5.5
A Whale of a Tale is the intermediate approach writ large, and though it has its moments in dispelling The Cove's hypocrisy and misinformation and shattering the Taiji fishermen's inaccurate cultural justification for their brutal practice, it is still the meager sucker fish clinging to another film for dear life while being inconsequential in its own terms.
6
There is just something missing here that would make Christopher Robin worth the Disney-prescribed injection of medicinal nostalgia for trying times.
4
My eyes glazed over as Elizabeth Harvest stumbled to retroactively unspoil itself while attempting to gaslight you into believing its twist was actually brilliant and original with the right context.
7.5
Caught in the reflection of a looming global conflict, the carefree souls that fill out Nobuhiko Obayashi’s unsurprisingly absurd and surreal latest waste away their last few months of innocence while the world and its war threaten to encroach on their idyllic
4
Filmed in sterile monochrome, with an almost clinical restraint, The Forest of the Lost Souls strives to mask its chosen forest with an ethereal cloak that would hope to convince the viewer something abstruse was lurking behind its utterly mundane locale.
5.5
We Make Antiques! is middling inconsequential comedy and that is all it really has to be.
7
Violence Voyager remains a disturbing bait and switch of gory delights for all who can stomach it.
7.5
Pin Cushion is comparable to dipping your toes into the waters of Todd Solondz in its display of preternatural lapses in human decency and empathy.
8.5
It is not everyday you walk away from a film and think the 30-minute, one-take aspect is the least interesting about it, but it is rings true for Ueda's layered horror comedy experience.
6.5
What is so interesting about Dukun's tackling of witchcraft as a horror subject is that the tension does not come from whether or not it is real, but from what the sadistic soul who practices it will do with her unregistered power.
7
Kanato Wolf's Smokin' on the Moon is a bait-and-switch exercise that begins with an anarchist sense of untethered visual chaos and grinds down to a cloying but effective buddy picture.
5
Scythian Lamb is a pointed, but utterly airless, exploration of a topic that Yoshida struggles to mold.
5.5
Attempting to highlight the idea that rumors have real-world consequences for the unlucky ones they concern, The Hungry Lion is a meditation on the effects of schoolyard buzz on one of its victims in a monopolizing, objective manner, which dryly makes its opinions heard through blank, repetitive sermonizing about the ills of the young people.
4
Under the Tree just kinda likes to wallow in its unearned misery, and that just bores me. I’d much rather watch Neighbors.
9
The assembled teenage tragedies that populate River's Edge aren't suffering in their nihilistic angst to provide a lesson, however, so much as they are there to exist and envelop you into their dead-end state of mind, living as they do in presumably hazardous proximity to an industrial district that is polluting the rivers that run behind the school from which they frequently skip.
6
The Blood of Wolves is a studied, committed throwback to the blood-soaked, abrasive Yakuza films in the vain of Kinji Fukasaku
