'Yasuke': Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos

A wildly stylized project that bodes well for future trans-Pacific productions -- but which might have been just as good without being wildly stylized

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Cover image courtesy Verso; photo © Nobuyosho Araki

Izumi Suzuki's 'Terminal Boredom': She Saw The Future And It Didn't Work

The first volume in English of this avant-garde feminist figure's work shows her approach to SF and fantasy as personal cultural commentary

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'Serial Experiments Lain': The Wired And The Weird

Now that we're all wired, whether we like it or not, this cyberpunk urban legend and vaporwave precursor is even creepier and more prescient

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'Eros + Massacre': Living History

Kijū Yoshida's staggering epic of Japanese anarchists Sakae Ōsugi and Noe Ito defies categorization, synopsis, or easy answers

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Any number of conventional movies could have been made about the lives of Japanese anarchist Sakae Ōsugi and his lover Noe Ito: a thriller-like investigation into his death; a romance about his various relationships, and so on. Kijū Yoshida's Eros + Massacre does none of these things. It’s not fiction or historical reconstruction, but an open-ended meditation, a way to show us the ideas that informed his life, not just talk about them. It is hypnotic, exasperating, pretentious, fascinating, tough to get into, difficult to sit through, hard to set aside, impossible to forget. I don't know if I like it, but I do think I love it.

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'Blade Of The Immortal': Life Sentence, Death Sentence

An all-new anime adaptation of Hiroaki Samura's classic long-running manga gets it right at last

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This one's personal. Hiroaki Samura's Blade Of The Immortal was one of the first manga given major-league distribution in English, and one of the first I picked up on -- gorgeous, audacious, ambitious, violent, worth devoting a whole shelf to. It hurt to see it adapted twice before, as a short anime series, and as a live-action film, only to have each of those fall short in some way. Now comes a new animated adaptation that addresses the original story end to end, and it's as good a version of this material as one could hope for. It also preserves two things about its source I most hoped would stay: some hint of its remarkable design work, and the way it manages the difficult balancing act of dealing with ugly things without itself becoming too ugly to watch.

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'Children Of The Sea': The Life Aquatic

Some of the finest animation around, lashed to the mast of a story that goes nowhere

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Sometimes a movie can just be about an experience without being about a story. Angel's Egg is as inscrutable as it gets, but the sheer power of its imagery tells its own tale. Children Of The Sea wants to be like that -- less a story than a state of mind, a vision of things -- and it marshals imagery so gorgeous and meticulous it almost works on that score alone. Almost. The problem is it still relies on a story of some kind to make its points, and that story's delivery is too rudderless and unfocused to function as needed. An hour into the film I was still asking myself, where is all this going? You've heard of something being all tell and no show; this one is all show and no tell.

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