Bubble Gum vs Plutonium

The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979) - Hasegawa Kido (Kenji Sawada) is a high school science teacher, known to his pupils as bubble gum, because of his habit of constantly chewing and blowing bubbles. He is regarded as an eccentric, but harmless man. But Kido has only one thing in mind - to build an atomic bomb. In order to achieve his goal, he physically trains himself, and steals a gun, in order to break into a nuclear power plant facility to steal an isotope to extract enough plutonium for the bomb.

While Kido is planning this, he meets inspector Yamashita (Bunta Sugawara, Battles without Honor and Humanity series), a ridiculously straight-up G-man with a buzzcut, when an unhinged WWII veteran, armed with a machine gun and grenades, hijacks Kido's school bus full of students, demanding to talk to the emperor. After the ordeal, which results in Kido and Yamashita saving the day and the gunman dead, Kido takes Yamashita as a worthy future opponent.

The actual break-in to the nuclear powerplant and ensuing making the bombs in a makeshift lab in Kido's tiny apartment, has a slapstick comedy element to it.


The film is also extremely procedural - showing Kido's bomb making almost step-by-step, as if in an instructional video. After successfully making two bombs - one with just enough plutonium to be detectable, so the authorities would take him seriously, and the other full working bomb with the timer, Kido starts making demands in a series of calls, using a voice scrambler. But his demands are silly - to have a baseball game aired on TV in its entirety instead of cutting the broadcast off at 9pm (which was a standard), and to get the Rolling Stones perform in Japan. His frustration at the society is well defined, but not what he wants. Throw in a beautiful radio personality, Zero (Kimiko Sawai), who figures out who Kido really is, but instead of giving him up to the authorities, she takes his case as a big exclusive scoop. Even if it means she gets involved romantically with him, and knowing Kido is dying of radiation poisoning. The cat and mouse chase ensues between Kido and Yamashita.

The Man Who Stole the Sun balances on the tight rope between not-so-serious and serious, full on satire and serious inquiry into the nation's psyche - the miraculous post-war economic development and consumerism, the generational gap- exemplified by the long-haired, aloof, rebel without a cause Kido and the overly stereotypical G-man, the unbending public servant, Yamashita. And of course, underlying of it all - the nation's ironic dependence on its nuclear energy and it being the source of existential threat (Fukushima anyone?)

As the two and a half hour movie unfolds, things get more and more outrageous - the massive car chase, shootouts, helicopters, daring stunts. Hasegawa's film has the same manic energy and chaotic nature of Shinji Somai's 80s output.

Hobo Code

Passenger (2026) - Øvredal André Øvredal, Norwegian director behind Troll Hunter, Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Last Voyage of Demeter, created a little corner for himself in the American horror film scene with successful modest budget projects over the years. And his latest, Passenger, starring Lou Llobel and Jacob Scipio as a young couple in love, on the road together is a tight, surprisingly good horror film that has plenty of scares.

Tyler (Scipio) and Maddie (Llobel) are city folks embarking on a new life on the road in a bougie Mercedes van. Their whole lives are packed in the van and they are hitting the road. It's the opposite of Nomadland where people are living out of their vans out of economic necessity, but these young couples are what the Winnebago community in a trailer park calls "Air bnb on wheels" folks.

It's Tyler's idea of retiring early and being free on the road, but Maddie is not so sure. It is extra hard to object, when he puts a lot of effort into this new life and thinks their love will be the only thing that they need. The thing is, any way you cut it, they are an adorable couple and we don't want anything bad to happen to them. But things start happening.

While they are on the road, they witness the aftermath of a brutal car crash. Since then, Maddie is seeing a scary figure in the corner of her eyes. There are deep scratch marks on the side of the van, which they later find out that it's a warning sign in a hobo code to be on the lookout for danger.

Their road trip on Route 66 turns out to be less ideal than Tyler anticipated, but downright scary with this 'passenger' attaching itself to them.

The couple learns that the only way to lose this scary ghoul is driving to the creepy abandoned church of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, somewhere off the beaten path in the desert near Grand Junction,CO.

In Passenger, jump scares are plenty and tension building is top notch. Øvredal uses all the tricks in the scary road movie genre tropes - car engine stalling, flat tires in the middle of nowhere, scary parking spaces at night with unreliable, flickering street lights combined with supernatural elements, debunking the American romanticism of hitting the road.

