Written by Masato Kato, Bushido holds you with its performances and a story that circles around questions of honor, loyalty, masculinity and the ties that bind and sometimes throttle.
It’s an unexpected illustration of how psychiatric challenges can turn one’s life into a “shrinking world,” as Jennings puts it, and how to keep going.
It’s a properly scary movie, the kind that merits watching in a theater with a good sound system (or headphones in a dark room, at home). And “Undertone” provides terrific evidence of what a filmmaker can do even under constraint. The most powerful tool in an artist’s toolbox just might be the audience’s imagination.
Reminders of Him deserves credit for serving it all up unabashedly and without a single wink. This is largely thanks to the stupendous Monroe, and also Withers.
It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films.
Although chiefly a straightforward — and at points repetitive — synopsis of the events, Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare distinguishes itself in its devotion to elevating these men as heroes.
Such blunt messaging reduces the onscreen carnage, which relentlessly occurs via this mute machine’s searing lasers, barrage of bombs and kaiju breath, to little more than the human toll required for this particular military man to feel again. Worse yet, the film concludes with hawkish intensity, fashioning itself into a tasteless recruitment video.
The humor is over-the-top and often exaggeratedly juvenile, but like many nominally “dumb” comedies, it’s the product of a keen and deliberate intelligence.
He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.
