Autumn Wright

Look Back is a requiem for art lost to violence, to circumstance, to conformity. It is also an argument to create.

The noir thriller takes us on a contemplative tour of a thoughtfully considered future, where traveling between Lunar and Martian colonies is as easy as flight today.

Execution isn’t the problem here—the acting, direction, editing, set design and costuming are all done well enough. It’s that these elements add up to something that doesn’t feel subversive at all, just vaguely aware of itself.

The film is as complicated as the man it is about, and this is what makes The Boy and the Heron a masterwork.

Blue Giant is a somewhat tropey story that captures its characters’ big feelings, and its incorporation of live combo recordings contributes something unique to the steadily growing canon of musical anime. While not quite the feature I would’ve expected from Tachikawa after Mob Psycho 100, it’s a strong next step in the director’s career.

Nimona is a legend for the freaks and the queers, a story told in figures, archetypes and tropes. Nimona understands that villains are often made villainous for their bodies and identities. Nimona embraces queer coding and turns it into a subversive power fantasy.

Without the affordances of prose, which let the original text explore the thoughts, memories and feelings of its protagonist, Lonely Castle in the Mirror ends up feeling like an abridged version of the book, already translated into English in 2021 by Philip Gabriel.

At its best, Suzume is a film that imagines modern Japan as a post-apocalyptic setting, evoking the animated beauty and “mono no aware” of pastoral iyashikei like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

A quintessential “last teen summer” story, the premise of Goodbye, Don Glees!, writer/director Atsuko Ishizuka’s first original feature, is a bit trite at first blush. But like the nectar of succulent flowers in full bloom, there is much to savor.