Whereas Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters is a fairly stationary film, charting one family’s experiences in and around their cramped Tokyo home, Broker is a story of people on the move.
JoinedDecember 1, 2019
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Calvin McMillin is a writer, teacher, and scholar. He is the author of The Sushi Bar at the Edge of Forever and the editor of Frank Chin’s The Confessions of a Number One Son. His film reviews have appeared in Asian Movie Pulse, Birth.Movies.Death, Far East Films, and LoveHKFilm.com. Currently, he teaches courses in American literature and Asian American literature in Hawaii.
We know the songs and the big story beats, but Baz Luhrmann shows us that with Elvis, there's still more to discover; not facts, really, but feelings.
Park Chan-wook’s new film may come to us in the guise of a detective story, a police procedural, even a quasi-erotic thriller. But at its heart, Decision to Leave is really a romantic comedy.
The Crimson Kimono is not a typical mystery; instead, it uses the conventional trappings of the hardboiled detective story to explore a taboo topic for its time.
Drive My Car suggests that art itself is a vehicle for both communication and self-exploration. It can communicate what cannot be said out loud, if we are willing to listen, and can also be the vessel through which we better understand who we are.
Burning hinges on the disappearance of a young woman, which suggests that the film should be classified as a mystery, the genre that most actively encourages viewers to interpret the evidence placed in front of them. But the ambiguity of human relationships—of what we see, of what we don’t see, and of what we choose to ignore—is the film’s biggest mystery.
As I watched Twin Peaks: The Return each week, I couldn’t help but recall the words of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
The Postmodern Mysteries of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing
