Thoughts on Only Yesterday

     On HBO Max, I watched Only Yesterday, a 1991 Japanese anime drama written and directed by Isao Takahata, based on the 1982 manga Omoide Poro Poro by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone. The version I watched had a 2016 English dubbing cast of Daisy Ridley, Dev Patel, Alison Hernandez, Laura Bailey, and Ashley Eckstein. The film jumps back and forth between the past and present of Taeko Okajima (the adult version voiced by Daisy Ridley, the child version voiced by Alison Fernandez), a 27-year old unmarried office worker who lives in Tokyo in 1983, and takes a summer trip to the countryside to work on picking safflowers for the harvest season, and reminisce on how much she loved visiting the countryside as a ten-year old child in 1966.

    Adult Taeko is nagged at by her family for being single at 27, saying she can't afford to be picky, and they don't understand why she prefers the rural countryside, or going there to do farm work as a vacation. On the sleeper train there, she reminisces about when she was a child, and often feeling picked on by her family for not being good at math or for being outspoken, with her mother admonishing her behavior and her older sisters mocking her. Her mother would scold her for not eating all of her lunch, saying the food was going to go to waste, and not listen when Taeko would say she doesn't like onions. At school, the lunch rules would allow children to leave only one thing on their plate, which leads to a mock debate on whether that was wasteful of food. As those scenes take place in 1960s Japan, with the parents having survived WWII, a lot of postwar anxiety about struggle and hunger and not being wasteful would carry over into their parenting, and carrying generational trauma onto their children.

    Taeko at school would struggle with embarrassment over crushes, and when the girls would talk about puberty with breasts and periods, and how one girl was an "early developer," and her mom wrote her a note to skip P.E. when she was on her period, which carries over as a rumor that any girl who skips P.E. is on her period, leading to Taeko feeling angry when she has a cold and has to sit on the sidelines and be mocked by boys for supposedly having her period and "cooties."

    She was much happier as a child when she got to go to the hot springs in the countryside, bathing and feeling like she was almost drowning, both literally and in a state of contentment, like she was where she belonged. Her adult self holds a lot of nostalgia for her time in the countryside, while feeling like she is romanticizing too much as an adult and not thinking about the downsides of farming, like droughts or bad seasons.

    When Adult Taeko arrives at the country town, Toshio (Dev Patel), the second cousin of her brother in-law, is there to greet her, and she barely knows him. But they connect and bond over their interests in organic farming and the countryside, and later, he talks about how the rural landscape was built by farmers as a collaboration with nature, instead of nature building itself, as outsiders would see it as, pointing out the irrigation ditches and gardens that people built. It's a wonderful way to see it as humans and nature working together to support one another, and it brings Taeko and Toshio closer together, even as she knows her time in the countryside will be brief before she returns to her city life.

    I really loved this film. It's a mix of being very sweet in parts, like with crushes and being excited as a kid to perform songs and watch children's TV shows, while also being honest about the more hurtful parts of being misunderstood as a child and being talked down to, holding onto small moments as core memories.. The film switches between the different ages of Taeko in a way to tie them together, for her to understand her past and figure out what she wants in life, and it culminates in a spectacular finale.

Thoughts on Resident Evil (2026)

    In Manhattan, I went to see Resident Evil, a 2026 horror film directed by Zach Cregger and co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Resident Evil video game franchise. The film stars Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier who is fighting infected monsters while trying to deliver a last-minute package to a hospital in Raccoon City, the fictional city where the Resident Evil stories take place. He is trying to get the package there in under an hour, but he is facing icy and snowy conditions on the road, but constantly faces obstacles with the monsters, when he just wants to get home to his girlfriend Michelle to talk about her being newly pregnant.

    The film begins with Bryan as a medical courier in a hospital delivering an organ in a cooler bag while talking on the phone to his girlfriend Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton), who found out she's pregnant, and him being unsure on how to talk about it, saying it could be a false positive, and things like that. He delivers the organ, and a doctor immediately offers him twice the pay to go to Raccoon City to deliver another item. Despite that Bryan promised his girlfriend that he'd be home in twenty minutes, he takes the job for the extra cash, and makes his way driving through icy streets, and accidentally hits a woman on the road. He goes out to find her, and she's frozen up and bloody. He brings her into his car, and the mayhem starts from there, with her being an infected monster, killing a cop who had pulled him over and offered to escort him to the hospital, and Bryan, who has only ever shot guns in video games and not in real life, is freaked out and inept. He can't shoot well, he accidentally electrifies himself when he jumps an electric fence to escape her, and throughout the night and on his way to the hospital, he encounters many monsters, with tentacles coming out of their bodies to grab him and mutate with him.