Tower to Power

The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025) - Assayas Based on a fictional account by Giuliano Da Empoli, Olivier Assayas, the one of the most astute observers of our ever evolving, complex world, takes on Putin's Russia in recent history, with the star studded international cast. The result is perhaps short on the satisfying narrative, but a fascinating history lesson nonetheless.

The film starts with an American journalist, Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), visiting Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former spin doctor of Putin living in isolation in the suburbs of Moscow. Baranov pulls out a yarn of the chaotic, exciting days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As a young man eager to prove himself, Baranov moves into the city filled with other young people, eager to take advantage of the anything-goes, wild-west of the Yeltsin era Russia. While others are busy making money and signaling the dawn of the future oligarchs, Baranov chooses art in avant-garde theater. There, he meets a punk performance artist Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) whom he would have a long off/on relationship with. His work in art leads him to TV and communications and works up the ladder and becomes a producer of a recently privatized national TV station, with the help of Berezovsky (Will Keen), a reigning spin doctor with political connections. The Chechen war was going badly and the Russian public was in need of change.

There's a funny bit about Yeltsin's sagging popularity and his alcoholism and in order to make him more 'presidential' on TV for his reelection, they have to tie him to the chair in order not have have him fall asleep at the desk and slow down the teleprompter speed.

Since Yeltzin is a goner, Berezovsky bets on a former KGB head, young & athletic Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) to be his successor. And this is where things get interesting. Putin, a disciplined former intelligence officer and spy, unlike other politicians in Russia, is not interested in money and wants to have no interference in government from newly minted oligarchs. And he hates the frivolity of TV and spins. Admirer of Stalin, he wants absolute power. While Ksenia moves from one billionaire to another, Baranov becomes a trusted counsel for Putin after his verticality of power speech, pushing his strongman image as what is needed in Russia.

Dano, in his puff dough face and forever smug, fits the role of Baranov, who observes the world with forever cynicism and insincerity. When asked about why he stayed so long by Putin's side, he admits that he is addicted to power. Law is scary as Putin, a one-track minded former intelligence officer and spy, who detests moneyed people and the west. Someone who wants to wield power in a geopolitical game in the new era.

Tom Sturridge shows up as Dimitri Sidorov, a flashy, hedonistic oligarch in the making, of whom Ksenia falls for.

There are tons of films about Russia's recent history, but Assayas makes a somewhat concise overview of how Putin's Russia came about. He juxtaposes the real threat of the strongman who does play by western capitalist standards. Baranov, who was fashioned after Vladislav Surkov, a spin doctor who served Putin in his aggressive pursuit of Crimea and then Ukraine. Obviously, these are villains. But aren't they as villainous as Europe and the US? As Rawland asks about the invasion of Ukraine and violence Baranov orchestrated, overseen by Putin, Baranov counters with all the villainy the West has been inflicting to the world at large. Aren't we as culpable as Putin - Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq and Iran?

Narratively The Wizard loses steam on the way to its fatalistic, unsatisfying ending. But again, Assayas accomplishes deciphering the complicated recent history and reflects on where we find ourselves, at this chaotic, morally ugly present.

Gen Z Detective Agency

Debut, Or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025) - Castronovo A female narrator tells us how she came in possession of a laptop and a handwritten diary of Julian Castronovo, a young aspiring filmmaker who disappeared while researching his subject that he came across in a New York apartment by accident. So starts Debut, Or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, an auto-fiction, a mystery within a mystery about a young filmmaker and a missing art forger. Castronovo introduces himself in a webcam- his age, his height, his proportionally bigger head compared with the rest of his body, and what is about to unfold in his debut feature. His trajectory is not dissimilar to that of hundreds of other young aspiring American filmmakers - moving to New York, then LA, pulling some shady connections and struggling while doing odd-end jobs to survive. Let's set aside his good looks and pompous title for the time being, because his investigation into a missing Chinese art forger is, indeed, very intriguing.

With some connection from a friend, he landed an apartment in New York. While repainting the walls, he finds a hard copy of Don Quixote and a drawing of a deer with three digit numbers written in the back in a hidden compartment. Doing some online research, he finds the former tenant was an art forger from China who worked for the landlord who turned out to be a gallery owner. The gallery owner later got busted for fraud and served prison terms. But the forger disappeared and has been missing for twenty years.

