I am slightly exaggerating but I can easily identify Kore-eda’s movies by how the light touches people’s faces. It’s lonely but warm, and realistic yet soft. And this mood of light resembles how the camera looks at the characters in his movies. <Broker> had a thicker plot than his previous movies but the message and […]

Movies about friendship always fascinate me. Growing up, even though I was a shy child, the intense loneliness inside me made me always seek out friends and intense friendship. So I quickly understood the nature of the friendship between Léo and Rémi. Because the movie is essentially split in two parts where the latter part […]

I probably have listened to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” easily a thousand times, probably even more, in various versions. Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of the composers whose music provided great comfort and consolation in my adolescent years. And I am probably not the only one who feels this way about his music. Several years ago […]

What does it mean for a person to be truly free? Corsage (not the flower arrangement but the German word for “corset”) explores the idea by telling a story of a historic figure, Empress Elisabeth of Austria. While watching the movie, I realized that it didn’t matter whether the movie was faithful to historical facts […]

Ryusuke Hamaguchi once said he doesn’t believe there is no such thing as pure fiction or pure documentary. In a way, <Happy Hour> represents this philosophy of his. Thanks to the quiet camera work and the sheer length of the movie (5 hours), the characters are fully realized and so realistic that even after the […]

The relationship between camera and object is complicated. In the movie <Nope>, this relationship seems to be about consumption of ideas and images. The movie starts with a dark square-shaped tunnel that shows a Black jockey on a galloping horse. Later in the movie, this tunnel turned out some sort of an organ of a […]

Depicting historic events in an art form is not an easy challenge. For movies, directors have to walk the fine line between over-dramatizing/-fictionalizing and being didactic or documentary-like. They also have very little room in terms of the plot because the events already occurred. Regardless of these challenges, <Quo Vadis, Aida?> rises to the top. […]

In my teenage years, I practically grew up with Joe Hisaishi’s music including the soundtrack of <My Neighbor Totoro>. I’ve always loved the soundtrack but I was never really interested in watching the movie. I just thought the synopsis sounded too simple and plain; a story of two young girls and their interaction with a […]