Belatedly making its U.S. debut, a 2008 film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”) offers new insights into his abiding themes and sensibilities.
Category: Movies
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‘Human Flowers of Flesh’ Review: The Life Aquatic
This contribution to slow cinema observes the quiet routines of a captain and her crew as they sail a small boat across the Mediterranean.
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‘Everything Went Fine’ Review: To Be or Not to Be?
This French drama about a woman whose father wants a medically assisted death is both bracingly unsentimental and a touch inert.
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‘Rare Objects’ Review: A Woman Under the Influence
Actors are given a long and generous leash in this sometimes compelling, sometimes tepid drama about mental illness from Katie Holmes.
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‘One True Loves’ Review: A Romance Lost at Sea
A film adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel has potential for drama, but it stumbles on stock melodrama.
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‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ Review: This Giant Frog Needs Your Help
An enigmatic adaptation of a short story collection by Haruki Murakami, this animated film is set shortly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
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‘Mafia Mamma’ Review: An Offer You Can Refuse
Toni Collette has no chance of saving this jumble of Mob clichés and female empowerment.
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‘Beau Is Afraid’ Review: A Visit With Mommy Dearest
In Ari Aster’s latest freakout, Joaquin Phoenix plays a sad sack who endures a crucible of suffering to see his monstrous mother. Paging Dr. Freud!
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‘Sick of Myself’ Review: When Main Character Syndrome Runs Amok
From Norway, this smug satire tracks the rise and fall of an attention-seeking young woman who intentionally disfigures herself by taking a sketchy Russian drug.
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‘Tommy Guns’ Review: A Shape-Shifting Spectacle of Military Life
Portuguese boys train for service in occupied Angola in Carlos Conceição’s drama, which incorporates elements of a ghost story.
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‘The Plains’ Review: Road to Somewhere
This experimental film pulls together excerpts from 11 evening commutes, as a man drives from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, toward the city’s center.