Generations Unite, At Least Momentarily, in Hong Sang-soo’s Reflective By the Stream

BY THE STREAM / Suyoocheon 

(Hong Sang-soo, 2024, South Korea, 111 minutes) 

It wouldn't be a Hong Sang-soo film if the characters didn't include an artist of some kind, if his partner (Kim Min-hee, winner of the Best Performance Award at Locarno) wasn't involved, and if someone didn't end up drinking too much. 

As his 32nd film begins, after last year's Traveler's Needs with Isabelle Huppert, Jeonim (Kim), a textile artist and instructor at a women's university in Seoul, meets up with her long-lost uncle, Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo, in his 10th Hong film), a former television actor and director who has traveled from coastal Gangneung, where he runs a bookshop, to write and stage a short play with her students. 

Junwoo, the previous director (Ha Seong-guk, a frequent Hong player who last appeared in Traveler's Needs), got the boot after dalliances with three of the performers, though he's a student himself, possibly a graduate student. He will return later in an attempt to finish a few of the things he started. 

Sieon, as it turns out, has a history with the school, which he will reveal toward the end. When Jeonim introduces him to her mentor, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee, Kwon's wife and another Hong veteran), an attractive and vivacious professor who adores his work, she offers to take them both out for dinner and drinks, where she admires the older man's "upper body." Jeonim looks simultaneously amused and embarrassed, but it's a mutual appreciation society, since Jeong feels that Jeonim is "a real treasure," not least because the students love her. The three, all beautifully played by actors attuned to the director's unique rhythms and techniques, will continue to enjoy more dinners and more drinks, a staple of Hong's cinema. 

Men usually do most of the drinking in Hong's films, but not always. 

Jeonim drinks so much during one outing that she sets up a blanket and a lamp in the dark outside her studio in order to sober up. She's soon joined by students who want to get in on the campfire-like fun. It's one of a few nearly pitchblack sequences in which she and/or her students commune in the dark (though the four young actors are quite good, their characters aren't distinguished by name.)

Jeonim is, in other words, a unique individual. As glamorous as Kim has appeared in pre-Hong films, like Park Chan-wook's erotic thriller The Handmaiden (below left), Jeonim favors shapeless outfits with roomy pockets. The former engineering student carries a sketchbook and watercolor kit everywhere she goes, so she can draw or paint as the mood strikes. Both her paintings and loom-woven pieces use water as a motif. 

Though she’s grateful to Sieon for helping with the play, she's concerned that he might be interested in Jeong. Since she has nothing but respect for the professor, her wariness comes across as jealousy or protectiveness, even if it isn't either; it could just be curiosity. Though Hong's films are dialogue-driven, that doesn't mean he spells things out. He really doesn't. 

And that's certainly true of By the Stream. I enjoyed spending time with these creative people, who embody three different generations, with 40-year-old Jeonim as the midway between the students and the professor, but I'm not sure what it all means, other than that people can change--if they want to. 

Sieon has a romantic history of which he isn't proud, in addition to some sort of scandal that led to his abandonment of acting, whereas Junwoo doesn't feel he did anything wrong, but maybe someday, he'll learn to see things more clearly and take responsibility for his transgressions. 

Jeonim doesn't really change by the end, in part because she already made a significant change when she switched from engineering to art after a rather disturbing and unexplainable phenomenon a few years before. Hong gives no indication she needs to make any changes, other than to suggest, with the professor's blessing, that she might take Jeong's place someday.

The filmmaker never defines her sexuality either, which is unusual for his work. The unisex outfits and lack of apparent interest in romance could mean anything, or nothing. She could be gay, straight, or disinterested one way or the other. It never comes up. She's an artist. She loves her work, she loves her students, she loves her mentor, she loves fried eel and ramen, and she loves her mother and her uncle–even if they can't stand each other. 

I don't think By the Stream was intended as a film about love, but rather regrets and new beginnings. For me, though, that's what resonated most. 

By the Stream plays Northwest Film Forum Aug 23 and 29-31. I've never met a Hong Sang-soo film I didn't like, but my favorite is the B&W Novelist's Film, about a writer who makes a breakthrough. With his 33rd film in the can, he's now working on the 34th. I've written about Oki's Movie, Nobody's Daughter Haewon, Our Sunhi, On the Beach at Night Alone, The Novelist's Film, Walk Up, and In Our Day--a mere 25% of his unstoppable output. 

Images from Variety (Kim Min-hee and Kim with Cho Yun-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo) and the IMDb (The Handmaiden poster with Kim and Kim Tae-ri).

Honey Don't!: In Which Margaret Qualley Plays a Rotary Dial Woman in a Touch-Screen World

HONEY DON'T! 

(Ethan Coen, 2025, USA, 

89 minutes) 

Writer/director Ethan Coen and co-writer/co-editor Tricia Cooke set themselves up for a very specific critique when they decided to title their second "lesbian B-movie" with Margaret Qualley Honey Don't! 