    It's a really fun horror movie, that has an atmospheric, creepy vibe to it, with the dark snowy night, that evokes the style of the game without using any stories from it. Austin Abrams, from Cregger's previous film Weapons, as well of Euphoria fame, is a really likable, relatable lead in it. As Bryan, he is a normal person working a gig job, who messes up with his girlfriend when he is trying to be supportive but sounds indecisive (when she asks him what he thinks of the pregnancy, he goes "It's your body, your choice," thinking that's the feminist boyfriend answer she wants to hear, but it doesn't help her); finds that shooting a gun is much harder in real life, like when he can't shoot padlocks off of chains or has trouble assembling a gun (as he says to Paul Walter Hauser's scientist character, "I'm not a gun guy."); and accidentally shoots the engine of his own car when trying to defend himself from the first monster. The humor helps the film feel more engaging in a "you wouldn't be able to survive this either" kind of way, like with Bryan's constant cursing or his muttering to himself anytime he's annoyed by somebody lecturing him.

    Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a scene where Bryan is at a dire moment after surviving a lot of monster attacks, and he leaves a voicemail message for his girlfriend, not being certain if he will further survive. It’s a really good scene, and it reminded me a lot of a scene from the 1986 horror comedy Night of the Creeps, where alien slugs get into people’s brains and kill them. The main leads are two male best friends, and in the scene, one of them is listening to a message his friend left him after he got attacked, as a goodbye message and describing what the slugs feel like inside of him, and it’s a really sad and heartbreaking scene. I don’t know if Zach Cregger got any inspiration from this scene, but it came to my mind while watching Resident Evil. 

   There's an excellent elevator sequence late in the film, a sequence with Bryan screaming and running down a city street as people fall from buildings onto parked cars, and a POV shot modeled after first-person shooter games like Resident Evil, Doom, and Duke Nukem. It really does well in the survival horror structure, and makes the film more immersive to watch. I did feel that the film ended abruptly, when it felt like it could have still gone on a few minutes more, so that felt a little jarring as a viewer. But overall, it's a really good adaptation of the video game, and Cregger, an alum of the 2000s comedy sketch show The Whitest Kids You Know, has excelled in the last few years as a horror film director with this, Barbarian, and 2025's Oscar-winning Weapons. I recommend this film for fans of body horror and survival horror.

Thoughts on The Little Sister

   On Criterion, I watched The Little Sister, a 2025 French coming-of-age drama written and directed by Hasfia Herzi, adapted from Fatima Daas' autobiographical novel The Last One. The film stars Nadia Melliti in her debut screen acting role as Fatima, a 17-year old French-Algerian girl living with her family in Paris, and is the youngest of three daughters. She is athletic and plays soccer, and her sisters chastise her for not helping out more with cooking. She goes to university, and is struggling with exploring her sexuality as a lesbian, keeping it a secret from her family and meeting women at clubs and through dating apps, using fake names and backstories, like saying she has seven brothers. Her peers know she's queer, though she denies it and even joins in on the mocking of a gay student, despite him calling her out for being a lesbian afterwards.

    She has asthma, and her pulmonologist has her attend a seminar to learn how to improve her breathing, and she meets the assistant to the doctor, Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min), who is French-Korean, and is also secretly queer. She and Fatima can sense that the other is a lesbian, and they begin a romance, bonding over being the children of immigrant parents who learned French as a second language, and being queer women. Their romance comes to an abrupt end when Ji-Na reveals she struggles with severe depression, and pulls away from Fatima out of shame and guilt, leaving Fatima to feel lost and confused, and exploring more femme queer communities to understand herself better. She also has trouble reconciling her Muslim faith with her lesbian identity, and visiting an imam to ask advice about a "friend" only leaves her with feeling shamed for being homosexual.

    I really liked this movie. It's an interesting drama that focuses on a Muslim queer girl figuring out her identity, and portraying more of the LGBTQ culture of Paris, with queer dance clubs and pride marches and chants for trans rights. Melliti gives a very sensitive performance as the quiet yet headstrong Fatima, who is blunt when she needs to be while clearly apprehensive in early dates with women, and Park gives an introspective performance as Ji-Na, struggling with feeling like an outsider because of her sexuality, race, and mental health issues. There's a very personal and intimate feel to this movie which I got into, being inside of this world of French queer life. I agree with the consensus that this film is restrained yet powerful.

Thoughts on Hope

     At the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, I saw Hope, a 2026 South Korean science fiction action film written and directed by Na Hong-jin. The film centers on the citizens of a small village named Hope Harbor, which is close to the border of North Korea, or the DMZ, who are being attacked by mysterious creatures and fighting back with lots of ammunition.