Castronovo moves to LA. There he hustles with fake business cards that he works for various movie studios and assumes a Chandler-esque detective identity- wearing black suits and ties from his catering server job. His hustling eventually catches the eye of a mid-level independent movie producer and together they shop around for funding to make a very movie about the mystery about the disappearance of the art forger. Some more mysterious phone calls later, he gets a hold of a box full of videotapes and other trinkets that belong to the disappeared forger, Fawn Ma. They reveal that Ma was not only a forgery artist but a conceptual performance artist which we see the glimpses of throughout the film.

The short feature is done very economically: there's no actual footage of any action. It's done through narration and webcam footage of himself talking. Any location shots are done with puppets donning Robert Smith hair. The rest are static shots of clues left behind by the forger and her art work - short videos, photos. With the photos of the forger pointing finger at objects and buildings, Castronovo tracks down her whereabouts, using google maps. And it turns out to be in the Czech Republic, coincidentally the place where an interested mysterious investor resides as well.

I have to give Castronovo credit for creating an entertaining yarn in a short feature with no budget. Debut hooks you in and never lets you go. It's an enjoyable ride spiked with ingenuity and creativity suited for social media generation, doing a lot with so little.

Rhythm of Life

Variations on a Theme (2026) - Delmar, Jacobs Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs's Variations on a Theme is a quiet revelation of a film. Shot entirely in the small rural community of Kharkams in Kamiesberge mountains in Western South Africa, it records the daily lives of Hettie, an 80 year old goat herder and her neighbors. With a stationary camera and wide frames, it records sunrises and sunsets and everything in between, as the narration (by Jason Jacobs, a grandson of Hettie) unhurriedly informs us that some town-wide scam is in progress. On the radio and loud speakers from a car, they are asking the residents, many of whom are descendents of WWII veterans, to turn in 'the blue form' to get reparation money the government owes them. According to the narrator, black South African soldiers were only compensated with a pair of army boots and a bicycle when they returned after the war.

All of the residents are swept up in the scam, paying exorbitant fees to file the form - "to spend money to get money". Even stoic Hettie is swept up in it. But daily life goes on. She lets out the goats in the morning, gets water from the town water tank (which serves also as the town teenagers hangout), chat with her neighbors, use the communal outhouse, watch some TV shows and see the sun goes down over the rolling, picaresque hills from her porch. Others play dominoes outside the ramshackle supermarket and children play in the playground.

Delmar and Jacobs build a gentle rhythm through repetition, in Variations on a Theme. It lulls viewers into a warm, comfortable and inviting place, where every day is pretty much the same. Hettie's daily routine goes on, the local dreamer who sleeps outside still dreams of a woman he met in the 70s. The sun goes down every night, providing a spectacular sunset every time. The cramped houses and their colorful walls and live animals, everything in the film is laid back and unchanging. The commotion comes from people still anxiously holding on to a hope for the reparations to kick in, which they believe, will come any day now - Gladwin, the local hairdresser, ordered all new supplies, expecting to get paid from the fund. Domino players talk about taking an overseas trip with the money.

Hettie's birthday is coming and according to the narrator, her large family from the city that she seldom talks to will be coming for her birthday, even though she is pretty much 'detached' now and started to enjoy her isolation and solitude ever since her husband's passing. After the hectic birthday celebration, and her large family staying in her small house for several days, Hettie's daughter suggests that she come and live with them in the city. She is not getting any younger and it is time to leave behind the inconvenience of rural living.

The storm's brewing from the distant, Hettie's milk on her nightstand falls and shatters on the ground. The change is coming. Delmar and Jacobs observe all these in an unhurried fashion, lamenting silently on the inevitability of time passing and changing way of life. Beautiful work.

Dumb Waiter

Hokum (2026) - McCarthy Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy's third outing has all the hallmarks of his two very scary predecessors: everything has to do with an elaborate scheme taking place in one isolated location. Once the mechanics of action are laid out- which takes some time, the film begins to click in its scary ways. And as with Caveat and Oddity, Hokum is scary, good fun.

American writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), is visiting Bilberry Woods Hotel for two reasons- to finish the ending of his Conquistador trilogy and scatter his parents ashes in nearby woods, because his parents stayed in the hotel when they were honeymooning. But Ohm is not a friendly fellow. He is arrogant and dismissive. He snaps at the old proprietor (Brendan Conroy) of the inn telling a spooky tale to the local children about how he trapped a witch in his hotel, calling him an old fool believing in superstitions. He admonishes Alby (Will O'Connell), a bell hop who is an aspiring writer, for asking for his autograph, rude to Fiona (Florence Odesh) the barkeep, all at his arrival. He later bonds with Fiona a little bit, because she reminds him of his dead mother.

The rumor has it, there's a witch who is haunting the place and the honeymoon suite is off limits because of that. You know that the suite is going to be opened up and will be the main location for most of the action taking place later on. Ohm is also carrying the guilt of the accidental death of his mother when he was a child. We see the glimpse of her ghost still haunting him and that he is in a depressive state.

Ohm encounters Jerry (David Wilmot), who lives in his van and drinking mushroom laced milk in the woods. Taking Jerry as a quack, Ohm dismisses his telltale stories about the witch and haunting of the hotel.

After Fiona and Alby discovering Ohm hanging from the ceiling, from an apparent suicide attempt, Ohm is hospitalized and recovers few weeks later. When he comes back to the hotel to gather his stuff, Ohm finds the hotel is closing for the season and Fiona has gone missing since Halloween night a couple of weeks back. Jerry is a prime suspect in Fiona's disappearance. Ohm runs into him in the woods again and Jerry suggests breaking in to the hotel after everyone clears out. Jerry is certain that they are keeping Fiona up in the Honeymoon suite.

The rest is pure McCarthy - repetition of the elevator and dumb waiter going up and down, the secret corridors in the basement, isolation and suffocation anxiety, the cat and mouse game with folklore tinged supernatural occurances. Plenty of jumpscare and hallucinogenic imagery- reoccuring rabbit creature references throughout his filmography, all mingle perfectly with the tense atmosphere McCarthy creates (out of little to nothing). Adam Scott playing the world-class asshole also helps with absurd humor. All the creepy details McCarthy puts in - the cherubic sculptures, the creepy rabbit mask, Fiona's rabbit costume, the grandfather clock, etc.

Hokum might not be as scary as Oddity, but it shows what McCarthy is capable of with a bigger budget and a Hollywood actor. I can't wait to see more from McCarthy.

Moving Picture

It Goes That Quick (2026) - Connor, Stankus We associate home movies as a nostalgic trip to the past, documenting those precious events in your life - birthdays, holiday gatherings, weddings, vacations, etc. In documentaries and narrative features, these old, faded images are used as ephemeral artifacts, to give more layers and contexts to support the narrative. But what if these artifacts are the subjects themselves in a film?

Filmmaker couple Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus started working on It Goes That Quick, in 2016, filming the lives of their respective families. It’s sort of a continuation of a home movie. But categorizing It Goes That Quick as either a documentary or a narrative would be doing the film a disservice. In it, the filmmakers' family members play themselves, with no clear narratives or big drama, other than displaying the passage of time, Connor and Stankus make the case for quotidian life as art.

Sure, there are gatherings and personal landmark moments in It Goes That Quick, captured in old film and video formats, but the majority of footage shot in the last ten years are more about life as is - like them arguing about little things and driving - lots and lots of moments that take place in cars. I remember a discussion in film class back in college, that if a person in the distant future who views movies from our lifetime, they may not understand our language, but our movement in mundane activities - walking, eating and driving, will be the most abundant things they will witness on screen and thus will represent our lives. Abbas Kiarostami's driving scenes are famous for showing the passage of time and observing life passing by through the car windows. For Connor and Stankus, being seasoned filmmakers, this notion is not lost on them. There is a lot of eating and driving in the film.

The title of the film comes from a family member telling a story of losing money fast in Vegas, at a family gathering. But it serves as the unrelenting passage of time - juxtaposing filmmakers' families getting older and greyer. There are many humorous as well as sad moments. They also make clear that their family members are being 'directed' - we see and hear either of them calling, "Action," or "Cut," or tail slating (for sync sound), within the earlier scene. But they are not reenacting some dramatic moments, it’s more of a stage direction- where to look and what direction to exit the frame. At one point, the arguing old couple say “I love you,” to each other while sitting on the sofa in their living room. Stankus calls the cut, and his grandma says, “I usually call him honey.”

