The ruse of connection within suburban domesticity thrown into crisis by your creepy neighbor. I can understand why this isn’t as highly regarded as Kurosawa’s Cure, it is essentially a re-telling of the same story: a police procedural inverted on its head to examine control and interpersonal dynamics within the nuclear family unit. It’s different though, the formal characteristics are more bland and well, sinister in their presentation. Entire colors & mood shift as conversations divulge. I was initially caught off guard…

"It's because people suppress their desires that the world has become so complicated!"

This Transient Life stages an interrogation of traditional Japanese cultural values in the form of a confrontation between a perverse hedonist and a spiritualist. Ozu by way of Suzuki?

Masao is a bit of a failson: his father wants him to get a good job and marry a good wife and carry the family legacy forward, but Masao doesn't want any of those things, so daddy threatens…

"Even before we enter the world, we are marked by karma."

Preceded by its reputation, of course — how I hadn't seen it until now when it's so obviously My Shit will forever remain one of life's great mysteries — but while I knew it was a stylish revenge thriller that played a large part in inspiring Kill Bill, what I didn't know about was its rich cultural and historical context.

Our story takes place 20 years after the Meiji…

The logical thematic conclusion for a franchise centered around a convict and her on-again off-again imprisonment, Beast Stable is all about bodily agency and autonomy, but here the theme is taken beyond the basic horizon of the carceral state. Here we tackle the issue of women's bodies and their sexual exploitation through two parallel narratives, one about a sister who pity-fucks her brain-damaged brother until she becomes pregnant with his child, and another about an underground sex work organization and…

"Let's go on a journey to learn what it means to say goodbye."

Reckoning with death. Asuna lost her father at a young age, and Morisaki, her substitute teacher and clear surrogate father ("Sensei, it's like you're my dad!") likewise lost his wife, so together they venture into the underworld of Agartha in search of the secret to reincarnation.

With her mother often away from home working late into the night compounding the void left by her father, Asuna was…

Two people who feel trapped in a life that's not their own, who find themselves and their place in the world through each other, who need each other in a way that's profound, almost existential, but not necessarily romantic or sexual. A young student whose mother ran out on him looking for a new maternal figure in his life; a teacher whose students bullied her out of class looking for a new source of inspiration to keep working. Each of…

They say five centimeters per second is the speed a cherry blossom falls, the brief window of peak spring beauty, the speed at which the season's prospering collapses to the ground — the speed at which young love flourishes before falling in turn to its inevitable fate. The tragic paradox of two lovers feeling farthest from each other in the very moment of their closest proximity, the impossibility of their life together only palpable once they've tasted its beauty.

But…

"During a class in primary school, I was staring at parts of my body like nails or hair, and then, as I looked more closely at them, I became aware of the particles that make up my body… Even smaller than atoms or molecules. However small, they're part of me. Then I realized there are even smaller parts than the air, which are still parts of me. And all the particles, like that of my classmates or of a chair,…