I get that it's a reference to a few different things: the 1956 Carl Perkins B-side (famously covered by the Beatles in 1964), Qualley's gumshoe character's name–Honey O'Donoghue–and Honey's rather heedless approach to romance, but the film's detractors are likely to describe the film as a "don't," as in "Don't go to this movie." I mean, it's right there in the title. 

I understand the impulse, but I'm not wild about cheap shots, and Qualley makes Coen and Cooke's black comic take on the sunshine noir or hardboiled detective story worthwhile–I just wish the film rose to her level.

It begins, as these things must, with a dead body. Disheveled Detective Marty Metakawich (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day) assumes it was a suicide, but the prologue suggests that it may have been murder, or a  convenient accident for a Bakersfield evangelist (Chris Evans, most recently of The Materialists) with a sideline in various vices. 

Honey, who had recently met with the victim, is certain something hinky is going on, so she decides to look into it. Though she's openly gay, she doesn't use words like that. She simply tells the detective, "I like girls," but he's too dense or too besotted to take her meaning. Not even after she says it several more times.

Honey dresses like a George Cukor heroine in puff-sleeve dresses, crisp white shirts and beige trousers, red lipstick, and "clickety-clack high heels." She refuses to use a cellphone and stores her contact information in a Rolodex. She's a woman out of time, except she's unapologetically queer and as hot-to-trot as Jamie, Qualley's Drive-Away Dolls character. 

While looking into the mystery, for which no one appears to be paying her, Honey meets with potential clients, like an uptight germaphobe (Billy Eichner), who believes his partner is cheating on him. She also has a fling with the police department's evidence custodian (Aubrey Plaza). 

I wasn't bored by any of these developments, but I wasn't fully engaged either. The actors are game, but the writing hems them in. Evans' Reverend Drew, for instance, is a thoroughly repellant individual–greedy, self-obsessed, and narcissistic–but once that's established, the character has nothing left to offer other than an unseen comeuppance that isn't nearly as satisfying as it should be. For a more effective heel turn from Evans, look no further than Knives Out.  

Coen and Cooke also present bondage gear as something inherently shocking, except it feels more like kink-shaming, which probably wasn't their intention, though Honey's enthusiasm for sex toys, including the dildos and anal beads she washes with loving care, doesn't merit the same treatment. 

As with Drive-Away Dolls, their first narrative, Honey Don't! has a screwball vibe, but lacks the requisite energy. It isn't long, slow, or listless, but it's consistently behind the beat. Something is off. Coen and Cooke are working with some of the same ingredients as Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, but that lesbian noir had a sense of urgency this one lacks, though it shares a predilection for gory violence that crosses into horror-movie territory. 

Though the film doesn't do Evans or Plaza many favors, Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) shines as Honey's niece, a fast food worker and goth girl with lousy taste in boyfriends. 

Coen and Cooke don't give Ryder anything funny to say or do--to the extent that she seems to have wandered in from a different, possibly better, film--but she's genuinely sympathetic. When she disappears after an encounter with a strange old man (Kale Browne), the film comes to life in a way it hadn't previously before returning to the less interesting central mystery. 

The filmmaking duo intends to make a third film with Margaret Qualley called, um, Go Beavers, but it remains to be seen if they're able to pull it off. Drive-Away Dolls didn't exactly light up the box office, and Honey Don't! may not fare much better--not even after Qualley's dazzling turn in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance--but she certainly acquits herself nicely.

For me, the film isn't a "do" or a "don't" so much as a maybe.

   

Honey Don't! opens on Fri, Aug 22, at SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, the Meridian, and other area theaters. Images from Screen Rant (Margaret Qualley), Wikipedia (1956 Sun 78, "Honey Don't", Carl Perkins), the IMDb (Qualley and Aubrey Plaza), and Thought Catalog (Qualley and Plaza). 

As Long as We Live, It's You and Me Baby: On Spike Lee’s Music Biz Thriller Highest 2 Lowest

HIGHEST TO LOWEST 

(Spike Lee, 2025, USA, 133 minutes) 

Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee's idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low, is the kind of overstuffed film a late-in-life director makes when they're still bursting with energy and ideas even as dozens, if not hundreds, of younger guns are nipping at their heels. 

Might as well remake a favorite film, reunite with a favorite actor, shoot on location in a favorite city, and throw all your favorite stuff--Toni Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat--at the screen. After all, you've earned it. 

That isn't to say it's nostalgic. Despite the 62-year-old source material and the references to an elder's past glories–from gold records to magazine covers–it's very much about today, and Lee has decidedly mixed feelings about that. Though he has shifted the business from ladies footwear to music, the allusions to the movie business aren't hard to miss, since both have been transformed by social media, streaming, and digital technology. 

