy Duck once said about a neat bit of gasoline-fueled stage entertainment he could perform, you can only do it once. Here, you also have to deal with the story.

Which in the case of Project Silence is way too busy. The late Lee Sun-kyun plays Jung-won, a factotum for the South Korean security minister, who happens to be running for president. Jung-won is also a single father, who is driving his reluctant daughter to the airport to study overseas when the above-mentioned pileup occurs. At the same time, a pack of mutant dogs is being transported across the bridge in order to be disposed of, and they get loose and start terrorizing the survivors of the accident, trapped between the burning tractor trailer at one end and the part of the bridge that threatens to fall into the sea at the other. As with all disaster flicks, the survivors represent a cross-section of hoi polloi, and several get picked off as they act either valiantly or selfishly. Adding to the suspense, it turns out the dogs are part of some kind of government anti-terrorism project that went awry and which Jung-won’s boss approved, so he has to keep a lid on the matter to avoid it leaking to the press.

Plausability is not a requirement for disaster movies, but character motivation needs to be a lot sharper than it is here. Popular leading man Ju Ji-hoon plays way against type as the film’s comic relief, a long-haired, disoriented tow truck driver with a proclivity for larceny that seems to be incited by the mayhem. The only characters who make consistent sense are the dogs, but that’s probably because they’re 100% computer-generated.

Revolver, in Korean, opens Feb. 28 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Project Silence, in Korean, opens Feb. 28 in Tokyo at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Revolver home page in Japanese

Project Silence home page in Japanese

Revolver photo (c) 2024 Plus M Entertainment, Sanai Pictures and Story Rooftop

Project Silence photo (c) 2024 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., CJ ENM Studios Blaad Studios

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Review: Tatami

Posted on February 26, 2025 by philipbrasor

As political thrillers go, Tatami represents for multiple national purviews just as a film project. It’s a U.S.-Georgia co-production because most of the money was raised by Americans (one of whom is Israeli-American) and the movie was shot and set in Georgia; and it’s co-directed by an Israeli, Guy Nattiv, and an Iranian, Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who is also one of the main actors. Given that Israel and Iran are well-known nemeses on the world stage, one might be surprised, but the purport of the film is solidly critical of the current Iranian regime (its take on Israeli government belligerence is harder to suss). Amir-Ebrahimi, it should be noted, doesn’t live in Iran any more. Still, what the various sides bring to the production, in addition to a grounded American cinematic sensibility, is invaluable because of the dynamics on display. Genre-wise, Tatami is as much a sports movie as it is a political thriller, but transcends cliches endemic to both. More importantly, it’s relentlessly gripping, and the directors and the actors know exactly how to ratchet up the tension when the script calls for it.

Set at the World Judo Championships in Tbilisi, the movie zeroes in on the great female hope of Iran, Leila Hosseini (Arienne Mandi), who is competing in the 60-kg weight class. Headstrong and totally committed, Leila at first comes across as the stereotypical athletic obsessive. When she weighs in and is found to be 0.3 kg over she sweats it off in 20 minutes. Leila methodically works her way up in the preliminaries to cheers back home from family and fellow countrymen with the help of her coach, Maryam (Amir-Ebrahimi), a former judoka herself whose career was ended by a mysterious injury. During these opening scenes, the directors, with the help of real professional judo announcers, keep the sports movie prerogatives central with closeups of the action on the mats, but once Leila reaches a certain level it becomes apparent that she will likely have to face an Israeli rival—who happens to be her friend—something the government back in Iran does not want to happen. And so, through Maryam, they order Leila to feign an injury or throw any of her bouts before the Israeli one. She refuses, risking retribution against her family and her coach, who tries to forestall retribution by threatening to disown her. Though the standoff is mainly depicted as being between Leila and Maryam, the various layers of interested persons are handled with an almost ferocious attention to detail, as the story shifts among Leila’s husband and child in Iran, the various under-table negotiations Leila conducts with competition officials, and Maryam’s complex coming-to-terms with her own sad history, which we soon find out mirrors Leila’s current dilemma.

Even as the drama flags a bit just before the big finish, it’s still heart-pounding stuff thanks to a welcome avoidance of emotional distractions and an unobstructed view of the consciences of everyone involved. We’ve had plenty of movies that effectively stick it to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and this one is not designed to change anyone’s mind in a political sense. It’s just an exciting movie that uses politics as a big spoon to stir the pot so that its contents boil even more furiously. 