Divided by chapters of the family circles in different configurations (there are grandparents, parents and lots of uncles), they argue about how to arrange tables and what to serve at a Seder dinner, doing favors by giving them rides to and fro to stores, do grocery shopping, plant trees to commemorate their pet dog who passed away and gather their old belongings from their old house as they move to an assisted facility.

In the center of it, there are Conner and Stankus as a couple, as they document their wedding, birth of their son and their little trip to Paris. As an established DP, Connor gives these 16mm Bolex shot home movie footage a little cinematic flair.

It Goes That Quick borrows that Documentary/narrative hybrid form to present the most authentic representation of life on screen, but it defies any genre conventions. The filmmakers’ method comes across as genuine, not a gimmick. What they are after is paying an ode to their family members by showing the most mundane moments in their lives, which is totally recognizable and relatable. I wish all families had their own version of this.

If Trees Could Talk

Silent Friend (2025) - Enyedi After delving into the contemplation on nature with 'all animals are sentient creatures' message in her film, On Body and Soul in 2017, Hungarian filmmaker, Ildikó Enyedi, presents Silent Friend, a loosely connected three narratives dealing with our connection with trees across time, observed by 200 year old ancient ginkgo biloba tree.

Tony Leung (making his first European production appearance) plays Dr. Wong, a renowned Hong Kong neurologist, who gets marooned in a medieval looking university campus in Marburg, Germany, due to Covid outbreak. He was conducting an experiment on how the human brain functions differently in babies from that of adults. In a lecture with a bouncing light ball in darkened room, he gives an example with spotlight consciousness (adult brains- concentrate on one thing at a time), and lantern-light consciousness (babies- open to surroundings more and their concentration differs as their attention shifts more freely like a floating ball). Now due to Covid, all the students and faculty are cleared out. Wong's research is on hold. His perky German-Chinese assistant is only communicable through zoom sessions, and he is the only one left in the whole empty campus with a cranky German custodian who serves him daily meals while keeping distance in accordance with the pandemic restrictions.

The second story starts in black and white with Grete (Luna Wadler), a bright student attending the same Marburg University studying botany. It's the turn of the century and she experiences blatant sexism from a sea of male students and faculty. In a cringe-inducing selection process in front of the all old male committee, Grete is interrogated mercilessly through the texts of Carl Linnaeus, whose classification of plants based on their sexual organs which was groundbreaking at the time. The societal prejudices and sexual insinuation against young learned women bleed into her life, Grete loses her lodging and finds solace in an old photographer's studio as an assistant, where she explores her artistic freedom and sexuality.

The third narrative thread concerns introverted Hannes (Enzo Brumm), who has a love/hate relationship with nature, due to his rural upbringing, falling for fellow university student Gundula (Marlene Burow) who has a lab experiment set up in her dorm room. The setting is in the 1970s - counterculture, drug use and free love. Gundula tries to record her geranium's reaction to humans, because she believes our silent friends- plants, trees, fungi, etc, want to communicate with us as much as we do with them.

While being stuck in isolation, Dr. Wong contacts a fellow scientist Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux) who specializes in communicating with plants, and decides to conduct an experiment on the ancient ginko tree right in front of his temporary residence at the university. But he has to deal with the German Gatekeeper, who is suspicious of his activities and is actively trying to sabotage his experiments.

With all these intersecting stories and through breathtakingly beautiful images (by Gergely Pálos, About Endlessness, Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, shooting in digital for 2020 section, 16mm film for 1970 and 35mm film for 1908), Enyedi tells our relationship with nature and by extension, among ourselves. Dr. Sauvage tells Dr. Wong via zoom that she sees lonely souls when she enters a garden. Male ginko trees separated from their female counterparts for landscaping reasons.

Tony Leung is aging like a fine wine. He carries the film with hefty philosophical implications with ease and elegance. His soulful, searching eyes and his wrinkles add to the wisdom and intelligence of his character, draping over simmering underlying sexual tensions in the film. He also does a tai-chi session in the garden completely naked.

Throughout these interconnecting stories, Enyedi makes us contemplate the fact that while a ginkgo tree can live up to a thousand years, observing us silently, as generations of us live and die in its time.

Silent Friend can be seen as narratively unsatisfying, by not tying up its threads neatly enough. But it reminds us that fleeting human existence and brief, yet meaningful connections that are what matters, in the eons of time.

