Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 9

Posted on October 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the older venues being used to screen films at the festival is the Busan Community Media Center, which looks as if it were built in the 1970s or 80s. I’ve already seen several movies there this year. Obviously when it was built Korean people were smaller, because the seats are cramped and there’s almost no leg room for someone who is over, say, 175 cm tall. They make an announcement before every screening, asking people to not move around so as not to bother the people around you, which is pretty difficult to do. I wonder because today’s young Korean men are noted for their height, or, at least, the movie stars and K-pop artists are. 

I saw two LGBTQ movies from India yesterday. Both are produced by Neeraj Churi, who I am trying to get an interview with. The first one, Lovers in the Blue Night, is about a couple living in Mumbai who are Bangladeshi refugees. The husband works as a rat killer while the wife works in a bar mainly as a phone sex worker. It is slowly revealed that the couple, who are Muslim, have never had sex or much of any kind of intimate contact, though the wife never seems to suspect that her husband may be gay. He seems to know it, though, and when he serendipitously helps a thief elude the police, they become partners in crime and in bed. Though the social issues are obvious, especially with regard to women’s position in this particular kind of milieu, the movie is foremost a melodrama, and quite an effective one. All the characters exist at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, and it’s implied that everyone has to lie, even to loved ones, just to get by.

The other Indian movie I saw was About an Intimate Matter, which deals mainly with the Indian public school system. As it turns out decorum is more valued than academic skills and student empathy, both of which are possessed in abundance by the main character, a female teacher at a high school in Kolkata who happens to live with a woman. When a student somehow gets into her private Facebook account and shares some photos with other students, the teacher is suspended pending an investigation, which is quite shocking in how deeply the school administration feels it can probe into her private life while giving lip service to the idea that one’s private life is off limits. It’s a canny film that shows how such matters tend to take precedence over what is supposed to be the priority—children’s education. In the post-screening Q&A the actor who played the teacher said that her love of teaching was more pronounced than her love for the woman she lived with, and that is the real tragedy. Churi, who said he has been out for 30 years, made the point that such couples should be deemed families, but that the social order does not permit them to call themselves that. But in any case, society’s prejudices go deeper than any legal concerns.

One of the biggest disappointments for me so far has been my inability to secure a ticket for any of the screenings of Possible Love. Lee Chang-dong is probably my favorite living director, but given the guest ticket system I couldn’t get one, so I’ll have to wait until November when it’s shown on Netflix. However, I did get to see the new movie by July Jung, who used to be Lee’s assistant director. I loved her first two films, A Girl at My Door and The Next Sohee, so I had big expectations for her new one, Dora, but, alas, it turned out to be another big disappointment. The title character is an 18-year-old girl with a skin condition that appears to be psychosomatic. She sullen and constantly apologizing for things that are not her fault and her parents, rather than pitying her, seem exhausted by the effort. They take her for the summer to their second home on the beach, which is next door to the father’s old acolyte/colleague (he’s a designer), who is married to a Japanese woman played by Sakura Ando. Lots of sexual shenanigans ensue among the various characters and Dora falls hopelessly in love with the Japanese woman, who is at first intrigued but eventually finds the girl’s neuroses off-putting. Much screaming and yelling ensued. The whole thing was just way too much and none of the characters felt at all plausible. 

I finished the day with Hong Sangsoo, who is always reliable. His newest, Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, isn’t as good as the last movie I saw by him, What Does This Nature Say to You (there’s another movie that came out between these two but for some reason BIFF isn’t showing it), but it has its charms. Hong’s partner Kim Minhee plays the main character, a woman who makes experimental films for her own pleasure, a pastime her mother, a successful restauranteur who runs a pension on Jeju Island, can’t quite understand. The woman and her more passive brother visit the mother and her relatively new husband on Jeju and the tension underlying their polite conversations is so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw. Unlike in What Does This Nature, which has a similar plot, the other shoe doesn’t drop and mother and daughter don’t air their mutual grievances with force, but it gave me a nice buzz if only for Hong’s always unusual presentation, which in this case was represented by his comically harsh sound design and background music.

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Review: Digger

Posted on October 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

It isn’t difficult to determine director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s personal convictions regarding the state of the world as the overstuffed plot of Digger unravels. He is certainly a believer in deadly climate change as a function of human progress, and places the blame solidly on the shoulders of oligarchs of all industries and nationalities. However, as the story becomes more complicated and less narratively reliable, it also becomes obvious that he isn’t sure if art has the actual power to speak truth to capitalistic perfidy, a notion that automatically gives rise to confusion over the purposes of this particular movie, which seemed clear at the outset but murkier as the true nature of the story reveals itself. 