Left: Toshirô Mifune and Kyôko Kagawa in High and Low

To be sure, 68-year-old Lee has embraced all of these things, but that doesn't mean he isn't skeptical, and who can blame him when it comes to AI, which merits a few mentions–it's helpful when the cops are trying to identify the voice of a kidnapper, but it's no replacement for the flesh-and-blood artists music mogul David King (70-year-old Denzel Washington in his fifth go-round with the director since 1990's Mo' Better Blues) signed in his younger years.

If King was a different kind of cat, he would have retired to live out his days with his glamorous wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, who recalls Lee's wife, Tonya Lewis Lee), in their dee-luxe apartment in the sky, but he's been hustling for so long, he doesn't know how to quit. If there's one characteristic that unites the different versions of the character, starting with the blond, broad-shouldered shoe magnate in Ed McBain's 1959 novel, King's Ransom, it's that they came from nothing, worked hard, and made it to the top. 

Though Kurosawa set the story in Yokohama, Lee brought it back to McBain's New York, except he opts for the city over the suburbs--King's Brooklyn penthouse is spectacular--and begins with the news that he needs to come up with a staggering amount of cash fast lest he get sidelined at the record label he made legendary. He may be rich, but it's more than he can afford, so he decides to roll the dice with everything he has. Pam, with her designer wardrobe and diamond-encrusted jewelry, is less than thrilled. 

Then, King gets a call that his teenaged son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped. To bring him home, he needs to pay 17.5 million in Swiss Francs. He'll do anything for his only son, but when he discovers that the kidnapper mistakenly abducted his chauffeur's son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), he balks, even though he's Trey's best friend, and even though Paul (Elijah's father, Jeffrey Wright, who first caught my attention in 1996's Basquiat), a Muslim ex-con, is as much a surrogate relative as a trusted employee. 

It causes a rift in the family with mother and son united against the father until he finally relents. Up until that point, I had my doubts about this film, which is too static in its early stages. King and Paul, who trade rhymes whenever they go for a ride, are terrific together, but too often Pam comes across as shallow and humorless. Lee and Hadera have worked together before, starting with his 2013 Oldboy remake, and I quite enjoyed her chemistry with Forest Whitaker on Godfather of Harlem, but a looser, warmer presence would have been ideal (Hadera is also 30 years younger than Denzel, though Alan Fox's screenplay suggests they're the same age). 

Once King and the anonymous kidnapper–Surprise! It's A$AP Rocky–come to an agreement about the ransom drop, which will take place at some to-be-determined stop during a subway ride, Lee lets his freak flag fly, and Highest 2 Lowest finally takes flight, not least because it takes place during an exuberant Puerto Rican Day Parade and just after a Yankees/Red Sox game. 

Left: Spike and Nick Turturro's brother, John, at a Knicks/Bulls game in 2013.

Prior to the game, the film gets in a few jabs at Boston, one involving former Celtic forward Rick Fox, who plays a high school basketball coach, but once King gets on the train, the Yankees fans who follow in his wake go absolutely and hilariously apeshit. Their ringleader: longtime Lee associate Nicholas Turturro (another Lee associate, Rosie Perez, appears as herself during the Puerto Rican Day sequence). 

In a move that recalls Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, which incorporates footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival, editors Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson cut repeatedly from the ransom drop, which involves black-clad motorcyclists zipping across the city, and a performance by the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra. It's a significant improvement over Howard Drossin's orchestral score, which can be distractingly heavyhanded, though Drossin shifts to a lighter, brighter register for the subway sequences. 

Then, once King and Paul follow a lead to the Bronx, where the mogul grew up, Lee throws James Brown's thematically appropriate "Payback" into the mix. By that time, I was willing to forgive Drossin's score, because I believe–or I would like to believe–that it represents the rich man's rut in which King has found himself; hustling to stay on top, taking his family for granted, and losing touch with the human-made music that once invigorated him as the producer and A&R guy with "the best ears in the business."

And that's the film in a nutshell: old dude gets his groove back. Not everyone needs a board coup or a kidnapping to get their head straight, but King let his get twisted, and what could have been a by-the-books genre exercise feels deeply personal, something I couldn't say about High and Low, a superior effort in many respects--though I can't imagine Toshirô Mifune spitting bars like Denzel Washington--but not one that tells me as much about its maker. 

If Highest 2 Lowest is Lee's most successful remake to date–a low bar in light of his misguided Ganja & Hess update Da Sweet Blood of Jesus–it's neither his best nor his worst film, but rather a Spike Lee joint through and through, and I'll be damned if the not-so-young dude doesn't still have it. 

Highest 2 Lowest opens at SIFF Uptown and Regal Meridian on Fri, Aug 15. It comes to Apple TV+ on Fri, Sept 5. Images from the IMDb (Denzel Washington times two and Toshirô Mifune with Kyôko Kagawa as Kingo and Reiko Gondo), Screen Rant (Washington with Ilfenesh Hadera), and VIBE (Spike Lee with John Turturro / Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images).