    The film focuses on a few characters as they are fighting against the creatures: Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief, who is racing through the town trying to figure out what's going on; Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), one of a group of hunters who are being hunted themselves in the mountains; and Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a rookie cop who is more capable than other cops and fires back at the creatures. As people are discovering the destruction of the town and the rotting corpses of cows, they initially think a tiger from the mountains killed the cows before finding the town's wreckage and realizing it's something much bigger, before seeing cars being thrown airborne and crushing people from a distance.

    The movie works well because it combines a lot of action and humor, and running gags like Ko Bum-seok being shocked at the heavy artillery that the elderly residents have and being like "How did you get all of this?" and they go, "That's not important right now." Or an inept younger guy is impressed at Ko Sung-ki's horseback riding skills during a chase sequence and is like, "How does he know how to ride so well?" An elderly local, Mr. Hae-sul (Im Hyun-sik) tells a story about hiding from the monsters while trying to keep from pooping in a bush and holding it in so hard ("the hardest I've ever clenched") that even Im Sung-ae laughs when she is trying to take his testimony because it's so bittersweet and funny.

    The action sequences are really fantastic, especially a couple of intense chase sequences that combine a lot of impressive stunt work with cars, horses, and people, and none that I want to spoil right now.

    The downside to the film is the CGI of the creatures, especially when there is a lot of build-up to the first one. The design looks good, but once they move more, they look more pasted into the film, and it's hard to believe them as part of the story when they aren't blended in as well. Some later CGI characters look okay, it's just a flaw of the film, as well as the last few minutes, that adds in some lore about the creatures that feels way too late to add at the end of a two hour and forty minute movie.

    I enjoyed this film as a funny monster movie with a variety of likable characters to root for, and felt it stood out well for its stunt work and character development.

Thoughts on Clean

    On Criterion, I rewatched Clean, a 2004 drama film directed by Olivier Assayas, and co-written by Assayas, Malachy Martin, and Sarah Perry. The film stars Maggie Cheung as Emily Wang, a former MTV VJ, who is in a common-law marriage with her rock-star husband Lee (James Johnston, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and they are both heroin addicts, and Lee is frustrated over the decline in his career, and Emily is seen by Lee's friends as a bad influence on him. Their young son, Jay, is being taken care of by Lee's parents Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry) in Vancouver.

    After a fight in a motel in Hamilton, Canada, Emily storms off and later shoots up heroin in her car, and when she returns, she finds that Lee has died of a drug overdose, and the police find drugs in her bag and arrest her. Despite that she wasn't around when Lee died, she is largely blamed by the press for his death. She spends six months in prison, and custody of Jay was awarded to Lee's parents. Upon her release, Emily moves to Paris, but not before meeting with Albrecht, who is sympathetic to her but advises her not to see Jay for a few years while she gets her life together.

    In Paris, Emily works at a Chinese restaurant owned by relatives and doesn't enjoy it, and is accused of not wanting to be around other Chinese people. She has become addicted to methadone as a way to get off of heroin, and reaches out to her old music industry friends for prescriptions for it. She doesn't relapse, but she falls into the same patterns of associating with shady people, and naively thinks that if she can get a letter to the singer Tricky through her friend, that he will help her get custody of her son. Her old friends bust into an apartment, where someone has overdosed, and rob the place of drugs before calling the police to alert them of his passing.

    Albrecht, Rosemary, and Jay are in London because Rosemary is ill and needs medical treatment, and Albrecht lets Emily know and arranges for them to meet but Jay initially doesn't want to meet her because Rosemary blamed Emily for Lee's death, so Jay thinks his mother killed his father. Emily and Jay eventually meet, but it's a rocky relationship when they barely know each other and Jay is hurt and angry and confused.

    Maggie Cheung is fantastic in this film, bringing a lot of heart and sympathy and understanding to Emily, and moves easily with her polyglot skills, speaking English, French, and Cantonese throughout the film.

    Nick Nolte is great in this film, and plays Albrecht as a grieving old man, who has just lost his son, and may soon lose his wife, and knows he doesn't have a lot of time left (though as of this review, Nick Nolte is currently 85 years old), and wants Jay and Emily to have a connection with each other since Jay has so little family to rely on. There's a comforting warmth to his craggy voice and a knowledge that he's seen life, and wants the best for both Emily and Jay.

    The film has cameos from Tricky and Emily Haines of the band Metric, and feels rooted in the early 2000s with brief mentions of Limp Bizkit and System of a Down. Béatrice Dalle has a nice supporting role as Emily's friend in Paris, and there's a subplot with Emily's former boss Irene (Jeanne Balibar) having a messy love affair with her younger assistant Sandrine (Laetitia Spigarelli) that Emily is the observant to.

     It's a movie that flows without judging the characters, letting scenes play out, focusing on a complicated lead character who is grieving her husband and doesn't know what are the next steps to take to move on in her life. I like that the film ends with some ambiguity. It's not all wrapped up in a happy ending, but it's not depressing, either. She still has to work to have a relationship with her kid, to stay sober, and to have a career, and just keep going. It's a really interesting and great film, and I'm glad I revisited it.