In Persian and English. Opens Feb. 28 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Tatami home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Judo Production LLC

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Media watch: All public toilets are not created equal

Posted on February 23, 2025 by philipbrasor

Inbound tourists invariably rave about Japan’s superior security and hospitality, and while you often hear them comment positively about smart toilets, it’s usually in the context of how surprisingly common they are. However, we’ve almost never heard anyone talk about public restrooms, which are convenient, clean, and plentiful in Japan, unlike in, say, the U.S., where they are almost impossible to find—and when you do they’re probably filthy.  We’ve known Japanese people who say they don’t like to visit the U.S. any more because relieving oneself when out and about is such a desperate chore. That’s never a problem in Japan.

But that doesn’t mean Japanese public toilets are perfect; or, at least, they’re not perfect for half the population. If you’re female, often you will have to stand in line for an empty stall in a public restroom if you’re in a busy place, and women and girls seem to take this inconvenience in stride. But if you think carefully about it, why is it that women have to wait and men usually don’t? 

A recent two-part feature in the Asahi Shimbun addressed this problem through the experience of a Tokyo notary public, Manami Momose, who researched the matter on her own. Several years ago, Momose was in JR Kurashiki Station when she desperately needed to relieve herself, and had to wait 5 minutes for a ladies room stall. When she emerged, she checked the floor plan diagram, which many public facilities post on the wall outside their rest rooms, and compared the gentlemen’s to the ladies’. She was shocked to find that the men’s room had 4 urinals and 3 stalls, while the women’s room had 4 stalls, a 7:4 ratio. Given the difference between male and female physiologies, not to mention gender-specific grooming habits and apparel choice—for the most part, women have more arranging to do before and after using the toilet—it’s easy to see why women might take more time in the rest room than men do, but why the discrepancy in facilities? Sure, women can’t use urinals, which take up less space than stalls, but why do men get more places to pee than women do?

With these questions in mind, Momose carried out a survey of public toilets throughout Japan, visiting railway stations, subways, airports, concert halls, retail spaces, parks, what have you, and what she found was startling. Of the 706 places she studied, 90 percent had more toilets in the men’s rest room—meaning urinals and stalls—than the women’s room did. And it was pretty consistent regardless of the type of place. For instance, Momose thought that in retail spaces like department stores there would be more toilets for women, since she imagines there are more female patrons, but, no: men still had access to more devices for relieving themselves. In fact, in many places men even had access to more stalls than women did, a situation she found “perverse.” 

She started publicizing her findings on social media, and received a lot of feedback from women who shared her outrage. She posted diagrams of rest room floor plans on X, pointing out that in almost all cases the floor area was the same for women’s rest rooms as it was for men’s. As already mentioned, urinals take up less space than stalls, so of course the people who designed these rest rooms could fit more toilet devices in the men’s room, but why didn’t they just make the women’s room larger? It’s a classic case of equality-versus-equity: same space for men and women, but not the same accessibility.

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Review: Dogs and War (Inu to Senso)

Posted on February 22, 2025 by philipbrasor

Japanese filmmaker Akane Yamada makes movies about domestic animals, often those caught up in disaster situations. She did one about the pets that were abandoned or otherwise unhoused following the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, and apparently received pushback from people who thought that she should be focusing on the human victims of the tragedy. Some will undoubtedly say the same thing about her latest doc, which uses the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a jumping off point to talk about animals during wartime. The point would seem to be that there is really no shortage of movies, especially documentaries, that follow the sufferings of people caught up in war and disasters, but many domesticated animals, as well as wild animals, suffer as well under such circumstances, and if we, as humans, value our humanity, then that suffering should be addressed as well.

Yamada has spent time on-and-off in Ukraine and Poland for the last three years covering how various groups and individuals have tried to help “dogs on the battlefield.” Many are pets whose owners have been displaced or even killed. Some are in shelters that already existed when the war started. But quite a few are strays that are, nevertheless, members of the communities where they live, fed and cared for by people who just think of them as neighbors. This aspect is cultural, and not necessarily strictly Ukrainian, but it does point up how broad the relationship between domesticated animals and humans can be. At one point she observes Ukrainian soldiers recovering from their wounds in a facility. They are visited by so-called therapy dogs, which they play with in an unself-conscious way. One soldier says that even when they are on the front lines, they encounter stray dogs that befriend them, because, in a very real way, they are all in this together and can actually comfort each other. A former British soldier who suffers from PTSD is profiled. He found that his interactions with dogs and cats after he came back from Aghanistan helped him to recover his mental equilibrium, and now he goes to war-torn areas to help save animals. He was in Ukraine and now, apparently, he is in Gaza. 