Anchorage Daily News Flashback: Herzog: A Little Risk Keeps Life Interesting for Director

In 1986, my mom, Doreen Ransom, interviewed Werner Herzog for The Anchorage Daily News. 

I don't recall that she had done any other film writing, before or since, though she certainly enjoyed going to the movies regularly, often with her only child. The following year, she won an Alaska Press Women award for the piece. 

In 2021, after being diagnosed with dementia in 2019, she moved to an assisted living facility in Anchorage. Her symptoms include aphasia, which has greatly reduced her ability to communicate with any cohesion.  

Mom's journalism career was relatively brief--she spent more time working for the State of Alaska Department of Corrections as an institutional counselor and pre-sentence reporter--but this is one of the best things she ever wrote, and she worked hard on it. Getting things right was very important to her; I would like to think I inherited the same trait. The interview isn't archived at the Daily News site, so I have reproduced it here.

Right: candids of Mom, probably from sometime in the 1970s.  

In 2005, I also got to see Herzog in person, presenting four of his documentaries--or documentary hybrids in the case of that year's The Wild Blue Yonder--at the Seattle Art Museum, in his inimitable style. It was a real treat, though I regret that I didn't get to meet the filmmaker, let alone to have a sit-down conversation with him.

Note: I have reproduced this piece exactly as published with the exception of the images and the captions. I was unable to find a copy online of the original Michael Penn portrait of Herzog that accompanied it, so I found another I liked (above), though it's from 1977 rather than 1986.

HERZOG: A little risk keeps life interesting for director

by DOREEN RANSOM

Daily News correspondent

    Seeing his early movies again, according to internationally acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is "like looking back on my own childhood."

    Herzog was in Anchorage last week to speak about his recent offering, "Ballad of the Little Soldier," the 1984 documentary about the Miskito Indians and their rebellion against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

    Growing up in Nazi Germany, the maker of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" didn't see his first movie until the age of 11. The film industry at the time was suffocating in the repressive atmosphere of the Third Reich.

    "I had to invent cinema for myself," he says, explaining how he developed his unique cinematic vision, incorporating intense personal themes and hypnotic visual images.

    Herzog, who is vacationing in the Alaska bush, spoke at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Here are excerpts from an interview.

HERZOG: Director's career has thrived on calculated risk [Continued from Page D-1]

Do you write all your own scripts?

    Yes, I have done that all my life. I am also producer of my own films. I became producer out of necessity. I have never found anyone who would have produced the kind of films I wanted to do.

You received a strong reaction to "The Ballad of the Little Soldier."

    I didn't expect the reaction to be that strong. But of course, there is a tendency, particularly among the dogmatic left, to (treat) the Sandinista movement like a sacred cow. There must not be anything negative said about them or shown about them.

    It is evident that the minority of the Miskito Indians have an enormous cultural problem in their own country and that the Sandinistas have never understood these people. You can read it in the government statements from the Sandinistas -- they admit they committed grave and dramatic mistakes.

    Unfortunately, the tragedy is still going on. There is so much military pressure from outside on the Sandinista government. As long as this pressure continues internally, they will only find military answers to the challenge of the Miskito Indians. And that's a tragedy of big proportions.

Right: journalist Denis Reichle, co-director of Ballad of the Little Soldier.

Did you have an anti-war film in mind before you arrived in Nicaragua?

    No. I didn't know too much about the situation beforehand. I went with a friend of mine, Denis Reichle, a French reporter who spent eight months with the Miskitos. He advised me to join him with a movie crew. He is a very trustworthy man. He has spent his last 35 years doing intimate reports on oppressed minorities all over the world. He was in Timor, in Cambodia, in Angola, in Lebanon, and I just trust in his competence.

    Many of the things were a big surprise for me, in particular that there are such young kids fighting in the war. When you read about Iran and Iraq -- the war there -- everyone is upset that there are very young soldiers, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old. But they are already in puberty and halfway grown up. In Nicaragua you find soldiers who are kids age 9, 10 and 11. They are real children, and that's very upsetting and disturbing.

Is this your first trip to Alaska?

    No, I was here a year ago. I spent a few weeks west of the Alaska Range on Lake Telaquana.

You have mentioned in other interviews that the landscape is a character -- a character you can direct. In your movies, you have focused on very extreme landscapes, such as the jungle and the desert. Is this on your mind during your visit here?

    Oh, it's not an extreme landscape. It's how landscapes should be It's exactly like God wanted the Earth to be.

The films you've produced are often shown in art-film theaters in this country, while "Rocky IV" draws long lines. Are German audiences so different?

    It's like everywhere else in the world. People would rather see "Rocky" than one of my movies. I don't worry too much about it. Some of my films have become more successful over time, even in the United States. In the third re-release of "Aguirre," the film became successful at the box office. A film like "Rocky" is used up as a consumer good and then it's gone. But some of my films will be seen 20 years from now. I have no doubt about that.