That isn’t to say Digger isn’t entertaining, only that its entertainment component feels beside the point given the huge consequence of González Iñárritu’s themes. The elephant in the room is Tom Cruise’s outsized performance as the title character, a stereotypically Texan oil baron-billionaire who struts and bellows and mugs shamelessly for his closeups, which he is not only ready for but constantly seeking out, as if by instinct. The best you can say about this stunt is that you really do forget you’re watching Tom Cruise, something I would have thought impossible since, to me at least, the definition of a true movie star is that you always see the star on the screen rather than the character. (I don’t necessarily say this is a bad thing, especially when it comes to stars of the classic Hollywood era, when stardom was the whole point) Digger Rockwell has been designed as a farcical presence, and when he wakes up one morning to find out that his rig on Greenland has ignited a methane explosion that’s released a hunk of ice the size of 60 Washington D.C.s, he goes from defiantly contrary to desperate and then back to defiantly contrary even before the president of the U.S. (John Goodman) and his ass-kissing henchmen show up at Digger’s palatial digs to talk about how to spin this disaster, which threatens millions of people in northern Europe. As it turns out, all these other characters, including the nominally level-headed climate scientist (Riz Ahmed) Digger grudgingly employs, are just as loudly mercurial and bug-eyed as Digger. Pandemonium ensues, but grounded by dialogue that tries to make sense of these characters’ fatuousness, and that’s when the switcheroo comes, heralded by a character played by Jesse Plemons who, as it turns out, has the last word on everything, thus throwing a monkey wrench into the satirical machinations on display. 

Digger‘s artificiality, from the animatronic cat that seems to be Digger’s only true object of affection to the painted backdrops, is the movie’s real point, and I’m not sure if the theme of “this is where our planet is headed” survives the complications of context that González Iñárritu imposes on it. The beauty of Dr. Strangelove, a movie that critics are unfavorably comparing Digger to, was that it created a whole black comedy world out of a terrifying scenario that had not yet happened but could. Digger presupposes global collapse, not as a warning, but rather as a phenomenon on which to apply the metaphysics of cinematic craft. 

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).

Digger home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026 WBEI and Legendary

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Review: Resident Evil and Absolution

Posted on October 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

As someone who doesn’t play games, either literally or figuratively, I have no opinion on how faithfully the new Zach Cregger-helmed reboot of the Resident Evil franchise follows the Capcom classic, but I did see a few of the Paul W.S. Anderson film adaptations that made so much money while—from what I understand, at least—veering widely from the feel and substance of the game, especiallly since they centered on a hero, played by Anderson’s wife, Milla Jovovich, who wasn’t in the game and reportedly had little to do with its whole vibe. Cregger’s version is nothing like Anderson’s, which was mostly about kicking zombie ass. Cregger simply places his protagonist, a young medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams), in a horror show situation in order to see if he can just survive it. What ass-kicking he does is mostly on the fly and conducted without anything approaching skill or finesse. Most of the time his survival is based on what we would call luck, though that may be taking something away from the gaming element. But that’s the thing: I’m assessing the movie purely as a movie.

And in that regard, it mostly succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is gross us out and make us root for the hapless hero. Unlike Cregger’s more celebrated previous two films, Barbarian and Weapons, his Resident Evil isn’t particularly frightening. The jump scares are telegraphed well in advance and the situations are staged for maximum visual effect rather than any emotional ones. The plot is so elementary it can be described in one sentence: Bryan is tasked with taking what he believes to be an organ for transplant from hospital A to hospital B, and on the way he is beset by zombies who have been infected with a virus that has somehow escaped from hospital B. What makes the biggest impression is the zombies themselves, which aren’t simply lurching meat-seekers but a wildly diverse group of monstrosities that have the power to fuse together to make more massive and more deadly monstrosities. Bryan, as befits a Gen Z hero who has probably not played the game, has to learn how to use guns along the way and keep cool under pressure, and in that regard he earns our sympathies without any effort. In fact, what makes this Resident Evil so involving is how cleanly he enlists our sympathies, a particular talent that Cregger displayed in his two previous movies. People say Cregger is the future of horror, and I wouldn’t disagree, because his protagonists feel more real than the horror stereotypes we’ve become accustomed to.

The stereotyped hero of the crime thriller Absolution is nailed from the get-go by the actor who plays him: Liam Neeson. The screenwriter, Tony Gayton, neglects to name this character (the credits list him merely as “Thug”), but Neeson quickly establishes his m.o. as an antihero: former boxer who ended up employed as an enforcer by a Boston crime lord (Ron Perlman) and, now at the end of his life and suffering from encroaching senility (CTE, to be exact), yearns to do something right for a change. The filigree is equally predictable: estranged from his children for years, he tries to reestablish ties with his daughter and then uses his inside knowledge of the Boston underworld to save a trafficked woman from the brothel where she is imprisoned. 