Much of Yamada’s footage seems to have been shot by other people—members of NGOs and private citizens in Ukraine and Poland who care about animals and are trying to do something. She collects this footage and some, such as cell phone recordings of two animal shelter operators who are cut off from their shelter due to war-related destruction, is very disturbing. It takes nothing away from the human suffering in war to look at the suffering of animals, which are just as innocent as civilians; more so, if you think they don’t have the capacity to wage war. 

In Japanese, Ukrainian, Russian and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Dogs and War home page in Japanese

photo (c) Inu to Senso Seisaku Iinkai

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Review: The Brutalist

Posted on February 21, 2025 by philipbrasor

The title of Brady Corbet’s movie about the hopes and dreams of a Hungarian immigrant to mid-20th century America refers to the contemporary architectural movement that the protagonist, László Toth (Adrien Brody), follows, but it also may describe Corbet’s own take on the monumental Hollywood epics that were popular during that time, and if it seems to copy the kind of big themes redolent in another movie about an arrogant architect, King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, released in 1949, based on the controversial novel by Ayn Rand, it certainly isn’t a coincidence. But Corbet stands Rand’s concept of the great man who transcends history on its head, because Toth ends up defeated by his time and the cultural forces that guide it, partially due to his arrogance. The main difference is that Toth is not only an immigrant, but a Jew who survived the death camps. His arrogance is born of anger and frustration rather than the superior mien of someone who naturally aspires to greatness, like the Gary Cooper character in Fountainhead. 

Toth’s strong suit is his stubbornness of vision. Having arrived at Ellis Island with nothing, he stays with his cousin, Attila (Allessandro Nivola), who has informally renounced his Jewishness after settling in Pennsylvania with a Catholic wife and a family furniture business. Attila has learned that Toth’s wife, Erzsébet, and niece, who were imprisoned in a different camp, are alive in Europe, and Toth is determined to bring them to America. Though Attila condescends to Toth for his purity of purpose, he brings him in on a job offered by a local rich kid named Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants to build a home library for his industrialist father, Harrison (Guy Pearce), as a birthday present. Toth throws himself into the project with more enthusiasm than it’s worth, working his Bauhaus training into the design, which involves louvers and hidden panels. The older Van Buren is scandalized, thinking the minimalist style stupid, even insulting. Equally enraged, Attila kicks Toth out into the street, where he makes a living as a construction worker, a vocation that exiles him to the margins. He hangs with lower working class Black men, patronizes prostitutes, and parlays a taste for morphine that was once medicinal into a full-blown heroin addiction. Reduced to designing bowling alleys to keep his architectural chops up to snuff, Toth is eventually sought out by Van Buren, who in the meantime has researched Toth’s illustrious prewar career in Europe and decides he is just the man to manifest his vision for a community center that will celebrate his own greatness as a philanthropist for all eternity. It’s a commission Toth only too eagerly believes he was made for.

The surface conflict of the movie is between the idealist Toth and the man-of-means Van Buren, but the real battle is within Toth for a soul that will never forgive the world for making him suffer, and if the great project he designs is a testament to ego, that ego is as much his as it is Van Buren’s, and this 3-and-a-half-hour tale still isn’t big enough for two; or three, for that matter. Once Van Buren’s lawyers secure a visa for the wheelchair-bound Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and her niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Erzsébet’s own demands force the issue of Toth’s relative inferior status compared to the men he is working for, not only because he’s a Jew and an immigrant, but because he’s an intellectual with an intellectual’s temperament, no matter how hackneyed that concept comes across. For sure, Toth’s ideals continuously run up against the prerogatives of big “C” capitalism, but the main hurdle is American exceptionalism that’s bred in the bone. Toth can’t win on that front, but he refuses to acknowledge that he can be beaten by philistines whose only source of power is money. What he can’t grasp is that their real power is their investment in the belief that America is the savior of the world, a belief Toth will never understand having lived through hell. The brutality of The Brutalist is in the cruel outcome of that basic misunderstanding. 