Silent Friend opens on May 8, in conjunction with the Tony Leung retrospective at Lincoln Center - The Grandmaster: Tony Leung.

Two Competing Narratives

Nuestra Tierra/Our Land (2025) - Martel Known for her visually and aurally, densely layered films, taking on Argentina's society of haves and have nots, esteemed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel's foray into the documentary form culminates to Our Land, a long gestating project that started in 2011, when Martel started reading the materials surrounding the murder of Javier Chocobar, a leader of Chuschagasta indigenous community in Argentina's Tucumán Province.

Combing through old archives, old video footage, testimonies and interviews and oral history, aided by new technology, Martel creates another complex and nuanced continuation of her investigation into the country's colonial history and injustices perpetrated on its indigenous population, mirroring in spirit, her epic masterpiece, Zama which came out 8 years ago.

Our Land starts with the satellite image of earth, then we zoom in to the topography of Argentina's northwest legion, revealing lush forest, then to the young girls playing soccer in the soccerfield, as the drone glides over the landscape. Uncharistically, Martel seems to be incorporating technology into her documentary, in stark contrast with her subjects - the people who worked the land for generations and their adversaries- founding fathers of Argentina; the colonizers who exploit the natives and went on the land theft, ever since the 15th century. The dissonance of her bird's eye view/big-brothers-watching-you method, and the rugged landscape and its inhabitants, is the point of Our Land.

Case in point, Martel leaves the footage of a drone getting hit by a bird in mid-air - as jarring and humorous as it looks, she is not interested in perfect gliding shots of drone footage over nature, like some David Attenborough style nature documentary. She is using the technology to make a point.

In 2009, the defendants, the landowner Dario Luis Amin and his two former police officer friends who went into the territory, armed with guns to intimidate and forcefully evict the Chuschagasta community, their best evidence of their innocence (in their minds) is their own videotaping of the confrontation and murder. The shaky video tape is played over and over again throughout the film.

As the trial finally takes place 9 years after the murder in 2018, the defendants' thin justification was that they were threatened and outnumbered. On paper, Amin, a former government official, is the land owner and according to the government records, indigenous people in that region went extinct in the 1800s.

Martel provides a wealth of interviews and ephemera - photographs, family histories and artifacts, years of court documents from the legal battles the community waged on for decades, long before Chocobar's death. It's also in the faces of the region's inhabitants- distinct from Argentina's general population with mainly their European ancestry. Antonia Hortensia Mamani, the widow of Chocobar, displays hundreds of old fading photographs, many taken by her late husband who was an analog photography enthusiast, and laments the legacy of their history being lost.

It becomes clear as the trial goes on, that what we are witnessing are two competing narratives - One the Argentine state's account and the other, people's account. At one point, the defendants explain in their own words, why they shoved approaching Chocobar, "the Argentine State taught us to do that," effectively making the government the defendant as a whole.

Our Land's story resonates because we see it happening everywhere in the world now - from Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine to a local level- here in New York, it's deed theft - coaxing longtime black and brown residents out of their homes, by greedy landowners and corporations, aided by NYPD.

The arrogance displayed in Amin's video becomes the defendants' downfall. Technology can be a double edged sword. The recordings are there for everyone to see and judge. But with deepfakes and A.I., the future of truth is unknown. Amin's 22 year sentence was appealed and he served only two years in jail, only to die of Covid. Two other dependants' 15 year sentence was appealed but then upheld later.

As with her narrative films which show satiric lives of the Argentine upper-class and the state's ugly colonial history, Martel shines a light on the daily struggles of her country's indigenous population with Our Land. The film is a meticulously researched and tactfully shot and presented, comfortably fitting in her impressive filmography.

Our Land opens in New York and San Fransisco May 1, followed by Los Angeles May 8. National rollout to follow. The Headless Woman 4K restoration opens at Metrograph in NYC on May 8.

Getting Lost in Strangers' Company

Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) - Miyake Hokkaido born writer/director Miyake Sho has been steadily making films about people living in the margins of contemporary Japanese society and their delicate human connections since the 2010s. His shorts and television work garnered him praises as one of the most promising filmmakers, yet his independent filmmaking status didn’t quite make him a breakout star in Japanese cinema landscape, even though his astute and intimate observations in films, like, And Your Bird Can Sing and All the Long Nights are just as beautiful and resonant as the works of Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Kore-eda Hirokazu.