Since Neeson is the only real reason to see Absolution, a caveat is in order: this is not one of those stories where his character has to eliminate countless goons in order to retrieve a loved one. It’s more on the order of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, though not nearly as elegantly plotted. That said, Gayton’s script is well-constructed, with characters established in the beginning returning at the end to assert those qualities we’ve already learned about them to deliver on the story’s dramatic intentions. Also, Absolution is not really an action film, though there are a few bits of violence. It’s mainly Neeson acting his age and imbuing a less-than-sympathetic character with more humanity than he deserves. And while the dialogue is cleverer than it needs to be, it’s by the same token better than it usually is in a Neeson thriller. “It’s the family curse of the asshole father,” someone says sarcastically when the Thug inadvertently reveals he was abused as a kid. The guy’s brief affair with a much younger black woman (Yolonda Ross) he sticks up for at a bar is unnecessary, but at least their pillow talk feels more or less natural. And the requisite meet cute with a grandson he didn’t know he had is played strictly for heartstring-pulling. But it’s a surprisingly assured production with its own prickly rhythms and an atmosphere that’s convincing. It stands on its own. 

Resident Evil opens Oct. 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 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 Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Absolution opens Oct. 9 at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001). 

Resident Evil home page in Japanese

Absolution home page in Japanese

Resident Evil photo (c) 2026 CTMG

Absolution photo (c) 2026 TG Movie LLC

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 8

Posted on October 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Since I arrived at the festival on its opening day, Tuesday, the weather in Busan has been great. Warm and sunny in the daytime and cool and dry at night. Nevertheless, my flight from Narita was slightly delayed and by the time I arrived at the Busan Cinema Center it was after 3 p.m. and I couldn’t pick up my badge and materials because they close the desk early for security reasons—the badge desk is in the same building as the opening ceremony, which started at 6 p.m. So I had to hunt down a foreign press person to get my invitations to the opening ceremony and reception.

This year the festival put me up in a hotel quite close to the Cinema Center, which is where everything happens. Usually, they give me a room in Haeundae, the resort area on the beach. Though it’s only 3 subway stops away, obviously being nearer the Cinema Center is better, except that most of the night action, meaning festival related parties and such, happen at Haeundae, and the subways stop at around 11:30 p.m. For instance the opening reception was at a hotel on the beach, so I had to take a taxi back to my hotel, though I seriously thought of walking the whole way since the night was so nice.

Because I’m a “guest” of the festival I get access to the guest ticketing system, which allows me four tickets a day to public screenings for free. However, the number of guest tickets is limited and they tend to sell out fast. In order to get them, you have to go online at 8:30 a.m. the day before the actual screening and register for them, but, of course, all the guests are online promptly at 8:30. Last year, when they introduced this system, I had no trouble getting seats for the movies I wanted, but so far this year it’s been difficult. On Tuesday, I was in a station waiting for the train to Narita Airport at 8:30 and had to get tickets for Wednesday using my phone. I was able to get a seat for the Korean monster movie Hope but nothing else. The same thing happened yesterday morning—I couldn’t get tickets for the movies I mainly want to see. It’s quite frustrating.

The opening ceremony was as long and boring as it usually is. Kim Min-ha, the actor from Pachinko was the MC by herself, which is unusual. In the past it was always one male and one female, so I suppose Kim has enough star power to handle the job herself. Or maybe it’s because she’s in the Opening Film, The Table: Day and Night, which was a very odd choice. As everyone knows, in the past year BIFF has had its rating as an international film festival boosted to the highest level, putting it on par with only a handful of other festivals, including Cannes and Venice. So this year’s edition is a big one for BIFF and may explain why I’m having trouble getting tickets on the guest ticketing system: there are just too many guests. Nevertheless, the last two years, as BIFF was gunning for its ranking to be boosted, it chose blockbusters for the Opening Film. The Table is more like a return to BIFF’s traditional mode of promoting smaller Korean films for the Opening Film, a tradition I approve of, though in this case it was something of a disaster. The Table, a kind of omnibus narrative set in a coffee shop, is ridiculously pretentious and shallow. I stayed until the end, but I would guess that a third of the audience walked out while it was on.

Being boosted to the top level also means that BIFF now has to have a Competition Section, the winner of which automatically gets submitted to the Academy for consideration for an Oscar. A lot of filmmakers I’ve talked to over the years actually admired BIFF for not having a competition section (instead they had the New Currents competition, only for up-and-coming Asian filmmakers), which is only put in place for publicity purposes. But at least the Competition Films at BIFF are limited to those from Asian countries.

Michelle Yeoh is this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year, and she gave the best of the speeches at the ceremony, thanking those Chinese directors who have helped her over the years. She said nothing about Hollywood, which I found refreshing. One thing about BIFF is that it very rarely screens Hollywood movies, though it does have a World Cinema section where such movies could be screened.

Come to think of it, Hope almost qualifies as a Hollywood production in terms of scale and professional savvy. It was the first movie I saw on Wednesday, in the CGV Multiplex’s IMAX theater. It was pretty breathtaking. The first hour or so is just nonstop action as the inhabitants of a coastal town near the North Korean border (there are signs everywhere alerting locals to stay vigilant) contend with a monster that seems to kill everything in its path. Director Na Hong-jin wisely keeps the monster off screen to increase the tension. However, once the monster is revealed as well as its provenance the movie loses a lot of its mojo even though the action itself becomes more intense (Na is a master of chase scenes, be they on foot or by vehicle). It seems like it’s gearing up for a sequel.