In English and Hungarian. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Brutalist home page in Japanese

photo (c) Doylestown Designs Limited 2024/Universal Pictures

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Review: No Other Land

Posted on February 20, 2025 by philipbrasor

This Oscar-nominated feature documentary, directed by two Israelis and two Palestinians, did not start out as a documentary. Since 2019, the directors have jointly and sometimes separately recorded the actions of the Israeli military, as well as Israeli settlers, in the occupied West Bank, specifically an area called Masafer Yatta, which is made up of 19 Palestinian villages that have been gradually decimated, ostensibly to make room for a “military training zone.” Many of the people who reside in the area, farmers, goat herders, etc., have lived there all their lives. Some say their families have been there since the 19th century, but for decades the Israelis have been seizing their land, saying that the people who live there don’t have any claim to it, which is a Catch-22 situation. Since the occupation, anyone who builds on land in the West Bank must receive a permit to do so from the military, and, according to the film, 99 percent of permits requested by Palestinians are denied, so the military has the right to tear down anything the villagers set up. 

The filmmakers record a lot of demolition, as well as the frantic reaction of the people whose homes are being destroyed. They also record peaceful Palestinian demonstrations, which the Israelis say are illegal and are often met with violence. We see several unarmed people shot simply for not doing what they are told. Two of the directors, Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who speaks fluent Arabic, and Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist with a law degree who grew up in Masafer Yatta, often appear on screen discussing the Israeli tactics, whose purpose is clearly to erase the Palestinian presence in the West Bank. They talk to the displaced, many of whom had to move into the caves in the vicinity because every time they try to rebuild their homes in the middle of the night the Israelis come back and tear them down. The two men and their co-directors, who do most of the filming, originally started the project to inform the world on a day-by-day basis of what is going on in the West Bank, but except for a few independent media like Democracy Now, they’ve drawn little attention. Then they hit on the idea of assembling and editing all the video into an integrated documentary, and the result has been a lot more attention, not to mention an Academy Award nomination.

It’s a grueling 90 minutes to sit through. In addition to the exhaustion and despair of the Palestinian residents on display, the friendship of Adra and Abraham is always being tested, mainly because at the end of every day Abraham can go back to Israel, back to a comfortable home; while Adra is forbidden to travel out of the occupied West Bank. This dynamic is as infuriating as anything in the movie because it exemplifies the apartheid system that Israel refuses to acknowledge. Certainly, the smug oppression of the settlers (“Go ahead, write your little articles,” one taunts Adra) speaks volumes about the blatant racism at the heart of the issue. No Other Land doesn’t have to explain anything. All the filmmakers had to do was just stand there and record. The cruelty and hatred is there for anyone to see. 

In Arabic, Hebrew and English. Opens Feb. 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

No Other Land home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Antipode Films. Yabayay Media

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Review: Memory

Posted on February 19, 2025 by philipbrasor

I’ve only seen two films by the Mexican director Michel Franco, one in Spanish set in Mexico and the other in English set in Southern California; and while I can see why one critic calls him a “shock auteur,” the kind of fatal characters he favors strike me as being conventional in terms of sensibility. It’s the circumstances in his stories that are extraordinary, not necessarily the people themselves. His latest is set in Brooklyn among white people who cover a wide range of middle-class experience, and everyone has a trauma to deal with, so their responses to everyday stimuli must be measured accordingly. 

We understand that Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a recovering alcoholic from the first scene, in which she is attending not her first AA meeting, but this time with her teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timer), in tow. Franco doesn’t give us much more to work with right away—nothing at all about the girl’s father or what may have been at the root of Sylvia’s addiction. She works at an adult day care center tending to people with developmental disabilities, and her daughter seems to spend a lot of time away from their apartment in a seedy neighborhood and at the nicer brownstone of Sylvia’s sister, Olivia (Merritt Wever), and her large family. Olivia is constantly trying to get Sylvia to be more social, and talks her into attending her high school reunion, which she isn’t too crazy about doing; and, sure enough, she spends most of her time alone in a corner while her former classmates party away. And then a bearded fellow, Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), seemingly materializes out of nowhere and sits beside her saying nothing. Spooked, Sylvia leaves and Saul follows her, still silent, all the way home, then sits in the rain outside her apartment all night. Franco continues to provide intelligence in a frustratingly elliptical fashion, but we eventually learn that Saul did go to the same high school as Sylvia and that he is now suffering from early onset dementia. At first, Sylvia thinks he is one of the boys who raped her when she was a teen—the trauma that drove her to drink?—and he claims to not remember anything about that, even though it’s his short-term memory that’s mainly affected by his condition. Further research concludes that he couldn’t have been a party to these assaults because he didn’t attend the high school at the same time Sylvia did, so now it’s Sylvia’s memory that is being challenged, mainly by her mother, Samantha (Jessica Harper), from whom Sylvia has been estranged since she became an adult but who is still close to Olivia. 