You've taken many personal risks. But you've said most of these risks have been calculated.

    Yes, actually. I have to emphasize that I am a professional worker. For the sake of professionality, you try to avoid difficulties. You have to look for the safest solutions you can find. There's only one exception, "La Soufrière," which was a sheer gamble because nobody knew whether the mountain would explode. It was a situation like Mount St. Helen. We stayed on the crater and shot the film. In this case -- and it was the only one -- it was sheer roulette.

You said that Western society is over-concerned with safety and that this makes our souls sterile.

    Yes, I see that danger. I sense it everywhere. Every single one of us has to make his own decision -- how far to go, where to limit the risks, when to put it on the shoulder of an insurance company. But something like life insurance sounds scandalous to my ears because there's only an assurance of death. That's the only sure thing. I have an attitude that's a bit against this over-insurance kind of life. It becomes sterile, boring, inhuman and uninspired.

I understand you were disappointed you couldn't continue to work with Mick Jagger in "Fitzcarraldo."

    Yes. The problem with Mick Jagger was that he went overtime in my production. Jagger at the time had signed contracts for a world tour with the Rolling Stones. In the second round of shooting, we decided that it wouldn't make sense to shoot around him for eight days. It would have been insane. So I decided to let him go, which was very sad. It was so sad that I wrote the entire part out of the screenplay. I didn't want to replace him.

In your 1982 Rolling Stone interview, you said of the late director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "He was like a sweating, grunting, fat and nasty wild boar who would just run through the underbrush and open a path behind him that was passable for everyone else." I thought that was great writing. Do you do other kinds of writing?

    Yes, I have published some poetry and have written prose books like "Of Walking in Ice," which was released here in the U.S. It's a book almost like a diary, when I walked once from Munich to Paris in the winter. I walked because a very good friend of mine, Lotte Eisner, an old lady, was dying. Out of protest and despair, I walked on foot for three-and-a-half weeks in a straight line as quickly as I could. I somehow knew if I came on foot she would survive and be out of hospital. And she was actually out of hospital. It was a pilgrimage, and I wrote the book, which I like better than all my films together.

Images: Rolling Stone / Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty ("The film-maker Werner Herzog giving a press conference, Stockholm, Sweden, January 27th, 1977"), the IMDB (Ballad of the Little Soldier), MUBI (Denis Reichle), Harvard Film Archive (Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God), and Goodreads (Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974).    

Capitalism Proves Crushing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Satirical Thriller Cloud (Though People With Guns Can Be Pesky, Too)

CLOUD / Kuraudo 
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024, Japan, 124 minutes) 

"You operate on impulse and instinct? No effort whatsoever?"--prospective seller 
"That's how I work."--Yoshii

Yoshii (The Boy and the Heron's Masaki Suda) works in a laundry factory by day. Though he could earn more as a manager, a promotion his pushy boss offers more than a few times, he would prefer to manage things rather than people. Company man Mr. Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa from Bong Joon-ho's Tokyo! contribution "Shaking Tokyo"), who mistakenly believes they're cut from the same cloth, can't understand why his employee wouldn't want to trade freedom and unpredictability for stability and repetition. 

In his spare time, Yoshii pursues his true passion: buying and reselling medical equipment, collectible figurines, and knockoff luxury goods. He takes photos of the items, posts them online, strings together a few persuasive key words, and waits for customers to click the "buy" button. 

Granted, Yoshii isn't a thief, and he ships the products he sells, but he underpays for merchandise, uses deceptive pricing, and fails to verify authenticity before listing designer wares, generating resentment among buyers and sellers alike. Initially, though, no one reaches out directly to complain, so he feels no shame and suffers no consequences. Granted, he uses a pseudonym, Ratel--the Dutch word for honey badger--so it isn't as if disgruntled associates can look him up online, though that will soon change. 

Yoshii might sound like a loner, except he isn't, and Suda doesn't play him as someone especially off-putting. Moral complications aside, he looks and acts like a regular guy. If he isn't a hero–and he doesn't necessarily qualify as an antihero–he isn't a villain either, but rather the catalyst for an uprising against a virtual world that has exacerbated capitalism's worst tendencies. His enemies list, which grows throughout the film, consists of buyers, sellers, and others even shadier than him. 

Though his sweet-faced girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), initially seems like a port in the storm, she's possibly the worst kind of partner for someone like Yoshii, because she encourages him to amp up his activities regardless as to the repercussions, so she can quit her job, buy a fancy espresso maker, and move to a bigger place. "I'll buy this and that," she enthuses. "There's so much I want." Her avarice makes it easier for Yoshii to justify his actions. 

One day someone leaves a dead rat outside his door. Then someone strings a trip wire between trees in front of his building, causing him to take a spill on his scooter. Could it be an unhappy seller, his resentful boss, or the schoolmate who becomes peevish when he refuses to invest in his new auction platform? One way or the other, Yoshii feels like he's being watched. 

