After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future. As the film begins, the family patriarch, middle-aged senior administrative manager, Ryuhei […]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brooding, atmospheric, surreal, and sufficiently creepy, but woefully underformed and uncharacteristically messy horror film, Retribution unfolds with the formulaic familiarity of a haphazardly (and irregularly) sutured career retrospective digest. A rumpled and overworked detective, Yoshioka (Kôji Yakusho) and his partner Miyaji (Tsuyoshi Ihara) are called in to investigate the apparent murder by drowning […]
An unidentified widow (Hikari Ishida) sits in the kitchen of the Sato home bearing a keepsake from her late husband in the desperate hope that her psychic medium, Junko (Jun Fubuki) can somehow connect her to him and help resolve her own conflicted emotions on the prospect of marrying another man. Soft-spoken, deliberative, and perhaps […]
An aimless, twenty-something man, Yuji Nimura (Joe Odagiri), bides his idle time at a local video arcade as he reflects off-camera in a solemn voice of recurring visions for a bright future that once filled his unconscious hours of sleep until recently when, suddenly and inexplicably, the pleasant dreams ceased. Volatile and asocial (where the […]
A solitary young woman stands on the deck of a near empty ship, staring out into the ominous sea, and solemnly recounts a seemingly ordinary day in a Tokyo botanical nursery when a young man named Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi) failed to return to the office after working from home on a software project. Concerned about […]
Charisma opens to an apparently familiar pattern of an overworked, rumpled, and unfocused officer named Goro Yabuike (Koji Yakusho) napping on an empty bench at police headquarters and being awakened by a superior officer to discuss the progress of his arrest case. One day, he is called to an abandoned house in the countryside in […]