Ostensibly, Memory traces the relationship between Sylvia and Saul to its uncomfortable but inevitable ends, which raises alarms not only among Sylvia’s family but among Saul’s, since he lives with an over-bearing brother (Josh Charles) who is taking care of him. However, Franco’s dramatic intentions are much wider, encompassing the class distinctions that this relationship implies, the ways that trauma colors not only the victim’s behavior but that of the people in their orbit, and how mental illness cannot be addressed without taking into consideration the mentally ill person’s hopes and desires. Much of the careful, complex plotting is contrived, but Memory boasts some of the most believably compelling characterizations I’ve seen in a movie that’s all about white Americans, which is saying a lot these days. 

Opens Feb. 21 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280). 

Memory home page in Japanese

photo (c) Donde Quema El Sol S.A.P.I. De C.V. 2023

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Review: The Promised Land

Posted on February 15, 2025 by philipbrasor

Historical epics have not gone out of style, but the prerogatives of big, crowd-pleasing stories set in the past have become less refined in the era of the MCU blockbuster, which makes this Danish movie all the more remarkable for how effectively it sells its old-fashioned dramatic ideas. Mads Mikkelsen is the primary salesman, with his preternaturally stoical visage, a seeming mask of imperturbability confronting the most scathing injustices and insults, carrying a movie that is essentially about how class can define a culture. Mikkelsen plays Ludvig Kahlen, a minor figure in Danish history who is here elevated to heroic proportions despite the man’s insufferable pride. Born a bastard to a nobleman and one of his servants in the 18th century, he grew up in poverty but achieved a level of distinction by joining the German army and rising to the rank of captain. However, upon retirement he receives only a meager pension and as the movie opens is living in a veterans poor house in Copenhagen. He decides to take up the king’s offer to help settle a blasted heath in Jutland and applies to the treasury, whose various bureaucrats mock his intentions, presuming that the moors are uninhabitable.

The premise is thus established: One stubborn man pits himself against not only impassive nature, but the layer of society that would keep him forever in his place. In addition to the bureaucrats he has to contend with a local magistrate, de Schinkle (Simon Bennebjerg), a sadistic monster who believes the moors belong to him regardless of the king’s edict. In fact, Kahlen’s first two hires, Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen) and his wife, Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin),  have escaped indentured servitude to de Schinkle, thus branding them fugitives. He also takes in an orphaned “black” child traveling with the dangerous “vagabonds” who roam the area. Kahlen is not kind to any of them because he sees life as harsh and his first obligation is to his mission to make this land arable and, thus, livable. As gravy, he will be given a title if he succeeds. Fortunately, he is introducing a crop that is still new to Europe—potatoes—which can grow under even the worst conditions. 

The Promised Land has been called a Western. Formally and spiritually it has more in common with the melodramas of Thomas Hardy, but with a blunter edge and much more violence. Once de Schinkle realizes that Kahlen isn’t going to move easily, he doubles down, indiscriminately slaughtering Kahlen’s growing workforce of vagabonds and German immigrants, thus forcing Kahlen to strike back with similarly brutal means. The director, Nikolaj Arcel, working from a script he co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, revels in the unsubtlety, making his villains cartoonishly evil and Kahlen’s imperious nature unreadable at times—that is, until the other shoe drops and the man’s humanity breaks through in ways that are no less than stirring. If The Promised Land hearkens back to the great historical epics of directors like David Lean, it’s because it isn’t afraid to use gross spectacle and big fat emotions to get your heart pumping. 

