inreviewonline.com/2018/09/13/tiff-2018-3/

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s intimate epic of friendship between women Happy Hour was my favorite film of 2016, so I had been eagerly awaiting his latest feature Asako I & II, which premiered in competition at Cannes last May. An adaptation of an acclaimed novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, Asako initially seems significantly scaled back from the formal ambition and narrative breadth of Happy Hour, a retreat to a recognizable mode of wistful romantic drama. But even across a more conventional two hours…

A case study in America's alienation from its own relatively recent past, and how history as recalled is inevitably and irrevocably shaped by power dynamics, self-mythology, forces of capitalism, racism and imperialism. At the center of this is a paradox that Greene revels in, that the more the people of Bisbee embrace the surreal artifice of reenactment, the more their comfortable distance from that history collapses. He doesn't need to put too fine a point on the contemporary resonances of…