Na showed up for the post-screening Q&A, which was completely in Korean without English interpretation or one of those little huddles near the corner of the theater where an English interpreter whispers what’s being said to a clutch of foreigners. What’s really frustrating is that they even made an announcement IN ENGLISH that there would be a post-screening Q&A and that everyone should remain afterwards to participate. This has long been a problem at BIFF, and seems to be getting worse. If BIFF really wants to be a world class festival equal to its newly earned status, it has to do more to connect to non-Korean speakers.

I saw three other movies yesterday, none of which I had originally planned to see, having hoped I could get tickets to other films I really wanted to see. In the video room I watched a documentary called Birds of War, about a female BBC-Arabic reporter based in London who falls in love over the phone with one her sources in Aleppo during the Syrian civil war, a male photographer who was also an activist. She’s Christian Lebanese and he’s Muslim Syrian, but they manage to connect intimately as he constantly moves around to escape the attention of Assad’s military and eventually escapes to Turkey, where she finally meets him. They marry, but their professional and moral obligations keep them apart. It’s a stirring doc, but I needed more details about those professional obligations, especially the BBC reporter’s involvement with the situation in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion.

The best movie I saw yesterday was 9 Temples to Heaven, a Thai film by the longtime assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose name I am too tired to spell out here. It’s basically a comedy about Buddhist superstition, but only hints glancingly at the kind of spiritual enigmas that Weerasethakul is famous for. A businessman is told by his boss that he had a dream about the busineesman’s mother’s funeral and recommends he and his family, along with the mother, do a pilgrimage of 9 temples in order to extend her life. The extended family makes the trip in two vans and, predictably, sparks fly emotionally, though no one gets carried away. It’s all kept under the surface. Also predictably, the mother for whose benefit this trip is being taken rejects it all and demands to go home, perhaps thinking it’s not worth it to live long if I have to put up with this. The movie is long and slow, but the family dynamic is not only believable, but rather affecting in ways that I can’t describe, and I’m sure that was the director’s intention.

At night I took in a press screening for Hirokazu Koreeda’s Look Back, a film I didn’t intend to see initially. The movie is already in general release in Japan and I missed the press screenings there because I was so disappointed with the other movie Koreeda made this year, Sheep in a Box. Look Back is better. It’s about two girls who bond during six grade over their love of manga, and they work together to form a team that becomes quite successful even before they’ve graduated from junior high school. Eventually interpersonal tensions drive them apart and tragedy strikes. Most critics have compared it to the animated version of the same story that preceded it, a movie I didn’t see, so everything was fresh and, for me, rather unstimulating. My main problem, however, wasn’t with the story, which was boilerplate melodrama, but with the girls themselves and how they were portrayed, especially the elementary school versions (there are two sets of actors). I just couldn’t believe how they behaved and what they said. This is particularly disappointing since Koreeda is one of the best directors of children in Japan, as shown by Nobody Knows and Monster (where it was the adults whose behavior and dialogue were unbelievable). What happened here?

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Review: Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Posted on October 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

There is a subgenre of documentaries that interrogates the act of filming so-called truth while ostensibly presenting something true. This Oscar-winning film is centrally about Vladimir Putin’s propaganda push to support his war against Ukraine as it is carried out by the authorities’ in a public school in the Ural Mountains, but its premise is much more interesting and involving. The co-director, main cinematographer, and narrator is a young teacher at the school named Pavel Talankin, who goes by the playful nickname of Pasha. He grew up in the town of Karabash, celebrated as one of the most toxic municipalities on earth due to its copper mine and smelting plant, and works at the school he attended as a child and where his mother is still the librarian. He is beloved by his students and maintains his office as a kind of sanctuary where they can go to chill and talk candidly among themselves about whatever is on their minds. He recognizes immediately what the authorities are trying to do at his school and he means to expose it, but, of course, the very nature of the government’s brainwashing blitz means he cannot do so overtly. As it happens, Pasha is an AV nerd and thus the school’s de facto videographer, so it’s actually his job to record the propaganda efforts so that the government can know the school is doing what it’s being told to do. Meanwhile, Pasha’s post-dubbed narration explains what is really going on and, in the end, he has to escape Russia with the video data to Europe, where a professional director named David Borenstein puts it together to make the documentary we are seeing.

Though often scary and suspenseful due to the danger that Pasha is putting himself through to assemble his images, the film is relentlessly entertaining because of the kind of person Pasha is. Much of the humor in the voiceover is in the typical self-deprecating Russian style, but Pasha himself is an immediately appealing host with his colorful outfits, floppy hair, and chubby physique, not to mention his way of framing subjects both visually and descriptively in ways that bring out their true character. Pasha’s most stirring concern is how the demands of the propaganda-making machine, which are basically meant to condition these young people for a long war and the boys especially for a glorious death on the battlefield, replace anything that resembles proper education. Reading and writing are sublimated into one-sided history lessons that equate the Ukrainian “military operation” with the Great Patriotic War (World War II), and subjects like math and science are simply thrown by the wayside. Pasha showers special attention on one history teacher named Abdulanov who is completely down with the program, showing how this stiffly proper pedant is a throwback to the ideal Soviet Man (In a guerilla interview he says that he can’t decide which of Stalin’s henchmen is his favorite “historical figure” because their respective bloodthirsty jobs were equally “interesting”), and keeps his camcorder running as a bunch of elementary school students struggle to remember their lines when attempting to “act” as if they are ad libbing patriotic boilerplate. 

