Scraps on Cinema

Released theatrically in the U.K. in the summer of 2021, After Love , the dramatic feature debut of writer-director Aleem Khan, only started its limited U.S. run last week. This will mark the first stateside release for British distributor Vertigo Releasing, and they must be feeling pretty confident about the word-of-mouth chances of Khan's little movie, given that they've decided to give it the added push outside the usual metropolitan arthouses and straight to select multiplexes. It's an odd gamble to take, given that it's already been a little under three years since After Love  did the international festival rounds in 2020, and a little over two years since it swept the British Independent Film Awards for Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, and Best British Independent Film. (Its star, Joanna Scanlan, also nabbed a Best Actress at the 75th BAFTA awards.) And while my own tendency is to support almost any independent and foreign film ...

Here's one of the more unexpected arrivals at this year's early box office: Missing , a spin-off of the 2018 mystery-thriller Searching , which starred John Cho as a single father who desperately investigates the disappearance of his teenage daughter. Though not a direct sequel, Missing  does occur within the same "universe" as the original film, kicking things off with a cold open that misdirects the audience into believing they are seeing a recreation of events from the original film, only to reveal that the protagonist is actually watching an episode of a Netflix true-crime drama based upon those events. Also, like its predecessor, Missing  is an example of a still emergent genre of "screenlife" movies, a term coined by none other than the film's producer Timur Bekmambetov. So-called "screenlife" movies can be understood as a format of immersive cinema that sprouted off from the explosion in popularity of "found footage" horror fil...

Originally created by special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya in 1966, the superhero Ultraman has gone on to have one of the most iconic and prolific legacies in Japanese popular culture, variously reworked, reincarnated, and reimagined through 56 years of T.V. series, motion pictures, video games, and comic books. Shin Ultraman , a new movie that received a two-night only limited release this past week, following its original national release last May, is itself only one of ten official works of Ultra -media to coincide with the last two years. But, while I'm in no position to comment on the more insularly familiar reputations of the various directors, writers, stars, and special effects technicians working on all these other projects, Shin Ultraman  is certainly being floated to both native and international fans as being of a higher pedigree by co-presenters Khara, Toho, and Tsuburaya Productions. The writer and producer of Shin Ultraman  is Hideaki Anno, a creator of Japanes...

And so a new year in cinematic culture commences, and as is often the unfortunate case so soon after the holiday tentpole and awards-season rushes, the pickings have been pretty slim for the past couple weeks. Now is really the time for the slow-rolling arthouse critic's picks of last November and December to finish soaking up the residual traces of engaged or curious theatergoers, whereas some foreign flicks are still just testing the waters of their major metropolitan premieres. Such is the case with Broker , a South Korean production written, directed, and edited by Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda, which already made a decent box office splash when it was released nationally last summer, and is now getting a stateside rollout courtesy of big-indie distributor Neon. A continuation of Kore-eda's focus on poverty, at turns cynical and sympathetic portraits of outcasts and criminals, and the unorthodox familial ties that form between them, Broker  stars Song Kang-ho and Gang D...