Thoughts on Grace of My Heart

    On Criterion, I watched Grace of my Heart, a 1996 comedy-drama written and directed by Allison Anders, and loosely based on the career arc of Carole King as a 1960s songwriter creating pop hits for girl groups before coming into her own as a solo artist. The film starred Illeana Douglas as Edna Buxton, a Phildelphia steel heiress who wins a talent contest as a singer-songwriter, and the prize is a record contract, but after nearly a year in New York City, she hasn't gotten anywhere with her career. A studio producer tells her that "girl singers" are not currently trendy in the music business, and advises her to write for others to make a living. She is led to record producer Joel Milner (Joh Turturro), who renames her "Denise Waverly," invents a blue-collar persona for her, and has her re-work her song for a male doo-wop group (played by the 90s R&B group Portrait), and it becomes a hit.

    She become a songwriter in the Brill Building, a famed office building where songwriters wrote pop hits in the early 1960s, and after a rocky start, she begins dating and later marries the songwriter Howard Caszatt (Eric Stoltz), and brings in her friend Doris Shelley (Jennifer Leigh Warren), whom she met years earlier as a fellow contestant at the talent show, and Denise writes a song for Doris and her friends to sing as a girl group, called the Luminaries. Denise and Howard write a song called "Unwanted Number," based on a girl's unwanted pregnancy, and the film has an interesting sequence that shows Denise with Doris near the fire escape where the girl, who got pregnant at 12, is telling her adolescent boyfriend and is struggling with being a mother so young, and that moment goes back and forth with Denise and Howard crafting the song, like Howard thinking it's more poetic for them to be under streetlights, while Denise says it's more "urban" for them to be on the fire escape. (The film doesn't question how Denise as a white woman is writing songs for Black music artists and becoming successful off of them, often having Doris and the young girl, who later becomes a babysitter for Denise's child, as her friends instead of focusing on their stories). The song is banned from the radio, but the controversy brings the attention of radio DJ John Murray (Bruce Davison), who brings the songwriting duo on his show and is supportive of Denise's career.

    The film follows Denise's career and her two marriages, to Howard (who she leaves for being a cheater) and the surf-rock singer Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon), who she struggles with because of his mental health issues and substance abuse disorder. She becomes friends with a fellow songwriter, Cheryl (Patsy Kensit), and I liked how the film subverted expectations with making it seem like she was going to be a sexy threat to Denise's marriage, only for Cheryl to not already be married to her writing partner, but that their friendship becomes close and outlasts both their marriages, that felt more positive for portraying female friendship and not jealously or rivalry between them.

    The film struggles with the lip-syncing scenes whenever Denise or any actor being dubbed over performs, because the dubbed voices don't sound anything like the actors' voices, and the lip-syncing is too obvious and takes me out of the movie. John Turturro's character has awful facial hair, where he would look better without it, and the film relies on costuming to boldly let the audience know what time period they are in, as the film story spans from 1958 to 1970. I was distracted by hearing Sonic Youth's "Little Trouble Girl" play in a scene as a song that Denise and Cheryl wrote for a bubblegum 1960s TV show, because even though vocalist Kim Gordon is evoking the Shangri-La's talk-singing style for the song, I immediately recognized it as a song from the band's 1995 album Washing Machine, and I couldn't see it as a 1960s fictional song the songwriters had made.

    There are obvious pastiches and references to real-life musical artists of the 1960s era. Jay Phillips is modeled off of Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, with his eccentric musical tastes and personal struggles, and Bridget Fonda has a fun cameo as a Lesley Gore-esque young singer, who is a closeted lesbian with her "roommate" Marion (Lucinda Jenney), and Denise and Cheryl write a queer-coded song for her called "My Secret Love." There is a musical act based off of the Everly Brothers, and the record producer Joel Milner is a mix of Phil Spector and song published Lester Sill.

    Illeana Douglas is great in this movie, and in her career, she has often played supporting roles, like sisters (To Die For, Stir of Echoes), sassy best friends (Picture Perfect), or quirky art teachers (Ghost World). She's rarely gotten to lead her own movie, and she's really charming and wonderful to watch in this film, holding it together even when the pieces seem a little messy.

    Director Allison Anders made the fantastic 1992 film Gas Food Lodging, a coming of age film centered on a single mother and her two teen daughters living in a trailer park in New Mexico. She drew upon her own history of sexual assault to make 2001's Things Behind the Sun, about a musician struggling with the long-term aftermath of rape. She is almost 72 now, and largely works in TV now.

    I'm glad I watched this, because it seemed like an interesting movie, but I hadn't come across it now, so I'm happy that Criterion added it this month for their "Girl Bands" programming on streaming.