Needless to say, Mr. Nobody Against Putin is effective in revealing the insidiousness inherent in making children bend to one’s will without their actually believing in what that will represents. Pasha’s tragedy, as he so movingly explains, is that he knows that what he’s doing means he will have to leave Karabash forever, a place he adores while acknowledging how dirty and ugly it is. And while the tense escape plan he has worked out with his nameless female go-between on the phone has a thrilling air of intrigue, it feels secondary to the huge loss that this delightfully uncompromising man will obviously suffer when he leaves the people he loves so dearly. This realization is much more powerfully felt than the intentions of exposing Putin’s horrifying designs. 

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

Mr. Nobody Against Putin home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 made in copenhagen Aps, Pink Productions s.r.o.

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Review: Pompei: Below the Clouds and I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol

Posted on October 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

Documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi struck paydirt when he found a middle-aged female archaeologist to comment on her work in a storehouse for artifacts unearthed during digs of the legendary city of Pompei, which was buried under lava and ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. The woman speaks of the sculptures and fragments in her charge with the air of a poet (“they were all wrenched from their contexts”), thus reinforcing the airy tone of the epigram by Jean Cocteau that opens the movie: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds of the world.”

Pompei: Below the Clouds is mostly about Naples, the port city adjacent to Pompei, which remains under threat, not only from Vesuvius (which last blew its top in 1944) but also the Phlegraean Fields, a volcanic caldera located west of the city. Every so often Rosi inserts a shot of lava and steam arising from some huge vent in the field. Juxtaposing scenes of Pompei’s ruins and their ongoing painstaking excavation—much of it being done by University of Tokyo archaeologists and their students—with scenes of everyday life in Naples, Rosi attempts to forge a continuum of mortality, life in the stark shadow of death; which may be why he chooses to shoot in black-and-white. One of his favorite locations is the local fire department’s emergency response room, where employees field calls from citizens who report rumblings under the earth as much as fires, petty crimes, and domestic incidents (the most fraught scene in the film is a fireman talking to a woman being beaten by her drunken husband). When the poetic archaeologist talks about the life of Pompei, she uses the present tense, as if the lives of the people represented by these artifacts were simply interrupted by the eruption. In Rosi’s depiction of a homey cram school filled with books, he conveys the extension of lives and the knowledge they hold into the future, while a pair of Syrian sailors discuss the huge hold of grain they are delivering from Ukraine to the world via Naples, and their fears of going back to Odessa for more, since the city is being bombed. Though these disparate episodes feel disconnected from one another, they are stories about Naples and thus connect subterraneanly to its history as a city, adding to its reputation as a region of global consequence. 

Another leitmotif is tomb robbers, who have plagued the area for centuries, a reminder of the value of the past in a more material form. We see law enforcement officials inspecting age-old tunnels built by raiders who somehow made a living from stealing old frescoes and art works without getting caught. The more recent past is represented by old films, including Rodolfi’s silent The Last Days of Pompei and Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, which are shown being screened in a derelict Neopolitan movie palace. Rosi’s film is a fitting companion to these attempts to come to terms with the past, and, in a sense, may strike the viewer as a requiem. 

Archaeology of a very different stripe is attempted by the rock doc I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol. The “I” in the title is the legendary punk band’s original bassist, Glen Matlock, who was unceremoniously kicked out of the group just after they released their one-and-only album and replaced with lead singer Johnny Rotten’s severely dissipated childhood mate Sid Vicious. Matlock proves he knows the right attitude as a rock’n roll raconteur. “I’ve told this story a million times,” he says before he starts, and I think I’ve heard this story a million times, but it’s mainly been from Rotten’s POV, meaning it’s steeped in resentment-in-hindsight vitriol, because Rotten’s voice was the only one that filmmakers thought was important. Matlock doesn’t possess nearly the command of words that John Lydon does, but his rendering of this oft-told tale has angles and contours that make it a bit more believable.

And lighter, too. One thing that Matlock puts across quite handily is what a blast he had as a Sex Pistol. With candid comments also being offered by bandmates Steve Jones and Paul Cook and none from Lydon, we get a more rounded picture of a bunch of gormless juvenile delinquents who happen to love old time R&B trying to do something with that love before life itself destroys them. We already know about the mercenary designs of Malcolm McLaren, the fashion retailer who put the Pistols together and introduced them to Lydon/Rotten, but previously we never really heard much about the mechanics of the band, how they wrote their songs, and what sorts of stylistic limitations they had to overcome in order to become one of the most original sounding groups England ever produced. As the main interpreter of the story, Matlock predictably toots his own horn, explaining how he invented the band’s rhythmic signature, not to mention the way he channeled his love of mainstream pop (Rotten reportedly got rid of him because of his affection for the Beatles, but Abba seems to have been a more direct influence) into the chord structures he worked out with Jones. Even more vital is his descriptions of the recording sessions, which were not the chaos casseroles you might expect but workmanlike efforts to get a sound that was in his head down on tape.