In Danish, German, Swedish and Norwegian. Now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

The Promised Land home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Zentropa Entertainments4, Zentropa Berlin GMBH and Zentropa Sweden AB

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Review: September 5 and Captain America: Brave New World

Posted on February 14, 2025 by philipbrasor

Having watched the ABC Sports coverage of the hostage ordeal at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games live while I was in high school, I am surprised after seeing this recreation of the event that the entire thing lasted only 17 hours. In retrospect it felt much longer. Tim Fehlbaum’s movie has to focus on something more direct than the situation in the Olympic Village, since that has already been thoroughly covered by Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September, so he keeps the action limited to the on-site ABC Sports control room. At only 90 minutes, the movie maintains tension easily, though often the drama has more to do with the journalistic decisions being made than with the hostage ordeal. For those who might have forgotten, a Palestinian organization, Black September, invades the Olympic Village and takes the Israeli wrestling team hostage, demanding the release of imprisoned compatriots in return for the athletes’ freedom, with one athlete being killed every hour until these demands are met. There were no US network news crews at the Games, so it was up to the ABC Sports team to cover the standoff as it happened, a task for which it received ample praise, though Feldbaum’s film shows what they were up against, and not just in terms of staying on top of the story as it unfolded.

In fact, much of the challenge was technical. The broadcast link is via satellite, which ABC can only access during predetermined time periods, so the on-site producer, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), has to do some serious voodoo to keep the link valid. Meanwhile, the assistant producer, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), has to direct the operation in real time, and he has absolutely no news experience. There is a great deal of back-and-forth between the crew and ABC honchos back in New York, who aren’t convinced these sports guys are up to the task, and one of the film’s most pertinent points is that the crew doesn’t really think they’re up to it either, but they’re the only people available who have the means to cover the action. It quickly becomes clear that Mason is more resourceful than he appears, but he is helped considerably by operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and the crew’s German translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), who has to multitask to beat the band. The need to uphold trite journalistic standards (a lot of precious time is spent discussing whether they can call Black September “terrorists”) gets the better of the hostage story, which can sometimes fall by the wayside, and the viewer might wonder where the priorities lie. 

As Macdonald so convincingly showed, the terrible outcome was significantly a result of the German authorities’ inexperience and fear of being seen as not properly cognizant of the Jewish hostages’ safety. This Olympics was, after all, the first real international event held in Germany since the Holocaust. If that aspect of Feldbaum’s recreation seems insufficiently addressed, it’s because the people involved thought they were on top of the story, but the information kept changing and a worst-case scenario played out in front of their eyes (or, in this case, ears). Feldbaum does a good job of conveying the horror the ABC Sports team felt as they realized what was really going on.

While September 5 works from the DNA of a journalism thriller, the new Captain American movie, Brave New World, is being touted as some kind of political thriller. Having not kept up with the MCU for the past several years, I couldn’t see where the story was going since I didn’t really know where it was coming from. I knew that Steve Rogers had passed the Captain America title on to the Falcon, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), but wasn’t sure what that entailed other than the iconic shield. So there’s a new Falcon (Danny Ramirez), an Hispanic dude who is basically Robin to Wilson’s Black Batman, thus giving this pair some DEI cred that would seem to be out-of-favor at the moment.  Still, I couldn’t quite figure out what their take on world-saving was without the Avengers in tow for context. 

But there’s this new super mineral that was discovered by the Japanese navy and the American president (Harrison Ford) wants to finalize a treaty that would guarantee all the world access to it, but then some super gangster (Giancarlo Esposito) steals it and Cap has to get it back. So far, so predictable, but then there’s an assassination attempt on the president, and it seems that somebody is manipulating minds remotely for ends that are never clarified except to say that that’s what evil people do. According to background I read, the script, written by five guys, has gone through a number of heavy changes in the past two years owing to certain real world events, and the only halfway compelling element I could find in the story is Shira Haas as an intelligence aide to the president who seems to be on loan from Mossad. But even she sounds confused as to who exactly she’s supposed to be fighting against. 

Of course, it wouldn’t be an MCU movie without a bid to end the world, so Cap and his new Falcon sidekick get to prevent the Japanese navy from starting war with the U.S., a hilarious idea if you know anything at all about Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces. And then there’s the Red Hulk, which is exactly what you think he is except that he isn’t who you think he is. If I found the action set pieces less than exciting it’s because they seem divorced from the general import of the story, as it were. It makes you sort of miss the Avengers, and I don’t even like the Avengers. 

September 5 now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). 

Captain America: Brave New World 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).

September 5 home page in Japanese

Captain America: Brave New World home page in Japanese

September 5 photo (c) 2024 Paramount Pictures

Captain America: Brave New World photo (c) 2025 MARVEL

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