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...

At some point in the development of one of his most revered classics, director Akira Kurosawa chose to change the title from "The Life of Kanji Watanabe" - an inverted homage to one of the project's inspirations, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich  - to the simpler, bolder "Ikiru," meaning "To Live." One of his screenwriters, Shinobu Hashimoto, considered it pretentious, though Japanese audiences apparently disagreed enough to make the film a minor financial hit, in advance of Ikiru  going on to persistent international acclaim as a highlight of Kurosawa's lengthening, prestigious resume. I suppose Hashimoto may have had a point. "To Live" is rather much, even if it fits the Capra-esque, sentimental naturalism of the film. At any rate, "Ikiru" packs a further phonetic punch for film lovers who don't speak Japanese. (English-speakers especially are suckers for three-syllable Asian words and names: harakiri, samurai, A...

At the time that Richard C. Davis was building up his light-weight body armor manufacturing company Second Chance out of the town of Central Lake, Michigan in the early '70s, the United States was still just at the very beginning of a spectacular rise in violent crime that would peak in the '90s. And despite a precipitous decline in crime overall since that peak, the resonant insecurity of that period continues to inform and inspire much of our nation's politics and cultural rhetoric, to say nothing of our production of new popular archetypes. Among the most enduring of these has been the myth of the vigilante anti-hero, satirically predicted by Peter Boyle's titular role in the John G. Avildsen-directed, Norman Wexler-scripted Joe released in the summer of 1970, but then incrementally denuded of its philosophical ambivalence by the Dirty Harry  films starring Clint Eastwood, the Death Wish  franchise starring Charles Bronson, and their many exploitation imitators. Dav...

This past February marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Neil Young's Harvest  album. Though quite commercially successful, and supported by the two hit singles "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold," critical reception for the record way back in 1972 was decidedly mixed. And with a half-century's difference, though Harvest  has gradually become accepted as one of the seminal works of folk rock, it's doubtless that there will still be those who quibble over where it ranks in terms of the prolific singer-songwriter's early catalogue. Nonetheless, one probably can't discount how significant the album must have become for the young Neil in that same amount of time. Having gradually built his rock reputation since the mid-'60s through his association with the short-lived psych-pop act Buffalo Springfield and the hippie supergroup he formed with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, he was only in his mid-20's when recording sessions f...