The usual parade of big-name contemporaries lend their opinions of the impact of the band, and while it’s all quite sincere it’s hardly something we need to hear again. More vital to the story is Matlock’s overview, from a distance, of what his firing did to the band in the end. Right after Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was released, the group embarked on several ill-fated tours that ended with them dissolving in a puddle of disgust at Winterland. Matlock, of course, can’t help but feel vindicated, and the movie gives him the last laugh by showing how he went on to a steady career as a rock’n roll lifer, including an extended stint with Blondie. I’m not sure I don’t detect a bit of “what-could-have-been” in his confident septuagenarian swagger, but he deserves to tell his story just as much as we deserve to hear it.

Pompei: Below the Clouds, in Italian, Neopolitan, Japanese, English, Arabic, now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Pompei: Below the Clouds home page in Japanese

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol home page in Japanese

Pompei: Below the Clouds photo (c) 21 Uno Film SRL/Stemal Entertainment SRL 2025

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol photo (c) 2025, I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol Productions, LLC

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Review: Disclosure Day

Posted on October 1, 2026 by philipbrasor

It was certainly inevitable that Steven Spielberg, after the most enviably productive career of any American film director in history, would try to summarize that career in various ways as he approached his 80s. His last movie was the highly enjoyable, fiercely autobiographical The Fabelmans, one of his best, and now he’s dropped Disclosure Day, a capper to his various sci-fi works that envisioned mankind coming into contact with extraterrestrial species, and while it isn’t one of his worst, it really feels like an over-earnest attempt to make his obsession with outer space aliens make sense. Some critics have already made a connection between the two movies, saying that the kind of broken family narrative that Spielberg lived through as an adolescent informed his outlook on so-called messianic aliens (the ones in The War of the Worlds pointedly excepted) and the possibilities that their arrival could lead to a healing of all human suffering. After sitting through Disclosure Day‘s whiplash-inducing plot turns, it’s an easy theory to get behind.

The premise of the movie is obvious from the beginning: the U.S. government is hiding from the world evidence of extra-terrestrial visits. The central prophet in this story is a Kansas City weather reporter, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who starts acting weird on air at about the same time news outlets are reporting on the world tumbling into World War III. Margaret starts speaking languages she doesn’t know and having visions that set her on the same path as Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a former government contractor who has stolen some secret data from his old boss with the intention of exposing the existence of aliens to the general public. Daniel’s girlfriend is a former nun (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter, by the way, which adds subtext that’s just too rich) who risks her life to help Daniel’s cause, the greatest threat to which is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a private defense contractor whose business and, it would seem, very existence depends on the secret remaining buried. 

Spielberg’s special skills are exercised to the max, especially in the many tense and riveting action set pieces that often feel as if they’d been staged for their own sake rather than for advancing the plot, which gets seriously hairy at some points. Though it’s easy to understand and even sympathize with the director’s belief in alien salvation—David Koepp’s script is one of the few Spielberg has directed that’s based on his own story—in the end the movie feels almost self-referential, as if it were built backwards from the climax, which, like most Hollywood product, doesn’t offer many clues as to what may happen beyond the timeframe of the movie; and I’m not sure if that was Speilberg’s intention. He really yearns for those alien saviors and will obviously feel really let down if he doesn’t live to meet any. This is probably the closest he’ll get.

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).

Disclosure Day home page in Japanese

photo (c) Universal Studios

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Review: Heart of the Beast and Hen

Posted on September 25, 2026 by philipbrasor

Loyal dog movies and TV shows were once a staple of American entertainment, but if Heart of the Beast feels too much like a throwback it tries to make up for its anachronistic vibe by centering the central human-animal relationship on a shared case of PTSD, which is downright 21st century. Both James Belmont (Brad Pitt) and his German shepherd companion Odin were part of US military special forces, Belmont being Odin’s trainer and handler. When Belmont retired he took Odin with him. Throughout the movie, both occasionally suffer from violent flashbacks that clearly have an effect on the way they perceive their surroundings. Conveying PTSD from a dog’s point of view would normally be a chump’s game, so props to director David Ayer for not going overboard. That said, the notion that Odin can do his supercanine stuff with one prosthetic limb would seem to obviate the need for any illustrative flashbacks. 

This is purely an adventure movie. The whole story takes place in a pristine Alaskan wilderness where Belmont has flown his seaplane with Odin in tow. They camp out and bond with nature, each demonstrating native skills to contend with the wild. What dialogue there is is limited to Belmont as he talks to Odin about what’s on his mind and what he assumes is on Odin’s. At one point they encounter a former gold prospector (JK Simmons, almost unrecognizable behind the whiskers and Walter Brennan accent) who is also traveling solo down a river in his homemade kayak, albeit without a four-legged companion. 

