Letterboxd — Your life in film

For the first hour, it felt like someone held a gun to the editors head and told them to filet most of the breathing room + dramatic weight off every scene and told them to get a fucking move on. There was a lot to like buried in there somewhere—giving a rapist the rapist equivalent of the uniform you can’t take off was a real highlight—but I found it hard to get on its wavelength. I know they had a…

“I want to create a movie that exorcises Tokyo of its possession by the spectre of capitalism.”
—Dir. Toshiaki Toyoda

The exorcism and expression of rage that is the molten heart of this movie fucking rules. It’s a shame it just did not work for me in any way beyond that. The fury against capitalism, at the 2020 Olympics, and the Japanese government’s response to the epidemic, to greed and apathy et al, is palpable, though not remotely coherent in…

Graham Swon has made a movie designed to deny you. There will be no killers, ghosts, or dead girls. No lurid resolutions or catharsis, wreathed in children’s blood, that we can pluck from the tree of all that was lost one summer night in 1996. The World Is Full Of Secrets, as much as it is a film about oral storytelling, memory, and the endless possibilities of a sleepover on a warm summer evening, is foremost an antithesis of the True Crime…