So, it's presumably a good thing when he and Akiko relocate to a modernist house by the lake, just outside Tokyo, where he resumes his business and hires an eager young local named Sano (Mother's Daiken Okudaira) to assist him. 

Despite the move, Yoshii still feels like he's being watched. It's a common experience for a character in a Kurosawa film. Though Cure took inspiration from Silence of the Lambs, and Pulse was remade in English in the wake of the Ring phenomenon, his films aren't horror in the conventional sense. 

Cloud can be chilling at times, but the disorienting ambiguity recalls Michael Haneke's psychological thriller Caché, more than the average American narrative with a known antagonist. Once the source of the antagonism becomes known, however, the film switches into a different register. 

Joseph Heller's famous Catch-22 adage "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" applies, because strange things keep happening, and I don't think it's all in his head, though knowing Kurosawa, it could be (for what it's worth, I've always associated that quote with the Nixon presidency, though Heller's book was published in 1961). 

Yoshii hasn't changed his ways, in fact, he's expanded his operations, and so the stalker--or stalkers--maintains their campaign of intimidation, undeterred by the change in location. As it turns out, resentment has been building over Yoshii's tactics for so long that the online furor has spilled over into the physical world. 

What he didn't know didn't hurt him, but Sano helps him to connect the dots. It's Kurosawa's way of showing how the things that happen online can have real-world consequences beyond the obvious. A customer who feels ripped off, after all, isn't just a screen name, but an actual human being. 

By the end, Yoshii is on the run from an armed posse, and the film segues from horror chills to satiric thrills involving a man who has made so many enemies that even his girlfriend, his assistant, and the cops–who know about the counterfeit goods–can't be counted on to get him out of the jam. 

It's one of Kurosawa's best thrillers in years, not necessarily because it represents a return to his roots, though it does, but because he's working with some of the same thought-provoking themes and spooky cues as before, while brightening the corners with his mastery of action and humor, and just when it seems as if the film couldn't get any darker or violent, it doesn't. It swerves, though the underlying message is blacker than black. 

That said, it's also a return to films about men, which is hardly a crime--for years, Kurosawa and Kōji Yakusho had a Scorsese/De Niro thing going on--but I was impressed by two semi-recent films featuring women as the focal point: 2019's To the Ends of the Earth, a lyrical character study set in Uzbekistan, and 2020's Hamaguchi collaboration, The Wife of a Spy, a wartime thriller. 

I assumed they marked a new direction for the veteran filmmaker, but he's previously taken detours into other genres, like science fiction, and other countries, like France, so I guess it's not surprising that it wasn't.

It isn't disappointing either, since Yoshii, and his honey badger ways, turns out to be one of his more captivating protagonists. With Masaki Suda's placid appearance and pragmatic affect, he has a certain blank quality; not bland, but open to a variety of readings. Where some saw a scoundrel, I saw someone who was a victim of the same system that ensnares us all. Love him or loathe him, you'll want to see exactly how his story plays out. 

Cloud, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2025, opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Fri, Aug 15. Images from the IMDb (Masaki Suda and super-creepy stalker), Wallpaper Magazine (Suda and Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), MovieWeb (Suda and Kotone Furukawa), and Austin Film Society (Suda).

Keeping the End in Sight in Kei Chika-ura’s Fractured Familial Procedural Great Absence

GREAT ABSENCE / Oinaru Fuzai 
(Kei Chika-ura, 2023, Japan, 134 minutes)

The party's over. People know that but carry on as if they didn't. Or they know and then forget. But he is the King. He mustn't forget. He needs to fix his eyes forward, know when to rest and when to move, know the exact length of the journey, and keep the end in sight.

--Marguerite, Eugène Ionescu's Exit the King

In Kei Chika-ura's Great Absence, Takashi (Mirai Moriyama, who recalls Tadanobu Asano in his younger days), an actor who never really knew his father, finds himself entangled in the man's life as dementia overtakes him. 

Chika-ura scrambles the timeline, so sequences play out before, during, and after Yōji's symptoms have kicked in. In the end, though, the bigger mystery involves his wife, Naomi (Shall We Dance's Hideko Hara).

In the not-too-distant past, Takashi visits his imperious father, Yōji (In the Realm of the Senses' Tatsuya Fuji), for the first time in 20 years. 

The actor appears on a historical drama, which impresses his kindly stepmother, but Yōji is dismissive. In private, Naomi tells him that Yōji looks forward to it every week, but he's incapable of praising his artistic son in any way. 

Five years later, Takashi and his producer wife, Yuki (Yôko Maki), settle Yōji, a former physics professor, into a residential care home. Naomi is out of the picture, and his father provides conflicting accounts of her whereabouts. 