In his forties and working with like-minded young producers, Miyake signals the emergence of a new generation of Japanese filmmakers, working away from the traditional studio system, who are not afraid of being different and more daring, both in themes and structure in their work. And his new film, Two Seasons, Two Strangers shows just that.

Adapting from short manga stories (A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo) by cult cartoonist Tsuge Yoshiharu, who passed away this year, Two Seasons, Two Strangers is a strange and wonderful diptych about a screenwriter (played by Korean actress Shim Eunkyung, who starred in several Japanese films previously - The Journalist, which she won the best actress, a first for non-Japanese actor to do so, Blue Hour and others) and her stories, as she travels through Japan. As she writes in her note book in Korean, we get to see the film about two shy young people (Kawai Yumi of Desert of Namibia and Takada Mansaku) on their summer vacation, meeting on the beach and their brief friendship. The young man does most of the talking and reveals his background, while the pensive young woman just listens. She is traveling with a group of other disaffected young people whom she doesn’t seem to connect with, but comes down to hang out with a chatty young stranger on the beach. Their youthful intimacy and connections in their loneliness are palpable in the sub-tropical setting. It culminates in them swimming in the rough ocean together on a rainy day.

Then the story pivots to the writer taking the train to a snowy countryside on a whim. She can't find lodging since she didn't book anything. Over the mountain, she finds an isolated quaint inn, run by a grunt who doesn't reveal anything about his private life, such as, why he is alone running the inn, which is traditionally done as a family business. On his part, after hearing that she is a screenwriter for movies and TV shows, he suggests she write about his inn, hoping for more business. Sleeping in the same room with the host with an irori (traditional Japanese square sunken hearth in the middle of the room for heat and cooking), this strange yet intimate arrangement brings out unexpected friendship.

Getting bored at being snowed in, The innkeeper suggests checking out a large ornamental carp pond his neighbor owns (turns out it belongs to his ex-wife’s new family) in the middle of the night. Then he proceeds to steal a carp despite the protest from the writer. But in fact, this is the most fun she has had in a long time. The cops are called, but the charges are waived after the sympathetic cops who know the family history overlooks the misdemeanor.

The contrast in character ages, the setting, and asymmetry of it all are all the charms of Two Seasons, Two Strangers. Miyake goes on sketching out the human connections among strangers in a gentle, playful, abstract way, blurring both fiction and real life/creator and its creations. Certainly one of the highlights of the early 2026 releases. Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens at New York's Metrograph 4/24. Limited nationwide expansion to follow.

Liminal Space Horror

Exit 8 (2025) - Kawamura Based on a video game of the same name, Genki Kawamura's Exit 8 could have been a primer 90s-early 2000s for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It's got everything that resonated at the time - everyday salaryman liminal space horror - taking place mainly in fluorescent lit subway station corridors where a character can't find an exit. The repetition, a metaphor for a rat race trapped in the moebius strip - purgatory or hell of modern existence, is very well realized in the creepy, antiseptic, impersonal setting that permeates dread.

There are rules to follow - you will need to reach Exit 8 by going through a series of identical corridors and when you notice something is different than previous time, you must turn back, otherwise you are fated to repeat from the beginning. That means, counting every billboard on the wall, every locked utility door, vents, etc.

It begins with an unnamed man (Kazunari Ninomiya) is seen talking to his ex who might be pregnant with his child, in a crowded subway during rush hour. He also witnesses a salaryman screaming at a young woman who has a crying baby. No one does anything including him. After he gets out of the subway car, he finds Exit 8 sign, but the empty corridors don't lead you to the exit. It is endless, identical corridors with white tiles.

He sees a 'walking man' (Yamato Kochi) with a briefcase passing him by at every turn. The walking man sometimes stops to look at his phone and is completely unresponsive. Then strange things start to happen. The ads on the wall change, the walking man's creepy smile, a lost boy, the ceiling dripping blood...

Exit 8 has a potential to have millions of ways to explore the existential dread and be the creepiest, most effective modern horror film. But instead, Kawamura settles on the Spielbergian narrative. There are some effective creepy moments in the film. But I miss the late 90s, early 2000 J-horror haydays.