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.
7.5
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.
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
6
There exists good intentions behind Harada's want to focus on the plight of Edo women and the disproportionate favoritism of the institution of marriage at the time, but lacking the follow-through and giving into broad populist appeals to entertainment makes these intents inherently shallow.
7
Kore-eda remains staunchly pragmatic in laying out this case as to make sure the “correct” lesson is taken away, and that makes the whole exercise falter significantly.
7.5
When it is knee-deep in prowling the ins and outs of the porn industry, the film shines as provocatively as Boogie Nights, but peering past this fun surface confronts you with little to no depth for the avatar doing the prowling.
7
Like most No Wave films, it is not necessarily what is on screen that will make you invested but the all-too-clear production details lingering just beneath the poor dramatizations that elevate the film to something more than its means.
5.5
Sadly Pressing On isn't so much interested in the technology's history or mechanics as much as the people who have propped up the letterpress community as this all-important subculture, nor does it translate as well as it thinks it does.