The care team believes it would be beneficial for Takashi to visit as often as he can. Though Kyushu is pretty far from Tokyo, he drops by once a month.

During one visit, Yōji claims he's been kidnapped. He also mentions an international conference, a virus, and someone named Tomoka Ogata. In sifting through his father's effects, Takashi puts a few pieces together. 

Then, he meets Naomi's resentful, cash-strapped son (Masaki Miura), who tells a different story about her absence. As he meets other people from his father's past, he finds odd discrepancies, things that don't quite add up. 

It's not unusual for those with dementia to get things wrong, but Takashi can't always tell when his father is misremembering or fabulating. 

Yōji's protégé (Daisuke Tsukahara), Naomi's diary, and Yōji's love letters offer further clues, but Takashi never finds a definitive source that can decipher the enigma. 

By alternating between Takashi in the present and Yōji--with and without Naomi--in the recent past, Chika-ura, who drew from his relationship with his own father, provides a clearer picture to the audience, than to the son, of Yōji's disintegrating relationship with the love of his life as he loses more and more of his faculties and becomes increasingly confused and belligerent.

The film ends where it began with Takashi rehearsing a play, Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King, and Yōji slicking back his hair, putting on a suit, grabbing his briefcase, and leaving his house, possibly for the last time.

In Ionescu's 1962 play, a dying king, Berenger the First, is attended by his second wife, Queen Marguerite, who helps him to prepare for the end, at which point he disappears into a grey mist. That isn't exactly what happens in Great Absence, but the parallels are hard to miss. In that sense, the play serves a role similar to Uncle Vanya in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car. 

There's a bit more to it than that, but the ending is more inconclusive than not, which I found both frustrating and true to life, since you can't get back what has been lost once dementia has taken hold--the film may have also gained a little momentum and lost a little clarity when Chika-ura shortened it by nearly 30 minutes after it played the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023.

By pushing his son away to start a new life with a woman who already had two sons of her own, his father ensured that he would remain a mystery.

Chika-ura's first feature, 2018's Complicity, also centers on a young man, an undocumented Chinese immigrant (Yulai Lu), who secures a job at a restaurant run by Tatsuya Fuji's soba master (Fuji previously appeared in Chika-ura's short Empty House). There are similar themes at work, since Otousan's son believes he should retire, though he's still in decent shape. 

The filmmaker scrambles the timeline in this earlier effort, as well, to contrast Liu Wei's precarious life in China with his even more precarious one in Japan.

There's a tendency in films about dementia to resort to sentiment and cliché, which Chika-ura handily avoids in Great Absence, but the directness of Complicity proves more emotionally involving--as an actor, Yulai Lu also gives a more expressive performance, though Mirai Moriyama is also very good.

What stands out the most about both films, though, is Tatsuya Fuji, who plays two very different roles--a judgmental biological father in one versus a warm-hearted father figure in the other--with indelible aplomb. 

The career of the legendary actor has spanned Japanese masters from Nagisa Ōshima in the 1970s to Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takeshi Kitano in more recent years. Chika-ura may yet join their ranks, whereas 83-year-old Fuji was, and remains, among the finest talents his country has produced. 

Great Absence opens in New York on July 19 and in Santa Monica and Glendale on July 26. There are no Seattle dates, but it comes to VOD on July 25. Images: Film Movement (Tatsuya Fuji, Mirai Moriyama, Fuji with Hideko Hara, and the poster) and SciFi Japan (Moriyama, Fuji, and Yôko Maki).

Jessie Maple’s Debut Will: Addiction and Redemption on the Mean Streets of Harlem

WILL 

(Jessie Maple, USA, 1981, 83 minutes) 

Jessie Maple's first feature, a true independent effort, was an unusual enough feat for a woman in the States in 1981, but doubly so for a Black woman. 

Maple's husband served as cinematographer and the cast consisted primarily of nonprofesional Harlem actors. With the exception of the two adult leads, most had never acted before and would never act again, but they brought the authenticity the former journalist and news camera woman prized. 

If Will wasn't widely seen at the time, that wasn't necessarily Maple's goal, but her film was never completely forgotten, and it's now making the rounds thanks to Janus, much like Zeinabu irene Davis's Compensation, an exceptionally fine film by another Black woman director, earlier this year. 

Maple's debut opens on a long-limbed man (Obaka Adedunyo, who has the angular features and wide-set eyes of Raúl Juliá), wearing only his briefs, writhing and sweating as he goes through heroin withdrawal. There's no music, only the sound of his yelling and grunting, static from a portable radio, and retching after he runs to the toilet to throw up. This is Will. 

Into this sequence, editor Willette Coleman intercuts glimpses of Will on a city basketball court in happier times. It's hard to miss the expansive length of his fingers–ideal for piano-playing and basketball-gripping alike. 

While Will struggles to get clean, his wife, Jean (Loretta Devine in her first feature), does the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and working, and her patience is running thin. She recommends he seek help, but Will insists he doesn't need it. Maybe she believed him once, but those days are over. 