The inevitable difficulties ensue, thus making the pair’s trip into a life-or-death one, as the elements, the landscape, and the local wildlife seem to conspire against them. Belmont risks his life to save Odin and vice versa, maybe more than once. The perilous incidents multiply so rapidly that it’s difficult to tell, and a lot of the bad things that happen feel more like stupid choices than bad luck, but, then, some people will tell you that bad luck is really nothing but stupid choices. Ayer knows how to stage dangerous situations, whether they involve raging streams or a pack of (digital) wolves, and the movie is both exciting and moving in the way man-and-dog look out for each other. But the only lesson I learned from Heart of the Beast is that you shouldn’t go to Alaska unless you have a place to stay for the night. 

Reportedly four dogs played Odin in Heart of the Beast. I don’t know how many birds played the titular fowl in the Greek movie Hen, but I assume it was a lot given how much editing the footage obviously underwent. The director, Hungarian György Pálfi, reportedly was inspired by the Polish movie EO, about the adventures of a donkey who goes from one owner to another. As with that movie, the feathered protagonist of Hen is mainly on hand to shift the plot from one human agent to another, though these agents are viewed through the chicken’s eyes. What makes Hen decidedly different from EO is that, like the chicken, the viewer is often confused by what they observe.

The hen’s odyssey is certainly compelling. After escaping from a delivery person who plans to make a meal out of her (her fate, since she was born in a battery farm), the chicken must outfox an actual fox, who pays dearly for his carnivorous ways. The hen then makes her way to a roadhouse convenience store whose elderly owner captures her and places her in his coop. There she is violated by a mangy rooster and while, thanks to her plucky (sorry) personality, she escapes the coop as well, she always gets recaptured and put back. During this time she has plenty of opportunity to watch the local humans do inhumane things, like traffic in refugees.

Though Pálfi wrings (sorry again) as much emotional expressiveness out of his poultry as you could hope for, it’s mostly due to his deft camerawork, which manages to catch the hen(s) at moments where she seems either baffled by what she sees or totally freaked out. It’s no spoiler to say that the hen fares much better in the end than some of the people. I cheered for her more than I did for the donkey in EO, and would have felt pretty put off if anything untoward happened to her. She’s a winner.

Heart of the Beast now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 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).

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

Heart of the Beast home page in Japanese

Hen home page in Japanese

Heart of the Beast photo (c) 2026 Paramont Pictures

Hen photo (c) 2025 Pallas Film-Twenty Vision-View Master Films-ZDF

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Review: Broken Voices

Posted on September 19, 2026 by philipbrasor

Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices was inspired by a real life scandal surrounding the Prague-based children’s choir Bambini di Praga. In 2008, the choir’s leader, Bohumil Kulínský, was arrested for having sexually abused two dozen girls in the ensemble over the previous two decades, almost all of them underage. He was later convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, and then released on parole after about two-and-a-half years. Not long after his release he died of kidney failure. Provazník’s film fictionalizes the principals and the story, limiting its time frame to several months in the early 1990s, not long after the Czech Republic emerged from communism and Czechoslovakia. The choir, here called Canticella, is a prestigious organization and the adolescent members are constantly in competition to rise up to and remain in the “A” choir, which is the main public face of the group, performing throughout the country and in Europe. The choir master, Vitek Mácha (Juraj Loj), is an imperious but not altogether cruel taskmaster, and the girls use their youthful feminine wiles to get on his good side. The protagonist of the story is 13-year-old Karolína (Kateřina Falbrová), a member of the “B” choir whose older sister, Lucie (Maya Kintera), is in the “A” group.

I know the woman who was the Japanese-English interpreter/road manager for Bambini di Praga during the 90s, when they came to Japan almost every year to tour the country, and I asked her to watch a screener of the film and give me her opinion. She said the actor who portrays Mácha looks a lot like Kulínský, though despite what he ends up doing in the movie, he comes off as more likable than the man she worked with. Kulínský, she said, was a drunk and a bully, a man who lorded over the girls (and two boys—in Japan the choir toured as the Praha Shonen Shojo Gasshodan) with almost comical bravado. He terrorized the Japanese staff with his demands and while the interpreter got along with him to a certain extent, she didn’t like him at all, but he always insisted she tour with them as they went from small town to small town, and since the choir was a money maker for the Japanese organizer he got his way. Kulínský spoke English but the girls mostly did not, so the interpreter’s relationship with them wasn’t very deep; and while she found the maestro’s behavior around them creepy (if they stayed at a hot spring he would sometimes bathe with them, behavior duplicated in the movie when Mácha shares a sauna with Karolína) she never suspected him of sexual abuse, though when she eventually learned of his arrest, some years after she stopped working with the choir, she wasn’t really surprised. Kulínský was a seasoned showman, which is why the choir was so popular in Japan. He knew exactly how to present the girls to Japanese audiences—he even taught them popular Japanese songs—and at the inevitable post-performance parties with local bigwigs he knew how to show them off to middle aged men who thought they were cute. The interpreter felt he was just doing what he was supposed to be doing, promoting the choir for the sake of the Japanese organizer, as well as Czech culture and, most importantly, himself. He was very ambitious, and had inherited the choir from his late father, the previous choir master. It was a family business, and his mother toured with them as assistant choir mistress. What he really wanted to do was move beyond children’s choirs and become a legitimate orchestra conductor, a goal he was on his way to achieving when he was arrested. In that regard, Japan was always central to his aims since his many years of touring here had given him a certain professional cachet he could take advantage of. His first orchestral gigs were in Japan. 

