First Kenji Mizoguchi film, a director I've heard nothing but good things about. Here, he depicts the suffering of women - at the constant mercy of men, especially those who say they'll provide for them - with a deft, empathetic hand. It never once feels exploitative or unduly cruel. Miyagi, spinning the pottery wheel while Genjuro singlemindedly chases his own ambition, mutters that all she wants is to work with him & live as a family. He doesn't hear her. By…
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Wolf's Rain 2003
Starts beautifully, but gets a little lost in the middle and doesn’t quite fully come together in the end. The sum is less than its parts, but those parts are incredibly good. This particular studio Bones team were so good in the late 90s and early 2000s, and so Wolf’s Rain feels like a group of artists operating at the height of their creative powers. Toshihiro Kawamoto’s character designs are startling, unnervingly beautiful, and Atsushi Morikawa’s backgrounds contain so much…
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Blood Sister 2003
The movie is shot and framed less like a film and more like a stage play, relying almost entirely on the actors performance to build its emotional world. It's in good hands - the trio of actresses here fully bring this story to life. Genevieve Nnaji is vivid and awful in a flat, animal way, but Patience Ozokwor's mother - a less cartoonish, more sympathetic character than other mothers she's played - was seriously triggering. That down-to-earth, true-to-life quality of…
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Born to Kill 1947
Despite being only 90 minutes long, it unfolds at an easy, steady pace & you get a strong sense of our characters, who are a really fascinating ensemble. This movie lives and breathes through Claire Trevor's performance as Helen Brent, a woman disturbed by her own depravity. Her attraction to Sam is both cathartic, as he's the only one who both sees and understands her darkness, and threatening, as his presence destabilises the careful world she's built within her milieu of…
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