It doesn't help that Will continues to hang with the same crew. If he was serious about quitting, he might put some space between them. Then one day, 12-year-old Delbert, aka Little Brother (Robert Dean), drops by. The men don't see a problem with a pint-size drug buddy, so Will raises a ruckus, they scatter, and he's left with a smart-mouthed kid who wants to cop. 

He has to think fast, so he comes up with a way to keep Little Brother from getting high. It works once, but there's no guarantee it will work again. The orphan, who lives in a squat, lost both of his brothers to drugs and violence, but he's convinced he won't get hooked. Will, who knows otherwise, invites him to stay over for a couple of days. It isn't a solution, but it's something. 

As nice as he is to the kid, who he entices with ice cream and a color television, Will could be nicer to Jean. Then he almost cheats on her with a former flame. Granted, employment officer LaVern (Mimi Ayers) started it. First, she offers him a basketball coaching job, and then she puts the moves on him, right there in her office. I didn't find that especially believable, though it ends in the least sexy way possible–heroin really is a hell of a drug. 

Instead of getting darker, though, the film gets lighter and funnier–until it doesn't. Prior to that swerve towards the end, the playful moments were starting to accumulate, like the prickly exchange between Jean's teenaged sister Audrey (Audrey Maple), a basketball player, and Little Brother, who refers to all women as "babes." Audrey quickly sets him straight. 

A blissful houseparty sequence also echoes and predicts similar sequences in Michael Schultz's Cooley High and Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock, two Black films with which it shares a few similarities, though it has even more in common with rough-hewn LA Rebellion films, like Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding or Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts.

Though it isn't clear why Will and Jean don't have kids, it doesn't need to be, even as the role of father comes naturally to Will. 

Nonetheless, Jessie Maple and her husband, LeRoy Patton (Brewster's Millions, Rosewood), who co-produced the film, had a daughter, Audrey Snipes, who has overseen Jessie's estate since 2023. Similarly, the role of mother comes naturally to Jean. Then again, she's been mothering her husband, as it were, for years. 

Working with young people does Will a world of good, and in short order, he becomes the coach of Audrey's team, the Pacemakers, but he isn't a miracle worker or a saint, and despite his best efforts, not everything works out, though he appears to be finished with the junk, possibly for good. 

Though it's easy to feel thankful when a worthy film gets a second life–it's just as easy to feel regret when the filmmaker is no longer around to appreciate it, but that isn't exactly the case with Maple as it has been for other woman directors, like Christina Hornisher (I wrote about her sole feature, Hollywood 90028, last year), and actors, like Carrie Hamilton (I wrote about her sole starring role, in Tokyo Pop, the year before). 

Rather than theaters, Maple intended her film primarily for churches, schools, and community groups. After all, it was too gritty for the family film circuit, but not gritty enough for the grindhouse crowd. 

Instead of waiting around for a distributor, she and Patton converted their home into a micro-cinema, 20 West, where they screened Will in addition to other works from independent Black filmmakers, including a young Spike Lee. 

So, I don't think she considered her first feature a failure, not least since she was sufficiently encouraged to do it all over again with her followup, 1989's Twice as Nice, but after that, she retired from narrative filmmaking and moved on to other projects. Like Kathleen Collins, the multi-talented director of 1982's Losing Ground, Maple had many skills and interests, and filmmaking was only one of them. 

Obaka Adedunyo, however, would continue to act, albeit in bit parts, while Loretta Devine began rehearsals for 1983's Broadway sensation Dreamgirls that same year. I would imagine her name was a factor in Will's resurrection, and she really is good, though not in a way that puts anybody to shame.

Afterward, Devine worked--and still works--regularly, though I'm more familiar with her work for TV than film, particularly A Different World, Roc, Boston Public, and Grey's Anatomy, for which she won a primetime Emmy. 

Though Maple passed away two years prior to this year's long-delayed release, she was aware that a restoration was underway–and genuinely surprised that there was enough interest to make it happen. 

There's a lot to be depressed about these days, but distributors, like Janus, and cultural institutions, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, one of the three entities behind this restoration, willing to preserve unique voices, like that of Jessie Maple, gives me hope. 

In 2024, the Library of Congress added Will to the National Film Registry. Maple may not have expected all this fuss over four decades after she made this $12,000 film, shot on 16mm, with her Harlem friends, neighbors, and relatives, but she deserves it.

Will plays Northwest Film Forum on Tues, July 15, thanks to Grand Illusion Cinema. Images from Janus Films (Loretta Devine and Obaka Adedunyo and Adedunyo and Robert Dean), Black Film Center & Archive (Adedunyo, Devine, and Dean), BLK MKT Vintage (Devine, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Deborah Burrell, the original Dreamgirls, on the cover of Ebony in 1982), and New York Women in Film & Television (Jessie Maple on the set).