In the movie, Mácha initially comes across as the urbane sophisticate, less a big brother figure than an unattainable hip uncle with his acoustic guitar, long hair, and colorful couture. He immediately singles Karolína out from her “B” choir peers and promotes her to the “A” choir, based on what he says is her native talent. As she gains his favor, we see Lucie grow more nervous and even jealous, thus leading to a cruel bullying incident that has dire health consequences for Karolína. She survives the ordeal and is selected as one of 20 girls who will embark on the choir’s first tour of the U.S. Along the way, she has to navigate the catty conflicts at play among the girls, some of whom we suspect have already been the victims of Mácha’s untoward attentions, though the extent of those attentions isn’t made clear until they get to their hotel in New York.

Despite one shocking scene, Broken Voices is almost too tasteful in its approach to its unsavory subject. It’s mostly concerned with how a monster like Mácha gets away with what he gets away with, since those who followed the real situation with Kulínský know he continued taking advantage of his charges for at least another decade. There are hints in the movie that Mácha’s mother, the choir’s “professor,” knows what’s going on, but like the Japanese interpreter with Kulínský, the general feeling among people familiar with the situation surrounding the choir is that sexual abuse was beyond the pale and thus unimaginable. Power dynamics between mentor and mentees in the art world is such a cliche that men like Mácha/Kulínský can confidently believe they will never get caught until, of course, they are.

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

Broken Voices home page in Japanese

photo (c) endorfilm s.r.o. Punkchart Films s.r.o. Ceska televize innogy Ceska republika a.s. Barrandov Studio a.s. 2025

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Review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Posted on September 18, 2026 by philipbrasor

Only a few seconds into this harrowing black comedy by Mary Bronstein, the protagonist, a fortyish Long Island mother named Linda (Rose Byrne), says to her complaining young daughter, “I’m allowed to be sad,” a massive understatement that will prove to be the foundational joke of the film. Over the next 110 minutes, Linda’s patience and sanity will be tested by a slew of misfortunes that will test the patience and sanity of the viewer as well. For the most part, Linda’s anxieties are justifiable. Her daughter, whose face we never see but whose voice and demeanor are those of a petulant brat, is suffering from some sort of ailment that has rendered her unable to eat and thus necessitates a feeding tube that requires constant care, and Linda’s rented apartment has just suffered broken plumbing that has forced her and her daughter into a cheap motel room while her cruise ship captain husband (Christian Slater, essentially a whining voice on the phone) is away at work for a few months, leaving her to her own devices and demons, some of which come in human form, though in the end Linda’s worst enemy proves to be herself.

Bronstein exacerbates the tension and fear by keeping the camera tight on Linda’s face, a landscape darkened by constantly changing emotional heavy weather. Though some have characterized If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (a phrase I didn’t hear used during the movie) as another study of post-partum depression, Linda’s daughter is not an infant—I would guess her age to be around 7 or 8—and Linda’s psychological condition, while certainly in dangerous territory, seems initially a product of the outside forces rallied against her. For sure, she is beset by assholes at every turn, whether it’s her daughter’s doctor (Bronstein), who scolds her for not taking the support group for mothers with ill children seriously; her own psychiatric patients, whose insufferable neediness would be hilarious if taken out of context; her mentor-colleague (Conan O’Brien), who receives her litany of complaints during requisite therapy sessions with unconcealed contempt; or the various service workers—receptionists, clerks, parking lot attendants—who refuse to see her as a woman under the influence because she makes their job that much more difficult. The only character at all seemingly cognizant of what Linda is going through is James (A$AP Rocky), the custodian at the motel who helps her acquire alcohol from the front desk and drugs on the dark web, tasks that at first smack of a kind of perverted charity but, of course, end up being disastrous choices, and not just for Linda, because everything Linda touches turns to shit, including, it would seem, her daughter.

The incontrovertible conclusion is that Linda is not fit to be a mother, an observance that Linda herself makes multiple times to herself and others, and any viewer with a modicum of pity will agree, though I’m not sure if Bronstein wants us to maintain that conviction through to the vaguely suggestive final scene. For sure, Byrne gives us a howling performance of female instability that rivals anything Gena Rowlands manifested back in the day, but since everything is channeled through Linda’s claustrophobic POV it’s difficult to tell how much of her suffering is imagined. I would guess very little, because the world is famously full of assholes. Some people are equipped to confont that world regardless of what it throws at them, and Linda ain’t one of ’em. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Legs Film Rights LLC

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